Loop (29 page)

Phantom it may have been, but the image of the revolving arrow digging into his eye, leading him into darkness, was something he couldn't chase away. It was a dry run for the death that was dogging his footsteps. More than the pain, more than anything, he found that it was the emptiness of death that filled him with bottomless horror.

Every time he experienced death he found a renewed appreciation for the fullness of life. Life and death brushed up against one another, intermixed. For the first time, Kaoru had a premonition of rebirth.

His breathing gradually came under control. As he regained his calm, he lay down again on the earth and looked up at the sky, head pillowed on his hands. Through a gap in one rim of the valley the full moon had appeared. Men had stood on the moon once, decades ago. As a result, the actual existence of the moon was something that was now within the realm of human knowledge. Most likely the sun, too, was really there, at the centre of the solar system.

But the Loop's sun and moon were real to its denizens, too, while Kaoru and others knew that they weren't, not in a spatial sense. Beings in the Loop were merely programmed to perceive time and space.

This train of thought reminded Kaoru of something his father had repeated to him once, a remark of one of the astronauts who'd landed on the moon.

It was just like in the simulation,
the man had said when pressed for a comment.

That had stuck in Kaoru's memory. Before going to the moon, of course, the astronauts had been through any number of detailed simulations of the moon's gravity and other physical conditions, many of which had taken place in the deserts of America. Only after they'd experienced the moon walk virtually a number of times did they experience it as reality. What this astronaut was saying was that the reality was exactly like the virtual reality. No matter how fine the calculations, though, there should have been some differences.

Kaoru remembered the Bible's words about God creating the world in His own image. What exactly did it mean that the Loop had ended up looking just like the real world? In the Loop's primeval state life had not arisen naturally. Then the researchers had introduced RNA life forms. And these had become the seeds of all life in the Loop-they'd developed into a tree of life just like the real world's. Given that the Loop and the real world shared the same physics, it wasn't, perhaps, all that surprising that life should have taken the same form. But, to take a hint from the astronaut, shouldn't there have been at least a few differences?

Is this an epiphany?

He couldn't shake the thought that the real world itself was only a virtual world. Logically, the idea couldn't be disproved.

A god. A higher principle. There was nothing to stop Kaoru from accepting life as the creation of such a being. If this was simply a virtual world, then it was after all possible for the Holy Mother, as a virgin, to give birth to the son of God. Or for the son of God, having once died, to rise from the dead in a week's time…

With humanity on the brink of extinction, now would be a good time for God to come. If things went on like this, the whole world would turn cancerous. God had to be watching somewhere, invisibly.

Kaoru stared unseeing at the starry sky, pondering the advent of God.

He'd used up half of his food supply, but he'd made his way out of the deep ravine and onto the ridge. He was about to head northward, toward the mountaintop.

The scenery was locked away in his memory. Once in a while he would hallucinate seeing the tribesman, and that would call forth recollections, letting him know which way he should go. Kaoru emptied his mind and went where he was led.

Sometimes this tribal guide would appear standing on a rock ahead of him. He'd stare at Kaoru until he'd fully caught Kaoru's attention, then wave to him before disappearing up ahead. He never drew his bow anymore. His gesture was easy enough to understand:
Follow me.

Sometimes Kaoru would see things drawn on the brown arcing rock faces deep in cul-de-sac ravines, things that filled him with foreboding. He imagined they'd been drawn ages ago by the Native Americans who had settled here, animals and human faces expressed with varying degrees of abstraction. Geometric patterns that, depending on how you looked at them, resembled the double-helix structure of DNA. Kaoru realized he was nearing his destination.

He pictured the elders living in a huge cave, preserving a more natural way of life. He'd come to imagine the place he was heading to as an unexplored region, veiled in mystery. There the elders lived as naturally as plants, dressed in hempen robes. Their mission was to impart to seekers the knowledge they'd stored up over the course of thousands of years…

But Kaoru's expectations were betrayed. He walked for a day and a night without finding any ancient cave filled with relics.

