Inert Salsotto

Within is one of the last remaining moving cities of Salsotto, the Tumbleweed. This city never stops, and because of that it is never swallowed by the black night or by the days when the sun does not set.

Seen from space, the whole planet of Salsotto glitters with golden light because of its vast sea of sand, and its enormous meteorite craters can be made out clearly from orbit.

At the fated hour, a strange meteor shower fell upon the planet Salsotto without pause. The meteors struck the planet ceaselessly over a long age and carved out peculiar sharp angles, so that the planet's rotation was gradually brought to a halt. As though someone had pressed a button to stop the world from running, the days and nights of Salsotto grew longer and longer, until sunrise and sunset seemed to stretch on without end, until no one could bear it any longer, until the rotation of the entire planet came to a stop…

Summers that scorch and burn, and freezing black nights that last half a year, became the plain truth. All that remained of the whole of Salsotto were two cities in ceaseless motion, forever trying to run close behind the twilight line.

The magnificent fortress in the air is like a rain cloud of colossal extent, drifting slowly across the dazzling golden desert sky with a rumble like rolling thunder. Wherever it passes, sand pours down like a waterfall and fills heaven and earth. Inside the giant moving city, the people of Salsotto in their winged suits fly up and down among the city's buildings. This flying race survived the great disaster by good fortune. They belong to the sky, and they are bound to the sky as well.

In the morning the sky fishers set out from the harbor and dive down to the sand flats to hunt the Burning Jellyfish, and they return to the city only at dusk. By the power of those mysterious creatures, the city is barely able to keep up its journey.

Although their entire survival rests wholly upon those fragile wings, the people of Salsotto remain optimistic and will never let the weight of fate press down on their shoulders. They spend time with their families playing instruments made of glass, letting the music carve itself right into the surface of the glass, and they are fond of pen and ink as well, often dropping letters into the Dandelion Mailbox for the moving city at the other end of the twilight line…

In truth the magnetic field of this planet is steadily weakening and its atmosphere is steadily thinning. Even with the end of the world plain before their eyes, the spark of hope for life has not yet gone out, and the eagle wings will never stop flying.

The day and night cycle of the planet Salsotto has stopped turning for an endless age, and people can only chase the “twilight line” and keep moving without pause in order to hold on to the one living space still left to them.

Ever since the stagnation caused by the “meteors” began, the “twilight line” has become the narrow lifeline of the people of Salsotto.

When it all first began, people still took the turning of day into night for granted. The twilight line swept across the ground, climbed over mountains, crossed ravines, brought dawn to those not yet awake and handed dusk to the places about to fall asleep… But as the rhythm of light and shadow slowed, day and night were no longer familiar things, and the endless, merciless heat and cold became like a hellish quagmire, slowly burying every life trapped inside it. And so the people of Salsotto, struggling to seize life for themselves, boarded the soaring moving cities and began their chase after day and night.

Climb to the top of the observation deck of the moving city “Tumbleweed” and look the way they are going: ahead lies daylight, but behind lies the dark of night.

The chase of the “Tumbleweed” is not only for survival but, above all, for a life of dignity. If it runs a little faster than the twilight line, the light of early morning turns into afternoon; when it runs slower, the glow of dusk fades away into deep night. In this way the people of Salsotto, optimistic by nature, were able to restore “an ordinary day”. The romance in their blood has granted them the easy spirit to sing at leisure through peaceful afternoons and to sleep soundly through nights full of stars.

And yet these stubborn, unyielding wings withered in the end, and the fall of the last moving city was still left behind by the twilight line.

Many years later, the two moving cities that had never once met stood face to face at last, their turrets towering amid the ruins and aimed at one another. Perhaps one of the two crossed half the planet to reach the other and set the war alight. The traces of the brutal battle between the two cities can still be made out here and there beneath the dunes, and together with a hatred that cannot be named, they have all turned into a single heap of ruins.

The planet Salsotto stays silent in just this way, and at some point, somehow, its cycle of rotation slowed and slowed further, opening up the possibility of its own recovery in a future with no people in it.