Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

The meeting at which the number of death forms is debated lasts a whole afternoon at Fort Glenn, the light swelling to brilliancy in the meet-room window every forty minutes, flowering in a swift sliding trapezoid along the floor and up the wall for twenty minutes, and then wilting and cliking out to reappear twenty minutes later at its starting place. It is some kind of loom-shuttle of light.

  The meeting is between Slater, a listless General Niflheim, and four officers from the Legal Corps. Something’s gotten into Niflheim, he’s pissed, or restless, or something (‘Wat’s up with Niflheim?’ he asked Philp yesterday, but there’s no answer). Slater doesn’t know wat’s wrong, but he can’t fret about it. He’s got a war to plan.

  They debate numbers. Slater’s professional estimate is casualties (Upland) between 250 and 350, casualties (US) zero-5. It is always a good idea to have more death forms prepared than will be thought necessary - nothing more fiddly, and fraught with potential snafu, than having to rustle up additional death forms actually during the conflict. But 2000? That, Slater opines, is overkill. If the number is leaked (‘and how could it possibly be leaked?’ booms Niflheim, crossly, - if, Slater presses, if by some mischance this number is leaked, then it’ll tend to suggest that the US are intending widespread butchery. It’ll be bad PR. 300 tops, is all’ll be needed. No but - yes but —

  They argue it bak and forth. Finally they agree on the larger number. It is not, of course, really a discussion about forms; it is about the degree of confidence each party has in the US Army’s capacity for restraint. Slater (as if his nikname weren’t Slayer!) believes he knows the soldiers better than the more alienated high-brass, believes they’ll hold bak. But he is outranked.

  Slater has been given a week’s leave to spend with his family before the war starts. Everything is in a high state of readiness. All the possible eventualities of Upland resistance have been stochastically appraised, these being:[1] No Upland resistance, and immediate surrender, the problem here being the need to keep the war going for more than forty-eight hours. They have a dozen schemes for this necessary prolongation.

  [2] No Upland resistance, but surrender delayed because of lak of national coherence and leadership. This would be very good; enabling the US to secure their territory before piking up a national leader and encouraging them to utter the crucial words.

  [3] No Upland resistance, but Gradisil refuses to surrender. Much Legal time has been devoted to listing which other prominent Uplanders would have the necessary legal plausibility to offer surrender. Since she has never been officially elected, it is arguable that Gradisil’s actions are a legal irrelevance anyway.

  [4] Some limited Upland resistance. This is the best scenario of all, because it would justify US action, enable them to prolong the war as long as they wanted, and give the troops something of a workout. With any military resistance the game becomes mainly military, and that’s where Slater’s confidence is highest.

  [5] Significant Upland resistance. However unlikely this is, given the lak of Upland resources, the lak of a national will to fight, and the precariousness of Upland supply lines, it cannot be entirely ruled out. Gradi is the wild card. It’s conceivable - just — that she will inspire at least some of her people to an heroic stand against the Americans [shout defiance in the maw of — !]. And this, number ‘5’ is wat Slater, in his truest heart, yearns for: a useful military target, a task to stretch the troops a little. The more military resistance they encounter, the stronger the US position; for they are, wholly, the dominant party in military terms. Nobody denies that. Slater has promised a seventy-two-hour war; but there is a great deal of leeway in this. Anything over forty-eight hours and less than one solar year is legally optimal. And there is simply no way the war could last as long as a year: for one thing, without food or the ability to travel downbelow the entire Upland population would starve to death before that. Which would not be ideal PR, but would still be a military result.

  He flies down, and there are no clouds in the bright blue sky through which he swoops. It is the same inside his head. Through the window of his Elemag transport he watches the land come up towards him, as if some paradoxical solid flood of matter were filling the cosmos, pouring in from a fountain of land. There is a shudder as the wheels kiss the running ground.

  He cheks out of the barraks, and takes a personnel jet to Florida, and then he signs a car out of the military pool to drive to his house. Six days of furlough. He calls Marina from the car. ‘Honey,’ he announces. ‘I’m ten minutes out.’

  She squeals in the screen with pleasure. ‘I thought tomorrow!’

  ‘Today,’ he says. ‘Are the girls at school?’

  ‘At school.’

  ‘Then I’m very pleased to announce,’ says Slater, fumbling the automatic with his thumb so he can take his hands from the wheel and direct his attention more closely to the screen, and the image of his beautiful wife, ‘that I’ll be home in a few minutes. I must announce to you I am declaring martial law in this house - marital law, in fact. You must remove any unauthorised personnel from the house. Only you are to remain, and you are confined to the house — in fact, you are confined to the bedroom.’

  She is giggling. ‘How long?’

  ‘Six days,’ he says.

  ‘Oh honey, that’s fantastic — ’

  ‘Get yourself ready, ma’am,’ he says, in his mok-stern voice. ‘Estimated arrival window, in a few moments.’ He is already imagining her body naked in bed, the dark wellspring of hair and the way her body flows, palely, down from her face in shallow sines of perfect desire. He is already imagining kissing her.

