Salt

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Yes, well, of course we can call it whatever you like. But to allow the fathers visiting rights, this is more than I had hoped for.’

  I shrugged. My mother still appeared in my memory and I was not listening very closely.

  ‘I have been instructed,’ she said, grandly, ‘to locate the children, to speak to them, and to arrange the first of these visits. My President hopes – personally addressed this hope, to you, mind – that this first step will clear the way to a great deal of co-operation between our peoples; and perhaps a scheme of exchange between Als and Senaar would allow the hos . . . ‘She gulped, stopped, started again,’ Children the chance to visit the land of their fathers.’

  I tried to visualise my mother; she was still alive, probably, but on Earth. An impossible distance away. I conjured her face in my mind, and it blurred with the face of Rhoda Titus, looking at me eagerly. Two dissimilar women, one broken from me, existing only on the other side of the profoundest physical rupture. The other’s rupture was only ideological. I brought my mind to attention on what Rhoda Titus was saying.

  ‘I cannot say,’ I said, thinking how best to express myself, ‘I can’t say I know what you are talking about.’ I smiled, to try and elicit a smile, but her face had clicked into its worried, haunted expression. A great deal of Rhoda Titus’s expressions were devilled with that edge of fear. A function of the hierarchy again, I think, for the subordinate must be constantly anxious and trying to please the superordinate, fearful of pain at their displeasure.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What do you mean by saying such a thing?’

  ‘I always mean what I say,’ I said. It seemed an uncontentious statement.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Rhoda Titus, ‘perhaps the best thing now would be for me to speak directly to the mothers. If you would just direct me to the place where the hos . . . , the children are being kept, I can speak directly to them.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Give me directions,’ she said.

  ‘I cannot,’ I said.

  ‘You can. I believe you can.’

  ‘Rhoda Titus: these children were conceived thirty years ago. This is the oldest of old history.’

  ‘No,’ she said, as if she had been expecting me to make this point, as if this were one of the anticipated moves in the verbal chess game she had been expecting. ‘One year for ten in stasis. They will be biologically eleven, at most.’

  ‘In which case,’ I said, curling the corners of my mouth downwards in a facial shrug, ‘they will still be staying with their mothers in the women’s dorm.’

  ‘Then I must ask you to arrange a meeting there.’

  ‘It’s the women’s dorm,’ I said. And then, because this did not seem to be enough for her, ‘I am a man.’

  But this seemed to strike her only as facetious. ‘Technician Szerelem, you are the diplomatic officer for this community, it is your responsibility to arrange this meeting. You told me that the fathers could visit their children.’

  ‘I told you the fathers could come here,’ I said. ‘And indeed they can, for who would stop them? We have no borders, or border controls, unlike you. But whether the fathers can see these children has nothing to do with me. That is a matter for the mothers concerned.’

  ‘But you said . . .’

  I stood up, bored with all this now. But she stood up as well, speaking with a loud voice now. ‘You cannot walk away,’ she said. ‘You promised me. I spoke to my President on the basis of . . .’

  ‘It is nothing to do with me.’ This was a simple truth as well, but it seemed to inflame her. She stood on the grass shouting at me, yelling and abusing me. But I was in a placid mood, so her words did not affect me and I wandered out of the dome.

  What happened then is that she attempted to gain entrance to the women’s dorm, but was greeted there (as I understand it) with non-comprehension, and then, as she pushed her case, with hostility. Eventually, when she would not stop her strident demands to be taken to see the hostages and to be treated with the respect and the dignity that a diplomatic official from a great nation deserved, a few women grabbed her and threw her into the general hall. She tried to come in again, so they threw her out again. Then she went back to her shuttles, and summoned her men, and tried to force an entry again.

