By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  She liked the interchange the best, when the flitter collected her from First, or from the Seawall, and hoiked her up into the sky. She liked to look down and see the city modelled, transformed into a bristling art-installation on the topic of Plenty. The rectangular green gap in the middle, and all around it, like a cluttered formation of crystals and basalts, an artificial giant’s causeway, pink and cream and grey. It was the Fridge, made stone. It was the Fridge laid on its side with the door removed, and all the bursting, thrusting fullness solidified into something permanent. Her insides would spangle, and the little hairs on her neck wriggle like the seeds in the book about the big peach. The waters would shimmer, and the antique bridges gleam, the suspension wires taut like bowstrings. And then the flitter would swoop and she would be deposited, with Adrianna, her new carer, Adrianna of the open mouth, who would puff and gasp as she manhandled Leah’s case out of the trunk.

  Switch off the screen and what have you got? The huge white door. No images moving upon it any more. Only the great block of blank door, like a monolith of milk ice cream. My god it’s full of – food? Is it? Stars, is it?

  Stars. Food.

  Towards the end of the year she became aware of a generalized pressure, in a psychodynamic sense of the word. It had to do with the imminent embarrassment that she might have to spend another year learning, like a mong, like a kaka, like the poor have to, because they can’t afford the braingeneering. But it was all all right. She had a sit-down talk with Mama – she always had more sensible conversations with Mama – about her age of majority. It was one of those ‘as you know’ chats. ‘As you know, Leah, it’s a privilege of wealth to be able to attain legal adulthood at fourteen.’ Leah didn’t know anything of the sort, but knew better than to say so. ‘This is not an automatic thing, of course,’ Mama was saying. ‘It is that a child of means is able to mature more quickly. And your time in – the thing that happened to you – took a chunk out of your schooling.’

  Leah contemplated this phrase: the thing that happened to you. ‘Papusza says that there’s a new tweak . . .’

  ‘Now, my darling,’ said Marie. ‘We don’t need to rush after any strange new treatments. Your tutor says you’re very quick – that you’re making very quick progress.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Leah.

  Papusza was her new best friend.

  Mama was doing more and more of her gardening work. She loved gardens, Leah knew, although Leah couldn’t imagine why. The city was a work of art, as far as Leah could see. Gardens were just smartified wildernesses, and she’d seen enough wilderness and weeds and scrub in her life to last her for ever. But she tried saying this to Mama once, and got snapped and snarled down. Queens was more than a wilderness.

  They went for a holiday to New Seattle. Everybody agreed – all of Leah’s friends, anyhow – that holidays in the tropics were totally over. It was uncool, all the swarming poor with their long black hair, clustering on the beaches like a beard of bees. The resorts were cleared of them by security, of course, except for those few vetted for work as, you know, waiters and that. But you saw them as you flew over. Papusza made an ‘eew’ sound that was higher-pitched than you would believe. It was almost up where only dogs could hear it, oh my god. Leah had never before in her whole entire life laughed as much as she did with Papusza. And Mama and Papusza’s two dads got on, so they all went to New Seattle together for a holiday. If George could have come it would have been even better. Not that it was bad, of course.

  ‘Come over here Lee,’ Papusza cried, from the right side of the flitter.

  They were all in Wasj’s private flitter, double trunk, with its own shower and fridge and everything. Leah rushed to the right side and looked down. The flight path was north over the ocean, and all the little dints and wavelets in the water were carved in light. It was easy to make out the old coastline – the land north of SF, this would have been once, where the sea had encroached deepest. Under the water, roads and houses and dead tree stems like the piles for vanished piers, all clearly visible. The new coastline was, variously, gentle upslopes and sharp ravines where waves ground themselves into a froth, but in either case the landscape was dotted, or crowded, or teeming with longhairs. God they were everywhere! Mrs Ficowski said you weren’t to call them longhairs, because that betrayed a vulgarity of condescension, or something. But that’s what they were! They just milled about, or lay there, or sat in groups, or fought with one another, or kissed and cuddled and pornoed together, and Papusza made her ‘eeew’ noise again, and Leah shrieked with laughter, until one of Pap’s dads told them to shush with the banshee stuff. They flew past stretches of new coast that were properly fenced off, where real people had their houses and gardens and so on; but the longhairs had no respect for fences. As they went by Leah counted three estates where the fences had been breached, and where longhairs were scattered about the property, eating the flowers, or just laying about. What could you do? There were so many of them.

