Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  The pregnancy swelled to its bursting conclusion, and I was present in the Helsinki clinic as Hope emerged. Wat an extraordinary planet a baby’s head is, a whole moving world! I remember being moved to tears by the sight of the squeezed conical skull, the cross little face with its bulging eyes shut, and I remember being rather startled by how unfleshlike the umbilical cord looked, bright blue, ropey and plastic. I was rather unsettled by the smell of the experience too, unsavoury and bloody. But the joy of the father at birth is too conventional a topic; you’re not interested in that, even though it’s your birth I’m describing.

  Gradi was bak Upland less than a week after giving birth. I stayed with Hope and the nurse in our too-large house. It was all very strange to me. I would wake in the night when Hope cried his hoarse little cry, even though it was the nurse’s job to attend to him; and I would lie there listening to the sounds through the wall of him being soothed, or chatted to whilst his diaper was changed, or fed. He was not my child.

  But how beautiful he was! His face was so fat it looked inflated, and yet it could crumple in a moment as if the air were suked through, and the skin would fold complexly at eyes and mouth, and he would disclose the various vowels that communicated feed me! change me! hold me! do something to make me stop crying! - and that was the whole of his universe, all of the rainy-stony earth shrunken to that world. The pleasure of holding my son in my arms whilst he sukled strenuously on his bottle-teat, eyes scrunched, milk making traks down his chin, that pleasure was the most intense I have known. He was not my child. My DNA did not shimmer in its minuscule woven threads in his cells.

  O.

  His face with its button nose and its great round cheeks pressing together his fuchsia-shaped mouth, like an old drawing of the god of the blowing winds, was so beautiful. I was simply unprepared for the surge of love that would rise in my throat and scatter through my chest when I piked him up and hugged him. He wasn’t my child, I loved him.

  I am tall, pale-skinned, with sand-coloured hair that would be thinning were it not for the intervention of pharmakos. I have the look, I think, of the Saxon French: a large-featured, open face, a long yet still stoky body, slightly over-sized limbs. My eyes are a dilute grey-blue colour. Gradi, of course, was half-Japanese, half Cypriot, and so she was small and dark and compact, quite different to me physically. Then there was Mat: a naturally skinny, thin-baked man with close-cut dark hair and skin the colour of a clear-sky dusk, and dark eyes like dabs of wet paint. When Hope was first born he had the blue eyes of the generic baby, but in a few weeks his eye colour darkened. I could see Gradi in his compact fat-cheeked little face, but when I gazed in it, and even at that early stage, I could see Mat too. Once noticed it was unmissable. But I saw Gradi in you too, that was the important thing. My love for her lighted hungrily on you as well, as a glorious doubling of the object for my emotions.

  I would put him in the chest-saddle, so that his little goblin face buried itself in the soft wool of my sweater, and his arms and legs in their padded jaket would dangle. Then I would walk out with him along the Bulevarden and up the hill of the Unionsgaten to the Lutheran Cathedral, and round the building and bak down the hill home again. The small weight of him against my torso was only a token, of course, but nevertheless it was gravity’s greatest gift to me. It was early autumn, but already cold, and bright clouds clustered together in the sharply blue sky, piling igloos and snowdrifts in mid-air.

  Gradisil’s mother came to stay with us. She was a crazy, spiky old woman was Klara: only just fifty years of age, yet giving the impression of somebody much older. In part this was her sheer physical exentricity; the weird little fidgets and jerks she wrung out of her body; her way of speaking, as if she could not gauge in her head the volume at which her utterance would emerge, or the proper balance of profanity and respect. It was also that she had that early-century disdain for the various pharmakos products available, so her skin was as wrinkled as might be expected of any natural-living fifty-year woman, rather than wrinkled after the taut, tugged manner of the actual fifty-year-old walking the street. She limped slightly; there was something wrong with one of her feet.

  I had met her several times, of course, since marrying her only daughter, but it was not until Hope was born that I properly got to know her. She arrived on the doorstep of the Helsinki house like a fairy godmother, wearing a blue puffy overcloak ripped to rags at the edges, whether by design or accident was not clear. Beneath the cloak was a thik-cloth dress, the cloth a centimetre or more thik, though buoyant. Beneath the dress she wore an all-body suit, from which her lengthy, bony wrists and her ankles like knots in silver rope were visible before they disappeared into fat gloves, and large oval shoes, respectively.

  ‘Hello Pa-owl ,’ she said, walking directly past me as I opened the door. Sometimes she called me Pa-owl, sometimes Poll, sometimes Pall, indifferently. ‘I have come to see my grandchild, and perhaps to bless him.’ She chortled at this, a weirdly birdsong-like series of chukles.

  She was a storyteller, was Klara. By this I mean both that she told good stories which amused children and adults, and also I mean that she lied. When she spoke she scattered words like a dog shaking itself dry, and the emission of words was far more important to her than the truth or otherwise of those words. Many people are like this.

  ‘It’s up the stairs, Klara,’ I called, ‘first on the left. And,’ (this spoken at greater volume as her slender form vanished up the stairway) ‘it’s lovely to see you again, mother-in-law.’

