by Adam Roberts
I dropped to my haunches, and put my bare fingers through the dense salt that made the dune. Up by the mountains, where the land has more shelter from the winds, the grains of salt tend to be much bigger, and to accrete in a variety of micro-shapes. But out here, in the bareness of the deep desert, the wind was the hammer that broke the salt into very fine globular grits. They rolled and trickled over the dunes like water flowing over water, the corners of each grain all worn away from the crystal. The grains rolled so smoothly over one another that putting a finger through the slightly stiff outer crust (which was the creation of the great heat and the slight moisture in the air) it felt like immersing the hand in water. I reached out a handful of the grains and held them in the cup of my palm, and it was fascinating to swirl my fingertip through it. To draw spiral patterns, like shamanic signifiers. A few grains adhered to my index finger after I had done this, and I brought my finger close to my eye to examine it. The grains were so tiny that they fitted inside my fingerprint ridges. I had a sense of the dislocation of scale, as if the megadunes through which we travelled were only the indentations of a titanic fingerprint, and the car but a miniature grain of salt rolling from peak to trough.
I poured the salt from my hand, and the sweat on my palm held a patina of salt, like the dusting of sugar on a doughnut.
I breathed in and lifted the mask with my left hand, so that the salty finger could go into my mouth. Then, the tart tang of salt on the tongue, gritty but giving the sensation of biting down on the grain even as it dissolves in saliva.
But the wind was starting to stir, and the sun was near enough the horizon to presage the Devil’s Whisper, so I stood up, and returned to the car to brace it against the coming tempest. Rhoda Titus followed me, puppy-like, with her hand still over her mouth.
After we had retreated back into the car, and as we sat eating, whilst the rising wind outside began its grinding ascent to that world-scarping intensity, Rhoda Titus spoke to me, for the first time in days. She did seem calmer.
‘Mr Technician,’ she said. ‘It is difficult for me to know how to address you.’
I finished my mouthful and looked at her. ‘I do not see the difficulty.’
‘I seem . . . to anger you.’
This was so straightforward that I said nothing. After the silence had stretched a certain distance, she said, ‘So it is true?’
‘You say nothing,’ I told her. ‘Human beings anger human beings. But this is not the point, I think.’
She stuttered, and then said all in a rapid breath, ‘Surely you don’t think this, and since we must spend time together would it not be better to work a way around this anger, although I confess I do not understand why I anger you.’
I paused after this speech, but it made little sense. ‘The point between us, I think,’ I said, once I had finished my meal, ‘is that you have a spastic reflex that crushes your anger inside you. Why can we not be angry with one another?’
She looked horrified. ‘Rage is a sin,’ she said.
I snorted through my nose. ‘How nonsensical you are, Rhoda Titus,’ I said.
‘You despise me,’ she said in a sorry voice.
‘You would have me limit my feelings for you so that only good ones are permitted to emerge,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I do despise you, sometimes I am angry. Sometimes I feel pleasure to be around you, sometimes I feel desire.’
At this she only narrowed her eyes, and opened her mouth dryly to speak without saying anything. So I continued, ‘But it would cripple me to break the bones of my feelings the way you wish.’
She was shaking her head, shallow rapid shakes from side to side, almost a tremor rather than a gesture. ‘I’m sorry I spoke at all,’ she said. I shrugged, and went through to the front of the car. For the afternoon’s drive I was alone, which made me happy. The day shrank towards night, and I drove on through the blackness.
By the following morning things were easier. Perhaps Rhoda Titus had finally begun to believe she was on the path to her home, for she was more blithe with me. ‘The part of your society that interests me,’ she told me, ‘is your fathering. Can it really be true that you do not know who your father is?’
‘And why should I know?’ I replied. ‘Parenting is of the mother. Fathers come and go, but mothers are the connection.’
‘You are close to your mother?’
I spat on the floor. ‘She is on Earth.’
‘Oh. Why did she not come?’
‘She is no Alsist. I am sure she does not realise I am no longer on her world.’
At this Rhoda Titus was silent. ‘I did not realise,’ she said.
