Salt Read online

  After settling treaty details with Babulonis, I shuttled up the coast and visited Lantern, on the western coast. A strange community Lantern, built around only three families such that every citizen is a member of one or other of these families: The gene pool, clearly, is not as diverse as it ought to be, and Lanternians do suffer amazingly high incidences of congenital and inherited disorders. Neither, I think, is the younger generation of Lanternians happy with the claustrophobic feel of their community. Many leave their families and homes, and move to other nations. Of course, few lands are as welcoming as Senaar. Most resist all forms of immigration, and those few that do not have strict regulations governing who can come. With Senaar, though, we have always welcomed the immigrant, provided he or she brings money (or money’s portable equivalent in skill and labour), and provided he or she is prepared to do their share of the work that is to be done. And over the years several thousand Lanternians have, I believe, tramped up to New Florence, boated to Yared and finally caught the spinal railway to Senaar. Some have even navigated their way there along the full length of the Galilee in home-made boats, a perilous undertaking but one that demonstrates the pull of a perfectly harmonious nation such as ours. We are the envy of Salt, my children, my people! It is no sin to take pride in this. It is, after all, God’s doing.

  With my visit to New Florence, and the signing of the final element of the treaty (with a great deal of public celebration all about the shores of the Galilee), the Southern Alliance was formally constituted. How little did I then know that this alliance, headed as it was by Senaar, was so very shortly to exist in a state of war with the nations of the north. Indeed, upon returning home, I was advised to travel north, to see whether some of the nations building themselves about the shores of the Perse might not also be encouraged to sign up to the Alliance. And I planned this; my people began talking to northerners by radio, setting the terms for the first visit. But about the Perse the Alsists were already establishing their malign hold.

  At home, in our beloved Senaar, the group of interested parties passed a Parliamentary motion expressing their anxiety regarding the kidnapped children. Ageing one year for ten in stasis, and living for a year’s acceleration and two year’s deceleration, these children were now biologically nine or ten years old. We were concerned that they had already been warped by the culture of Als, and the feeling was now commonly articulated that unless we could recover these infants before puberty they would be lost to us altogether. Senaarians are a people that value the family above almost everything, save God, and the prospect of never again seeing their children greatly distressed the fathers, many of whom were in the military. Of all the issues that were debated amongst friends, and by the nascent web all around Galilee, this was the most hotly contested.

  Some said we should negotiate; some said we should mount a raiding party and take the children back, whether Als liked it or not. The army was busy, but trained soldiers consider themselves warriors, and grow restless when they are being employed as engineers and sappers, building bridges and putting quintiglass windows in the facades of shop-stores. At monthly meetings of squaddie representatives there was, my subordinates told me, a great deal of grumbling. Whilst we struggled to make the gale-picked barrenness of the eastern Galilean plain fertile, stories were coming down of the easy life of the northerners. It was said that the Alsist settlement of the Perse basin was an illegal action, amounting almost to theft. It was said that the Alsists were using underhand methods to bring Convento and Smith into their sphere of influence. It was difficult to know what to believe: empire building ought to be flatly contrary to the anarchist philosophy of Als, but I had had many examples of their evil intent. And it seemed clear to many, even during those early days, that there was going to come a time when our two nations would come into bitter conflict; when the white deserts of Salt would redden with spilt blood.

  Petja

  When we realised the magnitude of the task before us, some of us wept. Salt tears fell upon the salt ground. We had dreamed many dreams as we travelled through space, foreseen many versions of our world, but we had foreseen none so bleak.

  Consider the desert God had seen fit to test us with. There was little water. The air contained poisonous levels of chlorine and some other noxious gases. The upper atmosphere was insufficiently stocked with greenhouse gases, and the average Salter was exposed to twenty or thirty rem of radiation a year. The topsalt was completely hostile to all the forms of vegetation we had brought with us from earth: cultivation of the plants we were familiar with could only take place in tiny plots laboriously reclaimed, boxed at the sides and underneath, filled with the mulch of our own organic waste. There were many species of native plant and algae but none of them were edible or in any major way useful to us.

  The salt-grasses, of which (I believe) thirty-three varieties have been catalogued, are barely plants at all, more a brutally primitive arrangement of salt crystals with a few organic traces, virtually no cellular structure. The sea algae, of which there are many dozen strains, are no good by themselves as food, although it is possible to use algae as a fertiliser for growing modified versions of various vegetables. The land algae is more interesting, but is only to be found in the mountains and (I understand) in the broken hills of the far south.

