By Light Alone

by Adam Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

In a world where we have been genetically engineered so that we can photosynthesise sunlight with our hair, hunger is a thing of the past, food an indulgence. The poor grow their hair, the rich affect baldness and flaunt their wealth by still eating. But other hungers remain ... The young daughter of an affluent New York family is kidnapped. The ransom demands are refused. A year later a young woman arrives at the family home claiming to be their long lost daughter. She has changed so much, she has lived on light, can anyone be sure that she has come home? Adam Roberts' new novel is yet another amazing melding of startling ideas and beautiful prose. Set in a New York of the future it nevertheless has echoes of a Fitzgeraldesque affluence and art-deco style. It charts his further progress as one of the most important writers of his generation.

Release date: August 18, 2011

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 414

Sample

ONE



THE ICE-CREAM MOUNTAIN

1



Some of them wore their skis like clown-shoes. They tripped and tumbled and then they struggled, with comic laboriousness, to get back on their feet. But some wore their skis
like the fins of fish or the wings of birds in the white medium, and made fizzing, sinusoidal passage down the mountainside. They were the effortless ones. There are, after all, two sorts of people
in the world. ‘It’s like the moon,’ somebody said, and George, eavesdropping (fiddling with the buckles on his boot), knew what they meant. Not the actual moon, of course, which
is tarmac-coloured and desolate. But the ideal moon, that shining platinum shield in the sky. That white place.

He had a vantage. A spaghetti of ski-trails leading down the mountain. These were braids of hair: they were Rapunzel paths. George looked around and around, amazed.

Strands of his soul were escaping out of his mouth.

The landscape was a purified ideal of white, and the sky put down a kind of swallowing brightness. The trees lost their trunks in amongst all the radiance, becoming floating piles of dark green.
Behind them the hotel, and its many balconies, looked like a chest with all its drawers pulled out. Plus a white witch’s hat of snow on its sloping roof. That tune kept going through
George’s mind.

Superfast, superfast, superfast.

You know the one. He tried to get himself into a good launch position, rotating his skis with myriad little crunching steps, and orienting himself with respect to the
downwardness of the mountain. Whilst he laboured, Marie swooped by with insulting ease, stopping dead with a shimmy and a little flume of snow.

‘I think I’ve blistered my heel,’ he said.

‘You do look bothered,’ she replied.

So he tried to move on, but the tips of his skies crossed and he tumbled. A draught of scalding snow went in under his collar and down his neck. Writhed, he writhed, like an upended beetle.

‘You handle your skis like chopsticks,’ crowed Marie, neatly reorienting her body downhill with one hop. ‘Like big fat chopsticks.’ And then she was off, leaning
perilously far forward – or so it seemed to her husband – but somehow not falling, instead vanishing with a blissfully fluid rapidity. Her legs were tucked into a double bend,
like a corporal’s stripes. She went up a prominence, stood for a moment on empty air and then shot down out of view.

George Denoone levered himself upright. He leant on his poles for a moment. Sweating inside his suit. There were little beads and crusts of ice on his eyelashes, like sleep. His breath produced
a spectral foam in the clear air. Away on the right others were being dragged up-piste by their various drones – mostly resort machines, although a few swankier individuals had their own
personal floaters. Everywhere else myriad people in their harlequin-coloured suits swerved and twisted their way down towards the big double-haven McDonald’s M in the white valley. Shocking
pinks and olives; bright purples and lime greens; any colour contrast so long as it jarred, and all laid against the amazing extent and brightness of the white ground.

‘Come on George,’ he told himself, gasping. ‘Come along and down we go.’

In the sky above, high in the zenith, a blimp was trundling. Seeding the high air with whatever it was they used to get the snow to settle in the night. ‘Off we go,’ George said
again. He didn’t move.

Somebody swooped and crunched to a halt beside him, with that little spray of white powder from the flank of her ski. ‘Hulloa George,’ she boomed. It was Ysabella, the Canadian
woman. She was the one married to what’s-his-name, tall man with the pudding-y face. The one with the jug ears and the green eyes. Green as old dollar bills, Marie said.

‘Why, it’s Y,’ said George, glad of the distraction. That was his little joke, that ‘why’ and then her name; on account of her spelling it with ‘Y’ like
that. They had only recently met, but already they were at the stage of shared little jokes.

‘We were watching you from up there,’ she said, skewering the air near George’s shoulder with her pole. ‘Peter said you should positively join the circus.’ She
laughed like a car alarm.

