by Adam Roberts
Later, with everybody asleep, Gradi and I zipped ourselves into a wall-bag in the bak-room by ourselves. She seemed distracted, so I hugged myself against her bak. ‘People are only anxious that this period of suffering be over,’ I whispered, like a supplicant. ‘That’s why Mat blew up in there.’
‘He lost it,’ she replied in a distant tone. ‘I expected more of him. I won’t forget this - that he lost it. At the crucial time.’
Unsure why I was defending Mat, I said: ‘it was only in front of you and me, and a couple of other people. We’re all loyal, it won’t go any further.’
‘That’s hardly the point.’
We were silent for a while.
Then, tentatively, I said: ‘We should talk, though, Gradi. We must, surely, be - you know where.’
‘Be? Where?’
‘We must be at the outside limit of this time period. I understand wat you said earlier, about the legal case and everything. About being under siege. But even so.’
Gradi laughed humourlessly. ‘That stuff about the siege - that’s not it.’ Her voice was grim. ‘That’s nothing. The US have a hundred senior officers in their Corps Legal who’ll tear that case to pieces in seconds.’
‘Yes? So wat did you . . . ?’
‘They’ll say we’re occupied, not besieged, and evidence the fact that American soldiers can pass easily from house to house. It won’t last three days in court.’
‘But if that’s not the thing . . .’
‘Georgie thinks we can go somewhere with it, but I think she’s being optimistic.’
‘Georgie?’
‘She’s my military second-in-command.’
‘She is? I didn’t know.’
‘Lots of things you don’t know, my love.’
Her condescension of tone piqued me. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to be like that. Nobody has been more loyal than me. I’ve laid my entire life at your disposal - all my money, my time, my,’ I couldn’t think of the word, so I said, ‘obedience. I didn’t know we still had a military command of any kind. There doesn’t seem much point in having one. You didn’t tell me?’
‘Top secret stuff, Paul.’ She sounded sleepy. ‘Bran showed how easily the Americans could get inside us.’
‘Alright,’ I said, my tom-tit masculinity asserting itself. ‘This is enough, right here. We’ve reached the final line. In fact, we crossed it a month ago - three months ago. Christ, Gradi, you’re pregnant! With my son. You’ve had four months, more, of zero-g pregnancy. It’s a miracle you haven’t lost the baby already. I daresay he’ll be born with some pretty problematic malformations. So, so, it stops, now. Why are you holding out? Wat are you waiting for? Is it just a kind of leader’s stubbornness, a refusal to admit that you’re beaten. We’ve all been beaten. Call the Americans, say wat they want to hear, then let’s get you to a downbelow hospital for the remainder of your pregnancy, and once Joshua is born — ’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she interrupted, with a harsh sort of laugh. ‘You named it?’
‘We talked about this. I told you I liked Joshua. Joshua is a good name.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said again.
‘It’s gone far enough. You can’t stay up here indefinitely. We’ve been luky so far, but you could miscarry — no, strike that, you will miscarry if you spend many more weeks in this starvation zero-g environment. We’re stopping this now.’
‘We haven’t been luky,’ she said.
‘He’s my child as well as yours. I get an equal say in wat happens.’
‘You say we’ve been luky so far, but we haven’t been luky,’ she repeated. This paused me for a moment. I tried a different approach, wheedling a little. ‘You’ve achieved amazing things,’ I said. ‘You’ve held this nation together through nearly half a year of extraordinary times. You’ve stood up to the world’s superpower pretty much single-handed. But — ’
‘It’s dead,’ she said.
I heard these words, and understood them, but for some reason the understanding did not mesh into the gears of my brain. It was still rattling along with its pointless chatter. ‘Once you surrender,’ I said, ‘all that will mean is the process of negotiation will begin, all the legal stuff. And that’ll take years.’
‘Felt it stop moving, stop kiking and so on, days ago. I can feel it’s motionless, not alive, I can feel it inside me, motionless and dead. Thirty, forty hours ago, maybe, it happened.’
