Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  In my misery I became looser-tongued. Gradi, who slowly recovered a percentage of her strength and her vigour (more than fifty, I’d say) sometimes asked me: ‘Are you alright, Paul? You seem very contemplative. ’ And where before I would have replied with some studied blandness, as befitted my role in the marriage, now I startled her with: ‘You married me only for my money, I think - you married me because I was wealthy, and you needed money to get up here.’

  I think I was quite deliberately trying to hurt her feelings in saying this. It was a poor and passive sort of aggression, I’m sorry to say; and Gradi had spent a decade perfecting precisely the political skills needed to turn away a sharp rebuke. She was able to intuit exactly my present blend of resentment and self-pity, and (for I baited her several times with this observation in the aftermath of her miscarriage) reply appropriately - as it might be:

  — ‘Don’t be silly, you know how close is the connection between us. It’s lasted this long, hasn’t it? I’d be lost without you — you’re my anchor’ which would scurr my self-pity in a little typhoonic swirl, and leave me teary-eyed and holding her and babbling about how much I love her. Or,

  — ‘Have you’ (spoken in a gruff, accusing voice) ‘been storing that resentment up all this time, and not spoken about it before? That’s a slap in the face to me, Paul. That’s not loyal.’ Which would act as an astringent and stem my complaints. Or,

  — ‘Right,’ (with a laugh), ‘and the gender balance in the Uplands is - wat is it? Eight men for every two women, most of the men super-rich, and one or two of them even better looking than you, my love, as if that were possible’ (with another sly laugh, and a chuk under the chin) ‘and I could have any one of them, yet I chose you - for your money?’ The comical incredulity of this might even coax a smile from me. Because, of course, she was correct: any heterosexual Upland man would have been powerless before her, should she have decided to claim him as her partner. The half-year of siege had only enlarged her in the collective Upland perception. As our misery increased, increment by increment, the more people chafed and gossiped and blamed the stubbornness of Gradi for prolonging the inevitable capitulation, the more we nevertheless found ourselves relying upon her. Everything else that had acted as orientation in our lives had been stripped away, so we clung more tightly to the one thing we still had. Take riches from the rich, and wat is left? Before the war, and speaking as a wealthy man, I might have said, nothing. But I discovered the truth was otherwise: without money the wealthy man becomes a creature defined by the money-shaped gap inside him, the hole-locus of all desire; he becomes a man in whom wanting is very much more intensely present. It is that wanting that is the key medium of the politician. Do you think Gradi didn’t know this?

  We passed from house to house, Gradi’s health slowly improving. And, as if some darkest point had been encountered and passed and overcome, the mood of the Uplanders we encountered improving as well. At Ustinov’s house for a second, or perhaps third, time, we found the old Russian in heroic spirits.

  ‘I shall thank you, Gradi, today,’ he boomed, as we floated through his doorway. ‘Thank you for taking away my wealth! I see now how much it was a parasite upon my soul - without it, I have rediscovered myself!’ His eyes burned with this new pleasure, asceticism, the one novelty his pleasure-weary body had not experimented with before, a thing that at a stroke validated all his old self-indulgences in one heroic action of self-denial.

  ‘You’re welcome, old friend,’ replied Gradi.

  Then there was the plague. No, that’s too absurd a way of putting it. We had regressed, in our hurtling cells, into the Middle Ages. I’m sure all of us had paid for that marrow pharmakos that protects the body against virus, in watever manner those pharmakoi work — those little gene-inflecting concentrations of organic matter that grow in a thready knot in the relevant part of the body, dictating the cellular manufacture of x or the cellular growth or inhibition of y. But of course, unlike drugs, pharmakoi cannot simply be stored in a cabinet and brought out at need; they need professional placement, they need to be adjusted to the specifics of each body before insertion. Even if we had had the supplies, and the medical personnel, in the Uplands, we would not have had the machines. And so we regressed to a more primitive humanity. Some disease, a three-quarter virus perhaps, bypassed our pharmakos, and spread quikly from Uplander to Uplander. In one sense we were fortunate that these diseases were not more deadly than they were. Everybody learns at school just how many assassin viruses there were in the twentieth century, the flu that killed hundreds of millions at the beginning, the sex virus that killed as many at the end. We suffered from neither of those skull-crossbone diseases. Our illness made us feverish and sik, and turned our eyeballs blood red, and muddied our urine; but only a few people succumbed fatally to this; older, weaker folk. Most of us suffered for a week, and then recovered. Gradi did not even get sik. I don’t know how she avoided it, given the continual restlessness with which we passed from house to house, avoiding the Americans.

  It meant that opening the door of a house was like as not opening a hatch into some sewer-like space, mephitic, the air rotten and warm and sometimes so foul that the lungs rebelled in coughs from having to breathe it. This was not the stench of disease as such (although the infected tended to sweat a stiky, rotten-meat-smelling sweat during the hottest part of the infection); it was that those who were ill were unable to perform even the most rudimentary housework.

