Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  I tried to tell Murphy-McNair that I had filed a report of the dangers of the spacebird design many months before. Perhaps I did this insensitively, for he bawled at me, yelled that nobody liked an I-told-you-so queen, and suchlike phrases. I gave up. I felt removed from it all, anyway. I felt less and less like a European, more and more like an uplander. Only the prospect of my own house in the uplands buoyed me up. I could not identify, for instance, with the atmosphere of heightened media hysteria that followed the crash. Downbelow news agencies and press went on and on about it: it was exaggerated to the point of multinational disaster. The political tensions threw the spotlight on the military, accusations flew that the military were not even able to fly a plane straight. All spacebirds were grounded over a forty-eight-hour total overhaul, and after that the military flew three up to the Station as soon as they could, in quick succession, to demonstrate their confidence in the technology. But everybody was edgy.

  ‘We need good PR now,’ Murphy-McNair told me. ‘Above all now. I’ll called in Norma Fryer. You and she will go out and round up some sacrificial victims. I want the media tomorrow celebrating our firm hand up here. I want some good news in the news.’

  I saluted. I told myself that this was my moment of testing. I would endure my time with Kooistra, and thereby earn my reward. I told myself that soon it would all be behind me. I would be the better person for forgiving her. I was not sure what form my forgiveness would take, but long afterwards, when I settled into my own house, I would be able to look back and think I did the right thing.

  Rectitude is a form of gravity, I think. The humanitarian duty to act properly, to do the right thing, is a sort of immanent pull on every person. It can of course be overcome, by criminals and psychopaths, but only with great effort. It’s simply easier to do the right thing, just as it’s easier to fall from the sky than it is to climb up into orbit. Or so I thought.

  seventeen

  My tale comes to its moment of forgiveness. Kooistra came on board, and greeted me with her usual, cloying warmth. I smiled at her, and she smiled back. We consulted with Murphy-McNair, and as the world moved round and around the pivot of my head I found myself, only three-quarters-awake, climbing into a EU spacebird with Kooistra behind me.

  ‘Well,’ she said, settling her saggy body into one of the cockpit seats beside me. ‘Here we are, my dear. Shall we?’

  She took the controls, edged away from the Station and accelerated fuel-inefficiently into a fast high orbit. I watched the Station shrink to a star standing on a tangent from the great swell of the Earth. Some voice in my head told me, here you are, sitting next to Kristin Janzen Kooistra. It was a disorienting thought. I recalled all the hatred I had known in my life towards her. I thought of all the hurt she had caused me, but it seemed a long way away. I thought of what it would achieve to kill her, and it didn’t seem to me that anything would result. My father would still be dead, as he had been dead for these many years. More, I didn’t see that I would derive any satisfaction from killing Kooistra. I tried to throw my imagination forward in time, but all I could picture was a worn-out feeling of emptiness. And yet! Here she was, sitting right next to me!

  ‘Oh,’ she said, brightly, and turning to face me. ‘You do look rapt in thought, my dear.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  Without premeditation I said, ‘Revenge.’

  At this she laughed, a chirpy little arpeggio laugh. ‘I have always,’ she said, ‘found room in my large heart to admire consistency. You are wonderful, my dear. You continue to impress me.’ Why did she say large heart? Or did she only mean that she had a large heart because every part of her body was so big?

  ‘Haven’t you ever,’ I said, with a sharp sense of the surreality of the conversation we were having, ‘felt the impulse for revenge?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, checking the transponder signal. ‘No, of course I haven’t. Or if I have, I have overcome the impulse. Revenge enslaves. Don’t you think? And of course the effort of life must be not to be a slave. Don’t you think?’

  I tried to think about this concept, but it seemed to slip from my mind. I kept trying to pick at it with the fingers, as it were, of my thoughts, but it kept slipping and falling out of my apprehension, like an oiled pebble. ‘I don’t think I understand,’ I said.

  ‘There we go,’ she said, and we lurched downward towards the Earth, picking up speed and hurtling towards the dark side. A star twinkled, swelled to the size of a pebble of quartz in the sunshine, and abruptly - with, I must admit, a skilful series of manoeuvring jerks on the jets by Kooistra - we were hanging before a patched and glinting house. Before us the line of morning divided the Earth dark from light, the land creeping inexorably from shadow into light, always, always. The landmass down there was glinting as myriad mountain-tops caught the new light and refracted it away white, yellow and pink. Honey-coloured plains, moss-green forests, little maggot-shaped lakes of polished brass, puffs and puffs of cloud like patchy snowfall, all inched continually into the light. Nothing stopped that progress. Nothing stops that progress. Nothing will stop that progress.

  Kooistra called the house on the mayday. A man answered, his voice crackly with fear even though the connection was clear. ‘Who’s that? Who’s that?’

  ‘You know who it is, my dear,’ said Kooistra.

  ‘Norma?’ said the man. ‘Is that you? Not today, OK? Come next week. I got a run-down to make, tomorrow or the day after. If you come . . .’ He trailed off.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Let us in,’ said Kooistra, smilingly.