Peter. That’s his name.

‘It’s this design of skis,’ George said. ‘This antique design. They’re hard to line up. When Marie and I stayed at Saint Moritz last month, the skis were Zephir
brand, that—’

But Ys was away, with an expert swank of her muscular rear-end. She plunged ferociously in a straight line, straight down. Her mauve, blob-shaped shadow rushed after her across the snow, like a
faithful dog eager to catch her, but doomed to disappointment.

George shuffled himself further closer towards position. Snow was adhering to his suit all down the left side; powdery but clumping like overcooked rice. ‘Now or never,’ he told
himself.

Trying to remember all the things needful, he pushed off. Lean forward. Tuck your arms in. Legs, so. The skis won’t straighten themselves, like modern boards do: you need to keep them
parallel by effort of mighty will, and by the clenching of sore leg muscles. He moved slowly, with an audible crunching sound. And then – abruptly, it seemed – he was flying
downslope, hurtling with insane and dangerous abandon. He howled. He really howled out loud. He couldn’t stop himself. As he strained to put his body through those ineffectual resistances
against gravity’s hostile intent, the possibility of all the harm that could befall him gushed into his mind: colliding with some obstacle; disappearing into a cartwheel of limbs and a
breaking wave of exploding snow; snapping an armbone, a legbone – or a spine, or a neck. Swerving uncontrollably towards the jagged-looking trees on the left-hand side; colliding with a fat
coniferous trunk with enough vehemence to stave-in his ribs, or punch out his chin. Or else simply to die of fright as he hurtled – faster and faster, he was going. When the railways first
came, people thought that travelling faster than a horse’s canter would flat kill the passengers. Lungs can’t suck in the air from the whoosh of the slipstream; the heart can’t
cope with the adrenalin overload as the world warp-drives around you. The trees seemed to lean under the pressure of his enormous velocity. The frozen air lashed his face. His uncovered mouth, his
goggleless eyes. Warp drive.

Superfast, superfast, superfast.

And then the fastest portion was behind him. The slope gentled. The padded barrier, the left-hand arch of the terminal , loomed up. The snow whistled contentedly under his blades. He leant to the left and tucked his knees in, more by instinct than anything. A satisfying skirt of ice-dust rose glitteringly
from his ski-edge. And then it was all over, and all the terror had been magically alchemized into exhilaration. Marie was waiting for him, her skis over her shoulders like a soldier’s rifle.
Oh he was hyper, like a little kid, and stomping towards her. ‘Did you see me?’ he boomed. ‘Did you see me fly?’

2



They took lunch with Ysabella and Peter, and also with a couple from England called the Horner-Kings. She was Emma Horner-King, and she was as quietly hesitant as her name
implied; but he was called, of all things, Ergaste. They made him say it, and spell it, and explain that it wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon king, or some fairy tale giant (very good, not heard
that one before), that, he said, ‘it had some obscure literary significance to my parents’. Ergaste took all the ribbing in good spirit, and the mood of the sixsome waxed jolly. Good to
hit it off with people; spontaneity its own reward. They all drank Chianti, and it was as cold and bright and elevating as the mountain itself. They ate blue grapes, and little spears of compressed
caviar dripped in a creamed-chilli sauce. Peter liked to roll a grape around the inside of his mouth, push it with his tongue such that his upholstered cheeks bulged alarmingly.

There was a good deal of laughter.

They dined on a balcony, shielded from the full glare of the glitter-freeze by an awning. There was something indulgently parental about the peak of the mountain itself, watching over
them from its distance.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Marie, leaning back in her chair, ‘I shall try the ice-cream slopes.’

‘Mobbed,’ said Ergaste, with his ridiculously fruity accent. ‘Always. Not worth it.’

‘Oh,’ his wife added, ‘except to say you’ve done it, you know. Ski it, and have a nibble too.’

‘Not good skiing snow,’ said Ergaste, drawing a thumbnail through his close-cropped red hair. ‘Is my point. And nor is the mix very tasty. They have to mix it,
jewsee, to make it skiable at all. One of those horrible compromise plays.’

‘You’ll excuse my husband’s Shrek-y mood,’ said Emma.

‘The problem I have with the ice-cream slopes,’ said Peter, loudly, ‘is the machinery.’

‘At the top, you mean?’

‘Loud!’ said Peter, loud himself. ‘I mean, let’s appreciate they’ve to generate the stuff somehow. I can appreciate ice cream’s not going to fall
from the clouds by itself. But still.’

