What if the world that cats see is not entirely real?
In earlier days, before the phantoms came, the cat could not even speak, let alone set out on the path of a legendary life. In those days, the cat was nothing more than just an ordinary cat.
One day, the cat was put into a new room. There were no windows; there was a bowl of water and a bowl of food; and there was a meticulous design to the space. A series of wooden planks extended from the walls, rising gradually in a pattern, turning the corners, like piano-key stairs. These steps encircled the room, on all four walls. A camera, quiet and aloof, gazed down from one high corner, recording all that happened below.
The cat first positioned itself in the center of the strange room. Then it sniffed in a circle along the foot of the wall, neither hurried nor slow, establishing a familiarity with the area. Its eyes swept over all the stairs that could be climbed, making designs on the ones it was confident of reaching. The cat pointed its nose toward the lowest board and then jumped lightly up to it with an easy shrug of its shoulder blades.
The cat surveyed the room once again from its new, slightly elevated station, walked a tight circle around the plank, rubbing its scent on it, enjoying a small sense of accomplishment.
The second board was not near enough to smell, but the cat knew instinctively and precisely the force and angle required to jump up to that one. As if it had practiced this move thousands of times, the cat leapt easily, and in a moment it stood on the second board.
Then the third.
Then the fourth.
Soon the cat had traveled halfway up the first wall and had turned a corner where one wall folded into the next.
Then, something unexpected happened.
Though the jump to the next board should have been completely within the scope of its abilities, the cat found nothing where its paws should have landed, and it plummeted toward the floor. Instinct traveled one step ahead of consciousness, and the cat’s body twisted reflexively. It landed on the ground, upright, scared but not injured. The cat was not at all certain what had gone wrong.
After a brief rest, the cat climbed up the wall once again, up onto the board set just before the stair it had missed. There was no mistake; the plank was clearly there, completely within range, not even a challenge really. The cat jumped out and up once again, but once again its feet found nothing there, only empty space. The cat landed, shaken but unharmed, on the floor.
Now the cat felt a growing sense of panic. It cried out for its master, that is, the human the cat thought of primarily as the “person in charge of shit-scooping,” among other essential roles. “Lab technician,” “experimental scientist”—these were identities that could only concern humans. Relationships with humans were very simple for the cat: the cat was calling for the person who was supposed to heed its call, who was supposed to appear at a time like this. That person did not appear.
The cat accepted for the moment that it could only depend on itself in this present situation. After returning to the highest board it could reach and after stretching out briefly and pensively on its belly, the cat once again faced its challenge. This time, after long observation and study, the cat chose the next board, one level higher. This jump would be more difficult, riskier, but it seemed to be the only option.
The cat first raised its head high, and then crouched, taut like a bow ready to loose an arrow. The cat stared fixedly at the target, eyes bright.
The cat had always been curious and bold; it was not accustomed to backing away from a challenge. The cat did not yet know the price it would eventually have to pay for these qualities.
The cat sprang, sailing in a high arc, well over the false step and landing firmly on another true, solid board. It released the breath it had been holding in. The world was normal once more.
However, that normal did not last. When the cat attempted the next board, it again found nothing there, and again it fell. It was just as if the board, which the cat could clearly see, had never been there at all.
The cat felt actual distress now, and it wailed for a long while. It shrank into a corner of the room and dared not move. The cat fervently wished for the person to come in as he normally would, to offer comfort and to carry the cat away from this place. The cat wanted to be back in the other room, its real room, where everything that it saw was actually there.
But for that the cat would have to wait a long while. The scientists knew that as long as the cat could still see and trust the reality of the levels of food and water in those two bowls, their work was far from over.
What if a person was completely disillusioned, left uncertain of all they thought was true, within a single day?
Little Gebu was celebrating the worst birthday in all his eleven years of life. His entire family surrounded him, candlelight illuminating their smiling faces. Gebu wanted to cry.
Instead of receiving his birthday wish, today Gebu had seen through the lie of his entire life. He had learned that he had been a foundling, an orphan, that these were not his real parents.
Little Gebu already missed seeing these faces shining beside him as “Mom” and “Dad.” They had been Mom and Dad to him for as long as he could remember. He had screamed into those faces in fits of anger, and he had rushed at those faces to beg them for comforting embraces and fierce kisses.
All that was changed now, and he regretted miserably that he had hidden in the closet for a nap and overheard their conversation, and now his life could never be how it used to be.
The smiling faces looked at him expectantly. Little Gebu forced his own smile and blew out eleven candles.
The sound of everyone talking at once and over each other in the darkness reminded him to make a wish. But before he had time to think of anything, the lights came on. In the embarrassment of the bright room, Gebu didn’t even have time to let a tear fall from his welling eyes.
The cake was quickly carved and pillaged, and Little Gebu’s face was soon smeared with icing. Everyone, it seemed, came around to give him a thorough cleaning with their napkins. His eyes blurred over again in the midst of the sounds of song, and he watched misty visions of people dancing.
The party had ended, and Little Gebu felt like a child who had fallen out of favor. He felt disgraced. He did not exactly feel that he had received anything or lost anything. Neither feeling, nothing at all that he could imagine in this world, would make him feel at ease again. Nothing could give him peace; it did not matter whether his family was cold to him or warm and loving. He felt a nervous, uneasy prickling in his spine. Everything was upside down.
Little Gebu had fled to the city’s lookout point, a small pavilion on the hill. A man slept on a nearby bench, drunk, and Gebu envied him. Pigeons foraged among the cobblestones. Gebu clenched his fists, still covered with cake crumbs, and he did not offer the crumbs to the pigeons.
The anger Gebu felt toward his parents had calmed. He was not an unreasonable child. Still there was something lodged in his heart that burned with another kind of fury. What was it exactly? He could not say.
A white cat jumped up onto the stone fence, and now Little Gebu spread his palm open. When the cat lowered its head to look at the offering, Gebu said, “Little white cat, all these things that have happened, all this that I’m feeling… I don’t know who to blame, and I have no one else to talk to. Can I talk to you? Would that be all right?”
The cat buried its face in Little Gebu’s hand and licked the cake crumbs from his palm with a slight sandpaper scratch. Below them, white houses spread down the mountain, layer after layer, and mirrored the bright afternoon sun. Waves of heat rose up from the asphalt of the streets, distorting and deforming the view. Gebu could see in the distance that people were lining up at the well to pour cool water over their heads. Others hurried on their way home along the streets, trying to stay under the shadows of the houses. Driving along the roads, as always, were a few decrepit automobiles. The cars in the city looked as if they were forever just about to fall apart, but somehow someone always patched them up. The very edge of the city lay at the foot of the mountain, and just beyond that point rose an enormous translucent barrier, like the glass wall of an aquarium. From any perspective within the city, the wall seemed to rise higher than the top of the mountain. That wall drew Gebu’s eyes now as it always had.
He had been taught these things in school along with his classmates, and many adults had looked sternly into Little Gebu’s eyes and spoken the same warning: Beyond the wall is an unfathomable and perilous world. Do not be tempted by curiosity about that world. Curiosity will kill the cat.
Gebu cultivated seeds of doubt in his heart about these teachings. He had packed for himself a small treasure chest; inside he kept a backpack, a water bottle, food that would not spoil, as well as a compass, matches, and other supplies. Every night he imagined braving the danger and having adventures in the world outside the wall. He was determined to one day go out beyond the barrier.
