Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  My dad went to Finland to work and I did not see him for four years, although he emailed me frequently. After that, from time to time, as I grew up, he would come visit, and my grandmother would tolerate him: but he would stay in a hotel, never in the guest room; and he would take me out for a meal to a place with plastic seats and plastic tables. He was never invited to join the family at their evening meal at home. As I got older and had all the fantasies that children have, my father became a talismanic figure to me. I did not resent the fact that he was away so much, but I loved the weekends when he came to stay. It’s funny how perfect he was in my secret imagination-I say funny because my Cypriot family did their best to poison me against him, telling me how terribly he had acted towards my mother, how you could never trust a foreigner and such stories. It puzzles me, in fact, that they failed to persuade me. They were persistent and eloquent, and sometimes I found myself half-believing what they said. But some inner part of me held back; and that inner space opened fractally before my closed eyes, and there was my father swooping and flying on wings of chrome through the blue-painted immensities.

  My father came back to Cyprus for my eleventh birthday, and the day after the birthday he took me out for a drive in a hire-car. He drove me right across the island, from Greek-EU into Turk-EU. In the car he said ‘Klara, you are my daughter and I love you. You are my whole life. Will you come with me?’

  Understand this: I had not been unhappy with my Grandmother Eleni. Life had been ordinary, and ordinariness is what a ten-year-old most craves, even if she does not realise it. But I was tugged by the gravitational pull of my father’s love. He moved in his orbit about Europe, finding work where he could, and he drew me after him, I moved in an orbit about him. He was the most important being in the world to me. I said, ‘Of course, Dad.’

  We flew from Cyprus to Ankara, and then to Roma, where we lived some months; then to Bristol in England-EU for a year, then to Lille in France-EU for six months. Then we left the Union and moved to Reykjavik, where we lived two years or so. We only left in ’57 because Iceland signed a new accord with the EU granting more extensive co-legal access, and that brought Father under the same legal jurisdiction as the Cypriot judge who had awarded me to my Greek family. So we moved on again, in ’57, to the Canadian Republic.

  I loved Canada. There was a large community of uplanders living there - twenty, or more - flying from the northern counties, from airstrips at high latitudes, up through the magnetosphere and into a North-Pole-inset orbit. The only ground-based orbital community of comparable size lived in Tierra del Fuego and flew from a privately maintained base on the Antarctic coast. What you must understand is that these people were all amateurs: men of moderate or comfortable means who had grown up watching SF screenshows and reading SF stories, men who were in love with the idea of flying in space. A particular friend of ours, an American called Jon Snider who was living in Canada at that time, pursuing his space flight hobby, told me: ‘I applied to join NASA, you know. I wanted to be an astronaut ever since I was a kid. Couple of decades ago I thought, “I’ll be like John Glenn, I’ll be like Piper Harrows, I’ll join the government agency”. They strung me along, strung me along, until eventually they owned up. “Hey it’s really really unlikely you’ll get any flight time.” Hah! They barely send up any people these days. They’re too busy trying to make a profit selling launch opportunities and fine-tuning comsats. You know for how much money the EU government sold the latest mobile netlink rights? Bandwiths were going for a billion euros, minimum. Thirty billion euros for the whole bag! That much! I’ll tell you,’ (he was getting quite heated now, his bald head blushing damson from cheeks to crown), ‘I’ll tell you, they’ll make that money back from consumers in two years. That’s just from EU consumers, never mind the rest of the world - spending so much on mobile netlink that companies can clear more than thirty billion in profit, in profit alone, over two years. Think of the gross! So you tell me - is that the best way of spending humanity’s money, webbing friends, playing games on the bus? A fraction of a single per cent of that money, we could have bases on Mars in five years. Destiny - possibility - glorious - but, no, we’ll keep frittering our money on games, on cosmetics, on flim-flam, and we’ll turn round in five hundred years and still be right here where we are now.’

  As you can see, Jon was very much like my father. Most of the original generation of uplanders, including my father, and including Jon, shared certain traits: they revelled in their technical competence and curiosity, independence - sometimes to an antisocial degree - and in a kind of restlessness, a refusal to simply take what fate had given them. Gather together three or four uplanders in a room drinking whisky, and the conversation would be about sixty per cent technical discussion of the practical problems of space flight (swapping stories and ideas, passing on corner-cuts and good practice, cackling over the incompetence of some third party), and forty per cent rants about the stupidity of the world, similar to the speech I have just put into Jon’s mouth.

