What Lot's Wife Saw (11 page)

The realisation of the ease with which the status quo could be completely overthrown had left its mark on the planet’s sense of balance, more than the geological catastrophe itself and the uncountable human casualties. The water had not just swept away human souls and buildings, but had destroyed the safety of the belief that the universe operates with comprehensible rules, and had cruelly cast us adrift with the knowledge that our lives are just a temporary and ridiculous interregnum in the vastness of non-existence. The blood-laden mud that the waves violently churned and deposited over the new coastlines stained the soul and mind and robbed Man of his innocence. It added lead weights to the hand of the Author and to the paintbrush of the Artist, corrupted the smooth perfection of marble, coated the piano keys with acid.

The shock of the Overflow could be expected to affect the arts, the sciences and the economy, but no one had really expected it to have such an effect on day-to-day life, to alter one’s walk, to alter the sound of a voice, sleep, love. It was as if the laws of perspectives had been skewed by the catastrophe, quite literally at times, such as when passengers on vessels bound for the Black Sea are asked to look over the side to see in the depths the four minarets of Hagia Sophia. Atlantis was actually in mankind’s future and not in its history.

“Have you not considered, Mr Book, that the price of blood had been necessary for the earth to relinquish its most precious diamond?”

Book, in shame, tried to hide his fingernails, on which a grain or two of violet salt could be discerned. He might dislike the Consortium, but he manically consumed its product, and this was a contradiction with which he had to live, as did all the others. The mental processes that demanded that the spicy substance that sprang from the ancient earth of Sodom was so irresistibly desirable had no logical explanation. The woman with no face on the poster, with the organ of disobedience sprouting from the tip of her tongue, connected the two cataclysms, the Biblical and the modern, but also the two senses, sight and taste, and the two unacknowledged pleasures, curiosity and guilt, thus opening the trapdoor of the subconscious. It is as if the experience of the condemned wife of Lot has survived for forty centuries, lodged, dormant, in man’s collective memory, a relic of our common ancestry which steers humanity, hypnotised, towards anything reminiscent of it or originating from it.

The Overflow unblocked some subterranean artery, which connected the core to the surface, allowing the scalding salt, hidden for millennia under layers of rock and metals, to pour out, just as the necessity of its consumption was lying in wait for centuries, in the dark depths of human hunger. Profit is born in the midst of lament. Quietly, without anyone noticing when and how, the titanic Consortium of the Seventy-Five was founded (
who on earth
are
the Seventy-Five?
), which, with secret deals, monopolised all the rights to the lands adjacent to the giant scar and to all its adjoining continental shelf. It constructed the Colony on the trembling land of the rift and began to systematically introduce the salt into a market which discovered how much it thirsted for the ability of these iridescent grains to provide all the answers, or rather, to hide the lack of answers.

The Consortium opened subsidiaries everywhere, to control the distribution and to recruit colonists who would be shipped by the thousands to populate the Dead Sea project. The choice of Head Office, which had also to incorporate huge shipyards and a monster port, fell between three historic European capitals. The land-locked Madrid, Paris and Vienna all became candidates, as they had become coastal cities in the expanded Mediterranean, in the south-east corner of which the crater oozed gold. Paris was chosen and the Consortium generously undertook to fund an ultra-modern port, the reconstruction of all the edifices along the new shoreline, from Versailles to Creteil, the upgrade and expansion of the network of approach roads and the construction of a new airport. Thus Paris was transformed into the busiest port in the Mediterranean but no longer belonged to its inhabitants.

In Ireland, Book, although glued to the television, didn’t admit to ever hearing any mention of the establishment of the Consortium or likewise of the construction of the Colony. He also had never heard any coverage of how and from whom the Seventy-Five bought the land, since the countries bordering it had been totally obliterated. There were international commissions set up to deal with the problems the crisis had created but they were woefully inadequate in contrast to their lofty purpose and impressive names. Treaties and agreements between nations under extreme pressure were hurriedly concluded to deal with the colossal calamity.

