by Adam Roberts
But the others have grown bored with his stammering prolixity. ‘If we could throw out a wheel the size of the Moon,’ said Hagen, opening his arms to indicate vastness, then it would need to rotate only very slowly, and the nausea would be next to nothing. Size is everything.’
The officers nod at this. The military has ever and always been enamoured of size.
‘After a peak in the twentieth there’s been a-a-a steady decline of both technical and conceptual innovation, with-with the conceptual graph descending steeper, which-which means that,’
Nobody is listening to the lieutenant, but still he keeps babbling on.
The room settles, and subalterns usher people through to the seats. Slater makes his way to the front of the room.
He gives his presentation, and waits for questions.
It goes well, but nobody puts any questions to him afterwards. Nobody is more status-obsessed than an army man, and they are all waiting for the Vice-President to kik it off.
But all the VP says is, ‘Nobody got any questions?’
Nobody has any questions.
‘Thank you very much, Lieutenant,’ says the Vice-President. That’s that, the end of the meeting. And at his words the room is filled with the rumble of many chairs being pushed bak, of many military officers standing up and filing out.
And, slightly dazed, his heart still working strenuously in his chest under the desperate weight of one full g and his limbs trembling slightly, Slater smiles, and nods, and pulls his thumb out of the projector slot and prepares to leave.
But before he can leave the VP comes over, and says ‘A word in private? Walk with me to my jet.’ And for the first time in his career Slater feels that heady sense that comes of being intimate, howsoever briefly, with the very powerful, that beguiling taste of proximity to the heart of things.
A conversation with Vice-President Johannes Belvedere III
The Veep walks with Lieutenant Slater to the door of the building but, looking out, stops there. ‘Let’s talk here,’ he says, as one of his five-strong security detail sweeps the corridor (even though it’s a military facility) and two more take up armed position fore and aft. ‘No point in getting mouthfuls of snow as we chat.’
Slater is a little thrown by the peculiar emphases the Veep gives to the word ‘chat’; but he says, ‘Yes sir.’
‘Good presentation,’ says Jon Belvedere III briskly. ‘The Moon?’
‘I’m sorry, sir?’
‘You didn’t mention it?’
‘No, sir. The Moon - still technically under international treaty, so the Moon, it’s in a slightly different category from . . .’
‘But we go there.’
‘Yes sir, though not often. There’s nothing there, pretty much. And as I say, we can’t actually claim the territory without violating . . .’
‘Uplands different?’
‘Well, eh, yes, sir, the orbital treaties, such as they are, are a century and a half old. No one supposes they’d stand up to sustained legal challenge, so they’ve effectively fallen into abeyance. Leastways, no lawyers filed suit when we declared Uplands a US territory in eighty-one. ’
‘Lawyers,’ says the Veep, drawing an enormous and rather intimidating smile out of his wide face. Slater’s answering smile is wholly beta-male-mimics-alpha, nothing to do with pleasure of amusement. He is struk, stupidly, by how very like the Vice-President the Vice-President looks, this face that he has seen a thousand times on screen media and in the newsbooks now here in front of him, and some part of his brain cannot get past the thought, wow you really look like the Veep of the USA. The brambly hair only partly kept under control by his personal barber; the slightly goat-eyed intensity of his stare, the drug-perfected tone of his beech-coloured skin that doesn’t - a frequent unfortunate correlative of drug-perfected epidermis - escape a certain staleness, a hint of the unalive. But certainly a strong face, a handsome face, certainly a senatorial face.
By saying ‘lawyers’ in that tone of voice, the Veep is laconically conveying the sense ‘damn lawyers, they’re a pain in the ass, now that the US is the undisputed monopower the closest we’ve got to an international enemy is fuking lawyers and their endless antiGovt suits’. Not that he would ever say that, out loud. Of course.
‘Yes, sir,’ says Slater.
‘OK,’ says the Veep, the smile tuked away in his face again ready for another occasion, his mouth set sternly. Statespersonlike. ‘Forget the Moon. Wat about these Uplands. They’re ours, de facto and legally, yeah-yeah?’
‘That’s right sir.’
‘And these Uplands are just crawling with billionaires, yeah-yeah?’
‘Well I don’t know about crawling, sir, but . . .’
‘And we’re entitled to tax their ass. So remind me why we’re not getting a revenue stream?’
‘Well, sir, the problem . . .’
‘Remind me,’ says the Veep, looking over Slater’s shoulder, ‘why the golden coins ain’t simply tumbling down out of the high sky into our treasury coffers?’
Slater waits a beat to be sure the Veep has finished talking, and then says: ‘Well, sir, the problem is with collection. We register all the house transponders so theoretically we can locate any tax avoider. But the Uplanders just change their transponders. They throw the old one out the door, and it continues in orbit, so our AIs think they still know where the house is, but then we send a team round to enforce payment and they just find the box orbiting in blank space, not the house. The house has disappeared into billions of cubic kilometres of space.’
