Salt Read online

  ‘It is strange to think about, though,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? Perhaps it is the invisibility. Now!’ – and he pointed, with his left hand – ‘all around us, the radiation is falling, raining onto our heads.’

  In fact, we were sitting under the dome beside the gloopy pool, into which we had just unloaded the baby eels (though they were too small to see), and so we were sheltered to a degree from the environmental level of radiation exposure. Sipos started to say something to this effect, but Hamar started again.

  ‘Particles, it is,’ he said, as if we didn’t know. ‘Tiny torn-up pieces of the sun, torn up and spat out at the speed of light. Down they come, all around us, like a never-ending blizzard of dust.’

  This was not exactly true either; the indications were that we had happened to arrive to Salt in the middle of an unusually intense period of solar storm activity, and that in a decade or so the rem count would drop to less punishing levels. But none of us pointed this out. Perhaps Hamar’s odd and poetic conceits had spooked us. We all sipped, sipped. The vodjaa warmed through us.

  ‘You can’t see it,’ he said in a lower tone, ‘or smell or taste it; you can’t feel it with your fingers. Only your DNA can feel it, feel the little dots as they hurtle through, dislodging atoms in the amines. Setting up patterns of disease, neoplasm. Pushing the dominoes over, and letting the cancer tumble along. What a strange thing it is when you think about it! That infinite dust, settling all around us, now, tomorrow, onwards.’

  ‘I read in Lucretius,’ said Csooris, suddenly, ‘that this is the nature of the universe.’ Csooris had a passion for Old and New Latin. ‘So the ancients believed: an endless rain of dust through the universe, falling from nowhere and falling towards nowhere. Lucretius says that this is all reality is, except that something has introduced the slightest of swerves into the falling, so that the atoms begin to move about, come together, move apart.’

  ‘He didn’t mean radiation though,’ said the more literal-minded Sipos. ‘He was one of the ancients; they surely had no such conceptions.’

  ‘It was a poet’s conceit, I think,’ I said.

  Csooris seemed angered by this. ‘What do you know of it?’ she snapped.

  ‘I have read the thing,’ I countered, bridling a little myself. ‘The Nature of Things. I read it in my mother’s dormitory.’

  ‘But in translation,’ she insisted. ‘Not in the Old Latin.’

  ‘Latin!’ I scoffed.

  ‘I can read a bit of New Latin,’ said Sipos, trying to defuse the situation. She had travelled amongst the Vaticano Republics when she was a young woman, I think.

  But Csooris was not impressed. She spat. ‘Kindergarten tongue!’ she scoffed. ‘You can learn it in a day.’

  Hamar was harumming, clearing his throat. He was being made uncomfortable by the sparring. Sipos didn’t like it either; she was a straightforward woman, more comfortable with facts than fancies.

  ‘The big question,’ she said, her voice a little too loud, to try and bully the other conversation out of the way, ‘remains. What are we going to do long-term about the levels of radiation? We need more than domes and holes in the ground.’

  Hamar was nodding. ‘We need two things. We need an ozone layer, and we need a magnetosphere.’

  ‘In that order?’

  ‘Other way round,’ said Csooris.

  I confess I was a little heated by the occasion, and perhaps angry with Csooris. ‘Of all the stupid things to say! And how do you intend to create a magnetosphere?’ I said, sneery.

  The situation (but I am sure you know it): Salt possesses a very weak magnetosphere. Our world has a nickel-iron core, molten, and a granite mantle, mostly quartz. The core revolves at a different rate from the rest of the world, and this differential generates a magnetic field, as it does on Earth. But the differential on Salt is not great, and the field generated is not strong. There were many theories, but the most likely explanation was that our world is a very old world. That its core has been slowing down for billennia. This would also explain certain other features. Maybe the surface of our world was once covered with a salty sea, but the water has been lost over many years. Maybe life once crowned our world, maybe even intelligence. There were people who boasted that they intended to dig out fossils of our Saltian foremothers; others who insisted that there had never been backbones on our world before, let alone intelligence. Other still refused to believe that our world was a dying one: and indeed, there were other possible explanations for the state of things.

