by Adam Roberts
‘I’m trying to make it easy for you,’ he said. ‘If you cause any harm to our agent, you will be prosecuted. You wouldn’t like it in prison, believe me. The choice is a simple one. Roll with it, and you’ll get what you want, eventually. Resist, and you’ll lose everything. Which is it to be, Klara? Roll with it, or resist?’
‘That doesn’t sound like a choice at all,’ I said.
‘I’m glad you see it that way,’ he said. He was smiling.
I spent the rest of that day in a sort of daze. I slept, for about twenty minutes. When I woke the whole encounter had the friable, out-of-focus feeling of a dream; but, limping awkwardly down the main corridor there was Kristin Janzen Kooistra, taking cautious little steps underneath the constant downward gale, testing her new artificial ‘weight’, coming along the corridor towards me. I turned and fled. I couldn’t bear it.
It was the reality of it that was unbearable. The reality of it. I was jammed, now, and there was no way out of the choice that Murphy-McNair had placed so lumpenly before me. I tried to think it through, like a chess game. Make this move, that move will follow. Make the move after that, and find yourself in the place you wanted to be. I told myself, a private citizen again, my own house in the uplands - not dependent on anybody else, not living on anybody’s sufferance, but my own person.
And then what?
This was what was most disorienting of all. I tried to be honest with myself. I sat eating government food in the poky little Station galley under the constant downward gale, and I tried to think the possibilities of the future through. If I became a private upland citizen, then what? Would I devote my retirement to trying to kill Kooistra? One voice in my head said yes! yes!, but it was a high-pitched and juvenile voice. Other voices in my mind had greater weight. No is a weighty word. No, I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t. Human beings don’t devote their lives to killing other human beings unless there is something wrong in their heads, some fused circuit in their skull. I had lived many years in the uplands, and they had been my life’s happiest years - and all through those years I had cohabited with Kooistra, in the sense that I had shared the uplands with her. Once I had knocked her communication satellite dish off her house in a fit of anger, but that was all that I had done. Had I spent every day consumed with the appetite for revenge? - of course I had not. I had been too busy, most days, to think of anything other than what my hand fell to, what jobs needed doing, my three-hour stint in the gym. This was the choice, then: to plan to live my life for me, or to plan to surrender my life to this abstract ‘revenge’, to the hope of killing another.
It was hard. I’m not trying to suggest it was easy. Kooistra left the Station for two weeks, and went about her own business. Murphy-McNair arranged for her to return at a certain date, and thereafter for she and I to fly out together to round up some sacrificial victims to the new idol of European Law and Order. Murphy-McNair seemed pleased with my restraint at the final meeting, but the truth of it was that I was not restrained, I was stunned. I even shook Kooistra’s hand.
Jon came to visit four days after that. He had returned to the uplands to pick up some supplies, before returning to his Moon house, and he phoned me from orbit. I cleared it with the Station, and he nosed his streaked, grubby plane into the docking attachment that I had fought to have installed.
I was excited at the prospect of seeing him, in fact. It had been years since I had seen any of my old friends. But when the lock opened and he pulled himself through, looking startled at the great wash of air pushing him down from above, I was struck by how old he looked. He had always been much older than I, of course; but now he was a broken-down and aged man, a great-grandfather rather than a fatherly figure. The lines on his face were deeper, his limbs were stick thin, his back seemed curiously bowed: not weighed down by gravity, obviously, but something the reverse, buoyed up and out of human shape into a simian curve. The last of his hair had gone, and splattery liverspots were all over the crown of his head. A series of unpleasant-looking red moles with black bases spotted his neck and the side of his face. But when he looked at me, and smiled, I saw something of the man I had once had a relationship with, and I hugged him.
‘What’s that breeze?’ he asked, looking up over my shoulder.
‘The artificial gravity,’ I said. ‘You like?’