‘So do another sweep. Make it illegal to switch transps.’
‘We did that, sir, in eighty-five.’
‘So do another sweep, fine the offenders, enforce the taxes, make a few examples.’
‘It’s,’ says Slater, nervy, ‘triky, sir. They’re slippery. When we do catch up with them they deny they’ve ever seen us before. They’re not who we think they are. They’ve changed accreditation, or papers. If we’ve got DNA on them they claim to be identical twins, that kind of manoeuvre. They’re wealthy and their lawyers are good. There are, if memory serves, four thousand legal cases pending contesting individual tax assessments.’
‘Four thousand?’
‘It’s very expensive for us, naturally. A greater net financial loss is due to legal contestation than to the brute expense of maintaining Fort Glenn and its staff, sir,’
‘It’s co-ordinated?’
‘Sir, yes, in our opinion this is a very efficiently co-ordinated policy of civil non-cooperation and obstruction.’
‘This Gradisil woman?’
‘She’s obviously the ringleader.’
‘Calls herself the President of the Uplands.’
‘Well, actually, sir, she’s careful never to call herself that. But plenty of other people call her that.’
‘Elected?’
‘No, sir,’
‘Remind me why we don’t have her in custody?’
‘Well,’ says Slater, nervy again, ‘it’s not necessarily that simple, er, sir, er. It’s. Partly it’s just the problem of locating her. It’s. Upland’s a very big place and she has lots of friends who’ll happily stash her in their bak rooms. And partly there’s the legal question. At the moment it would be hard to make a charge stik, which could turn any arrest into a very costly jamboree for the lawyers, and a very embarrassing public relations snafu for us.’
‘Right, but if,’ says the Veep, unsheathing his enormous smile a second time for several long seconds, ‘but if we’re at war, a properly constituted and declared war, then the legal situation changes.’
Slater’s straining heart does a gulping thrum; this is assuredly exciting. He can feel history about to turn, feel the say-so of the Powerful Man on the verge of moving events around a new axis. ‘Yes, sir,’ he says, quikly, ‘that’s exactly the point. Then she’d be a legitimate prisoner of war, and we could hold her as long as we like. In that case the tax cases go into legal abeyance, ’til
the war is over, and we open up all manner of possibilities.’
‘OK, lieutenant,’ said the Veep, looking past Slater’s shoulder and trying not to look like somebody who has forgotten his interlocutor’s name, ‘OK, lieutenant, let me tell you wat the President is thinking. The President is thinking we either have to be very discreet about this, or else we need to come out all guns blazing. Yes?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Slater.
‘My sense is that discreet has not worked. Is that your sense? Yeah? Tell me: is that the sense of the President’s good-and-faithful General Niflheim?’
‘Yes sir, I believe the general and I agree on that.’
‘Then, guns-blazing it is going to be. You and I, Lieutenant,’ the Veep says, pulling his collar up against his nek, ‘are going to be seeing a lot of one another in the next few weeks. We need a pretext, we need a strategy, we need AI’d in-and-out dates, and above all we need a proper intelligence so we can grab this Gradisil as soon as, cut the head off of the chiken.’
His security detail have opened the door and cheked the walkway outside. Snowflakes are drifting in through the open aperture, and a fridge-door waft of cold air touches faces. Outside the snow has loaded the roofs and trees.
‘Sir,’ says Slater, ‘just before you go . . .’
The Vice-President of the United States of America pauses, looks at Slater.
‘One more thing, sir. She’s pregnant.’
Slowly the Veep says, ‘I think I’d already heard that rumour. Yes.’
‘It’s true. Which means she’ll be on the ground, for the duration of her prepartum. That’s very good for us. She’s got two houses in the EU, though she’d be crazy to go there. Nevertheless it’ll be much easier to apprehend her if she’s on the ground.’
‘Good.’
‘Only - sir — ’ and Slater is increasingly anxious at how bad this looks, detaining the Veep as he is about to hurry through the snow to his jet, buttonholing the second most powerful man on the planet, ‘only, sir, that means the operation must get a green-to-go within the next four months, five at the outside.’
One final glimpse of Jon Belvedere III’s mighty smile. ‘Lieutenant,’ he says, turning away from Slater, ‘we’ll be at war long before that, I promise you.’
four.
Paul
Here is another Gradisil speech
This also is from late in her career, not long before the war, when the killing efficiency of the American army was unleashed upon the Uplands and so many people died. She was in a house in high orbit with somewhere between forty and fifty people, almost all of whom were recording her Q&A for wider dissemination around the Uplands.
I was asked: how can you feel patriotic about empty space? It’s the most deserted of deserts, ‘a million times more barren than the Negeb’ as the phrase goes. Wat is there to be patriotic about? A few free-falling foxholes in an immensity of nothingness. He was no Uplander who said this to me! [laughter] How to answer him? Perhaps by inviting him to see for himself? [applause] Or perhaps by challenging wat he thinks he means. Let’s leave the patriotism to the groundlings, to the little children downbelow cowed under the disapproving gaze of their Pater-Patriarch.
