By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  Dark?

  ‘There’s only one subject in human history,’ Raphael said. ‘Poverty. It’s the state most humans have been in for most of the time humans have lived on this planet. Viewed objectively, poverty is massively the defining aspect of human life. Wealth is a recent, occasional and – viewed overall – a vanishingly rare aberration from the human baseline. Is it a coincidence that almost all historians have studied wealth, that almost no historians have studied poverty? This is what they say: it’s not that it’s not a feature of human history, it’s just not a significant feature.’ And here there would be a blizzard of links to instances of two hundred years of historical focus. ‘They say a wealthy king is a more important topic for historians than ten thousand starving serfs. Is he? He certainly thought so! But that’s not it – the king does not build pyramids with his own two hands, does not wage war by himself, does not personally go into the world and gather wheat and gold and jewels.’

  And George pictured to himself a heap of yellow wheat-ears and yellower doubloons and bright red rubies.

  ‘Historians have hitherto worked from the premise that poverty is not as significant as wealth. But they don’t mean that. What they mean is that poverty does not make for diverting narratives the way wealth does. They mean people would rather watch a book with a sexy actress representing Anne Boleyn in a splendid dress, than watch a book about ill-clad peasants grubbing in the dirt. They mean poverty is dreary. And so it is! They mean that poverty is boring. And so it is! So, only understand this: historians look to history for entertainment, not for the truth. They go to be diverted and titillated, not to see how things really are. History,’ he said, fiddling with his Fwn so that the slogan was properly isolated and could be sent, ‘is like a study of a mighty forest of fir trees that only ever talks about some primroses growing on the extreme edge. History that talks about rich people is a lie. Taken as a whole, mankind has never been rich.’

  The thing was that George felt people were looking at him as if he, alone of all these people, he knew what that mystic signifier ‘poverty’ actually meant. But his daughter’s time in the village now felt like a very remote portion of his past. It had been real, of course. But it didn’t feel real. Raphael went on and on about poverty as the truth at the heart of the human condition. Conventional history was like a medical study of the human body that only interested itself in the jewelled earrings and hair-gen the person happened to be sporting. It was like study of the great oceans of the earth that talked only about oyster pearls and, more, that pretended that oyster pearls were the only thing worth talking about! That the whole focus of the ocean and all its force and depth, its ability to rise up and swallow whole civilizations, its still unmapped abyssal planes, all its multifarious life from krill to killer whales – that all of this must be understood merely as the backdrop to some few pearls. Absurd!

  ‘So what do we need instead? We need a history purged of queens and princes, that’s for one thing. We need a history that takes a total view, and understands that the being-in-the-world of human beings has always been overwhelmingly non-wealthy.’ Raphael proffered a link to being-in-the-world, but George didn’t follow it. He knew what being was, and what world was. Why would he need to follow a link that explained those two things?

  ‘Let’s start right here, right now,’ said Raphael, and the music underneath his voice changed, and it was exciting. It really was. George had had no previous interest in history, but still the thought that he was one of a select group of people completely reinventing the discipline, here in Manhattan, was thrilling.

  ‘The first thing we have to do,’ Raphael advised, ‘is to distinguish between different degrees of poverty. I’m not interested in the upper strata of the phenomenon, of the people with small monies who have been squeezed by society or circumstances – war, for instance. Not right now. We’ll keep that history for another day. I’m interested in the old bottom tier. The thing wealthy people don’t understand is that, for most of human history, poverty has been something that could always get worse. Human beings would appear to be completely down and out; but they could always sink lower. This was because for most of human history poverty was a subsistence phenomenon. Poor meant having the bare minimum. That is to say, it meant having something. And something can always be pared away. Not now! Now a new manifestation of poverty has come into the world – the most significant development in human history since the invention of farming. Now we have absolute poverty. And—’ adjusting the Fwn again, so that the music is right for the recording of another slogan, ‘absolute poverty is absolute freedom! It can’t be pared away, or threatened, or warred down.’

  George wasn’t sure about this, but, like, you know. Whatever.

