by Adam Roberts
‘It’s OK,’ she said, without exclamation-pointing the statement, which was the closest her voice could get to intimacy of understanding. ‘Don’t worry about it, love. It’s alright.’ She’d piked up that usage, calling me ‘love’ from her stepfather, who was English. She called him ‘Dad’. Two days later, we finally consummated our relationship; and for several months after that we almost had a ‘normal’ sex life. But we could never have been entered in the sex Olympics. We did not make love three times a night every night after the manner of the porn vids. We did not make love every night, nor necessarily every week. You are not as interested in this topic, my sexual life, as you think you are. I shall stop speaking about it.
five.
Slater
Slater
Slater flies bak up to Fort Glenn, up through the air and through the airlessness above it and all the way to the Fort which seems to stand in nothingness sixty miles above the seamless ground. Is that miraculous, when you think of it? Yeah? Is it, or not? A crew of twelve Quanjet pilots have been billeted at Glenn, encroaching on the cramped space in addition to the usual staff. They’re there for space manoeuvres. To fly and zip and stuka their spacecraft away from the Earth, away from the usual orbit lanes; to test their piloting abilities and the limits of the craft. Ready for the real war, the shooting war shoot-shoot (chute means fall). It’s not Slater who is falling; on the contrary he now knows the reverse! Ascension! Up and up!
Slater flies up in an Elemag plane, with that line of gleaming violet scorching along the cutting edge of the wing. He has to wear his spacesuit in this craft, which is less comfortable than his uniform. Blakness thikens visibly around the window he stares out from. The pilot takes the plane into a counter-orbital sweep until the Fort’s transponder registers, and then flies straight to the base; and out of his passenger window he can see the extra porch that’s been unrolled on the far side of the Fort, with the six Quanjets parked, wide-winged swans nosing at a tubular trough. ‘They’re something,’ says one of his fellow passengers, a supply-side colonel peering out through her own passenger window. ‘Those jets.’
‘Something,’ Slater agrees.
‘I guess they’re here for manoeuvres, testy, for test flights.’
‘I guess.’
‘I heard they can manage fractions of c, if the engines really let rip. They can turn the dial all the way up, that’s wat I heard’
‘Short haul, though. It’s an expensive way to fly.’
The sun comes round the wall of the horizon and each of the white, birdsfoot-shaped jets shines suddenly, gloriously, as if lit neon from within.
‘Tell ya something else,’ says the colonel, conversationally. ‘I happen to know that one of the things we carrying to Glenn is blak paint.’
‘Really?’
‘War paint. Come war, they’ll paint those babies blaker than coal at night. None,’ she adds, ‘more blak.’
They dok at the main porch, but Slater smells something wrong in the air. There’s the slightly margariney tang of the stuff they use to clean the walls, and the fug of recirculated air, and so much Slater knows well. But there’s an added animal scent, alien testosterone, that raises Slater’s metaphorical and wholly subconscious hakles. How little he likes having strangers in his fort!
He reports to General Niflheim. General Niflheim is excited at his news. They can start gearing up for war. General Niflheim hasn’t been this excited since he sat in the belly of a Quanjet bak in eighty-one, with a dozen nervous marines, gliding up through the atmosphere and preparing for their nation’s first ever official space war. That turned out to be the least bloody war in American history. But maybe this time it’ll be different. We can but hope.
Slater takes a meal. The Quant pilots are all standing together, laughing together, unwilling to share their bullish hilarity with the regular staff. They’re dressed in modish dark blue uniforms. Their heads are shaved bald, blue-smudgy pink skin or shining blak skin in a row like smooth pebbles.
‘They’re kings of the universe,’ says the man Slater is standing next to as he eats. ‘I do wonder wat we’re going to do with those jets, though. Nobody else has got them. It’d be like flying Z-33s against propeller-driven planes, you know? It’d be like a Elemag plane fighting a biplane, you know?’
‘They think,’ opines a second party, also floating nearby, ‘they’re training to fight aliens. You believe that?’
Slater stops looking at the Quanpilots. They are boring him now. His eye rests on the ridged wheat-coloured wall of the mess room. ‘But there aren’t any aliens,’ he says, half distracted.
‘Sure. But they think they’ll be fighting against them. They think that’s wat their training is all about. In case aliens suddenly appear in the solar system with, like, really zippy fighter starships or something.’
‘There are no aliens,’ Slater repeats, perfectly correctly.
The US has been to Mars by Quanjet: two separate expeditions, with suited explorers stumbling about in the autumn-coloured dusts. There was even talk, for a while, of a Mars base; but that seems to have come to nothing. The American attention is now on the Uplands, their solar gaze focused on the shiny-carapaced Upland houses, as if boys were focusing the midday beams through a lens onto silver-bodied ants and burning them up, for their sheer delight.
Busy busy busy. So much to do, too much to do, but he’ll do it. Slater is walking up and down the length of the Station, with many a snap and a twang, briefing people individually, compiling reports and requisitions, cheking out how close to combat readiness the Fort is, deciding how many extra rooms need to be flown up to accommodate how large a strike force. So much to do.
