by Adam Roberts
‘It’s only my face – and hands,’ I said, eagerly. ‘Look, I’ll show you—’ scrabbling at my coat, ‘—my stomach is really pale. I haven’t been out sunbathing or anything. Look—’
‘Stop that!’ Pander yelled. He sounded sincerely outraged. One of his men made as if to step over to me, and I dropped my hands by my side.
‘Come on,’ I implored. ‘Jesus, take another look at me. Take me to my husband, he’ll confirm.’
‘That’s that,’ shouted Pander, returning to his men. ‘That’s enough. I’ll tell the general his wife was not aboard the transport. You will all go to your barracks now, and get settled in, and you’ll be interrogated in due course.’ It was in this manner that my suntan changed the course of my life. I could dwell, even if only for a moment, on the alternative path events could have followed, except for Pander’s stupidity, or except for my own stupid tanned skin. I could, perhaps, have flown to the base further out in the snow where my husband was trying his best to conduct negotiations with the outsiders, to prevent their continuing bombardment of Liberty. And, following the successful completion of this, he would, perhaps, have taken me with him back to New NY. I would have been first lady to his Interim President. I would have become well-travelled, influential, a power in the land. Instead of which I’ve spent most of my life since that day in a small room. Instead of which I’ve never got beyond Liberty, and probably never will. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We were marched inside the fenced area and into a baldly furnished wooden and metal room. There were six beds, for the eleven of us.
‘We should double up,’ said somebody. I didn’t know his name.
‘We could sleep shifts,’ said somebody else.
We sat around on the beds for hours, talking nervously about what was going to happen. One by one, we were shuffled off by guards, ‘to be interviewed’ they said. ‘To be shot,’ said [Name deleted] nervously, laughing a little, because nobody seemed to be coming back after they were escorted out of the room.
‘We’ll be alright,’ I said to her. We were sitting on the same bed.
‘Shall we share this bed?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. I put my hand on her forearm, and smiled at her.
Several hours passed before it was my turn to be interrogated. A guard was at the door.
I was led over the yard and into a more substantial-looking building. Down a corridor we paused outside a door, whilst the guard knocked.
Through the door was a room, a table, two chairs. An officer was sitting in one of the chairs. The guard stopped by the door.
I sat myself in the vacant chair, and rested my cuffed wrists on the table. The officer interrogating me was reading a file, wholly absorbed in it. I decided to sit patiently for a while, to play the situation cleverly, but the truth is I have never been a particularly patient person.
‘Is there any chance,’ I asked, ‘that you could take these cuffs off?’
The interrogator stopped reading and looked up at me. He had a fine, rather feminine face; dark brown hair, a long column of nose curling into two scrolled elegances over his nostrils, thin lips, a broad scholar’s brow. His brown eyes were serious, and his scooped-out cheeks gave him a monkish cast. But he was wearing the same uniform as Pander, as my husband, as the whole military world, and I immediately mistrusted my instinct to like him.
‘Surely,’ he said, in a Midwest accent. He gestured to the guard at the door, who flourished a key, and in moments my hands were free.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You know why you’re here?’ he asked me, putting the folder down but not meeting my gaze.
‘I,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been accused of terrorist crimes – but I’m entirely innocent of—’
‘We’re not interested in that,’ he said.
I stared at him. ‘Not interested in my innocence?’
‘Not interested in those alleged crimes.’
This took the wind from my sails. I sat back. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, I guess I assumed that was why I was here.’
‘Do you know [Name deleted]?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him in a long time. I heard he was arrested.’ In fact, I had assumed he was dead. ‘Is he here?’
‘He says he had an “affair” with you.’ The officer raised his eyebrows to indicate the scare quotes around ‘affair’.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He hummed for a moment at that. ‘That’s interesting. He’s not a very reliable source – not reliable, you see. He claims to have had affairs with several women, some married to high-placed military figures.’
‘My husband—’ I started to say.
He talked straight over me. He didn’t raise his voice, he just talked through my words as if his voice had substance and mine was transparent. ‘My superior officer, who knows [Name deleted]’s wife personally, has already briefed me that you are not the person you have been claiming to be.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said.
‘Frankly, I don’t care. It’s [Name deleted] we’re interested in, not you.’
‘Him? Why? I’ll tell you, you know, he’s not the criminal mastermind he sometimes pretends to be.’ This, looking back, was a rather spiteful thing to say, but I was startled, unsettled.
‘He is,’ he replied, ‘a greater danger than even he realises.’
This quietened me.
‘Is he here?’ I asked eventually. ‘Is he in this camp?’
‘He’s outside. You can speak to him in a moment.’
‘Oh,’ I said, surprised.
‘Events,’ said my interrogator, ‘are coming to a head. We are trying to gather all relevant material. It is likely that you will only sit here, and be returned to Liberty in due course, but we can’t be sure. You will face charges for,’ he gestured with his left hand, ‘impersonating a senior officer’s wife, I’m sorry,’ and he almost smiled, ‘of course that’s not a specific crime, in actual legal terms, but you take the point – you will face the consequences of your deception, however we decide to frame the charge.’
