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?’
Gould nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s not deformed at all — any more than Carmen. It’s like the so-called population decline that we’ve all accepted as an obvious truth. In fact, there hasn’t been a decline — except in the sense that we’ve been slaughtering our offspring. Over the past fifty years the birth-rate has gone up, not down.’ Before Forrester could protest, he went on, ‘Try for a moment to retain an open mind — we have this vastly increased sexuality, and an unprecedented fertility. Even your wife has had — what — seven children. Yet why? Isn’t it obvious that we were intended to embark on a huge replacement programme, though sadly the people we’re replacing turn out to be ourselves. Our job is simply to repopulate the world with our successors. As for our need to be alone, this intense enjoyment of our own company, and the absence of any sense of despair, I suppose they’re all nature’s way of saying goodbye.’
‘And the runway?’ Forrester asked. ‘Is that your way of saying goodbye?’
A month later, as soon as Judith had recovered from the birth of her son, she and Forrester left Rosas to return to Geneva, After they had made their farewells to Se–or Cervera and his wife, Forrester drove the car along the beach road. It was 11 a.m., but Gould’s aircraft still stood on the airstrip. For some reason the doctor was late.
‘It’s a long drive — are you going to be well enough?’ he asked Judith.
‘Of course — I’ve never felt better.’ She settled herself in the seat. It seemed to Forrester that a kind of shutter had been lowered across her mind, hiding away all memories of the past months. She looked composed and relaxed again, but with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin.
‘Did you pay off the practicante?’ she asked. ‘They expect something extra for..
Forrester was gazing up at the faades of the Venus hotels. He remembered the evening of the birth, and the practicante carrying his son away from Se–ora Cervera. The district nurse had taken it for granted that he would be given the task of destroying the child. As Forrester stopped the Spaniard by the elevator he found himself wondering where the man would have killed it — in some alley behind the cheaper hotels at the rear of the town, or in any one of a thousand vacant bathrooms. But when Forrester had taken the child, careful not to look at its eyes, the practicante had not objected, only offering Forrester his surgical bag.
Forrester had declined. After the practicante had left, and before Se–ora Cervera returned to the lobby, he set off through the dark streets to the canal. He had put on again the silver jacket he had worn on the day when Gould had flown him into the mountains. As he crossed the bridge the young woman emerged from the hangar, almost invisible in her dark shawl. Forrester walked towards her, listening to the faint clicking and murmurs of the strong child. He pressed the infant into her hands and turned back to the canal, throwing away his jacket as he ran.