Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  The world was starting to move past my window, but Kooistra’s house - the thing of all things that I was trying to leave behind - remained stubbornly in frame. I realised of course that we were still connected, the house and the ’bird, she and I. Looking back, it surprises me that the gel connection did hold, but it was a tough sticking point, it was designed that way.

  Plane and house moved together. I couldn’t shake her off. She was the albatross.

  We were travelling faster now; half a g, more than half a g, and I could hardly pull myself clear of the back of my chair. I expected to see Kooistra’s grinning head rising up into the cockpit space beside me. The path was open for her to come, to crawl along the wall of her house that acceleration had turned into a floor, to slip through the porch and through the open hatch, into the ’bird. I expected to see her face appearing at my shoulder any moment, to see her wide grin, her man-killing hands. But I did not see her face, or her grin, or her hands at my neck. To this day, I do not know whether she was still too dazed from the semi-concussion to co-ordinate her own movements, or whether it was the sudden accel-gravity that baffled her, or whether she simply decided to stay in her house. I accept that this last belief is unlikely.

  I was panting, making little singsong ah! ah! noises. I couldn’t help myself.

  I angled up, the ’bird’s pushjet juddering and whining as I kept it fully firing, trying to build up speed. My fear had alchemised inside me into a sort of elation, a sense almost of jubilation. I was punching away, riding a rocket-jet, pulling higher.

  Then a shiver of panic trickled through my sensations at the thought of the open path from her to me, from the house to the ’bird, and without premeditation I yanked the lever to seal the hatch in the side of the ’bird; and then I pulled the gel-connection that held the docking pathway open. There was a great shudder, and the house swung suddenly, rotating past the cockpit and starting to dwindle, like a house in a hurricane, like that scene in Wizard of Oz. It was venting from the open airlock in a sparkly, snow-storm patch of glitter, and the outpour of gas was pushing it away and turning it slowly.

  I look back, and I try to calculate its trajectory, but I cannot be sure. This is what I like to think: I think it was angled fast and high along the same orbital pathway that the Earth itself follows, in true with the elliptic. We were travelling, at the point of release, much faster than eleven klims a second, and anyway at such a height even a slower velocity would have resulted in escape. I assume that the house swung very wide and high around the Earth and slingshotted away from the sun, hurtling out towards nothingness, darkness, the cold, the black vacuum. More than that, I cannot say, and neither can you. Maybe Kooistra was able to co-ordinate her actions sufficiently to close the door to her porch, to keep some of her air inside the house. Maybe she survived the initial departure. But if she did she was - I like to think - only reserving to herself a more lingering and less pleasant death: because there was no plane in her porch (she had flown hers to the Station), and because her house was fitted only with tiny directional jets, so she was locked into her escaping trajectory and was unable to do anything about it. I’m sure she had some supplies on board, but even if her house were packed with supplies they would eventually run out, and she would die of thirst, or die of hunger, speeding at a constant velocity through nothingness towards nothingness. For her sake - and I can say such a thing - I hope she was too disoriented by the blow on the head to lock up, that her air all flowed away, that she asphyxiated before she froze. I like to think that her body is now frozen in vacuum for ever. I like to think so, as I write this. That was the manner of my forgiveness, and of the death of Kooistra.

  eighteen

  Oh, but I wasn’t sure what to do next. I killed the pushjet and for an hour or so I simply sat, circled the world, watched darkness turn into light and light into darkness. Forgiveness is all very well, but it can have indigestible consequences. I had no house to fly to. There was only the Station, and if I returned there I would be arrested and expelled, or sent to prison, or (I didn’t know) shot as a traitor. I considered flying the ’bird down through the air and landing it - perhaps in America, a defector, bringing key European technology to the enemy. I even pondered the likelihood of my being able to make a deal with the Americans, somehow still obtaining a house and a plane of my own. But it was pipe dreaming. I knew it.

  In the end what persuaded me was the fact of Robert Yuille, still cuffed and strapped into a seat behind me. During the sudden acceleration, and after all the crashing and jerking about of the disengagement, he was silent. I suppose he was terrified. But after things quietened down, he began calling through from the back. ‘Hey! What’s going on?’ ‘Hey!’ ‘Look, you guys, I need to go to the bathroom,’ and so on. I pulled the Station’s signal on the dash and flew directly there.

  Murphy-McNair was furious when he realised what I had done. He detained me, confined me to my chamber, and I was content to stay there. He arrested Yuille, deported him down to the ground, but there was no evidence to convict him of any crime: I did not have the location or the transponder of his house, I had no material evidence, and I lacked Kooistra’s knowledge of his activities. He was taken down the following day, whilst Murphy-McNair spent an hour fuming and raging directly into my face. Debacle! Waste of time and resources! Where was Kooistra? Where was she? I lied: I told him that she’d asked me to drop her at her house, and then sent me on my way. I assumed, I told him, that the Station possessed her house’s address. He didn’t believe me. ‘Her plane is still docked here,’ he raged. ‘Why would she leave her plane here?’ I didn’t help my case by getting details of my story wrong. She told me to drop her at the house. I suggested to her that she stop at her house. She told me she had some evidence to pick up. She took the evidence from Yuille’s, and stowed it at her house. I wasn’t careful to be consistent. I didn’t care.

