by Adam Roberts
‘I see,’ she said.
Later I plugged in the microwave and we ate some hot food together, and drank some water. She spilled a fair bit, but all the crumbs made their gradual way to the corners as the house slowly turned. ‘I had no idea,’ she confided in me. ‘I mean, I heard of the uplands of course, on news shows and such. But it’s quite another thing to actually come up here. I really had no idea how - liberating a feeling it is.’
‘I like it,’ I told her, ingenuous. ‘Yeah, it’s free. It’s a free land. Give me liberty or give me death.’
‘No police,’ she said, musingly.
‘None of that. No government, no taxes.’
‘Except that you have to return to the Earth from time to time. For supplies.’
‘We do,’ I said. ‘But a friend of ours called Olsen, Åsa Olsen he’s called, he lives up here all the time, don’t ever go down. His house is on a similar orbit to ours, and he just pays people to bring his food up. Pharmaceuticals, I think. I mean, that’s how he made his money. HIV medicines, Dad says. But he always was a space nut, so he lives in a big house in the uplands and people make money bringing him food and things. He’s got enough money to just live up here all the time, you see.’
‘Really,’ said Kooistra, excessively interested. ‘Have you seen his house?’
‘Last month Dad and I brought him up some water, some scrubbers for his air, some hams. His house is five times our size - it’s got different rooms, and everything. Heating and cooling. A gym. Very nice. He gave us tea. He said he was getting another room flown up in the autumn.’
‘He must be wealthy.’
‘Oh - loaded, yeah.’
‘Doesn’t he get lonely?’
I shrugged. ‘He’s in touch with everybody by radio and webline and such. He gets visitors from time to time. He likes his own companionship, Dad says, or he wouldn’t have moved here in the first place.’
We finished our meal. After a long pause, Kooistra asked me, with a sly tone, ‘Aren’t you curious why I’m here?’
‘Dad told me,’ I said carefully, ‘not to pry. You’re a customer, you see. In Europe they say the customer is always right.’
‘In America,’ Kooistra said, ‘we say the customer might have a gun. It amounts to the same thing. Well, you can guess that I’m in trouble with some governments.’
I shrugged again. Shrugging in zero g is a different experience from shrugging on the ground. It shuffles the whole body. If your shrug is lopsided (not something you usually think about on Earth, but space is different) it’ll even rotate you a little.
‘There’s no need,’ she said, smiling and showing her enormous twin rows of perfect teeth, ‘for us to be coy with one another. I’m your guest. We can be friends. I’ll be frank with you: I’m what the European government calls a political undesirable, and the American government calls a defined person within the counterterrorism act. I’d more or less run out of countries on Earth in which I could safely have stayed. But up here, they can’t get at me. Up here I’m untouchable. Aren’t I!’
I stared at her. I’d seen enough action films to have preconceptions about what terrorists looked like, and they didn’t look like her. They looked like slim men with sideburns and expensive plastic suits of black or purple. They were bald or had dyn-stripes. They wore shades and moved with drug-enhanced rapidity. They said things like the best place to crack the ribs of the state and get at its heart - is from within, hah! hah! hah! They certainly didn’t look like a one-eighty-kilo white woman with a massy tangleknot of blonde hair on her head and creases all over her body as if she had originally been an even larger balloon woman who had been partially deflated. She didn’t look the part at all. But I kept my cool.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘It’s alright,’ she said, turning from me again to watch as the Earth - majestically rotating in our window now, as if we were looking into a cosmos-sized clothes drier and the globe were being slowly tossed - came between us and the sun. ‘I’ll be no inconvenience to you. I’ll stay a few months, until the police who are looking for me are properly confused, and then I’ll go down again. No more than a few months. Three months at the most. But I’ll tell you this, my dear. I’m seriously thinking of buying a house up here myself.’ The sun went behind the Earth, and it darkened abruptly inside the house. I lit up a bulb. ‘How beautiful it is,’ she said, still facing the window. ‘I could watch it for days!’
