Salt

by Adam Roberts

  We very quickly learnt to stay indoors during the dawn; to retreat to our homes for an hour as soon as the sun had vanished behind the horizon, but the wear on our equipment was very great. Machines clogged up with the fine salt; our plastic windows became so scored with fine lines as to become opaque grey filters that scattered light in sunburst-rainbow patterns.

  And so we built the Great Dyke. It is officially called the Barlei Dyke, in my honour, but I am uncomfortable with such tributes. And ‘Great Dyke’ accurately enough describes what it is: a Pharaonic feat of engineering, massive and beautiful. We excavated a kilometre east of our furthest settlement (fortunately the very severity of the wind meant that the topsalt was thinner here than in most places, and we did not have to dig too deeply to reach bedrock) then we carved out great slabs of quartz and saltstone and lifted them by shuttle to lay a great wall. This we built upon with small stones, and then bulldozed the salt from east and west to create the dyke. Finally, we secured the whole with (to the east) saltstone capstones, a solid bluff, and (to the west) a layer of engineered topsoil which was planted all over with salt-grass.

  The whole was the single most expensive undertaking of the pre-War period. It was paid for with a special tax, willingly paid by all Senaarians, as well as by contributions from the other Galilean nations, which were (even at that early time) allying themselves with the strength of Senaar. I contributed a million from my personal fortune. And the dyke meant that the severity of the eastern winds was abated.

  Well, to be truthful, for about a year after the dyke was built matters did not greatly improve. The aerodynamics of the thing were not perfectly figured, and for two of the years’s three seasons the winds were high enough to breach it. They would be sucked closer to the ground by the shape and come whipping into our land. More than this, the natural strains of salt-grass were poor things. Plant engineering came a long way, very quickly, but the indigenous strains were brittle and thin. As soon as the stems were a finger’s-length long, the wind would rip them from the sand and throw them downwind. At us. You know how sharp-edged salt-grass is? Imagine a flurrying tornado-wind filled with them. They gave the Devil’s Whisper a growl. We had to plant great pillars of quartz, quarried and lifted at huge expense, to break up the profile of the dyke. And the plant-engineers tried many strains of vegetation, adapted from Salt’s natural growths or adapted from Earth strains: salt-bamboos, which grew tall but spindly, easily broken by the wind. Scrub and web-algae that clogged the spaces between spars. Finally, a stronger salt-grass that held the leeward side.

  But what did teething-troubles matter? The dyke was a symbol! It was a hymn in stone and salt to the Lord, a statement of our power to build, to change the world.

  And how we built! Sometimes I think no nation, not even ours, will ever recapture the burning energy of those first few years. We dismantled areas of the ship as it sat on the salt shore of Galilee, leaving only the great central dome: this we kept, partly as a monument to our tremendous journey across space, but also because the gap between its double-shell was filled with fluorocarbonated water as a shield against deep space radiation. Our new sun was brighter than the old and put out more life-harming radiation, and the upper layers of Salt’s atmosphere were poor in greenhouse gases. The buildings were converted to hospital and creche facilities, and young children and the infirm – those most at risk from the higher doses of rads – were kept under the dome. There were three hospitals, actually, even in those early days! One was a standard medical installation, and took most of the insured and wealthy patients; but there were two smaller endowments made by wealthy Earthers who had been too old to accompany us, and these two centres of healing were set up on a nominal percentage fee basis. It was my proud boast in the early days that Senaar possessed the greatest provision of healthcare and pre-school facilities on the whole of Salt. This is still the case, although other nations have made certain advances. And although the War set us back.

  The typical dwelling-buildings, that grew all around the central dome, were of the sort familiar to us all from history visuals; those flat-topped, heavy stone structures. They look primitive (indeed, they were primitive) but they did the job. The job was providing shelter, from the wind on the ground and from the radiation above.

  Sites were initially all owned by the state, to be leased to the inhabitants for twenty years. After that they would revert to the inhabitants and the inhabitants’ descendants. This encouraged people to think medium-term, but did not tie them unreasonably. And so, in the spare time they could manage from their various jobs, people began to come out of the tents in the shadow of the dome, and pick their plots of land. They began to build their own houses.

  People could quarry their own saltstone, or have it quarried for them fairly cheaply: saltstone lies close to the surface, under the topsalt. So, they would build their walls of saltstone, lay out the rough plan of the dwelling. But the quartz lies deep, outpushings from the granite core of our world. The individual could rarely muster the means to quarry it himself. It is at such moments that the individual can draw on the strength of the whole community, the whole congregation.

  I dedicated one of the ship’s shuttles to quarrying and ferrying monumental blocks of quartz from east of the Dyke and I established a scheme whereby citizens could purchase these blocks from the state with a money deposit, the balance to be redeemed either in money or else in community work. The shuttle would carve a six-metre thick chunk of quartz from the quarry and airlift it to the dwelling, lower it gently onto its laser-points and let it settle. I know all about this procedure, because I built my own house. It was a good scheme: people got good houses, and the community got a great deal of public works at no cost to the treasury. We owe the North Coast Spinal Railway to this scheme, or at least the first fifty kilometres of it.

