by Adam Roberts
‘Go ahead.’
‘It’s only a suggestion, though.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Right,’ said [Blank]. ‘Well, I could organise a little get-together this evening, a basically mealtime get-together. Let’s say half a dozen gentlemen, you, me as broker. You’d get some nice food, and maybe something to drink – you never know. And you’d get to meet half a dozen nice guys.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Why would I be meeting these guys?’
This question stumped him. I might as well have asked him why is the sky blue? A line appeared across his forehead, and then another, and then his forehead was weighted down under a drift of worry lines. ‘I,’ he said, eventually. ‘Isn’t it obvious? I mean …’ He trailed off.
‘Put it this way,’ I said. ‘What’s my alternative?’
‘Alternative?’
‘I’m new here. Say, for whatever crazy reason, I’m not in the mood to meet these guys. What do I do?’
‘Do?’ This possibility was clearly an absolute remoteness as far as he was concerned.
‘Can I stay here? In the compound?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So where else can I go?’
He shook his head, like a wet dog shuddering itself dry. ‘Look,’ he said, smiling. ‘I think there’s a misunderstanding. You can go where you like – it’s a free world, after all. But you got to ask yourself, how you going to pay for things? How you going to pay for your food, for where you live? Where you going to get the money?’
‘I’ll get a job,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ he said, as if to a child. ‘But how? You don’t know anybody, to get a job. There’s no governmental employment exchange as such, not up here. So here’s a chance for you to meet some people, to get to know people, to get yourself a job.’
‘I kind of got the impression, from what you were saying,’ I said, ‘that the point of the meeting wasn’t strictly employment-related.’
He was grinning now. ‘It’s just a meet,’ he said. ‘No obligation! But these guys are all real interested in getting to know you.’
I discovered later that this guy, this immigration official, took a finder’s fee from all the interested men, and took an additional fee from the one who managed to grab me. It was one of the little ways of the Free World. Even if I didn’t want to marry any of these men, he still took his finder’s fees. The government didn’t pay him anything at all. The only people to draw ‘government’ salaries were the higher government officers and the military (and almost all the higher officers were military anyway). But there were no taxes as such, because the government controlled the money supply as a raw material, rather than, as in the old days, something they printed up. Accordingly they took what they needed directly from the supply, limiting themselves to a non-inflationary amount, or so I suppose. That was the theory. Miners bringing up dollars from below had to surrender them to officials; they were stamped with a braille-like starburst of dots and released back into circulation in various ways – official salaries, government purchase and contract, welfare, that kind of thing. That was the official explanation, at any rate.
Two
I went to the meet. I met.
I met [Blank], who worked as a [Blank] – a famous guy in the NUSA, as I later discovered. He already had a wife, but was hoping for a second. ‘No harm in trying my luck,’ he told me, disarmingly. ‘I know the odds are against me.’
‘Odds?’ I said. I was drinking: a sort of fruit vodka. I did not then realise how rare a thing alcohol was in the Free World. If I had known I would have appreciated it more.
‘Seven men to one woman, ratio,’ he said. ‘But I say to myself, you know, this isn’t communism, none of that equal-shares baloney. Hey! This is the Free World. I’m wealthy … hey, that’s no secret.’ He was grinning, his teeth wholly filling the space between his lips like white mosaic tiles. ‘I can afford more than one wife. You want a cushy job, maybe we should get to know one another better. You know? I could help you with that. A cushy job.’
‘Cushiony?’ I repeated, not quite hearing him properly.
‘Something warm; something inside, where the hours aren’t too bad. What do you say? Why don’t you,’ he said, lowering his voice and sliding over to me, ‘why don’t you come have dinner with me and my wife? You might find you like her.’
‘Is that legal?’ I said. The drink was making me less diplomatic than I, perhaps, should have been. ‘That’s not bigamy, is it?’
The smile shrank a little. ‘Hell,’ he said. ‘You want a nice desk job in Novadic? Or not?’
