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  He was too excited to hold it back. ‘It’ll revolutionise life in the uplands,’ he told me. ‘It’ll bring air and water. At the very least, it’ll bring fresh air. Pump it in this room, pump it out through a capillary pipe in the airlock, a constant supply of fresh air - no need for canisters, for scrubbers, for any of that. Imagine it! We’ll be that step closer to self-sufficiency.’

  ‘Is that pipe going to dangle all the way down into the atmosphere’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘How long is it?’

  ‘Fifty kilometres.’

  ‘Jesus. And you’re feeding it all out by hand? It’ll take a week.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But what else would I do with that week? Just hang about, eat, sleep, and at the end of it - nothing. But, at the end of this week, I’ll have my own free air. Free air!’ He’d been paying Emmet Robles to run up and down with canisters and scrubbers, and I guess the cost of it had been preying on his mind.

  In the end, even Teruo with his unnatural ability to concentrate on a dull task for lengthy periods of time, even he grew bored. He slept, and then he rigged up a little motor and some runners and automated the process, spooling the capillary pipe out and out. It was slow, and the motor was noisy which made life in the house less pleasant, but eventually it was all done. We anchored the pipe firmly inside the room, and fitted a small pump to the end of it. Then we set it running. I complained that, if he intended running it all hours of the day, the pump was too noisy. He insisted that we wouldn’t hear it after a while, but he knocked up a housing to go around it and muffled the noise some. Several hours later he shrieked with glee. ‘Klara! Klara! Come see, breathe the free air!’ And there it was: a tiny stream of new, cold air, coming out of the pump.

  ‘I must name it!’ he said, very excited, and so we debated what to call his invention. He wanted ‘periscope’, but I told him that the Greek meant ‘about-seeing’, and his device was nothing to do with seeing. I suggested telepsuche, the far-breath, but his Japanese-trained mouth couldn’t get around the pronunciation of that. In the end, after several uplanders had adopted the technology, refining it in various ways, it indeed became known - illogically - as the periscope. He was so excited with his invention that he called everybody he knew on the phone. Several people came by, had a look at the thing, and were suitably impressed. Teruo called Jon, and invited him over, but Jon was curt and didn’t come.

  Another time, at one of Sponti’s parties, we ran into Jon. He blushed, and was silent, whilst Teruo - drunk, and excited at his invention - gushed and chattered. People asked him questions. ‘Won’t it snag?’ ‘What’s to snag on?’ Teruo insisted.

  ‘It’s fifty klims long,’ said Bob Newman. ‘It’s a hazard to flying, surely.’

  ‘But it’s a millimetre across! The hazard is to me, not to a plane - if a plane hits it it’ll snap like cotton thread. I’m then the one inconvenienced, I’m the one who has to get more capillary pipe. But it’s so wonderful, having fresh air. Everything in the house smells clean!’

  There was a great shudder, and Sponti’s house jolted. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’

  It was Jon, leaving the party early without telling anybody. The shudder was him backing out of the porch, rattling the walls with his departure. We pulled ourselves to Sponti’s windows, and watched his jet dwindle in the black sky, marking its departure with little cigarette-end dots of light under each wing as he put out controlled bursts.

  I suppose I did feel a little bad. I had gotten slightly drunk myself, and perhaps I had been draping myself over Teruo a bit, like a trophy girlfriend. I didn’t do it deliberately to upset Jon. I don’t think so, anyway. But I was proud of Teruo and his new invention - the house was indeed cleaner-smelling, and it was nice to think that we were breathing fresh air. Keeping the house pressurised had become an automatic thing too: no need to open a canister in the morning, or to wave air from one room to another. We’d fitted a pressure-sensitive capillary pipe at the airlock; when the pressure rose beyond a certain point it opened and vented air. Because the pump was always bringing in fresh air, keeping the house pressurised was a simple matter of arranging the setting on this valve at the level we wanted it. Of course, we kept some canisters of air for emergencies, but we hardly ever needed to use them.

  seven

  Here’s a version of a media editorial I saw at Teruo’s. Because he had the news on all the time I fell into the habit of watching it, even though I disliked doing so. It is an addictive thing, news-watching, which was always a reason for not doing it, it seemed to me. It’s never a good idea to court addiction, I think. The news at this time was not good, by and large. America and Arabia were squaring up to one of their occasional military fights. This time, though, matters looked worse; America was lining up the newly militarised East Asian states in an anti-Arab alliance. They called it an anti-terrorist alliance, but most of the world saw it as anti-Arab. With the covert aid of the Japanese league - at least, without their opposition - Arab nationals and Muslims were being forced out of Malaysia, Borneo and some other locations. There was a great pother about this in international forums. Ethnic cleansing, they called it, although nobody was actually being killed, just turfed out of their homes. But there was a great scandal, and talk of World Court charges and so on.

