by Adam Roberts
But now, having cried, she was surly. She said, ‘Nothing, thank you very much. Nothing at all, thank you.’
‘Why do you thank me for nothing?’ I said.
She stared at me, and then her face fell again. I was afraid she was about to cry, but she managed to hold off against that and instead said, ‘In the name of Good God I am so hungry!’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I can stand friend for you at a Fabricant if you would like that.’
She tried to get to her feet, stumbled and fell down again. Now she was gabbling, speaking so quickly in the common tongue (which I do not speak well) that I could hardly follow her, but talking nonetheless about how she had starved for two days, how she had been reduced to taking water from the toilet and so on. I helped her up and through to the corridor. There was a Fabricant at the junction of the corridor with the main hallway, and I provided her with a little pasta in eel sauce and some water. She stared at it with wide eyes.
‘You do not eat it, though,’ I observed.
‘Not here,’ she begged. ‘Back to the other room, the one we were in.’
She was beyond being reasoned with on this matter, and soon I agreed to go back with her to the office space. There she gobbled the pasta down, strands of it lying against her chin, and drank the water in a single draft. Afterwards, she said she had stomach cramps, and was compelled to lie on the ground. ‘I’ll be sick,’ she said. Then her speech disintegrated into a series of heaves, as of somebody straining at something: but she managed to keep the food down, and shortly the cramps disappeared. I leaned her against the wall, and wrapped her own cloak about her shoulders. For a while she sat in silence, and soon I became bored.
‘Rhoda Titus, it is time for me to go,’ I said, standing up. My knees creaked as I rose; I was not a young man.
‘Will you return to me later?’ she asked, pleadingly.
‘No.’ Her expression collapsed into misery. ‘I am leaving Als for a time that will be at least several months, and may be years.’
‘You’re going?’ she hissed. I thought at first she spoke with contempt, but when she continued it was clear the wind had been taken from her with the shock of my words. ‘Can it be true? Has God shown you the truer path, shown you the wickedness of the people you call your own?’
This was so bizarre a thing that I laughed out loud, and Rhoda Titus ‘expression collapsed again.’ Not at all, Rhoda Titus. Only I wish to be by myself. The reasons are complicated, and I do not care to tell you them. But I suppose this is a goodbye, and I suppose I shall not see you again.’
‘No, wait,’ she called out, lurching a little forward to clasp me about the knees. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’
‘You must let me go,’ I said.
‘How are you going? In a shuttle? Take me with you.’
I sighed. Bending down a little, I disentangled Rhoda Titus ‘hands and crouched down to bring my face more on a level with hers.’ I am going in a car to roam the desert. I do not believe that you wish to spend three months in the salt desert with me.’
But there was an eagerness about her now. ‘You can take me with you, take me where you are going. You can take me south, take me back to Senaar, you can take me home, you can be my saviour.’
‘No,’ I said, and stood up.
At first I think she refused to understand the word I spoke but when I made towards the door she began howling and shouting, mixing imprecations against me with the most abject begging. I could not leave her in such a state; she was a woman, after all. So I returned to her and tried to reason her out of her position.
‘I am not going in the direction of Senaar,’ I said.
‘Then Yared,’ she said. ‘There is a spinal railtrack from Yared to Senaar, our leader’s personal project. Or to any settlement by that sea.’
‘I am going east, not south.’
‘It would hardly be out of your way. I implore you. I can reward you; I can give you anything you desire, any monies, any goods.’
‘Monies and goods do not interest me.’
Now she was crying and laughing at the same time, more than a little unsettling. ‘Then tell me what you are interested in, and I’ll trade it – or I’ll arrange to have it sent to you when I get home again. Oh, home home home. I am begging you, I am imploring you, in God’s name.’