‘Agree,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘Surely, this daynage, they could make the stuff less noisily.’

A waitress came to clear their table. She bent to gather the plates, almost as if presenting her centre-parting to George’s scrutiny. Ink-black hair, a strip of pale brown scalp.

‘I really flew down the slopes today,’ George announced to the whole group, apropos of nothing. ‘Positively flew.’

‘I don’t believe they’re allowed to wear their hair like that.’ Ysabella said. As she leant forward to retrieve her wine glass a Y-shaped vein blued and swelled slightly
beneath the plaster-white skin of her brow. ‘I mean, when they’re working? Aren’t there any rules against it? It’s disgusting, really.’

‘Fucking leafheads,’ said Ergaste without violence.

‘Sunny day,’ said George, absently.

‘But I mean – when they’re working? I’d say they might tie it decently away when they come to—’ She searched for the right word, before alighting, in a way
that seemed almost to surprise her, on: ‘us.’

‘Oh, plenty of sunlight in these latitudes,’ said Ergaste, sarcastically.

‘Oh I’m sure they’re fed,’ said Marie. ‘Oh I don’t doubt they take actual food as part of their wages. Don’t you think?’

‘We could ask, I suppose,’ said George, without the least intention of doing anything of the sort. He found himself wondering why, when he could clearly see his own shades reflected
in Emma’s shades, he couldn’t see her shades reflected in the reflection of his shades in her shades. It seemed to him that he ought to be able to do that.

‘It’s a little indecent,’ Ysabelle said, vaguely.

‘Not that you’re prejudiced,’ boomed Peter.

‘I’m sure they’re fed,’ said Marie again, as if this point were important to her.

‘I’m sure food is the height and length and breadth of their wages,’ said Ergaste. ‘That and a shared dorm room in which to sleep. I’m sure no actual
money changes hands.’ He seemed to find this richly amusing.

‘I know it’s a shocking thing to say,’ Ysabella went on. ‘But I find it wasteful for them to eat actual food. It’s not as if they need to. Perhaps
they may crave the . . .’ But here her conversational powers really did fail her, and she fell silent.

‘Women,’ said Ergaste. ‘The men are too lazy to do it. The women work, to build up bodyfat. Greedy little leafheads.’ He looked about. ‘Not greedy for food,
ysee,’ he clarified. ‘Greedy for babbies.’

But nobody was really very interested in this. George drained his drink. Wherever he placed his wine glass on the polished table it fitted neatly onto the base of its reflected self. There was
something satisfying about that. It said something about the innate harmony of the cosmos. The day’s skiing had left a distant ache in his thighs. Intensely satisfying. Real work, real hard
physical work – and actual danger too. And it had been dangerous, for all that MediDrones floated nannyishly over every bulge.

The conversation had moved on to food production. Ergaste was expatiating, in his clipped style, on the role of the gentleman farmer these days. His main point was, staples were right out. Right
out. No margin in them any longer. Pretty much all food production geared to the luxury market now; which had had the strange consequence that staples had become luxury foods – for
faddists, or religious cultists, or people who had mad reasons for needing it. Wheatgrain weight-for-weight was caviar-expensive. He knew people groused about this, but it was an inevitability. Get
with the programme, or get out of the game altogether. No margins in staples any longer. Not now that the world had the hair.

‘It’s a blessing,’ said Emma.

‘Certainly it’s the way the world is, now. For good or ill,’ said Ergaste.

The early afternoon sun was splendorous. Away at the far end of the balcony, two waitresses stood with their backs to the sun. One swivelled her face towards the other and whispered something
into her ear. The other, holding her tray like a chivalric shield before her torso, clapped a hand to cover her mouth: shocked, or perhaps amused, by what she had heard. George wondered what the
gossip was. Had they been looking in his direction? Probably not. Plenty of other busy tables on the balcony.

At this point Marie decided abruptly that she must see Ezra. She had her Fwn out and had called up to his room before George could intervene. ‘It’s his naptime,
darling,’ he said. But it was too late. ‘I haven’t seen him since yesterday,’ she told him – or rather, she told Peter, pushing George’s shoulder with her free
hand. ‘A mother has emotional needs and instincts. Only a monster would stifle the free expression of my maternal instincts.’

‘Since there are instincts,’ said Emma, cheerfully, ‘then why aren’t there outstincts?’

They all chuckled at this, because it actually was rather amusing, and clever, at least coming from somebody as mousy as Emma. Ergaste laughed loudest, boomingly even, and Emma slapped his lapel
with the back of her hand. But it was all terribly jolly, it really was.