  Close to the water, and in the uplands, where a relatively high proportion of magnesium chlorides, magnesium sulphates, calcium sulphates and potassium chlorides are to be found, there is a certain amount of aboriginal vegetation. But in the desert nothing grows; not even salt-grass can survive the parching barrenness, the regular scouring of savage winds. And deserts cover more than eighty per cent of our world’s surface. Our younger generations talk of transforming the whole world and many changes have taken place, even in my lifetime. I can stroll through the seashore arcologies on the north coast without a mask, I can run my fingers along the broad and waxy leaves of new plants, I can crush the tiny peppercorn bulb-heads of frogflowers between my fingers and smell the bitter perfume. The vista along the seafront of Smith is one of greenery, a lush and cultivated stretch of land beside a sea so dark it is purple-black. But we have barely touched our world. It is only a ten minute stroll south or eastwards from the seashore to pure, aboriginal desert: the unending acres of salt dunes, the world-girdling emptiness of the Great Desert.

  People wept because our first months of life on Salt might as well have been a continuation of the confinement of the voyage. We still spent most of our time inside, cowering under the dome of our ship or digging windowless homes into the ground to escape the solar bombardment. We still ate recycled foods; meagre meals bulked up with processed shit. My vision had been of spreading my shit on fertile alien soil, of growing large spinach and cabbage plants, but for the first months even our shit was too precious to waste on the soil. We held various scientific colloquia to discuss the best way to scrub the chlorine from the atmosphere, to build up an ozone layer, to create enough topsoil to provide sustainable arable production. But often as not I would leave these meetings early and find my only solace in a bottle of vodjaa and the bed of a friend. It seemed as if the task was beyond us.

  But – we must never lose our faith in that conjunction. But there were positive things about our world, too. It was mostly temperate; too hot in summer (and in the midday equatorial desert much too hot, without shade, humidity or breeze), and a little too cold in winter (except at the poles, where it was below freezing for much of the year), but for the lengthy spring and autumn the ambient temperature was perfect. Then there was, at least, some water. It is conceivable, I suppose, that there might have been no water at all. And, as a lover of mine once told me, if we had been sent to a world with oceans of water but without any salt at all, we would have surely died. I think she meant it as a sort of joke.

  Let me tell you how we first organised ourselves upon this new world. Work rotas were reinterpreted in terms of the tasks before us: those allocated agricultural duties spent our days marking ou
t fields and clearing the topsalt quite away until the quartz-granite was visible underneath. This would create deep, empty swimming-pool shaped holes in the landscape, and these we would line with ship’s plastic, cover with double-layered plasglass, and begin to fill with laser-pestled ground-up rubble from the mountains, a fine shingle, topped over with such waste and mulch as we were allocated, which wasn’t much, because the recycling bins still claimed most. We were trying to create an agricultural soil; which is no easy thing. Soil is a balance of minerals and decaying organic matter that took millennia to come to being on Earth. Unless it be perfectly right there are almost no plants that will grow in it. For months all we could grow were boltweeds (useful as food only in a heavily processed soup-form) and, oddly, tomatoes, which seemed to do well. This food was rather radioactive, of course; but we ate it anyway.

  Achieving a sufficiency of grown foods, rather than having to rely on dwindling ship’s supplies and the tasteless horror of the recycle bins, was a priority. Work rotas, then as now, could only ever allocate a quarter of a person’s day to work, and that only if a state of emergency were declared. But in those early days most of us did not stick slavishly to our rota. If the second half of morning were allotted to agricultural work, then we would turn up early and stay all day. I spent a month on soil work, and then was shifted to livestock, and then roads. Normally, livestock would have meant birds, but our birds were confined to the dome of our ship. Those few who flew away died in flight of the bad air and the high radiation, and fell to the earth like tied-up bundles. In this enclosed space there was little call for bird-farmers, and so I devoted my time instead to the eels. We hollowed out pools, and pumped partially desalinated water from the sea into them. Then we took out the frozen eel embryos, genengineered them for a while with a modicum of easy-splice materials, and then released them to swim and grow in the tented water.

  ‘If we can desalinate the Aradys, even only so much as partially’ Eredics said to me as we bobbed in this warm bath, with the eels wriggling against our waving feet, ‘then we could populate the whole sea with these eels.’ Eredics was a friend of mine, and we were rotaed together creating eel ponds.

  ‘There’s still the radioactivity,’ I said, my head back, my eye on the tent roof. Its envelope was filled with blockading gel, but it still did a poor job of protecting the eels from the solar buffeting. The ambient radiation was still too high, and mutations were common.

  ‘Not really,’ said Eredics. ‘They are bred to swim down. At a sufficient depth the water itself will shield them.’

  But this was to ignore the bigger problem, which was the desalination. The only thing that could survive in the seas of Salt at the beginning was the aboriginal algae, and even it found it hard. It was only to be found in the bays, where the water was still enough to allow a partial crystallisation of salt at the surface in the heat of the day. The algae would grow underneath this crust, where the water had been partially cleared. This made it easy to harvest by simply cracking the bumpy sheets of white and upending them, to grasp the beards of blue and green and pull them away. The algae made a reasonable fertiliser, although the amount of processing it required was too great for it to be eaten directly. Besides it tasted foul, even triple-processed.

