Meanwhile Vinaldi slumped with his hands on his knees, sucking air in like he was in danger of imploding. I guess he did time in a health club or something; compared to me he was fucking Superman. I could feel my body looking on enviously, wishing I treated it that well. I hate fit people. They’re so undermining.
When we’d recovered sufficiently we looked around, slowly turning in a circle. All we could still see, for 360 degrees, was forest—except that the second time we went round, a stream had appeared. (That was normal; either there are more than 360 degrees in a circle in The Gap, or things just don’t work that way.) We realized then that our feet were wet, and thus we’d probably come across that very stream. A large group of leaves was standing on the other side, unable to come across. Though they didn’t have eyes—obviously, because they were just leaves—we could tell they were watching us. Also, that if we tried to go back that way they would stop us.
So we kept turning, and saw that what was behind us hadn’t been what we’d originally thought. It wasn’t simply more forest. In front of us, about half a mile away down a slight incline, there appeared to be a village.
“How did we get here?” Vinaldi asked.
“Fuck knows. Couldn’t you tell?”
“Are you kidding? I couldn’t tell who I was. I’d forgotten you existed.”
“I don’t want to go down there,” I said suddenly.
Vinaldi nodded. “Me, neither. But we’ve got to.”
“No, we don’t. We could go somewhere else. Maybe that’s not the place. Or maybe the clothes led us and it’s a trap.”
“Jack, it doesn’t matter if it is or not,” Vinaldi said. “I can’t stay out here much longer. I don’t have the Bright Eyes anymore, remember?”
It hit me then just how much courage he had. Your eyes were operated on the day before you were sidelined into The Gap. There was something about certain types of light in The Gap’s forest—though not the villages—that caused human eyes to burn out from the inside; so a chemical was laser-implanted in a thin layer over your retinas, and this seemed to prevent the light from damaging them. Back in the real world, this chemical caused a slight reflection in certain lighting conditions, hence the “Bright Eyes” nickname. Vinaldi had spent the last—Christ—two hours, I found by looking at my watch, in the forest without protection. He was either inordinately brave or an idiot.
“I’d forgotten,” I said.
Legs aching from the run, we tramped toward the village. For the time being, the light in the forest was both safe and almost attractive, as if someone had installed small yellow mood-lights behind every tenth tree. Like all settlements in The Gap, the village looked insignificant against the infinite spread of the forest, but also seemed to pre-date it. Even from this distance we could see the trunks which shot up through the thatched roofs of some of the houses, so thick that it could barely have been worth living in the remains of the shelter they provided. Nobody knows why things are like this, because nobody ever managed to talk to a local for long enough to find out. Before the first sentence was over one or the other of you would be dead. The problem with the villagers was twofold; firstly, their implacable ferocity, and secondly the fact that they weren’t visible all the time. They were easier to see in the dark, but by then you were generally seconds from death. The children were more visible, and seemed to be less angry at us, but they were often used by the villagers to carry mines. For years after I was sideslipped out, at the end—or abandonment—of the war, I couldn’t see a child without being scared out of my wits. It was only when Angela arrived in my life that their ghosts were laid to rest, and it was only when she and Henna died that I understood how much they had protected me from.
“Are you okay?” Vinaldi asked, after a while.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
There were about thirty dwellings, arranged in a rough circle around a central area, with two paths bisecting at approximate right angles. The huts were lit by orange light that slipped and flowed around them, like a golden tide. Sometimes, I knew from experience, this light would coalesce into the birds I’d seen with Nearly and Suej in New Richmond. These birds were brain-damaged and appalling but they always seemed happy, exploding into being like liquid flames. After a chaotic few moments they’d disappear piecemeal, like smoke drifting into a dark sky. The birds only lived in the villages, which were otherwise deserted. None of the villagers lived in the villages, and it seemed that they never had.
“So,” I asked, when we were standing a few yards from the edge of the settlement. “What’s the plan?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Go in there and see if we can find anything, I guess.”
Not a very detailed plan of attack. I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to hold the second Rapt wave off and keep my head in one piece. “Together?”
“Yes of fucking course together,” he snapped. “Or do you want to go see if you can find some small dark room at the top of some stairs and wander in there by yourself?”
“You don’t think tactically it would make more sense to split up?”
“No, I fucking don’t.”
So we went together, shotguns held at port arms, keeping watch on opposite sides of the path. As we entered the village we stared hard at the huts we passed, searching for any sign of movement within. The huts looked polished and perfect, as always, as if fresh-minted from imaginary materials. You could see the fine detail of each piece of straw in the thatch, the little bumps in the white mud of the exterior walls.
We decided against doing a search of every hut-partly to speed our first pass through the village, mainly because we were frightened. Doing a recce with The Fear is like wandering blindfolded into a room you know is papered with razor blades.
By the time we reached the center, our faces were dripping with perspiration and my finger was moist against the trigger of the shotgun. We were wired very tight, our time off from the Rapt running out. We paused there, listening carefully. There was nothing to hear, and nothing to see except tree trunks and huts.
“Vinaldi,” I said, “we’ve got to hurry. The Rapt’s going to come on again soon.”
He considered this, nodded, and then pointed up the path. “I’ll go through to the other side. You start the circles. If you see anything, shout.”
He crept across the opening and onto the other section of the path, warily looking all around him. I headed off at an angle into the clusters of huts, peering through windows and round corners, seeing nothing except tendrils of orange light. The huts themselves were antiseptically empty, sterile as if stamped from molds. In one, I saw a small collection of leaves in the corner, looking as if they were having a meeting, but nothing more interesting than that. The leaf meetings never seemed to amount to very much. I think it was just a kind of play for them.
When I’d finished the first quarter I crossed the path we came in on and went over to the opposite side. I caught a glimpse of Vinaldi, now at the far end of the village and heading back toward the center.
I was checking yet another hut when I heard a sudden sound from behind me. I whirled around, trigger all but pulled, and saw a small flock of the orange birds fountaining up out of nothing into flight. They chittered and guffawed happily before disappearing with a shudder of air. Then everything was quiet again.
Well, not everything. When the last of the flapping noises died away I heard something the other side of the village. A human utterance of some kind. My first thought was that Vinaldi might have found something and was calling out to me, so I abandoned the current hut and ran in a crouch back toward the central path.