by Adam Roberts
‘You want water? Go away. You want to buy water? Chek the web for transp locations of water sellers. I’m not a water merchant. I’m a poet.’
‘Thing is,’ said Antonio, scratching his beard-bristled chin (the phone screen made him look dark and untrustworthy) ‘I’m sure you can understand, I’m in financial difficulties, y’know?’
‘Poor? If you’re poor then wat are you doing up here?’ This, he clearly thought, was clever of him. He turned to smirk at his audience. His expression said, very clearly: Upland is the rich republic; everybody knows that. Poor people have no place up here!
‘It’s a temporary financial embarrassment, I got things lining up, next month there’s the prospect of solvency, you know how it is, next month.’
‘I don’t understand how you could afford a house up here in the first place if you’re poor,’ the Tragic Poet said, pressing his perceived advantage.
‘My house was kind of an inheritance, y’know? My plane too. But I’m short of water and I thought I’d ask a neighbour to, y’know, lend me some — ’
‘Lend it?’ He laughed at this, high-pitched pipping laughter. ‘I’m not sure I’ll want it bak after you’ve finished with it! Wat would you do, borrow my water and bring bak urine?’
The face in the phone screen folded into a pained expression. ‘C’mon man, don’t be like that, I havn’t had a drink in a day. I’m real thirsty. Can I just . . .’
‘No!’ he said firmly. ‘Fuk off, leave me alone. Go downbelow if you want water - it falls out of the sky down there. Leave me alone!’
‘C’mon man,’ pleaded this stranger, this Antonio. ‘It’s not like there’s a communal Upland drinking fountain or anything. I’m desperate, man. I can’t go downbelow, not right now, I got personal reasons for avoiding — ’
‘Communal drinking fountain!’ he shrieked, laughing. ‘Fuk off. Leave me alone.’
After he had dispatched his mendicant caller, the Tragic Poet turned to us, but actually looking a little past us at the screen, and said ‘I shall recite a poem.’ He was holding a strap with his left hand to steady himself, and was holding the flimsy of one of his poems with his right, and he recited in a boomy high-pitched voice.
Sea-bred cattle slaughtered
Their deaths magnified
Their bodies as helpless
Until the blades
In the mudsink at the centre
O baboon-populated cities
into metastasising suburbs
their bodies pharmakon magnified
without magnificence
floating, as the most expensive houses
a slurry of lights,
O! disembowelling themselves
each scab of light a
It’s awful, it’s very awful. But Gradi had created on her face the expression of somebody rapt, captured by the beauty of the verse. That was the true work of art in the room; Gradi’s control over her expression.
As we left the Tragic Poet nodded ponderously, dolefully, and took Gradi’s hand and then my hand in his limp right manus. ‘It has been an honour to this house,’ he declaimed, ‘to have the President of the Uplands visit.’
‘The honour is ours,’ said Gradi, seriously. She never used the expression President of the Uplands in reference to herself, but others were starting to use it.
The Tragic Poet held up his right hand, its creased palm and twig-like fingers almost as long as his horse-long face. ‘As I said in my first epic, Felicity of Paking Face-folds and Wire-thin’ he announced: ‘Realising that nothing changes changes everything.’
‘Beautifully put,’ said Gradi with a straight face.
seven.
Slater
Slater
Busy busy busy. So much to do, marching from meeting to meeting with a snap and a twang. And here, at last, is a friendly face. ‘Colonel Philpot, sir!’
‘’d-up Slayer,’ booms Philpot.
‘Howdy doody.’
‘Now here’s wat I hate,’ says Philpot, grasping his friend’s shoulder: “‘howdy-doody”.’ He wrinkles his face and falsettoes his voice in approximate impersonation of Slater, and Slater laughs loud.
‘Man, it’s good to see you,’ he cries. ‘You on a war footing?’
Oh, they are grinning, the pair of them.
‘We are all on a war footing,’ says Philpot. ‘It’s all about to pitch off.’
‘Amen.’
‘It’s all about to kik off.’
‘Amen to that.’
‘I was downbelow to sign, to sign this legal documentation shit,’ says Philpot. ‘I wished I lived centuries ago, in one of the golden ages of warfare, before all this legal shit heaved in to make our lives complex.’
‘I’ve been doing the same, signing the anti-torture and the hazing contracts. It’s just all the hoops we got to jump through.’
‘Let’s get the lawyers over and done with and get the war going,’ exhorts Philpot. ‘Let’s get this party started.’
Strat has been piecing together an intel map of the Uplands, but it’s slow and patchy work, and since transp signals cannot be trusted it is in large part guesswork. But mostly it’s gathering wat intelligence can be gathered.
Slater briefs Strat: seven young officers in preternaturally clean uniforms, all paying very, very close attention to all the words coming out of Slater’s broad-lipped, well-proportioned mouth. He thinks of his own lips in motion as he speaks: worms writhing, seaslugs in ecstasy, pygmy snakes arching their baks in a mating dance.
