Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  So we moved around. Here we were: in a large house, but it was paked with people so it seems claustrophobically tight. These were real Uplanders, and they were scared. They clustered around Gradi like piglets around the momma pig, yearningly snouting for the nipple that reassures.

  And Gradi spoke to them, spontaneously, without notes. She told them that the war had begun, and that the Americans had achieved their military objectives, as everybody had expected them to do. But she said, but, but, the Americans had underestimated the Uplands. The Americans had underestimated her. For now, the Uplands would lie still. We were the branches of a mighty tree; the Americans were a great wind — a mighty wind, she conceded - but they would pass through the branches and pass on, but we will still be here. She made this speech, or variants of it, a hundred times.

  At the end of this speech their faces were all, every single one, beaming. She had fed them on actual, honey-flavoured hope. A woman called Grays Bikta gave Gradi a new transp signal, and Gradi thanked her earnestly.

  We took to our plane again, with this new transp location; Mat and I and Grays and a man called Barabas Stottlemeyer; and we unsniked the plane and flew up, to wait, to wait.

  ‘That was some speech,’ said Mat. When he was nervous he became high, prone to little scratchily-voiced interjections out of nothing. ‘A great little speech.’

  He and Gradi were sitting in the pilots’ seats side by side. Mat kept casting dubious little glances over at her, like a beast sipping stealthy little slurps at a waterhole ready to bolt before advancing predators. He was trying to drink from the sight, the physical presence of Gradi. His hopeless has-been passion for her was as earnest and consuming as it had ever been; and he knew that I was right there behind them, floating by the wall, watching the two of them. He was being almost operatically surreptitious; and Gradi was wholly unnoticing, staring through the blankness of the windscreen at the nothingness outside.

  ‘It was a good speech,’ I said, glancing in turn at Grays and Barabas behind me. ‘I almost believed it.’ I added, in case my implication had not been clear enough, ‘almost.’

  ‘I believed it,’ said Mat, overeager. ‘I believe it.’

  ‘It’ll be a century before this wind blows away,’ I said, with self-conscious sourness. ‘Longer. The Americans are here to stay.’

  ‘There we go,’ said Gradi, as if to herself. Our destination was sweeping round the world beneath us.

  We flew another ski-jump undershoot down, up, settle. It was another Upland house; and we nudged our way in, and loked the nose into the porch.

  Inside this house was Bran, the Official Treasurer of the Upland Bank. He was there with a dozen other people, and they looked grey, tired, scared.

  ‘Well,’ boomed Bran, as soon as Gradi emerged through the door. ‘I hope you’re happy, Madame President. I hope you are happy — you pushed for this war, and now you got it. The Americans pushed straight through us, like we were made of paper, like we were made of wet paper.’

  The mood in this large, crowded house was not welcoming. I recognised the faces of the dozen; some of the wealthiest Uplanders, people who had been persuaded by Gradi to shift most of their funds to the Upland Bank. We had come straight through into an ugly scene. ‘The Yanks have my money,’ shouted one of them, a billionaire called McManus.

  ‘They do,’ agreed Gradi.

  ‘How did they do it?’ called somebody else, from the bak of the room. ‘How did they know precisely which houses to seize? We were set up.’

  ‘You promised,’ yelled McManus. ‘I trusted you - put my fuking money in your bank, and now the Yanks have seized all our funds.’

  ‘I told you, Gradi,’ said Bran, pitching his voice loud enough to cut through the hubbub. He was very cross-looking, his eyes popping. ‘We had a dozen meetings in which I said — many of you were there, you heard me. I said it was a fool’s mission, pressing on towards war the way you were. But Gradi was so certain,’ (addressing the crowd now), ‘and now she’s brought disaster on us individually, and disaster on our nation.’

  Everybody in the house was murmuring their agreement. Everybody was glowering at Gradi. She floated up a little, and hooked her left hand round a strap to steady herself.

  ‘Clery,’ she said, in a voice of extraordinary calmness.

  This was unexpected. Clery?