  I shut the door and made my way up. The nurse, a girl called Kirsi Heikura, was giving Hope his afternoon feed. His little arms and little legs worked up and down, their clokwork motions of ecstasy; his little eyes were tight shut; the white cylinder shrank in realtime, leaving behind a ghost-cylinder of transparency. ‘Hello,’ shrieked Klara at the nurse, startling her and making Hope open his eyes. ‘I’m the kiddy’s grandmother. Hello, little Hope. Hello! Hellow! Helloo!’

  ‘Klara,’ I said, catching her elbow. ‘Don’t frighten the child.’

  ‘Which one?’ she asked, nodding at Kirsi Heikura, who was no more than eighteen herself. Then Klara laughed again. Then, in the middle of the room, she did a weird twisty little dance, holding her feet on the floor but wringing angular shapes out of her body and lifting her skinny arms over her head. Her hair was a very dense mass of blak, fastened on the top of her head with a clasp, and this she now unfastened so that her hair fell, a mass of cords and threads like wet weeds.

  ‘He is a very beautiful child,’ she announced, not looking at Hope. ‘He is worthy of being my grandson and I bless him — his life will be full of marvellous things, he will achieve marvellous things, he will be marv — ,’ and she broke off to laugh at herself.

  ‘I hope,’ I said, politely, ‘that you can stay with us for a while?’

  ‘Is Gradisil here?’ This was spoken almost sharply.

  ‘No. She’s Up.’

  ‘I’m staying, Pa-owl, I’m staying at least to the new year, at least ’til the summer, and maybe more.’

  This was more hospitality than I had been hoping to extend, but I smiled and nodded.

  ‘He’s a beautiful child,’ she said to me again. ‘But he looks nothing at all like you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  I don’t believe that she was trying to hurt my feelings by saying this. Such considerations would, almost certainly, simply not have occurred to her.

  Klara never flew. She travelled everywhere by train, preferring ground-effect trains when possible, but happily taking the slow-crawl antique variety when not, sitting in the single passenger car with a few like-minded exentrics behind hundreds and hundreds of cars of bulk cargo. She had arrived at Helsinki after a series of train journeys across Siberia and northern Russia. She could easily have contacted us to let us know she was coming, but she chose not to.

  She never went Upland.

  In her youth she had spent a lot of time in the Uplands, and she was ha
ppy to tell richly embroidered and implausible stories about her adventures. But she had not travelled in an airplane or spaceplane since the war of eighty-one, and vowed melodramatically (she repeated this vow whenever the subject was raised, sometimes raising her arm over her head and booming the words forth) that she never would return. Of the precise reasons for this disaffection she was uncharacteristically reticent, but from time to time she would drop hints of some calamitous encounter with the forces of America. ‘I have always taught my daughter,’ she would say, ‘about the grievous harm America has done to our family.’

  ‘I see, Klara,’ I replied.

  She took possession of a room at the top of the house, and spent several days wandering around the city, before growing bored with it. ‘Everybody speaks English,’ she complained to me at dinner. ‘I’m trying to learn the language, hazarding some Finnish here and there, but everybody replies in English. I spent hours and hours on the train here listening to teach-by-induct Finnish language files. You — ’ here she directed a piercing shriek at Kirsi Heikura who was sitting on the other side of the table with her boyfriend (she was living in the house, of course, and often joined us for dinner, and sometimes her boyfriend joined us as well). ‘You,’ said Klara: ‘ettekö puhu englantia?’

  Kirsi looked startled. She glanced at her boyfriend, and replied ‘Of course I speak English.’

  ‘Everybody here speaks English,’ I said.

  ‘Music off!’ boomed Klara, speaking in the general direction of the ceiling, her face creased with annoyance. Some caressing music was playing in the bakground; something by Michelle Kokel, I think. ‘Music off!’

  ‘Klara,’ I said, ‘you have to clap.’ I clapped once, sharply, and the music stopped; but she seemed to take my intervention as a personal affront. The rest of the dinner took place in silence.

  I would not have been surprised had Klara, the following day, announced that she was leaving; that this was no place for her — perhaps even simply vanished. But on the contrary, the following day she was hyperactive with joy, singing little snatches of song to herself, fussing about the baby, piking him up and cuddling him, laughing, handing him bak to the nurse, only to swoop him out of her arms again. She stayed, as she promised, the whole winter. The snow fell very powdery for several weeks, accumulating in the garden like volcanic talc. The city was duvet-covered in snow.

  Snow falling through the dirt of the city air gathered in drifts that looked like heaps of cold ashes.

  Gradi returns

  She called me to say that she was coming home for a week. ‘Do you hear that?’ I cooed to Hope. ‘Mamma is coming home. You’re going to see Mamma.’

  And then, late one afternoon, as the sky was blushing in the west and darkening above us, I was playing with Hope in the front room. She let herself through the front door, walked in upon us, kissed me on the cheek, piked up Hope and set him on her lap. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m bak.’

  My heart was instantly alive with my love for her. Light fell through me, and I felt holy to my bones with my love for her. I almost cried; tears were pressing in the tiny channels at the corner of my eyes and building. ‘Gradi,’ I said. ‘It’s so good to see you!’

