By Light Alone (13 page)

‘The bosses still need people to do the work, of course,’ Dot was saying. ‘So, you’re thinking: why would any peasant work for any boss? Right? Why don’t they just go off together and start a new village – or rise up and throw the oppressors in the canal? What’s stopping them? They don’t need the bosses for anything, after all – not for money, I mean. They can live by light alone.’

‘Sure,’ said George.

‘It’s the question. It’s
the
question, actually. And there are three answers. And the third of those three answers is really germane to your unhappy situation, Mr Denoone. I’ll come to that. But let’s do it in order. The first answer has to do with the inertia of the peasants, especially the men. I mean, a deep-dyed ontological inertia. But that sounds a bit racist. Peasantist. I know it does. So people don’t like talking about it. Not like that.’

George knew as much about peasant life as he did about life on the moons of Jupiter, so he held his peace.

‘Another answer, more practical, has to do with the bosses’ power. They can shave your head in a minute. How long would you last with a bald head?’

‘How long?’ George asked. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Hair grows at half-an-inch a month’

‘Half a what?’

‘A little over a centimetre a month,’ Dot said. ‘Less if you’re not well-nourished. So how long until you had enough hair to generate enough energy to keep yourself alive, from a bald standing-start?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Something like a smile, or at least a half-inclination of the corner of her mouth, touched Dot’s expression. George hadn’t seen
that
before. ‘Well, the answer is,’ she said, ‘it depends. But it’s a long time; half a year, nine months, something like that. And, of course, if you’re getting your energy from your hair, then you want that hair to be as long as possible – really you need a three- or four-year growth of New Hair to give you enough energy to work properly. So, if the boss’s men hold you down and shave your head, well – then you’ll die. You’ll die unless somebody supplies you with nutrients – milk say – for the whole course of the intervening period. Do you know anybody who’d be prepared to supply
you
with milk and meal for half a year? Imagine the cost of it! Remember you don’t have a single cent. Remember you don’t have
any
means of obtaining money. No one will gift you or loan you a penny. Half a year’s supply of real food – you’d need to be rich as a banker to even contemplate it. So, mostly, you’ll die.’

George thought of the bald-headed corpses he had seen lying by the trench on the trip he’d made to that village. He couldn’t remember the name of the village. He remembered the commissioner describing the whole trip as
wild-goose chase
. He’d eaten goose in a Tokyo restaurant once. Or gosling, which amounted to the same thing.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘But there’s a third reason,’ Dot said, ‘why people don’t just opt out of the whole village system, go live in the hills or wander the highways. It’s the reason why your daughter got stolen.’

Just at that moment the call shrilled through the bar, and Dot and George shoe-shuffled through to the flexible corridor and onto the ramjet. A minute and a half of settling themselves in their seats. The plane eased into motion on the slipway. It and the ground parted company with a little sigh. George and Dot sat through several minutes of chest-squeezing acceleration at a steep angle, before the belts snaked away and the seats swung round in their floor grooves.

An R2 trundled along dispensing drinks.

‘Mad Nic Neocles,’ Dot said, as if they had never been interrupted. ‘He thought he was giving the world a great new gift. And it’s true that you can live a long life with his New Hair, provided you get water to drink, and don’t mind nibbling the odd creepy-crawly from time to time. But here’s what you
can’t
really do, if the New Hair is your only source of blood sugar. You can’t carry a pregnancy to term.’

‘Really?’ said George. ‘I never knew that.’

‘Often you can’t even get pregnant in the first place. If you do then you’ll almost certainly spontaneously abort long before term. With only hair to generate blood sugars, a woman’s body doesn’t have the level of nutrient to keep the foetus viable.’

There was something revolting about the clinical way this woman used such language. ‘When I got out of bed this morning,’ George said, ‘I had no idea you even existed. Now you’re discussing these very unpleasant things with me like—’ He was going to say:
like we were lovers
, but that seemed too forward. So instead he said: ‘Like we’ve known each other for years.’

‘You need to know this stuff, Mr Denoone. Growing a baby in your uterus is a huge drain on a human body. It’s touch-and-go even in wealthy women with all the food-calories in the world to draw on. But if peasant women can’t have babies, then how do new generations of peasants come into the world for the bosses to exploit? That’s the question.’

‘You’re language is very,’ George said, crinkling up his brow and waving his right hand. He couldn’t think of the word.

‘Because obviously new generations of peasants do arise, for the bosses to exploit.’

‘—very
loaded
,’ he said. ‘Very
ideological
.’ He pulled both his earlobes with two hands simultaneously. ‘And “exploit” is a loaded term, isn’t it, though?’

‘This is what makes the world work,’ said Dot, blandly. ‘Because naturally the women want to have babies, so they don’t die childless; and naturally bosses want them to have babies, so the source of their wealth and power doesn’t vanish with the passing generation. So people find ways of making it happen. Some women do it by working: digging trenches for corpses, for instance, or any job that pays – they do it by working to earn money, so as to buy
food
to tide them over through their pregnancy. This is important.’

‘Important,’ said George. He had distracted himself with the fleeting thought of his unspoken
as if we were lovers
. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with this slight, intense woman. The thought was exciting, though distant.

‘It’s important because it means women are prepared to work, indeed
eager
to work, in a way the men aren’t. Plenty of peasant men are content simply to loll in the sun. If a boss wants a ditch dug, he goes to a woman. There’s little point in going to a man. He lacks the motivation to do strenuous physical labour for you. But a woman
needs
to scrimp and to save.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you? Good. Because it’s the most important of Mad Nic’s unintended consequences. His invention made men idle and made sure that all the heavy lifting passed to women. Not,’ she added, looking darkly at George, ‘that that wasn’t pretty much the case before.’

