by Adam Roberts
Then, our balloons floating down streets, over parks, perhaps knocking against the walls of buildings, and skidding along with the fan-blades rattling ineffectually against the blocks. But then the Whisper, the air scurrying with jewel-sharp tiny salt grains, the breached dyke letting through a more vigorous scouring wind than normal, and people cowering inside. Nature bursting our fragile balloons, filling the rigid structures with tiny holes and letting the ordinary air suck inside. Dozens of devices settling to the ground, tossed and kicked by the wind perhaps, rolling into gutters, or setting up in the ground-jambs of walls.
The explosions coincided with the height of the Whisper. I heard nothing, buried away in the body of the salt itself, but even had I been outside, I would have heard nothing against the rage of the Whisper itself anyway. And, in the dark, we stole away until the horizon to our south only glimmered with red from the damage we had done.
Four months, nearly. How many engagements did we fight? I cannot number them. How many hundred Senaarians killed? Was it as many as a thousand? I cannot number them.
I think back and try to arrange these memories into a dry account, but the events speak so indistinctly, and my associations so powerfully. It is not what I did, I sometimes think, but what I felt these doings meant in my life. Though there is no reason why you should have the same sense of significance, unless I can put it out to you, and even then, there is no passage into another’s head. That is a sober observation, and not one I feel a happiness about. But I say it from a certain position. I try to reach you, perhaps, and at the same time I can never reach you. I will tell you, for instance, about the surprise raid. We lay in wait, south of the city, to fall upon a trade car bound for the south coast settlements, to fall on it as eagles. And then we were detonating the underlying saltstone in great blocks to block the way of the car, and suddenly Senaarian soldiers were pouring out from the back, and taking cover in the nearer dunes. That was a fierce needlefight. It was dusk, shortly before the Whisper (and we had reasoned that the driver would be tired and thinking about battening down). In the end, I ordered us to pull back. I decided not to jump straight away, and I am not sure why; perhaps I feared a trap. So we fell back over the dunes, a dozen firing from positions, a dozen scurrying back with their heads below their shoulders, those dozen squirming about as soon as they cleared the peak of the back dune and taking up the fire to cover their colleagues. We went back a good kilometre that way, with fierce fire. I think I assumed that we would fight until the Whisper started, and then the enemy would give up. But they foreclosed that, and instead sent up a shrapnel device, that lit up like a firework, except that the blades of the explosion were needles also, and they rained down over us. People were deflating their own balloons then, and I need give no order; I pulled my own cord and heard my own engine whine to pump the air out of my bladders, and then the jet fired and I was lurched sickeningly skywards. We saw a second shrapnel device explode, but beneath us, and they are designed only to shower downwards upon the place beneath; it was such that from above the burst had some extraordinary beauty. It littered the carpet beneath with fragments of light itself, except that the carpet was the air, and then the salt, and the embers died slowly. We came down slowly, as if being dragged through some torpid element, as a ship’s anchor through a treacly sea. By the time we hit the ground again the Whisper was beginning, so that we fell into a cloud of buzzing salt, and had to struggle to bury ourselves. I was badly grazed by that Whisper, I remember.
But how does this transfer the experience from my mind so that it rests upon yours? I could say that we lost four people; that I received my most severe wound, a needle that lodged in my pelvis, the puncture at the top of my leg. That making my way north after that engagement was the most painful thing I have ever done, with every step a wrench of pain. That we had to stop and fight our way through the salt domes north of the dyke, and that I fought although every breath was now a whole world to me, that the pain had contracted about me like shrink-wrap. That I fired my weapon without being able to connect what I was doing with action in the outside world, and only fired it to scream, and only screamed to try and vent the pain. That we finally arrived back at the cars, and that Olega took out the needle with pliers; that the pain of this was almost a relief, because it took the background suffering and focused it into something I was permitted to scream about. That I lay for a week before I could even stand. I could say all this, but then the narrative is focusing on something else. All the pain, which is only expected since war is painful (I understate the severity, but the words are plain). But that is not the experience inside my head. All this happened, but that is not now my experience.
