Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Then she gathered her hair together, tied a knot in it, and fastened her scarf about her beautiful head.

  We swung round the horizon again and the sun buffed mother-of-pearl scintillations upon the scratched plastic of the pilot’s window.

  We swung round the horizon again and it was dark.

  We swung round the horizon again.

  We visited rich person after rich person. ‘Money is the key,’ she told them each, in turn.

  ‘You can’t have my money,’ they all replied, laughing. Of course they said many different things, but this is wat, in essence, each of them said. And Gradi handled their suspicion in many different ways, but in essence she said this:

  ‘I don’t want your money. The Uplands is not a taxing nation: this is a new kind of country we’re building here. The Americans tax, we don’t. The EU tax, we don’t. Your money is yours.’ That’s the kind of statement that you can’t say too many times to a wealthy individual. ‘But,’ she continued, smoothly, ‘I want to make sure that when the Americans declare the war that they are shortly to declare - next year, or the year after — I want to make sure that they cannot seize your funds, or freeze your bank accounts. We are trying to set up a new bank with Vijay Singh. In part it will be based in Bangladesh, and in part it will be based in excusive datafiles kept in multiple locations up here.’

  A bank in the Uplands? Our own financial system? Some sooner, some later, but all eventually saw the danger:

  ‘If the Americans declare war, they will seize this bank, and our money will become theirs. My fortune will then depend upon the vagaries of legal challenges to this seizure . . . and wat if that game of legal roulette does not end in my favour?’

  And Gradi reassured them all the same way. ‘If your bank data is kept in files in American banks downbelow then they will be seized. If your bank data is kept in EU banks downbelow then they will be frozen. This is certain. I’m not talking about building a bank in the Uplands with Doric columns in space and a neon sign saying Bank. We shall encrypt the data in two dozen linked machines in two dozen houses. The Americans may seize one or two, but not all. We will choose the most trusted Uplander of all to supervise this arrangement. Your money will be safer as Upland money than if you leave it in the EU.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ they would say, only partially convinced.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Keep your money in downbelow banks if you want. That doesn’t make you any less the patriotic Uplander. But do you know who I am putting charge of the first Bank of the Uplands? Bill Bran. He’s putting his own fortune in the bank, and he’ll be Official Treasurer. You trust him, don’t you?’

  Of course they trusted him. Bran was one of their own, one of the wealthiest Uplanders. He had made his fortune in investment. He had practically invented Investment Variables, and had helped create the Beliefs Market, upon which cultural capital was traded on various religions, and later on pop music and screen stars. Then he had followed the familiar Upland path: cashed in a large fortune, built a house in the Uplands, and transferred the emphasis of his day-to-day away from the Earth. He quikly became a famous member of the Upland community; tireless visitor to others’ houses, and hospitable arranger of parties and get-togethers. He was committed to the new country yet distanced from Gradi. My belief was that he hoped, one day, to challenge her for the Presidency, when the nation was placed on a more established basis; and that, with this in mind, he was keeping a careful distance from Gradi, not alienated yet not a too-close ally either. Treasurer was the ideal job for him; power and prestige without being in Gradi’s poket.

  ‘He’ll be responsible,’ Gradi said, to each of the forty or fifty billionaires we visited during that time, ‘for keeping your money safe. It’ll all be Bran. There will be no fees, no interest charged, it will be purely a question of keeping your funds out of American hands.’

  She persuaded many.

  Georgina took many calls of support, promises of money, of personal assistance. She received many invitations for Gradi to come talk at the University of Cathedral-Major, address the finalists; to be interviewed by a dozen multimedia news outlets, to talk to the management and executives of Porplic.Inc about leadership qualities (fee negotiable); to receive the freedom for the city of Danzig; to meet all three Popes (Catholic, New Catholic and the anti-Pope Petrus II); to model for a mote-sculpture by the celebrated Garten-Hagen, commissioned by the National Gallery of Modern Sculptural Art at Barcelona, to be present at the (multimedia-televised, anticipated audiences in the billions) initial tasting of the latest vintage of Les Ruffes La Sauvageonne in Languedoc (a non-alc red available for those who chose not to imbibe intoxicants), to come visit here, to receive honorary doctorate there. In the EU she became a very famous figure indeed.