There was a strip of cloth pinned over the porthole as a makeshift curtain. The rectangular border of this shape glowed with the inevitable, frequent dawnings of Uplands, the regular forty-minute gush of light escaping over the lip of the world. Crap caught all around the porthole glowed and threw off elongated shadows. The net of the cloth caught a draught of light in its close web and glowed.
‘Are you sure,’ I said, in a low voice. My chest was a creakily empty birdcage, not a boombox. I could barely swallow.
‘I’ve been getting these — ’ and she shuffled in the sleeping bag as if itchy, ‘cramps and, little tikly cramps. I think my body’s about to expel it.’
‘It,’ I repeated, in an accusing tone
‘I’m sorry you pegged it as Joshua in your mind, Paul,’ she said, in a level, chilly voice. ‘If I’d known you were thinking like that I would have discouraged you. That’s liable to make things harder than they would otherwise be. It’s - unfortunate.’
‘He’s dead?’ I said, stupidly.
‘It’s the Americans,’ she said, but without heat. ‘It’s another casualty of,’ but she broke off.
A hope fluttered feathery inside me. ‘You can’t be sure. It could just be sleeping. You don’t know he’s actually - dead, dead. We need a doctor. That guy MacWhirr, that Scottish guy, he was a doctor. Let’s pik out his transp and go over to his house, get him to look at you.’
‘It’s inside me,’ said Gradi, as if that said everything. Then she said, ‘I’m tired, I’m sleeping.’
I still didn’t believe it even when, with exhaustion challenging willpower, Gradi went into labour. Except that I did, really. I denied it to myself. Casta and Jocelyn attended her, in the bak room; and although the rest of us were forbidden from watching, I kept opening the door and looking inside. I looked for a few moments, and then withdrew in disgust, until agonised curiosity overwhelmed me again and I looked once more. Casta tried to catch as much of the mess with a pair of sheets, but zero g is a triksy medium and the walls were sloshed with blood and matter. Though dead, Joshua was a large size to push out; and though Gradi had had two children already her birth canal was unyielding and her muscles were sluggish. In the tiny house every howl and grunt was audible. Every single terrible yawp. Several times she screamed, and the scream wobbled as if modulated by a wah-wah pedal.
Mat turned up the volume on the screen. France-EU was playing Italia-EU in the semi finals of the EU Cup. With unpleasant irony, the swelling cheers of the football crowds seemed to grow after one or other piercing shriek of pain from my wife, as if moking her suffering.
It occurred to me, stunned and miserable as I was, that Gradi might die too. To die in labour seemed egregiously medieval: like the siege warfare that Georgie (Grinning Georgie was her military second-in-command? When had that happened? Why not Mat? Why not me? Shouldn’t we at least have been asked?) was planning to use as legal leverage when the courtrooms finally opened up to the cases. Wat if she died? Who would succeed? There was no succession. She had nominated no dauphin.
Then it was finally over, and pale Casta opened the door and flew past with a bloody bundle of sheets in her arms, stuffing the refuse straight into the porch and shutting the door. I watched from a side window as the convoluted sheet, more blak than red in the vacuum outside, partially unfolded, like stiff paper, as it floated away rotating slowly.
Gradi was asleep, but exhausted. She had lost a great deal of blood, and the house’s precious supply of water was at her disposal. She drank, she slept, she drank. I still didn’t believe it.
I sat up front, staring through the down-angled windshield at the whole world, all of it. From time to time a miniature shape moved with unnatural rapidity across the arc of the world, sweeping its path clear of absconding Uplander jets. It can only have been a Quanjet.
Gradi muttered something in her sleep.
Mat had come to sit next to me. I looked at him, an unashamed long look. I had known him for many years, had worked with him intimately in the creation of a new country, and had never had a prolonged conversation with him. Who was he? But if it came to that, who were any of them? They were like those advertising automata that litter the streets of American and EU cities, chattering phrases they don’t understand at anybody who approaches close enough.
