By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  She looked up, and saw these two slender cones of light closing and opening as they passed over the sea. Soaked and shivering, she got to her feet. She watched as the flitter located the other raft. There was a flash, and the yellow-white bubble of an explosion, and the raft began to burn. As it shone, the flitter circled it and dribbled blocky chunks of fire down upon it. She could hear the sounds of detonation and conflagration, almost covering over the screams of people. She could feel the heat of it across the water.

  People were splashing in the Bosphorus all around her, calling for help: people from her own raft. So she went to the edge and did her best to help them back aboard the structure. After a while she was too exhausted to carry on, and she fell asleep like that, with her arms over the side.

  She woke in the dark with everything quiet, save for one girl weeping. She dozed again and woke with the dawn. The girl – Tapa – was still moaning. Issa went over to her, and discovered a knot of older women already there: it seemed Tapa had broken her arm during the attack. There was nothing to be done, of course, but she could not be induced to stop groaning.

  In the daylight it was possible to take stock. The raft had lost much of the cargo stowed upon its surface, including the crate that the shorthair had delivered. Four people had gone, although Sudhir insisted they had not drowned. ‘It’s a short swim to the shore,’ she said. ‘They’ll pitch up on Stanbul, and they’ll be fine.’ Issa wasn’t so certain. Nobody else was injured, with the exception of Tapa – a remarkable thing. There was no sign of the other raft, which had evidently not been so lucky.

  They were not attacked that day. Perhaps Issa had reached a point beyond anxiety, for she found she no longer fretted about the possibility. Flitters passed through the air behind them, but did not approach. The land withdrew on either side. A pleasure boat, a hundred metres long, skimmed past on its splayed hydrofoils; the decks busy with shorthairs filming footage of the raft.

  Another night and another day, and the land withdrew completely away on both sides. People on the raft began to talk as if they had passed through the bottleneck. Sudhir was exactly as agitated as before, however. ‘It is only because we are a small raft,’ she told people. ‘That is how we have slipped past their notice.’ A small raft? Issa tried to imagine what a large raft would look like.

  Tapa’s arm swelled up, and went black as eggplant. Her fingers sank into the boxing glove of her own flesh. Her whimpering quietened, and then it stopped altogether. Some said they should simply pitch her body over the side and into the water. Others said that they should weigh it down, although it wasn’t clear what they would use. ‘It’s more respectful,’ said the weighers-down. But practical considerations intervened. Almost all the junk that would have been heavy enough had been knocked overboard in the Bosphorus. They said a prayer, in the name of the Redeemer, and sang to the sun, where God, Christ and Allah would welcome her. Then they pushed her body in. But it floated, buoyed by its distended and monstrous-looking arm. Worse, it seemed to follow them as they moved into the Mediterranean. People muttered that it was a very bad omen to be followed by a corpse, but though they poked her off with poles, and a few enterprising people swam out pulling her body further away, whatever they did she still bobbed and followed in their wake. They tried altering their course, but, as if tied to the raft by an invisible thread, the corpse followed. Only when they sailed, slowly (it took hours) right round in a great O, circling the dead girl, and heading off again did they eventually shake her off.

  So it was they passed southwest, into the Greek seas. One day a tiny raft, no bigger than a double bed, approached them. There were seven longhairs aboard. When they were close enough to talk to by shouting Sudhir brought out a gun – a rifle, no more than a few decades old – and held them at bay.

  ‘Did you know she had a gun in that cabin?’ Mam Elessa whispered to Issa.

  ‘No,’ Issa replied.

  ‘What do you want?’ Sudhir called over the water.

  ‘Our desal is kaput,’ said one of the newcomers, in a raspy, accented voice. ‘Can we come on you?’

  And they did look like a ragged band, their mouths crusted with sores.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘From Stanbul, or just down the coast at Stanbul. My cousin, she helped another woman steal the motor. It’s a good motor! You can have motor, make your raft double fast – if only we can come on board and drink! Our desal is kaput.’

  Sudhir thought for a time. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘One at a time.’