  A magnetosphere is a very effective protection against the rigours of solar radiation. But ours was not strong enough, and there were no ways to increase it, short of reaching into the heart of the world with a god’s hand and giving the core a great spin.

  ‘We must work at pumping ozone, or similar screening gases, into the stratosphere,’ said Sipos. The conventional response.

  ‘I’m in a dorm group,’ said Hamar, ‘and we have a plan. After all, we don’t need to shield the whole world, just ourselves. Why not build a filter, a huge filter kilometres across, and position it in geosync orbit over Als?’

  The rest of us laughed and scoffed at this, of course; but Hamar seemed quite genuine, and tried for a while to flesh out his conception. It could be constructed out of crystals, grown in orbit; it would make the midday sun more bearable; it would introduce temperature variants into the atmosphere that would break up the punishing morn and evening winds. After a while, getting a little heated, he said, ‘What else do you suggest?’

  ‘Build a gel-filled blanket and wrap the whole world in it!’ I said.

  ‘Dig underground and live like moles,’ said Csooris, happy again.

  ‘God will provide,’ said Sipos in a gloomy tone. Atheism had increased among us since our arrival, you see. Mostly, I think it was to do with the disappointment in discovering that our Promised Land was so flawed, that God had not provided for us. Of course, atheism is no business of anybody else’s. Many of us had only agreed to the religious protocols in the first place so that we would be allowed to join the fleet. (It is ancient history now, but the original initiative for the fleet had come from the World Ecumensis of Christian churches. We had joined because no more political grouping would have accepted us.) On the other hand, there were many deeply religious, or at least spiritual, people with us. I was one.

  We sat for a while in silence, with that sudden soberness of the spirit that can come with too much drink. I pressed my face close to the inside wall of the dome we had just built. Outside, invisible to everything but the eyes of our DNA, as Hamar had said, was the incessant rain of solar particles. I tried to visualise it. I tried to think of it as a rattling rain, like minute hailstones, or deadly bullets falling thousands to every millimetre. But I could not. For some reason my eyes could only see in terms of a softly tumbling snow, flakes of radioactivity blown about like a blizzard; like the swarming of an invisible hive. The sun was only just up, so perhaps that informed my fantasy. I thought of the dust landing on the ground, like snow, instead of hurtling on through the rock and into the planet, as was the truth. I thought of it building up over the millennia, great drifts of hot particles, dunes of white-hot sands.

  Later Hamar and Sipos wandered round to the other side of the pool to have sex in the water. I sat for a long time in silence with Csooris. I found myself recalling the times we had been together during the voyage, the places we had found to have love. We had almost fetishised secrecy, privacy, and had sought out places where other people were not. I was looking again at her hair. The dawn light, filtered through the dome, was almost pure white; it made strands of white reflection in her black hair. I reached out to touch it, but she batted my hand away.

  She seemed oddly maudlin, and was sipping away at her vodjaa with a great purpose. For a while I was content with the silence, the clarity of the moment. I thought of us in her universe, in her Old Latin poem, all of us falling together, forever falling through nothingness towards nothingne
ss. The most we do is only a reaching out, a trying to grab our fellow fallers, trying to swim through the air the way novice spacepeople do in weightless, thrashing pointlessly about our centres of gravity.

  ‘Do you want to have love?’ Csooris said to me suddenly. Without waiting for me to reply she added: ‘I thought you were going to ask.’

  I shrugged. ‘I was thinking of other things,’ I said. But, now that she mentioned it, I found the thought exciting. I was getting hard. Perhaps it was the remains of the buzz from the night’s work, a continuation of that out-going energy. I reached out to touch her hair again, but again she slapped my hand away.

  ‘Leave my hair!’ she said.

  ‘I was only going to caress it a little,’ I said, offended.

