by Adam Roberts
I stood. ‘What do you mean by this?’
His only answer was to spit on the floor.
Some have said that, at this affront, I should have imprisoned Szerelem aboard the Senaar, perhaps used him as a pawn to force the Alsists towards reason. But this misunderstands the nature of Alsist society. Each individual cares for nobody but himself, and they would in no way be distressed by the loss of another. Perhaps I should have detained him anyway, or perhaps had him executed. Had I been able to see into the seeds of time, as the phrase goes, I would have known then that such action could have saved our people a skyful of trouble. A skyful of trouble.
2
The Fox and the Lion
Petja
Ours is a world with very little landscape. It is largely salt desert, with some localised rock formations, and the Sebestyen mountains that back us are the only real mountains. There are three small seas. Before our departure from Earth, analysis of the spectrographic data from this world suggested there was a great deal of free water on our destination world; but there is too little water. It was water that threatened, in the end, to become a currency with us – to be, that is, monies, although such a thing is alien to our way. But scarcity will disrupt the proper order of things.
Whether there had been more water on Salt fifty years ago and that water had in some manner become lost, or whether the original data were corrupted in some way, it is difficult to say. I have heard conspiracy stories from time to time, stories that suggest that Earth authorities falsified the data to encourage us to go. Perhaps such things happen. And life here has been hard enough for me to be resentful, if I were given to resentful feelings. But the finest beauty is to be found in desolation, and our world is a piece of the finest beauty. It is the silver-salt jewel of God’s creation. Smoke stretching itself in lazy curls against the mirror at three in the morning – even though you know the smoke to be toxic and bad-for-health, even though it is very late and you are exhausted, even though you are stunned with weariness over the talking that has gone on so long – despite all this, the smoke against the mirror will shake you suddenly with its exquisite beauty. Just as a man may look down at his life’s blood draining away, and see the sun glinting in the wetness as a glossy red perfection. So it is that the green claustrophobia of the Earthly oasis, the free-standing water and the heavy wet air, the buzzing insects and the sweat; all these things are ugly, for all that they represent fertility. So it is that the wide stretch of the desert, blank and glittering in a sun that will steal your moisture and kill you, the emptiness and the waste; all this is beautiful, for all that it represents desolation.
In saying this I am out of touch with the younger generations, who want nothing more than to change the face of our world altogether, to introduce life and growth to every part of its dead face. This is a noble aim but I will be dead before it can ever happen, if it can ever happen, and I am glad of that. Do not think me perverse! A man may walk out on the surface of an alien world, and his eye may dwell on the emptiness, the desert of white aching towards the horizon, and he may feel at home for the first time in his life.
We arrived in orbit, a great procession of ships, strange and new, from another star. And we celebrated for three days and three nights; but even in the middle of celebration there were people too impatient to make merry. Those who had been allocated shuttle duties took themselves and their friends down to the surface; flew down to the shoreline of the Aradys sea, and danced in its powdery salts with masks on. They came back with chlorine irritation to their eyes, but they were envied. I went down myself, and walked for an hour and a half, wearing goggles and breathing mask; walked away from the sluggish water and past the mountain peak at the furthest end of the range. Walked into the bright east of a new day, with the sun iridescing in the early air.
It was this impatience that caused us to break with the fleet before the others, and bring our ship down to the seashore. The world was here to fulfil us; this was our chosen land. And, at the same time, we were here to fulfil it: we are its chosen people. This world had never had a moon, and we (the fleet) brought it three. The comet, star-shaped now with its loss of bulk from its twelve thruster-sites, like twelve bites into its edge. It circled the world, and on some mornings you could glimpse it, a shining star that swooped low over the sky. Then there was the ore-anchor, placed in a polar orbit; and the frozen oxygen. Three moons. There was little life on Salt, no biology and only some botany, and what little there was lurked in the mountains, or floated insentient in the lakes, insignificant. Over time we set about our great tasks, to begin soaking up the free chlorine, filling the sky with air, bringing down water and trace elements into the world. We brought our own life, adapted and tweaked it, and let it begin its slow colonisation. And we brought the world ourselves. We added soul, God’s most precious quantity, to a soulless place. We were the spirit of Adam, passed through the finger of God into his limp body. We were creation; the morning star and the evening star. We would burn down from the heavens, balanced on a spear of oxidising rocket-fuel, slowing to meet with the ground, a shuttle filled with materials and with soul.
