the dusty lam bedspread, dressed in a whore’s finery she had put together from her own wardrobe. Like a drunken courtesan in the last hours of pregnancy, she stared glassily at Forrester as if not wanting to recognize him. As he approached she picked up the harness beside her on the bed and tried to strike him with it. Forrester pulled it from her hands. He held her shoulders, hoping to calm her, but his feet slipped in the vibrators and film cassettes strewn about the bed. When he regained his balance Judith was at the door. He ran after her down the corridor, kicking aside the display stands of pornographic magazines outside each bedroom. Judith was fleeing down the staircase, stripping off pieces of her costume. Then, thankfully, he saw Gould waiting for her on the landing below, arms raised to catch her.
At dusk, when Gould and Forrester had taken the distraught woman back to the hotel, the two men stood by the entrance in the dusk.
? In an unexpected gesture of concern, Gould touched Forrester’s shoulder. Apart from this, his face remained without expression. ‘She’ll sleep till morning. Ask the practicante to give you some thalidomide for her. You’ll need to sedate her through the next three weeks.’
He pointed to the silver stains on Forrester’s face. ‘These days we’re all wearing our war-paint. You were over at the hangar, just before I landed. Carmen told me that you’d accidentally stepped on her glasses.’
Relieved that the young woman, for whatever reasons, had not betrayed him, Forrester said, ‘I was trying to reassure her — she seemed to be worried that you were overdue.’
‘I’m having to fly further inland now. She’s nervous when I’m not around.’
‘I hadn’t realized that she was… blind,’ Forrester said as they walked down the street towards the canal. ‘It’s good of you to look after her. The Spaniards would kill her out of hand if they found her here. What happens when you leave?’
‘She’ll be all right, by then.’ Gould stopped and gazed through the fading light at the causeway of the airstrip. A section of the porous concrete seemed to have collapsed into the sea. Gould nodded to himself, as if working out the time left to him by this fragmenting pier. ‘Now, what about this baby?’
‘It’s another one — the same defects. I’ll get the practicante to deal with it.’
‘Why?’ Before Forrester could reply, Gould took his arm. ‘Forrester, it’s a fair question. Which of us can really decide who has the defects?’
‘The mothers seem to know.’
‘But are they right? I’m beginning to think that a massacre of the innocents has taken place that literally out-Herods Herod. Look, come up with me tomorrow — the Cerveras can look after your wife, she’ll sleep all day. You’ll find it an interesting flight.’
They took off at ten o’clock the following morning. Sitting in the front cockpit, with the draught from the propeller full in his face, Forrester was convinced that they would crash. At full throttle they moved swiftly along the runway, the freshly broken concrete slabs already visible. Forrester looked over his shoulder, hoping that Gould would somehow manage to stop the aircraft before they were killed, but the doctor’s face was hidden behind his goggles, as if he was unaware of the danger. At the last moment, when the cataract of concrete blocks was almost below the wheels, Gould pulled back on the stick. The small aircraft rose steeply, as if jerked into the air by a huge hand. Thirty seconds later Forrester began to breathe.
They levelled out and made a left-hand circuit of the empty resort. Already Gould was pointing with a gloved hand at the patches of phosphorescent paint in the hills above Rosas. Before the take-off, while Forrester sat uncomfortably in the cockpit, wondering why he had accepted this challenge, the young woman had wheeled a drum of liquid over to the aircraft. Gould pumped the contents into the tank which Forrester could see below his feet. As he waited, the young woman walked round to the cockpit and stared up at Forrester, clearly hoping to see something in his face. There was something grotesque, almost comic, about this mongoloid girl surveying the world with her defunct vision through these cracked sunglasses. Perhaps she was disappointed that he was no longer interested in her. Forrester turned away from her sightless stare, thinking of Judith asleep in the darkened hotel room, and the small and unwelcome tenant of her body.