‘I was born into a religious community in the heart of the Old Continent,’ I said. ‘But I realised in my youth that unless a person gives birth to their own system, they will become enslaved by another’s. I travelled for many years, and for many years after that I was with the Alsists. I have not seen my mother for decades.’
Rhoda Titus had fallen easily into a sombre expression, another skill of the hierarchy. But when I saw it I laughed: ‘I cannot believe, Rhoda Titus, that you can genuinely feel concern for myself, or for my mother.’
At this she was jolted. ‘What do you mean? Of course, it is very sad, and I feel it.’ She was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘I miss my father.’
I had little interest in this, and told her so, at which she retreated into the back of the car. I drove until sunset, my mind occupied by the spareness of the landscape. When the evening Devil’s Whisper began rattling the car, I drove down the lee of a dune and waited, cursing myself for letting the drive go on so long. It was a stinging business, rushing outside in the semi-dark, battening the car. Back inside I examined my face and hands in the mirror: tiny scratches. But once the wind had died down, I went out again and freed up the car. Getting back into the rhythm of driving soothed me. My heartbeat. Even the stinging of the salt winds became, in memory, a devotional meditation. The caustic emptiness of the desert. I began to feel a fluttering sense of inner dawning. This, my marrow knew, was the true arena for closeness to God. The whiteness of the salt was an emptiness, clear as lymph, reaching out in all directions towards a sky that was the silver presence of God. Reaching in all directions away from me, because all directions away from me was the true path to deity.
Epiphany.
And afterwards, always, the reassertion of the flesh. I was suddenly fiercely hungry. My water bottle, in its dashsocket, was long empty. I pulled the car to a halt and rose from the driver’s seat. It is the harmonic of spirituality: the further one retreats into the soul, the more tugging is the backswing, back into flesh. I went through to the back of the car to find Rhoda Titus standing, as if to attention. I believe she used to leap to her feet when she heard me coming through from the cabin, perhaps (who knows) in fear, or in some odd hierarchical game.
I drank a long pull of water from the Fabricant spout, and then ordered up some ersatz-speltmash. Then I settled myself down on the stool at the back of the car and ate it.
‘Technician,’ Rhoda Titus said. ‘I must confess.’
‘More hierarchy games,’ I said. Pieces of the mash scattered from my mouth. I saw her wince.
‘I have been bored,’ she said. ‘And you make no effort to put your personal belongings away, no effort to hide them from me.’
This caught my attention. ‘I have no personal belongings,’ I said.
‘Your notepad,’ she said.
I turned my head. The notepad was on her bunk. I looked back to her face. ‘Yes?’
She steeled herself. ‘I have been reading your notepad,’ she said. And then, when I said nothing, she said, ‘You are very cross with me?’
I shook my head and finished off my mash.
‘I only wanted to access the Bible,’ she said. ‘And maybe some poetry. Perhaps a story. You understand how bored I have been?’
My belly was full now, so I replaced the bowl in the Fabricant, and ordered up some vodjaa. I lay on my bunk an
d started sipping out of the little bottle it provided. My eyes, used to staring at blankness, and emptiness in a visionary fugue, lighted on Rhoda Titus and I was as soaked in the image of her face as I had been of the salt desert.
Rhoda Titus, unsure, sat down herself. Then she picked up the notepad and held it towards me; and when I did not take it, she placed it on top of the Fabricant. Then she said, ‘Please, don’t stare at me, Technician. It is making me all uneasy.’
‘At what shall I stare?’ I asked, not taking my eyes from her face. The features seemed bizarre, dissociated from one another in an unsettling manner. Decomposing and recomposing at a level beyond immediate sight. But the unsettling thing was that it was occurring to me that faces were always like this, always radically strange, but that I had never noticed until this moment.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her face was blushing to sunset shades. ‘But please, this is embarrassing to me.’
‘At what shall I stare?’ I repeated. ‘At the Fabricant?’ And I notched my head about to look at the machine in the stern of the car, although the action of moving my head was somehow very hard.
