By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  George perked up to here himself so described. ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course – you are a wealthy Westerner. This is not usual. Usually it is Turkish and Irani children who are stolen. Sometimes Kurds and Armenians, but they more rarely.’

  From this sentence it was the word wealthy that popped up and rat-tatted George’s consciousness. He leant forward in his chair and said, in something of a gabble: ‘Money is not an object. If there is a ransom to be paid, we’ll gladly pay a ransom. If they want ransom, you will please tell them that—’

  The commissioner employed a placidly forceful manner of interrupting this flow, saying, without raising his voice: ‘They will not contact me, Mr Denoone. There will be no demand for ransom. These kidnappings are never about ransom. Of course I will speak to the local bosses. I will speak, and we will see.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said George. ‘How can it not be about money?’

  ‘Money,’ said Captain Afkhami, ‘may be required.’

  The commissioner opened his eyes wide, and then narrowed them again. ‘Oh money will be required,’ he confirmed, in an I took this to be understood tone of voice. ‘We will need to grease the bosses’ wheels.’

  ‘Money is not a problem,’ said George. It was, in truth, the one sure thing on which he could draw, his sole possible contribution to the situation. He could be forgiven for stressing it. ‘We can transfer any sums required – to whichever chips are needful.’

  ‘This money will not be to pay any ransom, though,’ said the commissioner.

  Unable to comprehend this, George only repeated. ‘Money is no object.’

  ‘I must banish you now,’ said the commissioner, mildly; although perhaps his command of English led him into a more alarming utterance than he intended, for he shook hands with both the captain and George, and promised to contact them as soon as he had information.

  Back outside, they made their way back to the flitter and clambered inside. ‘What did he mean, no ransom?’

  ‘The money will be used to bribe the village bosses,’ said the captain, tapping the drivescreen as the belt snaked itself round her waist.

  ‘I see,’ said George, although he did not. ‘But why are so many children being – stolen? The commissioner said that so many children were being stolen.’

  ‘There are many bad people in the world,’ was Afkhami’s explanation. She spoke in a distant voice, feeding the hotel’s location to the drivescreen. And the flitter lifted creakingly into the sky, and it soom-soomed north, and wild birds scattered before its passage.

  10

  George settled into a physically comfortable but existentially deracinated mode of life. He continued staying at the hotel, doing all the things guests did. He had daily meetings with Captain Afkhami, in her office – although there was never any progress to report – and spent several long sessions on either his own Fwn or the hotel’s Lance, talking to Marie. He skied, sometimes once and sometimes twice a day. He ate and drank, and on three further occasions he had sexual relations with Ysabelle. But she soon came to the end of their stay, and left for Toronto with her husband. After that George spent more time with Ergaste, drinking, or playing idle games. But mostly he simply drifted in a state of existential nullity, day leaching into day. He watched whole strings of books. He sat for hours in one bar or another, sipping all the many vintages on offer. The sunset hour would ripen the snow from pale to pink and then to a sugary red. The lights would come alive up and down the resort. The hotel interior would shift its mode from being darker than the rest of the world to being brighter. ‘It’s a scandal,’ Ergaste boomed, at his elbow. ‘They could shake the whole province up, if only they wanted the bother. Oh, they don’t want the bother.’

  Another blurry, wobbly walk along the corridor to his room. Another morning’s dose of Clear, and the shower-room’s always welcoming cone of hot water.

