by Adam Roberts
‘Nobody,’ said Gradi, in a low, intense voice, ‘wants to die a pointless death. And I promise you all this - nobody will die a pointless death by following me. But we must all die, sooner or later. And a death in a downbelow hospice bed with drugs soaking through your scalp to blot out your consciousness, that is a pointless death. And a death in the struggle for a truly free Uplands - that is a death worth something.’
Here the cheering broke out again. Bran seemed to lose it, his face blushing with wrath, and his limbs becoming marionettish with frustrated twitching. ‘You’re not making any sense, Gradi,’ he blurted out. ‘You’re not making any sense! That’s all very well - but if you provoke the US into war, you’ve admitted yourself that they will win. How does that help the cause of Upland freedom? That only takes away the little breathing space we have now! That will only lead to a full-scale military occupation, and proscription, and the seizure of our funds, not to mention Uplanders being killed, actual deaths - how does that help us?’
I heard all that because I was close to the old banker. But the noise in the rest of the room was raucous, and nobody was paying much attention. It was too much for Bran.
‘Silence!’ he bellowed. ‘Will everybody shut up? Will Gradi answer my question?’
The hubbub died. ‘Of course I’ll answer your question, Bran,’ said Gradi, in a tone of voice perfectly modified to express polite bafflement at his rudeness. He saw his chance, in front of this small audience and the much larger audience watching on screens. ‘Why are you so dead set on leading the Uplands into a war we cannot win?’
‘Why?’ replied Gradi. ‘Because I’m not interested in the war, I’m interested in after the war, it’s after that counts; after the war when we can win independence for the Uplands. I’m interested in freedom. Freedom! Svoboda! Liberté! Eleutheria!’ The cheering started up again. It was remarkable, and irresistible, to watch. Spittle and sweat beaded and floated through the air. A parallelogram of light moved, slowly but clearly, over the ceiling towards the bak, as if it too was moved by Gradi’s rhetoric.
Of course there were times when, like Bran the Banker, I doubted her. When I was not around her, it would occur to me, as it occurred to him, that she might be simply and purely insane. She was fearless, but the lunatic who stands in the path of a groundeffect train is fearless. She talked of the future, planned for Hope and Sol to go to school, to university, to live lives, and yet all the time I was thinking you want a war before the century’s end. This war would destroy the Uplands, kill many Uplanders, perhaps kill her; at the very least it would put her in an American prison for decades. Could she not see that? Was she wilfully blind? And the Uplands had no army, no training camps, no weapons beyond a few privately owned guns and explosives. The imbalance was obscene.
It was the energy with which she worked towards this end. She slept perhaps four hours a night (I needed twice as long). She was able to read 100KB documents in half an hour and then be able to argue expertly about the detail within them. She remembered thousands of people’s names, and token details about their lives (‘Tim! Alex, isn’t it? Your son? Is he still at school?’ ‘Boöpis! How’s your little Pharaoh?’ ‘Last time I saw you, Gennifer, you were starting an Illumination course, right? How’s that going?’ ‘Hao-Chu, still dead set against the pharmakos? My mother’s like that!’). She was able to go from dead tired, depressed, sunken, down-and-out, to perky and beaming in a fingerclik, and she could maintain that powerhouse charisma no matter wat was going on inside.
We no longer needed to go blind-canvassing, flying to random houses and introducing ourselves as we had done in the early days. She was well enough known now. But we still travelled through the Uplands a great deal, because she so rarely turned down an Uplander invitation.
She never took a vacation. I used to beg her: take a month off, come down to the France house, relax. She could not comprehend the concept ‘relax’, like an atheist contemplating God, or a blind man wondering about blue and red. She never took a month off. I went by myself, took Hope and Sol and four servants and spent the month stewing and miserable in the Provencal sun. Meanwhile she buzzed about her nation, far over my head, accompanied by Mat or Liu or Georgina-the-Grin.
Sometimes I saw her on EU screen media.
‘Hi, I’m Gradisil!’
‘Of course I know who you are. I’m honoured and proud to meet you ma’am. My name is Kentuky, like the state, though I weigh less.’ (Gradi made her laughter sound real, polite but not forced or artificial. I don’t know how she did that). ‘I’m honoured and proud to meet you, ma’am. I was born an American, but I consider myself an Uplander now. Seems to me the US are the redcoats here, and that we’re overdue a seventeen-seventy-six. That’s how it seems to me. Anything I can do — anything at all I can do — ’
‘Thank you, Kentuky,’ shaking his hand in front of the cameras and looking serious and sincere. ‘Every Uplander can do something. In this country, in this new kind of country, individuals matter. That’s the nature of true freedom - everybody means something important, everybody has a part to play, one man or one woman makes the difference.’
I saw that on one of the EU news stations. Gradi was a popular heroine in the EU. Downbelow I could stroll through the town market with Sol in a chair and Hope running to and fro round my legs, and there would be all manner of Upland merchandise: cheap vids and books of her life story (I sometimes had a bit part in those, but more often I was simply omitted); flags, maps, clothes, cut-downs, meadhres, all with her face, or some other Upland logo on them. The sunlight was as palpable as if we were submerged in hot, bright water. The shadows were sharp-edged, purple and blue and blak. Touristas and residents strolled, or lolled in the heat. The mairie, built of vanilla-coloured stone, projected onto its exterior wall images of the mayor herself meeting her constituency, shaking hands, smiling. The energy of it seemed dissonant with the heat and sluggishness.