‘I think I’d like to be a miner,’ I said. I can’t remember why I said this. I don’t think I had been pondering possible careers before the Meet, and I’m certain it had not crossed my mind to be a miner. But the phrase popped into my head from somewhere, and I said it.
[Blank]’s smile irised away to a tiny ‘o’. He looked at me for a moment. ‘Not my area. You need at least three years medical,’ he said. ‘They say three years when you apply, but you’ll probably need more than three to have a realistic chance of a job.’
I didn’t know what this meant. ‘OK,’ I said.
[Blank] turned and left me. I felt a little giddy with the understanding that I had alienated a man evidently powerful in this little community, but the vodka new in my blood meant I didn’t really care. Another man approached me, chatted for five minutes about this and that. The only thing I remember about that conversation is that at one stage he said ‘Miss London?’ and I replied, ‘Sure, a little. Still there though, isn’t it, underneath everything?’ and he looked puzzled. Afterwards I realised that he had been addressing me: Miss London, like a beauty queen title, because my name had been entered on the official form as Tira London. That didn’t seem to bother me much either. Maybe, a little tipsy, I even quite liked the idea; a new land, a new identity, like that guy, whatever-he-was-called, becoming Godfather Corleone in the movie, because he came from a town called Corleone although his name was something different. I can’t remember what his name was, originally. You know the movie? You’d need to be my age to remember it.
My age or older.
A man called [Blank] was the most persistent – not, it turned out, on his own behalf, but rather as subaltern to a high-ranking military man called General [Blank]. This intermediary – Pander I called him. You know the way you think up secret names for the people around you, names that never leave your own head? Only sometimes you slip, and your tongue betrays you. Well, that was my secret name for [Blank], Pander; and I never let it slip. He’s Secretary [Blank] in the government these days, a powerful and senior man. Anyway. This Pander talked to me seriously for half an hour, pressing my elbow between his thumb and fingers like a lobster gripping its prey. The general is a senior man, a great man, a man with greatness in him. He walks with God. He will be Interim President some day, be sure of it. And he has fallen in love with you, Miss London. He has fallen in love with you.
I was a little scared, actually, of Pander’s intensity, and so I reacted with lumpish humour, trying to scour out my weakness. ‘Is he married already?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Pander, looking shocked.
‘Has he got a wooden leg? Is he ugly? Dewlaps hanging from his face like folds of cloth?’
Pander stared, as if in dismay that his general had fallen in love with a madwoman. ‘Miss London,’ he said. ‘Believe me, he is pre-eminently serious about you.’
It occurred to me that [Blank] did not know exactly what the word pre-eminent meant, but used it anyway because he liked the sound of it, a sort of rhetorical malapropism. It was something he did a great deal in his speaking. ‘How can he be in love with me?’ I asked, more serious. ‘He doesn’t know me. He’s never met me. [expletive deleted], he’s probably never seen me.’
‘Miss London,’ said Pander, as serious-faced as a six-year-old; ‘please don’t swear. I implore you. And the general has indeed seen you. He came
to the immigration compound to observe you.’
‘Observe me?’
‘From one of the towers.’
‘Watching me, without my knowing it? Like a stalker?’
‘Please, Miss London,’ said Pander, his voice quiet. ‘Believe me; the general is unimpeachably interested in you. His feelings are genuine. You’ll not get a better offer.’
I felt the seriousness bear down upon me, like the weight of snow on my head. ‘Well, why don’t we meet?’ I said. ‘He and I?’
‘What sort of career were you hoping for, Miss London?’ Pander asked. ‘What were you hoping to do with your new life?’
‘Miner,’ I said. The notion had become a sort of fixed idea over the course of that evening, although, as I say, I don’t know where it came from.
Pander’s eyes widened, a you don’t say? expression. His mouth curled into a smile like a slice of bread going stale on a plate. ‘Well, Miss London, you’ve cottoned on quick enough, I’ll say that. OK, I think the general can help you with that. Not mining itself, of course, not snow face, of course, but work in the mining industry. OK, as I say, I think the general can help you with that.’
‘Excellent,’ I said, although I didn’t really know that it was.
