By Light Alone by Adam Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

is you must, my love,’ he said. ‘Nobody can say that.’
    She eyed him. She was, presumably, trying to determine whether he was being sarcastic or not. But, then again; wasn’t this a simple statement of the truth of things? Wasn’t this a nutshell definition of what it means to be rich? She kept her eyeline on him, and said nothing, and nodded, once.
    ‘I will, I will,’ said George. His eye was momentarily snagged by the view through the window. The view was of unscarred ground. Bleached sheets; the snowfreeze. White.
    Silence was never far away. Silence was always there. It falls, as snow falls, and covers us all. George summoned his willpower and put a footprint in it.
    ‘I’ll call the agency,’ he said, pulling out his Fwn. As he did so he felt something shift in his breast, like a tide hauling itself over and round. Some grand, hidden, gravitational reorientation of the world focused on his heart. ‘Better, better than that, I’ll call the agency we got what’s-her-name from. You remember, the Ecuadorian girl. I’ll call them, and I – will – have them fly a new carer over here —’ as he typed the search into the Fwn-screen with his thumb, laboriously, one character at a time. ‘It’s an hour and a half to Tabriz. She can be here early afternoon, and—’ and the more he spoke, the more a momentum gathered in his speaking, ‘—of course assuming she passes muster, assuming you like her, my dear, you, she and Ez can be on an evening flight back home before the sun sets.’ And in the spurious assertion of action, the logic of connection between this human being and this other human being altered. Marriage is a very old manuscript, and there are always gaps in the text. Two people may choose to be linked when what there is between them is something ; and that something may be practical or sexual or habitual, a shared sense of humour, a shared disinclination to holiday alone. What effe r. Whatehva. Choice is intoxicating enough at the best of times, and it fair makes the head spin when it tangles with such a linkage. But more potent than something is nothing , for that dissolves choice as salt dissolves a slug. And this is what George now understood, or rather (at any rate) what he now had some inkling of. Their marriage had once been a voluntary contract, but now they were joined by something much stronger than the will of either of them. Prison is a perdition, and perdition means something lost. That he and Marie, having previously been lightly connected by various somethings , were now, abruptly, terrifyingly welded much more solidly together by an absence, the nothing where their daughter had been.

8

     
    That evening George saw wife and son off at the flitter park. Ezra was in the care of a new young woman called Janet Devault, and Marie stared past George and past the hotel and stared into the distance with unthawed eyes. Then the flitter did its salmon-leap thing and shrank away in the sky, heading east.
    George stayed for a while, unsure what to do with himself. He scanned the sky. The sun like a neon coin. The moon its own ghost. As he made his way back to the hotel, he became conscious for the first time of a weird, dark dignity in himself. Of course he was sad his daughter had been taken – for ransom, of course, whatever the police captain lady said. It must be that. He was sad. How could he not be sad? But it was not a demeaning sadness. This thought occurred to him as he walked. For circumstances had gifted him with a type of tragic dignity. It was entirely new to him, this hollow grandeur. He liked it. He imagined the hotel staff looking at him with a new respect. It was sad, but sadly serious. It was a painful absence in his life naturally; but it was an absence like a zero added to a number: it turned him from inconsequential 1 to notable 10. He was conscious of that unnerving tingle, like an itch inside the web of his nerves. It felt like the great wall was about to crumble,