By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘The masses are lovable; they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that there are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the service for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it: they will only learn to be bored in a new way.’

  Palinurus, The Unquiet Grave

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  THE ICE-CREAM MOUNTAIN

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  PART TWO

  LEAH

  PART THREE

  OF QUEENS’ GARDENS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  PART FOUR

  ODYSSEA

  ONE

  THE ICE-CREAM MOUNTAIN

  1

  Some of them wore their skis like clown-shoes. They tripped and tumbled and then they struggled, with comic laboriousness, to get back on their feet. But some wore their skis like the fins of fish or the wings of birds in the white medium, and made fizzing, sinusoidal passage down the mountainside. They were the effortless ones. There are, after all, two sorts of people in the world. ‘It’s like the moon,’ somebody said, and George, eavesdropping (fiddling with the buckles on his boot), knew what they meant. Not the actual moon, of course, which is tarmac-coloured and desolate. But the ideal moon, that shining platinum shield in the sky. That white place.

  He had a vantage. A spaghetti of ski-trails leading down the mountain. These were braids of hair: they were Rapunzel paths. George looked around and around, amazed.

  Strands of his soul were escaping out of his mouth.

  The landscape was a purified ideal of white, and the sky put down a kind of swallowing brightness. The trees lost their trunks in amongst all the radiance, becoming floating piles of dark green. Behind them the hotel, and its many balconies, looked like a chest with all its drawers pulled out. Plus a white witch’s hat of snow on its sloping roof. That tune kept going through George’s mind.

  Superfast, superfast, superfast.

  You know the one. He tried to get himself into a good launch position, rotating his skis with myriad little crunching steps, and orienting himself with respect to the downwardness of the mountain. Whilst he laboured, Marie swooped by with insulting ease, stopping dead with a shimmy and a little flume of snow.

  ‘I think I’ve blistered my heel,’ he said.

  ‘You do look bothered,’ she replied.

  So he tried to move on, but the tips of his skies crossed and he tumbled. A draught of scalding snow went in under his collar and down his neck. Writhed, he writhed, like an upended beetle.

  ‘You handle your skis like chopsticks,’ crowed Marie, neatly reorienting her body downhill with one hop. ‘Like big fat chopsticks.’ And then she was off, leaning perilously far forward – or so it seemed to her husband – but somehow not falling, instead vanishing with a blissfully fluid rapidity. Her legs were tucked into a double bend, like a corporal’s stripes. She went up a prominence, stood for a moment on empty air and then shot down out of view.

  George Denoone levered himself upright. He leant on his poles for a moment. Sweating inside his suit. There were little beads and crusts of ice on his eyelashes, like sleep. His breath produced a spectral foam in the clear air. Away on the right others were being dragged up-piste by their various drones – mostly resort machines, although a few swankier individuals had their own personal floaters. Everywhere else myriad people in their harlequin-coloured suits swerved and twisted their way down towards the big double-haven McDonald’s M in the white valley. Shocking pinks and olives; bright purples and lime greens; any colour contrast so long as it jarred, and all laid against the amazing extent and brightness of the white ground.

  ‘Come on George,’ he told himself, gasping. ‘Come along and down we go.’

  In the sky above, high in the zenith, a blimp was trundling. Seeding the high air with whatever it was they used to get the snow to settle in the night. ‘Off we go,’ George said again. He didn’t move.

  Somebody swooped and crunched to a halt beside him, with that little spray of white powder from the flank of her ski. ‘Hulloa George,’ she boomed. It was Ysabella, the Canadian woman. She was the one married to what’s-his-name, tall man with the pudding-y face. The one with the jug ears and the green eyes. Green as old dollar bills, Marie said.

  ‘Why, it’s Y,’ said George, glad of the distraction. That was his little joke, that ‘why’ and then her name; on account of her spelling it with ‘Y’ like that. They had only recently met, but already they were at the stage of shared little jokes.