He finally understood why he was angry. Now that he knew he had been abandoned and adopted, didn’t that change the situation entirely? Didn’t that mean that leaving the city would no longer be running away from home? Maybe it now meant that he was escaping to look for his true home.
“But am I going to bite the hands that have fed me, Little Snowball?” Gebu asked the silent white creature.
Snowball finished licking the cake crumbs clean, and then made a circle around its own mouth with a rough tongue. It purred gently, as if agreeing to something.
“I want to be you, to become a cat like you,” Little Gebu said.
The cat looked away toward the city under the mountain. Its eyes were bright, translucent like crystals, like a clear sky. Gebu climbed up onto the railing, looking in the same direction as the cat. Through the barrier, colors were visible, but the objects beyond were rarely clear. Sometimes the wall appeared as a sheet of pure azure; sometimes there glowed rays of a multicolored sunset; sometimes there was the perfect solid yellow of daylight. But now Gebu saw a different yellow, one he had seen often at the wall before, the slow boiling rise of dust. Soon the color had risen halfway up the barrier’s height, roiling more violently the farther up it climbed. The wall shook with the impact and clamor of millions of tiny collisions. Gebu knew that if he could hear this sound from such a distance, it must be a true sandstorm, and one more powerful than he had ever seen in his eleven years.
The sky went black.
Little Snowball’s ears pressed flat against its head, and the fur on the cat’s back stood straight. The front half of its body stretched forward and pointed, staring with alarm at the distant scene.
Little Gebu comforted the cat saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay. No sandstorm can break through the wall. It’s not possible. Don’t worry.”
The wind roared, and still the clamor crescendoed. The yellow cloud was hurtling upward and would soon reach the top of the wall, which now shook violently. Somewhere in the city an alarm wailed. It was a sound Gebu had never heard before, though he knew instinctively what it meant. The entire city seemed frozen by the shock of that siren. It had come too late. There was no time to react before the barrier cracked.
A burst of yellow dust rushed in, and as it did, it was suddenly no longer dust, but a giant snake whose single head split into several heads, each turning down a different side street. The single cloud was soon followed by many more, and the city erupted in howls of terror that drowned out the siren and rang out long after the alarm was silenced.
“The phantoms are here! They’ve gotten through!” Little Gebu heard someone nearby shout in despair. He was surprised to discover it was the drunk, who had awakened and was now running down the uneven stone steps.
“Run!” Gebu screamed at Snowball with a low intensity that carried through the chaos. And the cat was gone like a wisp of smoke, even before his shout had ended.
Little Gebu ran for home. When he was only halfway there, the sand engulfed him, digging grooves in his cheeks. The city at the foot of the mountain seemed to have transformed into an enormous bonfire, flames licking up from every house. Yet the flames seemed frozen, like crimson crystals. The streets burned, or seemed to, and fiery crystals shot up like bestial walls, baring red teeth and brandishing red claws. He had been taught about the phantom weapons, but this was the first time he had seen the illusions for himself. He watched closely as the flowers in front of the flower shop became skeletal arms, green smoke rising from charred flesh. The shop’s owner screamed and threw the flowers to the ground. Soon the shop was gone from his vision as the phantom of flame swallowed up the road and everything on it. Little Gebu, too, found himself completely engulfed by flames, like a bug that had fallen into the belly of a flower. The flame gave off no heat and had no substance, but still it cost Gebu all of his determination to dare to push against those fiery walls. A car plunged through the front of a curbside restaurant. Gebu could not see it clearly, but he could hear the squeal of tires and the shattering of glass and wood. When a tire rolled past him, so near that he could see it faintly through the phantom flames, Gebu took a step back in surprise. He felt for the streetlight poles at the side of the road and used his memory to wend his way forward. He saw many other people groping their way along the street, some couples holding onto each other, some small groups huddled together, shivering and weeping.
Somehow Gebu seemed less affected than many of the others. He found he was able to close his eyes, to deny the phantoms and not be overly disturbed by the illusions. Up ahead Gebu felt himself nearing the intense heat of a real fire. He nearly tripped over something, paused, and then moved forward cautiously. He discovered a tangle of ruined cars blocking the road, all of them burning with real flames. He dared not close his eyes now, and he knew this route he had chosen was impassable.
He hid in a nearby grocery store. Inside, the store had become the belly of a monster. Dark red intestines wriggled across the walls, spraying a fine bloody mist. The shop’s owner and his family trembled in a corner. The machines had reached inside here as well. Gebu knew that some tiny phantom machines could get mixed in with sand and dust and could seep in through the smallest of cracks. Gebu grabbed a handful of sand from the folds of his clothes and thought he could see some small black particles mixed in with the yellow sand. Were those the phantom machines? No, they couldn’t be. Adults said that the machines were too small to see—but did the adults remember everything?—like motes of dust, invading everywhere, taking over every space.
Little Gebu had arrived at a dead end, and he found himself growing even more angry than before. His plan to return home had failed; he felt defeated. He should never have left his home and family. There was no knowing when the city could be rebuilt, when normal life could be restored, when he would see them again.
Little Gebu hid in the store for a long time. The owner kept feeling about for different items in the store, reciting the names of these objects, as if to maintain his tenuous grasp on reality.
Eventually, Gebu could sense that something was changing outside. The turbulent intensity of the wind grew less constant, and the city guards came through the streets to begin the evacuation.
Gebu followed the crowd, holding on to a guide rope with the others, pulled along by a security officer. The road became a dark river of water, higher than Gebu’s knees, and they all walked past ancient trees that buried the sky behind them. Black, slender bodies of aquatic creatures showed their backs at the surface of the water from time to time, their spiny dorsal fins cutting a wake near the refugees’ legs. Gebu saw a little girl riding on her father’s shoulders, and his heart felt sore.
The crowds did not return to their respective homes, but instead they all arrived together at an enormous cavern that had been carved out of the hills many years before. The entrance passage consisted of several airlock doors that kept the sand and dust from getting inside, and the hallucinations quickly faded away. A few people still seemed to struggle with after-images, a few remaining shadows. People entered in small groups, waited for decontamination, and then moved toward the interior of the cave’s great hall.
Once he was inside, Little Gebu was immediately embraced by his frantic parents who rushed at him from out of the crowd. They rubbed his face and his hair as if they wanted to make sure he was real, as if they wanted to rub off a layer of his skin.
“How long will we be here? When can we leave?” asked Little Gebu.
Mother took his hand in both of hers and said, “The outside is not safe anymore. This is our new home now.”
Little Gebu looked into the cave. Beyond the great gathering hall, all was dark as pitch. Several old lamps tried futilely to cast their light into the deep, but their glow was quickly swallowed up in darkness.
“I have to live here all my life?” Gebu asked.
Dad frowned, knit his brow, patted Gebu’s shoulder, and said, “Maybe someone will find another way, some day.”
Gebu pulled away. He understood the tone behind his father’s words: the city would not be rebuilt.
After the survivors had all been gathered, Little Gebu followed his parents and the crowds into the darkness.
He had learned in school that in the beginning people had lived everywhere, all over the Earth. After the phantom weapons were released and spread beyond human control, people retreated first to a few continents, then to a few safe zones, then to a few cities. Eventually those cities had lost contact one with another. And now people were burying themselves in the Earth. They were going to live in caves. The crowd silently swept Little Gebu along the passageway and carried him deeper and deeper into the ground. Behind them, the great iron gate groaned along its track to shut them in forever.