Perhaps I should have taken her more seriously when she said she wanted to move to the uplands. You’re thinking that, now, as you read this, because you can view the scene with the benefit of hindsight. But I naturally didn’t see it that way. I was tired after a long day, so I said to her: ‘There’s a thing about sleeping.’
‘A thing?’
‘Yeah - when you go to sleep you need to make sure your own breathing-out-gas (I knew this was CO2 but in my teenage arrogance I wasn’t sure she would know) doesn’t pool around your head. Here, you need to wear one of these sleeping tubes, like this - you wrap the elastic bladder around your chest and fix the tube’s end on your cheek with its sticker, then when you breathe in the bellows action will puff spurts of air over your mouth. It’s enough to stop the build-up.’
‘Why, thank you, my dear.’
‘Everyone wears them up here,’ I explained. ‘When they sleep.’ I unrolled a sleep-bag; it was warm in our house and the sleep-bags were made of silk. I fixed it to the Velcro patches on the wall, put my elasticised eye-muff on (the sunlight would wake me otherwise), climbed in and went to sleep. I woke a few hours later, because our spin had slowed down, the loose baggage knocking against the walls probably, and we were getting too hot; so I sponged myself with cool water and took a long drink and gave us a little more spin and tried to get back to sleep. Kooistra was snoring in her sack, her arms and her breasts - (she was naked) - hanging over the lip of the material and floating in front of her, so she looked like a stationary sleepwalker. Or like Frankenstein’s monster. But, when I say so, maybe my own hindsight is colouring my impression of her.
In the morning I upped the air pressure inside from a cylinder and checked the scrubber. I didn’t really need to do this, after only one night, but I wanted to show Kooistra how it was done. The new air cooled us a little. The two of us had breakfast and made more smalltalk. Soon Father came on the radio, letting us know that he’d cleared the auroral zone and would soon be with us. I pumped the lock and opened the outer hatch so he could fit the nose in. Then we waited for his arrival.
About an hour after this, the whole house shook as violently as if we were experiencing an earthquake (spacequake, I should say). Both Kooistra and I were flung lengthways and smacked into the bales of supplies that were stacked loosely at that end. There was the loudest noise, as if the whole house were breaking in two and we were being spilled into space. This was the Waspstar hitting the docking hole. There were more cracks and bangs, and soon enough there was a little breeze, a taste and smell of different air, and after a few moments father came floating through.
I don’t want to dwell on the recollection of this time, because it still hurts, so I’ll hurry along a little. We stayed, all three of us, in the house for another day. Then father flew me back home, to Canada. There was little point in me staying in the house up there, consuming supplies, breathing out carbon dioxide, getting in the way. Besides I was taking a university course (distance learning) in web topography and geography, and some term papers were due. I’d pestered my father to help me gain a little more education, seeing as how my schooling had been so heavily interrupted up to that moment. This particular college course had been my idea. I mention this, I suppose, to explain why I stayed downside, when my father flew back to the upland with more supplies and some trading cargo he hoped to sell to some of his neighbours and make money. He could have stayed on the ground with me, I suppose: there was no pressing need for him to go back up to the house. Kooistra was settled in alright. But he loved flying up and down;
loved doing little trades with upland neighbours. He felt good doing it. He felt free. So he went.
I spoke to him that night; a brief and crackly five minutes conversation on the radio phone, curtailed by him passing over the horizon. We didn’t say anything very much. I didn’t say ‘I love you, Dad’. I was sixteen, and that wasn’t the kind of thing you say when you’re that age. Anyway, I was going to see him in only a few days.
For several years afterwards I used to have a recurring dream about that conversation. Presumably my subconscious was trying to rerun my life, to make things better. To make it work out all right. I had the conversation again and said different things. But the odd thing is what I didn’t say, in this dream-I didn’t say ‘I love you, Dad’, or ‘Quick, get in the Waspstar and fly home!’ or anything like that. Instead I said ‘I’ve got to play the violin in front of the whole school later, Dad.’ And he said, ‘You can’t light a candle up here, but you can play the violin all you like. Light doesn’t propagate the way sound propagates’.
