Salt by Adam Roberts Page B

oxygen; or, at least, we had hoped for enough water to be able to derive our own oxygen. Itseemed for a time that the oxygen we had towed with us from Earth (actually from Jupiter) was not going to be enough to raise global levels but we discovered a certain amount of frozen oxides under the South Pole, protected from sun by the sheet salt-ice, and we were able to liberate the oxygen from them. And then we pushed our orbiting ball of pure oxygen downwards out of its orbit, into the atmosphere.
    What a spectacle it was! I have seen visuals from above, which show it streaking like a great firework [ intertext has no index-connection for a%x‘9705firework’ suggest consult alternate database, e.g. orig.historiograph ] round and round the world, spewing more and more of a tail and shrinking. But I do not have to rely on visuals, as you young people today do; I was there, I was on the ground. The Senaar was still in orbit at this stage, but we had established a home base on the eastern shores of Galilee with two shuttles, and I chose to watch the spectacle from there. It was a splendid sight, a chariot of fire and steam passing faster than sound to the north, along the equator. After it had gone over the western horizon its sound-wave boomed, with a great sound of tearing, like a mighty cloth was being rent in two before the temple of God. We waited expectantly, and it emerged again, much lower in the sky. And then it crashed, away over the horizon, to the north. It came down as we planned, almost exactly half-way between Galilee and Perse. Some of our people took trucks and drove out to examine the site. They said it was possible for them to stand in the mists it gave off and remove their masks, to breathe the air directly.
    Never forget your heritage, my children! Never forget that the first women and men to breathe the air of Salt unaided were Senaarians!
    The diffusion of this mass of oxygen fully into the atmosphere took several months; and the liberation of oxygen from such oxides as we could find took most of the year. But long before the end of the year concentrations in the atmosphere were up to fifteen and sixteen per cent, breathable though thin; we had raised atmospheric pressure by several points. The atmospheric scrubbing of chlorine and other toxins was a more complicated task, though.
    The difficulty here was that our eleven nations were settling,mostly, around the three great lakes, Galilee, Perse and the Pale Sea (those who were not settling directly along the shores were choosing sites close enough to the water to lay a pipeline without much expense). Much of our early energy, after we brought the Senaar to ground, was spent in building the desalination plants. Water settles in the depressions and chlorine, more than twice as heavy as air, settles in these depressions too. You will have seen, as I have, the banks of yellowy-green gas rolling as chlorine fog from the waters. But my people, and the people from the other ships, had spent decades cooped up in their hulls. We could not hide away, as if still voyaging through space: we had arrived. We had to get out. It is our nature to want to break any bonds placed upon us. Samson in the temple.
    We did two things. The first was to dedicate our Fabricants to manufacturing converters for an entire month. These were catalytic-ally-charged buoys, powered by the sun, that locked up the chlorine as solid bricks of chloride plastics. We launched hundreds of these floating detoxifiers on the broad, calm waters of Galilee. The other Galilean nations (they were young then, hardly the great nations they have since become! Still, it is right to talk about them as nations, for such they were, in their essence, in their potential), the other nations along the coast, Eleupolis, Yared, New Florence and Babulonis, contributed funds towards this project. They lacked the specific Fabricant software to be able to produce these buoys but New Florence created some solar-powered