A voice screamed in Gebu’s mind: “No! I don’t want to hide here my whole life!”
Gebu gritted his teeth and slipped back and out of the crowd. He ran to the gate and shouted to the guard who was lowering it; he told the startled officer to tell his parents where he had gone. The guard was shocked at the sight of a boy running in the wrong direction—he mistrusted his own eyes after the events of that day—and the guard missed his chance to grab the boy. Gebu ran out of the cave and out onto the path. He heard the gate slam shut behind him.
Immediately he felt lonely and scared, but still he ran from the caves with a kind of wild desperation. After only a few steps, he saw before him a city that was entirely foreign. Seeing that strange place, a panic came over him, and he turned and ran back again, only to find the dark shadow of the iron gate, barred against him.
“Dad! Mom!” He pounded at the gate, but it did not move at all. The guard had rubbed his eyes and gone on to other duties, and the wind carried away Gebu’s cries.
Nevertheless, Gebu continued to shout until his voice was gone. Then he walked dumbly away before the sand came to bury the iron gate completely.
Winding his way through the ancient forest, he tripped over giant roots, waded through the strange snake-infested waters, and climbed over fallen trees. He trusted his memory to find his way to the edge of the city. Then he pushed his body through a crack in the ruined wall, and he emerged out into the world beyond…
…and the world beyond the city was laid bare before his eyes.
Molten rock flowed across the surface of the earth; lava gushed out of one crater and poured down until it found a lower crater into which it could fall. The volcanic pockmarks in the ground stretched out before him to the horizon. Sulfuric vapor curled across the ground, some of it rising and transforming into shriveled corpse-like bird bodies, circling menacingly once around this new human on the landscape before dispersing again into smoke, as if they’d never existed.
Little Gebu took a tentative step forward, and his foot sank into a soft surface which he recognized as sand. He walked a short while, reaching out, swinging both hands back and forth until they hit a stake in the ground with a thick hempen rope tied to it. He had heard grown-ups say that in the early days of the city, an expedition team was sent out to explore the land and that they had set up a small outpost. They had used a path of rope to connect the city and the outpost. After a short walk, the rope grew heavy and angled down. Gebu dragged hard on the line and found that the other end of the rope was buried in the sand. He had reached the outpost, though it too was half-covered by the desert.
There was a ruined wall before him, and Gebu struggled to climb up to the top. He gazed out in all directions. In front of him he saw a line of hills, deep red; behind him rose the dark forest. His mouth began to feel very dry, and he had no idea where to go from here. Even at this height he could not trust what he was seeing.
The setting sun stared at him coldly behind the dusty sky.
There is nothing here, nothing to find, he said to himself. Setting out on this long-imagined journey was much more difficult than it had been in all of his dreams. This did not feel like embracing a new world. This felt like betrayal, though he was not sure if he was betraying something or if something had betrayed him.
“Do you need a guide?” a nearby voice inquired.
Gebu looked down in the direction of the sound, and saw the same white cat crouched at the other end of the wall’s remains.
“Little Snowball?” he asked in surprise.
“Well, I’m not dead.” The white cat’s mouth moved, and its voice sounded thin and soft, slightly aloof.
“You can talk?”
“I am a cat that has been… remade, so that I might better…”
“What? Get along with people? Communicate with us?”
The cat seemed uncertain how to express itself on this point and declined to finish its thought. It looked Gebu up and down and said in a fastidious tone, “Your courage is commendable, but, well, I am not at all certain you can survive on your own in this world.”
“Just now you said you know the way. You are a guide,” Gebu reminded the cat.
“Hmm. Oh, well…” The cat rose and stood properly. “I know how to get in and out of the city, and have done so often. I know how to make my way around my own domain. But the world is very large,” Snowball said demurely.
“Do you know about other cities? Have you been to other places with people?” Gebu thought if he could find another city, then his parents—all of the people—might be able to start a new life.
“No. I have never seen another human city.”
“How can I trust you? You lied to me about not being able to speak.” Gebu spoke in a suspicious tone.
“Huh. In the city? There has never been anything in that city worth talking about.”
After a pause, Gebu agreed. “Okay. Good point. Mostly true. Lead the way.”
“Lead the way?” Snowball asked in surprise. “Where are you going? Where am I supposed to lead you?”
“Well, just go…” Gebu looked in all directions, considering the question, “…give me a minute.”
The white cat sat still and straight at Gebu’s side. A sulfur-vapor vulture made increasingly tight and low circles over their heads, little white eyes fixed on them. There was no way to feel comfortable with those eyes above them.
“Well, let me know when you figure it out.” Snowball pounced in the direction of the phantom bird.
“Take me somewhere you’ve never been. I want to see places that even you haven’t seen. Maybe that way we can find a human city, right? What do you think?”
After a while the white cat came close again, out of breath from its phantom hunt. “Very well, then. We will go east, and we will keep going east. I have traveled some distance in that direction in the past, but I have always wanted to see what else there is to find where the sun rises.”
And so they walked east, Gebu feeling his way over dunes, passing low bushes and sometimes abandoned buildings full of sand.
“Is this what they call a bush?” Gebu asked in surprise, touching one of the shrubs that he had stepped near enough to feel.
“Yes, a bush. Bushes exist so that cats may enjoy some shade and rest in a cool place on a hot day.”
Gebu had never seen such plants, and he imagined clumps upon clumps of them in the dusk, little trees with intertwining branches, covering the landscape. But he still could only see the smoking bog of phantom lava all around him. Once he climbed to the edge of a phantom crater, trying to see for himself the true road ahead, and he dared for a moment to glance down into the volcanic pit. There he saw an enormous eye starting ineluctably toward the sky, crisscrossed by silky threads of red, bloody magma overflowing the socket. He was so frightened at the sight that he fell down a slope and rolled down to the bottom of the dune.
One time they trudged past the roof of a house sticking partly out of a dune, close enough for Gebu to see, and only then did he believe that humans had really lived everywhere around the world.
“Have you seen it?” he asked the cat. “The real world, like it used to be?”
“I should say I have.”
“I am so unlucky,” Gebu sighed despondently.
“This is nothing. This is simply how life is.”
Gebu’s stomach growled noisily, and his thirst grew difficult to bear. What is more real than this? There is nothing more real than these feelings of want. He had always dreamed of going out into the world by himself to explore, but now he felt truly alone. Gebu realized that there were many things in life that were not as simple as he had imagined.
The little white cat looked preoccupied. It checked every possible road they passed. It often chased birds, phantom or not, often running into the distance where Gebu could not see.
Gebu asked, “What did you do when you lived with humans? Before, I mean.”
Snowball raised its ears in an alert attitude. “I was a guide. I was always a guide,” the cat said.
“A guide? A guide to where?”
Snowball tilted its head. “This world.”
“Oh…” Gebu licked his lips. So he was not the only one who’d wanted to escape and explore. He felt some relief at this thought and slightly less lonely.
“And what about those people? What happened to them?”
Snowball stood up on tiptoes and stepped lithely forward. Gebu had no idea how it could move so gracefully, leaving just the barest chain of tiny paw prints.
