Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I disagree,’ says General Niflheim.

  He speaks.

  Everybody looks at General Niflheim. There is his desert lichen skin, his eyes overmoist, almost brimming, like a pool after heavy rain, in which like strands of lurid weed many red capillaries are visible. Everybody knows of his cancer diagnosis, his approaching death, and his weird metaphysical proximity to death gives him a shamanic aura. He has, after all, lived for much of the last five years in the Uplands. He knows the Uplands, he’s virtually a native. Homo planetensis. The altitude at which he has lived, with its reduced levels of protection against solar radiation, has indubitably contributed to his cancerous state; which is one more reason for attending to him. He’s paid the price for his knowledge. He disagrees, which reminds some in the room of the old saw, that there’s no discourtesy in saying grunt to a pig.

  ‘You disagree?’ prompts Veen.

  ‘I think they’d hold out to the very end, Mr President,’ he says slowly. ‘I think they have heart, now. This last year or so has toughened them, got them used to hardship, danger. Got them used even to death. They got something bigger’n themselves to live for now. They’ll know that by holding on they’ll be hurting us. They won’t care about the cost to themselves. Most of them won’t.’

  The President stares long at Niflheim, as if reading every line on his old and dying face as a hieroglyph. There is an electric silence in the room. Then, with a palpable sense of history pivoting, that vast yet silent weight shifting just enough to swing the whole teeter-totter inverted pyramid of everything into a new orientation, he draws his eye away. Is this the way it goes? Do you know? It’s an undecided thing, whether history is actually the agglomeration of myriad individual acts of will and motion, little people contributing little to it, Great Folk contributing much, such that the whole narrative is the heap of all these parts? Or whether History is a force in its own right, relatively independent of individuals, like gravity? People prefer to think it’s the former, because that gifts their actions with the potency of significance; but maybe it is the latter; maybe history is Force and Economics and War and Religion and nothing to do with the things individual homines sapienses want. Did President Veen have the power - I’m not speaking constitutionally, I’m speaking in terms of History - to order his troops into genocide, to pik the Uplands clean of humanity, to force that narrative to obtain against all the forces pulling in the other direction? You may decide to think, no. And if the individual cells in a plant, growing, were gifted with individual consciousness, wouldn’t they think yes, I struggle and strain and my individual action, combined with all my fellow cells, slowly builds this stem as we reach upwards? The strenuous, self-splitting wrench of pulling in two the central braided cord that lives inside you, of pushing half your fluids and half your chemicals into a second version of yourself, and then sulking through the pain of regrowing yourself and your budded-self to a dual version of the original - all-consuming, effortful, surely (you think) important? Surely of the greatest importance? But perhaps a different perspective is truer, that the tree grows according to the universal logic of trees, not according to the will of a million individual cells; that a tree grows up unless some calamity specifically prevents it, and even then. They say as the twig is bent so the tree grows, but that’s a lie. I exhort you to try the experiment. Bend a twig over, and then settle down to watch, cheeks on palms, elbows in the dirt, through the months that follow. This is wat you will see: first on the far side of the bend small new twigs sprout, like the fibres from old potatoes’ eyes; then the strongest of these stiffens and hardens and becomes the new stem, restoring the vertical line. And so the tree grows up, as trees always do, regardless of the failure of a disk of cells, and the seemingly terminal setbak. This is how it must be; humanity must grow out from this conker we call world and into the solar system as a whole, just as the tree must grow up; and only active prevention, or disaster, can stop it. Political leaders have the power to inflict misery on many, and even essay genocide, which turns the many to most; but they don’t have the power to change the larger currents of history, rant as they will.

  President Veen is not going to order genocide.

  There is disagreement in the room but it is already being carried along the lines of flow of inevitability.

  ‘Then,’ says Veen, on an indrawing breath, ‘I guess diplomacy — ’ and he is turning towards the Vice-President as he speaks.