‘You’ve heard all this before,’ he says to them. ‘So I shan’t dilate.’ And he smiles at them. They smile bak. Their faces look a little bloated. There is a pharmakos to deal with that, but the military doesn’t approve of it, since it needs to be inserted every time the individual moves to zero g and altered every time they return to one g, to prevent blood pressure rebounding. The army prefer people to adjust to zero g blood redistribution naturally so they can perform their duties without that dependency, which means that people tend to be bloated in their first few days up.
‘Intelligence is the way wars are won, it’s as simple as that. There are a thousand examples for US wars fought in the last two centuries in which a thousand dollars of intel has been more effective at saving lives, or at killing the enemy, than billions of dollars of ordnance.’ All of them looking at him. ‘The main difficulty of the Uplands is the high average net-worth of the citizenry.’ Only in a military briefing would you find a word like citizenry. ‘Hard to bribe billionaires; they already have more than enough money. Other forms of pressure need to be brought to bear. And given the organised nature of the resistance we are facing here — ’
He pauses to clear his throat, and in the instant before the noise gravels in his throat he catches the awestruk whisper from one or other of the officers, ‘Gradisil’, and it’s a recognition, almost a charm. King Arthur, Prester John, Johnny Appleseed. Fuk that. He barrels on: ‘Nevertheless, we don’t anticipate lak of intelligence being too big a problem for our purposes. In fact - I’ll tell you this - in fact, one of the problems we are facing is making sure we don’t win the war too quikly!’ He beams at them here, which is to say it’s OK to laugh at this juncture, and they oblige him with a row of wide mouths and trikly laughter.
‘As you all know, we need a short war, with minimum casualties - casualties on their side, I mean: we’re not anticipating any casualties on ours — minimum enemy casualties is wat PR are asking us for. But we also need the war to be more than forty-eight hours so that it falls into the right legal category. Once war is declared we will be acting quikly to take advantage of the lex bellorum window of opportunity; and ideally we’ll need at least seventy-two hours to accomplish all that, though forty-eight is doable. After that we need a transition to the right legal category of peace deal, the right sort of surrender. So when I give you your various intel targets, this is wat I’m looking for: not so much the conventional military objectives, but things like high-profile hous
es, certainly the banking net they’ve established.’
He has lunch with Philp, hanging by the window in Fort Glenn’s mess. The Ganges Delta is visible directly below them, those tasselled fringes of Indian and Bangladeshi coastline where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers mesh with the sea. It looks, in its intricate weave of channels of islands, like a sheet of china smashed with a hammer upon a blue ground.
‘Beautiful up here,’ he says.
‘Oh, nice view, Slayer,’ says Philp, not looking through the window. He laughs, as if he has said something funny.
eight.
Paul
The war began in 2099, but you know that, you know when the war started. Step bak in time a few years.
Here: our second child was born in the summer of ’93. It was in part for political reasons that Gradisil called him Sol, a name that meant not ‘sun’ (though many people have since assumed that was the referent) but was rather short for Solidarity.
By ’93 the mood of the Uplands had truly begun to coalesce. Disregard the thirty per cent of Uplanders who wanted nothing to do with anybody else, neither Gradi nor the USA nor EU, who wanted for myriad reasons only to be left alone - disregard them, and the remaining two thirds had discovered something extraordinary, an apprehension of what unity might feel like, a joy in being Uplanders. Solidarity was a reality. There was no way a single house could contain all the people who wanted to attend Gradi’s speeches now; so all the members of the audience filmed the speech and disseminated the files to other Uplanders. Everybody knew that war was coming; it was simply a question of when. Any one of that audience could have made money, or curried favour, by passing those files on to the Americans. But of two dozen speeches so recorded and passed around the Uplands, as Uplander visited or traded with Uplander, as people bumped into people, or gathered for other purposes — of two dozen speeches the Americans got hold of only two.
I loved my new son, Sol, but his face was dark and strange to me, his eyes slim, his cheeks big. People said he looks like his mother, but they meant he looks Far Eastern, and I knew that he looked like Liu. A year before, Gradi had seemed to grow tired of spending so much time with Mat, and although he had grown clingy and erratic she had squeezed her time away from him, and in his place had begun arranging one-on-one time with Liu. He was a handsome young man, attentive, with a rather daring self-sufficiency which both Mat and (obviously) I laked, puppyish as we both were, wholly addicted to the little tablets of attention Gradi passed us. Over the course of a whole year Gradi would announce reasons to fly off with nobody but Liu in attendance: visiting Upland houses, addressing meetings. When she told me she was pregnant I, naturally, made the calculations in my head. During that month in which conception occurred she and I had experienced physical congress to emission of seminal material on two occasions. I debated with myself, anxiously, wat the odds were on my being the father. But then Sol was born, and the question was put beyond doubt. He looked like Gradi and he looked like Liu; he looked unlike me.
My life became unbearable, stuk in a narrow channel, scraping me along a rough-scratch groove. But, saying so, I recognise the overstatement straight away. My life was clearly bearable, because I bore it. And wat was my life? Months in the Helsinki house with my sons, and the staff; the shops, the sports-domes. Months in France-EU when the sun was hot down there, swimming, drinking, reading. From time to time Gradi would be with us; from time to time I would mount up the branches of the world-tree and join her in some hurtling house in the blak sky. But I was more alone than not alone. My life was bearable, barely, but very close to the territory of unbearable.
