By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  Only once did they see a raft – toiling awkwardly through waves the sizes of house-roofs, up and down, its exposed longhair passengers clinging on desperately. It looked on the very threshold of capsizing; and the weather wasn’t even especially severe. Issa found Li belowdecks, going over something with the doctor on a tablet. Li listened patiently to Issa’s pleas that they rescue the rafters, and then told her that they would not, that there was no question of anything like that. ‘If we stopped for every raft, we’d fill up with useless bodies before the week was out. They’ll be fine. You’d be surprised how resilient these craft are.’ Issa went back on deck to see how they were getting on, but the raft could no longer be seen.

  They had three days of relatively calm weather, and then a storm: vertical seas, black as night at three in the afternoon, rain flying in all directions, the cones of the decklights buzzy with furious atoms. Issa got her arm through a supporting strap and held on as the floor imitated the wall and the wall the ceiling. She felt the heave of the sea inside her bones. Where the raft had slid up and down waves, the barge plunged directly through. The sound of the prow colliding with repeated cliffs of water, the horrible down-up bucking that followed, and the insane flood of water pouring down from the deck to gush along the floor was the worst of it. Otherwise it was all just shaking and rocking, and she didn’t mind that so much. But every cascade of water pouring past her into the bottom of the keel filled her with dread. Didn’t that mean that the barge was filling up with water? Wouldn’t it reach a certain point of saturation, and sink? She hung, pivoting on the strap, for half an hour in a state of horrible, acidic dread at this prospect, before her conscious brain reacted against it. The passivity of her situation disagreed with her. If the boat started to go down (she told herself), she would pull herself up the ladder and out. Then she would find whatever floating debris it had left behind and hold on to that. She could live off the sunlight, she reminded herself, and drink rainwater, and she would be fine. She knew, really, that this was nothing but a comforting lie, but it was good to construct a narrative that demonstrated there was nothing circumstance could do to defeat her. It made her feel better.

  Two hours later the storm calmed. An hour after that, things were steady enough for Issa to release the strap. A bruise, shaped like a snake, reached from armpit round to elbow.

  Christophe told her that the storm had pushed the barge back off course, and had damaged the engine. So they spent another day in open water, bobbing like a cork, as the engine was repaired. A plane overflew them, but so high it might as well have been a spaceship – except only that its passage drew a great cowl of noise after it.

  The engine repaired, they set off again. The sea was flat and as dark as a bed of silt. The clouds had been dabbled together by toddlers’ fingers playing with some white putty, and the sky was cold dark grey. The barge moved as smoothly as a skater over this new substance. Issa went fore and peered over the edge to where the keel cut into the ocean like a plough into soil. ‘Issa?’ somebody said, behind her. Christophe. ‘Could you come below.’

  Issa went, giving her hands alternately a rub and a squeeze. The innards of the barge smelt of coffee and something savoury, which meant that Drago was cooking. He needed to eat, of course; and some of Li’s women and men ate hardfood with him, to maintain their muscular development. It meant that twice a day there was a little dinner get-together belowdecks. Issa passed the open door in which the meal was being eaten. A semicircle of happy faces.

  Down the corridor, round a dogleg and into Li’s cabin. ‘Good,’ said Li, looking up. ‘We need to start thinking practically. Sit down.’

  Issa sat, and so did Christophe. Li slid a tab over to her. It struck the lip of the table and stopped. On it were some images: an old man, seated, in an open space, a park. He had his head on one side, as if listening to somebody speaking. ‘That’s Rodion,’ Issa said.

  ‘That doesn’t prove you knew him,’ Christophe observed. ‘It’s not exactly hard, finding out what Rodion looks like.’

  Issa looked him straight in the face. ‘Do you think I’m lying to you?’

  ‘I wasn’t saying that,’ said Christophe, not meeting her gaze.

  ‘This was taken earlier in the year,’ said Li.

  ‘The Park, in New York,’ said Issa.

