Spares

I was Gone Away for a long time, at least several hours. I’d never been away that long before, and when I eventually got back I was exhausted, terrified, and alone. The return is like waking up from your seventy-fifth hangover in a row to find that you’ve run out of coffee and American Express has put a bounty on your head. I faded back into life with the vague feeling of having been summoned, and found myself standing in a thick section of forest which was clearly a very long way from the village I’d fled.

I felt guilty at having abandoned Vinaldi, but the truth of the matter was that I could have done no good by being caught. Splitting up was the right thing to do. People don’t just do it in horror films to make the movie longer—they do it because it means not everyone gets killed at once. Running had also been the best policy, bad though I was now feeling about it. Vinaldi had been captured, but I hadn’t—which meant I was still, technically at least, in a position to do something.

When the guilt subsided I looked around in an attempt to discover where I was. Trees still marched off in all directions, but the ground was rougher than any I’d seen before in The Gap. Large rocks poked out of the leaves and there were hillocks and depressions in the ground. The light was a dim greeny-blue, filtered by the trees. The light made it look as if the forest was underwater.

I had no idea where I was, or how to get back to the village. My bleary examination of the ground failed to reveal any sign of the leaves having been disturbed from any direction in particular; it appeared that I had just been beamed down out of nowhere.

The first decision I had to make was whether to take any more Rapt. Or rather, since I was obviously going to take some more at some stage, whether I should take it there and then. I could feel a residual buzz in the back of my head and knew that the buzz would probably stay at that level for another hour or so, but there was no telling when I’d come up against something which would require me to be utterly off my face to survive. Decisions, decisions.

“Soldier.”

When I heard the voice I thought I was going to die. All my internal organs twitched at once, as if trying to leap out of a body which they clearly believed was not long for this world. I dropped to the ground in a crouch, darting glances around in as many directions as I could without actually disengaging my eyes from their sockets.

“Soldier.”

I almost didn’t hear it the second time, because my heart was beating so loudly. But then the word was repeated again. It was coming from behind me. Naturally.

Using my hands to brace myself, I slowly turned to face the other way without standing up. There was no one there. All I could see was a collection of hillocks, covered in trees, shading off into the darkness like undulating dunes on the seabed.

“Yes, soldier. Come to me.”

I saw a flicker by one of the hillocks, and had a strange urge to get up, but stayed where the fuck I was. One of the things about Rapt is that you learn to heartily distrust your first impressions. Being in The Gap at all is ill-advised. The idea of walking voluntarily toward anyone you don’t know is stupid beyond belief.

“Come, please,” said the voice then, and I saw that there was indeed something standing beside an outcrop of rock about twenty yards in front of me. At least I thought it was that far; the figure, if that’s what it was, seemed surprisingly small.

I stared at it, trying to work out what to do. No point in running; if I’d been seen, I’d been seen. I’d managed to outrun Yhandim and Ghuaji mainly because they hadn’t been properly into space when I spotted them. Also because I can run like fuck when I’m scared shitless and have a head start. I was absolutely confident that whatever was standing by the rock now would be able to catch me within yards.

I stood cautiously, took a couple of steps forward. The figure nodded in encouragement and remained by the rock, waiting.

I decided I might as well walk forward into doom rather than catch it in the back.

The thing was indeed small, but it was only when I was within a few yards of it that the flickering light settled into something recognizable. At first I didn’t see a figure, as such, but an area of space which was simply darker than its surroundings—as if its grip on the world was limited to casting a shadow upon it.

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.

The boy joined me, followed by the rest of the children. From the way they stood I understood that we had not yet found what I had been brought to see.

About two hundred yards farther on, the boy stopped again, and glanced up at me, expectant. I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at. One of the little girls broke from the group and walked steadily until she was standing about ten yards in front. She pointed ahead, then returned.

None of the other children seemed able or willing to clarify the matter further. I walked forward alone, peering in the direction she’d indicated. At first I could see nothing except the huge trunks of trees, and then my breath caught in my throat and I knew what I had been brought here to see.

It was a gunship, resting on its side between two of the larger trees and looming out of the blue mist as if lit from behind. I walked toward it, mouth open, wondering how the hell the children had brought it there. I didn’t know why, but I was sure they had, just as I now understood it had been the children who had collected all of the other debris.