  I spent a week confined to my chamber. The people I shared with were moved out - much, I’m sure, to their discomfort, and certainly to more cramped Stations. I was brought my food. And then, one morning, the door was opened by a stranger, somebody wearing a uniform I did not recognise. The Americans had captured the Station. That was that.

  I slept through the whole thing. Can you believe that?

  They had flown up in their new design space planes, stormed the docking hangar, swarmed through with glue-guns that fired great sticky gobs of stuff and disabled the enemy. The European troops had been unwilling to fire their conventional weapons, for perfectly commonsensical reasons, and apart from some shudder when the American planes connected with the Station, and apart from some shouting and running around (which was masked by the noise of the fans, I suppose), the whole operation was bloodless and rapid.

  From being alone in my room, I was again sharing with a dozen people, including Natalya Shelikhova. We were prisoners. It was a form of house-arrest. ‘War has broken out below,’ said Shelikhova, darkly. ‘The Americans stormed a dozen fronts in surprise attacks. They stormed us too, up here. I’m sure they’re broadcasting to the world that they have captured and “liberated” the uplands.’

  This is what later became common knowledge: the Americans had been developing their new design of space plane for over a decade, and had held back their invasion and the outbreak of groundwar until it was ready. Later, of course, I discovered the physics behind the design. At the time it was bewildering, like a piece of magic. It could take off from any place on the Earth and fly straight up into space! It did not need rockets or pushjets to fly through the vacuum, it simply glided through, apparently infinitely manoeuvrable, infinitely supportable. It was still a plane, of course; it still carried wings, and its main motor, set into the nose, still turned internal blades like a jet engine. But it works like this: it is a quantum wing. It divides not air, as does a conventional wing, but instead divides the constant background fizzing of particle and anti-particle that defines spacetime at the quantum level. The lead edge of the wing is inset with a
thread of quantum disturbance agents, and a field sweeps an excess of particles below the wing, and an excess of anti-particles above. The difference is very slight, but it is enough to create what amount to aerodynamic effects, and the plane flies. The leading edge of the five-bladed jet propellor works on a similar principle, pulling the plane through the vacuum. It is a most elegant design. And, what is more, it can accelerate at three-quarters g through clear vacuum. It can fly to Mars and return in two weeks. It changes everything. Everything has changed.

  I had of course assumed that the European government would return me to the ground and incarcerate me. I did not know what the Americans would do. I was still wrapped around by the near-mystical bubble of my forgiveness, buoying me up.

  We were kept on the Station by the Americans for three weeks, and mostly we were treated well, although circumstances were certainly cramped. Before the month was over we heard that peace had been reached between the US and the EU.

  I was interrogated by a colonel in the room that had previously been Gar Murphy-McNair’s office. He was a tall thin man with a shaved white head and a beard made of dreadlocks. ‘Gyeroffy,’ he said, looking at me, looking at the screen open in front of him, looking back at me. ‘Gyeroffy. Yes, we have intelligence on you.’

  He said it in a knowing, rather spooky voice, as if he were a priest and could see inside my soul. I said: ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We came across your daughter,’ he said. ‘In an EU military cadet uniform.’

  ‘Gradi?’ I replied. ‘What do you mean, you came across her?’ I felt instant nausea. My guts felt slippery, suddenly, as cooked noodles. ‘What about her? What are you going to tell me about her? Is she alright?’ I had, obviously, not had contact with her during the American occupation.

  He looked at me coolly for a long time; perhaps a minute. It is hard for me to convey how cruel it was of him simply to look at me for that time.

  ‘Ms Gyeroffy,’ he said. ‘We’d like to talk to you about Kristin Janzen Kooistra.’

  My gut spasmed again. ‘What about Kooistra? Tell me about my daughter. Tell me about my daughter first.’

  ‘Your daughter is fine. We picked her up in Paris. She was at a cadet school, but she was too young to be a combatant. She’s fine.’

  I breathed harshly for a while. My face felt hot. ‘Why did you pick her up?’ I insisted. ‘Do you normally pick up schoolchildren? What would an occupying army want with schoolchildren?’

  ‘Since you ask,’ said the colonel, putting his head a little way on one side, ‘we did it at the specific request of somebody important to us. Somebody who wanted us to guarantee that she would not be hurt. Now, if you’ll accept my assurance that she is fine and well, will you please tell me what you know about Kristin Janzen Kooistra?’

  ‘Somebody?’ I pressed. ‘Somebody? Who? Who?’

  ‘Ms Gyeroffy . . .’

  ‘Somebody important to you insisted that you pick her up, my Gradi. Who was this?’

  The colonel sighed, a slight noise. Then he said, not loud but distinctly: ‘Your father.’

  This clicked into my comprehension like a magazine snapping into a weapon. I allowed my eyelids to rise, slowly. The colonel’s American-Prussian face and knobbled white skull blurred a little. I tried to reply, but only a hushing noise came out. He leant forward, an enquiring expression on his face. He said: ‘Ms Gyeroffy . . . ?’ in a softer tone.