I stared at the Fabricant.
‘A Fabricant,’ I said, ‘can only ever be as good as the raw materials you put into it. It can be worse than them, but it can never add anything to them. All it does is deconstitute and reconstitute, boil and freeze, mix and separate.’ I spoke this speech with many pauses and lacunae, and in each silence I sipped more vodjaa. But as I spoke on, I discovered a deeper resonance in myself with my own words, as if I were expressing some tremendous truth. ‘A food Fabricant,’ I explained, ‘takes raw roughage, or the base derived from the shit tanks (perhaps) and mixed it around with other raw materials, spices, textures.’ I stopped, drank some more vodjaa. Rhoda Titus was silent, a perfect terror holding her face rigid. ‘Drink Fabricants only add flavour to water, or hastily distil to produce the roughest of alcohol. Machine Fabricants mould and plane and tool and work the plastic of their base model; or they melt and reshape metals put into them.’ I angled my head, looking carefully about the whole cabin. ‘They mat and compress grasses, or whatever their software tells them to do.’ My head came slowly back round to look at Rhoda Titus. ‘And so it is with people.’
She was goggling at me now, perfectly motionless, perfectly speechless.
‘I think that I will never see a person lovely as a tree,’ I said. A vivid, almost photo image of a tree came into my inner eye; tall, with the branches sprouting half-way up and supporting a hair of leaves. ‘People are made by fools like me. But only God,’ and I stopped. Part of me wanted Rhoda Titus to complete the rhyme. But she was a statue. ‘Can make,’ I prompted. ‘A Tree.’
The silence was eerie. I shuffled down further in my bunk, the empty bottle on my chest. ‘If I were a tree,’ I said, ‘I would drink with my feet. I would eat with the top of my head and my hands, held upwards. I would sneeze my sex into the wind.’ My slippage into sleep was not something I registered.
The following morning Rhoda Titus was unusually jolly, forcefully jolly. We breakfasted and she made impassioned smalltalk, about the food we were eating, about the journey ahead of us, about the differences between the Aradys and the Galilee. The Devil’s Whisper in the morning (whilst we slept) had been very severe, and a large bank of salt had built up against the side of the car. I had to clear some of this away with a shovel. Rhoda Titus came out into the hot air with me, holding her left hand over her mouth. She even offered, with her voice muffled by her hand, to help dig. But she refused to uncover her mouth for fear chlorine would sting her lungs, and there is little a person can do with a shovel held only in one hand.
Afterwards, when we set off driving, Rhoda Titus sat beside me in the second driver’s seat. At first she spoke over-brightly, but soon she settled down. Perhaps my conversational responses reassured her that day. She talked for a little while about her father but I have no memory of what she said. Then she began a long debate with me over the necessity of rules. Als, she insisted, had rules, just as did Senaar. It was only that Als expressed its rules differently. I listened to her talking without becoming angry. Indeed, I felt so liberated (it was so pure being in the desert; it was so good being away from Als; it was so much better to be driving in the day than at night) that I found myself becoming involved in the debate.
It continued after we stopped at the reddening of the sky, and after I had battened the car down for the Evening Whisper. We sat in the back of the car, and I drank a little more vodjaa (I was parsimonious, now, because the supply was limited).
‘But there are rules,’ she insisted. She was very loath to give up on this point. ‘You are given a work rota, which you must follow.’
‘No,’ I said, mildly. ‘There is no compulsion to work.’
She gave a little sigh, like someone trying to blow out a candle. ‘How ridiculous! Then why does anybody work?’
I shrugged. ‘I can speak for myself,’ I said. ‘And say that it is dull indeed to have no work at all. Work is a good way of filling the time.’
‘But there will always be lazy people,’ she said. ‘That is human nature. Laziness, perhaps you see it as a weakness or a vice, but what of them? What of such people?’
‘Lazy,’ I said. ‘I do not quite understand. Do you mean people medically disinclined to work? They are to be pitied rather than despised, surely, assuming you wish to give them any thought at all.’ I thought of Lichnovski with his months of enforced ‘laziness’ on his back in a hospital bed, waiting for his new lungs to be grown. He would certainly rather have been working than there.
