by Adam Roberts
He keeps the pressure on; his suit’s field suks its tiny wake in the giant invisible, impalpable fluid. He wonders: would spinning slow him more? Might it maximise his deceleration? Perhaps not — for his mind is incapable of making even approximate calculations or conceptualising or thought-experimenting. Thought, as such, has been burlied out of his skull by the sheer exhilaration. Diving into cold blakness that would, paradoxically, miraculously, soon metamorphose into a consuming fire. The thought of his body disassembled into constituent and carbonised atoms and raining softly down like dust upon the sleeping people below produces an almost exquisite sense of metaphysical pleasure in him. There are worse ways to go. This, he thinks, is wat it must be like to become a god, transformed into something radically different and durable but most of all infinitely disseminated, something that the ordinary mortals crawling over the face of the earth will breathe into their lungs, and rub into their eyes in their efforts to rub the smuts away: to become dissolved in the cells and bloodstream of millions.
There is a great lurch, as if he’s been hit by a plank. He jerks bakwards, and feels his stomach contents rise and hammer against the throat-sphincter holding them down. His feet twitch, kik, but not because he has willed them into movement. Wat was that? It’s like he flew into something.
The sensation of warmth inside his forearm is growing, and is no longer pleasant. There is a glow somewhere immediately below his legs - his head (as he topples) - his legs again. The blak Earth and the blak vacuum swap places in his line of sight with clokwork regularity. He can distinguish sparks flying past his visor with the colder, distant stars, shards of reality, splintering and flapping away under the impact he is making. He keeps the pressure on the fingerbuttons.
Cutting into —
A second soundless bang, and a nek-craking lurch bak and around. He’s no longer tumbling, he’s hurtling bakwards, he’s facing the way he came and is shooting bak-first. His arms and legs are out, at 90-degrees to his body, tuked into his trail, and he flitters like a shuttlecok. Everything is blak, except for the jarring epileptic fliker of random lights. Then, with a sharp blak smell (which must be inside the suit) the pressure in his gut is released. Has his EleMag net given out? It must have given out.
He is falling now, spine-first. His legs and arms are pulled irresistibly in front him, tuking into the slipstream of his bakward plummet, four tugs on four marionette strings, until they are all parallel with one another. Collapsing continually bakwards, his limbs trailing after him, down into the void. Won’t be long now, he thinks. He thinks that. His vision of a rapidly receding and infinitely lengthy tunnel.
With willpower, and straining his muscles, he pulls his hands towards his face. His right hand is still there, but twitching his fingers has no effect. The stench in his suit is making him cough.
He finds he cannot simply fold his left arm in to bring the hand to his visor. For some reason the elbow will not simply flex, the muscle is sluggish, the suit fabric has somehow stiffened or frozen, he doesn’t know why, he can’t think why. It’s hot now.
He drops the left arm, pivoting it at the shoulder, down towards his hip, levers it out into the slipstream, and tries to bring it up. He is choking, gagging and coughing, although the suit’s inner systems have purged the contaminant and his vision is clear. Perhaps his air supply is now at this moment giving up. Becoming exhausted. The little slab of hardware that stores and circulates and scrubs the air is woven into the bak of the suit, and is enduring the worst of Slater’s re-entry friction, so perhaps that has something to do with it. It hardly matters now. His lungs spasm, gulp air, and he pulls his left hand round and up, and holds it in front of his visor.
The hand is glowing, like a blak and heated coal. There are no fingers on it any more. As he watches, with a dream-like marvellousness, tiny flames suddenly fliker into life upon it. He is burning, burning, o lord — actually on fire. There’s no pain, it doesn’t hurt. It dazzles him. He holds his hand away from him, and it flares brighter. Down he plummets, his arm a flame-tipped brand.
Something in his eyes stops working. He’s gone, he’s under.
