Salt by Adam Roberts Page A

star that swooped low over the sky. Then there was the ore-anchor, placed in a polar orbit; and the frozen oxygen. Three moons. There was little life on Salt, no biology and only some botany, and what little there was lurked in the mountains, or floated insentient in the lakes, insignificant. Over time we set about our great tasks, to begin soaking up the free chlorine, filling the sky with air, bringing down water and trace elements into the world. We brought our own life, adapted and tweaked it, and let it begin its slow colonisation. And we brought the world ourselves. We added soul, God’s most precious quantity, to a soulless place. We were the spirit of Adam, passed through the finger of God into his limp body. We were creation; the morning star and the evening star. We would burn down from the heavens, balanced on a spear of oxidising rocket-fuel, slowing to meet with the ground, a shuttle filled with materials and with soul.
Barlei
    The calendar dates from the very date of landfall but many of us had put foot upon Salt before the Senaar landed on our new homeworld. In the months after arrival, and after we were settled in orbit around the planet, I was again very busy. The tasks that faced us were large, but it is the large task that draws the human spirit upwards. Humankind will always meet the challenges that face it, and will overcome, with the strength of righteous purpose and by God’s will.
    The world was not as hospitable as we had hoped. Our gathered data, purchased before the voyage, had suggested plenty of free-standing water on the world. The great problem with stellar colonisation – and should you, or your children, ever think of harnessing a comet and moving to another star, then you must bear this in mind – the great problem is that data is always received out ofdate. Our information left the sun twenty-five years before we began the planning for our voyage; by the time we had mobilised ourselves and arrived, another forty years had passed. The moral is: be prepared to be adaptable. You must play the music God has composed for you, and sight-read if necessary. When you stand before the great Creator at the day of your death, and he demands you explain your conduct on this world, do you think you will be allowed to stutter and mumble? No, you must sing out your life; you must read off the notes of your moral behaviour. You must make your life into music, and that music must be a hymn of praise to authority and to God. Salt was our symphony.
    The more immediate problems were not those of insufficient water. There are three bodies of water on Salt, and although the water in them is supersaturated saline it is easy enough to desalinate. Of course, the lakes are not very deep, nor very wide, but they are there; and they were deeper when we arrived than they are now. But even more importantly than the native supplies, we had brought our own ball of dusty frozen water with us in the shape of the comet that had pulled us the immense distance between our worlds. The majority of the comet’s bulk had been dissipated in the process, naturally, but there were still several hundred thousand tonnes. Comet activity in the inner system is low but there are a great many comets on wide and distant orbital trajectories, and it will always be possible, if the water situation becomes too grave, to mount an expedition and retrieve one.
    So I was not too worried about the water supply for our new world (these were precisely the terms in which I talked in the early days, as if our world were a house, and water merely a pipe that needed to be properly fixed; such talk raises morale). No, the water supply was not the greatest worry. More pressing, it seemed to me, was the atmosphere. The concentrations of free chlorine were relatively high, as were one or two other poisonous gases; the rest of the air was a cocktail of inert gas and fifty per cent nitrogen, but there were only trace levels of oxygen. We had hoped for more