  The one unanticipated benefit to all this was that George’s skiing improved. He passed smoothly down the piste, hooked himself to a drone and ascended to try again. Down and up, the recirculation of matter in a surprisingly satisfying cycle: fort, and the world rushes past; da, and it hauls itself back up again. New guests came, and inexperienced skiers essayed the slopes, and these folk gave George the opportunity to feel superior to their clowning – the way they’d hit a hump of the slope just wrong, and make mid-air Xs of their arms and legs before their head-down insertion into the snow; or the way they’d simply stand wrong and fall backwards, or fall forwards, without ever getting going. The more George skied, the more irritated he became at company. Growing bolder, he skied off piste; avoiding the famous ice-cream slope – which was always crammed with people – and instead exploring areas of unscarred snow, where man-high mounds of the stuff had been left untouched so long they had acquired pores all over, like patches of giant skin. He skied over to where the trees began, with their white-frosted boughs, dreadlocky strands of evergreen foliage weighed down with the previous night’s snowfall. In at the edge of this forest George felt, not quite free but at least experienced a compelling intimation of what freedom might be like. Here, the air was only distantly touched by the noise of the blimps; or scraped vaguely by the distant passage of a ramjet heading to Tabriz. For long moments the woods even achieved a perfect, enamelled silence. Silence, and then the cello-thrum of the overhead jet, and then silence. The sky is made out of silence.

  The leaves here do not rustle.

  A hotel safety agent skied over to check he was all right. He took off his glasses to meet George’s eye, nodding and smiling, and then had to put them back on to access the translation protocol. Hotel insurance liability does not include. Legal responsibility to inform esteemed sir. Some things cannot be translated. The silence cannot be translated.

  But he couldn’t stay in the trees for ever.

  Back at the hotel he took lunch with Ergaste and Emma. The couple – either tenderly, or else out of plain insensitivity, George couldn’t decide – insisted their baby be brought to the table to be cooed over. Five minutes of that, and the baby was waved away back to its room.

  ‘I tell you something,’ Ergaste instructed him, expansively. ‘When we’re in London, I’m speaking to some Media Stars I happen to know.’

  At this, Emma grew hotly cross, for reasons that weren’t quite clear to George. ‘Those people!’ she snarled.

  ‘No need for that,’ warned Ergaste, not looking at her. ‘’d be tremendously useful for George! Dozens a week, children kidnapped – George says the police told him that directly.’

  ‘That is what the Doğubayazit Police Commissioner said,’ George confirmed, speaking mildly and looking not at his interlocutors but at the liquid chalk of the sky, the bright, cold sun. He shifted the angle of his gaze and examined the hip and flank of the mountain, the dark shagpile of its distant forestation.

  ‘Dozens!’ said Ergaste. ‘People should be warned. It should be on the Media.’

  ‘I told Shiroko,’ Emma said, confidentially, to George, ‘that she’s not to let Algy out of her sight. Not for a minute, I told her.’ Then, perhaps belatedly thinking this undiplomatic, she cleared her throat, rolled her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger and added: ‘Not that there’s really anything we can do as parents. That’s what’s so alarming!’ There was a lengthy silence. ‘So,’ she said, shortly. ‘Anyway, whatever happened to your – dear – um, girl’s carer? I can’t remember her name, the carer’s name I mean.’

  ‘The captain says she’s still in custody.’

  ‘Ysee, these media people I know might make a book of it,’ said Ergaste, abruptly. ‘The world should know this is going on!’

  ‘News,’ hissed Emma at him, like an expletive.

  ‘And I’ll say something else,’ boomed Ergaste, apparently addressing the bright sky. ‘This holiday hasn’t done an iota to unstring you.’

  ‘But how could it?’ she retorted. ‘How could I unwind, given what happened to poor George and Marina?’
>
  ‘Marie,’ George said.

  ‘That’s not it,’ opined Ergaste, loudly.

  ‘Oh? Is it not? What is it then? Is it that you’re using any excuse to get together with those – prostitutes and pole-dancers from ZYZ?’

  ‘Oh for fucking out loud!’ groaned Ergaste, with such volume that several other diners turned to look at them.

  ‘Don’t swear, so! George and Marina have suffered such agonies, and all you do is swear!’ hissed Emma. ‘And you can’t wait to hot-tail it back to—’

  ‘Please don’t fall out on my behalf,’ said George weakly.

  ‘Oh George, if I told you half the things that happened in that ZYZ Media Palace,’ said Emma.

