Salt

by Adam Roberts

  He came to me about a fortnight after this had begun, to ask my advice. On this occasion, I had to ask the man with the camera-spectacles to wait outside my house. I like my private conversations to be private.

  ‘I have come to ask your advice, Mr President,’ he said. He always called me ‘Mr President’ at the beginning of our conversations, and I always had to correct him with a ‘Call me Barlei, my dear Lieutenant.’

  ‘What advice can I offer you, my friend?’ I asked him.

  ‘It is a question of romance, Barlei,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘Of all the topics on Salt, that is the one I am least qualified to offer advice about! I have had so little experience of love affairs that I am a mere child where such matters are concerned.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ he persevered. He was so pure, so manly, that the mere contemplation of the subject was making him blush. ‘I am wondering about taking a wife.’

  ‘Splendid idea,’ I said, heartily. ‘You have been single long enough.’

  ‘Fifty years!’ he joked. This was a common joke amongst those who had come through the hibernation of the voyage. In fact jean-Pierre was biologically a little over twenty-five.

  ‘Why do you need my advice, my friend? Should you not rather come for my blessing?’ His parents had both died in the hibernation tanks, and on landing I had taken a kindly, parental interest in his welfare. I regarded him almost as my son.

  ‘Well, Barlei,’ he said, shifting in his seat. ‘I have had several offers, from several ladies. Some of them less than decent.’

  ‘Beware this sort of temptation, my friend,’ I suggested. ‘Particularly now that you have signed your soul away to the Visual companies! But joking aside, it would harm the morale of our nascent community if word got about that you were a man of loose morals.’

  ‘All the more reason for me to marry!’ he said.

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Then this is my problem: two first daughters from prominent families in Senaar have taken a fancy to me, and I cannot decide which I should marry!’

  I laughed at this. ‘Which do you love?’ I suggested.

  ‘I love them both,’ he said, sighing. ‘They are both wonderful.’

  ‘Which is the more beautiful?’

  ‘One is dark and one is fair,’ he said. ‘But could you say that day is more beautiful than night? Or that red wine tastes sweeter than white?’

  ‘This is a predicament indeed, my friend,’ I said, still laughing. ‘I think I will hold an exclusive banquet, here in my house, and perhaps I will happen to invite both of these families, and then I can really give you my opinion.’

  Preminger was against this idea: he thought it would appear too elitist, too extravagant a gesture this early in the life of our land. But I overruled him, although I did concede him one point and invite the Visuals to cover the occasion. What Preminger did not understand (he was a man of brilliant intellect, but only a narrowly conceived understanding of humanity) was how a little high living can raise a people’s spirits, even if they can only experience it at second hand. The banquet took place one night the following week, in the still air after the Devil’s Whisper had died away. The nine richest Senaarian families attended. The food was provided by my own chef, although the numbers were such that he had to borrow the skills of another three cooks from neighbouring families. A military quartet provided the music: Bach and Schubert, which I consider the most easeful for digestion. And, naturally, jean-Pierre came, with two of his fellow officers, his friends.

  There was a great deal of conversation and laughter, with glasses of wine (red and white, in jean-Pierre’s honour, a little joke between the two of us; although I’m afraid it was only Fabricant wine, water-mixed powder, which never quite tastes the same) and a little dancing. Both Visual companies were there, and a large crowd gathered outside my front door, to cheer each new arrival. It was so liberating, so civilised.

  ‘We might be back on Earth,’ said Herr Warnke, to me.

  ‘Not at all,’ I countered. ‘This is distinctively Saltian.’ And, indeed, there were great dishes of differently-coloured salt, all gathered from the topsalt of the surrounding territory. There were many kilos of the stuff in each bowl, clearly much too much for condiment, but in those early days, when the food we ate was still being taken and reconstituted from the ship or the recycle farms, people used to add a little salt to taste. Nowadays, of course, everything we eat (more or less) is salty enough already, coming from the environment it does. But the platters of salt were more than a mere gesture in those days.

  And so we filed in to the dinner-hall, and ate delicious food beneath plastic candles that burnt to give off the perfume of lavender and cinnamon. The light glowed on the polished quartz of the table, the Visual camera people hovered discreetly out of the way, the conversation murmured around the table. At one point I proposed a toast to our new life, our new world, created by God’s Grace in the face of such difficulty, and everybody cheered.

  But neither did I forget why I was there. I made sure to be sat within talking distance of both the women jean-Pierre was interested in. One was the eldest daughter of Herr Warnke, a very wealthy man who was already making good business from the manufacture of sorel cements, particularly promising for construction purposes and much cheaper than always mining quartz slabs, with a side-business in trace elements taken from the salts. I knew Warnke fairly well: he was a large-bodied man, with a taste in black suits and orange shirts, a fashion I was not afraid to tell him was too young for his maturity. But at this he would simply shake his balding head and laugh. We had had several meetings, because Warnke Inc. had agreed to take on board two dozen refugees from the chaos along the coast in Eleupolis. Many people wanted to get out, and as the most prosperous nation, even at that early stage, many people applied to come to us. Of course, there would be little point in them coming unless they had money (why would they want to come just to starve in the streets?) or else a guaranteed job of work. Accordingly, Warnke had sent representatives down, and the first two dozen Eleupolisians were due to fly back. This was good for them, because they got to escape the horrors of their homeland; and it was good for Warnke, and for Senaar, because he obtained the very cheapest workforce. He had explained the situation to me, and I (after all, only a military man) had not been too proud to learn.

