By Light Alone by Adam Roberts

the dam was about to give way, and just behind the barrier was something huge, and important, and sublime, balanced on the threshold of flooding down into the cosmos.
    But even the most transcendent sensations of tragic dignity don’t excuse us from the need to fill our hours with something. For lack of anything better to do, George went to the Fitzgerald Bar and started drinking. His new friends did not abandon him: Peter and Ysabella both found him there, and Ergaste too – even Emma put in a brief appearance, drank a single pomegranate-vodka and went off to bed, squeezing George’s shoulder as she passed him. ‘They’ll find her,’ Peter kept saying. Iteration robbed the words of weight. ‘They’ll find her, old man. Don’t worry. They’ll find her.’ George pondered that to say a word once is communicative, and to say it twice is emphatic, but to say it twenty times turns it into a trippy floating nothing. Utterance was strange like that. Was there something corroding his sense of dark eminence, his new tragic significance? Was something eating away at it from the inside? He knew what that was, intuitively. It was the true misery of the situation. But he didn’t want to experience that . This dignified centre-of-attention role-playing was much more agreeable. Keep that at arm’s length. The more Peter said ‘they’ll find her, boyo’ and ‘they’ll find her’ the more the fear was actualized that he would never see his Leah again . That sentiment was not the stuff of dignified tragedy. That sentiment was demeaning, red-eyed, wailing, snotty, unbearable loss of everything, and tears flowing, and choking, and intolerable, intolerable. ‘They’ll find her,’ said Peter.
    Peter was a little drunk.
    George kept drinking, but the booze all vanished into some inner void. It went into his inner cavities without so much as touching the sides. He sat straight up and stiffly. Misery-as-dignity, to keep a lid on his panicking soul.
    After a while they all went through to the Jazz Bar. A musician typed frantically at his piano keyboard. Tinkle tinkle tonk. This chappie wore a look of almost unhinged concentration on his face, the point of his tongue visible in the corner of his lips. George couldn’t decide whether or not he liked the fiddliness of it all. The open whale-mouth of the piano lid emitted filigree, unpredictable structures of sound. So big a mouth deserved a grander song. Ergaste was drinking Cognac. Peter and Ysabella both had glasses of Afghani fruit beer. Lights shimmered in waves across the ceiling, the fabric of the room imitating – what? – the pelt of a deep-sea squid. Two tables along a pokemon card game was in progress. Barks and whistles of surprise or pleasure erupted at irregular intervals from the players.
    George levered his right shoe off, and pushed his bare toes through the pile of the carpet. It was soft as sand. The pattern was one of those fat-pixel Persian carpet sorts: stepped triangles, blocky swirls, like images from the very dawn of the computer age.
    ‘Put your shoe on, man,’ boomed Ergaste, indulgently.
    George tucked his foot back in his shoe. He muttered the word ‘never’. He did this as though trying it for size on his tongue. ‘Never.’ Sour. ‘Never never never.’ It was a pulse. ‘Never never never.’ Say it enough and it flipped about: vernev, ver-nev, ver-nev. Repetition really did drain the word of all its bitterness. Here was the very cornerstone of magic.
    His wine tasted of jam.
    ‘I don’t blame Marie for pushing off,’ said Ergaste. ‘Traumatic environment for her.’ He fiddled a c:snuff dispenser up a nostril large as an eye-socket, and sniffed.
    ‘You’re bearing up, George. More power to you, though,’ said Peter, in his horrid Canadian voice, with its whining, ski-jump inflection. I could take this wine glass, George thought. I could take the glass and crenellate its rim to jags with my teeth, and I could grind it into your eye. But