Gradisil (GollanczF.) Read online

  ‘She’s mocking me,’ I cried. ‘She’s baiting me. She’s tasking me.’

  ‘I don’t want you to kill me,’ Teruo insisted. ‘I don’t want you to damage this expensive plane that I converted to space flight with my own hands and with my own money, god damn it. I don’t want you to kill baby either.’

  ‘She’ll get away. We’ve got to stop her. We’ve got to get her,’

  He had me in an embrace, although I struggled, and we were spinning in the main body of the fuselage now, knocking the walls from time to time, literally bouncing off the walls. ‘Say you crash into her house like kamikaze,’ he said. ‘Say you do that. How do you know which room she is in? What if you get the wrong room, and she seals her doorway, and then you’re dead and I’m dead and the baby’s dead, and she’s still alive. Is that what you want? Is that what you want?’

  ‘What else can we do?’ I sobbed. ‘What else? We don’t have weapons. I can’t fire one of Jon’s harpoons at her, we don’t have it. What else?’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do now,’ he insisted. ‘We must go home, and plan it more carefully.’

  Eventually his reasonableness wore me down, penetrated my hysteria. I calmed down a little. Ten minutes later we took up our seats in the cockpit again. ‘I want to scare her, though,’ I said. ‘I want her to think I’m going to kill her. I want to ruffle her feathers.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ Teruo advised.

  I called her again. She picked up after two rings. ‘Hello?’ she said, as if she really didn’t know who was calling.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, with instant warmth. ‘You worried me. It sounded like you had a funny turn.’

  ‘You’re insane,’ I said. ‘You’re a sociopath. I feel sorry for you.’

  ‘Are you still upset over your father?’ she asked, with genuine bafflement in her voice. It was as if she were talking about a finger cut yesterday.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, in a heavy-voice. ‘I’m upset about my father. Perhaps you don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘When we had our slumber party - do you remember? Happy times. I’ll tell you what I liked about you then. You seemed a very unsentimental individual. I admire that in people. Too many people lived their lives poisoned with sentiment. I do hope you haven’t gone that way. I hope you haven’t lost the ability to see more clearly. Some people live in the valley, and they are conformist and they are sentimental. Some people, though, live on the mountain-top, and they are the future-humans, the higher-humans, the above-humans. That’s where we are. Oh, what is there to be sentimental about anyway? Everybody dies, after all. Your father died, I will die, everybody.’

  ‘You’ll die sooner than you think,’ I said, and pushed two spurts out of the strapped-on solid sticks. The plane lurched towards the house, and Teruo’s head and mine snapped back. In a second we were past, and speeding away. I puffed side jets and brought the plane about, by which time the house was a speck lost against the backdrop of the Earth. I had to pick up Tam’s transponder to find my way back. It was sloppy flying. But this time I came in more slowly, and deliberately nose down, and nudged forward. I was aiming for her comm set-up, and this time I caught it. The plane’s nose went under the main dish, and with a painful, metallic wrenching sound, that made Teruo squeal with fear that the nose was breaking open, I pushed on and ripped the dish away. I hope that it sounded like the end of the world inside Kooistra’s house, and that she was scared, if only for a moment. I hope I at least rattled her for a moment.

  We flew home.

  It turned out that I had indeed warped the nose a little, and Teruo had to open the hatch from inside with a crowbar, which made him grumpy. ‘You were lucky not to break the seal,’ he said. ‘Then we’d have explosive-decompressed, and that would have shoved us backwards, and you wouldn’t have been able even to break off her precious comm disc. Not to mention, putting us to con-sid-er-able inconvenience.’

  ‘I didn’t break the seal,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You were lucky,’ he said, as he fetched a hammer to knock the nose back into a better shape. But I didn’t feel very lucky.

