we spoke mostly German, and in German,
"Still" is a word which means quietude.
Over the weeks and months that followed,
the idea of a molecular still grew in my
imagination into a wonderful thing, a
place that is quiet even on the molecular
level, far different from the booming
sounds of war. In my imagination, knowing
my foster father was a gentle man who
wanted nothing but peace, I thought of it
as a reverse secret weapon, something that
would bring this wonderful stillness to
the world. When he disappeared to the
wonderful molecular still, each time I
would wonder whether this would be the
time that the still would be ready, and
peace would come.
And the city held. "Salzburg is an idea,
little Leah," my foster father Johann
would tell me, "and all the birds in the
world could never peck it away, for it
lives in our minds and in our souls.
Salzburg will stand for as long as any one
of us lives. And, if we ever abandon the
city, then Salzburg has fallen, even if
the city itself still stands."
In the outside world, the world I knew
nothing of, nations quarreled and were
stalemated with indecision over what to
do. Our city had been fragilely connected
to the western half of Europe by
precarious roads, with a series of tunnels
through the Alps and long arcing bridges
across narrow mountain valleys. In their
terror that the chaos might spread
westward, they dynamited the bridges, they
collapsed the tunnels. Not nations, but
individuals, did it. They cut us off from
civilization, and left us to survive, or
die, on our own.
Governments had become increasingly
unimportant in the era following the
opening of the resources of space by the
free-trade zones of the new prosperity,
but the trading consortia that now ruled
America and the far east in the place of
governments had gained their influence