‘Lunch tomorrow,’ said Pander, briskly.
‘Why couldn’t the general come here, anyway,’ I said, the vodka now manifesting itself in my manner as a sort of petulant crotchetiness. ‘Why did he send you?’
Pander was standing as if to attention. ‘He’s a very busy man, a very great man,’ he said. ‘We’ll call by the compound tomorrow noon, sharp.’
This was how I met Crow – Crow was my nickname for him, you see, because he was angular and had a beaky nose and for some other reasons that elude me now. I called him Crow at that first meeting, to his face, and he liked it: he was not used to people speaking back to him. He was used to automatic deference. That’s how it works in the army, after all. I think he found my spiciness enticing.
You know what? He thought I was Irish. He thought Tira was, like, a version of Tara; and he thought my black hair and pale skin had an Irish look about them. His own roots were Irish, he told me, on his mother’s side. I said, wow, excellent, or whatever, and didn’t understand the relevance of the remark until much later.
He liked me, though. We were married within a fortnight. That’s a hurry, I know, but times and manners change after a thing like the Snow. I went to live with him in his apartment in the Liberty Barracks, near the heart, surrounded by military men all day. Things were OK for a little while. What can I tell you?
Three
Everybody went to church, but I didn’t want to go. I’d never gone, I didn’t believe, I didn’t see why I should. Crow thought it was because I was Catholic, where the church was Baptist – he told me this long afterwards, and I laughed about it. He was too awkward to tell me about it at the time. But for two Sundays I managed to stay out of church. Come my third Sunday as a married woman the pressure came to be applied. ‘It looks odd,’ Crow said to me; ‘you need to be in church beside me. Come today.’
‘OK,’ I said. But at the last minute I ducked out, and Crow had to go without me again. I wandered the barrack-compound, and then slipped past the church-house and wandered the streets. It was a feeble sort of rebellion, though I say so myself. As I look back on myself from the vantage point of so many years, I can see not a principled woman, but a petulant one. I see her standing by the perimeter fence, a sort of rail, looking out at the snow-desert beyond the city limits. I can see her real clearly – Hey there! Stay out of the sun, don’t get a tan, it’ll ruin your life! My words don’t reach her, of course not, course not, course not. The past has a different language from the one you and I speak today, and there’s no linguist can translate between them. I want to tell her, you’ll tan and it’ll destroy your life, but she flat can’t hear me.
Standing at the rail looking out. The snow banked up, rising away from the perimeter into a low hill-ridge all round the city that was caused by the weight of Liberty itself, bedding down into the snow despite its under-balloons and spread-supports. These hills shortened the perspective, giving the horizon a weird stage set-like closeness, like a special effect.
I was struck by the thought that the whole city – all of the cities of NUSA – were based on a kind of insubstantiality, on nothing but floss, on nothing but cloud stuff. It is the clouds that are frozen solid beneath us. It’s not snow at all. It’s a whiteness that signifies emptiness. The night-sky emptiness should be white: if there were no smuts in the interstellar sky, if there was no dust or planets or dark matter, then the nothingness itself would blaze white with the light of seventy trillion trillion stars. What might this mean? Only that it is the dirt and the dark that save our eyes from burnout. Up! Hey! Don’t tan!
She’s still not listening.
I looked at the sky all the time. I couldn’t get enough of looking at the sky.
People talk about ‘the blues’, as if blue were somehow a colour intrinsically associated with depression. What a crazy notion. For me, blue will always be the colour of transcendence, the flag the sky waves in promise of depth, in promise of something more. White is the colour of depression. How could it be otherwise? Because white is what is left when the colour is bleached away and when life is smothered, horizon to horizon, under the pressure of unhappiness. There are things underneath, true, but they can only be excavated, they cannot be alive. On the other hand, white is all colours, isn’t it? It is the magic paintbox in which red, blue and yellow are stirred up together and make not mud-brown but purest, dazzlingest, opaquest white. The colour wheel spins, blurs, whites out. This world-drift is white according to this logic, since all the world has been whipped up in its creamy concupiscence.
