Salt (12 page)

‘Few as sizeable as yours, my friend!’ I told him.

He laughed. ‘But the economy cannot really subsist on pure wealth, you see. We need an underclass, people to do the menial jobs. There are few enough of those, but we suffer employment difficulties at the bottom level. I know I do.’

‘You think these migrant workers will be the solution?’

‘Oh I wouldn’t think of them as migrant,’ he said. ‘I think we
should grant them full Senaar citizenship, with a clause to revoke citizenship and expel them if they become bankrupt.’

‘Bankruptcy to be defined by . . . ?’

‘If they cannot pay their taxes, I suppose. If they have no money.’

‘But they’ll come to us with no money! Should we expel them straight away?’

‘If,’ Warnke corrected, laughing, ‘if they have no money and they lack the patronage of an employer. As long as they’re working for Warnke’s, they’ll have enough money to pay their taxes, and to eat.’

And so we arranged it. Warnke built workers’ dormitories, and shipped in his cement workers from Eleupolis. But I am straying from the point, which has to do, of course, with his daughter. She was the fair-haired beauty, like a golden child. Slim, elegant, with the prettiest laugh, and perfectly bred. More, she was accomplished as a flautist. Her name was Kim.

‘My dear,’ I called to her over the table. ‘Tell me, which uniform do you prefer? The regular army, or the technical corps?’ The army uniform was the deep blue it has always been, and the pilots and sappers from the technical corps wore green.

She laughed. ‘Such is the question a woman has to answer!’ she called back. ‘Nothing to do with affairs of state, or the priorities for building railways lines, or anything like this, but blue or green!’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘The blue of the regular army, of course.’

And jean-Pierre sat there, in his immaculate dark-blue uniform, with his gleaming gold pips of command on his shoulder, and blushed like a schoolgirl.

The other woman in the contest, as it were, was the only child of a man called Hardison, who was establishing a school and a college. There were virtually no students in the latter, although there were some children for the former, but Hardison’s plans were long-term, and his personal fortune large enough to enable him to wait for profits. I applauded the public spirit of his enterprise, because the effect was to provide education for the few children of our community by running the school at a loss. When the birth rate rose (we
confidently expected a great burst after the initial business of settling Senaar into the new world was finished and people could turn their thoughts to such things) more schools would clearly be established: by then Hardison’s school would have the longest pedigree, and would be attracting the best students. And would be able to charge the highest fees. So perhaps Hardison’s altruism was not so short-sighted!

His daughter Coventry was tall and lovely, hair as black as deep space, skin a delicate brown, the colour of the desert at dusk. She too was tall, lithe, lovely-looking, with a beautiful long face and eyes of such depth they drew the watcher in. I leant in her direction, and called to her.

‘My dear! Which is your favourite instrument?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Your favourite musical instrument?’

She smiled at this. ‘And must I pick a favourite? Isn’t the point of musical instruments that they do not compete, do not strive with one another, but play together, in harmony?’

‘Still, you must have a preference?’

‘The piano, then!’ she said, laughing. ‘My own instrument!’

After the meal, Coventry and Kim played. It was a Mozart concerto and was exquisite. There was a perfect hush in the room, and we were, for that time, transported away from our worries, our anxieties, even (if I could speak for jean-Pierre) from our loves and human passions, into the realms of pure music.

The next day I saw jean-Pierre again, just before he was due to inspect a parade. ‘Well?’ he asked me, as he straightened his collar.

‘You are right,’ I conceded, laughing. ‘How can I tell them apart? They are both as lovely as one another!’

‘Perhaps I should marry them both,’ he said, laughing. But this joke was a little too low for my tastes.

‘I cannot advise you, my friend,’ I said. ‘You must follow your heart.’

Three weeks later the engagement was announced, between jean-Pierre and Kim. Their wedding was the social event of the
community; hundreds attended, and most of the rest of Senaar watched the Visuals. He asked me to be best man, but I decided that this would not be compatible with my position as President, and so a brother officer stood next to him in church. But I was present too, in the front pew, and I am not ashamed to say that I shed some tears of joy for my brave boy as he spoke his vows in the presence of God and that congregation.

