Salt (20 page)

I had never been one of those hermit-people (
soldjosbeyern
) who, from time to time, are seized with a desire to quit humanity and live by themselves in the wilderness. Such people have always been a small part of Als, and usually they will spend a number of years solitary before growing tired and wanting people again: and so will return, and take up work rotas again, and mingle with people, drink, make love, until the urge for solitude becomes strong in them again and they leave again. But this was not me. I was always amongst people, always with a partner, always engaged in work that benefited the whole of the community.

Now, for the first time, I yearned to be absolutely alone, and alone for a long time. I slept in the cab, and woke with a sense of liberation that there was nobody with me. Then I worked some more at grinding away a tunnel, and finished late in the afternoon with a resolution: I was going to spend some time alone. I would take a car and drive into the desert, simply be by myself: perhaps simply stay in the car and drive slowly about the world. Or perhaps find a likely place by a water source and build a hermit-hut.

I could have gone straight then and there, but I did not. For a while I contemplated telling people where I was going and what my plans were (as if people would be interested!), but I realised underneath
this strange desire was an attempt to give myself an excuse to get back into the company of Turja; to say, perhaps, that I was leaving. And perhaps (so perverse had I become) to hear her say, ‘No, don’t go, stay with me.’ But once I had identified this lurking desire I was able to sidestep it. Being by myself would do me good in that area as well.

I only returned to the diplomatist office to collect my screenbook and to ensure that there was a car I could take (it occurred to me, as I wandered back through the evening, through knots of people coming together and separating and all talking war, that all cars might be taken in this new enthusiasm). By the time I went back inside the cave it was dark outside, and in the office I turned on the light. There was a squeal, little more. Rhoda Titus, unused to fasting, was in a feeble state.

‘Technician,’ she wheezed. ‘Please, I throw myself upon your mercy. I am your supplicant.’

I replied, but my voice was hoarse with having been silent for days. ‘I admit to surprise at still finding you here, Rhoda Titus.’

At this she cried, her tears coming so copiously from her eyes that they scattered and dripped off her face. ‘I had no idea that any military action was planned!’ she gasped, each word requiring a breath. ‘Please, believe me!
Please
believe me!’

I was not paying too much attention in fact, but was busying myself with gathering together a few things from the office and accessing the datastore on the terminal, but she seemed to take my involvement in these things as a snub of her. She came over, her red and blotchy face pressed into my shoulder, her hands taking hold of my arm and repeated her insistence.

‘You
must
believe me. Oh please! Please believe me!’

This, of course, is another function of the hierarchy, the need for the person above you in the chain to ‘believe you’, that is, to accept the assurance of the subordinate that her mind is properly in tune with the requirements of the hierarchy itself. As you can tell from this, it is in the nature of the hierarchy to seek to control even thoughts and beliefs, and it is the way of those who live under it to
boast of their openness, as if their minds might be read by telepaths and be proven pure. I did consider trying to explain to Rhoda Titus how alien this was to me (why should it matter to her whether I believed her?), but decided it was not the best time to do this. Instead, I completed my requisition of three months’ water and food, with a fuelled car, and stood up to go.

At this Rhoda Titus started keening, an unpleasant sound like an engine slipping out of gear. Her hands slid from my arms and she tried to take a grip at my hips as she collapsed onto her knees. But, as I stepped towards the door to leave, she relinquished me and her wailing broke up into a series of shorter and shorter sobs.

As I stepped through the door into the corridor outside I heard her voice, pitched almost too low for my ears, as she said:

‘How you hate me.’

For some reason this snagged in my brain. Hatred. I had managed only a few metres down the corridor before I turned myself back. I came back into the little room and found her in the same position, still kneeling on the floor.

‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘I am intrigued that you should say such a thing. Why should I hate you? Why should I feel anything about you at all?’

She looked at me with blackened, bleary eyes, and said only, ‘What?’

‘You said I must hate you, but I assure you I do not. You seem to think that I have some emotional connection to you, to feel one way or another about you.’ Having said this, perhaps I should have gone straight away. But still I loitered.