He dreams, and whilst he experiences the dream, immersed in it, he is simultaneously aware of the fact that he is dreaming, and that this may be the last dream he ever has. He’s in an Upland room with Gradi and the Vice-President, but it’s an impossibly long room, there’s something from earlier in the dream, or from another, related, dream, which he can’t remember, and this bothers him. Gradi is explaining how fireworks operate. He turns to look at the Veep, but whichever way he turns he sees Gradi, as if she nips in front of him, or perhaps as if there are many Gradisils. But just as he sees that one of the Gradis is actually Marina in disguise, just as he is about to demand of her wat she is playing, the dream stops —
Is this wat happens when people die in their sleep? Do they begin a dream which then shears off, incomplete, with nothing to follow and no consciousness to worry that the strands were not woven together, as the waking sleeper often does, rising from bed and stumbling into the bathroom thinking all the time wat was that? It is a sort of Russian-roulette dream that will end, Slater knows, not because his alarm clok has chirruped, but because the consciousness that attends the dream has ceased to be. The pistol has six bullets in its six chambers, it’s just a question of when the finger squashes the trigger bak to —
Shh. There is a great shushing. A giant is trying to hush him to sleep. It is a waterfall, he is trapped on his bak in a waterfall which is pressing an enormous weight of fluid constantly against his faceplate and front. That’s not right. The faceplate is pressing against his face. That’s not right. There should be a space between his nose and lips and the plastic of the faceplate.
It’s grey, the colour of predawn.
The faceplate has a split in it. He can’t be sure wat he’s seeing; it’s not easy, even opening his eyes. But he opens his eyes, and it takes him several moments before he realises that the gash in the sky in front of him is a line in the material of his visor, and not the veil of the sky itself rent across.
He’s been sleeping the sleep of the hypoxic, but something has woken him. Perhaps this powerful headache. This ache, ow, in head, ah-ah. Man, that’s bad. Or, now that he gathers himself enough to notice it, perhaps this spread sense of soreness across his bak, his shoulders. It occurs to him to chek his left hand. He holds it up in front of his face, but it doesn’t seem to be there. Be there.
There is a crakling noise from his faceplate, he doesn’t know wat that is.
Suddenly he is very awake, very awake, adrenalin is lurching and sparkling through his bloodstream. Fuk. He is in air. He needs to think quikly. He thinks: I must think quikly, but the quik thoughts do not come. He had slowed himself in orbit, slowed himself to a point where he was indeed simply standing on nothingness sixty miles above the Earth, and then he fell - down. He tries to see past the big gash in the centre of his vision, he twists his body, which stings and groans in painful complaint. He tries to sit up, as if he is on a bed, and then laughs at the stupidity of it; for he is in no bed, he is cushioned all around by rushing air.
He pulls his mind bak, hand over hand as if hauling in a great wet sea-rope from some vortex: those jumps over the Mojave, part of the basic training. Remember to remember those. Stepping over the metal lip of the plane’s square open ass into the burlying air. Falling; remember falling. Slater had developed this little trik, of slipping the catch off his mind, letting his gears spin free, so as not to be thinking about wat he was about to do. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to do it. It wasn’t a fear of heights, exactly, since unlike being on top of a tall building there were none of the usual visual clues as to height, it didn’t, actually, feel as if one were high up - it was a non-human perspective. But his brain knew that wat he was doing was dangerous, and that orderly part of his thoughts disliked that: the pull-down menus in his mental map behind which were stored, methodically and according to proper protocols, all
the facts and probabilities of living: all the fatalities and serious injuries of people who had stepped out of planes, just like this one, wearing one of these parachutes (centuries-old technology upon which nobody seemed to have improved). He had read all the books.
He knew that terminal velocity of an average man, averagely laden (for, counterintuitively, the terminal velocity of a fat man is greater than that of a thin man) is about one-hundred-ten miles per hour, before the parachute is deployed. Laking a parachute, this means the average man’s body (averagely laden) will hit the ground at one-hundred-ten miles per hour. Slater’s instructor, those years ago, had explained it in these terms: imagine standing on top of a groundeffect train travelling at that speed, wind in your hair, it’s even exhilarating, except that you’re still standing there as the train sokets into a tunnel. The train goes in, but like a toon you are left behind, flattened onto the overhang of the tunnel. Would you expect to survive such a collision?