  ‘There’s money to be made in this sort of thing,’ she would declare, smakking her hands together and rubbing them so hard that the friction of skin against skin made a rusty squeaking noise. ‘But we need to be selective — or I’ll wear myself out running hither and thither downbelow.’

  ‘You’re certainly flavour of the month in the EU,’ I observed, intending the comment to be witty and la-mode, but instead sounding even to my ears only bitter and envious and petty.

  ‘Flavour of the year,’ put in Mat, in an over-enthusiastic voice, to override the negative energy with which I might otherwise be contaminating the proceedings.

  ‘Flavour of the century,’ added Liu.

  ‘Which century?’ asked Gradi, laughing. ‘The next one I hope? The next one?’

  And there, unexpectedly, was my face, reflected in the polished metal of a wall-strut, sandy hair floating as if charged with static, and the eyes collapsing in on the face in anger and sadness, the mouth mapping the hopeless ballistic trajectory that drags rokets bak down to the ground. I could hate that beautiful face, I thought. I am not worthy of her love. I am not worthy to be with her. She is so high above me.

  A flare of light through the window of the descending plane. Gusty lights of purplish silver, a fatter, less fiery form of sparking caused by Elemag field meshing with the outer branches of the world-tree to slow us down.

  And down we go.

  And that rollercoaster feeling of tugging sikness in my stomach makes me close my eyes in misery. I will myself not to be sik. There’s a worse thing than this lurching-sinking trajectory-induced nausea, I realise. The worse thing is the realisation, in my very marrow, that this sensation of sikness in my gut is no new thing to me. The most remarkable thing about this nausea is its familiarity. This is how I feel all the time. Something has gone very wrong somewhere.

  The skin on the bak of my hands was dry, eczematic. I had little shallow scabs on my elbows. There was soriasis on my scalp. I required pharmakos to sleep, and although it was the best drug available and had no side effects I knew I depended upon it, and made a little fetish out of its sliver-shaped dispenser. I carried this container everywhere, and fiddled with it, and played with it.

  There was one form of downbelow invitation which Gradi always accepted. She never turned down an approach from properly-constituted downbelow diplomatic authorities. She was a politician before she was anything else.

  Three years before the war, Gradi met secretly with the Finn-EU local ambassador, and with the Cypriot-EU ambassador. Two years before the war Gradi met secretly with the Finn-EU local ambassador, the Cypriot-EU ambassador, the Polish-EU ambassador, the Italia-EU ambassador, the Czech-EU ambassador and the UK-EU ambassador. The year before the war she met with local representatives from most EU nations, in secret little confabs, meeting in wood-lined Suomi rooms, three times on board jets flying up or flying down or even - amazing! - flying along.

  She never met with any of the Federal officials, the actual power-players. Nevertheless she received official instructions from the US embassy to the EU to desist. In return she filed suit against the US, arguing that there was no peacetime international legal ruling that should prevent her from meeting with local
EU officials. She was careful never to approach, or to be caught being approached by, the EU Presidentiat. And the case sank into its years-long process.

  There was another kind of invitation that Gradi never (or very rarely) turned down: invitations from fellow Uplanders. And they came in all manner of variety; invitations to dinner from wealthy men and women; ‘come talk to our commune - we’re dedicated Uplanders, and many of us have foresworn the ground altogether’; invitation to come try our peaches (‘Upland-grown, in a perspex diving-bell-shaped conservatory appended to our house!’); invitation to come play 3-D Twister (the only game for zero g!); invitation to address our political meeting, the Upland Nationalist Party (the UNP was one of several dozen similar political groupings. I once asked Gradi why she didn’t form her own political party. Her reply was: ‘Isn’t it obvious?’).

