Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  My interviewer did not seem very happy with this; I don’t think it was the answer he was expecting. ‘Still,’ he pressed, ‘houses in the uplands are getting larger and larger. Surely there will be some demand for building professionals to fly up and work on these properties?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I conceded. ‘Perhaps the weekend uplanders you mentioned might be more likely to employ contractors.’

  ‘And then there’s the Moon,’ he added. ‘A dozen people are living there now. A man called Åsa Olsen has been, it seems, voted mayor of the Moon. These mooners fly down to Earth orbit - to, that is, the uplands - during the lunar night, and fly back up to the Moon for the lunar day.’

  ‘Åsa Olsen,’ I said, smiling, ‘is a man with ample independent finances, and can do what he wishes. But how can a village on the Moon become anything other than a rich man’s folly? How could it become economically self-sufficient? I don’t see it.’

  The truth is, my years living downside again had altered my perspective on the uplanders. I tended to see them now as foolish sorts, living an impossible life, which was pretty much how the ground-media presented them. How could it ever become a real country? It was so hostile to life, so difficult and expensive to live in. But despite the awkwardness of this interview it had significant consequences for my life.

  For the time being, however, I could not foresee this. I was living in the builders’ village, and Gradi was going to a France-EU school, and hating it. ‘Only half the lessons are in English,’ she said. ‘The rest in stupid French. I hate my teachers, and I hate my schoolfellows.’

  ‘Are you being bullied?’ I asked, anxious, and she looked disdainfully at me, as if I had mentioned something embarrassing. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I just hate them.’

  ‘Just because your daddy was originally from Japan,’ I told her, ‘doesn’t give anybody the right to make fun of you.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said, her tone of voice inexpressibly dismissive of my foolish notion.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s because I’m an uplander’s child. They all say so.’

  ‘What?’ I was shocked to hear this.

  She set her mouth in a thread-thin line and looked at the floor.

  ‘Do they hate uplanders so much?’ I asked.

  ‘They say the uplanders killed Paris. I’m glad they did - if Paris is full of people like that, they deserved it.’

  I rebuked her for this savageness, but only mildly. It startled me, in fact, that there could be such hostility towards the uplanders in a European school. ‘It was the Americans that bombed the city,’ I told her, but she only shrugged, and went off to play with her ElectroInsect, flying it round and round her room with her control glove. That was her toy of the moment, I remember.

  I became a little paranoid, in fact. I began to think that it had been foolish of me to give so many interviews, to broadcast the fact that I was an uplander, if they - if we - were to become the new hate-figures, the scapegoats, the new Jews, the new Arabs. I found myself walking past knots of people on the shopping boulevards, overhearing or imagining that I overheard disparaging comments. It was almost certainly nothing but my imagination. When the commissioners contacted me, I assumed at first that it was to arrest me for being an uplander. I nearly fled.

  They approached me, all three of them in EuroCivil uniforms, when I was standing at a coffee counter in the market boule of Paris-Est.

  ‘Ms Gyeroffy?’ one of them said.

  ‘Who are you to ask?’

  ‘We also have you on file as Mrs Baldwin,’ said the second.

  ‘I no longer use that name.’

  ‘Are you, though,’ said the first, ‘the Klara Gyeroffy who used to live in the uplands?’

  That was when I nearly ran off; nearly dropped my shopping and left my coffee and limped-ran away. But I didn’t. I swallowed deeply, and tried to calm myself. ‘It is true,’ I said, ‘that I used to live up there.’

  ‘Have you had lunch?’ the second one asked. I said no. ‘May we take you to lunch? We have an officially sanctioned proposition.’

  They took me to a very expensive and exclusive luncherie. My then-boyfriend, the builder, was fairly well-to-do, but he had never bought me food at so expensive a place. ‘Let me ask you one thing, Ms Gyeroffy,’ they said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do I want?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I thought about the question. Perhaps it is a strange thing, but I had not thought about that question for many years. You become caught up in the day-to-day when you have a child. ‘I want,’ I said, ‘a house in the uplands.’

  The commissioners smiled at me, and looked less like policepeople. ‘We can help you to that.’

  As soon as I said it, and as soon as they replied, I knew that this was truly what I wanted, and that I wanted it more than anything else. Gradi was twelve. In a few years she would be an adult and would leave me, and then what would I do? Pass from boyfriend to boyfriend until I became too old? Work at one or other menial job? I would never earn enough money to be able to afford a plane, to be able to buy a house, to be able to do nothing but live in the uplands. Like the overwhelming majority of the people who lived on the skin of the Earth these things would always be beyond me - above me. Saying I want this is, in part, articulating what you do not have, what you may never have. We desire unattainable things with an intensity we cannot muster for the attainable. How else could it be? It was the gap between me saying I want a house in the uplands and these policiers replying we can help you to that - it was the little abyss of unattainability between those phrases that gave such piquancy to my excitement. It was fireworks in my belly and my brain. I said: ‘Can you. Can you really?’

  ‘Sure,’ said the commissioner.