  I spent a week building some harpoons, like the ones Jon had used on me. My hope was that Kooistra would stay more or less where she had been. If she was using a periscope to bring in air - more and more uplanders were doing so - then she couldn’t fly to too high an orbit; it limited her range. I told myself that it would be easy to find her, and that this time I would break open each of her rooms one by one. I told myself that the mistake Jon had made, when he had attacked me, was in not coming close enough to the house before firing. I told myself that I wouldn’t make that mistake. Teruo refused to come with me, and indeed tried to talk me out of going. ‘You’ll waste solid sticks,’ he said. ‘These things aren’t free. They cost, you know? They cost money. Somebody’s gotta schlep them up from downstairs, and everything.’ But I didn’t care about that.

  The old model of bubble-set sticks, solid fuel shot through with bubbles of oxygen like the old chocolate bars, had been replaced by a newer model, longer thinner sticks of solid fuel with a spiral-shaped detonation thread running along it. They were more efficient and much easier to fly, but they were also more expensive. Nowadays, of course, almost nobody uses solid sticks; electrical generation is so much more sophisticated, it’s easily possible to generate the amount of energy you need to manoeuvre through the magnetosphere in space as in the atmosphere, and solid-state fuels are a thing of the past (or so they say: I never go upland these days). But then these accessories were a drain on upland finances.

  But I was in no mood to listen to Teruo whinge about money, something he did all the time these days. I snapped at him, and took the plane, and flew round and round the Earth looking for her. But of course she had pulled in her periscope and moved off to another orbit. I was looking for a needle in a great, black sea. It was hopeless.

  ten

  The time came when I could no longer postpone returning to the Earth. My encounter with Kristin Janzen Kooistra had upset me, and I could feel my upset as a physical symptom, because when I was angry the hormones upset my baby, and it kicked and jiggled inside me. It was the physical manifestation of my agitation. I neglected my exercises. I was sour when Teruo told me he’d been in touch with somebody he knew in UK-EU, and had set up a flat for me to live in in London. But my biology compelled me along the path.

  Teruo flew me down to a private landing strip outside Reykjavik, complaining all the time that he had had to pay for its use. I told him I was happy for him to drop me at his usual place in Japan-Siberia, and then pay for a conventional flight to London, but, as he knew very well, that would have worked out more expensive overall.

  I had to be taken from Teruo’s plane in a wheelchair. In fact, I spent the rest of my pregnancy in a wheelchair. I had not anticipated just how heavy a pregnant belly is: the baby, the fluid, everything. It was agony. I caught a passenger-charter flight to London Barking Airport and took the train across the capital to the flat Teruo had rented for me. Ah, but that first night on Earth was one of the hardest I have known. I could not sleep, because the sheer weight of my bones kept me awake. It was not possible to lie in a comfortable posture: the huge tug of my planet-shaped belly, the bruising downward pressure my ribs seemed to exert upon my lungs, the feeling my newly large breasts gave me of hauling my skin out of shape. It was all painful, everything was painful, every breath and every single movement. The baby didn’t move very much inside me. I thought, at least it’s happy. Then it occurred to me that perhaps the lack of movement signified the reverse of that; that maybe it meant that the baby was very far from happy. Maybe the baby simply did not have the musculature to move its new gravity-laden limbs. Maybe it was being crushed, maybe it was dying. I panicked. I rushed to a doctor.

  I spent almost all the money I had in my chip over the remaining three months of my pregnancy: I was in the hospital much more often than would have been norm
al for a pregnant twenty-year-old: checking my health, checking my baby’s health. It all cost money. My daughter was born in the summer of 2063. Had she been a boy, I would have called him Miklós, after my father. I thought of Mikla, but didn’t like the sound of it. I thought of calling her after my mother, Nikola, but that sounded too much like Mikla. Instead I called her Gradisil. ‘What kind of name is that?’ the registrar asked me, checking the child’s vital signs. ‘Is that a Greek name? You’re Greek-EU, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s a Hungarian name,’ I lied. Then, because I felt weirdly uncomfortable at the lie, and because I associated the name with my dad, I added: ‘My father was Hungarian-EU,’ as if that explained and justified it.

  ‘It’s pretty,’ said the registrar, ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means,’ I improvised, ‘road to the stars. Or, rather, it means Beautiful Tree,’

  ‘Lovely. A pretty name for a pretty baby.’