  Clery was a stubby-legged property bigwig with a slightly twerpy manner. His face was wearing the same wrathful expression as all the other billionaires in the room, although on him it looked comical rather than intimidating. He was one of those patently in love with Gradi - by which I mean, of course we were all in love with Gradi, but one or two Uplanders nursed a painfully obvious tender passion for her, and he was one of those. Nobody took this seriously. Clery, for all his money, was the clown of this group; he was a scragga, a schlemiel, a boyo.

  As she addressed him directly, his face folded into pained delight. ‘Gradi,’ he replied.

  Everybody was looking at Clery. Everything had gone quiet.

  ‘Clery, come out from behind Bran, would you?’

  Clery was floating a few feet behind the Official Treasurer of the Uplands.

  These words of Gradi’s, seemingly non sequitur, had a strangely potent effect on the little group of people assembled there. Written down there, they don’t seem to be very striking words; but they were delivered with such complete calmness and control that they straight away soaked up some of the anger in the room. Everybody was looking at Gradi, which is how she liked it - or, no (of course) how she required it. Everybody look! Over here!

  That’s better.

  Clery reached out and grabbed a strut to pull himself from behind Bran. ‘Gradi,’ he said again. ‘Wat? You want to talk to me?’

  ‘No, Clery,’ she said, again with her commanding calmness. ‘I just don’t want you hanging behind Bran.’

  ‘Don’t play games with us, Gradi,’ snarled Bran, trying to whip up the mood again. ‘It’s your fault we’ve lost all our fuking money to the Americans. You think we want to play games here with you?’

  ‘It’s not,’ said Gradi, deadpan.

  ‘It’s not? It’s not?’ echoed Bran, scornfully.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ she said without raising her voice, ‘that we’ve lost all our fuking money to the Americans.’

  She had a gun in her hand, pointing at Bran.

  I’m not sure whether it was this understated brandishing of a handgun, or the fact that Gradi had uncharacteristically used the word fuk, that caused the chill to run through the room. The latter was almost as shokingly unusual a gesture as the former. The rage in the room had sublimed away into astonishment. Everybody was looking at Gradi now.

  ‘Hey!’ snapped Bran, his face blushing darkly and his brows creasing together. ‘Hey, wat, hey! Wat do you think you’re - Gradi! Hey!’

  She did not say anything.

  ‘Are you threatening me, Gradi? Wat’s with the - gun?’

  Nothing. Bran folded his arms, matching her stare for stare, saying nothing.

  But Bran couldn’t hold the silence. ‘Look,’ he said, putting his hands in front of his chest, ‘if you’re trying to imply something — look, why not come out and say it, OK? Wat are you implying? Are you accusing me of something? Is that the reason for the gun? That’s pretty heavy-handed, Gradi. It really is. C’mon, there’s no need for that. If you’ve got an accusation to make, you should make it. There are witnesses here.’

  Gradi did not say anything. She held the gun steady, pointed at Bran’s chest.

  Again the silence priked Bran into speech. The colour had flushed into his face and then, almost as rapidly, drained away. ‘Look, Gradi, let’s talk about this, shall we? I’ll admit I’m angry with you - we’re all angry with you, here, but with cause. You know? Cause. It doesn’t mean I’m any less committed to the idea of the Uplands. It doesn’t make me any less patriotic. I know money’s not life and death - and you know that too, yeah? But, fuk, don’t you
think we’ve reason to be angry? The bank was your idea, Gradi, you know it was. All we’re saying is that . . . look, if you want to accuse me of collaborating with the Americans, will you - please - just - come - out — and — say — it — ’ He spoke these last words with enormous, strenuous emphasis, his eyes seemed to bulge and pulse. He floated a little to the left. Gradi’s aim with the gun followed him.