‘If you don’t hate me,’ she said, her voice thick, ‘then why don’t you help me?’

This was a puzzle. I sat down on one of the chairs. ‘I do not understand. You cannot help yourself?’

‘Of course not!’ she blurted, anger getting past her tiredness and her hierarchy-trained subordination.

‘This is strange to me,’ I said.

Perhaps the kneeling was uncomfortable to her on the hard floor,
because she sat back, and then wriggled her legs out from underneath her to clasp them in front of her, the posture of a frightened child. ‘You’re mocking me,’ she said.

‘Not at all.’

‘Of
course
I can’t help myself,’ she said, the warmth of her words seeming to heat her a little. ‘I am a woman, all by myself in the middle of the enemy; forgive me, but you are the enemy. I looked outside, I saw your mob: Als is famous for its lawlessness, but it was terrifying to see, that anarchic mob venting its caveman urges, killing and destroying. If I had,’ she went on, her words gathering speed as she spoke more of them, ‘if I had not hidden myself away in here your people would have torn my limbs from my body, would have mauled me to death. Of course I’m scared; what would you
expect
me to be, except scared?’

At this she paused, as if waiting for my reply. I was shaking my head a little. ‘It is genuinely difficult for me to understand you, Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘You talk of
my people
as if I owned them all, every woman, man and child in Als, as some sort of slaves. And you talk about being scared, when I asked whether it was true you could not help yourself. You speak as if being scared and being unable to look after yourself were the same thing.’

Her brows contracted. Anger and despair jerking in combat over her features. Then she started crying again.

‘You’re a monster, a
monster
,’ she said over and again. I tried to speak some more. ‘Rhoda Titus, if you were scared of coming to Als why did you come? If you considered coming to Als as putting you in a position where you felt unable to help yourself, why did you come?’ But she was not listening to me.

I sat for several minutes whilst Rhoda Titus worked out her crying, and then for a minute or so more in silence. Then I said, in what I hoped was a softer voice (but it was so difficult talking with this strange creature who never said what she wanted or what she did not want, but rather expected you to read the complexities of her alien social relations into her moods), ‘Perhaps you would tell me what you want of me?’

But now, having cried, she was surly. She said, ‘Nothing, thank you very much. Nothing at all, thank you.’

‘Why do you thank me for nothing?’ I said.

She stared at me, and then her face fell again. I was afraid she was about to cry, but she managed to hold off against that and instead said, ‘In the name of Good God I am so hungry!’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I can stand friend for you at a Fabricant if you would like that.’

She tried to get to her feet, stumbled and fell down again. Now she was gabbling, speaking so quickly in the common tongue (which I do not speak well) that I could hardly follow her, but talking nonetheless about how she had starved for two days, how she had been reduced to taking water from the toilet and so on. I helped her up and through to the corridor. There was a Fabricant at the junction of the corridor with the main hallway, and I provided her with a little pasta in eel sauce and some water. She stared at it with wide eyes.

‘You do not eat it, though,’ I observed.

‘Not here,’ she begged. ‘Back to the other room, the one we were in.’

She was beyond being reasoned with on this matter, and soon I agreed to go back with her to the office space. There she gobbled the pasta down, strands of it lying against her chin, and drank the water in a single draft. Afterwards, she said she had stomach cramps, and was compelled to lie on the ground. ‘I’ll be sick,’ she said. Then her speech disintegrated into a series of heaves, as of somebody straining at something: but she managed to keep the food down, and shortly the cramps disappeared. I leaned her against the wall, and wrapped her own cloak about her shoulders. For a while she sat in silence, and soon I became bored.

‘Rhoda Titus, it is time for me to go,’ I said, standing up. My knees creaked as I rose; I was not a young man.

‘Will you return to me later?’ she asked, pleadingly.

‘No.’ Her expression collapsed into misery. ‘I am leaving Als for a time that will be at least several months, and may be years.’

