Salt (15 page)

The first thing Rhoda Titus said to me was, ‘Where is the rest of your delegation?’

I only shrugged and smiled at her. Remember, at this point I was still happy in my relationship with Turja, happy in my rigidist paradise. I looked and I saw a neatly-presented, short but pleasant-looking older woman. Womankind delighted me in all its forms, because Turja was a woman so I was minded to be polite to Rhoda Titus. ‘There is only me,’ I said.

‘I am Rhoda Blossom Titus,’ she said.

‘I know who you are,’ I said. ‘Who else would you be, arriving in a military shuttle with armed invaders?’

She bristled up at this. ‘This is my honour guard. They are here purely for my protection.’

I shrugged again.

‘You are Petja?’ she asked.

‘I am.’

‘Well,’ and her official mask fell away a little, ‘why don’t you tell me so? This is most awkward, standing about like this.’

‘I clearly didn’t need to tell you,’ I said, ‘since you knew anyway. But if you feel awkward we can go inside. It is doubtless not good to be standing in the sunlight, soaking up so many rems.’

‘You have facilities prepared?’ she asked, straightening up again.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What do you mean, “why”?’

She wore no mask, even though we were outside, because the Senaarians had this sinus technology; she simply mopped at her nostrils constantly with a handkerchief, and squinted at me in the high-chlorine sunlight by the lake. It meant I could watch the precise motion of her face. Her mouth wrinkled up prettily when she was puzzled.

‘Why do you want facilities?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she snapped, her official mask dropping a little again. ‘So that we can begin negotiations! Unless you have prepared a reception for me? Food? Drinks?’

‘If you want a drink,’ I said, ‘then I’ll stand friend. But we have nothing prepared.’

‘Well, are we to negotiate out here? In the radiation, and the heat?’

‘Negotiate?’ I said.

At this point somebody threw a stone, and it clanged noisily off the side of the second shuttle, sitting by the waters. The guards twitched. Another stone came flying. Another. Rhoda Titus whirled around, and around again.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘I am doing nothing,’ I said.

‘You are attacking our shuttle! This is an outrage!’

I shrugged. ‘I’m not doing anything of the sort.’

The captain of the guard of six muttered something, an order clearly, and the soldiers adopted their positions: three dropped to the ground, the remainder standing behind them. They had lowered their rifles at the stone-throwers.

‘Tell them to stop!’ insisted Rhoda Titus.

My mask was itching me a little, so I shifted it slightly on my face. ‘It really has nothing to do with me.’

The rock-throwing had stopped now; maybe people were bored with it. It was a hot day, and throwing stones is heavy enough work, but the commotion had brought a few more people out, and some were calling names and shouting abuse. The soldiers, I suppose, did not speak our tongue. But they looked nervous.

Rhoda Titus made little noises in her throat, as if nervous. She hurried back over to the soldiers, and the captain of the troop started, as if electrically jolted. He moved between the stone-throwers and Rhoda Titus. It occurred to me he was protecting her but the crowd was in flux, people coming and going now, and there were no more stones. Rhoda Titus was looking at me. I was laughing, indeed, with the comicality of the bustling Senaarians.

She came back over to me, cross now.

‘Perhaps,’ Rhoda Titus said to me, ‘perhaps you think this suave, but believe me, no leader in the sight of God would tolerate such lawlessness.’

‘What can you mean?’ I asked. I was not asking her, I was merely speaking my thoughts aloud. But her bleary eyes lit up.

‘I’ll tell you what I mean. I mean the divinely ordained duty of leaders to provide a good example to their people. I mean the necessity of order and harmony. Why did you not restrain those hooligans? The stone-throwers? What if they provoke my guard? What if they were to get themselves killed? What then? This would have stained your honour and mine, both, and possibly started an international incident. Why are you not calling your police, to have these people arrested?’

But I was bored by this time, so I turned to go inside. In those days it was never a good idea to stay too long in the sunlight.

I heard Rhoda Titus give a little yelp of outrage behind me, and then she hurried to catch up. I could hear the
klink klink
of the uniform buckles as the honour guard jogged into position behind us.

‘Are you trying to insult me?’ Rhoda Titus demanded, pulling alongside me. ‘Are you trying to insult Senaar?’