He stops at one of the Fort windows on his way somewhere else, and looking through he notices that the new Quanjet porch is empty. He loiters, peering through the small window. The porch is there, but every single one if the craft is away in outer space somewhere, flying somewhere, moving at greater speeds than any other craft is capable of, performing zags and zigs of unprecedented agility. He strains his nek, wondering if he can see their white forms whooshing across his field of view; but there’s nothing to see. And then the sun comes up, and in the half-second before the glass reacts to the sudden brightness Slater’s retinas are branded with persistent little blots of blindness. He swears.
He briefs and briefs. Sometimes he thinks that he must be briefing every single soldier of the assault force personally.
‘Supply lines,’ he says, to three weightless people and, via a vidlink, a dozen more on the ground. The ones on the ground have weight, which they have distributed into various chairs around a table. ‘We hold all the cards. We can supply our troops at will; but better than that, we can cut off the Uplanders’ lines of supply. They’re flying up all their supplies, everything, food and water, everything. A lot of them drape these lines into the upper atmosphere for air, but that’s vulnerable too. Cut them, stop the food, water getting through, it’ll be the most rapidly effective siege in the history of war.’
‘You’re sure, Lieutenant?’ asks a lugubrious-looking general on vidlink, the screen image, which Slater can only see at an angle, flattening his angular face into a series of pink polyhedra. ‘You are sure we can cut them off?’
‘Absolutely. That’ll be one of the easiest interventions of the war, General, believe me.’ (Be! Leave me!) ‘They can only fly up from a narrow band of latitudes, much of which is ocean, and almost all of their bases are northern hemisphere. In practice, the infrastructure for supplying the Uplands exists in a dozen places only, in northern EU, Canada, Iceland, Siberia. There are one or two sites in the southern hemisphere, but most of it is northern. We can isolate those.’
‘Treaty terms would make a military occupation of northern EU difficult . . .’
‘We wouldn’t need to occupy, simply to monitor, intercept planes when they got above a certain height.’
‘By intercept,’ says a female general, floating to Slater’s left, ‘you mean
... ?’
She doesn’t need to complete her question; and Slater doesn’t need to answer it. That’s obvious. Boom!
‘But this is only applying pressure. Cutting off their supplies, and a few high-profile military interventions in the Uplands themselves, and we predict the war will be over within one week. Certainly no more than two weeks. Worse comes to worst we can grab the ground bases and deal with the legal fallout later; but I do not believe it’s going to come to that.’
‘Good,’ says Slater. He likes the sound of this word, and says it again, resays it. ‘Good, good.’
Busy busy busy. With a snap and a twang Slater marches up and down the Station. He has a meeting with the senior propaganda officer Tchang. Tchang has bluebell-blue eyes in his sharply handsome Tibetan-US face, and these eyes see everything. Oh, you’d have to get up very early in the morning to get the better of Tchang. ‘You’ll excuse me if I seem ignorant, Lieutenant,’ he says, smiling, as they sip lukewarm coffee from two globes, floating together in the otherwise empty mess. ‘Only I need to know wat we’re dealing with, to start setting up the strategies for managing and spinning the war to downbelow media.’
‘Of course.’ The coffee tastes too bitter on Slater’s tongue; too strong perhaps. Dirty-tasting, too sharp and bitter. The coffee tastes funereal. But it at least contains caffeine, and the caffeine at least perks him.
‘We’re looking at a short war?’ Tchang wants to know. ‘You’ll pardon my ignorance, Lieutenant, but nobody’s told me otherwise; for all I know the war is scheduled to last years.’ He laughs at the absurdity of his own speculation, but it is shortlived laughter. Once it has served its indicative purpose the laughter stops.
‘Weeks at the outside,’ says Slater. ‘One week is our best guess.’
‘Good. With the new century coming up, it would be better for us if the war did not go over into the new year. We can spin it as a new start for the Uplands, the Twenty-Second will be a New Age for the Uplands. These symbolic markers play really well downbelow. So you can guarantee me that the war will not last into the next century?’
‘Guarantee.’
‘Excellent - only, if I set this up as a new century for the Uplands and the war is still being fought Jan 2100 then it’ll look bad,’
‘Guarantee,’ repeats Slater. He is so bored by this meeting. He hates this side of the war-making process. He’s the inheritor of Vikings and samurai and here he is jaw-jawing with law-lawyers. He takes another sip of the ashen-flavored coffee.
‘Now, Lieutenant,’ Tchang continues. ‘You’ll excuse me if I seem ignorant, only I must ask about the EU. My office thinks that the EU is the biggest problem we face, both legally and in PR terms. They won’t like it, you know. They won’t like us going to war with the Uplands.’
‘You didn’t get my briefing file?’ Slater asks, bored. ‘Intelligence is that Gradisil has been meeting secretly with the EU. Spin that, embarrass the EU, press them on that, and the war will take a bak-seat.’