  ‘It was a tough week,’ she said, exhausted-sounding.

  Then Mat came through the door after her, and the force of my love for my wife burst into electric disgust, and I closed my eyes. I had not seen Mat since the birth of Hope, and I had not thought about him more than I could help, but here he was, grinning his stupid grin, and even though he had just spent many weeks with my wife, closely confined with her, enjoying her all this time, yet still now I was not rid of him, not purged of the thought of the two of them together.

  ‘Gradi,’ I said, turning to her, ‘your mother’s here.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘She’s out now. But she’s here, staying with us. She came visiting whilst you were out.’

  ‘Klara,’ she said, enunciating the two syllables very clearly to the baby in her lap. ‘Kla. Ra. Klaara. Klaaara.’

  ‘I’ll bring in the bags,’ said Mat, disappearing round the door.

  Politics

  Politics went on. There were many more meetings than in the earlier days, because the demand by Uplanders was more acute. Word would go round, or be announced on newsnets or some other form of information dissemination. From giving speeches to half-empty houses, Gradi was soon filling Upland venues completely, and we had to turn people away.

  We met a man called Alexis Wadenström, who styled himself the Upland’s first farmer. He was, of course, a very wealthy individual; absolutely a dilettante gardener rather than a farmer. But Gradi was very aware of the PR possibilities he represented. The first step towards practical independence for the Uplands; no longer dependent on flying up fresh and dry supplies from downbelow. A meeting was set up by the Upland Council who liaised between Gradi’s team and Wadenström himself. We flew round and closed in on his dumbbell-shaped house.

  ‘I’m very excited to meet you,’ said Gradi, floating through the porch-door with her smile completely convincing, even though it was manufactured purely for that occasion. Nobody but I could tell her simulated smiles from her real smiles. No. No. I’m not sure even I could tell them apart. Wadenström was a classic example of a fat man kept thin by pharmakos drugs; his body was too long, somehow, his limbs connected to the torso with not-quite-right fluency, his face had an elfin, almost monkey keenness to it. But he was very excited to meet the great Gradisil in person. ‘The honour’s mine,’ he said. ‘I’m a big fan. I’m very excited by wat you’re doing for our people.’

  ‘You are the future of the Uplands, Mr Wadenström,’ said Gradi, shaking his hand so hard he started to rotate in air.

  ‘It’s just a hobby,’ Wadenström insisted. ‘I made my money in the law, made more than enough. It was a childhood dream to be an astronaut. I always told my wife I wanted to take up farming . . . but she didn’t realise wat I meant by that!’ Richly amused by his own sentence he repeated it: ‘She didn’t realise wat I meant by that!’

  Gradi was expert at precisely judging the appropriate level of delighted laughter.

  He took us around his house: two central rooms in which he slept and ate, and at each end a globe. Each was a metal gridball inset with two dozen fat plastic windows, and each was full of green.

  ‘They grow well,’ he says. ‘It’s not enough to live on, ’course. I ship most of my food, and all the water to grow these things,’ and he paddled his fingers in the foliage of his plants, ‘but it’s satisfying.’

  ‘If we can come up with our own supply of water,’ Gradisil said, with a serious expression on her dark little face, ‘then we can start on the long road to becoming independent of the Earth. If we could, for instance, snag a comet . . . ?’

  We dropped into a lower, faster orbit and swung up again to slow before a large seven-room house, with a centrifuge at one end: this was the House of the Tragic Poet. He was famous in certain groundling subcultures, a very flamboyant figure in a very messy three-room house.

  ‘I have come here to write,’ he told us, and through us the watching audience, for our meeting was being recorded on screen. ‘I have come here to escape from downbelow and write the poetry out of me, the way Thomas Mann’s invalids went to their high place to sweat out their fever. I wake, make myself coffee, pull the tab on a croissant to heat it, and sit at my window watching the world. In the old days I had much more peace. Poets must have peace. But now people are constantly pestering me. Is this a consequence of fame?’

  ‘Fame is the enemy of art,’ agreed Gradi, and the Tragic Poet smiled, pleased.

  His phone was chirruping. ‘There it goes! Go on, interrupt the inspiration, the working of the muse within me — ’

  He snapped the screen on. ‘Wat? Wat? Wat is it?’

  A dark, tentative face on the little screen. ‘Er, hello?’

  ‘Who is this?’ The Tragic Poet may have been acting up because he was on s
creen; or he may have been like this all the time, observed or unobserved.

  ‘Hi, my name is Antonio. I’m a neighbour.’

  ‘Wat do you mean? Wat do you mean by that?’

  ‘Hey, I’m a fellow Uplander, you know? C’mon man, we’re all in this together.’ He was peering out of the screen, trying to see past the face of his interlocutor to see who the people were in the bakground of this house.

  ‘All in this together? In wat?’

  ‘Look I’m outside your house now, in my plane, yeah?’

  ‘Go away, I’m working! Wat do you want? I don’t know you!’

  ‘I’m just being neighbourly, man. I’m paying a social call. Also, I was wondering if I could borrow a chunk of water, y’know?’