They thought they’d finally gotten to the bottom of it when they stopped the writing of collapsing code, a language based on the way the human mind itself was shaped. When written with perfect syntax it would collapse in on itself, creating software with just one line, a line whose meaning was opaque even to the person who had written the original. The writing process became like a childhood, lost and unreachable. The software would work, and work marvelously, but there was always the fear that something else, something unintended, had been sealed in with the instructions. Especially after computers themselves were given the job of writing the code. They were better at it, much better than us, but their motivations were sometimes uncertain, and after the code was sealed it was impossible to tell what was in there. Perhaps things were being said that we couldn’t hear; perhaps this was a conversation humans weren’t invited to eavesdrop on anymore.
Once they banned collapsing code, The Gap didn’t get any bigger, so maybe there was something in that. But some of us believed that if any of the above was true it had only been a facilitator, a gateway that let us find something people had been looking for all along without realizing what they might find.
We’ll probably never know for sure because, now that it’s over, no one wants to even think about it. Trying to conquer it was a mistake, and nobody brags about mistakes. The war was kept quiet at the time, and the silence since has been ear-shattering. There haven’t been any movies about what happened in there, and there never will be. It was one defeat too many. It wasn’t even classified as a war, but as a training exercise, and you’d be surprised how many Bright Eyes have died in suspicious circumstances since it ended. Especially those who started talking about it.
You won’t find it in the history books, but it happened. I know. I was there.
We discovered how to get into the world’s subconscious, but instead of respecting it, and letting its good influence seep out into the conscious world as it always had, we tried to charge in and take it over, as if it was a new territory which could be owned. We found Eden, and napalmed it; found Oz’s wells, and pissed in them; found the mainspring of power which kept the real world sane and spread the virus of insanity throughout it. Maybe we even found the truth my father believed the real world hid; if so, we should have left it alone.
It was never officially called The Gap. It had several names, their length increasing with the seniority of the person who spoke them. But the only name ever used by anyone who was actually there was The Gap. And when they took us in, units of teenagers with nothing better to do except be the guinea pigs in someone else’s war, why did they make us stand in such a way that no one could see—or be seen by—anyone else? Because, I believe, that’s what The Gap was all about. Falling between cracks, being cut out of the loop, consigned to dead code, which has lost its place in the program and which nobody remembers anymore.
I believe The Gap is made up of all of the places where no one is, of all the sights no one sees. It comes from silence, and lack, and the deleted and unread; it is the gap between what you want and what you have, between love and affection, between hope and truth. It’s the place where crooked cues come from, and it’s the answer to a question: Does a tree exist when there’s no one there to perceive it?
It exists all right, but it’s in The Gap. And there will be many more of them, and they will not shade you from anything and they will not be your friends. A flash of images: hydraulic stumps; bloody necks; weapon jam; fear. None of it real, just a spasm of remembrance.
Then Ghuaji in front of us, but not completely there; only his clothes running off between the trees, banking and dodging as if under heavy fire. The truck roaring in the silence. And the trees. All the trees were there.
Flash again, but reaclass="underline" a sharp crack as the truck ran into a bank of trunks, Vinaldi and I flung forward to collide with the windshield. It cracked, but not enough; we spent the first seconds back in The Gap barely conscious.
Then it cleared and I swirled my head up and saw the clothes still floating into the distance, like a runaway laundry basket. I felt a moment of dismay—as if entering once more a recurrent nightmare, barely remembered during the day, but like an old soiled glove at night. An incommunicable dread; of half-turns and stares, of screams in the shelves and shoes poking out from beneath curtains in the middle of the night. “Come and see me,” the shoes say, but you know the person they belong to is dead and the shoes shouldn’t be there at all.
When I could still see the clothes half a mile away, I knew it was really so. It is so dark there, silky dark, and yet that doesn’t stop you seeing. You can’t imagine it unless you’ve been there, and when you’ve been there you can’t forget. The quiet, an ultimate stillness; but once you notice the silence you spend an eternity covering your ears against the noise.
It’s not a nightmare. However you explain it, it is not a dream of any kind. It is all simply there. And so were we.
Vinaldi slumped in his seat, shaking his head, whether against the crash or Rapt or The Gap I couldn’t tell.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “No, I’m not fucking all right.”
I shook his shoulder gently. “We’ve got to go now or well never catch up with him.” Vinaldi reached blindly for the gearshift and pushed at it, but it was like moving a rotting stick in a stream; it didn’t make any difference to anything. “I don’t think the truck is really here,” I added. “Come on. Get out.”
I grabbed as much ammunition as I could fit in my pockets, together with one of the pump-actions Vinaldi had thoughtfully provided, opened my door, and climbed down from the truck. On the other side Vinaldi did the same, and we stood for a moment, looking around us.
The darkness in The Gap is strange. It is like the lack of any light at all, because our sun has never shone on it, and yet sometimes it is like a slanting sunset or twilight in the corner of your eye. As you move your head you see different things, changing lights. For a moment I thought I saw late-afternoon sun glinting off the roof of the truck, and then all was silky evening and the truck was only colored space in front of me. The light in there is blue, for the most part, a blue which I have only seen in one place since.
In all directions, as far as the eye could see, were the trees. A forest of unimaginable age, rank upon rank of thick trunks shooting up into infinity. Sometimes it seems as if they are entirely separate from each other, at others as if they were all extrusions of the same thing. The forest floor was covered with leaves so densely that it seemed like there were no individual leaves at all but only a carpet of moleskin, covered with a fine and shifting mist.
“Which way did he go?” Vinaldi asked, rubbing his hand across his face. “Not that it makes much difference.”
“That way,” I said, joining him. “I think I can still see the clothes, out in the distance.” I couldn’t, but we needed some impetus. To stand still in The Gap is to stop swimming for a shark. You sink to the bottom, and can’t start moving again.
We started off quickly, both of us giving the vehicle a backward glance after a few yards, as if we knew that leaving it would commit us to being here. The truck was gone, which didn’t surprise me. You can’t carry large objects across all in one go. The vehicles used in the war—which were in any event few and far between—all had to be ferried across piecemeal and assembled in The Gap; even the machines which ultimately enabled us to be sideslipped back again.