‘No, no. I mean, if there is work to be done, and some people do it and others shirk it, then the ones working are carrying the load. The lazy ones are taking advantage of you. They are laughing at you, sucking the fruits of your labour from you. They must be made to work.’
But I could make little sense of this.
‘Really,’ said Rhoda Titus, leaning forward, as if it was particularly important that I grasp this point. ‘You do have rules. What would you do if somebody refused to work their rota?’
‘What would I do? Probably nothing.’
‘Well, what would any Alsist do?’
‘How can I say? You must ask them.’
‘Are there no such people, people who ignore their rota, even if it is important work for the good of the whole community?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, vaguely.
‘Well, what happens to them? Do you see my point? There must be some mechanisms for making people work, even if they don’t want to.’
‘Why would such a person not want to work?’ I asked.
‘Because,’ said Rhoda Titus, a little too loudly, as if she were growing angry. ‘Because he prefers sitting about with his friends drinking and eating and talking to doing any work.’
‘He has plenty of time to sit around drinking and talking,’ I said. ‘He has three-quarters of the day to do this.’
‘But he wants to spend the whole day doing this,’ Rhoda Titus insisted.
‘Why? It would become very dull.’
‘I don’t know why, that’s not the point. Say that there is such a person. Surely you would make him work?’
‘No,’ I said.
She made an exasperated sound now. ‘You are merely saying that to try to win this argument,’ she said, hotly. ‘But I know you would.’
‘Believe me, Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘I have no desire to win this argument, or even to have an argument with you. But if there were such a man as you describe, his boredom would be a sort of punishment I suppose. But it would be his responsibility to deal with that, not the responsibility of the state. I suppose his friends might become cross with him, if he avoided all rota duties and if they suffered as a result; say he had a medical duty, and a friend were hurt and had to wait longer because the medical rota was understaffed.’
‘Ah!’ said Rhoda Titus. ‘Exactly.’
‘Well then his friends might
shun him, might even beat him up, I suppose. Then he could sit and drink all day, but he would be by himself. Most people who feel that way, who want no friends. Well, they simply leave and set up homes away from habitation.’
She seemed to have had enough talk for the time being, and wordlessly turned about and stretched herself on her bunk, staring at the ceiling centimetres over her face. I took up my notepad and read some matter or other. The Whisper was growing now, rattling the walls of our car and jerking it like a pendant on a chain. For minutes we did nothing but lie in our bunks and listen to the world outside us. Then I got up and poured myself some more vodjaa, sitting on my bunk to sip at it. Suddenly, Rhoda Titus sat up herself, swinging herself out of her alcove to sit on the edge of the bunk.
‘I remember,’ she said, triumphant, as if the clincher in her argument had occurred to her. ‘Out of your own mouth you said it, when I first arrived in Als. When I was prosecuting my diplomatic duties: when I asked you to take me to the women’s dormitory you said no, that you could not. So there is a law there, isn’t there, a law preventing you from going to that place if you’re a man.’
I laughed a little. ‘There’s no law,’ I said. ‘There are many women there who would not like to see me, I think. They would beat me up, throw me out. But that does not make it a law. And besides,’ I said, after a little while. ‘Why should I wish to go there?’
Rhoda Titus did not answer this for some time, except with a gentle shaking of her head from side to side. ‘There might be many reasons,’ she said, eventually.
‘Why, though? To meet a woman? I might meet her at any time. Why else?’ When there was no reply to this, I said, ‘I can tell you why I think you ask, indeed. Because you have a law, you naturally immediately think of breaking that law. You squash that desire deep in your heart, perhaps, because you think it wrong, but you feel it anyway. So then you have the law, and then you need police and army to prevent people breaking the law, and you need prisons and executions to punish those who do, and you need something greater than all this; you need the edifice of thought in which you wish every citizen to live, the prison in which thinking the opposite of the law is forbidden. And what we have chanced upon, in Als, is that without the law in the first place you need none of this.’