  Family

  Later that day Slater lies in bed with his beautiful young wife tuked under his arm, both her hands resting flat on his broad chest She is either asleep, or in that state of satisfied awakedness that lies still and calm like sleep. The walls are painted blue, and the ceiling white. The curtains, thinweave, green-blue-dyed and lit behind by the afternoon sun, move like two unhurried aurorae boreales. He is searching his mind, applying some of the methodical thoroughness that army training has given him, looking for reasons to be unhappy, or anxious. But there are none: a beautiful wife, two beautiful children, a world-spanning job that has been time-demanding and stressful but in which he has acquitted himself very well. If he handles this war as well as he knows he will - if he brings the victory in within the parameters he has specified to the top brass - then a promotion will be a certainty. He’ll be a colonel in months and a general before he’s forty; by retirement he could well occupy a senior political post. He is loved and loving, he is working and useful, he is fit and happy. He is, indeed, very close to being the optimal human product of his age. He has a sense of almost painful satisfaction in his chest.

  Later, the girls come home from school, ferried by the maid, a pug-faced little woman from the Republic of Bass Strait in her early twenties. This maid uses a conversational enhancer, worn looped over her ear, to augment her patchy English. Slater has forgotten her name, if he ever knew it.

  ‘Daddy!’ cries little Alice, and littler Menya, both hurtling themselves at Slater’s body and swept in his broad arms upwards and around. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

  ‘My princesses,’ he booms. ‘Have you been good girls whilst I was away?’

  ‘Are you bak for ever, Daddy?’ asks Alice.

  ‘For a few days,’ says Slater, kissing them both, and depositing them on the carpet again, where they fidget and jig about him. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

  The following day Slater takes both girls out of school for a day, and drives the whole family over to the GWB Public Park, with its undulating perfectly manicured green spaces, with its award-winningly designed play areas, and its motorised dinosaurs of purple and gold that stalk clumsily in and out of the little copses of tamarind trees. The girls howl and whistle their delight and run and run. Slater links arms with his wife and they stroll together, like an antique couple. Their girls orbit them in ragged loops of sprinting and shouting, and then ru
n off together giggling.

  ‘Do I got any reason to worry?’ she asks, when it is quiet enough for them to hear one another. The perennial question of the military wife.

  ‘Given wat I can’t tell you,’ he says, slowly, and pauses, ‘though you’ll guess a bunch of that, I know.’

  ‘I watch the news,’ she says, laconically, looking past him at a hill in the middle distance topped with growing bamboo, like pins in a green cushion.

  ‘Right,’ he says, and they walk on for a while. ‘Yeah, given wat I can’t tell you, I can at least say that — no, you got no reason to worry. Maybe something will happen, but I’ve been involved in the planning, and it’ll be the best planned something in the history of - somethings.’

  ‘Still,’ she says. ‘There’s always a risk.’

  ‘Really and truly,’ he replies, earnestly, ‘there’s no risk, not in this case. In this case I’ll be as safe as if I were with you, down here. I’ll not be frontline, and anyway it’s all planned most carefully.’ The clouds above them are being conveyed quikly across the bright blue sky. Some of them are edged with grey and purple, like white fruit just starting to grow mould at the edges. ‘Maybe it’ll rain,’ he says, inconsequentially.

  ‘Is that military code?’ she asks, ingenuously.

  It sometimes surprises Slater that he never gets tired of looking at the loveliness of his wife’s face. ‘No,’ he smiles. ‘I mean real rain, downbelow rain.’ He calls. ‘Girls! Girls - we’re going over to that shelter, ’kay? By the little river.’

  ‘OK, Daad,’ come their voices bak, distanced, gleeful.

  Slater and Marina sit hand in hand on an oak bench under a plastic canopy, and for a while they do nothing more than both stare at the creek slipping past them down its stepped channel, the continual flow of its rain-cold solution washing gold-painted pebbles, and yet never washing the gold paint away. There are little green fish, like leaf litter, swirling and darting in the water.

  ‘There’s something,’ Marina starts, and Slater sits bak a little. Something. His warrior sense tingles, the instinct bred through a thousand generations of anticipating dangers before they become threats. When one’s wife says there’s something, it could be the preliminary for a marital disruption, unhappiness; illness; confession of affair. Wat counts as something? After a night and a day, is this going to be the first flaw in his otherwise flawless existence? He readies himself, inwardly.

  ‘Wat?’ he asks, calmly.

  ‘I was going to tell you earlier, only I figured I’d be better telling you face-to-face. Not through a screen, you know? Only — ’

  He doesn’t feel too anxious. Watever it is, he feels competent to handle it. Accordingly, when he says ‘wat is it?’ his voice is neither urgent nor angry.

  ‘I’ve seen the Pastor again, just a couple of times.’

  ‘I see,’ says Slater.

  ‘It was only a couple of times,’ says Marina, rolling her shoulders as if to remove a tightness in the muscles there, ‘and he said I should tell you, that there should be nothing underhand about it.’

  ‘Just the two of you, was it?’

  ‘No!’ Marina is blushing a little. ‘Of course not — a group.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was in Florida,’ says Slater, in a neutral voice.

