By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I feel responsible.’

  ‘You remember that Nature Fact Book you watched, the one about the giant bull seals?’

  Issa couldn’t bring her mind to focus properly on this statement. ‘What?’

  ‘Sure you remember it. You watched it, like, a hundred times. There was this big colony of these huge seals, like long massive rubber sacks filled with jelly, with dog faces on one end. Whiskers and everything. And the biggest male had these great tusks, like walking sticks, poking out of its mouth. They were huge, these creatures, metres and metres long, big as a flitter. And the biggest male kept all the women in a harem. And if any of the younger males tried to creep up and schlup one behind his back, he’d get really furious, and flail around and sack-race chase the challenger over the beach, and head-hammer those teeth into the rival’s fleshy back, like big knives.’

  ‘Schlup doesn’t sound like the sort of word you would use, Rageh,’ she observed.

  ‘You do remember that book. It is the nature of the universe, that book. The only way for the younger male to get any women is to get fat enough to fight the old guy and kill him. The youngster needs to grow his teeth long as a sword, and then sheathe them in his rival’s flesh. The women just flop around, whilst the males fight over them.’

  ‘How can you know about that book, Rageh?’ Issa asked. ‘I saw that long before I ever knew you.’

  Rageh looked at her, and something shivery went through her heart, so she said: ‘This is, like, a hallucination, isn’t it? I’m hallucinating you.’

  ‘You don’t drink enough,’ he chided. ‘And you need more minerals. You need to get your energy levels up.’

  She was going to reply: It’s not easy! But she was going to say so in a whiny voice, and she squashed the sentiment before it emerged. Whining wasn’t going to help her.

  ‘You know I’m right,’ said Rageh, indulgently. ‘More water. And a little hardfood! He’s got money, why doesn’t he buy you a little, from time to time? All this lounging about!’

  ‘It’s in the way of me getting up and going.’

  ‘Get up and go,’ agreed Rageh.

  ‘I just . . .’ said Issa, searching for the elusive truth of it. What, though? ‘I just – I don’t know. I feel an attachment.’

  ‘But he threatened you with a gun!’ said Rageh, looking disapprovingly.

  ‘Not just him. Roxan. Can I just abandon them?’

  Rageh laughed. When he opened his mouth wide, it was possible to see the far wall right through, on the other side. This, more than the laughter, made Issa tremble. ‘That’s the easy abandonment! You’ve had the giving-up of food thrust upon you, that’s the hard part. Perfect freedom is almost yours! But you keep getting tangled up in new addictions. Glued down by them. People!’

  ‘It’s natural,’ she said. ‘It’s the human thing.’

  ‘And you’re content with that,’ said Rageh, in a sly voice. He came a little closer. ‘Queen of New York? Or just some girl?’

  Issa breathed in through her nose. ‘What must I do?’

  ‘Drink more. Eat as much as you can get your hands on. Energy levels! See that spider?’

  ‘Spider?’

  ‘There. Start with that. Just that, and then you can go.’

  This spider was all elbows, and a self-important manner, lodged in the corner of the ceiling. It tasted shockingly bitter, howlingly bitter, and made her tongue stretch and gah. She drank a gutful of water after, and then spread himself flat in the window’s patch of sun and fanned out his hair. The aftertaste of the spider was foul, but she’d done a good thing by eating it. She looked around and noticed that Rageh had vanished.

  She stole two bottles of water and left.

  It was easy enough making her way along the Trabzon road, skirting the western bank of the lake. It was late afternoon. Crowds lined the way, shifting reluctantly every few minutes. The setting sun, going behind the eastern peaks, pushed shadow further up the slope, and the crowds shuffled to stay on the light. Issa kept her head down, and ignored the various hoots, or hellos, or offers of sex, or pleas for a drink of water from her bottles. There were many of these, some aggressive. Issa wished she had cached the bottles in a bag or sack, to disguise them a little, rather than having to carry one in each hand. As the sky darkened and deepened overhead, and the first stars jabbed the points of their needles through the cloth, she found a place to rest and sat down. People were all around her, all of them settling for the night; and Issa fell into conversation with a woman called Ayşe who was walking in the opposite direction up the road. This woman stood out because she had a backpack. She was from Rize, she said, and was trying to get enough money together to buy hardfood to see her through a pregnancy.