  ‘Just so. He often goes there. We also have some footage from his house.’ She reached across to tap the tab, but Issa intercepted her hand. ‘Wait.’ Three more figures had come into frame: a stout, baby-faced middle-aged man, a young lad and an older girl. Issa was conscious of a peculiar sensation of simultaneous expansion and shrinkage within herself. Perhaps you’ve had that sensation yourself. She felt an intense stillness in her soul; and at the same time she felt a vertiginous sense of tumbling.

  Li asked: ‘Do you know him, the man, there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Issa, her windpipe suddenly smaller than it needed to be.

  ‘He’s one of Rodion’s friends,’ said Christophe, ‘and his kids, his daughter there – she’s especially friendly with the old boy too.’

  Issa felt something build inside her, and wondered what it was. Then her face clenched, and she sneezed. She rubbed the knuckles of both thumbs into her eyes. She felt very peculiar. She felt very jangled, and yet none of that janglement seemed to affect her behaviour or voice or breathing. ‘When did you say this was from?’ she asked.

  ‘Earlier this year,’ said Li.

  Issa looked at the girl, at the young boy, at the man. ‘That’s George,’ she said, feeling the oddity of calling him by his first name.

  Christophe stretched out in his chair. From the corner of her eye, Issa could tell that he was smiling a big beamy smile. ‘Maybe you do know Rodion!’ he said. ‘So you recognize young George, do you? What about the girl?’

  ‘The girl is his daughter,’ said Issa, the words bouncing through immense empty chambers located somewhere inside her body. But they came out sounding normal: ‘She’s called Leah.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Christophe. ‘I am impressed!’

  ‘Is that right?’ Li asked. ‘About the name of the daughter?’

  ‘How would I know? But that man is definitely called George. How did you know them, anyway, my sweet?’

  Li reached out a forefinger and moved the image on to one of Rodion’s house.

  ‘I lived there,’ said Issa. ‘Thereabouts.’ She could hear what Christophe was asking her, and was aware of those other people, in that place. But her attention was somewhere else. A great, sudden tide of thought was filling her up. ‘I played with – that girl.’

  ‘So how did you end up . . .’ Li asked, distractedly, pulling out her Fwn and fiddling with the screen.

  ‘My family went on holiday. The next thing I knew I wasn’t in the hotel any more, I was in the back of an antique van, and it was driving on and on. For a very long time. Then I was with this woman, but she died. I don’t know what she died of, she was pretty feverish by the end. Then I was with another woman, and she sold me to . . .’ But Li was murmuring something to Christophe, and it was clear enough that neither was interested in the whole story. Nor did Issa want to go through it all. She tapped the image and it went into run-mode. Another one taken in the park. What sort of a feeling was this, watching the images of George putting his hand, affectionately, on the top of Leah’s short-cropped head? Watching the synchronies of their smiles? Well, it was a clear emotion, even a pure one. It was not a disagreeable or confusing emotion. It was anger, that was what it was called. Issa thought to herself: I am not caught out by this. She thought: I have already disengaged from all this. The image run came to its end, and looped back to the beginning again. There was old Rodion, and there he sat, and now into frame came the other man and the girl. Really, though, anger wasn’t the right word. It wasn’t a thorny or aggrieved thing she was feeling. It was a feeling with a similar forcefulness but with a completely different trajectory. It was as if these images disproved her own existence. It was
that the young girl in the images genuinely was Leah, and that her dad’s little affectionate gestures were directed towards their proper focus. And who else was there on the whole rainy stony Earth to whom they ought to be directed? This sequence of images simply emptied her out, left her a void consciousness. Liberty. So her anger was not resentment at being replaced. It was more like the happy fury of a genie, released finally after a lifetime’s confinement in the bottle, into the endless freedom of the open air. He has forgotten me, he has erased me, he has put somebody else in my place – all that. None of that. Instead: the thrust and the roar and a cloud of fire and then the cloud was below her, roiling on the ground, and she was above it and clear in frictionless rocketing spaceflight.