  ‘What’s that you’re flying?’ he said. I imagined him peering through his window. The sunlight had frozen it white from our point of view, but he must have had a good view of the sweeping curves of the silver spacebird.

  ‘Oh, it’s government business, my dear,’ she said. ‘You must let us in. Don’t make me huff, and puff, and blow - this ’bird carries four different sorts of offensive weaponry, you know.’

  He let us in. He clearly had no doubt in his head that Kooistra would be happy to experiment with the destructive capacity of the plane upon his house. His name, Robert Yuille, was not on our list, but as we inched the ’bird towards the house Kooistra turned to me and said, ‘Oh, a bad man, have no fear. A deserving case for the police. A deserving case.’

  We had fitted a smartgel docking converter to the hatch on the ’bird, and - apart from the fact that it was more difficult to sidle the plane up to the port than it was simply to fly the nose straight in - the connection was smooth. We opened our door, and Kooistra called through for Yuille to crawl in. He obeyed as meekly as a puppy: a froggish, unshaven man with sallow skin, yellow cheeks marked all over with irregular black patches of stubble, like banana-skin on the turn. He was wearing a Tshirt and shorts, an outfit that displayed how fat was his belly and how very thin his legs and arms. He seemed genuinely afraid of Kooistra, who smiled at him, and smiled at me, and smiled at the walls. She positively beamed as she turned her head. Her smiles went everywhere. I watched as she bound his hands with plastic cuffstrip, and strapped him into one of the cargo seats of the ’bird. ‘You stay there, my dear man,’ she said. I watched him flinch every time she came close to him. What I was thinking was: how strange that he is so afraid of her, and that I’m not. Perhaps surrendering the impulse to revenge means surrendering the reasons to fear?

  Is this what my life story amounts to? A giving up of the impulse to revenge? A tale of giving something away, a gift, a donation. To give, to for-give: is fore-giving a pre-emptive sort of gift? I really haven’t thought about this stuff for such a long time, and these observations only just now occur to me, now that I am old. I don’t know.

  There is a difficult with giving, as I’m sure you can agree. If somebody gives you something it obligates you to them. If you give them something, then they are obligated to you. No matter how freely and bountifully you intend the gift, the recipient becomes
in a small way enslaved to you. Is there a gift that breaks this bondage of obligation? Kooistra’s gift to me had been the death of my father; how could I repay such a gift? Or could I short-circuit the connection that bound us together, her to me, me to her?

  What would my father want?

  If I try to recall my father’s face I can picture it easily; but if I think more carefully about it I realise that what I am recalling is - always - a photo of my father that I possess. If I try to recall some natural memory, some image, I cannot do it. This, I believe, is simply how memory works. Try it yourself. Try now.

  You see?

  Kooistra floated through into this man Robert Yuille’s house, and returned after only five minutes, carrying a pillow-case full of stuff. ‘Evidence, you see,’ she said. ‘This will please the government people.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  It was all very odd. It felt almost dreamlike.

  We took our cockpit seats again, and disconnected from the house, dropping into a low orbit and sweeping round through the dark for ten minutes. The cabin lights switched on. The black Earth below us was dusted with lights: street lamps, lit house-windows, cars, all the paraphernalia of human night-time activity. Those lights have a distinct orange shade to them, and they form strange random swirls, patches, spirals. The Earth-constellations are interrupted again by the blank spaces of clouds moving across them, black soap-flakes and rags.

  Our passenger, or prisoner, spoke only once. He said: ‘Norma, where are we going, where are we going Norma?’

  ‘You be quiet now,’ Kooistra called back. Then she spoke to me: ‘You continue to impress me, my dear. Impress me very favourably. I’ll confess I used to wonder if you were ever going to become competent enough to handle your feelings of anger.’

  ‘Handle them,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, sweetly, ‘there’s a talent there, don’t underestimate yourself. There’s a talent in recognising the force of necessity. Necessity is a terribly important feature of our lives in this cosmos.’

  ‘How do you mean,’ I asked, interested despite my disgust, ‘necessity?’

  ‘Well, look at you, look at me. If you tried to assault me I would easily overcome you. Am I not more powerful than you? Am I not more skilled in combat?’

  This was too close to my own thoughts for comfort. ‘What makes you think,’ I jittered, ‘that I want to — ’

  She chuckled, and it sent zero-g shudders through her fleshy chin like waves in treacle. ‘A lesser woman would hurl herself at the blank wall, crack her head against it like an egg. But you sense the pointlessness of that. We get on well together, you and I,’ she said, and favoured me with another smile.

  Then she said: ‘Would you like to see my house?’

  ‘My house,’ I said.

  ‘A house is only a thing,’ she insisted, putting up her right index finger in front of her rather pedantically. ‘Things pass from person to person. But, yes, it was once yours. Is now mine. Would you like to see it?’ She fixed a new transponder signal, pulled the jet up, slowing it down. ‘I need to make a stop before we return to your government’s facility.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said.

