by Adam Roberts
Not that they have anything confidential to say. It’s just habit.
‘Hey Slayer,’ says Philpot. ‘You want to fire up? Or down?’
Slater grins, although Philpot can’t see it behind his darkened visor. To fire down is to watch bullets flare briefly as they burn up, but there’s always the chance (who knows? millions-to-one but you don’t know, do you?) that you’d hit a jet, a space plane in the upper stages of its journey to the Uplands, and cause some real damage. The chances may be millions-to-one, but it’s not zero. And that thought makes Slater grin. He can’t help himself.
‘Up,’ he says, conscientiously. ‘Or along.’
‘Could try hit one-nother,’ says Philpot mischievously.
‘Kill my best friend,’ replies Slater. ‘Sure. Yes.’
‘And I figured Marina was your best friend?’
‘Sure,’ agrees Slater. ‘I do indeed prefer having sex with her.’
And Philpot barks a laugh. ‘Marine,’ he replies, mok-severe, ‘I am obligated to warn you that sexual harassment is a potential court martial offence, and I may be having to have to report you to the Legal corps.’
‘I can only apologise, sir, apologise,’ says Slater, and then: ‘your transp on?’
‘Yowsir.’
‘Yow.’
‘Well then, let’s untether this little,’ says Slater, turning the laser off. He unhooks their target from his belt (for, of course, they have brought an official army target with them) and tosses it like a baseball pitcher (which causes him to rotate about his centre of gravity, which motion he stills with a twitch of his glove). It disappears into the dark, flying rapidly and with a perfectly straight trajectory away.
Slater is able to steady himself with a twitch of his glove because inside the finger is where the primary controls of the Elem lining to his suit are located. Now he activates the whole grid, and - small though the charge is, relatively tenuous though the foliage of Yggdrasil is at this height - it sets him straight, with a slight shudder. Philpot has already used his grid to move away from his comrade until he is a small red-white doll in the distance. He is practised with the Elem suits, with generating just enough differential front-and-bak to surf the lines and move himself along. Slater is good too, but not so good as Philpot. But then Philpot is a colonel, and Slater only a lieutenant.
Slater fits the VHS-rifle to his armpit, the exhaust over his shoulder. His visor software connects with the dwindling, near-invisible target, blows it up for his eyes.
He wobbles as the twigs of Yggdrasil brush through him; he waits until he is steady again, aims, fires.
There’s the sensation of a hand squeezing his shoulder hard; the recoil from the bullet matching the opposite-and-equal recoil (calculated by the rifle’s chip) from the exhaust. And in his visor he sees a schematic, and sees that almost as soon as he fired the target registered a hit. He sees a momentary cloud from Philpot’s rifle, dissipating as soon as it emerges from the rifle-mouth, and another hit registers.
In his head he, Slater, is thinking: that’s a rebel house, and that’s put a fist-sized hole in their wall at two klims, and all their air is going away. It feels very good, it does feel doubleplus good. He can’t wait for this war to start.
On the Plane Down
Hagen and Walsall are on the plane down with Slater; the three of them in their purply-blue dress uniforms, three of them belted into the circular seats in the middle of the plane. It’s an Elem plane, much cheaper to run than Quant types. The pilot undoked Fort Glenn at precisely midday.
‘So,’ Hagen is saying, conversationally, to Slater. ‘You going down to make the case?’
‘Make the case?’ echoes Walsall.
Wherever Slater moves, howsoever he shifts in his seat, whichever way he leans against his straps, Hagen’s eyes follow him. Each of Hagen’s pupils is like the bubble in a spirit-level, leaning left or leaning right with Slater’s every move. Slater has, in the past, wondered if Hagen has the hots for him. But then again, he has no idea whether Hagen prefers the masculine of the species or the feminine of the species or the bivalve, or wat he likes. He’s known Hagen for two years now, and he doesn’t know even this basic fact about him, no. He’s a comrade-in-arms, and he’s prepared to die next to him, and yet he doesn’t know the first thing about him. It’s because he doesn’t like him, of course.
‘I’m giving a presentation,’ said Slater.
‘So, this war about to start?’ asks Hagen, watching cobra-fashion as Slater shifts in his seat. Slater fidgets, unused to the sensation of gravity created by the plane’s deceleration (as it hurtles into the foamy leaves and brush of the world-tree and slows for descent). ‘This war about to start, is it? I only ask - it’s not I’m indifferent to the need for secrecy and the . . .’ But perhaps he is tired, because the repetition comes, ‘the secrecy and all.’
‘And so on,’ agrees Walsall.
‘I respect of course the need for secrecy, chain of command, and so on. But you know wat I’m working on. You know my brief.’