  By this stage, the commotion had drawn a fairly large group of people to the entrance of the women’s dorm. I had wandered off to swim in one of the eel pools (I liked the slippery sensations of the eels brushing against my body as I swam), so I was not present in person during these events. But reports were widespread, and I heard several eye-witness accounts. It seems that Rhoda Titus returned to the dorm entrance with six armed men. A group of women from the dorm blocked their way, yelling and shouting at her; and she stood there (they say) quivering with her rage, which was chronic in her, impacted like a bad tooth. The soldiers took aim, but the women from the dorm would not back down. They were yelling, and spitting, and somebody brought out a pillow from her bed and began slapping it on the heads of some of the guards. They flinched, but it would not be right (according to the hierarchical code of honour that Senaarian soldiers swear to) to shoot a woman armed with a pillow, only because she would not stop hitting you on the head with it. They say that some of the dorm women were shouting in home tongue, some in common tongue, and that the commotion was deafening. Then Rhoda Titus ordered her men to force their way through and enter the dorm, and the men surged forward; but there was such a crush of women in the entrance space that the soldiers heaved and heaved to no effect. They say that when Rhoda Titus withdrew her men to their shuttles, she was dark red in the face with her shame and embarrassment, and weeping tears copiously.

  I did not see her for two days. Then, on the third day, she came and found me during my rota shift.

  ‘It is Sunday,’ she said. ‘I would like you to take me to one of your churches. I have been dreadfully tested by God this week, and it is time for me to pray in a House of God.’

  I was chewing something; leekroot I think. ‘Church,’ I said, the word mushy with my full mouth. ‘This is one of your Senaarian customs.’

  She looked blankly at me, and then digested my words. But her reaction was not what I might have expected. She did not rage at me, nor lecture me on the ungodliness of Alsist peoples. Instead she sat down, with a bleak expression, and began sobbing.

  ‘We do not have churches,’ I told her, taking another bite of leekroot. ‘There are no priests, no establishments, nothing to interfere between the individual soul and God. Why should there be a special room to which people have to go to speak to God? Is any one room on Salt different from any other? As God sees it, does it matter whether a soul is in a certain room, or is somewhere else?’

  ‘I have tried, God knows I have tried,’ she whispered hoarsely. Then she sobbed some more. Then she said again, ‘I have tried, as God is my witness.’

  ‘Surely,’ I continued, ‘you can pray where you like? You can pray here, if you like to.’

  ‘I have tried to understand you, your people. But I see lawlessness and misery. That’s all I see! Lawlessness and misery, and a people with no point to their life, no harmony.’ The sobbing had stopped now. ‘My President has instructed me to leave, to abandon the godlessness and return home. But I told him, No! I said, give me one more chance to reach out to these people, to this Szerelem. I said, it is Sunday, the Sabbath, the Lord’s day, and on this day I will be able to speak to him in the language we have in common, the language of God. Because we have that in common, Senaar and Als. We both worship at the feet of the same God. And it was this God who said, suffer the children to come home to their parents, do not keep them in bondage like the Israelites in Egypt, do not keep them as slaves.’

  I was not sure what to say to this, so I observed, ‘We keep no Sabbath here. Each day is equally appropriate in our eyes to the business of the individual’s connection to the Divine.’

  A great sob rose in her throat, and she swallow
ed it down. ‘But it is in the Bible,’ she said, as if this were a final judgement. ‘How can you keep no Sabbath, when it is in the Bible?’

  I shrugged. ‘The Bible is a book, somebody else’s book. If we fit ourselves wholly into that book as you say, then we become slaves to it. The only freedom is to shape one’s own relationship with the Divine. To write one’s own Bible.’

  ‘Slaves?’ she said. ‘How can you talk of slavery when you are keeping innocent children in captivity?’

  I laughed at this. ‘Ask them, and they will not speak of being in captivity. Nobody is captive here.’ She seemed to have genuine difficulty comprehending my words so I repeated the sentiment, speaking slowly, ‘That is the point of Als.’

  ‘If I ask them, they will say this? But how can I? How can I speak to the children when your warrior women will not allow me to see them, meet with them?’

