Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘You ran out on me,’ said the agent, into my ear, with a dripping purity of enunciation.

  ‘You really think,’ I said, louder than I meant, and speaking more rapidly and less in control than I wanted, ‘that you can insinuate yourselves into my head, persuade me to betray my wife and,’ but I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘my country’, since it had dawned on me — there, at that time, in that moment - that I had no country, especially not the Uplands, which was merely a sort of nightmare location existent only in Gradi’s mind. So I ended up just repeating, ‘You really don’t believe you can insinuate yourself into my affections with this 3nimation-style spy-school shit.’

  The law was that advertising automata could speak only if people approached them. In practice this approach meant that anybody who walked within a metre of them prompted their voiceboxes into their chatter. I took several strides, trying to walk away from the American agent, and passed by a 150cm manikin, which cooed at me Real flowers, gentian flowers, delivered to your door! Ask me about the —

  The agent was at my side, matching my steps. ‘If I had nothing to offer you, I’d hardly be so bold,’ she said.

  ‘Offer me?’ I said, looking down at her. ‘You think I’m interested in . . .’ Wat? Nothing again nothing. Trailed off again.

  ‘Paul, come bak to the coffee shop. There’s somebody there you know, waiting. Guarding our coffees! Come and meet him.’

  I stopped walking. I felt abashed. It suddenly occurred to me that I had not been treating this person properly, as a human being. I had been guilty of wat I deplored, projecting my own resentment onto the shape she made in my line-of-sight, taking her as only a more sophisticated automated manikin. I rebuked myself, and on the upstroke of this purely internal adjustment felt a tremor of sensual possibility. They had been clever: they had not sent a woman who physically resembled Gradi, that would have been too crudely obvious. But there was a certain likeness in this person, in terms of physical appearance only, a quality of self-containment, of dark-haired neatness, that did appeal to me. I had a flash of wat it might be to have her body, naked, underneath mine; of her face pressing itself into the curve made by my shoulder and nek, of my own climactic pelvic vibrato. It can be hard to keep that sort of day-dreaming from one’s mind as one talks to attractive women.

  ‘Who’s waiting?’

  She knew better than to tell me straight away. Instead she led me bak along the Bulevarden, and bak inside the steamy low-ceiling kaffeshoppe, and there, at the table, was Liu. I hadn’t seen him for a year, not since an American military patrol had chanced upon him in the besieged Uplands and carried him away. He looked better than I did: stronger, happier. And he smiled too, as I sat at the table. He started talking, but wat struk me most, as I lifted the mug to my lips, was that my coffee had not gone cold. I felt as if I had returned from the land of where the wild things are, to find my mug still warm.

  You won’t be interested in most of my conversation with Liu; or if you are, then I must disappoint you. I won’t tell you; it’s an intimacy I do not wish to violate. Meeting him again, after a year or more, I was less surprised by his conversion to an American cause than I might have supposed. ‘It was seeing her on screen,’ he told me. I didn’t need to ask him whom he meant by her. ‘It’s a very different experience to being with her, in the flesh. I don’t know how to describe wat it’s like being in a room with her, the charge of it, I mean like electric charge. The charisma, the buzz. I don’t need to tell you.’

  ‘No need to tell me,’ I said.

  ‘But seeing her on the screen I came to see her as a, well, fraud. If I state it so bluntly it sounds kinda crude, but you need to understand I came to this realisation over several months.’

  ‘Did your, um, hosts,’ I asked, nodding at the still nameless American woman sitting beside us both, ‘encourage you to, er...’

  ‘My name is Lucette,’ she said. ‘We did nothing to Liu here, except supply him with wat he asked for.’

  ‘It’s true,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Of course you’d say it’s true,’ I pressed. ‘I mean, if they had done . . . something.’

  ‘It’s a misunderstanding of pharmakos,’ Lucette put in, ‘to think it can be used to alter consciousness, to brainwash or turn people into zombie-loyalists. Surely you know better than that, Paul?’

  I smiled weakly at her. ‘Science keeps making new breakthroughs,’ I said.

  ‘Come come,’ she chided. ‘You had pharmakos to alter your sexual preference, didn’t you?’

  I thought of registering surprise that she knew such a secret about me; or perhaps outrage that she was sharing this detail with Liu, and anybody else in the shop who might have been eavesdropping. But instead I say, ‘That’s got nothing to do with anything.’

  ‘I only mean, did it alter your brain? Did it change the way you think? No, of course not. There’s no such thing as a bioelectric pharmakos; it’s just hormones, moods, just the mindless organic cellular processes.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Liu. ‘I don’t mean about the pharmakos - I don’t know anything about that, that’s not my field of knowledge. But I know that they didn’t do anything to me, apart from give me access to lots of screen reports and leave me to think about things for a while.’