‘You said you were thirsty. Shall I stand friend and get you a drink? Your people too? But they are soldiers, so perhaps they have their own rations.’

We came under the Istenem overhang and so out of the sun and into the dorm entrance. There were people gathered, sitting in the shade and watching the comings and goings by the seashore below; people standing and talking; a game of five-a-side played over by the other wall, with a goal chalked against the rock. But people stopped what they were doing when I came in followed by half a dozen armed soldiers. There was some muttering, a sense of communal displeasure. The Drinks Fabricants were on the other side of the seal-door, so I went through, and Rhoda Titus and her entourage followed.

I keyed in the code, and stood friend for Rhoda Titus; the Fabricant poured us two fruit-tint drinks, and I drank mine straight
down. It was hot, and I had been standing in the directness of sunlight. Rhoda Titus looked at hers with suspicion, as if perhaps I had poisoned it. She handed it to one of her honour guard, who sniffed it, sipped it, waited, handed it back. This struck me, again, as comical, so I began to laugh, after which I could see this commanding officer and several of the men frown with distaste, even scorn. Understand this about the Senaarians: they lack humour.

A friend passed, and I chatted for a while. She was called Haefner, and was on a Fabricant technical rota. ‘Who is this?’ she asked. ‘Somebody from Senaar,’ I replied. ‘Rhoda Titus.’ ‘And soldiers!’ said my friend. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘They are jumpy. But this is the manner of things in the hierarchy.’

‘What are you saying?’ interrupted Rhoda Titus. ‘I heard my name – you are talking about me. I demand you tell me what you are saying.’

‘She is angry,’ said Haefner, still in the home tongue. ‘Perhaps she is angry like this all the time.’

‘I understand so,’ I replied, in home tongue also. ‘I think it is a function of the hierarchy they practise down there. Everybody is frustrated at some level, everybody is prevented from doing this and that by law, or by the person above them in the hierarchy.’

‘It is interesting,’ said Haefner. She scratched at the space between her eyes, as she did when puzzled. ‘What of the person at the top of the hierarchy?’

‘He too is thwarted, I believe,’ I said. ‘Even though there is nobody above him in the hierarchy, he is constrained by his duties and responsibilities. Their last Hierarch was killed, you know, for failing to treat his duties with enough respect.’

‘You
must
speak to me in common tongue,’ Rhoda Titus squalled. Her hands were flailing in front of her, giving pathetic emphasis to her words. ‘As diplomatic representative of the People’s Republic of Senaar I
insist
you accord me the respect due to my status.’ She turned to her Captain of Guards, but I suppose even he would have found it hard justifying killing a person only for speaking their own home tongue.

‘She is angry,’ said Haefner, in home tongue, ‘and yet she does nothing about it. There is something inside her that prevents her from taking any action.’

‘It is curious to see,’ I agreed. ‘The hierarchy is internalised.’

‘How bizarre,’ said Haefner. She mulled over the idea for some short time. ‘Why would a human being internalise such a thing? It cannot be healthy.’ She started sniggering at the absurdity of it.

Rhoda Titus puffed out her breath several times, regaining control. ‘Will you force me to return home to report this insult? By ignoring me, you are ignoring the entire people of Senaar! By insulting me, you are insulting the entire people of Senaar!’

At this Haefner tumbled into laughter. ‘Why?’ she demanded in common tongue (which, actually, she spoke better than I). ‘Are they all in your belly?’ She laughed again, at her own joke.

‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said to her. ‘How can I insult the entire people of Senaar? It would take me many months to go amongst them all, insulting each one to their face.’

Rhoda Titus was silent. After a short space she said: ‘You are mocking me, I think.’ Her expression was dark. Her guards shifted their weapons uneasily from hand to hand.

Haefner had grown bored. She shouldered past the guards and plugged her applique into the Drinks Fabricant. I ushered Rhoda Titus to follow me, to allow her the space and quiet to do her job. Rhoda Titus came after me, her face dark with the heat of her anger; her guard trotted after her, a great unlikely crocodile of people. We came to the cot I was sharing with Turja, and I pushed off my outside shoes, each foot prised off with the toe of the other. Then I sat, cross-legged, on the wide bed.