  I don’t want to give the impression that my father and these others had a grand plan for the colonisation of the solar system. They didn’t. Not at all. They were really only interested in getting themselves into space; theirs was a fundamentally selfish dream. But their DIY culture was in part created by a sense of the futility of state-sponsored space flight. ‘DIY’ was a one-syllable word in their patois, ‘die-y’. You may remember this: in 2055 EUSA put together a solar probe, with complex and weighty magnetic shielding to enable it to penetrate a fair distance into the Sun’s penumbra. They paid a South African company to launch it, on a rocket (of course), and fired it towards the Sun. It stopped transmitting data two days into the mission. It was barely out of Earth orbit. Nobody knew what had gone wrong; some malfunction, screw-up, random accident, impossible to be sure. But the whole enterprise was a dead loss. The EU news media roasted their own agency for this: money thrown into a black hole, they said. The cost of the mission was 45 million euros, and it was indeed wholly wasted. But, worse than that, EUSA suffered permanent harm: their funding was cut, their mission schedule reduced, their chief executive sacked. The same year Cosmos II: The Void was produced, starring Jenny Open and Pablo Stilmandole. It cost 90 million euros, an average budget for an A-league movie in those days. It earned back five million. It wasn’t even the biggest flop of the season. The studio shrugged their shoulders, and went on to commit a budget twice the size for Swimming in the Mainstream the following year, which also flopped. As my father said at the time: ‘it’s like a punch in the face, the stupidity, the aggressive stupidity of it all.’ Think what the space programme could do with a fraction of the money spent on media entertainment - on teenage cosmetics, narcotics and communication - on clothes that are designed to melt off the body after one wearing - on specialist food. Billions and billions wasted every year on these pointless nothings. A fraction of this money would give humanity a genuine future.

  I hear myself. It’s arresting: I sound exactly like my dad.

  When my father died I was sixteen years of age, two years beneath legal majority for EU and therefore two years shy of Canadian legal jurisdiction. I applied to stay with Eric and Deborah de Maré, who were kind enough to agree to take me on - solidarity between uplanders, I suppose. They were good people. In fact, I did live with them for nearly two months, until a Canadian court ruled (Eric and Deborah and I were present virtually) that I must return to my mother’s family in Cyprus, and so I had no choice, I went back. I hated it. I was placed back in a Cypriot school, two years below my ability level because I had not been following the official syllabus. I had to share a room with the Somali maid my grandmother had hired to help her around the house, although there was a spare room in the house (‘we must keep that for guests’, grandmother said). I had no friends, and the family were chilly with me because I had, in their eyes, deserted them to follow my father. There was no sympathy expressed by my Cypriot relatives for his death. As far as they were concerned it
was, as they say in England, a ‘good riddance’. I was miserable. I stayed nine months, and took to cutting my arms with a sharp knife. I can no longer remember why I did this, except that it proceeded from a deep and nebulously suicidal sense of misery and self-hatred. I used to curl up under the duvet and score red lines into the skin of my forearms, not minding the pain, in fact darkly welcoming the hurt of it. Then I would wrap my wounded arm in loop after loop of tissue paper and try to go to sleep. Sometimes when I woke the mattress would be sticky and wet beneath me with my own blood. I failed the year’s school classes and was re-entered the same year. I had visions of repeating the same miserable cycle in my life forever, of being stuck and trammelled. I was possessed by the hopelessness of it. I wept for my father every day. Sometimes I would lie in my bed weeping and, simultaneously, I would think how astonishing it was that a person could be so profoundly unhappy and not simply expire of the sensation. It was unhappiness as acute as the pain of a newly broken bone, as consuming as influenza, a grey and utterly devouring affliction.

  My grandmother soon became alarmed at the scars on my arms, and took me to an expensive clinic where they fitted drug-release sacs into my scalp. This eased the acuteness of the mental distress, but did nothing to relieve the blankly oppressive underlying pressure. I moped. ‘Cheer up!’ my grandmother exhorted me. ‘It won’t come easily, but you must work at it - you must make the strenuous effort to be cheerful. You think happiness comes to people like the leaves to the trees? It doesn’t - it’s work, not nature. You say I’m unhappy, and what I hear is: I’m too lazy to cheer up. Don’t do it for your own sake, but for other people.’ But I did not cheer up. Perhaps it was indeed a sort of emotional idleness, as she said; sinking into the quicksand rather than trying to pull myself out, but there was no fight left in me, no fight of that sort at any rate. I shaved my head, which was the fashion in those times, and fitted plastic carbuncles into the skin to mimic plague symptoms. Many teenagers across Europe were doing this sort of thing, listening to atonal thrash music, wearing clothes made of black strips that sagged to reveal more than they concealed. I didn’t like the music, but then liking wasn’t really the point. I hung out in bars downtown with scary teenagers. My grandmother despaired. ‘I despair,’ she said. On a few occasions she hit me, slapping me on the face or across the back of my legs, but this had no incentivising effect upon me. It was only a small pain, and a larger humiliation, and I believed at that time that pain and humiliation were my proper due. I pulled the drugsacs from my head, breaking the skin of my scalp to get at them. I took to smoking a tobacco pipe, as was the fashion for women at that time, and sometimes I would dip my fingers’ ends into the glowing bowl of the pipe and burn the skin. My fingers’ ends acquired thimbles of scar tissue.