  ‘We were watching you from up there,’ she said, skewering the air near George’s shoulder with her pole. ‘Peter said you should positively join the circus.’ She laughed like a car alarm.

  Peter. That’s his name.

  ‘It’s this design of skis,’ George said. ‘This antique design. They’re hard to line up. When Marie and I stayed at Saint Moritz last month, the skis were Zephir brand, that—’

  But Ys was away, with an expert swank of her muscular rear-end. She plunged ferociously in a straight line, straight down. Her mauve, blob-shaped shadow rushed after her across the snow, like a faithful dog eager to catch her, but doomed to disappointment.

  George shuffled himself further closer towards position. Snow was adhering to his suit all down the left side; powdery but clumping like overcooked rice. ‘Now or never,’ he told himself.

  Trying to remember all the things needful, he pushed off. Lean forward. Tuck your arms in. Legs, so. The skis won’t straighten themselves, like modern boards do: you need to keep them parallel by effort of mighty will, and by the clenching of sore leg muscles. He moved slowly, with an audible crunching sound. And then – abruptly, it seemed – he was flying downslope, hurtling with insane and dangerous abandon. He howled. He really howled out loud. He couldn’t stop himself. As he strained to put his body through those ineffectual resistances against gravity’s hostile intent, the possibility of all the harm that could befall him gushed into his mind: colliding with some obstacle; disappearing into a cartwheel of limbs and a breaking wave of exploding snow; snapping an armbone, a legbone – or a spine, or a neck. Swerving uncontrollably towards the jagged-looking trees on the left-hand side; colliding with a fat coniferous trunk with enough vehemence to stave-in his ribs, or punch out his chin. Or else simply to die of fright as he hurtled – faster and faster, he was going. When the railways first came, people thought that travelling faster than a horse’s canter would flat kill the passengers. Lungs can’t suck in the air from the whoosh of the slipstream; the heart can’t cope with the adrenalin overload as the world warp-drives around you. The trees seemed to lean under the pressure of his enormous velocity. The frozen air lashed his face. His uncovered mouth, his goggleless eyes. Warp drive.

  Superfast, superfast, superfast.

  And
then the fastest portion was behind him. The slope gentled. The padded barrier, the left-hand arch of the terminal , loomed up. The snow whistled contentedly under his blades. He leant to the left and tucked his knees in, more by instinct than anything. A satisfying skirt of ice-dust rose glitteringly from his ski-edge. And then it was all over, and all the terror had been magically alchemized into exhilaration. Marie was waiting for him, her skis over her shoulders like a soldier’s rifle. Oh he was hyper, like a little kid, and stomping towards her. ‘Did you see me?’ he boomed. ‘Did you see me fly?’

  2

  They took lunch with Ysabella and Peter, and also with a couple from England called the Horner-Kings. She was Emma Horner-King, and she was as quietly hesitant as her name implied; but he was called, of all things, Ergaste. They made him say it, and spell it, and explain that it wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon king, or some fairy tale giant (very good, not heard that one before), that, he said, ‘it had some obscure literary significance to my parents’. Ergaste took all the ribbing in good spirit, and the mood of the sixsome waxed jolly. Good to hit it off with people; spontaneity its own reward. They all drank Chianti, and it was as cold and bright and elevating as the mountain itself. They ate blue grapes, and little spears of compressed caviar dripped in a creamed-chilli sauce. Peter liked to roll a grape around the inside of his mouth, push it with his tongue such that his upholstered cheeks bulged alarmingly.

  There was a good deal of laughter.

  They dined on a balcony, shielded from the full glare of the glitter-freeze by an awning. There was something indulgently parental about the peak of the mountain itself, watching over them from its distance.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Marie, leaning back in her chair, ‘I shall try the ice-cream slopes.’

  ‘Mobbed,’ said Ergaste, with his ridiculously fruity accent. ‘Always. Not worth it.’