  More than this, practice had never taken the salt out of water; it had always taken the water out of the brine, and collected it at some other point. But we could not do this with the whole Aradys; we could not boil away an ocean of clean water and accumulate it somewhere else. And so, other plans, more or less absurd, were hatched by people sitting about the night-time fires, sipping their vodjaa or dancing or telling one another tales.

  But this was not to come next. Next, we built the home dormitories. We were mining some metals from the hills around and we stored these in trenches on Istenem Hill. And we dug the three main dormitory caves underneath Istenem Hill, so that this metal store, and the saltrock of the hill, could help shield us from ambient radiation. Most of us were happy to move from the ship, which could now be devoted wholly to livestock and birds. Of course, some wanted other than to live in the public dorm, and to these people then as now the same remedies were available. They could live where they liked. Then as now, this gave little freedom to the individual, for a single woman or a single man can work only very slowly at building their own home, particularly in the inhospitable conditions of Salt in those days. But many people did leave the dorms, and set out to make their own homes, by themselves or in groups. Small spontaneous collectives grew up to establish rock-roofed halls, or churches, or larger dwellings. Some people wanted still to live in the dome, which meant they had to endure the stink and company of livestock; but it was true that the dome provided the most efficient radiation shield still, and for some that was the most important thing.

  One dorm was allocated to women and to women-and-children. The other two were general, although the hospital was located in one of these. For the first few months I lived in a general dorm with my then lover; but towards the end of the first year she was pregnant and moved to the women-and-children. We would still meet, of course; still eat together sometimes, but we were more Purist in those days. Today’s fashion for cohabitation was unthought of.

  Her name was Turja. Our relationship started the week after the Als was brought down to land on the new world. She moved very gracefully, like a dancer, although she was actually rather squat physically. She was less defined by curves than most women: her figure was more square, and her breasts had the solid squareness of car headlights. Her legs went straight down, and her waist did not dip inwards. But she was still extremely graceful; she moved on the front of her feet, tripping forward and back as if in a perpetual dance. And her face was very beautiful.

  One week her rota took her into the dome to tend the birds. After feed had been laid out for the flying stock (something that took only moments) this chore revolved chiefly around feeding the geese. I wandered in one morning. I had spent most of the night roofing a new eel pond. Of course roofing was tiring work, physical work, and I had tried to get a little sleep after dawn. But I was still high from the job, the mania of prolonged effort, the talking with the other members of the team. Do you know how that is? Laughing together, singing, telling bad jokes.

  There had been four of us, two men and two women. Sometimes workgroups click, sometimes not. How else would it be with the random allotment of the rota? This group had clicked, and we had finished the job in a single night, instead of the two days scheduled. That is how it is, when workmates jolly one another on, set one another impossible targets, laugh at failure and accident. I cut my arm against one of the supports, and the others jeered as I hurried off to the dorm to get it sealed. But when I came back they were in even higher spirits. We finished so rapidly that we were left with a sensation of discontinuity, almost of dismemberment. There was a sense in which we wanted the delirium of the job to continue, to carry on the high. But there was nothing more to be done, save check the finished dome more times than it required; and we ended up sitting in the paling of the dawn laughing and talking, sipping celebratory vodjaa.

  They were Hamar, Sipos and Csooris. I had spent some time with Csooris on the voyage, but we had spoken little to one another. She had the most beautiful hair of any woman I have known; it was so black it seemed to shine. Cutting it off during the voyage had seemed a great loss; but it had grown back during trance and deceleration, and was now down to her shoulders. Apart from that, there was the joy in discovering a bond, a connection, with people I had previously been happy to nod to in passing, to smile at in the dorm. We talked about the radiation, the thing our little dome was supposed to block.

  ‘Of course,’ said Hamar. ‘There is no substitute for several metres of heavy metal. Our little envelope with its gel will do something, but little enough.’

  ‘Our work is useless then!’ said Sipos, but laughing as she spoke. The thought that we had quite wasted our night seemed hilarious to us, and laughing spread roun
d like a ripple of flame.

  ‘You can’t use heavy metals to generate electricity,’ I pointed out. That was the trick with our design: two layers of tough plastics and the space between filled with a polymerised composite gel that soaked up solar radiation, grabbed the passing particles like a playing child snatching a thrown ball out of the air and set up a resonance-excitation pattern that sensors at the base of the structure converted to electricity, which in turn was used to power the pond; keep it heated at night, keep it aerated, supply the food and so on. It was an elegant machine, although the gel lost its protective properties after time and had to be replaced every five months or so.

  Hamar was a large man, with a great deal of red hair on his body, chest and back. This hair sprouted up his neck and throat, but he kept his chin and mouth shaved, and he was completely bald, so that when he stripped to the waist – as he had done that night, with the heat of the work – his head looked oddly smooth and clean on top of his ruggish torso. He was sipping his vodjaa through a straw. He used to drink it through a straw because (he said) it increased the rate of absorption of the alcohol, although I never understood the logic of this proposition. His mood had shifted down a little now, and he was more reflective.