Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I love you,’ he says, suddenly, although wat he was thinking was, how can I have such complete access to your body, so that there is nowhere on its perfect surface hidden from me, no point of entry denied me, and yet be so loked out of your mind? It is on his tongue to ask ‘Wat are you thinking about?’ but instead - surprising himself - he asks: ‘Does this Pastor guy have many skizophrenics in his congregation?’

  Her eyes widen, and then shut completely. ‘Wat?’

  But he’s started now, so he can’t bak down. As he continues, he is thinking, I shouldn’t have said that; but the subject has been broached now.

  ‘I mean, does he specialise in skizophrenia?’

  ‘Not at all,’ says Marina, meekly.

  ‘I mean, please tell me’ - and Slater can hear a kind of ugliness in his own tone of voice, and he wishes he weren’t speaking, but still he goes on — ‘you don’t want to go bak to being - being the way you were?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I guess, you see, from my point of view - you see, I don’t know wat it feels like from the inside, only from the outside, but the way you were looked pretty bad.’

  ‘It was terrible.’

  ‘And you don’t want to go bak to that?’

  She shakes her head. She looks mournful.

  ‘So tell me,’ Slater presses on, although he is now urging himself, internally, to stop. But he can’t seem to help himself. ‘So tell me about this Pastor. Is he opposed to all pharmakos? I mean, some religious people are, aren’t they. Refuse to have any in their systems. Is that his bag?’

  ‘Why are you being so hostile all of a sudden?’ she asks, her voice low.

  ‘I was just curious whether this was part of a crusade this Pastor guy’s waging against all pharmakos. Or if it was just the stuff that keeps your skizophrenia — ’

  Marina flares up at this point. ‘Since you’re so insistent,’ she snaps, ‘then the answer is no, he’s cool with most pharmakos. Since you ask.’ She is blushing, and stops abruptly.

  Her anger calls forth a proportionate emotional response in Slater. ‘Then it’s just your fuking pharmakos he opposes, is it? He’s just got a plan to wrek our marriage, is that it?’

  ‘Don’t shout at me!’

  ‘I’m not shouting. I’m asking a . . .’

  ‘He’s a man of God.’

  ‘Asking a question.’

  There’s an agonised pause in the exchange. But then Marina doesn’t do anything other than repeat, sulkily, ‘He’s a man of God.’

  ‘Like that excuses anything,’ Slater urges, straining to keep his anger hot. ‘He’s fuking irresponsible, is wat he is . . .’

  This sparks her up again. ‘Don’t swear at me!’

  ‘Am not swearing at you, if you wanna know. Actually I’m swearing at him.’

  Things are getting out of control. The level of rage is escalating. Slater catches a glimpse of the maid slipping from kitchen to front room, just the briefest sight of her sour little face. Was that a smile on her lips?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, putting both hands on the tabletop. But he doesn’t sound sorry. ‘I think we need to bear in mind that he’s a preacher, not a doctor, and that for him to recommend . . .’

  ‘He’s a man of God!’

  ‘Mar, we’ve been through this,’ Slater says, sounding exasperated. ‘We’ve been over this a score of times. Yeah? The visions and voices and all that, those were the disease, they - were — not God. You thought they were God, but they were just, you know. Brain malfunction.’ Her face tightens. ‘Or not malfunction precisely . . .’ he tries to correct, but she cuts across him:

  ‘He disagrees, you know? He thinks that science doesn’t understand skizophrenia and he’s right.’ With that last word a flame of passion flares up from her, red as her flushed face. Slater wishes, wishes, wishes that he hadn’t started this whole thing now. ‘He thinks that the pharmakos muffles and distorts my soul.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Slater, with automatic scorn. ‘Soul...’