He wriggles, and his skin complains. The pain sharpens his mind, fills him with swear words. Is that crakling noise coming from his skin?
On the other hand, terminal velocity means that you’ll hit the ground at that speed whether you fall from a thousand feet, or, as in Slater’s case, from a third of a million feet. It will still be fatal. The height below which most fallers survive but above which most falls are fatal is thirty feet. His instructor had told him that. Slater can recall his instructor vividly, Captain Sheridan, a tall man with short-cut sandy hair, flat cheeks, eyes like willow leaves, bony wrists and long, rather scholarly hands in constant motion as he explained aspects of parachuting. Thirty feet is not much. One full general died after falling from a military jet, and it was still on the ground. He had been waving from an open door, and lost his footing, fell through just enough of an arc to break his nek.
The noise of rushing air is so complete, so immersive, that Slater can only become aware of its full intensity by actively concentrating on it. Belatedly he becomes aware that the air is touching his skin. There are holes in his suit, like cigarette burns. With his one hand he reaches behind him and fumbles at the mothwork that heat has done upon the bak of his suit. Looking down his front he cannot see similar damage on the front.
He tips himself forward, is falling face down. The cloud thins.
Breathtakingly, the grey dissolves away around him, like salt in clear water, and the world reveals itself. It is terrifying and beautiful, two apperceptions that often go together. The sun is very low, resting on the furred horizon like a drop of wine on the rim of the sky’s upturned wineglass. The world below is misty, with occasional jaggy prominences rising above the opacity. He looks for snow; a snow-banked mountain flank upon which he might - just conceivably — land, upon which he might obliquely roll and not die. But there is no snow. The fog is thiker in some places than others; where it is less opaque he can see green hills, with the tessellated press of many different kinds of roofs. He looks to the horizon again; the line is fuzzy with trees. He looks down again, and sees the towers of a suspension bridge priking through the silk undulations of the fog layer. That means a river, a major road, a built-up area.
This is no good at all. Houses, roads of stone, these are bad things on which to land. There might be a river, but to hit water flat at a hundred miles an hour would be exactly the same as striking concrete. He needs to slow —
The flaw in his vision, this crak running down the middle of his vision, is quivering. Perhaps it is about to give way.
His training tells him to roll four-point, ankles, thigh, hip, shoulder, to distribute the deceleration. As if that’s going to make a difference at the speed he is going. The biggest fist in the solar system this side of Jupiter is flying towards him at over a hundred miles an hour.
There’s not much time to thing. Not thing, think. But even if he had all the time in the world to think, his brain isn’t much help. His skin is burning, and with a half-reflex, half-cunning motion of his right hand he fumbles at the catch that releases the fastener down the front of the suit. His gloved fingers are too crudely plump to effect it. He reaches over with his left hand to unfasten the right glove and realises, after long fruitless seconds that he has no left hand, none at all.
He knoks at his visor, but his hand flies away like a ball bouncing on stone. The wind takes it and flaps it up in the air, over his head somewhere. This won’t do at all. This will not do at all. He pulls the hand bak down, but the muscles feel stretched and weary, the tug gone out of their elastic. It takes active willpower to pull the hand bak down. With more focus he knoks at the faceplate again, trying to get inside. With one or other of the repeated, rather frantic little blows the crak spreads and a huge noise of wind fills Slater’s ears, chills his face. He thrusts his hand in at the space, bumbling over his own face, forcing the hand to the side by his right ear to give his teeth the purchase on the tag that released the grip at his wrist. It doesn’t seem to want to — something, presumably adrenalin, is giving Slater a renewed mental clarity and sense of urgency. The noise of the air is very large, very loud. He bites down.
He pulls, and his hand slips out of its sheath naked in the freezing uprush. Almost at once he starts to lose sensation in his fingers’ ends, which is triky because it’s a delicate operation to find the frontal-tag, the thumbnail-sized stiff button that must be rotated three times counterclokwise. He fumbles at his chest. The ground is coming towards him at a hundred-ten-miles-an-hour. The wrist of the glove, its hand still in his faceplate, is flapping like a propeller. It slips, and the bikering noise increases in volume, and then it is gone, whipped away to fly through the air.
