By Light Alone by Adam Roberts Page A

either way. He doesn’t. But he’s content for somebody else to come and shake the tree, see if anything falls out.’
    They got back in the car. ‘ Will you find her?’
    ‘I can’t promise I will, Mr Denoone. But I can promise I’ll try harder than they did.’
    The car bounced upwards. George’s stomach pressed into the cradle of his pelvis. Cloud hurried down to embrace them. A few moments of fog, and then up into bright sky again. The sun shone. They passed a few dozen metres from a seeding blimp, fat as a European socialite, or a New York supermodel. Then they were sweeping away through the enormous, compliant air of the third world.

14

     
    Awaiting his ride home to New York, Dot and George had a conversation in a bar at Tbilisi air-station. Used to travelling in the company of affluent tourists George found the surrounding press of beaky, harsh-eyed businessmen and -women unsettling. With only a very few exceptions, himself amongst them, everybody was thin . It looked shabby. Seedy, in fact. The predominant dress was advertising pinafores and ponchos. Which is to say: these people were so strapped for cash it was worth their while generating this trickle of cents, even though the garb was deeply unfashionable.
    George drank fruit whisky through a straw. Dot had a sherbet. ‘Let’s talk about why your daughter was stolen,’ she said, without preliminaries.
    ‘OK,’ said George.
    ‘No,’ said Dot. ‘Wait. A better way of coming at this would be: why, despite the earnest desire of the authorities to recover her, and despite all your money – which we can agree ought to lubricate things nicely – why has she not been found?’
    This last phrase was closer to George’s own language. He repeated it, with a Georgesque inflection: ‘Why has she not been found?’
    ‘So, Nic Neocles changed the world with his invention,’ Dot said, airily, ‘and nothing changed. That’s the thing, actually. Understanding that nothing changes changes everything. There’s no such thing as revolution . Revolution is just another way for things to stay the same. So, there were a few years of violence, but quick enough things settled down into a new pattern – a variation of a very old pattern. The oldest pattern, I suppose.’
    ‘You’re a little,’ he observed, ‘digressive.’ Was that the right word? But she wagged a finger at him and went on talking.
    ‘The situation in Ararat – which is to say, practically speaking, in Iran – is the same as the situation all round the whole band of the tropics. Wherever it is sunny, it is the same.’
    ‘OK,’ he said, assenting to he-knew-not.
    ‘At village level – or at city-block level in the cities – the bosses run the world. They give out the orders, and dole out the punishments. If a crime is committed in an area, you shake down the bosses, make things either uncomfortable enough, or provide them with inducement enough, to sort out your problem. Otherwise you leave them alone. So, if there’s trouble, lean on the bosses. They lean on the peasants. That works for almost any crime. Indeed, it works so well for most crime that we, higher-up, I mean, never even get to hear anything about it.’
    ‘Higher-up.’
    ‘I mean people who have some money, like me. Or people who have lots of money, like you. By lower-down I mean people who have no money at all . Once upon a time, even the lowest of the low had a little bit of money, because in the old days peasants had to eat. Had to eat or die. A dead peasant isn’t any good to a village boss. You can’t get any work out of a dead peasant. So village bosses had to make sure the peasants got subsistence monies – in cash or kind. Enough to eat, enough to live.’
    ‘The New Hair freed people from that,’ observed George.
    ‘Just so. Now, you might think it would have freed up the peasants to spend their small money on something else, to better themselves, whatever. All that utopian jibberjabber. But it didn’t.