Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Later that day I was flown down to the Earth in one of the new American planes - the first and the last time I have travelled in such a machine. It was a smooth flight, smooth all the way down.

  On the ground, near Biarritz, I was given a new pharmoneurological treatment and kept in a bed in a secure room. The urge to hurt myself was lost in a weltering swell of lassitude. I watched the high window throw a perfect square of graph-paper on the white wall opposite, and watched as that square moved smoothly along to the folding together of wall and wall, where it folded itself slowly and inexorably into a fat shining tick shape, a very good marked against the copy book of life. And then it moved on, until it faded and died, and I slept, and in the morning there it was again, ready to begin its journey.

  ‘Very good,’ said one doctor. ‘These new adrenoinhibitors really are the most sophisticated medication yet devised for personality disorders. You’re doing very well.’

  ‘I want to see my father,’ I said. ‘Can I see my father?’

  ‘Not right now,’ said the doctor, distractedly, writing something on his screen, which he was cradling awkwardly in the crook of his left arm.

  ‘If he’d have been made head of NASA,’ I said, ‘we’d have cities on Mars by now. Princesses on Mars and mistresses on the Moon.’ I think the medication, by taking away the sharpness of my aggression, took away the sharpness of my focus too. Had you ever considered that you are only able to focus, to concentrate, because of your anger? That’s the truth of it, you know it, you’ve known that for a while now. Without my rage I meandered, I free-associated. Perhaps when I asked the doctor if I could see my father he assumed I was only meandering, free-associating. But I wanted to see him very much. I wanted to see him before they stopped the drugs, before my anger came back, because when that happened I wasn’t sure that I would be able to prevent myself from hating him.

  A lawyer visited me in my bed. ‘Your case is going well,’ he told me. He had dark black skin and sharp green eyes, a striking combination that may have been artificial, or genetically induced. He was a handsome man, but I was too droopy even to flirt with him.

  ‘Going well,’ I said.

  ‘You can imagine there are tens of thousands of court cases happening all at once. It’s always that way when a war comes to an end.’

  I snorted a little out of my nose at this, but the earnest young lawyer said: ‘No, no, it’s best that way, believe me. It prevents governments from waging war for too long a period. If there are tens of thousands of lawsuits after a three-week war, imagine how many there’d be after a year-long war! It would bankrupt any government. It’s a force for good, it’s a force for peace.’

  This had the smack of a prepared speech, but I didn’t much care. They were reducing my dosage, and occasional flickers of anxiety would curl at the edges of my consciousness.

  ‘Who’s paying you?’ I asked. ‘I can’t afford you.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said, smoothly. ‘Your ex-husband’s paying me. He’s pulling strings, too.’

  ‘Pulling strings?’

  ‘He has some powerful friends in the American military,’ said the lawyer, but didn’t say any more.

  The lawyer told me: he’d offered a plea-deal to the Staff Office of Military Prosecution. They could prosecute me for killing Kooistra - assuming, he added, that she is even dead - but if they did (he said) we’d have ‘a hell of a good shot’ at prosecuting them for incitement, arguing that their agent’s cover story, ‘serial killer’, was too well handled, that ‘any reasonable individual’ would have believed her a serial killer, and would therefore be justified, ‘on grounds of self defence’ in killing her. ‘We’d probably win that. It might not keep you out of prison, but it’d reduce your sentence, and make you rich - psychological damage, that kind of thing. Sue, sue, sue. My sense is that, to avoid that, they’ll let you take prisoner-of-war status, which means you’ll be released as soon as the General Command releases all the other prisoners. ‘StOMP don’t like me,’ he added. ‘But, hey, it’s not my business to get StOMP to like me. I’m a defence lawyer, I’ve got to do the best by my client.’

  My brain was too slow to be able to work out who StOMP were. ‘They don’t like you?’ I asked, hoping for more clues.

  ‘Hell, no, but they don’t like any defence lawyers, methinks.’ I was struck by his use of this odd word. ‘They’re annoyed, we might say, because Kooistra was a valued agent. That’s what they said to me - a valued agent.’ He shook his head.

  ‘She was working with my father,’ I said.

  He put up his hand. ‘Stop. Don’t tell me. The less I know about your case the better for you. Just leave me to do my job, Ms Gyeroffy, and you’ll be fine.’ He left.

  From my bed I watched the square of light process across the blank wall again.

  nineteen

  I was eventually released. Technically I left American custody with a criminal record for ‘war-related manslaughter’, but I have not found that this, in my later life, has ever been an encumbrance. European employers were not, in the last two decades of the century, liable to pay any heed to U S-sponsored criminal records. So I was released by the Americans in southern France-EU. I had to find my own way back to Paris. I had no money, but there were many military transports threading back and forth across the newly cratered battlefields and through the newly shredded towns, and soldiers are usually happy to help any not-bad-looking woman, even if her arms are marked with scars old and new. In three days I was home.

