By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Oh, but the beauty is in the profusion!’

  ‘The untidiness certainly is.’

  She laughed at this, a series of little, piping sounds. ‘You are funny.’

  ‘Hey! Really? Well that’s not something generally remarked upon.’

  ‘You are funny,’ she insisted. ‘You’re wry.’ Then, glancing nervously over her shoulder, she stretched up and kissed him. George could not have been more astonished had she punched him on the nose – kissed him on the front of his face, not quite connecting with his mouth, her upper lip pressing against his lower and the rest of her mouth squelching against his chin. At the same time she put her left hand on his right arm, her right hand on his left arm, and squeezed with an almost mannish grip, as if fearful he’d bolt and run away.

  George disengaged as best he could. ‘Emma.’

  She began gabbling a good deal of stuff in a low voice, several times looking over her shoulder at the others: ‘You’re so sensitive, your carriage and bearing is so sensitive. You have such a beautiful face. I’m crushed by Ergaste. He’s crushing me. You understand me – you have a beautiful soul’

  ‘Emma, look, really . . .’

  ‘I love you, I feel this tremendous passion for you, I confess it, how rare it is to feel a connection with a person in this hothouse of life. The stars have determined our meeting.’

  It was all very tiresome indeed.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong link, Emma,’ he said. ‘I’m – no – I’m a no. I’m sorry.’

  But she wasn’t to be deterred. She tried a different angle, hissing quickly in a hoarse voice: ‘I’m a woman living in a hellish prison. Er doesn’t care about me, he doesn’t love me, he never shows me any affection. He’s shown no more decent husbandly interest in me than if I were a piece of furniture.’

  ‘He has shown,’ George said, removing the grip she had reasserted on his right arm, and trying to keep his voice on the civilized side of anger, ‘enough interest in you to father your child.’

  She flinched away at this, as if at a slap. And just in time, too; for the other four were strolling back, discussing which of the several rapidly sliding lights belonged to the Orbital, and which were L8 burners. Ergaste, blithely unaware of his wife’s mood, putting a tampon-shaped c:snuff dispenser into his left nostril. ‘Shall we go back down?’ he boomed. ‘A snifter before we call it a night?’

  All down the sliding walkway Emma kept peering over at George. She looked distressed. Or perhaps she looked angry. Either way, George was relieved to get to the bar, I’ll not lie to you, and to top up his blood-alcohol level with some Red Whisky.

  Marie conducted a long conversation on her Fwn with Wharton about Ezra, even though only five metres and one wall separated them. Peter and Ergaste had a bantering disagreement on the proper way to cook jellyfish. ‘Point the Fwn at him again,’ Marie was saying. ‘No – at his face. Is his mouth open? Is that an open mouth? Is his nose blocked?’

  Then Emma, turned her back on all of them with an actor’s command of the space, and began sobbing loudly. Ergaste swept her up in his right arm and whisked her away. ‘Splendid to see you all,’ he said. ‘George, Marie, we’re with you. You’re doing tremendously well.’ He was at the door, and his car was drawing up outside, but he turned once more, cradling his sobbing wife into his armpit, and called back to them: ‘Look how well you’re doing!’

  Later, in their own car, with Ezra snoring like a mosquito in his cot, and Wharton’s eyelids slipping down and perking open over and over, Marie said suddenly: ‘Did Emma make a play?’

  ‘Oh,’ he exclaimed, genuinely. ‘Horrid woman!’

  ‘I thought I saw her all over you. On the roof, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It came from nowhere,’ he complained.

  ‘I thought I saw her make a play,’ she said, in an unreadable tone of voice.

  16

  Something invisible in the city was releasing, or relaxing, and it was the seasons changing. Spring was increasingly filled the city’s vacuum. Spring. Dot called through, on the Lance. Her usual weekly progress reports usually came as ordinary messages on the Fwn, so it was startling – portentous, almost – to see her actually there in the room. ‘I have found her,’ said Dot.

  George drew a long breath into his lungs from the exhaustless reservoir of the world’s air. He held it and blew it out again. There was no tingle in his skin at these words; and no apprehension in his stomach. Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t there have been? ‘You’ve found her,’ he said. The inflection of that last word was exactly halfway between the upward slope of a question and the horizontal tonality of a statement.

