Gradisil (GollanczF.) Read online

  We were almost a year in Iceland. At the end of that time Father was summoned to appear in an Icelandic court to speak to a case brought by my mother’s family, and rather than face that judge we left for Canada.

  two

  In 2059 my father and I flew Kristin Janzen Kooistra into orbit in Waspstar. We had a small house up there. I was the one, actually, who settled her in there, showed her how everything worked: how to turn the house around on its axis when the sun was on it to stop it overheating; how to vent waste; how to cook; how to recognise and plug leaks, how to scrape and spray the mould that kept growing in the danker corners, and so on. I was a child, but that was alright because it’s a very simple procedure, maintaining an upland house. A child can do it. I did it often. The house was, in effect, only a large metal cylinder with a window at one end. We dragged it up empty to orbit one flight in ’58, emptying everything possible out of the plane to reduce weight and even then it was a strain. Father thought of hiring a friend of his to tow it up for him, a man who operated an adapted 777 to the uplands, with a more powerful pulse motor that generated more amp; but that would have been expensive. Uplanders don’t do things for free, even for good friends. They’ve got to make a living, after all.

  In the end we managed it, although only into a very low orbit. We had to fly down straight away and load up with solid burners, fly back up, fit them to the outside of the tin can, and shoot it up to a higher, slower, safer orbit. After that, my father pressurised the house himself. As with most of those sorts of early-day colonial upland adventures (read the history books) it was a hand-to-mouth, see-how-it-goes procedure. He chatted with friends, checked the web, but in the end he just flew up and did it.

  This is what he did: he rendezvoused with the orbiting object, by hand and eye rather than any fancy space-tracking or -docking software. I know that everybody uses the software now, but manual docking isn’t as hard as you think, after the first couple of times, after you get the feel for it. I’ve done it many times. He nosed into the hole at the end of the tin can until it was a tight fight. When he first bought his jet he’d sawn off the nosecone and refitted it so that it opened outwards three ways, and then he had fitted some retractable spikes so that he could lock Waspstar into the hole.

  Then he opened some nox cylinders inside Waspstar until the air pressure inside the plane was much higher than usual. Then he just opened the nose. I’m sure he was bashed about as the air rushed through and the pressure equalised; in zero gravity it doesn’t take much to rattle you around like a dried pea in a maraca. But you can strap yourself down if it’s a thing you’re worried about. Then he opened some more cylinders until the pressure was comfortable again, and drifted through.

  The next task was to seal all the holes and gaps in the tin can, which Dad did by puffing a little mist into the air from a hand-held perfume atomiser filled with water and watching the directions in which it was drawn. Seal the larger holes with patches and sealant; seal the smaller ones with rubber, with cycle-repair-kit components, with whatever you have. The far wall of our house was one great circle of reinforced glass, and provided a really super-splendid view. The only problem was that the frame leaked air very badly, and Father spent a long time sealing all along it, and then repairing his seals, and then fixing his repairs. This process was, doubtless, made much harder by the fact that venting gas into space can cause the house, and the attached plane, to rattle around like a rodeo horse. It’s not easy to apply glue to a patch, or to press malleable rubber sealant to a crack with such wild bucking about. But Father managed it all ‘without hiccough’ as he put it in English, a phrase he had picked up in Aberdeen, UK-EU, where he had lived for several years. Finally he fitted the airlock, bringing the pieces one by one from Waspstar and assembling them around the open nose hatch. After twelve hours’ constant work he was done, and our house was airtight. He slept.

  Ours was, perhaps, the fortieth house built in the uplands. We were not the very first people to move there, but we were amongst the very earliest settlers and that is a fact of which I am proud. In those days it was like a small village. Everybody knew everybody else. Forty houses in many billions of cubic kilometres of clear space.