As for Gebu, the sand filled his shoes constantly, and he needed to stop and pour it out to keep his feet from hurting. But after a while, he was too tired to deal with the sand, and the granules quickly wore out the soles of his feet. He began to walk more and more slowly.
“Wood smoke. Where are the forests? Did they all burn up? Why isn’t the whole world covered with smoke and ash? Were the buildings in the forest?” Gebu was growing faint with hunger, and he dragged his feet forward, slowly, heavily.
The sky was growing dark, and the phantom machines that had absorbed the sunlight were still directing the phantom magma to give off a deep red light. The surrounding landscape appeared as a dark and twisting red mass, stretching off to the horizon.
“I’m going to die,” Gebu said.
“What?” The white cat looked a little nervous.
“I’m starving. I can’t move anymore. I’m going to die here. Maybe I’ll die of thirst. So those other people, the ones you guided, did they all die like this?” Gebu thought about his Mom and Dad. They would be heartbroken.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Snowball spoke reproachfully.
“What can you do? You’re just a cat.”
“Just a cat who happens to know about an old human supply depot that is not far from here.”
An hour later, they sat together in a small bunker. Gebu used every last bit of his strength to open two cans of soybeans, and he passed one to Snowball. They even found a few candles, and in the candlelight, the small space felt cozy and safe. It seemed to speak to them in deep mellow tones and say, “Rest here tonight.”
“Ahh. I miss the fish soup stall on Muye Street. Every time I walked past the shop, the aroma alone made me feel like I had eaten a full meal.” The white cat said this while closing its eyes and licking a circle around its mouth.
“It’s sad to think that those places are gone forever,” Gebu said. To be honest he found the can of beans to be quite delicious, and he thought that this too was a thing of the past that was now gone. Who could say how many things there were that existed once on this earth and then gradually disappeared, the space they left behind them now occupied by illusions.
Above the bunker was a small log cabin that had collapsed long ago. Gebu dug a notebook out of the rubble. He opened it, and sand poured out from between the pages.
The notebook was titled “Expedition Record.” According to the journal, an explorer had set off from Gebu’s city more than twenty years earlier. On the return journey, the explorer’s companions had died one after the other, or gone missing. As the entries went on, the explorer’s spirit seemed increasingly distracted and dim. His final entry stated that he planned to head toward a great lake in the east.
“We should go to the great lake, too. There may be others there,” Gebu said.
“There is no great lake in the east, and there wasn’t one there twenty years ago,” the white cat said coldly. “I have seen nothing there but a vast canyon of death with only one bridge across it, and who can say in what condition that bridge might stand today?”
“But if this explorer was headed that way, maybe there is someone there now.”
“No one knows this land better than I do. There is no one there.”
Gebu could not hide his suspicious look.
“Humph.” The cat turned its face away. “Humans always see things the way they want to see them, and they are blind to the truth.”
“Well, I suppose I should trust you.” Gebu did not argue anymore. He closed the notebook and left it in the bunker under the cabin.
When the night sky was completely dark, Snowball invited Gebu to come out and look at the sky. Gebu climbed out of the cellar.
The stars filled the sky like sugar granules spilled onto a black carpet, like a bucketful of sand cast across the heavens.
“Is it real?” Gebu asked.
“I have no way of answering that,” Snowball replied.
“The view from the city is nothing like this. There you can only see a few stars, very few. Some people say that the stars are also illusions. People in the city argue about this question.”
“Do you believe?”
“I…” Gebu wanted to say he believed, but he remembered doubting it in the past. He reached out his hand toward the sky, but he could not touch anything. And no one could tell him whether this was because of distance or illusion.
“Do you often look up at the stars like this?” Gebu asked the cat.
“All the time.”
The figure of the white cat was silent and pure under the starlight, and the starlight glistened on the tips of its fur. There was no need to touch the stars; Gebu knew they were real.
Gebu lay back on the ground, looking at the starry sky, imagining the worlds out there, each one more distant than the last. “Tell me. Is it possible there could be a world out there… where you know that everything you see is really there? Where everything can be trusted? The stars up in the sky, all destinations. When people set off on a trip over a long road, they know the place they’re trying to get to is really going to be there.”
Snowball was quiet for a long while. Gebu thought the cat was sleeping.
“This is just more wishful thinking, seeing what I want to see, isn’t it?” Gebu thought about the question, alone, and tears fell from the corners of his eyes.
A soft yet prickly sandpaper tongue suddenly licked his cheek once, and then the cat lay down again.
Gebu’s face was warm, burning even, an actual sensation. Gebu reached out and touched the white ball of soft fur, but the creature trembled nervously at his touch and walked away. Gebu pouted, but gradually fell asleep. The white cat dug out a shallow nest in the sand not far from, but not next to, Gebu. It licked its fur for a while and curled up into a tiny circle. The cat fell asleep like that, its body undulating gently on the waves of its own breath.
Starlight and magma flowed over their sleeping figures.
The next day, loaded down with as much as he could carry, Gebu was still determined to head eastward, whether or not there was a big lake there. Snowball still insisted on walking ahead of him.
After two more days, the sand gradually faded away, and Gebu could feel grass growing at his feet.
The lava swamps before his eyes turned to barren flats with enormous spiny bones piercing up through the soil and weaving themselves into a kind of forest. The path through these ersatz woods continued eastward, so they followed it.
Walking, for Gebu, had long since become a mechanical exercise, insipid and dull. Suddenly, without warning, Snowball stopped, one paw suspended over the earth, not letting it fall to the ground.
“Careful. The canyon is right in front of us,” said the white cat.
The ground seemed to extend out ahead of them. Gebu could see nothing peculiar about the path before them. Half trusting and half doubting, Gebu stretched a foot out before him just a little. Sure enough, there was nothing there but empty space. His heart thumped wildly, and only then could he perceive the sound of wind howling through the gorge below them.
Snowball made some calculations, sniffed around again, and said, “A little further north, that’s where the bridge is. The bridge is extremely long, and I cannot tell in what condition we may find it. I have never crossed it before.”
Gebu hesitated.
“If you decide to go back, I still remember the way. I can guide you,” Snowball said. “If you return to the cave, at least you can live well with your family.”
What a comforting temptation it was. Gebu imagined the words his parents would say to him. They would weave for him stories of sparkling hopes, visions of glittering cities on the horizon. In order to ensure that Gebu did not pass his lifetime in despair, they would also force themselves to believe in those illusions. The shining eyes of all the remaining people that Gebu knew of floated in the dark cave before Gebu’s eyes, like the stars in the sky.
No one would be able to make those visions a reality if he returned to the cave; no one could fulfill those hopes except himself.
He gritted his teeth and said, “I want to keep going and see this world for myself.”
“This is a strange and mysterious place, full of dangers! Are you sure you want to keep going?”
“Didn’t you say you always wanted to go east and keep going east? That you always wanted to know what was over there where the sun rises?”
“Really? You’re going to quote me back to myself? Okay, fine. Then let’s go,” said the white cat.
Snowball turned to the north and had not gone far when his ear twitched guardedly to the left. It was growing dark over in the west, and though the black shadow was still far away, it seemed to be moving toward them at a pace that was visible to the naked eye. The oncoming shadow was accompanied by a deep and muffled rumbling at the horizon.
“Sandstorm!” They ran.