  Dot waited, perhaps for some specific prompt from her employer; but when George said nothing she said: ‘She’s all right. You and your wife must get the next ramjet – I can meet you at Tbilisi. Right away; I’ll meet you at noon.’

  ‘Now?’ said George, dully.

  ‘That’s right. Straight away.’

  George thought of his daily routine: the gym session; his therapy at twelve; the café for lunch; a chess game. For some reason, the thought of abandoning it all to go shooting off to the other side of the planet distressed him. Dot’s words: I have found her. The her, of course, meant Leah. George shifted the weight from his left to his right leg. He had no mental picture of Leah at all. ‘Marie won’t come,’ he heard himself say. ‘She’s vowed never to go back there.’

  ‘Then you come, George,’ said Dot, displaying – uncharacteristically enough – an impatience amounting almost to ill-temper. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Of course,’ said George feeling not elation or anticipation but, weirdly, a kind of profound sleepiness. He slouched though into the wardrobe to put suitable gear on. He put on a smart overcoat. He sat on the carpet fitting a shoe onto his left foot and then fitting a shoe onto his right foot. And yawning. Big jaw-creaky yawns. ‘Marie,’ he cried, syncopating little right hand/right cheek, left hand/cheek slaps, trying to haul himself into full consciousness by sheer willpower. ‘Marie!’

  He had to go from room to room before he found her.

  ‘Marie! Leah has been found!’

  She received this news with inscrutable placidity. George explained that he had to catch a ramjet, and said that he’d Fwn her as soon as he arrived at Tblisi. But she scowled at this. It took him a sluggish moment to realize that she did want to come with him after all; and George, in a kind of foggy stupor, reminded her of her vow. ‘You want to stop me from coming?’ she snapped.

  ‘Of course not. No!’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  So they caught a ramjet together from Ronald Reagan, and as the windows darkened to deep-space black George at last felt something like excitement swelling in his belly. Leah had been found. He repeated the phrase, inwardly, to himself. To make it realer to himself. He was going to get his daughter back.

  ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ Marie asked him. ‘What are you muttering?’

  ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he told her. ‘It’s a dream.’

  ‘You gave up hope,’ said Marie.

  ‘I never gave up hope!’ he returned.

  ‘I never gave up hope,’ she snapped. But this claim that she alone had kept the flame alight infuriated him; and out of his annoyance he felt the kindling of excitement in his bowels. The catalyst of strong emotion. Outside, the air was breaking into yellow and white sparks. Luminous dashes and hyphens were flowing past the window. The tug in his gut of descent; the thrill of incipient reunion with his lost child.

  George and Marie disembarked like zombies.

  Dot was there in the landing lounge. Standing beside her was a tall, bearded man wearing combat-style trousers. ‘This is Ivan Indrikov,’ said Dot. ‘He has been working with me.’

  ‘To meet you,’ said Ivan, shaking both Marie and George by the hand, in turn, with a stiff politeness. He had a wide face, tanned skin and a spread of untanned lines converging on the outer edge of each eye. A pale mole was tucked in by his right
nostril, like a reset button. ‘Great! So pleased!’

  ‘He knows the area,’ Dot explained. ‘I could not have located your daughter without him.’

  ‘We’re very grateful,’ said Marie, uncharacteristic nervousness tingeing her voice. ‘Is Leah here? Have you brought her?’

  ‘Not here,’ said Dot.

  Marie said ‘Can I see her?’ at exactly the same time that George explosively cleared his throat.

  ‘We must go to village,’ said Ivan.

  ‘We could not claim her,’ Dot added. ‘We’re not her parents. But we can be at the village in an hour and then you will have her.’

