Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  It was my first visit to those Helsinki streets, though I came later to know them very well: the yellow-fronted monumental architecture with grids of blok-fringed windows; chain-mail sheets of Christmas lights hanging very prettily from the department storefronts; the humps of gritty snow amongst the slush; the grumbling of trams; posters announcing Bakkonaalit and Kotimaan Matkailuneuvonta, and none of our party prepared to take off our gloves to spell these words into our palmcomps and find out wat they meant. Every Helsinki man woman and child was wearing woollen hats. Nobody sported the sorts of enhancements - hair, or metabolism adaptations - popular as defences against the cold of the winter in other northern hemisphere countries. A distinctly old-fashioned feel. Every other store sold ski-wear, puffed-up multicoloured sports jakets, huge boots.

  We walked past the harbour where the authorities subsidised an antique market as a draw for tourists, and we saw shrimps blak as beetles piled on beds of ice, and fish astonished at their own death lying row upon row also upon ice, and rusty-looking crabs the colour of autumn leaves. ‘Are all these fished from the local seas?’ Mat asked the kioski man.

  Everybody spoke English. We didn’t bother with translation chips.

  ‘Of course,’ the stallholder replied.

  ‘Shall we buy some?’ asked Liu, excited.

  ‘I wouldn’t know wat to do with them,’ said Gradi, a little hyper after her successful diplomatic encounter (that went well, I think? she kept saying, as we wandered the streets of the city). ‘Eat them raw? Microboil them? Christ knows wat.’

  But the stallholder winced at her obscenities. ‘Madame,’ he said, a little severely. ‘Excuse me.’

  Gradi looked wide-eyed at him. ‘I’m sorry, did I offend you?’

  ‘As a Lutheran I find your swearing offensive,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I apologise again, but — if you don’t mind, for I find this very interesting - is it only religious swearwords, or all swearwords? The word fuk for instance . . .’

  ‘I would not use that word myself,’ said the stallholder stiffly. ‘But it’s hardly as offensive as the citation of the Lord Saviour’s name.’

  ‘A hundred years ago fuk was considered far more offensive than Christian terminology,’ she observed.

  ‘That’s as may be. I’m not interested in that. I can only say, if somebody said, eh, that f-word, or damn, or something, I would not take offence in the same way.’

  ‘I understand. Thank you — I’ll be more guarded in wat I say in future.’

  The guard took her proffered hand and shook it seriously, nodding his head. As we walked away Mat whispered, in a thrilled sotto voce, ‘if you were in a Finnish election he’d fuking vote for you!’

  ‘You are a marvel,’ Liu agreed.

  We wandered about some more, and made our way to a bar not far from the hotel. Bar Tartary. Here, on orange plastic settees, under strings of glowing bulbs like luminous onions hanging from the ceiling, the four of us drank beer together. Mat and Liu were, I think, giddy. I’m sure, like I did, they felt like kids playing grown-up roles, like amateurs who were somehow, miraculously, managing to con the professionals. We were diplomats, weren’t we? We were ambassadors, and politicians, and the proper representatives of tens-of-thousands of Uplanders, a whole new nation? It was exciting and giddying and slightly alarming for us; but not for Gradi. She was completely at home in this world. She was born for it. But there was a ruthless quality in her. I think I have already mentioned how ruthless she could be. Have I already mentioned that I’d loved her since the very first time I saw her? That I worshipped her, I revered her, I loved her so much it was a physical pain to me?

  ‘Paul,’ she said, in that Helsinki bar, rotating her beer glass slowly on the low table, as if its disc top were a blonde planet circling. ‘I want us to buy a house in Helsinki.’

  ‘A house in Helsinki,’ I said. We owned a large house in France, and a smaller one in Iceland. But if she wanted a house in Helsinki, then I would buy one. Of course.

  Mat and Liu were silent. ‘OK,’ I said, after a short while. ‘I’ll find a house here, I’ll buy a house - central, is it? A central city location?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You’re sure?’ said Mat. ‘I mean, you want a house as . . . ?’

  ‘ . . . as a diplomatic outpost?’ Liu overlapped. ‘Are we that far, yet? I mean . . .’

  ‘Liu’s right,’ Mat cut in. They were both suddenly high with excitement, like schoolkids. They couldn’t contain themselves. ‘Obviously eventually we’ll want a proper groundling base, an embassy, but is Finland really the place?’

  ‘And is the time really now?’ said Liu.

  ‘I’d say France-EU,’ said Mat, looking at me, for no other reason (I think) than that I was born in France-EU. As if that had anything to do with it.

  ‘France, or Russia, but not yet surely,’ said Liu.

  They were practically bouncing on the settees. It was look at me! notice me! It was like toddlers, and Gradi was calm as any mother. I sipped beer and it caught a little in my throat, a heartburny sensation. I think I had an intimation of wat was coming, but perhaps that is merely the narrator’s hindsight.

  ‘It will be a private house,’ said Gradi, firmly. ‘A private house, that’s all. We’ll see wat happens down the line when we’re down the line. I’m not thinking politics. Not for this one.’

