Gradisil (GollanczF.) Page 13

  ‘How’s the house, Teruo?’ I asked.

  Immediately he was suspicious. ‘What do you mean?’

  I got a little angry to cover myself. ‘I was only asking,’ I snapped. ‘Have you added to it? Is the periscope still working? I’m only trying to distract you from your misery, you selfish cuss. But don’t tell me, I don’t care, I don’t want to know.’

  ‘The house is fine,’ he said, sounding cowed. ‘I haven’t added anything, but it’s good. The periscope is fine. Most people have them, now, up here. That was a good invention, I think.’

  ‘And you told me you didn’t have any money!’ I said, mockchidingly. ‘When you’ve got a perfectly good house of your own.’

  This made him cry again. ‘But it’s not mine,’ he said, between gulps. ‘I borrowed money from Åsa. It’s his house now. It’s mortgaged to him. But I needed the money to live on! I ran out of money, Klara.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’

  ‘When I - when I - when I — ’ he said, as if he was having trouble putting the words out, ‘when I am gone,’ he said, finally, ‘Åsa’s going to take my house to the Moon.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  ‘He’s got a little ranch there. That’s what he calls it, a little ranch. He wants more living space, up there. He says the lunar gravity agrees with him better than no gravity at all. They’ve got an inflated tent, there, now, you know. Inflated. They’re putting their shit in it, their shit mixed up with lunar dust and so on. They’re maybe going to grow some lettuce or tomato or something, in a couple of months.’

  So that was that.

  I had medical tests with EUSA. They scheduled me for a flight up to the new European station. It was all going ahead.

  I had to broach the subject with Gradi. It wouldn’t be possible for her to come and live in the uplands until she had stopped growing, assuming that she even wanted to. But she needed to know that I was going back up, and she needed to know that her father was dying. I hadn’t discussed it with anybody in the government, but I wondered if it would be possible to fly her up to say hello-goodbye to her father, and then fly her down again and put her in a live-in school. As I look back on it now, it seems to me that I was almost monstrous in my self-obsession on this issue. Perhaps I should have put my daughter first, and told the government to go fuck itself. But, you must understand, firstly, that Gradi was an unusually self-reliant child, so much so in fact that I had gotten out of the habit of thinking of her as a child at all and thought of her as a little adult. And secondly, you must understand that I wanted so very much to return to the uplands. If that latter reason does not sound convincing or weighty to you then I can only think that you have never been to the uplands. Go, look through the window, then you’ll understand.

  I went in the car to collect Gradi from school. She looked so beautiful, in her tiny coat and hat, sitting entirely alone and apart from the other children in the drop-off lane. ‘My darling,’ I said, embracing her. She let me embrace her, but only briefly. ‘Did you have a good day in school?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and climbed into the back of the energCar next to me. When some other children climbed in after her, she shuffled along, pressing into me to ensure that there was clear upholstery between her and them. I squeezed her hand.

  ‘I’ve some news,’ I told her, ‘I spoke to your father today.’

  ‘Daddy,’ she said, and momently her face brightened. ‘Is he coming to see me?’ She meant Thom Baldwin, of course, when she said daddy.

  ‘I don’t mean daddy daddy,’ I said. ‘I mean your biological father.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, the interest draining instantly out of her. ‘Him.’ She looked out of the window as the half-rubble, half-built-up streets rolled past.

  ‘He’s not very well. In fact he’s very ill.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

  I tried to be shocked. ‘Gradi!’ I said.

  ‘He’s a stupid uplander,’ she said, savagely, and twisted one of her coat tails in both her hands. Her reaction nonplussed me; it didn’t bode well for my other piece of news. But the energCar had pulled up and this was our stop.

  We went in the house, and I cooked some food, and Gradi did some of her homework, which seemed to consist of callisthenic gestures and movements - nothing like the sort of homework I used to take home when I was a child. But times change, I suppose. When we sat at the table to eat, I tried to raise the subject again.

  ‘Don’t you like uplanders, Gradi?’ I asked.

  She munched, moodily, and then turned her face away. I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but then she said, ‘The other children at school have daddies, most of them. Some of them don’t have daddies, but then their daddies died in the war, and that’s better. But my daddy is a criminal.’ She meant Teruo when she said this. ‘Uplanders are all criminals and bank robbers and murderers, and they’ve run away from the world, and it’s proper to despise them. The teacher said so.’

  ‘The teacher shouldn’t have said so,’ I returned. ‘You shouldn’t believe such things. I know many uplanders, and they’re not any of them criminals. I used to be an uplander myself,’ I reminded her.

  She looked at me, with a tender expression, and suddenly dropped down from the table and ran around to me, hugging me about the waist. ‘But you came home, Mamma,’ she said. ‘But you came home!’

  I was surprised by my own tears when I hugged her. I don’t know why I cried. It was the mere pressure of emotion, I suppose, the sudden intimacy with my chilly daughter, the fact that there was at least one small thing I had done which had pleased her. The steam coming out of the kettle’s spout doubtless doesn’t understand its own relationship to the heating element inside the device.

