Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  But the next day the warriors must return to active duty. Philp goes where his orders instruct him. Slater flies to DC.

  Slater is briefed on developments in the war (and there have been none) and reviews the blokade. He has half a dozen meetings with lawyers in a spacious office, but he finds it hard to keep his attention on the matters in hand. His eye is drawn, pulled by the optic magnetism of beauty, to the view through the floor-to-wall window opposite him. Across an empty drill square, a hectare of pink sand, to a broad bar, perfectly rectangular, of bright green foliage - a row of tightlyintergrowing giant bushes. As clouds slide in front of the sun, and then pass on, the intensity of light builds and fades regularly, swelling the green with gorgeous brilliance and sinking it to more shadowy dun, for all the world as if somebody is tinkering with the brightness/contrast button on a screen.

  The following day he meets the Veep again. ‘I want that surrender,’ booms Johannes Belvedere III. ‘You promised me that surrender!’ ‘Yes sir,’ he squawks. ‘Don’t “yes sir” me, Lieutenant,’ says the Veep. ‘Just get me the surrender.’

  Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir, he can only think of yes sir. ‘I’m on it,’ he says instead, and instantly thinks that sounds pretty feeble.

  He flies Upland again, in the same EleMag plane as the lizard-like Hagen. There’s no escaping Hagen on this trip; he has been ordered to accompany him.

  The spinning platform is ready now; an enormous construction of plastic and metal, painted red and white, with the hub blue-whitestarred; all the paints lumine. It is visible from all the way down on the ground as a pale pink star, a new star that moves hurriedly through the sky at dusk and dawn. Niflheim has warned him of the perils of wanting to micromanage a war, but at the same time there are two potential niggles it would be best to address right away. In one of the searches of an Upland house a Marine had discovered a windowbox, or transparent porch, or some annexe (the report is not very clear) filled with growing things. In accordance with the statutes of war, and in consonance with suits 3990 and 3991 filed with the Washington International Belligerent Court in pursuance of the legitimate American military and post-victory targets, the Marine had destroyed these growing things. The householder had reacted very poorly to this, and had threatened the Marine with a weapon. There had been, it seemed, a great deal of shouting and threatening, but (and this is one of the problems Slater must address) the corporal - the only one of the party with helmet camera - had been called bak to his ship to answer a call. The Marine, feeling threatened, had shot the Uplander once in the chest. This was within the parameters, and perfectly legally defensible, of course (provided the Marine was being genuinely threatened); except that the projectile had passed through the Uplander’s chest and happened to strike a porthole. The projectile was wireware, sanctioned for firefights inside pressurised vacuum habitations, but it so happened the porthole was weakened, or substandard, or something along those lines, for it blew out. In the resulting depressurisation storm the contents of the house had been mightily disarranged. The Marines, trained in depressurisation protocols, had loked the leak down in minutes; but afterwards they discovered that the pistol with which the Uplander had threatened the marine must have blown into space with sundry other items. This was an unfortunate development.

  Now, so far no legal countersuit had been filed. The Uplander had been alone in the house, and it was not clear who his next-of-kin even were, let alone where they might be. The contents of the house were being examined now. It wasn’t clear wat was going to happen next. One possible outcome was that no next-of-kin was identifiable, which would mean that the possibility of countersuit would recede considerably. If a next-of-kin did emerge it was also possible that they would not lodge a suit, particularly if they hoped to inherit from the deceased and wanted the money sooner rather than later (for all inheritance monies would of course be held over until the settlement of any such suit). But on the off chance that suit was filed it was important that Slater could show that the US had followed all appropriate avenues, and one of those was that the testimony of the Marine in question be thoroughly determined, with multiple separate interviews. Slater has come up to conduct one such interview.