  ‘Almost all native Senaarians had come on the voyage with fairly sizeable fortunes,’ he reminded me, rubbing his bald head with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Few as sizeable as yours, my friend!’ I told him.

  He laughed. ‘But the economy cannot really subsist on pure wealth, you see. We need an underclass, people to do the menial jobs. There are few enough of those, but we suffer employment difficulties at the bottom level. I know I do.’

  ‘You think these migrant workers will be the solution?’

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t think of them as migrant,’ he said. ‘I think we should grant them full Senaar citizenship, with a clause to revoke citizenship and expel them if they become bankrupt.’

  ‘Bankruptcy to be defined by . . . ?’

  ‘If they cannot pay their taxes, I suppose. If they have no money.’

  ‘But they’ll come to us with no money! Should we expel them straight away?’

  ‘If,’ Warnke corrected, laughing, ‘if they have no money and they lack the patronage of an employer. As long as they’re working for Warnke’s, they’ll have enough money to pay their taxes, and to eat.’

  And so we arranged it. Warnke built workers’ dormitories, and shipped in his cement workers from Eleupolis. But I am straying from the point, which has to do, of course, with his daughter. She was the fair-haired beauty, like a golden child. Slim, elegant, with the prettiest laugh, and perfectly bred. More, she was accomplished as a flautist. Her name was Kim.

  ‘My dear,’ I called to her over the table. ‘Tell me, which uniform do you prefer? The regular army, or the technical corps?’ The army uniform was the deep blue it has always be
en, and the pilots and sappers from the technical corps wore green.

  She laughed. ‘Such is the question a woman has to answer!’ she called back. ‘Nothing to do with affairs of state, or the priorities for building railways lines, or anything like this, but blue or green!’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘The blue of the regular army, of course.’

  And jean-Pierre sat there, in his immaculate dark-blue uniform, with his gleaming gold pips of command on his shoulder, and blushed like a schoolgirl.

  The other woman in the contest, as it were, was the only child of a man called Hardison, who was establishing a school and a college. There were virtually no students in the latter, although there were some children for the former, but Hardison’s plans were long-term, and his personal fortune large enough to enable him to wait for profits. I applauded the public spirit of his enterprise, because the effect was to provide education for the few children of our community by running the school at a loss. When the birth rate rose (we confidently expected a great burst after the initial business of settling Senaar into the new world was finished and people could turn their thoughts to such things) more schools would clearly be established: by then Hardison’s school would have the longest pedigree, and would be attracting the best students. And would be able to charge the highest fees. So perhaps Hardison’s altruism was not so short-sighted!

  His daughter Coventry was tall and lovely, hair as black as deep space, skin a delicate brown, the colour of the desert at dusk. She too was tall, lithe, lovely-looking, with a beautiful long face and eyes of such depth they drew the watcher in. I leant in her direction, and called to her.

  ‘My dear! Which is your favourite instrument?’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Your favourite musical instrument?’

  She smiled at this. ‘And must I pick a favourite? Isn’t the point of musical instruments that they do not compete, do not strive with one another, but play together, in harmony?’

  ‘Still, you must have a preference?’

  ‘The piano, then!’ she said, laughing. ‘My own instrument!’

  After the meal, Coventry and Kim played. It was a Mozart concerto and was exquisite. There was a perfect hush in the room, and we were, for that time, transported away from our worries, our anxieties, even (if I could speak for jean-Pierre) from our loves and human passions, into the realms of pure music.

  The next day I saw jean-Pierre again, just before he was due to inspect a parade. ‘Well?’ he asked me, as he straightened his collar.

  ‘You are right,’ I conceded, laughing. ‘How can I tell them apart? They are both as lovely as one another!’

  ‘Perhaps I should marry them both,’ he said, laughing. But this joke was a little too low for my tastes.

  ‘I cannot advise you, my friend,’ I said. ‘You must follow your heart.’

  Three weeks later the engagement was announced, between jean-Pierre and Kim. Their wedding was the social event of the community; hundreds attended, and most of the rest of Senaar watched the Visuals. He asked me to be best man, but I decided that this would not be compatible with my position as President, and so a brother officer stood next to him in church. But I was present too, in the front pew, and I am not ashamed to say that I shed some tears of joy for my brave boy as he spoke his vows in the presence of God and that congregation.