  It was not easy. I hadn’t the heart to raise the subject again that evening, and when I tried talking about it the next day Gradi seemed to blank me out. She didn’t want to hear it. She had no room in her feelings, and perhaps no room in her mind at all, for her dying father, or for the idea of her mother returning to the uplands.

  ‘But,’ I tried, the next day, or the next week (because it went on and on), ‘but wouldn’t you like to live in the uplands? To live amongst the stars? You’re weightless up there, you know. You can float, and fly. We could go to the Moon.’

  ‘The Moon,’ she said, with deadpan twelve-year-old intensity, ‘is all desert and vacuum. Why would I want to go there? There’s nothing there but emptiness.’

  I tried to find a way of communicating to her that I had been happy in the sky; that my life on the ground had never been as satisfying or fulfilling. But I didn’t have the language. Or, more precisely, she and I did not have the language in common.

  It was a time of tears and tantrums.

  I remembered how I had been at her age, when my father came to take me away, how eager I had been to go with him. Now I was offering to do the same with her, to take her away, and she wasn’t interested. She didn’t want it. As I write this down I feel how foolish it is, or to be more precise, how foolish were my unspoken assumptions at that time. What was I thinking? I was thinking, at some subterranean level: as I was at twelve, so must my daughter be at the same age. When I state it baldly, like this, of course I can see how foolish it is. But this belief, in some unmined, unrefined form, was certainly inside me at that time.

  I moved out of the builder’s house, not particularly mourning the end of that relationship, and I took an apartment in the Government development of Paris-Nord. Gradi resisted this also, because it meant moving schools. ‘But,’ I told her, rather baffled, ‘you always said you hated that other school. You said the children were cruel to you, and that you hated the lessons in French. All the lessons in this school are in English, you know,’ English being the language of governance.

  ‘You don’t know anything!’ Gradi shrieked. ‘You’re taking me away from all my friends. I’m never allowed to settle anywhere! I’ve been to a thousand schools, and they’re all awful. And now I’ve got
to leave the only school I ever liked. All my friends are there!’

  It was hard. She sulked, and banged doors, she refused to eat. Once she threw the food I had prepared for her from the table to the wall. I tried to discipline her; something I had never done before. I tried grabbing her and smacking her. To be honest, I was very angry myself. But although I am a relatively tall woman, and although Gradi was a girl of small proportions, I did not have the strength. She wriggled free easily and ran off.

  Eventually I made some sort of peace with my daughter. One night, as she lay in her bed I came through and sat on the edge of the mattress. We talked for a while, and she surprised me. ‘What do you want, Gradi?’ I asked her, and she replied without hesitation: ‘I want to join the military.’ Imagine it! ‘You want to be a soldier?’ I asked her, taking care not to load my voice with any tone of dismissal or contempt, trying to ask the question in a neutral way. ‘The teacher told me,’ she said, ‘that I was probably too small for the army, but that my stature would be a positive asset in the air-force. I could fly planes. I want to fly. That’s my dream. I’ll be thirteen in five weeks, and then it’s only four years until I can join up.’

  ‘You never mentioned this before,’ I said, suspecting it was a whim of the moment.

  ‘You never asked,’ she said, with a hint of sulkiness. ‘Anyway, you hate the military, you always said so. But Daddy was in the army.’ Now she meant Thom Baldwin.

  ‘He was seconded to the medical corps,’ I said. ‘During the war. But that was during the war, when lots of people went in the army who wouldn’t normally. He’s not in the army now. There’s no war on now.’

  ‘It’s always war,’ she said, simply. Those were words that stayed with me for a long time; that blank wisdom, that unstudied eloquence that children sometimes achieve. I sat in silence on the end of her bed. She sang to herself for a little bit, and I realised that she had been conducting the conversation with me at the same time as listening to some of her music through a single earphone. She liked a very different sort of music to the sort I had liked at her age: hers was softly melodious, with multiple harmony and echo effects and a soprano vocal line trembling above it. It seemed insipid to me, but it was what she liked. She sang: fire light, fire light, fire little, fire light, or something like that. Then she said: ‘It’s alright, Mamma. I know you want to go to the uplands.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, shortly. ‘I do.’

  ‘It’s OK. You can go, if you like.’