The few gunships that were employed in The Gap were of a very unusual design. Because of the omnipresent trees, they were built rather like a flying wing tilted on its side. The nearest comparison lean think of is of a giant angelfish; a shallow triangle bulging out to ten feet in width near the front, but narrowing to virtual two-dimensionality at the nose and along the other edges. Observation windows on either side of the cockpit enhanced this impression, looking like a pair of eyes. The windows were there for little more than cosmetic reasons, because flying the gunships through The Gap had been far too difficult for anything other than high-powered warDroids, which didn’t need windows to see out of. It was about ten meters tall and painted a dark olive green, with insignia stamped large and black on both sides.

And it didn’t look damaged at all.

The children stood in ranks behind me. There was no sign of what they were expecting me to do, so I just did what occurred to me. I climbed the ladder bolted onto the lower wing of the gunship and tugged at the entrance hatch at the top. It opened silently.

I looked down, hoping for some reassurance, but the children had disappeared.

I felt bereft, as if abandoned by everyone I knew, but this must be why they had summoned me. They would only have left because their job was done. I knew next to nothing about gunships, having only set foot in one once to haul out a drunken officer whose so-called expertise was required. He’d tried to bribe me by saying he could get me sideslipped out of The Gap. I threw him out of the ship.

I pulled the hatch wide and climbed inside. The door opened onto a narrow corridor which ran the walk-able length of the craft. To my right it gave almost immediately onto a rounded area slightly smaller than eight feet square. The interior walls were of heavily riveted metal, and stepping into the control area felt like climbing into a kettle which had been left on a hillside for a long time.

The glass in one of the observation windows at the front was broken, but aside from that the bridge seemed miraculously unharmed. Perhaps the gunship had never seen combat, or at least not been shot down. At the front of the open area was an array of computer equipment and monitors, sparsely covered with leaves. Before doing anything else I carefully picked the leaves up and dropped them back out the window. They hadn’t looked as if they were going to do anything, but you can never tell. They’re unpredictable bastards, leaves. The bulk of the floor space was taken up by two rows of three seats, with a little more perching space arranged around the sides. The back wall of the cabin was covered with maps and order sheets—we had to rely upon old-fashioned paper a great deal in The Gap, because computer results were unreliable. The computers that ran the gunships had to be furnished with absolutely enormous power, most of which was burnt up in error checking.

I felt almost nostalgic. Every piece of paper tacked there had the war’s logo printed in the top right corner. It had been a long time since I’d seen that little design. It brought back so many botched orders and flawed commands, each rewritten by the war’s Marketing Department so many times that by the end they didn’t really mean anything. What fun the Generals must have had, sitting back in the real world and directing frightened grunts at one remove. It had been the first chance they’d had in quite a while. Once people had started suing each other for bodily harm and property damage during armed conflict, governments had avoided wars wherever possible. They were just too damned expensive, degenerating into a thousand pitched battles in courtrooms. Often soldiers couldn’t turn up for important offensives because they were giving evidence in court or consulting with their press agents. The whole thing just became unmanageable.

Not so the war in The Gap. The villagers weren’t interested in litigation; they were interested in annihilating the race which had invaded their territory. It was a war out of the old school, and the Generals didn’t even have to provide body bags, because when soldiers died their bodies just disappeared. I lost so many friends, and after they died I had about two minutes to remember them before they vanished, absorbed into the fabric of The Gap.

Eventually, I went and sat at the pilot’s seat. Okay, so I’d found an old gunship. What now?

The children had brought me here for a purpose, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. I couldn’t fly this thing, didn’t even know where to start. The control panel looked as if it had been stripped at the end of the war. This machine was dead. The most use it would be to me was somewhere to cower when I ran out of Rapt.

Running my eyes over the grimy controls, I noticed an area where something had clearly been taken. A panel marked “IQ” lay open, revealing a small space inside. In the middle was an indentation, about four centimeters by two, with rows of tiny contacts along the edges. They still seemed to be intact, for what difference that made.

