Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Jon wouldn’t come to the porch, no matter how I coaxed him, even when Åsa came on the phone and begged him to come in. I felt a strange mixture of intellectual alarm at the thought that I had been near my own death (although this did not move me very much) and concern for poor old Jon, fear that he might be about to do something stupid, something suicidal. I went over and helped bandage Julie’s face, and I could hear Åsa on the phone losing his temper. ‘What you want to do that for, anyway? That’s just crazy, you could have killed us all, you could have killed us all.’

  I didn’t say what was going through my mind, which was that of course he’d been trying to kill us all. He cried on the phone to me, to Åsa, to Teruo, even to Julie. Then he hung up. Then he called again, and cried again at us over the phone. Finally he said ‘I’m going, I’m going’ and hung up. I watched out of a window as he pulled his jet away and slipped up out of view.

  What happened next was that, the following day, we got a call from Sponti, telling us that Jon had fetched up at his place. He invited us over. I for one was not eager to go. I was disinclined to meet Jon. I felt a degree of responsibility for what had happened. ‘You’re stupid,’ said Teruo, unhelpfully, ‘to say so. Responsibility? You nineteen - he’s sixty, near enough. You break up with him, of course you do. You’ll break up with me in time. That’s only natural. We gotta accept that. He couldn’t accept that, this is his problem, not yours. That don’t give him the right to get crazy-murderous. This is a dangerous land, you can’t go bashing people’s houses. He’s a crazy cannon.’ He meant loose cannon.

  We flew over to Sponti’s, and Åsa and Julie came with us. When we got there his porch was packed with planes; we took the last available docking point and climbed through. Sponti’s house was filled with uplanders; there must have been twenty people inside. Because I had been at the heart of the incident, it hadn’t really occurred to me how exciting a thing it had been. It was, after all, attempted murder. It was a crime of passion. Uplanders love passion, though they are usually reticent about it themselves. And of course it was rare for something so melodramatic to happen in the narrow world of upland life. The gossip went around the houses at lightspeed. It was a much, much more interesting thing to uplanders than the prospect of war downbelow.

  Jon was there. He caught my eye guiltily, and then looked away. He looked, somehow, smaller. I felt no animosity towards him. I suppose my nineteen years carried with them a certain elasticity of character. Events did not dent me out of shape then. Perhaps they do, now, more, now that I’m in my eighties.

  Sponti pulled himself to the ceiling and we all oriented ourselves in line with him. ‘I thought we should talk about what happened. I figured it could go like this: let Jon say what was on his mind when he did this thing, and then decide what to do next. We ought to decide. We have no courts, no police, no gaols, nothing like that. What happens in a case like this? What do we do? Do we want courts, police, gaols? I don’t think we do, I don’t think that’s what the uplands are about, but then we got to decide what to do when something like this happens.’

  People murmured, chatted, and Sponti pulled an uncomfortable-looking Jon up to the ceiling by his sleeve, pulled him into a place where we could all see him. He started talking softly, and his first words were lost in the chatter, but people quieted down when they realised he was speaking.

  ‘I want to say,’ he said, ‘that I’m real sorry. I went a little crazy. People here know that Klara and I used to be together. Maybe they don’t know I,’ his voice caught a little, carried on in a slightly higher register, ‘loved her, I still love her, it fills me completely that I love her. When she ended it I couldn’t bear it. I got nothing against Teruo personally, he’s a nice guy, but I couldn’t bear it. I sat at home just thinking about it, thinking about it over and over and thinking about nothing else. You can imagine. Can you? It went round and round in my head until I think I went a little crazy. So I fitted some harpoons to my plane, just metal spikes with a short-push booster on the end. I mocked them up in my house, fitted them to the plane by waldo, and then I sat at home for a further week. I sat at home doing nothing but going round and round in my head about Klara, Klara.’ He caught my eye again, and started crying. ‘Oh Christ I’m sorry,’ he said in a loud voice, hiding his face in his hands. I don’t know if he was apologising for trying to kill me, or for crying in front of us all. Maybe the latter. Eventually he got his tears under control. ‘I thought about it for a week, and then I just got in my plane and flew round to Teruo’s. I fired all my harpoons, but only one of them hit. It’s hard,’ he said, the tears drying as he explained the technical problem of propelling missiles in zero g, ‘to target correctly, because the short-burn stick throws the plane a little off whack, and your targeting goes with it. I targeted, and fired, three times and missed with each of them. Then I fired the last three at once, in a spread, and only one hit.’