  ‘We read your interview in Builder Europe,’ said the second commissioner. ‘You really know the upland community, don’t you? I mean, you know the core community - the people who have been there for decades. The key players. Maybe you don’t know the new people so well, the parvenus, but you know the important people.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘This mayor of the Moon, for instance,’ said the first commissioner. ‘You know him?’

  ‘I know him well,’ I said, and I did not add although I have not spoken to him in many years.

  ‘What we want, Ms Gyeroffy,’ said the first of them, ‘- and by we I mean the People’s Government of the Union of Europe - the thing that we want is an ambassador.’

  Here it was that my life changed about again. The restaurant was called Potalovo. It’s still there, I believe, in Paris-Est. A long, lowceilinged new building. Its tables were made from marble, and it was lit by droning artificial flies that circled over the tables and mazed their way through the girders up by the ceiling throwing a variable pale-orange illumination below them. There were hardly any other diners in the place. The inside was fashionably murky, dark corners in which diners could feel they were enjoying privacy, but the broad frontage windows were shimmering and bright with daylight. When waiting staff passed before these windows on their way from the kitchens to the tables at the back they became, as silhouettes, spectral, blur-edged, dark smudges.

  ‘An ambassador,’ I repeated.

  ‘Let me ask you not to repeat this outside this restaurant,’ said the first commissioner. ‘Europe is on the verge of recognising the uplands - recognising them diplomatically, that is. We want to go further, we want to establish a specifically European enclave in the uplands themselves. Naturally we want good relations with the existing uplanders. Ideally, we want a treaty, an alliance of one sort or another, but more important than that - that may come, in the fullness of time, but more important than that now - is that we establish friendly relations with the uplanders.’

  ‘You can help us to that aim,’ said the second commissioner. ‘You’re an EU citizen, born and living in Europe. But you are also an uplander, with many friends.’

  ‘The father of your d
aughter,’ put in the third, ‘is an uplander. Is he not?’

  They didn’t need an answer to that. They knew that already.

  ‘As ambassador,’ said the first, ‘you would live for a while in the European, uh, in the European enclave. But eventually, after some years, we would be able to help you towards a house of your own - a private house, in the uplands. If that is, indeed, what you want?’

  ‘That is what I want,’ I said. I was slightly dazed. I took another sip of wine.

  ‘Then I’m delighted to say it is settled!’ said the first commissioner. ‘You will agree to work as acting ambassador. You will not be granted actual ambassadorial rank; it’s a quasi-appointment. But it will help you on your way to a house of your own. And your brief — ’ he trailed off.

  ‘My brief?’

  ‘To establish friendly connections with the uplanders.’ There seemed to be some unspoken problem here. The commissioners looked one to another as if egging one another on to say something to me. Finally the first of them spoke. ‘Let me put it this way,’ he said. ‘We would like the uplanders to be well disposed towards Europe, rather, say, than towards America-Japan. Do you understand?’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘I can say,’ the second commissioner announced, ‘that EUSA is changing. The old order vanishes, yielding its place to the new. NASA, you see, is still wedded to rocket flight, but EUSA, and Europe as a whole, is now committed to flying planes through the torsion of the magnetosphere. A new breed of space plane is being developed right now - as we speak. Six large carriers, bigger than any plane that’s flown into space yet. A dozen smaller jets, fast deployment. And that’s just the start. We intend to establish a large-scale European base in orbit; the first national presence in the uplands.’

  ‘There are, naturally, worries,’ interjected the first, ‘that the present inhabitants will not be - ah - pleased with this development. We need to find ways of assuring them that our intentions are in no way hostile. Not hostile towards them, at any rate,’ he added.

  ‘You are building dedicated space planes?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, your old techniques, adapting conventional jets, that’s no good for a proper project,’ said the first commissioner, with easy condescension. ‘The safety margins are too narrow. No proper government could run a space programme on patch-up-and-mend the way you people, the way your uplanders, have been colonising the area. No, for us it’s got to be design-from-scratch, great gleaming spacebirds. I’ve seen the tenth-size model . . . a beautiful design. Curves by Stilnoct, you know. Some of Europe’s most exclusive designers are being included in the project.’

  twelve

  In this way my life changed. I began to think realistically of returning to the uplands. I had several meetings with European officials, and signed a number of documents, including secrecy documents. According to my lawyers those documents had a fifty-year statute of limitation. It didn’t say so on them when I signed, but apparently a recent court case established the half-century principle for most government binding contracts; of which legal decision I am glad, because without it I would not be permitted to tell you anything of what followed.

  I used official facilities to call all the uplanders I had once known. I had fallen out of the habit of talking with them over the previous few years, because the cost of the calls tended towards the prohibitive. But the Union government was content for me to call all the uplanders I liked. I couldn’t reach Åsa Olsen, Emmet Robles or Bert Felber, but I spoke to Tam - he was pleased to hear from me, I think - and to Sponti. Then I called Teruo, and with him I had a much less pleasant conversation.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Who’s this?’ he said, and his tone of voice was worrying, like a senile old man’s. ‘What? What do you want? What?’