He pondered it for a little while, and rubbed a smut out of the orbit of his eye. ‘No,’ he said, eventually. ‘What’s the point of it?’
‘The point of it,’ I said, taking his arm, ‘is that we can walk together down this corridor, even in zero g.’
We walked. ‘It’s an odd sensation,’ he said.
He stank: a coarse, chemical smell, and a mist of dust, like grey pollen, was being blown from his clothes, from his skin. I tried to identify his stink, and placed it eventually as gunpowder. ‘Jon,’ I said. ‘You smell of gunpowder. Have you been building fireworks?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s the moondust, that’s the way it smells. It gets everywhere in the house. I don’t even notice it any more.’
I showed him round the inside of the Station, and he was suitably impressed by the grandeur of the scale, and the gorgeousness of the design. ‘But what’s it all for?’ he asked me. I wanted to say, to annex the uplands for Europe, but of course such honesty would not sit comfortably with my new role as diplomat, so I said ‘Who knows? Big governments like big projects.’
He harrumphed softly.
I took him to my chamber, and we drank some whisky that he had brought with him. For a half an hour we chatted. I wanted him to tell me about Tam’s trip round Mars to the asteroids. ‘A guy called Crisp says he’s been to Mars already,’ said Jon. ‘Opinion is divided.’
This was news to me. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘He’s a relative newcomer, this Crisp. Walter Crisp is his name. He says he flew out on one-tenth g acceleration the whole way, made it to Mars and back in four weeks. William Crisp. No, Walter. No, William. I can’t remember.’
‘Four weeks?’ I boggled.
‘The conjunction is right, and if he really did pull one-tenth the whole way then the time factor wouldn’t surprise me. He took some pictures of Mars from his window as he circled it, and they’re very pretty, but I guess it would be child’s play to mock those up with the right computer software. There’s no other proof, nobody tracked him. But it could be true. One tenth gee the whole way would be some achievement, but these new motor sticks are extremely efficient, and he claims he had a great stack of them, and his plane is only small.’
‘He went in his plane?’
‘Yeah, not very comfortable, must have been cramped. Me, I wouldn’t go except in my house. You need that extra bit of leg room.’
‘Does that mean you’re thinking of going?’
He twinkled at me, but didn’t say anything.
The conversation moved round, inevitably, to the one topic that was most on my mind. ‘I saw Kooistra again,’ I said.
Jon didn’t say anything, but he dropped his head a little. He looked even more tired. ‘Where?’
‘Why, right here. Right here. Can you believe it? Jesus. She walked down that corridor that you’ve just walked down.’ I explained the circumstance. ‘Jon,’ I said, ‘I’ve a very important question to ask you. Do you remember a party that Sponti held, years ago? He was guilty because it was through him that Kooistra came to stay in my dad’s house, and he prodded me into a vow of revenge.’
‘I remember.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Now I’ve met up with her again.’
He nodded slowly. Eventually he said, ‘And?’
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What should I do?’
He pondered my question for a while, as he always did with my questions, no matter how goofball. ‘You mean,’ he said, eventually, ‘with respect to this question of revenge? Hmm. Hmm.’
‘If I attack her at all, or even try to get at her, they’ll send me downbelow. I’ll never see the uplands again.’<
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‘That’s hard,’ said Jon.
‘But can I not?’
‘Can you not?’ he repeated. ‘I see.’ He sat in silence for a long time. ‘It may be,’ he said, meekly, ‘that you’re asking the wrong guy, Klara. I have nothing good to say about revenge. You remember?’
He was referring to the time he tried to kill me, and to kill Teruo. I squeezed his hand. ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘That’s OK. That’s different, that’s alright.’
But he was agitated now, and I was worried that a great flow of apologies was going to come tumbling from his lips. ‘No, no, it’s not alright, it’s not OK. I was out of my head, sure, but is that a defence? I don’t think so. I didn’t do you any harm, OK, but I might’ve. That’s where revenge got me. Sitting in my house all alone, just thinking of you, thinking of you all the time, running my imagination over the memory of your body, turning it over and over. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t healthy. You’re talking revenge. Shouldn’t you vow revenge on me?’