  ‘Oh,’ his wife added, ‘except to say you’ve done it, you know. Ski it, and have a nibble too.’

  ‘Not good skiing snow,’ said Ergaste, drawing a thumbnail through his close-cropped red hair. ‘Is my point. And nor is the mix very tasty. They have to mix it, jewsee, to make it skiable at all. One of those horrible compromise plays.’

  ‘You’ll excuse my husband’s Shrek-y mood,’ said Emma.

  ‘The problem I have with the ice-cream slopes,’ said Peter, loudly, ‘is the machinery.’

  ‘At the top, you mean?’

  ‘Loud!’ said Peter, loud himself. ‘I mean, let’s appreciate they’ve to generate the stuff somehow. I can appreciate ice cream’s not going to fall from the clouds by itself. But still.’

  ‘Agree,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘Surely, this daynage, they could make the stuff less noisily.’

  A waitress came to clear their table. She bent to gather the plates, almost as if presenting her centre-parting to George’s scrutiny. Ink-black hair, a strip of pale brown scalp.

  ‘I really flew down the slopes today,’ George announced to the whole group, apropos of nothing. ‘Positively flew.’

  ‘I don’t believe they’re allowed to wear their hair like that.’ Ysabella said. As she leant forward to retrieve her wine glass a Y-shaped vein blued and swelled slightly beneath the plaster-white skin of her brow. ‘I mean, when they’re working? Aren’t there any rules against it? It’s disgusting, really.’

  ‘Fucking leafheads,’ said Ergaste without violence.

  ‘Sunny day,’ said George, absently.

  ‘But I mean – when they’re working? I’d say they might tie it decently away when they come to—’ She searched for the right word, before alighting, in a way that seemed almost to surprise her, on: ‘us.’

  ‘Oh, plenty of sunlight in these latitudes,’ said Ergaste, sarcastically.

  ‘Oh I’m sure they’re fed,’ said Marie. ‘Oh I don’t doubt they take actual food as part of their wages. Don’t you think?’

  ‘We could ask, I suppose,’ said George, without the least intention of doing anything of the sort. He found himself wondering why, when he could clearly see his own shades reflected in Emma’s shades, he couldn’t see her shades reflected in the reflection of his shades in her shades. It seemed to him that he ought to be able to do that.

  ‘It’s a little indecent,’ Ysabelle said, vaguely.

  ‘Not that you’re prejudiced,’ boomed Peter.

  ‘I’m sure they’re fed,’ said Marie again, as if this point were important to her.

  ‘I’m sure food is the height and length and breadth of their wages,’ said Ergaste. ‘That and a shared dorm room in which to sleep. I’m sure no actual money changes hands.’ He seemed to find this richly amusing.

  ‘I know it’s a shocking thing to say,’ Ysabella went on. ‘But I find it wasteful for them to eat actual food. It’s not as if they need to. Perhaps they may crave the . . .’ But here her conversational powers really did fail her, and she fell silent.

  ‘Women,’ said Ergaste. ‘The men are too lazy to do it. The women work, to build up bodyfat. Greedy little leafheads.’ He looked about. ‘Not greedy for food, ysee,’ he clarified. ‘Greedy for babbies.’

  But nobody was really very interested in this. George drained his drink. Wherever he placed his wine glass on the polished table it fitted neatly onto the base of its reflected self. There was something satisfying about that. It said something about the innate harmony of the cosmos. The day’s skiing had left a distant ache in his thighs. Intensely satisfying. Real work, real hard physical work – and actual danger too. And it had been dangerous, for all that MediDrones floated nannyishly over every bulge.

  The conversation had moved on to food production. Ergaste was expatiating, in his clipped style, on the role of the gentleman farmer these days. His main point was, staples were right out. Right out. No margin in them any longer. Pretty much all food production geared to the luxury market now; which had had the strange consequence that staples had become luxury foods – for faddists, or religious cultists, or people who had mad reasons for needing it. Wheatgrain weight-for-weight was caviar-expensive. He knew people groused about this, but it was an inevitability. Get with the programme, or get out of the game altogether. No margins in staples any longer. Not now that the world had the hair.

