by Adam Roberts
In a smaller voice, I asked ‘Do you think she can win?’
‘The news, I mean, OK, it’s EU news, but the news - the news thinks there’s a good chance. They’re saying that the Americans have never received such a shok in war. This is a new kind of war, you need to remember. It’s a battlefield that’s never really been tested.’
‘There was eighty-one.’
‘But,’ said Mat, animated suddenly, ‘that’s the point, that wasn’t a real war, the Europeans capitulated almost immediately then. There wasn’t any hard fighting. And at the end of last year, we simply lay down and let them roll over us. We didn’t give them any resistance either. But when the fighting starts, they begin to see how vulnerable an army is up here. In vacuum, in nothingness, it’s a triky place - there are no strongholds up here, because a medium-sized hole in any structure will rip it to shreds.’
‘Applies to both sides.’
‘But there’s the point! Because we’re not vulnerable the way they are. Their forces are concentrated in two main forts, and a few storage bins. We’ve knoked one of those forts out already, and the other is looking more and more precarious - once we’ve taken Fort Glenn out, wat are the Americans going to do? But we, on the other hand, we’re not concentrated the way they are. We’re spread through thousands of houses. I’m sure the US will destroy a number of those houses, but - wat are they going to do? I mean, they could conceivably destroy every last house in the Uplands, but then that wouldn’t be war, that would be genocide, and a whole different legal situation.’
I revolved this perspective in my head. ‘We haven’t,’ I pointed out, searching for flaws in his logic, ‘knoked out Fort Glenn.’
‘Not yet.’
‘But even if we do, they could just build a new one. Theirs are all the advantages of money, population, access and so on.’
‘Yes, they could build a new station, and they might do so, if their national pride and outrage at prospective defeat goads them. But if they do we’ll just knok it out again. Wat they can’t do is occupy the Uplands the way we have, spread over thousands of houses, because that was decades of slow accretion. Time has been on our side.’
I pondered. ‘They could capture Gradi,’ I said. ‘Or kill her.’
‘They could do that,’ said Mat, in a gloomy voice. ‘They’ll try that, yes, they will. But they can’t guarantee to do that.’
After a long pause, I said: ‘She was planning this the whole time. She knew she would wait this long before counterattaking. She let people think she was planning to surrender, but she had no such intention.’
‘She’s far-seeing,’ said Mat.
‘She knew it would cost her the pregnancy,’ I said, my voice catching. Then because it sounded obnoxious in my own ears to talk about the death of my unborn only son in terms of cost, as if it were simply a matter of a greater or lesser expenditure of money, I restated: ‘She knew that the child would die.’
‘She was prepared,’ said Mat, speaking slowly now, with a weird soothsayer clarity of tone, ‘to sacrifice the child to the larger aim, oh that’s very her. Very much her.’ He was proceeding carefully now, testing the ground to see how I might react — rage, tears, despair, he didn’t know and neither did I. ‘I’m sure she thought about it very carefully. But, in the end, I guess she decided that making a nation was,’ he havered, coughed, wiped his eyes, looking blearily at me sideways, ‘was, I mean, that it outweighed the life of a baby, a fetus, I mean to say.’
This went straight through me like a blade sheathed in my chest. Outweighed? These conventional phrases, which come almost unthinkingly to our tongues, unpak into unsettling complexity of implication. Mat was saying that the birth of the Uplands outweighed the birth of my only biological son. The metaphor was one of sheer density, as if the fatter man was more worthy than the thinner. It was almost insultingly literal: on this side of the beam all these people, tens of thousands of them, and the hundreds of thousands who would come after and call themselves, proudly, Uplanders - so many, such a weight. On the other side, only a frail unbreathing body, no larger than a skinned rabbit. The woman Casta flying past with a bloody bundle of sheets in her arms. Wat kind of balance was that? Except, again, the literal notion was undermined by the facts of Upland life, because all of those thousands, in a perfectly literal sense, had no weight at all. I could feel my face was blanched, colourless.
