by Adam Roberts
The people with whom we stayed often pressed Gradi on precisely this point, ‘I’m not used to the hunger, the actual physical hunger, Gradi,’ said Ustinov, when we stopped for five days in his spacious house. And it was true, his skin was draped loosely about his large bones now, like pale leathery robes. ‘You see I’ve never experienced it before, in my life, and it’s much harder than I thought. I’ve lived that whole life as a wealthy man, and never known hunger. I’m too old to turn ascetic now, Gradi - when will you announce your surrender? Make it soon, draw a line under this suffering, and let me get my people to fly me up some chiken, some salted trout, caviar, real red cabbage in vinegar — ’
‘Stop!’ I squealed like a whiny child. ‘You’re making my mouth water.’ And it was; drool was seeping out through my lips and glazing my chin.
‘It won’t be long now, my friend,’ said Gradi. ‘Soon. I’m just waiting to - to time it right.’ She looked corpse-like, her body upsettingly distorted - the shoking plumpness of her waterballoon belly and the extreme thinness of her arms, her legs, the suked-in cheeks. She was continually nauseous and often sik. She barely slept. There were violet leaf-shaped patches under her eyes all the time. But she still manages to conjure energy and charisma, as if from a limitless store, whenever we hauled ourselves through the door of a new house, a new place to stay for five days, or three weeks, or a single night. ‘Hello, hello! It’s excellent to see you again, John’ (or) ‘Nan-Shan’ (or) ‘Deborah’ (or) ‘Mohammed’ (or) ‘Jukes’ (or) ‘Gallano, my old friend’ (or) ‘Parky’, or whosoever it might be. The brightness of the eyes, the carefully focused interest, the sense she always managed to generate of doing, of futurity, possibility, change, excitement - all those things. As she got iller and thinner it became more of an effort for her to do this; but she still made that effort.
Everybody had had the Americans through, in their lumine red-and-white suits, with their guns out and primed. Some Uplanders showed, with shy pride, bruises on their cheekbones or foreheads, where they had objected noisily to this intrusion and floated too close to the troops and been batted bak with a telescopic baton, jak-and-boxing out suddenly to wak them with its plastic tip. It was poor resistance, but it was better than acceptance.
We stayed for four days at the Islamic retreat daru’l-ridzwan: twelve serious men of various ages in white clothes gone grubby with unchanging wear. Their hostility to the Americans had overcome their distaste for the billionaire’s play-republic with its immodest female president. Gradi wrapped her head in a shawl and acted a part of perfect restraint. ‘They came in here,’ said the Imam, an elderly man with a trailing beard called Avram, ‘without courtesy or respect. They rummaged through everything and disarranged the pages of the holy Qur’an. They knoked many of us with their punching stiks, and aimed their guns.’
‘They are,’ said Gradi, ‘scared.’
This was the first time I had heard her say such a thing. It startled me, but the Imam nodded sagely. ‘They are looking for you,’ he said, inclining his head towards the unself-declared President. ‘The longer they go without finding you, the more scared they become.’
When we left the daru’l-ridzwan, the Imam gave us a scroll on which was written, in willowy Arabic script, the first line of the declaration of American independence.
It is very hard to know how to describe the smell of this war. Smells grow old so much more quikly than do the people who create them. A stiff, cabbagy-rotten stench that never left, that seemed to lodge insinuatingly inside the nose itself. The tart, metallic smell of the fabric of the house; the purply-green stink of old sweat, unwashed flesh, the softly gagging smell of food rotting. Not that many people allowed food to go off, since we lived in various degrees of starvation.
