By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  Angels and Pain book, and with the same actors! There’d been talk of number seven being the last one, but now there was going to be an eighth! Everybody Leah knew was more excited than it was humanly possible to bear.

  THREE

  OF QUEENS’ GARDENS

  1

  The three years after she separated from her husband were the happiest of Marie’s life. This wasn’t cause and effect. This was not exactly cause and effect. It wasn’t that she had been miserable with her husband and therefore happy to separate from him. Rather, it just so happened that becoming single again coincided with new substance entering her existence. She had no wish to be unfair, or to blame George for everything. These things might have happened whilst she was still married to him. It was just that they hadn’t. Or, to be particular, the one thing that had happened – she got her daughter back – had turned out to be the catalyst for ending the marriage. And as she said to her friends, she had not realized how much she loved her daughter until Leah had been taken away. But everything else had come afterwards by serendipity. Her glancing association with the Queens Rewilding Project had blossomed (good word!) into something truly fulfilling. Her friendship with Arto had grown into something special, the authentic emotional and sexual connection she had always craved and never known. She had come to an understanding of her trauma, and that in turn had unlocked its creative potential. You didn’t realize that trauma could be creative? Plus, she had a new circle of friends. That awkward transition from the friends one has as a couple (those awful people they’d met on Ararat, for instance) to your own friends was miraculously shorted. She took up the standing invitation to join the Project Steering Committee – the cabal, they called themselves. And there she was, chatting by Lance with Imlah, or Lehmann, or ‘the Minotaur’, or meeting in person with Moniza Stainer, who represented the Five States administration, or handsome Arto – who claimed to be a spy, the big kidder – or with Fainlight. Fainlight was the sole member of the cabal who had to work for a living. Nobody called her a jobsucker to her face, of course; that would have been vulgar. But it’s what she was. Her business was to liaise between the cabal itself and the lower strata of labour collectives and frontages, to ward off the ‘news’ horrors that would otherwise contaminate the work of the Project. All the messy how-to things. Obviously, Marie didn’t socialize with her. But the rest of the cabal provided a very useful new set. People to drink with, to chat, to play.

  With some people you just click, you know?

  Marie moved into an eastside lagoonfront apartment; smaller than the house, of course, but with a redemptive view past the southern promontory of Roosevelt to the new possibilities across the water. Limes and the towering vacuum-bamboo fringing the old Brooklyn dockworks. From time to time a dinodozer lumbered on its fat mechanical legs pursuant of some task or other. By the time they were finished the whole of Brooklyn would be forested, and that forest – haunted by sunbeams, rich in shadow and gossamer and butterflies – would be part of the larger project of the Queens Garden.

  She didn’t entirely drop the Gunesekera Organization set – that was still an important charity. The people who organized it were lovely people. Gunesekera worked to bring education to the disadvantaged, which meant (practically speaking) to the deserving longhairs. Actually, donations had somewhat dried up lately. There’d been the riots down in Florida, and public sympathy had migrated elsewhere. Marie didn’t know the details, because (unlike her ex-husband) she was not prepared to debase herself with news. Obviously, she wondered at the stupidity of longhairs, biting the hand that was trying to help them. They could hardly think it helped charitable enterprises like the Gunesekera when they went wild and smashed everything up.

  But the truth, for Marie, was that she simply had less time for the Gunesekera people than she had once had. The garden had taken over. Because, although providing educational opportunities to the disadvantaged was important work, it wasn’t directly creative, the way the Rewilding project was directly creative.

  Queens was art.

  She knew Arto didn’t agree with this. He thought the project was pure politics – a twenty-second-century Clearances – to move a population of potentially dangerous low-earning types further away from the city itself. Not that there were exactly herds of the actual poorstruck over there. Mostly the area had been home to those hardscrabbling lower-middle-class types who serviced the threescore menial jobs that couldn’t be automated. A resentful, sly crowd, envious of the ease of the truly wealthy. Plus, of course, the various longhairs such people retained in various service capacities – and everybody had some of those. ‘It’ll be a buffer zone, quite apart,’ Arto said, briskly. Quite apart! He meant quite apart from its aesthetic value as nature – he knew that was where Marie’s soul was. She flew over the water and landed at Station 3 to meet him for cocktails. Two workwomen, long black queues dangling and QRWP on their jacket-backs, were loading a planter with StoneRoot shrubs. I suppose you could say that Marie and Arto were supervising them, although they hardly needed supervising.