“This year’s storms are more powerful than in previous years,” the cat said as it bounded forward. “Five kilometers ahead there is a car, half buried next to a wall. We can hide there for a while, but I do not know if there is any way we can survive this storm. The nearest supply point is still a day away, so there is no way we can get there before the storm catches us. Oh, god, I don’t have much time left now.”
“What do you mean you don’t have much time left?”
“Keep running!”
They found the car just as the storm caught them. A huge sandworm with an enormous maw made up of thousands of other mouths rushed at them, every one of the mouths full of keen fangs forming a thousand cruel smiles. Gebu shouted to Snowball to help him pull away the oilcloth tarp that sheltered the car, and together they dug away the shallow sand that pressed against the lower parts of the doors. Gebu climbed in and found a key in the ignition. Incredibly, after a couple of tries, the engine caught and roared, and Gebu knew that this good luck represented more secrets the cat was keeping. The four-wheel drive and off-road tires threw sand against the wall behind the car as violently as any sandstorm could, and soon the spinning tires found purchase on some solid ground beneath the accumulation of sand, and the car leapt forward away from the sandworm.
“Wait! You’re a kid! How do you know how to drive?” the white cat shouted, terrified.
“My dad’s a mechanic. He taught me. It’s not that hard,” Gebu shouted over the engine and the wind. He shifted gears and pressed his foot to the floor again. The car charged over a small dune, swaying left and right a few times before grudgingly finding its center, and they plunged forward through the forest of giant bone thorns.
Snowball tumbled around the cab a few times before it stabbed its claws into the leather bench seat and managed to steady itself. The cat clung tight to the seat, crouching low, and not daring to move.
“Wait! This is not going to work! This is dangerous! If I’m not on the ground I can’t recognize the road. From here I can’t even see out the windows.”
“Do you know which direction the bridge is?”
The cat jumped onto the back of the seat and dug in. “The valley is probably, pretty much, in that direction, but…” Snowball was about to say more, but the leading edge of the sandstorm wrapped around the car, and the din—like driving through a hive of furious hornets—drowned out the words and even the thoughts. The cat did not speak again for a while.
After more than ten minutes, during which time the car sometimes stayed just ahead of the sand and was sometimes caught among the angry bees, they summited a large, steep slope and then slid, not entirely under Gebu’s control, down the sand on the other side. Snowball suddenly raised its head again, breaking its silence to say, “Yes. I know this. Keep on in this direction. Do you see a little hill just ahead?”
The car made a rough jolt as it indeed jumped up and over a small hill. Snowball yelled, “Left! Go left! Cross three more small hills!”
Gebu spun the steering wheel violently, and the car shot over three sandy slopes in a row, its rear end drifting crazily like a shark’s tail.
Snowball continued to give directions: “Turn back to the right now and then keep on straight.”
After a beat, Snowball’s tone grew serious: “The bridge is not far ahead now. I have seen many bridges in my time, most of them either untrustworthy or fully collapsed after many years of disrepair. I do not know what we will find up ahead. We may plunge down into the valley. We may find the bridge is blocked by many other ancient vehicles. Now is our last chance to make a decision and turn back.”
The sandstorm licked at the tailgate of the car, the giant mouth in the rearview mirror seemed to widen, preparing to swallow them at any moment. It seemed to be feeding on the sand the car threw in its wake, and it grew in size and power. The cacophony was now so intense that it was almost impossible for Gebu to hear what Snowball was saying.
The storm drew a whirlwind of sand into the air, exposing for a moment the corner of a structure they both knew was the bridge entrance. The light against the windshield flickered, one moment blinding them with glittering reflections off grains of sand, and then in relative shadow, shimmering like all the glory of days gone by. Gebu saw everything clearly in an instant.
“Let’s do this!” he shouted to Snowball. “If you’re with me, we’re driving on!”
“I have nine lives. I can afford to lose one more. Now! Right turn! Here!”
Gebu slammed the steering wheel clockwise and the tires found pavement. After a violent squealing pause, the car shot forward, and the frustrated scream of the sandworm was lost in the growing distance behind them.
The wasteland was suddenly gone, and the full structure of the bridge loomed above them.
“Look at that.” Snowball’s voice was as soft and thin as a slip of paper.
“What is it?” Gebu asked. He was still gripping the steering wheel hard, his knuckles bloodless.
“A great lake.”
Gebu turned his head to look out of the window, so surprised by Snowball’s words that, for a moment, he forgot to drive and slowed the car gradually to a stop. Directly below the bridge was an incomparably large lake, like a dark and gloomy well. Though the expanse was not a perfect circle, Gebu realized that he first perceived it as a well because he had seen a monstrous vortex in the middle of the lake. The heart of the whirlpool was a bottomless pit, exuding silent power, a black hole that would absorb the whole world. The precipitous wall of water extended outward and upward in a spiral shape, and gradually the water grew lighter in color at the surface, more blue than black, and the small waves that hung at the rim of the huge cone appeared as decorative molding around the edges, motionless and solid. The wall of water spun slowly beneath them, and the bridge suddenly seemed to the travelers like a delicate thread stretched tenuously above that expanse. On this filament the car stopped and sat motionless for a time, as if hypnotized by this great spinning gorge.
A voice whispered out of that gullet, nearly inaudible and yet more powerful and eternal, and more enticing, than any other sound they had yet heard: “Come. Join us.”
“You were right. The big lake is real,” Snowball said. “And it’s really big.”
Gebu’s whole body shook as a terror spread out from the depths of his heart and filled every vessel and cell. For a moment he was sure that his curiosity was about to destroy them, that he would be drawn inexorably to the edge of the bridge and would plunge them both into that maelstrom. For a moment he was certain that he would never be able to see reality, that he had no ability in himself to be part of the actual world.
Snowball drew the four claws on one paw gently, but not too gently, across Gebu’s forearm. Gebu pulled his arm away, grimacing in pain. Four red welts rose instantly on his skin.
“Sorry. It was an accident. The car was too bumpy,” Snowball said, though Gebu’s foot was still planted firmly on the brake pedal.
With the spell of the whirlpool broken, Gebu punched the horn angrily, sucked in his breath, and slammed on the gas once again. The car charged forward and soon flew off the damaged exit and out the far end of the bridge. Four wheels spun pointlessly in midair for a slow-motion second, and then the car slammed into the ridge of a sandy slope and dashed recklessly down the far side. The steering wheel did nothing now, and the scenery around them swept by quickly and then began to spin as the car tumbled and the boy and the cat screamed helplessly. At last, with a decisive and sickening crunch, the car landed, grill-down, in the sand. The front wheels idled, and the rear wheels spun uselessly against the air.
The boy and the cat crawled out of the car.
Gebu sputtered to get some of the sand out of his mouth and then said, “Wow. I blame you.”
“You were driving. How can this be my fault?” Snowball replied indignantly, shaking sand from its fur.
“Where are we? What is this place?”
Flowers overspread the ground, glowing faintly with blue light; fireflies danced among the blades of grass. Cats, several of them, emerged briefly from the taller grass, passed by, and disappeared into the grass again. They left no paw marks in the sand.
“I’ve never been here before,” Snowball said.
They continued on. An abandoned building appeared vaguely before them, through the phantom visions. A glass door was half buried in the sand. The building was five stories tall, and most of it was still above the ground. Gebu pushed carefully with his shoulder against the glass door. It gave forward against his weight, and Gebu climbed through. Snowball lifted its nose and sniffed at the air inside. The cat seemed anxious about this place.