  She said nothing, only shifted herself over towards me on her bottom (we were sitting cross-legged beside the lip of the pool) and began to kiss me on the mouth. This was very pleasant. So we had love quickly, with most of our clothes still on, and with Csooris on top. But as I lay there, acting the solid earth to her pounding, I began to feel weirdly insubstantial, as if Csooris above me, coming down upon me again and again, was actually falling through me. But maybe it was a good thing, being distracted, because she came twice before I did, and then came again when she saw me climaxing.

  Afterwards she fell asleep straight away, and I lay next to her. Maybe I dozed for a moment or two, but my consciousness refused to disengage. I stared at Csooris’ face for a while, at the little lines underneath her eyes, and the pores in her cheeks and nose. That moment is very clear in my memory now. The light was like water, somehow; clear and fresh, reviving like a cold wash of the face. Soon enough I got up and climbed through the little doorway of the dome to the outside.

  My mask clicked up over my mouth, and I fidgeted for a while with my nose clip. The air was still cool from the night and I was struck by how quickly the air under the dome (a dome we had only finished a few hours earlier, after all) had already become greenhouse-heated. It was pleasant to feel my skin chill. I wandered over to a nearby pile of stones, and climbed up to sit on them for a while. This was a little foolish since, clearly, it was dangerous to spend unnecessary time out of doors, and to rack up rems on the dosimeters we all carried hung about our hips. The dosimeter was checked every week, and the exposure was then factored into the work rota. If I had thought about it, I would not have risked being allocated a month’s indoor work, since I enjoyed being outdoors: but I was fascinated by the sun. It was still only just climbing over the mountains. A great wedge-shaped shadow lay over the surface of the Aradys, on which the chlorine fog roiled and played. The white and pink skin of the mountain, of Istenem, looked darker in the morning. The other mountains, on the far side of the water to the west, gleamed where the direct sunlight fell upon them and seemed to bleach the rock.

  Soon enough I got up and wandered over to the dome, more to get out of the radiation for a while than anything else. There were people playing football in the area behind the entrance, so I wandered further back and into the goose farm, still wanting to be alone. This was where Turja was just beginning her morning shift.

  She had scattered seed for the airborne birds, and was cleaning out the water from the troughs. I watched her do this for a while, propped under one of the trees newly planted in this part of the dome. I still felt no fatigue from my night’s exertions; if anything, I felt rather hyper, rather keyed-up by the excitement of finishing the project ahead of time and by the morning sex. There was something soothing in watching Turja go about her duties. She moved calmly, gracefully. From the trough to the goose-gate, and then into the compounds to shoo the geese out. They came, hissing and croaking as is the goose way, and she followed, waving her arms in great sweeps and whooping to make them go. These geese were genengineered; they were the height of a man, and most weighed more than a man, but their brains were still tiny goose brains and they were easily scared. The flock started feeding, and Turja moved among them, poking and checking. She noticed one with a septic leg, and had grabbed the huge bird and up-ended it in a moment. I was transfixed. Such grace, combined with strength. She didn’t even need to sit down: the beast’s wings unfurled and struggled against the floor, its cross-looking face twisting away, its legs up in the air. Turja cleaned its wound and applied a steripatch.

  ‘You’ve worked with geese before,’ I shouted across the yard to her.

  She wasn’t startled, which suggested she had seen me come in and had been ignoring me. But once she had right-ended the goose and watched it scurry away to join its lanky fellow, she wandered over and sat down beside me.

  ‘It’s on my list of preferential jobs,’ she said. ‘I’ve always liked birds.’

  ‘Birds, yes, I have always liked birds also,’ I said. ‘But not geese.’

  ‘Really?’ She turned to look at me with eyes narrowed, ready for mockery. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I think maybe it is the teeth. I find it hard to like birds with teeth. Teeth are surely for animals. They look sinister lining a beak.’

  She laughed at this. ‘What a rigidist you are!’ she said. The reference was to an old sect from before the voyage had begun, a group who had preached a sort of religiously-endorsed essentialism; it was only used now in jest.

  I laughed with her. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ I said, feeling warm.

  ‘You’re not handsome,’ she replied. ‘Not to my eyes. Although there are some who think you are.’

  ‘There are?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So you know who I am?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said again.