  So they passed through the terminal and out into the parkyard. In moments the four of them were squeezed into a flitter and were zipping through the bright sky. George cleared his throat again, coughed, and thrummed his tonsils noisily. His previous numbness had somehow transformed itself into an agitation of the uvula. Cough, cough. He rehearsed the thought that he was about to be reunited with his daughter, after eleven months of cruel separation. It did not feel real. Cough. He thought about it, and it occurred to him that it did not feel real because the separation itself did not feel real. With a mild, notional panic he wondered if anything felt real to him. But it was all right; because looking through the flitter’s passenger window he saw the sky, a purer and more enduring blue than even the sapphire of his Fwn-screen. And he saw the tawny ground beneath, creased like a dirty sheet into little humps and hillocks. Khaki stretches of barrenness, and then a rectangle of crow-coloured weeds running wild over what had once been cultivated land.

  Cough.

  They came in a little lower, on the outskirts of a town. A huge crowd of people had gathered, like the crowd at a football match; but there was no game being played, and no purpose to the gathering. So many hairy heads, all crowded together, had the appearance of a great expanse of black seaweed at low tide – and then they were over a huge wire fence and into a commercial compound.

  ‘We must continue the journey in an iCar Armoured,’ said Dot.

  ‘We cannot,’ Indrikov elaborated, ‘be safe in the air over the territory.’

  Marie stared at him as if he had spoken in Russian.

  So they landed, and stepped out into a stone heat so fierce it made both George and Marie shudder. Walking five metres to the hefty iCar was enough for both of them to start sweating incontinently; but then they were inside, and sitting upon the cool, bed-broad seats of the vehicle. The driver, looking over his left shoulder, grinned at them, and then held up a Versace chain-pistol – perhaps to reassure them, although in truth it was an intimidating gesture. Indrikov, clambering in to sit beside George, spoke sharply to the fellow and he put the gun away.

  ‘Should we be worried?’ asked Marie, in an eerie voice.

  ‘No ma’am,’ said Dot, firmly, climbing in to the front seat. She pulled the weighty passenger door closed with an enormous clunk. ‘We will go to a village, and collect your daughter.’

  The car grumbled into life and pulled away. Cumbrous but well engineered.

  ‘Some money is paid,’ said Indrikov, leaning forward. His jacket gaped open to show – like a girl at a party inadvertently displaying her cleavage – a glimpse of his own holstered handgun. ‘More money must be paid. I know these people.’

  ‘What is the name of this village?’ George asked.

  ‘It is,’ replied Dot, looking to Indrikov for confirmation. ‘Orc—’

  ‘Öcalan,’ said the Russian.

  Everybody in the car fell silent. The minutes passed, as minutes invariably do. The landscape, darkened by the tinted windows, rolled monotonous variations out of brown, yellow and cream. They drove through a smallish town. When the iCar slowed to go through the narrower, built-up streets George saw Indrikov slide his hand inside his jacket.

  George directed his attention outside. This frazzled, desert place. He was still trying to come to terms with being here and with the imminence of seeing Leah again. Or would it be another goose-chase? Through the window he saw an empty dust-field between buildings, and in it a long trench being dug by women, and a tangle of skin-sheathed skeletons, heads bald as footballs, lying beside it. A man in a cowboy hat stood watching this excavation, cradling a shotgun to his breast as if it were a baby. On the other side of the road a score of long-haired men were sitting or standing, observing the proceedings with dispassion.

  Round a corner, and up a slope, and here were many more long-haired men at the roadside, standing or walking or sitting. Several had gathered round a precarious-looking tin table, on which a game of cards was being played. They turned a corner. George had a brief glimpse in through an open doorway as the iCar rolled by. As they passed, the view down a narrow hallway swung on its perspectival hinge. At the end was a bright room in which a woman stood rubbing at the unclothed torso of a muscular man with – George thought (he only saw it for a moment) – a sponge. There was something about this brief glimpse, about the unsought intimacy of it, that startled George. That there were such things as rooms, and private lives, behind the pasteboard frontage and all this set scenery. Then they had gone right through the town, and out the other side, and they rolled out into the weedy, wasted countryside again.

  The car laboured up a long slope, drove between two hemming rocky embankments and began a long, gradual straight descent. Marie took hold of George’s hand. A squeeze. He tried to settle his thoughts on Leah; on what he would say to her – on what he and she would do back in New York to catch up on the stolen eleven months. But his inner eye kept reverting to the image of that man, stripped to the waist to display his bulky upper body, whilst that woman worked her way over it with a wet sponge. The lit room at the end of the dark, straight corridor. The surgical glimpse past shuttered windows and plaster wall and doors with metal over-frames.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Dot.