  ‘Aren’t you scared somebody will steal your pack?’ Issa asked.

  ‘At this time of day,’ she replied, ‘people get sluggish, and it’s not usually a problem. But I have a gun,’ she added, bringing out a small iron pistoletta red with rust. ‘And I’m careful. I’m travelling the coast, buying and selling in a small way. I pick up a euro here, a euro there.’

  Issa held up one of her bottles of water. ‘Would you buy this?’

  ‘I’m on the way home,’ said Ayşe, cautiously, ‘so I’m more interested in selling than buying.’

  ‘I’ll give you a good price,’ Issa pressed, eager to be rid of the weight of the thing. ‘I don’t really want it, anyway.’

  ‘You shouldn’t tell me that!’ said Ayşe, laughing. ‘That’s no way to bargain!’

  ‘I’m not skilled at bargaining,’ said Issa.

  ‘Your accent,’ said Ayşe. ‘I can’t quite place it. Where are you from?’

  ‘Several places,’ said Issa.

  They sat down together and each drank a little from the bottle in question. Ayşe talked a little more about the challenges involved in raising the money to have a baby. ‘I wouldn’t try it in spring or summer. With the stronger sunlight, and after months of enforced winter sluggishness, all the men go a little crazy. Leaping about, grabbing at you – rape, even. They wouldn’t think twice about stealing anything I was carrying. But look at them now—’ She gestured with her right arm. ‘Late autumn, they’re much quieter. It’d be even safer in the wintertime, but then I’d end up eating half the food I collected, just to keep going.’

  ‘You can’t, you know, do it on insects and leaves?’ Issa asked.

  ‘No,’ said Ayşe, gravely. ‘I mean: this will be my first child, so I’m not speaking from experience. But speaking to the older women in my village, it takes a lot of energy to bring a child to term. And then you’ve got to feed it, with milk. It comes out of the nipples, on your front!’ Ayşe shook her head at the strangeness of this. ‘They come out bald. Have you ever seen one?’

  ‘I have a brother,’ said Issa, remembering very vaguely the arrival of a blue-rompered little creature, all red in the face.

  ‘Well then you know!’

  ‘And the Boss of your village wouldn’t help with food?’

  ‘We don’t have a Boss. There’s a ruling cadre. It’s much more progressive. We were cited by the national government as an example! Imagine that! But there’s not much they can do to help us, when it comes to caching food. Still,’ she smiled at her new friend. ‘It means I’ll be able to pick the father.’

  ‘How do you mean,’ Issa asked, ingenuously, ‘pick the father?’

  Ayşe explained: ‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be the Boss! I can choose whichever boy I like!’

  Issa nodded slowly at this. It seemed to her a marvellous, a spacious and illuminated thing. Choice! ‘Do you have a boy in mind?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, one or two,’ laughed Ayşe. ‘But I like to keep them dancing attendance. You don’t want to give it all away. It’s hard enough in this world, being a woman, and a longhair woman at that. You need to make the best of what you have. What about you? Where are you going?’

  ‘New York,’ said Issa.

  ‘Where’s that? I don’t
know where that is.’

  ‘It’s away in the west,’ said Issa, and that was information enough.

  After a while, Ayşe agreed to buy the bottle of water they’d shared for twenty cents. It was four-fifths full. ‘And I’ll get forty cents for it from the right buyer. As much for the bottle itself, as the water. Are you sure you won’t feel ripped off?’

  ‘Do you have a bag you could let me have?’ Issa asked, thinking of the other bottle she was going to have to carry. ‘A plastic sack, or something?’

  ‘A plastic bag and fifteen cents for the bottle and the water,’ offered Ayşe.

  ‘Deal.’

