Salt Read online

  They washed me in their airlock soda-shower and then gave me paper clothes and invited me through to talk. And they gave me a glass of lukewarm vodjaa, except that it was barely a glass, hardly a thimble. And they sat and crowded about me, with all their uniforms and rank-insignia, that meant little to me, except that it made it difficult for me to know to whom to talk. And Barlei was there, and introduced himself. Oh yes, I met him. He was a flabby man, but his clothes refused to recognise the fact and pinched at his flappy throat, and squeezed his fluid belly. Accordingly, his face was grape-coloured, and his eyes bulged forward out of his face. But he had played their game, whatever their game was, and risen to the top of the hierarchy, and Tyrian, Turian, was no more.

  Of course, all they wanted to know about was the death of Katarinya. Every ship had cast eyes upon it, naturally. It was the event of the voyage. But where another ship might have poured us cold vodjaa, or whatever their drink, with the liberality of the wake, and wept with us, and laughed with us, and swapped stories of the dangers of cabin craziness – where another ship would have done this, the Senaar did not. The staff officers all sipped their drinks, and scowled and put the thimbles down on the table as if they were unpleasant things, and then Barlei began talking with a rasping voice about the dangers to the voyage that our ship had brought with it.

  ‘Cabin craziness is indeed a dangerous thing, Captain,’ I agreed.

  And he replied but did not, as I had done, address me by any title or name. This, according to his own schema, was a bad error although it could hardly bother me. He said, ‘We must take precautions to safeguard the voyage as a whole. What if this person had flown upcable? What terrible damage could have been done then?’

  I had thought this myself, of course, but I said (because this is how the game must be played on Senaar), ‘You misunderstand the case. This Katarinya was sick, homesick. She had left a baby girl with a partner who refused to join the voyage. She lost her mind over this baby and thought to rejoin it. But she was a poor pilot and burnt out the engines, and so she crashed.’ There was an awkward silence, and the staff officers looked at me. So I said, ‘You may replay the visuals to see for yourself.’

  ‘Our problem, Technician Petja, is . . .’ began one of the officers but he was clearly a junior one, because another broke in upon him.

  ‘It is clearly a matter of discipline, is it not? It is inconceivable that one of ours would do such damage with a shuttle.’

  ‘Is there no cabin craziness with you?’ I asked, in mockery. But they have no such irony in Senaar, and shook their heads with serious expressions. ‘I am indeed impressed.’

  ‘You can follow our way,’ said the officer. ‘You can begin to train your people as we are trained.’

  This was an insult, and nothing less. So I drained my vodjaa in one gulp and stood to leave. But the Captain, Barlei, held up his hands to usher me down again. ‘Must we quarrel, Technician?’ he growled. ‘Can we not remain allies and friends? You understand our concern. It is not for ourselves, but for the voyage as a whole.’

  ‘We have convened commune meetings, and . . . adjusted the shuttle rota,’ I said. ‘There will be no further jeopardy to the voyage from us.’

  ‘Sit down, please, Technician,’ he said. I sat then, but it was not the right thing to do. He nodded, and said, ‘We think it would help the voyage if your commune of command were made permanent.’

  ‘Permanent?’

  ‘A full-time body, charged with the duties of governance.’ He began, at this, to lecture me on the Senaarian way, of politics and hierarchies, and I grew offended and spat on the floor.

  He pretended hurt at this, and said, ‘Can we not even offer you advice?’

  ‘To recast us in your image? I think not.’

  ‘Surely we are already part of the same federation? Surely we will all be living on the same world? Surely,’ (he said this last with a wheedling voice) ‘surely we all serve the same God?’

  I stood up again, and left. As I made my way back to the airlock in my ridiculous paper clothes, Barlei came after me, with all his junior officers scurrying after. He said, ‘Before the voyage began, we saw a free and fair interchange between our ships. Many of your people came and visited Senaar, and many of ours spent time upon the Als.’

  I stopped here, because I was uncertain what he meant.

