Free Salt by Adam Roberts Page A

greeted the saltstone.
    This, my first house on our glorious new world, was a place of great happiness to me. It was, perhaps, a little dark inside, but that was necessary in the face of the radiation hazard. Windows were few, the ceiling felt lower than it actually was. In the winter it could become rather cold. Still, I have only happy memories of that house. From inside that house I co-ordinated the building of a city. At evening I would sit on my porch, watching the sun set over the Galilee, with my advisors around me. Or, sometimes, just old friends; or perhaps ordinary citizens, sitting at my side and sipping herbal tea. Talking. Admiring God’s beauty. Somebody might play some music, an air on the pipes for instance, or a sonata on the keyboards I kept by the window overlooking this porch. These were the times of tranquillity for me.
    But tranquillity can only ever be enjoyed if it is sandwiched between times of great work. And how we worked!
    There were epic meetings in the Parliament, during which the various plans for the city were debated. Tempers ran hot. There had been many plans for the overall layout of the city submitted, by qualified architects and planners as well as by ordinary citizens. Most favoured a cross-shaped design, with urbanisation branching in four directions; not very practical, I am afraid, to dissipate buildings so widely. Others expressed self-consciously musical motifs, or attempted to pick out a pattern on the ground, of a face or the Eagle of St John, or some such. Some were more mathematical, grid-patterns or circular grilles of streets. I consulted with my advisers and shortlisted six, which were then defended in Parliament by their designers and ultimately voted upon in a special pre-season debate. The vote treasury had never before, and has never since, taken in so many votes! It was remarkable how fervently people cared for this issue. The debate went on for three days, and each day I had to suspend discussion because no pause in the proceedings presented itself.
    When the particular grid was decided upon, there was an intenseperiod of building. People would work all day, and then spend all night building, taking only a few hours sleep at dawn before going back to work. Nobody was idle. Adolescents, who would normally be at school except that the schools had yet to be built, lent a hand constructing their classrooms. Pregnant women worked during their rest-time. The sick would do what little they could, programming netscreens from their hospital beds. Only on Sunday mornings would the work stop, and people would gather, in the open air at first, and later in the first churches, to give praise.
    We built houses, and we fused down the topsalt between them to make roads. People scoured the topsalt of their garden, laid plastic in the pits they made, and hawked and traded their organic rubbish and the algae cleared from the bays of Galilee to spread over it: a foul-smelling stuff, but the first slow stages in building the mulch we think of as soil, the first step on the road to growing Earth plants. We programmed out Fabricants to produce bicycles, to be sold at basic government price, and the streets were crowded with people making their way to and from work. Houses came into being along the road. Every day seemed to bring in another shuttle flight, with another huge piece of hewn quartz from out east. Everybody was busy, everybody contented. And although you could see the strain in people’s faces, the physical exhaustion, nonetheless we all tapped into the energy and resilience of youth (for we were a young nation). Concerts happened without planning; a woman with a guitar and two men with pipes would start playing on one of the scrubby open places that still pocked the city. A crowd would gather. People would be talking, laughing, cheering the music. Or else, the word would go round the net, or even by word-of-mouth, that a quartet was going to be playing in such-and-such house, or