  The following week was revolution; something the rest of the cadre excitedly chattered about on Fwn for days in advance. Secretly, again, George thought this, really, was missing the point – for he had taken to heart Raphael’s point (or what he assumed was Raphael’s point) that history had so often been hijacked by the dramatically engaging instead of by the True. And of course there was no doubt that revolutions made for more exciting books. He watched the ones they had been advised to watch: two about the American Revolution (there had been an American revolution! Who knew?), one about the French Revolution, which involved a lot of inventive decapitation, and three about the Russian Revolution, which seemed to be all about the swarming of crowds. It was hard to follow the narrative in this last one, particularly – a shipful of revolutionaries had docked and then all the crew had rushed about a city and up and down some stairs and . . . what? Something imprecise but very deeply felt. Something intellectually tangled but emotionally very powerful.

  ‘Here’s another thing conventional historians have missed,’ Raphael said. ‘They know that revolutions occur from time to time . . . which is to say, that for long stretches human societies go along without them happening, and then suddenly they happen. But nobody has really worked out what the underlying logic is. Is it an inevitable part of historical process? Does it happen to coincide with famine, or war? Can it be spread from country to country like a disease? Does it happen when tyrannical societies begin to reform?’ Yeah, yeah, get on with it. ‘I’ll tell you the truth other historians have missed. What’s needful for a permanent revolution? Not an industrial proletariat, and not even a peasant mass. What’s needful is a large enough lumpenproletariat.’ George was going to check the links on those indigestible words, but he saw that Raphael was morphing the musical accompaniment, which probably meant he was about to utter a slogan, and that would surely boil it all down for him. So he waited, and sure enough: ‘A large population of idle people is the perfect kindling for permanent revolution,’ he said. ‘Power keeps adjusting as the People keep trying to rise up against it, and Power has learnt a number of tricks for stifling revolution – strategic concessions, more effective police and army technologies, ideological propaganda. But the best trick Power managed was: keep people too busy to rise up. Keep them tired and distracted. And that kept a hundred and fifty years free of uprising. But the new hair has changed the game. The new hair means that there are millions of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with their time. Millions of idle poor, too well-situated to die, but not occupied with any of the tasks or chores of staying alive. The perfect revolutionary class!’

  26

  He had lunch with Rodion. ‘When I sit down to break bread with you, old boy,’ he started, but stopped, uncertain how to go on. ‘What I mean is: what I always feel,’ he said, ‘is that you have a secret.’

  ‘I’m sure we all have secrets,’ Rodion replied, mildly.

  They were sipping coffee. George’s coffee had a skin of nectar floating on its surface. To drink the coffee, his lips touched the molecule-thin skein, and his tongue was aware of just enough of its flavour to take the brittle edge off the coffee’s sourness. It was a beautiful cup of coffee.

  ‘I’ve come to the conclusion,’ said George, ‘that
the secret in my life was – me.’ He couldn’t help looking at the old man with a triumphal expression on his face, a self-satisfaction, as if he had uttered something terribly profound and original. Of course, he had not. Of course he had only touched on the most mundane baseline, universal feature of human existence. Rodion, though, was too polite to do anything other than smile and nod gently, and lift his own coffee cup (plain black, of course) to his withered lips. His lips were withered because there comes a point where even the most elaborate genetic treatments reach the limit of their efficacy. Otherwise, we would all live for ever.

  Rodion waited a decent interval, such that changing the conversational subject wouldn’t look too rudely abrupt. In fact he needn’t have worried; George wasn’t expecting to be probed on his so-called revelation. Had he been politely asked to say more about this secret self he had supposedly uncovered, he would have been reduced to cliché, or to flailing about. Birds flew left to right, over their heads, and right to left, and appeared from behind them. George considered the clouds. They were fishscale silver against the dark blue sky. They were painted-looking. George could almost see the brushstrokes.