He sat there now, looking drawn and thin, his sharp Malay features sharpened by that graphics programme that hunger runs called whittle. His hair, unwashed, was starting to clot together into dreadloks. ‘I feel terrible,’ he told me without preliminary. ‘I know it was a function of the zero g, her losing the baby I mean, but I feel almost responsible. I mean I feel terrible that I — well, you know.’
‘Wat?’ I asked, quite unable to see wat he meant.
‘The day before I’d lost it, I’d ranted at her. I mean, maybe it had nothing to do with - wat’s happened to her. But I can’t stop blaming myself for — ’ he stopped speaking, but almost eagerly I supplied my own silent conclusion to his sentence, for effectively killing your child, Paul. How little desire I had to talk to this man. Living in close proximity to anybody is like constantly handling a fragile piece of paper - some paper with antique value, an old literary manuscript or legal document. Perhaps you don’t read the paper (as I had rarely spoken to Mat). But you have it always about your person. We had experienced extraordinary things together, Mat and I — the attak by that rapist and Gradi’s lethal reply; the execution of Bran, the first traitor of the Republic, a hundred other things, he and I had been shoulder to shoulder. Yet I neither knew him nor liked him. The constant pressure of fingers and thumbs on the paper reduces it to shreds, rubs the ink away and eventually degrades the fabric of the parchment itself. I looked at Mat. He had long ceased to be a real person, a full human; he was just Mat, only a thin matrix of habit away from becoming some kind of blank simulation. I wondered how his death would affect me, but instead of indifference I found, in my heart, a sudden little kik, something approaching delight. From there it was a short step to starting to imagine how he might be killed; lingering over fantasy details, over wat I would say, over how I would lean in to push the knife —
‘She is strong,’ he was saying, glancing over his shoulder at Gradi.
‘She is that,’ I said, noncommittal.
‘I mean physically strong. But of course she is the other - she has a strong will. Those two go together, I think. If I were religious I would say she had a strong soul.’
‘Great soul,’ I said in the same blank voice.
‘Wat I mean is that she’ll return to health soon. It is barbaric, wat has happened in this house. We should have been in a hospital facility; instead of which she might as well have been in a Neanderthal cave. But she’ll recover. She’s strong.’
‘Wat if she doesn’t?’ I asked.
This made Mat’s cheeks darken; a blush connoting either shoked anger that I would say so unfeeling a thing, or else embarrassed aknowledgment that his own thoughts had been running along those very lines. For a minute we neither of us said anything. The sun went behind the earth in a glory of rays, like an illuminated engraving, and then into a more impressionist blush of colour, and then darkness.
‘Who takes over, if she does pass?’ I asked, puzzling myself as I spoke by the strange choice of words I have, half-unconsciously, employed. Passed?
Mat considered this, staring out the window. When he did speak it was not immediately obvious in wat way his comments related to the question I had asked.
‘Before I met her,’ he said, ‘I had only encountered the concept of will in an abstract sense. I studied philosophy, you know, at Paris XIV. There’s a lot of philosophy about will - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, that sort of thing. They say it’s important. And even political philosophers. And I thought I understood wat they meant. But until I met Gradi I really didn’t. Left to its own devices the early American Republic would have divided into two separate nations, and probably into three or four, but Lincoln said no. His will dammed that force up, kept the nation together. That’s how the historians read it anyway. I’d never really believed it.’
He cast a shy, almost flirtatious look in my direction, and then fixed his eye out the window again.
‘But that’s Gradi, isn’t it? It’s her will that we not give way to the Americans. Without her we would simply have given way, immediately. Indeed, without her there probably wouldn’t be a nation at all. She is will.’
This little lecture unnerved me. Mat had studied philosophy at university? This was news to me: I’d thought of him, when I’d thought of him at all, as just another rich boy, somebody filling his time and spending his money by indulging a passion for life in the Uplands. But, it occurred to me, he had intellectual pretensions.
