Salt by Adam Roberts Page B

solid earth to her pounding, I began to feel weirdly insubstantial, as if Csooris above me, coming down upon me again and again, was actually falling through me. But maybeit was a good thing, being distracted, because she came twice before I did, and then came again when she saw me climaxing.
    Afterwards she fell asleep straight away, and I lay next to her. Maybe I dozed for a moment or two, but my consciousness refused to disengage. I stared at Csooris’ face for a while, at the little lines underneath her eyes, and the pores in her cheeks and nose. That moment is very clear in my memory now. The light was like water, somehow; clear and fresh, reviving like a cold wash of the face. Soon enough I got up and climbed through the little doorway of the dome to the outside.
    My mask clicked up over my mouth, and I fidgeted for a while with my nose clip. The air was still cool from the night and I was struck by how quickly the air under the dome (a dome we had only finished a few hours earlier, after all) had already become greenhouse-heated. It was pleasant to feel my skin chill. I wandered over to a nearby pile of stones, and climbed up to sit on them for a while. This was a little foolish since, clearly, it was dangerous to spend unnecessary time out of doors, and to rack up rems on the dosimeters we all carried hung about our hips. The dosimeter was checked every week, and the exposure was then factored into the work rota. If I had thought about it, I would not have risked being allocated a month’s indoor work, since I enjoyed being outdoors: but I was fascinated by the sun. It was still only just climbing over the mountains. A great wedge-shaped shadow lay over the surface of the Aradys, on which the chlorine fog roiled and played. The white and pink skin of the mountain, of Istenem, looked darker in the morning. The other mountains, on the far side of the water to the west, gleamed where the direct sunlight fell upon them and seemed to bleach the rock.
    Soon enough I got up and wandered over to the dome, more to get out of the radiation for a while than anything else. There were people playing football in the area behind the entrance, so I wandered further back and into the goose farm, still wanting to be alone. This was where Turja was just beginning her morning shift.
    She had scattered seed for the airborne birds, and was cleaning out the water from the troughs. I watched her do this for a while,propped under one of the trees newly planted in this part of the dome. I still felt no fatigue from my night’s exertions; if anything, I felt rather hyper, rather keyed-up by the excitement of finishing the project ahead of time and by the morning sex. There was something soothing in watching Turja go about her duties. She moved calmly, gracefully. From the trough to the goose-gate, and then into the compounds to shoo the geese out. They came, hissing and croaking as is the goose way, and she followed, waving her arms in great sweeps and whooping to make them go. These geese were genengineered; they were the height of a man, and most weighed more than a man, but their brains were still tiny goose brains and they were easily scared. The flock started feeding, and Turja moved among them, poking and checking. She noticed one with a septic leg, and had grabbed the huge bird and up-ended it in a moment. I was transfixed. Such grace, combined with strength. She didn’t even need to sit down: the beast’s wings unfurled and struggled against the floor, its cross-looking face twisting away, its legs up in the air. Turja cleaned its wound and applied a steripatch.
    ‘You’ve worked with geese before,’ I shouted across the yard to her.
    She wasn’t startled, which suggested she had seen me come in and had been ignoring me. But once she had right-ended the goose and watched it scurry away to join its lanky fellow, she wandered over and sat down beside me.
    ‘It’s on my list of preferential jobs,’ she said. ‘I’ve always