  Can anybody claim to feel at home until they have experienced the joy of building their own house? As head of the government, of course, I had quarters inside the dome, in the government buildings, but I decided this was not appropriate. It might have looked as if I was hiding under the protection of the dome, as if I was too frightened to brave the dangers of radiation like my people. Worse (in political terms) it associated me with the weak, the sick and the children. So I chose a site on a raised plateau, five metres above sea-level, overlooking the Galilee (enemy propaganda suggests I had the police evict two families to vacate this space, but this is not true: both families were very happy to give the ground over to me). I brought in half a dozen workmen and workwomen – in fact, I had to insist they took their wages, so keen were they to do the work for nothing. But I reminded them what it is the Bible says about the worker being worthy of his hire. Together, we quarried the saltstone and built the walls; we laid out the interior with bedroom, kitchen, dining, reception room, guest rooms, study, bunker, lumber room and bathroom. Then the shuttle hovered in, the copestone dangling massy beneath it. I can barely express how satisfying was the sound of the thuk with which the quartz greeted the saltstone.

  This, my first house on our glorious new world, was a place of great happiness to me. It was, perhaps, a little dark inside, but that was necessary in the face of the radiation hazard. Windows were few, the ceiling felt lower than it actually was. In the winter it could become rather cold. Still, I have only happy memories of that house. From inside that house I co-ordinated the building of a city. At evening I would sit on my porch, watching the sun set over the Galilee, with my advisors around me. Or, sometimes, just old friends; or perhaps ordinary citizens, sitting at my side and sipping herbal tea. Talking. Admiring God’s beauty. Somebody might play some music, an air on the pipes for instance, or a sonata on the keyboards I kept by the window overlooking this porch. These were the times of tranquillity for me.

  But tranquillity can only ever be enjoyed if it is sandwiched between times of great work. And how we worked!

  There were epic meetings in the Parliament, during which the various plans for the city were debat
ed. Tempers ran hot. There had been many plans for the overall layout of the city submitted, by qualified architects and planners as well as by ordinary citizens. Most favoured a cross-shaped design, with urbanisation branching in four directions; not very practical, I am afraid, to dissipate buildings so widely. Others expressed self-consciously musical motifs, or attempted to pick out a pattern on the ground, of a face or the Eagle of St John, or some such. Some were more mathematical, grid-patterns or circular grilles of streets. I consulted with my advisers and shortlisted six, which were then defended in Parliament by their designers and ultimately voted upon in a special pre-season debate. The vote treasury had never before, and has never since, taken in so many votes! It was remarkable how fervently people cared for this issue. The debate went on for three days, and each day I had to suspend discussion because no pause in the proceedings presented itself.

  When the particular grid was decided upon, there was an intense period of building. People would work all day, and then spend all night building, taking only a few hours sleep at dawn before going back to work. Nobody was idle. Adolescents, who would normally be at school except that the schools had yet to be built, lent a hand constructing their classrooms. Pregnant women worked during their rest-time. The sick would do what little they could, programming netscreens from their hospital beds. Only on Sunday mornings would the work stop, and people would gather, in the open air at first, and later in the first churches, to give praise.

  We built houses, and we fused down the topsalt between them to make roads. People scoured the topsalt of their garden, laid plastic in the pits they made, and hawked and traded their organic rubbish and the algae cleared from the bays of Galilee to spread over it: a foul-smelling stuff, but the first slow stages in building the mulch we think of as soil, the first step on the road to growing Earth plants. We programmed out Fabricants to produce bicycles, to be sold at basic government price, and the streets were crowded with people making their way to and from work. Houses came into being along the road. Every day seemed to bring in another shuttle flight, with another huge piece of hewn quartz from out east. Everybody was busy, everybody contented. And although you could see the strain in people’s faces, the physical exhaustion, nonetheless we all tapped into the energy and resilience of youth (for we were a young nation). Concerts happened without planning; a woman with a guitar and two men with pipes would start playing on one of the scrubby open places that still pocked the city. A crowd would gather. People would be talking, laughing, cheering the music. Or else, the word would go round the net, or even by word-of-mouth, that a quartet was going to be playing in such-and-such house, or that the children’s choir was practising in the dome, and people would slip away from their work for half an hour, and gather by the wall to listen. Music is the soul of mathematics, somebody once said, and work is mathematics; energy expenditure, efficiency curves, technology and science, the geometry of building, the topography of city-plans. And people would sing as they worked, God’s plan manifesting itself in this new city. Music would soar from the half-finished houses, the squat office buildings without roofs, the public areas.

  Praise.