‘You make her sound like a Nazi,’ I said, to show that I too had studied a little history. I pronounced this as if it were an English word, nahsi. As soon as I’d said it I realised I’d got the pronunciation wrong. Mat didn’t correct me. Perhaps he knew no better than I.
‘I’m not saying she’s a tyrant,’ he replied, looking over his shoulder at her sleeping form with exactly the twitchy paranoia a party apparatchik would look at a tyrant. ‘She’s not that. But she’s sometimes - I don’t know, superhuman.’
And with that I realised that Mat’s love for Gradi was different to mine. I loved her as a personal goddess, as muse, as the huntress-queen; mine was the love that mediated precisely my human emotions. But he loved her as the idealised force of history itself, as Will, as the spirit of the people incarnate. I despised him as a fool. But, at the same time, I despised myself, since he and I were the same individual - I wonder if you can understand that? He was defined almost wholly by his relationship to her; and I was defined almost wholly by that same relationship, and as a mathematical expression this reduced, straightforwardly, into an equivalence. We were male-shapes given substance only by Gradi’s regard. I despised everything. I even hated her, emotion that startled up inside me at odd moments and overtook me with its vehemence.
We piked up the transp we were waiting for, and cheking that our stretch of sky was clear, for the moment, of Quanjets we made our way to a four-room house.
Georgie was there. Her grin, her famous grin, had become a rather desperate, unpleasant feature. I remembered our first encounter with her, in that shared house with its floating and micturating cat, its mess and student-digs feel. She had come very far since then. She had hardened, and her grin had hardened too: now it emerged like something frozen on her face, and stayed there only long enough for it to thaw and vanish. She had, it transpired, spent more time travelling even than Gradi and I. ‘I’m not sure there’s a corner of the Uplands to which I haven’t been in the last few months’ she boasted wearily.
I was amused at the notion of the Uplands having corners. This, let’s be honest, is the least cornered land in the history of the world. Gradi said, ‘Good good.’
The two of them talked, at length and in detail. I started listening to them, but my mind could not focus. I found myself watching the action of Georgie’s lips, the action of Gradi’s lips, the chewy, pursing, smiling, circling motions, the liked-by-tonguetip, curling, tapping-together, holding-apart varieties of the movement of their mouths. The sounds these mouths were making became alm
ost an irrelevance. If a whole language can be created only out of the movement of deaf people’s fingers, then surely a whole soundless language could be created out of the motion of people’s lips.
I was in a state of shok, I think. The thing that surprises me about it is how well I was able to function, despite the depth of it. I went through the actions of life, day by day, waiting, watching the news. We watched France-EU beat UK-EU in the football, that celebrated Euro final match in which eleven goals were scored; and it occurred to me, in some thinking part of my head very far from my face, that the crowds in the Paris stadium were wholly absorbed in that match: that for those ninety minutes those teams and that ball were the most significant thing in the cosmos to them - that even those who supported the Uplands in their continuing siege (and many in the EU did support us) then all thoughts of us were squeezed from their heads during that time. It seems inconceivable, monstrous somehow, that all of us living and dying only a few miles above their pumpkin heads could be dismissed from their thoughts by a game of football. Our life was so intensely experienced, minute-by-minute, our misery was so acute, we most of us had that child’s belief that the whole of the universe must be infected by it, even if only to a degree. But that’s not the case, of course. People would file into football stadia, or settle down to watch a performance of Hamlet, or turn on their screens for the latest instalment of Sea Farm Family, or any 3nimation, or concentrate on cooking, or making love, or their jobs, or scratching themselves, or clearing a reluctant and maddening piece of grit from the lining of the eye, or adjusting the settings on their smartcloth coats for rain, or fingering a cut on the scalp caused by tripping and stumbling against a piece of furniture, or reading, and the evanescent thoughts of Upland suffering vanished completely from their heads. This, it seemed to me, was beyond comprehension.