  I looked at Liu Chuanzhi and tried to remember wat he had been like before. He had been in the bakground at first, following Gradi like a pet hound as we all did. Then his star had risen as Mat’s had waned, and he had spent much more time with Gradi - attending her personally, going off on trips and missions à deux. But even in this period, his glory, there had been a vacancy about him. His heart-shaped flat-fronted face with its pharmakos-perfected skintone, his mouth precisely as wide as the broad nose just above it. His dark eyes then, I had sometimes thought, were indices of an inner emptiness, twin blakholes. Now, in this coffeeshop, his eyes no longer looked empty or hungry. On the contrary they looked glisteningly filled, like blak olives glazed in oil. His whole face was fatter. His whole manner was more contented.

  ‘You look happier,’ I said, eventually.

  He nodded, and then he said: ‘You don’t.’

  I almost laughed aloud at this.

  ‘I shall tell you both something interesting,’ said Lucette, spreading both her hands on the table. ‘When we - I mean the United States of America — decided on going to war with the Uplands, one factor which influenced our timing and our planning . . . do you mind me talking like this?’

  She was looking at me. ‘Not at all,’ I said.

  ‘One factor was our knowledge that Gradi was pregnant for the third time. We, I mean our intelligence service, smart people sitting in committee, thought that this pregnancy would be a constraint upon her. We thought,’ (and she was watching me intently as she said all this) ‘we thought that she would have to sue for peace after a month or so - at the latest - in order to fly down and complete the pregnancy on Earth. The alternative was that her child, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to upset you,’ (but of course she did), ‘but the alternative was that her child, your child, would die. We didn’t think she would allow her own child to die in order to — ’

  ‘OK,’ I said, gruff. ‘You don’t need to labor the point.’

  ‘It’s a question of whether politics is more important than your own family, your own child. Isn’t it?’

  This was a fatuous thing to say, and ill-judged on the part of Lucette. If I hadn’t already been so deeply implicated in this whole business - if I hadn’t already betrayed Gradi a thousand times in my thoughts - I might have walked out at this point, in protest at the crudity of her approach. But I didn’t. I scowled. I sat. We talked some more. It continued growing upwards, my beanstalk betrayal.

  We talked for half an hour. ‘All we want is Gradi, and that only for a brief period of imprisonment. We’d take her to America, try her, lok her up for a year, then let her go. That would be enough to . . . serve our purposes.’

  ‘If you want her so badly,’
I said, ‘why don’t you grab her from here? She’s down here, Helsinki, pretty often. It’d be an easy thing, bundle her in a car...’

  ‘That’s not going to work,’ said Lucette, briskly. ‘The whole political situation is very delicate. We’re in complicated negotiations with EU right now, it’s all happening right now in Paris. A kidnapping would be . . . legally bothersome. We might be forced to give up Gradi after taking her. It might jeopardise - no, it would jeopardise the talks. It’s too risky. But if we took her in the Uplands . . . that’s a different sort of territory altogether.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. But I was expressing practical, not ethical, reservations.

  ‘There are ways of arranging it,’ Liu insisted. ‘It doesn’t have to be tomorrow . . . months may pass. We’ll set up a meeting.’

  ‘She’ll insist on safeguards. It wouldn’t work.’

  ‘That’s fine. We’ll meet. Tell her we want to talk. Let her lay down watever safeguards she wants. We’ll set things up.’

  When I came to leave, walking stiffly out with a calliper still on my left leg, I asked. ‘Wat shall I tell her about today?’

  Lucette spoke eagerly, almost excitedly, about the most efficient method of lying. It occurred to me, watching her, that this may have been a topic on which she became physically, even sexually, excited. A very slight blush, like the pale pink that marks the petrified lips of a sea-conch, was visible in her cheeks. ‘The trik with convincing lying is to keep it absolutely as close to the original as you can. When you next see her, tell her — do you know when you will next see her, by the way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never mind. When you do next see her, tell her that you met me. Give her my name if you like. Say that you were approached by the American intelligence services. Say that we tried to turn you to our side, although, of course, don’t tell her that we succeeded.’ This seemed presumptuous to me. I was not turned; on the contrary, I had turned them, was using them as a tool for the purposes of giving my one, solitary, dead son his chance at swordplay in the light. But I did not interrupt. ‘Tell her that we said we want a meeting, a negotiation. Leave it to her to determine how to make that safe.’

  I wasn’t really listening to her at this point. I was recalling a dream I had had a week or so before, in which I had rolled over in my bed (I was in my bed, dreaming that I was in my bed, except that my dream bed was larger and sheeted in red silk) and come upon my son; he was a slippery little fish of rubber, a fetus with closed eyes, but he had opened his mouth and started crying when I rolled onto him.

  twenty-one.