  ‘Shutup!’ his wife cries, her voice needles and broken glass, the command compressed into one sharp word. ‘Shutup! You shutup! You can’t understand it, because you’ve never had a connection to God. But I had one, he lived in me, and now that’s gone, because of the pharmakos. All the Pastor says is that I need to think hard about wat God wants. Not wat my doctor or my legal adviser or my husband want, or even wat I want, but wat God — but wat’s the use? Why should I - wat is the point?’

  ‘Now look, Marina. Look. We went into all this, we’ve been through all - look. Some reduction in the immediacy of religious mania, I mean religious experience - it’s listed as an effect of the pharmakos. But you still go to chapel? You still pray, and all that?’

  ‘It’s all mumbo-jumbo to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t mind the religion. You be as religious as you like, honey. I mind the mental illness, and the mania, and all the stuff with that sword you made from a walking stik and a kitchen knife with the tape around — ’

  ‘You think you really need remind me of that?’

  ‘That’s wat he wants, for you to return to that!’

  ‘No he doesn’t. All he says is that it’s a shame I’ve lost my intimacy with God. And - he’s - right — ’ She’s standing now, preparing to storm from the room.

  He’s faster and stronger than her; he’s trained. Even though he’s spent a good long time in orbit, and his body’s not as strong as it might be, he still catches her easily, and holds her easily as she thrashes at him. He carries her upstairs, careless of wat the maid might see or think, and kiks the bedroom door shut behind. Then, like it used to be in the bad old days, he holds her on the bed whilst her eyes roll white in her head and she kiks and hisses out her tantrum. And then, when it starts to abate a little but there is still fire in her eyes, he pulls her clothes off and grapples with her, loosening her arms so that she can finally strike him, scratch him, all the stuff that can only enhance the sexual act.

  Afterwards she sleeps, and he stares at the bright window and wonders if he provoked her on purpose. But the sex, alas, has not been cathartic. Rust has started its munching crumbling work upon his once cleanly metallic happiness. When he had first known Marina there had been a dangerous purity about her, a wild spiritual enthusiasm that had excited him even as it frightened, and even to an extent repelled, him. Sometimes she was calm, demure; and her lovely face would be haloed by her blak hair, and Slater could actually feel his heart in his chest breathe in with love for her. But then, on other occasions, her talk would become a clamour of excited words, and gestures, trying to catch the eye of invisible spirits, beings, angels, sometimes demons, and a blaze would almost emanate from her. For fractions of her time this might even be numinous and wondrous, times when it was impossible for her to see that there even was such a thing as an ordinary rainbow; times when the mere presence of rain in the air, or the texture of brikwork, or the visible signs of currents in flowing water, could move her to tears and a sort of mental orgasm. But this was only a small fraction of the time. More usually, during one of her episodes, she became fidgety and paranoid, her eyes in constant nervous movement, her fists clenching and unclenching, her darting gabble becoming soaked through with aggression and accusation. She spoke to God, in a pillar of cloud, or a smoky cloud of flies, or in the roar of the freeway. And God returned the communication, commanding her with sub-bass roar and elongated vowels to rule to kill, or believe, simple imperatives given awesome and alarming weight and heft by being boomed across the coastal freeway and echoed off the soundboard of the Atlantic. She strained to do wat God told her. She heard and tried to obey detailed, bizarrely particular commands from angels (take a shovel, but it must be a shovel with a wooden handle, and cook twelve plain blak beans, and take them to the stretch of grass behind the schoolyard and dig three feet down, and lay the beans in the shape of a cross and fill in the dirt...). Sometimes the commands were violent (you must score the word putas in the f
lesh of the belly of the woman who works in the water-machine shop...). On three separate occasions she cut her mother with a knife, and faced legal sanction, despite her mom’s refusal to press charges. Her mother was a deeply religious person, and was in fact rather overwhelmed, even secretly impressed, by her daughter’s confident assertion that she spoke to angels, and even God Himself. Because of this, and in common with many of the more intensely religious Americans, she denied her child pharmakos, regarding such drugs as theologically interdicted, although she did eventually, worn down by the relentless intensity of her daughter, countenance some varieties of the older anti-sychotic drugs. They had not worked very well. But earnest entreaty from Slater, besotted with this beautiful woman, had persuaded lucid-Marina to try the pharmakos that banished crazy-Marina forever.

