Salt

by Adam Roberts

  But she did not tell me, and for several months I had no idea about the foetus inside her, and we carried on like teenagers. She was moved off the farm rota and given a diplomatic and programming job instead, something she had done before several times. I finally grew too bored with the sims, and went off with my road-roller. Most of the roads from Istenem to the rest of the settlement were already finished, and there were no urgent road-requests for me to address, so I could decide to build a road where I liked. Or I could decide not to build a road, but the boredom would not be pleasant. So I set off in the smaller car, driving a path northwards along the bank of the Aradys, clearing rubble out of the way (there wasn’t much) with my small fitted crane, and putting down road-markers. This was quick work, and within days I was driving back along the coast. Back at Als I called the mine, told them I was building a road, and the operator at the other end shrugged: they were flying most of their processed minerals down to the settlement, and had no urgent need of a road, but (I told them) the shuttle flights were absurdly wasteful of energy, and in the long term a road would be a great boon. At least they did not actively object to the road, and neither did anybody else when I posted my plans in the dorm on my return home. So the following week took me away from Als, and away from Turja.

  I fired up the great bulk of the road-roller (rebuilt and upgraded from an old shuttle chassis, it was), and set off north: the under-carriage lasered, rodded and grazed the salt beneath me, and the after-roller applied a layer of superdur plastic that bonded with the sink-rods. The whole process happened as I drove on at about seven k.p.h. I needed most of my attention on the first day, moving through the north of our settlement, to avoid the farming robots left lying since I prospected the route, or to detour around the site of somebody’s home (a dingy, tiny-looking hut-in-the-ground, usually with a pile of rubble on the low roof for radiation protection). But by day two I had gone past habitation and I could spend more time looking around me. I spent the morning watching the scenery; the dark waters of the sea with their shifting banks of green fog were illuminated brilliantly by the rising sun. To my right was the bulge of Istenem, with our buried dorms, and the stockpile of metals like a bizarre snowcap. North of it the mountains rose, step by step, until by day three I could only see the peaks by pressing my face against the side window of my cab.

  At lunch I would eat pasta, or chew a reconstituted bread (shit-bread, it was called, with a superfluous literalism), and with half my eye on the way ahead I would compose elaborate, flowery voice-mails for Turja. I would tell her how she had set my heart aflame, how I could not wait to see her again, all the things I wanted to do when we were together again, all the usual romantic clichés. I sent these after lunch, and I know that Turja must have received them directly because she worked her morning shift at the message/visual computers. She never replied, but replies were not her style, and I know she enjoyed receiving the messages.

  In the afternoon I would read. Sometimes I would step out of the truck, and walk alongside in my mask and nose-peg, but there was little to do or see, and it seemed foolish exposing myself to unnecessary radiation. By early evening I would watch the scenery again. The setting sun was now behind the mountains, and the palette of colours had changed completely. The eastern sides of the Sebestyen mountains were richer and darker in colour, features more clearly visible; the quartz-granite was rusty-red, with patches of tomato-coloured regolith. The Aradys was inky in the shadow of the mountains, and a glorious purply-blue out of them. To my right, the direct sunlight showed the salt patches over the skin-coloured granite.

  But then I would stop and batten down. I was quite sheltered from the Devil’s Whisper but it still came rattling the sides of the roller and throwing salt against the windows like gravel. And when it had passed; I would set the roller going again, putting the control on its most sensitive setting, and go to sleep. The machine would stop and wake me perhaps three times in the night, sometimes because a stone the size of a fist (say) had been blown into its path, sometimes for no obvious reason. I was never angry with these interruptions to my sleep, and I was never tempted to adjust the control to a coarser emergency setting. Rather the machine wake me at the slightest thing than I go ploughing into a great boulder and breaking down.