  She went away, her face blotchy with crying. But half an hour later she returned, a little more composed. She sat opposite me, cross-legged (to show me how far she had lowered her dignity), and began a long, rambling speech about how she apologised for her behaviour this morning (the apology is one of the deference rituals of the hierarchy), and how she had been upset because the President had recalled her mission, and how she had felt she had made progress, and had begun to understand our culture, and more along this line. It was quite dull, listening to her. Then she said:

  ‘But I knew that just as God is Mercy, so I would have another chance to break through the barriers between us. We must reach out, we must connect. For all that you have fallen from the true path, for all that you no longer congregate in churches, no longer observe the Sabbath – nonetheless, we have this bond. I know you worship the same God I do, I know this as a fact.’

  ‘How can you know the God I worship?’ I asked. The question was curious, not aggressive. ‘This is difficult for me to comprehend. You do not really know me, so how can you know how I perceive something as numinous as the Divine?’

  She stalled at this, but then lurched on. ‘The people of Als have’ (note the possessive!) ‘the same God as the people of Senaar.’

  ‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said, pleasantly. ‘The people of Als have nothing at all. There is nothing possessed in this land, nothing owned. The only thing we will talk about having is when two people enjoy themselves in sex, and here we only talk about having because the experience is, of necessity, so fleeting.’ I would have gone on to explain this point a little further. After all, Rhoda Titus had been talking about how difficult she found it understanding the ways of Als, and it is an interesting crux. The only thing we can have in the sense a hierarch might understand it is precisely the thing that cannot be had. I have sometimes thought that the point of this idiom was to identify the essence of the possessive culture, that the pleasure it takes from its possessions, as great as the pleasures of sex, is in effect evanescent. But Rhoda Titus was not interested in this line of discussion.

  ‘I know you worship the same God. This is what binds us together. We were all part of the same fleet, we all travelled through space together in praise of the same deity. You could not have joined the fleet unless you were from the same Earthly congregation.’

  I made the gesture, turning one hand palm up, palm down, several times, that used in those days to indicate a half-agreement.

  ‘What you do mean by that?’ she said. There were tears in her eyes again.

  ‘The situation on Earth,’ I said, ‘was difficult. Politics there had coalesced around a stricter and stricter definition of the hierarchy. This made some sorts of religious worship difficult, as I know was the case in Senaar. But it made the position much more difficult for a people such as us. There were establishments on Earth dedicated to destroying us, wholly because of how we lived.’

  Blank face; a glittering in the eyes where the tears were accumulating, a curve of salt water swelling, ready to fall. ‘Do you mean,’ she said, but stopped. I waited a little while, to see if she wished to complete her sentence, before going on.

  ‘There were three fleets planned,’ I reminded her. ‘And the only one we could have joined was the one we did join. The others would not have accepted us, for all that we had assembled the necessary monies, because ideology, which is the wickedest thing, barred our way. With the fleet as it was set up, all we needed to do was declare our faith to be your faith, and pay our share, and we were allotted a space on the cable.’

  ‘You lied,’ she said, in a small voice.

  ‘No. There are many religious people amongst us. I am one. I was present in many negotiations, and whenever I was quizzed about my relationship with the Divinity I spoke simply about just that. Of course, it is the nature of life with us that I could not have spoken about other people’s relationship with the Divinity, even had I wished to do this. I could only ever speak for myself.’

  The tears had dried away now, and there was a pale edge to her voice. ‘I have failed,’ she said. ‘I shall return to my shuttle, and then I shall return home.’

  I shrugged again, because it mattered to me very little either way. Rhoda Titus stood to leave. She did not leave, of course, because it was then that the raid happened.

  Barlei

  Ms Titus’s mission was, as I had always thought, pretty much doomed from the beginning. But her going enabled a number of political manoeuvres. It gave me a set of eyes and ears actually there, on the ground, in Als; able to discover where the hostages were being held, for instance. And, as a woman, it gave me somebody whose honour could very well need protecting from the anarchist advances of a lascivious people. This last eventuality did not come about, unfortunately; but the incident where Ms Titus had attempted, in broad daylight and with law and right on her side, to enter the cave in which the hostages were being kept and speak with them, and where a mad horde of screaming maenads had prevented her, provided the necessary pretext.