  ‘That’s not possible.’ I said.

  He sat upright at this, ‘Isn’t it? I assure you it is.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said again.

  ‘I can see from your file,’ he said, looking down, ‘why you might think so. But I assure you he is not. He’s been working for us, actually, for a while now. I can believe it’s a shock to hear that - some might call him traitor, quisling. But that’s not how he sees it.’

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ I said, breathily. Then I said: ‘Kristin Janzen Kooistra killed him.’

  He was too military a man to laugh at me, but his eyes sagged a little with amusement. ‘I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed, Ms Gyeroffy. Why would she do so?’

  ‘Serial killer,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, that’s only her cover. Her cover story. She’s been an agent of ours for a very long time.’

  ‘Gar Murphy-McNair hired her as an agent for the EU,’ I said. I was only able to take shallow breaths. My throat felt prickly.

  ‘With,’ the colonel replied, putting a finger on his screen, preparatory to writing something, as if the conversation had finally lighted on the topic in which he was most interested, ‘with our cognisance, of course. Of course, I . . .’

  ‘She told me she’d killed him,’ I insisted.

  ‘Told you that? I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. She’s not a killer.’

  ‘You’re saying she’s never killed?’

  ‘I’m saying,’ said the colonel, ‘that she’s not a serial killer. That was her cover story.’ He repeated this as if speaking to a child. ‘Her cover story. She may have killed, I suppose, in the line of her duty. We’ve been at war. But your personal animosity against her has no basis. Didn’t I just tell you she was working for us?’

  ‘Why,’ I said, feeling a desperate sorrow and a frantic unease building inside me, ‘why didn’t he contact me?’

  This seemed to puzzle the colonel. ‘According to your superior officer,’ he said, ignoring my question, ‘you went on a mission with Kooistra some weeks ago, and returned alone. Your report seems contradictory. Please tell me what happened.’

  I told him. I recited the story in a monotone, all the time thinking why did she tell me she had killed my father? I tried to recall whether she had ever actually said those words, or whether she had only ever used phrases such as he died or he passed on. But I was sure she had boasted of killing him. I tried to imagine the circumstances, my father still alive somewhere in America, helping them with their war effort. Perhaps, I fancied, designing their marvellous new spacecraft, for he was still, to my thirtysomething mind, the magician with machines that he had seemed to my girlish eyes. Why had he abandoned me? It hollowed me out and bent me to think he would abandon me. And to use a subterfuge, so hurtful a fiction, to slip away from me. Could he not have simply said I’m going to America and you can’t come with me - could he not say that? And why could he not take me with him? I had followed him faithful as a dog to whichever country he had gone. I would have gone with him to America. Had he thought I wouldn’t be prepared to throw in my lot with the Americans, had he assumed my loyalty would be to Europe? I would have been prepared to throw in my lot with the Americans, if he had asked. And then, as the words I was speaking to the colonel mumbled and knocked against the words in my head, an interference pattern started to emerge. I should not have killed Kooistra.

  But I found it hard to feel sorry for my action, nonetheless.

  ‘You killed her?’ the colonel repeated, in poorly disguised disbelief.

  ‘I threw a microwave at her,’ I said. ‘It caught her with one of its corners at the base of her skull and this stunned her. Then I climbed back into the jet and flew away. I flew off with the house attached, and jettisoned it as I was accelerating. It would have voided of atmosphere. Even if it didn’t, it would have slingshotted around the Earth, and it’ll be halfway to Mars by now.’

  The colonel tutted and shook his head. I was taken away, and locked up in a room by myself. After weeks of cramped co-existence with other Station staff this was almost a relief. I could not think of myself as a criminal.

  I tried out thoughts, gingerly, like touching the flat of an iron to see if it is hot or not. I tried out: I’ll see my father again. But it was too painful. How could he leave me? How could he justify his deception? And so painful a deception - he could just have slipped away without telling me, that would have been less cruel. My whole life, I thought, had been bent out of shape by this o
ne act, and it turned out my father had been the agent and not Kooistra at all.

  I was interrogated again, by a team of military lawyers. I replied that I had believed Kooistra to be an enemy agent, and that I had believed my life in danger. ‘She never once so much as suggested she was other than what she appeared,’ I said. ‘How did she appear?’ they asked. ‘A killer, a killer,’ I said.

  At night I found myself unable to shake the certainty that my whole life since my sixteenth year had been a wrong-turn, a false narrative; everything that had happened to me since I was a teenager had been a sort of ghost life, an alternate reality pathway, as in the science-fiction tales, that had diverged from the true path - the true path, I felt, was me growing old with my old father, like Cordelia and Lear. In that frame of mind it was easy for me to slip into adolescent habits of cognition. I allowed dark thoughts to circle and swoop through my head. I pulled a screw from the base of my bunk and tried to cut my wrists with it. The screw’s-end was too blunt to cut my skin, but it scored and scored the flesh so that red shooting-star trails marked the white. The soldier who brought my breakfast in the morning could not help but see the wounds I had made on myself.