The sunlight was as sparkly as a white firework, and gemstones of brilliance twinkled across the entire snowfall.

And here was Arsinée, carrying a very grumpy-looking Ezra across the balcony towards their table. ‘Here’s my little package of loveliness,’ cried Marie.
Arsinée presented the baby to its mother rather after the manner of a wine-waiter offering an unusually expensive bottle to a diner, and for a minute or so Marie cooed and poked a finger
into the dimples of the thing’s little face. Miraculously Ezra did not bawl. Which is to say: he did screw up his little eyes against the brightness of the day, and he did ready his
hands for an imaginary munchkin boxing match, but no sound accompanied the opening and closing of his mouth. Marie redirected her attention back to Ergaste, and Arsinée hovered for a moment,
uncertain whether she was required to stay or to go.

‘I want to see mine too,’ Emma declared, pulling a Fwn from her sleeve.

‘Oh for fucking out loud,’ groaned Ergaste.

‘Language!’ his wife chirruped.

‘We had her for breakfast.’

Emma pulled out her Fwn and briskly instructed somebody called Shirusho to bring Charlie down to the balcony restaurant, darling, right now?

‘We had her all through breakfast,’ said Ergaste

‘Is Leah your one and only?’ Ysabelle asked George.

‘Don’t listen to my ogre husband,’ said Emma. ‘It wasn’t even five minutes at breakfast.’

‘She kicked my chococross right off the plate,’ boomed Ergaste.

‘It was an accident and it was delightful actually, really, it was spontaneous physical comedy.’

George turned his face from Emma and Ergaste’s little squabble. ‘Two,’ he replied, meeting Ysabelle’s eye. ‘Ezra, there. We’ve a daughter as well.’

‘Two!’ repeated Ys, as if this number were one of those mind-stunning statistics you hear on documentaries about the vastness of interstellar space.

‘Physical comedy bollocks,’ announced Ergaste, in a slightly too-loud voice.

‘Language!’

‘A man’s entitled to breakfast!’

‘Who’s for some after-lunch skiing?’ Marie put in, brightly, her attempt to break this unseemly display of discord. Arsinée, looking from person to person for further
cues, wrapped Ezra up and slipped away off the balcony.

‘I simply don’t see it’s too much to ask,’ said Ergaste, sitting back in his chair as a bearish lump, ‘that a fellow be allowed to break his fast in
peace.’

‘I’ll have another go skiing,’ said Peter, loudly. ‘That Chianti has set me up nicely.’ His sticky-out-ears had changed colour, chameleon-like, to match the pink of
the awning.

‘Not me,’ said Ysabella. ‘That Chianti has set me up for a little nap.’ She trailed her gaze languidly around the little group, and, just for a moment, her eye met
George’s. There was a little electro-something, a spark. ‘A little lie down,’ she repeated.

‘Why, Ysabella,’ he said, testing the instinct. ‘Surely you haven’t overindulged, winily speaking?’

Ysballe looked him straight in the eye. ‘It was too tempting,’ she said, with a slight, voluptuous slur in her words.

‘Alcohol,’ he agreed.

George had met her for the first time only days earlier. But this – this was the inward vertigo, that exciting and alarming sense of hurtling into something new. Everything was all about
exciting possibilities. ‘What about you, darling?’ he said to Marie.

‘I’ve not come all this way to lie down,’ she replied, sharply. ‘I can lie down at home. I’m giving the slopes another bash.’

‘You could try the ice-cream slope,’ he prompted – because, after all, that was a whole hill away, more distant from the hotel, which would give him that much more time alone.
To cover the obviousness of this gambit, he added: ‘It’s the big feature, after all. People come from all over the world to, and so on, and so forth.’

‘Maybe tomorrow. Regular piste will suit me for now. Will you?’

‘No, I’ve done my death-dicing today,’ he announced. ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening in the games room. Or maybe just catch up on the news.’

News was a dirty word, and the group flapped their hands disapprovingly. Life was too short for news. But news was one of George’s little eccentricities, and he was perfectly
aware of the mild distinctiveness it gave his otherwise blandly unmemorable character. And now Marie was on her feet, so Peter scrabbled to his legs too, with just too much eagerness. And Ysabella
bade them all good afternoon and wandered over towards the lifts. So George got up and sauntered away, carefully picking a trajectory across the balcony that made it look like he wasn’t
simply following Ys. That was all part of the game, of course. And it was a splendid game. The Horner-Kings’ carer was emerging into the light carrying a wriggling bundle of tiny Horner-King
– superfluously now, of course; for the point in having her brought down in the first place was to show off to the others.

