Salt

by Adam Roberts

  Eredics flew the worst wounded of us straight into the mountains north-west of Als. There my cataracted lenses were cut away, and new plastic lenses inserted. Skin was cut away too, but there was less that could be done about it and my radiation-induced cancers. It was Csooris who was on the rota to perform this medicine upon me, but she told me that the old way of rotas was changed now. The War meant it had to be.

  ‘It is a shame,’ I said. ‘Rotas are a fair way. They are free.’

  We were in a portion of a deep mountain crevasse, ceilinged with rubble fallen from above and wedged. Lighting was industrial, with great cables about the floor, but the medical area had been cleaned and sterilised, and there were rooms caddied up against the naked rock.

  Csooris fussed about my face, and finished post-op swabbing. She was so close that I could examine her wounds in great detail. Her face was healed now from its burns, and some of the front had been patched with new skin, although there was no hiding the novelty of this part of her face. To the sides, where it mattered less, her skin was marked and puckered by the old burning, so that along her neck and under her ear, onto her cheek and up to where the artificial hair started seemed made not of face-skin but of anus-skin. Still, as long as she faced me, and with the tug of old acquaintance, I did feel some sexual urge for her. In the field, I had mostly been having sex with Salja but I had grown weary in the latter days, with the cataract and the whole sickness of fighting.

  ‘Do you have many offers for sex now?’ I asked.

  She snorted. ‘Few enough.’

  ‘I would offer, when my wounds have healed.’

  She was washing her hands in a medical soda-wash, away in the corner of our little booth. ‘Some of your wounds will never heal,’ she said. ‘The cancers are not only floating on your surface now, but have sunk into your depths.’

  I was silent for a while, contemplating this. ‘At least I have lived,’ I said.

  She came over to me again, as if not having heard what I said. ‘Yours is no uncommon thing,’ she said. ‘Perhaps there is some comfort in that. Most of us will die this way.’

  ‘And most Senaarians too,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘It is our world. Still, we live for a while. We have children. Perhaps that is the point.’

  I blinked my eyes, slowly, but the scars were already healing. I could feel them as slight ridges on my cornea. ‘At least some radiation sickness can be cured,’ I said, blinking again. ‘Although I am sorry to discover that my chlorine-lenses did not protect me from the cataracts.’

  ‘Nor are they supposed to,’ she said. ‘Nor could they, I think. They only keep the chlorine from stinging your eyes.’

  ‘Must I still wear lenses outside?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Your eye is the same; it will still be irritated by the chlorine.’

  I lay down again, sleepy, but she slapped my torso. ‘You cannot sleep there, Petja,’ she said. ‘If you are tired, go sleep on the cave floor outside. This is needed for some other patient.’

  Grinning, I got up and pestered her for a kiss, but she was stronger than I, and I was sore with my operation. ‘Still,’ I said, as I pulled on my clothes, ‘it is good to see you again.’

  ‘I am glad you are not dead,’ she said. But she did not smile.

  ‘Do you remember what your Lucretius said?’ I asked. ‘Dust falling forever. I think of that, from time to time. It is a way of explaining the universe. Did he have much to say on the matter of war, your Lucretius?’

  But Csooris was not to be drawn. ‘I have no time for reading these days,’ she said, curt.

  Then, as I was readying myself to go, she said, in a lower voice.

  ‘There have been rumours, about you.’ Then, after a pause: ‘You talk about the people you fought with as “yours”.’

  At this I was silent.

  ‘Many say that you always were a hierarch and a rigidist. That you were this way even on the voyage, and that now you dream of setting yourself in power at the top of a ladder of hierarchy. That you order people about in war as if they were slaves, as if they were belongings.’

  I breathed slowly in.

  ‘War,’ I said, ‘is a weird prism, through which all is distorted, I think. I say things in war that would revolt me in peace. I never was a rigidist, all those times before the war.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Csooris, turning from me. ‘Nobody doubts that. Of course, during the war you will be praised. Nobody doubts that this is an efficient way of making war.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘you will never have sex with me?’