  ‘They might be able to help the man!’ boomed Ergaste.

  ‘—your ears would burn blue! They really would!’

  ‘She’s like this,’ Ergaste appealed to George, ‘dayn, dayout!’

  The Horner-Kings left later that day, cutting their holiday short, and with apologies for leaving George in the lurch. But he could tell them perfectly truthfully that he didn’t mind. He was looking forward to spending some time alone. He actually was. ‘They’ll find her,’ Ergaste asserted. ‘It’ll be a ransom, that’s what. What else could it be?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ And the two Horner-Kings and their kid and their kid’s carer got into a flitter and in moments they had all vanished into the wide sky.

  After that George took some little care (and, in truth, it was not hard) to avoid picking up any new friends. He drifted through the days. He drank.

  One day, a week or so after the departure of the Horner-Kings, he went back to Doğubayazit to meet the commissioner again; accompanied this time not by the captain but by one of her subordinates. The news was not positive. He was told that there was nothing to report. None of the local bosses could help. This was either because they were obfuscating, or else because they really did not know. The commissioner considered the former unlikely, given the generous amounts of money that were on offer. ‘It’s possible your daughter was taken outside the district. I am liaising with other districts.’

  ‘But why did they steal her away?’ George asked, in an anguished tone.

  The commissioner dipped his head.

  As he was being flittered back to the hotel, George tried to work out in his own mind whether it was better that the exact possibilities of Leah’s fate remained unspecified, or whether the vagueness only intensified his dread. She was beyond his care, now. But whoever had stolen her, and for whatever wicked purpose, surely could not be tormenting her every single hour of the twenty-four. Could they? There must be times when the misery stopped and she knew relief, or possibly even enjoyed herself? Perhaps she was being kept in a room, somewhere, alone and afraid – but even then there must be moments when the sunlight would crop a section of the opposite wall with brightness. There must be toys for her to play with. Or other children – surely there would be other children. But, you see. But of course you see that the scope of possible sufferings a vanished child could be enduring is so vast, so much larger than interstellar, that it is quite literally inconceivable. It would collapse the mind to own the knowledge. The shadows of dread, rolled across the white landscape of George’s inner world by vast clouds in stately motion. Even to think of the possibility of it made his ribs all clench together around his heart.

  In practice, though, mostly he was able not to think about it. Sometimes, when talking with Marie in New York via Fwn, the unavoidable unmentionable would insert itself into what they said. But it was so sharply painful to them both, separated now by the whole globe, that they would hurriedly spin a floss of unrelated words around it, bundle it away. Every time somebody in authority mentioned ‘the bosses’, George felt a racing thrill of horror in his breast, sickeningly akin to excitement. To be boss; to have another human absolutely in your power. It made him nauseous.

  At some point, he began the process of considering that he would never see Leah again. He couldn’t say when this bleak possibility first consciously occurred to him. It insinuated itself into his thoughts, until before he was fully aware of it, it had become an old dread. It was almost as if this was a dread that predated the abduction itself – but how could that be? That made no sense at all. Let us stick with the rational, at all costs.

  At the beginning he spent a period of each day watching images of his daughter at play in the snow, on their first day; or else mooning about her room playing her various games. The latter he could watch easily enough, but there were moments that made the former too painful: moments when Leah would look up at the lens and smile, breath steaming from her mouth, her teeth flashing in the sun. After a few days he stopped this belated voyeurism altogether.

  One week became two. George sensed that he was, in small increments, being deprioritized by the hotel. Although he still had his daily briefings with Captain Afkhami, they became more and more perfunctory. There was nothing for her to say, and nothing for him to ask. The other demands of running a hotel intruded on the security staff.

  This is what he now thought: there is something grim in the rhythm of ordinary existence. This is because the alterations from day to night, from moment to moment, are not the actual idiom of things. The idiom of things is a vast monotony. Existence belongs to the unyielding, not the yielding; and the most unyielding thing of all is the eternal changelessness of being. There are no stories to tell about it. Everything is always and everywhere boring. It must be, or we wouldn’t need so many distractions.