  I was curious. Or, perhaps, curious does not properly express the feeling I had. I was drawn to that house, the primal scene, the house in which my father and I had lived. To be able to say I have come back. My stomach seemed to be pulsing, expanding and contracting with light. It was sparkly, and buoyant, I kept dabbing at the corners of my eyes with the coarse cloth of my sleeves. We came through the line of shadow into the light again. The blue-white sun was, suddenly, there in the sky, bursting continually with its great light. Kooistra sat beside me, her arms hovering at her sides the way limbs settle in zero g, and the light pushing through the cockpit and enveloping her, washing all around her, giving her great bulky body a luminously spectral edge. We jerked in our seats, shoved forward by deceleration, shoved again.

  ‘Here,’ she said, and I realised we were at her house.

  We were at her house.

  I should say at the house. The is a better word than her.

  Carefully she pulled the ’bird round, bringing the docking excrescence on its side up to the porch. ‘There,’ she said, as a shudder of contact passed through the fabric of the plane, gel-suckers latching onto the metal of her house. ‘Home.’

  We left Robert Yuille cuffed in the body of the ’bird, and Kooistra hauled herself easily through the air, through the hatch, and into her house. She was carrying her pillow-case, the goods she had pilfered from Yuille’s house, and I realised that it wasn’t evidence at all, that it was booty. I pulled myself through after her. Through the porch, and into the first of her rooms. This was the space that had once been my father’s house, but I did not recognise anything. The clutter that floated, or was strapped to the walls, was her clutter, not ours. The window at the far end could have been anybody’s window. A new door led through to a wholly new room.

  ‘Home,’ Kooistra was saying, with her back to me, ‘is such a bittersweet concept. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I grasped the frame of the doorway and my right hand fell on something blocky. I started fiddling with the strapping. I did this much as a person fidgets with a pen, or a cigarette, or picks their nose, or rubs the top of their skull. I did not do it with any clearly defined intention in my head. I wasn’t even sure what the thing under my right hand was, to begin with.

  As the strapping slipped free I was able to hook a thumb underneath it and lift it level with my eyes. It was the size of an old-model television, and for a moment I thought it was a television, but then I saw that its screen was blank, its controls were dials rather than buttons, and I saw that it was a microwave oven.

  Kooistra was looking through her window. Her attention distracted for a moment by the sight of the world in the sunshine below her. But it would only last a moment, and then she would turn back to me, and the chance would go. ‘Oh,’ she said, without turning to me. ‘I never get tired of that view.’

  My hands had their own minds, their own consciousnesses. My brain was thinking, we’ll be back at the Station in a quarter of an hour and I can take a shower. I remember having that thought. I thought of the shower, of cleanness. But my hands had undone the webbing around the microwave, and freed it from the wall.

  I grasped the door-jamb more firmly with my left hand, pulled my knees up to my chest, pressed the face of the microwave against the palms of my feet with my right hand and kicked out with all my strength.

  The block of metal and plastic flew in a perfectly straight line. It flew with surprising speed - surprising because I had become so used to a sort of dreamy slowness that always surrounded Kooistra. By chance, it started to turn in flight such that it presented one sharp corner to the back of her head.

  With the impact the whole of her body tipped around in space, and her face bounced against the floor, her limbs starfished in surprise. Her fat body wriggled, and she twisted round, and I could see that the microwave was still sticking into her head. Its sharp corner had actually dug into the flesh of her head, and as she turned it turned too. Then it caught on the wall and broke free, floating off and still turning. Pearls and balls of blood were stretching out from its corner, drawing a rough line through space to the back of Kooistra’s skull.

  My heart was thudding. I thought to myself, what have you done? If the microwave had hit Kooistra’s head flat on it would probably only have jarred her, it would barely have had any effect. Oh, what an insane risk I took! By chance the corner had struck her, not the flat, and now she was wobbly, now she was hurt and bleeding. But her eyes were still open, looking at me. She raised an arm, and kicked out with a leg, probably to launch herself at me, but her leg struck the wall at an oblique angle as she flew off to my left and collided with some rolled packs of cloth - clothes, sleeping bags, I didn’t know what. She trailed a beaded string of red through the air after her.

  S
he scrabbled with her hands, tried to get herself in the same orientation as I. Then her limbs went loose. Her eyes seemed to lose focus. Then she scrabbled again, and a great fear seized me. I felt it pour into my innards, like molten metal. I felt her physical proximity to me as intolerable. The conviction was in me that she would reach me and tear me to pieces with her bare hands. She would reach me and kill me. I entered a less than rational state of mind.

  I pulled myself back into the ’bird, and heaved clumsily through to the cockpit, banging my limbs as I went, jarring my shin on the expensively designed metal expanse of flight-deck. I hooked my feet together around the stalk of the pilot’s seat, charged up the drivestick and put excessive acceleration through the pushjet. My fear exaggerated my surroundings. It seemed as though I was not moving. I was jiggled in my seat, but despite leaning the control all the way over, we were hardly shifting. Then, but only slowly, we started picking up acceleration. I tried to angle the jet down, to sweep into a lower and faster orbit, but the directional jets were as sluggish as the main powerstick.