"Yes, naturally ..." said he, "yes ... yes."
Perhaps she came up to welcome the pups, he thought as he bounced around in the back seat alongside a gloomy Quentin, gazing at the even movement of Acey's ears. Acey was chewing something. She came out of the forest thickets white, cold, confident, and stepped into the water, the water she knew so well, entered into the lake as I walk into a library, sank into the rippling green twilight and swam toward the pups. She met them straight away in the center of the lake, on the bottom, and led them off somewhere, for some reason, at someone's behest, and one more knot of forest events is tied. And perhaps miles away from here something will happen or start to happen; banks of the lilac fog that isn't fog will seethe between the trees, or another cesspit will start up in a peaceful clearing, or mottled aborigines who've just been sitting and watching an educational film and patiently listening to a lecture by Beatrice Vakh, earnestly hoarse, will all of a sudden get up and go off into the forest, never to return... And it will all be replete with profound significance, the profound significance that informs the movements of complicated machinery, and it will all be strange and, therefore, meaningless to us, at any rate for those of us who still can't get used to lack of meaning or accept it as the norm. He sensed the significance of each and every event, every phenomenon about him: that no batch of pups could number forty-two or forty-five and that the trunk of that tree there was overgrown with red moss and no other, that the sky was invisible along the path because of overhanging branches.
The vehicle shook. Stoyan was driving extremely slowly and from some way off Pepper could see a leaning post and a sign with something written on it. The legend had been washed out by rain and faded, it was a very old notice on a very old, dirty-gray board, pinned to the pole with two huge rusty nails. "Here, two years ago, pathfinder Gustave was tragically drowned. Here his memorial will be set up." The landrover made its way around the pole, lurching from side to side.
Whatever got into you, Gustave, Pepper thought. How did you manage to drown here? You were a tough guy no doubt, your head was shaved, your jaw was bristly and square, a gold tooth, tattooed from top to toe, your arms hung below your knees, you'd a finger missing on the right, bitten off in a drunken brawl. It wasn't your heart that sent you off to become a pathfinder, things just panned out that way, you served your time up on the cliff where the Directorate stands now and there was nowhere for you to run to except the forest. And you wrote no articles in the forest, you never even gave them a thought, you thought about other articles written before that and aimed at you. And you built a strategic road, laid concrete slabs and chopped down the forest far away on both sides so that eight-engined bombers could land here if need be. Could the forest put up with that? It drowned you in a dry place, but they'll put a monument up to you in ten years time and maybe give your name to some cafe. The cafe will be called "Gustave's" and driver Acey will drink yogurt there and stroke the rumpled girls from the local choir...
Apparently Acey had two convictions, neither, for some reason, for what might be expected. The first time he'd landed up in a labor colony for stealing stationery from some concern, and the second time for offenses against the passport regulations. Stoyan there was clean. Doesn't drink yogurt, nothing. He loves Alevtina tenderly and purely, whom nobody ever loved tenderly and purely. When article number twenty came out, he would offer Alevtina his heart and hand and would be turned down, his articles notwithstanding, his broad shoulders and beautiful Roman nose notwithstanding, for Alevtina couldn't stand anybody fastidious, suspecting in him (not without reason) a rake of such refinement as to be beyond her comprehension. Stoyan lives in the forest whither, unlike Gustave, he came voluntarily. He never complains about anything although for him the forest is just a vast pile of material for articles, guaranteeing him against treatment...