  Two women tied the little raft tightly alongside. The seven new folk staggered, or were helped, over to one of the desal pumps, where they drank like babies at the teat. Six fell asleep straight away, and the one who had spoken before – Sabah, she was called – stayed awake to tell their tale. She spoke in a very weary voice. ‘Things very bad for longhair in Stanbul now, much hate.’

  ‘More than usual?’

  ‘More than that. They clearing us out from areas. They do fire, burning fire, and gun. On the northern shore they spread special sickness. Very bad!’

  Sudhir, though, seemed pleased. She inspected the new raft’s motor, and declared it sound. ‘It won’t double our speed,’ she said. ‘But we will go faster.’

  Rather than remove the motor from its housing, Sudhir and two women lashed the new boat tight to the side of the raft.

  ‘Faster’ was still very slow, however. They drifted day after day across smoke-grey waters. Issa watched the black-bearded stormclouds clashing on the horizon, shading the space between them and the sea with rain. The clouds became bigger, the hissing sound of the storm upon the water, and then the clouds were above them, and the lightning was around them, and thunder dinned, and water flew in every direction. The sea was shrugging itself, pushing humps and jags up that palpated the whole raft, and the only thing to do was to grab some of the strapping that held the elements of the craft together and hold on. But the storm didn’t last for ever. Issa found herself thinking that this was the truth at the heart of things: that nothing does last for ever. That the only skill a person actually needs, in fact, is endurance. She stood, the deck of the raft misty in the sunlight, her own clothes steaming, looking back in the direction they had come. The storm was still tormenting that one patch of Mediterranean with its mindless hostility.

  Life on the raft settled into its particular social geography. Everybody knew everybody, of course, but not everybody spent time with everybody. The men tended to keep separate from the women. A crowd of younger men and lads spent their days as idly as any male land-lubber, gawping at the sea, eating as much sun as was possible. One of them, Niki, owned a pack of cards, so filthy and ragged that it was possible to tell the identity of pretty much all the individual cards from their backs. But it was all the group had, by way of pastime. The rumour was that Niki charged his friends to use the cards – two wanks or one blow-job – but since nobody ever saw the boys sexually interacting with one another, and since privacy was an evident impossibility on the raft, maybe this wasn’t true. Sex did happen, of course. But it was a low-key, rather restrictive affair.

  The women, socially speaking, fell into three groups. There were those who were closest to Sudhir, or at least considered themselves close to her. There was a group of older women who spent the days chatting and reminiscing, and who attracted a group (about as many again) of younger girls. Issa was one of these latter. The mood of this group was indulgent, accommodating, pleasantly gossipy. And then there was the largest group, consisting of many variously disaffected women of various ages. This last lot were motivated, it seemed to Issa, by resentment, and they spent their time rehearsing the evils of the world and the most effective way of remedying them. Since what they talked about, inevitably, was Spartacist doctrine and strategy, Sudhir approved, and spent a good deal of time with them. But Issa’s own private judgement was that they were a flaky bunch, interested more in opportunities to vent their individual frustration than in the coherent politica
l vision Sudhir preached.

  They saw another raft, but made no attempt to go towards it, and were not themselves approached. One day the dawn rose over a shield of land laid flat upon the water, with brandnew rich-people dwellings built at the brand-new waterline. A single sunkite floated over the peak of the island’s centre, its tether catching the light like a geometrically purified everlasting line of lightning. This, Issa knew, was a Greek island. She had done the Greek islands at school, eons and ages before, and was frustrated that she did not know the name of this one. Sudhir steered the raft away from the landmass, and continued southwest.

  In the night everybody was woken by the sound of a flitter passing overhead; but it did not attack. Issa lay awake for a while, staring at the stars. It was the oddest thing. She looked, and they seemed very far away, infinitely distant, lost in the immense space of the world of Angels and Pain and all those spaceship books. But then she would blink, and she would be possessed by the certainty that the stars were close enough to touch . . . that if she just reached up her hand she could get her nails underneath one of them, a yard above her face, and prise it loose. This would leave – what? A hole? And through the hole – what?