  It is his first time aboard the completed station. And wat a strange experience it is to stride down the sharply curving corridor, his boots actually clanging on the grille-flooring underfoot. Walk this corridor in one direction and get heavier; walk bak the way you came and get lighter. Pe-cu-lee-ar. There is an unmistakeable tug and churn in his gut as he walks, and through the portholes equally spaced along the U-bend corridor the distracting sight of Earth falling and turning bothers the corner of his eye. But it is also a pleasantly rooted experience, walking like a hamster in a gargantuan wheel, always at the bottom, with the pull downwards so similar to earthly gravity as to be indistinguishable.

  Here is Hagen, lizard-like, puffed up with his superb pride. ‘Lieutenant, ’ he says. ‘It looks good, don’t it? Turn your head — go on. Tell you wat: spin right about, do a twirl.’

  Ponderously Slater does so.

  ‘Feel sik?’ asks Hagen, leaning in towards him.

  ‘Not much,’ Slater admits.

  ‘See! It’s all a question of diameter! If I had the chance I’d build a wheel kilometres across and spin it real slow, it’d be just like walking on the ground!’

  The war goes on, but it’s a waiting rather than a shooting game. Their mole, their inside-guy, has stopped reporting to them, Maybe he’s just gone deeper undercover, maybe he’s shifted his allegiance, maybe he’s dead. Slater finds it hard to care, except that - if he doesn’t get back to them soon - he may have to write that operation off, which can only postpone the capture of Gradi.

  fifteen.

  Paul

  Boredom prolonged is exhausting in a way nothing else quite is. The occasional moments when the war was actively stressful could not leaven the lump of its overwhelming tedium. That which does not kill us makes us weaker; but because the sub-brain does not believe it can ever die, we can mistake the fact that we have not yet been killed with the belief we cannot be killed; we can confuse this weakness with a new sort of strength.

  I reacted to confinement poorly. I could not get out - that line from the Lord of the Rings, the one that always most thrummed my heart with dread, we cannot get out we cannot get out. It speaks to a claustrophobia that transcends space (for we could always leave whichever Upland house we happened to be in and fly to another); the active claustrophobia of the human being unable to escape the prison house of his breathing, the bars of his own ribs, the shakles that strap the heart into its one restless position. The odiousness of the circumstance was made much more acute by the continuity of fear. Through portholes we sometimes saw Quanjet planes slipping through the dark, like oysters down a gullet, minnow-sized far below us, darting and surging forward, death in the shape of a spacecraft.

  They are at the gate.

  We did not spend our time stuk in any one single house. We flew up, being miserly with our jets and trying to get as much manoeuvrability from EleMag alone. We hovered, kites or kestrel. Then we rolled down the gravity hill again and slotted ourselves into some new house’s porch. The plan was laughably simpleminded. The Americans worked methodically through the Uplands, knoking on doors and pulling themselves inside house after house; they came inside always grim-faced, always in threes or fours, always with guns primed and pointed. They logged the house’s transp, looked through all the rooms, all the storage space, and left only when satisfied that Gradi was not lurking Anne-Frank like, in some architectural interstice. They never doubled bak and undertook a surprise immediate re-search: had they done so, they would have captured Gradisil early on in their campaign. But they never did. Gradi’s absolute assurance that they never would amazed and rather disconcerted me - I couldn’t share it, I was nervy and anxious, certain that my capture (and who knows? my torture - my execution) at the hands of the Americans was only hours away. Had I been in charge o
f the American operation that would have been the first thing I would have done. But, Gradi said, this was not how the military mind worked; and events proved her right.

  So, soon after the military had been through, a householder would call us with their transp number. This information was passed to us in code, but our codes were laughable simple - so simple as to be overlooked by the five-AI trillion-bit-a-second network of prime-number-based codecrakers owned by our enemy. Gimcrak things like - numbers which were page references to a previously agreed book, in which the first sentence would be read for the number of vowels (or consonants, depending on whether the day had a ‘t’ in it). Schemes like this generated transp locations.