  ‘No,’ she said simply, as she busied herself with something out of my sight.

  I left then, and slept for several hours. But later that day I discovered that what she said was true. Many people disdained me, some even spat at me or rushed up to strike me. But many also clustered round me, offered me rations (it was a kind of money, because rations were so scarce; they were ‘buying’ the right to talk to me, but I was so hungry I did not even recoil at this perversity). And all these people thought of me as somebody with the talismanic power to strike a blow against the Senaarians.

  I was a sort of god. A war idol.

  And it made me feel sick-tired, a depression in my bones. Or perhaps all I felt was a response to the operation, or to my growing inner sickness. It occurred to me that I had been so ready to die, and that this was where my battlefield happiness and purity-of-mind (vernou) had come from; and at that same time, with the jarring of a joint going out of socket, it occurred to me that now I was amongst people again, that purity was being polluted. I spent the evening talking with a group of about thirty, many of whom were friends of mine, and I wanted to be able to look forward to more of these in the future. And so my readiness to die diminished, and so my purity-of-mind greyed. That night I slept in a cot in the side of the mountain, matted with a sack filled with soft plastics, and I had some sex with a woman, little older than a child. But the act was no longer the act of release from the body, the prelude to battle: it was the act that tied me to a certain life, a certain living. Three days later I led my (so – possessive) group of guerrillas out to kill Senaarians on the site of old Als; but I did so with a sense of the irritation of having to do this thing. Yet still I did it.

  6

  The Gift

  Barlei

  It has been two years. So long? Surely not so long. I have lived, for those years, in the war-room longer than any other room. But our war has been glorious, and God and freedom have prevailed. There were those who doubted, but doubters never thrive.

  Ours is the strongest, the proudest of nations. Ours is the strong right hand God has chosen to shape His new world. But war is terrible, and we have all suffered. All have suffered, from the lowest to the highest. All of us must pray to God to have the strength of will to ask that terrible question: was the price worth the payment? Is even as glorious a victory as ours a thing worth buying with so many of our finest pearls?

  But this war has been a necessary thing. Nobody can doubt that. I look to the salt now, the salt that surrounds us all, and I pray to God to tell me what the landscape means. I used to think that Salt was a place of tears, but now I think differently. If the salt were to lose its savour . . . ? This war has been the savour in our meat. Without it, life would have been the dull round of planting and reaping, of giving in marriage and giving birth, of growing and dying. But the war has given us interest, excitement; it has rendered the meat more palatable. And, like salt to the body, war is essential to the body politic. Then I can again give praise to God, that He has seen fit to so perfectly emblematise our life. Our planet is a rebus in God’s text.

  It has been a year and a half since my jean-Pierre was taken from me. A sniper’s needle took him: how cowardly, the sniper’s serpent task! To lie in the shadows, in the distance, and to poison the Eden. I was furious for weeks afterwards. I broke the furniture in the war-room in the rage and fugue of my grief. I howled like an animal. My gen
erals fled from me in terror, and I broke wood from the table’s edge with my bare hands. And afterwards (the memory is almost too painful for me to relate) I sat in the bathroom en suite to the war-room proper. I sat on the floor, in the unforgiving strip-lighting, and I stared at myself in the floor-ceiling mirrors on the far side. What a sorry thing I was, how old, how pale, how grotesque: and yet I possessed life, and the young, the beautiful jean-Pierre did not. I think I was not entirely rational. My enemies say that I ordered the immediate poisoning of the whole Perse Sea, the nuclear detonation over multiple sites in the Northern Mountains. If I ever ordered anything so destructive, and so certain to bring damaging retribution from the two other Perse nations, then my generals wisely ignored it. But I cannot believe I would say such things. I did not believe my leadership would be capable of such ill judgement. Instead, I believe that my enemies in Senaar have been spreading poison about me. Of course I would do nothing so foolish as to destroy valuable items in the war-room.

  But the grief was real.