  On the fifth day I arrived at the outbuildings of the mine, and met up with the workers. There was quite a community there, a hundred people or so, and they seemed happy. Many had paired off and there were even some obvious pregnancies, which rather suggested that people had been trading their work rotas to stay together on the site. Either that or quite a few people had been very lucky in their allotments. I have a particular dislike of trading work rotas, as do many of the first-generation Alsists, although I know it is a common enough thing amongst the young, but I was in too good a mood, with the relationship with Turja in its early stages, to want to make a fuss. Besides, it seemed clear that the other mine workers were not offended by this behaviour, so in all likelihood I was going to find myself making a noise all alone, and I might well have risked a beating.

  I stayed in the mine for two days before I became bored. There was little work I could do without training up in the simulator, and I was not moved to do this. I went on, and laid more road to the next mine along, which was following a seam of silver into the heart of the mountains. This team had hollowed out a great hallway under the mountain and played football there often. I joined in, and was glad to give my body some physical exertion after its week sitting cooped up in the cab of the road-roller. Afterwards, I got into a fight with a drill-bit co-ordinator, who took exception to what he called my self-aggrandisement; a reference, I suppose, to the prominence I had once enjoyed during the voyage as tether expert. This was strange, because since the landing I genuinely believed I had faded out of general consciousness; but this man – he was called Lichnovski – was shouting and yelling and spitting at me. To begin with, I shrugged and tried to leave his company, but he followed me, and then he made a swing for me with an aluminium spar. I have an instinct, something in the sub-brain, that serves me well in fights. I was able to rush him, feint, pull the spar from him, and then start to pummel him with my fists upon the back of his head and the small of his back. He lay down upon the ground crying (probably because of the excess of vodjaa he had drunk rather than the damage my fists had done), and I let him be. But later that night he came at me again, when I was sitting cross-legged, discussing politics with a group of miners. This was not so good: he surprised me with his fist and broke the skin on the side of my head, just before the ear, so that the blood came out very liberally. This time we wrestled and broke apart to aim great swinging punches at one another, most of which missed. The rest of the miners shuffled away, embarrassed by our display, but one of Lichnovski’s friends came to try and pull him away, and a few more miners stood about, watching. Our scrap took us staggering along and out through the main entrance, where nobody followed (it was night, and cold). Outside, we fought a little more, but there was blood all over my face and in my eyes, and I was not watching very closely when I punched his face. I connected with his mask which broke away and fell useless to the ground. Lichnovski fell too, coughing and howling. The chlorine levels were low, since we were halfway up a mountain, but they were enough to poison him. Worse, I did not realise what had happened for a little while, because of the dark and the blood in my eyes. When I did I hauled his convulsing body back through the swing-lock and into the mine; but his lungs were badly hurt. He was flown down to Als on the next shuttle. I did rather regret the whole business.

  After the fight I felt antipathy towards that mine, so I left and visited another two, carrying on the road. Then, after only a few days I started back, laying a parallel carriageway south, back towards Als.

  Seeing Turja again was a joy that almost made the intervening absence worthwhile. She had been involved in negotiations with the other settlements around Aradys over plans to pool resources and build some gigantic chimneys in the mounta
ins, to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The southern hemisphere settlements were also talking with us. She had also fielded requests that Als appoint a diplomat, a somebody to greet the various visitors, official and otherwise, who wandered into our land as well as a somebody to go off on diplomatic visits. Visitors were sometimes puzzled, and even angered, by the lack of hierarchy or formalised relations in Als. They expected to be met; they were bothered by the fact that nobody demanded to see passports or threatened to throw them into gaol as illegal immigrants; they disliked the lack of police, the absence of restrictions, all those chains that reinforce in slaves their sense of themselves. Because Turja asked me, I did agree to respond to some of the official advances, particularly the ones from the south. There were no diplomatic spaces allotted to the work rota, because the business of relating to other nations cannot be reduced to a timetable in advance. It is supposed that foreigners approach the relevant person, such that if they wished to ‘trade’ hogs, they should approach whoever has been given the job of raising hogs at that particular time. But the circumstances were unusual, it is true.

