The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  I started work, which was entirely his doing. He had arranged the job before our disaffection, although I didn’t actually start working until after we were sleeping in separate beds. For the week immediately following the wedding I did nothing, and Crow and I were sort of on honeymoon, although he still called by the mess, and did little bits and pieces. Then for two weeks after that I hung about, attending a couple of classes on food-mining with some other prospective miners, and reading a bound printout of the technology. This last pamphlet was so well thumbed the pages were greasy and frayed. Then there were several more weeks of nothing at all, of me sitting bored in the apartment, or wandering about Liberty with my hood up. But then Crow came home one afternoon and sat me down. ‘You start work tomorrow,’ he said, his high-pressure smile and high-pressure body language pumping jolliness into the situation. ‘You’ve been kept hanging around for way too long, and I spoke to [Blank] today. Block four, Science Street, eight-thirty.’ Suddenly I was employed.

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  I’ll talk about my job in a minute, but first I want to say something about my husband, about [Blank]. I really don’t think I’ve caught, precisely, the way he was. I worry that I’m giving the impression that he was a one-dimensional man, when he really wasn’t. I’ve been suggesting he was – if you’ll pardon the punning – a black-and-white-man. He wasn’t merely a black-and-white-man. So, for example, although my anger (which was frequent) made me think of him as nothing more than a racist pig, and although I used this term and many like it to his face, I now look back on that time and I’m not so sure he was. Clearly there was some racist component in his make-up, but racism – or homophobia, or hatred of women (again, all of which accusations I threw at Crow from time to time) – cannot make up a whole person. There’s not enough material in such attitudes to make up a whole human: a grotesque, a cartoon villain; real people aren’t like that. I’d believe that not even the Chief of the Ku Klux Klan could have been a racist all the time, through every fibre of his body. However distorted their mind were, there must have been gardens and comfortable rooms in there as well as burning deserts of hatred. Mustn’t there? And Crow was no KKK villain. He never said ‘I’m not a racist’ (and he never said ‘I’m a racist’, either). Though his actions were sometimes bad they were sometimes good. There were, for instance, the many little courtesies and kindnesses of cohabiting life. In addition to which, of course, he got me the job. When I started working, and saw how many people were on the committee only because of their skill in [expletive deleted] their husbands, I was impressed that [Blank] would still go to the trouble of finding me work when he and I were sleeping in separate beds.

  One day I said to him, ‘It’d be no bother if we got a divorce.’ The phrase sounded callous to me as soon as I uttered it, and it wasn’t one I had premeditated, but that was the offhand phrasing that my mind chose at that moment of utterance. It’d be no bother.

  [Blank] looked at me as if a piece of ice had slipped down inside the back of his collar. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I could just move out.’ I was sitting on the sofa, and [Blank] was sitting at his desk with some paperwork.

  ‘Move out?’ he said, turning his whole body on his chair to look at me properly. His wide-open eyes annoyed me, for some reason.

  ‘I’m trying to make it easier on you, you racist queer-[expletive deleted],’ I said. The spot anger cooled immediately, and the words tasted ashy in my mouth. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘look, just look. This isn’t easy, right? Not easy for you. Not for me. Shall I just move out?’

  ‘Where would you live?’

  ‘There must be somewhere in this [expletive deleted] city,’ I said. Every time I swore a little wincing shudder of the lines in his forehead, a twitch of his eyebrows, made it clear that my words were causing him pain. Naturally, I swore often, to try and magnify this migranic flutter.

  ‘Tira …’ he said.

  ‘I’ve walked about the city,’ I pressed. ‘There’s plenty of places to stay. I’ve got a job now. Surely my salary could cover rent and food. Wouldn’t you prefer it? You could start over. You could divorce me, and get a white wife, a lily-white wife, all blonde and pink and smelling of [expletive deleted]. Wouldn’t you like that? Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Tira, I don’t understand you,’ he said. I was crying.