Barlei
The calendar dates from the very date of landfall but many of us had put foot upon Salt before the Senaar landed on our new homeworld. In the months after arrival, and after we were settled in orbit around the planet, I was again very busy. The tasks that faced us were large, but it is the large task that draws the human spirit upwards. Humankind will always meet the challenges that face it, and will overcome, with the strength of righteous purpose and by God’s will.
The world was not as hospitable as we had hoped. Our gathered data, purchased before the voyage, had suggested plenty of free-standing water on the world. The great problem with stellar colonisation – and should you, or your children, ever think of harnessing a comet and moving to another star, then you must bear this in mind – the great problem is that data is always received out of date. Our information left the sun twenty-five years before we began the planning for our voyage; by the time we had mobilised ourselves and arrived, another forty years had passed. The moral is: be prepared to be adaptable. You must play the music God has composed for you, and sight-read if necessary. When you stand before the great Creator at the day of your death, and he demands you explain your conduct on this world, do you think you will be allowed to stutter and mumble? No, you must sing out your life; you must read off the notes of your moral behaviour. You must make your life into music, and that music must be a hymn of praise to authority and to God. Salt was our symphony.
The more immediate problems were not those of insufficient water. There are three bodies of water on Salt, and although the water in them is supersaturated saline it is easy enough to desalinate. Of course, the lakes are not very deep, nor very wide, but they are there; and they were deeper when we arrived than they are now. But even more importantly than the native supplies, we had brought our own ball of dusty frozen water with us in the shape of the comet that had pulled us the immense distance between our worlds. The majority of the comet’s bulk had been dissipated in the process, naturally, but there were still several hundred thousand tonnes. Comet activity in the inner system is low but there are a great many comets on wide and distant orbital trajectories, and it will always be possible, if the water situation becomes too grave, to mount an expedition and retrieve one.
So I was not too worried about the water supply for our new world (these were precisely the terms in which I talked in the early days, as if our world were a house, and water merely a pipe that needed to be properly fixed; such talk raises morale). No, the water supply was not the greatest worry. More pressing, it seemed to me, was the atmosphere. The concentrations of free chlorine were relatively high, as were one or two other poisonous gases; the rest of the air was a cocktail of inert gas and fifty per cent nitrogen, but there were only trace levels of oxygen. We had hoped for more oxygen; or, at least, we had hoped for enough water to be able to derive our own ox
ygen. It seemed for a time that the oxygen we had towed with us from Earth (actually from Jupiter) was not going to be enough to raise global levels but we discovered a certain amount of frozen oxides under the South Pole, protected from sun by the sheet salt-ice, and we were able to liberate the oxygen from them. And then we pushed our orbiting ball of pure oxygen downwards out of its orbit, into the atmosphere.
What a spectacle it was! I have seen visuals from above, which show it streaking like a great firework [intertext has no index-connection for a%x‘9705firework’ suggest consult alternate database, e.g. orig.historiograph] round and round the world, spewing more and more of a tail and shrinking. But I do not have to rely on visuals, as you young people today do; I was there, I was on the ground. The Senaar was still in orbit at this stage, but we had established a home base on the eastern shores of Galilee with two shuttles, and I chose to watch the spectacle from there. It was a splendid sight, a chariot of fire and steam passing faster than sound to the north, along the equator. After it had gone over the western horizon its sound-wave boomed, with a great sound of tearing, like a mighty cloth was being rent in two before the temple of God. We waited expectantly, and it emerged again, much lower in the sky. And then it crashed, away over the horizon, to the north. It came down as we planned, almost exactly half-way between Galilee and Perse. Some of our people took trucks and drove out to examine the site. They said it was possible for them to stand in the mists it gave off and remove their masks, to breathe the air directly.
Never forget your heritage, my children! Never forget that the first women and men to breathe the air of Salt unaided were Senaarians!