  When they parted it was dark, and all around people were clutching one another to keep warm through the night. Some few had sheets of cloth or plastic, but most did not. The sky was the colour of the deep water beneath the ocean. The Milky Way gave no energy to the blood. Issa pushed on for another mile or so through the night air before she had to stop from exhaustion and lie down. The thought had occurred to her: What if Sergei comes after me? He might do. And he would ask himself: Which way would she go? Not south into the mountains, or west or east into the wilderness, but north to the Black Sea. So he would come up this road, with his gun, and his unpredictable rage, looking for me. But as she lay down, and pulled her arms inside the body of her shirt, and tucked her legs tight against her tummy underneath the material, she thought to herself: He would never have the gumption. And then she thought: And even if he did, how could he spot me, amongst all these people? The sheer populousness of people was her shield. Her prop and stay. Her sword and spear.

  She slept.

  In the morning she took a drink, just to moisten her mouth, and walked on; slowly at first, but more energetically as the sun warmed her head. The sky was pale blue; white trilobite-shaped clouds crawled, occasionally intermitting the sunlight and causing Issa to slow. But by midday she came over the crest of a hill and at last saw the Black Sea. It was so beautiful a sight her heart danced upwards like a flame. Water, as far as the horizon!

  She stopped for a rest and took a long drink from her bottle in honour of the sight of it. There were no fences forbidding access (the water was brine, of course). She could see the new road, a fat concrete line linking the eastern and western horizon. The old road, clearly visible under the water, ran alongside, as if in spectral homage.

  She watched the sea for a long time. There was something hypnotic in it, in the mélange of illumination and shadow. The magic eye. There were no hawks. There were neither hulks nor icebergs. Nothing dropped violently down from the white sky. All that happened was that the Black Sea butted its blue head gently against the shore, and the wind went all in one direction, endlessly, above it, and people sprawled in the sun. Earth and sky. Suds on the surface of the atmosphere were clouds, erratic and baggy or tight as bolted cloth.

  The sun set and there was no sun.

  The following day, with almost all her water drunk, she walked westward. She talked to a few women, and ignored, or rebutted – or in one case wasted valuable energy fleeing – sexual advances from idle men and boys. The main event of that day was passing over a river. The river flowed in a ragged-sloped valley through land the colour of burnt toast. The road passed over it, a flat slab of concrete.

  A great scrum of longhairs packed the riverbank, like ants on honey. Issa tried to get down to the water and fill her bottle. Down towards the sealine there was some order amongst the longhair masses, but as she tried to penetrate the press to get to the water a tall man demanded she pay a toll. Wishing not to spend her fifteen cents if she could avoid it, Issa came away and instead tried to get at the free and flowing water upstream. But here the crowd was bad-tempered and aggressive. She eventually got down the side of some gritty rocks and reached down to hold her bottle in; but it was only half full when a beak-nosed woman tried to snatch the vessel from her, and it was all she could do to scramble away. The whole thing was so energy-intensive that, after scuttling half a kilometre further along the rocks, she had to lie down in the sun, the bottle underneath her body, and spread out her hair. After that she left the road and mounted the southern slope, until she found an empty spot with a reasonable angle on some sunlight. All around her, people were settling, or settled, like puffins on a cliff-face.

  She was close to a man, who sat with his knees pulled in at his chest, staring out to sea. Normally she would stay clear of engaging conversationally with a man, but the way this fellow shyly held back from approaching her endeared him to her. After a while she asked him his name. When he didn’t reply, she turned to look properly at him, and saw then that he was dead, motionless, his eyes hemmed by a living, clotted mascara of flies.

  She found another place to rest.

  By the time she properly had her energy back it was late afternoon. She walked a few hours, picking her way along the western highway. Occasional cars passed, their horns set to head-denting levels of loudness to try and clear a path through the milling pedestrians. The sound of their engines accelerating when they broke through to clear freeway was a monster hound growling fit to rend meat with its jaws. And then, diminishing into the distance, leaving behind the sound of waves lapping at its new coastline, hungry in a different and more implacable way.

