by Adam Roberts
‘There is not the lift.’
‘You could say,’ I said, testing my wobbly legs my stepping forward, ‘there is no lift. Or more idiomatic would be, there isn’t a lift.’
‘We can talk German, if you prefer.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re all right. You’re all right with your English.’
‘What is the matter?’ He peered into my face and I got the chance to see his features properly: pale skin, but very dark eyebrows, like pieces of felt, and liquorish-coloured eyes. Close trimmed black hair.
‘I have a fever,’ I said.
‘I must help you, to go up the stairs?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
He draped my arm about his neck like a stole, fitted his shoulder into my armpit, and started up the staircase, taking some of my weight from my feet. ‘We must hurry, I am afraid.’ A few strides to the end of the hall, and then, a little awkwardly, up the stairs. One, two, three. Da! I thought. Da! Da! The musk of him was in my nose. I can only smell strong scents, nowadays, so I assume his smell was a strong scent.
‘Please tell me,’ he said, as we ascended, his voice tight with the effort.
‘I will tell you,’ I said. The stairway - up; turn right and alone, up again; turn right and along, up again - was assuming a weirdly phantasmagoric quality in my perceptions. It was - trippy.
‘Tell me how such a man as you, injured and weak - please tell how you are able - to kill giants.’
‘To slay giants,’ I said. ‘To knock the giants down with my slingshot.’ I wanted to stop my head lolling, side and side, because the movement tugged uncomfortably upon the scar tissue of my neck. But I couldn’t stop the lolling.
‘How do you do it?’
I echoed his question: ‘How do we do it?’
‘How do you do it?’ he repeated.
I felt like I had been smoked out. ‘How do I do it?’ I said. ‘That’s the right question. You should probably bisect my head with a round from your pistol. Shouldn’t you?’
‘We voted,’ he said. ‘We take you back.’
‘And why?’
The final flight of stairs was smaller, and brought us not to a landing but a narrow fire door that in turn opened out on to the roof. There was a small flat area amongst otherwise sloping angles and tiled flanks: a space covered over with roofing fabric, the material as dark and abrasive as asphalt. Chafing my senses. I was unwell. A low rail surrounded it on three sides; the fourth was blocked by the flank of another building. All those angled surfaces, like a small-scale abstraction of a mountain range. Like a cubist sculpture of the Alps.
In the middle of this little roof space were three objects: two microlite backpacks, and one common-or-garden wooden chair.
Schäferhund 2 poured me out of his arms on to the roof, and I stood, just about keeping my feet, gasping, looking about. I hurt fairly badly where my skin had been scraped by his grip, and my lungs had not recovered from the severity of the previous exercise. Schäferhund 2 stood with his hands on his hips as if he had just finished a marathon. What people forget about that first marathon race - though the fact is inscribed in the name - is that the runner was a soldier, and that he had just finished fighting a particularly tough battle. Sport, you see, was cracked out of the egg of war.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why do we take you back?’
‘Why not just kill me here? Why not kill me back in the hotel room?’
‘Because you are weapon, we think,’ said Schäferhund 2. ‘Please to sit in the chair.’
It was an old-fashioned wooden chair, taken, perhaps, from a bar or a domestic kitchen. Its seat was a circle. Its four legs splayed slightly outwards at the bottom. It had two little armrests, and its back was a pretzel-weave of wood bounded by a wooden hoop.
‘You want that I sit?’
‘You must sit.’
I suppose the chair made me think of summary execution, although such thoughts were at odds with what Schäferhund 2 was saying to me. I ought not to have cared, but I did. I told myself: I don’t want to die like that, strapped in a chair with a bullet in the back of my head. Dying in open battle was one thing; going like a Viking. But not in so mean and despicable a manner. This wasn’t the truth, though. The truth was that I didn’t want to die at all, under any circumstances. That’s always the truth, when a person comes to it. Whatever you might think, however much you believe you crave death, when you actually come to it that is what you’ll feel. You can’t help it.
