Spares

by Michael Marshall Smith

  One thing has always summed up The Gap more than anything else to me. It’s a warning sign I saw, as a child, in front of a dirty lake. The sign was a perfunctory painting of a little boy who had fallen in the water. In the picture there was no one else around, just this child slipping deeper. His arm reached up, his mouth was wide with entreaty, but you knew he was going to die. “BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU PLAY,” the warning at the bottom said: “HELP MAY NEVER COME.”

  Ghuaji’s arm jerked out suddenly, as the rope was pulled taut. His eyes opened, and we knew they had because they threw a beam across the trees. Not of light exactly: a different view, a sideways glance. What we saw across his vision was something not really there at all, but which might have been. The rope jerked again and Ghuaji half-stepped, half-toppled, in the direction of the cat, which had now presumably found that door for which its kind had always been searching.

  “Start the truck,” I said.

  “Won’t he hear?”

  “All we’ll be is a patch of silence.”

  Vinaldi turned the key and the engine chugged into life; sluggishly—if we’d sat much longer it might not have restarted at all. We watched as Ghuaji staggered off toward the trees. I motioned for Vinaldi to follow him.

  “We can’t go down there in this,” he said.

  “Just do it,” I said. “And make sure you’re exactly behind him.”

  Ghuaji started to pick up speed, partly because he was reaching a steeper slope, mainly as the pull gathered momentum. As Vinaldi steered the truck off the road and down after him I felt the first twinge of Rapt, the forerunner of forerunners, insinuate itself into my system. “Christ, not again,” my brain said, but it knew it was the right thing to do, and perfect timing. The truck bumped down the slope and the Flip was stronger there, the space between things seeming to resist until Vinaldi had to push his foot down on the accelerator even though we were traveling downhill. Ghuaji didn’t turn, though we were only five yards behind. He couldn’t hear us. The line to the cat stretched out in front of him like a steel cable and it was pulling him so fast he was almost running.

  A thrumming sound started to come up out of the ground, melding with the noise of the truck to cancel out and add to the silence. It felt as if the truck were slipping into some slippery channel carved in air, the bumps from the rocky ground only turbulence. The trees were getting ever closer, Vinaldi’s rictus of concentration tighter, when Ghuaji dropped the rope and started running, just as I saw the cat come hurtling back up the other way. It had seen what it had found, and wanted no part of it.

  But Ghuaji kept running, and I screamed at Vinaldi to go faster, and the truck now hurtled down the slope toward trees only ten yards away. For an instant the interior of the truck looked like the inside of a tree trunk, all the surfaces mottled and lined, and I knew it was really about to happen.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Vinaldi said. He knew it too.

  “Look away,” I said urgently. “Took away from me and away from him. Head for the biggest tree then look away.”

  In that last instant before I turned my head I saw a huge tree trunk in front of us, Ghuaji now sprinting toward it, injuries forgotten. The tree was three feet across, a pillar of blackness, but now it was not a thing at all. In the darkness of its body I could see shadows of beyond, the tree now merely a gap in the impermeable space around it. Through the gap I could see the shape of other trees, trees which stood in a different forest in a different place.

  Then I yanked my head to the side so I couldn’t see either Vinaldi or Ghuaji, and watched the other gaps running past, jumbled and swirled as the truck crunched over boulders and fell after Ghuaji toward somewhere else.

  Vinaldi shouted at the last moment, as if trying to make the truck change course through words alone. By then it was too late.

  The truck hit the tree head-on and went through.

  At first they said it was the Internet, as it was called back then. They said the traffic on the network had gotten too dense, that this virtual world had grown too heavy and that all the man with the cat did was discover it had begun. They said all this, but it wasn’t true.

  Yes, the Internet snow crashed two weeks before The Gap was discovered, and they never worked out why. True, they had to switch to the alternative Matrix which was already in place, and the old net never worked again.

  But The Gap was always there, waiting.

  Then they said computer code was at fault, the little lines of syntax we’d thought were perfect and inviolate, simple instructions to simple beings, the chips in the wild inside, flowering up through meaning into function. We’d believed the languages we’d created were protected from ambiguity, but there was seepage from day one. The same sentence in English said with two different inflections creates slightly different meanings: turned out we hadn’t appreciated the difference situation made to code, because we didn’t really understand the way computers think. All the unspoken half-meanings we missed, the sly words, hidden implications; all of these, it was said, added up to something and went somewhere else and created another place.

  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 real: 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.

  “Are you Rapt yet?” Vinaldi asked.

  “No, but it’s coming,” I said.

  “Good. It had better. Because I’m getting The Fear.”

  “Perhaps we’d better run.”

  “You know something? I think you could be right.”