In this climate of arbitrariness and improvisation the Consortium, a privately owned company, managed to weave a massive and successful series of land purchases from private interests, of former national territories. Not only that, but it achieved a scandalous dissolution of international maritime law by creating an internationally accepted private sea. Book definitely remembered that governments worldwide enthusiastically hailed the inauguration of the Colony, which offered housing and work to the nationless, providing much needed relief from the burden of refugees to the countries of the north. He did not find it strange that he remembered nothing else, since the only thought that had tortured him at that time had been that the one hour’s advance in time that Cousteau’s watch had predicted had not helped him to warn them in time. He, who’d noted that the time, according to the hands of Aunt Mildred’s clock, had been seven, and who’d promised to alert them of important world events an hour before they occurred, had failed to warn them to abandon the country, because when it became seven in France the flood was covering their rooftops.

Since the Overflow had been caused by the irresistible pressure exerted on the earth’s surface by the violet salt in its need to find an escape route, the latter was ultimately responsible for the millions of deaths, so how could mankind stand to consume it?

“Allow me to refill your cup, Mr Book.”

He covered the cup with his palm and shook his head. The bright lounge had released the demons of his conscience, they dragged sharp claws over his cheeks, plunged tiny sharp teeth into the lobes of his ears and seemed urgently to want to know what business it was of his to be there. When a multinational company exploits a geological catastrophe like the Dead Sea Rift, which narrowly failed to submerge three continents, it should be held responsible for the catastrophe itself.

“Oh come, Mr Book, it’s like saying that because Noah prospered once the waters receded, he should be held responsible for the Flood.”

They were totally guilty because they were marketing the cause of the disaster, and Book was twice as guilty since he consumed it, if not for the mere fact that he was alive. He shouldn’t have survived the Overflow and become a cowardly deserter from his own fate. He should have been under the water, like all inhabitants of the South, amongst his drowned relatives and lost friends. He did not belong to the new reality, he couldn’t accept it. That’s why he continued to be amazed that Paris was a coastal city, that Rome could not be found on any contemporary map, and he also continued to wonder what the Seventy-Five expected of him with this invitation.

The man returned the pot to the table and leant forward in his armchair, carefully scrutinising Book.

“What exactly is an Epistleword, Mr Book?”

SECRETARY SICCOUANE

… The price being isolation. The Colony is completely inaccessible – I could say, invisible. The clouds emanating from the saltworks are impenetrable to satellites so that there’s no way the Seventy-Five, who are established on another continent, could have a picture of what’s going on here. They have never set foot here, nor smelled its damp air, they don’t know how we live, and yet, they know us better than we know ourselves. We’re a construct of their intelligent minds, thus we were conceived, and thus they rule us.

Captain Drake was forced to agree with me and he admitted that he’d never understood who or what the Seventy-Five were. Did the mysterious number imply a cooperation between individuals or companies or was it a clever cover for a single guiding mind? Priest Montenegro, while mopping up water dripping from the ice on Bera’s bed with a towel, asked what on earth I was driving at.

I tried to convince them that we should try to work out the logic of our creators if we wanted to interpret correctly why the regulations didn’t allow for such an eventuality as the Governor lying dead in front of us.

“Couldn’t it have been just a simple oversight on their part, Siccouane?” asked Drake hopefully.

