Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  His name was Thom Baldwin - that much is undeniably public domain. When I met him he was working in the clinic to which I was obliged to take Gradi. She was two now, and was walking with the help of motorised callipers on her legs. But she was tiny for her age, and had little appetite, and was often ill, and sometimes her skin tone was unhealthily yellow-green. Thom was working a paediatric term. He attended to Gradi. He prescribed drugs that I couldn’t afford because Gradi needed them, and when he realised the level of my impoverishment he filched the drugs from the hospital supplies and gave me them free. He smiled at me as he handed this illicit plastic package to me, and I sensed the possibility of another partner. And so it proved; within a day we were rutting - a word I use deliberately, because there was a slightly frantic, animal flavour to our sex. We fucked at every opportunity, and in every location, until my knees and the small of my back were scratched and bruised from cramming myself into cars and cupboards. After two weeks of that I moved into his place. By the time Gradi was three she was calling him ‘daddy’. We were married the year of her third birthday.

  It was hard living to begin with, and the Army Council was spending most of Europe’s wealth on reconstructing the bomb-ruined western cities and on building up Atlantic defences. There was talk of the need to build an Asian shield wall, fearful speculation in the media that the Americans might launch a land assault from their Japanese bases and sweep through Russia. Eastern-EU nations, who had largely escaped the destruction of the recent war, were most worried by this, of course. But in practical terms all it meant was that there was too little food in the shops, too few clothes and shoes. Nobody seemed to have any money. Even doctors like Thom earned next to nothing. Our clothes became ragged. I was even grateful, in a way, that Gradi was so small of stature. Because she grew so little it meant I did not have to buy her too many suits of new clothes.

  But even in these early days Thom had plans to make himself wealthy. ‘I won’t go for it now,’ he confided in me, ‘because the taxes are still too high, it’s still war-level taxation and I’d lose most of my wealth to the government. But in a year or two, when things settle down, I’ll make us a fortune. I’ll be rich, you’ll see.’

  This he did. He had invented a drug regimen when still a student, and had been able, in between his official medical work, to refine it down to a single implant. This is before the ubiquity of today’s pharmakoi, although Thom’s work was, I suppose, part of that climate out of which they were developed. This was how it worked: the metabolic systems that take excess food and lay it down as fat are governed by hormonal and chemical pathways. Slimming treatments that had been developed in the late twentieth century had simply blocked the uptake of the fat in the gut, but this had the unavoidable and unpleasant side effect of creating loose, malodorous and sometimes uncontrollable stools. Thom’s drugs had a different effect. They rewired the body. Fat was still laid down, but it was only stored in one place in the body. A woman could eat as much as she liked, and she would only get fatter in her breasts.

  Thom marketed his drug for the first time in 2067, and it was an instant hit. The austerity of the war years was changing, giving way to a voluptuous cultural styling that emphasised female breasts as desirable objects. More and more food was coming on the market from the oceanic farms. People started celebrating more, eating more, dressing more showily. Women bought Thom’s drugs in enormous quantities. It was a craze. It crossed the difficult Atlantic boundary and became a craze in the Americas too. Female breasts assumed wholly new sizes and dimensions. The effect was completely unlike surgical breast enlargement, for the new breast matter was ordinary body fat, and the breasts felt and moved in wholly non-plastic, realistic ways, excepting only that they were huge. There were side effects of course: many women suffered backache from the unusual weight on their chests, and some tried to sue Thom’s company, but the lawsuits were unsuccessful. Worse, if the breasts became too fatty, the texture of the flesh could deteriorate, leaving the skin of the breasts deeply dimpled and pocked. But although all this was well known it did not deter many hundreds of thousands of women from taking the drugs. Fat women took them in order to slim; skinny women took them to enlarge their breasts; and so it was something that Thom could sell to everybody. The market grew and grew. In commercial terms it was a glorious success. Thom became one of the wealthiest EU businessmen in the postwar boom.

  An irony was that Thom did not much care for breasts. My own breasts, once the milk went out of them, were small, and he told me this was how he preferred it. I have always been skinny, regardless of what I eat, so I have never needed slimming regimens. But I did not complain about Thom’s business, or about our large Cambridge house on the Anglian coastline, or our London townhouse in the central section, with a roof garden, or the cars and planes. I did not complain that Gradi got the best medical interventions money could buy, and that she finally discarded her callipers and walked free and strong with only minor internal prostheses to help her knees and hips carry the weight. I did not even complain, although I felt bad about it, that Thom began relationships with a succession of women he called ‘muses’, which is as good a euphemism for ‘mistress-prostitute’ as I know. It was, I told myself, one of the consequences of his great success, one of the perks I suppose, and a natural follow-on of the many new people who thronged around him all the time. He had met me when we were both poor. Now he was not poor, he was wealthy, and he was a different man.

