Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  I said, ‘Yeah, this is life.’ I knew what it was to be pushed by forces too strong to resist such that my body scratched itself along sharp objects - knives, say. I knew what Billy experienced. Jon only observed it from a distance. I’m not saying that he was a cold man, not a distant man, I’m not saying that exactly. But - well, put it this way: he was a little further away, as it were, than many men I have known in my life.

  Still, we settled into a comfortable period of upland living in which I was, I am tempted to insist, happy. I had left my misery behind. I was up. I was living where my father’s spirit still spun, soaring round and about the globe in forty minutes and trailing photons and invisible radiation. We went about the day-to-day business of living in an upland house. We exercised a great deal in stretch and push devices, to stop our limbs from whittling away like polio victims. We maintained the house. We flew the plane down and brought it back up again, coasting on the broad leaves of the polar World Tree. We stared out of the window at the world turning below us. If you stare long enough at the image of the world you begin to see fractally, and greater and greater depth of detail starts to uncurl in your field of vision. Clouds like crumbs, details of glimpsed land masses like jewellery worked tightly into fretwork and checkerboard fields. Little brooch-like cities, pewter-and-lead coloured, like scabs on the buff. The improbable smoothness of the oceans from which reflected sunlight would smear into brightness.

  Six months of happiness. My future was as open as the view from our upland window. Life circled on its orbital rhythms.

  During that time I had a number of conversations with Giangiacomo Spontini. When he first heard I had moved up to live with Jon he called, and asked to speak with me. These were the first words I exchanged with him since my father’s death. He said: ‘Klara, Klara, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I feel responsible.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said, and although the sentiment was nonchalant my throat was tight and there were unshed tears at my eyes.

  ‘I never knew her, I never met her, I’m so sorry,’ he said. He spoke English and Greek with me, interchangeably, and with a bad accent in each. ‘A business acquaintance recommended her to me, and I passed on your father’s details. She used a false name with me, I never knew who she was. Can you forgive me? Can you forgive me?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘I have cut my business acquaintance, he should have known better. I’ll help you find her - you must have revenge upon her, it is truly terrible, truly terrible.’

  ‘Goodbye, Sponti,’ I said, because now I was crying, and I hated to cry.

  After this time, Sponti and I had other conversations that were not so fraught. He gave a party one Christmas and had five separate planes, not counting his own, docked at his mansion. We ate fine food and drank wine and schnapps and played poker and sang songs, all of us as close and hot as badgers in a sett, and I cried again, but happier tears this time. ‘I’m sorry,’ Spontini said, ‘with my crazy talk of revenge and all, only it’s the way in my tradition, you see. But don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to me! Only, I loved your father, he was beautiful man, I loved him so.’

  ‘I swear revenge,’ I said, my brain thrumming with alcohol and the stimulation of company. ‘I will listen to you, Sponti. I’ll find her and kill her if it takes me all my life.’

  There were twelve in the party, I remember, and all of them cheered and clapped at this. Uplanders love a violent oath, a promise; it appeals to the romantic dimension of their souls. But I knew that nothing would come of this. It’s easy to talk of melodramatic quests for vengeance when you’re drunk and amongst friends who egg you on, but people can’t actually live their lives that way, outside Viking sagas and Shakespeare plays. It’s not the way the grain of life runs, to dedicate yourself wholly to such an aim. Nevertheless my oath freed up the conversation. People had been inhibited from talking about Kooistra in my presence for fear of upsetting me; but my fire and determination gave them licence. ‘I met her,’ said Teruo Nakagomi. ‘She’s not alone now, I think. She lives in Miklós’s old house, in your house I mean Klara - lives there with a companion.’

  No! people said. Wow! Who?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Teruo, rubbing his palms over his close-cropped hair vigorously, as if trying to strike a spark from his scalp. ‘I didn’t get a good look. A small, shifty little fellow, like a lapdog. A sidekick, you reckon? A lover?’

  ‘She never needed a sidekick down on the ground when she was killing people,’ somebody said.

  ‘I guess not,’ said Teruo. ‘But a lover? She’s the size of the Moon. Ugh, ugh, no. I docked with this house, didn’t know whose it was except that they’d called mayday, and when I opened my snout she called through “Don’t come in, don’t come in, we’ve got flu”. But by then my head was most through the hatch, so I could see her, stark naked - not nice, not a nice sight. And behind her this little weedy fellow.’

  ‘What did she want?’ Jon asked.

  ‘Medicines,’ said Teruo. ‘She wanted these new-style pharmakos, or failing that conventional medicines. Said she had a terrible flu, all her body aching and her head giving her hell.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ agreed, Teruo. ‘Good.’

  ‘Did you sell her medicine?’