“Come on in,” said Gebu. “Let’s look around.”
They both entered. Very little sand and dust had invaded this place, and the phantom visions only remained as a thin layer near the door.
Gebu saw the logo of a technology company in the lobby, and next to the entrance hall he looked through a small room filled entirely with screens. He found a flashlight there, but it did not light up. This place was full of things that belonged to a different age and that no longer existed in the world. There was a door with a code lock. The keypad was not functional, but the door was half-open. An emergency light in an empty corridor still flickered from time to time. Gebu did not recognize anything that he saw. He lit a candle that he had brought from the bunker. Snowball dropped down low, pupils wide, and the cat’s steps grew cautious and light. The flickering feline shadow cast on the wall by the candlelight made them both jump and then laugh nervously.
“Don’t be afraid. I’ll scout ahead, okay?” Gebu said the words without much conviction.
He came to an office where they saw a lizard flee from the intruders through a crack in the window. Sunlight penetrated through the cracks, illuminating some dust floating in the air. A few fireflies there fluctuated on the edge between existence and illusion as the air currents shifted. Snowball seemed so nervous as to be indifferent to these sights, both the living and the phantom. Gebu laughed gently at the cat’s trepidation, and Snowball had nothing to say in reply.
Gebu opened a cabinet drawer full of files, neatly arranged. “Phantom Test” was the label on the first file they saw. The words were faint, barely legible, and the dates on the files were more than a century old. Still, the paper seemed to give off the vague scent of ancient ink. The words inside the folder, the few that were not already faded and gone, made no sense to Gebu.
He left the room and started to climb another flight of stairs, but Snowball stopped suddenly.
“What, you’re not coming up?” Gebu asked.
“No, I’m not. This doesn’t feel right,” Snowball replied, remaining at the door of the entrance hall.
Gebu climbed the stairs alone. The floor here was made of a soft material, and his footsteps were almost completely muffled. The drippings from his candle, on the other hand, fell to the ground with disturbing plopping sounds, louder than his feet, and they constantly made him look back as if someone were following him.
The room at the top of the stairs was labeled with a number, a code with a font that Gebu found familiar, but could not quite place. Rows of glass jars lined the shelves in the room. Holding the candle close to look at these jars more carefully, he found some of them contained what looked like shriveled skin and fur.
In an adjoining room he found several large cages. The door to one cage was wide open, and the wires were twisted.
At the next door, Gebu paused even longer at the numbered label on the room before he pushed the door open and entered. This room seemed particularly silent, and when the candlelight illuminated the space, Gebu discovered the reason for this. This room had no windows at all. Strange wooden boards circled the walls, undulating like waves, like an odd sort of display case. No, more like steps leading up and around a cliff overlooking a deep and secluded valley. But the steps were not continuous; a few platforms in the sequence were missing, like pitfalls in a well-arranged trap. Gebu noticed some dark reflections on the cliff surface, and when he approached, he found the wall was inlaid with tiny black particles smaller than grains of rice. Apart from this, the room was almost completely unfurnished. Two bowls were set in the corner, and a camera lens overhead reflected the light of Gebu’s candle.
Gebu felt his chest tighten, and his breathing grew rapid and shallow.
As he was leaving the room, he paused and squatted down by the door, running a hand over the surface of the wooden portal’s lower half. Rough grooves from countless claws were engraved there in the panel.
“What is this place?” Gebu asked Snowball when he had descended to the foot of the stairs.
The cat squatted in front of the door but slowly turned its head away from the light. “I do not know.”
The roar of the approaching storm gradually rose in their ears.
“You do know. There is a string of numbers tattooed in your ear. The same number is on the door of one of the rooms up there.”
The white cat shuddered feverishly, and his eyes seemed to beg Gebu not to ask any more questions.
The sandstorm had caught up with them at last, and a mad burst of sand surged in through the half-open lobby door, blowing the hair on Snowball’s body so that the cat seemed to swell up. The cavernous maw of the sandworm appeared outside the door. The white cat stood, unshakable, in the midst of the mad gust.
Gebu charged at the door, pushed at it again with his shoulder until it was fully closed, turned toward the cat and embraced it.
“It was here, in this place, where I was trained to be a guide in the war against the phantoms.” The white cat slowly related the story to Gebu.
“I don’t know if I should hate the experimenter or not.” Snowball leaned against Gebu’s stomach and said, “He lied to me, but he also left me with many beautiful memories. He trapped me in one experiment, but he also fought for the transformation program that made me what I am. He took me out of one laboratory and then again used lies to make me stay in another. He participated in phantom weapons research, and because of leaks to the media, he was taken away from me without saying goodbye. I never saw him again.”
This corner of the entrance hall was illuminated by candlelight, and the wind was roaring outside. Several small phantom cats wrestled together in phantom blue grass. Gebu’s hand barely touched the tips of Snowball’s fur.
The cat shied away. “All tenderness is a prelude to deception. This is the truth that my subconscious tells me,” Snowball said. Gebu’s hand froze.
“Before he was taken away, but after the phantom apocalypse had been set in motion, the experimenter started to train me as a guide for humans. Privately, he would rub my head, scratch my chin, and even take me home to sleep on his bed with him. But when we arrived at the lab the next day, he would do nothing to comfort me. His face would express a kind of resigned sorrow, as if he had no choice, and he would tell me that everything would be okay in the end. I understood that he loved me, so I chose to endure it.”
“That must have been terribly painful.”
“My pain made him suffer as well. Once I became truly intelligent, I understood that it was my curiosity about the world that prepared me for this role. I began to doubt my natural instincts.” It lowered its voice. “It took me many years to leave this place. Even now, so many years later, I would not be able to face him.”
Gebu gently kissed the top of Snowball’s head. “I too resented my family for a time, and even after I understood them again, I still left them. Not because I don’t love them. Just like most cats can only purr and cry, often people too can’t express themselves very well or say all they want to say. But one day we will all understand each other. If there is ever a chance to fix all they did to you, to make up for things, I’ll be happy for you if you decide to go back to being just a cat.”
Snowball lowered its head, walked around in two tight circles, and curled up against Gebu’s chest.
When they pushed the door open again, the sandstorm had passed, and the sun was shining down on the world. The boy and the cat squinted against the glare. With eyes half closed, they walked slowly into the daylight. As they left the phantom grassland behind, Snowball spoke in the language of cats to greet the phantom felines, though they could not hear or respond.
This valley region had clearly once been a district of science and technology, and the remains of many of the old research institutes were scattered about the land.
The travelers found that some of these places had been rummaged through and plundered, but they did not know when or for what purpose. At the end of the valley region, the illusion of the ground beneath their feet transformed into enormous square stones, each brick as large as half a soccer pitch. These tiles turned out to be the floor of some giant’s idea of the main hall of a Buddhist temple. The pillars of this phantom hall were even wider than the floor tiles, and they rose straight into the sky, vanishing into the atmosphere far above. Several huge spherical objects were scattered on the ground.
Gebu approached one of these, but he quickly stepped back several paces in fright. He recognized this sphere to be that which he had seen in the fire long before. These were the bloody eyeballs from the volcanic crater, but instead of staring with menace, they seemed uncertain and fearful, looking at the visitors or up at the sky. They seemed to be asking who it was that had gouged them out of their bodies and thrown them down in this place, still covered with gore.
