by Adam Roberts
And so, in those early days, we three flew from house to house; we chatted with old friends, and made new friends; we radio’d or phoned from our plane to speak to householders who were too suspicious, or too hermetic, to agree to allow us in. We started visiting as many houses as we could. ‘Wat do you want?’ people would ask. (They would only ask this at the beginning, of course; after a while Gradi’s fame grew large enough such that this question became superfluous).
Gradi would introduce herself. And replies:
‘Who are you? Wat do you want? Leave us alone, we have a firearm.’
- or -
static, nothing, no reply, which was another way of saying fuk off.
- or -
‘Never heard of you. You trying to sell something?’ which at least left the door open.
- or -, perhaps, a more welcoming conversation, or even an invitation into their house. During the first year the former responses were more frequent than the latter; but in the second and subsequent years the latter became more typical.
We met many people this way. It was not that we were making friends, for politicians - I mean true politicians, not amateur committee-sitters or school-board makeweights - must not expect to make friends. But we were establishing a good network of positive contacts.
- we piked up a new transp signal and swooped down for speed and up to bank and slow outside a three-room house of spacious proportions linked together in one long line, with a large bulb on the end, the porch, with two planes doked. The side of this house was inscribed in a flowing magenta script of sikles, half-moons, rice-grain dashes and marks: Arabic. We phoned in. ‘Hello! How are you?’
After a pause, a man’s voice, with no visuals: ‘Who are you? Whoever you are we request that you leave us in peace.’
‘My name,’ said Gradi, ‘is Gradisil. We were just passing, and were hoping to introduce ourselves.’
Another pause: ‘why?’
‘To make friends. We are all Uplanders together, and I believe we need to know one another - to help each other out if need be, to leave people alone otherwise.’
Another pause, and then a different male voice, deeper and with more of an undertone of anger: ‘the name of this house is daru’lridzwan. This house had been established by the People’s Islamic Republic of Brunei as a retreat, for contemplation and the Will of Al’lah, the wise, the compassionate.’
‘Well,’ said Gradi, finding in her voice that extraordinary ingenuousness and innocence of tone that served her so well as a politician, ‘as a European, and somebody who fought the Americans in the last war, I can understand your caution upon encountering a stranger here in the US-occupied Uplands.’
The voice coughed a few phonemes of scornful laughter. ‘We are not afraid of the US, up here or below. US occupation in this region, this is only a joke. Please leave us in peace; we wish to have nothing to do with politicians, orbital or ground-based. We are a religious retreat.’
I could tell from the expression on Gradi’s face that she had immediately cloked daru’l-ridzwan as a lost cause. She had the politician’s instinct to know when to persevere with a possible convert, and when to abandon the case. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I myself have no desire to receive the infected title of politician. We shall of course leave you in peace. Only, before we go, please allow me to tell you — we believe the Americans are planning military occupations in the Uplands, with a view to registering all transponder codes and levying taxes upon them. Our advice is that you keep a number of transponders, with different codes, and that should the Americans visit you appear to accede to their demand, register your transp and then jettison it into orbit and start using a new one.’
There was no reply to this, and soon Gradi nodded to Mat and we dropped into a lower orbit and sped away. The sun stretched two arms of light around the curve of the Earth, lazily, before blinding us with its face.
- we piked up a new transp signal and swooped down for speed and up to bank and slow outside an aggregation of rooms, linked in so disorderly a manner that it took a while before we could count them: five, a power-bloc connected, and a mantle of ice spread like tendrils over the whole. There was only one plane parked at the porch.
Gradi phoned in, and the people inside were delighted to hear from us. ‘This is so great,’ said an excitable voice, and an excitable smooth face on the tiny phonescreen, it being impossible to tell whether either was male or female. ‘I’ve heard of you - I really approve of wat you’re doing. You wanna come in?’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Gradi, sombrely.
We doked at their porch, and pulled the hatch to float into a hot wet dishcloth atmosphere flavoured with something sharp and offensive to the palate, ammoniac. There were lights on in every room, and a heater in most of them, and the air was blurry with smoke. Smoking in an Upland house is a stupid thing to do, but some Uplanders do it; and although they pollute their air and strain their scrubbers they enjoy (apart from the chemical input into their bloodstreams of course) the sight of smoke in zero g, which is something weird and beautiful: pooling out from a cigarette end, dissipating into a perfect haze, like a drop of oil spreading entirely to cover the surface of still water. There are none of the ribbons and strings of smoke you get from smoking downbelow: instead a slowly expanding oval as you draw the cigarette through the air to prevent the accumulated smoke snuffing the lit end. It makes for a hypnotically sculptural sense of ease.