And colours are colours because of different wavelengths – isn’t that right? Short wavelength, blue; long wavelength, red. It’s a function of an overly literal mind, I know, but I could never read the word wavelength without thinking of actual waves, at the beach at Brighton, say, where Minnie sat dour and self-contained even as an eight-year-old, picking up pebbles and turning them over and over in front of her face, and putting them down neater than nature had contrived. Before the Snow, of course. And me, my chin on my knees and my cigarette flaring brighter in the sea breeze, looking out at the waves. The sky, clouds with sunlight shifting through their greyness, a sharkskin colour. A forceful breeze coming right into our faces, and the collars buttoned up on our wool coats. Long ridges of waves lifting slowly in the swell, coming towards us, then curling down on themselves as they approached the shore, like the closing of sleepy eyelids. Twelve feet, maybe, between each wave. The water in between stretched like Lycra, swelling up and down, foam webbing on the indigo water – like the shreddy pattern you see on the skin of some black grapes, you know the thing I’m talking about? A fungus, is it? (The pattern you used to see on grapes, I should say, since nobody has seen a grape in many years, of course.) But those waves, those long wavelengths – difficult to think of them as red-shifted. They were so purple, so dark.
And waves break against the shore. Their splendour is in their ending. Do light waves break, in a spume of shattered photons, when they reach the eye?
I suppose not.
The English Channel was usually grey, or brown. But sometimes it was a beautiful deep shade of blue-purple.
When I was a kid I had an argument with my sister. She had a silver-coloured plastic dagger, a toy, plastic curlicues on the hilt and a fat seam running in an unbroken line around the edge of handle and blade. She called it her gold dagger. I told her it wasn’t gold, it was silver. Gold, she insisted. And the bickering went back and forth like ping-pong, Silver! Gold! Silver! Gold! I tried to convince her with more complex, considered arguments: only an idiot, I suggested, would call that gold. But she did not take the force of my reasoning. It is gold, it is, it is. Ask Ma, she’ll tell you. If that’s gold, I said, snatching a 10p piece from the windowsi
ll where somebody had left it (next to an orange train ticket and an empty key ring and an unwrapped sweet) – if that’s gold, what’s this? That’s gold, she insisted. It’s not gold, it’s a silver ten-pee. No-it’s-not-it’s-gold. And so on.
I got very worked up. I cried, even. Why did this stupid spat upset me so much? It was not my sister’s intransigence, exactly: it was rather (although I didn’t think of it in these terms then, of course) – it was the abyss of relativism that her insistence opened up. I knew what colour was meant by the word ‘silver’, and what by ‘gold’, but they’re only names after all. If everybody agreed that the red light meant go and the green one stop, traffic lights would still work perfectly well (if everybody agreed). I look at an object and see it as silver, and I say the word ‘silver’; but what if somebody looks at the same thing and sees gold? Maybe their brains are wired up wrong in their colour-recognition centres. Or maybe it is my mind that is wired up wrong. Maybe everybody else who reads the word ‘silver’ sees, mentally, what I would call gold. How can I convince you of the colour as I see it, without just using other colour-words? They’re just as slippery. Grey, yellow, blue, white, white – what do they mean to you? Your whole spectrum may be different from mine. It’s unsettling. There’s no higher authority to settle the dispute. That’s what upset me, I think, when I was a kid bickering with my kid sister. It was the sense that what I had assumed was solid ground under my feet was in fact a thin crust, and could drop me through into an abyss at any time, into I don’t know what.
Talking of colour, here’s a conversation on that topic I had with Crow. We had been married a month.
‘So,’ he said. He was brushing his uniform with a dry toothbrush. A clothes-brush couldn’t be had for love nor money; not even for somebody as senior as Crow. The toothbrush took longer, but did the job just as well. And actually I think Crow liked the work, liked the sense of preening himself, liked to dilate upon that task and thereby dwell on his status. General [Blank] of the New US Army! As he brushed, he said ‘So, Tira, I was thinking. There’s a Jack London.’
