Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  He looks around. He can hear his heart drumming, inside the seal of his suit. Wat can he do now? There’s nothing he can do now.

  seventeen.

  Paul

  When I was a boy, in Amiens, I was sometimes scared by the trees in my parents’ garden. Isn’t that the strangest sentence I have written yet? Don’t you think it is?

  My parents’ house was an extensive estate on the outskirts of town, and to step through the bak doors was to walk across a stretch of warm-breed grass, perhaps thirty metres, and then into the broader, more old-fashioned reaches of garden and meadow, which in turn led down to a stream, the border of the estate, whose water moved with an insolent slowness. There were trees all over the gardens, but in particular there was a phalanx of trees that lined the warm-grass, a living wall separating the greenhouse to the right from the view out of the bak door: a dozen sentinels, twenty metres tall, standing in a line.

  The trees were not scary in winter; on the contrary they looked poor, beggarly, like the skeletal phage-plaguers who camped out down by the old cathedral, hoping like medieval peasants for divine intervention to cure their horribly man-made ailments. Nor were the trees scary during the height of a summer’s day, plump and self-satisfied in their bulging greenery, riddled with birds like a shaggy dog with fleas. But there were times, especially at dusk, when they were blakly silhouetted against a sky in which light and dark were indifferently mixed, when they would move with a more than vegetable urgency, and would thresh the air like giant serpents. Then I was actively scared. The strange thing is that I often sought out the fear that this created inside me — which was a very real fear, panting, sweating, staring, a terror that filled me with rabbity panic. Sometimes it would be too much and I would flee from the bak of the house altogether, run all the way up the stairs to my room. But sometimes I would lurk there, whilst the huge shadowy things lurched and hissed at me, and I would let the fear pass through me and through me, like a kind of metaphorical vomiting. Finally, when I could bear it no longer, when the giant trees seemed to becoming more and more agitating with inchoate Brobdingnagian rage towards me, I would break and run, the fear flushing suddenly into pure adrenalin.

  Of my father I remember little, except that he was tall and slender, and rarely in the house. With the blitheness of childhood I simply accepted this as part of the way the universe was structured. I didn’t miss him; I had Mama. My mother was the most beautiful human being I ever knew; the first person whose physical loveliness intruded on my otherwise wholly inward-looking life. She was a small woman, but perfectly proportioned, with the most beautiful face I, as a child, had ever seen: her eyes perfect almond-shaped, with two mirror-image tiks in the far point of each of them, lined with make-up blak, like Maria Callas. Her body was a pillowy aggregation of spheres and ovals, with a gorgeous sweet-like smell to her skin. There was no happier experience to me as a boy than to fold myself into the embrace of that body. I was struk by the enormous disparity between my own body and my mother’s. Specifically I liked to touch myself a great deal in the bath — I don’t mean only my genitals, although there as well, but my whole skin; running individual fingers or a stronger pressure of both palms, over my chest and stomach. There was something ineffable about the beauty I found in my own torso. My legs less so: they seemed skinny and somehow irrelevant, as if they were marginal; perhaps because removed from the core of my being, my face, my chest. But the fascination I found in my own skin was intense enough to be unsettling to me, even at that young age.

  The way the breeze that touched my face, and the breeze that pushed through the weave of my shirt to touch my shoulder and chest, felt so differently, although it was all the same breeze.

  I’m rambling - wat about the war? Wat about the assault? With the counterattak, Gradi was suddenly galvanised into becoming a war leader, no longer a partner in the world with me, her poor cukolded, passive, moneybags husband - no, nein, non - now moving purposefully through a world of her own making. I was so depressed that I barely noticed; exhausted by my illness, caved-in mentally by previous events. I stayed with this Uplander or that, in this or that strange house, and did nothing more than go through the motions of eating with mashy teeth, and watch the screen (the news stations suddenly enormously interested in events in the sky), and sleep.

  The key to her counterattak had been co-ordination; and with a simple innocency that baffled the less child-like Gradi had arranged this in full view of the enemy. She had employed, indeed, the most puerile code of all. The night before the attak, she had phoned her dozen key military people, one after the other. As each of their faces appeared on the screen, she had said to them: ‘I shall speak to the Americans tomorrow; tomorrow afternoon I shall meet their preliminary representatives at five pm EU standard to talk about surrender.’ And the code was this: for surrender read counterattak. I daresay there’s never been a simpler code in the history of war, and yet it was a code the Americans failed to break. As simple as that: the intricate discussions over the many months of the siege, the location of caches of hardware disguised as space junk floating in orbit, or hidden in plain view bolted to the side of houses (but taken for piping, or ice), the various strategies, the grander plan, all this was primed. Her message was the first glimmer at the fuse’s end.