But of course I sat. What choice did I have? Straight away he fed a strap around my chest, under my arms, and fastened it at the back. Another strap went over my lap and got fastened underneath the seat. My arms were free. Only when he unspooled a thick cable - mountaineering paraphernalia, perhaps - from his back and clicked it to the back of the chair did I understand what he intended.
‘Might it be easier for me to take the spare micro?’ I suggested, nodding at the backpack.
‘But then you would fly away from me,’ Schäferhund 2 pointed out. ‘And I would not be able to bring you back with me, as has been voted.’ The spare micro, I realized, was for the deceased Schäferhunder.
‘You want me because you think I’m a weapon?’ I said, watching him unzip the microlite pack, pull out its stalk and unfold its rotor blades - this latter a rigid hollow long as a surfboard and nearly a quarter as broad. Schäferhund 2 clicked the structure together, and then fed helium into it from a little bottle. Once this was done he could lift the whole motor - it was a large motor - and harness with his left arm, and hold it whilst he slipped his right arm in. With a wriggle of his spine he fitted it on his back, the rotor like an etiolated parasol over his head. Then he took the cable attached to my chair and hooked it to the belt of his harness.
‘Do you want me because you are planning to go to war against other NMAs?’ I asked him. ‘I’m no use against regular armies.’
He didn’t answer, his attention taken up with reaching behind himself to extend a pole from the back of his pack, and twist a torch-like object round to a ninety-degree angle. It occurred to me that fitting these packs was really a two-man job. It was awkward, doing it by himself.
‘You want me just on the off chance? Keep me in reserve?’ I was chattering too much, but that was because of the fire within my head, and the hot dribble from my nostrils, and the fact that I could feel the whole of both my eyeballs, all the way around, as if the skull were a sense organ and was palpating them.
This fever—
I was partly trying to persuade him to kill me. If the Colonel had overheard me, he would have thought I was betraying his trust - trying to protect the Schäferhund NMA. But it wasn’t that at all. All those conversations with the Colonel, and he now thought I was his weapon. But I wasn’t. I was trying to prevent my deployment not to protect the NMA, but to protect everybody else. Do you see? I was worried about the world of ordinary people. The Colonel didn’t know what sort of weapon I was.
‘Do you want to unpack me and see how I work?’ I shouted. I needed to shout because Schäferhund 2 had started the motor.
The torch-like object was no torch. As the rotors began to turn it coughed and started to whirr, and as the rotors’ whoomf sped to the point where the sound began to blur, the device blew harder, and a tiny spike of flame quavered in its mouth, to counter the rotatory impulse of the blades. I watched with feverish fascination. Schäferhund 2 lifted from the ground, like an angel ascending. The cable that linked us rose like a snake-charmer’s cobra.
I shouted something else, but since I couldn’t hear my own voice over the noise of the mechanism, I don’t know what it was. The chair jerked. A poltergeist had kicked it. If tables can be turned, why not chairs. It slid backwards across the roof. Then with a little kick of its lifeless legs it jumped up, bounced, sagged, drew the cord taut.
There was a thump, and it made me cry out, as the back of the chair caught the fence. But then we were up, and I had become the dangling man. The way the cable had
been attached meant that the whole chair tipped forward a little way, and my body strained against its restraints, and my view was directed downwards. But I was swinging, too, in a long slow pendulum trajectory, and this brought more of the ground into my view, and then more of the horizon and sky, and ground, and horizon, and ground and horizon. The engine noise complained, and the downdraft from the rotors blew right down my collar and touched my skin.
