Gradisil (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  This jolts her into shaking her head, and mumbling, ‘I’m sorry my love, it’s all just been, it’s just all been, it’s just all been such a shok. Your poor hand! At least you’re not left-handed. They’ll fit a prosthetic? That’s alright. Oh I’m sorry, how selfish I’m being, how are you? Are you OK?’

  ‘Not so bad,’ he said, smiling with relief at this more conventional wifely responsiveness. ‘I watched the hand burn up, right in front of my eyes. That was - something.’

  ‘Oh my poor love, did it hurt?’

  ‘No no,’ he says, ‘never. It was all numb, down to the marrow. It was just - spectacular.’

  ‘But why did it burn?’

  ‘I guess I, I guess it gotten itself heated up pretty high when I was falling. It was black from the depressurisation, bruising, so it absorbed the heat. I guess coming fast through the atmosphere, it got heated.’

  She thinks about this. A strange, dislocated expression is on his wife’s face now, and he doesn’t like it. He tries to fish up a more reassuringly loving face from the depths of Marina’s mind with the hook-on-line of saying ‘Love, are you feeling OK?’ But the expression of almost cringing stealthiness which comes over her instead is painful to him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

  He is sterner-voiced. ‘Wat is it, Marina? Wat’s on your mind?’

  ‘Look,’ she said, getting a red-bound notebook, the size and thikness of a wad of banknotes, from her jaket poket. ‘I made some notes. I wanted to talk to you about this, but you were . . . up there.’

  ‘Talk about wat?’

  ‘I was in the garden, a week ago. It was beautiful, it was a beautiful morning, and I was just drinking a little coffee, and there was this bird . . .’

  ‘Bird?’

  ‘I don’t know wat kind of bird,’ she said petulantly, perhaps piqued at having been interrupted. ‘A blak creature, with a shiny blak beak like a great blak thorn. It flew down and then settled in the tree, in the garden - the elm, you know?’

  ‘So there was a bird . . .’

  ‘It spoke to me. I mean, it made its cawing noise, its graa-graa and its o-a-o-a noises. But I listened, and then it suddenly kinda cliked in my head.’ She pauses, and looks at her husband’s pillow-propped head to chek he is following wat she is saying. ‘It’s really crucially the . . . thing,’ she goes on. ‘I mean, I know birds can’t talk, leastways not talk like human beings, no?’

  ‘No,’ he says, firmly. ‘Mary . . .’

  ‘But if that’s so then how was I hearing the words? Somebody, some . . . thing . . . was speaking through the bird. I did a screen search and birds have been considered creatures of omen in a thousand cultures. I wrote down wat I heard.’

  ‘Mary — ’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she says, urgently, ‘but before you start at me, just have a look at wat I writ.’ She opens the notebook at the proper page and places it in his one remaining hand, where it perches, not unlike a bird itself, headless with two rectangular wings.

  Slater contemplates this. ‘Marina,’ he says. ‘This is — is this a joke?’

  ‘Joke?’ She is offended. ‘No!’

  ‘All these words, these are in your head, not in the bird. You know? You hear these words in the birdsong the same way that people pik constellations out of the sky. The constellations aren’t really there, it’s just the pattern-making bias in human consciousness.’

  But these are not the terms on which she wants to discuss this matter with him. ‘I wanted to talk to you about it right away, and I called your base, but they said you were away on active duty, and it was classified, and so on. But it seemed so urgent, and when I turned to look at it it flew away.’

  ‘Marina . . .’

  ‘It was warning me, don’t you see? It was telling me to go away, to get out, to get away, but where?’

  ‘Calm, love. Don’t get over-excited.’

  ‘But then I got the news about you - your news. Don’t you think that confirms it? Don’t you think that’s more than a coincidence?’

  ‘I really don’t, no I don’t.’

  This doesn’t register with Marina’s jitterily monomaniacal mind. ‘It says to go, it must mean both of us, but where should we go? Go where? After we talked about it I decided that . . . I know you won’t be angry with me, my love. I’ve only seen him a few times; but it makes - oh, such a difference.’

  He understands. She has been bak to the Pastor. She has had her pharmakos neutralised. The sensation inside his head is an almost exact analogue to the sensation he has already experienced in his gut upon falling from sixty miles. This is terrible. Blotches, like monstrously exaggerated semi-transparent bacilli or bacteria, float across his line of sight. His head feels larger than it did before, or else much more massy, almost like a bowling ball. His limbs feel similar, like rolls of dense cloth. ‘Mary,’ he says, his voice still raspy but stronger. ‘Have you been bak to see the Pastor?’

  She doesn’t answer this directly; it’s self-evident. Instead she says, ‘He wants me to tell you that love is a universal, that if you love me and God loves me, then this is the same thing, from the perspective-point of eternity, isn’t that a beautiful thought? There’s only love, like drops of water in the ocean so if you love me and God loves me it’s impossible for you and God to be on different sides of the . . . uh.’ She falters before the shrunken fury of his face.

  ‘Is he in the car? Did you drive with him all the way up from Titusville?’

