by Adam Roberts
I returned to the Earth for Christmas, and spent a distant two weeks with Gradi in Paris. She had enrolled in the University of London on a military scholarship, and was due to begin her studies in the spring. At one point she said to me: ‘When you were my age, Ma,’ and I put down the book I was reading and looked at her.
‘Yes?’
‘You were pregnant with me, weren’t you?’
‘I guess so. More or less.’
She looked at me, hard. ‘That must have been awkward.’
‘It was alright,’ I said.
She went back to the music to which she was listening. The fashion at that time was what they called neo-celibacy. Teenagers spent as much time together as they ever had done, but it was not cool to have sex. Instead one or other of them exerted themselves on elaborate chivalric rituals - it might be the male or the female who undertook these, but they absorbed as much energy as the older courtship rituals had used to, and more. I looked at my daughter in that Paris apartment, and I realised that I had no idea whether she had a sex life or not, whether she had a boyfriend or not. More, I had no idea how to frame the question to ask her that without offending her. I did not feel especially senior to her. Looking back, with my hindsight, I suppose I was feeling out of place in a broader sense. The cultural climate was changing, and the new morality was starting to make itself felt. It was my daughter’s generation, and most especially their children, that has shaped the cultural idiom in which we all now live. I think I had an intimation of the way things were changing.
In January I flew up again to the uplands, and again I clutched the armrests of my seat as the plane wobbled and jerked through a dangerous upper flight. As soon as I arrived at the Station Gar Murphy-McNair came up to me. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear this, Gyeroffy,’ he said. ‘We’ve some work for you to do. You always complain that you’ve not enough to do. Well, we’ve got an important assignment for you.’
We went through to his office, and he strapped himself into a chair. I found the corner of his room with the least downdraft, where I felt most comfortable.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.
‘You’ll be working with a contact of ours, an uplander.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Woman called Norma Fryer.’
‘I’ve never heard of her.’
‘She’s not as well-connected as you, though she’s a longstanding uplander. But she’s been living up here for quite a while. She’s coming to the Station tomorrow. You and she, you’ll form a team. For our purposes,’ and by this he meant the purposes of command, ‘you’ll be senior, but I don’t want you bossing her around.’
‘And what will we be doing?’
‘Listen to me, Klara,’ he said. ‘I’m serious about this. We have certain public relations victories to win, do you see? Polls say there’s still a widespread hostility to the uplanders in Europe. I’m not giving away any state secrets when I say that the hot peace may soon get a little hotter, do you see? That there may soon be a development with regard to the Americans. When that happens, the uplands will be an important arena. We need to show our people that we’re in control of the land up here.’
‘But we’re not in control of the land up here,’ I said, mildly. It was a simple statement of fact.
He overreacted to this. ‘I’m not standing for your insolence, Gyeroffy,’ he bawled. ‘You’re under my direct orders, and I’ll put you on a charge soon as snap my fingers. You’ll fall in behind me and do as you’re told.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to be insolent. I was only saying . . .’
‘This is the way it’ll go,’ he said, still yelling, and clicking his fingers in front of my face. ‘There are a lot of uplanders now. The population is well over three thousand, and most of them still feel more of an attachment to the ground than the sky. But the old guard, the people you know, carry a great deal of weight in the - for want of a better word, the community. They’re respected. They’re the pioneers. If we make a gesture with them, it resonates far and deep. Do you see?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘There have always been two sorts of uplander,’ he said. ‘There have been wealthy eccentrics who just like living up here. And there have been people who came here to get away from the law downbelow. OK? Millionaires and criminals. But money has changed, OK? Since the war, old-fashioned chips have been largely replaced by these new bearer-chips. We don’t like this development - by we I mean the authorities. The old bank-tied chips were easy to keep tabs on, and very hard to steal. Or, more exactly, they were very hard to use once stolen. But these newer chips are negotiable. They’re like cash, you see? But people won’t trust bank-chips since the war, since those insurgent attacks collapsed half the banks in the world. So now there’s a great fortune floating around in bearer-chips.’
‘I don’t see . . .’ I started saying, but he cut me off.
‘There have been a number of large-scale robberies. People in the uplands have been handling the stolen chips. In effect, laundering them. Some of your old-timers think they’re beyond the law, think they’ve nothing to lose. Criminal gangs send the chips up here, and they’re kept out of circulation, or re-entered someplace else, or else traded against other commodities. It’s a scandal. It is illegal.’
‘You want it stopped ?’
‘Ms Fryer, who you’ll meet tomorrow, is what you might call grey uplander. She’s not white like you.’ There was a hint of sarcasm in his voice as he said this. ‘But she’s not black, like some of them. You and she will sting a number of old-timers, arrest them, and we’ll have a big PR celebration. We’ll splash it all over the Euro media. We’ll win hearts and minds downbelow. Cleaning out the upland Augean stables.’