  Gradi on War

  A meeting in a long narrow room, hurtling through the hurtling Uplands. A bakers-dozen of people, including Bran, the individual recently appointed Official Banker-Treasurer of the Uplands Bank. Since his appointment, and the establishment of an independent bank, Bran had begun a strategy of distancing himself from Gradi, establishing himself as the, you might say, natural opposition, playing the long game, manoeuvring himself to succeed her, to become President in his turn. In large part this consisted of him opposing Gradi’s position on the impending war. I forget how this particular meeting, filmed of course, came about - but watever the putative reason for calling it, Bran turned it into a platform to attak Gradi.

  ‘You’re steering us towards war,’ Bran was saying, visibly angry. He was a relatively old man, with the slightly mummified look that pharmakos can give older skin: two umlaut eyes over a fat nose and a broad, slightly drooping mouth; a furze of close-trimmed hair over his head and down his sideburns like black turf. His was a muscular, compact frame, which alternated periods of preternatural calm with interludes of rapid, strenuous agitation. ‘Ms Gradisil,’ he said, deferring sarcastically to her, ‘President Gradisil’ (a self-deprecating expression on Gradi’s face as he addressed her with this last title, a sweep of the right hand to brush this vainglorious title away, but Bran continued) ‘Madame President, the one thing I don’t understand is - you can’t expect to win a war. We simply couldn’t beat the Americans in a fight. We don’t even have an army. So why? Why would you goad the shark? Why would you push the US into declaring war, into moving the conflict into an arena where they are clearly superior?’

  ‘They are clearly superior,’ aknowledged Gradi.

  There was a crowd of about three dozen present, watching Gradi and Bran talk. Gradi had requested that no recordings be made, so we dozen were the only witnesses as the newly appointed Upland Banker and the unofficial Upland President debated the folly, or otherwise, of leading the Uplands into war.

  ‘Wat do you think you are doing?’ asked Bran, looking at the crowd. ‘I don’t think you know wat you are doing. It’s a game of chiken, is it? It’s all a giant bluff, a hope that the US will bak down at the last minute, is it?’ Bran was shaking his head sending countershakes through his body as he dangled in zero g. ‘Because I’ll tell you wat — ’

  ‘Wat?’

  ‘I’ll tell you wat. They won’t bak down. They’re itching for war. They’re uncomfortable in this debatable political land they’re in at the moment, all lawyers and court challenges and countersuits, all public opinion and media coverage, and the incremental movement of sympathy away from them and towards us. They hate that. Once they get a war started, once they get a legitimate, legally sanctioned war started, then they’ll be much happier.’

  ‘I believe they will,’ said Gradi, blandly.

  ‘I don’t think you understand wat I’m saying,’ said Bran, becoming more angry, his face-colour shifting chameleon-like to match the dark pink-painted wall behind him. ‘At the moment we can keep them tangled up in innumerable lawsuits, and they’re tied down, they’re Gulliver and we’re Liliput and we have the innumerable little strands and cords of law. But when the war starts, when the war that you’re doing everything in your power to hurry along starts, all that changes. Gulliver snaps all his fuking little threads, you see?’

  And suddenly Gradi came alive, her furious energy focused as delight, her eyes shining. Her nova charisma filled that space. ‘That’s it! That’s exactly it! Once the war starts the legal status changes . . .’

  Bran barked, ‘And you want to bring that on? Is it a death-wish?’

  ‘You need,’ she said (and she was no longer really addressing Bran, though she was looking at him; she was addressing us, her followers, her disciples), ‘you need to understand wat war is in the twenty-first century, in the soon-to-be twenty-second-century. You absolutely need to understand. War is not wat it once was, the arena for masculine bravery and heroism, killing the enemy. Wat is war nowadays?’