  I had authorised the construction (at great expense, because new software for the Fabricants had to be carefully devised, and the first attempts revealed terrible flaws in the programming) of some mountain attack craft. The problem this difficult northern terrain provided was extreme: our sats told us little, our cars and trucks could not travel over it, our aircraft provided neither the necessary reconnaissance nor efficient platforms for warfare. This meant that we sent a succession of foot patrols into the area; an area known by the enemy much more accurately than by us. It is not surprising that we suffered heavy casualties. And so I ordered the creation of a craft deft enough to be able to negotiate the ways of the mountain, but sturdy enough to stand up in combat. At great cost, we developed a low hovering craft with heavy lower shielding. It is known as the Senaar Military Craft VII, or SMIC 7. It will finally finish the war – a war we have already won, over and over, but which refuses to die. But the program has not been problem free. We produced four SMIC 7s before we discovered difficulties in the engine that resulted in the distressing explosion I am sure you have seen on the Visuals. And so we redesigned the craft, and brought them into service six months later than we wished.

  And this, this ridiculous flaw in Fabricant software, caused the death of my beloved jean-Pierre. Had he possessed the new craft, he would have patrolled with them. Lacking them, because of this flaw, he was forced to continue patrolling on foot.

  He set off shortly after the Morning Whisper (I have his subordinates’ reports by me at this moment), and marched for three hours through difficult terrain. At fourth hour he encountered a group and exchanged shots, but our fire-power being superior the enemy cadre withdrew. Of course, my jean-Pierre followed (was he tricked? Did these devils deliberately lead him on? Entice him into a deeper, darker part of the mountains? We can put nothing from our minds, no suspicion is too tenuous). He brought up his men in quick time, and they chased the enemy through awkward-lying land. Then jean-Pierre (recklessly, according to one under-lieutenant, reasonably according to the other; but neither of them understand the bravery of jean-Pierre as do I, the perfect bravery, the perfect purity), then jean-Pierre followed the enemy into a rock culvert, and came into heavy crossfire. The reports do not specify whether the men on the ground assumed it to be an ambush. Nor do they give any sense of the immediacy of the moment, the sudden hot realisation of danger, the silent flash of needles through the sunny air.

  I feel myself closer to his Soul when I relive it.

  So, jean-Pierre tried to pull back, but found that by chance or skill a cadre of the enemy had made their way behind him. Many of our men were cut down by enemy needles. The reports speak of them falling stuck with many needles, and firing back as they fell.

  With jean-Pierre’s skills, the troop was able to regroup, and fight back out of the engagement. They then fell back, but under fire at all times and being pursued by a much larger force. They retreated in good order, and finally broke through to the more open ground that slanted down towards the sea-plain on which the New Towns were visible. Three-quarters of the band were lost, and not a man free of injury, but my jean-Pierre had survived, and was able to lead his men down the final stretch with dignity. And this is the bitterness. Within sight of the sanctuaries, a few moments away from the heroic welcome for his good work, a needle felled my mighty warrior. The reports manage some of the banality of it, the way tragedy sometimes masks itself as comedy. They say they had dropped from the rock to the salt plain, that they were within a few hundred metres of the first gate, with their comrades’ faces clearly visible on guard duty, when jean-Pierre (not that they call him that, of course; but I cannot chill this narrative by referring to him only by his rank), jean-Pierre suddenly tripped and sprawled, like a child. There was even some laughter, I believe (soldiers are hearty laughers). But he did not rise. Then an ensign stooped to help him to his feet, and he stood up and danced backwards, crying with pain. Some of the others laughed at him too, but this was no matter for laughing. The ensign had been shot through the shoulder, and my beloved jean-Pierre was dead, shot through the back of his neck, with the needle sticking a half-metre out of his Adam’s apple. And this is where I leave him, as his comrades dive for cover in the salt and try to return fire (but where?); as his fellows, with whom he had fought so valiantly, scatter away from him in all directions. How could the sniper have chosen jean-Pierre? He was not to be distinguished from his subordinates by dress, for that would be to give the enemy the chance to slice off the head of the military unit. He wore the same deep blue combat fatigues, the same whole-mask. How did the serpent in the wilderness know whom to bite to cause such hurt? Satan has luck; God’s people are luckless, because only then can their faith be tested. So said a religious man of my acquaintance. Do I believe him? Do I believe? He is still dead, my boy.