  Free of her past. How many people get to say that?

  ‘Hey,’ said Li. ‘You hear about that. It happens a lot, though, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You do hear about it,’ agreed Christophe. ‘It’s – a thing.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘The snatching – what’s the word?’

  ‘Kidnapping,’ said Christophe.

  ‘Kid-kidnapping,’ said Li. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Can I go now?’ she said, watching her father come into the frame for a third time, and watching him half-turn his face to smile at old Rodion, and watching the little girl who looked like her – although, truthfully, not very like her – press the ice cream to her lips, and watching her dad lay his hand tenderly on the top of her head. Erasing the file of her life. Returning her life to factory settings. It was a kind of birth, and only painful in the way that birth is for the squeezed, forced-down-the- pipe infant. Inside her heart there was a clear flame burning, almost invisible, except for the slight tremor it imparted to the objects seen through it.

  ‘Sure.’

  She got up, disgusted with herself for the way her legs trembled as she walked away. It was the sort of muscle-shimmer dogs get, sometimes. It was a kind of horse-flank twitch. But she could still walk, and she walked out of the cabin and past the disgusting fleshly smells of Drago’s hardfood cooking, and she got herself up on deck. Breathing very deeply. She laid herself out in the thin, late fall sunshine, and made the most of it. The sunlight may have been stronger than she realized, because she could feel it burning on her face.

  When she fell asleep, there, it was like a shutter clanging down inside her head. When she woke a cold drizzle had started falling, and she was wet through. She went belowdecks.

  The barge pulled into an island bay – not Triunion, according to the crew, but not so very far from it. Li threw a rope around the roof of a four-fifths submerged building to anchor them. Issa stood on the deck and surveyed the island. The slope of the shore was stacked with shanty roofs and plastic-board shacks: longhairs, most wrapped about with blankets for the colder weather, filled all available horizontal spaces.

  They moored there a week. A dozen or so people went ashore on the second day, and Issa was offered the chance to go along. She refused. She preferred to spend her days on deck, watching the mix of clouds and blue in the sky. Always changing, and always the same.

  When Li returned, Issa caught her elbow. ‘We’re going to grab Rodion, and then use him to unite longhairs all across the world behind our cause,’ she said.

  ‘Soon,’ said Li, surprised.

  ‘And what about New York?’

  ‘We’re going to smash the city,’ said Christophe, coming over to see what the business was.

  Issa looked from her to him, and back again. She released Li’s arm.

  On the fifth day a raft came into the bay: a vast undulating platform carrying perhaps a hundred longhairs. There was no sign of disease in this crew. Li went aboard the raft and talked with the cadre leaders. ‘Come up from Argentina,’ said somebody, leaning on the rail and watching the crowd. ‘Eager to get on. Eager to pitch in to the fight!’

  The raft didn’t stay at the island, passing with painful slowness past the barge and out to sea. Issa watched it until it slipped into the long narrow slot between sea and sky. It was gone.

  People on the boat were talking about timing. It was all about coordination, they said. About hitting the sweet spot of getting as many people as possible behind the first assault.

  When Issa slept she dreamt of smashing the city. She saw the sky descending as a white-hot solid plane, burning the towertops, sparking and crumbling them, pressing them flat against the earth. She saw it all squished out of being with a horizontal blast of light, like a ripple spreading on a pool. Everything was a perfection of compression. Then the lit sky lifted away to reveal not a polished glass desert but, counterintuitively, a pleasant landscape, a table of green fields and a set of cushiony hills. Trees cast their shadows distinctly upon the ground.

  Sometimes, when she woke, Issa would experience a moment of pure contentment, such that registering her surroundings and shaking the last of the sleep out of her head would feel like a dip down into gloom. But it was OK. She needed to think practically. She needed to think what she would do, once the city was gone. She was a dizzily unconstrained person. She could go anywhere. The only contamination that remained was the urge to return to New York; and once the city was gone, she would be free of that weakness too. Where should she go? The world would be all before her.