There were half a dozen people in the house, men and women, and more than half a dozen more (we were told) downbelow at the moment. They were all young, or youngish, and welcomed us with disarming openness. We all hitched ourselves to wallstraps or furnishings and passed around a globe of weak, warm beer. ‘It’s a cost-share thing,’ one of the householders, Brendan, explained. ‘We’re none of us rich. I’m a schoolteacher. Aziz there is a software specialiser. Lyn and Kate both work for the government’ (the EU, he meant). ‘But we all love it up here; so though we’re none of us rich we’ve pooled our money with a dozen other people and bought a plane, bought this house. We spend as much time up here as we can.’
The source of the ammoniac smell became apparent as a cat came floating through the doorway. It was a large, overfed domestic cat, with fur the colour of a tiger’s eyes. The expression on the creature’s face was that of furious non-comprehension, an animal that did not understand and implacably did not like the experience of weightlessness. He scrabbled at a wall, trying to get a purchase, but there was nothing for him to sink his claws into and he only succeeded in propelling himself into the middle of the room. Urine beaded in a kinked string of noisome pearls from his hindquarters.
The householders laughed joyously at this, and did not seem to mind the slow floating trajectories of the miniature fluid asteroids, inevitably due to intersect with the walls, or with the occupants, of the house. I found it distasteful, and although I tried to hide my feelings I’m certain my distaste was only too obvious. But Gradi, though fastidious and clean in her own space, seemed genuinely not to care. She laughed with them all, chatted, and had an involved private conversation with Georgina, a turf-headed violet-eyed girl with a permanent femmequi-rit rictus on her face and the slightly loose-skinned slenderness of the drug-enhanced slimmer. Whilst they talked, Brendan and Aziz showed me round their communal house.
Later, Gradi generated an ersatz but wholly convincing enthusiasm of her own, to chime with the messy enthusiasm of this house. ‘Georgina wants to help,’ she announced, with her arm around Georgina’s skinny shoulders. Georgina’s grin was even wider than before, if that were possible. ‘Georgina wants to join my staff. I’ve told her we can find a place for her.’
‘Many hands make light work,’ said Mat.
‘Welcome aboard,’ said Gradi.
‘Thanks, I’m really excited,’ said Georgina, a nervous trill in her voice.
‘Shall I tell you where we are, and when we are? Guys?’ said Gradi, addressing the whole room. ‘We’re here
at the birth of a nation.’ Half a dozen wastrel weekender Uplanders, I thought to myself, and she sounds as if she’s addressing the Congress and Senate of the United States itself. But that was part of her genius; to take each and every person as if they were the crucial contact that would make her political career. Never to slak. Attention to detail. ‘We’re here at the birth of a nation,’ said Gradi, ‘and we have the chance, almost unprecedented in world history, to shape the development of that nation. To make it a place of justice, equality, a shining beacon for the world below. Georgina is going to help me make that dream come true.’
There was applause. Applause followed Gradi wherever she went.
At Gradi’s prompting I bought a house in Helsinki. This was early on, a year or more before we met with Georgina, several years before she addressed houses crowded with adoring followers. This was in the third year of our marriage when she was pregnant with her first child.
Finland-EU, in common with many countries above the 70th parallel, had found in the Uplanders an economic asset. Between the 70th and the 79th parallels the lines of electromagnetic force branching down from the pole were at the optimal angle in sky for the flight into space, and myriad little specialist suppliers had set themselves up in the countries in between those magic lines. Of course it was possible to climb the branches of the Yggdrasil from an inset point further south, or further north; it was simply more energy-expensive, requiring the generation of greater charge along the wing-cables. The Americans had the Quantwing and could fly straight to orbit from anywhere on the planet they liked; but that was much more energy-expensive than Elem, and only marginally cheaper than roketry, so those two bands of geographical serendipity, 60-68 north and 60-68 south, gleaned their little economic booms. Suppliers of new and second-hard hardware; little communities clustered around airstrips; the large and the small cargos that Uplanders needed, ready to be ferried up.
It was for this reason, I suppose, that Finland-EU was the first groundling nation to establish semi-official links with us. They had appointed a local minister for air economy, which was to say, for Uplander-related trade and monies, and his name was Aleksandr Smouha. The office of Smouha made surreptitious approaches to the office of Gradisil, which is to say Mat, and we flew down to Helsinki to meet with him.
We had been Upland for a couple of weeks, and it took us a day and a sleepless creaking night to begin to acclimatise to full g again: Gradi, me, Mat and a man called Liu Chuanzhi. We were taxi’d to a central Helsinki hotel where we did nothing for twenty-four hours but lie on our respective beds watching TV, or moving painfully and complainingly to the toilet and bak. But Gradi was the most resilient of any of us; more motile sooner, a better sleeper, and the following morning she was a walking, smiling picture of vigour when we were still using autocallipers on our legs to help us walk.