‘I don’t know why you keep looking at me as if,’ said George, peevishly, ‘as if it is
my
fault.’

‘Bosses leverage their women’s desire to have babies into many years of grunt-hard work; the women do it to stockpile enough protein powder to see them through pregnancy and breast feeding. And when that kid grows its hair and can loll about in the sunshine like its fathers and uncles, it’s back to work
she
goes, to save up powdered milk or milled grain for the next one. Thus turneth the wheel.’

‘Wheel?’

‘The wheel of work. In the villages, the bosses pay
just enough
to allow this to happen. That’s called capitalism. It used to be that the bosses paid peasants just enough to stop them starving; now they pay peasants considerably less – just enough to keep one fraction of a family in milk-powder for a year or two. That way the bosses make more money and keep more money. Which means that people like you or I, higher up the pyramid, have more money.’

‘It’s hard,’ said George, haughtily, ‘to feel a
personal
responsibility. I’d never treat another person so cruelly.’

Dot ignored this. ‘Carrot, paying the women’s pittance. Stick, shaving delinquent heads. Not everybody shaved dies, but most do. If
your
husband got his head shaved, would
you
give up your baby powder to keep him alive until the hair grew back? You can always get another husband – the village is full of idle men. They are
literally
lying about.’

‘To talk of human lives in so cavalier a manner,’ George began but vaguely, unable to inject any actual outrage into his voice.

Dot nodded, as if this were fair comment. ‘Now, the bosses aren’t stupid,’ she went on. ‘And women aren’t stupid. Easier to grab a child than carry it two thirds of a year in your womb. The women get a kid; the bosses get their population of serfs renewed. That’s why they’re so reluctant to intervene. If a Turk or Iranian had stolen your gold-plated Fwn, then the police would’ve run the news round the local villages, a boss would have shaved a couple of heads, pocketed the reward and the trinket would have come back to you. But the bosses make a point of not getting involved where child theft is concerned.’

George was discomfited, though in a distant sort of way. It was some small thing that gnawed at his thoughts. Or else it was an ocean pivoting about on the hinge of its tide deep in his soul. He wanted to ignore it. He knew the way his world worked, which meant he knew the way the world worked. Surely. ‘It’s,’ he said, searching for the right word, ‘monstrous.’

‘It’s what makes the world go around. Usually children get grabbed from the moderate-poor in the cities. Pretty much, rural life is too closed and known to get away with stealing from a neighbouring village. But kids disappear from cities all the time. It is rarer to steal from the wealthy, such as yourself. Though the kids they get that way tend to be stronger – good long bones from years of actual nutrition. Have you seen how stunted kids arms and legs get when they’re raised on pure sunshine?’ Of course George had not seen this, and of course Dot knew he had not. So she pressed the point. ‘Kids raised on nothing but sunshine and a little clean chewed mud? Small.
Height
is an index of beauty, in this day and age. Just like body fat. A hundred years ago beauty was thin. Not any more.’

‘Leah was in the ninetieth percentile for height,’ George said, not really focusing on what he was saying.’

‘There you go. That’s why she was nicked.’

‘What do you mean,
nicked
?’

‘Stolen, I mean. Nicked means stolen.’

‘Is that a Britishism? I thought you mean she had been cut,’ said George, blinking.

‘It’s the hidden economy. But knowing all that doesn’t make it any easier to locate her. Bosses won’t talk, and of course the peasants won’t. If she really stood out from the other kids – if she were Chinese, or black. But she’s Jewish – yeah?’

‘Her mother.’

‘Semitic, right, so I daresay she’ll look more or less like all the other kids in her village. Taller, sure. But the girls are usually taller than the boys anyway – they’re fed for longer, nurtured more. They’re more valuable, of course. Beyond that they’ll have fed her the New Hair bug, the Neocles seed, and then weaned her off actual food for a few months. By now she’ll be living like all the other kids; soaking the sun, scratching in the vegetation for worms.’

‘Oh God,’ said George. But he couldn’t seem to get the word to come out with the appropriate force and heft. He couldn’t, somehow, insert enough grandeur and woe into the syllable. He tried again, launching it from deeper in his chest. ‘God.’ Still no good. He tried bending the ‘o’ around his mouth, with a quavery thrum. ‘God.’ No.

‘You need to understand the reality of the situation,’ Dot drawled. ‘Is why I’m telling you. I will look hard for your girl. Believe I
will
. But it won’t be easy. I can’t promise I’ll find her. But – and you can allow yourself to hope – I
may
do.’

‘Leah,’ said George, more quietly this time. He felt as if he ought to be crying, now. He felt, that is to say, that tears would be an appropriate reaction. But his face wasn’t putting out any tears. He wasn’t skilled in forcing them out.

‘I’ll need data on your girl,’ Dot said,

‘What data?’

‘Pictures, flash, physical details, medical details.’

George brought out his Fwn. ‘I’ll send you everything,’ he said.

15

Marie received the news that ‘a professional’ (which was what George decided to call Dot) was searching for Leah and offered no reaction, neither good nor bad. She called up Wharton, took Ezra from her and, despite his wriggling protest, clutched him close to her. ‘I don’t care what you do,’ she said. ‘Only I’m never going back to that place. Do you understand?’