A strange dream.
The next day I tagged my term papers and emailed them to the tutor. It was about internet geography - tree-locations, and web-leaves - old-fashioned terms, now, to today’s youth, I have no doubt: but that was where the subject was in 2060. Then I radioed the house, because I knew it would be in the sky over Canada. The radiophone buzzed and buzzed, and that was odd - strange that he didn’t pick up the phone straight away. There was no way out of the house, except by the Waspstar. You couldn’t pop out into the garden; you couldn’t go to the east wing and not hear the phone. It was right there, beside you, all the time. I wondered if Dad had flown away from the house for some reason, and if Kooistra, feeling herself a stranger and a guest, was reticent about answering the call. After a little while the receiver was picked up and I heard a woman’s voice say ‘yes?’
‘Hi, Kristin,’ I said. ‘It’s Klara.’
Without pause she replied: ‘How lovely to hear your voice again, Klara. I wanted to say how much I enjoyed our little time together. It was like a slumber party. The two Ks, yes?’ Her voice was perfectly warm, perfectly natural-sounding.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Great. Could I speak to my dad?’
‘Oh, I’m afraid he can’t come to the phone.’
‘What you say?’
‘There’s been an accident, I’m afraid.’
I coughed with surprise. ‘What? Is he hurt?’
‘Oh, yes, I’m afraid so. In fact, it’s worse than that.’
‘Are you joking? Are you making a joke? This isn’t a very funny joke.’
‘It’s no joke, I’m afraid,’ she said in her fruity, thrumming voice. ‘I’m terribly sorry, of course. You know, I’m not sure I can pilot the plane without him. Is it a plane? Is that what uplanders would call it? Or is it a spaceship?’
‘What? What? Tell me what happened. What’s happened? Put my dad on. I want to speak to my dad.’
‘Oh, he can’t speak, I’m afraid. He’s dead. It’s a shame. But accidents will sometimes happen, even in the best regulated homes.’
‘Let me speak to him!’ I was crying, suddenly, with the shock and the fear of it.
‘My dear,’ she said, her voice never varying its balanced, melodious tone. ‘I’m not sure you’ve been listening to me. He’s dead, as I explained.’
‘Did you hurt him?’ I said. ‘Put him on the phone, you fuck.’ My voice was high-pitched and unsteady. ‘What did you do to him?’ I was almost shrieking. You can imagine what I was like.
‘It’s unfortunate, I know,’ she said. ‘But everybody dies, you know, eventually. Oh, did you think he’d live forever because he was your father? Is there a manual or something?’
‘What?’
‘A manual - for the plane, you see. I have flown a plane before of course, but never,’ and she laughed a little self-deprecating laugh, ‘in space you know.’
I put the phone down. My head was burning. I couldn’t believe it. I walked round and round in a tight circle. I couldn’t believe it. I phoned again, thinking ‘This time Dad will answer the phone’, but once again I got Kooistra. ‘Hello again, my dear,’ she said warmly.
I howled.
I didn’t know what to do. I called some friends, an elderly couple called Eric and Deborah de Maré who lived half an hour away. Eric had been an upland-traveller, flying up a few times, although he never built a house there; but then he’d had a cancer in his sinus and the treatment had left his head too sensitive to pressurisation and depressurisation to allow flight. I called their house in tears, and they drove straight over and comforted me. At first they didn’t believe it. They called the police for me, and a squad car came over, and a policeman took a statement, two policewomen tried to comfort me. They gave me sedatives and I slept eighteen hours. When I woke a different set of policepeople were in the house. They wore the dark blue uniforms of UP. ‘Tell us everything,’ they said. ‘From the start.’
I repeated everything.
They seemed surprised that Kooistra had given us her real name. ‘That was bold of her,’ they said. ‘Usually she uses a false name. Didn’t you recognise her name?’
