Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Jon’s new Moon landing made headlines in the websheets and newscasts, but the headlines were all ‘NASA implicated in moonwalk hoax’, ‘Fraudster wearing NASA spacesuit’ and so on. Not that any uplander cared what they thought downbelow. We knew what Jon had done.

  What about downbelow? The situation downbelow got much worse. This is what happened: war planes flew over the Atlantic. Dozens of new military satellites were rocket-launched into orbit - into our uplands. Lots and lots of them, sharing our space. We tried not to get involved, to keep out of the way (and there’s a lot of space up there in which to keep out, so it wasn’t hard). But this remilitarisation of orbit was so thorough-going, the rockets coming up were so commonplace, that we couldn’t keep entirely out of the way of them. I saw two launches myself, and once we actually saw one of the new breed of ‘dumper’ satellites up close. It happened this way: I noticed something glinting in the sunlight from our window. It’s true to say that, by this time, the uplands were busier than they had ever been; but nevertheless it was a very rare thing to see anything man-made from the window. The space up there is so vast. I really can’t overstress just how big the uplands are. Very bright in the acid sunshine, very wide-horizoned, curved like a longbow and enclosing all the blue of sky impossibly below you, scribbled and laced over with folds of cloud-fronts, or the intricate sketch-threads of coastlines, and all that is your basement, all that is your footstool, and you’ve ten times the cubic space to live in as they do down there - and there are only a few thousand of you. You very rarely see anything up there but the overspill of black.

  So, one day, when I saw something glinting I didn’t know if it was a satellite, or a piece of junk, or another house. I thought, perhaps, it was Kooistra’s house - my house, I should say. So I jollied Teruo into starting the plane and flying towards the bright light, hauling up into a higher orbit until it swelled in the cockpit window. We could see it was a piece of military ordnance because it was bristling with downward-pointing shark-teeth missiles, and blistered with chaff pods and comdiscs, and it had ‘USAF: Private Property’ painted in white letters on the side. Teruo thought that a specially nice touch, the private property notion: this object chucked untended and untenanted into space. But, on the other hand, the uplands are a private sort of place. Then Teruo checked the radio, and sure enough the ground was cycling through a wide range of frequencies trying to reach us. ‘Intruder! You are violating US air space. Move away from the satellite, or we will be forced to shoot you down.’

  ‘Do you think they could shoot us down?’ I asked.

  ‘From the ground, I doubt it,’ said Teruo, pressing his face against the window to see more detail. ‘We’d see a missile coming, and we’d avoid it.’

  ‘Would it be heat-seeking?’

  ‘We could shut down our heat. Turn off our electronics. How would it trace us? But I’m more worried about the chaff pods on the satellite itself. If they decided to blow one of those off, we’d get chaff-shrapnel all in our fuselage. No, let’s not risk it, let’s go.’ So we flew away and returned to the house.

  nine

  It was a few weeks after this that something big happened, and everything changed abruptly: I discovered I was pregnant. Teruo went to pieces when he heard the news, slapping his head, pulling at his eyelids, jabbing his thumbs in his mouth, sticking his fingers in his ears. ‘This is terrible!’ he said. ‘Terrible! I don’t want children! You should have told me there was the chance!’

  ‘I didn’t realise that there was a chance,’ I replied.

  ‘This is terrible!’

  ‘I’ve got a contraceptive chip fitted in my uterus. How was I to know that zero g was likely to dislodge it?’

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s what happened. I guess it was something like that. Maybe it malfunctioned.’

  He rubbed his head feverishly. ‘I never agreed to children,’ he insisted, sounding himself more and more like a tantrum-possessed child. ‘You didn’t discuss this with me.’ He was spinning in the middle of the room.

  ‘I didn’t discuss it,’ I said, getting angry, ‘because I didn’t know it was going to happen. I didn’t plan it. I don’t want children either. Leastways, not now. And not with you, that’s for sure, you immature idiot.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, coming up to face me with wide eyes, grabbing the fixtures with one hand to steady himself. ‘Anyway, you can’t bring up a child in zero g. It can’t be done. The uplands are no place for a child. They’d never grow properly. They’d grow all deformed. You wouldn’t want our child to grow all deformed, would you?’

  ‘It’s our child now, is it?’ I snapped. ‘I know that I couldn’t bring it up here. I’d have to go downbelow to have the child. But maybe I’ll have it aborted. Sam the Clinic has all sorts of pills; he’ll surely have some pills to terminate the pregnancy.’

  Teruo beamed, as if the idea had not occurred to him before. ‘Yeah,’ he said brightly. ‘You could do that!’

  ‘I could,’ I said, infuriated by his selfish, grinning face. ‘But I won’t. I’ll have the child. I’ll go downbelow to do it.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Canada. Europe.’

  ‘How will you live? You can’t live down there like we live up here. You need money, money. Where will you get it?’

  ‘You’ll give me some,’ I said boldly.

  ‘No child-support police will ever knock on my door,’ he said proudly. ‘They can’t reach me up here. You can whistle for your money.’ But then he added immediately, ‘Although, I will give you some money. Sure, you can have some money. Only I don’t have too much money, you know, I’m not rich any more.’