My experience now is back at the road, south of the city. It is the first swim of the battle. It is a certain precision of focus in my senses as the needles start to be propelled between us. It is very hard to nestle the meaning in these words. It was the smell of the evening air, the salty ozone smell of the cooling air before the Whisper. But it was not only that smell, it was the realisation that I had not been noticing the smell of the air before that, and only with the launching of the combat did the smell strike me. But it was not even that, because realisation (keristalsen) misrepresents the sensation. It was merely a way of being, as if being were something other than thinking. It was because the occasion hurried me out of thought, perhaps. Or the excitement of it, and the beautiful clenching of muscles in the abdomen, as beautiful as the clenching of a woman around a man in lovemaking. It was the most fleeting of senses, the imaginary connection with the white desert stretching away behind the attackers, greying in the sinking light; and stretching that way forever, stretching all the way about the abdomen of the world itself until it reached us, positioned on the other side of the road (actually this was not the case for this engagement, because the road ran within half a kilometre of the intervening sea, but now I am not speaking of facts, but of a certain hard-to-define something in the memory of war, of this war, of my war). Needles, fired, make only a very shrunken hissing sound, like the draw of fabric upon fabric. They slip through the air invisible, unless they catch the light, in which case they gleam like fish in water. But if you see one it is too late to dodge it; it has already fastened itself into your innards: into your leg, your arm, foot, wherever you may be injured. But there it is, the beauty, and the beauty strikes you quicker than the wound is made. And the beauty is what lasts. That is what I take away. The scurrying, as ballet; the falling into position, with the thrilling in every part of my body. The recoil-less spurting of my weapon, with a dotted line of metal going towards the enemy. The smell in the air. The beauty of Salt.
But I am wasting my time, here. Perhaps you would be more interested in my injuries. I brought up a bruise on my knee from landing badly after the jump. I scored my skin against the Whisper as I struggled to the lee of the dune, and tried to scrabble myself into the salt with only my hands; and I dug poorly because my mind was completely filled with the pain from my hip. Afterwards, I could barely pull myself out, and I could not muster, so I was forced to call out until somebody noticed me, and the muster happened about me. Gornij tried to pull the needle out but could not obtain purchase and so (agony) tried to push it through, but it was lodged in the marrow. On impact the metal sometimes deforms, so as to lodge itself in flesh. I know all of this, and remember it.
But I cannot call the feelings of pain into my mind by putting this here. And I can call the feelings of beauty merely by shutting my eyes.
This is what I remember now, as my eyes fall shut. I remember the group of faces about mine, as I briefed them. Also, there is the colour of the sky, the headiness of the paling from white to blue at dusk. These people, these soldiers. My people. This moment, before battle, when I was with my people in the salt wilderness under a jewellery sky, was the happiest in my life. I remember it now, and salt-and-water (kratchadys) dribbles from my eyes, through my shut lids.
Ah, but I am becoming a sentimentalist.
My troop, my warriors. And so they are running now, into the darkness; they disappear over the cupolas of the dunes.
And the darkness has them.
Is it night now? I am heavy with the tiredness of this task. My friends are mostly dead, and we killed many Senaarians during those months, and afterwards. Those words say enough, I feel. Those words, that have appeared on the screen; they speak. Their os and as open and close as human mouths do, full of air or full of blood that surprises you with its redness. Their es flap their lower lips, seen in profile, up and down. I am bitter, but I will say this: that I am not unhappy because of the deaths of people, since people all die. I mourn instead the passing of this beauty. It is intangible, but the soul is intangible, and God preserves that in the deep freeze of heaven.
Well, well. What else is there for me to tell you about the war? We were in the field, there in the southern hemisphere, for four months. We killed many Senaarians, and a few from other nations. We destroyed much equipment. We fed off the food being shipped into Senaar for their hierarchical ‘trading’, and drank that water. We broke the spinal railway in four places with detonations, and forced a great deal of traffic onto the road. We knew, because we monitored the various transmissions, that there was a deal of debate in Senaar about the removal of transportation of goods onto the water, but the design for a boat large enough and stable enough to survive the storm-winds at Whisper was beyond the capabilities of wartime Fabrication. All efforts were being put into rebuilding the Senaarian airforce.