  ‘It’s Klara,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

  ‘I’ve no money!’ he shrieked. ‘No money at all! Leave me alone!’

  I tried to remain calm. I told myself to get into the diplomatic idiom I would soon be using as quasi-official ambassador. But it wasn’t something that came naturally to me. ‘Teruo,’ I said sternly. ‘I don’t want your money. Don’t be stupid. Let’s talk.’

  But he only said, ‘I’ve no money! No money at all!’ and then he started to cry. I began to wonder if he had gone a little mad, or a little more mad, and this thought, oddly, made me angry. What right did he have to lose his sanity in my absence? How dare he not remain the same whilst I was away? It seemed to me that the least he could do was to stay as a fixed point in the background of my life, like a star, so that I could return to him and things could be as they always were. Of course we all treat the others in our life this way. We don’t see them for, say, two years and then we resent the fact that, on meeting them after all that time, they’ve grown, they’ve changed. If we leave our house in the morning we don’t wish to return to it in the evening to discover that it’s grown an extra storey.

  ‘Stop that crying,’ I shouted. ‘Shut up! I don’t want your money! Will you be quiet? Don’t you want to know how your daughter is doing?’

  This made him cry more, and he became incoherent. I caught ‘my daughter’ and ‘oh, humanity!’ and ‘crazy’, but the rest was garbled, some of it in Japanese. I thought of calling off, of trying again another time, but suddenly Teruo stopped crying and his voice came through very clearly.

  ‘It’s a shock to hear you, Klara, actually,’ he said. ‘My skin is all bubbling off me.’

  This was such a weird thing to say that I almost didn’t register it. I decided to ignore it, thinking Teruo was just acting goofy, or just overplaying his reaction to hearing my voice for the sake of sympathy.

  ‘I don’t mean to shock you,’ I said. ‘Has it been so long since we last spoke?’

  ‘Three years,’ he said. He sniffed. ‘No, four years. More than four years. Such a long time. How are you? Are you well?’

  ‘I’m well,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some news.’

  But he didn’t seem to want to hear my news. ‘And how’s Gradi? How’s my daughter? The daughter that I’ve never seen?’

  I didn’t say, the daughter you didn’t want to see, couldn’t wait to get rid of. ‘She’s well. Doing well at school. We’re living in Paris now.’

  ‘Paris,’ he said. ‘They’re rebuilding Paris. It’s to be the Euro capital.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘It was on the news. Paris was destroyed during the war.’

  ‘I know,’ I said again, worrying that Teruo’s mental faculties were so loose. ‘Are you alright Teruo?’ I asked. ‘You’re not making a whole lot of sense.’

  His voice, when he replied, was stiff with anger. ‘Didn’t you hear me earlier? My skin is all bubbling off. It’s coming off my back in sheets.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ I said. ‘Really?’

  Now he was crying. ‘It’s been this way for months now,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m dying, Klara, dying. I’m going to be dead, and I’ll never have seen my own daughter. How I wish I’d come down with you, lived with you in London! Don’t it sound stupid to say so? Leave the uplands - me? I was never happy down there. And yet look what it’s done to me, cancer, carcinoma, neoplasm, all over my skin and under my skin, and I look like a freak. I’m so glad there’s no picture on this phone, or you’d faint to see me. Fucking uplands, they’ve boiled me with their radiations.’ He snorted, sniffed, and then, abruptly and rather shockingly, he laughed very loud. ‘When the war started and I knew you were in London, I said to myself, at least I’m up here. Can you believe that? How selfish I was! I had visions of you and Gradi being smashed to atoms by the American bombs in London, and I thought I was safe up here. Safe? Safe?’ He was sobbing again, now. ‘It’s fried me, living up here. I got cancer, and I’ll be dead before the end of the month.’

  It was heartrending. Uplanders still live within the protecting curtain of the magnetosphere, of course, but they’re much higher up than groundlings: the p
rotection is less and the risk accordingly higher. I spoke to Teruo for hours. I said to him: ‘Fly down, come down to Europe. Or if you’re too ill to fly, get somebody else to fly you down. Come and spend some time in a hospital down here, maybe you can get cured.’

  He was dismissive. ‘I’m already dead,’ he said morosely. ‘I’ll be dead in a week.’ Then he started crying again. ‘I haven’t exercised in nine months,’ he whined. ‘My legs are like a doodle-man’s. They’d snap if I came down, snap like they were made of breadsticks. There’s no hope! There’s no hope!’

  It was extremely upsetting. But I must make a rather shameful admission. During the middle of this conversation, when Teruo was sobbing and telling me how much he regretted, and how he didn’t want to die, and when I was commiserating with him and reassuring him as much as I could - right in the middle of this, I thought to myself, if Teruo really is going to die soon, then maybe I can get his house. I used to live there, after all. It should come down to his daughter by the laws of inheritance - and then I’ll have my house in the uplands again. I felt bad that I could think such a thing at such a time, but that didn’t stop me bringing it up with him.