She went on in this fashion for a while. After a while I became bored of it and went away, wandering about the sunlit settlement for a little while. I sat by the waters of the Aradys, feeling the sun against my naked head, and watching the wriggling currents within the sluggish banks of green fog on the water. I cannot remember thinking about very much. A few images from my time with Turja may have gone past my inner eye, those sorts of memory that give pleasure in solitude. Perhaps some tatters of my perversion still clung about my imagination; perhaps some recalcitrant part of me wanted a better conclusion, a more aesthetic rounding to our time together, but this was doubtless just the old desire to see her again, to be able to hold her and hear her speak to me. The patterns in the fog-bank shifted again. After a while I felt the time had come that I should leave, and so I did.
I went back to the office, and found Rhoda Titus with a strange expression, eyelids risen high and eyeballs convex and straining out of her face, doing nothing I could see other than staring at the wall opposite her. I told her, ‘I will take you to Yared, and you can make your own way along the coast to Senaar.’
She stared at me, and I realised (I had already begun to understand the arbitrary conventions of Senaarian behaviour) that, despite having heard my words perfectly well, she wished me to say them again. I am not sure why she wanted this reiteration: perhaps it is another game of the hierarchy, that the subordinate must make show of not comprehending a positive act bestowed by the superordinate, as if she were saying, ‘But I am too humble to deserve such a thing.’ But I had no desire to play the games, so I shrugged, and turned to go. Then, at my back she began babbling her thanks (another prompting of the hierarchy, I suppose) and struggled noisily to her feet.
I took a twelve-metre car, with enough supplies of food and water to last two people a little under two months, and rolled out of Als. It was dusk by the time we left, and I rolled on through the darkness for a while. Rhoda Titus spent these first few hours of travel nervously flitting from the driving cab into the back of the car; exploring the territory like a spooked mouse. I tried to put her from my mind but her rattling and banging in the back was a small distraction. After a while I called for her to be quiet, and then there was absolute silence. This was oddly extreme in the other direction; because she had neither replied with assent nor denied my request. I believe now she was scared of me; at the time I merely put it from myself.
Eventually she came through and sat in the co-driver seat, but she was still abnormally silent, and sat with her hands in her lap. It did not look comfortable. The darkness thickened around us, and soon all that was visible from the cab was the Venn diagram of the three headlight spots on the salt before us. When a small stone, or a patch of salt-grass, slid across this shape of light it was possible to snatch a sense of movement, but when the path was clear (and I was travelling along a well-travelled path) the lights seemed motionless, silver-white, and the night around us was darkened further in contrast.
After a few hours I began to grow tired of this weirdly dissociated travelling. My mind moved into a near-fugue state, staring at the bubbles of light on the ground ahead, almost to the point where the white circles hallucinatorily lifted upwards and danced in the sky. I was not exactly tired – not sleepy, at any rate – but I decided it would be best if I stopped driving. I pulled the car off the road, and halted it.
Rhoda Titus looked at me, so I looked at her. I realised that she required an explanation (even though it was obvious what I was doing), and I realised at the same time that it was somehow inappropriate in her conception of the hierarchy to ask for one. It is a bizarre creed. We sat for a moment, and to attempt to put her at ease I decid
ed to say aloud what I was doing.
‘I have stopped,’ I said. ‘I am not sleepy, but I think it best to stop, to go through to the back, to lie down.’
She did not reply to this, although her eyes opened slightly as if in repressed panic. My vision was weary from the travelling and I found it hard to decipher this, why she might be scared, why she might now be gripping the driver’s wheel with unusual force. I could not be bothered to decode these fathomless signals, so instead I rose out of the driver’s seat and went to the rear of the car.
I opened the door and stepped through into the airlock chamber, an uncomfortably tight fit, even for a relatively short man such as myself. Then I was outside in the cool darkness, and my mask leapt at my mouth. I went round to the side of the car, and pulled free the car supports so that, should I still be asleep or disinclined to get up at dawn, the Devil’s Whisper would not knock the car flat over. I fixed one, then the other, and then wandered right around the car on the outside, just to check if it was all right. The night air was cool on my skin, and the yellow lighting from the inside of the car spilled out. Rhoda Titus was still sitting in the cabin, illuminated vividly in the windscreen: still sitting stiffly gripping the wheel, with her eyes wide. It was impossible, I decided then and there, to reach empathetically and enter her consciousness. It was blank, a blot. I shooed it away from my imagination, climbed back inside the car, and pulled my mask free.
