by Adam Roberts
‘Hello,’ said Jon, as he opened the door. ‘It is Miklós Gyeroffy’s girl, as I live and breathe.’
He took me in, suggested I had a shower. After I had cleaned up he found me some fresh clothes, gave me some food. After I’d finished eating, with him sitting opposite me watching, I told him my whole story, and he sat silently throughout it. In fact he said very little; he only sat and looked at me with a quiet intensity. I was not so jeune that I didn’t know what it meant, and not so innocent that I didn’t think I couldn’t exploit it. But I didn’t think I could simply come out with it and ask, so I said. ‘The psychiatrist - my grandmamma sent me to him - said that happiness was finding your roots in the ground, and not running away from your fears and anxieties. My grandmamma, though, she said that happiness is in making the effort to be happy, for the sake of other people. What do you think it is?’
He sat for a long while, thinking about this: a fifty-five-year-old man taking this teenage girl’s question as seriously as if he were testifying before the House Committee on Terrorist Activities. His head, empty of hair except for two pale beige eyebrows and two rows of filigree eyelashes, was crossed and marked all over by a higgle of creases. These didn’t follow the normal pattern of old people: laughter lines bedded in where the person had been wont to laugh, worry lines huddled in at the brow where the person had been wont to wrinkle their brow, that sort of thing. Jon’s lines went seemingly in defiance of the process of ageing: two deep ones running diagonally across both cheeks like duelling scars, making a great V across his face; lines horizontally and vertically on his brow and head, lines on the back of his neck. He looked, I used to think, like Callisto, his skin like the cracked and refrozen ice-skin of that Jovian moon.
‘Happiness,’ he said eventually, with his soft Missouri accent. ‘Only one place I’ve found that, and it ain’t on this planet.’
‘Take me upland,’ I urged him, grabbing his forearm with my two hands. ‘Eric and Deborah say the police will take me back to Cyprus, and I can’t go back there.’
He thought about this. ‘You could live in my house for a little,’ he said, slowly. ‘Sure. Would you mind it? It’s only a bachelor pad, but it’s bigger than your dad’s place.’
‘Oh yes, oh please, oh please, yes.’
He nodded, and stood up. ‘We’ll go up tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘I’m too tired to pilot tonight.’
‘We can go straight away. I’ll fly,’ I told him, in my eagerness.
He considered this. ‘You only flown your dad’s old Elector, I reckon,’ he said. He meant I had never flown a modified Flight Master, bigger and more powerful, and he couldn’t trust me with it. He was right, of course. Then he said, ‘I was sorry t’hear about your father.’
‘Me too,’ I said, uncertain how to respond to formal expressions of condolence.
I didn’t think I was going to be able to sleep that night, I was so excited, so keyed up with the thought of returning to the uplands. But I must have been more tired than I realised, because I fell asleep as soon as I saw the bed, not even undressing simply flopping onto the mattress, I woke once that night, sometime after three a.m. There was a strange cooing noise, very distant and eerie, audible through the open window-casement. I thought to myself that it was probably one of the ferals, as they were called; domestic dogs and cats adapted by animal rights activists to grow bigger and act more savage and predatory, and then released into the wildernesses. Have they all been culled now? I don’t know. There had been a craze for these things in the mid ’50s, but now they had been mostly rounded up by the authorities as a danger to civilians. But a few still lived out there, I think; and their calls were strange and otherworldly, because although their bodies were hormonally enhanced many of their internal organs, including their voiceboxes, were still original size, giving them a falsetto edge to their calls. I fell asleep to the music of it.