  ‘Of course not!’ she says, blushing. But, just as Slater thinks, with a ridiculously disproportionate spurt of relief, that she is at least sparing his feelings, she adds, ‘He’s an important man, I couldn’t coop him up in a car for hours and hour,’ and he realises that in fact she has been sparing his feelings.

  He closes his eyes.

  Had he the power of prophesy, wat might he see? That his recovery will take longer than the doctors anticipate, despite the excellent spinal knits generated by the specialist pharmakos? That his artificial left hand will give him pins and needles up and down his arm whenever he tries to pinch its fingers together, in some obscure neural-feedbak glitch that the medics can’t quite eliminate? That his wife, once again in thrall to the overwhelming mental stimuli of God and Devil will leave him, tearily, convinced in some way she cannot quite articulate (because to articulate it would be to reveal its illogicality and puerility) that by falling from heaven, burning as he fell, her husband has changed from being a Warrior of Light into being a devil, Miltonic, melodramatic? He can’t see these three things. Nor can he see that however earnestly he will try imploring her, rotating systematically through begging, yelling, weeping, reasoning, insisting, bak to begging, she cannot be dissuaded. She will not try to take the children, because her two-thirds-cancelled mental pharmakos has not relinquished its hold on her mood entirely, and therefore she feels (in herself) irrational, guilty, even a little stupid at the decision she has made. But, sinner though she is, she owes a greater duty to her immortal soul, a thing that belongs to its creator and not to herself. It’s inconceivable to remain married to a man God has - in the most elaborate way possible — revealed to be a devil, even if you love him. So she follows the bird’s advice and runs away. But there’s a truth here, which Slater will, only very slowly growing uncrippled, come to grasp, something along the lines of (although not precisely) ‘I will die, therefore I am’. It’s a triky business.

  twenty-two.

  Paul

  My betrayal cheered me, perversely. I became less depressed, more energised; I had something to live for, to live towards. Gradi noticed the difference in me, and encouraged me (or permitted me, which perhaps amounted to the same thing) to accompany her. ‘We’ve got a few months of post-victory euphoria,’ she told me, ‘to lay down some of the structures of a properly-functioning nation. We need structures about which to congregate. I don’t mean literal structures - although, in the long run, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to put up
a few public houses, a public water supply for individual use, a town hall, maybe a - but I mean to establish the principles of Upland citizenship. No taxation, that’s a given. Though Gallano thinks we can top-slice some of the money the Americans seized when we get it bak from the courts, establish a modest treasury. I’ll need a treasurer.’ Was she asking me to be treasurer? That would be a high prestige post in the new Upland republic, although the fact that Gradi had executed the previous Upland chief banker with her own hand might reduce the number of people eager to put themselves forward.

  The new stars in Gradi’s political firmament were: Georgina, Ustinov, Gallano. Mat and I had waned, become little more than pasteboard figures to fill out the bakground of screen shots and publicity opportunities.

  Why did my betrayal cheer me? Sometimes Gradi’s sheer charisma would inspire me again, and I would start to believe in the possibility of a glorious future for the Uplands, houses that swim forever into new dawn after new dawn. It occurred to me that I could have taken a senior governmental position, become a world political player — except that, now, it was only a matter of time before my betrayal became known to the world and instead I fled not only the Uplands (for who in the Uplands would suffer a Judas such as I to live there?) but also the Upland-friendly EU, ran into an exile and an entirely deserved obscurity. Nevertheless the fact of my betrayal cheered me. Why was this?

  It was because I had a secret to nurse: I had a reason to get up in the morning, I had something worthwhile to hide from Gradi. Given the previous dynamic of our relationship, with my complete passivity and openness to her, this presented me with a series of interesting challenges. Every morning I greeted Gradi, shadowed my usual scurrying thoughts with a sinister, thrilling, mendacity. It was just dangerous enough to be exciting (for, after all, it was treason) but not so dangerous that it threatened my fundamental peace of mind. Because whilst Gradi was now Gradi the Victor, vanquisher of the USA, forger and fuehrer of the Uplands, she was still (of course) my Gradi, the same girl I had met more than a decade before — penniless, desperate for anybody who could help her with the financial necessaries to lift her into the Uplands. And then, although I permitted myself to be persuaded by her expert advances that she really did love me, that it really wasn’t just my money, it was less my vanity and more the sheer delight a parent experiences with a clever child - how well she played me, how sensitive and perfectly judged her advances were, thinking to overcome my resistance when in fact I had loved her almost from the first time I had seen her, and wanted nothing more than to be overcome. Had she uncovered my treacherous scheming wat would she have done? Shot me, as she had shot Bran, the first traitor-Cain of our new world? It’s a counterfactual, so the case can be argued. But I don’t think so. She was no sadist, she took no pleasure in hurting or intimidating people, she wasn’t like that. Of course, she was, as Mat had said, free from the debilitating pity that mars most people’s will-to-power, but that’s a different matter. I believe she would have forgiven me. I believe, in fact, that I was, obscurely, doing wat she wanted me to do.