‘You’re going?’ she hissed. I thought at first she spoke with
contempt, but when she continued it was clear the wind had been taken from her with the shock of my words. ‘Can it be true? Has God shown you the truer path, shown you the wickedness of the people you call your own?’

This was so bizarre a thing that I laughed out loud, and Rhoda Titus ‘expression collapsed again.’ Not at all, Rhoda Titus. Only I wish to be by myself. The reasons are complicated, and I do not care to tell you them. But I suppose this is a goodbye, and I suppose I shall not see you again.’

‘No, wait,’ she called out, lurching a little forward to clasp me about the knees. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’

‘You must let me go,’ I said.

‘How are you going? In a shuttle? Take me with you.’

I sighed. Bending down a little, I disentangled Rhoda Titus ‘hands and crouched down to bring my face more on a level with hers.’ I am going in a car to roam the desert. I do not believe that you wish to spend three months in the salt desert with me.’

But there was an eagerness about her now. ‘You can take me with you, take me where you are going. You can take me south, take me back to Senaar,
you
can take me home, you can be my saviour.’

‘No,’ I said, and stood up.

At first I think she refused to understand the word I spoke but when I made towards the door she began howling and shouting, mixing imprecations against me with the most abject begging. I could not leave her in such a state; she was a woman, after all. So I returned to her and tried to reason her out of her position.

‘I am not going in the direction of Senaar,’ I said.

‘Then Yared,’ she said. ‘There is a spinal railtrack from Yared to Senaar, our leader’s personal project. Or to any settlement by that sea.’

‘I am going east, not south.’

‘It would hardly be out of your way. I implore you. I can reward you; I can give you anything you desire, any monies, any goods.’

‘Monies and goods do not interest me.’

Now she was crying and laughing at the same time, more than a
little unsettling. ‘Then tell me what you are interested in, and I’ll trade it – or I’ll arrange to have it sent to you when I get home again. Oh, home home home. I am begging you, I am imploring you, in
God’s
name.’

She went on in this fashion for a while. After a while I became bored of it and went away, wandering about the sunlit settlement for a little while. I sat by the waters of the Aradys, feeling the sun against my naked head, and watching the wriggling currents within the sluggish banks of green fog on the water. I cannot remember thinking about very much. A few images from my time with Turja may have gone past my inner eye, those sorts of memory that give pleasure in solitude. Perhaps some tatters of my perversion still clung about my imagination; perhaps some recalcitrant part of me wanted a better conclusion, a more aesthetic rounding to our time together, but this was doubtless just the old desire to see her again, to be able to hold her and hear her speak to me. The patterns in the fog-bank shifted again. After a while I felt the time had come that I should leave, and so I did.

I went back to the office, and found Rhoda Titus with a strange expression, eyelids risen high and eyeballs convex and straining out of her face, doing nothing I could see other than staring at the wall opposite her. I told her, ‘I will take you to Yared, and you can make your own way along the coast to Senaar.’

She stared at me, and I realised (I had already begun to understand the arbitrary conventions of Senaarian behaviour) that, despite having heard my words perfectly well, she wished me to say them again. I am not sure why she wanted this reiteration: perhaps it is another game of the hierarchy, that the subordinate must make show of not comprehending a positive act bestowed by the superordinate, as if she were saying, ‘But I am too humble to deserve such a thing.’ But I had no desire to play the games, so I shrugged, and turned to go. Then, at my back she began babbling her thanks (another prompting of the hierarchy, I suppose) and struggled noisily to her feet.

I took a twelve-metre car, with enough supplies of food and water to
last two people a little under two months, and rolled out of Als. It was dusk by the time we left, and I rolled on through the darkness for a while. Rhoda Titus spent these first few hours of travel nervously flitting from the driving cab into the back of the car; exploring the territory like a spooked mouse. I tried to put her from my mind but her rattling and banging in the back was a small distraction. After a while I called for her to be quiet, and then there was absolute silence. This was oddly extreme in the other direction; because she had neither replied with assent nor denied my request. I believe now she was scared of me; at the time I merely put it from myself.