I told them that neither of us had recognised her name.
‘I guess you don’t follow the news too close,’ one of them said.
One of the UP officers said to me: ‘You shouldn’t worry that he suffered.’ By he he meant my dad. ‘She usually kills quickly, cleanly. She doesn’t make her victims linger.’ I think he believed it would make me feel better to hear this.
It didn’t make me feel better.
Later, maybe a month or so later, another UP officer during another interview told me how lucky I was, to have spent a whole night in a small room with Kooistra and to have lived to tell the tale. ‘I wonder why she didn’t kill you?’ this one mused, aloud. ‘Maybe it was because your father hadn’t brought up the shuttle, so she was worried she would have been stranded. But he would surely have come up anyway, even without hearing your voice on the radio?’
They asked me how she had come to contact us. I told them, again, that the billionaire Spontini had given her our name. She’d called us, she’d told us that Spontini had recommended us, that she needed a little help, somewhere to lie low for a while. ‘Spontini,’ they said, knowingly. ‘He doesn’t come down from orbit any longer. He’s got plenty of contacts in the world of crime and terrorism.’ I thought of saying he’s our friend, because he was. But, after several weeks of close contact with them my sense of hostility to the police was a continually growing thing, and I was behaving in an increasingly uncooperative manner. At one point I threw a tantrum. It wasn’t exactly play-acting, because I genuinely was upset: but it was partly a set-piece because I was bored and wanted to rattle them and wanted an excuse to get out. I screamed, ‘My dad’s dead, and you don’t care a bit, I hate you all, I hate you all,’ and I ran out of the house.
The irony was this: Dad loved the uplands because they were free from the police interference and harassment that had plagued his earlier life. He believed in individual liberty, he disbelieved in organised government. I believed the same things; but there were fewer and fewer places on our overregulated planet where it was possible to live as a free human being. He was drawn to the possibilities of the uplands for that reason. But, now that he had been killed, the police disclaimed all capability to help. They couldn’t apprehend the killer unless she came down again, and more or less presented herself to the authorities. ‘Our squad cars don’t fly that high,’ they told me, as if it were a joking matter. They were worse than useless.
four
Let me tell you a little about my father, Miklós Gyeroffy. He was born in Hungary-EU. But he had come to Cyprus as a young man when he was travelling around the world in his restless way. There he had fallen in love with a Cypriot woman, and had married her in the teeth of her family’s disapproval. I was born six months after that wedding, in May 2043. In ’46 Dad wanted to move to Scotland, but my mother’s
family would not permit her, or me, to accompany him. He flew planes he’d built with whatever money he could accumulate, but there was never enough money, and my mother’s family hoped, I think, that he would crash and die, and then Mother could fast-forward through a decent period of black-clad mourning and marry a nice Cypriot man. But he did not die, and when he was offered a job as a satellite consultant in Aberdeen, my mother did not go with him. So he gave up that job, and stayed in Cyprus, poor. Late in 2046 my mother died of what my family call ‘an infection’, but which may have been a hangover from terrorist bio-weaponry of the ’20s, one of those phage-plague things. It was sad that she died, but, of course, I was only three and not much affected. I do not remember my mother. I do, however, remember my father arguing with my Cypriot relatives, a few years later. I remember a court case when I was seven (or thereabouts; I think I was seven), a case about custody, in which a Cypriot court awarded me to my maternal grandmother, and her multitudinous relatives and allies. So I had to go and live with them. Instead of calling me Klara, which had been my name all my life, they called me Kassandra. My grandmother wanted to call me Eleni, after herself, but I was registered in school as K. Gyeroffy. My violin (I used to play the violin in the school orchestra) had ‘K. Gyeroffy’ written into the varnish with a heat pen. I had labels holo’d into my clothes that said ‘K. Gyeroffy’. So, rather than go to the bother of changing all that sort of thing they kept my initial. But they changed my name. Grown-ups understand the importance of names.