  Then I fell ill myself. It seemed, at the time, simply the logical summation of my despair: my mind had collapsed, and so my body followed. I floated in a perfect distillation of agony for long days, unable to sleep for more than a clutch of minutes at a time but never exactly awake either. My eyesight dimmed. My mouth felt crusted over inwardly with dry scales, my fingers seemed to my disordered senses grotesquely large and elongated, as if the forearm that led up to my palm had been surreally replicated, five-fold, at that same palm’s other end, although, when I peered at the digits they looked normal enough. I hitched myself to a wall fastening, and watched the lozenge of sunlight slide over the floor and up the wall opposite me, making its twenty-minute dash, pausing for twenty minutes and reappearing again at the start point. In my confusion I think I forgot that I was in the Uplands at all. Perhaps I believed I was in the France house, lying on a bed, and watching not forty minutes but twenty-four hours with each of these passages, such that months seemed to pass in a delirious stasis of misery. I was living according to geologic rather than human time, watching the parallelogram of light move away from me and up the wall before fading, only to be reborn in a swift swelling illumination as a square on the floor again. After an indeterminate period of time I was grasped, not unkindly, and floated through the room and through the door into a plane, to be jostled by acceleration, and shuffled through into a new house. For a while I was aware only of my skin’s clamminess, in a misty vagueness.

  Finally I began to recover my health. I was first very thirsty, and then, as my wits restored, extremely hungry. I devoured such scanty rations as I had and begged like a child for more. There wasn’t enough food, but perversely even without a full or healthy diet I became strong again.

  We were in the house of a loyal Uplander, a man called Rorik. It was a three-room string, with a (and these were increasingly common in Upland houses) transparent thik-plastic pod at the far end in which a variety of vegetables were being grown. The Americans, on their periodic searches, made sure to trample out anything they found there, the better to starve us into submission; but it seemed that in the bright Upland sunlight and the zero-g plants grew surprisingly rapidly. I ate real cress, bitter little carrots so orange as to be practically red, a soup made from some variety of algae whose name I cannot remember but which tasted tart and strong and filled me up. Gradi was her old self, inexhaustible, as good-looking as Jekyll and strong as Hyde. Rat-tat. Bang!

  ‘Things are moving along,’ Mat told me, fidgety with excitement. ‘It’s very much a
ll coming together. At last!’ he cooed. ‘At last! Gradi was telling me - it’s almost time!’ So I knew that Gradi had finally judged the moment right to approach the Americans. I was so exhausted, so depressed, it meant very little to me.

  ‘How long has it been?’ I asked her directly, during our first time alone. Myself and Gradisil alone together! ‘I think I lost trak of time there, for a while, whilst I was ill. How long has it been?’

  ‘The siege? Nearly nine months.’

  ‘You knew, didn’t you?’

  She didn’t answer this. I meant, and Gradi understood perfectly: you knew when the war started that you would hold out for this length of time, nine long months; and you knew that this would cost you your pregnancy, but you judged that a sacrifice you were prepared to make. For why? Only to hold the Americans at arm’s length for this period of time, so that post-war legal discussions would be marginally advantaged? The cinder in my heart had come alight at this, and my resentment at the death of ‘my son’ (oh) in the service of this fuking political game-playing roused me. My murdered son (oh, oh). She could tell I was angry, even as I floated there sullenly.

  ‘It’ll soon be over now,’ she offered, as if to placate me.

  ‘This part of it is over,’ I retorted, ‘is wat you mean. But it will not be over - it will never be over for you, will it? This phase ends, but you’re going to continue the war some other way — aren’t you.’

  She didn’t need to confirm the rightness of this judgment. It was, really, self-evident.

  ‘So,’ I pressed, weary and angry at the same time, ‘wat now? Do you contact the Americans and ask for a parley?’

  She nodded, very slightly. Then, an almost incredible admission. ‘I know it has been hard for you.’ She never said anything like that to me before. ‘I’m - grateful that you’ve stuk by me.’ That didn’t sound like her either. Perhaps it was her acting the role of concerned spouse. Or, then again, perhaps it sounded, to my ears at any rate, almost like a plural vous, not a tu, that you, of all people, have stuk by me. I pondered it for a while. How to answer it? Something like: wat else could I do? Did I have the force within me to escape your gravitational pull? I didn’t say anything.

  Failure, when it is finally embraced, is a more complex and more deeply human experience than success. Any success is only a postponement of later failure, after all, for otherwise we’d all live forever in endless delight. But it is the prospect of failure that is the so much more debilitating thing than failure itself. Entering the house of failure, as we finally did, was in fact a refreshing thing. It was almost a sense of reconnection with the essential business of being human. And we realised at the time, just as, looking bak, the observation seems unavoidable to me: that there was something monstrous about Gradi’s willpower, her insistence on holding out far longer than she needed to do, regardless of the cost to herself or to others. The house of failure was the place at which this monstrosity finally assumed its normal shape again.

  sixteen.