  Petja

  For a while Turja and I were happy enough in the large dorm. Actually, since most of her rota came up during the day for the first two months (caring for the livestock and so on), and since most of mine (basically construction) came up during the night, we only saw one another for morning and evening meals. But after two months I was rotaed onto road duty, something of which I had absolutely no experience. Accordingly, I spent five days or so on the simulators, familiarising myself with the design and construction aspects of the job. Strictly speaking, I did not need to spend so long, but I chose to learn the job as thoroughly as possible because it suited my purposes. Clearly, I could choose whichever time of day I liked to work the simulations, and so I started sleeping with Turja through the night.

  The dorms were mostly empty at night, because it was night that saw most of the outside work being done, to reduce the radiation hazard, and most of the early work of the settlement (construction, open-mining and so on) was night-work. We would cuddle together under the duvet, giggling like children.

  ‘You are most deliberately being slow in learning your new rotation,’ she would say to me.

  ‘I am, I am deliberately boring myself stupid so that I can be with you.’

  That was the point, of course: I could have stayed on the simulators for the whole rotation if I liked. If I liked, I could have stayed on them for the rest of my life (except the next rotation would have thrown me off; and except that people would have been unhappy that the roads weren’t built, and might have shunned me, or beaten me up maybe). There was no compulsion or, rather, the only compulsion was internal. The simulations are boring. They occupy the hand and eye, true, but they achieve nothing; they are merely computer pixels moving around. Who, in their right minds, would want to spend their quarter-days climbing into a simulator cab to go through the same routines over and over, when they could get out into the real world; when they could plan real roads, and then build them, and climb out of the cab at the day’s end with a weary but profound sense of satisfaction?

  In other lands, I know, work is a chore. People hurry through it, or drag their feet so as not to get too wound up in it, and yearn for it to end so that they can go off and do whatever else they want to do. But in other lands work is distributed poorly, with jaded workers who have spent their lives doing the same job until it has worn a groove smooth in their brains and they can no longer summon up the energy to do the job properly. With us, we work a quarter-day, and the rest of the time is ours.

  And we discover this: that there is not enough to do outside work to keep ourselves busy. That we find ourselves wandering off to other people on work duty, offering to lend a hand, wanting to be useful again. With us, nobody gets into the rut of the eternal working return, every day the same as every other. With us, we are given a new job every few months. If we do not know how to do the job, then we learn; it rarely takes more than a few days. And after a few years we discover we can bring skills from all our areas of expertise to bear on any problem that confronts us. It keeps our minds alive. Only with extraordinarily specialised jobs, that require not a few days but many years of training – as with my expertise in tether technology, that had proven so vital during the voyage – is the labour limited to one person.

  But in the bliss of those first few weeks with Turja, everything else was blotted from my head, except the joy of holding her and having her arms about me. Under the duvet, in that warm dark space like twins in a womb, so close our breath blurred into the air together; and one day we woke to find that our hair had become entangled and we had to pick it apart with a comb, laughing the whole time. We would have love before going to sleep; and then we would wake together, and have love again, a sleepy delicious kind of sex. I loved the way her skin smelled, the taste of her hair in my mouth, and the back of her neck. I loved the gentle roughness of her legs, where her hairs grew, and the dark narrow hairs that lay along her pale legs like cracks in enamel. I would run my hand slowly up the left leg, and she would squeal with ticklish delight. I loved her feet too. Often I do not like a woman’s feet, perhaps because there is something awkwardly unaesthetic about them – the strange combinations that a foot represents: hardened toughened skin on the heel and ball of the foot, but with that soft, vulnerable baby-pink skin in the arch in between; the pure line of the top of the foot and the messy fringes that are our toes; the sheer gnarled size of toenails. I don’t know what it is; a person is allowed their quirks and tastes, I suppose. But Turja’s feet were perfect, quite large but for some reason every element of her feet was perfectly balanced with every oth
er element. I could tickle them for ages, kiss them, rub my tongue over them. She liked my body too, for all that she had said she preferred more muscular men.

  Our lovemaking fell into a pattern, a pattern as natural and satisfying as breathing. In the evening she would be the dominant partner, moving me around purposefully, egging me on, squatting on top of me or grabbing me and adjusting my rhythm when I was on top of her. In the morning it was different, because I woke slightly earlier and with a deal more energy than she did. Then I would take the initiative, and she would lie in a delicious helplessness. I would get out of the bed and go naked to one of the dorm Fabricants to fetch some breakfast, then I would bring it back and the two of us would eat in bed, spilling crumbs and splashes of ersatz-coffee on the duvet, laughing like little children again. Then she would dress and go off to the farm, and I would go off to the simulator, and work through the technique of operating a road-roller. In the afternoon we would wander through the dome, simply talking, or else lie under the tree in the goose-yard.

  She must have pulled out her contraceptive patch within the first week, to judge by how soon she had the baby. She did not tell me she was going to come off her contraception, and clearly there is no reason why she should have told me. It was her business, obviously. But perhaps there is some significance in the speed with which she made her decision. After she had gone to the woman’s dorm, I was thinking about this. I knew that she had never before removed her contraceptive patch with any man. There was an unspoken compliment there, I think.