Instead, let me suggest matriotism. Instead, let me suggest that not a single Uplander owes a duty of obedience to this country, that not a single Uplander owes a duty of tax to this country, [cheers] not a single Uplander owes a duty of subjection to this country, that all we owe is our multiple-individual loves for freedom, as we circulate forever in the amniotic orbit. And if it comes to war [more cheers] then we will fight not because the father orders us to, but because the mother needs defending, because our freedom needs defending, against the enemy.
Afterwards, in response to some question or other, she said: ‘Well some people just love deserts, I guess.’ That brought laughter of delighted recognition. People took that up as a sort of slogan. You’ll find that in the archives of political quotation under Gradi’s name.
The dangers of canvassing
In those early days of Gradi’s political career we flew from house to house, meeting and getting to know and getting ourselves known, that was the most of it. People ask: but weren’t you scared? Weren’t you sometimes scared? There are a lot of criminals and sychos hiding in the Uplands, fugitives from downbelow justice, and you were walking unprotected into all these strangers’ houses, were you really never scared?
The answer to that question is that I was frequently scared; and I believe Mat was often scared, and when he joined us, Liu was scared as well. Sometimes we would call in and people would be suspiciously eager for us to enter their houses. Though we went in together, strength in numbers, we did not go armed, though Mat sometimes suggested it. But wat sort of an impression would that make upon people? Gradisil objected. Hey, the President’s come to visit our house, but she’s coming through the door with a gun?
She began referring to herself as President early on, but only in private. She was too canny of the precarious auctoritas of her political status to do so in public.
So we might pik up a transp signal and swoop down for speed and up to bank and slow outside a four-room house made of hexagonal units, with a two-plane porch and get ourselves invited in. Inside would be (on this one occasion) a trio of dangerous-looking men; wearing static batteries at their neks to keep their long hair in a state of continual electric excitement, such that their drug-skinny bodies appeared to dangle from a massy dandelion explosion of hair. They were tattooed all over their bodies in sine waves of purple and gold, and their naked torsos were a knotty mismatch of bone-prominent skinniness and occasional drug-enhanced muscles standing up like elongated blisters. They declared themselves to be the Cannes Cannibals (though they spoke no French) and laughed aggressively and drank continually, and throughout the whole long hour of our visit I was in a state of heightened terror, a condition I was able to disguise only poorly. All three of them carried firearms, with which they played as they talked. There were many more firearms strapped to the wall behind them. I convinced myself that I could decipher their body language, and that language told me that they were going to shoot Mat and myself and rape Gradi and kill her. Or perhaps (I became increasingly convinced of this as the hour wore on) shoot Gradi and rape Mat and myself, torturing us perhaps for days before leaving us in their porch and opening the front door. Sweat beaded from my forehead clinging to my skin in the zero g until it was a bulging skin of water, and I wiped my palm across it scattering salt pearls of water in a promiscuous little shower.
‘You sweating,’ observed one of the Cannes Cannibals, leering at me.
‘It’s hot in here,’ I returned. And indeed it was hot in there. But that was not why I was sweating.
But then the meeting was over, and the Cannes Cannibals were congratulating Gradi on her plan to snatch freedom for the Uplands from the USA, and cheering her, and promising to spread the word. I could not believe that we had escaped with our lives. It was thirty minutes in the plane afterwards before I began to believe that I was going to live. But Gradi was blithe. Were you not even a little bit scared? I asked her. No, she said.
I believed her.
On another occasion, in a two-room house with one inhabitant (a man called Denis, from Australia) there was Actual Violence. In the middle of our conversation he brought out a gun and told us he was robbing us. But Gradi was utterly calm. It was miraculous, it was inspiring to watch her. She did not move, and she did not give ground. I think he was called Denis, our attaker. Perhaps it was Dengbert. His house was painted mustard yellow on the inside, I do remember that: and I remember that the lighting was very bright. I remember thinking that a man might go mad in such a room, and when he brought his gun out I thought to myself, without satisfaction: you were spot on there, Paul. ‘That’s an ordinary gun. If you fire that weapon inside your house,’ said Gradi, unruffled, ‘you’ll puncture the wall. You want to puncture your wall? How much air will you lose whilst you’re fighting o
ff my two associates?’ She gestured towards us.
Mat pulled a face; I believe he was trying to look mean. I don’t know how I looked; I’m sure I looked as terrified as I felt.
‘Just give me your chips, give me your stuff,’ the robber repeated.
‘No,’ said Gradi.
‘I fuking mean it, guys. I’ll shoot you.’
‘No,’ said Gradi, ‘you won’t.’
There was a long pause. Then the robber put his gun away, and looked pointedly past us at the wall behind. And then Gradi started talking to him again, skilfully drawing him bak into conversation, and by the time we left there was even a tear in his eye. He pledged himself to our cause with a tear in his eye.