Gradisil (GollanczF.) Page 14

  I took my seat inside the spacebird and simply gawped at the fixtures and the fittings. They were signed with the logos of half a dozen of Europe’s most celebrated design companies: JaF, Stilnoct, Charles-Pierre Dutoit, Daysign, Adidas. It was undeniably chic if rather oppressively opulent. They served me luxury food, dainties, fine wine. My seatbelt had a platinum clasp.

  The actual experience of flight, however, was less pleasant. I chatted with an aide as we rose, and I couldn’t stop myself clutching the armrests. Through the windows the air darkened from pale blue to lavender, to a prune-black speckled with random blinks of ionisation, and finally to the authentic black of space itself. Stars shimmered into visibility. But instead of a continuous rise the plane lurched and tumbled, stuttering in its upward momentum before catching again and rising. These drops wrenched my gut nauseatingly.

  ‘I guess you’ve flown up plenty,’ said the aide, a West-Russian called Natalya Shelikhova. ‘But not in such confort!’ Her English grammar was excellent, but her vocabulary sometimes let her down.

  ‘Confort,’ I repeated. ‘No, I haven’t. But I don’t like these sudden little drops.’

  ‘Clear turbulence,’ said Natalya, with a shrug of her shoulder. ‘I have been up thrice. Each time this has happened. It does that.’

  ‘It shouldn’t happen that way,’ I said. ‘Not once we’ve cleared the air, not when we’re running on mag-aerodynamics. There shouldn’t be any turbulence up here. There’s nothing to - uh, to turbulate.’ Her bad English was infecting mine. I was, in fact, very nervous. The plane was stuttering in flight, dropping, climbing sharply, leaving your stomach above you and below you in a nauseous manner. The only time I had felt that before was when I had taken a ride down in Teruo’s plane, one time, long before. He’d painted on heatResist enamel to the belly and underwings of his plane, as was necessary, but he’d done a poor job and it had cracked. On the way down the heat had seeped through, although we didn’t realise it at the time, and burnt out some of the electromagnetic spread of the left wing. So we unloaded, and reloaded, and trundled back down the runway. But when we tried to climb again to the uplands the bite of our field into the earth’s magnetosphere, our purchase on the branches of the Gradisil, had not been complete enough and we had gone into a tumble and a spin. We were lucky: we weren’t too high; we levelled out, flew back to Teruo’s strip, and rewired the wing.

  In this gleaming new craft I got the impression that the spread of underpinning was poorly laid out by design.

  I tried to explain all this to Natalya Shelikhova, but she was blasé. ‘Oh I believe our designers know what they’re doing,’ she said smugly. ‘They’re the best in Europe. They know more about magnetic flight than a bunch of - if you’ll forget me - rag-tags like your uplanders.’ When she said if you’ll forget me, she meant if you’ll forgive me.

  ‘They do have experience,’ I began, but she raised both her palms to me.

  In the event we got safely to the uplands. I filed a report, actually, warning of the dangers. I said that my feeling was the wings were not properly in-pinned with the necessary spread of electromagnetic conductor cable, and that the plane’s purchase on the magnetosphere was too tenuous to be safe. I said that loss of the correct altitude in flight resulted in complete loss of power, since the planes only flew up on their electromagnetic friction; and that without that friction planes were liable to tumble disastrously from the sky, to go into spin, that there was a strong chance that any such plane could crash. I have no idea whether my report was ever read by anybody other than my senior officer. I don’t believe anything came of it. I tried calling it up, recently, to see if it were still on file; but certain military documentation is subject to a longer-than-fifty-years legal interdiction and I could not gain access to it.

  On the Station I was met by my new superior, a tall man called Gar Murphy-McNair. He showed me to my chamber. ‘Eventually you’ll share,’ he told me. ‘When we carry our full complement of crew. But at the moment you’ve got the place to yourself.’

  He had to shout, to be heard above the noise of blowing.

  The Station had been designed with a simulated gravity. The walkways were metal grids, and the ceilings were fitted with huge expelair fans that blew a constant stream of warm air downwards. The effect was to press you gently against the floor as you moved along - to provide a floor and to enable you to walk - but it felt nothing at all like actual gravity. At first the sensation was deeply strange: your body felt the push downwards, but your limbs tended to float. The oddest effect of this design was that, should you try to walk naturally, the pressure changed markedly. You might lean forward into a step, and expose a greater angle of your back to the ceiling, and suddenly the pressure would increase suddenly enough to wrongfoot you and send you sprawling on your face. Similarly, if you straightened up the area of your body exposed to the downdraft would decrease and you might find yourself leaping inappropriately through the air. But after half a day you developed a form of habitude that enabled a sort of progress around the Station in a weirdly dancing-zombie style of perambulation.