‘Can I have a ice cream?’ asked Hope, tugging my trouser leg. ‘Pwee-zhe icecream? Icecream? Pwee-zhe un-e ice cream?’
‘OK, my love,’ I said, my heart dense in my chest as tungsten. It was not drawing in and discharging its blood as smoothly as it ought. Just looking at my son made my eyeballs prikle. We left the market and made our way through the summer streets. The maid was pushing Sol, who had now fallen asleep in his chair, along the lime-shadowed pavements, down the tall, shadowed alleys. We settled at a café, and the maid got Sol’s bottle ready, and I tried to keep Hope sat in the aluminium-tube seat as he bounced excitedly going can-I can-I in French, and then shouting choko! choko! as if we were bak in Helsinki. And I thought to myself, shouldn’t I be here with my wife, rather than with this sullen maid? Shouldn’t wife and husband be sharing this time with our children? But they were her children, and they were not my children at all. That thought always struk home like a scalpel poked into my chest; an actual, palpable, feel-it-on-the-nerve-endings pain. Despair clanged brassily upon the shell of my being. I was dissociated from human community and family. I was a simulacrum-father. The waiter took our order, and I sat bak in my chair and stared straight up, at the sky, which is where she was. The sun put heat and light down through the high summer haze as if it were the biggest zero-g candle flame in creation. There was a thin smoky quality visible in the high air, the sky blue like tobacco fug, nothing like the sapphire or blue water the poets talk of. Passers-by moved listlessly along the pavements. Hope had already smeared dark brown all about his lips, over his chin, on his nose. The tik and scrape of his spoon on his bowl. I was drinking Opium-and-Vitriol, and it added to the heat and the stupor of my soul; it dulled me, made me sleepy, but it did not take away the sharpness of my misery.
Sol woke, in his chair, suddenly, and glared straight at me with the innocent fury of the just-woken infant. My love for him made a knot in my throat, made me cough. Fumes of Opium-and-Vitriol and the hot summer air caught in my gullet. Unless you have experienced it I do not believe I can convey to you the anguish a
father feels when his child opens its eyes and another man peers out innocently through them. But I don’t want to dwell on - I don’t want —
On this question of the war she was consistent, and perfectly truthful. The one occasion when we met, officially (I mean in a diplomatic capacity) with the Americans, they were baffled by her absolute readiness to concede that the Uplands could neither defeat the US militarily, nor resist the military might of the US. I think they were expecting defiance, a rebel yell, a speech for the benefit of the world media.
‘You cannot seriously expect, Ms Gradisil,’ said the leading American representative, ‘to take on the US in a military conflict and defeat them? You can’t be so deluded as to believe that?’
‘On the contrary,’ said Gradisil. ‘I completely accept wat you say. It would be foolish to deny the superior military might and expertise of the US.’
The American representative looked left at the various cameras, worn in the hats or on the lapels of various media reps present. ‘I have to say, Ms Gradisil,’ he said, ‘that’s a pretty crude play — you’re angling for sympathy from the world’s media - you’re trying pity-us, we’re the underdog.’
‘Mr Representative,’ Gradi said smoothly. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. For I’m only stating the facts. The US are a great military force. The Uplands lak even a civilian militia. In the event of war, there is no doubt in anybody’s mind who would be the victor. I wouldn’t expect any such war to last much more than a week - for how could it?’ She smiled at the media. ‘The US outgun us, outnumber us, have better strategists and AIs, have a clear achievable goal, control all supply lines for their own and our supplies. They have the determination and the military will and the political will of a great nation. We are a near-anarchic assemblage of millionaires and billionaires and a few less wealthy enthusiasts, all of whom are too canny to hang around whilst their homes get boarded or even destroyed - they’ll be in their downbelow mansions, I can promise you that. War between the US and the Uplands? If there were to be such a war then we will lose it, then we have already lost it.’ And the US did not know how to take this blithe admission of our national ineptitude.
nine.
Slater
In Fort Glenn
General Niflheim, with Slater and Philpot and an officer from the Law Corps, have all just finished viewing a recording of Gradi’s meeting. General Niflheim’s face, slak in zero g, manages a bizarrely oxymoronic expression of angry stupor.
‘Wat is she getting at?’ he demands. ‘Wat is she getting at? Like she’s got some kinda death-wish? Is that it?’
‘The best guess of our strategy team,’ says Slater, ‘is that’s she’s hoping for a Gandhi-style victory.’
‘A wat?’
‘It’s a historical term. The idea is that she simply sacrifices her people, lets us kill them, destroy their houses one after the other, until the number of the dead starts to mount up and erodes public, eh, confidence in the rightness of the, eh . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ (crossly), ‘I see wat you’re getting at. But she can’t be that stupid, can she?’