  It took, I suppose, a dozen flights, over a month and a half for us to fit out the house properly. The trickiest task was strapping the various solid-fuel sticks to the outside, which we did with a radio-controlled waldo (the most expensive piece of equipment of the whole project, apart, of course, from Waspstar itself). I tried to hold the plane in a stable position whilst Father fitted the rockets: the two large ones, initially, to repair orbital decay; and then on subsequent flights the various smaller ones used to move and roll the house. But the waldo’s gusts of directional gas kept nudging me out of alignment, and it took a long time. Later, as Elemag technology became more sophisticated, uplanders would rig their houses with Elemag coils and position their houses by riding the turbulent electromagnetic medium. But these were early days. We positioned heat-transfer piping to generate some electricity. Then we rolled metal tape around the whole house; or, rather, we rolled the house beneath us spooling out metal tape, like a spider cocooning its kill in myriad reflective structurally-binding strands.

  Furnishing the inside of the house was easier: some plants, some air scrubbers, some cylinders, some canned food, some dried foods, some lights, a microwave, kegs of water, radio equipment, microwave transmitter, three pumps, books, clothes, all the paraphernalia of a house.

  It was cosy. It was home.

  We lived in the house together for several weeks, just to settle in, just to experience upland living for that length of time. I was happy then. After that we flew down, and restocked, and Father flew back up alone and lived there for two months by himself. He didn’t like to leave the house unoccupied: without somebody inside to turn the house in the sunshine the temperature differential outside becomes too great whenever the house orbits in sunshine, and the whole warps. Cracks can appear, and the air can all drain away - not a fatal eventuality because a house can always be re-aired, but a circumstance that kills all the plants and might damage the more sensitive electrical equipment. I was worried about the window - if that broke, then everything inside would be sucked into space and we’d lose all our stuff. But Father was never worried by this. It was a special weave-glass, not cast like traditional glass but woven of transparent square-profile strands, and so it had more flexibility than conventional glass. ‘It’s tough,’ he would say. ‘It’ll hold.’

  But over the following year we were not able to spend as much time in the house as Father would have liked. We came and went as much as we could, but it was never enough for Dad. He fretted that the house was wracking and ruining as we sat around at the plumb of the gravity well. He was happy, therefore, to acquire a tenant. ‘She’ll look after it for me,’ he said, ‘and she’ll pay for the privilege.’ At that time I agreed with my father. I suppose I had notions of us turning the house into a extremely lucrative form of hotel, with guest following guest, paying us riches, and stringing our income generation out indefinitely into the future. That was wrong. Of course, looking back I would rather we had never been introduced to Kristin Janzen Kooistra. I would rather our house had fallen out of the sky and crashed into the ocean. Such is the wisdom of hindsight.

  three

  I have said that there were forty other householders in the uplands when we first moved there, and I’ll now say something more about them. Some of these forty were very wealthy. Some were moderately well-to-do, technophile middle-classers, retired businessmen or stockbrokers. Only one of them was a woman. None of them were poor. Twentieth-century Apollo had cost NASA eighty billion euros over two decades - huge wastage of money, as my dad would say. The uplanders got into space for a tiny fraction of that enormous cost, but that tiny fraction still meant - [item] enough money to buy and convert a jet, [item] enough money to buy such expensive toys as solid-fuel rockets to attach to your plane, [item] to buy cylinders of nox
and canisters of lithium hydroxide, [item] to buy jet fuel, [item] to buy waldoes and other devices. My father was one of the poorest of the original uplanders. One of the richest was Giangiacomo Spontini, heir to the energy baronetage and one of my father’s friends. It was he who suggested to Kristin Janzen Kooistra that we might be able to offer her the sanctuary of an upland house.

  ‘She’s a friend of mine,’ he said, ‘and she needs a place to hide away for a little while. She’ll pay rent.’

  ‘Great!’ said Dad.

