By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Sometimes history pops up in the present,’ said Arto, ‘like a zombie.’

  ‘So Rodion’s a zombie?’

  ‘Might become one. But we’ll keep an eye on him, and make sure that doesn’t happen.’

  One night, she had a nightmare. It took place in the Queens garden, and it was completed and it was a place of rare, Edenic beauty. She was there, and Arto, and George too – though, why him? – and Arsinée, who had been one of Leah’s carers years and years before (why think of her?), and a dozen or so other people. It was as if everybody had gathered for an opening ceremony, and she was expected to make a speech. But she couldn’t think what to say. So she looked around the crowd. Ezra was there; but she couldn’t see Leah. She looked about at a complex tapestry of greens and green-blues, olives and emeralds, with bright red and bright blue flowering blooms, the loveliness of neoEden. Then she looked into the sky, and she saw a great fleet of flying machines, filling the sky from horizon to horizon. And as she gazed upward she saw one break away from the formation and swoop down through the air. It didn’t look like a plane or a flitter; and it didn’t look like a military aircraft, although that was clearly its intent. It looked, rather, like a comet. An oval chassis with a bright light at the nose, and streaming away behind it a huge windsock tail of brightness. It came closer, and Marie could hear the rapid click-clack noise of its approach. At the very last moment, and with abrupt terrifying horror, Marie understood that it was coming down to destroy the whole of the Queens garden. She saw it was coming down, although nobody else seemed to. Everybody else was stupidly placid, and unconcerned. She tried to open her mouth to warn people, but her mouth muscles did not work. And then the whole area, everything, everywhere, was a great tangle of fire – explosions all around, lifted by her imagination directly from books: rosebud knots of flame unfolding and swelling; and spiky bursts of smoke and fire, red and white and black and a hideous tempest roar. The plants were all burning with the intense heat of—

  Awake.

  She was lying in her bed, and Arto was snoring beside her.

  When she thought back to that dream, it seemed to her that it happened on the night before the garden was overrun. But this was her memory telescoping things. In fact, there was more than a week between this vivid dream, and the events in the garden. Still, there was some symbolic point to the compression of time; for together they marked the point at which everything in the world toppled over.

  Leah. It was a conclusion that felt inevitable once she had reached it. It felt, in fact, as if she had made the decision a long time before, but had through some clumsy oversight not realized until this moment. To look into her eyes was to see George, and not see herself at all. Ezra was different. Ezra was not a stranger to her. She wondered if this was how men felt, looking into the faces of their offspring and registering the impossibility of knowing, for certain, their paternity. She felt like the first woman in history to have that sensation. There was nothing for it, Leah would have to go and live with her father. Leah would have to go to George, with Marie’s blessing – with her love. But she couldn’t stay in this place with this person.

  Her new life was beginning.

  She had a row with Arto. He was drunk, again, and kept saying in his most braying voice that marriage was vulgar, that love was vulgar, that love was for the fucking longhairs, that it was all empty air and free light and nothing real. ‘I can’t believe you want to wound me like this!’ Marie was yelling at him. ‘I’ve opened my heart to you! I can’t believe you want to lacerate me like this!’

  ‘You haven’t seen where it all ends up!’ he cried. He was crying! Oh Lord, look at that! Tears squirming on his face. All the wah-wah-wah. And now there was nothing but scorn for him in her rage.

  ‘Are you a man?’ she boomed at him. ‘Are you a little baby, crying for your Mamma or are you a man? God, you make me despise you. You’ve turned all my love for you into contempt.’

  He was on the floor, sobbing, and his tears and slobber made a darker patch on the rug. ‘You haven’t seen where it all ends up!’ he kept repeating. ‘And I have! I’ve seen where it all ends up! Love? Love? You haven’t seen where it all ends up!’

  ‘There is a connection between us,’ she told him. Or perhaps she was telling herself.

  ‘If you could see where it all ends up,’ he was saying – or something like this, it was hard, it was hard to understand what his words were, they were slurred, ‘you wouldn’t talk about love and marriage if you could see.’

  The wine pours from the bottle, the fluid moving out of the cylinder and through the glass pipe neck. The wine is a twisty rope. To the glass. It is toxins that give it that red hue. The wine is the red snake that leaps down from the bottle writhing in the sunlight to curl in the glass.

  Later, she took charge: moved him to the bed (which wasn’t easy, because he was a big fellow), and soothed him with her mouth. He came very quickly, with a little, squeaky series of gasps. She spat her mouthful of quicksilver onto the mattress. Her head felt full of light. There was a spacious, mystic, cosmic quality to her drunkenness.

  One Clear sorted her out the following morning, but Arto needed two, and even then it was a struggle getting him to take it. ‘Leave me to my misery,’ he groaned.

  ‘Come along,’ Marie told him, putting on her brisk voice. ‘Don’t be foolish: you’re very obviously suffering a very bad hangover.’

  ‘Leave me! It’s all that I deserve!’ His sobbing sounding like the ticking of an antique clock: slow, deliberate,

  He took the two Clears eventually, and they sat in silence on the balcony drinking coffee. When the Lance chimed, Marie had an intimation that it could not be good. Fainlight appeared, shimmery, on the balcony; and her heart sank down. Fainlight had never presumed to Lance her before. And although she was straightaway apologetic, her briskness of manner suggested insolence behind the polite form. ‘I am sorry to intrude into your apartment, but I have alarming news.’

  ‘The garden?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. There’s been some kind of mass action.’

  ‘Mass action?’

  ‘Thousands of longhairs. Thousands! The Nassau fence has been breached in half a dozen places, and many more have landed from the water.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Arto, pulling out his Helios.

  ‘I’m letting all the members of the Steering Committee know,’ Fainlight said, with just the faintest touch of smugness. ‘It’s probably best not to flitter into Queens, not until the situation has been addressed.’

  ‘Shit,’ growled Arto. ‘Shit.’

  ‘What about our security people! What were we paying them for?’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Fainlight, ‘that they were just overwhelmed. I’m afraid the numbers were just too great.’

  She shimmered away into nothing, into the blank morning air, and Marie’s gaze moved over to Arto. ‘It’s happening,’ he said to her. ‘It’s happening, and they’re cutting me out.’

  She was going to ask: Who is cutting you out? But the question would have been redundant. It was obvious enough. She looked at him and tried to identify what it was that had made him seem so strong, when first she knew him. It was only too obvious now that strength had nothing to do with him. All she could see now was a special assignment soldier dropped by his army after a nervous breakdown that had nothing to do with counter-terrorist action. That had been in fact only the manifestation of the fractures running right through his soul.

  He looked so bereft. ‘They’ve frozen me out.’

  ‘Never mind, baby,’ she said.

  Later that day, as the first sounds of gunfire rattled through the rectangular canyons of Manhattan, Marie was hustling Ezra and Leah and Arto too up onto the roof to take a flitter to – anywhere but here, obviously. Well, it was as she was doing that that she found herself thinking: But how have I ended up with three children to take care of? Nobody was taking her calls, but that was presumably because there was nobody to take calls, bec
ause everybody was scattering, getting out of the city. ‘You’ve a place in Connecticut, yes?’

  ‘We need to get out,’ Arto was saying. ‘We need to go!’

  What she bit back was a yell: What do you think I’m doing? Because, obviously, yelling at Arto was going to be no better than yelling at Ez. He’d only crumple, and that would make it harder to shift him. Her plan was to fly over the garden, and hope that the hordes of longhairs that had crashed the place weren’t armed with anything that could shoot down a flitter, and then to zip northeast, and hope the flitter had the range to get to Connecticut. She needed the code for his place, and she wasn’t sure she had the patience, in the panic and frenzy of the moment, to coax it out of him. Why couldn’t he just tell her?

  ‘We’ll go over the island and follow the coast,’ she said.

  ‘We need to get out!’

  ‘Sure. What’s the code for your Connecticut place?’

  ‘They’re going to eat us alive!’ he gibbered.

  So she gave up on that. ‘You’d better be able to guide me in, when we get up to your place,’ she told him. But Arto was only gabbling, wide-eyed, get-out-get-out-need-to-get-out; and there was no deriving sense or use from him.

  As they emerged on the roof something very substantial exploded, over to the west of the city. There was a horribly cacophonous rending noise, fringed about with the sounds of things splintering and shattering. All of them turned their heads at the same time. A tar-black smoke cloud was bulging upwards, over intervening roofs.

  ‘Our flitter is gone,’ said Leah.

  And it was true. Somebody had stolen their flitter. Marie’s outrage at the betrayal of trust – for it could only have been somebody in her employ, somebody who knew the lockcodes – almost overwhelmed her panic. How were they to get out of the city now?

  She had children with her!

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Arto asked, in a blank voice.

  Ezra, somehow impervious to the general mood, ran over to play on the glassy surface of the flitter’s recharge pad, running to pick up speed and dropping at the last moment to his knees to slide, slide. He picked himself up, and took another run at the vacant pad. Arto had his Helios out again, and was trying, in vain, to connect with somebody. Anybody. Marie looked around her. The snip-snap of gunfire in the streets below was weirdly lugubrious. The sun was directly above them. Up, down. The sun was directly overhead.

  FOUR

  ODYSSEA

  Preacher said: ‘Hair’s made all men preachers, now. Made all men preachers or else lazy dogs in the sun. Hair took our work, which had sustained us for millennial generations. It took our power over women and our power over the things of the Earth. These things were ours, and the Hair took them away.’

  Issa was ready to yawn at all this chatter. But Rageh loved it. He was amazed. He wanted it unpacked; which is to say, he wanted it elaborated, so as to make it more real in his imagination. ‘We used to have power over women?’ he asked.

  ‘Surely we did. We said go, and a woman go.’

  ‘And if she did not?’

  ‘We strike her with our hand,’ said the Preacher, gravely. ‘And she do it.’

  Issa couldn’t really believe it. She saw Rageh’s eyes popping out, like boils, at this amazing fact, and there was no mistaking the fantasy of power it represented to him. But the men they knew were skinny as a new moon; scraping together their energy from the sun, combing out their hair strand by strand to maximize the surface available to the light. Enfeebled and stringy men. How could (say) Ari, or Moh, or Atil strike with their hands at – Mam Ann, to take one example only? Mam Ann pinned the ends of her hair to the hem of her shirt, like the splendid array of a bird. Mam Ann who snatched actual food from here and there and everywhere, and had grown superb upon it. Who had the Waali’s trust and did the Waali’s work? She knew where the best bugs were to be found, and she had the strength of stomach to chew great mouthfuls of plain soil, not the little crumbs here and there that Ati sucked on. If Ati ever tried striking at Mam Anna with his hand, she’d land a blow in the middle of his forehead would knock him lips-down in the dust.

  But the Preacher insisted: ‘In those days, when we had the food the rich eat, men grew up stronger than women.’

  ‘Why?’ Rageh asked. ‘Men didn’t hold the growing young inside they midriffs, did they?’

  ‘No,’ said the Preacher, with his slow, considered manner. ‘No, it was women who did that.’

  ‘Then why did the men grow stronger than the women? What use was they strength?’

  This, Issa thought, got to the nub of the matter. This was the really crucial question. And for a moment the Preacher looked uncertain as to how he was going to reply. But then his expression settled into its gaunt placidity.

  ‘They strength was the glory of God,’ he said. ‘Ra, the father. Saturn, the father, God the father, Christ the father, Muhammed the father. And anyway, they needed strength.’

  ‘Needed howso?’

  ‘To delve.’

  ‘What’s delve?’ Issa asked.

  ‘Delve is Adam’s business,’ the Preacher replied, not looking at her. ‘Spinning cells in the womb was women’s business, but delve was man’s.’ The Preacher nodded once, twice, thrice, fource; one for each of the quarters of the world. ‘Was the way of it.’

  As to what delving meant, Issa was no clearer.

  ‘And power over the things of the Earth?’ Rageh pressed.

  ‘Gifts and raw materials. Called raw, as food is, for it was to be cooked: metal ore cooked to metal, plastic ore cooked to plastic. All a man did was lift the hem of his shirt, at front, to make a pouch; and the things of the Earth stood ready to fall into it. Gold and equipment electrical, and raw ores filled with gems. But the Hair come, and all is taken away. The rich live as they always have, and the poor gone poorer.’

  The thing with the Preacher, Issa knew, was that he did not speak plain. It was not that he lied outright, but that he used language in a certain way. More like poetry than history. But being poetry did not mean it wasn’t truth, after a manner.

  Preacher used to say: man shan’t live by Sun alone.

  Issa considered what it took to become strong, like Mama Ana. For one thing, she had the knack of lust; which is to say, the knack of pretending it, which was the best way. So Mama Ana got scraps of food from the Waali by having his dicks into her mouth, or otherwise doing the sexual thing with him; or sometimes with his gunmen too. Her diet was meagre, by richman standards, but at least her body was habituated to food. On the rare occasions any of the village men – or any of the village Skinny Girls – get hold of food, or alcohol-drink, they would gobble it and then struggle to keep it down. Nine-times-from-ten it come up again, retching with a reeah and a tch! But Mam Anna, and the others like her; that was a different matter. They’d get tidbits almost every day, and they could supplement what they were getting with bugs from the weeds, or garden salad if it grew. So they become stronger, and so the men and the Skinny Girls hit the bottom and get weaker and soon enough die out.

  The village stood in the highlands, with views westward pretty much all the way to the sea – or more, or less. Most days the haze was such that the view was a descending arpeggio of rock and dust all the way to the end of things. But some days it was possible to see a thread-thin line of azure, laid precisely to effect a seal between the body of sandy ground and the cap of monomaniacally blue sky, and that was the sea. Nor was this simply a picture-book vista. The Waali in the village made money by moving people about, as most Waalis did; but Abda, the big Waali, did more than move people. He shipped water, moving a green Zeppelin-balloon, bigger than any of the houses – almost as big, Issa thought, as the whole village – down the roads to the coast. There, according to Rageh, it drank, like a cow, from the seashore, and then it ambled more slowly back up, its belly sloshing with millions of litres. Issa was probably the only person in the village, aside from Abda, who knew how to use the word million with so
me precision, rather than vaguely as a signifier at the end of a one-two-many sequence. Taking the blimp down was easy; and hauling it back up was hard, for it became swaggery in the air when it was filled with its cargo, desalinators fizzing, load heaving back and forth. And if it were to scrape against a sharp enough rock, or roll itself ornery-fashion upon the sharp peak-points of dry mountain firs, or if malign idle men found some way of spearing or shooting the membrane . . . well, then, all the water would spill out and be lost, and the blimp expensively damaged into the bargain. So it was a precarious trek, bringing the water back up. Since it was the source of Abda’s wealth, that made him grateful to the mothers who accomplished it, just as it would make him murderously angry if the blimp were damaged or the water lost. His gratitude was the one valuable thing in the village, and his wrath the more fearful.

  It was only ever mothers who escorted the blimp. Only ever mothers, and occasionally (perhaps one trip in four) Abda himself, and a couple of fat-bellied gunmen. In her dreams, Issa saw a poetic rightness in that fact: the great pregnant air belly of the blimp, as if the sky itself were gravid. But in her waking hours she saw, rather, the practical benefits. Mothers left their children behind in the village, and that made them less likely to simply abscond. Issa had never been down to the coast, but the rumours were that Preachers and Jihadists and Spartacists of all sorts roamed, offering extraordinary inducements to peasants to join their revolutionary causes. They rarely came up into the hills, and, young as she was, Issa found it hard to imagine what those inducements might be. But Abda worried enough about it, certainly.

  And, though she was young, Issa understood why Abda got so worked up. She saw things from his point of view. The water was gold and jewels. People could be bought from all the wide lands to the west and east, and passed down to the factories and orchards of the south, where things were grown and made for the wealthy of the world. But they had to be moved over the desert, and in the desert the dust was grey with dryness, and there was nothing whatsoever apart from the wind-gathered piles of plastic, or the sheared-off stumps of concrete posts, sprouting wires at the top like hairs from a wart. Concrete walls bitten down by time, and buildings over which dunes of masonry dust moved slowly, filling the spaces with sand. Some of the old houses still stood, up near the rocky prominence, roads and small squares intact; but lower down, where the scrub and dust had moved over, everything was ruin, and waste. There was not so much as a single date tree, or the stubble of grass. There was some poison in the air, too; although there was plenty of good strong sunlight, and all that was needful was enough water to see the phalanx of trudging people down through to where the weeds started growing again. Rageh thought there were probably a dozen places, like this village, where Waalis like Abda made money supplying that water to people-movers. That was as it might be. This one village was enough of a horizon for Issa.