‘You’re free to spend the night in the driving cabin if you like,’ I called through to her. Perhaps I was a little angry with her. ‘Or you can come through and pull out your own bunk. It makes no difference to me.’ After this I pulled out my own bunk, climbed into its envelope, and turned to face the wall. I spoke out the lights in my portion of the car, but the light in the driver’s cabin spilled through, casting out pouring shadows at the back and greying my bunk. After a moment it seemed that Rhoda Titus was not coming through, and so I called to her: ‘The light in the driving cabin is distracting me from sleep: I would like you to speak it out.’
For the first time that day her voice came, ‘Does it respond to common speech?’ It sounded fractured with lines of exhaustion.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Did you not hear me speak out the lights here in the back in common speech?’
She said, ‘Lights, out’ and the whole world went dark. I shuffled in bed to get myself comfortable but there was something, some little grit of irritation that was preventing me from drifting to sleep. Presently, I heard Rhoda Titus rise, with a clicking of joints, from her sitting position, and attempt to come through to the back; but of course in the deep blackness it was not easy. There were several small knocks, bangs, and I could hear her sucking in breath to prevent herself crying out. It was ridiculous.
‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said, my face to the wall. She froze. ‘If you are coming through, why did you not speak on the lights?’
She breathed several times, and then said, in a low, hurried voice, ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘You disturb me with your banging about. Lights on,’ I said. Bright electric light, the colour of condensed orange juice, filled the space. I turned over to look at her standing there, although the light made my eyes wince. She stood like stone halfway through the driving cabin hatch.
‘You are a strange woman,’ I told her. ‘Why do you stand there? If you get into your bunk, we can speak off the lights and both sleep.’
At this she began hurrying, pulling herself through the hatch, stumbling into the back. She could not find the bunk strap, and then she could not unhitch the bunk. I sighed, I think I remember, and offered to get up from my bed and unhitch the bunk for her, but she gabbled no, no, that she would do it herself. And eventually the bunk unhitched itself, and she climbed into the satchel and lay still. I spoke out the lights and soon after I was asleep.
The next morning she seemed a little easier with me. I woke before her, sometime after noon, and got up and washed, and went into the driver’s cabin. There I sat and watched the bright landscape around me whilst I ate a breakfast of grain and pasta. I pondered waiting until sunset before driving on but decided against it: the car, after all, was fairly well rem-shielded, and the dark-driving was tedious to me. And so I geared the car and started off.
The tremble of the engines woke Rhoda Titus, and after a little time she came through and sat next to me. Why she should be happier in the morning than she had been in the night was too much for me to understand. Perhaps, I reasoned, she was fearful of the dark.
But she said a good morning to me, and asked how I had slept. This was another cultural difference, I think; for she could hardly have had a genuine interest in my sleeping, and said this only to placate the person she perceived as being higher in the chain.
The afternoon’s drive took me through metal-bright sunshine and the white salt desertlands past the last outposts of the Als settlements. The track faded on the ground before us; the few cars that had passed this far south before had left no tracks deep enough to withstand the Devil’s Whisper. For as long as the Aradys sea was to our west the ground was rolled smooth by the wind, and the car moved smoothly forward. Soon, though, we passed the southernmost extremity of the waters away to the west: and now, for the wind, there was nothing but planet-belting salt desert: a complete latitudinous stretch of emptiness. The terrain changed: dunes of salt gave our journey rise-and-fall; and the further south we travelled, the larger the dunes became, until we were travelling along the spines, or diagonally up the face and down the slope of the megadunes. This was a landscape that presented a certain bleakness of view and, of course, driving now became a matter of mere monotony; yet I began to find it rather soothing. From the peaks of dunes, rivulets of finest salt scurried down the face, balanced by the wind and then released like Moses’ spring by the wind. A thousand scurries of salt so fine as to virtually be a fluid: they glittered. Driving became determined by a slow rhythm, the gradual rise, peak and then the gradual descent as we moved over dune after dune; and this rhythm was a sinal one, almost organic. It was the slow in-breath and out-breath of the flotation tanks. It restructured the circadians of everyday life at a more deeply peaceful level. And as we travelled, the extraordinary beauty of the world through which we moved settled slowly at the bed of my soul, like a rich sediment.