  ‘This Florida news is a bad business,’ Rodion said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I sometimes wonder why it’s so terribly unfashionable to follow the news,’ Rodion said. ‘I mean, I am unreconstructedly old-fashioned, I suppose. Once upon a time, and I don’t think we want to go into the details here and now – but once upon a time, you know, I was news. So I’ve kept a kind of weather-eye on it ever since. I just haven’t been able to discuss it at polite dinner parties!’ And he chuckled to himself.

  If he hadn’t been so eager to talk about himself, George might have followed up on this I used to be the news hint. Instead he said: ‘As for my news-watching, well. It’s one of my things. I mean, I’m not a slave to the head-in-the-ostrich of fashion.’

  ‘And what do you think about the events in Florida?’

  ‘Events in Florida,’ said George, nodding. Then: ‘Events – when?’

  Rodion drew a thumbnail across his bald scalp. ‘Over the last few weeks.’

  ‘There was something,’ said George, looking into the maw of his white stone coffee mug. ‘There were riots, I think. There are always riots, though.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rodion, uncertainly. ‘I suppose that’s true. Not in New York, though!’

  ‘There was trouble, back when they cleared Queens.’

  ‘Oh, yes! That’s right. I suppose I meant: not in Manhattan.’

  ‘Christ, no,’ said George, with feeling. ‘Thank heavens, not here.’

  ‘I think,’ Rodion said, tentatively, ‘that the Florida business was more than just “riots” ’, you know.’ And when George peered at him, with that doll-like intensity, his large black-pupilled eyes like a shark’s, Rodion added: ‘I think it was more concerted. An attempt at revolution.’

  ‘Really?’ Now here was a subject George felt he knew something about!

  ‘Longhairs seized pretty much all the Keys. Lots of people got killed. They called themselves Spartacists – not that,’ George was blinking, ‘not that it matters what they called themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of them at sea now, in tens of thousands of little boats. Going by that name.’

  ‘At sea!’ George, now that he thought of it, had noticed a lot of news imagery of ragged-looking flotillas. But since he was in the habit of watching the news with the sound turned down, and the tickerfeed disabled, he’d not been quite sure what those images meant.

  ‘They can live at sea for as long as they like,’ said Rodion. ‘A desalinator in the boat for water, and endless sunshine. It’s the ideal place for them, really. Anyway, the anxiety was that they were coordinated. They did all this D-Daylike stuff, seized the Keys. Then they started to encroach on the mainland. The deaths numbered in the thousands. In the several thousands.’

  ‘Good grief,’ said George

  ‘It’s been contained, now, of course,’ said Rodion, unsure why he felt the urge to reassure this man. Except, of course, that this man – his hair down to his shoulders, like a teenage rebel – sparked some sort of paternal instinct in him. ‘Luckily the authorities have gotten pretty good at containment after Triunion.’

  ‘I’ll always remember Triunion,’ said George, piously. ‘I remember, the riots were going on in Triunion when Leah was kidnapped. The two things are kind of linked, in my memory.’

  ‘Better to watch the news,’ Rodion said, ‘than get caught up in the news.’

  ‘I like to watch,’ said George, with unconscious quotation.

  ‘And those clouds,’ Rodion said, after a while. ‘The ones sliding overhead from the east. Now, they look a little too café noir for my liking. Shall we go inside before the storm breaks?’

  ‘Yes,’ said George, getting to his feet. ‘Let’s.’