Rhoda Titus stood for a while, glaring at me, and her guard huddled behind her. For a while neither of us spoke, but eventually she broke out with, ‘What is the meaning of this?’

‘Rhoda Titus,’ I said. ‘I shall explain the way of things here. There is work to be done, and it is allotted by rota; programmed rota, not a human one. It so happens that I have been prioritised for diplomatic duties. But I take no pleasure in them. I am doing this because my
rota requires it. Shortly the work period will be over, and then I shall go off to spend some time with the woman I am seeing.’

Rhoda Titus did not know what to say to this. ‘You are going to abandon me?’ she said. ‘What are we to do? Where should we go?’

‘Do you need me to tell you what to do? You don’t know yourself what you want to do?’ I said, chuckling at the oddity of the conception.

‘Have you at least assigned me proper diplomatic quarters?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ll stand friend again, and you can have a cot in the general dorms. Not all your men though, but they can surely bivouac themselves elsewhere.’

If it were possible, I would say that she seemed even more outraged. She looked about herself, and stared at the dorm. The cots spaced out, the glowlamps bobbing against the ceiling, marking out splashes of light that disappeared with perspective into the distance. It was day, so many of the cots were occupied; in the silence it was possible to hear some moans from couples having love. Rhoda Titus cocked her head, not recognising the noises, but understanding at some deep level that they were offensive to the Senaarian prudery. ‘You are suggesting,’ she said, as if with tremendous effort, ‘that I stay . . . here?’

I shrugged. I was greatly bored now, and on the point of giving up my work rota for the day and simply going off.

‘In the same building as . . . men?’

‘You could go to the women’s dorm and see if somebody would stand friend for you there,’ I suggested. ‘But you’d have to leave your soldiers behind.’

‘I expected specifically designated diplomatic quarters,’ she shouted. It was really a shout. ‘I expected quarters that we could have to
ourselves
!’ Note the possessive! Rhoda Titus’s speech was truly littered with possessives.
My
mission.
My
men.
My
country, even. To think of
possessing
a country in entirety! But she was blind to the comicality of her expression.

‘If you want such a thing,’ I said, very bored indeed at this point,
‘then you can go out into the wasteland east of here and build it for yourself.’

I left her then, and went over to the dome to see Turja. I am not sure what they did in the end. I suppose they went back to their shuttles and slept there. The following morning I put Rhoda Titus and the whole Senaar mission to the back of my mind and spent an hour or so contacting the other Aradys settlements by voice-mail. But Rhoda Titus came to see me anyway. She must have overcome her shyness and asked directions.

‘My dear Szerelem,’ she said, and smiled at me. ‘I have come alone.’

I shrugged. I could see there was a tiny twitch in her brow every time I did so, so I assumed that my shrugging was irritating to her. But she did nothing with her anger, only squashed it down inside her, so that it pulled at her face with its invisible string. Of course, this was fascinating to me: that somebody would have an anger inside them and make every effort to prevent its emergence. Naturally I took every opportunity to shrug, to see this internalisation in action.

‘I have come alone,’ she said, her voice a tiny bit harder, ‘as a sign of trust. I have sent my bodyguard out to train in the wastelands east of the settlement, which leaves me unguarded in your presence.’

We were in a chamber off the dorm, where the voice-mail equipment was. I stood up and went out, wandered over to the Fabricant and fetched myself a drink. Rhoda Titus came hurrying after me. ‘Perhaps you don’t understand the significance of what I have done,’ she said, high-pitched.

‘Tell me,’ I said, settling cross-legged on the floor. She looked down, thought about joining me, thought better of it. Senaarian women are trained to think that their dignity is the most precious thing, so she could not settle herself on the floor next to me. But at the same time they have codes that force them to be uncomfortable, ill at ease, standing awkwardly and talking down to me, that dissolve that dignity entirely away. A paradoxical people.

‘My men,’ she began (possessive!) ‘are more than a practical guard
against things happening to me, although heaven knows there’s a real enough danger of that in this anarchist place. ‘She looked about her, anxiously.’ But they are more than that. They are a symbolic representation of the might of Senaar. They are the . . .’

I stopped her. ‘I cannot say I am interested in your metaphysics.’