by Adam Roberts
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘ — not long ago, you know? We met with them not so long ago.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said.
‘It’s kosher? It’s a real meet, you trust them on this?’
‘It’s concessions, that’s wat I heard, only they want to be a bit secretive, they don’t want EU media knowing that they’re granting you concessions. You know?’ This was all a lie. There were no concessions. They only wanted Gradi, to imprison her, to try her as a terrorist. My heart was quivering as I spoke this lie, as if it was fitting. I loved her so much it resembled epilepsy, or Theresa’s religious ecstasy. It was not even especially sexual; it was much more thoroughly bodily than that.
‘Is it,’ she asks, her brow still furrowed, ‘your usual source? Your guy - wat’s the guy?’
I squeeze up a broad smile. The guy. ‘It’s him, it’ll be fine.’
‘We only met a month ago,’ says Gradi, distracted, peering at the brightness that plunges through the window. ‘Why do they want another? So why do they want another meet?’
‘Maybe they want you to run for the Presidency when Veen steps down. Maybe they want a real leader running the US this time!’
Gradi laughs at this. She has many laughs. Her laughter is almost a language in its own right, and this is one of the many, many reasons that I love her. She can laugh with her heart and her chest; she can laugh so hard she wees and loses control; she can laugh with a charming sparkly fullness; she can laugh politely, pointedly, generously, precisely. She can laugh with an official reserve, a diplomatic laugh. This last one is the laugh she uses when I jocularly suggest that the Americans want her to run for President. She is looking past me at the group of people lolling and fidgeting at the bak of the plane, like a true politician. For a politician never need doubt her spouse’s vote of course; whereas a group of half-friends and strangers might well be potential supporters. For a true politician, the unknowns, the as-yet-unaligned, are the most fascinating human beings in creation. Not that there was anything as antiquated as voting going on in the Uplands; but support for a politician is support for a politician, whether it’s registered by democracy AIs in the polling booth or not. I am looking at her, as the bright sunshine illuminates her face, and I am thinking how sharply and totally I love her. It surprises me almost into tears; but it shouldn’t surprise me. Of course I love her. How could I betray her to the Americans if I didn’t love her?
‘And where’s the meet?’ she asks me, not looking at me.
‘I’ve sorted it, it’s in hand,’ I assure her.
‘Where’s the meet?’ she presses, her eye moving over the crowd.
‘Gallano’s.’
‘Same as last time?’
‘Same. We’ll fly there from hub.’ But she is already moving away, she is already ignoring me, and I move my gaze bak to the window and the sunlit sky outside. I can hear her, hullo, hullo, behind me. I can hear the buzz of the hoi polloi behind me rise as she comes over to them. They are excited to meet her. She is an Upland celebrity; she is known all around the world. Of course! The antiphonal interphase of conversation, Gradi’s voice, some man’s voice, the words not clearly audible. A child suddenly shrills Parky’s got a nosebleed! Parky’s got a nosebleed! and a gush of laughter swells through the group. Then, gradually, Gradi’s voice grows more and more audible, as she takes control of the conversation, as she pulls these new people around the orbital tether of her charisma.
I put my face closer to the glass. We are not going to Gallano’s. I shall fly her to an American facility and hand her over to the enemy, and this will be my betrayal. People have died for lesser betrayals. I’ve seen that with my own eyes. The enormity of wat I am doing excites me almost exactly as much as it terrifies me.
I look not through but at the window. The high sunlight casts all the myriad scratches and buffs on the plastic window into brilliant relief, as if they are burning hieroglyphs from some mysterious language written on the plastic, the plangent significance of which is only just out of my mental apprehension. Up, the strange symbols say. Light — Space — Freedom — Up — — Up — — they say. They look like the uttermost twig-ends of the luminous world-tree itself. Grimoire means grammar, the arrangement of words, nothing else.
The clouds below us span the great arc of the horizon. Looking down upon it is like looking along the top of an immense white forest; albino oaks bleached like bone; enormous coralised florets of white. Then we have moved higher in the sky and the clouds look more like a snowfall, a snow-covered landscape. Sound shrinks in my ears, which removes me further from the scene I am observing. I might glance bak and see Gradi in animated conversation with the other passengers, but it’s all dumb show, a front with nothing behind it. Then, hold my nose and close my mouth and blow hard and ears pop, and the words become audible again.