3



He caught up with Ysabella by the lift. They ascended together. Not a word was spoken. This feature of the tryst was something that George found almost more thrilling than the
prospect of actual sex. It was the thought that it was possible to arrange these things without ever having to spell out the awkward specifics in words. That an understanding could be arrived at
spontaneously, as it were; like leaves coming voicelessly to the branches of trees, or like whisky-coloured sunlight laying itself down intimately upon the white snow.

He kissed her in the corridor outside her room, and then they tumbled through the door like teenagers. Down they went, onto the crisply made bed. He grasped at Ysabelle’s splendidly ample
flesh, dug his fingers in to the contours of thigh and buttock. She pushed him away for a moment, dialled down the glass balcony-doors’ glass, and then was straight back at him, pulling off
his clothes with an efficient series of yanks and hoiks. In moments he was naked, and the fact that she was still fully clothed was – well, alarming, really. Perhaps there was simply
something subliminally intimidating about her muscular confidence. Not that this did anything to diminish the visible solidity of his desire. He wouldn’t be the first man to be drawn
precisely by the desire to be alarmed.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Shall we?’

He went to her, fitted his arms around her broad torso and began kissing her neck, and kissing her face, rubbing his fingers over her bristly scalp. She undid the catch and shook herself free of
her trousers. Her knickers fell to silky pieces with a twitch of her thumb. George’s heart was hammering. And in the moment the foreplay was a process of postponing the inevitable, terrifying
exhilaration. It was getting the top half of her clothing off, running his mouth and hands over her dark skin, the small, low breasts, the nipples like black olives. It was all that. But it
couldn’t be postponed for ever – and down we go.

Superfast, superfast, superfast.

He pumped away, despite the tiredness of his thigh muscles, for the longest time, all the while fumbling as best he could at Ysabelle’s cleft with his right hand. But it
seemed to take her a long time to get where she was going. She lifted her long, mannish legs and brought the soles of her two feet together somewhere behind George’s head. This neither
thrilled him, nor put him off. On and on he plugged, to a rising sound-effect of squelching that made him think, randomly, of jellyfish. The undersea kingdom. Bubbles, and bubbles, and bubbles.
Then – finally! – a mist of opal crept over the oily surface of her eyes, and she was gone.

Afterwards he got up for a piss, and loitered a little in the enormous bathroom. With a fine feeling of superiority, he poked a finger in amongst all of Peter’s myriad grooming products on
the mirror-shelf. Coming back through he helped himself to a glass of wine from the minibar, and lolled on the bed, watching the screen.

For quarter of an hour Ysabelle lay on her side. She snored with the noise of a fly trapped behind a windowpane. But then she awoke, with a shudder, and stretched out all her limbs enormously,
and got off the bed, and took herself off to the shower.

On the news, a stare-eyed US official, his widow’s-peak shaven into a cruciform shape, was being interviewed by a Japanese chat anchor. ‘Repetitive raiding heavily leverages our core
capability to break states,’ the US wallah said. The screen ran his words along the bottom: repetitive raiding heavily leverages capability to break states.

‘But if Triunion government retains its oppositional—’ the interviewer tried to say.

‘Triunion needs to understand the investment the US Government has already made in military intervention.’ He rolled the phrase ‘US Government’ into a single word:
five syllables compressed to three. ‘The financial investment,’ he added, as if there were any other kind.

George scratched an itch on his kneecap with a circular motion. To the right, the darkened glass of the balcony door had turned the bright sky to a shadowy gentian colour. We are the immortal
offspring of the heaven and the earth. The interviewer said, ‘Everything remains just as it was.’ The screen cut to a montage from Triunion. It was the usual thing: crowds surging like
fans at a music concert, up and down dingy-looking low-rise streets. All with their crazy trailing hair. Another shot of a courtyard, or a town square, or something, filled with angry-looking
longhairs. There was a shot of a military Quadpod pulling its metal legs up and hoofing them down again with almost comical fastidiousness, stepping over the tin roofs, striding up and down the
dirt alleys. The guns under its belly looked like ski-poles. People surged, washed up and down the alleyways. The guns spat and sputtered. Here was a shot of a crowd tugging down street-lamps and
rushing at the Pods like pedestrian Sir Lancelots. Here was another shot: the fat tiling of a wall of army riot-shields.