  At the end of the week, suddenly, the mood on the barge changed. Although Li issued no direct orders, it somehow became generally known that they were heading off, that the time for the attack was upon them. The engines were warmed up, and the barge pulled away into open water.

  That evening Christophe found Issa at the prow, watching the ceaselessly fascinating way the boat in motion cleaved the waves. ‘Have you ever been to war before, Issa?’ he asked.

  She looked at him, and it was obvious the answer he was expecting. She shook her head.

  So he put an arm about her shoulder. ‘You might think there’d be no need to ask that question, since you’re so very young. But you’d be surprised! I’ve met veterans of Florida who were younger than you.’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ said Issa, still looking out to sea, ‘that war is so very different from peace.’

  ‘Spoken like a true Spartacist! Always the struggle, eh?’

  ‘What will you need me to do?’

  ‘You come along with us. We’re going to steal a flitter – we have a number earmarked by people on the inside – and we’re going to go collect Rodion. You’ll accompany us. He may be less than pleased about coming along. We’ll restrain him if necessary, but he’s very old, and it would go better all round if he could stay calm. Talk to him, get him to remember you, chat about old times. That kind of thing. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Issa. ‘And afterwards—’

  ‘Afterwards we get out.’

  ‘I mean . . . the city?’

  ‘We’ll destroy it,’ said Christophe. ‘To begin the action of revenge for Triunion and for Florida.’

  The day passed, and another one did. Then, after the long voyage, events came to a head with anticlimactic rapidity. In the morning they came to a coast marked by a long dyke. The barge made its way through the channels formed by a number of mostly submerged rectangular buildings: the waves were small and numerous and little blots and blurs of snow were swizzling down from the dark morning sky. One of the buildings had once had giant letters arranged along its flat roof, displaying the name of whatever corporate or governmental business had been conducted within. Now only a five-metre A remained, the waves splashing around its spread legs. Li brought the barge in and threw a rope around the shoreward limb of this huge letter.

  They waited for an hour or so. Issa watched the dyke, expecting – she didn’t know what. Longhairs to come swarming over the top of it? The dyke itself to crumble and fall? The US Army? But nothing happened. Black clouds threatened a heavier snowfall, but it did not quite come. Only a few flakes moved in the sky, cold and grey as old ashes. Thunder groaned wearily away to the south, but there was no lightning. Issa had a hat,
shoes, a cotton jacket, but she still felt the cold. She walked around the deck to get a better view of that way, pulling her blanket closer around her, and watched the landscape. The dyke ran a long way north and south, but in the latter distance there was a white bar between sea and sky, like a giant’s rib laid upon the ocean, water become a bone. The thunder came from that direction, but there was no lightning. Then she did see some flickers of light, but they were coming up from behind the white bar, not down from the sky. She understood then: that white line was the Hough Wall, and that behind it was Manhattan. The word ‘home’ came to life inside her, she couldn’t stop herself. But at least she had the discipline to remind herself that (the hand tenderly patting the crown of the other girl’s head) it wasn’t home, any more.

  She almost expected to see Rageh, standing behind her, but when she turned about the deck was empty. It was horribly cold, and there was hardly any sunshine. The weariness was gritty inside her muscles. But then a deep, resonant boom echoed over the water, and she looked back to the south with a little chirrup in her heart.

  There was some sort of midge-like activity over the Hough Wall, but they were too far away properly to see it. A little later she saw a bird approaching them, and a moment later she could see that it wasn’t a bird after all. Li and Christophe came bustling up onto the deck. Issa looked again away to the south, and she could see that it was a flitter. Then everything happened very quickly. It grew larger and larger, and then it suddenly reached them. A domestic machine, it touched down on the deck of the barge. Li bundled Issa up inside it, and Christophe and another man came after. Issa recognized the man from the barge, but couldn’t think of his name. Then without any ceremony, or introductions, the driver took the flitter up again, and in moments they were swooping low over the water towards Manhattan itself.