  Slater wooed lucid-Marina, and won her, and married her; and a daughter was born, and then a second daughter. And even Marina’s mother admitted that pharmakos might be God’s will, so complete and harmonious was their result. Marina was happy. She had never, she assured her husband (usually at his specific prompting) never been happier. But God had been banished from her personal acquaintance, and now she was only going through the motions of religion, in the same way that everybody else in chapel was, she realised, going through the motions. Like them, she was actually praying for the possibility of connection only.

  And that was the way it was; until Marina met this Pastor man, who hinted to her that perhaps her skizophrenia - for all its unpleasantnesses - had been God’s way of opening the possibility of His communication. And she began to fret that she had lost something more important than all the things she had gained, which is a dangerously persistent meme.

  Slater’s last day with her ends at 4, when a military car drives itself to his door to collect him. By dusk he is in a plane, climbing through a sky that seems to him to have gone into mourning over the loss of — something, he’s not sure wat. Below him the western stretches of the Atlantic are becoming less and less distinct under the drawing crescendo of encroaching night. The water has taken on the appearance of tarmac. He stops looking down. Wat is ever the point in looking down, when up is so filled and fulfilling?

  eleven.

  Paul

  ‘I came up here, to the Uplands,’ said Ustinov, ‘to be closer to the stars. I am an astronomer.’ He smiled for the cameras. The cameras simply stared their fish-eye stare, but downbelow a million people smiled inwardly bak.

  ‘Not just an astronomer, my friend,’ said Gradi, looking concerned and attentive. ‘One of the most famous astronomers in the EU!’

  Ustinov did not deny this. He showed Gradi, and the trail of attendants with their camera-headbands and globe-viewers, around his house: three large rooms, very well appointed, and then an even larger annexe in which three different types of telescope were mounted. Of all the wealthy individuals who had bought themselves a house in the Uplands Ustinov was one of the wealthiest. Indeed, one of the things that distinguishes the truly wealthy from the lesser fry is the adoption of a modulated form of humility: no parvenu showiness of conspicuous display for him. He seemed genuinely smaller than life.

  ‘No, Madame President’ (the cameras were catching all this, so Gradi made a self-deprecating gesture with her hand with a smiling shuffle of her head to disown the title), ‘no, just a humble astronomer, an amateur.’

  ‘An amateur with some of the most sophisticated telescoping technology outside the military!’ said Gradi, laughing kindly.

  ‘It is my life,’ said Ustinov, simply. ‘I spend more time in the Uplands than I do in Moscow. I consider myself an Uplander - one of your citizens, Madame President.’

  ‘One of my friends,’ she countered, suavely, putting her hand on his shoulder. Personal contact like bak-slaps and hugs and handshakes are a delicate business in zero g; you don’t want to send the other person spinning or lurching or knoking their forehead against the wall. It’s too easily done.

  ‘And now!’ said Ustinov, with tremendous Russian dramatic emphasis, ‘the Americans! Tell me that my telescopes must be confiscated! But why? I ask you: why? Because they think I’m using my scopes to spy on their idiotic military force-of-occupation up here? A moment’s thought reveals that as absurd. I am examining the Kuiper Belt. I am traking nearby star systems with planets. My gaze is set far away. As if my scopes could even see their ridiculous blak-painted Quantum-jets! As if I could even focus them on ground-based installations!’

  ‘How absurd,’ agreed Gradi.

  ‘They harass me, they seek to take away my life’s work, to beggar me.’ Since Ustinov could, without exaggeration, have bought several small nations entire, this seemed to me unlikely. But I looked sober and nodded thoughtfully every time Gradi did. I was barely in shot, but it would not look good if I was caught rolling my eyes at the ceiling.