‘This is insane,’ I said. ‘It’s like Alice in Wonderland. Why not just get hold of the general and ask him to come take a look at me?’
My interrogator looked at me. ‘I’ve been told that you’ve insisted on a personal meeting with the general before, several times. With a, shall we say, suspicious energy. Frankly, Ms – Ms – what shall we call you?’
‘Call me [Name deleted],’ I said, getting angry.
‘Well, that’s exactly what we can’t determine,’ he said. ‘Whether you’re simply delusional – and you wouldn’t be the first person to suffer the delusion that you’re married to the IP, or in this case the future IP. Or whether you have some sinister ulterior motive. Your insistence on meeting the general suggests to me the latter. A possible assassination attempt, perhaps?’
‘This is such a crazy thing, it’s beyond crazy,’ I said. ‘If he’s here he can just take a look at me, from a distance if you like – he’s probably going to bump into me anyway, isn’t he, if I stay here for any length of time? It’s not a large camp.’
‘The general isn’t here.’
‘He isn’t?’
‘He’s several miles from here.’
‘What – out on the ice?’
‘He’s in the middle of the most delicate negotiations. Negotiations that hold the possibility of – not only peace – not only respite from attack – but also the possibility of future survival for the whole human race.’ He said this in such a deadpan, sincere way that it did not at all sound overblown.
‘Jesus,’ I said.
He inclined his head a little. ‘Indeed. There’s an immense amount at stake, more than you can easily imagine. He can hardly walk away from these negotiations on the whim of any deluded woman who comes in here claiming to be his wife. Can he now?’
‘Negotiations with whom?’ I asked.
He nodded, slowly, as if I had s
aid something with which he agreed. ‘We’re not far from an announcement,’ he said. ‘In the meantime you’re free to move about the camp. But not to leave it. It would be extremely foolish of you to leave the camp anyway, since we’re sixty miles from Liberty in you-don’t-know-which direction. If you wandered away you’d be dead in days, and probably in hours. But, so that there is no misunderstanding, if you move outside the camp boundary the guards have the authority to shoot you.’
‘Negotiations?’ I said.
‘You’d be best advised,’ he went on, ‘to stay in the barracks to which you’ve been assigned. That way you’ll at least stay warm, and fed. Goodbye.’
The guard came to stand behind my chair. Looking at him, and at my interrogator, I stood up. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I know lots of other senior officers. I know plenty of people on [Name deleted]’s staff who could vouch for me – I know [Name deleted], isn’t he a colonel?’
The next thing I was being shuffled to the door of the small room.
‘Wait,’ I called. ‘You said [Name deleted] was here. Can I see him?’
‘Ah,’ said my interrogator, with dry distaste, ‘your “lover”. He’s here. Outside, to the left. Door at the end of the corridor. That’s where I last saw him. But,’ he sat up straight, twisted in his seat. ‘I’d warn you.’
‘Warn me?’
‘Only that he is not to be trusted. He is a fantasist. In my judgement you can trust about a third of what he says. About a third is true, a third is altered from some recognisable truth, and a third is pure fantasy. He used to be a writer you know.’
‘He told me that.’
The interrogator shrugged. ‘He has acquired the habit of fiction, like an addiction. He told us, for instance, that he was abducted by aliens as a child. He was quite … graphic in his accounts of it. Unpleasant.’ He shook his head.
And, with that, I was shuffled through the door and left to wander down the corridor outside by myself. Minutes earlier I had been cuffed and guarded, now I was free to meander about the compound. I wasn’t sure what had happened to make the difference.
And there was a door at the end of the corridor, and I passed through it into the intense bright light of sun-on-snow, and, just as I had been told, [Name deleted] was sitting on an empty packing case.
He looked up at me as I stepped out, his face blank.
I looked around, drew in one lungful of cold air, then another. Everything glittered. The sunlight was positively painful. I wished for shades, but I had none.
‘I thought you were dead,’ I said, taking a seat on a case next to his. He looked exactly as I remembered him: the lined and cracked expanse of baldness, the twitchy movements, the lively eyes. But there was something diffuse, something uncharacteristically loose, about his manner that belonged to a different person. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
He squinnied at me. ‘Nice to see you too. I’m sure.’
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘What, for that matter, am I doing here?’
‘Ah,’ he said. He shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand. ‘Great things are afoot. The greatest in human history. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’m at the heart of them.’
‘You are?’
‘You see those clouds?’ he said, suddenly pointing at two or three foamy clouds in the zenith. ‘Didn’t you used to love cloud-watching? We thought clouds had destroyed the world. Hey, didn’t we? The snow comes out of the clouds, and the clouds cover the earth, and the snow covers the earth and—’ He broke off.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Surely. Surely.’
‘You seem a little – I don’t know. Is something wrong?’
‘It’s been a lot to take in,’ he said. ‘I thought it was the same thing, as in, like, the snow had come out of the clouds. Bu’ it turns out it didn’t at all. So, it turns out the Snow didn’t come outta there at all. Man,’ he said, ‘that takes us back doesn’t it? The Snow, when it started. You remember that first flake of snow? And you thought this is just another snowfall there’ve been a million like this already – only there haven’t. You remember? It wasn’t like any previous snowfall. And now, we know that’s truer than we thought. That very first snowflake, it’s—’ he broke off again.