  But a war must go on, Freedom cannot go without its champion for the death of one man, even if he be the greatest. I ordered the body flown home, and a magnificent state funeral was paid for from my personal fortune. I had him interred in a saltstone tomb (he was a hero! A hero’s body cannot be simply dumped into the compost bins, to help grow the meanest vegetables! My enemies in Senaar seem unable to grasp this distinction: one law for all! Ironic! Who was it that protected that law, that upheld it? It was him). I visited his tomb this very morning, prior to writing this.

  But there is a bitterness even here. When I think of the crowds of cheering Senaarians who gathered at the founding ceremonies of our great nation, I was shocked and personally hurt at the meagreness of the popular show. My enemies tell me that many stayed away in protest at my handling of the war, at the fact of the war at all! Mendacity. How easily cancer breaks into the body politic. But I can still see that littering of thin pale bodies along the route, an insult to a great man. There were so few of them bothered to turn up, and those that did wore such ragged clothing, and seemed to be protesting and preaching sedition with the very boniness of their arms and legs, the very drawn and skull-visible faces. The people are the limb of my body. I will not have it.

  But he was so fine.

  Petja

  I am dying, now. The pain is fiery in me, and vodjaa helps little. But I have fought and fought. I have become what I despised and I am content that I have done good, because it has brought death to so many. Now the habit of command is second-nature to me, and I think in terms of having and owning. In this fashion does the war go on. The last of the birds died last week. Only a handful had survived the attack, and those few were in small cages. They did not prosper. The last of them, a linnet, lost its feathers and finally refused feeding.

  Many people have made their way right around the northern coast and have settled, to some degree, in Smith. This is no concern of mine. Some stay in the mountains with us. But people are different from the way they were before. They have been infected with the ways of the hierarchy, or so it seems to me. Couples cohabit, couples stay with one another during childbirth. It seems
somehow wrong.

  I have fought and fought. More recently, my legs have been disused. My cancers poisoned my lymphatic veins and channels, and the treatment was not as successful as possible. My arms still function but my legs are withered and blackened, as much with the treatment as with the sickness. It is little loss. For months before the operation it was agony to walk on my legs, as if my joints were filled with acid; and they were swollen and ugly. Now, after it, I have them strapped up against my chest, and make of myself a tiny parcel; and then I go on the back of Hamar, an old friend. Hamar is a large man, although he has lost much of his hair to the effects of radiation. But he still has much of his strength, and he carries me like a backpack. The voodoo of war is such that I am now talismanic; people are happy to think of themselves as my people, as my beings.

  Hamar is dead, of course, but you knew that. He was bearing me through a skirmish, and I was waving people round the flank of one of the new Senaarian hovercars. They deploy them poorly. They fly up, but then they park and the machine is left stationary: and so we can go round it and destroy it. It had happened once, and then again it happened days ago. We held the attention of the enemy from the large scree and an agile force slipped away and behind. We destroyed the car, it was easy work because the hover-skirt is a weak place. But Hamar fell, still carrying me. A needle went through his lung, which is not a fatal wound in itself, but he bled into his lungs and up to his mouth, until his mask was filled with blood and he drowned. Normally, high in the mountains as I was, I would have pulled away his mask for him and allowed him to spit out the blood and breathe, because usually the mountains are relatively free of chlorine. But this war has liberated a deal of chlorine: and the enemy bring dischargers that pump it into the battlefield. Their masks are better than ours, and even if they lose them they have sinus-filters, so they use the gas as a weapon of war. We do lose people to chlorine, if their masks are knocked off, or if like Hamar they bleed from their mouths or vomit into them. It is a stupid way to die.