  ‘But you don’t find me attractive?’

  She shrugged. ‘I like my men with more muscle, larger bodies,’ she said.

  ‘What a shame,’ I said, laughing. ‘Because I was going to ask if you wanted to have sex, as soon as your rota shift is finished. But now I find that you only like over-developed men!’

  She smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I will have sex with you,’ she said. ‘But not until after my morning’s work.’

  It was as simple as that. I fell asleep under the tree, and Turja went back to her job. It felt remarkably secure, just sleeping there; popping into consciousness for a moment and noticing her about some other chore, and then slipping away into sleep.

  Barlei

  Part of the purpose of this document is to tell what I knew of the hero, jean-Pierre Dreyfus. You will know his face, so there’s little need for me to describe it any detail, but I can say that the visuals do not capture the versatility of expression, the lively vigour of his eyes and his mouth. He was a handsome man, the perfect army officer, and there is a reason why his memory is cherished, even to the present day. That reason is that he represents something, the embodied essence of Senaar. Strong, brave, light on his feet, always courteous and glad to be of use. With his white skin and pale hair he always looked as if he belonged on this world, as if he were a true native. And in his dress uniform he was so handsome! There is no shame in a man admitting the handsomeness of a man, if there is nothing impure in that admiration; and there was nothing but a pure delight in my breast at the figure of the warrior that jean-Pierre cut.

  I promoted him from his lieutenantship to a captaincy soon after our landing, when it became clear that his skills were of an above average calibre. Sometimes people think that the soldiers of an army exist only to kill, but of course the truth is very different. The true soldier loves life, his own and others, almost as much as he loves freedom. The true soldier works and plans to avoid war, to safeguard life. The attributes he possesses are the power to command, the strength to carry out his will, and the bravery to face any consequences. jean-Pierre had all these. Superior officers would find themselves following his suggestions as if they were orders, so forcefully and expertly did he speak. His men loved him with a passionate dearness; they would have died for him at the merest hint. And the women adored him from afar.

  By the second week
I had put him in charge of the job of building the barracks. This took priority over even the building of domiciles, since the army must be settled and strong before it can usefully hold the umbrella under which the rest of the community may shelter. So jean-Pierre had the power, which he used judiciously, to take civilian workers on secondment (of course they were paid at the army rate, according to their skill) to help construct a secure area with all the necessary facilities. His was a model command. He was up before dusk every day, immaculately turned out in uniform, to greet the evening reveille (most construction took place during the night, of course, when the radiation levels were lower). Then, throughout the evening, he co-ordinated teams, personally gave them their orders, and ensured that the raw materials were delivered, that the Fabricants were positioned and programmed, that the site supervisors knew what was what. Throughout the night he worked tirelessly, bullying-up his men, rebuking the civilians for falling behind the military, encouraging and bringing together. The barracks and all the necessary inner installations were completed a full week ahead of schedule.

  He helped me with the building of my own house after this: the man had tremendous energy. After the first month I organised a festival to celebrate our progress, and the whole of Senaar turned out in the cool of the late evening (once the wind had died down) to cheer the torchlight parade of our army. And the loudest cheer went up for jean-Pierre.

  In those early days we were all too much preoccupied to watch many Visuals, but some enterprising individuals were setting up Visual companies nonetheless, using their voyage capital to invest in transmission equipment and going door to door in the new town to sell subscriptions. The pre-recorded shows were all old news, of course: we had all had many years during the voyage to watch the soaps, the sermons, the practical shows. In order to whip up an audience the Visual companies – there were two I think: Senaar Visual and one other, that sank into bankruptcy shortly after beginning trading – anyway, to entice an audience SV hit upon the idea of Visualising our growing community. A sort of real-life soap, you see. They approached me, through my agent, the ensign Preminger, but I declined: I valued my privacy too much to consent to being filmed the whole time, and I did not need the money. I suggested they contact jean-Pierre: he was an up-and-coming man, a popular figure, but I knew he did not have a personal fortune. And so it was that jean-Pierre’s life became a Visual programme.