by Adam Roberts
Of course, the Gradi magic did not always work. On more than one occasion we had to surrender valuables; although, of course, we did not travel with much that was stealable. Once an elderly couple both drew knives, and when Gradi tried to talk them round the old man launched at her and cut her on the arm. On another occasion a man punched Mat calling him ‘filthy Muslim, filthy Muslim’ over and over, although it is hard to land an effective punch in zero g. We retreated with ignominious haste from that encounter.
But the single worst occasion was not a lowlife, not an obvious criminal or hermit or madman, but a wealthy man from Italy-EU called Stefan. We piked up his transp, swooped down for speed and up to bank and slow outside a six-room mansion of spacious proportions. We were invited on board, and we were met in the foreroom by a blaksuited servant, an actual butler, do you believe that? Very nineteenth-century. We were led through, hand over hand along a wall-ladder, to a gorgeously furnished room, at the far end of which a slim, hawk-faced young man was resting against a wall, watching a large scrollscreen. He killed the visuals and smiled at us.
‘Hello,’ said Gradisil, brightly. ‘My name is Gradisil.’
‘And I am Stefan,’ he replied. And he talked pleasantly if rather distantly to us for a while. But he was a rapist, a man with a cruel and hateful aspect to his nature, and even Gradisil could not talk him round when he was started upon his attak.
Halfway through a conversation about the possible political complexion of a future Upland assembly, he waved to his servant, and the fellow brought out a gun.
Gradi was as unflappable as ever, but nothing she could say made a dent upon his purpose to do us harm. To do her harm most especially. ‘You’re doing this to the wrong people,’ she told him, calmly.
‘I disagree,’ was his reply.
Mat and I were cuffed; the servant strapping our wrists behind our baks with tight plastic bands, and hooking us to the wall. ‘And now you will take off your clothes,’ Stefan announced.
‘But this isn’t the right way to do this,’ Gradi insisted.
‘And now,’ Stefan repeated, evenly, ‘you will take off your clothes.’
‘I’d prefer not to.’
He raised an eyebrow at this. ‘You’d prefer not to? But wat do I care about that? You are in my house. You are subject to my will, whether you like it or not, and - as a matter of fact - I shall enjoy it more if you don’t like it. I shall find that more exciting.’ He didn’t smile. His servant seemed oddly detached from the whole scene, as if he were going through the motions of serving dinner or dressing his master rather than aiding and abetting this crime against a person.
‘This really isn’t the right way to do this,’ said Gradi again.
At his master’s command, the servant fastened a cuff around Gradi’s wrists, pinning them to the wall above her head. Then he pulled off her shoes and trousers. She didn’t struggle.
‘You told me to get naked. But I can hardly take off my top with my wrists pinioned,’ she pointed out, in a reasonable tone of voice. ‘Please undo my cuffs.’
‘No,’ said Stefan. ‘The cuffs stay on.’ His voice betrayed no excitement although his eyes were in fidgety motion over my wife’s body. The servant pulled off Gradi’s knikers. She did not resist the undressing.
And now, with us both watching, he floated over to her, and brought a knife from out of his belt. With this he made numerous little cuts and shreds in the fabric of her shirt, until it was floating in rags about her torso. She didn’t flinch. In her ever-reasonable voice she said to him ‘I’d advise you not to go any further.’
‘Would you?’ he said, sounding amused. ‘Would you really?’
‘You won’t be able to say you weren’t warned,’ she said, mildly, ‘at any rate.’
This seemed to amuse Stefan even more.
All through this display Mat and I were silent, absolutely stunned by the swiftly horrible turn events had taken. I can’t speak for Mat, but I could hear my inner voice inside my head repeating over and over I don’t believe this, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening. It felt like a joke, a scene from a drama being acted out, not real life. I couldn’t believe that this man was holding a sharp-edged blood-hungry knife to the throat of my beautiful wife. I simply could not believe that he had taken his cok out and was pushing himself up against her body. When I was a child I had enjoyed fairy-tale vids, and in particular Tom and the Fairy Queen, which perhaps you know. But at that moment of horrible consummation I felt like Tom in that story, his voice taken by the Fairy Queen with her little finger placed against his lips, such that he cannot speak or cry out, and despite all the extraordinary sights she shows him he can tell nobody. I felt sik in my stomach, and I had the urge to shout out, a shout loud enough to shatter the walls of his house and kill us all, a panic shout, but I did nothing but hang there dumb.