  The car pulled up in a tiny village square. This must be Öcalan: a scattering of low-level houses, and rising above them a single fort-like edifice fronted by an imposing double-door. In the middle of the square a fountain poured a quavery thread of shining water into its stone font. There was a single palm tree, leaves foxed and frayed at the edges. Several dozen long-haired men lounged in the sunlight; more strikingly, half a dozen short-haired men sat or stood underneath the palm tree.

  ‘Permit me to go out first,’ said Indrikov. Nobody contradicted him. He popped the passenger door, slipped his firearm into his right hand, and climbed into the brightness. George watched him walk over to the palm tree, and stand for a while talking to the men. The group there consisted, George could see, of one big-bellied, doleful-looking fellow with his wrists bound together in front of him, and two burly men at each of his shoulders. A few strides away stood another man, a sailor’s cap on his head and the manner of easy command. Two women loitered by the sailor-capped fellow.

  Indrikov came back to the car. ‘It is OK,’ he informed them. ‘Please, you shall come out.’ As Marie and then George extricated themselves from the vehicle, he added, ‘I tell them it is not necessary, but they wish to do it.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘It is point of honour for them, they say. I say Mr-Mrs Denoone have no desire for it, but they insist.’

  ‘Lewinski,’ said Marie.

  ‘Desire for what?’ asked Dot.

  ‘That man,’ indicating the man with his wrists tied, ‘used to be, here, head-boss. He is to blame for not giving up your daughter. They wish you to witness justice.’

  Before George could reply to this, Marie hooted ‘Leah!’ and started running over the dusty ground. And there, behind the two women, was Leah: wearing a dark grey, long-sleeved dress, her hair black and long, a look on her face of astonishment, or desperate hope, or overwhelming recognition, or disbelief that it was finally all over. A face filled with profound and genuine emotion. Marie reached her, and threw her arms around her crying ‘Leah! Leah!’. The two women stepped aside. George picked his step. There she was. Ther
e she was! Tears pricked his eyeballs, like hayfever. ‘I can’t believe,’ he gasped, to Dot, who trotted alongside him. ‘I can’t believe it’s all over.’

  He was weeping, actually weeping. He got to his wife and daughter, put his arms around them both, weeping with a strange mixture of pain and joy. It was the sensation of a great pressure suddenly released, a sort of existential abscess to which he had become accustomed, but which gave him the actual, palpable pleasure of relief as it was suddenly pierced and drained. He said ‘I can’t believe it’s over!’ and then he said, ‘It’s been so long, my darling girl.’ Leah was crying too, and grasping at her mother’s waist.

  ‘Oh, but you’re thin!’ Marie cried.

  Dot touched George on the shoulder. ‘Meet the new boss,’ she said, as if quoting something. ‘We agreed a sum, but he now wants more.’

  George blinked in the bright sunlight of his new landscape of joy. ‘What?’ To think of fussing over sums of money – to, in effect, haggle – was all massively irrelevant to him now. ‘More? What?’

  ‘Not much more,’ Dot said, drawing him a little further away from his wife and daughter. ‘But it is your money, after all.’

  ‘I don’t care about that,’ said George, his chest thrumming. ‘I have my daughter back. I don’t care about any of that. She has come back to me.’

  The sun was bright as a ball-light. Shadows black as mud clogged the doorways. The whole square felt like a performance space, lit and ready for something, for something, ready for something. The human beings occupying it were fidgety with readiness. George was too, though he didn’t know for what. Money was a concept from a wholly other world. Readiness for what, though?

  ‘I understand,’ Dot was saying ‘I have a credit chip readied to transfer, though, and only for the agreed amount.’

  George said, in a disengaged voice. ‘I can’t believe you’re quibbling over this. Does money matter?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dot, not catching the profundity of George’s question. But you can hardly blame her for that. ‘Indrikov can transfer the extra money. We’ll sort finances back at Tbilisi.’ Ever the practical mind.