Salt (3 page)

Some people say they do not like the onset of trance, and indeed, some people do panic when they can no longer breathe, or earlier even, when the mask covers the eyes and they can no longer see. But I have always found it the most delicious of sensations. The tablet takes effect slowly, and you drift away, but it is the most relaxing feeling, the abandonment of everything. You do not need to move, the suit is stretching your muscles slowly, with an infinite care and the most sensuous precision. You do not even have to bother with the slow drawing of breath – have you ever stopped to consider how wearying it is to have to draw breath, every second, awake or sleep, for the whole of your life? With the muddling in the head of the tablet, like the finest vodjaa, it is a relief to abandon the breathing. Everything slips. Consciousness dissolves.

A wave lifts, c-curves and falls against the infinite beach with a perfect sound of white-noise. Another.

Another.

The tablet encourages you to fall asleep, of course, but you do not sleep through the thirty-six years of trance. Other ships practise that form of medically-induced coma, as perhaps you know, but not us. Lock a body in a box and put it into coma. Startle it awake at the end
of the process. The problem with such techniques is the mortality percentage. Depending on which technique you use, this can reach as high as twelve per cent. This represents too great a toll on the whole crew. Worse than this, it turns hibernation into a death lottery. Would you go to sleep knowing that there was a one in ten chance you would not awake?

Mortality rates for trance are much, much lower. On our voyage, our ship lost only two people in trance. Because it is not a coma, consciousness is never really lost but it does enter the weird world of sensory deprivation. There is not even a heartbeat by which to orient yourself, not even the heaving of the chest with breath. The mind does not exactly go out, but neither does it exactly stay switched on.

Shall I tell you what it feels like? To begin with, it is simply like falling asleep in the comfortable darkness. It is being a child again. And, at some stage (although it is difficult to say when) you wake up and it is still dark, and dreams are bothering you at the margins of your thoughts. And you sleep again, or wake again, but your mind is not settled. It processes the thoughts and the memories, and puts them together in odd ways, and stores them away. You sleep again, or you wake again, or one of the two. But you are dreaming less and less and memories bother you less and less. You are nowhere, you are nothing. Nirvana. There is no distant roar of engines to capture your senses; no tug of gravity to force your mind to constantly orient itself. No breath, no heartbeat. There is no sense of time. Moments of darkness and quiet exist, they blend seamlessly together in the mind, and who knows how many years exist between each one? Only the slow, slow rhythm of the stretch, the cat-like stretch of your body, and then relax. But although this happens so slowly it takes days, it becomes what your breathing used to be. A peaceful, background thing; and soon you cease to notice it.

But then, the body begins slowly to convulse, a jagged awkward sensation, and you become aware of waking up, and it is an unpleasant itch, a crotchet. Then you are handled, and the mask
comes away, and the dim lights hurt your eyes. So you cough, and blink; you retch up the fluid in your lungs; you take a shower to wash the slime from your skin, and you dress yourself, and float out.

You have been in a trance for twelve years; you feel as though you have slept but a single night. And now it is time for your six months of ship duty. Maintenance, shuttle duties, in weightlessness; sitting around with your half-dozen other awake colleagues. You play, you copulate, you work, you exercise your stiff body in elastic harnesses to simulate gravity, and you know a boredom that trance had made you believe was impossible. But your detail is over eventually, you can climb back into the suit, and return to the trance.

Another wave slowly ascends, bends, breaks on the red sands. Another.

Another.

Then time has dissolved altogether.

In zero-gravity, and supplied with moisture, the body ages barely one year for ten. In the dark, the mind rests.

I put my name to the documentation for the voyage at the age of thirty-one; I was seventy-two by the time of our arrival at Salt, but at the same time I was not even forty.