We fly on and the cloud cover below us breaks into cumulus, fragmenting into innumerable islets of white isolated against the deep blue of the Arctic Sea far beneath. It looks like the edge of the pak ice. Then the cloud vanishes, we are over clear sea, the blue unlittered with cloud. For long minutes we fly on over the unmarked sea, and then, slowly at first but with gathering haste as we move onwards, the cloud gathers again, like patches of foam on an immense and immensely blue bath of water. Then there is nothing but cloud beneath us: we are over another horizoning bank of cloud, the white below us covered in odd striations and grooves running for hundreds of miles, scored into the white bubblewrap bobbliness of the whole. The engines roar louder, for we are piking up speed.
‘Elem two minutes,’ calls the pilot from the open-plan cokpit. ‘Everybody get ready,’ and we are supposed to bukle up, like landing and take-off, for Elem represents a middle sort of take-off, or perhaps a landing of a different sort, a landing onto the colossal branches of the great tree. Nobody really bothers with the safety. Then the pilot says ‘OK, OK.’ And he fliks the switches.
The Elem motor hums, its generator coils running underneath our floor and out along the wings. The wings start shaking like the terrors are in them. The cabin jiggles violently. I hate this part. I always hate this part of every flight. An ahh, half moan and half exhalation, is vibratoed by the shaking. The ahh is from my throat. It just comes out, I can’t control it. The blue looks a long way down now. Little clumps of white afro cloud.
‘Little faster, hold on,’ the pilot announces, over the noise, his voice tremulously bright. ‘Hold on, folksies.’ The whine of the Elem motor increases in pitch and, suddenly, schoom, we are flying level and smooth. I have been holding my breath and now I release it. But I keep my eye on the view below. It is my suspicious terror that hints to me that by merely looking down as we enter this bizarre magical mode of flight I can exert some magical pressure upon the ground and thuswise hold us up, balanced, as it were, on the invisible shaft of my eye.
There are a few sparks coming off the leading edge of the wing. This is one of the things that happens in Elem flight, sometimes; and it goes away when the air gets thinner. But that knowledge does not reassure me. Sparks, they glitter into existence in irregular clusters along the leading edge of the wing, like luminous crumbs of disaster, and the spirit of fire, and the promise of love, for do we not, sonorous voice, echoing in the echoey head, do we not fly through the medium of love? Like a ten-euro preacher, very not-good cheapskate preacher-man, very very not-good-at-all. Perhaps he had moved to the uplands to be nearer to God, this nonexistent preacher, who knows? Does not love strike sparks from our leading edge, and give us the gleam in our lives? Did you not, yourself, collide with Gradi herself as a flint upon granite, and strike up the sparks of love? And did those sparks not fall on the tinder of your heart and flame up in passion? So now the inner preacher is addressing me directly, and that is the most not-good of all - by - golly - oh - fuk. I am sweating a little. I am panting a little. I can’t take my eyes of the sparks hurtling off the leading edge of the wing. Perhaps a fellow passenger will lean over and try to reassure me, ‘tha
t often happens, it don’t mean shit, don’t fret over that’ or something like that. Perhaps not. I am scared.
Once, observing my twitchiness, a fellow passenger, some skinnymalink fellow, asked me, ‘If you hate flying so much, why do you keep going up?’
‘It’s not so bad up,’ I replied. ‘Properly up. You don’t feel like you’re continually on the edge of falling when you’re actually up. It’s - peaceful. It’s the getting that is so - stressful.’ But all the time I spoke I was looking, not at my interlocutor, but at the view below.
And then, miraculously, a purply darkness thikens around us. Blue shrinks to a sedimentary layer of paler shades pressed down against the horizon by the much greater weight of blak, and stars distil out of the sky like droplets of luminous condensation. Finally I am able to relax a little. I breathe out.
I breathe out.