  Commentators talked grimly, but with a glint of excitement in their eye, about the approach of war. News reporters love war. War makes for lots of news. Especially worrying, they said, was the position of the Union of Europe. Several member nations had high Muslim populations, especially UK-EU, Allemand-EU, Espana-EU and Morocco-EU. There was pressure in the Bruxelles parliament for the Union to ally itself with Arabia, or at least to sign a non-aggression pact with Arab states. America was furious at this proposal, furious at the very thought of it. US diplomats blustered and threatened, and although there were significant voices within Europe against such a move, nevertheless (said the smug newscaster) the prospect of an EU-America war grew ever more likely as time went on.

  ‘It’s crazy down there,’ said Teruo, hugging himself and spinning over and over in front of the tvs. ‘They’re mad. Nation states, nation-state-conglomerations, they’re all crazy-insane.’

  But Teruo had some unreconstructed views with respect to Arabs. ‘I never saw one,’ he told me, ‘in Japan. No Arabs in Japan. I met one in Asia-Siberia, but he was a civilised man, a flier.’ He pulled a face. ‘Mostly they are not civilised, the Arabs.’

  ‘Teruo,’ I cried. ‘Are you a racist?’

  ‘Everybody in Japan is racist,’ he said. ‘Everybody in Japan hate Arabs. Hate all foreigners, howsoever not? - except maybe Americans, Elvis-style Americans. I’ll tell you,’ he said, smacking the wall with the palm of his foot to propel himself over to me, grabbing me in mid-air and hugging me as we tumbled over to where the bedding was stowed, ‘I’ll tell you a secret, if you promise not to think me crazy. Sometimes I think you look a bit like an Arab. I think maybe Greeks have that Arab look about them, and that excites me, that turns me on baby.’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ I said, but I was laughing.

  Here’s another media editorial I saw at Teruo’s. This was a talk-to-camera piece from Lyn Whitney, one of the most respected opinion-formers on ENN. This is what she said: ‘In these days of political tension, of possible military conflict between those two great power blocs - America and Europe - that have done more to shape the world in the last three centuries than any other . . . when every other nation in the world has to decide with whom to ally themselves . . . run the risk of ignoring a small but threateningly placed nation that has grown up over our very heads. They call themselves the uplanders, a rag-bag of eccentrics and criminals who eke out a primitive living in patched and dented tin cans hurtling round the planet. Estimates suggest their population is no more than four hundred, but they are growing, growing all the time. When they started, there was a rash of human interest news stories about their adventures, but as time has gone on many
people have forgotten that they are there. But we forget at our peril! They have reached a crucial stage in their development as a community. For the first time, companies down here are manufacturing equipment specifically designed for this new, exclusive market. The uplanders fly up and down regularly, taking up supplies and equipment. They trade with anybody, promiscuously. They have no loyalty except to themselves, no sense of honour or worth, except for money. What if there is a war? Might one of these uplanders not decide to take the yankee dollar, haul up ordnance or dirty bombs, drop them down upon European targets? I say the time has come when the nations of the earth stop turning a blind eye to this growing threat! It is time for EUSA to be given the mandate to police these people. If they appear in the skies over Europe, I say they are European! If they are European, then they should be compelled to obey European law, to pay European taxes, and to ally themselves with the European cause of racial and religious tolerance and diversity, against the monolithic McDonalds imperialism of the USA!’

  McDonalds had gone out of business in 2056, after a cattle phage had pushed the price of beef too high for their plastic restaurants to cope. And nobody had bought their beanburgers, so they’d gone belly-up. But when I was a girl people still used the term as a shorthand phrase for all they disliked about America - this was before the establishment of the MakB franchise you see. I had lived in Europe, and I had lived in America (or Canada, which is the same thing), and I liked things about both places, and disliked things about both places, but that wasn’t the way ground-dwellers were thinking in those days.

  This newscast caused a deal of debate amongst us uplanders. Some were worried. The follow-up newscasts, and various ground traffic, suggested that Lyn Whitney had hit a chord with ground-dwellers. American networks started carrying similar opinion pieces, that if uplanders appeared over American skies (as we all did, as we all did over European skies) then we were American, and we should be compelled to obey US law, to pay US taxes, and to ally ourselves with the US cause of freedom and peace against the religious fundamentalism and civilian-murdering terrorism of Islamic states and their misguided non-Islamic allies. And so forth. And so on. Some newscasters tried to speak to uplanders, and some uplanders gave interviews - I saw Piper Harrows, Bert Felber and Åsa Olsen on shaky image-capture talking about our point of view. They said what was on their minds, and mostly it was sensible - how we were our own people now, how we felt less and less interested in the continual round of politics and war on the ground, and how it increasingly struck us as simply batty. But Bert also said he felt like a god, looking down on puny mortals, which was not a politic thing to say, and was widely reported amongst the groundbased media. There were calls in the Euro parliament for police action against us. ‘Threaten to shoot them from the sky unless they capitulate!’ MEPs yelled. Opinion in America was similar.

  ‘Maybe they’ll invade,’ I said. ‘Send up troops.’

  ‘But how,’ said Teruo, ‘are they going to do that? This is our land.’