‘The what?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you know any mythology at all?’ he snapped at me. ‘I thought you were Greek?’
I took a deep breath. ‘If you think I’m going to betray any of my friends . . .’
‘Don’t get all high and mighty,’ he said, waving his hand and making a sour moue with his mouth. ‘Please, please. You won’t have to betray any of your friends. There’s a list of people, you can vet it in advance. We only need, say, three high-profile cases, enough to convince our people that we’re bringing law and order to the uplands, clearing out the outlaws. So that it’ll look, in the media, as if we’re taking the uplands under our wing, building a land fit for Europeans to live in. You might have a word with your friends, of course,’ he added, ‘let them know that things are changing. That it’ll benefit everybody to live under the rule of law. That’s true, after all. Don’t you think?’
‘Under the rule of European law,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
There was a silence. The white noise of the fans seemed louder in my ears. I said: ‘Show me this list.’
He handed me a piece of paper that flapped and wriggled in my hands as I took it. On it were a dozen names. I recognised four of them. At the top of the list was Åsa Olsen. This was a shock. I remembered him saying to me on the phone ‘I’m not well liked in Europe’, and now I understood his reluctance to pay me a visit. But I had always thought of him as a man of bottomless wealth. It had not occurred to me that he might have been driven to money-laundering as a means of financing his life in space.
‘You only need three?’ I said.
‘Three or four. Provided they’re high-profile enough.’
‘Åsa Olsen is a friend of mine,’ I said. ‘I’ll not betray him.’
‘Then pick four other names,’ Murphy-McNair said.
I chose four unfamiliar names, and went to my chamber. I was sharing it now with the West-Russian aide, Natalya Shelikhova, but she was asleep, so I lay down in the dark on the mattress-grid under the blowing pressure and thought for a long while. It seemed to me that my dream of reacquiring a house in the uplands was becoming morally compromised. Then I scolded myself: surely you didn’t think that they would ju
st give you a house, did you? You’ll have to earn it. And, I told myself, there is some justice in what Murphy-McNair had said. It was better to live under the rule of law than to live in an outlaw community. Eventually, I told myself, the uplands would have to grow, to take on for themselves the trappings of civilisation. It was inevitable.
In this way I reconciled myself to my new work. I persuaded myself that I was not only being selfish - that there were good reasons for my actions apart from my own selfish reasons. I persuaded myself that I was helping the land I loved become a better place.
In the morning I washed and put on my uniform, ready to meet this grey uplander, Norma Fryer, with whom I would have to work. I waited by the hangar as her plane nudged into a lock. Murphy-McNair and Natalya Shelikhova were with me. The docking seemed to take ages. Finally the gate opened and Fryer pulled herself through.
Stupidly, perhaps, I did not recognise her at once. She had lost weight, although she was still enormous; but her skin was saggy now and curled itself in patterns of cellulite and pock-marking that seemed, under the dual forces of downward-blowing air and ambient zero g, to move and flow with an oily fluidity. Her hair was as massy and tangled as ever. She stood, unsteadily, under the fan blast. As her eyes fell on me she beamed a great smile, and her two great dolphin-like rows of teeth became all visible.
‘Klara,’ she said. ‘How delightful to see you again.’
I was dumb. I said nothing. I didn’t launch myself at her, I didn’t scream, I didn’t try and throttle her. I simply stood, unsteadily, as Natalya Shelikhova advanced and shook her hand. It felt as if I were still dreaming. Is it a cliché, to say so? But that was exactly how it felt - actually as if the timbre of reality had, somehow, slipped out of focus. I could still hear the susurrus of the fans above me, but now they seemed almost to be speaking to me, hushing me, telling me to hush, to hush, to hush. Murphy-McNair was saying something, his mouth moving, and I clicked my eyes from her face to his.
‘May I introduce,’ he was saying, ‘Norma Fryer.’
‘I’ve met Ms Gyeroffy before,’ she was saying.
‘Kristin,’ I said, my mouth dry. But my mouth was often dry in that place. ‘How do you come to be here?’
‘Oh,’ she said, turning her great bulk about and about. ‘I flew here. As, I suppose, did you.’
fifteen
At no point during that first meeting was I alone with Kristin Janzen Kooistra. There was an official briefing chaired by Murphy-McNair and attended by half a dozen others. Then there was a period when I was alone. Then there was a second meeting. Finally Kooistra retired to her guest chamber. By this time my mind had returned to me, at least in part. I was fizzing.
As soon as I could, I demanded to see Murphy-McNair alone.
‘What is it now?’ he said, grumpy. ‘You’re a very awkward woman, Klara. Why can’t you just accept what we’ve agreed? A week’s work and it’ll be done.’