Rhoda Titus, however, did not like it. She became increasingly bored as the day stretched on; she began fidgeting, humming to herself until I told her to stop (and she did stop, although without the abject terror with which she had regarded me the day before). Then, as the sun finally set, there became almost something sullen about her, something as of a child. She began saying things such as, ‘How terrible this landscape is, how wasted and terrible’ and then she might sigh and say to herself, ‘Well, it must be to God’s purpose, I suppose.’ Then, from memory, she might quote some section from the Bible, some passage about the destruction of Sodom and the sowing of the fields with salt.
After sunset we stopped and ate some food. Abruptly, in the midst of eating, she looked up at me and said ‘I don’t know if I’ve said how grateful I am to you for taking me on this drive.’
I was in a peaceful mood after the beauties of the day, so I let this idiocy pass, and continued eating. But she continued with her hierarchy rituals, and thanked me several times. Eventually my patience was eroded, and I started shouting at her to be quiet, not to try and afflict me with her ridiculous rigidist perversions. At this she became very white, pale as the salt itself, and her mouthful of food went unchewed. I, of course, felt better for the expression of my anger, and finished up eating swiftly; but she was too blocked inside to allow the flow of her own angers to come out, and it was easy to see the harm this ‘repression’ did to her. Her eyes were rheumy, her face began to flash with red blushes. But she said nothing, and I went through to the cab and started the car again. She did not join me. I drove for four or five hours through the darkness, and when I came through to the rear she was in bed, with the lights o
n, and her back to me. I got into my own bunk and spoke out the lights. Sleep came easily.
The following day Rhoda Titus was cowed, her head sunk so far forward that the back of it was of a level with her shoulders. But the rhythm of our driving was set. We woke at noon, ate, and I drove on until sunset. Then I would batten down, and we would eat again; and after food and the Whisper I would drive through the radiation-quiet darkness. As we moved south it became hotter, although the cabin kept the temperature at a reasonable level. From time to time we would stop and I would step outside and walk around the car, just to stretch my legs and admire the view. The heat was fantastic in the early afternoon; a positive pressure on the skin of heat, and the view of salt dunes sparkling away towards the west. On our fourth day Rhoda Titus came out herself, holding her hand over her mouth to ensure she breathed through her nasal implants. She had not been out for days, and it was, she said, easy to forget the presence of chlorine and take in a choking lungful; after which the body reflex took over and coughing would automatically draw great shuddering breaths after it, which would only make things worse. I winked both my eyes at her over the snout of my mask.
But the world! My heart crumpled and filled like a lung, like a spiritual lung, in the oxygen of its beauty. I had rolled the car to the peak ridge of a megadune, and we stood looking east, where the great ripples of white powder, the standing waves, shrank in their perspective towards the world’s-edge. The shadows cast by the reclining sun stood out very black against the silvery-white of the salt itself, a barred range of black haloes about the white peaks. Then, to turn west and to bring up the hand like the peak of a cap to guard the eyes against the brightness of the sun, a white sun, tinted into a pale pink the colour of flesh by the refraction of the approaching horizon. Here the dunes possessed the eye, like the curves and the sockets of a body, swelling and retreating. Where the light caught the billion crystals of the summit of each dune it was shredded into spectra that threw out reds, pale greens, mistral blues, faint traces of all colours scattered in the air.