  ‘Hit them hard now,’ Raduga interjects, hurriedly. ‘All I’m saying, say, why don’t we? — hit them hard, that we set out - exterminate all the br — the enemy, quikly. Let Legal sort it out afterwards. Wat’s done is done, and if we depopulate the Uplands entirely I don’t see how they could . . .’

  But the debate about possibilities has moved past him now. Belatedly he realises this and stops speaking. He is sweating a little. He blinks his eyes, blink, blink, blink.

  ‘So,’ says the President. ‘Wat deal should we hope for?’

  ‘They’ll want,’ says the Veep, ‘absolutely uninterrupted access from the ground to the Uplands, and a cessation of house-to-house searches. For that I think we can get the right to build a new Upland base, free from attak I mean, and I think we can manage to avoid giving up our claim entirely. We can probably get commercial enclave status. We can also keep most of their money in legal limbo for several years, that’s a given. It’ll be a compromise.’

  ‘It’ll need to be a compromise we can spin as victory,’ says the President, in a weary voice.

  This is so obvious a point that nobody bothers to agree with it. But the Veep adds, for the benefit of everybody, ‘We need a longer-term strategy. The Uplands, watever treaty we agree, the Uplands are in our sphere of influence. In the longer-term we need to think of ways of advancing American interests up there.’

  ‘Well, the first thing to do,’ says Niflheim, rousing himself, ‘is to take out Gradisil. Grab her at the first opportunity - take her out of the equation.’

  This produces a general murmur of agreement.

  Slater

  Slater is flown up in a Chinese military transport, and transferred to a US military transport in midair, through one of those newfangled ponto-tubes. Both planes follow a computer-coordinated falling trajectory that create zero g which facilitates the transfer of his mostly inert corpus. Once this human cargo is loaded, the US transport disconnects and slides up into a high trajectory to rise to a programmed peak, so as to fall gradually towards the southeastern corner of the USA, its destination. Slater, strapped face-up on a medical gurney, is settled into his new transport. A medic attends to him.

  This medic is a great mass of muscles in military scrubs: a close trimmed hairdo, a nek thiker than his head, that tight look in his face that comes with years of intensive physical training. But his hands are expert, even tender, as they settle Slater into his tech-pallet; and his bleached-blue eyes have an approachable slant to them, catching their patient’s eyes as if to share the sly understanding that all this medical suffering can actually be a shared joke.

  ‘Where am I going?’ rasps Slater. ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘They should be taking you to the Smithsonian as an exhibit of the marvellous in the modern age, you want my opinion.’ He plugs Slater to a monitor with a cable no thiker than a nerve. ‘You mind if I put some music on? I work better with music on. Just the radio, you know, just pop songs. OK?’

  ‘Watever you like,’ breathes Slater. The distant white-noise hush of the plane’s engines is soothing, and otherwise it is silent in the plane. Slater’s feelings on the subject of music are entirely neutral.

  The medic reaches over to his side and pulls a holographic button out of the air. The music comes on, the ether-thin soprano of Arnault Lariviere, this year’s big star:Qu’est ce qu’ils savent

  de la’amour?

  Et qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent

  Comprendre

  de la’amour?

  That swirlingly uppy-downy melody line
that had helped the song climb the invisible rungs of the popchart to its apotheosis as number one, il primo, un, une. French is this year’s language en vogue for pop songs. The medic is working his way over Slater’s left-arm stump, shining some sort of diagnostic light-pen onto the flesh. As he works he is half-singing, half-humming, de la’aa-aamour. ‘Wat happened to me?’ Slater asks. ‘I remember falling. I don’t - how did I get here?’

  ‘Short-term memory a bit jangled is it? Twas quite a knok you received.’

  ‘I fell.’

  ‘That you did.’

  Slater thinks of adding, I fell through the aquamarine sky with my left hand blazing as a torch, but hesitates. It would be uncharacteristic of him to speak so purply. He’s not sure, even, where the impulse came from.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘The facility at Newport. In the Panhandle.’

  Slater considers this. ‘A military hospital?’