‘That’s just stupid,’ I said.
‘Is it?’ he wanted to know. ‘Is it? Why is that stupid? If you can forgive me, you’ve the strength to forgive her. Haven’t you?’
That clarified it for me. It struck me, with a sense of belated revelation, that this was the issue. Could I bring myself to forgive? Did I have the emotional competence to achieve such a mighty thing, to forgive the murderer of my father? I remembered when I had been a child back in Cyprus, and my grandmamma had sent me to one of the old psychiatrists. I remembered that for that shaman Kooistra had been my mother in some strange way. I hadn’t believed it then, and I still didn’t really believe it, but it made me think. My mother died, but I vowed no vow of revenge on her account. Why was it so easy to forgive the fate that killed her? Why was it, accordingly, so hard to forgive the fate that killed my father?
‘I forgive you,’ I mumbled, not sure what I was saying. Then I focused my gaze, saw Jon’s puzzled face. ‘That goes without saying, Jon,’ I added, to give the impression that I had been talking to him. ‘Of course I do.’
‘Well,’ he said, pulling away from me a little petulantly. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t do,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, I mean.’
‘Is it as clean as that, though?’ I said, suddenly pulling myself together. ‘Is it actually forgiveness? - civilisation - all that? Or am I just selfishly pursuing a house for myself in the uplands, am I masking my egotism and self-interest under fancy terms?’
But Jon had lost interest in the conversation. He wasn’t looking at me. I noticed, with a start, that there were tears in his eyes. ‘I shouldn’t have come, Klara,’ he croaked. ‘It was stupid of me to come.’
‘Jon! What’s the matter?’
For a moment his bleared old eyes caught mine, and then he pulled his gaze away again. ‘You don’t even see it,’ he said.
‘See what?’ I said. And, genuinely, I didn’t understand.
‘There’s a cruelty in your soul,’ he cried, and put his hands over his face. ‘Can you really not see? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; you were like this before, you’re like it now.’
Perhaps I had some shadowy intuition of what he was saying, but I shied away from it and adopted a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I’m starting to think you’re going a little ga-ga, Jon. What is the matter? What won’t you tell me?’
He made a little percussive grunt in his throat, and then pushed with his legs, bouncing high in the windy air of the chamber, dropping down near the door. With his back to me he said, ‘When you were younger, when I used to say, sometimes, that I loved you, you always got this blank look on your face, like I was speaking a foreign language. No, no, that’s not it. It was the look of a kid who hears the adults talking, hears them using a certain word, and doesn’t really know what the word means, but doesn’t want to admit that they are ignorant, doesn’t want to give the impression that something has gone over their head. That’s what it was like.’
‘Jon,’ I said.
‘But because you didn’t know what that term meant didn’t mean that it wasn’t real.’ He was facing me now. ‘It was real. I really felt that way. It’s not easy for me to say so, it’s not in my nature to go on, to open myself, but I did with you and you always mirrored back this blankness, as if my love for you were an empty term. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Jon, but — ’
‘You know how I could tell it was real?’ he said. It was so unusual for him to interrupt me, to chop across my sentences with his own like this. I can’t tell you. It was very much out of character. ‘You know how I could tell it was real? How I knew it was something more than just a crush, more than just the sex? Because of how it hurt. Because of the hurt of it, the way it stopped me thinking about anything else, because I could only have you in my head, like a migraine. The not sleeping was real, and hurting was real, and love for you was real.’
He stopped, embarrassed at his own outburst.
‘I don’t see,’ I said, speaking slowly and trying to put sincerity into the words, ‘what there is about me that is so loveable.’
