We were going to be Uralians, John Muir and I. We were going to go east, to Chelyabinsk in the Urals, and plant sunflowers in the hot zone.

Some places are more than just co-ordinates. Sodom, Plymouth Rock, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, San Diego, Taipei. They are landmarks in our psyche, cemented in there by stories told again and again of something worse than an individual death-urge, an annihilation of more than the body, perhaps of sanity, such as it has been. Nuclear war is a marriage of obscene knowledge and the will to choose for everyone. In the hot zones we find the opposite of the Big Bang. The Big Whoosh, where we all go up together by our own hand.

There was only a minimal practical point in what John and I wanted to do at Chelyabinsk. The area was saturated by billions of curies from Ozyorsk to Semipalatinsk, gusting fallout wind as far as the British islands, even before the war. The Urals mark the line between older and newer destruction. Then there was the Third Day bomb, wiping out the weapons factories and reactors at Mayak, opening the radioactive cankers of Lake Karachai and the Techa river, sending a westward breath of isotopic rain onto the Allies. My grandfather said you could see the glow of irradiated graphite reflares sometimes, when the station passed over 55N60E. If we atoned anywhere, it would be there, among our species’ unacknowledged offspring: Tritium, Strontium-90, Plutonium-238, Cobalt-60, Carbon-4, Irridium-192, Cesium-137. All our fissile shapelings.

I’ve never bought into the idea of communal apologies. It was a fashion in the twentieth century – apologies for enslavement, for genocide, for war crimes. Decades and centuries after the events, when the harm had been inscribed epigenetically into the survivors’ descendants, and no one admitted to being descended from the perpetrators. One community brokered an apology with another. But sin, if you want to think of it that way, is individual. It’s one hand that signs the paper, brings down the rod, pulls the trigger. It’s why we imprison individuals, not families, not the grandchildren of criminals. Before a hand is laid in anger on another, the mind consents. Otherwise we’re a hive. This is still the basis of everything – it’s why there was so much unhappiness about the lottery in the Station. I alone can reproduce myself, and I alone  rate myself worthy of that privilege.

To apologise, you say I consented to do this thing. I regret it and the harm it has caused. I intend not to do it again. No one can apologize for you, nor can you for anyone else. Such is the terrible power of individual capacity, individual action. It may sound strange, but I can’t tell you what John’s reasons for going were. We don’t pry into reasons here, as you’ll find. Perhaps we should. But we are all travelling through difficult terrain, and the weight of other people’s reasons can bog you down.

Some plants are hyperaccumulators – they can take up astonishing amounts of heavy metals, and store them without metabolizing them. Sunflowers, field mustard, amaranthus, cockscomb, water hyacinth, and the redgums, pines, and maples, they all accumulate radionuclides. John had refurbished a vitrification unit from a factory in Istanbul in the last year of the fuel cells, and a pyrolysis reactor from somewhere in France. We were going to sow, harvest the plants and dispose of the biomass by pyrolysis, then vitrify the concentrated waste for storage underground. It was impossible to say how long we would last in the environment. Sixty years before the war began it was the most contaminated place on Earth. The war only brought the rest of the planet up to the level of the Ural graveyard. Kyshtym, Karachai, Ozyorsk – these are forgotten because they have no stories, there are no apologies, no clamorous descendants railing about the obscenities done to them.

We thought we would survive a year at the most. Others would come eventually and continue it, or the first generation of plants and trees would self-seed and continue the repair without humans.

It may like like an act of atonement. I believe the process was called phytoremediation when it was developed after the nuclear accidents of the twentieth century. But remedies are only ever so by our standards. Atonement means acting to return a balance which only we see, only we judge. Apologies are only understood, only needed by humans. Our actions are either harmful or irrelevant. We cannot atone, we cannot act, without causing some kind of harm. It’s our moral spancel, the hobble that ties us to sorrow. This attempt to clean up our nuclear tantrum was not an apology. It was a way to express my sorrow, to acknowledge with my own life that this was what I am, and what I and all like me, do.

Although superfluous, there is a certain satisfaction from ending your life with right action.

See – even morally, it’s all about us.

But I have always loved sunflowers.