  For a time, Turja and I moved out of the general dorm and slept in the dome with her animals. This was a whim of ours; to make love under a tree instead of under a rock roof. After a week or so we began to miss the comforts of dorm life and moved back.

  If I think back and am honest I must confess that I hurled myself into this relationship with Turja. I clowned to amuse her, and bullied her into pastimes and jollity with a manic desperation. And this was because, even so early, I knew that she was withdrawing from me. I was busy with the road-roller for another week, laying down a road that had been requested around the settlement. I would come off duty and hurry down to the dome, but Turja would not be at the place we had agreed to meet; or else she would shoo me away, saying that there were chores she had to attend to; or we would be together, but her manner would be distracted, awkward. Sometimes she would blush.

  I took another work rota, this time as a medic (a rota I had done previously and which needed little training anyway; the netscreen provided all diagnosis and treatment). This was good, except that it brought me back again to Lichnovski with his chlorine-blasted lungs. New lungs were growing in a special Medical Fabricant, but it was taking weeks; in the meantime, Lichnovski could do nothing but lie about, breathing pure oxygen through a mask, glaring at me with his fierce eyes over the top of this plastic snout.

  Barlei

  Tragedy struck a mere two months into the perfect marriage. Our whole nation wept. My beloved jean-Pierre was on manoeuvres, practising grouping and regrouping his men in the salt desert, without air-cover (I was already thinking ahead to the possible necessity for raids upon Alsist territory); life in Senaar was gradually assuming a normality. A party of women, jean-Pierre’s wife among them, set out in a rover to explore the lands to the south of Senaar. Such parties were common in the early days; the wives and daughters of the wealthy had few enough pastimes, after all, and a rover, driven by a military man, was a useful and exciting way of acquainting them with their world. They left the salt-flats in the late afternoon and climbed the rover onto a rocky hillock; and there the Devil’s Whisper caught them. Their driver had gone outside to secure the clamps but the design was faulty (he said) – or he was incompetent – and the rover was blown over. The side windows shattered on the rock and three people inside died. Those fitted with internalised sinus-masks survived, of course; a shuttle picked them up twenty minutes after the disaster, weeping and dribbling mucus but alive. The driver survived for the same reason. But Kim died. She had never had a sinus-filter fitted, for reasons, I am sorry to say, of vanity – she didn’t like the idea of her pretty face disfigured with some of the less pleasant side-effects. We may deplore this prideful self-regard but, well, she paid her price. As for the driver, there were differing views on his culpability. The rover was standard Fabricant ware, and as such was obviously of tested and reliable design. But the truck-clamps, that pinioned the vehicle to the rock, were not. We had not known, until coming to Salt and experiencing the severity of the Devil’s Whisper, that we might need such things. And so the army, and other truck owners, had put out tenders to several possible companies (all still nascent in these early days), and the cheapest and best design was commissioned. As is usual, the driver (I am afraid I cannot remember his name) could not claim faulty parts against a company-owned product without risking a lawsuit; and rightly so. That sort of claim, that the company’s product was criminally liable for three deaths, would be a serious blow to that company’s trading potential, and as such the company would be allowed to challenge the possible loss of revenue in court. But a man in the driver’s position would, of course, not be in a position to fight a lawsuit; the cost would ruin him. Admitting personal liability would only result in a fine, in most cases, and was the preferable option. Certainly, I remember that the fellow talked wildly of shearing plasdesigns to begin with but was more sober after he had bought a little legal advice, and admitted responsibility.

  It goes without saying that jean-Pierre was heartbroken. I felt for the poor man. I granted him a fortnight’s compassionate leave, and he spent three days, Achilles in his tent. He came to see me personally to request reassignment; his face was salt-coloured, his features frozen. There was something manly in his determination, in the strength of will to conquer his grief. I sent him back to his corps.