  She did not raise her arm. She went back to sleep.

  The next day, the Stanbulis began to get sick. It happened to all of them at once, which was the worrying thing. The rafters set them all in one corner, and crowded closer together to leave as much space between them as possible. Some said now was the time to put them back in their boat and cut them loose – taking their motor, said others. But no decision was taken, and by the end of the day nobody would have agreed to go close enough to them to carry them across to their own craft. They looked hideous: big raspberry-coloured sores visible on all exposed skin, the scabs around their mouths big and white as knucklebones. They lay too ill even to moan. The whisper went around the raft: ‘They’ll die! Push them straight in the water!’ But nobody had the hardness of heart to do it. Or perhaps nobody had the stomach to go closer to the revolting symptoms of disease.

  The following morning, they were still alive, but looked worse than ever. ‘Somebody should give them water,’ was Mam Elessa’s opinion; but when one of the boys retorted ‘You do it, then’ she turned her back on him. Issa went as close to them as she dared. The sores had grown bigger in the night, and now looked like sliced tomatoes laid upon their skin. Three were lying on their backs, and she watched their chests looking for movement. It was hard to tell.

  By sunset the general opinion was that they were all dead. ‘We can’t just leave them there to rot,’ said Sudhir. ‘We have to dispose of them.’ Three lads offered to throw them overboard, if they got blow-jobs from the girls of their choice as a reward; but older women beat them on their heads and faces with the flats of their hands and chased them away. In the end Sudhir and two of her associates wrapped scarves about their mouths and kicked the bodies overboard with their feet.

  That night, Issa lay unable to sleep, thinking that the bodies were following the raft as Tapa had done. She dozed, woke, dozed. Rain fell and woke everybody up. When dawn made the eastern cloud-cover gleam dusty silver, the rafters scanned the waves, but saw no sign of the Stanbulis.

  Three days and nights passed. Sudhir altered the direction of the raft, so that now they were travelling directly west, heading for the glory of sunset every evening. Issa sought her out. ‘Show me your Rodion,’ she said. ‘On your Fwn.’ Sudhir observed her for a while, and then wearily complied. ‘I do know him,’ Issa confirmed.

  ‘I’m too exhausted for your make-believe now, Issa,’ said Sudhir.

  ‘It could be of use to the mission,’ said Issa, although she could not imagine exactly how. ‘I could be an asset.’

  ‘Go away.’

  The next day they saw smoke from beyond the horizon: a great spectral skyscraper of black tailing off near its roof into streamers and puffs of grey. By the afternoon they discovered the source of this smoke: land. A wildfire was burning upon that place, although whether it had been started deliberately or accidentally it was not possible to tell. There were no signs of civilization. The fire was a bowstring of brightness drawn across the scrubland, and it sent a huge amount of smuts and dust upwards. As they passed, Issa could smell it. The smell stayed with them for a long time.

  Two days later a storm pounced on them like a panther, and the cabin was struck by lightning. Nobody was hurt.

  Two days after that, the first rafter showed signs of the Stanbuli sickness.

  The plague went all round the raft rapidly. The first day everybody except Issa had boils about their lips, and complained of thirst and pains in their eyes and sinuses. The second day some rafters got worse, and some better, and Issa permitted herself to hope that things might be all right after all. But on the third day several rafters had sores on their chest and neck, and by the fourth everybody on the raft was afflicted except Issa. Some women hissed that she was a witch or a demon, or promised her that her suffering was just around the corner. Most did not have the energy for that. Issa did her best, carrying water all about the raft, but the whole group grew sicker and sicker. The sores were disgusting, although she found she got used to them. They looked horrid, and smelt worse, but it was possible to look past them, and see the individual underneath.

  The first rafters died on the sixth day. When she was bringing Sudhir water, inside the cabin, the older woman grabbed hold of her wrist. ‘I know why you’re not sick,’ she rasped.