  I never saw the point in this pseudo-gravitational artifice. The main disadvantage of zero g is not that it impedes progress around a house - quite the reverse, in fact. The main disadvantage is that without the natural stress of one g your bones lose calcium and your muscles waste. This blow-air pseudo-gravity did not apply anything like enough pressure to keep your bones strong, and if anything it made moving around the Station more, not less, difficult. But I think it reveals something of the government or the military mindset (as I get older I tend to think of those two things as one and the same). The government-military thinker is happiest if he or she can plan everything on a grid, on a map. They like the idea of the familiar. Rather than design a space station according to the constraints of the uplands, they build it as they are used to building a military base, and then try to orient the natural conditions of the new environment around their design. It is the same as the old rocket technology: forcing the world around the machine, rather than adapting the machine to the world.

  So, these fans were tiresome. They were noisy (although Murphy-McNair boasted that they were a new design, the quietest fans ever built), so they made talking and concentrating hard. They consumed a great deal of energy, because they had to be run all hours of the twenty-four. Worse, the constant passage of air dried out your skin, dried out your mouth and nose. If a new arrival came up to the Station incubating a cold, then everybody in the Station caught that cold in a matter of days. Bits of fluff and rubbish were forever swirling through the air; grit and smuts were always getting in my eye, catching on the back of my throat.

  Still, there were aspects of the Station that I did like. I liked my spacious chambers. The Station was in a geostationary orbit, so my view was always of the same shield-shaped spread of the Earth, and I spent long and happy hours simply observing it. I became very familiar with its geographical features, with the dozen-or-so varieties of weather-fronts, with the occasional flashes of rockets (rockets were still sometimes launched), or with the scratchy lines scored in the atmosphere by approaching spacebirds. I stared at the painterly splotches of white cloud, or the miniature etching effects of landmass geography, or at the way the line of darkness did not mark a clear crescent, but rather a grey scythe-shaped area that varied in depth depending on whether dusk was sweeping over clear air or cloudy sky.

  Otherwise I had little to do. I tried to persuade Murphy-McNair that I ought to take one of the docked ’birds and so visit some of the uplanders. He discouraged me. ‘You can surely just talk to them, radio them.’

  ‘I could have done that from the ground,’ I said. ‘What’s the point of my being up here if I’m not actually going to go face-to-face?’

  He looked evasive. ‘There’s a problem with that. Our ’birds are all designed with side-fuselage docking tunnels. Your uplanders all have nose-hatches, don’t you? I don’t think our ’birds can actually dock with an
y of your upland docking hatches.’ He grinned, like a boy who had done something naughty. ‘It’s a design flaw,’ he said. I was going to agree with him, when I realised that he meant that the flaw lay in the uplanders’ docking hatches. I scowled. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, as a parting shot, ‘you might talk to them on the phone, persuade some of your uplander contacts to fit more up-to-date docking features?’

  fourteen

  I kept myself calm by telling myself that this was all only a means to an end. I would serve my term as European ambassador, and then I would make sure I received my private upland house in which to retire. I was thirty-seven. I had no official career plan, no contractual obligation to work a certain amount of time, but I assumed that by the time I was in my mid-forties I would have completed any diplomatic duties the government might have required. Perhaps it seems naïve to you now, but this is what I believed. I thought to myself: at forty-five I would still have half a century of living as a private citizen in the uplands before me. I even countenanced the possibility that the Europeans might want me to come out of retirement from time to time, to liaise between up-and downlanders. That would be alright, I told myself. I saw myself, hazily, as a sort of elder statesman, a grand old woman of the uplands. Settling disputes, chatting to the younger generations. Things like that. Foolish, of course, but my wanting had infected my thinking.

  In the event, I was - mostly - bored. The upland hostility to the European base and the incursion into upland territory that the government had anticipated did not materialise. Perhaps the government had simply underestimated the potency of the upland live-let-live philosophy. Vivre et laisser vivre. Or perhaps they had overestimated upland bellicosity. In the event the Station was just another house, one among many hundreds now circling the earth. Nobody gave it much thought.

  I tried to find work for myself. I pestered Murphy-McNair. ‘I feel I’m useless,’ I told him. ‘A fifth wheel.’

  One day he took me on one side. He put his mouth close to my ear so that others could not overhear his words; but he still had to speak up, to be heard over the noise of the fans. ‘You don’t get it,’ he said. ‘It’s obvious you’re not used to working for the government. There’s no hurry. Fill the time any way you like. Think of it this way; you’re waiting until you get your guaranteed government pension. Do you know how impoverished non-government workers are, generally, nowadays, when they retire? The government pays the best pensions, and you don’t want to do anything to jeopardise that. Just put in the days, the months, the years, and do what you’re told. You’re on the gravy-plane now.’

  He told me this as if he were imparting the secret of life. Perhaps, from his point of view, he was. In my head I substituted my own house in the uplands for his phrase pension, and then I started to see wisdom in what he said. But still I pestered him for things to do. I couldn’t help myself; I was bored. I spent more time in the Station gym than anybody else.