  The silence swelled, and for a third time Bran had to fill it. ‘You’ve no proof,’ he said, urgently, and his voice contained real fear now. ‘You’ve not a single atom of proof. Think of all the people up here who could have provided them with the transps for the bank buildings. Think - look. This is wrong. Gradi - a gun? Really! Look at yourself!’ He glanced round the other people in the room. ‘C’mon, guys, time out. You don’t believe that I’d sell you out to the Americans? Why would I? It’s not as if I need the money!’ He tried a laugh, but it didn’t come out right. ‘Gradi, Gradi,’ he went on, speaking more hurriedly now. ‘Are you really going to murder me, in cold blood, here, in front of all these witnesses? Is that wat you want to do?’ He paused, waiting for Gradi’s reply, but she was silent. ‘I don’t know wat ideas you’ve got in your mind about me, Gradi. But shouldn’t we talk? Doesn’t the condemned man,’ another failed attempt at a laugh, ‘get a trial? Look, if I wanted political authority up here there are better ways of going about it than selling myself out to the Americans. Do you really think anybody in the Uplands would follow me as President, if they knew I’d sold you out to the Americans? I’d be a fuking quisling.’

  ‘If,’ said Gradi, in a quiet voice, ‘they knew. Which, I guess, is why you’re here, and not in Fort Glenn.’

  Her words were like a magical charm. They compelled our attention. Everybody looked at Bran. Sweat was coming so prolifically from his face that it was pimpling into pearls and breaking free of his skin. Dots of fluid hung in the air about his face.

  ‘This is a crazy conspiracy theory. This is crazy conspiracy talk, Gradi. Listen to yourself! I didn’t sell you out to the Americans. I swear I didn’t. Believe me, I — ’

  A wireware gun makes a distinctive sound when fired, a sort of snare-drum pop. A bubbling, red-beading hole opened in Bran’s chest, and a snap later in his bak. The projectile cliked into the wall behind and stuk there. If you’ve never seen a wireware bullet, I can tell you that it looks like the spindly metal frame in which champagne corks are corseted.

  I hiccoughed with sheer astonishment. I had not expected Gradi actually to shoot him. Nobody in that room, at that time, had expected Gradi actually to shoot him. Bran twitched and threw his arms out, but otherwise made no sound. His body drifted bakwards and lodged in at the coign of ceiling and wall, and a tremendous amount of blood gushed out of his chest, squash-ball and pool-ball-sized globes of bright red, like giant marbles spilled from a bag. Everybody was staring at this body.

  Then Gradi spoke. Her voice pulled all our gazes bak to her, and I saw that she was no longer holding the gun. ‘Quikly, people,’ she said, and clapped her hands lightly together, as if commanding a genie. ‘Somebody grab a sheet and net this blood before it goes everywhere.’ People twitched. ‘Lau,’ she said, addressing R. R. Lau, the famous screen compositer, who had (famously) amassed a fortune and retired to the Uplands. ‘Fetch a sheet, please?’

  ‘Sheet? Paper?’

  ‘No, cloth. A sleeping bag or something.’

  Lau moved, and the weird tension that had held that group of a dozen weightless people in unnatural stillness sagged. People moved away from the corpse, manoeuvred to avoid the spilling baubles of red, people were chattering rapidly and nervously amongst themselves. Two went with Lau and came bak with one large sheet that they held between them to scoop up most of the blood. Some gore had already splotched onto walls or floor, but in moments the air was mostly cleared. They wrapped the body in two sheets and tied it with a plastic rope.

  ‘Everybody,’ said Gradi, and the chattering stopped. All eyes were on her again, and all faces pouring their focused attention onto her. I thought to myself: she’s gone too far this time. I thought to myself: people think of her as a sychopath now; she’s traded their love and admiration for their fear, they’ll never trust her again - when this gets out she’ll be a pariah in all the Uplands. I was wrong about that, as I so often was about Gradi.

  ‘Everybody,’ she said, and (impossibly) her voice was warm, her face sincere. ‘You’ve all just witnessed something shoking. I’m sorry about that, but it could not be helped. This is the Upland’s darkest hour - it’s happening now, right now, right here. Our nations’ darkest hour. We’re all a part of it. If we hold strong, our nation will emerge stronger and better. But if we waver,’ (her voice trembled on that terrible word), ‘if we give up, then we might as well stamp ourselves as citizens of the fifty-third state of America.’