  ‘You’re thinking?’ Liu egged on, leaning forward.

  She stopped revolving her beer glass on the table and took my hand. This was it; it was coming. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  The world stopped turning. The twenty thousand houses of the Uplands fell out of the sky like rubble. The world folded over in half like a paper circle. I breathed in deeply. I breathed out.

  My first thought, wide-eyed, was: I’m to be a father! Gradi was still speaking, ‘It’s early days yet, so don’t go announcing it to the whole world, since I know from my mother’s experience that you need to be very careful with pregnancy when you’re in the habit of spending a lot of time Upland. In fact I’ll be spending no more than a day or two in the Uplands at a time for the next nine months. We need a base, and I like it here.’

  Liu said ‘that’s fantastic news, Gradi! That’s, like, the best news!’

  I thought: I’m to be a father. My heart, I realised, was moving faster than normal, the fibres of its muscles vibrating like strummed guitar strings. The beer had all cleared out of my skull. The decor of the bar resolved into abnormal clarity and vividness: the foul bright orange of the seating, the paisley walls, the white plastic straps fitted to the windows, the bulbous glowing ceiling lights.

  ‘Congratulations!’ Liu was saying, lifting his glass. ‘C’mon everyone, a toast, to Gradi’s coming motherhood. A toast!’

  ‘We’ll need serving staff,’ said Gradi, to me, and squeezed my hand. ‘And a house with a garden.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, still feeling a little numb. I’m to be a father.

  She lifted her glass, and clinked its cold rim with Liu’s. I raised mine with an automatic hand, and chinked her glass and Liu’s before it occurred to me to say ‘Should you really be drinking in your condition?’ She smiled, and then I realised that Mat had not joined the toast. I looked over at him. He had on his face the stunned, almost-smiling expression of the druggy. And, as Gradi smiled at me and released my hand, I suddenly knew, I suddenly knew, that the child in Gradi’s womb was not mine at all, but Mat’s. And I saw that he knew too.

  Wat? But of course, of course, parenting a child is not ownership, for that would make the child a thing, a plastic lump of raw immaturity. From the first assertive labial grip of a teat, the first furiously ecstatic eyes as the milk goes down, children are beings not belongings, curiously dense and branched little knots of will, and so, and so it does not matter that it was this spermatozoon or that spermatozoon, of the more-than-galactic trillions being generated daily in the conker-hanging testicles of the various men who surrounded Gradi, t
hat chanced to pierce the egg. But the Paul inside the Paul sulked, bristled, despite my very best efforts — and I urge you, as you read this, sons, to believe me how strenuously I tried - to convince myself of this. I wept, although I managed to reserve the tears for my private use. This is the considered judgment of hindsight: the truly salient feature of any of this phylum of depression (under which are arranged, in neatly-lettered legends, bereavement, existential sadness, rejection, wounded amour-propre and the nebulous grey blankness that sometimes swallows the most watchful consciousnesses) is the future-blindness that accompanies it. Unable to see beyond the malign tractor beam of gloom, the sufferer can see no end to his or her misery; just as I, throughout my wife’s first pregnancy, when my insight about the true identity of the father was confirmed by a thousand little clues, just as I could not see a time when I would feel anything other than corrosive humiliation. But (to glance ahead in my narrative) it did not stay like this for ever. When the child was born I felt my bones warm towards him. And children have a strong magic about them, a verbal magic (grimoire means grammar and is therefore, after all, only an arrangement of words), and when the boy first called me Papa the mere utterance made it so, conjured fatherhood out of me, interpellated me into the relationship.

  three.

  Slater

  On the ground

  It’s early in the year 2099, it’s downbelow, and the frost has made coral of the blak twigs of the trees. None of Lieutenant Slater’s elasticated prophylactic garments have managed the trik of preventing a certain amount of bone loss, or have prepared his muscles for the feeling of dead obesity and dreary inertia of full gravity. He spends a day only lying down, or walking slowly in callipers, like a fuking cripple, as he puts it to his subaltern.

  He calls his wife. She is in Florida with the children. She likes Florida. She insists (insofar as somebody with a personality as passive as hers ever insists) on living there, she really prefers living there, despite the fact that most of the military establishments at which her husband might conceivably be based are located further north, to take advantage of the Elemag effect. There are one or two Quantplane bases in the South, but only a few, for Quant flight is so expensive.

  ‘Don’t be nervous, honey,’ says Marina. ‘You’ll do just fine,’

  ‘Sure,’ says Slater. ‘Did Caz like the movie?’

  Marina laughs. The phonescreen cannot capture her pollen-delicate beauty, the extraordinary and almost Native American blakness of her spreading hair; but Slater’s memory is not screen-sized or screen-limited. He loves to see her laugh. ‘I’ll tell you wat Carrie said about the movie,’ Marina says.

  Carrie is their younger child, three years old.

  ‘Wat did she say?’ Slater asks, and the total anxiety of the imminent presentation has sublimed away.

  ‘She said “Mom I liked all of the heads and all of the bodies and all of the legs”, that’s wat she said.’