Snowball said that these uncanny eyes were just one of the psychological attack methods of the phantom weapons program, one that had persisted and had not yet faded even to the present day. The cat glanced at Gebu to make sure he was all right, and the boy nodded. They moved on across the enormous tiles.
In the depths of the Buddhist temple hall, they arrived at a huge bowl tilted on its side, facing out toward the sky. It was real, and it was even larger than the phantom tiles. A three-story building stood nearby, also real, and that looked like nothing more than a medium-sized rock in comparison with the wok-shaped structure. Many years of wind and sand had only just filled a small slice at the bottom of the tilted bowl, and even the phantoms all around could not hide the massive silhouette of the thing.
“That is an antenna,” the white cat explained.
“What could possibly need such a huge antenna?” Gebu was excited by the idea, but puzzled as well.
“The antenna is a thing in itself. It does not need to serve something else. It may find something new. It is a sort of telescope.”
Gebu looked at the enormous bowl and then at the sky toward which it faced. “So, this means the stars are real, doesn’t it?”
“This was once general knowledge.”
“Nothing is general knowledge now.” Gebu looked at the sky, infatuated with the sight. Although it was daytime, he knew there really were stars out there. And he knew that people in former times were not so bad. They’d had the courage to believe in what they saw, and they had built this enormous thing because of that belief. He couldn’t help but imagine that, when they were done building the big dish, they must have celebrated, singing and dancing under its shadow. Gebu himself wanted to shout with excitement at the thought.
A stream of sand falling out from the edge of the cauldron brought Gebu back to reality. They moved toward the building next to the dish and found rooms piled up with rusted computers. In a room at the top of the building, they found another telescope, a much smaller one with a hole for the naked eye to look through.
Gebu pushed open the third-floor window and lowered his head to the eyepiece on the telescope. He saw the magnificent grasslands, the forest made of bones, the great expanse of water that he could not believe was real, and jagged mountains far away. And he saw what looked like a lighthouse standing on a distant cliff. He looked again, more carefully, in the evening after the sun had set. The faraway tower was indeed sending out a rotating beam of light.
“There seems to be something over there,” he said to Snowball.
“Where? Oh, way over there. It could be something ... but I have never traveled so far.”
“We should go and see for ourselves.”
“It may be merely a phantom.”
Gebu paused and said softly, “You don’t have to hide your true nature anymore. You may act scared, but you are the bravest cat I have ever seen.”
“I…” The little white cat seemed to want to say more, but then it hesitated and simply replied, “Thank you.”
After night fell and the darkness was complete, Gebu looked out through the telescope again. The powerful beam from the distant lighthouse pierced the darkness. The telescope was not necessary now to see the light, but through the telescope even the lighthouse mirror could be seen, a faint twinkling behind the glare, like a star in the sky.
Gebu insisted, “No phantom machine can produce so strong a light. If this signal is real, it must be important.”
Snowball’s tone grew solemn again: “You must make this decision prudently. Getting there will require at least three days’ travel. And the tall cliff on which the lighthouse sits? Can you climb that? And what if it is all a trap? Then what? I do not know how to advise you, but if you are determined to go there, I will go with you.”
“Yes. I’m going,” Gebu said. “I do not want to do this without you, but I need to go. Together we make a powerful team, but I will go on my own if I have to.”
So they walked for three days, and they finally arrived at the cliff. Looking up at the rock face from that vantage point, it seemed these lowlands were still occupied by phantoms. A waterfall of acid, hissing and smoking, poured over the heights, and a huge white bone, like a rib from a whale, protruded from the cliff face. The acid mist hid the actual waterfall and camouflaged the actual rocks. The real danger was behind the deceptive phantoms, and both were frightening.
“I’ll take the lead and scout ahead,” Snowball said. “Follow me, and stay close.”
The cat dove through the solid sheet of acid and jumped onto rocks that were invisible to Gebu. At every safe stone Snowball found, it walked a full circle, leaving a path of wet prints. Gebu followed closely behind the four white paws and tried to keep them in sight, mindful of the horrible fate that awaited him if he made one wrong step. They ascended gradually through the air, up the cliff, approaching an uncertain destination and an unexplored beam of light.
Along the way, a desperate murder of crows flew nearby and pecked at the whale bones, searching for any detritus that might remain there, but perhaps these were phantoms as well. A giant cuttlefish stretched its tentacles out through the falls, wrapping one appendage around a bird and pulling it back to its lair. Once, the tentacle seemed to be reaching for Gebu, and it hung suspended for a time directly in front of Gebu’s face. Gebu forced himself to ignore the creature, phantom or not. Behind the stinging waterfall there seemed to be something else lurking, something real, always staring at Gebu. He dared not look for fear he might miss a stair.
Following closely in the white cat’s steps, Gebu enjoyed the certainty he felt that every stone would be solid. But eventually he tired, and just as his eyes were growing blurry, when he didn’t think he could continue safely, Snowball said, “We’ll stop here today.”
They slept in a small sheltered area set into the rock wall. Gebu shared out the few cans of food remaining from their stay in the supply bunker. At night, the beam from the lighthouse swept out and over the canopy of the dark woods, casting shadows of enormous insects.
In the morning the pair continued their climb through a sea of fog.
“Be careful. This mist is real. The stones are slicker today,” Snowball said.
At first they walked very slowly, but after the sun rose, the way improved and grew easier to navigate. They improved their understanding of each other as well, and their movements grew more coordinated. There were always rocks to grip and steady footholds, and Snowball seemed to have a gift for finding the path.
Just as they were finally about to reach the very top of the cliff, the path suddenly turned, and they entered a cave. Gebu crawled for a long time, his body stretched narrow like the taut frame of the cat he was following, and they finally passed through a hole and emerged on the top of the cliff.
Gebu was stunned. A city appeared before him, and the lighthouse towered above them in the center of that city.
They had just exited from an underground passage, but when he looked back, he saw that there were many passages. Already he could not be sure which one they had emerged from. The streets of the city were small and narrow, and crowds of cats were walking everywhere.
Snowball was gone; Gebu had not seen the white cat go.
The cats turned their heads curiously, staring at the human intruder. A small bus, just half the height of a person, sped by, the feline driver blaring its horn furiously. Gebu quickly jumped to one side. He could feel the wind as the bus passed. All of this was real. The cats in the bus stuck their heads out of the windows and looked back at the boy. Gebu could see that the inside of the bus was divided into a grid of small boxes, one for each feline passenger.
The cats on the street took the opportunity to circle around the visitor and consider him with misgivings. The sounds of suspicious murmuring rose and fell like waves. Perhaps Gebu’s human odor kept the cats at a respectful distance. The cats in the surrounding buildings and in the tree houses also stretched their necks out of every window.
Gebu noticed that the buildings here were of two distinct types. The vertical surfaces of the metal buildings were punctuated with many horizontal platforms, like balconies, and each building had a pillar outside wrapped in hempen rope that seemed to serve as a staircase. Some curious cats were indeed hanging from the columns and watching the visitor from that vantage point. The rest of the buildings were small wooden structures built among the branches of trees, each large tree holding a dozen or more small cabins.