A breeze blew in through the window then, and I glanced outside. The mist was still glowering around the trees, but all was quiet. This was the longest period of relative calm I’d ever experienced in The Gap. Maybe things were different now, or perhaps the Rapt was still working. It didn’t feel like it. I felt tired and very nauseous—the familiar Rapt comedown. It was probably time to shoot up again, before anything happened, but I couldn’t face it just yet. There’s such a thing as too much fun. I lit a cigarette instead, thinking that actually there was nothing in the world I wanted so much as a cup of coffee.

I was trying to avoid thinking about Suej, and Nearly, and Vinaldi, and the spares, to find something to occupy my brain while I waited for my subconscious to come up with some probably unworkable plan. Perhaps that’s why it fastened so securely on the idea of coffee, on the notion that if I could just have a cup, my mind would clear and I’d be able to think of something.

Coffee. Just give me a cup of coffee! I could smell it, taste the welcome bitterness at the back of my tongue.

Coffee, I thought. Coffee. Then—

Ratchet.

In the pocket of my jacket was an object I’d trekked about for the last few days without remembering it, which was something to do with a computer, but wasn’t RAM. I pulled it out.

As I ran my fingers over it I realized that the chip Ratchet had slipped into my bag sometime during the last minutes at the Farm was about the right size to fit in the slot in the “IQ” panel. Maybe the number “128” printed on it was a code designation, or even a serial number, rather than a unit of measurement. And perhaps the “IQ” referred to intelligence, or the central processing unit.

I put the chip on the desk and frowned at it for a while. Then I reached forward and gently slotted it into the socket, with the number facing up. It fitted perfectly.

Nothing happened. I waited for five minutes, finishing my cigarette, feeling slightly foolish. Of course the chip had nothing to do with a gunship. How could it? Which left me still sitting in a piece of archaeology, with no idea what to do and with time running on and on. I ground the cigarette butt out on the floor with my boot, abruptly deciding to just get out, shoot up, and go running into the forest like some chicken gone berserk.

“Initial checking procedure completed,” said a voice, scaring the living shit out of me. I glared wildly round the cabin to see who’d spoken. There was no one to be seen, but a small camera in one of the top corners suddenly swiveled its beady eye toward me, and lights came on across the whole control panel.

Then the voice spoke again.

“Hello, jack,” it said.

My brain tried to crawl out of my ears.

“Fuck!” I said, when I could breathe again. “How do you know my name?”

“It’s Ratchet, Jack,” the voice said calmly.

“Ratchet,” I said, as my brain had another crack at escaping, presumably in a bid to find somewhere more explicable to live. I considered jamming my fingers in my ears, to firmly block that route, but then realized I wouldn’t be able to hear anything.

“Yes. It’s good to see you. I gather we’re in The Gap.” With a quiet whirring sound the camera zoomed in on my face. “Your pupils are pinned. Have you been taking Rapt again?”

“Fuck that,” I said. “Screw what I’ve been up to. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” said Ratchet. “I assume you brought me.”’

“Well,” I said, “yes, I did. But how did you get in my bag? You were still at the Farm when I left.”

“I was running on a back-up processor. When it became obvious that the events at the Farm were unlikely to have a uniformly positive conclusion, I put my main CPU somewhere safe, so you were likely to take it with you.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to die,” he said, simply. “Also, I hoped I might come in useful someday. Why are you in The Gap?”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story. But how come you can run this gunship?”

“That’s what I was built for in the first place. Not this ship, but another like it. At the end of the war the CPU’s were salvaged. Arlond Maxen bought up a job lot of them. I ended up on the Farm.”

“You were a warDroid?”

“Yes. I was.”

I stared at the camera, mind whirling, picturing war-scarred computers running traffic control and electronic toasters all over the country. It could explain a lot. “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew I’d been a Bright Eyes. Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”

“You didn’t ask—and I wouldn’t have told you anyway. The last thing you needed at the time was to remember the war. It wasn’t relevant.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s why you were so stupidly powerful. That’s why you were so weird”

“What—compared to you?” Ratchet asked, and I suddenly realized just how much I’d missed him.

Then I remembered the overall position, my global world view at that time, and the mood transformed into panic.

“Look,” I said. “Weird or not, we need your help.”