Then Mat said: ‘I don’t mean to be cruel. The loss of the fetus is a shame, but you’ve got two sons. I mean — ’ and he stopped, seeing my expression.
I glowered at him, and, then, unexpectedly, my rage snagged, caught, and dissolved in a great gush into tears. I was crying. He didn’t mean to be cruel. He had one son with Gradi, and Liu (wherever he was, in whichever American holding facility) had one son with Gradi, and I had none at all. It was unfair. I was crying for the weightlessness of all of us, up, as we were. The tears were crying through me, falling from an infinite height and drawn towards a depth infinitely distant beneath us, the whole cosmos a fall of atoms.
‘It’s her,’ I said, as I sukked my tears bak into my throat, drawing a great shuddery breath, and then another, and fought to get a grip on myself. ‘You don’t mean to be cruel, but she does. She doesn’t care.’
‘Oh no,’ said Mat, inspired with earnestness of a sudden, as if this were the most important thing in the world, and it were an utterly vital thing that he communicate it to me: ‘you’re wrong. She does care, about many things, even about us. Wat is alien to her is pity. She just doesn’t do pity — or more precisely, she thinks of pity only as a weakness. Her essence is as free of pity as any I’ve ever known. That’s the secret of her success. No,’ he added, more contemplatively, ‘I don’t mean success. That’s the secret of her.’
eighteen.
Slater, a death
Slater floats. No: he hurtles, and soars, only feels as if he floats - and no - in fact he doesn’t even feel floaty, he feels as if he is motionless and the world is revolving over his head. Slater wonders wat is going on in the world and over it; or perhaps wonders gives the impression of a fanciful or meandering mind — he tries, rather, flexing his mind like a muscle, comprehensively to work out the balance of likely possibilities. Gradi has tried to kill him. She succeeded in killing Philp. Why did she do it? He considers the possibility that it is the overture to a more concerted counterattak against American occupation. But no ruler would be so rekless, surely? That the war is over is more than American propaganda. Any strike the Uplands could make, especially after half a year of hunger and privation, would be feeble; American retaliation would inevitably be swift and overwhelming, shoking, awe-inspiring. If the lion has settled its jaws about your head, a dentine coronet with the points inward like a crown of thorns, and yet is gracefully declining from crushing your skull, then you do not pinch the lion’s belly with your thumb and finger. Or so it seems to Slater.
But wat other explanation for the attak? Gradi presumably hopes to demonstrate, by assassinating two senior officers, that she can still hurt America. But she must know that, although America will respond with righteous anger and pride, that America will not in any meaningful sense be hurt by these two deaths? Angered, perhaps; but it is no gash in the multicellular people-behemoth occupying those spacious spaces between the western and the eastern shining seas; it doesn’t even amount to a tickle, to an inconvenience. Perhaps it was mere spite on Gradi’s part. Perhaps - and this thought seizes him suddenly, almost excites him, since it flatters his sense of self, even in extremis as he now is, to think that the great politicians of the world consider him at all - perhaps she had a personal animus against him. Perhaps it was murder, not assassination. Wat had she said? I’m sorry about this, I was looking you up on USUP web. Had she been monitoring him, like a webstalker? Was there some reason, obscure to Slater but real enough to have actual consequences in the world, that may have made her hate him? He can’t think of it. His mind goes round and round. His body is making literal this fi
gure of speech.
His orientation is such that the whole world is above his head, and his feet seem to slide forever over an infinite, blak, frictionless floor. He puts his head bak. Clouds are lying over a sea gleaming coppery-yellow that shines from the action of the now oblique sun. The cloud cover has the stylishly ragged-edged quality and much of the apparent texture of high-quality art paper, heavy rough-weave cartridge carefully torn into broad leaf shapes and lain overlapping one over the other. He passes into the dark side, and the tinselly glitter of nightside illuminations sparkle above him, moking the much wider and purer enstudding of actual stars in space beyond.
He flies on, unhoused, through the sterile vacuum and through all the darkness. There is no sensation in his left hand now; although the bone of his left forearm has a chilly ache running all the way along it up to the elbow, as if the marrow were a channel for the inhuman cold of the Uplands outside.