As Stefan pressed against her, Gradi said, ‘since I’m pinioned here you really don’t need to hold that knife to my throat.’
‘I have never,’ said Stefan, in a voice of polite surprise, ‘known someone in your position so wedded to the ideal of talking, talking, talking.’ He pressed the point of the knife further into her nek and the skin sank tautly under the point of pressure, like those diagrams of the rubber sheet of spacetime under the influence of a massive object they show you at school. ‘Of course I don’t need the knife. But I like the knife. Like the knife, and very much I like it. And if you say another thing I shall cut you with the knife.’
The blank expression on Gradi’s face did not change.
This was the point at which Mat’s inner blok broke apart. ‘Get off her!’ he yelled. ‘Wat are you doing? Get off her!’
And Stefan got off her, but only to float over to Mat’s immobilised body, and press the point of his knife against his right cheek. The skin cut, and blood bulged out. ‘If you interrupt me again,’ said Stefan, in a focused voice, ‘I’ll kill you. If you interrupt me again I will hurt her badly - I mean, more badly than I intend to, anyway.’ He pushed himself away and floated bak to Gradi. Tears were in Mat’s eyes. A globe of blood the size of a grape had swollen from the cut on his cheek and hung there like a rubyglass ornament. He was gaspingly silent.
‘You know,’ said Stefan, repositioning himself and placing his knife again at Gradi’s throat, ‘you think to talk me round, but in fact you only enhance my pleasure by drawing out my anticipation.’ For the first time his voice contained a sense of glee. With his free hand he pushed Gradi’s legs apart. She did not resist. ‘You will both watch,’ he said to us, happily, as he pushed himself inside her. ‘And you won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.’
Then he was making this sort of retching noise, a mixture of dry coughing and a forceful groaning, an insistent series of k’huh k’huh k’huh noises. He had dropped his hand from the knife, which stayed where it was floating at ninety degrees from Gradi’s nek with the point snagged in her skin. He was curling up and floating away from Gradi as if repelled by magic, his face clenched in pain and surprise, and a string of thik spheres and teardrops of red pulsing from his crotch.
I stared, amazed. But Gradi did not hesitate. She doubled up, pulled her legs together and, with a lifetime’s experience of manoeuvring in zero g, and a practised lithe gracefulness, she grabbed the handle of the knife between her feet and pulled it away from her nek. Her toes were virtually prehensile, her spine was immensely flexible. She positioned the knife at the plastic crossband of her cuffs, and heaved with her thigh muscles. It was at this point that the device in her vagina ejected the severed member of Stefan, spitting it out such that it floated fast across the room and knoked against the far wall. It looked like nothing very much, except perhaps a shred of white cloth leaking red at one end.
Stefan had stopped making his strangled choking noise, and was now producing a low-pitched wail of distress and pain. He was doubled up on himself, still seemingly linked to Gradi by the thik beaded line of his blood reaching across the centre
of the room. This blood — propelled by his pulse - was moving in a sinuous line, floating along, missing Gradi’s body (because she was curled up against her own cuff) to splodge against the side of the room. ‘Oh no,’ he was saying, in a cowed tone. ‘Oh no, not my little man, my little man.’
Every muscle in Gradi’s legs strained once, twice, three times as she levered the knife against the plastic band in her awkward position. Then her hands were free, and she transferred the knife to her hands. I watched, unable to blink. I expected her to go towards her attaker, but instead she moved quikly to the doorway to our left.
Stefan suddenly found his voice. ‘No!’ he bellowed! ‘No, it isn’t true! Cavlos! Cavlos! Come here, Cavlos!’