  We flew from northern Canada, the three of us squashed into the cockpit. Waspstar was packed with luggage and supplies. The plane was sluggish on the runway, lifting off uncertainly and climbing more slowly than usual. She reached her flight ceiling at a lower level than was usual too, and when Father got out of his pilot seat to go aft and switch on the conductor relay he put his elbow, inadvertently, into my face, ‘Sorry sorry’. Kooistra looked on, amused. It didn’t help that she was such a large woman. She seemed to fill the already crammed space to the point of popping the rivets and bursting the compartment. She was a conspicuous human being, obese, extrovert, with a shotgun laugh, and creases and folds in the flesh of her face and neck that seemed to chew when she moved, as if the skin of her body were devouring the space around her.

  We flew due east, Father turned on the current through the wing resistors and I squeezed a few seconds of burn out of the side rockets to give us the necessary upward inclination. Then, cutting into the lines of force of the magnetosphere, our counterfield gave us purchase, and the phenomenon of magnetohydrodynamics (I had spent a whole evening at age eleven learning how to spell and define the word, to please my father) kicked in. Without wishing to bore you, I will explain a little: the added torsion caused by the interaction of our wing current and the magnetosphere creates this effect at relatively low speeds. The aerodynamics of flight become an electromagnetic phenomenon rather than a matter of air currents, but the effect is the same. Our wings mark a differential of electromagnetic potential, beneath and above; or, if you like, think of electromagnetic fields as fluids - for they are like fluids: not compressible, true, but flowing, variant in intensity, and (with electronic fields at any rate) drawn into sinks and expelled from sources. So we dug our fins into this tenuous medium by firing rapid pulses of lightning-strike intensity through the cables of our wings, and flew upwards. Or, if you prefer to think of it this way, we jagged ourselves into the branches of the Yggdrasil, we stuck our heels in and we clambered up through the sky.

  And so we climbed, and climbed, circling in great arcs through the magnetosphere, each rotation bringing us higher than before. We flew no faster than four hundred klims-an-hour, one hundredth of NASA escape velocity, but fast enough to move us up. And the sky darkened and darkened around the cockpit, like a late winter afternoon, until it was purple-black and the Earth below us showed a lens-shaped curve. ‘Hell,’ my father called from somewhere in the back of the plane. ‘There’s a new leak. I can hear it hissing. I can’t hope to find it with all this junk back here - we’ll need to open a new canister until we’ve emptied the hold.’

  He was speaking English, for the benefit of our passenger, and so did I, turning towards her and reassuring her: ‘It’s OK, we always discover new leaks when we come up. It happens every time. It’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I wasn’t worried,’ said Kooistra, smiling broadly.

  Father was trying his best to locate the leak by pulling items out from the wedged mass of objects, cursing and having no luck, so I was the one that lifted us to our house’s orbit, picking out the radio beacon and accelerating towards it. I had done this on several previous up-flights, but it was always an exciting thing. The sky is black and unimaginably vast, and the Earth turns its face as if spurning you, which means you are free. Then you see the bright star in the distance, and you give the plane another double burn and the star grows brighter and brighter and thickens in brightness until you can make out its shape. The trick with docking is not to try and do it all in one go. Fly up until the house is big enough to fill the cockpit windscreen, then stop applying the bursts. Without thrust you won’t accelerate, and because both you and your destination are hurtling in the same direction, you won’t get any closer without acceleration. Then it’s just a question of orienting yourself at the right end, and nudging forward until the nose slides in and you can release the clamps. Father had fitted a manual release, and it was hard work tugging the lever that brought out the spikes. I wanted a hydraulic release, which would have been easier on my skinny arms. ‘So do I. I want lots of things, my princess,’ he told me. ‘We can’t always get what we want.’