  ‘I do too,’ said Issa. ‘I used to wonder why so many people got ill – like poor Tapa with her arm. Or when I was back on the mainland. They got sick and I never did. But it only really sank in these last few days. None of you have gWhites. It’s such a crazy thing! No gWhites!’

  ‘You have them,’ gasped Sudhir.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Of course,’ laughed Sudhir. She looked a terrible sight.

  ‘I thought everyone had them. I thought they were like – teeth, or something.’

  Sudhir asked solemnly: ‘Do you know Rodion – really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish I’d known about you. Or. I did know. I knew something was wrong about you. I thought you were a spy.’

  ‘I’m not a spy.’

  ‘We could have used you!’ She retched, coughed, and lay still. Issa watched her intently, thinking that perhaps she was stopping breathing. But after half a minute, her chest started going up and down. ‘Sudhir,’ said Issa, in a small voice. ‘Everybody is going to die. What will I do?’

  Sudhir looked at her with crusted eyes, but didn’t speak.

  ‘I’ll be alone,’ said Issa to herself, feeling a wash of sorrow and self-pity come up, like the ocean swell, inside her.

  Sudhir closed her eyes.

  Issa went back out onto the deck. It was not possible for her to say whether the waves slid and danced under the action of the wind, or whether it was the fluid wash of tears across the global surface of her eyeball. She drank some water from the desal pump. Some of the women had dangled fishlines over the side of the raft – for those moments when sudden cravings for some nibble of hardfood became particularly acute. Nobody was tending them now. Issa laid her finger against one, and felt the thrum of a trapped creature.

  She felt intensely sorry for herself, and that, of course, is not a pleasant sensation. But worse than that was the sharp apprehension of her own weakness. All bundled in together, feeling bad and feeling a harder kind of worse that she felt bad in the first place. She could not have put it into words, but she had the intuition that this was a dangerous state of mind, a sort of emotional short-circuit that might burn the tender membrane of her consciousness. And instinctively, she withdrew from it. Feeling sorry for herself was stupid. She wasn’t sick, after all! She wasn’t in such a bad situation as the others. The thing to do, she realized, was to stay active.

  The next time she went into the cabin it smelt worse. Sudhir was dead. She lay with her arms and legs starwise. One of
her people was propped against the wall with his head so slumped his face was virtually pressed into his stomach.

  She went round the whole raft with a beaker of water, offering it to those who were still alive. But those who were still alive were barely alive, and would not be so for much longer. Nobody had the energy to drink. Still, she did not feel she could be idle, or the tears would come back. So she cleared a space in the corner of the raft, moving bodies out of the way. She didn’t have the strength, in herself, to pull the larger corpses, so instead she waited until the swell lifted that portion of the structure, and pushed with her legs to roll the bodies away.

  By evening she did another tour of the raft, but as far as she could see nobody at all was left alive. That night was not pleasant. It kept returning to her that she was alone on a ship of corpses. It was eerie, and made more so by the way the clouds spun through the heavens intermittently illuminating the heaps of bodies. She told herself: Imagine they are only sleeping, and that made it a little better. But the air was very cold, and there was nobody she could cuddle against to warm herself. So she slept only a little, and greeted dawn with stupid tears of idiotic gratitude.

  ‘This won’t do,’ she said aloud, speaking English for the first time in – a long time, she couldn’t say how long. She went back into the cabin and searched for Sudhir’s Fwn. It was in the last place she looked, which was actually underneath the woman’s dead body. She brought it out in the sunlight and sat cradling it for a long time. She wondered, vaguely, about using the Fwn to call for help: but as she sat there she found herself thinking: But who should I call? And besides, of course the Fwn was locked.

  Clouds kept dimming the sun, but after an hour or so she had gathered a little more energy. She tried to focus her thoughts on practical matters. She went over to look at the raft’s main motor. It was a large cylinder set underneath the water that passed water through it to propel them onwards. She understood, more or less, that this was how it worked; and understood too that changing the vector of water passed through altered their direction. The controls panel looked simple enough. But how would she know which way to steer? West, she supposed. But surely she would collide with land at some point.