  But then he said, ‘I believe several of my men’ (note possessive!) ‘fathered children aboard the Als.’ His voice was sterner now.

  ‘That,’ I said, ‘is a matter for the mothers. The child begins life with the mother, of course.’

  ‘The child belongs,’ he said, stressing the possessive word, ‘to the family of the child. And the father is a part of the family.’ It was in this way that the whole question of the children of Senaarians was inaugurated between us.

  As I piloted the shuttle downcable with a parcel of software and some ‘traded’ foodstuffs, I thought little of this. I decided that we faced only five months of acceleration and then we would be cruising; these worries would fade away as we entered our trances. But this thing about the children, this was a seed planted.

  The craze for suicides burnt itself out, of course. As we neared the end of acceleration people became distracted by the possibilities of trance. We disbanded the commune, and society returned to normal. And finally we were travelling at the cruising speed. Our gravity dribbled away as the accelerators petered out; we walked with larger and larger strides. We jumped higher and higher. And now spirits were high, because we felt as if the back of the journey had been broken.

  When you go from full gravity to no gravity your blood pressure rises. You feel heavy-headed. But after a day or two the pressure comes back down, and then you are ready for trance. This is what you must do: you climb into a suit that pumps a cream in at the neck and out at the left foot, because you will be suspended for decades and you must keep the skin and upper derma softened and supplied with nutrient or you will age. Then you inject another pipe into the carotid, that allows the passage of a soup of hyper-oxygenated molecules contained in a nutrient fluid into and out of your blood stream. Now, these molecules are micro-crafted, and release oxygen slowly during their time in your body; passing through a slow filter they will spend a few months in your bloodstream, and will keep all muscles and tissues supplied with oxygen, just as the medium in which they move will allow cells the energy to function. The final thing, before the mask goes over the face, is the pneumelectrics in the suit; these will slowly build muscle resistance in a long stretch, like a cat stretches but extended over days, and then a slackening, and then the stretch again – every muscle in your body, in sequence – over and over, for the length of your time. Because your muscles must not sleep, or they will waste. Now it is time, and the trance technician pulls the mask over your face, and you feel the slow seep of the cream, like a sludge, up your chin and over your nose, your cheeks, your forehead. And now you take the tablet, which you have kept under your tongue (or swallowed immediately, depending on your preference), and you let it go down your throat.

  Some people say they do not like the onset of trance, and indeed, some people do panic when they can no longer breathe, or earlier even, when the mask covers the eyes and they can no longer see. But I have always found it the most delicious of sensations. The tablet takes effect slowly, and you drift away, but it is the most relaxing feeling, the abandonment of everything. You do not need to move, the suit is stretching your muscles slowly, with an infinite care and the most sensuous precision. You do not even have to bother with the slow drawing of breath – have you ever stopped to consider how wearying it is to have to draw breath, every second, awake or sleep, for the whole of your life? With the muddling in the head of the tablet, like the finest vodjaa, it is a relief to abandon the breathing. Everything slips. Consciousness dissolves.

  A wave lifts, c-curves and falls against the infinite beach with a perfect sound of white-noise. Another.

  Another.

&nbs
p; The tablet encourages you to fall asleep, of course, but you do not sleep through the thirty-six years of trance. Other ships practise that form of medically-induced coma, as perhaps you know, but not us. Lock a body in a box and put it into coma. Startle it awake at the end of the process. The problem with such techniques is the mortality percentage. Depending on which technique you use, this can reach as high as twelve per cent. This represents too great a toll on the whole crew. Worse than this, it turns hibernation into a death lottery. Would you go to sleep knowing that there was a one in ten chance you would not awake?

  Mortality rates for trance are much, much lower. On our voyage, our ship lost only two people in trance. Because it is not a coma, consciousness is never really lost but it does enter the weird world of sensory deprivation. There is not even a heartbeat by which to orient yourself, not even the heaving of the chest with breath. The mind does not exactly go out, but neither does it exactly stay switched on.

