… In the desert we burned them immediately. They came out in the long trains through the burning heat and the choking dust and the ones that hadn't died in the black trucks we offered copious water; no will could resist the thirst those baking days spent amongst death had built up in them.

They drank the poisoned water and died within hours. We incinerated the plundered bodies in solar furnaces, our offering to the insatiable sky gods of Race and Purity. And there seemed to be something pure about the way they were disposed of, as though their deaths gave them a nobility they could never have achieved in their mean, degraded lives. Their ashes fell like a lighter dust on the powderous emptiness of the desert, to be blown away together in the first storm.

The last furnace loads were the camp workers — gassed in their dormitories, mostly — and all the paperwork: every letter, every order, every requisition pad, stores sheet, file, note and memo. We were all searched, even I. Those the special police found hiding diaries were shot on the spot. Most of our effects went up in smoke, too. What we were allowed to keep had been searched so thoroughly we joked they had managed to remove each grain of sand from our uniforms, something the laundry had never been able to do.

We were split up and moved to different posts throughout the conquered territories. Reunions were not encouraged.

I thought of writing down what had happened — not to confess but to explain.

And we suffered, too. Not just in the physical conditions, though those were bad enough, but in our minds, in our consciences. There may have been a few brutes, a few monsters who gloried in it all (perhaps we kept a few murderers off the streets of our cities for all that time), but most of us went through intermittent agonies, wondering in moments of crisis if what we were doing was really right, even though in our hearts we knew it was.

So many of us had nightmares. The things we saw each day, the scenes we witnessed, the pain and terror; these things could not help but affect us.

Those we disposed of; their torment lasted a few days, maybe a month or two, then it was over as quickly and efficiently as we could make the process.

Our suffering has gone on for a generation.

I am proud of what I did. I wish it had not fallen to me to do what bad to be done, but I am glad that I did it to the best of my capabilities, and I would do it again.

That was why I wanted to write down what had happened; to witness our belief and our dedication and our suffering.

I never did.

I am proud of that too.

He awoke and there was something inside his head.

He was back in reality, back in the present, back in the bedroom of his house in the retirement complex, near the sea; he could see the sunlight hitting the tiles of the balcony outside the room. His twinned hearts thumped, the scales had risen on his back, prickling him. His leg ached, echoing with the pain of that ancient injury on the glacier.

The dream had been the most vivid yet, and the longest, finally taking him to the ice-fall in the western face and the accident with the drag line (deep buried, that had been, in his memory, submerged beneath all the dread white weight of his remembered pain). As well as that, whatever he had experienced had gone beyond the normal course, the usual environment of dreams, propelled there by the reliving of the accident and the image of fighting for breath while he stared transfixed into the face of the dead girl.

He had found himself thinking, explaining, even justifying what he had done in his army career, in the most definitive part of his life.

And now he could feel something inside his head.

Whatever it was inside his head got him to close his eyes.

— At last, it said. It was a deep, deliberately authoritative voice, its pronunciation almost too perfect.

At last? he thought. (What was this?)

— I have the truth.

What truth? (Who was this?)

— Of what you did. Your people.

What?

— The evidence was everywhere; across the desert, caked in loam, lodged in plants, sunk to the bottom of lakes, and there in the cultural record too; the sudden vanishings of art works, changes in architecture and agriculture. There were a few hidden records — books, photographs, sound recordings, indices, which contradicted the re-written histories — but they still didn't directly explain why so many people, so many peoples seemed to vanish so suddenly, without any sign of assimilation.

What are you talking about? (What was this in his head?)

— You would not believe what I am, commandant, but what I am talking about is a thing called genocide, and the proof thereof.

We did what had to be done!

— Thank you, we've just been through all that. Your self-justifications have been noted.

I believed in what I did!

— I know. You had the residual decency to question it occasionally, but in the end you did indeed believe in what you were doing. That is not an excuse, but it is a point.

Who are you? What gives you the right to crawl inside my brains?

— My name would be something like Grey Area in your language. What gives me the right to crawl inside your brains, as you put it, is the same thing that gave you the right to do what you did to those you murdered; power. Superior power. Vastly superior power, in my case. However, I have been called away and I have to leave you now, but I shall return in a few months and I'll be continuing my investigations then. There are still enough of you left to construct a more… triangulated case.

What? he thought, trying to open his eyes.

— Commandant, there is nothing worse I can wish upon you than to be what you already are, but you might care to reflect upon this while I'm gone:

Instantly, he was back in the dream.

He fell through the bed, the single ice-white sheet tore beneath him and tumbled him into a bottomless tank of blood; he fell down through it to light, and the desert, and the rail line through the sands; he fell into one of the trains, into one of the trucks and was there with his broken leg amongst the stinking dead and the moaning living, jammed in between the excrement-covered bodies with the weeping sores and the buzz of the flies and the white-hot rage of the thirst inside him.

He died in the cattle truck, after an infinity of agony. There was time for the briefest of glimpses of his room in the retirement complex. Even in his still-shocked, pain-maddened state he had the time and the presence of mind to think that while it felt as though a day at least must have passed while he had been submerged in the torture-dream nevertheless everything in the bedroom looked just as it had earlier. Then he was dragged under again.

He awoke entombed inside the glacier, dying of cold. He had been shot in the head but it had only paralysed him. Another endless agony.

He had a second impression of the retirement home; still the sunlight was at the same angle. He had not imagined it was possible to feel so much pain, not in such a time, not in a life-time, not in a hundred lifetimes. He found there was just time to flex his body and move a finger's width across the bed before the dream resumed.

Then he was in the hold of a ship, crammed in with thousands of other people in the darkness, surrounded again by stink and filth and screams and pain. He was already half dead two days later when the sea valves opened and those still left alive began to drown.

The cleaner found the old retired commandant twisted into a ball a little way short of the apartment's door the next morning. His hearts had given out.