  ‘No, a dinosaur theme park, of course a hospital. It’s the new facility, I’m sure you heard of it. Not far from Tallahassee. Now, on your side, please, I want to take a look at these Chinese spinal inserts.’ He helps Slater to roll in the pallet, and taps at the four metallic pads inset into this wounded bak. ‘These are pretty good,’ he says, shortly, and with a reluctant tone of voice,

  ‘I remember falling. Mist - and I tried everything I could to lose speed. I used the EleMag coils in my suit to — ’

  ‘I love this one,’ enthuses the medic, gently repositioning Slater on his bak. The song has changed. A spiky, rather jittery drum loop swells with piano-percussion and distant, rather eerie top-end wail, rising and falling, and a layered-over guitar thrum that is delicately stinging. It was a hit last year, but has already acquired that slightly stale intimations-of-mortality stain of the old-fashioned. The vocal is split between three singers:Senshuraku wa tami wo nade

  Medeta kere, shakuson, shakuson!

  Japanese was so very much last year’s vogue in singing in pop. The medic doesn’t sing along (perhaps he doesn’t know the words), but he waggles his head from side to side with a joyous expression, and tries to follow the intricate drumming with his right thumb against the palm of his left hand.

  ‘I don’t really remember wat happened after I went into the mist,’ says Slater. But he is not really trying to remember. He’d prefer it if the burden of narrative was taken by somebody else. An exterior perspective would perhaps fix wat he has been through, make it more solidly real.

  ‘Hit a tree,’ says the medic. ‘First of all. It flipped you about, which is a luky thing. Then you hit a cow.’

  ‘Hit,’ Slater repeats, stupidly, as if still trying to wrench his mind round it.

  ‘It was a pet, actually-factually. I heard it was a purple fur-shagged yak-like beast, one of those genengineered creatures that they make nowadays. It b’long a family, was just standing in their garden, probably asleep. I don’t know, I didn’t see the cow, I only heard.’

  ‘Did I kill the cow?’

  ‘Put it this way. If you were a cow, and a man dropped on you from sixty mile up, you’d expect to live? The fortunate thing is you were flipped over by hitting the upper foliage of the tree in their garden, so you hit the cow back first. That broke some ribs, and tore up your skin some, but all that’s fixable. Much more important is the topography of the inside lining of the skull. I can explain why that’s important. The bak of the inside of your skull is lovely and smooth and curved, and the perfect shape against which to decelerate the wet-suet of your brain, if deceleration become necessary. On the other hand the front of the inside of your skull is jaggy and spiky, full of inpointing thorns of bone and dangerous holes, especially in the area of the nose and the eyes. Decelerating in that direction tends to impale your soft brain on the iron-maiden spikes, and kill you. So you were luky to get flipped about.’

  ‘Luky,’ says Slater. ‘I — ’ But there’s neither verb or object to attach to that pronoun in his mind right now, and the sentence is not completed.

  ‘Course, falling on your bak has certain other difficulties associated with it. You broke four of your vertebrae badly enough, although there are things we can do with those. Wat we can’t really do anything with is your left hand.’

  ‘It was on fire.’

  ‘Fire.’

  ‘Where did I land? I was over Russia I think. I remember passing over the terminator, seeing the little lights in the blak like glitter.’

  ‘You landed, Colonel, onto a small town in China, in the province of Ch’ueh, town called called K’an. We just piked you out of a Chinese transport in mid-air. You don’t remember that? You don’t remember Chinese medical personnel treating you, loading you in that plane? I’d better look inside your head, I think, see if your brain’s still there.’

  ‘I think I remember that.’ But it’s very hazy.

  The next song is in English.

  Wore out my shoes walking, on the eighth day

  Come over mountains and down into LA

  In Autumn too many leaves just broke their stalk

  And the worn-out rain pooled on the sidewalk

  The transport, passing the apex of its trajectory, begins its descent. The sensation of coming down is very gentle, but it claws in Slater’s belly and primps memories out of the shok of his mind. He gasps, and clutches at the side of the pallet as if that can save him, his eyes widen a little. But by the time the medic sees his distress, his internal flush of adrenalin has carried him up to a mini-peak of alarm, and then pushed him over the lip into the consequent trough of exhaustion and sleep.