  And now I am an old woman, nearing ninety. I am grateful to Fate that Gradi was too young to be in the military at the time of that war - the space war of ’81, it is sometimes called, although seizing the Station was a very minor portion of the hostilities. I am grateful to Fate and to Thom, although he cheated on me and cheated on me because deception is in his heart. After that war Gradi served three years, and got out as soon as she could. By then she had a new dream, which she pursued with the doggedness that is part of her nature, with her ability to concentrate on close detail for long periods that perhaps she inherited from her father, and with the ability to keep in view a longer-term aim that, perhaps, she has inherited from me. She had met a bland but wealthy young man called Paul, and she set about using his money to further her dreams - something he connived in, with that sacrificial blankness in his eyes, like the Tollund Man, glad to be throttled by this young woman with whom he was so besotted. It’s not for me to judge, of course. Gradi is a forceful personality, and perhaps that is what men really want. All that erotic side of life seems irrelevant to me, mostly. The time of one’s life when sex, or indeed politics, government, war and such, all seem vital and worth sacrifice and worth even dying for - that time does not last, for most, beyond their forties.

  I remember the ’80s as a terrible decade. I had breakdown after breakdown. To have grown habituated to the fact that my father was dead, and then to have that certainty yanked away from me. His return to life, in my head, was more shocking in its way than his original death. To live, and die, to be brought back to life, to be shuffled off into death again, it was too much for an ordinary person to handle.

  I was in Paris for two weeks, after my release from US custody, before I got through to Gradi. It was very hard to find out where she was. Nobody in the US occupying administration would talk to me. I was, I suppose, one of thousands of suppliants. I tried to trace her through her new school, her cadet college, but few of the original staff remained, and nobody seemed to know anything. I tried net searches. I thought of paying for advertisements in likely media. Then she contacted me herself.

  ‘Gradi,’ I called, when I saw that it was her on the phone. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been sick with worry. Sick with worry.’

  ‘I’m fine, Ma,’ she replied. Her dark little face looked embarrassed by my outburst. ‘I’ve been with Dad.’

  It occurred to me, vaguely, that it was odd for her to refer to her Granddad as Dad. ‘Where are you now?’
>
  ‘London.’

  ‘Stay there. I’m coming there.’

  ‘Don’t, Ma. We’re coming to Paris tomorrow.’

  I thought of my father and my daughter travelling together to come and see me. The thought was inexpressibly unsettling for me. That night I stayed awake into the small hours writing a letter to my father. I kept writing drafts and then erasing them because they weren’t right. I am glad, I wrote, that you have been able to get to know your granddaughter. I am sorry that you must find me like this.

  When I said ‘like this’, I meant that I had lost weight. That when the drugs regime had finished, I had taken to cutting myself again, as if I were an unhappy teenager in Cyprus all over again. I cried much of the time. I woke myself up crying. I stood in line at the store, one of the few not emptied or destroyed by the Americans, and I burst into sudden tears. When the storekeeper told me there was no more meat, I offered - in a loud voice, so that the whole queue could hear - to have sex with him if he found me some chicken for my supper. I washed my feet over and over, scrubbing between my toes with a toothbrush until the skin cracked.

  I have missed you, I wrote to my father. My voice was so warbly that the voice-writing programme queried one word in three on the screen.

  The next day, at lunchtime, Gradi arrived at the door. Thom Baldwin was with her. I stepped onto the landing and looked around, half expecting to see my father standing in the shadows, but of course he wasn’t there.

  twenty

  Can you believe this? It took me three whole days to understand the true state of affairs.

  Gradi understood what had happened in my muddled head, early on, but no matter how many times she explained it to me, I could not grasp it. Something in my head prevented it from being true. So all the years I had believed my father dead, it seems, I had not really believed him dead at all. Or put it another way: perhaps I had known, intellectually, that he was dead; but in some deeper, squatting, toad-like, patient part of my mind I had known him alive. When I had fashioned my gift for Kooistra, my for-giving, I had on this level believed it would make my father happy. Why else would I do it? If Dad were dead, then whether I killed her or did not kill her would be equally irrelevant to him. But if he were still, somehow, somewhere, alive, then I could imagine him nodding with satisfaction at her paying-back. I needed him to be alive to give purpose to my revenge. I felt him to be alive.

  When the American colonel had said to me, ‘Your daughter is with her father’ and I had heard him, genuinely, actually, literally heard him to be saying ‘Your daughter is with your father’, it was only because I felt the truth of the latter statement that I was able to perpetrate the mishearing. Is there so much difference between ‘her’ and ‘your’, spoken with an east-coast US accent? When I had insisted, slightly hysterically, that this could not be true, that he was dead, the colonel had checked his records and seen that Gradi’s biological father was dead, her step-father alive, and he had replied ‘I can see from your file why you might think so.’