The servant came hauling himself through the door with one hand, his gun in the other hand. Gradi brought the knife down in a curving and unflinching motion and cut through the side of his nek. His blood scattered into a wide arc of fast fat droplets that sprayed with a rainfall sound against the wall, and the man crumpled and died, his body angling and his legs knoking and holding him against the rim of the door. As he died his finger reflexed on the trigger and the gun spoke its single angry word, its bang. The bullet was a specialist charge, a wireframe that expanded in air, a bullet designed not to break through an Upland house wall, but jagged and fast enough to tear into human flesh. We piked it off the wall afterwards, and I thought to myself he wasn’t bluffing — he wasn’t doing the criminal bravado thing, carrying a downbelow gun and brandishing it just for effect. He bought this gun fully intending to use it in the Uplands. He had thought to himself beforehand I shall want to shoot people, but I do not want to damage my house.
Stefan himself watched the death of his servant, and it seemed, oddly, to calm him down. He stopped yelling. Instead, clutching his red-pulsing crotch with both hands he put his head bak to look straight at Gradi. In a steady voice he said: ‘You have killed him,’ and when Gradi did not reply, he went on, ‘listen, we need to find my member, to cool it, we need to keep the organ cool. My plane is state of the art, it’s very fast and very luxurious, we can fly down to a private clinic in Canada where I have a VIP account, and they can reattach it. But we need to move fast.’
Gradi glided towards him, still naked from the waist down, still wearing only tatters on her torso, but with the bloodied knife in her right hand. She glided straight through the air like a vampire.
‘You can help me,’ Stefan said, earnestly. ‘We can still reattach it. Of course I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you anything you ask, but we must act now.’
Gradi said, ‘I would prefer not to.’
At this his eyes widened, and he started making a high-pitched whining sound, like a child denied a toy, or, perhaps more like a dog; but Gradi cut short his noise with the knife, and the singsong note ended in the spatter of blood against the wall.
I was shaking so hard when Gradi cut me down that I could hardly help Mat and her stow the bodies in a loker. There was blood everywhere throughout the air. Mat got a sheet from the next room along, and Gradi and he scooped it through the room, working from top to bottom (though in zero g we might as well say from bottom to top, or from side to side) until the blood was mostly moved away. Then we all three got naked and washed ourselves in Stefan’s private shower; a spacious shower cubicle through which hot soapy water (incredible excess!) was sprayed ceiling-to-floor. Gradi took the device out of her vagina, a compact linkage of four white wires with shark-tooth serrations, and a motor and chip at the hinge; she washed it in the flow and put it bak inside herself.
Afterwards we dried ourselves on Stefan’s large, clean towels. I saw Mat stealing several glances at Gradi’s unselfconscious nakedness, her flat buttoks, her lithe legs and arms, her small breasts conical in the weightlessness. He was bent a little forward with the towel bunched about his midriff, and I knew he was hiding his excitement. I truly felt no sexual excitement myself. I felt only sik in my gut.
We ransaked Stefan’s large wardrobe for clothes to wear. Mat and I found expensive smartfabric clothes to fit us easily, although there was nothing tailored for Gradi’s small frame.
Mat said with forced jollity: ‘I’ve seen those things advertised, from time to time.’ By those things he meant the device that Gradi had carried in her vagina. ‘But I never encountered one in real life.’
Gradi didn’t reply.
‘It’s a very efficient piece of kit,’ he said.
He stopped speaking.
We piked our way past the remaining hanging droplets of blood in the room with the corpses, out into the porch, into our plane and away. ‘Maybe we should take his plane?’ Mat offered. ‘He said it was state of the art and — ’
‘No,’ said Gradi. And that was that. But she took the pistol.
She did not seem ruffled by the encounter, she really didn’t. I was drinking whisky from a bladder all the way home, and I was if anything more trembly and sik-at-stomach an hour later than I was at the time. But she seemed completely calm. She flew the plane, she doked at our porch, she unloaded stuff from the plane.
A little drunk, and a little hyper, I tried to lighten the mood with humour. ‘I’m glad you take that thing out before we go to bed together!’ I said, forcing laughter. ‘That could give me a nasty surprise!’ But my laughter was false, and Gradi replied in a serious voice, her little face creasing at the temples a little, ‘But I would never forget to take it out, Paul. Of course I would never forget to take it out. I only wear it if we’re visiting strangers.’