  Teruo looked nervous at this, and rubbed his scalp double-hard, such that flakes of skin lifted off and flew slowly through the air. ‘Well, I did,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘I did. I saw who she was, and I got a bit scared, to be honest. So I hurried back, and shouted through that if I gave her some red-cross she had to promise to undo the docking hooks. She promised, so I threw a green box through and she undid the hooks, and I got the hell out of there.’ What’s interesting to me about this, as I recall it, is that Teruo did not lie. He could have said I didn’t give her anything, I pulled the lever from where I was and I left, but he didn’t. It’s a feature of uplanders, like the ancient Persian nobility, that they do not lie. I’m not sure why it is that way, but it is. It’s not a point of essential principle with us, this telling the truth at all costs. It’s just something we do. In this case, it brought Teruo much hostility. ‘How could you!’ ‘You didn’t even sell it her, you just gave it away?’ and so on. He turned his face away, and people flicked chunks of bread at him.

  That night I had bad dreams, unsettled by Teruo’s tale of sticking his head inside Kooistra’s house - her house that used to be our house, used to be my house - and seeing her inside with her new companion. I hated the thought of it, but couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  six

  After a year I left Jon, broke up with him and moved in to the house of Teruo Nakagomi. It was not an easy break-up. Jon refused to accept it. He wept. Teruo had been, you might say, courting me for several months. Women were still, in those early days of the uplands, a rare commodity, and many of the men I met would look at me in a way I could hardly interpret as anything other than lust. I was neither repelled nor excited by these circumstances, but I was self-aware enough to plan how best to use them. What did they see when they looked at me? I was skinny and tall. I wore a pantshirt and some feet-gloves to give me purchase on the walls as I moved around. My hair had grown back black and lustrous, and I did not cut it, but because long hair is an inconvenience in zero g I wore a headscarf most of the time. There were old sunken scars on my forearms, two rows of paler lines in the skin like tiger markings. Was I desirable? Or was I only desirable because there was so little choice for the heterosexual men of the upland population?

  Teruo had made it plain he wanted me. On several occasions when I was still ‘with’ Jon I would take the plane and fly out and up to Teruo’s orbit, and park and go in. Once, when Jon flew downside solitaire, Teruo came over and we had sex then and there, in Jon’s house. Isn’t that shocking? But I had no more remorse than a bitch on heat. It was exciting, to be honest. We had a number of those secretive little meetings, fox-like couplings, the thrill and shame of it. Finally I decided I shou
ld move out, and I did. I decided to end it with Jon and afterwards leave his house.

  After a meal I told Jon that it was over between us, and that I wanted to move out. He stared at me for two lengthy minutes in complete silence, and then started crying with strange little yelping cries, like a puppy. ‘I couldn’t bear that!’ he said, as if I had only been rehearsing the possibility of a split, instead of announcing it to him as something that had already happened. ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’ He went on and on. Finally, after hours of crying, and clinging to me, he said ‘Let’s talk about it in the morning.’ I said, no, I was going now. Either he could fly me to Teruo’s, or I would fly myself and Teruo would bring the plane back in the morning for Jon to drop him off afterwards. These complicated games of permutation were necessitated by the fact that Jon’s house had only one port. More and more of the upland houses were fitting multiple docking chambers (they were known as ‘porches’) but Jon had not gotten around to that.

  In the end, after hours of wrangling, and several phone calls, I flew Jon - still weeping and calling out loud denials - to Sponti’s house, where Teruo was waiting to collect me. And that was how I left Jon, except that he refused to accept that I was going, and kept phoning Teruo, shouting at him, threatening, cajoling, begging. It was embarrassing. At first I felt guilty for his pain, but his persistence was so forceful and so annoying that soon I could do nothing but despise him for his weakness. It was a shame our relationship ended that way. It had been fun, for a while.

  I stayed with Teruo for less than a year. Our relationship was much cooler than had been the case between Jon and myself - on Jon’s side, at any rate. Teruo never declared his gushing love for me. He was in his early forties, a shrewd businessman with a childlike side, a man who had revered space flight from a young age. There was much about him with which I could not connect. He was, for instance, a news junkie, and I have always hated the news. He had three viewscreens in his house and they were on all day, in the background, churning out three different news channels, two in English one in Japanese. I told him I couldn’t understand how he coped with the noise, the interference. I couldn’t concentrate on any one of the programmes because the other two jabbered in my ears and distracted me. He claimed to watch all three at once.

  He was a fairly handsome man. He kept his body in trim, and had a neat-featured face, although he had a series of nervous mannerisms. Amongst these were: rubbing the palms of his hands vigorously back and forth over his close-cropped hair; pulling his eyelids out from their eyeballs, one after the other, and running the tip of his finger inside the lid; yanking out eyelashes and eating them; pulling on both of his earlobes at once; and squeezing his lower lip between two fingers and rolling the bulge of flesh left and right. He was twitchy. He had set up a commercial company in Japan as a young man, and it had prospered, and he had sold it to a bigger company and with that money he had bought an old commercial JapanAir jet, and had adapted that for magnetosphere flying, and had fled the world. ‘I was never comfortable down there, not as a man, not as a child,’ he told me. ‘Don’t think me crazy, but when I was on the ground I got to feeling that my actions were not my actions.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I used to think - you’ll think me crazy-I used to think that somebody had an effigy of me, like a voodoo doll, and was making me move my head this way or that way, or making me raise my hand. I got in trouble with the police sometimes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I had some trouble with schoolgirls,’ he said, obscurely. Later I learnt that he had manhandled these schoolgirls on the subway trains, pulling at their skirts and pushing himself against them. He had been arrested. His defence in court had been that his actions were not under his conscious control. This was a real psycho-medical condition, or so he insisted, but the vogue for psychiatric explanations of criminal behaviour had passed, and he was sent to a correctional institute. ‘I hated being locked away. I couldn’t bear it. I paced and paced the cell, and threw myself against the wall, and broke all my fingernails trying to open the unopenable window. I went a little mad. It was horrible, horrible.’