He thought about this for a while. That was more like the old Jon. Finally he said, in a low voice, ‘Neither do I. Neither do I. But what can you do? I was in love with you then, and I’m in love with you now, and there’s no chance that anything can happen between us and that is painful to me. And you don’t even see it, and that makes the pain worse. You can look right at me, and not even see it. There’s a dead part in your heart, you lack something.’ He was speaking in a calmer voice, but his face was flushed, sunset-coloured blotches on his cheeks and forehead. ‘You left your kid on the Earth and hurried up here. Your mind is caught in the orbit of itself, round and round itself. I don’t know. You break my heart. You have always broken my heart. I gotta go. I gotta go.’
He fumbled with the door, and loped out of the chamber down the blowy corridor. I limped quickly after him. Better used to the artificial gravity I caught up with him quickly despite my malformed foot.
‘Jon,’ I said. ‘Wait. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been insensitive, I can see that.’
But he would only say, ‘I gotta go,’ and he clambered back inside his plane and sat in the cockpit. Then there was a bathetic coda to our meeting, because he couldn’t fly his plane away until the gel-clamp was released, and I couldn’t do this without the watch officer’s permission, and the watch officer was, would you believe it, in the toilet. So I hung around for ten minutes, and Jon sat stiffly in his cockpit looking straight ahead at nothing, for all that time. Finally he was released, and I told him he could go, so he puffed his plane back and then juddered a brief burst and pulled away into a lower, faster orbit. That was the last I saw of him.
The meeting did upset me, but - if I am honest - only a little. I pondered what he said. Not to sound banal, but there seemed to be so many points of connection between human beings over the course of a life that involved hurting them. Had I really broken his heart? Say I had. He had tried to kill me, but I found that easy to forgive. I had broken his heart, and he couldn’t forgive me that. Which was the greater crime? My thoughts went round and round, all the time circling the empty centre. I did think about Jon a great deal. Truly, I did. It bothered me. It buzzed at me mosquito-like. Of course, if I’m being honest - since I’m being honest - I’d have to say that I only thought about this question of Jon and me as a way of avoiding thinking about Kristin Janzen Kooistra. I knew that even then, even as I was doing it.
sixteen
Down below us, on the ground, there was an incident. The Eastern Siberian government declared itself in alliance with Asian Siberia, which is to say in effect with America-Japan. At a single diplomatic stroke the American border had moved, effectively, from Khabarovsk to Irkutsk. The European media went into a frenzy of outrage. What next? Would America extend itself as far west as the Urals? Eastern Europe would be next, and then - shadowy, unspecified, but newsmonger hints of rape, pillage and disaster.
The political situation seemed so much more intransigent than it had done in my own youth. Troops were rushed from Atlantic defence to the middle of the Asian continent. Shots were exchanged in the Sayan mountains. It looked as though full-blown war was on the very edge of breaking out; but then, tensely, nothing happened. For a month nothing happened. The month grew into three, and the prospect of immediate war began to seem less real. The media called it the Autumn Tension, because it was autumn in the northern hemisphere. But we had no sense of the passing seasons in the constantly blowy, continually monotonous existence on the Station.
For those three months the routine on the Station changed. More people flew up, and the corridors were crowded. I found myself sharing my chamber with three people in addition to Natalya Shelikhova. I don’t know what all these people were for, or why the government thought to pack the Station with armed men and women. Perhaps they anticipated a gun battle in space - an absurd notion, of course. But there they all were. Murphy-McNair called reveille, drilled us in safety procedures, prepared everything for crisis. The crisis did not come. Or, to be more precise, an unexpected crisis came. This was it: one of the spacebirds, ferrying up some supplies and three medical orderlies, fell out of the sky shortly after entering magnetohydrodynamic flight. It crashed into the bronze-coloured forests of the northern Norwegian coastline. The pilots died, and although three passengers successfully ejected, the wind blew them out to land in the sea and, in a grimly absurd twist, only one of them survived the cold. They were still dressed in summer uniforms despite the fact that it was late autumn.