five
The following morning I helped Jon load cargo into his plane and then, as he went through the pre-flight checks, he told me the latest news about Kristin Janzen Kooistra. She was occasionally seen by one uplander or another, he said, but mostly she was a mysterious figure. Presumably she had learned to fly Waspstar, and settled herself into our house - my house, it was now, as my father’s sole heir. But she had changed the transponder, so that the old signal was no longer heard, and had moved the building into a different orbit. Despite the fact that the uplands are all open space it is extremely easy to hide there, hurtling round at thousands of klims an hour, in whatever orbit you choose, from less than a hundred to many hundred klims high. There’s a mass of junk up there: old satellites and systems, new devices, other uplanders’ houses, debris, waste, chunks of ice, all sorts. In a few hundred thousand years, people say, much of it will settle into an equatorial orbit and Earth will have its own ring system, like Saturn, only smaller and more tenuous and made of crap. As it is, it’s all but impossible to scan the sky and be sure of finding what you’re looking for - say the few tens of square metres of metal-tape-wrapped house that used to be my home. I had the frequency of our homing beacon, but of course she’d turned that off. In effect, flicking that switch made her invisible.
‘She comes down to the ground from time to time,’ Jon said, as we strapped ourselves into the cockpit seats.
‘How do you know that?’
‘You don’t follow the news?’ he asked, checking his instruments.
‘Not much,’ I said. I never liked the news; it pretends to be all different, every day, when in fact it is all the same. It’s so eager to generate anxiety and fear in its viewers, to get them hooked on it; but it is the definition of ordinary. The definition of everyday. I avoid it as much as I can.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘security video taped her killing three people in Kuala Lumpur. Hey,’ he added, looking shyly at me. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset you or anything.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It don’t upset me as much as it did.’
‘She killed these three, people don’t know why, money the police say. Then she vanished. Then she flew upland again.’
‘Kuala Lumpur’s a long way from the poles,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘You know Bert Felber?’
I knew him: he owned an especially large upland house, four rooms and a multiple docking port so several planes could nose in at once. He sometimes held parties.
‘Bert traded with her. Says he was scared, says it didn’t really sink in until after she was gone. Somebody called him, asked him if he wanted some water-ice. He said, sure, of course, who wouldn’t. She said she’d fly it over, and barter it for some food, a few knick-knacks. On the phone she said her name was Carter. Big fat blonde woman came through the hatch. Bert had his boyfriend over, Tam, you know Tam Entzminger?’
‘Oh,’ I said, gossipy-fatuous in the midst of this terrible anecdote. ‘Are those two dating now?’
‘Sure, for months now. Which I only mention because Bert reckons if he’d been alone she’d have killed him. But I reckon, no, it wasn’t that. If she’d wanted to kill them both she would have done so. But then who’d trade with her?’
‘You mean people’ll trade with her now?’ I demanded, outraged.
‘Well, naturally. I mean, you’re right, it’s somewhat shocking, but - you know,’ said Jon. But what he meant was, of course they trade with her, trade is what uplanders do.
We flew up from Jon’s Canadian strip and into the huge, forgiving sky. It was a smooth passage up, and as we pulled up into a first orbit the sun came round the curved wall of the Earth, spreading light all over the broad uplands. The light came as a giant and luminous smile that poured through me, that world-spanning U of transcendent shining. I’d forgotten how beautiful sunrise is from space. Cyprus, and needles in my cranium, and cutting my arms with sharp knives, all that fell far beneath me. That life seemed suddenly to belong to somebody else.
Jon’s house was nicer than ours had been. Two rooms, and a separate attachment f
or docking that could act as a man-sized airlock if you wanted, and had the equipment, to space-walk. Jon had even acquired an old NASA EVA-suit, complete with the fishbowl helmet and metal hoops set into the cloth at elbow, shoulder and knee. The Nasty-Suit, I called it. But he said he hardly ever used it: unscrewing a screw took hours in it, he said, because the fingers were fat as cushions, and you could hardly move your limbs; you got overheated quickly because you weren’t rotating, it was worse than useless. ‘I use a waldo,’ he said, ‘for most anything now.’