  Slater laughs. ‘But wat does that mean? I thought it was a movie about horses?’

  ‘Zebras, yeah, it was a sort of fantasy about the zebra republic,’ says Marina, beaming. ‘I don’t know wat she meant about the “all of the heads” bit.’

  ‘I gotta go, love,’ says Slater, because his aide has stepped into the room. ‘I gotta get my presentation ready.’

  And she wishes him good luk. She tells him she loves him. She wishes him good luk again. She assures him that he will do just fine.

  Through the gateway into the compound, a flagpole, a blok of three-storey barraks, and behind it all the jute-coloured winter sky of Washington. Slater’s callipers take him awkwardly across this little cardboard scene. The air is very cold. Those parched-coloured clouds are plein with snow. Some ashy intimations of the coming storm are starting to droop, dilatory, mazy, down through the air.

  He walks through the first snowflakes. The winter air of Washington State smells distantly of cold apple. This, Slater knows, is the barraks odour, released by small motile automata on continual aerosol patrol to cover wat would otherwise be an unpleasant stench of petrol and the putrid organic-pit behind the mess hall and, above all, the weirdly persistent, hot-rubber-dust stench created by the Quant engines, separating the underlying logic of space to generate their special kind of lift. A wonderful invention, of course, but one that does something horrible to the sense of smell.

  But here he is. He steps inside the building, and it is crowded with folk.

  A very palpable buzz of excitement is evident, a thrill that might almost be measured on a static monitor. The Vice-President is going to attend the briefing. Nobody knew that the Vice-President was planning to attend. Everybody thought that this was going to be strictly in-house, a purely military briefing. But if the Vice-President is here, then maybe the whole administration is planning to get serious about the Uplands.

  It makes Slater nervous. He brushed his teeth three times in his hotel room bathroom. Immediately before coming here he had sat at the little hotel desk and opened his palmcomp, extended the keyboard, let his fingers rattle and dart at the keys as he ran through his presentation one last time, as he cheked the latest web news, as he confirmed the truth of the rumour about Gradisil and her third pregnancy (and it does seem to be true). Usually working at a comp calms Slater, takes his mind off things, but on this occasion it was as if his fingers were plunging and dabbling in his own chest. It felt as if his heart had embarked upon its final drum solo, and was working itself towards a clattering climax.

  His heart is still straining as he prepares to give his speech. It’s only the effect of the gravity, he tells himself, just gravity making my heart tumble. This is true but this doesn’t calm him.

  Outside the window is Washington State and winter, and it is snowing in earnest now. A very great many white corpuscles of snow are floating and spiralling lazily in the air, as if disinclined to join the upholstered chill of the ground. The sky, insofar as it is visible, is pale grey and bright. Slater stares through the glass of the main door at this weather. There’s no weather in the Uplands.

  The hall is crowded, but as he walks through the door Slater knows it is too late to turn bak, and his nerves solidify into something more useful, something that approximates courage. This is one of the oldest soldiers’ triks.

  First coffee: then the presentation, Q&A, all that. Hagen is attending the briefing; the only face Slater knows in the crowd of people. He’s there in the hall amongst all the other uniformed USAF and USUP officers filling the little room, holding the little cups to their chestbones and talking to one another animatedly. Hagen has created a little knot of people around him, interested in his plans to build a simulated gravity environment.

  ‘If the radius is large enough,’ he is saying, ‘then we can reduce the effects of nausea. But that’s only reducing, that’s not doin’ away with it altogether. I guess it’ll just be one of those things. If you want to move under the influence of artificial gravity you’re going get a bit queasy.’

  ‘Wat we need,’ put in a stoky female officer, ‘is a proper artificial gravity.’

  ‘Sho nuf,’ agrees a dun-coloured officer with deep-set weathering lines on his elderly face The creases have enhanced and piked out the lines of his cheekbones, the contours of his mouth, and have left his eyes and forehead relatively line-free.

  ‘Wat we need is, like,’ continues the female officer, ‘a grid we can charge up to imitate gravity, something to fit in dek floors to draw people down.’ The last three words are accompanied by hand gestures, the right hand pushing the left down in three connected motions. It annoys Slater that the officer has said draw people down but acted out with her hands push people down. That sort of disparity seems to him an index of sloppiness of thinking.

  ‘Yes, that would be good,’ says Hagen, expansively, ‘but until such time as a wholly new technology is invented, we’re stuk with physics as we understand it, and it’s acceleration, or centrifugal effect, or we’re stuk with elastic straps tying our boots to th
e deking.’ He beams.

  ‘Still,’ says the walnut-skinned old officer, ‘they are inventing new stuff all. The. Time.’

  ‘Actually,’ puts in a thin-faced lieutenant, his beakish lips quivering slightly, ‘I was reading a paper on this on-on hawknet, and they-they said, the authors of the paper that is, they said they surveyed the-the rate of technological innovation over four centuries and-and they plotted two graphs, one for technical advance, and one for underlying conceptual breakthroughs and-and,’