Briefly, Slater gets a blurry glimpse of the ground hurrying indecently towards him. He tries to pull apart the front of his suit, but the tag needs another twist before it will unbukle. This is all crazy. Is it possible to — there it goes, and the seam unzips smoothly down, and —
(//uurgh//) the whole of Slater’s suit inflates with ice-temperature air blown in at pressure. His sleeves go stiff, his trouserlegs go stiff, the wind’s deathly cold intimacy reaches round to the small of his bak. The little wormholes burnt into the bak of the suit vent just enough air to keep the suit inflated. He can feel himself yanked upwards, as if a cord has been pulled, but it does not seem to slow him very much, because — and he goes into the mist. That’s the end of him.
nineteen.
Poodle-hoops
The American media give little time over to reporting the counterattak, in part because it coincides with a much more public-fascinating brouhaha concerning the subcutaneous technical augmentation of several key pitchers’ arms in the World Series, the putative legality or illegality of this, wat it means for the future game, and so on. The deaths of US servicemen is news, but the US media spin it according to governmental feed: terrorist action, under control, outrageous assault, the very fact that you can imagine just the sort of thing the media say shows how easily these interpretations fit into human preconceptions. Meanwhile, after five pitchers admitted to ‘MA’, or Muscular Augmentation, the Southern States become the first major league team to pay for their key hitter to be similarly beefed up (metalled up would be more like it). ‘The Courts are sitting on it,’ said SoSta manager Vinny Shenin, ‘so we decided to act. They can sort the legal out later: this is the future of baseball. Right now we got our sights on the Alaskans.’
Two runs crossed the plate, a scoreless tie broken, the game not even four innings old, and the stands above the Southern States dugout began to tremble, then shake, then earthquake with the aggregate excitement of the crowd. For all we reporters knew, GWB Stadium was about to come apart at the seams — but it neither alarmed nor annoyed us. It may have been the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
‘Words can’t describe it,’ SoSta center fielder Bryan Synagog said. ‘This is the most thrilling baseball I ever seen. The game has crossed into the twenty-second century. The future is ours’.
Like partygoers so wholly focused on getti
ng to their party to have A Good Time they don’t quite register wat distressed Mom on the phone is telling them about Dad in hospital dying, actually dying now, storing it away ’til later when they’ll be prepared to hear those words, and be sorrowful then — just so, these media indulged the story. It had been coming to the boil for many months. Military kerfuffle and niggle was the second lead, but all eyes were on the GWB Stadium. And then, like those partygoers, America woke the next morning guiltily hungover. News feeds started siphoning EU reports: for the EU had dropped all other stories to cover this one thing, this Upland counterattak. It was the end of American domination.
Finland-EU was the first officially to recognise the Uplands as a new nation, self-determining and under the presidency of Gradisil Gyeroffy. It was hot-headed defiance of America, and for three long days the rest of Europe held its breath whilst the US corpus diplomaticum blustered and raged. But you don’t invade a country for diplomatically recognising another, even another with whom you are at war. And besides . . . and besides . . .
In the US the story filled a day; and was demoted again to second lead after twenty-four hours, because a better story came along - a major-league soap star revealed that he had been conducting an incestuous sexual affair with his own brother. The revelations came after the screen star (he hid a secret actual name, rumoured to be the unappealing Krolik, under the screenname Gentian de Koch) had ended the relationship, as a direct result of the spiritual guidance of the Church of Christ the Green Man. De Koch gave a press conference at which he confessed that it had been a pharmakos adjustment to his sexuality that had provoked the long-term sinful relationship, something he and his brother had freely decided upon as part of a twisted desire to explore the territory on the far side of taboo - neither of them previously being gay, or intrafamilially inclined. This Church (116,000 registered members) was pushing its campaign to have pharmakos outlawed, as meddlesome perversions of divine design, whether gay or straight.