Hagen’s job is liaising with the civilian contractors who are, slowly, putting together a new project, a wheel-shaped spinning platform in orbit, a real 2001-Space-Odyssey style USUF space station. A great rim of a station with real simulated gravity, none of your snap-twang elasticated imitations, no sir. This has been tried before, of course, but it’s never been got to work, no sir. The problem with those retro 2001-Space-Odyssey style space stations is the vomiting - you see? Stand on the dek and it’s not too bad, but start walking and you feel sik. Turn right or left, or (god forbid) turn right around and trying walking the opposite way, and your inner ear has its conniption fit. Jesus, shake your head to answer a question ‘no’ and you’ll like as not throw up. They’re bad. The first USAF-Dev wheel, only a small one (forty metres across) was niknamed The Vomorama by its staff. The designers had assured the military that initial disorientation would go away, that the inner ear would get used to it, that it would only take a day or two - that was proven wrong, wrong, and the puking went on. ‘The only good thing about this,’ said Colonel Ash Ederdidge, in notional command of this eternally spinning bicycle wheel, ‘is that the puke does fall to the ground, so it’s not too difficult to clean up.’ Puke in zero gravity is an unpleasant thing.
The first wheel was abandoned. It’s still up there, it’s used as a storage facility.
But the USAF and the fledgling USUF have not given up on using centrifugal effect to simulate gravity. They’ve been working on some new models, some new concepts, a mucho-mucho bigger wheel for one thing, so that a considerably relatively slower rotation will still generate a palpable seudo-gravity; and a system of moving walkways that provide sharp centrifugal differentials. But this is a big project; a big money project, and a major investment of men and material. This is Hagen’s problem.
‘This war comes along next month, or month after, then my ferris wheel gets bumped bak in the schedules. You gather? So I’m only asking, do I get my pet project sooner, or later. That’s wat I’m asking.’
‘Later,’ says Slater. ‘That’s wat I hope.’
‘We know wat you hope for, Slater,’ said Hagen, grinning.
‘. . . hope for,’ echoes Walsall.
And the strange thing is that Hagen hopes for the same thing. Even though it would muk up his own schedule, even though it would push his pet project bak by many months, nevertheless he’s a soldier, and soldiers in peacetime always look forward to wars. Fish need water t’swim-in, roots need soil t’grow-in, soldiers need - but you don’t want the platitude.
The two soldiers sit in silence for a little while.
‘Shall I tell you wat I heard?’ Hagen announces. ‘I don’t know, this might just give you something to work with, downbelow . . . maybe Niflheim already told you this?’
‘Niflheim didn’t tell me anything,’ says Slater, intrigued despite himself. ‘Niflheim told me nothing. Wat?’
‘It’s about Madame Gradisil,’ says Hagen. �
��You have heard the latest Gradisil rumour?’
‘I heard she’s pregnant again,’ says Slater. ‘That wat you mean?’
‘I don’t mean that,’ said Hagen.
‘Not that,’ repeated Walsall.
‘She is pregnant though,’ Slater says again.
‘Yes, yep, third time, number three, but better than that. I heard she had a meeting with the EU ambassador. That’s a treaty-breach by the EU, right there.’
Slater thinks about this for a while. ‘An official meeting?’
‘Well a secret meeting of course. But not a local official, you know. One of the three EU ambassadors.’
‘EU ambassadors,’ says Walsall, knowingly.
‘And most of all, a meet, a political meet. EU is plotting something. Uplanders are plotting with EU.’
‘Plotting wat?’
‘Saint Christ alone knows!’ barks Hagen, for some reason very amused by this question. He grins, the grin in his big round head like an axe-cut suddenly in the side of a honeymelon. ‘I don’t know that! How would I know that?’
‘But you can use your imagination,’ says Slater.
‘We can all use our imaginations,’ agrees Hagen. ‘Something’s cooking. Upland is a glass bowl, you know? EU can’t really have thought that they could send an official to neg-o-t-iate with Gradisil herself and it not be noticed.’
‘So it’s a deliberate EU play?’
‘We can all use our imaginations,’ says Hagen again.
‘Yep,’ agrees Walsall.
‘It’s a pretty flagrant flouting of the terms of the eighty-one treaty,’ says Slater. ‘But they can’t want a war, can they? We’d kik their ass. We can surely kik their ass if they want it, but they can’t want it. I mean, less they got something up their sleeve. They got something up their sleeve, you think?’
‘Me I’m liaising the space station, that’s all,’ says Hagen, sitting bak. ‘I’m the wrong soldier to ask. But you got to wonder. Are they trying to precipitate a war right now, up here? That’s the salient, no? Up here!’
‘Yes,’ replies Slater, meditative. ‘Thanks for sharing,’ says Slater.
The plane is shuddering now, as if cold, because it is into the atmosphere, and soon it is sweeping down and around, over the Earth that lies passively there below them, like Danae sighing in anticipation, and the sighs visible as little cotton clouds. And then they fly through the clouds and down.
two.
Paul
Who I am
My name is Paul Caunes, husband of Gradisil. You’ve heard of her, even if you haven’t heard of me, but bear with me and I’ll get to her, as soon as I’ve sketched some conventional, uninteresting details about me. I was born into a wealthy EU family, and as a consequence I have never had to labour to earn my fortune. But I did need to labour, and earnestly, at spending it; finding an appropriate outlet for it. It was in the strenuous and not entirely joyous pursuit of this aim that I became an Uplander. And it is as an Uplander, as the husband and political consort of Gradisil, that I can now tell my story.
