Carrying Salt to Heaven

By S. A. Barton

Krig is one of the People, the last humans on Earth: a static society that waits for the end and no more thanks to the bots that tend to their needs and a society bound to tradition. When he boards one of the bot ships that carries the dead to Heaven, he discovers a strange new world and the history of the People. But the discovery has cost him his humanity, and the way forward is strange...

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. A. Barton
• Release date: Sep 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005159214

S. A. Barton

S.A. Barton knows third person bios look professional, but he doesn't care for them nonetheless.I prefer to be more personal, partly because overcompartmentalization is a former flaw I remain mindful of. As a (recently diagnosed) autistic/ADHD human, I have many reasons to remain mindful and many rewards for doing so. I dislike the label disability but understand it does sometimes apply to me and my work–but enough about that.I live in the Chicagoland exurbs near parentals and my sole sibling and her family, where the city is in reach but the deer are closer. Like many writers I often live in my own head; I prefer to be close to nature and select humans daily so I don't stay there.My children live in Virginia with their mom and her husband. Buy more of my books, please: help finance some in-person visits because thrice-weekly videocalls are good but not the same as IRL hugs.My writing is diverse and reflects all of the above as well as roughly four decades of personal seeking and many jobs beginning with my rural Wisconsin roadside worm stand, begun to finance an RPG habit in 1981 and shut down by the state when my success began luring customers from the local bait shop.You'll find my more polished and mostly self-published fiction here; so far my nonfiction lives with my visual art and select fiction on Patreon.com/sabarton and Twitter.com/sabartonwrites :)

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License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for supporting a self-published author.

Carrying Salt To Heaven

By S.A. Barton

Copyright 2022

Smashwords Edition

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Contents:

License notes and title

Beginning

Heavenbot

Leaving Meat

End

Carrying Salt To Heaven

Krig kneels back down in the deep, broad field of botshat salt and resumes his work; today is the third day of preparing his friend's body for the afterlife. Tomorrow may be his last day on Earth as well. The thought fills him with a vague floating anxiety that he can do nothing with, so he sits with it and makes his body busy doing the work at hand.

He scoops up the gray flakes and green-golden crystals in leathery, work-rough hands. In comparison to the hands he remembers from youth, it is as if he has grown gloves. Even the sting and rasp of the salt is blurred, distant, muffled to his senses. And intensely familiar.

This is the first time he's done it alone; Zhu was without surviving family and asked Krig to care for her after death.

Krig works slowly, gravely, packing the body of his cancer-wasted friend with the coarse salt. Under his breath he curses the bots; they provide medicine, first aid, and the cure for many lesser diseases. Krig cannot bring himself to believe that cancer is beyond them.

He presses the salt into the cavity of her torso, leaning into the copper slaughter smell. He packs each handful flat against the mild vealishness of her bloodlet inner flesh and sleek white membranes that cover the pales of her ribs. He packs more into the long slashes down to the bone on two sides of each limb. The salt gradually blushes, drawing out the last of her moisture, filling her with the substance of the bots, of the sea that has cornered the People on this last sliver of polar land. It cures her like a ham; one more concept Krig does not possess. The closest he could come if he were to try to express his feelings is bitter as botsalt, sweet as botwater. An old saying–the workhorse of oral tradition. Not that he had a way to express that.

He pulls up the flap of her scalp and pours salt into the bot-sawn hole in the skull beneath, hating the violence of it. There are no tools of greater subtlety. Why try to invent them when the bots can make and do everything better? And when trying to do it yourself with a sharp rock got you exiled, as far as Krig had ever seen (once) or heard.

It is his honor to prepare her. Soon she will depart to Heaven to meet the Gods: an unseen but faithknown type of bot.

The builderbots are very nearly finished making the most recent Heavenship.

The builderbots work day and night, but they are few and the ships, anyone could see if they cared to watch (Nobody did once they were grown up, so Krig didn't. Lest shunned, as usual) are intricate clockworks made of thousands upon thousands of perfect parts, some tiny, some huge. The bots cut and shape them with their own powerful fingers and fine manipulation tendrils and beams of light and tongues of flame. Or pull the smaller components from their own chests--sometimes showing lights and colors, or even making sounds like Peoplespeak, but different.

When the door to a ship is opened, the people bring their dead. The ship speaks to each one; nobody understands. It's a bot language, or a lost one.

Slowly each Heaven Ship is assembled; a year is enough time for the bots to create two or three. One is almost ready to open its door now; it will leave very soon.

In a year with only two Ships, the People say each one struggles into the sky. Everyone knows it's true, because when there is a long time between Ships they have to pack the dead in three or even four deep, and the dead are heavy. Common sense says those ships go slower, the way a caretaker carrying two babies must walk slower than a parent carrying a single one.

But they didn’t go slower, Krig knew. The year before he’d become a man—so he’d been fourteen—he’d started secretly counting his heartbeats when a Ship rose. After he’d seen a few rise he made the mistake of saying aloud that a heavy Ship rose as quickly as a light one. Everyone had laughed at him and shamed him for weeks, calling him a fool. Even his parents. A decade later the memory still stung.

He had had to be inventive to figure it out, too, because the People didn't know how to count beyond a hand of hands. He had concealed a handful of pebbles, and for every hand of heartbeats he counted, he transferred a pebble from one hand to the other.

By the time the Ship vanished into the sky, he always had a little more than a hand of hands of hands of pebbles by day (or twice that by night because the Ship’s tail of smoke and fire glowed in the dark and could be seen longer) no matter how many or few dead were aboard. If there was any difference it was not a significant one. Even if he could hardly hold the huge number in his mind, or explain his numbering to anyone. Nobody would listen.

The People did not have new ideas, nor did they challenge old ones. But Krig knew at least one old idea was wrong.

The Ship the bots are now finishing is the third of the year. It will not be overfull; there may even be floor space left free of bodies. It’s good timing, and will make what he plans to do easier. Krig is ready to do something new; he has not felt at home among his own since his shaming. Perhaps it is fitting that he does what nobody has done before: leave without being shunned, exiled; not cast out to