There was no place to go outside; no place
that was safe. The sky had become our
enemy. My friends were books. I had loved
storybooks when I had been younger, in the
part of my childhood before the siege that
even then I barely remembered. But Johann
had no storybooks; his vast collection of
books were all forbidding things, full of
thick blocks of dense text and
incomprehensible diagrams that were no
picture of anything I could recognize. I
taught myself algebra, with some help from
Johann, and started working on calculus.
It was easier when I realized that the
mathematics in the books was just an odd
form of music, written in a strange
language. Candles were precious, and so in
order to keep on reading at night, Johann
made an oil lamp for me, which would burn
vegetable oil. This was nearly as precious
as candles, but not so precious as my need
to read.
A still, I had learned from my readingЎand
from the black marketЎwas a device for
making alcohol, or at least for separating
alcohol from water. Did a molecular still
make molecules?
"Thatтs silly," Johann told me.
"Everything is made of molecules. Your
bed, the air you breathe, even you
yourself, nothing but molecules."
In November, the zooтs last stubborn
elephant died. The predators, the lions,
the tigers, even the wolves, were already
gone, felled by simple lack of meat. The
zebras and antelopes had gone quickly,
some from starvation-induced illness, some
killed and butchered by poachers. The
elephant, surprisingly, had been the last
to go, a skeletal apparition stubbornly
surviving on scraps of grass and bits of
trash, protected against ravenous poachers
by a continuous guard of armed watchmen.
The watchmen proved unable, however, to
guard against starvation. Some people
claim that kangaroos and emus still
survived, freed from their hutches by the