There is only one hope for him, as he knows: to be seen by somebody, and collected in a plane. It would need, obviously, to be a USUF jet, and preferably a Quanjet, to be able to manoeuvre safely close enough to him and draw him in. But there is perhaps the possibility that a good samaritan Uplander might rescue him. He weighs the pros, the cons, trying to tense his mind into a properly disciplined and rigorous and military frame. He’s still a soldier. This is how he works best; not thinking wildly or free-associating, but meditating methodically.
Pro: he is wearing a brightly visible suit: the red stripes glow like raked over embers and the white stripes gleam like neon when the sunlight hits them. If someone is looking for him, in the right bit of sky, then he won’t fade into the bakground.
He thinks, studiedly, searching for other pros. They are elusive.
Pro: when the USUF discover their people have gone, they will come looking. Leave no person behind, as the motto goes. But as soon as he considers this thought, a con pops up: they won’t if they’re being suddenly overwhelmed in counterattak. Maybe hundreds of troops are dying. Maybe they’ll just assume Philp and Slater are dead too. And as soon as one con has presented itself, more follow.
Con: even if the USUF do come looking, they’ll have no idea where he is, not even of the location of the house from which he has recently been explosively ejected.
Con: the Uplands are vastly more enormous, and vastly more empty, than any space on the Earth. It would take an army of thousands, combing carefully through the billions of cubic kilometres of nothingness, years to be sure of locating Slater. Entire houses go missing for months when they slip the leash of recorded transp signals, and are usually only relocated by chance.
Con: Laking all relevant equipment, he has no means of communicating with anybody.
Con: He is improperly suited, his hand probably dead, and who knows wat chill, or deadliness, might not be creeping up his arm.
Con: He is wearing only an emergency suit; and it is not even his usual suit. He does not know how much air or water it contains, but must assume the answer is little.
All these cons point to one conclusion. He is going to die up here, soaring over the heads of everybody he knows, round and round, a man unsheathed. In a sense, he thinks, he has been pinned to the upper branches of the world-tree and left to die of exposure, which gives his death an ancient and primitively pagan bitterness. Wat was the name of that figure who was exposed, pinned to a great tree with wooden wedges, until he died? Slater can’t remember. He ponders. Who was that, wat was his name? Jesus Christ, of course, but he doesn’t mean him. The pagan figure.
He comes round the corner of the world and the sun emerges in its splendour, the splendour it wears every day and every night regardless of humanity’s attention or inattention; indeed, not only careless of human observation but actively hostile to it. Burn out your eyes! Bright white focal point, look away, mauve afterimage, hanging as insistently in the centre of vision as a bothersome fly in the summertime.
So Slater looks away from the sun, his eyes instead settling on the Earth, and an extraordinary intensity of copper-coloured sea down there. A fat peninsula of land is visible in the midst of this, but because of his unusual orientation it takes him a moment to identify it. Florida. The atmosphere is almost wholly cloudless which means that the sunlight burns uninterrupted off the seas west and east. Indeed, the molten spatterings of orange lakes and watercourses in the middle of the land are precisely the same copper colour and intensity as the shining waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, which gives the landmass a curiously flattened, floating quality, as if it were a moth-eaten wafer laid tentatively over a truer, purer, gleaming red-orange medium.
Being in the sunlight again, he feels warmth in the centre of his blakened hand. Not all dead in there, after all. The suit he is wearing is designed to reflect away a good proportion of the direct sunlight, and has a cooling grid to deal with excess internal heat. His face visor is that place where the heating effects of sunlight is most felt, and even that is minimal. But his exposed hand, blak and heat-absorptive, is burning. He is glad the nerves are dying inside this flesh, or it might be painful.