  He wakes only when he is being unloaded from the plane, and wheeled through the open air. This is Fort Newport, where Slater will be nursed bak to health. The air is warm, and smells of growing things, of clean vegetation and a pleasant taint of sea-air. Slater can see that he is being moved towards a wide three-storey building very white in the Florida sunshine. Behind this, reaching a long way up, are many trees. They seem positively dripping with bright green foliage, like crashes of verdant foam, a mighty wave frozen in the process of engulfing the settlement. And the blue sky is a bank of colour above them, and it is more than blue, a brilliantine, photoshop, flawless blue. Everything is neon-ish and hypervivid, almost at the point of being hurtful to the eyes, not because of its brightness (although it is bright) but simply because of the brimming fullness of its realness, of wat the philosophers call its quiddity, the marvellous glamour of ordinary things in ordinary conjunction. That so much intensity of affect can be milked from simple things just because they are real - just buildings, just trees, just sky - strikes Slater with such force of revelation that tears come to his eyes. He can’t remember the last time he cried, but he is crying now, at this plush beauty of ordinary things: weeping stupidly, brine flushing down the sides of his face.

  The medic is still in attendance, and leans over him now. Slater doesn’t know the medic’s name, and, since the guy will leave on the plane that brought him, he never will. But the medic knows him better than most. ‘No shame in crying,’ he says, bringing his face close to Slater’s. ‘No shame at all.’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ Slater rasps.

  ‘Glad to be alive,’ says the medic, firmly. ‘Reason enough.’ Yes, yes, even Lucifer can feel glad to be alive, still to be thinking, even in his broken body.

  A swift slides downwards through the air, wags its wings and soars up. How art thou fallen from Heaven O — round and round, throwing O-rings about the world. That’s the Uplands, isn’t it? A whole world of people who fly forever.

  twenty.

  Paul

  And so the war ended. There was a peace treaty that was, in essence, a declaration of Upland victory, although the (two fingers) ‘V’ word was not used anywhere in the documentation. That didn’t matter. Uplanders, living with the bright eyes and hectic complexions of people for whom exhaustion and privation have become witches’ familiars, were suddenly free to fly home again, if they chose. The
treaty was signed by Gradi, but not sitting in the same room as President Veen. She did not trust the Americans, she said - she said this publicly, frequently, on any media that interviewed her. ‘It’ll be hot for me for a while,’ she said. ‘They’ll want me, they’d like that - imprison me. You’d never see me again. I think I’ll stay out of the way of American forces for a while longer!’ So Georgina and Ustinov flew down to Paris to collect the treaty; they flew it up, it was transferred between half a dozen planes, and eventually (the camera on her) Gradi signed. The treaty was flown bak down, signed by the Vice-President, and that was that.

  The complex process of post-bellum legal negotiations and tidying up began. New suits were filed, alleging breaches of protocol and demanding reparations, on both sides.

  The jubilation was enormous in the EU, and in other parts of the globe. There were street parties. There were thousands of virtual meetings. Apparently - I didn’t see any of it myself. In common with the majority of Uplanders I did not avail myself of the immediate post-war opportunity to fly downbelow. I was scared, in fact, of the prospect of walking under the influence of a full g, afraid my shins would snap like wax tapers. During the long indolences of the siege we had, almost all of us, kept up with the elastic exercises of leg-push, leg-pull, of bak stretch and arm-heave - after all, there had been little else to do. But springs and elastic are no substitute for the immersively bowing force of gravity itself. With vaguely virtuous ideas of upping the exercise routines and preparing myself better I postponed my return, even though my children were waiting to see me, and importuning me to return on the frequent phone conversations we were able, finally, to have with one another.