  ‘He travels around.’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’

  ‘It was a small group, Olivia arranged it - you remember Olivia? When he was going to be in town, she set up a worship group. So we met a couple of times for prayer and - and such.’

  ‘With the Pastor.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The girls are approaching with scurrying legs. The girls are running over the green, towards their Mommy and Daddy, which is not a fair race, as Alice is older than Menya and therefore faster. Their faces are ecstatic with the hurry of it, the play of it, and the fact that they are coming closer and closer to the perfect location of their parents together.

  ‘Did you,’ asks Slater, ‘talk about it? About that whole thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Slater looks away. The kids will be on them in a moment and he needs to press the point. ‘Does he still feel the same way about all that?’

  ‘Well, he does,’ says Marina, as if this is the prelude to some longer speech, but she doesn’t say anything more.

  There’s a question Slater wants to ask, but he doesn’t ask it. He is weighing up whether it is a good idea to put it into words - whether it mightn’t ruin the mood of his furlough, whether it would suggest distrust. He wrestles with it for a while, until Marina rescues him.

  ‘You want to ask whether he’s been trying to talk me out of my pharmakos.’

  ‘Honey,’ he tells her. ‘You know the only thing I care about is your happiness - you and the children — ’

  ‘The answer is no,’ she says, in a hurry, as the noise of the children’s delighted yelling swells and they hurtle in towards the shelter ‘The answer is, he isn’t. I’m still taking my pharmakos.’

  Then with a clatter and thud the girls land in the laps of their parents, laughing and sweating. ‘I saw a dinosaur,’ shrieks Menya. ‘I saw him. He was purple. He was coming to get me but I ran away.’

  ‘I’m a dinosaur,’ says Slater, in a large play-voice to cover this sudden awkwardness with his wife. He gets to his feet and tries out a few roars, and his daughters squeal with delight again and wriggle free and leap the creek to run away, as he lumbers after them with his arms out — more like Frankenstein’s beast than a dinosaur (as Marina later says) but happy.

  Supper is Barachos-brand patties, and a special soup, and four different kinds of fresh vegetable. The kids are so excited they cannot sit still on their chairs. Afterwards they all watch the Bedtime Channel altogether, as a family. It’s Tibby-Cat (‘gimme a kissy-cuddle!’) followed by Prairie-Song of the Buk-Hare, which is edutainment. The girls go to bed exhausted-delighted. Marina prays with them, all three females knelt together in the girls’ room, whilst Slater loiters atheistically in the hall outside, a misbeliever who is still weirdly touched by this little ritual, this verbal escort for the tremulous little souls through the darkness of the night. ‘I love you, girls,’ he hears Marina say, in a muffled voice, perhaps because her face is kissing their hair. ‘We love you too, Mommy,’ says Alice, and then in a louder voice, ‘love you too, Daddy!’

  ‘Goodnight, girls,’ says Slater, in a slightly too loud voice from the hall.

  That night Slater and Marina make love again, and then talk about the Pastor some more, and then make love again. But it’s not a matter that can easily be resolved. His wife is entitled to hold religious beliefs, after all, entitled by national law and perhaps by natural law too. He does not share these beliefs, but he appreciates the freedom that permits them to her.

  The girls are bak in school the following day, and Slater does nothing more than exist in his own house, breathing in each of the rooms, feeling his way bak into a domestic life. Marina doesn’t mention the Pastor again. She sits in the front room reading, and eventually Slater comes and sits beside her. He wants to start a conversation with her, but can’t think how to commence it.

  The maid, haunting the room with her surly diffidence, asks ‘Shall I cook lunch, Mrs Slater?’ The words are prompted to her by Conversational Aid.

  Wife and husband take lunch together, in the dining room, the whole of the bak wall glass, looking over the sloping emerald lawn to the row of silver beeches at the garden’s extremity. This is his lovely house. This is his beautiful wife. He can afford as many fresh vegetables as he wants, and have them cooked by his servant to succulence. His job is going tremendously well; though only a lieutenant he has - in effect — been trusted with organising General Niflheim’s war; and, given the widespread knowledge of the general’s lassitude, this means that everybody knows he is really in charge of the campaign. When the victory is declared he will surely be promoted; it will launch a diamond-glittery career. And yet, he has to admi
t that the mere fact of the Pastor has dulled the gleam of his perfection. He can remember the first night of his furlough, that dazzling almost heroin-pure sensation of perfection in his head, in his body. He looks inside, and it is not there any more. He ponders whether it is the fact of the Pastor, meddling in his perfect marriage; or whether it is the fact that Marina has kept something from him. She had always been (or he had always taken her to be, which amounts to the same thing) transparent as a windshield, open-hearted, incapable of deception. If one is distracted by (let’s say) ‘other things’ for a time, it can be a jolt to return attention to the homebase; the hypothesis that things can change, suppressed by inattention, asserts itself more alarmingly than it otherwise might. She had told him: I figured I’d be better telling you face-to-face, not through a viewscreen. But was that the truth? Or was this symptomatic of a broader series of mendacities? He looks at his wife as she forks spinach salad to her mouth. He smiles at his wife, and she catches his expression and smiles bak.