  And with that casual permission, she stopped fighting me. It was as simple as that. She stopped her tantrums, and became a much better behaved, if slightly distant, young woman. At her birthday five weeks later she invited friends from her new school. By then it was apparent that she was much happier. I had the sense, only nebulously available to my conscious mind, that some great obstacle that had been blocking my actions as mother had been rolled away; indeed that, in some sense, I had completed my duties as parent, that at twelve Gradi had moved into adulthood.

  thirteen

  The new EUSA spacebirds test-flew for the first time in late ’75. By ’76 the cargo birds had carried several hundred building components up to a high orbit. Just as the journalist from Builder Europe had predicted, scores of specialist builders were contracted to assemble a platform. A hangar, a dozen chambers, generators, heating and cooling, solar panels for energy, hundred-klim-long periscopes to siphon-in clean air. It was to be the largest house yet built in the uplands. The cost was estimated at a hundred and twenty million euros. By the time it was finished this price-tag had risen to nearly three hundred million euros. My father had built our first house for a little over 6000 euros for the major parts, another 2000 for essential components, and maybe 900 for fuel (this is not counting the original cost of Waspstar and of father’s various modifications of the original jet). Of course, the government’s house was much bigger. But to be involved in the manufacture as I was, even in a relatively minor position, was to see how much money was wasted, how much was scooped off by corrupt operators, how much was spent unnecessarily. It reawakened my father in me. I found myself sounding off to people in the staff bars, about the wastage, about the inefficiencies of government. One time I got too drunk, and I said ‘The more I think about it, the less I think that colonisation of new lands should be in the province of government at all - government should never try to colonise, that’s just oppression. People should do it themselves.’ The following day I was reprimanded by my superiors. ‘You work for the government now,’ they told me. ‘You can’t simply mouth off every thought in your head. What if a journalist had been listening? What if a spy had been listening?’

  There was a great deal of talk of spies in those days. Suspicion and what was called ‘hot peace’ existed between the American-Asian alliance and Europe. Nobody expected the peace to last. The only question in the media was: what form will the war take? Will it be a lengthy and casualty-rich war of attrition? Will it be a short war of sharp-shocks? To think of it now . . . to think how blasé we became in contemplating mass death.

  I was on the government payroll, it is true. I spent my days in my office doing the Times of Europe crossword, or reading, or staring through the window. That’s what it’s like to work for the government. Sometimes I spoke to uplanders, and I filed reports on what I said. Here is a conversation I had with Åsa. I checked the transcripts, which recently became available under the fifty-year rule.

  ‘I have missed you, my dear,’ he said. His wheeze had gotten worse. ‘There are so few people from the old days left. Not that I’m lonely. More people have houses up here than ever before, you know. But I miss some of the old faces. Did you hear that poor Teruo died?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Poor fellow. He got very ill. We all tried to encourage him to go downbelow for some treatment, but he was always stubborn. Stubborn to the end. But how are you, my dear? I have missed you. You always had such life, such energy. You were working your way through the available men up here, do you remember? First Jon, then Teruo, poor Teruo. I always used to hope that you’d work your way round to me in due course.’ He laughed, amiably. ‘Times weren’t so bad back then, were they.’

  ‘How is Jon?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s very well. I’ll tell him you were asking after him. He’ll be pleased by that. He has a house on the Moon now, and a house in the uplands, and he goes from one to the other. Sometimes he digs out interesting things from the Moon, and hauls them into lunar orbit - rocks and crystals and things. It doesn’t take much to get them into orbit, and when they’re up then it’s downhill all the way to Earth. He had an arrangement with some American universities, I think, to provide them with raw material. It doesn’t pay much, but it’s something.’

  ‘Is it true that you’re mayor of the Moon?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I heard this story that you’d been voted mayor of the Moon. It sounded a little bizarre to me, but that’s what I heard.’

  ‘Ah, the Moon!’ said Åsa. I think he was getting a little bit deaf in his old age. ‘It’s a splendid place. You really should come and visit. Although,’ he added, with a certain snideness in his voice, ‘I hope I’m not being insensitive. I sometimes forget. It’s a privilege, isn’t it?’

  ‘A privilege?’

  ‘Living up here. Being able to fly to the Moon, to live in the clear unfogged sunshine of the uplands. Not everybody can do it. It’s such a long time since I was on the ground, since I had to work for my money. I didn’t mean to - what’s the expression - to rub your nose in it.’

  ‘You didn’t rub my nose in it.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘In fact,’ I said, and as I said it I felt a joyous little contraction in my chest, a knot of euphoria and hope tying itself there, ‘in fact I may be moving back up to the uplands fairly soon.’

  ‘Really? How marvellous.’ He sounded wary. Perhaps he thought I was about to ask him for some money to buy a plane and to b
uild a house.

  ‘I’ve taken a job with the European government,’ I explained. ‘They’ve promised to establish me in a house.’

  ‘Your own house? Or government accommodation?’

  ‘The deal is I work for them for some years, and afterwards I’m allowed to retire to a house of my own. Isn’t that wonderful?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Åsa agreed, in a bland voice.

  Eventually I got to fly back into the uplands. The EUSA Station was complete, and had been staffed with scientists, all of whom held senior ranks in the European military. I was flown by low-air flight to Norway, and there boarded into one of the new spacebirds. She was a beautiful-looking craft, silver-skinned, sweeping lines running from the cup-nosed cockpit down to fretted wings, serrated, or ‘metal-feathered’ as it was termed, on the trailing edge. Two large cargo doors were inlaid into the spine of the fuselage. This was one of the smaller spacebirds too; the larger, freight ’birds were simply enormous, the size of ocean liners, able to haul incredible amounts of stuff into orbit.