A gross oversight from those who have never been wrong in their estimations, who have achieved the unimaginable, daring to invest in a product horribly susceptible to damage, tricky to handle, that can only be mined in a forbidding territory. After the creation of the Rift, Africa and Asia became uninhabitable for a radius of thousands of kilometres around the salt-bearing area. The desert that surrounds it is impassable, full of dangerous craters, and the salt fumes are fatal to all but human life. Moreover, no aeroplane can fly over the areas because the pilot’s visibility is severely restricted by the thick clouds and the salt’s insane magnetism completely destabilises all instruments. In addition to that, exhaust fume poisons and most electromagnetic radiation would immediately turn the violet salt into its white, common, variety. It loses its colour, taste and aroma unless it’s handled with care from the moment it’s mined. This means that the Colony can only be approached by sea, the thick syrupy sea, on which special wind-powered vessels sail at a snail’s pace. In other words, the investors knew from the beginning that it was unfeasible to communicate directly with the production centre or to monitor it from afar using electronics. It would be easier to observe phenomena on the moon or Mars than the Colony. If the Colony got blown off the face of the earth, they would only find out after three weeks. No other multinational has had to face such a challenge in the electronic age, in which instant communication is a given. Despite that, the Seventy-Five had overcome every drawback, every threat, and had conceived and established a system of remote administration which ruled out the possibilities of mistakes, mutinies, disobedience and loss of control. Do you really expect oversights from such ingenious businessmen?

“There is something to what Siccouane is saying,” agreed the Doctor, and he asked me to continue.

“Well, I for one, fail to be impressed by the genius of a Green Box and a single, isolated Governor,” commented Lady Regina.

The simplicity of this complete concentration is exactly why it is ingenious. Reducing the recipients of its commands to one, they’ve eliminated the possibility of misunderstanding, of corruption or of tampering with the message, despite the lack of feedback and direct control. The rest of us are condemned to hear commands without knowledge of their origin or purpose; we have no choice but to obey. Facing the remote central power and its omnipotent local representative, we are totally enslaved and, at the same time, relieved, because this beguiling servitude has been set up so cleverly that there isn’t the slightest chink in which to drive the wedge of doubt.

“Your reasoning is leading us to a paranoid conclusion,” Lady Regina complained. “Are you suggesting that the Seventy-Five ordered the death of Bera? Do you expect me to believe that?”

I explained to her that she, for one, should agree with the theory I’d been proposing, that the Governor had been ordered to commit suicide. Did anyone doubt his complete devotion to the Consortium, given that he’d forced his wife to sleep in a separate room so as not to expose the key that hung around his neck to danger? She herself has maintained that Bera had always been unapproachable, as befitted a man on a mission. What we see as a gap in the regulations is, in reality, a well-thought-out step in the evolution of the administration of this Colony.

“But why should the Seventy-Five kill him?” puzzled Judge Bateau.

“I would rather say ‘withdraw’ him,” I explained. “It must be that every Governor has a predetermined useful tenure. Whoever is made party to the secrets of the Consortium cannot be put out to pasture and draw a pension like an employee. By accepting such a position, you accept your fate as well.”

“And now what do we do?”

“I’m sure we are mostly doing what the Seventy-Five expect of us. We’re wondering, we’re frightened and we’re waiting.”

Judge Bateau stood up in a panic and started to circle around the room, shouting that this means that the Seventy-Five are everywhere, they can see us and hear us, they’ve foreseen everything, they’ve even foreseen the ice that we brought up to preserve the body. He hopped about and declared shrilly, “I’m innocent, I’m innocent,” for the benefit of the invisible eyes of the Seventy-Five. We worried that he might be heard all the way to the basement, where we’d banished the staff. Montenegro rushed over and gagged him, Captain Drake managed to immobilise him and Dr Fabrizio gave him a tranquillising injection that he’d found in his bag, to stop him thrashing. Briefly, peace reigned, while we all tried to digest the idea that Bera had obeyed a termination order. In any case, we’d rejected all the other possibilities.

“It’s a fact that the Seventy-Five would’ve rushed to protect him had they thought that he’d been in any danger from aspiring murderers. The Seventy-Five don’t leave anything to chance – who disagrees with that?” mused Dr Fabrizio.

But a simple glance at the body would suffice to convince one that death had not come upon him either violently or uninvited. He had been in his official uniform, his arms ceremonially crossed on his chest, and he appeared calm and smiling. I had witnessed him myself the previous night, in his pyjamas, on the veranda. Why would he have dressed up like that at night, if not to meet his death? Obviously, the Green Box that we delivered last night had contained a phial of colourless poison and the instructions that he should take it that same night.