  TWO

  LEAH

  The thing about the fridge was the way it was just there, all day and all night, and always full, and always accessible to anybody who just walked up to its door. For Leah it was a continual source of amazement. It wasn’t so much the size of it, although it was big. Rather, it had something to do with the way the heavy door was perfectly hinged to swing open at the lightest touch and reveal the cavernous wonders beyond it. Shelf after shelf of food and drink. A great, stacked structure of different foods, reaching high over her head. When she opened the door the genie in the box said, Hi can I help you?, and after she’d breathed in the lovely cold wafts for a while he said in a deeper voice: Wow, you’re leaving the door open for an age and an age! So she heaved it shut and the deep-set thunk of its closure was very thrilling to her. It sounded like some lost portion of the cosmos reclaimed and clicked into place. It was much bigger than the fridge in the village, but that was hardly a surprising fact, when you came to think of it. When she had been kidnapped, as she had learned, the Big Man in the village had a fridge, in his house; and there was that one time she’d gone into the house with Shabine to do what Aga H. had told them to do – retrieve a knot of plastic leads and cords from the room behind the kitchen, for whatever incomprehensible purpose Aga H. had needed them. The two of them had passed the humming monolith. ‘You know what’s in there?’ Shabine had said to her, and she had replied: ‘Go on, open it – take a strawberry.’ This had been a joke between them, because the day before Shabine had told her that strawberries were a kind of crunchy straw, of the same family as the splinterish blades that grew all over the narrow field behind Isman’s. But Leah had said, no, she’d seen a picture show with strawberries and they were red as lips. And, lacking any strawberries, real or imaginary, against which to test their disagreement they had moved on to other things.

  Now, today, in New York, Wally came in the kitchen, and wsht-wshted her away. Wax, mother called him. Leah could tell from the way she said this that it was one of her jokes, although she didn’t understand it at all. So she went away, and went up to the roof instead. It was a hot afternoon, the sort of weather that still sometimes made her feel a little homesick, although, mostly, she’d gotten on top of all that nonsense a long time ago. And homesick was a stupid word, anyway. The feeling that people called homesick wasn’t in the least bit a nausea, nothing sicky-of-gutty about it. It was more a tingling, or kindling feeling in her heart. And it had nothing to do with ‘home’, for wasn’t she home right now, standing on the roof of her home and looking about her at her city? It was for something else that made her soul fizz with yearning; an idea of something, a simple loss, like the chopping off of her hair. Where was that hair now? What did people do with hair when it was cut off? Did it go in the organic waste chute, or in the plastic chute, or in the compressibles? Which category did hair belong to? She lolled about the roof of the building, and checked out the cityscape, making sure everything was in their proper places. Overhead a sunkite lay sprawled on the air, two linked triangular sheets spread over an invisible mattress. Leah didn’t understand why the
y had to be so big. They had done sunkites at school a few weeks earlier, so she understood the principles involved; but she still didn’t understand why they had to be so big. They were doing Antarctica tomorrow.

  Her father and mother were going to divorce, just like Tercier’s parents, and Kelly’s. But there was a difference, because this was her fault. She broke the fridge, and it made her parents break-up – though not because they were cross with her, because oddly enough they didn’t seem to be cross with her. But there was, obviously, a connection. She had told her father that Wally was out of the kitchen, although she didn’t say that he was in Trotters again. He went there to kiss-and-cuddle, she knew, but she liked not telling anybody – except Marthe, of course. She had no secrets from Marthe.

  How it happened, was.

  It was still an astonishing thing to her, even after all these years. To think that food filled every shelf of this huge box, and that the door was not locked. She’d said that Wally wasn’t in the kitchen, and Daddy had said to go back down there and look again. So she had. She’d considered this a permission. Alone in the long room, she had stood before the fridge. Stainless-steel-coloured dolphins played endlessly across its wide door; shaped by the waters they swam in, as pebbles are shaped by the millennial stream. A purple-blue sea. She flicked the door with her thumb and the images changed to another of Wally’s presets – she assumed Wally had preset these, for who else would have done so? Breakers on a beach, curling like peeled rinds and crumbling in a blizzard of white spray. What was it with Wally and the ocean? Did he have, like, a thing for it? Another thumb-flick and another preset: the constellations of myriad globular jellyfish, pulsing like hearts, like wafer-walled, transparent hearts, against a green-blue background. Talk about boring. So, postponing the moment of actually opening the fridge (because she was going to open the fridge, and because it was pleasant to prolong the anticipation), she pulled a menu out of the pictures and scrolled through to something a bit less gique. She found a scene from a new book, Angels and Pain, and let that roll for a while across the door: Mica, who was the coolest angel, soared through rainbow clouds chasing Aer, who had killed Mica’s mother. They shot heatrays from their wings.