  Issa chatted with another pedestrian, called Alia. She was going to Trabzon because she had heard that there were Christian missionaries who handed out free water and vitamin pills in return for listening to a sermon. ‘And if you can convince them you’re pregnant, they take you off to a special hardfood facility and stuff you for a year and a half with ice cream and roast chicken.’

  This didn’t sound very likely to Issa, but she didn’t want to contradict Alia, a tiny, fidgety woman with wrists thin as breadsticks. ‘Are you pregnant?’ she asked her.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘but that’s easy enough to arrange. First I want to check the story about the ice cream and the chicken is true, though, before I get myself into that interesting condition. I haven’t saved anything up for a baby. My cousin got pregnant by accident, and it killed her.’

  ‘How?’ asked Issa, experiencing that familiar unease at her lack of anything except intellectual curiosity in the face of such a horrible personal circumstance.

  ‘She did her best,’ Alia said. ‘She lay in the sun all day, and she drank a lot, ate as many insects and dirt and grass as she could. But the baby just drained all the meat out of her arms and legs, and she got so that her eyes bulged like her skull was trying to shit them out of their sockets. Then she couldn’t keep the baby going, and lost it, and there was a lot of blood. Then she got hot and shivery and died.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Issa, in a neutral voice.

  ‘I wasn’t especially close to her,’ said Alia, looking out to sea. ‘And people said it was her fault for getting pregnant in the first place. But I don’t think that’s fair. It shouldn’t be a crime, getting pregnant.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Issa. ‘Not a crime. Not a death sentence.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Alia suddenly, pointing out to sea. ‘There’s a raft!’

  It was a foreshortened dark rectangle, away near the horizon, like a black rug laid over the water. The sun was low in the sky, so Issa sat down with Alia and watched it. It moved gradually to the shore; as it came closer Issa could see how crowded it was.

  ‘I’d love to get on a raft,’ said Alia. ‘The open sea!’

  ‘It looks rather crammed,’ said Issa. ‘And I thought you were going to become a Christian and get ice cream?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alia, ‘it pays to keep options open, don’t you think? And there’s no harm in dreaming. We could be dead tomorrow.’

  ‘A morbid thought.’

  ‘I was speaking to a woman from Batumi who said that they’d invented a new disease, especially for longhairs.’

  ‘Disease?’

  ‘Sure: makes your hair fall out and your skin come up in blotches, red and black. Kills you
in days.’

  ‘They invented this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Alia. ‘The wealthy, I guess.’

  In the morning the two walked on together and by noon they were at the outskirts of Trabzon. The town sat in a series of linked wide concavities in the coastline, the remains of the old harbourfront clearly visible beneath the chemically blue waters. The town itself was fenced, of course, and longhairs were discouraged; although, resting after her walk, Issa watched one crocodile of longhair women, dressed in black, showing IDs and being permitted through. There were the usual dusty crowds of longhairs loitering on the scrubland outside the fence.

  Issa rested, and got talking to a group of Georgians. Their talk was all of the new bioweaponry, targeted specifically to attack longhairs.

  ‘They hate us. Ever since Flowrida.’

  ‘Flowrida was worse for us than them!’ one man said. ‘Tens of thousands of our kind died at Flowrida’.

  ‘Florida,’ Issa corrected. ‘And what happened in Florida anyway?’ A few glowered at her, as if she had made a joke in bad taste.

  ‘It goes back further than that,’ said another Georgian, a young woman with very wide-spaced grey eyes. ‘It goes back to Triunion.’ Everybody murmured their agreement. It was the opinion of everybody that Triunion was where the problems had started, and the blood-deep hatred of the wealthy for the longhairs was born. Issa, not wishing to invite mockery by admitting she didn’t know what Triunion signified, held her peace. ‘They treat us like animals – they treat us worse than animals,’ said somebody. ‘Then they mustn’t be surprised if we act like animals – and devour them.’

  Somebody asked her where she was headed.

  ‘New York,’ she told them.

  There were gasps, some laughter. ‘Good luck! But what will you do there, little longhair lady?’

  ‘It’s mine,’ she explained. ‘I own that city.’