  That day two senior US officers flew up to, they thought, receive Gradi’s surrender. At 5 pm, EU standard, the house they were in was blown up. Simultaneously two EleMag ships came rolling silently down from high orbit and fired old-fashioned firework missiles at the large rotating space station the US had only just finished building. This was too large a target to be destroyed by the home-made weapons at our disposal of course; or so the Americans thought. Its great circle of corridors and rooms was heavily armoured on the outward side. Dart lasers were positioned to pik off debris that might knok holes in the fabric; but they were tuned to objects of a particular sort, the size of discarded screws and bolts. There was a missile-cannon located in the hub, but it was not in a state of readiness at the time of the attak - and since there were two ships on the attak run, it wouldn’t have made much difference even had it been. The assailants fired at the hub, hitting it three times.

  Here is the simple truth that Gradi had grasped, which was the core of her strategy: any pressurised container in a vacuum is effectively two-thirds bomb anyway. It takes very little, once the wall is pierced, to destroy it completely. Breaking through the wall itself will often be enough. And as soon as the central hub area of the US station was ripped away, in tendrils of glinting metal and plastic, the complete structure was doomed. It continued to spin, of course; but without a central structural lok the ring began to deform under these unusual pressures. Where external attak would not have been able to penetrate the armour, internal stresses broke the constitutive segments of the ring apart from one another, a process that gathered momentum with its increasing destruction. There were, I believe, nearly 400 soldiers and officers aboard at the time of the attak; and of them precisely 11 survived, because they happened to be in an EleMag plane doked at a porch when the attak was launched.

  It was ill-fortune rather than any defensive action by the Americans (troops who had long ago given up — if they had ever possessed - the belief that Uplanders could fight at all) that destroyed one of the attaking Upland planes: the cokpit window pierced by a chunk of debris from the disintegrating station, pilot and co- killed. But the other plane got away, dropping into a low fast orbit, spinning round the world, and then climbing out to drift, all engines off, as just one more piece of occupied flotsam, amongst the many thousands in the Uplands. The Americans, preparing for our surrender, were not even patrolling the escape routes downbelow with their previous thoroughness.

  Fort Glenn was also attaked, by three planes. But it was a sturdier platform, and although several chambers were pierced and casualties inflicted, the Fort survived. Two Quanjets were stationed there, and both were launched: one Uplander plane slipped away, but the Quanjets, sup
ple and rapid as eels in water, dogfought and destroyed the other two. Two other sites were attaked; an old EU Station now used for storage by the US, with a skeleton staff; and the main polar relay satellite.

  Over the many months of American house-to-house searches, a man called Harrison Gow had been assembling an AI map of US procedure. Gradi later said that she was by no means certain the Americans would be so predictably systematic - that if she had been in charge of the Occupation she would have randomised the house-to-houses throughout the Occupation. But, after a two-week period of random searches the US settled into a distinct pattern. They did not proceed one, two, three, of course; but they did move according to a determinable grid and Gow’s skill - working like an old-fashioned amateur, with limited computing power and patchy data, phoned in by only those householders able to contact him - was to scan it. His AI map meant that Gradi knew which houses were due to receive their latest visit from the Americans. Gow only just had it ready by May (had we had it earlier we could have saved ourselves a lot of anxiety as we fled from house to house); but it was ready in time. It meant that Gradi was able, with some hurried shuffling about, to remove certain unreliable (because lily-livered) Uplanders from their houses and replace them with people prepared to fight, and perhaps die.

  This aspect of resistance did not go as straightforwardly as it might have done. A dozen planes were in flight, carrying armed teams to a dozen houses. Half of these turned bak from their missions on hearing the paniked news over their comms that Forts Freedom and Glenn were under attak. Of the half dozen who carried through their orders, only two were unprepared for resistance: having doked immediately prior to the counterattaks, they came through the doors as they had done hundreds of times before, and were gunned down. Uplanders pushed through into the American jets and fought with the remaining crew. Both jets were taken, with only one Upland casualty. In the remaining four planes, crews were jittery with anticipation, lodged in porches, opened their doors and shouted warnings through rather than simply entering, shouting ‘Show yourself, put your hands first through the hatch, come in, you are inside our firing arc!’ and so on. These battles were more hectic. Uplanders fired blind through the door, but this is a poor way to hit targets; American return fire was heavier and more devastating. Some Uplanders rushed the door, or threw bombs along the weirdly straight trajectories that are characteristic of zero g — crazy desperation, since to blow up one ship is to blow up two when the two are linked together. It is hard to think oneself into these four fierce little firefights; except to know that, at the end, three times as many Uplanders were dead as Americans, and the US were still in control of those four planes.

  After all those many months of confinement in the Uplands, after spending day after day after day in Mat’s company, I had only one further conversation with him, after which I was never to see him again.

  I was moved from house to house. I had no idea where Gradi was, but people would fly in, ask me politely to accompany them, and passive as a caged bird, I would go with them. We were no longer taking the long way from house to house; any plane in the sky was a potential target, so we hurried journeys, minimising transit time, diving precipitously and then climbing up with deceleration that sometimes bruised my ribs against the straps holding me. I did not know why I was being moved from house to house, and did not ask. I was content to be a passenger; or, indeed, a mere piece of cargo.