  Shall I tell you what it feels like? To begin with, it is simply like falling asleep in the comfortable darkness. It is being a child again. And, at some stage (although it is difficult to say when) you wake up and it is still dark, and dreams are bothering you at the margins of your thoughts. And you sleep again, or wake again, but your mind is not settled. It processes the thoughts and the memories, and puts them together in odd ways, and stores them away. You sleep again, or you wake again, or one of the two. But you are dreaming less and less and memories bother you less and less. You are nowhere, you are nothing. Nirvana. There is no distant roar of engines to capture your senses; no tug of gravity to force your mind to constantly orient itself. No breath, no heartbeat. There is no sense of time. Moments of darkness and quiet exist, they blend seamlessly together in the mind, and who knows how many years exist between each one? Only the slow, slow rhythm of the stretch, the cat-like stretch of your body, and then relax. But although this happens so slowly it takes days, it becomes what your breathing used to be. A peaceful, background thing; and soon you cease to notice it.

  But then, the body begins slowly to convulse, a jagged awkward sensation, and you become aware of waking up, and it is an unpleasant itch, a crotchet. Then you are handled, and the mask comes away, and the dim lights hurt your eyes. So you cough, and blink; you retch up the fluid in your lungs; you take a shower to wash the slime from your skin, and you dress yourself, and float out.

  You have been in a trance for twelve years; you feel as though you have slept but a single night. And now it is time for your six months of ship duty. Maintenance, shuttle duties, in weightlessness; sitting around with your half-dozen other awake colleagues. You play, you copulate, you work, you exercise your stiff body in elastic harnesses to simulate gravity, and you know a boredom that trance had made you believe was impossible. But your detail is over eventually, you can climb back into the suit, and return to the trance.

  Another wave slowly ascends, bends, breaks on the red sands. Another.

  Another.

  Then time has dissolved altogether.

  In zero-gravity, and supplied with moisture, the body ages barely one year for ten. In the dark, the mind rests.

  I put my name to the documentation for the voyage at the age of thirty-one; I was seventy-two by the time of our arrival at Salt, but at the same time I was not even forty.

  We covered the distance between worlds at .7 c, which meant a long period of deceleration at the journey’s end. But for this arrival year we were all awake, and full of excitement. So we connected computers, and burnt our thrusters to turn the whole fleet one-eighty degrees, and, with the comet behind us now, we reignited the burners and began to slow. Deceleration pressed us against our ship floors with .2 g at first, which was hard enough on our soggy bones, but we began to recover, and week by week we increased the deceleration thrust, and the gravity climbed, and the hard torchlight of our new sun, silver-bright, was visible clearly.

  Barlei

  The planet we know today as Salt was originally designated Nebel 2. Naturally, this was only ever going to be a temporary identification, an astronomer’s tag, and it would not serve as the name of a homeworld, but I still regret the name that has superseded it. It strikes me that it concentrates unduly on the negative, the bleaker features of our planet, and therefore it contributes – subtly, but surely undeniably – to a lowering of morale. My own suggestion to the fleet panel was Keseph: the word is the Hebrew for ‘silver’, and reflects the appearance of the world from space. The white-silver shine of the planet, in the gleam of Nebel’s whiter-than-sol light. Silver is also precious, which might encourage inhabitants to value the splendour of the world God made, and made (let us not forget) for all of us. Exodus 26:19 tells us that the sockets of the pillars in God’s tabernacle were made of silver; and in Zechariah 6:11 the holy crown is made of silver. All this, and other examples, suggest to me the Divine blessing that silver carries with it. But Keseph has not gained popular currency, and so I must talk of Salt.

  Salt is a planet with a gravity of a little over .8 g. It has no moons, or rings, or other associated phenomena. Indeed, the Nebel system possesses rather fewer of the standard requirements as specified by Paulo’s Law. It has only three planets, one in a close orbit, one at almost exactly one astronomical unit, and one gas giant on a very wide and slightly elliptical orbit. The gas giant, an argon world clearly visible in the night sky, is known as Hadros, the Greek for unicorn, although the name strikes me as unnecessarily fanciful.