More acute than the shortages of food and water, than the itchy sensation of clothes worn without change or wash for weeks at time, than the oppressive sameness of all the different houses, loaded with weary hostages to Gradi’s will, imprisoned as was I in her sheer stubbornness of mind — worse than any of this was not being able to talk with my sons. Gradi’s reasoning was that the Americans had certainly loaded the screens and phones in Helsinki and France with their most sophisticated locating devices; and that as soon as Hope or Sol answered my call two Quanjets and a dozen Marines would storm whichever house we were placing the call from. I knew she was right, but this didn’t stop me growing increasingly furious with her for depriving me of my boys. Oh, they were neither of them mine; but this fact had ceased to gnaw at me. Hope peered at me with Mat’s eyes; and every guest or passer-by who complimented me on how like me my son was touched nothing but a gentle melancholy inside me. People were less likely to compliment me on perceived similarities between myself and Sol, for he was a singular-looking little boy who bore surprisingly little resemblance either to me or even to Gradi; as he grew older he acquired a purer Eastern look, short dark hair, brooding little face, canny little eyes. But they were still my boys. I had hugged them when they hurt themselves or were sik; I had changed their nappies — or, at least, I had been present when servants had changed their nappies. I had taken them out for ice cream, or walked in parkland with them whilst they whizzed past on their powerbikes. I had sat with Sol in the ambulance all the way to hospital, where doctors had fixed his broken leg. When we look at a tree we give no thought to the provenance of the conker from which it grew; we care only for the way the trunk has risen straight as a solid geyser, the way the foliage spreads itself to accept the photonic gift of the sunlight. The way I saw it, if these boys were not strictly mine at birth, then I had made them mine during the process of raising them.
I achieved a degree of peace; but Gradi’s third pregnancy unsettled me again. Because, after betraying me (as if she could help it!) with Mat to conceive Hope, and with Liu to conceive Sol, she had enacted a more complex betrayal for her third child and ensured, with her tenacity, that it was fathered by me. The conception happened during that period of three months of intense travel and activity, as she went from house to house in her land readying her people for the coming storm. She insisted I come. She insisted we sleep together. She even managed a perfect imitation of insecurity, luring me in to physical reassurance. As the wind blew sparks out of the wings like electric bubbles and the sky outside grew darker she leant in to me and said, ‘We make love so rarely these days.’
I blushed. I had not expected this. ‘I’m sorry,’ I blurted.
‘No, my love,’ she said, putting her arm round my nek. ‘I’m not rebuking you, I know that kind of thing can be difficult after so many years of marriage.’
‘It was difficult on our wedding night,’ I said, more severely than I intended, ‘if you remember.’
‘But it’s been better since.’ This sounded feeble to her, so she added, ‘Much better, really’, which qualification (of course) made it worse.
‘Off and on,’ I said, to try and agree. My blush had sunk inward, and I was feeling that chafing sensation in the chest that signifies swallowed anger. Why was this making me angry? Perhaps I had grown so used to disappointment that I was disinclined to surrender it? At least a person knows where they are and wat to expect with disappointment.
‘I want to try harder,’ she told me, facing me directly, ‘There’s a new pharmakos, a married-love concoction, that — ’
‘I’ve already had a pharmakos for my sexual drive,’ I blurted out. This sentence came out much louder than I had intended and my blush roasted again on my face.
Gradi looked actually shoked. I had never before, in all our years together, admitted this fact to her before: this fact from my life before her.
‘You have?’
‘It was years ago,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘It was before you. Only, these sorts of pharmakos, they root in the brain pathways, don’t they? I don’t know if it’s possible to combine two of them. I mean, not into the same physical system — like the sex system. They might throw off unforeseen — ’ I stopped speaking.
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sp; Gradi was looking intently at me. There was a nakedness in her eyes that I had not seen for many years; and perhaps I had never seen it before. Behind the calculation and political charisma and judgment as to how to play people, there was this almost child-like innocency of astonishment.
‘You never told me!’