  Whilst Teruo and Åsa and Julie and I had been chatting blithely away about earth politics, these harpoons had been silently hurtling past our house, perhaps only feet away. It was a chilly thought.

  ‘After I saw one hit I was glad,’ Jon said. ‘Then as soon as I felt that, I felt ashamed. I felt terrible. I’m real sorry. I’m real glad I didn’t actually kill anybody. All the hate and desperation went out of me. I felt like I’d done something stupid.’

  ‘You did do something stupid,’ said Teruo.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jon. ‘Only, maybe you don’t know what it’s like. To sit all by yourself, crazy for somebody you can’t have, so that the thought of them goes round and round inside your head. It’s hard.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You got any questions for Jon?’ Sponti asked. ‘Anybody?’

  Somebody at the back said, ‘So, you’re admitting that it was premeditated? You made these missiles with malice aforethought, and had them in your house for, like, a week?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jon, covering his head with his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I only figured,’ said the person in the crowd, ‘that it being premeditated maybe made it worse.’

  ‘Oh I reckon,’ said somebody else (I could see it was Tam Entzminger), ‘that it’s a crime passionelle, for all that.’

  ‘What?’ somebody called. ‘What was that about cream?’

  ‘A crime of passion.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said a couple of people.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jon again.

  ‘I don’t see what we can do,’ said Bill, in the midst of the crowd. ‘I don’t see we’re a properly appointed court. How did you pick us, Sponti? Just call a score of folk at random? Is that a way to appoint a court?’

  ‘I couldn’t invite everybody,’ Sponti objected. ‘My house is not big enough for that.’

  ‘We’re like a jury,’ said Tam. ‘They get appointed at random.’

  ‘But the judge don’t,’ countered Bill. ‘Judges sentence, juries don’t.’

  ‘Maybe up here it shouldn’t be that way,’ insisted Tam. ‘Maybe up here juries should sentence. Hey, Jon, do you accept the, uh, what’s the word, the authority of this court?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jon. ‘I’m real sorry for what I did.’

  ‘What are our options?’ somebody else called. ‘We can’t lock him up.’

  ‘Take away his plane,’ somebody suggested. ‘House arrest.’

  ‘I think exile is a better punishment,’ said somebody else.

  ‘Permanent exile? Or temporary?’

  ‘What do you think, Klara? Teruo? It was you he tried to kill.’ said Sponti.

  ‘And me,’ said Åsa, a little petulantly. ‘And my girlfriend. Hey!’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that maybe exile’s the best thing.’ Leaving somebody in their house without a plane for long periods of time seemed to me unusually cruel.

  ‘Maybe that’s it,’ agreed Sponti. ‘Down to earth for a while. Do we think?’

  ‘Well,’ said Jon, shifting, and blushing all over his fa
ce and bald head, ‘I could suggest something else. I tell you: I was thinking of going away, but not downside. I was thinking of going to the Moon for a while.’

  That shut everybody up. There was silence for a full minute. Finally, Sponti said:

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yeah. I was thinking of it anyway, but maybe I should go now, just push off up there, and get out of everybody’s way.’

  What happened next was that this new plan of Jon’s squeezed out the pretence that we were a constituted court of law. The primary interest of uplanders (which is to say, the fascination with technical aspects of space flight, problem-solving and science-fiction dreams) came to the fore instead. ‘How will you power the flight?’