Eight hundred feet below them was a wide valley that led inland towards the foothills of the Pyrenees. The line of low mountains marked the northern wall of the plain of Ampurdan, a rich farming area where even now there were small areas of cultivation. But all the cattle had gone, slaughtered years beforehand.
As they followed the course of the valley, Forrester could see that sections of the pathways and farm tracks which climbed the hills had been sprayed with phosphorescent paint. Panels of silver criss-crossed the sides of the valley.
So this was what Gould had been doing on his flights, painting sections of the mountainside in a huge pop-art display. The doctor was waving down at the valley floor, where a small, shaggy-haired bullock, like a miniature bison, stood in an apparent daze on an isolated promontory. Cutting back the engine, Gould banked the aircraft and flew low over the valley floor, not more than twenty feet above the creature. Forrester was speculating on how this sightless creature, clearly a mutant, had managed to survive, when there was a sudden jolt below his feet. The ventral spraying head had been lowered, and a moment later a huge gust of silver paint was vented into the air and fanned out behind them. It hung there in a luminescent cloud, and then settled to form a narrow brush-stroke down the side of the mountain. Retracting the spraying head, Gould made a steep circuit of the valley. He throttled up his engine and dived over the head of the bullock, driving it down the mountainside from its promontory. As it stumbled left and right, unable to get its bearings, it crossed the silver pathway. Immediately it gathered its legs together and set off at a brisk trot along this private roadway.
For the next hour they flew up the valley, and Forrester saw that these lines of paint sprayed from the air were part of an elaborate series of trails leading into the safety of the mountains. When they finally turned back, circling a remote gorge above a small lake, Forrester was not surprised to see that a herd of several hundred of the creatures had made their home here. Lifting their heads, they seemed to follow Gould as he flew past them. Tirelessly, he laid down more marker lines wherever they were needed, driving any errant cattle back on to the illuminated pathways.
When they landed at Ampuriabrava he waited on the runway as Gould shut down the aircraft. The young woman came out from the darkness inside the hangar, and stood with her arms folded inside her shawl. Forrester noticed that the sides of the aircraft fuselage and tailplane were a brilliant silver, bathed in the metallic spray through which they had endlessly circled. Gould’s helmet and flying-suit, and his own face and shoulders, shone like mirrors, as if they had just alighted from the sun. Curiously, only their eyes, protected by their goggles, were free from the paint, dark orbits into which the young woman gazed as if hoping to find someone of her own kind.
Gould greeted her, handing her his helmet. He stripped off his flyingjacket and ushered her into the hangar.
He pointed across the canal. ‘We’ll have a drink in your bar.’ He led the way diagonally across the car park, ignoring the painted pathways. ‘I think there’s enough on us for Carmen to know where we are. It gives her a sense of security.’
‘How long have you been herding the cattle?’ Forrester asked when they were seated behind the bar.
‘Since the winter. Somehow one herd escaped the farmers’ machetes. Flying down from Perpignan through the Col du Perthus, I noticed them following the aircraft. In some way they could see me, using a different section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Then I realized that I’d sprayed some old landing-light reflector paint on the plane — highly phosphorescent stuff.’
‘But why save them? They couldn’t survive on their own.’
‘Not true — in fact, they’re extremely hardy. By next winter they’ll be able to out-run and out-think everything else around here. Like Carmen — she’s a very bright girl. She’s managed to keep herself going here for years, without being able to see a thing. When I started getting all this paint over me I think I was the first person she’d ever seen.’
Thinking again of Judith’s baby, Forrester shook his head. ‘She looks like a mongol to me — that swollen forehead.’
‘You’re wrong. I’ve found out a lot about her. She has a huge collection of watches with luminous dials, hundreds of them, that she’s been filching for years from the shops. She’s got them all working together but to different times, it’s some sort of gigantic computer. God only knows what overlit world nature is preparing her for, but I suppose we won’t be around to see it.’
Forrester gazed disagreeably into his glass of brandy. For once the Fundador made him feel ill. ‘Gould, are you saying in effect that the child Judith is carrying at this moment is not deformed?’