  I don’t know why I was crying by this stage. It had started as a genuine attempt on my part to break the logjam of our relationship. And I didn’t cry often. Hardly ever. I had turned away from Crow now, and was trying to breath in deep and calm my sudden sobs, as if breathing in would blow me up like a balloon and smooth the teary crumples from my face.

  When I said I hardly ever cried back there, I may have been exaggerating. I’ll be honest with you on that point. Actually I cried from time to time. Or I cried a lot.

  In a minute I had got myself under control. I wiped my face against the back of the sofa like a dog, and turned back. [Blank] had been quiet the whole time.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he said, in a softly consolate voice.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m happy, perfectly OK, no I’m not. I’m not happy that we never talk about this stuff.’ I clamped my jaw. I presented a strong face to him.

  ‘We can talk,’ he said, looking genuinely concerned. ‘I don’t want a divorce.’

  ‘You could marry again.’

  He said: ‘There’s nobody.’ Then, perhaps thinking that sounded too much like I’ll just have to make do with you, scrapings-of-the-barrel, he added, ‘There’s nobody else I’d want to marry.’

  I looked at him. ‘OK,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘We’ll carry on as we are then.’ Then, I added, the thought spurting up in my head from nowhere, ‘Is this a keeping-up-appearances sort of thing? Is this a running-for-office thing? [Blank] told me you were thinking of running for IP.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

  ‘Are you thinking of running for IP?’

  ‘That’s politics,’ he said. ‘That’s not real life.’

  ‘It’s real power, though,’ I said. ‘Is it I need a wife and respectable-looking life if I want to run for IP? Is that what it is?’

  ‘Tira,’ he said, looking weary, running the tip of his forefinger along the tiredness lines under his eyes, first his left eye, then his right. ‘Tira.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, high-pitched. ‘You don’t need a row right now. OK.’ And I left him there, at his desk, and fumed through the kitchen. I put on coat and mittens and boots and stomped around outside in the talcumy snow. Then I came in again, and put my head through the door of the room, and there he was, bent over his desk doing some paperwork or other.

  The notion that I was a sort of window-dressing companion became one of those fixed ideas, those obsessive little notions that grow like crystals in our minds. When I was more rational I could dismiss it. It wasn’t very likely. The sexual politics of NUSA are different from the more conservative old USA. Of course they are. That guy at the meet, [Blank], who suggested I become his second wife – he wasn’t a Mormon. He was simply registering the seven-men-to-one-woman inequality of the new world, the scarcity and therefore collectibility of women. If Crow had divorced me, other men would have bid for me, not because I was necessarily wonderful or beautiful but just because I was a woman under a certain age. People would not regard Crow as immoral, or unelectable, for divorcing me; they might, at worse, regard him as a touch foolish to let an eligible woman go, but that’s all. I don’t believe that would have stood in the way of him becoming elected Interim President. Or, at least, it would have figured as a very small thing compared to the fact of his military rank, his reputation, his ability to say ‘go’ and they go, ‘come’ and they come. Maybe it would even have worked the other way around: people would have admired his marital profligacy, as if he were saying look, I’m so powerful I don’t even need to cling on to the one woman I’ve been lucky to snag, like the rest of you – see! I discard her! I don’
t know.

  Of course, that leaves open the question of why Crow didn’t simply divorce me. Maybe my furious fixation on the notion that he wanted me to stand beside him as he stood for political office was actually, and simply, a way of distracting me from that more fundamental question. Why didn’t he just leave me, kick me out? There isn’t a straightforward answer I think.

  Four

  Let me tell you about my job. I was a mining administrator, committee-level. This meant that I sat on a committee and discussed questions relating to mining; nothing more. Eight-twenty the following day I was standing in the metal hallway of the metal building at four, Science Street. A corporal showed me through. I went up a metal-grid staircase into a larger first-floor room. The door was of a different colour and design from the walls; it had the word STROSSEN printed in sharp black capitals, over the handle. That stuck in my mind for some reason, although I did not know what the word meant.