  In one house, walls greasy with sweat and mould, detritus floating everywhere, three exhausted occupants, I met with Mat. He was hanging on the wall watching a craked but still functioning screen tuned, of course, to a news channel. There was a pervasive smell of burnt vegetable oil in the house, mixed with sour old milk, and a sharply acidic coppery stench that scraped the sinuses and was perhaps from some overheated piece of equipment. I took up a place on the wall next to Mat, and watched the screen with him in silence for a while. The three householders passed to and fro in front of us, fretful and worn-looking, speaking broken phrases or peeps of conversation, their skulls shrink-wrapped in ill-looking skin, their eyes fever-bright.

  Eventually Mat spoke, without looking at me: ‘I had no idea this was coming,’ he said.

  ‘You think I did?’

  Mat sniffed derisively through his nose. ‘You are Gradi’s — wat’s the word the English had, once upon a time? You’re Gradi’s consort.’

  ‘She has several consorts,’ I said, without rancour. However much I despised him we at least shared something: two men, possessed of certain gifts, wealthy men by the standards of the downbelow, yet both men essentially zeros, in themselves nothings that only come into importance when placed after the ‘l’ of Gradi.

  Mat sniffed again. I realised that his sniffing was not an affectation: he was suffering from a head-cold, with a pressure of gluey snot in his nose and ruddy, scratchable eyes. ‘They’re saying,’ he said, after a while, ‘that this is our tet offensive - the newscaster used that phrase just then, in an interview with the Finnish president.’

  ‘Finland? Wat does Finland say? My sons are there.’ As I spoke this a voice in my head reminded me that neither of those sons were mine; and that, indeed, the father of one of those cukoo children was hanging right next to me. But they were my boys. The sparkle of fury that flushed through my head, dissipating as a blush and a sense of weariness (wat did it matter? They were still my boys - wat did anything matter, after all?) meant that I missed Mat’s reply.

  ‘Still,’ he was saying, ‘wat’s a tet offensive?’

  ‘You’re asking me? I don’t recognise the phrase,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t recognise the phrase. Isn’t it French? You’re French, aren’t you?’ The ludicrousness of having spent a large fraction of ten years in close company with this man - of having shared my wife with him - and after all this time him asking me a question like that, as if we’d only been vaguely acquainted; for some reason this infuriated me. Not that I cared wat Mat thought about me. But still. Piqued, I replied in a reedy, insistent voice.

  ‘Come on, Mat, you speak French, I know you speak French.’ And then, to ensure the point was made. ‘We’ve known one another long enough, after all.’

  ‘Don’t feel I know anybody very much,’ Mat replied, in a preoccupied tone, his eyeballs shimmering left to right, left to right, as he tried to follow some complicated newsinfo graphic on the screen. ‘Isn’t it “head”?’

  ‘Tête means head,’ I confirmed.

  ‘It’s some historical reference, I guess.’

  We were silent together for a long time. The news broke off for commercials.

  ‘She . . .’ said Mat, eventually, and said nothing more than this one word for several minutes. We both knew to whom she was referent.

  I knew wat he was going to say; so I said it for him. ‘She was planning this from the very first; planning this but not telling us.’

  ‘Didn’t tell you or me,’ he agreed, tacitly catching the tone of aggrieved fraternity between us.

  ‘Told Georgie, I hear.’

  ‘Georgie.’ Mat shook his head.

  After a while I spoke again: ‘She,’ and again, although we had just been talking about Georgie, the non-specific female pronoun clearly meant Gradi, ‘she waited all that time, the whole period of the siege. She planned it all out. She knew how long to wait, to lull the Americans into false security, and . . .’

  For the first time Mat became animated. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Oh no, it wasn’t that,’ he said, as if this were a crucial point that I had misunderstood. ‘It was for our benefit.’

  ‘Our benefit?’

  ‘I mean to say, for the benefit of the Uplands as a whole. It was a period of coming into being of our nation. That’s why she did it. Wat bound us together, this village-sized population of billionaires and space-obsessives? Nothing, we were all, each of us, all wrapped up in our own selfish world. Wat gave us common cause? Wat bound us together? Well, she orchestrated this . . . experience. And it has bound us together. We’re
a nation now.’

  ‘We were before,’ I said.

  ‘No. But now we are. Before, we were lots of people addicted to money. Now the money has been cold-turkeyed out of our systems and we’ve been given a much more potent drug instead. If we win,’ and his voice caught, as if even he - detached, knowing, alienated - could not help the surge of excitement in his breast at - the — very — thought — ‘then it’ll take root and grow through all our souls.’

  ‘If we win,’ I repeated, meaning to sound dismissive, but also caught up in the luminous possibility. ‘Do you think we can win?’

  ‘If she had just surrendered, and the Americans had chopped and ordered the Uplands according to their convenience, then the idea of this nation would have withered, and the various billionaires would have fallen bak into their selfish ways. But if she can knok them down,’ (as if Gradi were a muscular prizefighter in the ring and the entire American air force a single flabby contender) ‘particularly after they made us suffer so much for so long — if she can do that, then she will make something out of us. She, single-handed. She’ll be a god to us, and we’ll be her people - one people because her people.’