Salt by Adam Roberts Page A

grown in orbit; it would make the midday sun more bearable; it would introduce temperature variants into the atmosphere that would break up the punishing morn and evening winds. After a while, getting a little heated, he said, ‘What else do you suggest?’
    ‘Build a gel-filled blanket and wrap the whole world in it!’ I said.
    ‘Dig underground and live like moles,’ said Csooris, happy again.
    ‘God will provide,’ said Sipos in a gloomy tone. Atheism had increased among us since our arrival, you see. Mostly, I think it was to do with the disappointment in discovering that our Promised Land was so flawed, that God had not provided for us. Of course, atheism is no business of anybody else’s. Many of us had only agreed to the religious protocols in the first place so that we would be allowed to join the fleet. (It is ancient history now, but the original initiative for the fleet had come from the World Ecumensis of Christian churches. We had joined because no more political grouping would have accepted us.) On the other hand, there were many deeply religious, or at least spiritual, people with us. I was one.
    We sat for a while in silence, with that sudden soberness of the spirit that can come with too much drink. I pressed my face close to the inside wall of the dome we had just built. Outside, invisible to everything but the eyes of our DNA, as Hamar had said, was the incessant rain of solar particles. I tried to visualise it. I tried to think of it as a rattling rain, like minute hailstones, or deadly bullets falling thousands to every millimetre. But I could not. For some reason my eyes could only see in terms of a softly tumbling snow, flakes of radioactivity blown about like a blizzard; like the swarming of an invisible hive. The sun was only just up, so perhaps that informed my fantasy. I thought of the dust landing on the ground, like snow, instead of hurtling on through the rock and into the planet, as wasthe truth. I thought of it building up over the millennia, great drifts of hot particles, dunes of white-hot sands.
    Later Hamar and Sipos wandered round to the other side of the pool to have sex in the water. I sat for a long time in silence with Csooris. I found myself recalling the times we had been together during the voyage, the places we had found to have love. We had almost fetishised secrecy, privacy, and had sought out places where other people were not. I was looking again at her hair. The dawn light, filtered through the dome, was almost pure white; it made strands of white reflection in her black hair. I reached out to touch it, but she batted my hand away.
    She seemed oddly maudlin, and was sipping away at her vodjaa with a great purpose. For a while I was content with the silence, the clarity of the moment. I thought of us in her universe, in her Old Latin poem, all of us falling together, forever falling through nothingness towards nothingness. The most we do is only a reaching out, a trying to grab our fellow fallers, trying to swim through the air the way novice spacepeople do in weightless, thrashing pointlessly about our centres of gravity.
    ‘Do you want to have love?’ Csooris said to me suddenly. Without waiting for me to reply she added: ‘I thought you were going to ask.’
    I shrugged. ‘I was thinking of other things,’ I said. But, now that she mentioned it, I found the thought exciting. I was getting hard. Perhaps it was the remains of the buzz from the night’s work, a continuation of that out-going energy. I reached out to touch her hair again, but again she slapped my hand away.
    ‘Leave my hair!’ she said.
    ‘I was only going to caress it a little,’ I said, offended.
    She said nothing, only shifted herself over towards me on her bottom (we were sitting cross-legged beside the lip of the pool) and began to kiss me on the mouth. This was very pleasant. So we had love quickly, with most of our clothes still on, and with Csooris on top. But as I lay there, acting the