  ‘I’ve got some money of my own,’ I said, trying to act proud and disdainful, but actually thinking that the money - my Dad’s Canadian assets, some few dozen thousand euros in a Canadian bank - was probably inaccessible from Europe, given the heightened tension between the two blocs. And then thinking that if I went down to bring up my child in Canada I might get interned, as technically being a European national. Then I thought, I could fight through the courts for the right to be declared an uplander citizen, although that was not a category that existed in law, and although I doubted whether any court would give my claim any attention if - when - war broke out. But the prospect of a fight, any kind of fight, buoyed me up for a while.

  After a night’s sleep, Teruo said, pulling at his eyelashes with pincer-fingers, one by one, ‘Are you really going to have the baby? I mean, are you sure you don’t want it terminated?’

  ‘I’ll keep it,’ I said, sounding decided. The truth was I had no strong urges either way. If I came down on any side, it was on the side of keeping the baby, but I felt no special maternal bond.

  ‘It’s hard to believe it’s real,’ Teruo said. ‘Me? A dad?’ He snorted, a ridiculous laugh. ‘Crazy.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Should you go down straight away?’ he asked, a concerned expression on his face. ‘I mean, would it hurt the baby to grow - in your uterus - in zero g?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s ever been done before. I can look online and see if there’s anything published about it, but I don’t see how there can be. But I don’t see it’ll matter to the baby. Babies are weightless in the womb, aren’t they? They float in that fluid. It won’t matter to them if I’m weightless as well as them.’

  I knew, in my heart, that all I was doing was deliberately postponing going back down to Earth. I didn’t want to go. I had no good memories of being down there, and I couldn’t see how I was going to make a life there that was in any way half-happy. It was, as Teruo said, unreal. I stayed in the uplands for three months, four months, until my stomach was unmistakably pregnant, and my belly button became thorn-shaped. It was easy, being pregnant in weightlessness, much easier than those poor human milch-cows lugging their double-weight through the treacly gravity of Eart
h, but my exercises - which I increased in frequency and effort to prepare my bones for Earth’s gravity - became harder, I became more tired more quickly. I felt changes in temperature more acutely than I had done before too. I was not nauseous, though: either because zero g nullifies pregnancy nausea, or else because I just wasn’t. Teruo withdrew from me. He didn’t like having sex with a pregnant woman, and became more fidgety and more eccentric around me. ‘You look fat,’ he told me, baldly. ‘I don’t like the look of you.’ ‘Thank you,’ I replied, sarcastically. He bunched up his face, rubbed his bald pate with great energy. ‘I’m only being honest,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t want me to be a liar. You wouldn’t want that.’

  ‘Save your honesty,’ I said.

  ‘We should sort out where you’re going to live, when you’re down,’ he told me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I guess.’

  Then another significant thing happened. Tam Entzminger called on the phone. ‘Hi, Klara,’ he said. ‘You’ll never guess where I am.’

  ‘If I’ll never guess,’ I said, ‘why should I try?’ I was feeling flippant, skittish.

  ‘I’m outside Kristin Janzen Kooistra’s house.’

  Away went my flippant mood at once. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said.

  ‘Not kidding. I was chasing some junk, thinking of salvaging it, and I saw a light. I got curious, so I flew over. It’s your old house. I’d recognise it anywhere. It’s been augmented.’

  I called Teruo from the other room. ‘Tam’s chanced upon Kooistra’s house,’ I told him, and then said into the phone, ‘How do you mean augmented, Tam?’

  ‘Two more rooms. A porch. She’s fitted a periscope, I think. Difficult to see, but something’s glinting in the light, like a thread going down to the Earth. She’s put some powerful-looking com dishes out of one of the rooms. It looks like she’s keen to keep in contact with the ground.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, excited. ‘I can’t believe we’ve found her after all this time. Is she home?’

  ‘There’s a plane in the porch,’ Tam said. ‘It might be her. Difficult to say.’

  ‘Can you set your transponder?’ I said. ‘We can fly to you.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  So we hauled ourselves into the plane, and flew round from the dark side into the night side in a lower, faster orbit, and then climbed up on a line to Tam’s transponder, bursting out into the sunshine again. There was a bizarre multi-layering of cloud in the blue of Earth below us, like rips and patches of white-bread pressed into a great mass. But the sky was its same black purity hammered by the shining tentpeg of the sun. Tam’s plane was a speck, then a smudge of white, then a chevron-and-stick, and then we were right by it, large as life. We pulled gingerly alongside, so close that we could see Tam’s face peering at us through his cockpit windows, and we waved to him. He waved back.

  He was right. There was no mistaking the taping around the left-most room, nor the corner dents. This was my old house. Kristin Janzen Kooistra had augmented it a great deal, and Tam had not been exaggerating about the mass of communication equipment piled, seemingly precariously (although, of course, in fact not so), on the right-side room. The plane that was docked in the porch was not my Dad’s old Elector jet; whether that had been discarded and this new plane was the replacement, or whether the Elector was off flying somewhere, it wasn’t possible to tell.