  A warm day in late spring, and the sky was a clean grey-blue. Marie was wearing a Sheena Pugh overshirt, and smartcloth trousers. Her handbag threw up a skein to shade them, and they sat on Project chairs sipping their drinks. Arto was – well, the thing about Arto was more than just good looks. What do good looks count for, these days, anyway? George had been good-looking. Had been, that is, before he’d let himself go to seed, holed up in his breakwater apartment growing his locks like a longhair. It wasn’t Arto’s looks, precisely: although there was clearly nothing wrong with his tidy nose, his pistachio-green eyes, his firm flesh. His body was plump without being flabby, his clothes were always perfectly chosen. But it was more than that. It was that Arto had a self-assurance, a confidence that was not arrogance. He had the air of a man with a secret. Something about the way his eyes smiled.

  Above all, Marie and Arto shared something. Others on the Rewilding Project – the cabal, that is – used it as a platform for social eminence. But Arto and Marie were both drawn to it because they wanted to remake the world. In a phrase, that was the core of Marie’s rebirth: her new understanding that life could not be passively endured, but must be actively engaged. The year when Leah had been taken away from her had been a continual agony of helpless waiting. When her daughter was returned Marie knew that she could never be passive again. She must do, must create, must produce. Gardening was the finest and purest articulation of this creative urge, a literal remaking of worldly chaos into beauty. And the Queens project was the biggest gardening scheme in the world!

  Arto meant something different by ‘remaking the world’, of course. Something grander, he would say. ‘It’s been half a century and we still haven’t come to terms with the hair,’ he said.

  They sat, in company chairs, sipping their drinks, and breathing the warm air. All around them the old stone was being broken up, and earth that had been stifled for centuries was being rotovated to the air again. That smell of loam. Still so much to do! Station 3 was mid-island, located at the – of course wholly unforested – Woodland. To the south the derelict airport was mostly under water, only the upper sections of its towers above the waterline, constituting a series of art-installation islands, cuboid, multicoloured, and with, of course, longhairs lolling on the roofs. There was some discussion in the project coordination meeting as to whether all the submerged buildings ought to be demolished. Some said they should. Others liked that all manner of aquatic life had found a new home in amongst the underwater portion of the structure. Marie did not have strong feelings, one way or another.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said we still haven’t come to terms with it – Neocles’ hair.’

  A brightly coloured bird, a parrot, a macaw, a rainbow gull, whatever it was, hurtled from east to west and disappeared into the foliage hundreds of metres inland. Marie surveyed the world. The land was a confusion of half-demolished old buildings and juvenile vegetatio
n.

  ‘Oh, you’re a bit obsessed with the hair,’ she joked, her attention only half on what he was saying.

  ‘I’m serious about it, if that’s what you mean. It’s a Frankenstein whatname, isn’t it? Though? Monster, is that the word I mean? Am I the only one who sees that? What are we to do? Either we address it, or we’re going to end up squeezed out, living at the poles, six-month-long nights and everything dreich and cold.’

  ‘I think you like spinning yourself melodramatic storylines,’ she said. Of course, she didn’t believe there was any way the longhairs could force the world’s powerful and wealthy elites away from wherever they chose to live. Chase them to the poles? The very idea! ‘Apocalypse and impending disaster,’ she drawled. ‘I believe it adds spice to your life.’

  He made a chopping gesture, as if to silence her; but he was grinning. ‘Oh you’d wither under the artificial lights!’ he said. ‘You’re the sort of fine bloom that needs actual sunlight.’

  ‘Artificial lights?’

