craters and the detritus that marked where
the castle had stood, mountains looking
down on humanity with the gaze of
eternity.
My real parents, I have been told, were
rousted out of our apartment with a tossed
stick of dynamite, and shot as infidels as
they ran through the door, on the very
first night of the war. It was probably
fanatics of the New Orthodox Resurgence
that did it, in their first round of
ethnic cleansing, although nobody seemed
to know for sure.
In the beginning, despite the dissolution
of Austria and the fall of the federation
of free European states, despite the
hate-talk spread by the disciples of
Dragan Vukadinoviлc, the violent cleansing
of the Orthodox church, and the rising of
the Pan-Slavic unity movement, all the
events that covered the news-nets all
through 2081, few people believed there
would be a war, and those that did thought
that it might last a few months. The
dissolution of Austria and eastern Europe
into a federation of free states was
viewed by intellectuals of the time as a
good thing, a recognition of the impending
irrelevance of governments in the
post-technological society with its
burgeoning sky-cities and prospering
free-trade zones. Everyone talked of civil
war, but as a distant thing; it was an
awful mythical monster of ancient times,
one that had been thought dead, a thing
that ate peopleтs hearts and turned them
into inhuman gargoyles of stone. It would
not come here.
Salzburg had had a large population of
Asians, once themselves refugees from the
economic and political turmoil of the
twenty-first century, but now prosperous
citizens who had lived in the city for
over a century. Nobody thought about
religion in the Salzburg of that lost age;
nobody cared that a person whose family
once came from the Orient might be a