  Inside was a Formica table and some scuffed plastic chairs. The walls were bare, thickly corrugated like metal corduroy. A single large window was icily, painfully bright with morning light. Half a dozen people were in the room, crowded at one end. When I went over I could see that they had gathered around a small waste-burner, and were trying to absorb the heat.

  ‘Eight-thirty,’ said the corporal. He was not a young man. ‘Time for the heater to go.’

  Without complaint, the little group zipped and buckled themselves into their various fat coats and took their seats around the table. The corporal swung a lid onto the heater, picked it up by two handles, and hoiked it out of the door.

  ‘No heater?’ I said, to nobody in particular.

  I was answered by the Chair, a man I was to later to know very well indeed. At the time I thought him just a crumpled face, swaddled and padded about with bulky coat and hood; but I don’t want to play the tease-you writerly game of, you know, gradually revealing more and more about him, of keeping you hanging on whilst I slowly reveal his significance in my story, all that nonsense, so I’ll tell you all about him right away. He said: ‘Seven of us in this room, our body heat will warm it eventually.’ Later that day I discovered his name, [Blank], and his courtesy rank, although he had not been a serving military officer from before the Snow. He was old-US, his family originally from Eastern Europe, from Poland I think. They’d been called [Blank] which they had Englished to [Blank] when they emigrated. It was a little while later that I discovered the more personal details about him, his habits, his little fetishes, his dead wife, divorced then killed by the Snow, his previous career as a writer. And later still, after we had been [expletive deleted] for a month, that he told me his secret life: his hopes, his suspicions about the NUSA administration, the whole Che-Guevara side of him. I didn’t realise he was a terrorist until I had known him for a long time. Should I say terrorist, or freedom fighter, or should I say agent of change, or some euphemism like that? He certainly talked about change, and he talked about freedom, and sometimes he talked about ‘terror’.

  Perhaps it sounds strange, but when I started working I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing in this committee, other than the fact that it was something to do with mining. So I sat at the table, and listened attentively to try to winnow the clues from the discussion.

  [Blank], chairing, began by introducing me to the group. ‘People,’ he said. ‘This is Tara, recently married to [Blank].’ I didn’t bother correcting him about my name. ‘We all know [Blank], he’s a friend to this committee. And I’m sure we all want to congratulate Tara on her marriage to such an important person.’

  A murmur went round the table. People seemed genuinely appreciative, as if marrying Crow had been some sort of actual achievement on my part.

  I smiled, nodded at people.

  ‘OK,’ said [Blank]. ‘Let’s get on with it today. Let’s get this show on the road.’

  Now, as I write this, and as I recall that day, the memory is overlaid with later memories, like drawings on transparencies laid over a painted backsheet in the making of an animated movie. [Blank] was, that day, pompous and exact. He kept holding things up to pronounce on breaches of the necessary protocols. My first impression, I am sure, was of a tight-arse, a government man. His constant little catch-phrases infuriated me: ‘let’s get this show on the road’, ‘we can drive that past them (the military) in an open-top Mercedes and see if they salute’, ‘well, there are fifty ways to leave this city’ (or ‘fifty ways to skin this cat’, or ‘fifty ways to get yourself killed’). But now, as I write this, I can picture a different [Blank]. I see him lying in my arms, his chest hair prickling against my bare skin. I picture him talking about the Seidensticker memo, or sometimes about the Seidensticker interview, although (he would say) the two things were probably the same secret document. I picture him saying ‘the government is lying to us, just as it always did. Things are worse now, because they control communication much more efficiently. Only somebody halfway inside, like me, gets even a whiff of the truth. This Snow was not a natural disaster; it wasn’t caused by Russian environmental abuse, it wasn’t reactors in Siberia that kick-started it, all that stuff is just a lie.’ And he would tremble in my arms with the suppressed fury of saying those last three words, actually tremble with this sweet, loveable, innocent hippy-outrage. ‘The government is lying. If we can find that Seidensticker document we’ll know the truth.’ The long conversations we had in the pale afternoon light, with him telling me everything he knew about this man Seidensticker – a scientist who had been working for the government at the time the Snow started falling, who had written something that proved that it was the government that was responsible for the disaster that had ruined mankind. This was a completely different [Blank] from the pompous man who chaired that committee when I first met him.