  Perhaps you understand how idiotic a small error can be. But the result of this small error, this banal mishearing, was that first I lost my father, and that then he was reborn to me, and then taken away from me again. I expected him to come back to me at some later stage in my life. And then taken away again. Isn’t that how it happens? Round and round we fly. The orbit is the trope of living. We have all the space we could possibly need, and yet our lives are cramped. And yet we keep coming up against the same people, over and again. Now that I am an old woman I can contemplate this in a more sanguine fashion, but at that time, exiled from the uplands never to return, it was more than I could stand. I cried.

  Gradi said, for the twelfth time, ‘But I didn’t say I was with my Grand-dad, I said I was with my dad.’

  I cried, again. You can understand, I hope, how heartbreaking a statement that is. If I were my daughter, and she were me, and we were together to say that statement I was with my dad, then my father would be alive again.

  There were several difficult years at that point in my life. Drugs were effective when I could get them, these new ‘pharmakos’ treatments that were just then coming onto the market. But I could not always get them. When I stopped the spectres returned. I thought death was the gift that short-circuited the push-pull economy of the gift. I was wrong in that. It is too easy to summon up ghosts from the grave, and then they are more demanding than living beings. A simple mishearing of ‘your’ for ‘her’ will do it, and then the ghost is there, and it is quietly and insistently demanding. I gave you everything, it seems to be saying. I gave you everything. I presented you with life. How can you make me a gift that balances out such a present? I don’t know the answer. Do you?

  If you know, what would you require to tell me? What would the price be?

  I am now an old woman, but I still do not know the truth of what happened between Kooistra and my father. She may have killed him, or not. If not, then I have heard nothing more from him during all the many decades of my long existence. From time to time I have tried to trace him, but without success. She was supposed to be a killer, but I was told she was not a killer. But she may still have killed. Who can say? I, in my turn, may have killed her. Or not. If not - if she were retrieved by the Americans in their vacuum-rapid space planes - then I have heard nothing about it. But I daresay they would keep that kind of thing secret. But, I tell myself, surely that cannot be the case. Surely when I left her, wounded and bleeding, her air was moments away from leaking out altogether. Surely she asphyxiated, shortly before she froze solid. Surely she has not been retrieved by the Americans, but is still up there, somewhere, falling in her Newtonian trajectory. A gentle kink in an infinitely long line.

  It is all travel, travel, it is all only travel.

  Once, many years later, I was travelling on a ground-effect train across North West Russia, a journey from Moscow to Helsinki. There is no need for me to go into the reasons why I found myself in that place at that time, or for me to reveal the identity of my (still living) travelling partner. Only that I went to the upper floor of the car to look about and noticed that the world all around had opaqued, misted, and that we were isolated, apparently motionless even as we swept ceaselessly onward. Far behind the motive car hummed invisibly, shrouded in the mist. Ahead the body of the carriage in which we were standing faded after a few metres. From time to time a pylon would materialise out of the mist, hurtle past over our heads and vanish behind us. Apart from that, there was no sensation of motion at all. It was a spectral, ghostly medium. My companion said to me, ‘Isn’t this exactly like life? Rushing on, but feeling motionless, no sense of where we go or what we do.’ But, although at the time I said ‘Yes, you’re right’, I am not sure, now, that he was right to say so. Some people travel surrounded by a mist, wrapped in the ghosts of their past, unable to see past the spectral material of that fact. Of course that is true. But for many their destination is too clearly, too sharply defined. There’s a kind of vertigo looking forward in your life, for that sort of people, as there is in looking backwards into the past when you are old. On a clear night, when the stars are distinct and multifarious over my head, I look up and think in fact I am looking down, at the jewels embedded in the furthest, deepest, abyssal floor. It is a long way to fall. Somewhere in that same sky, Kristin Janzen Kooistra is in the process of falling that long distance. She can see exactly where she is going, it is all spread out before her with the inevitability of gravity and the terror of falling. But it will take her millions of years before she reaches the black rocks and occasional sparkles of that deep downbelow ground, before she and her cold dead house crack and splinter on the rocks. Millions of years. At least, I think so. I have no certain knowledge one way or the other.

  The news this morning was presented by a young man from the US base on Mars. They’ve established a base there, at the northern ice-cap where most of the water is. Today is June 21st, 2132, and my name is Klara Gyeroffy.

  P
art Two

  GRADISIL

  one.

  Slater

  Fort Glenn

  Here is Lieutenant Slater in the main corridor of Fort Glenn, walking with a snap and a twang.

  In one of the rooms off the main walkway is Colonel Philpot, Slater’s superior officer but yet his friend. Philpot has his arm hooked round a handle to keep his body steady for a moment, and is squeezing himself into an all-body elastic skin. This piece of total underwear is designed to put resistance into every ordinary bending and flexing motion of his human limbs, with the very creditable aim of thereby reducing bone loss. Everybody wears them on Fort Glenn. They are wearisome, and not especially effective at preserving bone mass, but those are the orders. ‘Hi, Slayer,’ Philpot calls. ‘How you doing?’ Slayer is the nikname by which Slater is known.