  Perhaps it would be true to say that I have lived aspects of my life through others. Now, old as I am and given to musing on the past, I cannot be sure whether jean-Pierre was a son to me, or whether he was an empty shape into which I could suture my own sense of self, my own identity as a man. Was it myself that marched, at salute, from the house to take a shuttle out to a tented camp in the Great Salt Desert? Was it jean-Pierre who stayed behind, weeping small, painful tears in a darkened room? Were we that interchangeable?

  The same small tears are there, now, as I speak these words. And they cannot be for jean-Pierre, since he is long dead. And how can they be for me, when I am still alive? Perhaps there is a nothingness that summons tears. Perhaps that is what they are.

  I grow fanciful in my old age.

  Sometimes I dream of my bright boy; dead, dead. God’s will.

  It was shortly after this that I officially opened the new Parliament building, an impressive twin set of quartz towers a hundred metres tall. The towers were mostly for show since the Parliament chambers were buried under the topsalt and under a ceiling of bedrock to protect the proceedings from radiation. It was a great day. There had only been one opportunity for the people to vote on any proposal since settlement, and that had been on the shape of the settlement, an out-of-the-ordinary referendum; the normal procedures of our democracy, the patterns of political living we had been used to on the voyage out, had been denied us with the pressures of our new life. I made a speech, for those there in person and the Visuals, a powerful one I think (although if I am honest I think Preminger wrote it for me), about the potency of this establishment of democracy on the new world. There was a sizeable crowd present but most people stayed indoors, away from the dangers of the sun. The speech was Visualed throughout the Galilean basin.

  The Vote Treasury came on-line at mid-day, of the third day of June, P.A.5. A great day. There was some small disturbance in the fortnight that followed, which I think is mentioned in the history books. Or perhaps not, since it was only a small-scale business. It had to do with the conversion rates of ship-vote stockpiles to new vote currency. Earning, and hence taxation, had been limited in scale during the voyage out, for obvious reasons; and therefore people had not been able to accumulate votes at what might be considered a normal rate. There was a pressure-group formed to agitate for conversion from ship-votes to new-votes at a double rate, or even a triple one. Naturally I held firm on this point: vote inflation is one of the things any reasonable ruler needs to guard against. And, this being a constitutional matter, I was able to veto any attempt to
have this proposal itself voted through, but there were one or two small demonstrations.

  jean-Pierre headed a small platoon to police these demonstrations. There was steel in his eyes on that day. I remember taking him to one side to talk with him and being struck by how fierce and manly his repression was, how firmly and precisely he kept hold over his boiling emotions of rage and hate. The Visual company was still paying to broadcast details of his life to the Galilee basin, and so there was a man with camera-spectacles following him always, even at so trying a time. I shooed this fellow away for five minutes of privacy with my friend. ‘My friend,’ I told him, ‘soon there will be a time when you can give true voice to yourself, in actions not words. Soon you will have a chance to redeem the honour of all Senaar, to go heroically against the enemies of our people and rescue the hostages.’

  3

  The Raid

  Petja

  I became obsessive, that worst of things. I tell you this, not because I am proud of it, but because perhaps it helps you understand what happened. I fixated on Turja. I became a rigidist, by instinct, by accident. Nowadays, perhaps it is less unusual but in those days there was something almost scandalous about it. I spent all the time I could with her: I spent every moment during which she did not actually push me away. My work rota had been specialist-overridden: representatives of the other nations settling around Aradys were approaching us. Turja received requests from other governments to meet and discuss international co-operation; she fed the request into the computer, and my previous experience at tether work signalled me for diplomatist, and so I was assigned. To be truthful, though, this rota was thin indeed. There was little enough to do as diplomatist, and so I spent much time with Turja, and when she sent me away (as she did often) I went back and assisted in the hospital. The level of sickness was rising, with cancers and cataracts beginning to come in greater numbers, and chlorine poisoning also, so extra help was welcomed. The man I had fought with, Lichnovski, was still there and he scoffed at me when I returned to the ward. His voice was still wheezy and full of coughing, but he strained to shout to me.