Then it resolved into a little boy, about ten years old and dressed in the strange conglomeration of rags and straps that Gap children wore.
He smiled and held out his hand. I just stared at it. Staring seemed to be about the limit of my powers at that moment. When I realized he was expecting me to take it I stepped backward, suddenly sure that this was a trap of some kind, or maybe a hallucination. Gap children aren’t insubstantial, like the villagers had been. They look real, or very nearly so. You can see them, and catch them, which is why… take it from me, you just can. For this one to look like it did there had to be something wrong with it.
The child didn’t say anything, or make any move toward me. It simply stood patiently waiting for me to make my mind up. It was that which made me decide that it probably wasn’t a trap—or that if it was, it was too clever for me to resist. I put my hand out tentatively.
At first I couldn’t tell when it met the boy’s, because his hand was thin and made of smoke; but then it seemed to gain a little solidity and grasped hold of mine. It was like holding a handful of water just above body temperature, and also reminded me, for some reason, of the first time I’d taken Suej’s hand to bring her out of the tunnel at the Farm.
The boy turned away from me then, indicating with his head that I should follow. Breathing shallowly, wondering what I was letting myself in for and just how much it was going to hurt, I allowed myself to be led.
While we walked I didn’t think of anything. I watched and waited for whatever was coming next. Gap children didn’t come to strangers, unless they had no choice. I couldn’t imagine why this one had come to me, or where we could be going.
It turned out that we were simply moving to the other side of the hillock. There, the child stopped and looked at me. Making a small motion with one of his hands, he turned away again. I raised my eyes to follow his gaze.
There must have been two hundred of them, maybe more. For the first few seconds they seemed limitless, stretching into the forest for miles like pebbles on a rock beach. Then I saw that they stopped more or less where the forest light faded into blackness fifty yards away.
It was a group of Gap children, all standing motionless in blue light. Rank upon rank of them, shadowy and barely there, and all of them staring at me. I heard a soft rustling and slowly turned to see that another group had come silently up behind us, almost as many again.
As far as I could see, in all directions, I was surrounded by silent children.
You never saw more than three Gap children in a group; they came and went in small handfuls. During the war, we hadn’t even been absolutely sure they were younger versions of the villagers. Some people believed they were a different style of being altogether. I used to wonder if even the villagers weren’t people, as such, but just our way of interpreting some other phenomenon, symbols for thoughts in The Gap’s mind—and that the children were different, younger thoughts. They had represented youth of some kind, though; which was why what happened had been unacceptable. I believed that even in those days, as a drugged-out teenager. After Angela, I felt it even more strongly.
The stillness was broken by a ripple that passed through the whole group. The ones nearest to me took little running steps forward, until they were right up against my legs. The ones behind pressed closer in, and I was about to scream when I realized what was happening. They were greeting me, and greeting me as a friend.
Silent smiles broke out on gray faces, all directed at me, and small arms reached up to touch my coat and arms. Not a single sound came from any of them, though their mouths opened and shut as if they were speaking. It was like being surrounded by a cloud of moisture that kept resolving and dissolving into hands and arms and faces. There were girls, and boys—some in their early teens, others little older than babies. Coming so soon after the thoughts I’d had while being Gone Away, their apparent affection was so unexpected as to be almost unbearable. It was as if I’d been brought back from being Gone Away to be shown exactly what it was I was missing.
Or, perhaps, that I could have it again.
After a while the contact stopped, and the group parted in front of me. The original boy led me forward again. The rest of the group was turning that way, too, as if preparing to move off with us.
Letting my other hand run briefly over the insubstantial gray hair of the nearest little girl, I took my mind off the hook and decided to follow them to wherever they wanted to go.
At the time I strongly believed that the children would be the most surprising sight The Gap had to offer. Half an hour later I was proved wrong.
We walked through the forest in silence, the boy steadfastly leading me and the others following behind. More than once I turned to check if they were still there and saw a column of them stretching back into the darkness. The ground remained rocky and uneven and, though it was difficult to tell, I reckoned we were gradually moving uphill. A heavy mist was collecting between the trees, white and soft and apparently lit from within.
After a while I began to see objects on the ground, guns and empty ammunition cases. I assumed it was random debris left over from the war, but as we progressed I knew that couldn’t be so. Most of the weapons had the U.S. Army insignia stamped on them, but others were of unfamiliar design, and had clearly once belonged to fighters from The Gap itself. A few lay haphazardly, but the majority had been collected into piles round the bases of trees.
Then larger pieces started to appear: moldy backpacks, broken radios, fragments of larger weapons lying tilted like gravestones in an abandoned churchyard. The children paid them no attention. Larger shapes loomed in the mist ahead, and as they resolved into recognizable forms I was forced to grind to a halt. The children didn’t seem to mind, and watched as I walked open-mouthed over to the nearest shape.
It was a jeep, a U.S. Army light vehicle of the type which was very occasionally used during the war. Most of the time we had to travel on foot, because the majority of the forest was very heavily wooded and the position of trees tended to vary from one minute to the next, but there had been a few jeeps of exactly this type. Mostly they were reserved for brass, and the joke was that the only gear which worked was “reverse.” I ran my hand over the cold metal of the vehicle’s hood, wiping the moisture from it. It was crumpled and bent around a large hole. From the damage and the thick coating of carbon, it looked like it had taken a hit from some kind of rocket launcher.
I looked farther into the mist, and realized that all of the other larger shapes bulking between the trees were also vehicles of one kind or another. A couple of hospi-Vans, a few of the small armored motorcycles that the villagers had found so easy to destroy, and maybe three more jeeps in various states of repair. I pulled at a hospiVan’s back doors, and they opened with a rusty squeal that seemed grotesquely loud in the silence. Rotting pieces of medical equipment lay broken and abandoned in the dark and musty interior. They hadn’t been able to use telesurgery in the Gap war, because the signals couldn’t make it across the divide, and so the banks of remote surgeons used in normal wars hadn’t been available to us. We’d had to make do with the hospiVans, staffed with terrified medics who were all at least as Rapt as we were and driven to vomiting panic at the sight of blood. I could almost hear the screams of the men who’d lain in the van, trembling and crying as people leaned over them with shaking hands.
None of the vehicles looked remotely functional, but that wasn’t the point. Someone had been traveling around The Gap collecting this stuff and bringing it here.
It was a memorial, a silent monument dedicated to a war which should never have happened.