The diffusion of this mass of oxygen fully into the atmosphere took several months; and the liberation of oxygen from such oxides as we could find took most of the year. But long before the end of the year concentrations in the atmosphere were up to fifteen and sixteen per cent, breathable though thin; we had raised atmospheric pressure by several points. The atmospheric scrubbing of chlorine and other toxins was a more complicated task, though.
The difficulty here was that our eleven nations were settling, mostly, around the three great lakes, Galilee, Perse and the Pale Sea (those who were not settling directly along the shores were choosing sites close enough to the water to lay a pipeline without much expense). Much of our early energy, after we brought the Senaar to ground, was spent in building the desalination plants. Water settles in the depressions and chlorine, more than twice as heavy as air, settles in these depressions too. You will have seen, as I have, the banks of yellowy-green gas rolling as chlorine fog from the waters. But my people, and the people from the other ships, had spent decades cooped up in their hulls. We could not hide away, as if still voyaging through space: we had arrived. We had to get out. It is our nature to want to break any bonds placed upon us. Samson in the temple.
We did two things. The first was to dedicate our Fabricants to manufacturing converters for an entire month. These were catalytic-ally-charged buoys, powered by the sun, that locked up the chlorine as solid bricks of chloride plastics. We launched hundreds of these floating detoxifiers on the broad, calm waters of Galilee. The other Galilean nations (they were young then, hardly the great nations they have since become! Still, it is right to talk about them as nations, for such they were, in their essence, in their potential), the other nations along the coast, Eleupolis, Yared, New Florence and Babulonis, contributed funds towards this project. They lacked the specific Fabricant software to be able to produce these buoys but New Florence created some solar-powered catalyst rovers, to travel the depressions and dry sinks in the desert and do the same job there. There were, I believe, other projects launched in the north. But this business of clearing away the poison was very large-scale; it was going to be many years before we saw a significant reduction.
So there was a second strand to our approach. We fitted our people; we altered ourselves! If Moses will not come to the desert, the desert must come to Moses, a proverb of which my old grandmother was particularly fond. The devices we used are antiques now, of course; at the time they were the highest of high-tech. We would take a person, and sedate them, and under surgical conditions we would remove much of their sinuses and fill the space with a carefully grown filter. An organic substance this, derived I think from coral (you will not know what coral is, of course, but you can check it if you are interested), that scrubbed out the chlorine. And because it functioned as a sinus, the removed chlorine was washed out of the nose again in mucus suspension. A self-cleaning lifelong filter-mask. Perhaps you say: what was wrong with the ordinary masks? Was it so much bother to have to put them on? Well, today (and because of us) you can walk about your homeworld as God made you, you don’t understand the irritation of the masks. The way the edges rub the skin, bringing out welts and infections in the flesh. The uncomfortableness, the sense of constriction. And, of course, the danger: they could fail, fall off; you could be at home when your window is breached and your mask not to hand. Worst of all, I suppose, they were symbolic of our incapacity; they squashed against our faces, artificial pig-snouts, a reminder of our imprisonment. How could we bear to be imprisoned on our own world?
Of course, the Alsists mocked our new technology. It is in the nature of anarchy to fear new technology. Their propaganda satirised us: whenever the visuals were set in Senaar the people always had runny noses; always dirty noses when they represented us! But they did not understand that mucus was only produced when one had been in contact with chlorine; and then it was simply a matter of carrying a handkerchief in order to wipe it away, in the thoroughly civilised manner. With some people, it is true, the implant would cause minor infections, and this would involve them in continual production of mucus; but whatever the Alsists have said, for most this was not a problem. I myself was fitted with an implant (it has since been removed) and I experienced no discomfort or side-effects at all.
My first walk in the open air was televised throughout Senaar, of course. And what an experience! I fitted my contact lenses, and put in place a gum-guard, to inhibit me breathing through my mouth (it is surprisingly easy to forget to breathe only through the nose and a lungful of chlorine is an unpleasant thing). Then I stepped through the airlock on the crystal-salt beach. To be able to walk down to the water, to feel the wind gently on my face, to breathe deeply (through the nose) of the air of our world! To watch the sun, still white, settling towards the horizon, throwing long black shadows behind us all. I would have stayed longer, but the Devil’s Whisper starts up at dusk.