  We opened the nose, and there was immediately a breeze in the cockpit, air blowing from behind us through the hatch. You always lose a bit of air from a house if you leave it unoccupied, but it’s not usually anything serious. Pressure equalises when you redock. So we waited for the breeze to settle. Then we unclipped the seats and stowed them, and Father started hurling great packages from the hold with that illusory super-strength that zero g gives you, those bizarrely straight trajectories that the objects follow when you chuck them, that ant-with-a-leaf disjunction of your small arm and your huge burden. I slipped into the house and took the luggage and tried to stow it, but there was too much stuff for the storage straps that Father had installed so I had to leave various things just floating around. Kooistra squeezed through the nose into the house - she only just made it, I remember, because she was so fat. Father, in the plane, was squirting gas from a coloured aerosol into the air, following the curls and draws it made to the leak. ‘Found it!’ he yelled. ‘Got it. It’s one of the bolt holes.’ He meant the holes he’d drilled in the fuselage to fix the pencil-rockets. They hadn’t taken very well to resealing afterwards. We’d often had trouble with them.

  Then what happened? It’s a long time ago, now, and my memory’s not what it used to be, but I want to get it right because it’s so very important. Father fixed the hole in the Waspstar, and we all had some food together. Then Father flew back down to Earth, riding the electromagnetic surf, ducking and squirling down with his metaphorical hands and feet firmly on the branches of the Yggdrasil, never accumulating enough speed to overheat the fabric of the plane. He went down below, leaving me to settle our tenant in.

  ‘Oh, it’s spartan,’ she said. ‘But oh, it’s got a marvellous view.’ She floated her bulk to the window, where the sun was lining the Earth’s nightside horizon with white, as if a great arc-shaped lid were about to be levered off that side of the globe and the light inside was spilling free. ‘So these are the uplands?’

  ‘First time up?’ I asked, nonchalant in my sixteen years, as I squeezed some water into the base of the plants that were fixed to the wall. She didn’t look at me.

  ‘First time. I must say, this lack of gravity is very pleasant indeed. For a woman of my weight. I mean, of course, mass.’ She laughed with disconcerting vehemence.

  ‘It’ll make your hands and feet cold,’ I told her. ‘Even when it’s real warm, you never quite get warm in your feet. But you get used to that. Also you’ll feel heady to begin with, the blood will swell in your head until your body sorts itself out. That takes a day or two.’

  I showed her how the house worked. ‘In about five minutes,’ I said, ‘the sun’ll come up. We can switch off the lights then, it’ll be bright enough. I usually wear shades, actually. But when we’re in the sun you got to turn the house, which you do by firing the jets a bit, for a second, or less. You do that with little little turns of this handle — ’ showing her ‘ — and it’ll tumble.’ A little jarringly, it did. ‘Catch hold of something. You get used to it, it’s only a very slow turn, you get hardly no g out of it, but it stops the wall getting too hot on one side.’

  ‘Does it get hot in here at all?’

  ‘Yeah-huh,’ I said, with that inflection of voice that conveys teenage disdain of another’s ignorance. ‘It’ll get hot. You might want to undre
ss, it’s up to you. You get used to it after a little while, leastways I always do. It does cool down after you go into shadow again, but not much. Vacuum’s the best insulator and we’re surrounded by it. More-or-less vacuum.’

  I suppose, if I’m honest, that my English was not as good as I’m here reporting it. It was school English, not the decades-familiar day-to-day idiom I use these days. But it was good enough to communicate.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ she said, in an absent voice, ‘you don’t fit a cooling system.’

  ‘Sure we’ll do that,’ I said. ‘When we get round to it. When we got the money. It don’t really matter, I think. The heat don’t bother me.’

  She didn’t reply, because she was watching the art-deco splendour of a sunrise from space, the smile-shape of light widening and then the spearbright sun - not yellow up here, but blue-white - pulling itself clear from the Earth’s body, and all the stars dimming, as if in homage. I fumbled for my shades.

  I showed her how to vent waste, by putting it in the airlock, pumping as much air out as the puny little pump we owned could manage, and then hauling the lever to open the outer hatch. When I did this, the house trembled and shook, bucked a couple of times, shuffling free several items of luggage inside. ‘It’s best not to do that too much,’ I said, ‘or you can mess up our orbit.’