  But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Our meetings, I slowly learned, involved one particular large construction project. There was a much smaller quantity of snow falling out of the air every year. The massive falls that had blanketed the world were, according to the best guesses of army scientists, a thing of the past. ‘We can start to think of our basing ourselves at this height of snow,’ said [Blank]. ‘That seems assured now.’

  ‘Totally?’ asked a woman I was later to come to know very well as [Blank].

  ‘I can confirm,’ said a man in a major’s uniform, [Blank], ‘that the snowfall is now less than four inches a year. There is reason to believe,’ he said, looking at the Chair, ‘that it will reduce even further.’

  The plan, then, was to base the city. Previously it had been built up as the snow built up, supported on old Air Force barrage balloons filled with helium in the early days of the emergency. This had worked well enough (I discovered) because encasing the balloons in snow had effectively cut leakage from the balloons. As the snow levels rose the balloons had been dug out and moved to the side, a couple of hundred yards or so, one at a time; a new platform had been laid down on top of them and the prefab buildings moved one by one onto the new base. I discovered this recent history of the city in the first week of meetings, I think, and I can remember my astonishment at the amount of work it must have involved; all that physical labour, like squaddies building the pyramids. ‘Oh,’ said the major, when I expressed my amazement, ‘that’s nothing. Liberty is a recent build. By the time it was sited, the snowfall was starting to slacken off anyway, and the place has been moved only a couple times. You should have seen how the original survivor cities were constructed, over-Stateside.’ He told me epic stories of military installations growing into small cities with the influx of essential personnel; of platforms built on stilts, like oil rigs, with their legs being extended month by month as the snow rose, until it became clear that the world was looking not at hundreds of yards of snowfall-depth but at miles. Each of the six over-US cities worked on their solutions, some placing inflated balloons at the base of their stilts, some working networks of gridwork into the snow at angles, most having to abandon eve
rything and simply rebuild whilst their populations struggled in the whiteout frozen chaos.

  The most striking thing, he said, was how utterly ordinary this whole apocalyptic labour became. How used people became to it, such that it was just another day’s work, digging the city out of the accumulating snow and hauling it physically upwards, upwards. Amazing, really.

  I sometimes think that the human being is a machine designed to take the extraordinary and make it ordinary, habitual, banal. What would you call a machine designed for that purpose?

  Now that the snowfall was finally dying down, plans were being drawn up for more permanent habitation. Our committee was addressing one aspect of that normalisation. Specifically, we were discussing the best way to construct a mineshaft down to the food-mines beneath. Up to now, all the food, all provisions and supplies, were mined out of under-snow sites by adapted military craft. These burrowed down through the snow, most of them on battery power. Their crews excavated supplies, filled their holds, and burrowed back up to the surface. There was much talk about the design of these machines, of the ways in which former submarines had been adapted, how former trucks had been welded together with former airplanes, how hovercrafts were salvaged from every military location, and hovercraft blowers and skirts added to the most unlikely machines to enable them to skim over the snow’s surface. Some of these mining craft were little tubs, lowered from the side of the larger hovercraft, such as the one that had dug me out of the snow. Some were larger machines that could hover to their dig-site and then burrow in.

  But it was a troublesome and dangerous technology. The machines required complex and continual maintenance, with an extremely limited supply of spare parts. Sometimes they went down and did not come up again. Worse than this, their capacity was very limited. Their hold-spaces were small. They couldn’t surface if they were carrying too much weight, so not enough heavy metal, machine spare parts and other weighty things were coming up from below. It was all, I realised, terribly unsatisfactory. I didn’t take in too much about the specifics about diggers, skimmers, ice-subs, the blueprints and wiring charts and all that boys-toys stuff, because I really wasn’t that interested. But the picture it painted in my head, the webwork of human interaction, the struggle and labour, the social organism contracting like a muscle and pulling together, sent trickles of electricity up my back and neck and made my hair stand up a little.