I lived with Jon in that house for more than a year. We slept in the far room, where the gym equipment was. Exercising in those elasticated pulleys and pedals took up a great deal of our time when we weren’t working. After exercises, we used to work together in the near room, where Jon taught me many useful things about electromagnetics, about repairing machinery, and about medical competence. For the first six months we made repeated trips down and up, collecting the tradeables of the upland world: water, food, jetsticks, new technology.
There was at that time an upland craze for cladding, and panels of lead or compacted asbestos became very widely traded. Money could be made on those products. People were realising that they were spending longer and longer in the radiation-rich atmosphere of the uplands, and more and more people wanted to clad their homes, or at least have one cladded room into which they could retreat in the event of solar storms. Jon mocked the craze; he said most orbits were still inside the Earth’s field, protected, as it were, by the upper branches of the Yggdrasil, and that solar storms were crazy things to worry about. He mocked the craze, but he earned a lot of money supplying it. Of the two determinants of cost in the upland economy, the dead weight of the commodity was by far the more important. Its original price, downside, was of less significance than the fact that somebody had had to lug it up the trunk and branches of the Earth’s polar magnetic tree and put it into orbit. So sometimes Jon by himself, and sometimes the two of us, would fly down, buy up used lead panelling, load it, fly it up, and then sell it to various uplanders at a smart profit. Some customers even paid us to fit it using our waldo. Imagine that! That was laughable to us, you see, because uplanders were above all self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency was the key defining quality of our people. Paying somebody else to do a job you could easily do yourself was a flat insult to that ethos.
And yet, I suppose, for those wealthy enough it was worth shirking the tedious, pernickety chore of manoeuvring the waldo, removing whatever was affixed to the outside of the house, taping panel after panel down, and replacing positional jets or sat-discs. Six months of this and Jon had earned, he told me, more than he had taken in the whole of his life as an uplander before. He mocked these people for buying expensive lead panels, however. ‘Lead’s not the way,’ he told me. ‘Water is better - better because, a)’ (and he ticked the reasons off on his fingers as he spoke) ‘everybody trades it anyway, so it’s cheaper; b) it’s a better insulator against radiation, and c) it’d encourage people to cover their houses in water, instead of cluttering up their insides with hundreds of stupid little bottles of the stuff.’
He followed his own advice, too: he brought up water and poured it out through a special hose in his plane, parked up against the dark side of his house, in the coign where his two rooms made an L shape.
Jon didn’t need to rotate his house, as Father and I had been compelled to do, because his was fitted with an expensive cooling system. That meant that the shady side could store a great mess of water. I pointed out to him that this provided no insulation from solar radiation, and he pooh-poohed. ‘I’ll put another room that side,’ he said, ‘make my mansion Π-shaped, and then that far room’ll be our bolt-hole in the event of a radiation emergency.’ He did this, too; using his money to hire Tam Entzminger’s adapted 777 to fly up another empty accommodation cylinder, and positioning it behind the mass of ice. He and I cut a door between the bedroom and the new room, and sealed it, and decorated the space on the far side.
You’ll have guessed that Jon and I lived as a couple during this time. It was remarked upon in the close-knit community of uplanders. Of the, maybe, 120 people who lived there now, eighty or more were in continual contact with one another. The other forty were, I suppose, too reclusive, too shy, too grumpy, or - like Kooistra - too wary to join the village. They existed on its outskirts, contacting the others only in emergency, or for occasional trade. But amongst the eighty, Jon and I became a fixed feature of gossip. He was old enough to be my grandfather, they said. The shock of my own father’s death had unbalanced me, they said. I know they said these things because they told Jon so when he was alone with one or more of them - ‘You understand,’ they told him, ‘we’re concerned for the kid, she’s only a kid after all. We gotta to look out for her - we gotta to look out for one another. Make sure she’s not being exploited.’ Jon would come home in agonies of remorse and repeat all these comments to me verbatim, begging for reassurance that he wasn’t exploiting me. I cradled him and stroked his head and told him it was all alright. I told him - which was the truth - that they didn’t know the way our relationship worked, that I was much more the mother to him than he was the father to me. That was the truth.