We covered the distance between worlds at .7 c, which meant a long period of deceleration at the journey’s end. But for this arrival year we were all awake, and full of excitement. So we connected computers, and burnt our thrusters to turn the whole fleet one-eighty degrees, and, with the comet behind us now, we reignited the burners and began to slow. Deceleration pressed us against our ship floors with .2 g at first, which was hard enough on our soggy bones, but we began to recover, and week by week we increased the deceleration thrust, and the gravity climbed, and the hard torchlight of our new sun, silver-bright, was visible clearly.

The planet we know today as Salt was originally designated Nebel 2. Naturally, this was only ever going to be a temporary identification, an astronomer’s tag, and it would not serve as the name of a homeworld, but I still regret the name that has superseded it. It strikes me that it concentrates unduly on the negative, the bleaker features of our planet, and therefore it contributes – subtly, but surely undeniably – to a lowering of morale. My own suggestion to the fleet panel was
Keseph
: the word is the Hebrew for ‘silver’, and reflects the appearance of the world from space. The white-silver shine of the planet, in the gleam of Nebel’s whiter-than-sol light. Silver is also precious, which might encourage inhabitants to value the splendour of the world God made, and made (let us not forget) for all of us. Exodus 26:19 tells us that the sockets of the pillars in God’s tabernacle were made of silver; and in Zechariah 6:11 the holy crown is made of silver. All this, and other examples, suggest to me the Divine blessing that silver carries with it. But
Keseph
has not gained popular currency, and so I must talk of
Salt
.

Salt is a planet with a gravity of a little over .8 g. It has no moons, or rings, or other associated phenomena. Indeed, the Nebel system possesses rather fewer of the standard requirements as specified by Paulo’s Law. It has only three planets, one in a close orbit, one at almost exactly one astronomical unit, and one gas giant on a very wide and slightly elliptical orbit. The gas giant, an argon world clearly visible in the night sky, is known as
Hadros
, the Greek for unicorn, although the name strikes me as unnecessarily fanciful.

Clearly, according to Paulo’s Law, the absence of sufficient and deep enough gravity wells to attract away stray asteroids and cometoids should have resulted in the relentless bombardment of Salt, and the pulverisation of all life upon that world. There is, our scientists tell me, a certain amount of evidence that Salt has been extensively bombarded, but the tenacity and complexity of vegetative life suggests that it has been several millennia since the last major
impact. The system is strewn with a large number of small orbiting bodies, comets and meteors, it is true but most of them follow a wide orbit at several degrees from the elliptic. We were concerned, at original settlement, that asteroid bombardment might pose a serious threat to life, and even went so far as to plan Senaarian orbital defences to try and screen the larger bodies (which we have never built, what with their expense). But since settlement, meteor falls have been relatively rare.

We have transmitted this information back to Earth, as is proper; but it is twenty-five years before they receive any transmission, and another twenty-five before any reply might be picked out of the infinite night. At such distance we do as other colonies have done, as is the right and proper and holy thing: we dissociate ourselves from Earth. You are young and have never known that world, and it means little to you, although I understand there are organisations of youths in other cities who define themselves as Earth-patriots. But even for those of us born on Earth it is difficult to feel the connection in the heart. We are a new world, a new beginning. The dawn cannot be always concerned with the moon at midnight.

The trouble at settlement began much earlier, of course, before any plans for asteroid defences were mooted, and it is my duty, I suppose, to trace the pedigree of this war right back to the long voyage, and even before. I take no pleasure in this. Nor do I have even the littlest desire to occupy this time, these files, only to justify myself and my own actions. Everything I have done has been done for the good of my people. For my community, my tribe. For this nation and its dedication to God. History, they say, is more than a chronicle. A history empty of justification, of politics and belief, is a blind history.