It was getting to be time to wonder about his food supply, whether it would run out and with it his strength. Now was the time to turn back if he was going to. He still had a little food left, and if he could just make it back to where he'd left the motorcycle, he should be alright. The bike had nearly a full tank of gas, and the nearest town was about twenty miles, an easy ride. Maybe he ought to go back there and replenish his supplies.

He'd have to do what the situation demanded, he told himself, in an effort to calm his thoughts.

He couldn't let himself be trapped in a blind alley.

He'd been mentally referring to the beings that lurked here as "the Ancients". The question was how to meet the Ancients and learn from them how the world worked. His father's life, his mother's life, Reiko's life depended on it.

Somewhere along the line, Kaoru had started to see the Ancients as some kind of gods. But he told himself that he needed to consider the opposite possibility, too. What guarantee was there that they bore good will toward men?

As if to second that notion by allowing him a glimpse of malevolence, clouds raced across the sky. Since coming to the desert, he hadn't paid much attention to the sky. Day after day of clear, bright weather had lulled him.

From where he stood on the ridge he had a three hundred and sixty degree view of the landscape-he felt he could see to the ends of the earth. Now in an instant his vision was cut off by roiling clouds, and the sky was a thick ashen colour.

The clouds were moving in layers, hanging low in the infinite sky, until they seemed like they'd come crashing down on his head. The pressure was suffocating.

Expecting rain at any minute, Kaoru began searching for a particular spot on the ridge. The trees up here were short and their foliage sparse, he knew he'd find no shelter under their limbs. He was looking for something like a crevice between boulders. He'd seen several small openings while following the river upstream, but they were too far down the mountainside. Up here on the ridge near the peak, it wouldn't be so easy to find a suitable cave, he was beginning to fear.

A drop of rain hit him on the cheek. He tensed his body, ready to dash for shelter, but there was none to be found, only rubble. A few more drops spattered on his head. Then the rain let loose with an earth-shaking roar of thunder. The scene was so changed that its previous appearance seemed to have been an illusion. At first the parched ground drank up the rain, but soon it could absorb no more, and rivulets of water began to appear.

Kaoru had no option but to huddle where he stood. There was no escaping nature's wrath. For the first time in his life, he was afraid of the rain.

He had plastic bags in his rucksack, but only a few, and of what use would they be anyway? He had no tent, nothing to keep himself dry with. And even if he had brought a tent, it wouldn't have done him any good. He was soaked to the skin in a flash.

His sneakers were waterlogged and heavy. Each step squeezed out a little flow of water. Waterfalls ran down his back and belly under his heavy jean jacket. He couldn't see where he was walking anymore, and he began to be afraid he'd stumble into one of the torrents that had appeared from nowhere. All he could do was find slightly higher ground, firm footing, and crouch there.

His last bread was in his rucksack, wrapped in plastic, but he knew he hadn't wrapped it very well. It was bound to get wet and dissolve. But he couldn't eat it in this downpour. He was forced to stand there helpless while his food supply was destroyed. Then again, he thought, at least he'd have enough water. He opened his mouth wide to take in as much of it as possible.

But the rain was falling too mercilessly: it hurt to stand there with his face exposed to it like that. He had to squat on his heels again.

Looking down, however, exposed the back of his neck to pain. He couldn't leave any skin uncovered, it seemed. He moved his pack so it covered his neck, then hugged his knees and waited for the rain to pass. He had the impression that rainstorms in the desert never lasted very long.

But this one did. The raindrops did get smaller and smaller until they seemed to turn to mist, but then, instead of stopping, they returned to their former size and force, pelting the ground. It was as if the storm was mocking him.

His fear grew. The rain had robbed his body of all warmth, and he was chilled through and through. On top of that, it was getting late. Darkness, cold, and hunger. He thought of this rain continuing all night, and it nearly paralyzed him.