  The fatter of Pap’s two dads came over to the window to see what they were making so much noise about. ‘They come up from So-Cal and Mec-hico,’ he said. ‘Lord knows why. It’s not as if there’s more sun up here. Less, rather.’

  ‘They should make the fence between America and the South stronger,’ said Papusza, imperiously.

  ‘They come in waves,’ said Pap’s dad. ‘It’s to do with religious sects. I’ve also heard it’s drugs, there’s proponents of both explanations. But anyway, a great mob of them gathers, time-to-time, and they just bust through. Provided they have water the desert’s no barrier to them. On the contrary. All the sun in that desert? Desert’s a restaurant to that lot.’

  ‘We should,’ said Leah, excitedly, rubbing her own close-cropped scalp unconsciously, ‘block the sun for a few months! Put up a space filter – I saw a book about, about it, science fiction it was. You put it in space directly between the Earth and the sun, and stop all sunlight for a few months, and clear them all out.’

  ‘You come up with the most idiotic ideas,’ snapped Mama from the other side of the flitter.

  But Pap’s dad chuckled at Leah’s idea, actually laughed! So it can’t have been a bad one. And as he laughed the fat on his neck trembled like a rapid pulse. ‘It’s sure a radical solution,’ he said.

  ‘They’re weeds,’ called Pap’s other dad across the aisle of the flitter. ‘Poisonous weeds. And that’s all there is to say about them.’

  ‘You quiet your Nazi noise, Tishani,’ said the first dad, and laughed again.

  ‘I know it seems like the problem is a long way off when you’re in New York, kids,’ said Tishani, addressing the two girls. ‘But it’s getting worse. It’s worse because the authorities won’t seize the nettle. These longhairs come over with guns you know. They’re like cockroaches, real hard to kill, and mean as hell.’

  Ez, who had been immersed in his game, perked up at the mention of guns. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Do they send in the militia?’ God he loved guns, that boy.

  ‘They did that two years ago,’ said Tishani. ‘There was a mob assault on the LA fence.’

  ‘Did they send in the Striders?’ Ez asked, growing more excited.

  ‘The kit, the caboodle, the lot,’ said Tishani. ‘Men, robots, the whole lot. It was a mass–a–cre.’

  ‘Cool!’

  ‘I never heard of it,’ said Mama, crossly, from the back of the flitter.

  ‘It was all over the news,’ said Tishani. ‘But who watches the news?’

  Leah wasn’t stupid. She knew nobody cool watched the news, because it was all vulgar nonsense. And she knew that if she’d said: ‘My dad watches the news’ it would have made Mama angry. So she held her peace, and looked out the window again. The crowds of poor became sparser the further north they went. Of course they did. The further north you went, the less sunlight there was – everybody knew that.

  Secretly, Leah wished she could watch the news too. Just to find out what was going on. She could watch on her Fwn, of cou
rse; or on the house screen when nobody else was about, but then Mama would see it on her records, and she’d get into trouble.

  ‘If you blotted the sun out,’ Papusza said to her, ‘you’d kill all the crops. Fruit trees and so on.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Maybe your science-fiction book hadn’t thought it all through?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  Pap sounded very complacent and wise and clever-old-crone-y as she added: ‘It’s all interconnected, you see. You can’t just snip out one section. It’s all part of a complicated interconnectedness.’

  Oh, they had a great week in New Seattle. They were in a house and all around were fields of grass; red and yellow and pink and green. Pap and Leah used to lie down between the long stems, their arms around one another, and listen to the noises made by the breeze. Like the whole world was trying to whisper something to them. They played games, and ran about, and saw real live livestock and real live wildlife, and pretended to fight one another. She never laughed so much in all her life before.