We engaged Senaarian soldiers on more occasions than I can remember. Towards the end, they were arming themselves with heavier calibre weapons, and more from Als died. But the heavy-calibre guns and rifles were very weighty, compared with the lightness of needleguns, which meant that they were too cumbersome to take on patrols unless there was truck backup.
On one occasion, we hijacked a multitrailer from Babulonis. The trailer team fought, and we killed them; then we drove the trailer into Senaar itself, and parked it in the main square. The explosives we had Fabricated were not especially effective, but they were able to spread radioactive matter from the drivepole a fair distance. The band that drove the car, four people, simply walked out of the city and were free.
Of a band of sixty, we were seventeen left alive when I decided we should pull back. Why did I decide to pull back? I will tell you the wholeness of the truth: my eyes were fogging. I could see, but only through a pearl mist. All the fighting in the sunshine, all the moving around in the daytime, was poisoning my eyes. Mine were not the only cataracts, either. Of our soldiers, two died of the environment (Mechta developed sores on his face and skin, and they spread quickly into his blood system. He shot a needle through the roof of his mouth when the pain was too much. And a good soldier, a good killer-of-Senaarians called Prizrak, suddenly collapsed into sickness. His skin came up rowdy, red, scurfed with eczema, and his hair dislodged itself from his scalp. These radiation burns came from nowhere, it seemed, but they made him scream, for any pressure on his skin was unbearable. Within days (this happened outside of the cars, of course; when we were in the field, killing the enemy) his skin began sloughing off, great plates of skin simply falling from the body. He was dead by the time we got him back to the car. His body has been buried in the desert salt, where it will be preserved for thousands of years.
Do we ever think of how we are stocking up the research of the future archaeologists? This salt that is our world will let nothing decay, unless we put the bodies in our fertile fields, as is common practice in the cities. But even then, what? We eat our friends, our lovers, as compost in our food. And so they are preserved. But the arena for war is the salt desert, and the warriors that become buried are kept forever. There is something appropriate about it, perhaps; something tribal and primitive about our societies setting the bodies of its warriors aside and preserving them. But then I think again, of the thousands who died and were not buried, because any corpse left on the surface of the salt will be deteriorated by the Whisper within months.
Well. These two died, suddenly, of the radiation; and most of us had sunburn, or had new freckles, new moles that itched and that oozed blood when scratched, but these were not things to worry about in the middle of the battle. My problems were the cataracts, and they were not the only cataracts. As many as a third of our people suffered this same pearling of vision, this same drowning of the particularities of sight in a brine of greyness. For some it was only a fogginess of seeing, for others the world was only dazzle and blocky shapes of darkness. There was little we could do with only the medical facilities of the car.
And so we dug the cars out of the salt and drove north. At all times we remained battle-ready, at all times expecting the sats to pinpoint us, and to send in aircraft to intercept. We thought we were about to be bothered with some aircraft, too: two low sorties in the distance, but nothing more.
Of course, we were cautious. It was not practical to dig ourselves in every time we stopped, but we wrapped the cars in salt-cloths, and we kept no heating to minimise infra-red. All of us knew, we were as exposed on the salt plain as mosquitoes on a white tablecloth; and the eye of the sat was as relentless, as unblinking as the eye of God. And yet we found ways to move around. Sometimes the air, in the very zenith, would blur, a smearing of salty winds in the upper air. This, we reasoned, gave us some small chance of hiding from the eye of the sats, and we tried to use this time to move quickly. Perhaps I was reckless, because my own sight was now incapable of picking out the details, and so some part of my soul rendered it difficult for me to imagine some machine doing so. Still, luck, God, favoured us.