  ‘Land,’ said Julie, scoffingly. But Teruo was adamant.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We own this land, they don’t. EUSA still uses rockets, they got basically no access to us up here.’

  We were having dinner. Åsa Olsen and Julie Spelling were with us; in fact Åsa, who was the wealthiest uplander of them all (probably) had brought the food with him. He could afford to be generous in ways that the rest of us couldn’t, could afford to stand other people meals and wine and such. Julie was a relative newcomer, coaxed up by Åsa and his money, but she seemed nice enough. So they were round having food, chez nous, and the discussion naturally turned to the news.

  ‘I agree,’ said Åsa, in his slightly wheezy voice. ‘But several states now operate Elemag plane-ferry services up to orbit, placing satellites and such. It’s so cost-effective, it’s only a matter of time before EUSA and NASA switch from rockets and embrace the better technology. Then they can flood the uplands with their bases, with their people - with soldiers, maybe.’

  ‘Not them!’ I said, remembering my father’s opinion on the subject of NASA. ‘NASA is nothing but rockets, rockets for a hundred-twenty years now. If they stop using rockets then they’re nothing. And as long as they keep using rockets, they’ll be too inefficient as carriers to do much more than lob up a satellite or two.’

  ‘I saw a rocket come up the other day,’ said Teruo. ‘Made a nice picture, long foxbrush of light moving very rapidly across the dark of the earth, and swooping up and round to the lightside. It left a sort of residue behind it in the atmosphere, and even up into space, a little bit. A trail. I didn’t know they did that. In space, I mean.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Julie, unimpressed.

  ‘I still warn against false optimism,’ said Åsa, helping himself to more pasta. He was a flabby man, and he had more or less given up exercising, so his legs were skinny dribbles of flesh. Had he flown downside the gravity would have snapped them like wax rods; but he said he had no desire to go down ever again, he was happy to stay up here until he died. He seemed positive about this, but his manner was melancholic, and some of his friends called him the knight of the doleful countenance. ‘Eventually NASA will adapt, or die. If it dies, then another agency will be formed, and they’ll use the planes. It’s not that I worry, you understand. Because,’ he added, with grim satisfaction, ‘I’ll be long dead. But eventually you younger uplanders are going to have to work out what to do. Should we band together, form an army, repulse invaders? Or should we let whichever government exploits us first, Europe or America, just annex us?’

  ‘It won’t be Europe,’ said Teruo, with a little flush of anti-EU Japanese pride. ‘They ran down EUSA after the sunprobe went wrong. They haven’t the impetus to invade the uplands.’

  ‘America then,’ said Julie, in a soft voice.

  ‘They won’t bother,’ I said. ‘Three hundred people? That’s not even a village. It’s not worth their while.’

  Abruptly, suddenly, there was an absolutely massive noise of buckling metal and shrieking, and a great rush of air threw the food parcels and the wine sachets and the bits and pieces and us into the air and slammed us against the walls. It was like the world ending. I was not hurt, because I happened to hit a place where there was some padding. Julie flew through the air, hit the radio casing and broke her nose. Åsa hit Teruo, who had hit blank wall and bruised himself quite badly. The air was howling all around us, and pressure was dropping, and the house was bucking and swinging about and about. Julie was shouting something, but the air pressure was shrinking and my voice was tiny and my ears felt plugged. I could see Teruo struggling to brace himself, looking around for the breach. It occurred to me, given what we had been talking about, that America, or Europe, had attacked us. I half expected to see space-suited stormtroopers crash through a hole in the wall.

  Teruo was pointing. Through the hissing, and the lurching spinning of the wall, I could see a pole sticking out of the floor that hadn’t been there before. We pulled ourselves over towards it, my grip impeded by something slimy and loose that had got smeared on my hands - later, I discovered that it was Julie’s blood, from her nose. Pearls and balls of red were floating in a sticky string from her face as she span in the middle of the room.

  The spike was loose in the floor, and air escaped past it where it had punctured the skin. But it was tapered, and by grabbing it and pulling it inwards Teruo was able partially to seal the hole, and I found some sealant and smeared it all around. Then, because my ears were popping and my sinuses were hurting, and because I felt breathless and very cold, I located a cylinder and emptied it, filling the room with bottled air.

  For a while everybody simply hung, recovering. Teruo swore from time to time. Julie clutched her face and rotated.

  ‘Was that war?’ Åsa asked nobody in particular. Obviously he’d been thinking along the same lines I had. ‘Are the Americans attacking us? You see how vulnerable we are?’

  The phone rang. It trilled three times before
I roused myself and pulled over to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’

  It was Jon.

  He said: ‘Are you alright in there?’

  ‘Just about,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s there with you?’

  ‘Where are you, Jon?’ I said. ‘Are you outside?’

  ‘Yes I’m outside.’

  ‘Well, come and dock, there’s room in the porch. We need some help, this is mayday, we’ve had a breach. It was scary stuff.’

  He paused for a little while, and then said: ‘I know. That was me. I’m sorry, Klara. I’m sorry.’ He was crying, I could hear it in his voice. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said. ‘Oh, Jesus.’