And wat was my life? Portions of humiliation and alienation in interference pattern with the joy. I was always afraid, I didn’t particularly know of wat. When I spent time with Gradi I could not bear to see her. When I was away from Gradi I missed her so powerfully that the clok of my brain stopped at its sheer brink, and I existed in a dead dimension of loss and lak and acute misery. It was impossible. It was impossible. Gradi was still affectionate. I would float through and there she would be, head leaning in with Liu, whispering words together as if they were discussing a war-strategy. But they were whispering something more intimate than that, I knew it, I knew it. They were about to fuk, or they had just finished fuking, or they were laughing together about the many things that only they shared, things - in - which - I - had - no — part. And Gradi would look up at me as I came through, and beam her perfect simulacrum of a smile at me, and would float over to me and kiss me on the cheek, or snake her arms around me. But I knew. The whole scene was lit by that pure sharp light of the Uplands, everything was illuminated and bright and clean.
I was trapped. There was nothing to be done, and everything to be endured. Twice-cukolded, which naturally meant cukolded an infinite number of times, which naturally meant tear-stained sessions entirely by myself, private, in which I imagined precisely what Gradi and Mat were doing together, precisely where he was inserting, precisely how she, on hands and elbows, put her head back and cried out, sessions of internal TV that were excruciating to me and yet which I revisited frequently, like a fool who cannot resist probing the agonising tooth when he should let it well alone. But then again, there were two beautiful cukoos to hug and nuzzle and change nappies and cry over.
‘We’re going on a PR blitz,’ Gradi told me one day. ‘Upland. We need to be working together in the Uplands for a few months — Kirsi can take care of the boys for that long. Hope’s starting school anyway. We need to do face-to-face with a dozen of the most important Uplanders. We need to do it now. Events are starting to come together.’
‘We?’ I would ask, and my voice sounded distant in my head, a scratchy piping sound buried beneath an avalanche of tearing, tumbling, rending inner sound, the noise of my blood as it slurried around my body amplified a million times.
‘You, me, Liu.’
‘Not Georgina?’
‘She needs to be fielding downbelow calls. I got her fielding calls all day, heading up eight or nine folk. There’s a lot of people down there, they’re excited, they want to pledge, to support, to enquire, you know.’
I waited a beat, and said: ‘Not Mat?’
‘He’s not here. Mat?’ (as if he were some figure from her distant past). ‘No, no. I have,’ (gesturing vaguely) ‘other plans for Mat.’
So the three of us went; it was just the three of us. We climbed into the little plane, and Gradi and Liu laughed and chattered with one another. He piloted and she sat up front, and I sat at the bak like the illustration for Brooding in a visual dictionary. They did not notice my mood. They were caught up in themselves, and the glorious and manifest destiny of their land, and meeting after meeting with important people, wealthy people, good meetings, ‘That was a good meeting’ Gradi would say. That brief golden era between Gradi forging the collective sense of nation out of her pure will, and the fast approaching moment when the American military would clout us and shut us down in a war it was quite impossible for us to win. But the candle that burns briefly burns more brightly, or so they say, or something like that, or something. Gradi knew that her slot was narrow, and so she worked with fanatic energy. Me? It swayed no yarrow stalks for me. But I was drawn along in the sinuous tourbillons of her wake, as her curious-shaped and -bladed mind cut through the element of my living.
We visited a faceless succession of wealthy Upland men and Upland women. It all happened a very long way away from the centre of my head, even though it happened within inches of my face. In the centre of my head was sunk a needle-thin but v-e-r-y deep gravity well that hooked round, like a fish-hook, and snagged the constant thought of my wife parting her legs and receiving into her body the flesh of some other man — worse, of this other man, this man who was saying: ‘Thanks, Mr Bran, that’s perfect, that’s wat we want.’
And Liu looking at Gradi with this completely transparent you-me-love look. And even the thought that he was only the latest of Gradi’s pretty men, that in tim
e he’d be discarded and a new beau acquired, couldn’t leaven my despair and hurt. And Gradi would swoop a little at the broad, red, sweating face of this Mr Bran, and pek at his right cheek, snatching a tiny kiss from his fat cheek, and pek at his left cheek, snatching an equally tiny kiss from that one. ‘Thanks,’ she would say, breathy.
We were bak in the plane.
We swung round the horizon. Gradi undid her scarf and fluffed her lustrous blak hair out with her hands. She was complaining of an itch in her scalp, so she buried her hands in her hair and rummaged, rummaged. Liu said something and her face bloomed into a full smile, the real variety, not the simulacrum that she used on political supporters or donors or me. She brought her hands out and clapped them together, that’s how delighted she was with Liu’s witticism. Watever it was Liu said, I don’t remember, except that it delighted her. She duked her head a little and looked round at Liu in the pilot’s seat. Since we were in zero g her hair did not move as her head duked down, so that it appeared to rear up around her face like a snood.