‘It never came up,’ I gruffed. But then, immediately, I corrected myself; the nakedness of her gaze was warming me a little; I blushed. ‘No that’s not it, of course,’ I said. ‘I’m ashamed of it. That’s it. You always seem to inhabit yourself so powerfully, with such effortless command. It makes me feel inferior. I mean, I mean,’ I added, speaking more rapidly, ‘in a bad way - of course, I feel inferior to you in lots of ways that are right, proper, you’re Artemis and I’m happy to be your acolyte, you’re Gradi, I’m just an Uplander. But there’s a place inside a man that reacts very badly to being diminished. I have no doubt it’s a ridiculous caveman thing. But — ’
At this point she kissed me, tenderly on the lips, and leant away again. Tears threatened at the bak of my eyes. In that moment all my buried and impacted resentment just melted away; as if this was the single moment for which I had been waiting. Sleeping beauty woken by a kiss. ‘I love you!’ I cried. ‘I love you!’
‘And I love you too, Paul,’ she replied. I think that was the only time, in all our married life, that she said the phrase that way, just straight out as a flat statement without qualifier. It filled my heart.
‘We will,’ I swore. ‘We’ll make love more often! Let’s make a child together - let’s make a baby.’ I had never known her so open to me, so guileless and unprotected. My prik was stiffening then and there in the plane.
‘Another one,’ she said. ‘Very well. But, Paul, wat was your pharmakos? ’
‘Wat?’ I asked, stupidly, distracted by my increasing seizure of desire.
‘You said you had a pharmakos treatment for your sex drive — tell me about it. When was it? Wat was it for?’
‘It was when I was a teenager,’ I gabbled, eager to exploit this sudden intimacy. ‘Years and years ago. I’m sorry I never told you about it. I should have told you about it.’
‘But wat was it?’
‘It made me hetero.’
‘Really?’
‘The doctor was rather surprised, actually,’ I said, trying to remember interesting details I could tell her about wat was, actually, the dullest of medical interventions. ‘He asked me twice to confirm that this was wat I wanted. He said that most people came to him for the opposite - straight men who wanted to be gay men, and took the pharmakos to lodge their minds that way. Men who were having too little success with women, and who believed they were going to increase their chances of getting sex. That sort of thing’
‘I’m sure it would. Would increase their chances, I mean.’
‘Or, if not that exactly,’ I went on, driven by the strange new dynamic that had blossomed between us, to be as precise and truthful as possible, ‘then at least to simplify their sexuality. Male homosexuality is really preferable to male heterosexuality in many ways. It’s a less conflicted, more straightforwardly male sort of sexuality. Prik, prik, you know? Anyway, the doctor told me he had a dozen men wanting to be oriented homo for every one who wanted to opposite. But I wanted the opposite.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh — ’ and I grimaced. The pressure to continue this rigorously truthful communication was starting to bow down my words. How to explain it? ‘It was complicated. I think I wanted to escape myself a little bit.’ I tried to remember. ‘I think that’s wat I wanted.’
She kissed me again.
That night, in our own house in the hurtling Uplands, we made love - this was the first time for several months. We shared a sleeping bag, and clutched one another like swimmers, and went through the slightly unsatisfactory buking and wriggling of zero-g sex. We shared the same sleeping bag every night for two weeks. This was when our third child was conceived, and he (the early scan revealed he was he) was mine, he was my blood and genes.
That was many months before, in the late autumn of 2099. Now it was February in the year 2100, and still Gradi had not relaxed her will. She was holding out for something, although she would not tell us wat. Why should she bother telling us? It was all happening in her mind, a spindle strung on the spar of her will, that was all. Increasingly, people, exhausted and starved and unhappy, pressed her. ‘When’s the surrender coming, Madame President?’ asked Aziz, in his fantastically messy and ramshakle house.
Gradi simply hung there, immovable as a planet; and as her legs and arms grew thinner and her face seemed to shrink, it was the absolute pulchritude of her swelling belly that was increasingly coming to define her physical presence.