Was that the truth? Oh, I think so.
To be honest, I didn’t think much about it at that time. It was just the way my life had arranged itself. We cohabited easily, because neither of us was an overly emotionally demanding individual. We did not require constant attention or endorsement or validation from the other party, which is, as I later discovered, often the logic of adult relationships. Also, both of us were interested and involved in the practical, the day-to-day problems of maintaining a house in the uplands. That aspect of our relationship was the easiest part. Sex was the most difficult. It was not frequent, and when it happened it was, whilst not unpleasant in the moment, always awkward afterwards. Now I tend to think, looking back, that Jon felt guilty doing it with so young a girl. He desired me, that was plain; but he hated himself for desiring me, and I suppose he half believed the opinions of the others, that he was taking advantage of me. I told him he wasn’t. I didn’t mind. For me, sex has never been too big a deal. I have a theory and here it is: sex runs according to a generational sine wave. For one generation it is a terribly important thing, the most profound connection, something that must be regulated and controlled with countless codes and rules and restrictions because, unconsciously, people believe that unregulated it is so powerful that it would tear society apart. Then for another generation it is simply no big deal, just one of the many things bodies do, more or less pleasurable depending on how skilfully performed, but otherwise not any more significant than the other bodily functions and appetites, eating and shitting, drinking and pissing, scratching yourself, stretching, luxuriating like a cat. And so on. Jon and I straddled that generational gap. He thought, for instance, that I must be a virgin, at seventeen, and was so shocked by my laughter and my blasé account of my previous sexual connections that I had to stop talking about them to avoid upsetting him. He apologised if I so much as winced during the act; he was a cautious, attentive, rather dull lover. Here’s another thing: whilst I loved living in the uplands, I never much enjoyed zero-g sex. The positioning can be fun, but good sex needs a degree of purchase, something to push against, something to make you feel the pressure, the force, the weight of the other party. In zero g you tend to bungee around the room, sometimes banging your head or your shin, rarely getting a good run at it. Or else you strap yourself side by side, and then you’re much more restricted than you’d be on the ground. Another turn off: after sex Jon would sometimes cry. I don’t know why he did that.
Sometimes he’d say, ‘I love you, Klara,’ and I would never know how to reply. Sometimes I would reply: ‘That’s great’, or ‘That means a lot to me’. Sometimes I wouldn’t say anything. Then we’d fall back into our more comfortable non-erotic rhythms, cooking, exercising, mending, making, trading. We made four consecutive trips down a
nd up for Åsa Olsen, each time bringing up nothing but water that we collected from the pump on Jon’s land. Åsa was accumulating an enormous supply of uplander water, wisely. He paid us well for that.
‘I guess,’ Jon would say, as if to console himself, ‘that sometimes the oddest folk end up together as a couple. I guess that’s just the way life is.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘This is life,’ I said. That was the difference between us. His phrase, that’s the way life is, was, as it were, the statement of somebody standing outside life, observing it with a degree of dispassion and disengagement. My phrase, this is life, was spoken from the heart of it. Perhaps all I’m saying is that a man nearing sixty does not live life in the pulse and in the gut the way a teenager does.
An uplander called Billy Season had a structural failure and an explosive decompression in his house, and was dragged suddenly the whole length of the room, catching his leg on his comm equipment as he went and cutting it very deeply. He fixed the hole in a daze caused by lack of blood, working through a sticky red mist that filled the room. He could barely bandage himself. He called a neighbour two days later, but by the time he’d gotten himself transported down to a hospital on the ground his wound was infected, and doctors amputated. I heard this story first from Teruo Nakagomi, and when I told it to Jon he shook his head, and said, ‘That’s terrible. But you shouldn’t have sharp objects fixed to the walls of your house - there are too many jolts and jars up here liable to smack you against them. Oh, that’s terrible, Billy lost a leg. But I guess that’s the way life is.’