  Grandmama, yielding to advice from other branches of the family, paid for me to attend a psychotherapist. This was a last resort for her. She didn’t believe in the practice, because (as she put it) psychiatry had been so thoroughly exploded as a medical science, exposed as mumbo-jumbo. But what else could she do? There were still small groups of believers, cadres of Freud-enthusiasts (or is it spelled ‘Frued’?), and there was a practitioner in our town. So I sat through a dozen sessions with a stocky, craw-bearded man in a blue hoop-suit who dipped his head, as if in respect, every time I spoke. Some of his questions were fatuous: ‘why do you cut your arms with a razor? Why do you burn your fingers?’ Others were more thought-provoking. He had a theory, something I came to understand over several sessions, that I had suffered a psychic trauma because, in effect, my ‘mother’ had killed my father. Of course, Kooistra was nothing at all like my mother: home video showed a small, precise, dark-faced, black-haired woman with a clear laugh like a door-chime. Kooistra, in contrast, was an enormous tent of a woman with snow-pale skin and yellow hair like a tangle of cloth offcuts. But this did not deter the psychotherapist. He said: ‘Of course, you must have recognised her name when she first introduced herself to you - she used her own name, after all.’ I said: ‘But we didn’t recognise the name.’ He refused to believe this. His theory was that I must have recognised the name of one of the world’s most famous serial killers, but that I had repressed this information in my subconscious, and that this was now making me feel responsible for my father’s death. I don’t think it had, until this moment, occurred to me that I ought to feel responsible for his death, but once the psychotherapist had put the idea in my head, of course I started to believe it. ‘It’s natural,’ he murmured, ‘for a daughter to feel both love and murderous hostility towards her father. You resented him for taking you away from your Cypriot family, and dragging you all over Europe, for disrupting your life, for flying you up into space when all you wanted was to keep your feet on the ground.’ This, I now believe, was almost exactly the opposite of the truth, but then, seventeen years old, crying, picking at my skin with dirty nails, slouched in the therapist’s chair, I half-believed it.

  He said: ‘Once you acknowledge your sense of responsibility, your aggression towards your father, your sense of complicity with the woman, Kooistra, then you will start to feel better.’ I made this acknowledgment, or I tried to. Genuinely I did. But I didn’t feel better. I was aware of no sense of complicity with Kooistra. I fantasised about spiking her onto the metal spire that was on top of the school tower, impaling her, of running her through the heart until she spat out her own blood from her mouth like vomit. I didn’t tell the psychiatrist this violent fantasy. I assumed he would misinterpret it.

  One day my psychiatrist made this little speech: ‘The essence of good mental health,’ he said, ‘is to be found in a grounded existence. Too many people seek constantly to escape their unhappiness by running away, by flying away, but no matter how rapidly you fly you will not escape your unhappiness, because it is carried inside you, inside your head. Instead of the pathological urge for escape, instead of the restless compulsion to travel, you must root yourself in one spot. You must confront your demons, purge your subconscious conflicts, and centre yourself.’ So many theories of happiness! As I look back, after a long life, this theory seems to me to possess less merit than my grandmother’s theory. But I thought about it a great deal at that time.

  I thought about it. I lay in my bed that night, with the maid snoring in the other bed, and I thought about it. I thought about flight, and about stasis. I thought about escape, and acceptance. I shut my eyes and imagined the video image of one of those great rockets from the 1970s, hurling out millions of kilos of thrust from its tail and rising into space. You know the image? It’s kind of a famous one. It seemed to me, as I thought of it, that it was not so much that this building-sized rocket was rising, but rather that it was the still point of the world of flux, that the cosmos was moving around it. As if the power of the rocket was forcing the universe out of shape around it. Then I thought of Waspstar, floating up like a leaf in an electronic hurricane, and it seemed to me a more natural mode of travel altogether. A more natural mode of travel.

  I got out of my bed then and there. I dressed without waking the maid, stole some money from my grandmother’s chip, and left the house carrying a loaf of bread and some cheese. I walked five miles to the station, hired a cab to take me to the airport, and flew to Italy-EU. From there I used the de Marés’ family name, address and co-don card (I’d memorised the number when I’d lived with them) to borrow money for a flight to Canada. I justified this to myself by telling them that I’d pay them back when I got to Canada. I’d get a job or something and pay them back. I lied to the airport staff, telling them I was nineteen. I was going to say ‘eighteen’, but then I thought to myself that a bigger lie is a more believable lie, provided only that you don’t go too far.

  The de Marés were kind, and, frankly (it seems to me now) they deserved better than the angry, graceless teenager who descended upon them. They explained, patiently, several times, that they couldn’t take me in: that the police would simply return me to Cyprus. There was nothing they could do
. I cried, howled, shouted at them, called them appalling things, but they were quietly adamant. So I calmed myself, and went to see Jon Snider. He lived sixty klims away, and to get to him I took the de Marés’ energCar, without asking their permission, and without ever returning it. So selfish! I look back on my seventeen-year-old self and I think: she is another person to me, a stranger. Am I really connected to her? A mere chance of timelines. But there was an animal drive for self-preservation, a strength of will, in me then.

  The energCar only ran on state highways, and Snider - like most of the uplanders - lived away by himself in the wilderness, with his own runway and his own adapted farmhouse. I left the Car sitting in a two-hour-maximum siding and hiked across country. When I reached his house, I must have been a sight: mud and dead leaves glued to my shoes and calves, wearing one of Eric de Maré’s too-large overcoats, my head covered only with a layer of black fuzz where the baldness had grown out a little, the petite constellation of scars from my old treatment still visible through the suede of it.