Salt (10 page)

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 round 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.

‘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 nothingness. 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.