  ‘Well the magnetosphere is dipole to about six Earth radii,’ said John eagerly, for this was the sort of thing about which he could be immensely fluent and eloquent, ‘though it gets pretty weak so far away; but I’ll climb, and try looping round, slingshot to give myself momentum. When I’m fast I’ll fire a single tube rocket. I’ve done some back-of-envelope calculations, I reckon that will get me there.’

  ‘But the Moon doesn’t have a magnetosphere . . .’ somebody objected.

  ‘It’ll have to be conservation-of-momentum venting,’ said John. ‘I was thinking, water. I’ve got a great mass of water, in the coign of my building. I was thinking - I don’t know what you guys think - I could run a wire out through it, insulated except for the end, heated wire that would bore through it easy. Then if I applied current, I’d steam off a little portion of the block, and that would give me some jet power.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be enough,’ said Ben, immediately. ‘Not just a wire. Maybe a spread of wires . . .’

  ‘Or a tube, with a heated element at the end.’

  ‘Do you have more than the mass of the house in ice, Jon?’

  ‘Bout the same.’

  There were some murmured conversations, people solving equations in their heads. Sponti called a calculator to his screen and put in some equations. After twenty minutes of discussion, unanimity was reached. By putting out a series of wires into his ice block, in such a way that the wires were pointing towards a focal point two metres behind the back of the block, Jon could generate thrust. With a long enough burst to slow himself, and a bit of careful piloting he could manoeuvre himself over the Moon, maybe even drop down. He said he’d buy a spring-frame with six legs and fit it to his plane. With a little care he should be able to land on the Moon. He’d take some solid packs with him, too, so that he could lift off again when he wanted. ‘It’s only point one six g,’ said Sponti, several times, with an exaggerated brightness of tone.

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Jon, looking brighter, ‘I’m sure I’ll be OK.’

  ‘It’ll take days to get there - maybe a week.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But,’ I said, uneasy at the speed with which this topic had taken over the discussion. ‘How will you navigate?’

  ‘I’ll keep the Moon in my left-hand window all the way up.’ There was general laughter at this. Of course!

  ‘Man,’ said Sponti, excited. ‘The Moon! Nobody’s been since Apollo. Nobody’s been in a hundred years.’

  ‘But what?’ I asked, because it was bothering me. ‘But what will you do there?’

  ‘Sit,’ said Jon, looking at me with cow eyes. ‘Think about stuff. Maybe wander about . . . I’ve got an old NASA suit, you know. Maybe play golf.’

  People were crowding round Jon now, laughing, congratulating him. ‘You tell me what it’s like when you get there,’ one booming voice announced. ‘Maybe I’ll come with you. Be your neighbour.’ It was ironic: the meeting had started as a court of law, condemning Jon Snider. It ended celebrating him as the new Apollo hero. When Teruo and I finally got home, he was furious. ‘He tried to kill me, crazy man, and now he’s celebrated all over the uplands.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I guess he’s still being exiled. I guess that was the point.’

  Teruo banged from wall to wall all up and down the house. ‘Crazy people up here. Murderous crazy-men up here, murderous warmongers down there. What a people! Oh the humanity!’ He calmed down eventually, and we went to bed together. After the sex, I was thoughtful: ‘do you think I could get Sponti to convene another court?’ I asked. ‘We could convene another court, and condemn Kristin Janzen Kooistra. Condemn her as the murderer of my father.’

  Teruo pulled his arms out of the silk bag we were both in, and rubbed the top of his close-shaved head very vigorously with both palms. He considered. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Why not? Condemn her how, though. To exile?’

  ‘To be executed,’ I said, my belly turning over with the excitement of the thought. ‘Why not? Eye for an eye. To have her executed.’

  ‘Off with her head,’ said Teruo. ‘Stab her with a harpoon. Sure, but how we going to catch her?’

  ‘I guess we set up a posse. Search her out. Follow the next lead, whoever runs into her.’