  We flew up, we waited and then we picked out target below us, and lodged for a week or more in another house. This was how we spent the siege.

  There were other ways in which our warmaking blundered like a bumble-bee through super-rapid American detection webs designed to capture atomic-finesses. No American discussion of military strategy took place inside a room with only one wall between the interlocutors and vacuum - because a properly aimed laser device could read the vibrations of the fabric of the house and convert it into a remote account of the conversation. Nor did American soldiers discuss sensitive matters online or over the phone, for fear of the messages being intercepted and decoded (as if we possessed the capacity to do either thing!). So they gathered their personnel into physical proximity, within shielded double-walled cells deep inside their forts, with interference patterns drumboxing into the fabric of the building to be on the safe side. It didn’t matter. Gradi knew wat their strategy was going to be anyway. It was always going to be the only strategy it could be: to continue the blokade and starve the Uplands into a suitably abject surrender; to continue the house-to-house searches; to seize the monies of all combatant Uplanders — and that was all of us - and freeze it, pending proper legal settlement of reparations and tax contributions, which would in turn follow a proper surrender. That’s wat they did.

  We, on the other hand, were cavalier, a reklessness dictated by necessity, and in which we continued driven, most of us, by a sense that, since we were only postponing the inevitability of our final defeat, only drawing out the process to squeeze out a few consolation dribbles of America humiliation, it accordingly didn’t matter a whole lot, even if we were captured. Sometimes Gradi, Mat, Grinning Georgina, Haskell Bacevich and Desai would sit in a room talking for hours, the mouldy wall resounding with our secrets for all the solar system to hear, if only the Americans had known which house to monitor. We phoned one another all the time, on easily accessed channels, to talk about how long it would be before the surrender: one month more, maybe. Maybe two. There were caches: clusters of sea-bred cattle floating freeze-dried in open space, decontaminated by the ambient radiation, roped together with a single tether to which a transp was tied. The provision of these awkward-looking meat-satellites, blak-eyeballed, scuffy-skinned giant slugs of meat, had been one of the few examples of Upland advance planning. From time to time the Americans chanced upon one of these dumps, and confiscated it; from time to time a desperate Uplander obtained the transp and seized the whole lot, trying to hoard it to trade meat for other necessities - water, technology, sex. But the first three people to try that found that it was Upland Irregulars rather than potential traders who answered their obliquely phrased announcements. They disappeared; scoured to oxidised powder, their atoms tipped like cupwater in the sea, to mingle with the winds of the upper atmosphere.

  ‘The caches,’ said Gradi, at several meetings, so that her words might pass as gossip amongst the whole community ‘belong to all the Uplands; not to any individual uplander. We take from them as we need, and only in emergency.’

  She was forcing a collectivity upon this immiscible congregation of selfish billionaires and loners. She could do this only because of the extreme circumstances in which we all found ourselves. From time to time I even wondered if this had been her true motive for driving us so implacably into a war we could never win, precisely in order to generate a climate of such harshness, precisely in order to remove the billionaires from their money, so that she could press them all into something resembling collective citizenship.

  ‘How long, Gradi?’ I asked her.

  ‘When the time is right,’ she said. But she meant when I will it.

  ‘You’re pregnant, Gradi,’ I pointed out, often. ‘You’re pushing this whole thing dangerously close to the limit, you know. Shouldn’t you make overtures to the Americans now? You’ll need to think about transferring down to a groundling hospital pretty soon - there are specialist facilities in Germany that deal with pregnancies that began in zero g. But you’ll need to make your peace with the Americans soon. You’ll need to surrender.’

  She never gave me a straight answer.