It was as if he were conducting a monologue, and it didn’t really matter who was listening. It was if he had barely registered that I was there at all. It was very odd.
‘Did you find your Sidewinder memo?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘You used to tell me that there was a memo by a guy called Sidewinder, a government scientist, that gave the real reason for the Snow.’
‘The Seidensticker memo,’ he said.
‘Yeah that. Did you ever find it?’
An expression of cunning came into his face, and for the first time in our conversation I had a real sense of the old [Name deleted], the conspiracy theorist, the believer, the guy with whom I had had an affair. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘That was a smokescreen.’
‘A smokescreen.’
‘Yes,’ he said, leaning towards me, and speaking more urgently. ‘Wheels within wheels. Misinformation. The government had its official story, and it had its unofficial story. It had the both of them. The government had its official story, that Russians started the snow with their nuclear industry. But who’s going to believe that? I mean, really? How could so much snow come about that way anyway? … It doesn’t make any sense when you stop to think of it. Jesus, a kindergarten kid could figure out that this wasn’t the way the snow came. So they laid a false trail, they invented the Seidensticker memo. You know what? I don’t even know if there is a real Seidensticker, I don’t even know if he exists! But it’s some made-up story in his memo, about scientific advances that turned the oceans to snow – that’s not especially believable either, though, is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said uncertainly.
‘Of course not. But why did the government lay this elaborate false trail? Why forge this memo in the first place, unless the truth – the actual truth – were so incendiary that it had to be covered up at all costs?’
‘What truth?’
‘The real reason for the snow. What else?’ He averted his eyes, and his voice shifted to a mumble. ‘And I’m the key to it. They wrote the memo to provide a spurious justification for the Snow for those few people canny enough to see through the “official” story and seek for the truth. But the real truth was behind that memo. And I’m the key to it.’
‘I’ve just been,’ I said, gesturing to the door with my head, ‘in there, being interrogated by some guy …’
‘Colonel Fairford.’
‘Was that his name? OK, Fairford. He interrogated me. Although to be fair, you couldn’t really call that an interrogation. It was really … I don’t know, soft.’ [Name deleted] chuckled, as if this amused him. ‘But,’ I added, ‘he mentioned you.’
‘He did?’
‘He said you weren’t to be trusted.’
This seemed to amuse [Name deleted] further. He grinned. Lines bunched up at the corners of his eyes like millipede legs.
‘I told him,’ I went on, ‘that I knew you, and knew how far you were to be trusted. But he said one thing about you I didn’t know.’
‘What was that?’
‘He told me,’ I said, grinning at the stupidity of it, ‘that you claim to have been abducted by aliens when you were a kid!’
His reaction surprised me. I was ready to laugh with him at this absurdity, but instead he looked horrified. He leapt up off the case and stalked around in a small circle. ‘Jesus!’ he howled. ‘Jesus Christ! I told him that in confidence, and he’s blurting it out to everybody! I told him in the strictest confidence. Christ, why does he have to tell the whole world? Is nothing sacred, is nothing secret? Christ alive!’
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. It’s me. Remember?’
He stopped and looked at me, but nothing in his look
made me confident that he really knew who I was. His mind was considerably more unhinged than it had been the last time I had met him.
‘You got to promise me,’ he said, with desperate earnestness, ‘not to repeat that to anybody. That’s absolutely secret. Nobody must know – Jesus can’t I have a single secret that’s just mine?’
‘Alright, alright,’ I said, trying to mollify him. ‘You can calm down, it’s alright. I’m not going to tell anybody.’
‘It’s a secret!’
‘In which case I have to ask, why did you tell it to – him, to – Fairfax in there.’
‘Fairford.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, oh, I thought it was relevant,’ he replied, throwing his hands up in a melodramatic gesture. ‘I was trying to help. I thought it would help. Given the current negotiations.’
‘Yes,’ I said, getting up off the crate myself to move my limbs and get my blood circulating again. ‘Fairford said something about that too. What’s happening? What negotiations? With whom?’
‘It’s really cool, actually,’ he said. His whole manner changed again, becoming once more secretive and adolescent. His moods were highly volatile. ‘Who’d have known it? We all thought the clouds had eaten the Earth, but in fact it was something completely different – war of the worlds, invasion.’ He chuckled, and then, with a teenager’s abruptness, he was off, running with an ungainly trot across the open space at the centre of the compound.
That night I lay in the narrow, hard little bed with [Name deleted], and she put her arms about me, and I put my arms about her. I told myself it was to stop myself falling out of the bed, which was part of it. But it also pressed her bony body up against mine, it also brought her heat into my skin, under my skin. Her hair, unwashed for months, did not smell bad; on the contrary, it had an attractively organic smell, the real animal McCoy. I pressed my face against it.
It was dark. We cuddled together like schoolgirls.
‘Do you know what? I never used to like you,’ I whispered, into her ear. ‘Isn’t that stupid?’
She didn’t reply for a moment. Then she said: ‘I always liked you. I was always – drawn, to you.’