Read Online Salt by Adam Roberts - Free Book Online Page B

It makes a high-pitched hissing as it moves over the ground. It will entirely devour corpses left in its path within months; and, of course, there were to be corpses (but I will not hurry my narrative forward). It is known, still, to those who have to venture eastward beyond the Great Dyke as the Devil’s Whisper.
    We very quickly learnt to stay indoors during the dawn; to retreat to our homes for an hour as soon as the sun had vanished behind the horizon, but the wear on our equipment was very great. Machines clogged up with the fine salt; our plastic windows became so scored with fine lines as to become opaque grey filters that scattered light in sunburst-rainbow patterns.
    And so we built the Great Dyke. It is officially called the Barlei Dyke, in my honour, but I am uncomfortable with such tributes. And ‘Great Dyke’ accurately enough describes what it is: a Pharaonic feat of engineering, massive and beautiful. We excavated a kilometre east of our furthest settlement (fortunately the very severity of the wind meant that the topsalt was thinner here than in most places, and wedid not have to dig too deeply to reach bedrock) then we carved out great slabs of quartz and saltstone and lifted them by shuttle to lay a great wall. This we built upon with small stones, and then bulldozed the salt from east and west to create the dyke. Finally, we secured the whole with (to the east) saltstone capstones, a solid bluff, and (to the west) a layer of engineered topsoil which was planted all over with salt-grass.
    The whole was the single most expensive undertaking of the pre-War period. It was paid for with a special tax, willingly paid by all Senaarians, as well as by contributions from the other Galilean nations, which were (even at that early time) allying themselves with the strength of Senaar. I contributed a million from my personal fortune. And the dyke meant that the severity of the eastern winds was abated.
    Well, to be truthful, for about a year after the dyke was built matters did not greatly improve. The aerodynamics of the thing were not perfectly figured, and for two of the years’s three seasons the winds were high enough to breach it. They would be sucked closer to the ground by the shape and come whipping into our land. More than this, the natural strains of salt-grass were poor things. Plant engineering came a long way, very quickly, but the indigenous strains were brittle and thin. As soon as the stems were a finger’s-length long, the wind would rip them from the sand and throw them downwind. At us. You know how sharp-edged salt-grass is? Imagine a flurrying tornado-wind filled with them. They gave the Devil’s Whisper a growl. We had to plant great pillars of quartz, quarried and lifted at huge expense, to break up the profile of the dyke. And the plant-engineers tried many strains of vegetation, adapted from Salt’s natural growths or adapted from Earth strains: salt-bamboos, which grew tall but spindly, easily broken by the wind. Scrub and web-algae that clogged the spaces between spars. Finally, a stronger salt-grass that held the leeward side.
    But what did teething-troubles matter? The dyke was a symbol! It was a hymn in stone and salt to the Lord, a statement of our power to build, to change the world.
    And how we built! Sometimes I think no nation, not even ours, will ever recapture the burning energy of those first few years. We dismantled areas of the ship as it sat on the salt shore of Galilee, leaving only the great central dome: this we kept, partly as a monument to our tremendous journey across space, but also because the gap between its double-shell was filled with fluorocarbonated water as a shield against deep space radiation. Our new sun was brighter than the old and put out more life-harming radiation, and the upper layers of Salt’s atmosphere were poor in greenhouse gases. The buildings were converted to hospital and creche facilities, and young children and the infirm – those most