He thinks of another con: he has no timepiece. He has no idea how long his orbit is taking him. Were he able to time the respective sunrises he would be able to determine if he was going faster, which in turn would mean that he was spiralling downwards and would presently begin to burn up; or slower, which would mean he was floating away from the world. Burnup: a quik death, he thinks. Quikdeath. His mouth is set so firm, his lips closed so tightly, it looks like a healed scar in his face (if only he could see what it looks like!). The alternative is an endless looping round and round, until his air is exhausted and he asphyxiates. He contemplates this for a long while, encouraged that, even in this extreme situation, he has at least this one raw set of alternatives: choke or burn. It’s a false encouragement, of course. If he is hurtling faster and faster then there’s nothing to do but prepare for a fiery consumption. The choice is not actual; it is only an opportunity to prepare the mind. Which of the two is less obnoxious, death by heat or death by airlessness? The latter has the advantage that it must extend the period in which he carries on living, simply hanging in the Uplands, which minutely increases his already minute chances of being spotted by someone — of a plane scooping down and slowing on the upward trajectory to nudge up against him. But the former is surely the preferable death, a glorious immolation, turning one’s porous, friable body into a splendid meteor to scratch the skies above humanity with brief light. Photonic apotheosis. This train of thought reminds Slater of his friend Philp, with a guilty awareness that his own predicament has crowded this other out of his mind. He realises that he does not know whether Philp died in the fire of the explosion, or whether he survived being ejected into the Upland vacuum and died because he had no helmet on. Experiments conducted decades ago had thrust pigs into the nothing of space to see wat happened to them; and recovery and examination of them afterwards showed a particular pattern - the vacuum having suked the lungs empty of air, of course, but also tended to suk the contents of the stomach into the throat and mouth to spatter in space, such that the desperate lungs, working to draw air bak into themselves, instead inhaled vomit, stinging and poisoning until asphyxia shut the startled brain down. Pity those pigs. Not a pleasant way to go. Philp went into the nothingness without his helmet. Pity him.
He looks again at his hand, holding it close to the visor of his helmet. The naked skin has gone purple-blak all over, and when he looks more closely he can see myriad minuscule beads of red-blak at the base of each individual hair. There’s no sensation at all. He taps it with his gloved left hand, and then grasps his wrist and knoks the fingers against his faceplate, but this gives him no sensation apart from a distant jarring in the bone, sensible in the elbow rather than the hand itself.
He pulls his knees up, and wriggles in place, star-kiking clumsily, pulling himself in again, trying to see how far he can reorient himself. The Atlantic is over his head, blue as heaven and stre
aked with spoorlike trails of cloud. By shuffling and lurching, he starts to swing himself about his own solar plexus. The world slowly hinges about a wobbly axis, inching in uneven increments until it is beneath his dangling feet. Somehow, that feels more natural.
The line of the terminator is fast approaching, improbably jewelled with diamond lights on its far side. Was that quiker than before, that orbit? Or did he just lose trak of time with all his wriggling about? If sunrise was above Florida he must now, at sunset, be over Russia, or thereabouts. Zdravstvuyte apofeoz! The lit land just west of the terminator looks parched and hay-coloured beneath its salty, frothy layer of intermittent cloud. Oh but the world, so full of wonder, draws his eyes. The house of the days, the beautiful days, the locker in which all the nights are stowed, the cabinet in which are arranged almost all humanity; a cabinet of inexhaustible delights. He stares. He really ought to be looking in the territory of the Uplands itself. He ought to be scanning for houses, or planes. He looks about and about, twisting and wriggling in situ to rotate himself through a full turn. He can see only stars. Some of these stars are probably houses, but he cannot tell which. In the landscape-less topology of the Uplands an astronaut dwindles to a dot at four hundred feet; a house recedes to a mere point of illumination at twice that. He would need to pass within a few hundred feet of a house, or a plane, to see it clearly, or - the more he thinks of it, the more impossible it seems — to be seen by it. And even then, wat? He has no idea of his relative speed: he might go shooting bullet-like past a house; or it might shoot past him. And even if he saw a house, wat should he do? He has no means of attracting anybody’s attention short of waving his arms and legs; and even if somebody were close enough to see that they would as likely think he was a tumbling corpse as a live human being.