  ‘Like they have in the polar – oh, but you’re mocking me! Look, though! We both agree the world needs to be remade. You think it needs to be re-Edened. To be remade for purely aesthetic reasons. I’m more practical, that’s all it is.’ He shuffled his chair closer. ‘Ring the city with wilderness – and some farmland too, of course, since we need food. Fence the wilderness about; police the whole zone. Then let the longhairs swarm over the Midwest for all I care! We’ll have our sanctuary.’

  ‘Fences don’t make the problem go away,’ she replied, although mostly she was thinking how ugly the big rooted-fences were: slabs of orange a hundred metres high, spiderbots crawling up and down by the hundred thousand like maggots on a corpse.

  ‘Yes there are more radical solutions,’ said Arto, matter-of-factly. Marie breathed in, and breathed out. Oh, when he pretended to that kind of ruthlessness, this genocidal unflinching purposefulness, she felt a flutter of erotic excitement underneath her breastbone. People were having this particular conversation a hundred different ways all over the developed world. But for the sake of form she said: ‘We can’t simply exterminate them all, now can we?’ She threw in a little laugh. ‘What about the bodies? Think of the smell!’

  ‘After what happened to your daughter,’ he said, distantly, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had any sympathy for them.’

  From anybody else this would have been a too provoking thing. But, somehow, from Arto, it didn’t upset her. ‘You worry too much about the longhairs,’ she told him.

  ‘The danger isn’t the longhairs,’ said Peter. ‘I know people get anxious about them, of course. The great mass, the great unwashed. But they’re not the true danger.’

  ‘Oh no?’

  ‘No. It’s the middle-earners. It’s those who struggle through their lives earning just enough to buy food, the ones envious of the well-off, desperate not to fall into the sump of the truly poor. They’re the ones we should watch.’

  ‘You don’t really understand the fundamentals,’ Marie told him.

  ‘Oho!’

  ‘The danger is the poor. You see, we have a way of controlling the lumpenbourgeoisie. We have something they want. In point of fact, we are what they want, what they want to become. They won’t destroy us, because they aspire to be us, and to destroy us would be to exterminate their own dreams. The poor are another matter. There’s nothing we can offer them as inducement, and nothing we can withhold as punishment.’

  Arto leaned closer to her. ‘I’m going to come out and say this,’ he said.

  Marie waited.

  ‘Would you like to have sexual intercourse?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, laughing. And as he moved closer, surprised delight on his face, she added: ‘But not with you.’

  Just a moment his face fell into the most hilarious mask of dismay. But then he was laughing, and she was laughing, and the two finished their drinks and strolled, arm-in-arm, around the area.

  2

  Over a year, the project cleared a swathe of built-up land from the Nassau fence right down to the Jamaica Bay dyke. The trick was variety. Some of the buildings were straightforwardly pummelled by dinodozers, or cracked and dustified by detonations. Others were deliberately overgrown with NeoIvy, or flowering nettle. Some of the roadways were planted with Rock Roots, and the job of breaking up the stone was left to the plants.

  This was at the heart of her life now. Purpose, creativity, joy, wonder. The steering committee debated whether to call the finished area ‘Queens’, or to break with the stagnancy of the past altogether and go with ‘Paumanok’. Occasionally other names were proposed. It was an on-rolling, never-ending discussion. They’d break it off, and then resume at odd moments, when more pressing project business didn’t intervene. Otherwise her routine was sweetly regular: hot lamb petals and pea-sized potatoes in the winter; cold lamb jelid and chilled pea-sized potatoes in the summer. A Liquid Leisure for breakfast. Early afternoon check-in with the cabal, by Lance or in person. Siesta and the preparations for the evening’s entertainments.

  She wasn’t like George. He had been almost completely untouched by the absence of Leah. For the whole of that time when Marie had been most cast-down and desolate, he had trundled along in his passive, cheery little groove as if nothing had happened. She had been the one to feel Leah’s loss, not him. The irony was that, after Leah’s return, it had been George who had gone off the rails! Lurking in his apartment with his hair all long. She had been renewed. Misery was so habitual to him that he couldn’t cope with happiness.