You may have seen the representation of me contemplating Galilee, with the sun just clipping the horizon, and a crowd gathered to watch me. They were going to put it on our banknotes, but I stopped them because I considered it would have been vainglorious of me to allow such a graven image on something so important as money. But it is commonly reproduced, and there is a mosaic of the scene, assembled from different shades of salt, glued to the wall of the primary debating chamber.
Petja
Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask. It was a clever thing. You would wear it about your neck at all times, like a pendant, but when its sense-cell detected chlorine, at even the most minute levels, it would leap up. Like a live thing, like a salmon, which is a fish that used to hop out of the waters for joy on Earth. A receptor was embedded in your tooth, a tiny device: the homer was in the mask. And it would leap up towards its mate and there the mask would be, clamped over your mouth. You needed to remember to breathe through the mouth only, of course, but it became a sort of reflex. To feel the gentle smack of mask over the lips, and then to take a deep breath through the mouth. Then you had the leisure to take some nose-clips out of your pouch and fit them over your nostrils. Chlorine up the nose is not a pleasant thing. It is a gas that irritates the lining of the nose.
Barlei
It was characteristic of the Alsists that, without compunction, they stole the land east of the Perse Sea. It is true that protocols signed before t
he voyage were, shall we say, vague on the subject of exactly how the land was to be allocated although they did stipulate that all nations were to have equal access to water, arable land, mineral resources and the like. But on arrival, it was generally accepted that all ships would remain in orbit until negotiations had reached a consensus concerning land apportioning. Of course, I agreed to host such negotiations aboard the Senaar. But the Alsists, and Szerelem in particular, flouted the process of democracy. They took their ship down and landed on their present site without so much as informing the other captains of their actions. I remember the day; being woken by my PA in the early hours of ship-time, and hustling up to the command bridge in my uniform dressing-gown to watch the Als bruising the atmosphere purple and red with the heat of their entry. And by then it was too late to stop them.
Today, when it is generally accepted that Senaar is the most advantageously positioned nation (rooted as we are on the fertile east coast of the eel-rich Galilee), it may be difficult to understand why this Alsist manoeuvre caused such outrage. But think yourselves back. With so little by way of geographical features, Salt’s weather is dominated by the coriolis force. The winds in the northern hemisphere are prevailingly western; and Als is positioned at the back of the Samson mountains (the Sebestyen, as they call them), which represent a sort of natural windbreak. But the winds in the southern hemisphere come mostly from the east. East of Senaar there was nothing but a thousand miles of salt desert, stretching on and on until eventually you reach the broken hills north of the De Morgan Sea. Often the weather was calm, but when the winds got themselves roused up they could be fierce indeed.
There were two times of great wind, of what used on Earth to be called typhun [intertext has no index-connection for a%x‘160typhun’ suggest consult alternate database, e.g. orig.vocabhyp]. One would happen shortly around sunset, when the cooling air of the nighttime out east would sink and push great howling winds towards us. These would last for an hour or so. Then there would be a dawn wind, less savage but just as unpleasant. And wind off the desert is much worse than wind off the water. As you know, the waters of Galilee are supersaturated and will barely take on more salt; salt blown on to them sinks to the bottom as a sort of sludge, which is one of the reasons why the Galilee is so shallow at our end, and why the water is constantly, yearly, creeping westwards. But in open desert, the driest place in the world, winds break the tiny particles of salt into even smaller microparticles of salt that can be as little as a few atoms across. On exposed bluffs, which act like rock anvils for the hammering wind, these tiny specks are blown up by the billion, a stinging, coruscating blizzard that looks like smoke and feels like a million insects eating the skin from your flesh. At its most intense, the east wind will blind the unwary watcher; will make any exposed skin bleed from a thousand scratches. It makes a high-pitched hissing as it moves over the ground. It will entirely devour corpses left in its path within months; and, of course, there were to be corpses (but I will not hurry my narrative forward). It is known, still, to those who have to venture eastward beyond the Great Dyke as the Devil’s Whisper.