  Gradi was at school when the Short War happened. She watched the news reports of the destruction of Paris by those dumper-fired shark-teeth missiles, and she was very upset. If you’re too young to remember that, then there’s little I can do to convey the sheer shock of it. There had been several years of peace, and then, suddenly, this enormous destruction. It was not that we had forgotten the war, but it had assumed the marmoreal other-ways distance of history, anecdotage, tv-docs, memoirs. Peace was the new medium in which we lived, and we got used to it. Then, from nowhere, a diplomatic storm blew up, and then we dumped on Atlanta and they dumped on Paris, or perhaps the order of those two events was the other way around, I can’t remember. The consequence was that everybody seemed to stop, abruptly, in the middle of their frivolous spinning lives and look around them with, as the poet says, wild surmise. Could everything end so quickly? It seemed to spring on us from nowhere, a tiger tumbling from the high heavens. But the Short War lasted only three weeks, and the Peace of Madrid that followed seemed to us a more permanent footing for world relations than we had ever had before.

  Thom and I were living in separate apartments now, although he was still supporting me financially, and still took an interest in Gradi’s development. He was courteous, and distant, and sometimes he was sentimental, particularly when he had been drinking: then we would have sex, and he would sometimes coo into my ear how he loved me, only me. But he didn’t. I saw less and less of him, these awkward occasional reheatings of our former relationship notwithstanding. His love was directed elsewhere; it found another woman.

  He offered to pay for me to have the scar tissue removed from my arms, but I refused. I think I was still attached to my past, even the painful portions of it. I think, also, that I wanted to spite Thom for separating from me, to snipe at him about his new relationship with a younger woman, whose name I cannot recall. I was bitter that I was now a single parent. Thom did not stint me financially, and with his money I lived a pleasant, leisurely life; but I was ungrateful, telling myself he could afford it, that he was buying me off, that it was my entitlement.

  It’s strange to recall it now, because the world has changed a great deal and such petty racism seems very dated, but Gradi was bullied at her first school. She had a rather Japanese look about her face, it is true, and immediately after the war there was a deal of anti-Japanese, and anti-American, hostility. She was taunted, smacked, locked in a cupboard, she had her lunches stolen. But even as a little girl, she was a fierce creature, and I did not realise what was going on un
til several weeks later because she did not tell me. She was too proud and too solitary to come crying to mummy. She tried to fight her bullies, despite the fact that she was small and relatively weak. She would launch herself at them in class. I only learned, belatedly, that things were wrong when I was called to speak to the three-person headmaster panel.

  ‘She bites,’ they told me. ‘Now, it is true that the other children sometimes call her names, but she kicks and scratches and attacks them physically. She interferes with the balanced dynamic of the classes. Perhaps it would be best to remove her to another school?’

  ‘Are you expelling her?’ I asked, becoming angry.

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘We only make the suggestion of transferral.’ Their faces might have been carved from ivory, so inexpressive they were. They sat, three people in charge of one of the most expensive schools in Europe, behind an ebony desk in a tall room lit only by lines of clear glass windows high up near the ceiling. Light fell in interlocking parallelograms on the polished floor, on the clear table top, and fell across their grey jackets and their impassive faces. There was a suggestion of dust in the air, but barely a suggestion. The room smelt of lavender and musk. Only the presence of a folded-away ordinater in the corner revealed that it was ever a workroom.

  ‘If my daughter is being bullied,’ I told them, ‘surely it is because you are failing in a duty of care towards her.’

  ‘Is it true,’ one of the headmasters, a woman, asked, ‘that Gradisil is half-Japanese?’ Her voice was insinuating.

  ‘Is Gradisil a Japanese name?’ asked a second.

  ‘We only ask,’ said the first, ‘because there is still a legal duty to register all Japanese Europeans with the authorities, just as it is with American Europeans.’

  This was too much. I told them that I knew my legal responsibilities. ‘I thought we fought the war against racial discrimination,’ I fumed. ‘I thought that Europe stood for diversity and cultural respect, and not for a foul, ingrained racism.’ I told them that they did not have the legal right to expel my daughter, and I threatened and blustered. But, when I took Gradi home that evening, I couldn’t get her to open up about the bullying. She seemed embarrassed that I would even ask. ‘It’s alright, Ma,’ she said, in her ten-year-old way. ‘I can handle it. Don’t go on about it! Leave it alone!’ She was small as a bird. I hugged her with a sort of desperation. I didn’t know how to get through to her. She was so self-contained.

  The following week she bit one pupil, and stuck a broken calculator-chip into another one’s eye. This latter child had to have surgery. Causing actual bodily harm constituted non-contestable reason for expulsion, without refund of fees, and Gradi left that school. I decided to teach her myself, at home, but after two months of that I gave up. I had gotten used to being a woman of wealth and leisure, of morning lie-ins and lengthy alcoholic lunches, and it was too much of a shock to my system to have to stick to school-teacher hours, and to enforce a school-teacher timetable, and to have to discipline my wilful, passionate daughter. I arranged for her to go to another school.