  Mama took samples of these new grasses with a handheld device. It had something to do with her Queens’ garden. Sometimes Leah tried asking her about all the gardening she was doing now, since the break-up with Dad, but if she tried to ask Mama generally snapped at her. About her nose. Which is to say, nosiness. She seemed to get pretty angry, these days. That was the truth of it.

  She was pretty sad when the week had to end, and that’s the truth.

  Back in NY she introduced Papusza to Rodion. ‘My good God he’s old,’ Pap shrieked, right there, right in front of him. It was, like, the rudest thing.

  But Rodion only chuckled. ‘Ice cream, ladies?’

  ‘Ice cream is for tiny kids,’ said Pap, grandly. ‘I want a coffee. Are you more than a hundred?’

  ‘I am,’ said Rodion, getting slowly to his feet and curling his book into a scroll.

  ‘Are you more than two hundred?’

  ‘I am not. Would you like a coffee, too, Leah?’

  And this was a dilemma. Coffee always made Leah think of the village; the Big Man had always had a cup of coffee in his hand, so far as Leah remembered. When she made a mental picture of him, in her head, there he was, holding the little cup of pungent-smelling black liquid. It looked like hot tar, and the tiny cup might just as well have been carved from stone. The Big Man would be sat there, in one of the rooms of his enormous house (though it was hardly enormous by actual standards; it was only enormous by the village standards, and that wasn’t saying very much), and he’d open his mouth in that big croco manner he had, and he’d be holding his coffee cup in his right hand, or else perhaps he’d be balancing it on his spherical belly. Little wisps of steam would be coming up out of it, like threads. Aga H. preferred Shabine, but mostly he liked having both of them there. ‘You know why I like you girls?’ he said, once. ‘You don’t pester me for food.’ Leah’s job had been to hold the Big Man’s big belly out of the way, so Shabine could work properly, and it used to make her arms ache. It really was a large mass of flesh. It didn’t seem part of a human being, somehow; it felt like a water-filled piece of furniture – like a mattress. ‘Grown women are lovely,’ the Big Man had sighed, fitting his words into Shabine’s rhythm. ‘But they always have an agenda. Food, food, always food. Hoarders. They want to. Have babies. So it’s food, Aga, please, food. Oh they’ll do what I want. They’ll do things you can’t. Oh, uh, uh. How I get sick of the nagging!’ At this point Shabine disengaged her mouth and put her head round the side of his belly: ‘Oh I’d love to try some food, Aga, can I?’ ‘Hey!’ he boomed. ‘I didn’t tell you to stop, did I?’ ‘I’ve never tried any food,’ Shabine had insisted. ‘I’ve love to try some sugar! Could I?’ But the Aga had smacked her on the top of her head with the flat of his hand. ‘Get back to your work, kid! What do you want food for? You can’t have babies for years yet.’ There were tears in her eyes now, because the smack had not been gentle, but Shabine persisted. ‘Oh, please, Aga! Just a little taste – just a taste of your coffee, there?’ Leah had caught on, though fearful of getting a smack too: ‘Ooh, yes, Aga, can we just have a taste?’ He had growled, like a thunderhead, and said: ‘I’m the only food you’re to put in your mouth.’ Shabine, always bolder than Leah, snapped: ‘Swallowed that once and it made me want to sick up,’ she said, wriggling from between his huge hairy legs and darting away. ‘It tasted like death! Bitter like death. I want something sweet!’

  ‘Come back here!’ he bellowed. ‘You shitless creature.’

  At this, carried away by Shabine’s small rebellion, Leah had dropped his pendulous belly and rushed over to her friend.

  ‘Shitless, the pair of you,’ the Aga had snapped, sitting forward in his lounger. But he switched immediately to wheedling. ‘And if I give you a sip of my coffee, will you come back here and finish what you started?’

  ‘Oo,’ squealed Shabine. ‘Coffee! Coffee!’