‘Well, we think that, if that is her strategy, then she’s miscalculated her population base. These aren’t peasants whose lives are so oppressed they’ll shout “liberty or death”. These are real wealthy men and women, most of them. Real wealthy. Since wat we want from them is only a tiny fraction, a tax, leaving them most of their wealth, they’ll surely prefer that to throwing it all away following this woman.’
‘The AIs agree?’
‘They do, sir.’
‘I don’t like it, though. I don’t like it. She’s up to something. Wat did you call it?’
‘Sir?’
‘The kind of victory for which she was hopin’?’
‘A Gandhi-style victory, sir.’
‘That’s a weird kind of name. Has she styled her name on his, do you think? A Gradi, Grandi, Gandi kinda thing.’
‘I was wondering,’ puts in Philp, ‘whether it’s a legal play?’
‘How do you mean?’ General Niflheim asks, and everybody looks at the officer from the Law Corps. Her name is Evans.
‘Go on,’ asks Evans. Philp nods.
‘Well, maybe she thinks that conceding defeat before war is even declared gives her the legal grounds to challenge the war when it comes?’
‘Say more,’ orders Niflheim.
‘In the sense, sir,’ says Philpot, ‘that - well, maybe she’ll argue “there can’t be a war, I’ve already conceded the war to the US”, which means that we can’t shift things to a war-legal footing, which means we lose one of the main reasons for going to war in the first place.’
‘Well,’ says Evans, her face the puffy pink of a first-time-visitor to the Uplands, ‘that’s not going to wash, sir. I assure you of that. That’s plain not going to wash. Precedent is very clear on that one, sir. You can’t admit defeat in advance, and neither can you do it retrospectively, for that matter. You can only do that when a war has actually begun. At the moment, in the eyes of the law, there is no war - so a surrender means nothing. Only once we’ve made the declaration . . .’
‘Yes yes I see,’ says General Niflheim. ‘Still, she’s up to something. Wat’s she up to?’ Then, turning to Slater and changing the subject without breaking his flow, he added, ‘Got a complaint from Cristof Hagen - you know him, Slater?’
Philp chukles.
‘I know him, sir,’ says Slater, deadpan.
‘Says you been deliberately ignoring him?’
‘Certainly not, sir,’ says Slater, glancing a little nervously at Officer Evans. ‘It’s just that I’m pretty doubleplus busy, wat with all the preparations for - you know.’
‘Talk to him,’ says Niflheim, bluntly. ‘Downbelow has decided his gyrostation gets immediate go ahead. It’s going to be ready, or leastwise ready enough, to billet the majority of troops for the war.’
‘It’s going to be built before the war begins?’ repeats a dumbfounded Slater.
‘You heard me soldier. It’s wat the brass want, right now, downbelow. Don’t antagonise Hagen. That’s my advice. It’s for your own sake but more importantly, for my sake. He’s promised them that the shell will be up in a month, and the whole thing pressurised and katherine-wheeling in two. Capiche?’
Capitchy, thinks Slater, sourly. Cipatchy. ‘Yes sir,’ he says.
‘Excellento,’ says the general. ‘Now, if you guys will excuse me, I have a long session about pre-declaration suits with Legal-Officer Evans here.’ His words are jovial, but there is a strange sluggishness in Niflheim’s manner that Slater can hardly read except as dislike. It puzzles him.
ten.
Slater
Lawyers
With something as fine-tuned and delicate as planning a seventy-two-hour war, the little-littler-littlest thing can completely throw the timetable out of whak. Slater went bak to his people with the knowledge that there was to be a delay of at least two months whilst the U is welded to the U and the great wheel, to be called Fort Freedom, is assembled. Two whole months! It pushes the war closer to the end of the year, yet the ground are adamantine in their insistence that the war be over well before the new century celebrations. They don’t want an American military episode spilling over into the new century; everything is to be neatly tied up by then. But they also want this huge spinning base, this eighty-billion-dollar installation, and five hundred highly trained troops billeted there. So Slater shunts the plans bak two months.
But everything is coming together, despite these impossible criteria.
He meets with the Veep. He is flown, by Elemag and even (on occasion, spacesuited up as if in fancy dress) Quanjet. Lawyers lawyers lawyers. There is no end to the lawyers. Even though he has nothing more than a minor in law, just like the majority of school graduates (his major was in War Studies - something less usual amongst military men than you might think) he is nevertheless expected to peruse a thousand legal documents. The precise wording for the declarat
ion to be lodged, when the time is judged absolutely right, with the appropriate International Belligerent Court, probably either Washington (which has strategic advantages but will perhaps make the whole escapade look parochially American) or London, it has yet to be decided. There are half a dozen of variations for each possible submission. Then there are additional suits, countersuits prepared for every possible Upland retaliatory lodgement, summaries of precedence compiled both by AI and - Slater had to insist upon this, for it was very expensive - by real, breathing human beings. There are affidavits, copies made and witnessed on the proper legal standing of all American warriors liable to be involved, testifying as to their status as properly constituted belligerents. There are two thousand death forms, on which the enemy casualties must be logged (within the usual rubrics of reasonable search and notice).