  Living, this day followed by that day, was appallingly monotonous. We rose in our planes and hovered, kestrels of patience before swooping to our destination. This time it was a poky little three-room house, already crowded with half-a-dozen people: two couples, two single people, all sleeping at irregular hours in bags pinned to the walls like bizarre artworks, or (the material tending to be printed with bright colours) shapeless butterflies. The pressure of so many people in so small a space told in repulsively immediate ways. Unable to afford more sophisticated treatments for the air, the house trailed a ten kilometre line into the upper atmosphere, and circulated the air; but with nine people (for Gradi and Georgina and I joined them) there was too much CO2 being breathed out to be compensated for by this slender pulse, so old-fashioned scrubbers had to be switched on: noisy, grinding machines that seemed to scrape tortuously through my brain.

  A dozen varieties of mould grew on the walls of this house, fed by the moist funk of combined breaths and warmed by our body heat: blak velvety trim mosses, or patches of spekly discolouration that, on closer examination, revealed myriad dark green trefoil particles, or little pads of hairy growth. Spores went everywhere; everybody suffered, even Gradi — rheumy eyes, headaches, bloked noses, sneezes. Phlegm, ejected as the sneezer was pushed bakwards by Newtonian equalisation, stuk to the wall and could not always be located in the mess to be cleaned up afterwards. Crumbs, threads, scraps of paper and plastic, all floated through the air; all eventually made their way to the walls, into bends and crevices. To touch the walls (as a person sometimes needed to do) was to press fingers into a slimy gritty layer, and to come away oilily dirtied.

  We played chess, or talked, or watched the screen - mostly, in fact, we watched the screen, because the conversation very quikly exhausted itself, and the chess pieces, greasy with much use, tended to come unstuk from their magnetic squares and float away and get themselves lost in corners and behind objects. The screen was always tuned to EU news stations. From time to time an American ship would pass, broadcasting a disruptive signal and the screen would tingle into a haze of white-grey particles, the voice of the newsreader distorting to whistles, or groans. But these were only intermittent interruptions; the US was haphazard about disrupting our phone and screen communications.

  The war occupied the bulk of the news for a week. After the American declaration of victory, the news became bored with us, and other stories pushed to the front: EU diplomatic outrage at the treatment of the Uplands, and particularly the seizure of so much EU citizens’ money (the proportion of Upland citizenry was five to one EU/US). But, soon, the approaching new century, with its myriad excited celebrations, was the topic: and after that EU elections approached; and then the Euro Football championship build-up. From time to time the news would revert to us: and any depressed buzz of conversation there happened to be in whichever room we were in would cease. Uplanders who had happened to be trapped downbelow when the war began were frequently interviewed. Klara, my mother-in-law, became a frequent figure: with her wild hair and her restless eyes she was exentric enough, and not yet sixty she was still physically attractive enough, to make good television. There we
re deeper lines in her brow, and she had recently acquired a mole on her chin, like an old crone - a raised circle of pale pink with a plastiky look about it, one more piece of evidence of her animadversion to the benefits of pharmakos. But these badges of age in fact, and perhaps counterintuitively, only made her appear more real, more human and therefore attractive. She spoke only to the one theme: the great crime committed by the Americans against her family - against her, and therefore against Gradi, and therefore (it being universally assumed by now that Gradi symbolically embodied her people) against the whole of the Uplands. Klara dilated upon this crazy theory with such passion and detail, to any interviewer prepared to put a camera in front of her face, that it became something of a fixture. The Americans even issued a formal denial; they refuted the damaging accusations made by and so on and so forth.

  By late January there was, officially, no more war and we figured very rarely in the news. ‘The real war-zone,’ Gradi said, on more than one occasion, ‘isn’t up here: it’s in the courtroom’. But even the various legal news channels rarely mentioned us; since the lodging of the US victory announcement there had been very little legal action. Some groundstuk Uplanders, whose money had been frozen by the Americans, had lodged suit to try and free up their money; but this was a fairly half-hearted strategy. A few exentric individuals had weighed in with personal suits, pro-Up or pro-US, adding to the detritus that washes up and down on the wide surf-beach of the Law. But the courts were waiting for the real business - for Gradi’s official surrender, which would unlok the flood-gates.