I concentrate upon breathing out. I’m not even sure where the breath is coming from that I am breathing out so thoroughly. I am purged of air. My lungs are as vacuum filled. But it’s alright, it’s alright, we’re here, and the babble of people chatting around me becomes audible again, and I look out of the window at a land of wonders, a blak and three-dimensional sink of a land, and the view.
Look down now. What see you? The dunes of the West African desert crowd together like ripples in yellow sand at low tide. The white peaks of the mountain ranges, running through central Asia, or running along the bakbone of South America, blend into the broken cloud formations which they so strongly resemble.
The spekly, sugary look of the high white cloud that covers most of the visible demihemisphere. It looks like sand has been trailed over a curving blue surface.
The globe looks so vivid and sharp directly below, yet the horizon-arc is so misty viewed as it is aslant, looks so air-brushed, a 2-D ring of fuzzy blue ringing the bulging 3-D world. I remember wat it is about this place that I love so. My relief and my love mingle, and I find that I am crying. Gradi has come bak, and kisses me on my cheek. ‘Soppy,’ she says, kindly. ‘Crying again?’
Since certain recent events, I have been crying all the time, it is true. There are deaths it is possible to learn to accept, because there are structures society provides that help us work through the grieving process. There are other kinds of grieving, such as the sort I have been enduring, for which these structures do not exist, such that the grits of grief precipitate out of the miasma as teary rain for months and months. Her acknowledging it makes me cry more.
The in-the-chest urge almost overwhelms me, to level with her, to tell - her - the - truth - in all its horror, to throw myself on her mercy, to beg her not to stop loving me. I can barely keep it under control. ‘I just love this place,’ I say, feebly. She is strapping herself in the seat next to me to stop floating off. ‘And I love you,’ I add, even more weakly, feeling vulnerable and stupid as I say it.
‘I love you too,’ she replies, but her voice is automatic, it’s not real, and the bulging urge to confess curdles and sours in my breast. She is not even looking at me. That’s the truth of it.
Here is a Gradisil speech
This speech, like the previously described flight up, is also is from late in her career. In the early days (which we will come to in a moment) she sometimes gave speeches to mere knots of people: three people in a tin can whirling round the world; a mere seven people on one occasion, I remember, in an empty storage facility, also in the hurtling Uplands. But usually, in the early days, she would not give speeches as such. She would engage in conversation. She would visit, like a good neighbour. This was so old-fashioned a political strategy it was almost modishly novel. Groundling politicians never ‘just’ met; and how could they, when their constituencies were counted in the millions? Instead, they interacted only with people preselected, these meetings being streamed out to much larger audiences. But it was thought of as almost dishonest, certainly disingenuous, for a President to pretend he was ‘just out there, pressing the flesh’. How could a groundling President, stroll amongst all his people and stare them smilingly out, face-to-face? Upland was different, of course. When I first moved there, before knowing Gradi (and how strange a phrase that is - as if there could truly be a before) my first Upland house took its place in a population of no more than 50,000. That’s not even a city, nor even a town; that’s a village. It became a more populous place later; but I’m talking about the beginning.
So through canvassing Gradi could meet a significant percentage of the total population she was working towards representing. It was a unique political environment. Here is one of her speeches. They’ve all been preserved for future historians:Upland is a new country. But more than this it is a new kind of country. In the past when new territory was opened up it was - America, Australia - largely colonised by the poor. Indeed, the first stage of colonial history is largely wealthy nations deliberately offloading their poor upon the wide open spaces. Those poor did not, many of them, stay poor for many generations: there were indigenous populations to press into servitude, people who had developed the natural resources, husbanded the land in various ways, whose labour and resources the settlers could steal. When they were plagued and slaved into abeyance, there was also the new poor, settlers from other lands, who also could be harnessed. This has been the logic of colonisation on Earth for centuries.
Not in Upland. We have no poor. We supplant no aborigines.
There were no previously existing indigenous peoples here. More significantly there are no poor people amongst our population. Most are wealthy; some are super-wealthy. Think of that!
It is not that Uplanders are somehow better human beings than previous settlers of previous new worlds. If we had happened to be poor - and if we had happened to find a population of technologically bakward little green men living amongst the space junk - then we would probably have exploited them. Stolen their habitats. Made them slave for us. But we weren’t poor. And there wasn’t anybody here before us.