  This was obviously one of her rhetorical questions, and nobody answered.

  ‘War nowadays is a mode of changing the legal protocols. And that’s all it is. For complicated historical reasons we have evolved two separate, if intertwined, legal systems: one for peacetime and one for wartime. The premise behind this, once upon a time, was that peacetime law was the norm, and that on the infrequent and extraordinary occasion when war happened a different set of laws was introduced. This is still the unspoken premise behind the legal superstructure of contemporary life. Of course, it is a lie. Human history has never been long stretches of peace interrupted by the occasional short war. The opposite would be a more accurate description. In practice, law for the pax and law for the bellum have always existed side by side. And so they do now. Historians insist that the court martial, and the whole of the lex bellorum, began life as a means of enforcing discipline within the ranks. So it did. But war is never just limited to soldier killing soldier; it always begins to involve soldier killing civilian, soldier capturing and torturing civilian, soldier stealing civilian’s house, money, belongings, and so on. So the lex bellorum became more and more complex, made a series of connections with lex pacificium, roots and fibres from each discourse nosing their way under the soil and inter-tangling with the other. And now law is the dominant force in modern international relations. Not justice, of course not, but law, but the structures, the documentation generated by lawyers, the competing claims for relative jurisprudence of the many many courts.’

  Everybody was silent. We were like attentive schoolkids, every single one, even Bran. Imagine listening to so tedious a lecture! Her words were holy to us.

  ‘That’s wat war means nowadays. It means a shift to a different code of law. And that’s all it means.’

  ‘Rhetoric,’ objected Bran, weakly. ‘Wat I mean is - that’s one way of putting it - but, actually, there are such things as actual armies. The US trains actual troops, with actual guns. People get actually killed.’

  ‘Killing somebody is a felony,’ said Gradi starkly, ‘unless it is justifiable homicide. War invokes a different legal discourse for defining the justifiable.’ Without waiting for Bran to reply, she went on, ‘War used to be England and France at the time of Napoleon, squaring off, each pretty much the military equal of the other, and hammering away until one side or another reached victory. Not any longer! The military outcome of any war is, nowadays, always certain before the war begins. Wat nation would be so foolish as to commit thousands of men and billions of euros to a war where the outcome was uncertain? Strategists and AIs and officers for the Legal Corps work it out down to the last hour of every day of planned action. The last war that did not go the way the planners planned it was the South East Asian War of the 1960s! Since then every war has gone the way of the strategists’ plans - there’s too much money at stake for it to be otherwise. Everybody knows as much! Bran is right. When the US declare war on the Uplands — ’ (I drew a breath in at that moment, because Gradi had never before aknowledged that this was a when rather than an if) ‘ — when they declare war, of course they will win. How could it be otherw
ise? They have thousands of highly trained troops, they have all the weaponry, all the spacecraft, all the experience. We don’t even have a militia. We have nothing but a hundred thousand mostly wealthy people, most of whom have no intention of dying for the Upland cause . . .’

  From the bak of the room, somebody shouted out: ‘I’d die for you, Gradi!’

  Suddenly the whole room was cheering, people clapping, a confusion of voices, ‘so would I!’ ‘I would too!’ ‘Gradi, Gradi, I believe in you!’

  It took long minutes for the mood to settle; it was cheering and babble and a slowly re-emerging quiet.

  ‘Gradi,’ said Bran, his voice calm and his face clear of anger, speaking slowly, ‘please take me at my word when I say I believe in wat you’re doing. I believe in the cause of the Uplands. I believe in your dream - the Uplands free. And if my dying would advance that cause, then I would be glad to die. But I don’t want to die a pointless death.’

  The whole room was deadly silent now. You could hear the creaking of the walls as the house moved again into the bright side, and the metal warmed, and the sun came in a solid blok of light through the single window at the bak, falling irregularly on the bodies of people hanging there.