  ‘It’s a blessing,’ said Emma.

  ‘Certainly it’s the way the world is, now. For good or ill,’ said Ergaste.

  The early afternoon sun was splendorous. Away at the far end of the balcony, two waitresses stood with their backs to the sun. One swivelled her face towards the other and whispered something into her ear. The other, holding her tray like a chivalric shield before her torso, clapped a hand to cover her mouth: shocked, or perhaps amused, by what she had heard. George wondered what the gossip was. Had they been looking in his direction? Probably not. Plenty of other busy tables on the balcony.

  At this point Marie decided abruptly that she must see Ezra. She had her Fwn out and had called up to his room before George could intervene. ‘It’s his naptime, darling,’ he said. But it was too late. ‘I haven’t seen him since yesterday,’ she told him – or rather, she told Peter, pushing George’s shoulder with her free hand. ‘A mother has emotional needs and instincts. Only a monster would stifle the free expression of my maternal instincts.’

  ‘Since there are instincts,’ said Emma, cheerfully, ‘then why aren’t there outstincts?’

  They all chuckled at this, because it actually was rather amusing, and clever, at least coming from somebody as mousy as Emma. Ergaste laughed loudest, boomingly even, and Emma slapped his lapel with the back of her hand. But it was all terribly jolly, it really was.

  The sunlight was as sparkly as a white firework, and gemstones of brilliance twinkled across the entire snowfall.

  And here was Arsinée, carrying a very grumpy-looking Ezra across the balcony towards their table. ‘Here’s my little package of loveliness,’ cried Marie. Arsinée presented the baby to its mother rather after the manner of a wine-waiter offering an unusually expensive bottle to a diner, an
d for a minute or so Marie cooed and poked a finger into the dimples of the thing’s little face. Miraculously Ezra did not bawl. Which is to say: he did screw up his little eyes against the brightness of the day, and he did ready his hands for an imaginary munchkin boxing match, but no sound accompanied the opening and closing of his mouth. Marie redirected her attention back to Ergaste, and Arsinée hovered for a moment, uncertain whether she was required to stay or to go.

  ‘I want to see mine too,’ Emma declared, pulling a Fwn from her sleeve.

  ‘Oh for fucking out loud,’ groaned Ergaste.

  ‘Language!’ his wife chirruped.

  ‘We had her for breakfast.’

  Emma pulled out her Fwn and briskly instructed somebody called Shirusho to bring Charlie down to the balcony restaurant, darling, right now?

  ‘We had her all through breakfast,’ said Ergaste

  ‘Is Leah your one and only?’ Ysabelle asked George.

  ‘Don’t listen to my ogre husband,’ said Emma. ‘It wasn’t even five minutes at breakfast.’

  ‘She kicked my chococross right off the plate,’ boomed Ergaste.

  ‘It was an accident and it was delightful actually, really, it was spontaneous physical comedy.’

  George turned his face from Emma and Ergaste’s little squabble. ‘Two,’ he replied, meeting Ysabelle’s eye. ‘Ezra, there. We’ve a daughter as well.’

  ‘Two!’ repeated Ys, as if this number were one of those mind-stunning statistics you hear on documentaries about the vastness of interstellar space.

  ‘Physical comedy bollocks,’ announced Ergaste, in a slightly too-loud voice.

  ‘Language!’

  ‘A man’s entitled to breakfast!’

  ‘Who’s for some after-lunch skiing?’ Marie put in, brightly, her attempt to break this unseemly display of discord. Arsinée, looking from person to person for further cues, wrapped Ezra up and slipped away off the balcony.

  ‘I simply don’t see it’s too much to ask,’ said Ergaste, sitting back in his chair as a bearish lump, ‘that a fellow be allowed to break his fast in peace.’