  I ordered her to leave Als at once, but she stayed behind. Perhaps she was fascinated by the very hypnotic qualities of evil that repulsed her. Perhaps she thought that she could, somehow, save the Alsists from themselves. But whatever the reason, she was still on site when jean-Pierre moved in with his troop.

  Petja

  They came armed with needleguns. Do you know this weapon? It is built around a butt that contains a reservoir, and the reservoir contains a plasmetal alloy. A solid lump, that fills the butt, gives it weight. And from the butt there is the usual barrel, the sight, the trigger. And this is what happens when the trigger is pulled: the gun melts a little of the reservoir of metal and injects it into the base of the barrel. Then the laser, a powerful little laser, spurts it out. Pushes out the molten metal in a long thin line. The metal is fired very fast, no muzzle friction to slow it down, almost as fast as the laser can propel it (and the laser wants it to go at the speed of light). The metal solidifies in the air, and you have produced a very fast, very thin, very long needle, hurtling through the air at your enemies. Now, this needle can be as long as you like; the gun can be programmed to produce little darts that puncture and injure, or longer strands, half a metre or more, that do more damage. The design admits of a great deal of compactness; the Senaarians have pistols no bigger than a palm; rifles that are aimed from the shoulder and reach no further than the crook of the elbow, which is the prop from which it is fired.

  We unearthed the loading of needleguns (and more importantly, the Fabricant software for needleguns and rifles) before the voyage even began, and made a complaint, because all colonists were strictly forbidden from carrying weapons of war. But the Senaarians appealed, claiming that needleguns were not weapons of war but police accessories. They were filed as such on the ship manifests. Their defence of this position was specious (as events proved), but hinged on the fact that needles were not conventional projectiles. The argument stated that needles were thin as a hair, that one fired at you would go right through you. A policeman might fire one at your torso, the needle might go straight through the lung and out the ot
her side. This can collapse the lung, causing immobility and pain, but this damage might be repaired. A projectile, they said, would strike the torso and force out large pieces of flesh, much more likely to be fatal. They said that if a projectile hits your head, then your head will explode; but if a needle strikes the head then the result might be disablement rather than death.

  I have faced needleguns in war and I have wielded needleguns. I have been struck by needles. I can vouch from my own experience that the Senaarians lied when they presented their weapons as peacekeepers. And so, when we put ourselves in the position of fabricating these guns, you might say we acceded in this hypocrisy. But such is the necessity of war. We poached the software of this weapon and fitted up a Fabricant to manufacture it; but for a long time we did not actually utilise the machine. Who would want such a weapon circulating in society? But when the war began, we armed ourselves.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. The raid.

  Barlei

  The raid proceeded with a precision worthy of the finest musical composition. Now that the war is over, I sometimes dilate on this analogy; surely the greatest general is indeed a composer, putting men and machinery into the right positions as if each unit, each piece, were the physical manifestation of the musical note. Manoeuvres are phrases, some short, others longer; the melodies of the battlefield. The analogy bears a further inspection, I think: some wars are symphonic, the bringing together of a great many different forms of warrior, flesh and machine, in a grand and stirring design; other wars are sonatas, the deploying of (in this case) jean-Pierre and his men with their specialist training and ordnance. And, like a sonata, the raid involved action, counter-action, and then a reprise of the original action.

  I ordered the intervention at dusk, after the Devil’s Whisper had died away. I inspected jean-Pierre and his twenty finest men by floodlight on the airfield. They were a handsome sight to see. Twenty of the strongest warriors of our nation, in their blue combat fatigues; swords at their backs, pieces by their sides, and needlerifles smartly angled against their shoulders. I am not ashamed to say it brought a tear to my eye to see them. To think they were ready to go to their deaths, if necessary, to defend the honour of Senaar. I wept a little, manly tears; I embraced jean-Pierre and sent them away into the sky.