  Clearly, according to Paulo’s Law, the absence of sufficient and deep enough gravity wells to attract away stray asteroids and cometoids should have resulted in the relentless bombardment of Salt, and the pulverisation of all life upon that world. There is, our scientists tell me, a certain amount of evidence that Salt has been extensively bombarded, but the tenacity and complexity of vegetative life suggests that it has been several millennia since the last major impact. The system is strewn with a large number of small orbiting bodies, comets and meteors, it is true but most of them follow a wide orbit at several degrees from the elliptic. We were concerned, at original settlement, that asteroid bombardment might pose a serious threat to life, and even went so far as to plan Senaarian orbital defences to try and screen the larger bodies (which we have never built, what with their expense). But since settlement, meteor falls have been relatively rare.

  We have transmitted this information back to Earth, as is proper; but it is twenty-five years before they receive any transmission, and another twenty-five before any reply might be picked out of the infinite night. At such distance we do as other colonies have done, as is the right and proper and holy thing: we dissociate ourselves from Earth. You are young and have never known that world, and it means little to you, although I understand there are organisations of youths in other cities who define themselves as Earth-patriots. But even for those of us born on Earth it is difficult to feel the connection in the heart. We are a new world, a new beginning. The dawn cannot be always concerned with the moon at midnight.

  The trouble at settlement began much earlier, of course, before any plans for asteroid defences were mooted, and it is my duty, I suppose, to trace the pedigree of this war right back to the long voyage, and even before. I take no pleasure in this. Nor do I have even the littlest desire to occupy this time, these files, only to justify myself and my own actions. Everything I have done has been done for the good of my people. For my community, my tribe. For this nation and its dedication to God. History, they say, is more than a chronicle. A history empty of justification, of politics and belief, is a blind history.

  Perhaps the best way to start is to try and explain the sense of harmony, of the necessary balance between order and freedom, that prevailed upon the Senaar during the voyage, and which has prevailed within Senaar since we arrived at Salt – to explain it with an analogy from music. I love music. Music is the great passion of my people. It requires discipline, application, hard work and self-denial to master the skills of the keyboard, my own i
nstrument of choice. But once you begin to achieve that mastery, the playing grants you freedom beyond the possible dreams of Alsists. In the same way, the music itself contains the tension, between the rigidity of the notes themselves, each one precise in its evocation of a certain tone, and the tumbling freedom of their combination; between the path you must follow that was set out by the Master Composer, and from which you must not deviate (who would dare ‘improve’ the writing of a Beethoven, a Bach?), and the channel you must find to express yourself, your own individuality, and without which music might as well exist only on computer disk. A nation is a composition, a sonata in people. It must possess harmony or it is nothing. So, to me, this history of my people, this narrative I bequeath to you all, is a sort of symphonic poem, a major-key hymn to the energy and achievements of our people.

  Before I begin the narrative, I must add one further thing, in answer to the slanders that have come from the Alsists. It is true, I concede, that we packed needleguns from the very beginning. But to assert that this in some manner contradicted the terms of the accord all ships signed before committing themselves to the project is absurd, and propagandist. The accord allowed each prospective settlement to make provision for its own self-sufficiency (although it was expressly stated that settlements can expect any and all reasonable support from other settlements – something ignored, or perhaps flouted, by the Alsists); and self-sufficiency, clearly, includes self-defence. Neither did we ‘hide’ the fact that our cargo included needleguns, as they claim. To say ‘hide’ suggests a deliberate attempt to mislead, but are we truly bound to itemise every single piece of cargo? Surely that is contrary to the spirit, and the reality, of organising so large a project. Besides, any objections voiced by the Alsists to needleguns are voided by the fact that they stole (mark the breakage of divine commandment!) a whole bartel of our guns at the earliest opportunity upon landing, and have since duplicated many more. Clearly they have no principled objections to the use of such guns. Too many of my people, some of whom I considered members of my family, have died at their hands, let us not forget.