‘That woman,’ I said. ‘That Norma Fryer, as she is calling herself. That’s not her real name.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We know.’
‘Her real name is Kristin Janzen Kooistra,’ I said.
‘We know.’
‘You know? How can you know? She’s a killer. She’s the most wanted killer in the world.’
‘No,’ he said, blankly.
‘What do you mean no?’
‘She has got a criminal record, yes, that’s true. But if you check the web, the world’s most wanted killer this week is Yakov Znamenski. Fryer’s name doesn’t appear even in the top twenty most wanted.’
I was silenced by this. My mind was burning. ‘Are you crazy? Don’t you know what this woman has done?’
‘She hasn’t killed anyone in years,’ he said. ‘We don’t have her down as suspect for any European killings at the moment.’
‘I can’t believe that you’re so blithe about this,’ I said. My voice was high pitched. ‘I can’t believe that. Is she working for you for a pardon? Is that it?’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘If you listen, you’d hear me. She doesn’t require a pardon from us. She’s not wanted for any crimes by the European police at this moment in time. She’s working for us for money. What else?’
‘She killed my father,’ I said.
He looked at me. Then he said, ‘Really?’ It was as if I’d just told him my favourite colour is blue or the canteen overcooked the eggs this morning.
‘Is that what you say? You say really?’
He blinked. ‘What else do you want me to say?’
‘I want you to say that you’ll arrest this woman and prosecute her for the murder of my father.’
‘Well now,’ he said, folding his hands together. ‘I don’t see how we could do that. When do you allege she committed this crime?’
‘I say she committed it in ’58,’ I said.
‘That’s a while ago,’ he said.
‘It’s under the statute of limitations for murder,’ I said.
‘Well. Did you report this crime to the police at the time?’
My face went into a sort of spasm. My eyes closed and my mouth fell open. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. ‘Of course I did,’ I said. ‘Of course I did.’
‘Then I’m surprised your complaint doesn’t appear on our police records.’
‘It wasn’t the European police who dealt with it,’ I said. ‘I reported it in Canada.’
‘Oh,’ he said. Then he made a sort of ‘hhh’ noise, an exhalation. ‘That explains that.’
‘You can call up the Canadian records,’ I said.
‘I very much doubt it. Really. Relations between America and Europe are in a dip at the moment. There’s about to be a war, you know?’ - spoken as if to a child.
‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘Are you insane? For something like this an exception would be made. I’m not asking for state secrets. It’s a humanitarian, a criminological requirement. Ask them, they’ll send the evidence file over to you.’
He looked at me for a long time. ‘Do you know what?’ he said. ‘I don’t doubt it. Ms Fryer is a significant asset to the European agency. A significant asset.’
It took me a moment to take this on board.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ I said.
‘What do I mean? I mean she’s an asset to us, I mean she’s a thorn in the side of the Americans. I don’t doubt they’d be happy to concoct some file or other to get her into trouble. I don’t doubt they’d be very happy for us to lose her - ah - special skills. Her contacts. She’s a major player, Klara. She’s a big cheese. Do you know what? It’s very good of her to help us with this current project. Rounding up a few delinquent uplanders, that’s small beer to her. She’s doing it for a very small fee, relatively speaking. We’re very grateful to her.’
My ears appeared to be ringing. My face felt hot. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ I said.
‘Believe it,’ he said. For a moment his face creased with an expression almost of humanity. ‘Look, Klara,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this isn’t easy for you.’
‘Isn’t easy for me,’ I repeated.
‘Will you listen to me for a moment? Will you take my advice?’
‘Advice.’
‘Let it go, alright? Do this thing I’m asking you to do. Let it go. In a week she’ll be out of the way again, you needn’t bump into her any more, you can forget about her.’
I considered this sentence. ‘Forget about her,’ I said.
‘That’s right. My advice is, to consider your options very carefully. You can’t touch her. You can’t even embarrass her. There won’t be criminal proceedings against her. Will not be - do you understand? Not unless the Americans invade the uplands and arrest her, and we’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s why we’re here after all. She’s helping us make sure that doesn’t happen, and she’s doing a tremendous job. She’s an immovable object as far as you’re concerned, alright? So your options are clear. You can do what y
ou’re employed to do. You can let her go, and then - eventually - you’ll get your own place up here. Then you’ll be a private citizen. Then you can do what you want. Come that day, I will no longer care. Or — ’
‘Or?’
‘Or you can make a fuss. But you won’t be able to get to her. What would you do, try and punch her out? She’d break your neck like a cigarette. Or what? Listen to me, Klara. If you so much as embarrass her, if you so much as incommode her, you will be sent back down to the Earth. You will be dishonourably discharged. You’ll go to prison. You’ll live the rest of your life afterwards in poverty on Earth, and you’ll never see the uplands again. Do you understand?’
I was stunned.