  Slater

  Marina drives up by energCar from Titusville, leaving the kids with Elizabeta. She does not fly, although it’s a four-hundred-kilometre journey, because she doesn’t like to fly, she’s never liked that business of being disconnected from the living earth. She drives the first few hundred klims, telling herself that it will get her there more quikly, but in fact in order to have something to concentrate upon, to prevent her mind from wheeling with anxiety about her husband. He is the only husband she has ever had. But by the time they get onto route 10 Marina has had enough of the intense concentration. She flips the car to automatic, and stares out of the window, smoothing at one hundred kliks past the great artificial swamp, in which blue herons, as elegantly bodied as hand-turned glass vases, pek and pry, or rise up in floks like dark litter in a strong wind. The swamp, in its flatness, recedes in every direction like a virtual landscape, a mathematical plane.

  At Fort Newport she is kept waiting for half an hour in the front lobby, before a military nurse, a trimly bearded young man, takes her through to her husband’s room. He is lying on his bak, spinal-plates plumbed into the techne of the bed. There’s a screen in the ceiling he can watch if he chooses. His eyes swivel, and he smiles.

  ‘Hi, love,’ he says. He doesn’t get up.

  Her sloping tumble to the ground is interrupted by the chair at his bedside, which collects her hips between its upholstered arms. ‘Oh God, look at you,’ she says, and then: ‘Oh God, look at you.’

  ‘Not too bad,’ he replies, as if she had asked how he was feeling, as perhaps he had expected her to. ‘Considering wat I’ve been through.

  ‘They won’t tell me anything,’ his wife sobs. ‘They said, told me, you’d crashlanded in China, But why did you choose China?’

  He gurns, thinks how to answer. ‘It chose me,’ he says.

  ‘We’ve never been to China! Did you go to China on military mission, on time?’

  ‘Mary — ’

  ‘And why did you crashland? Did your plane go wrong? Darling, I was worried. This uniform rang at the door, and he told me . . .’ But she gives up this sentence, and tries to convey, with the sheer intensity of her gaze, wat has been so oppressive in her mind. She tries, almost, to beam the state of her emotions directly into him tele-empathically, like that character from the TV show that Alice watches every weekday afternoon, wat is it called? She can’t remember wat it is called. But she wishes that instead of the clumsy impedimenta of words she might be able to run a cable from a port at the bak of her skull directly into the port at the bak of his, so that he can immediately understand how unendurably massive has been her anxiety, her resentment and even her despair, how she has wanted to scream, and felt nauseous from waking to sleeping such that she’s wanted to do nothing but sleep.

  Slater, in his raspy voice, says wat any husband would say in these circumstances: ‘It’s OK, my love,’ he says. ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ he says.

  She shakes her head. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says.

  ‘I came down without a plane,’ he tells her, in his rough voice. She has to lean in closer to hear him properly. ‘Wat? Wat?’

  ‘Seriously - it’s the truth. I was in orbit in nothing but a suit. I didn’t even have the glove for my left hand. I used the EleMag coil in the suit to slow my velocity, and then slipped down through the air at - barely - less than burn-up temperatures. It’s so crazy I can hardly believe it. I can hardly believe it and I lived through it.’

  She cannot process all this at once, and so she fixes on one detail. ‘You were in empty space without your spacesuit glove?’

  ‘That’s right. Everything happened at once - did they tell you how I ended up there?’ His voice is like unplaned wood.

  ‘They haven’t told me anything,’ she repeats.

  ‘Well - you’ve been following the war on the screen news?’

  ‘It’s horrible,’ she sobs. ‘It’s terrible. They’ve had dozens of widows — any of them could have been me! I can’t watch it, it’s so terrible.’

  Slater thinks how to judge wat he has to say to match his wife’s mood. ‘I ended up in space, outside any plane, just me - I was thrown out, as part of the Upland counterattak,’ he says. ‘And I didn’t have time to put on my glove.’

  ‘But can you go in space without gloves? Is that allowed?’

  Slater smiles. ‘It’s not advised, no.’

  ‘Didn’t it hurt your hand?’

  By way of reply he fishes his left-arm stump, sealed in its plastic bandage cap, out from underneath the bedclothes. He holds it up, and his wife stares at it for long minutes without saying anything.

  ‘Not too handsome, I know,’ he says, a little anxiously, seeing the undisguised upset on Marina’s face. ‘But they’ll fit me with a machine-hand. Some of those are very life-like, you know. They haven’t come to try and fit me yet - not yet, anyhow.’ There is a hollow moment in the communication between them. The expression on her face has not changed. He says, ‘Say something, love, you’re freaking me out a little. It’s not so bad, is it?’