  We started trotting then, hopefully in the direction Ghuaji had gone, but I was already none too sure. For now the forest seemed quiet; as if ignoring us, but we both knew that wouldn’t last. Leaves started running beside us then, like children playing. Vinaldi kicked out at them, but I stopped him.

  “Little fuckers,” he said.

  “Better them than the trees.”

  We ran, faster and faster, as The Fear came. Its coming was like a return to everything you thought you’d left behind. Not just our memories, but everyone’s, until we were no longer really following Ghuaji but just fleeing from everyone and everything. Men, dead and wounded, spread in pieces around the floor and their blood not lying still yet. Children, jerking spastically toward us. None of this was here now, but it had been, and The Gap remembered. The Gap was full of ghosts, of the thousands whose bodies had disappeared before anyone had a chance to grieve or offer thanks.

  Vinaldi’s face flashed white beside me, our breaths labored and ragged; both of us had been smoking far too long to enjoy this kind of shit. The feeling of having a hand squeezed round my temples grew stronger and stronger as The Fear froze into my bones, and still we ran.

  “I can’t stay in here long,” Vinaldi panted. “I can’t do this for very long at all.”

  “Me, neither,” I said, as terror found yet more speed in our legs and we sprinted between the trees, a trail of leaves following us enthusiastically, pretending they couldn’t keep up but not getting left behind. The bark on the trees sniggered at us, but that was all right. It couldn’t move quickly enough to do any real damage.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, and then suddenly the light went out Vinaldi moaned beside me and we found ourselves in a huge bush, slicing against needles and spines. We kicked and thrashed our way through it, but the bush got thicker and thicker, and the worst part was that I knew that if we ever got through it then the other side would be even less fun.

  We found ourselves in the middle, face-to-face, unable to move or to see each other’s eyes. All we could hear was each other’s breathing, the sound sinister and loud. Vinaldi wanted to kill me, I knew. He wanted to reach out and pull the eyes from my head and chew them while he clawed the skin from my face. I wanted to do the same to him, but then suddenly the bush was no longer there, and the light was back—but it was yellow now, curdled and old.

  Vinaldi stared at me, stricken. “This Rapt isn’t strong enough, Jack. It isn’t helping at all. I was going to—”

  “Yeah, I know. But it’s all we’ve got.”

  “This is a mistake. We shouldn’t have come back.” “What the fuck’s that?”

  Vinaldi whirled to follow my gaze, and I realized: It was Ghuaji’s jacket The bush we’d clawed through was now several yards away and a bloodstained fatigue jacket was hung across it The cotton started unraveling itself, and the dried blood revivified in midair to form a small hanging droplet A twig from a nearby tree reached out and greedily sucked it up.

  Then Vinaldi grabbed my arm and pointed behind me.

  Ghuaji’s remaining clothes were standing fifty yards away, facing us. The clothes turned slowly, a
s if on a revolving pedestal, and then quickly glided away into the gloom.

  We ran after them through more trees, more shadows, until there were so many leaves around us that it was like falling into a tunnel of dryness. And finally the Rapt kicked in with a vengeance, and for a while we didn’t know where we were, or what we were doing, or who we were chasing after. For a little while, I don’t know how long, we were just two shadows in motion toward nothing, and it was exactly like it had been back then.

  I don’t think I could describe the war in The Gap reliably, not a single tree or village or death, despite the fact that I still see them in dreams and probably always will. I see the ferns and leaves, the blue light which sifted between the trees; I see the little towns, nestled amidst them like fairy-tale villages. But that’s not the way it really was. Part of being there at all was a knowledge that we weren’t really seeing what things were like, however hard we looked. Somehow the reality of it was always just round the corner, or hidden under a layer of light. We couldn’t trust the people, we couldn’t trust the land, and in the end we couldn’t even trust ourselves. We were like baffled, terrified children alone in a dark multi-story parking garage full of sadists.

  Partly it was the drugs. Eight out of ten people were off their face all the time. It was encouraged. It meant you coped better with The Fear. The other two out of ten were either drunk or crazy.

  I realized this within minutes of being sideslipped into The Gap, and made a pact with myself. I was going to do this thing straight, scared though I was. From the moment you set foot in The Gap you knew something was wrong, and every breath you took confirmed that knowledge and made it a part of your very metabolism. Fear ran through people like blood. Whether you were looking at someone huddled shaking into the roots of a tree, or standing proud with shoulders back and gun spitting, you were looking at someone who was mortally afraid. As I stood in the base camp on that first day and saw the shells of men around me, I hoped to God that I had slipped into some dream and would wake up very soon. “This can’t be the way it is,” I said to myself, already shaking. “They can’t all be like this, and even if they are I’m not going to join them. If I’m going to be this scared, I need to know what I’m doing.”