SCIENCE FICTION
KALPISH RATNA

CARBON

Hana was eight when she first felt the pull of the earth. Other kids had dolls. Hana had stones. Not even pretty ones - smooth or patterned or coloured. None of those. Hana's stones were lumps and clods, chance splinters, flints, stones the world walked on. 

These were not Hana's playthings. They were her books. She carried them to school with her and sought out their stories. When her teachers failed her, she began reading on her own. At eighteen she was the Island's youngest geologist.

This was Hana's vocation. To restore a mountain from a clod of earth through a powerful act of imagination. To picture a forest in a lump of coal. To span a river across the width of a pebble. 
Now at twenty six Hana felt as old as the earth. Or as young - for the earth was constantly changing. And she with it. 

Hana wheeled out her bike and set off for work.
It was a six mile ride. It took her past the narrow mean factory area, through the People Plaza, now at half past seven desolate like any other empty playground of human desire. 

She pedalled up the steep incline of the terraced hill. Her site lay beyond its perimeter, and there was no throughway past it. 
One day, she told herself, I'll return to this hill. I'll pull up the turf, uproot these silly travesties of plant life and sink my hands deep into its muddy ooze until I light upon its sial heart. 

The"hills" were cordoned off with barbed wire. There was no sentry. None were needed. The alarms were so effective that everything from changes in ground temperature to the vibrations of footfalls was recorded on transducers planted like mines. 

Hana produced the piece of plastic that allowed her free access.
She worked with a dogged persistence for an hour on the flat rock rising wartily from the ground. Fractured on its north face its cut surface showed thin veins of green. This was basalt, once live and charged with thermal energy, powering it at speeds of 60 km/hr. Hana stopped her chipping at that thought. 

60 million years ago, this rock had whizzed past - what? 
Trees, engulfed and eloigned to be secreted as peat. Broad-hipped lizards trapped in their own clumsiness and borne along for embalmment in glassy basalt as fossils. 

No, that wasn't strictly true. 
The heat would have killed them before lava got anywhere close. 900 deg C at the very least. Enough to char flesh and hide. Not hot enough to incinerate bone.

Hana imagined the gracile neck of a brontosaurus clogged with soft feathery volcanic ash and pictured the thundering anguish, the bewilderment in its small head and its collapse-buckling and slithering down. Even bloating in that heat before the lava arrived. The gases that bubbled up through that surge of lava to bleb and burble in this fossilization might have been the saurian's own.

The dinosaur was a distraction. 
In truth Hana was preoccupied by something more intense-a half-glimpsed truth which somehow continued to evade her alert brain. 
Did she dream it? Saw it in passing and recorded it so deep in memory it now defied retrieval?

Hana dropped her tools and straightened up. She walked as if in a trance beyond the fringe of trees where the great pit yawned. That pit was part of the subsidence before the Flood. 
Or was it?
As Hana stared, the memory of her vision revived. 
She saw it again.
No hallucination, this.
In the smoky grey hollow of the pit-a sullen cast of colour.
A trick of light?
Perhaps not.
Hana moved swift as a snake, took handhold on tussocks of the rim, and let herself dangle down into the pit till she eyeballed it, as red and green as the thumbprint of the sun.

It throbbed, morose and certain, encrusted with mud. But still it showed in that grim gneiss. Eclogite. Red and green nodules formed out of unbearable compression. Strange metamorphosis of glassy basalt which made it denser, fitting it easier into the dungeon that walled it in.

It took her all afternoon to free that clump. It was no bigger than a small pebble-a mere bud that had snapped off. There would be an entire boulder of it within this stony heart.

Her palms scratched and bleeding, Hana raised her hands to the sky.
She wasn't reaching out to heaven. She was feeling the wall of rock and mud that once had towered above this pit. It had crumbled and fallen away, and nobody had thought to look for it. Perhaps the pit itself had been uncovered during the Flood.

Strange how all lies, all camouflage and subterfuge, were weathered away and eroded in time, and the truth could wink at you in the red-green complicity of a gemstone. The pit was a caldera. Beneath her feet-how many million years ago?- there had roared a volcano.

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