  I persuaded him to have an airlock converter fitted to the Station, so that uplanders could - if they wished - come by. He agreed to this only after my repeated nagging, and then it took three months before the component arrived. It was newly designed, a smart-gel technology that morphed itself into one of a hundred shapes, and that fitted as a prosthesis to any European airlock. I was inordinately excited. As soon as it arrived I called round all my contacts in the uplands and, effectively, invited them to the Station. But they were all reluctant.

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Sponti. ‘But I’ve learned to become more and more suspicious of governments the longer I have lived up here. I’ll have to decline your invitation.’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Åsa. ‘No thanks. Not even the pleasure of seeing you again could compensate for the peril of walking into the European den. I’m not well liked,’ he added, mysteriously, ‘not well liked in Europe.’

  The only person who was in any way open to the suggestion was Jon Snider, which surprised me. I had not spoken to him very often since coming up to the Station. There was, I suppose, a residual embarrassment there on my part. But when nobody was prepared to come visit me, I called him. I waited three days until the Moon was in a position of sight-line radio conjunction. I could have bounced the call off a military satellite, but then I would have had to clear the call with my superior first and I didn’t want to do that.

  ‘Hi, Jon,’ I said as he picked up the phone.

  There was a pause. Then he replied, with a dawning warmth in his voice, ‘Klara? Klara? Hey, is that you?’

  I felt a clutch of affection in my gut for him, this man in whose house I had once lived. ‘Hi Jon,’ I said. ‘How are you? How’s things on the Moon?’

  ‘Good,’ he said, after reflection. ‘Yeah. And you? You’re a government woman, now?’

  This sounded to me a little like a rebuke. ‘Yeah,’ I said, apologetic. ‘It seemed the only way I could get back up here. The only way I could get back up to the uplands. I don’t have the money to build my own house up here, you know.’

  ‘Jesus, Klara,’ he said, the faintest popcorn crackles speckling the connection. ‘Why didn’t you say? You could have come lived with me again. You could come live with me still.’

  I surprised myself when he said that, because my eyeballs were prickling a little, as if tears were not far away. I was touched. ‘That’s kind of you, Jon,’ I said. ‘Come live on the Moon? What’s it like up there?’

  ‘In the day it’s good,’ he said. ‘They last a fortnight, the days, and it gets warm. In the night it’s not so good. The equipment doesn’t last so well. In the cold, I mean, outside. It tends to break down. We’ve two tents here, now.’

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Two tents?’

  ‘Sure. We put all our waste there, mix it with the lunar soil. Vegetables grow pretty well, in the day. To think how we used to just chuck our waste out the door in the uplands! That seems such a scandal to me now, such a waste of waste.’ He chuckled at his own joke. ‘Waste is too precious to chuck away.’

  ‘But surely you’re not self-sufficient there now,’ I said.

  ‘No, Jesus, no,’ he agreed. ‘Not by a long long way. But it’s not bad. It’s easy taking off from the Moon in a regular plane, and then easy to coast down to the uplands. That’s down all the way, you know, down the gravity incline. Hauling stuff up is harder, and landing on the Moon is always a little tricky, killing orbital velocity just right, and dropping down just right. But Tam has a plan.’

  ‘Tam?’

  ‘Sure. Ever since Bert died - did you know Bert died?’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling sorry.

  ‘Well, he did. He went down, Earth-down I mean, and crashed on his runway. Maybe he had a stroke or something as he flew; maybe his plane just malfunctioned. But he died. Ever since then Tam’s been at a loose end without him. You know what he said? You know what he said to me? He said I thought of killing myself, but I’ve a better plan now.’

  ‘What’s his plan?’

  ‘He’s going to fetch some water. He reckons it’ll be easy to find, in amongst asteroids.’

  He had to say this last sentence twice, because crackles on the line meant that I didn’t quite catch it. When he repeated it I still didn’t believe it.

  ‘You’re kidding?’ I said.

  ‘Hell, no. He’s bought up some big sticks, some of the new power sticks. He reckons he could pull over half a g acceleration to Mars, slingshot round, and be in the belt in three months. He says, what else would I do with those three months? Sit on my ass? He might as well sit on his ass in his plane, and get somewhere interesting, as sit on his ass at home and go nowhere. I reckon he’s got a point.’

  ‘So what’s he going to do?’

  ‘Find something with plenty of water, and then just push it back downhill, down towards the Sun, and bring it to us. With a big chunk of water and lots of clear solar light we could grow plenty, I think, in our tents. The longer we stay, the more of us there are, the more waste we get, the more we can grow. None of it is
thrown away.’

  ‘Jon,’ I said. ‘This sounds pretty bizarre.’

  ‘I know,’ said Jon, with glee in his voice. ‘Doesn’t it, though?’

  I invited him to come to the Station. ‘So, do you come down to the uplands much?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘Come and visit,’ I said. And he said he would.

  I thought about Jon’s invitation to go live with him. It was tempting, but not realistic. I wondered how it would work out, practically. In my mind I had grown attached to the idea of having my own house, of living in my own space by myself. The older I got, the more I valued my own company. I clung on to that ideal.