  It was shortly after this that Thom lost his fortune. The vogue for enormous breasts passed, as all such cultural fashions inevitably do. Sales of the drug fell away. New implants that burnt fat in situ, giving over-eaters an all-over slim physique and a constant supply of energy and vigour, became the fashionable way of treating obesity. Thom had diversified his portfolio in a range of separate investments, but he was unlucky. The Euro economy suffered one of its frequent depressions, and he lost all his money. By this stage Thom and I were divorced, and his financial ruination had little impact on my life, except only that the monthly payment for Gradi ceased, and this was inconvenient. I took work as a hair artist, a skill I had picked up in my years of leisure. The fashion at this time was balloon hair - all out of date and hopelessly old-fashioned nowadays, I know, but all the rage, as they say, once upon a time. It went like this: I coated each strand of hair of my subject with a special gel, that hardened in seconds; then I attached a micro-nozzle to the end of each hair, and inflated it with various gases. You would do this regularly over the surface of the hair, varying the effects, and the result was a floaty arrangement, or tangle, of lenticular expanded hair-strands that bobbed and rose and gave body and shape. It was a time-consuming and therefore an expensive process, but I was good at it. For a time I had enough money to send Gradi to another school, but the company I worked for went out of business and I was unemployed for four months. Gradi had to leave the school, and we lived on the handouts of one of the welfare charities. This, financially, was our lowest period. We shared a large but nevertheless single room with two other single-mother-daughter families in Kent. After this, my life improved.

  eleven

  I did not entirely lose touch with my uplander friends during this period, although I did not stay in contact as closely as I perhaps should have done. But from time to time I spoke to one or other of my old neighbours; and from time to time I sold interviews to the media about the uplander life. This became harder the longer I stayed down on the Earth. Editors began to think, with reason, that my first-hand experience of the lifestyle was out-of-date.

  It was 2075, thirty months after the devastation of the Short War. This was the time when Paris was declared the capital city of the Union of Europe - the arrangement superseding the unwieldy shared-rotating scheme, whereby a northern, southern and eastern city shared the status of capital for two years. Nobody could object to Paris becoming the centre of the Union, since Paris did not, properly speaking, exist. Some of the banlieues, and some of the old twentieth-century suburbs (which had their own historic charm) had survived the bombardment, but much of the housing from the river to the peripherique had been flattened. By ’74 there was a comprehensive regeneration scheme in place, and Paris was to be rebuilt as Paris-Centreuro. By chance, I was at this time dating a building manager, a specialist in the then new technologies of aerated-concrete, who won a lucrative contract to work on re-covering glassed ground with stone for roads and foundations. He was keen on me, I remember, and he suggested that Gradi and I come with him.

  So we moved to Paris. We stayed in builders’ quarters, which were comfortable but noisy with the comings and goings of sky-cranes, buses, energTruks and the like at all hours. Here I gave an interview to Builder Europe magazine that changed my life. It was, naturally, about my time as an uplander, and it was more interesting than many I had given before. Instead of the usual prurient interest in zero-g sex, or in my father’s murder, or things like that, this interviewer wanted me to speculate on the possibilities for the building trade of the new community in the sky.

  ‘There are,’ he said, ‘well over a thousand people living permanently up there, and another six hundred who own little huts and boxes up there and fly up for weekends.’

  ‘Is it so many now?’ I replied. ‘When I first moved up there were no more than forty houses in the whole of the uplands.’

  ‘Planes are more powerful now; the pushjets can operate on a small reservoir and provide vacuum thrust equivalent to the old solid sticks you used to employ in your day.’ The interviewer enjoyed displaying his technical knowledge.

  ‘Really!’ I said. ‘How fascinating.’

  ‘War always results in advances in technology,’ he said with false blitheness. ‘The new Civilian UltraJet has a range of two thousand klims, and can fly from pretty much anywhere above the Tropic of Cancer to polar orbital entry in under an hour.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ I said.

  ‘The new elec-generators can maintain high-amp pulses for much longer stretches. It’s possible now to use Elemag not only to climb into orbit, but to manoeuvre, to perform quite intricate manoeuvres.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ I said again. But I couldn’t see the point in interviewing me about new developments, when the interviewer clearly knew more than I did. I was expecting to be asked to reminisce about the historical earlier period of upland colonisation. But this was not how th
e interview proceeded.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘my question is: given the continued expansion of the upland community, and given the fact that more and more industry down on Earth is producing specialist material for these uplanders, can it be long before they start hiring builders to fly up and work for them?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, carefully. ‘All of the uplanders I know pride themselves on their self-reliance. Very few of them would be happy contracting work out, especially to ground-dwellers. It’s a specialist environment, you see, and a very unforgiving one. You mention the companies down here who manufacture for the upland market. To take them as an example: I don’t know any uplanders who would be happy to buy their stuff and use it without modifying it, checking it, rejigging it. There’s a company, I know, called Belius, producing expensive vacuum suits - but only a fool would put one on straight from the shop and jump out of an airlock. If you haven’t made it yourself, you don’t really trust it.’