In fact my portion of this narrative is a simple story, and here it is: story of a woman who marries a man, but not for love, rather for his money, for the opportunities he can bring her. He is a branch for her to set her foot upon, a stepping stone on the path she wishes to tread; and her wish is a potent thing, her willpower can shake nations and win wars. And, perhaps, she does not even despise him. Weeks and, sometimes, even months pass when she is not even fully aware he exists. She doesn’t even hate him, which is the worst of it, for in hatred there might be some sort of passion to answer the passion in him. But she is largely indifferent. When it occurs to her, she is even affectionate. She even uses the phrase ‘I love you’, although it tends to come up in phrases such as ‘you know I love you’, and ‘don’t be silly, of course I love you.’ Which, I hardly need to tell you, isn’t quite the same thing. And as for him, well, he loves her. He loves her wholly and hopelessly. He betrays her, he hands her to the enemy knowing that it will mean the end of her life (in prison, in execution); and knowing that, and loving her as he does, he betrays her. This, then, is the story of that betrayal, that’s all.
Why does this man love this woman? Not for her political ambition, or the plan she has to shape by force of will a disparate collection of selfish, wealthy exiles and forge them into a nation. Not for her celebrity. Not for her faithlessness, although I concede that is a reason why some men love some women. Not for the 3nimation figure cultural historians are already sketching in clumsy sphere-and-blak characters. He loves the real her, the actual her; the her that generates the particular odour of her skin, the her that pushes the blak hairs from her scalp millimetre by millimetre. He loves her distinctive smell, which is hers alone, and which you can only smell by being close to her.
Here is a public Gradi
We were on the ground, in a pale wood-clad room. The room was in Finland-EU. The wall projections were fluid with swifts and alouettes. There was a green hatstand in the corner, shaped like a cactus. Gradi was there, a handsome woman, physically slight but enormously charismatic, compact like a jewel or one of those jade circuit-chips that has folded all humanity’s cinema into its miniature whorls and dots. She was dressed in blak. She was a few weeks past her fortieth birthday. She was sitting slightly askew in a large chair, the desk at a forty-degree angle away from her, and I was sitting diagonally across from her. There are three other people in the room. This is late on in Gradi’s political career. I suppose we can call it a career. The three other people, two men and one woman, are wat a more conventional politician would call aides or advisers, although it was part of Gradi’s style that she did not use this sort of vocabulary.
One of the men is at a second large, polished-and-carpented plastic desk. The other man and the woman are both huddled intently over opened notepads. We are all discussing a certain matter: politics, diplomacy. The man at the desk is holding two telephone receivers to his head simultaneously, one each side, like an Amish beard. He looks very severe, very stern, this man. His name is Mat. One of the receivers goes into its cradle. ‘It’s viable,’ he announces. Gradi looks sage. ‘He near as had a nosebleed when I suggested it,’ continues Mat. ‘But it’s viable.’
‘Viable,’ says Gradi, a verbal nod.
‘Wat is it?’ I ask. But she shushes me, since the man is still talking on the other phone.
‘We’ve set up a meet in Gallano’s house.’
‘He changed his transp,’ says Gradi.
‘I’ve got his complete cycle,’ says Mat. Gradi nods, nods, uh-huh.
I get up and I walk out of the room, and I believe, and I still believe today, that the others did not even notice that I was gone. I walked through the rest of the house. I had bought this house myself; I had used my money, and searched the housing sites, and met with the vendor, and furnished it; I had lived in it for longer stretches than anybody else who lived there, for they were often away in the Uplands or moving restlessly about the globe. And yet it was not my house; it was Gradi’s house, since everything was hers.
Here is a flight to the Uplands
I flew ground-Up and Up-ground so many times that, now as I cast my mind bak, all those many flights coalesce into one: a single hypertextish ‘Flight’. Sometimes I flew up with Gradi and nobody else, or with only a small group of people; but more often I was in a plane with a large crowd. People wanted to come and go; seats were traded and bought, people hopped aboard when it was clear that there was a flight upward. It is one of those sorts of flights that is, for my purposes here, my Flight.
The plane is paked with people, blithely disregarding the straps and even the seats as we thunder along a runway and climb into the air, with that distinctive lurching sense of inner rearrangement that comes from kissing-off the ground and trusting to the invisible medium. The judder of flying through the treacly lower atmosphere. Wat do I do? I look out of the window.
Here we are, in the sky, fancy! But t
he ground is only a few metres below us; you could fall from here and not hurt yourself too badly. But now the ground is much further away, the ground is a spread of toy buildings and toy cars on diagrammatic roads. Then roads and rivers are threads, towns ragged-edged scabs of blak and brown. Then swirls of smoke, quikly blanking out the window as we rise into the whiteout of the clouds.
And up again out the other side, into the upper sunlight. The brightness stings in my eyes.
Gradi has come to sit alongside me. ‘You’re sure?’ she asks. ‘You’re sure they want to meet? I met with them — ’