Mat was there too. Even he, the most loyal of Gradi’s immediate staff, had begun, grumpily, to press her to name the date by which the collective misery would be over - which is to say, to challenge her. He had taken to reading the Qur’an over and over: an English-language translation, not the original. Whenever asked he still insisted he was an atheist; but his repetitive reading was puzzling. I remember one time in particular, for reasons that will become apparent in a minute. There were six of us in Aziz’s house: Gradi, Mat, Aziz, myself, and two women called Casta and Jocelyn. We had shared a meagre meal of pasta between us. Mat had sulkily floated over to the seam of wall and ceiling, where he piked crumbs and fragments and examined each of them in turn to see whether they were edible or not.
Casta, a short woman shrink-reduced by hunger to an infant’s frame, was talking to Gradi. She had Upland-pale skin, I remember, and large denim-coloured eyes, very striking eyes, variegated blue-grey rings that looked worn and tired in her round pale face. Her bone-blonde hair had grown out from its practical close crop over the six months of the siege into an unwieldy dandelion frizz. She spoke nervously, chatterly: ‘Everybody is talking about the surrender. When the Americans came through here last week, that’s all they were asking. They kept saying “wat’s she holding out for? Wat’s she hoping to gain by holding out?” I couldn’t answer them.’
‘Yes,’ called Mat, from the ceiling. ‘Wat are you holding out for, Gradi?’
‘Madame President,’ said Casta, trying to reframe Mat’s question in a more respectful manner. ‘Wat I mean to ask is — ’
‘Your people,’ said Mat, speaking over her, and pushing himself away from the wall with one leg to float down towards us, ‘are curious as to why you’re delaying? Your people want to know wat your plan is. In fact, Gradi, your people need to know that you have a fuking plan — that you’re not just making this up as you go along.’
Gradi fixed placid eyes on Mat and his miniature rebellion.
‘We were just in Ustinov’s house,’ Mat announced to the whole room. ‘Gradi and I.’ I’d been there too, but Mat didn’t mention that. ‘Ustinov and Gradi here spent three hours cloistered together, talking about . . . wat were you talking about, Gradi? You and he? Could you tell him wat you’re doing, wat you are playing at? Him and not us? Did you talk to him because he was clever enough not to put any of his money in dear-departed Bran’s Upland Bank, so he can still command funds? Is that why you treat us so cavalier, and keep him so close to your planning?’
‘Mat,’ said Gradi, in a quietly commanding voice, ‘be quiet.’
Mat glared at her, but stopped speaking, and shortly he returned to the ceiling to hunt for crumbs.
There was a very awkward silence. Gradi, sighed and, cradling her floating planet-belly with both hands, she started speaking:
‘Wat you all must try harder to understand,’ she said, in a brittle voice, ‘is that wars are won in the lawcourt. That’s one place where we can salvage something from this wrek. The US have all the advantages, but they have miscalculated in one respect. They prepared, legally I mean, for war, for victory and for my surrender. By not giving them this last thing we compel them to maintain their blokade. That means that, legally speaking, we are under siege. Do yo
u understand the significance of that?’
Everybody was looking at her.
‘There hasn’t been a siege since the twentieth century. And sieges haven’t been a regular part of warfare since the middle ages. Downbelow air power and heavy ordnance make it impossible to withstand military assault; walls get knoked down, citadels get occupied. The last siege was Berlin in the 1960s. Or perhaps Stalingrad in the 1940s. There’s not even legal consensus on that point, on which was the last siege, never mind on the proper legal protocols for siege warfare as such. Which means that, we have something for which the Americans have not been prepared. Nobody knows how the Belligerent Court will play this. All we have to do,’ she said these last words with a kind of desperate emphasis, ‘is to hold out long enough to establish that we have been besieged. Then we have humanitarian grounds, shaky legal precedent, room for manoeuvre.’ She was lying, of course; but I didn’t realise that ’til later. ‘Enough,’ she snapped, as if overwhelmed by our idiocy and disloyalty, ‘I’m going to sleep.’