Free Salt by Adam Roberts

at risk from the higher doses of rads – were kept under the dome. There were three hospitals, actually, even in those early days! One was a standard medical installation, and took most of the insured and wealthy patients; but there were two smaller endowments made by wealthy Earthers who had been too old to accompany us, and these two centres of healing were set up on a nominal percentage fee basis. It was my proud boast in the early days that Senaar possessed the greatest provision of healthcare and pre-school facilities on the whole of Salt. This is still the case, although other nations have made certain advances. And although the War set us back.
    The typical dwelling-buildings, that grew all around the central dome, were of the sort familiar to us all from history visuals; those flat-topped, heavy stone structures. They look primitive (indeed, they were primitive) but they did the job. The job was providing shelter, from the wind on the ground and from the radiation above.
    Sites were initially all owned by the state, to be leased to the inhabitants for twenty years. After that they would revert to the inhabitants and the inhabitants’ descendants. This encouraged people to think medium-term, but did not tie them unreasonably. And so, in the spare time they could manage from their various jobs, people began to come out of the tents in the shadow of the dome, and pick their plots of land. They began to build their own houses.
    People could quarry their own saltstone, or have it quarried for them fairly cheaply: saltstone lies close to the surface, under thetopsalt. So, they would build their walls of saltstone, lay out the rough plan of the dwelling. But the quartz lies deep, outpushings from the granite core of our world. The individual could rarely muster the means to quarry it himself. It is at such moments that the individual can draw on the strength of the whole community, the whole congregation.
    I dedicated one of the ship’s shuttles to quarrying and ferrying monumental blocks of quartz from east of the Dyke and I established a scheme whereby citizens could purchase these blocks from the state with a money deposit, the balance to be redeemed either in money or else in community work. The shuttle would carve a six-metre thick chunk of quartz from the quarry and airlift it to the dwelling, lower it gently onto its laser-points and let it settle. I know all about this procedure, because I built my own house. It was a good scheme: people got good houses, and the community got a great deal of public works at no cost to the treasury. We owe the North Coast Spinal Railway to this scheme, or at least the first fifty kilometres of it.
    Can anybody claim to feel at home until they have experienced the joy of building their own house? As head of the government, of course, I had quarters inside the dome, in the government buildings, but I decided this was not appropriate. It might have looked as if I was hiding under the protection of the dome, as if I was too frightened to brave the dangers of radiation like my people. Worse (in political terms) it associated me with the weak, the sick and the children. So I chose a site on a raised plateau, five metres above sea-level, overlooking the Galilee (enemy propaganda suggests I had the police evict two families to vacate this space, but this is not true: both families were very happy to give the ground over to me). I brought in half a dozen workmen and workwomen – in fact, I had to insist they took their wages, so keen were they to do the work for nothing. But I reminded them what it is the Bible says about the worker being worthy of his hire. Together, we quarried the saltstone and built the walls; we laid out the interior with bedroom, kitchen, dining, reception room, guest rooms, study, bunker, lumber room and bathroom. Then the shuttle hovered in, the copestone danglingmassy beneath it. I can barely express how satisfying was the sound of the thuk with which the quartz