Salt (17 page)

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 swallowed 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.

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.

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 other 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.

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.

It was jean-Pierre who had the command, of course; his number Two (nowadays this rank would be called ‘Point’) was carrying one of the two recording chips; the sub-sergeant the other. All these men were the finest. They flew due north in their sound-damped military shuttles, two of them; they could have fitted into one, but redundancy is an important thing, particularly with respect to machines.

They flew directly into the middle of the Alsist camp, and landed within metres of the entrance to their women’s dorm, the prison in which the hostages were kept. They landed next to the Senaarian shuttle already present, with its contingent of honour guard for Rhoda Titus. These men, apprised of the shuttle’s approach, were ready. Their job was to provide a rearguard, protecting all three shuttles from any attack, jean-Pierre marshalled his men and moved in. Surprise was absolute. The recording chips reveal only a few people gathered about the cave entrance, around a primitive little camp fire. They stare, they stand up. One starts shouting. But jean-Pierre’s men have already moved through at the double and are at the entrance of the dorm. There is no door. Three women are standing on the inside.