  But Gradi was not healthy. I should not, it transpired, have spent so much time pregnant in zero g. Calcium had not fixed in her bones properly. She broke her legs being born, and cried and cried. She fed hungrily from my agonised breasts, but for two meals out of three she would immediately vomit up all the milk again. Doctors gave her a nutrient implant, in the wall of her duodenum, to prevent her becoming malnourished. I had to replenish this through a plastic duct in her belly. Her poor belly, stabbed through with this plastic implant.

  After a month she stabilised, and after three months more the casts came off her legs. I went back to living in my tiny flat in Putney Common in London, and for six months or so, it was very hard. I begged Teruo for more money, but he whined and whinged and said he hadn’t any more money. I called Sponti, almost with the last money I had in my chip, and cried and cried, and begged him for help. I was not so upset, although I was crying, that I didn’t tweak the guilty spot in his conscience by mentioning my father. He still felt responsible for Dad’s death, even after all this time. He was very supportive. He emailed me some more money at once, and arranged for some business contacts he knew in London to come and see me, to introduce me to some people downside, with a view to finding me some work.

  It transpired that we uplanders were followed by a large community of Earth-bound fans. Especially in Europe and the US, it seemed, there were specialist webgroups, media channels, conventions and the like devoted to following us. Telescopes tracked out trajectories across the sky. Receivers listened in to all our open-band communications. One of Sponti’s Earthside friends set up a number of paid interviews, and I talked about my life as an uplander. The questions followed a certain pattern. Groups were interested in the Moon landing, and almost always prefaced their questions with ‘Personally, I absolutely believe that you guys went to the Moon, I don’t believe the EUSA bullshit about it being a hoax’. They really did. They more than believed. They seemed to think that we had a whole community living on the Moon, that we flew back and forth all the time.

  ‘Have you been to the Moon yourself?’ they asked.

  ‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. But,’ I added, ‘I know the guy who did go.’

  They knew some features of our gossip, of our interpersonal relations, but not others. When I mentioned Jon’s name, they said ‘oh, right’ in a knowing voice, as if they were all aware that he and I had been an item. But they did not seem to know about Teruo.

  They all asked this question: ‘Will you go back there? Will you go back to the uplands?’

  I always answered it: ‘Yes, absolutely, as soon as I can.’ This was what I believed.

  I did half a dozen European interviews, three of them face-to-face. I did two US interviews, by virtual connection. The European interviews were, all of them, interested in my dad. ‘Your father,’ they would say, sometimes having the grace to look sheepish about asking so intimate a thing, but sometimes looking only avid and intrusive, ‘your father, he was - if you’ll excuse me - killed, murdered, wasn’t he?’ ‘Yes,’ I would say. ‘I hope you don’t mind talking about it,’ they would say, looking understanding and concerned, but still hungry for all the painful details. ‘He was murdered by the Crystal Killer, wasn’t he? She’s now officially the world’s most wanted serial killer, Kristin Janzen Kooistra. Did you know that? Did you know that she’s now the world’s number one most wanted?’ No, I said, I didn’t know that. ‘She’s an American, of course,’ they would say. ‘She’s been hiding out in the uplands for years now. The best intelligence says that she is secretly being funded by NASA, as a fifth columnist, living amongst you, an American spy in effect.’ I said that sounded unlikely to me, but my opinion was insufficient to discourage them from their conspiracy theories.

  Neither of the American interviews mentioned my dad, but they both - to my surprise - brought up the long gone subject of my mother’s death. ‘That was a long time ago,’ I told them. ‘I was very young when it happened. I really don’t remember it.’ ‘But isn’t it the case,’ an American interviewer pressed, ‘that she died as the result of Arabic terrorist action? Another civilian casualty in the ongoing Islamic war or terror against peaceful civilians?’