  I stared at my old home for a long time. You know that uncanny feeling, that unheimlich feeling, you get when you see an old house that used to be your home and isn’t any more? I had that feeling. It was intense. I could sense Teruo sitting next to me, fidgeting with nerves, watching my reaction. He kept jiggling and jiggling his legs, trilling his feet against the floor of the cockpit and bouncing his knees up and down, pushing his body up against the restraining harness. I stared at my old home.

  Then I looked at the Earth. All the time I had lived in the uplands it had never stopped fascinating me. Like almost all the uplanders I loved staring at it, watching through a window for, sometimes, hours at a time. The size of it, and the detail. The way familiar shapes of coastlines and the crumpled spreads of mountain ranges are overlaid by the unfamiliar, ever-changing shapes of cloud formations. The polished blue-steel effects of the sun reflecting from exposed ocean; the wadded and stringy stretches of cloud. The impression of inlaid precious materials, of golds and browns, yellow and ochres, of creams and greens, all fitted mosaic like in a ground of blue and then draped over with shredded cotton. It looked, to my eyes then, beautiful but strange. It didn’t look like home either.

  ‘Should we see if anybody is inside?’ Teruo suggested.

  Tam came over the radio. ‘I flew round. The docking ports are all shut. We could try calling her? We could use the mayday frequency.’

  I picked up the phone and sent out. There was a thirty-second pause, and then the sound of the connection being made. I heard a woman’s voice. It was her voice. It said: ‘hello?’

  ‘Kristin?’ I said. ‘This is Klara. This is Klara Gyeroffy.’

  ‘Klara,’ she said, with apparent warmth and ease, ‘how lovely to hear from you. How are you? It’s really been too long.’

  ‘It’s been too long,’ I said. I felt removed from myself. My voice sounded oddly in my own ears, a controlled and rather taut voice, somebody else’s sound being relayed to me. My head seemed, strangely, smaller than it usually did. My senses were playing tricks with me.

  I said: ‘I like what you’ve done with the house.’ I think I was trying for an acidic and withering wit, but she took my words at their face value.

  ‘Do you? I’m so pleased to hear that. It was a little cramped, wasn’t it, before. Are you outside now?’

  ‘Yes, we’re outside. We’ve got you. We’ve got you in our sights.’

  ‘You’ll excuse me for not inviting you in,’ she said, blithely.

  Then, I’m sorry to say, I lost it a little. ‘That’s my house, you murdering psycho, you killed my father, you killed my father, I hate you, I’ll kill you, you sent me to hell but I’ll reach up and stab you to death.’

  Teruo’s hand was on my leg. I ranted some more, and then I bit my lip and made myself stop. There was static for a moment, then Kooistra’s voice.

  ‘You do sound upset, my dear,’ she said, smoothly. ‘I am sorry to hear you so upset.’

  ‘Did you ever lose a father?’ I asked. ‘Did you ever have a father?’

  ‘Everybody has a talent,’ she said, and for a moment I wondered if she had misheard me. ‘You do, my darling. I do. Your father had a talent. His talent was to build this house, for me. His talent was to die at the right time. And if that seems like a poor sort of talent, well, it’s exactly as important as everybody else’s. Your talent? I don’t know, my dear. Oh, maybe it is for revenge, maybe that’s where your talent lies. But I’m not sure. Now my talent . . .’

  I interrupted. I’d bitten a piece from my lip, and blood was moist and earth-tasting on my tongue. ‘Who cares about you?’ I snarled. ‘Who gives an iota about you?’

  Her voice in reply was mild. ‘Oh, I think you do care about me. Why would you be so upset, otherwise? Why would you have come looking for me? Oh, I think you do care.’

  ‘You arrogant miss,’ I said, but I didn’t say any more because I could feel tears coming in the back of my throat and behind my eyes, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of hearing me cry. I didn’t want Teruo to see me crying.

  ‘Now,’ she was saying, ‘my talent is particular. It has to do with a certain cast of mind, a certain way of thinking - clarity, the ability to see through to solutions, of a certain kind. An uncluttered mind is how I sometimes like to think of it.’

  ‘The ability to kill,’ said Tam, cutting in to the conversation.

  ‘Why thank you,’ she said, ingenuously. ‘Whoever you are, sir. I’m pleased you recognise that it takes talent to do that. To know when to do it, and to do it. Oh, my talent is not more important than yours, sir, or yours, Klara,
or your father’s, but it has certain material advantages. There are people who pay well for its use.’

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ I called. I grabbed the controls. I believe, truly, that I would have rammed the house there and then if Teruo hadn’t wrestled me back. He held me with one arm, undid my webbing with the other, and hauled me out and away. I was crying, sobbing, swearing. He cut the phone connection.

  ‘Don’t be crazy,’ he said. ‘You want to kill yourself?’

  ‘I don’t care!’ I screamed.

  ‘You want to kill me? And what about your baby. You want to kill your baby?’