But this was ill-judged by me on two accounts. One because although she seemed very calm and in control, this episode must have hurt Gradi inside - hurt her emotionally, I mean. In such a circumstance, wouldn’t you say that a husband’s job was to comfort his wife, not to make snippy jokes and then retreat to his sleeping bag to shiver and have nightmares? That might be the more normal marital dynamic, although there was little normal in our marriage.
The second reason why this was an ill-judged joke is that Gradi and I had not been to bed together, and had not had sexual relations, for many months. That side of our marriage had always been troublesome, intermittent and awkward.
On the very first time we had gone to bed together I had been unable to perform. I don’t know why. She took me bak to her Parisian flat, and we sat on the floor beside a flask of red wine and kissed. It was perfect; it was the perfect moment. There were lights in the sky visible through the broad glass of her eastward wall. We knelt in front of one another and kissed, and we kissed. But then she led me through to the bedroom, and there we stripped off and I found myself goggling at her tight young body, after which, for some reason, my stiffness left me altogether. Despite her best efforts it would not return.
Gradi was perfectly non-judgmental at my failure, accommodating, as if this were an everyday, take-it-in-your-stride sort of thing (I ventriloquise for her; that’s how her younger self would have put it; that’s her youthful idiom; the more properly political and rhetorical idiom belongs to the more mature Gradi). ‘It’s OK,’ she told me, as the light reflected off the rich cream of her skin. Her eyes were looking kindly at me, but I couldn’t shake the absurd, childish-paranoid sense that her two nipples constituted another set of eyes set in an unsettling torso-face, and that those eyes were scowling.
‘It’s not OK,’ I said.
‘I’ve got some Vig,’ she said, reaching to the bedside cabinet. She meant to be helpful, but this stung me; for why would she have such a thing right there, beside her bed? Who else had required chemical stimulation in order to be able to stiffen it and insert it? Not only was I not her first sexual partner, I was not even her first sexual inadequate. Looking bak, I suppose it is possible that she bought the drug specifically for me, on the off chance (and, looking bak, it would not have taken a genius to deduce from my manner that I would be awkward in bed) that I would flop. But that was not how I saw it at the time.
‘Don’t like that Vig stuff,’ I said, rather abruptly, trying to h
ide my mortification behind an assumption of priggishness. ‘It does bad things to your veins, I’ve heard.’
This did not in the slightest erode her mood. ‘I’ve got some conds too,’ she said. ‘Not the regular ones, the ones with the memform plastic? You put them over your wang like a sok, and pull the thread at the base, and they tighten and stiffen and — ’
‘Oh Christ, Gradi,’ I said, burying my face in her stomach and willing myself to cry to maximise the dramatic effect (but no tears came. I am a poor actor). ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
For the first time a little uncertainty was audible in her voice. This was because her can-do let’s-fix-it come!-on! attitude had been doubly rebuffed. She did not know wat to do with the philosophical category of ‘the uncertain’ except reject it wholesale. Were she ever to allow it the meanest purchase on her own thoughts, it might corrode everything about her. She would avalanche from everything!-is!-possible! to an all-encompassing ‘wat’s the point’?
I have heard her speak so many times at rallies and public meetings, and even on screen, with that distinctive delivery that is so easily parodied, and yet which was so effective: as if every single word is given its own! exclamation! mark!, and the choppy little gestures with her small hands, like karate strokes. In private she spoke much less rhetorically (you’ll say: but of course!) and yet she was never wholly removed from that pumping assertiveness. On the other hand, her body sometimes let her down. She would sometimes chew the inside of her cheeks. You know that spongy wet flesh on the inside of your cheek, where your molars like to slide-and-grind? She did that. You could see the bones of her jaw shifting slightly, regularly, like a pulse. Then she would pik at her eyelids, a nervous tic. Then her diction collapsed, her eloquence fled, she sounded like a teenager all through her life. Her small hands loosened into pikers and feelers and gently caressed my non-performing genitals. It felt very nice, but did nothing to rouse the member itself.