  George sank into it. The torpor possessed his soul.

  Then, from nowhere, came news of a breakthrough. A breakthrough! It made the heart like a fish pulled out of the water and cast upon the dry pier timbers. George realized, if he hadn’t already known it, that things happening is a more painful and less bearable state of affairs than nothing happening.

  It was a fortnight into George’s solitary stay, when the captain met him over breakfast. Something had come up. It was a breakthrough. They had broken through. He was flittered to a town east of Ararat, and once there he was told they must transfer to a groundcar. Commissioner Sahim attended in person. ‘We are going to a town called Khoduz,’ he said. ‘We must go within a car, on the ground. It is a drive of half hour from here.’

  ‘Why can’t we go by flitter?’ George asked. His heart was thundering.

  ‘It is not so safe, where we are going, to fly’ said Captain Afkhani.

  ‘Have you found her? Are you taking me to her?’

  ‘It is more safe to go within a car,’ said the commissioner. ‘We have this iCar Armoured, it is plated, it is very safe.’

  ‘Flitters are more vulnerable to small weapon fire,’ said Afkhami, smilingly, as she walked briskly alongside him. ‘They cannot fly high enough to evade evil people and their weapons.’

  ‘Is it a war zone?’ barked George, his chest tinkling with excitement, or fear (as if there is really any difference between those two emotions!). He no longer knew what he was saying, exactly. Standing in the direct sunlight. The iCar Armoured pulled up in front of him and the nearside passenger door clicked open and swung wide. Sweat was needling his face and torso. ‘Is that why she was kidnapped? Is it something to do with war?’

  ‘It is nothing to do with war,’ said the commissioner, climbing into the iCar. ‘There is no war here, although there are some bad people, and some of them have guns.’

  ‘Leah is in Khoduz?’

  ‘Let us get into the Car please,’ said the Captain.

  George stood looking at the cavernous cavemouth of the open passenger door. The whole machine was twice the length of a flitter, massy and ponderous, more like a house than a vehicle, from its broad domed snout to its room-sized trunk. Its paintwork was white as snow. It hurt the eyes to look directly at it, even through shades. George got in. The inside was cool, and the seat adjusted itself beneath him.

  ‘Away!’ said the commissioner.

  They rolled for te
n minutes along a rod-straight road of spongy tarmac; and then turned off onto a road of compressed dirt. An angled plume of pale dust shot from the back of the vehicle, like a rocket exhaust. George stared through the tinted glass. Where the canals ran, the land was scrubby with weeds. In between the zones of irrigation, sun and dryness had extirpated all life. The mountain dominated the distance, one big peak and an eastward downward slope to another, smaller peak. It looked like the profile of a mighty crocodile basking on the horizon. Objects near-to – parched trees, solitary buildings, discarded tractors – bulleted by, but the mountain was too huge and solid to move so much as a centimetre.

  George peered through his window. He pressed his face to it, to look ahead. The road was taking them towards a small hill, scaled all over with single-storey buildings. They were in the outskirts already. People lounged on the ground, or sat on the roofs, with their hair out.

  At a bend in the road just outside this village the car slowed to take the turn, and George saw two women in a dusty field, digging a trench, their arms glisteningly bare, their long black hair swaying with the motion of the spades.

  Supine on the ground, a few metres from them, was a line of half a dozen shop-front dummies: every brown head bald as an egg, and far too skinny to be actual human bodies. George might have speculated on what these manikins were doing in this remote village, or why the women were burying them, but his mind was too agitated by the thought that Leah was in one of these very houses! That he was only moments from being reunited!

  ‘This is Khoduz?’ he asked.

  They rolled through the place. The car pulled up in a narrow town square, with a central drinking fountain the shape of a rocket, and a couple of bang-haired palm trees. Men and children sat on the unshaded side of the square, letting the sunlight get to their hair.