For a while Turja and I were happy enough in the large dorm. Actually, since most of her rota came up during the day for the first two months (caring for the livestock and so on), and since most of mine (basically construction) came up during the night, we only saw one another for morning and evening meals. But after two months I was rotaed onto road duty, something of which I had absolutely no experience. Accordingly, I spent five days or so on the simulators, familiarising myself with the design and construction aspects of the job. Strictly speaking, I did not need to spend so long, but I chose to learn the job as thoroughly as possible because it suited my purposes. Clearly, I could choose whichever time of day I liked to work the simulations, and so I started sleeping with Turja through the night.

The dorms were mostly empty at night, because it was night that saw most of the outside work being done, to reduce the radiation hazard, and most of the early work of the settlement (construction, open-mining and so on) was night-work. We would cuddle together under the duvet, giggling like children.

‘You are most deliberately being slow in learning your new rotation,’ she would say to me.

‘I am, I am deliberately boring myself stupid so that I can be with you.’

That was the point, of course: I could have stayed on the simulators for the whole rotation if I liked. If I liked, I could have stayed on them for the rest of my life (except the next rotation would
have thrown me off; and except that people would have been unhappy that the roads weren’t built, and might have shunned me, or beaten me up maybe). There was no compulsion or, rather, the only compulsion was internal. The simulations are boring. They occupy the hand and eye, true, but they achieve nothing; they are merely computer pixels moving around. Who, in their right minds, would want to spend their quarter-days climbing into a simulator cab to go through the same routines over and over, when they could get out into the real world; when they could plan real roads, and then build them, and climb out of the cab at the day’s end with a weary but profound sense of satisfaction?

In other lands, I know, work is a chore. People hurry through it, or drag their feet so as not to get too wound up in it, and yearn for it to end so that they can go off and do whatever else they want to do. But in other lands work is distributed poorly, with jaded workers who have spent their lives doing the same job until it has worn a groove smooth in their brains and they can no longer summon up the energy to do the job properly. With us, we work a quarter-day, and the rest of the time is ours.

And we discover this: that there is not enough to do outside work to keep ourselves busy. That we find ourselves wandering off to other people on work duty, offering to lend a hand, wanting to be useful again. With us, nobody gets into the rut of the eternal working return, every day the same as every other. With us, we are given a new job every few months. If we do not know how to do the job, then we learn; it rarely takes more than a few days. And after a few years we discover we can bring skills from all our areas of expertise to bear on any problem that confronts us. It keeps our minds alive. Only with extraordinarily specialised jobs, that require not a few days but many years of training – as with my expertise in tether technology, that had proven so vital during the voyage – is the labour limited to one person.

But in the bliss of those first few weeks with Turja, everything else was blotted from my head, except the joy of holding her and having her arms about me. Under the duvet, in that warm dark space like
twins in a womb, so close our breath blurred into the air together; and one day we woke to find that our hair had become entangled and we had to pick it apart with a comb, laughing the whole time. We would have love before going to sleep; and then we would wake together, and have love again, a sleepy delicious kind of sex. I loved the way her skin smelled, the taste of her hair in my mouth, and the back of her neck. I loved the gentle roughness of her legs, where her hairs grew, and the dark narrow hairs that lay along her pale legs like cracks in enamel. I would run my hand slowly up the left leg, and she would squeal with ticklish delight. I loved her feet too. Often I do not like a woman’s feet, perhaps because there is something awkwardly unaesthetic about them – the strange combinations that a foot represents: hardened toughened skin on the heel and ball of the foot, but with that soft, vulnerable baby-pink skin in the arch in between; the pure line of the top of the foot and the messy fringes that are our toes; the sheer gnarled size of toenails. I don’t know what it is; a person is allowed their quirks and tastes, I suppose. But Turja’s feet were perfect, quite large but for some reason every element of her feet was perfectly balanced with every other element. I could tickle them for ages, kiss them, rub my tongue over them. She liked my body too, for all that she had said she preferred more muscular men.