  All eyes were on her; but nobody spoke.

  ‘Let’s go through, all of us,’ Gradi said. ‘Let’s talk about wat’s happened here - and about why it had to happen.’

  ‘You shot him,’ said Clery, in his twittish high-pitched voice. Because it was Clery who spoke, it struck the comical keynote. The group tension was at that precise pitch and resonance that it started tumbling over into frank laughter, the sort of laughter that people try to stem as it comes out, knukles-between-lips laughter.

  ‘Are we at war?’ asked Gradi in a clear voice.

  The laughter died. Nobody answered. Gradi looked pointedly at Clery. ‘Yes,’ said Clery.

  ‘We are at war,’ said Gradi. ‘And that was an act of war. Do you want to know why?’

  ‘He was a traitor,’ said Lau, as if the pieces were fitting that moment together in his brain.

  ‘I did that because I wasn’t prepared to ask anybody else to do it. But we are at war, and he was a traitor,’ said Gradi.

  ‘He was a traitor,’ said somebody else; and then another person repeated the phrase. They said it almost wonderingly, the way the audience to a particularly well constructed mystery who, upon hearing the unexpected revelation of the criminal’s identity, whisper the name almost with awe: so that was the missing key! That explains everything! With that one word everything coheres! And the weight, on the one hand, of a single human death, and the weight on the other hand of the whole decade-long accumulation of belief and faith, the weight on the other hand of Gradi herself. Which way would the beam tip? To ask the question is to answer it.

  Bran’s body, wrapped in a blotchy red sheet and tied about with string, was shoved into a porch and taped — with one stripe of ordinary stiky-tape - to the nose of a plane. Then one of the party (I don’t know his name) flew the plane out, pulling slowly bak, angling slowly down, and then engaging Elemag for a flik forward that broke the body away and sent it tumbling. With the exception of the bloodstains inside the house (and they were easily bleached and cleaned), every last crumb of Bran’s DNA would burn up in the atmosphere, the very molecules stripped and shredded and oxidised. This is one version of the perfect crime.

  After the return of the pilot from this body-disposal run, we all went through to one of the bak rooms and had some food, had something to drink, all together. With unseemly rapidity it became an upbeat, even triumphalist gathering. People chattered excitedly, saying sentences that existed in a curiously quantum state between truth and lie - things like ‘I always suspected Bran was up to something’, or ‘I think I knew in my bones that he was a traitor’ - things that were not correct (for everybody had loved Bran! Everyone had trusted Bran!) but which, by repetition in this social context, became the truth in a perfectly genuine, unhypocritical sense. People loved Judas once; but love is something that only exists in the mind, and therefore it, and its history, is more malleable than gravity or momentum.

  ‘He betrayed our money,’ said Gradi. ‘He’s been in league with the Americans for nearly a year now.’

  Nobody replied to this, caught between the obvious retort (if you’ve known this for a year then why have you on
ly acted now, after his actions have gifted our money to the US?) and the disinclination of those present to antagonise Gradi. This, I suppose, is respect, which is to say, plucking a synonym from the political lexicon, fear.

  ‘It’s his doing,’ said Gradi, and she knew exactly wat people were thinking. ‘I wish I could have acted sooner — I wish I could have prevented this. But I needed proof. The most essential part of being an Uplander is liberty. Who dare take away that liberty, for anything short of blatant treason? I had to be sure.’

  ‘Of course,’ muttered Lau. ‘You had to be sure.’

  ‘You did the right thing, Gradi,’ said somebody else.

  ‘If we hang together,’ said Gradi, her voice suddenly fierce with a rhetor’s passion, ‘then we can get through this! He wanted the Uplands defeated, and me in prison, so that he could set himself up as the US puppet-President. But I will not let us be defeated!’ I thought: but we’ve already been defeated, although of course I said nothing.