Tchang smiles at him, a hard-cornered smile that says stik to your own job, Lieutenant. ‘Right,’ he says, as the smile falls away.
In the corridor behind him there’s a rapid drumroll of snap-twangs and Hagen touches his shoulder. ‘Slater,’ he says. ‘Lieutenant. A word?’
‘Hagen, I’m really busy,’ says Slater.
‘It’s mission-related,’ says Hagen, with an air of self-important, reptilian superbus.
‘I thought your big nineteen-oh-one spinning wheel was bumped bak in schedule.’
‘That’s two thousand and one,’ corrects Hagen, puffing his chest up, although of course Slater knows that, and Hagen knows he knows. ‘And I’ve got new orders. They want to bring it forward. They’re talking about garrisoning the Uplands after your war. Rumour is your war will be a seven-days war.’
‘Is that the rumour,’ says Slater, uninflected, uninterested.
‘So my wheel might be on in construction sooner than we’d thought.’
‘Post-hostilities,’ says Slater, walking on with a snap and a twang. ‘That’s not my department. I’m strictly conflict. You need to talk to post-conflict people.’
‘But there are things I need to talk to you about.’ Hagen hurries after him, with a snap and a twang.
‘I’m late for a meeting now, Hagen.’
‘Let’s eat lunch.’
‘My lunches are all booked up, Hagen,’ he says, thinking to himself: I so do not want to luncheon with this lizard. He quikens his (snap! twang!) pace.
He steps briskly to his meeting. This meeting is with three USUF lawyers. It is the first of wat will be a great many meetings with lawyers. Meeting with lawyers, swearing antebellum affidavits, establishing rules of engagement, filing anticipatory bloking suits, setting in place the whole elaborate superstructure of legal war-making. There are, for legal purposes, eight different varieties of war that can be declared, and they need to establish which is the most legally advantageous declaration to them in this instance. They need to map out the legal parameters, plot the best path through the legal landscape.
‘Good morning Lieutenant,’ says the Captain-Legal, a small-featured, snow-coloured, lilac-eyed young man, good-looking in a childish sort of way, neat and handsome features but very young. Slater thinks he looks very young to have achieved the rank of Captain, even in a corps like Legal, but he smiles, and returns the Captain’s insinuating handshake. ‘Shall we get started? We’re going to be seeing an awful lot of one another over the coming month or so.’
‘I guess we will,’ says Slater.
six.
Paul
Our first child, a son, was born in Helsinki in ’91. We called him Hope, and his full name was Hope Gyeroffy Baldwin-Caunes. This is a spectacularly uneuphonious hyphenated surname, I know very well; but we agreed upon it, nevertheless. In practice he was called Hope Baldwin (for instance, when he was registered at his first school in ’95), and so my own name was extinguished in him. He later decided aet 21, or 22, I forget, to take on his great-grandfather’s surname and became Hope Gyeroffy. Old Man Gyeroffy, long since dead, had been killed by the Americans. He was a folk hero of sorts to some amongst the Uplands, and by the twenty-one-teens he had acquired talismanic properties.
The last few months of the pregnancy I began to consider the possibility of happiness again. For the first time in our marriage Gradi was tied by her sheer sloshy weight to one place, and I had uninterrupted time with her. I woke up with her in the morning, I went to sleep in her bed at night. I became habituated to the intoxicating smell of her skin. There were consolations to being a cuckold, a tendency for the deceiving wife to pay various little attentions to the husband.
I bought a house in central Helsinki, in the Rödbergen district: a pleasant, four-storey manor built several centuries before out of some purplish Scandinavian stone: a granite, perhaps, which darkened to crow-blak in the dusk, and warmed and sparkled to violet in the early morning. The windows had been replaced with weave-glass and the internal technics were run by an AI, of course, but otherwise it was an actual old-fashioned house. At the bak and at the front, symmetrically aligned, were two square lawns, perfect as pressed green sheets, each surrounded by a pathway of pink sand. To sit in the garden, in the weakly bright Finnish sunshine, whilst Gradi sat beside me, earnestly absorbed in a screen on her lap, was exactly like happiness.
But Gradi was not happy, because she wanted to be Upland very intensely. She kept complaining that there was so much to do, and she didn’t mean to do downbelow. Soon she was too large to move with any comfort; her stomach as curved as the world itself, her belly-button a tiny fleshy beak. She hated her very corporeality. She fidgeted herself out of bed, propping herself round the bedroom by hanging on to the furniture under the unforgiving gravity. ‘I wish I were up,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be weighed down with . . .’
‘I wish you could just forget about the Uplands for a little while!’ I complained.
But the Uplands were the l
ines of force around which our lives were oriented, for good or ill. I had my part to play as well. I was expected to accompany Gradi from time to time, to attend the more important Upland group meetings. I was part of her inner Council and sat through many tedious discussions of strategy. Now that Gradi was confined to Earth, prior to her confinement, I myself flew up in her place,