The roof was a yard or two below me. Then, abruptly, the roof was a long way down. The house looked like a model of a house. I could see the streets of Strasbourg, and see their thrum and human clutter. I even took the trouble to look for evidence of the attempt to recapture me, because - my fever head had not driven this fact out of my skull - because, you see, I was important! Jack the Giantkiller. I suppose I thought to see troops scurrying through the narrow streets - police cars, sirens, barricades being put up, ranks of trotting soldiers. But I didn’t see any of that. I daresay there were police cars, and soldiers running, somewhere down there. I don’t doubt that the gendarmes, or the polizei, or whatever they called peelers in this part of the world, had erected a temporary tent about the US soldiers’ body in the street - had stopped the traffic from flowing, had moved any lingering rubberneckers away. I don’t doubt they had discovered Martin’s body in the hotel room, sprawled across the cosy chair. The EU Military Command, and the Americans, must know I was gone. But I couldn’t see any of that from where I was.
Away to the east the cloud cover was dense and fuzzed in purples and blacks; but directly above me it was white and bright.
The noise of the drone went up a semitone, and my pendulum swing began to acquire a circular momentum. With the noise, and the rush of air, and the cold, it was hard to concentrate on details below. There was the city of Strasbourg. I knew that. There was its unmistakable cathedral spire, the tallest in the world between 1647 and 1874, or else between 1674 and 1847. It was the giant needle, the omphalos. There were the roads, stitching the buildings together. Roofs, scattered cards, mahjong tiles. An antique circuit board. And we pulled higher, and the effect was almost exactly like sliding the toggle downwards on a terrain googlemap. The ring road came into view. The thread of the river Ill, the Al as it now is, trailing along until it met the Rhine’s fat cable away to the east. The roads did not shine as nicely as the rivers. And there are patches of cloth, in varicoloured greens, and these are forests, and fields. They are strips of garden, running from parkland down to farmland. Tweedbrown, seagreen, and lines of grey and silver and black like ore. This is motley. The etymology of the word politics is from the Greek word for motley, the variegated and multicoloured democratic polis. Who wears this mixture of clothing? A giant, and the giant of all giants. Its name is Europe.
The drone of the rotors circling was the music of the spheres.
I tipped my head back and saw the ceiling of white, coming closer now; and silhouetted vividly against it was the black bugshape of the Schäferhund soldier - a tight perspective of feet, legs, head, and a wide halo of blur above. The cable that connected us was taut and thrumming. My circling motion doubtless mixed confusion into my feverish head. The fever had flared too soon, there was no question about that. And round I went, round and round, like a hypnotist’s bauble, the dangling man on a long rope. Europe below me, and stretching all about me in every direction; the landscape of the world. There were other parts of the world, of course I knew, but that was something I knew intellectually rather than in my soul. I felt myself to be suspended directly over the exact heart of Europe. Europe the primal giant, the first to be woken from pre-vivid sleep to stretch, and groan, and shake its limbs.
I looked down again: the toggle had slid further down the googlemap scale-bar. Strasbourg was a crust of stone and metal over European earth. The vegetative soil. I could see the larger shape of the forests, and a longer section of the trunk of the Rhine; and yet, even at this height, I could see the glitter of cars and trucks creeping corpuscularly along the motorways.
I was shivering. It was very cold and very bright all around me. The swing of my chair disoriented me. The altitude was pressuring my inner ear. My eyes kept rolling up in their sockets, sliding out of alignment and needing to be reset. Whiteness sifting down from the source of all light. Chilly little clumps of mist were around me.
What happened next was that I vomited. The stuff came as if from nowhere and blurted out of my mouth in a fan. It wasn’t especially uncomfortable. I felt like a conduit, and the content of my stomach was broadcast outwards into the encompassing air, and rained away, or else, atomizing, was swept away by the winds and blown throughout the whole of the huge sky. The stuff I had put into my stomach on the plane, in the air, as I flew over from London, was now coming out of my stomach, back into the air. There was a harmony in that.
My seat swung back once again, and I drew a deep breath, and I opened my eyes to see the imprecise architecture of the clouds - bulges and spurs, blue-edged shapes - sink around me. And then, with a distinct sensation of a drop in temperature, we rose into a cloud, and everything became white and blank and pure and cold.