And then, in the night, a plane landed ahead of us. Of course we emptied from our cars, and took up positions; the seventeen of us one body, sprawled along a single dune. I could see next to nothing.
There was a single person (said Salja, who was next to me on the dune) who emerged from the plane and approached us. We held our fire. And it was only when he was close enough for me to hear his voice, and to touch his face with my questing fingers, that I knew it was Eredics. A friend of mine.
Barlei
Hopes for a swift victory over this terrorism were broken by the elusiveness of the southern terrorist force. I sent troops against them time and again, but they had developed a random jet-jumping device that scattered them and took them away. Every engagement cost us men, but cost them men as well; and we had more men to spend. Perhaps you consider it heartless to talk of human lives in this way, as if they were monies that we could easily deploy but everything in this universe has a cost: God has told us that. In this case the cost was high, but the product being purchased was liberty. Our soldiers died bravely, and each of them took another of the enemy with them. And the alternative was to allow the enemy their evil. The destruction they created, the buildings in Senaar they destroyed with loss of innocent blood, the number of soldiers and associated workers they killed: all these things.
I was tempted to pull jean-Pierre back from his important work in the north. But he was having a hard time of it, securing the necessary base at Als. Indeed, I tell no lie (as indeed I should not) when I reveal that for a whole month we spent more public money on Als than we did on Senaar itself, even though (and my enemies have made enough capital with this) some people were hungry in the streets of our great city. But my responsibilities were clear! To end the war as quickly as possible, so that we could refocus energies on producing food again, so that the price might drop down again. Food production on our world is precarious enough, even in peacetime: and with the wanton destruction of carefully-composted growing-fields and the breakage of farming machinery, production teetered. Growing still went on in the west, of course, but they have always been less efficient, and their prices were extortionate. More than this, of course, we lost a great deal of lawful supplies to banditry from Als. Some lawsuits are still, I believe, working their way through the courts on this matter. Foreign traders trying to take money from Senaarians on a
lleged contracts interrupted by piracy.
Still, jean-Pierre made a number of suggestions, and I agreed to them. He had taken a large body of broken-spirited Alsists into effective imprisonment but this took a large manpower to guard, and cost us dearly in supplies. So we rebuilt their town, and fenced it about to stop the terrorists in the area from infiltrating it. We told people to get on with their ordinary lives. Told them that the war was over, and that they should grow food because Senaar could not be their bread-basket forever. In a way, this action was the most selfless act one nation ever bestowed on another: for the victor nation to rebuild the damaged parts of the losing city, to provide that defeated people with laws which they never had before, to place the means for their own livelihood back in their own hands. Many have called me too generous, but I know how people are.
Once the protected portions of Als were completed, jean-Pierre was able to go amongst the northern hills flushing out recalcitrant rebels, and (of course) offering sanctuary in the new town for all who accepted that the war was over.
Petja
The enemy had built a number of large camps, and fully enclosed them in wire. Criss-cross wire fencing twenty metres high surrounded them, and the wire was heat-releasing, such that a light touch would only scorch but with prolonged touch the heat would build until your flesh cooked. And from the wire fences, they had hung wire ceilings, presumably because they had encountered our manpacks in the south and thought of Alsists as grasshopper folk who might spring away if unprevented (even though only my troop had possessed the packs). Inside the camps were built parodies of towns: barrack-like living grounds, warehouse blocks where work was required for eight hours a day. Hundreds of Alsists lived there now. It was a mere prison and was patrolled by a tight force of soldiers as guards: but each (there were five when I returned to Als) was enormous, covering many hectares. The effort and labour that had gone into this exercise was astonishing. That Senaar would do so much, in order to achieve so little (they shipped away a harvest of salt eels to feed their increasingly hungry peoples in the south, I know, but these must have been our world’s most expensive salt eels), it amazed me. Of course, there was more here: they wished to isolate and tame the people of Als, and thence to turn Als into a portion of the body of Senaar by the northern sea. Perhaps, some day, they might hope to turn the whole of our world into a limb or a portion of the body of Senaar.