  Not every night was restful, of course. Let’s be realistic. Most of the time she slept just fine, thank you very much, but every now and then she’d have a night when sleep just refused to come. She didn’t mind the crying so much. The crying had a psychologically emetic function. Or so she supposed. It couldn’t be a pointless exercise; evolution must have designed it with a purpose. Catharsis, or emotional autoimmunity, or something. She was prepared to believe that the crying was good for her. But sometimes the crying would leave her physically exhausted – weeping for hours is hard work, after all – and still she couldn’t sleep. She spoke to her medic, of course, and she in turn suggested a number of fine tunings of her load. She’d been carrying extra GēnUp ‘Psyche’ ever since the initial trauma, the kidnapping. To help her cope. Just to tide her over. She’d thinned the load when Leah was returned to her, of course; but oddly enough this opened the door to long sessions of despair, to weeping and bitter feelings, to stabbing her forearm with a divot-knife and leaving a dozen or more little puckered scars. When her medic – her then medic – had suggested going back on the prior Psyche dose, she had grown furious with him, really, really angry. It had been a puzzling thing, actually, just how intense her animadversion had been. She’s screamed at him, abuse, obscenity . . . well, not screamed exactly. Screaming was hardly her, was it, now? But the rage had possessed her. Tried to poke him with a fruit knife, though he’d interposed furniture between himself and her. Oh, but she’d given that squirming, middle-class job–sucker a piece of her mind. Listen: she had got her daughter back! She – had got her daughter – back. And he had the nerve to sit there, and tell her she needed GēnUp’s shitty anti-melancholics? He was telling her that getting her daughter back had made Marie sad? Oh, the coffee had been projected at the wall, cup and all. No mistake there. And of course he wriggled and danced about the room as if electricity was passing through the frame of it, and tried to stutter out apologies or whatever. She was superb. She felt superb, felt the vril of it, surging through her. ‘You have no conception,’ she yelled at him, ‘of the bliss I have felt at being reunited with my beautiful daughter!’

  That was the end of her association with GēnUp, and no regrets. Ghastly corporation. Most of its customers worked for a living. She felt stupid that she’d ever retained them at all.

  She was happier? Of course she was happier.

  She retained a different company – CellMech – with a much better-mannered
personal agent, and tried a different regimen, which helped a little. Not anti-melancholics (because, as Marie explained with brittle emphasis, she had nothing to feel melancholy about), but an older model of mood stabilizer. She had a greater proportion of good nights. Her joy at being able to spend time with Leah– literally that, at just being able to spend time with her – was so intense that often it manifested as a kind of jagged snappishness. But Leah never cried, or complained, or rebuked her mother for ill temper, so presumably she understood the intensity and complexity of the emotions involved.

  And then, as the year turned around, she finally broke it off with George. Dear, foolish, hopeless George – sweet-natured, but hopeless. Incapable of deep feeling, that was the truth. A shallow individual. And divorce was like a new injection of youth. She really felt now, what was it the characters in that book said, when the earth stood all before them – or whatever the line was. Her life was getting better in every way. It was the very perversity of life that this development brought with it whole days – sometimes whole stretches of several days together – when she couldn’t get out of her bed. She felt so drained of life-force. Whatever this experience was, it wasn’t unhappiness. She was honest with herself, over a solitary bottle of grape vodka. There was no point in anything except honesty, after all. If divorcing George made her miserable, then the logical thing would be to bring George back into her life. But when she contemplated such a move, her spirit sagged within her. And when she looked at her prospects without him, she felt only a sort of spacious gladness. It wasn’t that the divorce had made her unhappy.

  It was her new medic who provided her with the answer to this horrible, counterintuitive tangle. Wiczek was her name, a compact, pleasingly fleshy woman with the scent of ginger about her. She explained something to Marie that had simply not occurred to her before. Coming to Marie’s new apartment, listening to the narrative of the previous three years, she nodded very slowly at Marie’s insistence on her happiness and her repudiation of the need for anti-melancholics; and eventually she spoke: