By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I’m in love with her already,’ said the crest-haired man. His accent was heavy, as if he were chewing the words in his mouth as he spoke them. ‘She doesn’t think of me as a Nudnik. Uses my actual name!’ He was lying on a messy tangle of sheets, and spoke to them without getting up.

  ‘She’s got a tin of beer,’ said Roxan. ‘Will you buy it?’

  ‘And how did she obtain such a thing? Theft, is it?’

  ‘There’s only one way to get things in the world,’ said Issa. ‘It’s just a question of whether the thieving is large-scale or small.’ She was not happy with how squeaky and ordinary her voice sounded: how unlike a Preacher. But it was what it was. ‘When a longhair steals it’s theft. When a rich person steals it’s—’ And she wanted something to round the sentiment off grandly, but couldn’t think of the best word.

  ‘I see,’ said Sergei, getting to his feet. ‘You’ve picked up some Spartacist patter. Is that why you want me to buy your tin of beer? So you can turn a few cents over to the grand revolutionary reserves? Changing the world costs money, I suppose.’

  ‘We’re thirsty,’ said Roxan.

  ‘If you’re thirsty, why not drink the beer?’

  ‘You obviously don’t know much about beer,’ said Issa, unsure, actually, as to the status of the person she was speaking with.

  At this Sergei began to laugh. ‘Little Spartacus,’ he told her, ‘I spent my twenties swimming in beer! I was pickled in the stuff, like an onion. Of course, not everybody likes onion. I don’t touch that stuff any more.’

  ‘We only want a few cents,’ said Roxan. ‘Or we’d swap it for, let’s say, twice the quantity of water.’

  The Nudnik continued, supine: ‘Well if you’re thirsty, why not say so? You’re welcome to drink with me. There are some bugs in my garden you can eat, too. Stay. We’ll make a little bower of bliss for ourselves.’

  Roxan was silent for a few seconds, and then laughed brashly. ‘Oh you’re not interested in my scratched-up old face, Nudnik.’

  ‘I love you both. But I love you more, Roxy,’ said Sergei. ‘Look at your new friend, the Little Spartacus: she’s so pretty, and so tall, she might be a rich kid from Stanbul who’s grown her hair out for a lark. But you’re the real deal, Roxy. You’re the irresistible lure of disenfranchisement.’

  ‘You want to stay here, Issa?’ Roxan asked. ‘You got somewhere else you’d rather be?’

  ‘New York,’ said Issa.

  The two of them were silent for a while.

  ‘The city?’ Roxan asked.

  ‘Hey,’ put in Sergei. ‘You want to go to New York?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Issa.

  ‘How you going to get there, Little Spartacus?’

  Issa hadn’t worked that out yet. ‘Fly?’ she hazarded.

  Roxan and Sergei both laughed, as perfectly synchronized as if they had rehearsed it. ‘You spread your hair in a big wind, and away you go!’ said Sergei.

  ‘There are jets and geldarm, gelderms,’ Issa pointed out. ‘Jets.’

  ‘You gather a chip topped with money, shave your head and buy some rich-woman clothes, maybe they’ll sell you a ticket,’ said Roxan.

  Issa saw what she meant. ‘I’ll find a way,’ she insisted.

  ‘Why do you want to go to New York?’ Sergei asked.

  She hadn’t even asked herself this question before that moment. She thought about it. ‘It is,’ she said, the thought striking her with potency only as she put it into words, ‘my city.’

  Sergei laughed again. ‘Good for you, little Spartacist! You claim that city for the revolution!’

  Issa stayed. Sergei, as she came to understand over the days that followed, was the son of a moderately wealthy Putingrad businessman. ‘Enough money to keep us comfortable, though not enough for me to ski through life,’ Sergei put it. ‘I was supposed to learn a trade. It’s cut-throat, though. Cut-throat in the sense of competitive. But cut-throat in the sense of destroying people. Anyway, I rebelled.’

  Roxan and Issa slept in an annexe room on a bed of blankets. Sergei made his sexual advance that first night, but was perfectly unruffled in the face of Issa’s rejection. It occurred to her that this was his thing, actually; that he had made rejection his great life’s project. ‘I probably wouldn’t have known what to do with you if you’d said yes,’ he confided, settling back with his snuff pipe. ‘But I had to try, you know?’

  Issa shrugged.

  She and Roxan slept wrapped about one another. Roxan was affectionate, but Issa didn’t mind that. By day, she sat in the sun, and drank as much as she liked, and listened to Sergei go through his repetitious life-story. It was interesting the first time he told it, dull the tenth. ‘I started hanging out with the Putingrad Spartacists – some religious folk, some driven by ideology, and some honest-to-goodness Black Sea longhairs. There’s a problem in the Spartacist movement, though. Because they despise the rich, and they want to destroy them. But their kind of revolution needs money, and so they’re compelled to fraternize with the wealthy – or the moderately wealthy, like me.’

  ‘So you’re a Spartacist?’

  Sergei’s head-shake was lazy and prolonged. ‘I left the movement after Triunion.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Do you have to ask?’

  Issa thought about this. ‘Yes,’ she said, seriously.

  ‘Because of the bloodshed. So many dead! Because I understood then what I hadn’t before, that Spartacism depends upon the bloodshed. The rich have all the advantages but one, and that one is, numbers – it’s the longhairs who have the numbers. It’s like an antique battle, where you throw wave after wave of sacrificial soldiery at the enemy.’ A lazy draw on the pipe. ‘Tell you what. That’s very – not me,’ he said.

  On occasion, to alleviate the tedium, and if there was enough sunshine to give her the energy, Issa wandered about Longlake. The outskirts were swarming with longhairs. Most were rootless, shuffling round and round or simply lying there. Some fragments of incipient community were visible here and there. A few enterprising women were selling water out of this house or that, with male, or sometimes female, muscle to protect the resource. The properties were in various states of dereliction.

  On the lakeside of the fence was a resort for the reasonably off. It was not especially high-class, as Issa could see, peering through the slicewire. One afternoon she saw a mob of longhairs attempt to storm the main entrance: a hundred or so people pushing forward in an ill-defined way, accompanying their own motion with a series of whoops and holloahs. Nobody seemed to have initiated the movement; and nobody coordinated it. It happened spontaneously. A much larger body of longhairs, several thousand people, stood or sat, watching. In many ways Issa found this latter group even more interesting. Theirs was pure spectatorship: unengaged with the attempt at breaching the perimeter except, Issa presumed, in the opportunistic sense that if a breach was effected many of would hurry through to get to the water. But otherwise they lolled, observing with the purest, idle indifference.

  The knot of people dashed at the guarded gate. Issa could see the faces of the guards on the far side, stark-eyed with panic. There were various hurryings to position; then the snipsnap of weapon fire. The first shots made no apparent impact on the press of people, and the crowd’s collision with the gate made a loud crash and sent tremors up and down the fence. For a moment it looked as though the weight of people might simply push the barrier over. But it held. And on the far side the guards were aiming and discharging their firesticks. A police flitter, bright green, leapt over the farside roofs and plumped itself down on springy prongs on the police side of the fence. Its belly cracked open, and police tumbled free. In moments armed men were clotting behind the gate, focusing their weapons fire. And moments later the cohesion of the mob dissolved, and longhairs were scattering. After it was all over, Issa counted a dozen bodies.

  The sight of these dead bodies did not disturb her; although she was a little disturbed at how little she was disturbed. Th
ey were human beings, after all. And now they were dead.

  Roxan was more practical. ‘They should have organized it better,’ she said. ‘There’s no glory in stupidity. That’s just giving the guards drill practice, that is.’

  Sergei gave a disjointed, rambly lecture on what he called the real lost opportunity. ‘A dozen martyrs – wasted,’ he said. ‘If they’d broken through, and filled their bellies on water, so what? But a dozen martyrs, wasted! Martyrs are gold. We don’t even know their names.’

  For the first week or so, Issa wondered what the milling, itinerant population of longhairs did for water at all. There was a black economy in the stuff, for those who could scrape together a few cents. The women – always women – queuing at the metal-barred-windows in amongst the derelict buildings; picking up bottle or beige-coloured water; or else little packets of hard food to help them through late pregnancy. But the majority of people, and all the men, lacked even a few cents. What did they drink? When it rained, people became frantic as fleas, and all manner of containers and plastic sheeting was brought out. But this went sour and dangerous in a day or so, and the long stretches of dry weather must surely parch people to death. Sergei, who received a stipend from his family, had water delivered in torso-sized plastic barrels, along with small boxes of hard food, though he ate very little. Issa drank in the morning and again in the evening; and Roxan drank even more frequently than that. But the others? The conclusion at which Issa arrived was that whilst some found spits and spots of water here and there, others, having come here lured by the prospect of lakewater, were driven away by the impossibility of access. What looked like a constant population was actually a continual turnover of new people. And of course, some must die. The numbers of longhairs was so great, milling or lounging, that natural wastage must produce many dozens, or perhaps hundreds of deaths daily.

  ‘What do they do with the dead bodies?’ she asked Sergei. He was stroking gel into his great plume of headhair, teasing it upwards with his fingers’ ends.

  ‘Collected by the waste agents,’ said Sergei, dreamily. ‘The law requires that they be held three days for family to collect them. Then the bodies are sold to farmers, who undertake to bury them in arable.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In fields, where hardfood is grown!’ said Sergei, opening his eyes prodigiously wide. ‘They fertilize. They are fertilizer.’

  ‘I cannot stay here for very long,’ said Issa. ‘I cannot stay for ever.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sergei, wafting dotsnuff about through the air in front of his face. ‘You must go to be Queen of New York.’

  ‘I need to know the way.’

  ‘West,’ said Sergei, drifting off. ‘West of here.’ She thought him asleep, but he lurched awake, and blurted: ‘Spartacism needs bodies to fertilize its revolution too! Spartacism is arable too!’ And he laughed, in an unhinged manner, before drifting back to stupor.

  West was vague; but it was better than nothing. Since flying was out of the question (and why had she even thought it possible? She was no bird!) she would have to walk. She could set out in the sunset direction, and ask for further direction as she proceeded.

  Sergei was not always devoured by snuff-induced lassitude. Some evenings he roused himself, and went out. ‘My pretty girl,’ he told Issa. ‘I fully intend to show you that Spartacism’s not the only game in town.’

  ‘Are we going out?’

  ‘I’m going to take you out!’

  So she went with him, along a series of bafflingly tangled small roads, to a one-storey building. Judging by its tattered advertising paraphernalia this had, once upon a time, been a shop. This night it was lit with iWicks and filled with several dozen people. Sergei brought Issa in at the back of the audience. ‘This is the weekly meeting of the Siblings of Islam,’ he told her. She asked him: ‘Is this your group?’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, looking past her. ‘But I like the way they’re planning to build heaven on Earth. I like the way they plan to do so without resorting to the blood-soaked nihilism of the Spartacists.’

  Several people came up to greet Sergei, and they seemed pleasant enough when he introduced them to Issa. Soon enough a woman stood on a chair and delivered a speech. Issa mostly followed what she was saying, despite her rapid delivery and a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary. She was talking about fasting, and about how fasting had always been a distinctive and central aspect of Islam – not merely during Ramadan, but at any time of the year. Mohammed taught that abstinence was an ever-shining sun of infinite virtue and invaluable soul-strength: it teaches the spirit moderation and willpower, and divine patience and modesty and selflessness. For by fasting, a Muslim feels the pains of deprivation in order to endure them patiently and so demonstrate love for God. No Muslim should fast upon ’Eid-ul-Futr, of course; or upon any Friday. But this did not mean that Muslims ought to gorge on hardfood on those days. It was enough to nibble a little clean earth, or take the vitamin supplements that even longhairs required. For the prophet specifically said: the worst thing a man can fill is his stomach. And he meant, it is better to fill the soul. Peace be on him.

  Issa found all this interesting, as far as she could follow it, although it seemed short on specifics. When the speech was finished, and questions were solicited, she put up her hand. ‘I am a stranger, and I apologize if my question is foolish. But what is your practical programme for undoing the injustices of the world?’ Everybody was looking at her, and she felt, belatedly, self-conscious. A blush warmed her face from the inside. This prompted her to add: ‘Last week I saw a thirst-maddened crowd press at the gate that leads down to the lakeside. The guards shot a dozen people dead.’

  There were murmurs. The woman who had spoken said: ‘It is a great wickedness, and it displeases God.’

  ‘I do not understand,’ Issa insisted, feeling a point of stubbornness inside her soul and pressing out against it, ‘how fasting addresses the injustice.’

  The woman said: ‘Fasting is forced upon longhairs. But despite being forced on us, it can be voluntarily chosen. And when the rich and the hardfood-eaters embrace it too, and swallow the Bug, the whole world can join in a sacred union of fasting. When this happens, all wickedness and oppression will cease; the whole of creation will be a great Ramadan. The Bug is a gift of God. The inventor of this drug was a Muslim, you know. The West styles his name ‘‘Nick’’, but in truth he was called Nuh Kareem ibn Muhammed. He was a Cypriot Muslim.’

  Issa said, ‘Thank you’ and said no more. But returning with Sergei to his place, she found herself cross. ‘The rich will not willingly give up their food. That will never happen.’

  ‘Isn’t it a beautiful utopia, though?’

  ‘I want something more practical.’

  ‘You are a little Spartacus!’ he laughed. ‘Well, I won’t give up. I’ll convert you, don’t worry. Or at least I’ll divert you from the violence of Spartacism. There are other games in town. Not all as God-oriented as the Siblings, there.’

  The following day Roxan told Issa that she was pregnant. Issa was alarmed at how shocked she was by this news. ‘Is it Sergei’s?’

  ‘Of course!’

  This was enormous news. Issa didn’t know what to say. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I will need a great deal of hardfood. Not all at once, but over the period of the pregnancy, and afterwards, whilst I feed the little thing from my old breasts.’

  Issa realized that, despite several conversations with the other women, back at the village, she had no idea what practicalities were involved in pregnancy. ‘How will the baby grow its hair? Will you have to feed it the Bug?’

  ‘It will get the Bug through my milk. But to make the milk I’ll need a great supply of hardfood.’

  ‘Sergei can get you the food.’

  Roxan shook her head. ‘He slept with me because I sleep with you. It was his way of getting close to you. He’s not interested in having any children. He’s not interested in anything to do with that.’

  ‘Are
you sure? Have you asked him?’

  She shook her head again. ‘I can’t stay here. Not here in his place, not here in Longlake. There’s nothing for me here.’

  Issa digested this information. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I must have the hardfood. There’s no helping that. Usually women plan to get pregnant, and work for a year or more to save the money they need. But I haven’t planned anything for this.’ Then, a little shyly, she added: ‘I’ve heard that there are Social Missionaries who give out hardfood to pregnant women in Stanbul. So maybe I’ll go there. Will you come?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Sure! It’s closer to your New York, though I don’t know by how much. We can keep each other company on the way, we can look out for one another. And maybe, when you see the baby, you might even want to . . . to stay with me?’

  Issa pressed her lips very tightly together. ‘Hmm.’

  ‘We could be a family, you and I.’

  Issa tried to think of a way to decline without hurting Roxan’s feelings. But nothing immediately occurred to her. So she deferred that problem, and gave Roxan a hug. ‘A baby!’ she said. ‘That’s enormous news!’

  That evening Sergei roused himself for the second day running: a record for him. ‘Tonight,’ he told her, ‘you shall meet a different sort of apostle. A famous person, in this town. She holds court in this town once a month, and her gospel is directed only to longhairs.’

  ‘Unlike the Muslims.’

  ‘Oh, you only heard the Siblings! There are dozens of different Muslim groups and organizations, all with various plans and ideas with respect to the longhair problem.’

  They were descending stone steps, the concrete edges rubbed smooth by long usage. The sun was going down amongst clouds the colour of oxygenated blood, and Issa’s belly was full of water. ‘I would say,’ she put in, ‘that there is no longhair problem. That what we are talking about is a problem of the rich.’

  Sergei glanced over his shoulder at her, grinned, and said: ‘I wouldn’t want to contest the point with you, my little Spartacus. But Maguelone has a radical solution that cuts through all that.’