What are clouds? They were all about me. Clouds are mist that aspires higher than to slink its belly along the wet grass like a worm. Clouds are protean giants that think themselves angels.
I couldn’t see anything, but it did not matter. I could see everything feelingly, in that properly Shakespearian phrase. It was all spread out below me. The European landscape, howsoever scribbled over with motorways and the cellular growth of concrete buildings, was still, in its essence, a medieval landscape. Its true nature was antique forests and mountains, immemorial rivers and low-lying meadows. It was fields ploughed neatly into ribbons, and small knots of buildings. Directly below me was Alsace, the pivot about which everything moved. Eppur si muove. The way it is mapped, according to the logic of contemporary mapmaking - which is, a beak of France-EU poking into Germany-EU: a shelf upon which are piled Luxembourg and Belgium and Holland, as if ready to tumble down - that’s not true to nature. Alsace is not sharp-edged in that way. Not according to the anatomy of the giant. Alsace lies along and above the great Alpine spine. A mighty ridge, curving west-east. And great pads of ground to the north, and north-west and north-east - soft, fertile landscapes through which rivers sine and ease themselves.
I could almost reach out and touch it.
To the south-west was the Midi, where the mountains were baked the colours of brick and biscuit and sand. And then, further south still, mountains became hills, scattered with bushes and then became lowlands, vinefields like diffraction gratings, antique towns that had - until the coming of the NMAs - somehow avoided the fate of the north, of being pounded and milled-up by war, towns still filled with the architecture of the Romans and the Middle Ages. And here, running smoothly along, down the rivers to the sea; the great Mediterranean bay that is the southern French coast, and vast beaches of sand fine and yellow as pollen. In my blindness I could see all that.
Or, directly westward to the Bay of Biscay, Brittany stretching out like the bough of great growth. Sweeping over the farmed lands of central France, and over Paris, where mankind has constructed its elaborate petrification in imitation of these same features: strips of field in stone, curves and straights of river in stone, and the whole thing pinned with a giant Parisian metal spike to keep it in place, like a butterfly upon a board. And in this city were millions of people acting in concert, flowing along the unelastic veins, packing together or breaking apart, each working at a project as a miniature machine: to eat, to drink, to push objects here or there, to disassemble or reassemble, to fuck, to caress the computer keyboard, to organize others, to walk or drive. I saw. And swing west from there over giant fields tickled by slow moving combine harvesters, to the western coastline and the untilled waves beyond, pulling apart and clapping together over the sunken remains of Ys.
And to the north the Manche, where the sea had a different hue and consistency: shivery little waves like dint
s in pewter. Boats drawing comet tails over the water’s surface. An airplane below me, small as a drawing of an airplane, and below that the plane’s shadow. And we’re across, the coastline and cliffs white and irregular like the severed edge of a broken piece of crockery. And then green fields, and towns and villages; and then conic church spires and shoebox naves and chancels; cars cramming the roads; people standing outside their offices to smoke cigarettes - and here is London, as old as any town in the world, the teeth of stone on both sides of the river’s opening jaw. A god, this river, worshipped for millennia. Follow the mouse’s tail of the Thames through smaller towns, and past dreadlocked willows and under arches and threaded through the manacles of river-locks until it vanishes, like a wobbly perspective line, somewhere in the centre of Britain.
Sweep right, and here’s the restless low plateau of the North Sea: admire these oil platforms pinned to its breast like brooches. Here is the dragonhead of Scandinavia reaching down to seize Denmark in its jaws, interrupted in its meal by some geological freeze frame. The Norwegian coast resembles a medical diagram of the womb-wall as it makes itself hospitable to the implantation of an egg. And the blue fluid runs through myriad tubes and into myriad pockets, and lakes and fjords and rivers and ponds. The porous archipelago. Move over it, and look down at a surface furry with woodland.