“Bullshit. And if the whole thing was just some sort of fucked-up code zone, like they said, why couldn’t someone have found some way of hacking back into it?”
I shook my head. “That’s only what they said it was.”
“You don’t agree?” Vinaldi spoke with heavy irony, which I supposed was fair enough.
“No,” I said, “I don’t.”’
Then we both saw Ghuaji. He was limping out of the old Farm building with something on a long piece of rope. The soldier was walking slowly and awkwardly, one leg dragging painfully behind. It was too far for us to see any detail, but I thought it fair to assume that he would be hurting badly by now, the wounds in his head and body reopening and trying to pull his body down to where it so much wanted to be: six feet below the ground, in a kind of peace. Instead, he was trying to return it to somewhere it should never have been in the first place.
“What the hell’s he holding?” Vinaldi whispered. “And is this going to work, if we’re watching?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s a cat,” Vinaldi said. “There’s a cat on the end of that rope.”
The cat was small and thin, and in the dim lights radiating from Ghuaji’s car it looked ill and underfed. This wasn’t some pet which had been drafted in for the day. This was an animal which had been brought here some weeks ago, for a particular purpose. The fact it was still here proved that whatever experiment it had been a part of had succeeded. The further fact that it didn’t look as if it had been fed in the meantime, but simply left in the old Farm building until it was needed again, proved simply that Maxen and his accomplices needed nothing quite as much as they needed a good solid kick to the head.
So Maxen actually had found a way back in. Probably, whatever it might be, it couldn’t have worked unless Yhandim and the others had been trying to come the other way too, but worked it obviously had. Perhaps sometimes the two sides had to touch each other. I don’t know. Chance, fate, or darker forces at work, it didn’t really matter. There was no more room for pretending. Twenty years were going to be stripped away today.
We were teenagers, you know. Eighteen, nineteen. That’s how old most of us were when they sent us into something we didn’t understand. They left us there until they realized we weren’t going to win, and then they pulled us out and threw us away—except that when they brought our bodies out they didn’t check hard enough to see if they’d brought out our souls, too.
Ghuaji leaned inside the car and turned the engine off—luckily Vinaldi was ahead of me and killed ours simultaneously. The mountain and the sky were very quiet, the only sound that of Ghuaji’s feet crunching through the snow, and of our own hearts beating. Warmth and cold, getting closer to each other all the time.
“He’s going to see us,” Vinaldi whispered.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied. “I don’t think he’s going to be seeing anything very much at the moment.”
“He got here, didn’t he?”
“He did, but he’s also had a bullet through his head. Maybe it wasn’t him who was directing. Maybe he got pulled this way.”
“Don’t start with that shit again,” Vinaldi said. I shushed him as Ghuaji passed over the road thirty yards ahead of us. There was next to no light, and he was looking the other way, but it was still bizarre that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of moonlight glinting off the angles of our truck. That same light caught the side of his head for a moment and I saw blood there, and a darkness on his shirt. He was close to the end—if he didn’t find the way in quickly he was going to die, and our hopes along with him. Suej and Nearly had already been gone for twelve hours. I didn’t want to think about what might already have happened to them, or to the other spares.
The cat on the end of the rope was padding through the snow after Ghuaji, each foot pulled high against the cold. She saw us, certainly—for a moment her head turned and stared at the truck as if concerned that it was in imminent danger of exploding. But then she lost interest and moved forward again, peering around at the world.
When he was about five yards the other side of the road Ghuaji stopped walking, and stood still, head down. The cat padded past him and into the trees at the edge of the compound, trailing the rope behind her.
“What the fuck is going on?” Vinaldi demanded, panicky.
“You must have heard the story,” I said. “How The Gap was found?” Now that it was all going down I felt strangely serene, the way you feel in the seconds after you’ve had a bad car accident. It’s almost as if you know, all your life, that something bad is going to happen to you, come what may: and as if in those seconds, once it has happened, you find your only moments of peace, of relief from the tension of waiting for the ax to fall.
“Heard a hundred stories on the first day,” he said irritably. “Didn’t listen to any of them.”
I nodded. “I heard a few, too, but only one that ever seemed to make any sense.” The cat was ambling around the bases of the trees now, going about cat business, whatever that may be.
“Is this going to be more hippie bullshit?”
“A guy was watching his cat one day,” I continued, ignoring him. “Nowhere near here—out on the West Coast somewhere, and maybe the original guy was some kind of space cadet. Anyway,” I said, pulling my spike out of my jacket pocket and laying it on the dashboard. “This guy spends a lot of time watching the cat, and realizes one of life’s great truths.”
“What was that?” Vinaldi eyed the needle on the dash with suspicion. I opened the two packets of foil, laying them out carefully on the screen of the Positionex.
“A cat’s always on the wrong side of a door,” I said. “You don’t let it out of the house, then outside’s exactly where it wants to be—until you do let it out, when it suddenly needs to be back inside again. You keep it indoors, it always wants to be inside the cupboards—until you shut it in one, when it suddenly wants to come out again. You put a cat down anywhere on the earth, and it’s going to go looking for somewhere else to be.”
I glanced outside to see that Ghuaji was still motionless, and that the cat had worked its way round to the far end of the compound, still sniffing, still looking around. Then I lifted the bottle of Jack’s from the floor and poured a little into the cap of the bottle. I put the tip of my finger into the whiskey and carefully carried the drop of liquid over to one of the foils. I repeated this with the other foil and then watched as the two small piles of Rapt deliquesced. Within seconds there were two pools of concentrated liquid, sitting like mercury on the foil.
“This guy thinks about this for a while, and wonders what the fuck the cat is looking for. He gets the idea in his head that there’s some final door somewhere, and all cats are searching for it. So one day, when he’s stoned and has nothing better to do, he lets the cat out and decides to follow it. First thing the cat does, of course, is come straight back in again. Naturally. It’s a cat. Then after a while it goes back outside, and wanders out into the yard. And this yard, okay, backs out onto a forest, and the cat is used to trailing around out there. So the guy follows it, at a distance, and watches while it does what it normally does.”
“I think Ghuaji’s dead,” Vinaldi said.
“No, he isn’t,” I said. “Now listen. There isn’t much more. This guy follows the cat all day as it tromps round the forest.”
“Must have been good dope he was on.”
“He watches the way it goes behind trees, goes into hollows, comes back out again, generally cats around. And then—”
“Something’s happening,” Vinaldi interrupted.
“What?”
“I don’t know. But I saw something.”