  ‘They are the mafia of this land,’ said Ustinov, fiercely. Since he had made much of his money via organised crime downbelow this was a clever comparison to draw in many ways.

  Later, as we flew down and up to a new house, to meet some further Uplanders, I challenged her directly. ‘I wish you’d include me.’

  ‘I include you,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t include me. I don’t understand why you’re pushing so hard for war. We can’t win a war against the whole armed might of the USA.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The whole of the EU, with air force, army and weaponry, didn’t last two days against the US in eighty-one!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘All I’m saying. There are many Uplanders with - concerns,’ I said. ‘You’re pushing things along to war.’

  ‘We cannot win this war.’

  ‘But Gradi I really don’t understand, I really wish you’d explain to me, I really don’t understand how you can say that and still . . . you know, keep applying the pressure that will shove the nation along the groove to conflict.’

  ‘The path to true victory lies through the road of defeat,’ said Gradi. She was moking me? I turned and looked through the window at the blakness.

  My last trip downbelow before the war

  I spent a month with the boys, in Helsinki. Gradi was with us for only a few days. If I raised this matter, implying without having the courage actually to accuse her of neglecting her family, she looked at me as if I had sworn at her, or accused her of some crime of which she was manifestly innocent: a sort of hurt surprise that flowered from the unexpectedness, for her, of the rebuke. She genuinely did not, I think, comprehend any delinquency in her attentions. An only child, raised by a stiffly self-controlled English stepfather and by a mother, Klara, at best only semi-connected with the real world, I believe the truth is that Gradi’s heart was so soaked through with herself that she was beyond seeing so abstract a concept as selfishness. It is not that she laked a sense of her role as mother; it is only that an entire nation of discontinuous houses and similarly self-absorbed, monkish billionaires fitted her notion of ‘child’ better than her own flesh and blood. ‘Mother of the nation’ meant more to her than actual mother to Hope and Sol and less still to the as yet unnamed presence in her belly.

  We spent one last day as a complete family; Gradi, myself, Hope and Sol, with Kirsi along to help us. It was a cold late autumnal day, and we walked, as a family, down by the doks. Sunset came early in that latitude, at that time of year, and the boys ran bak and forth with Kirsi shepherding them away from the water’s edge. Salt-halos shimmered into existence in the bay, reflecting the lights on the hill behind us. The water and the airy horizon blurred in magenta purple, the sun just round the world’s corner, but slipping further, the sky darkening continually. The white and yellow lights of the town were assuming more and more solid definition. It was 5. ‘Let’s go eat,’ said Gradi. She was, I remember, very nervy that evening, constantly looking over her shoulder, cloking every passer-by. ‘Do you expect the Americans to kidnap you, here in Finland-EU?’ I joshed. But she was terribly and dramatically serious. �
��This would be the optimum time to nab me,’ she told me, as if confiding a great secret. ‘If I were them, and faced with a threat like me, I’d act now.’

  I tutted. ‘You’re growing paranoid. Listen to yourself! Kidnap? That sounds so very twentieth century.’

  ‘Practical,’ she corrected. ‘Although, kidnap is a less good idea than a quiet assassination. If it were me, I mean, that’s wat I — ’ but she stopped machiavellising abruptly. ‘Boys!’ she yelled, sharp. ‘Time for food!’ And, cheering, they rushed at us to takle us both round the waist, Hope grabbing me and Sol her. This latter collision brought out a rebuke from Gradi.

  ‘Be careful,’ she scolded Sol, disentangling him from her midriff, pushing him away until he was at arm’s length. He was only just six years old, a slender and rather jittery child, with eyes the colour of coffee-without-milk and his pinkish-yellow skin quite literally thin. Running as fast as he could, at that age, he could never have accumulated the momentum to damage even the small pregnant frame of a woman like Gradi. Indeed, I felt a prikle of anger at my wife for overreacting, and hurting the feelings of my little prince needlessly. But I said nothing, of course I said nothing.