The temperature of the air was falling, too. The dimness of evening turned into pitch blackness, and the rain sounded even louder. He couldn't see, but he could feel someone close at hand, striking him on the back and the head. He was surrounded by people kicking and hitting him. He felt like he'd been cornered by a lynch mob.

But even worse misfortune awaited him. Suddenly muddy water was flowing around his feet, and when he jumped in surprise, he dropped his pack. He lost his footing, twisted and fell, and as he did so he lost his sense of direction. Based on recalled sounds, he groped around for his pack, but to no avail. He touched the ground with both hands, feeling out a circle around where he lay on his back, but found nothing. It could be just a little ways away, or it could have been carried off by the current. It was all the same to him: the pack was gone.

Kaoru stayed still in the midst of the darkness, unable to move freely. He'd have to rely on his sense of touch and his hearing now. If the water eddying around his feet rose to cover his ankles, he decided, he'd have to move, but to where? He'd have to hear and feel his way to where the water wasn't as deep.

He was a worm, squirming in the mud. He'd seen worms that had crawled up out of cracks in the asphalt after days of heavy rain, only to be caught and dried up by the burning sun. Why did worms crawl out of the ground after the rain anyway? One theory was that they were trying to escape the carbonic acid gas dissolved in rainwater; Kaoru didn't know if this was right or not. Poor creatures-they finally crawl out of the dirt and get out of the rainwater, only to be dried up by ultraviolet light. Was it the light that drew them, despite their weakness to it?

Kaoru would settle for even the tiniest bit of light at the moment. He'd been in utter darkness for hours now. How many hours, he didn't know, as he'd lost all sense of time. He couldn't even see the hands on his watch.

Without being sure of the lay of the land around him, he couldn't walk anywhere. On the way up he'd seen numerous hundred-yard drops. If he wandered off now he might step right into a yawning crevice.

He thought he heard the sound of falling rock somewhere close by. He stiffened with fear. Several boulders rolled by, shooting pebbles when they hit them-he could feel the air move with their passage. The rain must have softened the ground enough to start a landslide. But then the rumbling abruptly stopped, right in front of him. There could be only one explanation: there must be a ravine directly in front of him. As the falling rocks pitched into empty space, they ceased making any sound. He was sure of it. He was on the edge of a gaping maw.

He backed up, sliding along the ground on his back. He had to put some distance between himself and this pit whose depth he couldn't know. It was an instinctive thing. His feet slipped once, and he slid back down a couple of feet, and even that was enough to set the muscles of his buttocks trembling.

He was taking the rain full in the face now, and by and by he was becoming oblivious to the drops pounding his cheeks. No doubt tears were coursing down his face, too, but the Kaoru that wept seemed like somebody else.

Illusions crowded in on him with frightening force. He saw himself clinging to a rocky outcropping amidst towering waves, waist washed by the sea, and then again he saw himself being sucked into a bottomless swamp, sinking deeper into the ground the more he squirmed.

And then every time he managed to shake off the delusions, to recover his grip on reality, he was left with an overpowering consciousness of death. His body was nearly frozen, and his senses were about to give out.

I'm going to die from rain.

He'd never, not once in his life, worried about rain. It had simply never occurred to him that it could kill him. It was comical, really. Here the whole world was about to die of cancer, and meanwhile he was going to die of a little rain.

He realized it had been quite some time since he'd been rained on enough to get wet. He remembered a late afternoon shower about a month ago: he'd stood by the window on the top floor of the hospital and watched it. One moment the clouds beyond the thick pane of glass were changing color, and the next moment the streets below were wet. That pane was all that separated him from the outside, but it looked at that moment like another world.

Reiko had been with him. Shoulder to shoulder they'd stood in the air-conditioned hallway; Kaoru had been glad for the shower, as it hadn't rained for a while. He'd looked on it as a blessing then. Ryoji was still alive, and new life had just begun in Reiko's womb.

Rain was rain, but what had once seemed like heaven now felt like hell.