  ‘You come here now,’ the Big Man had said, settling back, ‘or I’ll shave your fucking heads right now, and throw you on the mercy of your aunts.’ But even this hadn’t deflated Shabine’s excitement. She and Leah had squirmed back over the fellow’s body, and taken turns at the lip of his little cup. Shabine first, Leah second. The liquid was lukewarm, gooey, and it made a weird contrary jarring confusion on her tongue. There was something sweet about it, she thought, much sweeter than the time Nada had brought some stems of wild beet back from the wasteland and Leah had licked at the broken end. But the predominant flavour had been horribly bitter – even more bitter than the Big Man’s gunk, which was horrible-tasting enough, and which even he never expected them to swallow (sometimes Shabine did, mind you, though it never had good consequences). It was so tart a flavour that it set Leah’s face into a rictus, and she gagged. Shabine endured the coffee a little better, but even she made a face like a rat, pushing out her lips and wrinkling her nostrils. The Big Man had found this very amusing. After that, he had pressed sips of coffee upon the girls on several occasions, and Leah came to associate the ghastly combination of sweetness and toxicity with those sessions.

  ‘I’d rather have an ice cream,’ she had told Rodion.

  Pap mocked her, and they had one of their instant fallings-out. The black swan thrashed the waters languidly with its wings; not wanting to fly, apparently, but not wanting simply to sit still either. Rodion always looked pained when Leah bickered with one of her friends. ‘Perhaps a compromise?’ he suggested. ‘They do a very lovely coffee ice cream, I believe.’

  ‘I would prefer strawberry, Rodio, if you don’t mind,’ said Leah, scowling and crossing her arms. She was cross about Pap and the coffee, though Pap of course didn’t understand why she was. Pap wasn’t the one who had been kidnapped, after all. But by the time Rodion came back to them the two girls had made up.

  Then it was Ezra’s seventh birthday, and he had a party, and Mama insisted that Leah join in. She pointed out that she was way older than any of Ez’s stupid friends, but Mama got cross with her and wouldn’t hear a word of excuse about it. Snappity snap snap. So there she was, sat scowling amongst all these little little boys. She watched a portion of some book or other on the lap of her smartdress, one of her own, and tried to pay them no mind, but her carer kept hissing that she was being rude. Like she cared! Not even Ez cared. A vampire pursued a woman over the folds of her dress hem – but a good vampire, who didn’t want to eat food, but instead made up blood-substitute from water and iron and stuff. Then the little boys all got in a ring and she had to join them. Even though she was way older, some of these boys were almost the same height as her! It was pretty humiliating. Back in the village she’d been one of the tallest – her mother had taken a pride in it, and kept feeding her milk as long as she could snatch scraps of food to keep the supply going. She had had the memory of milk, long before she had ever tasted a Central Park ice cream. She’d been much taller than Shabine, say. The Big Man had done all the uncomfortable things to Shabine, because – well
, why wouldn’t he? But he’d been more restrained with Leah, telling her that, being so tall, there was a future financial margin in keeping her unmolested. And it had been her height that had singled her out (nobody had told her this; she’d worked it out for herself) and it had been her height that had meant that her mama and dad had driven up to the village in a car the size of a house. And the ride in the flitter, and the plane. But then she’d got to NY and discovered that she was the shortest girl in her age-year!

  It was humiliating.

  The memory of milk. The taste of stars.

  Ez was like an alien monster, anyway; like the creature in Hyperspace Horror. He looked like a Homo sapiens, but he had no interest in normal human things. He didn’t like books, for instance. He only liked sports, and even then his attention only held for the start of the show. Then he’d get too excited and run off to imitate the players – to hurtle his ball against the walls, for instance; or to smack the cleaning bots with his Harding Stick.

  Mama wasn’t angry with her all the time, of course. Sometimes she’d be really affectionate, and fold Leah in a great hug and cry tears into her hair. But most of the time she was snappish. ‘You Mama has a problem,’ was Pap’s opinion.

  ‘I know!’

  ‘I know you know!’

  ‘I know you know you know!’

  ‘Wrongo!’ Pap. ‘You should say I know you know I know!’

  ‘I said exactly what I intended to,’ said Leah, regally.

  ‘You know Kelley’s parents dee-eye-vee-ohed? And, and, Kelley’s dad had a catastrophic personality breakdown afterwards! Maybe that’s what’s happening to your Mama!’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Leah, though cautiously; because it seemed to her that Mama kept to a pretty even keel, most of the time. But what did she know?

  And then it was announced that there was going to be a new