And so we are in a unique position. We can build a nation that - for the first time in the history of the world! - is not founded on conquest, oppression, on human misery. To build a fair nation! To build a strong nation.
To build a guiltless nation, a beacon for the future. That is our challenge - and our glory!
I remember that speech particularly well. I remember thinking at the time how typical it was, and indeed its very typicalness made it memorable. There were hundreds of speeches like that. Perhaps seventy people were present, not counting myself, Mat, Liu and Georgina.
We were inside wat they used to call a house, a structure that was in fact an enormous tube, a fifty-metre-long cylinder schlepped Upland filled with some tradeable (milk, wine, who knows) strapped beneath one of the Leviathan-class Tanker jets FowenCo developed specifically for the Upland traffic. First, the pilots sold the contents, mostly to middlemen and middlewomen. Then the pilots sold the tube, and some enterprising Uplander cleaned it and sealed it and fitted an open access porch that could accommodate scores of planes at once; they could then rent it out - or live in it - or do watsoever they chose.
This tube was paked with enthusiastic Gradiphiles. How they loved her! How completely they loved her! People had hooked themselves onto the floor-straps, and the wall-straps, either side of the ceiling (isn’t it tiring having to deploy those inverted commas, that prissy pedantry, the ‘ceiling’ yes, the ‘floor’ yes, we know). They listened to her every word. Most had recording buttons, so as to be able to replay it over and over.
As she finished her speech, the applause started. People clapped and clapped, the sound like summer rainfall against a stone tile roof. Gradi had the knak of smilingly acknowledging applause without ever looking smug.
From the far end of the tube she looked small. But, then, she was small. Of course, the people in that tube were not applauding her as such, the small-framed, slightly plump, dark-haired woman, they were applauding the sense of hope she brought them, the possibilities, she sparked in their minds, the fr
igid brilliances of the dream she was peddling. They were applauding the vision of themselves as citizens, stakeholders of a new world power. In other words they were applauding their own egos, and the self-regarding indolence of it made me scornful; but privately scornful. I kept my scorn to myself. And, naturally, I clapped too. I was the Husband, the Husband-in-public.
I fixed my gaze upon a curiously-shaped patch of mould growing up against one of the strip lights. The applause went on and on.
As it finally died, Mat unhooked his foot and floated up. ‘OK,’ he said, brightly. ‘Questions?’
Later, bak in our plane (we weren’t leaving, but space was tight in the tube and this was the best we could do by way of an anteroom) - bak in the plane with Mat and Georgina and Liu and me, Grad was glowing, beaming. She was wide-eyed and buzzing, flashing smile after smile from her dark little face. She often got that way after a successful rally. ‘To our next gig!’ she beamed. She panted the question. ‘I think it’s time to spread a little more love.’
At the beginning of our marriage, at the beginning of Gradi’s career, we visited widely amongst the peoples of the Uplands, canvassing, meeting, growing networks and making as many friends as we possibly could. This, for several years, was our main occupation. And I say our occupation, but it was Gradi, it was always Gradi. At the beginning she had only one assistant, other than myself: a general political factotum called Mat Chang (Mat being short for Mohammed) who followed her out of an unquenchable belief in her manifest political destiny as the saviour of the Uplands. He loved her. We all loved her, of course. He was a young-middle-aged businessman who had made a fortune out of banknote design - software to design it, machines for printing it out so that it looked exactly like the actual antique product (dollars or euros), something that enjoyed a worldwide vogue in the early ’80s just as the major powers finally retired their last foldable exchange. Frat houses, Reading Tribes, gangs, families, all sorts of groups made their own banknotes, really beautiful things; people traded unique designs; collectors assembled huge collections. There were many imitators, but Mat’s company was first in, and claimed the Vogue, and he sold up and took a considerable fortune and moved Upland. When Gradi moved Upland herself, as my wife, and slipped so naturally into her unique hand-shaking and face-to-facing political career, he got to know her. He fell under her spell. Everybody falls under Gradi’s spell sooner or later; Mat was just one of the first.