  For the first month I was busied with establishing the superstructure of government: another building, if you like, but a metaphorical one, set up on the base of my people. But I also travelled. I visited the building of the dyke many times, and put myself about amongst my people, often physically lending a hand. Everywhere I went were happy faces, joyous women wiping sweat from their faces to shake me by the hand, reedy men laughing at my jokes. I visited the hospital many times, greeting the sick and confined. Mostly it was the radiation-foolish, people who were too sloppy with the necessary protocols. Many burns, depilations and cataracts; but even in the venue of sickness there was joy. People would grasp me by the hand with tears in their eyes, even though the skin of their palms was coming away beneath their bandages. I remember particularly leading a ward in prayer; one woman sang loudest of all the worshippers, and the nurses told me afterwards that they were astonished by her vigour, that until my visit she had hardly been able even to raise herself from her bed. She died later that day, I believe; I like to think of her exertions as proof that the spirit can be stronger than the body.

  Within a month of the landing of the Senaar I was beginning my first Galilean journey. The number of times I have travelled around and over our sea but I shall never forget the first time! I flew by shuttle to Yared, on the north coast: from the first, our closest ally and dearest nation-friend. I was there officially to initiate negotiations for the North Coast Spinal Railway, but in fact there was more joy, celebration and praise – and more trade negotiated – than can be suggested by that rather bland official label. I was banqueted every night, shown the plans for their city. The land north of Yared is bitter, without even the limited algae fertility that we enjoy east of Galilee. Accordingly, Yared hemmed the coast, kept close to the water that gives life: few buildings were more than a hundred metres from the waters, and the Yaredish had their gardens in the front: not faux-grass and flowers growing weakly in hastily-assembled soil, but portions of the shallow sea boxed off and desalinated, places for waterlilies and big-fronded leaf plants, for eels and tiny genengineered sticklebacks. I visited many of these homes, met many of the Yaredish people. There was a great televised summit meeting between myself and the Yared President, Al-Sebadoh, at which the treaty of accord was signed. In all the vicissitudes that followed, the years of war and hardship, this treaty between our two great nations has never been breached.

  Of course, Yared is a much poorer nation than are we and most of the trade we undertook on that first visit was symbolic; from the Yaredish artefacts and statues that do indeed possess a certain beauty but are of little practical use, from us Fabricant programmes of tremendous and immediate use. But although enemies of mine have sometimes stigmatised my dealing with the Yared as unprofitable, you must understand that profit is not always measured in terms of money. With Yared we have always had the staunchest of allies, and our alliance is partly founded on their sense of indebtedness. And if some of the more hot-headed Yaredish factions have resented the Senaarian dominance of the Galilee basin, most have recognised the force of necessity, have understood the good order and harmony that comes out of a single recognised authority. And after all we do worship the same God, which can hardly be said of the puerile individualism of faith practised amongst the anarchist Alsists; a faith which in practice amounts to atheism.

  From Yared I flew over the waters (I can still remember pressing my face against the shuttle porthole as the pilot banked to catch the thousand glittering fragments of sunlight thrown up by the waves, as if our sea were molten, brightest platinum waves) to visit Eleupolis. They were having their teething difficulties, problems that marred their foundation, and I have no wish to slander one of our allies by dwelling too harshly on that time. Suffice it to say that I did not stay long, with the volatility of the political situation so severe. Eleupolis was a poor place then, with too much squabbling and fighting to allow time for building. Things have improved there now, and I understand that it is now quite fashionable for our young people to take trucks round the south-east curve of Galilee and visit. But at the beginning the people of Eleupolis bickered and fought and argued amongst themselves, and there was little by way of building. And the people paid the price for this lack of strong leadership. Living in tents is all very well as a temporary measure, but without solid roofs to fend off the radiation you will not prosper. Sickness and death began its slow growth curve. And instead of recognising this evil and banding together to combat it, the Eleupolisians only bickered and fought and argued the more. I understand from historians that this nation suffered the greatest proportion of deaths in the early decades. The workforce was decimated, the land was stunted. I established alliance protocols with the provisional government, but I believe that same government was overthrown within days of our departure.

  From there I flew along
the coast, and then south-west over the shrugging broken hills of Gant to Babulonis. This was a more stable community. They had decided not to build by the shore, and instead carved their homes from the Gantian hills. Their first great public work was the great pipeline, running from Galilee to their city, powered by solar pumps. They preferred the hills partly because it made building their homes easier, but also because there was an indigenous sort of salt-grass there, less harsh and useless than our East Coast variants. We tried transplanting this strain, of course (we traded Fabricant software and some other technical knowhow for various Babulonis goods), but it did not thrive in the windier east. Babulonis was centred on a long, winding valley, fairly sheltered from the whipping winds. The pipeline deposited some water in a pool at the head of this valley, and it ran (by means of certain cleverly-concealed pumps) up the course of an ancient riverbed to a reservoir at the far end. Strange to sit by a stream and watch it run uphill! But I sat there, in the white light of midday, patting at my face with a silk handkerchief in the heat. The chief of Babulonis described the process by which they created this stream: resurrecting the dead planet, he called it. And it was a beautiful sight to sit in the mouth of an elegant Babulonian cave-home, looking down past meadows of cropped salt-grass and over municipal buildings to a river, sparkling in the sun. Some call this Babulonis Canal, since it is an artificial waterway; but, as they themselves point out, the riverbed was a natural Salt feature, not of their construction, so it is not appropriate to call it a canal.