‘You’re amazing,’ said Liu, to Gradi. ‘It’s like you just shake off the gravity.’
‘I’m small,’ said Gradi. ‘That’s the key. Small, and strong bones.’
But the truth was that she didn’t have strong bones; she had suffered various serious and concurrent ailments as a child, and she retained, beneath her bullish exterior, a physical fragility. She simply refused to let this show. She acted health and strength with utter conviction during our first official diplomatic meeting, with Aleks Smouha, in a pine-clad room with December’s sunlight falling coldly lemon-and-white through the tall windows in the far room. It all smelt of cleaning products, of polish. The sunlight made gleaming parallelograms upon the polished ebony of the tables.
‘You understand,’ said Aleks Smouha, ‘that we cannot officially acknowledge the Uplands as a separate nation. Officially you’re a territory of the US. And naturally we are, after ’81, in a tiklish situation as far as the US is concerned.’
Gradi had adopted a thoroughly convincing facial expression of concerned understanding. It almost fooled me, who knew it to be an act. It must have made a good impression on Aleks Smouha.
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘We understand how difficult the Americans can be. And,’ she added, with the most perfectly understated smile, ‘might I compliment you on your English? It’s fluent, perfectly idiomatic and almost wholly accentless.’ And Aleks Smouha was flattered by this clumsy praise, because Gradi was able to put it over as convincingly ingenuous and appropriate.
‘Thank you,’ he replied, his pleasure too evident. ‘But let me tell you wat the local government of Finland . . .’
‘Not the EU,’ said Gradi, nodding sorrowfully as if she perfectly understood the regrettable limitations of his position.
‘No, not EU in entirety, but Suomi-EU, and, believe me, I can speak for the whole of the Finnish population when I say that we had long wished to establish a bridge with the actual Uplanders. Not the puppet American Upland representative, but the individual who most accurately and democratically represents real Uplanders . . . you, Madame, are that person.’
Gradi nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘Although our system is not exactly democratic in the sense you mean.’
‘I did not mean to give offence,’ said the diplomat, smoothly and immediately, ‘I only meant to contrast the . . .’
Gradi nodded again, and smiled, and he stopped. ‘You’re quite right. It is just that our system is much looser than is implied by the term democracy. We might call ourselves an anarchy, the ideological principle of no government, only the affiliation of Uplanders when and if they face common threats, or common opportunities. But anarchy is a word . . .’
‘I’m not sure I’m familiar with the word . . .’ said Smouha, smiling.
‘An archaic term. When pressed I usually describe the government of the Uplands as a Liberty. It suits the population, and the landscape. So, for example, I have never been formally elected as Upland President . . .’
‘We are aware of this, of course,’ said Aleks Smouha. ‘And I must report that there are members of the local government a little troubled by your status. But talking to actual Uplanders, many of whom have bases in Finnish territory, it seems clear that . . .’
‘Don’t make the mistake of underestimating my authority,’ said Gradi, her voice gleaming with it, summoning charisma out of nowhere in that way characteristic of her.
‘Of course,’ demurred Smouha. ‘Of course.’
‘Let us be honest with one another, Minister,’ said Gradi, leaning forward and somehow filling the room with her presence, with an infinitely expandable charisma. I don’t know how she did that. Everybody waited for her words. ‘We are here, in this room, discussing possible futures. There’s little benefit, here and now, for Finland-EU or for the Uplands, in an official treaty between our two small nations; but in the future . . . who can tell? All we can offer you right now is that rather nebulous thing, the goodwill of a good proportion of Uplanders, which may or may not translate into economic benefits for your country. And I appreciate that all you can offer us is an under-the-table friendship, nothing that will arouse the annoyance or even notice of the USA. All you can offer us is the possibility of future flowering.’
‘You put it,’ said the ambassador, ‘very well.’
‘Then we understand one another.’ She stood up.
Aleks Smouha, who had clearly been expecting some bluster, or more resistance, now found himself pouring out concessions that he had clearly intended to yield slowly, after long negotiation. ‘Of course we cannot,’ he said hurriedly, standing up also, ‘sign anything, and we must ask you to keep these meetings secret, but I am authorised to give you my personal assurance, and the personal assurance of the whole Finnish government, that we regard ourselves as bound to you in a treaty of amity in all but name . . .’
‘Excellent,’ said Gradi, briskly. ‘Thank you.’
Another night, slightly better sleep, and another day’s rest, then the four of us were well enough to explore Helsinki a little. And so we wandered in the late afternoon through the broad clean streets of the city, past many
posters announcing Helsinki Pour Vous, which (we debated amongst ourselves) was a festival, or a tourist advertising campaign, or a perfume, it wasn’t clear. The sky was blank and bright, but its light was muted, like white neon filtered through fog. Our breath made ectoplasmic sallies out of our mouths in the winter cold.