  ‘How long were you inside?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, dropping his head and pulling mournfully on his earlobes. ‘Three days, three nights. Never again.’

  When he came out he poured all his nervous energy into making money, working all the days of the week and many of the nights, and even in the hyperactive money-making society of Japan he had done well. This was in the late ’40s, when Japan was rearming, and Teruo’s company supplied a number of essential devices for the air force. When he had what he thought enough money he sold out, fled to the uplands. ‘Up here,’ he told me, rubbing his pate with his palms, ‘I never feel like somebody else is controlling me. I always feel in control of my body. Isn’t that strange?’

  ‘I know that nowadays everybody disses psychiatry and such,’ I told him. ‘But I think there’s something in it.’

  ‘Is that the explanation for my behaviour, do you think?’ he asked me, with his ingenuous face. ‘Was it psychiatric?’

  ‘Sure. What else?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, turning round and round in the zero-g like a dog settled into its bed. ‘Maybe I was just crazy. Sometimes I thought so - sometimes I wondered if there really were - you’ll think me crazy - mind control rays, or something. The military have some weird things.’

  ‘I find the first explanation,’ I said, ‘more likely than the second.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  He had excellent powers of concentration, Teruo, and although he was a little unhinged in various eccentric ways, I never felt unsure or uncomfortable with him. The sex was better than it had been with Jon: less hamstrung with guilt and anxiety, much more a straightforward physical thing. Here’s one good thing about Teruo in that respect: if he made sexual advances towards me and I wasn’t in the mood, and I turned him down, he accepted the rejection blithely and went and did something else. With Jon, and with some other men I have known, such a rejection seemed to crush them, leaving them despondent or angry for days, as if I were denying their essential worth. With Teruo it was no big deal, he just tried again later. That’s an attractive feature in a man.

  I taught him some Greek phrases, and some French ones. He tried to teach me some Japanese phrases, but they were too hard for my tongue. I told him, ‘That! I can’t say that! It’ll break my jaw coming out!’ He laughed at this, and tried to catch me and kiss me, and we pushed and flew around the house laughing.

  Teruo was not much of a trader. He made occasional flights down, but he preferred to stay in orbit. Although he exercised with an admirable regularity he had been downside so infrequently that he was starting to worry that his bone mass was reaching an untenable state. ‘I don’t want to go down and try to walk and break my legs,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go down there at all.’ Personally I think his animadversion was more psychological. His associations with the ground were all bad, and so he preferred not to go there. When I was with him he made a few more trips down, and I went with him. He kept a prefab room in a settlement in Asian Siberia, in the northern territories, up near Magadan, a miserable and freezing settlement near the Arctic Circle. But otherwise Teruo had no links with the Earth. Since he didn’t really trade, he had little income, and was still living on his savings, which gave him a more frugal attitude than many uplanders. ‘Savings don’t last forever,’ he said.

  One day he woke up with an idea. It came to him, he said, in a dream. ‘I dreamt of spaghetti trees,’ he told me. So then he ordered a huge reel of fibreoptic sheathing, tens of kilometres long, over the ethernet from a Russian company. Then he emptied his jet of all it didn’t need, and flew downside, to Asian Siberia. He wouldn’t even let me come with him on the flight: even my skinny body might compromise his lift, and prevent him bringing his cargo back up with him. ‘I don’t want to have to hire Tam’s big plane,’
he said. ‘I can’t afford that.’

  In the event, he’d underestimated the power of his plane, of magnetohydrodynamics, of the broad branches of the Gradisil tree, and he lifted his cargo easily. It was an enormous wheel of spooled-up microcable, the passage inside the pipe less than a millimetre thick. ‘What are you going to do with this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Watch,’ he said. He was giggling, he was so excited.

  Teruo’s house was three rooms, not spread out on the same level as most houses but arranged as a stack, like three can-shaped rooms stored one on top of the other two. This is what he did: he drilled a hole in the lower room, sealing the hole with a new brand of sealant, a semi-liquid vulcaniser -a kind of jelly held in a grid, very dense but minimally malleable. Because his cargo, this great wheel of cable, was too large to fit through the nose of his jet, he had to unspool it inside the plane by hand and feed the piping through into the house, round the corner and into the lower room. It took all day, and I quickly got bored with the task, but Teruo persisted, pushing the pipe through the new hole he had made and feeding it down and down. I exercised for two hours, came back and he was still methodically doing this. I went off, ate, slept, read for a while, exercised again, came back and he was still doing it. ‘What’s this about?’ I asked.