  Slater

  Surrender

  It’s the ‘we need to talk’ that passes between international players. It’s the yada-to-yada of nation-state affairs.

  Nine months after the declaration of American victory Slater is flown High Arc to DC. It is mid-morning in the eastern US. He is escorted from the plane into government buildings by an honour guard, the moment captured by official cameras. He walks a long beechwood-lined corridor. At the far end his friend Colonel Philpot is waiting, sitting patiently on a slotted beechwood bench outside a large double door. ‘Congratulations, Slayer,’ says Philpot.

  ‘Wat you doing here, Philp?’ Slater asks.

  But Philp only nods him to the main doors, and together they walk, through the portal, onto the deep soft pile of purple carpets into which the crest of the President is woven, a deadening of step. The Vice-President is there, and General Niflheim.

  ‘You’re promoted Colonel, Slater,’ says the Veep, without preliminary. ‘Colonel Philpot will be your new aide, and act as your liaison with me.’

  And so, after more than a year of saluting Colonel Philpot and keeping his raillery within proper military bounds, Slater is suddenly Philp’s equivalent in rank and his de facto superior. He has been expecting a promotion, but the suddenness of this startles him. ‘Thank you, sir’ he says, loudly. ‘Thank you!’

  The far wall has nine screens on it, tuned to nine different TVs. All of them are news channels, and the only news is the Uplands war.

  Through the bay doors a path leads away, flanked by at-attention guardsmen daffodils, quivering slightly in the breeze. The apple tree in the lawn bulges with cottony blossom, as if its soul has returned to it. The sky is water blue, water clean. Colonel Slater, and not yet thirty. Colonel.

  ‘She wants to meet,’ says the Veep, and for a moment Slater has trouble dragging his attention bak to the room. People will say of me, he thinks to himself, that he had a good war. He can’t stop himself smiling. Colonel Slater! Fuk! ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

  ‘Gradisil. She’s made the usual advances through diplomatic channels. Course she’s jittery, afeared we’ll simply imprison her. She doesn’t seem to realise that our situation is now legally triksier, now that so much time has passed since the victory declaration. Nevertheless a meeting is a good idea. The surrender has not been accepted yet, and that’s the crucial legal rubicon - wat I mean is, when that happens the whole legal flow will begin. You go, you take Philpot with you. Meet with her.’

  ‘Where?’ says Slater. ‘US, or EU?’

  ‘Up, of course,’ says General Niflheim, almost crossly. His big, lumpy face is looking reddened, a little scorched; less than healthy. Slater half-wonders why he doesn’t get his facialist to prescribe him something to make his skin less florid. He almost wonders why Niflheim is being so crosspatch. But he can’t think about these, because the glory of Colonel Slater is filling his mind.

  ‘In the Uplands,’ he says. ‘OK.’

  ‘There’ll be a run-around,’ says the Veep. ‘They’ve asked that you carry no gun and no personal transp. It’s to be a face-to-face, and they don’t want to give her position away. Like I said, they’re being suitably paranoid.’

  ‘It’s urgent,’ says Niflheim, again with an undertone of wrath. Slater tunes in to this ire, but cannot imagine why the general would be angry with him. Or is it this mission? Does he think this mission is a bad idea? Why doesn’t he just say so?’

  ‘Urgent, like the general says,’ confirms the Vice-President. ‘You’re going straight to a Quanjet and straight up. To a house, thence who knows where. But they’ve promised to get you bak within the hour, so you’ll be coming down to me early this afternoon to tell me wat - she - says.’

  ‘Am I to . . . excuse me, sir, but am I to negotiate with her?’

  ‘Wat’s to negotiate? She’s the President of the Uplands. We’ve beaten her fair and square in open war. That’s the intro and main portion and postscript of the whole story. That’s all there is to say. I’m assuming she wants to meet with you to surrender, in actual fact even if not in so many words. She’ll want terms. She’s only got one thing to negotiate with, and that’s herself; she’ll want something in return for handing herself over. Listen to wat she wants, concede nothing, come bak down and tell me.’

  ‘Sir!’ Slater salutes.

  ‘Now, this is crucial, Colonel. We’re flying the best Colonel-Legals we have up from the EU arena right now. They’ll be prepped and ready for their trips Upland this very evening. If she offers to surrender don’t concede anything. Wat I mean is, of course, she will offer to surrender, and your job is not to concede anything. Tell her that we’ll send a team to accept her surrender. The transition to the proper post-war legal protocol is . . .’ he shakes his head with a sour expression on his face to convey just how vital this is. ‘No schoolchild errors, Colonel. Don’t be triked by her offering, say, unconditional surrender. Don’t say anything that a lawyer might subsequently use in court to argue t
hat the US accepted her unconditional surrender. You follow wat I’m saying?’