  ‘I’d say she keeps herself to herself mostly,’ said Teruo. He turned away from me and went to sleep.

  eight

  Jon left the uplands and went higher up. He fitted his plane up, and climbed into the highest orbit he could, where the magnetosphere gets tenuous and turbulent, and then swooped through a slingshot orbit - decelerating the Earth a tiny bit in its solar orbit, accelerating his house a great deal in its Moon shot - and spun away into a quicker orbit. He did this half a dozen times, picking up speed each time, depriving the Earth of a fraction of its speed so miniature it would be impossible to calculate it. He did it another dozen times, and then he was able to fling himself moonward.

  The flight lasted seven days, and he was on the phone to various people almost the whole time. He called Teruo and me quite often, the first time with tears in his voice, but as time went on in a more controlled way. He kept apologising, every time he spoke to me. He was clownish with apologies. It was embarrassing. After Jon entered lunar orbit, Bert Felber hooked his phone line through a transmitter, and we were all able to tune in to his descent. It was clumsily done, Jon angling his plane so that it was orbiting sideways, as it were, and then blowing off a targeted stream of water to bleed off his velocity, and he started curving in to the Moon. Once he was committed to a landing his voice got very panicky. He was familiar with the ease of manoeuvring a plane through the sticky medium of the Earth’s magnetosphere where Elem pulses slowed you as much as you liked; but this was different. ‘Oh god,’ he gabbled, ‘I don’t want to come down on those mountains, oh god, this lump of water is not equally spread on my belly. Oh god, I shouldn’t have committed to landing when I did - another twenty seconds of orbit and I’d have been over the plain, Jesus, no, I’m going to splinter onto that rock, I’m coming down too fast, I’m going to crack my plane open on the rock.’ There was a pause, with nothing but buzz. This was what was going on in my head: I had a mental picture of him smashed and decompressed, his body lying frozen on a lunar mountainside. Then we heard him again, ‘Burn, burn, Jesus’, presumably exhorting his solid packs, because the buzz on the line rose in volume. Then, after a heartbeat’s pause, his voice came through exultant, ‘Jesus, I’m hovering over the Moon’, I can see the dust running away from me all around the plane, below, and - ugh - I’m - down. Jesus, there’s a leak. Jesus, there’s another one.’ There was a minute of static as he hurried about fixing the holes in his house. We learnt later that he had landed beautifully at the foot of the Mons Lunaris, and that he had a lovely view from his right-side window over the lunar plane. The mare, he called it. He pronounced it like mary.

  Some Earthbound receivers picked up the broadcast, and there was some media interest in a new Moon landing, but NASA came out early on to deny the validity of the story. Uplanders, said Earth media, could only manage a low earth orbit. They had neither the power, the know-how nor the equipment for a lunar journey. It was a hoax, probably perpetrated by the Europeans to discredit NASA. EUSA and the EU government officially denie
d this slur, intimated that they thought NASA was behind the hoax, condemned the whole affair as an attempt to distract the world from their own racist religious intolerance. Jon took a walk in his second-hand suit, having established a video camera at the airlock, and a downlink with Bert so the images could be disseminated. He opened his door, and hung on whilst the last of the air blew away, and then he stepped out. ‘I’m on the fucking Moon!’ he said, the first words spoken by a moon-walker in a hundred years.

  That’s true, that part. People sometimes say that it’s an urban myth, but I can vouch for the fact that it’s true. He was very lucky, was Jon. He really was. In the years that followed many people tried to land on the Moon, and later on to land whole houses up there, and several died in the attempt: I don’t have the actual numbers (why would I have the actual numbers?) but it was a fair few people. Or, to be more precise, several crashed; but most of those who died did so because they crashed at high speed and broke their bodies. For those who managed to get their speed right down - and that’s easy, so they say, in the one-sixthg - even a poor landing, and rupturing of house walls and so on, was not likely to prove fatal. Once you get used to explosive decompression, it’s much easier to deal with than you might think. The trick is not to panic. Keep your head, fix the hole, even if the air pressure goes right down. Go straight to the hole and fix it; don’t try to repressurise until the hole is fixed, even if, as I say, the air pressure goes right down.