Ysabelle came out of the shower with a towel draped over her shoulders, but otherwise superbly, enormously, statuesquely naked. ‘What’s this?’

‘Riots in Triunion.’

‘I don’t want the specifics,’ she said, bending all the way down to the minibar to pluck herself a drink. Holding one of the miniature little wine bottles she looked for
all the world like a giant, a vrai giant, something splendidly and erotically Brobdingnagian. ‘What I mean: you’re watching the news?’

‘I like the news,’ he said.

She sat herself back on the bed, beside him. ‘I thought we sorted out Triunion last year,’ she said, shortly, perhaps so as to show George that she wasn’t entirely a news
philistine.

But, for some reason, George wasn’t in the mood to be placated. Something vaguely unsatisfying about the encounter was niggling at him. The sex, or the wine, or the anticlimax, or
something. ‘I don’t believe the Republic of Canada had anything to do with it,’ he said.

‘By we I mean,’ she drawled, looking through the half-darkened glass at the flank of the mountain. But instead of finishing the sentiment she took a swig of yellow-white
wine.

They were silent for a while. The interview continued onscreen for a minute or more: the US guy explaining the scaled punitive tariff that would be applied to Triunion if hostilities continued.
A barchart sprang up in front of him to illustrate his words; this many native deaths for this much resistance, this larger number if the unrest continued into next week, this much larger number
if—

‘I thought you Americans sorted out Triunion last year,’ Ysabelle said, shortly.

‘You’re right,’ said George, changing the channel. ‘It’s boring.’

They watched some sport; then a musical stab-match between two hard-pop superstars. Then they watched a book for a few minutes.

‘Did you say you had two children?’ Ysabelle asked.

‘Ezra you saw,’ said George. ‘There’s also Leah.’

‘And how old is Leah?’

‘Ten.’

They sat in silence and watched a whole book. Belatedly, George grasped that Ysabelle had been prompting him. So he asked: ‘You?’

Her posture on the bed relaxed marginally. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘How’s that?’

‘Do you think I have any kids?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he drawled. ‘How would I know, one way or another?’

She moved herself a little closer to him. ‘Come along Sherloon. Would you say my pussy is the pussy of a woman who has had a child?’

‘Sherlock,’ he said.

‘Sherlock, whatever. Use your little grey cells.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Would be my answer. I’d say that pussy is too pristine.’

The way she wriggled with self-consciously girly deliciousness really was not suited to her powerful frame. ‘I have,’ she purred. ‘I gave vaginal birth too – my
lovely Ernesto!’

‘You’d never guess,’ he said, trying half-heartedly for gallantry. ‘Not by the state of – uh, state of your pussy.’

‘Oh and Ernie was enormous, too! One of the largest they’d seen at the clinic. It’s a good thing, for the health of the infant, but hard work for me, and for my
pussy. But I had a genius surgeon called Mowat, called Lev Mowat, a graduate of the Moscow school. He did amazing micro-work up there. Amazing muscular work.’

‘Amazing,’ agreed George.

‘It’s tighter than it was before! It really is.’

‘I could,’ George began, starting to say I could tell. But this would be a ridiculous thing to say, for to say I could tell surely implied prior experience against
which he was judging it. Instead he said, ‘I can imagine.’

‘He did something with the nerve-endings too. It’s much more pleasurably sensitive in there than it was before.’

‘Excellent,’ said George, feeling uncomfortable. ‘That is excellent.’

Afterwards they strolled down together and had a coffee in the hotel’s Costa. The circular logo circumferenced the company name around the stylized representation of three coffee beans.
George’s eye kept drifting to the logo, and its beans, like three torn-out brown tongues. He was in a morbid sort of mood, really. Caffeine wrestled with alcohol in his streaming blood. Ys
chattered on. The encounter seemed to have perked her up.

Eventually they parted, and George hung vaguely about the games room for a bit. His Fwn murmured, and it was Marie – breathless and strawberry-cheeked from her exertions. They agreed to
supper à deux. After the call, George dawdled through the basement-level mall, and bought himself a complete new suit of clothes, all the while thinking that he ought to feel perkier
than he did. It was not that he felt bad, exactly; but there was an insubstantial sense of apprehension somewhere in his sensorium. He couldn’t pin it down. From the basement he
travelled up to the penthouse bar. He ordered a Poppy. He pulled a leaf of the hotel’s viewsheet from the dispenser, but found he couldn’t concentrate on the images, flicking through