  I nursed my secret, feeding it tenderly and swaddling it about with carefully spun-out half-truths. I told Gradi I had met with the American agent Lucette, who had wanted to set up a meeting; but I didn’t tell her I had met with Liu, which would have piqued her curiosity too much. I told her I could meet this agent again, and Gradi, thinking herself sly, briefed me with a complex series of proposals for her.

  I met Lucette in Helsinki aquarium, surrounded by the spooky sheer walls of deep blue behind which both real fish and genengineered fauxpoisson circulated and circulated and never grew tired of their circulation. In the big tank sharks jerked their heads and fanned their tails to cool the water and moved coolly on, orienting their peaked heads and 2-D eyes on blue vacancy, and then on more vacancy, and blue vacancy again, and always swimming towards it without arriving. Squid, lying sideways, shuddered their horizontal way through the water. Small fish fled in shoals that moved with just-slightly-out-of-synch singleness. I sat on a bench and Lucette sat next to me in the aquamarine light, and I said to her: ‘I don’t want Gradi to be harmed.’

  ‘Of course a lot depends on how we might want to define harm. Deprivation of a person’s liberty might be termed harm.’

  ‘You know wat I mean.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And wat do you mean?’

  ‘It’s physical harm. I want a promise from you, from America, that Gradi will not be killed, or physically injured, or I’m pulling out of this altogether. I mean it.’

  Her smile looked ghastly in the blue light; blak lips craking slightly to reveal mauve teeth. ‘I think it’s too late for pulling out of this altogether. ’ This did not reassure me. ‘But I’ll happily give you that kind of assurance, Paul. Gradi dead is no good to us. Wat - Gradi the martyr? Do you really think that’s wat we want?’

  I was silent for a while.

  Gradi set up a meeting with the Americans, together with Aleks Smouha, the Finnish ambassador whose career had flourished egregiously on the fame of being the first diplomatic officer to talk to Gradi — though that meeting, many years ago, had been fully hole-in-the-wall and clandestine, Smouha anxious that the Americans not find out about it. But that didn’t matter now; now everybody celebrated Smouha’s incredible prescience. We met the American representative - a plausibly official looking young man, in a smartcloth suit of purple and a tie that displayed the latest Market and Sports scores. He was, I suppose, an agent, although he acted the part of diplomat so perfectly that the two roles seemed indistinguishable.

  We flew up. We flew down. Gradi toured her kingdom, and was greeted as a hero in every house. She made speeches.

  The problem with establishing a new country — establishing a new kind of country — is that revolution is exciting, and winning wars is exciting, but politics is not exciting. Day-to-day politics may be essential, but it does not inspire the heart. But we must guard against this! Without this essential day-to-day politics the Uplands will be stillborn. Everything we have worked for, and suffered for, and fought for, and some of us died for, everything will be lost. And I’ll tell you my truth — the possibilities that politics opens up for me are the most exciting I have yet known. The possibility of a land genuinely free: for our citizens are wealthy enough, and our infrastructure needs are non-existent enough, for us not to need to levy taxes; and our space is large enough to welcome as many incomers and immigrants as there are people on the planet below, provided only that they build their own houses and arrange their own transport; and our spirit is strong enough, and the independence we have fought for is vital enough for us to need no police force or army — except that every Uplander is dedicated to policing this freedom and defending it against attak, except that every Uplander will defend his or her fellow citizens from any person or persons who seek to interfere with their liberty. This is the dream I am following, the utopian gleam that tempts me onwards. If this is politics, then who dares call it boring?

  She really had all those triks of political rhetoric down pat: those modulated repetitions, those Gettysburg-Address touches of heightened vocabulary and diction. Was this the last speech she made before the end? One of the last, certainly.

  ‘It’s important,’ she said to me, ‘that we meet the Americans on our own turf. We need to assert our independence. It would be too easy, having broken the American hold over us, to fall into the comfortable embrace of the EU. I know they’re keen to grab us.’

  ‘You think so? They seem to have their hands full digging their moat between the US and themselves.’

  We were talking outside the Lutheran cathedral in Helsinki; sitting on a bench, with two security guards (at wat point did Gradi start hiring security guards? We had never needed them before the war - or during, for that matter) standing a little way behind us, hands on weapons. The boys were running down the hill towards the market at the foot, and the two of us were sitting on a bench.
There was a very attractive view over the bay, the hammer-point sun coming down towards the anvil of the horizon with tender slowness to our left. The sunlight was the color of pale whisky.

  ‘America and the EU have history,’ she said, as if this were necessarily a bad thing, like typhus or slavery. But in her vocabulary, of course, it was. A key reason the Uplands gleamed so hopefully in her mind was that it was free of history. History is the shape of a drug-addict’s career; it is that thing that makes it so difficult for him to break his addiction. History is habitude.

  ‘We could,’ I suggested, as if this were something I had thought up myself, and not something Lucette had told me to say, ‘arrange a meet at Gallano’s.’

  She contemplated this idea. ‘Maybe,’ she conceded.