Perhaps the best way to start is to try and explain the sense of harmony, of the necessary balance between order and freedom, that prevailed upon the
Senaar
during the voyage, and which has prevailed within Senaar since we arrived at Salt – to explain it with an analogy from music. I love music. Music is the great passion of my people. It requires discipline, application, hard work and self-denial to master the skills of the keyboard, my own instrument of choice.
But once you begin to achieve that mastery, the playing grants you freedom beyond the possible dreams of Alsists. In the same way, the music itself contains the tension, between the rigidity of the notes themselves, each one precise in its evocation of a certain tone, and the tumbling freedom of their combination; between the path you must follow that was set out by the Master Composer, and from which you must not deviate (who would dare ‘improve’ the writing of a Beethoven, a Bach?), and the channel you must find to express yourself, your own individuality, and without which music might as well exist only on computer disk. A nation is a composition, a sonata in people. It must possess harmony or it is nothing. So, to me, this history of my people, this narrative I bequeath to you all, is a sort of symphonic poem, a major-key hymn to the energy and achievements of our people.

Before I begin the narrative, I must add one further thing, in answer to the slanders that have come from the Alsists. It is true, I concede, that we packed needleguns from the very beginning. But to assert that this in some manner contradicted the terms of the accord all ships signed before committing themselves to the project is absurd, and propagandist. The accord allowed each prospective settlement to make provision for its own self-sufficiency (although it was expressly stated that settlements can expect any and all reasonable support from other settlements – something ignored, or perhaps flouted, by the Alsists); and self-sufficiency, clearly, includes self-defence. Neither did we ‘hide’ the fact that our cargo included needleguns, as they claim. To say ‘hide’ suggests a deliberate attempt to mislead, but are we truly bound to itemise every single piece of cargo? Surely that is contrary to the spirit, and the reality, of organising so large a project. Besides, any objections voiced by the Alsists to needleguns are voided by the fact that they stole (mark the breakage of divine commandment!) a whole bartel of our guns at the earliest opportunity upon landing, and have since duplicated many more. Clearly they have no principled objections to the use of such guns. Too many of my people, some of whom I considered members of my family, have died at their hands, let us not forget.

I cannot forget.

Representatives from all eleven communities met, and all satisfied the Convention and Allied legal establishment that we could live in peace together. It is no small undertaking, to travel to another star, to make home upon another world. At this early stage in the pre-voyage, spectrographic [
intertext has no index-connection for a%x ‘1895spectrographic’ suggest consult alternate database, e.g. orig. science
] data suggested there was more water on Salt than in fact there is (and, the logic went, where there is water there is abundance and plenty). Accordingly, it seemed likely that we would be able harmoniously to share the planet between us, to build another outpost of Zion in the skies. Pre-voyage negotiations were accordingly smooth.

I met Petja Szerelem twice before the voyage actually began. At this time I had not risen to the rank of Captain, and was an over-lieutenant in the ship’s crew. As such it was my duty to liaise with the command officers in the other thirteen ships, to set up channels of communication should we need them during the voyage. In most cases this was straightforward:
New Florence
and
Eleupolis
were similar enough to our own. And my stays aboard
Yared
and
Smith IV
were particularly stimulating and pleasant. But no ship was as awkward as the
Als
. To begin with, I had dealings with a woman called Marta Cserepes, but she had no official standing, because (of course) the Alsists have no concept of officialdom, or government, or anything else. This Cserepes had been assigned the job of liaising with other ships in a work rota allotted by a computer program that could not (amazing!) be rewritten without destroying all its files. There was so little flexibility in this arrangement that, midway through my initial connection, the Cserepes was assigned on some other task, some menial cleaning chore in all likelihood. I was presented with another liaison officer, whose name I forget. But I took action. I approached Szerelem, who was at that time chief technician. He had been voted by all the ships as best qualified to supervise the tethering operation, making certain that we were all securely attached to our comet. It seemed to me that, as the most eminent, or at least, the most famous among the Alsists (of course, we didn’t think of them as
a nation at that time, but it is convenient to use the present terminology), he should assume the mantle of command, at least for the duration of the voyage. It seemed to me then, as now, that the rigours of deep space require a firm hand, a structure of command; and that if anarchy were so precious to these people, then they could reinstate it in their own kingdom when we arrived at our destination. I explained this to him, cordially. But he frowned, like a child.