Our lovemaking fell into a pattern, a pattern as natural and satisfying as breathing. In the evening she would be the dominant partner, moving me around purposefully, egging me on, squatting on top of me or grabbing me and adjusting my rhythm when I was on top of her. In the morning it was different, because I woke slightly earlier and with a deal more energy than she did. Then I would take the initiative, and she would lie in a delicious helplessness. I would get out of the bed and go naked to one of the dorm Fabricants to fetch some breakfast, then I would bring it back and the two of us would eat in bed, spilling crumbs and splashes of ersatz-coffee on the duvet, laughing like little children again. Then she would dress and go off to the farm, and I would go off to the simulator, and work through the technique of operating a road-roller. In the afternoon we
would wander through the dome, simply talking, or else lie under the tree in the goose-yard.

She must have pulled out her contraceptive patch within the first week, to judge by how soon she had the baby. She did not tell me she was going to come off her contraception, and clearly there is no reason why she should have told me. It was her business, obviously. But perhaps there is some significance in the speed with which she made her decision. After she had gone to the woman’s dorm, I was thinking about this. I knew that she had never before removed her contraceptive patch with any man. There was an unspoken compliment there, I think.

But she did not tell me, and for several months I had no idea about the foetus inside her, and we carried on like teenagers. She was moved off the farm rota and given a diplomatic and programming job instead, something she had done before several times. I finally grew too bored with the sims, and went off with my road-roller. Most of the roads from Istenem to the rest of the settlement were already finished, and there were no urgent road-requests for me to address, so I could decide to build a road where I liked. Or I could decide not to build a road, but the boredom would not be pleasant. So I set off in the smaller car, driving a path northwards along the bank of the Aradys, clearing rubble out of the way (there wasn’t much) with my small fitted crane, and putting down road-markers. This was quick work, and within days I was driving back along the coast. Back at Als I called the mine, told them I was building a road, and the operator at the other end shrugged: they were flying most of their processed minerals down to the settlement, and had no urgent need of a road, but (I told them) the shuttle flights were absurdly wasteful of energy, and in the long term a road would be a great boon. At least they did not actively object to the road, and neither did anybody else when I posted my plans in the dorm on my return home. So the following week took me away from Als, and away from Turja.

I fired up the great bulk of the road-roller (rebuilt and upgraded from an old shuttle chassis, it was), and set off north: the under-carriage lasered, rodded and grazed the salt beneath me, and the
after-roller applied a layer of superdur plastic that bonded with the sink-rods. The whole process happened as I drove on at about seven k.p.h. I needed most of my attention on the first day, moving through the north of our settlement, to avoid the farming robots left lying since I prospected the route, or to detour around the site of somebody’s home (a dingy, tiny-looking hut-in-the-ground, usually with a pile of rubble on the low roof for radiation protection). But by day two I had gone past habitation and I could spend more time looking around me. I spent the morning watching the scenery; the dark waters of the sea with their shifting banks of green fog were illuminated brilliantly by the rising sun. To my right was the bulge of Istenem, with our buried dorms, and the stockpile of metals like a bizarre snowcap. North of it the mountains rose, step by step, until by day three I could only see the peaks by pressing my face against the side window of my cab.

At lunch I would eat pasta, or chew a reconstituted bread (shit-bread, it was called, with a superfluous literalism), and with half my eye on the way ahead I would compose elaborate, flowery voice-mails for Turja. I would tell her how she had set my heart aflame, how I could not wait to see her again, all the things I wanted to do when we were together again, all the usual romantic clichés. I sent these after lunch, and I know that Turja must have received them directly because she worked her morning shift at the message/visual computers. She never replied, but replies were not her style, and I know she enjoyed receiving the messages.