There were cats in the air above Gebu as well, walking along overhead skybridges. These aerial tracks seemed to connect all the buildings in the city and were far more numerous than the surface roads, so numerous and jumbled, in fact, that they made the city look like a tangled skein of wool.
Among the crowds of cats, Gebu still could see no trace of Snowball. Gebu called out for the cat, but he was prevented from moving by the dozens of city cats that surrounded him. Dozens of tails interlocked around him, and dozens of noses gathered and approached him. Serious, analytical expressions studied Gebu. A calico cat with a warning light strapped to his forehead approached and ordered the crowd to back up, and the circle widened. The calico then came forward, sniffed at Gebu, and let out a disapproving grunt.
At that moment, the cats all looked up into the sky. Snowball appeared there on one of the skybridges. Uncertain what pronouncement was about to be handed down, the cats moved even farther from the boy, and the circle opened.
Snowball blinked at Gebu, and with a slight motion of the head and eyes, signaled for him to follow.
Gebu ran along the streets. Snowball ran on the overhead paths, sometimes leaping from one track to another. The entire city was constructed as layers of platforms, rising toward the city center. Gebu ran up the levels, higher and higher. Cats all along the way turned their necks to watch their progress. Gebu ran past a cat-grass farm, a cookie shop, a salon, a dry cleaner’s, an enormous temple. Every hundred steps or so there was a giant litter box. He passed a park in a boulevard where catnip grew; cats stood in line waiting to roll around in it.
The two travelers stopped finally in a plaza, the scale of which appeared larger than all of the other city structures. Some cats lay in the square and basked in the sun. Many of these raised their heads to stare at the human, but none of them stood up.
Snowball walked up to a sculpture that was larger even than human scale. The sculpture was a monolith, as steep and rugged as the stone face of a cliff. Embedded in the monument were many stone slabs, sticking out at right angles, forming a kind of incomplete staircase. In some places the stone stairs were missing, reminding Gebu of the walls he had seen in the laboratory.
“This is our city’s memorial. This wall represents my bitter memories, memories shared by all the guides. Welcome to Clifftop City.”
“Who are you?”
“I am the founder of this city,” Snowball said.
“So this journey, everything you told me, was all a lie?”
“I know this is painful, Gebu, but there was no other way.”
“Lies ... lies ... it was all pretend, all along.” Gebu stumbled backward away from the white cat.
“Listen to me, Gebu. Please stay.”
Gebu turned and ran, ignoring the shouts of Snowball behind him. He kept running, further up and further in, up to the city’s highest level where he finally arrived at the foot of the lighthouse. The lighthouse staircase could actually accommodate human passage, and Gebu rushed up the stairs to the top of the tower, panting and sobbing.
The phantom sea at the foot of the cliff rolled without rest and transformed itself into enigmatic shapes. The wind at the top of the cliff dried Gebu’s tears, but more tears surged forth and took their place.
The white cat squatted on the railing, facing the city, waiting for Gebu to quiet down. It seemed to have been sitting there already for a hundred years.
“We are not by nature wary of humans, but distrust is carved into our blood now and has been for more than a century,” Snowball said. “In the beginning you and I didn’t know each other very well.”
The white cat continued its tale: “Long ago, at the beginning of all this, I brought together a team of guides. We took advantage of the time before the phantoms spread throughout the land to build this city, to secure it. We lived here in peace for many years, cherishing the idea that we had escaped humanity and could live apart from you people forever. During this period, we sent forth scouts to seek out the vestiges of the human race, to learn about human civilizations and the accomplishments of the past. These explorers witnessed the tremendous projects and daring endeavors that humans had once engaged in as they pursued truth, as they attempted to understand reality. We discovered that human beings were just as curious about the world as we were. And after much debate, we concluded that one day cats and people would reconcile, join forces, and defeat the phantoms together. We constructed this lighthouse at the highest point in the city, above the reach of the relatively heavy phantom machines. We hoped that people, some bold human explorers, would follow this light and find us here. They would need to be curious and courageous and clever to make such a journey. Fifty years passed, and no one came, so we stopped waiting. It seemed the human race was withering, exhausted. None of you were willing to pay the price of curiosity.”
The white cat hung its head and looked out toward the setting sun.
“So eventually I summoned up my own courage and approached the humans myself. I was drawn to you in particular, and I observed you with great attention, though still on my guard and with my heart full of doubts. I had to test you to be sure. I was continually filled with internal conflict and uncertainty, and I know I have made mistakes along the way. I do not think myself to be any better or more noble than a human. But I want to strive with all that is in me to become something like this ray of light, like the beam from this lighthouse. I do not regret having met you, for you are the most courageous human I have ever known.” A profound quiet divided them for a time, but little by little the air between them transformed into something else.
“I am sorry,” Snowball said at last.
Gebu’s tears flowed once more, and he did not speak.
Snowball said, “Ever since the experiments, I never dared to go back to that laboratory. You made me think more carefully about the scientist and how I felt about those times. I cannot deny the beautiful things that came to me along with the phantoms. Sometimes there is reality within illusion. I remembered something the experimenter said. He said he taught me how to speak because he wanted me to have the ability to say ‘no.’ Maybe all along he wanted to hear me say this word. And the night before he was taken away, he told me a bedtime story. He told me that one day a cat would meet a good man, someone better than himself, as he said. Together they would become knights in a world of phantoms, and they would pursue the truth amidst all the illusions, and finally, one day, the phantoms would be overthrown.”
The white cat turned away, and the last rays of sunlight touched the tips of its fur. The fur shone like platinum. The cat’s eyes were clear and bright and seemed to see all the days from now until the end of time. “Now, I need to ask you. Are you willing to join us? No matter how you choose, I feel very much indebted to you.”
“You want me to be a knight?” Gebu opened his mouth slightly.
“This is the title given to the most courageous guides.”
“Guides for whom?”
“For everyone who still has the courage to explore this world of phantoms.”
Gebu bit his lip. “Yes. I am willing. I am no longer afraid of the phantoms. I can see the truth behind them. I will be a guide with you, and a knight. I will fight the phantoms with you.”
By now the lights throughout the Clifftop City were switching on one after another, and the cats were climbing up into their buildings and into the trees, making their way home. Other cats carried packs on their backs and picked up tools and walked with them toward the edges of the city. Fog rose into the air above the dark forest, and the outline of a terrible monster began to take shape there.
The cat ran its eyes over the city, taking it all in, and then said, “Even cats that have been transformed do not live on indefinitely. I have only a few years to live now. I regret that in the end I will not be able to witness the final end of the phantoms with you. Over the years we have preserved all the human knowledge we could gather, but the world is large, and there is much that we have not yet explored. Collecting and interpreting human knowledge will require human help. We need to find more like you, more human guides, more knights.”
Gebu wept quietly and nodded his head solemnly. He moved to place his hand on Snowball’s back, lowered the hand tentatively, and finally buried his fingers in the soft fur.
“Ahem.” Someone cleared a throat behind them. A burly ginger cat stood there and looked at Snowball with a serious expression. It seemed to be awaiting a signal or a command.
The white cat stood, saluted the ginger with a deep bow and then gave a smaller nod.
The ginger cat nodded in reply and turned to enter the lighthouse.
The powerful beam of light suddenly shot into the darkness, like a keen blade. It swept across the dark forest and cut through the raging waves of the phantom sea. Gebu watched this display, but his soul had already flown ahead of the brilliant light to the distant horizon.