  This was tricky, and perhaps I should have been more diplomatic. But I still thought of myself as an uplander, not as a European living in a continent on the brink of war. ‘Oh,’ I explained. ‘It’s not certain, but I guess so, I guess so. There was that terrorist campaign in the ’30s, of course, when some fundamentalists poisoned a large number of breweries and distilleries. It was a way of striking at the decadent Western addiction to alcohol, they said, seeding our beer and wine with a genetically mutated yeast that acted as a gut poison, and adding those, what-d’ye-call-them, those neuropoisons to spirits. Most of that alcohol was intercepted and destroyed, but in some parts of the world some supplies slipped through, I think my mother was just unlucky, she happened to take a bottle of beer that was from an old crate, and she got a gut rot that killed her.’ I surprised myself, as I was saying this, by how little moved I was. Why should my father’s death churn me up, and my mother’s not move me at all? Weren’t they both equally my parents? Weren’t they both equally dead?

  That’s genuine equality, right there.

  But the Americans ran my interview under a ‘Mother Slain by Islamic Terrorists’ banner, and the Europeans ran it under a ‘Father Murdered by US Spy’ headline, and only then did I realise how naïve I had been. I earned less than nine thousand euros from all those interviews and picture rights, and I created, inadvertently, a great deal of fuss. In my defence I think I really didn’t understand how close to war the downbelow world was.

  War came, of course. I lost touch with my friends in the uplands, because I could no longer use radio communicators to talk to them: the use and even possession of such transmitters was declared a prisonable offence. I ran out of money. Life became much harder. I could not stay in my pleasant London flat, and had to wheel myself in my wheelchair, with Gradisil on my lap, all along the west road and out to less salubrious parts of the capital. I was walking a little now, with difficulty even after six months, but I used my motorised wheelchair for longer journeys. I travelled twenty-five kilometres at three kph an hour; and I had to stop frequently to soothe or feed my baby; it was a ridiculous way to travel.

  Then the European armies were mobilised. This meant, at least, that work opportunities opened up for those of us not in uniform, as the regular workers left to travel to the Atlantic front. I took some work as a data manager in an office in London-West. There was an office crèche, and free medical attention for my still tiny, still ailing baby, and that was more of an incentive for me than the meagre salary. I had an affair with the manager, a one-armed man with a tender face, but he was married and he broke it off after a month or so. German troops were stationed in our buildings, prior to being moved out to the Atlantic platforms, and I had a brief affair with one of them, a man called Matthias Henke. He was a beautiful young man, and was, in fact, the first of my lovers for whom I myself felt a
n overwhelming physical attraction - the swoon of that physical infatuation, the tug of it. But he went out after a few weeks, and I believe he died in the fighting. There was, as you may know from the history books, a two-month period of intense combat, and then a year of very little other than sporadic raids. Then there was a period of heavy bombardment, and I lost three toes from my left foot when my leg was crushed by falling masonry. My foot is still misshapen today. After that there were several months of uneasy peace between the USA and the EU, and finally the Treaty of Tenerife was signed and we were no longer at war. Europe remained under military dispensation for a year, or longer. That’s all common knowledge, and I don’t mean to bore you by rehearsing it here.

  At the end of this period I was living in Cambridge on the UK-EU East Coast with a new man, called Thomas Baldwin. Thom is still alive, and I have asked him whether he has any objection to me writing down details of our life together, but he always was a secretive, suspicious man - although not without a generous side - and he has refused me permission. I have checked with lawyers. They have an obligation to go through my manuscript after I have completed it and make sure it complies with the Decency and Privacy legislation of 2122, so they have promised that they will make sure that what I write here complies with the legal right of my ex-husband for privacy, whilst enabling me my constitutional right to self-expression. It’s a balancing act. I don’t know, actually, exactly to what extent ‘the right to privacy’ is defined under the legislation. I am an old woman now, and the doings of governments seem remote to my life. It seems to me that the legislation does not prohibit talk of sex, provided it is not in more than a certain degree of detail, and provided certain forms of words are avoided. As far as the privacy legislation goes, I may talk about material relating to my ex-husband that is undeniably in the public domain, and that means his business success, his name, his nationality and so on.