Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith Page B

bang in the middle of that hour. I still couldn't make any noise though, as the carriages have microphones all over the place. If you make any noise a silent alarm goes off somewhere and they come and throw you silently off the mono, and you have to walk silently down the silent streets instead, which is even worse.
    So I sat and thought, trying to calm my mood and also to remember as much as possible of what Snedd had told me about Stable.
    There wasn't much. The Neighbourhood had been forbidden right from the start. When The City reorganisation had started to take place, Stable had simply built a wall all around itself, shut out the sky, severed all connections with the outside world and pretended it didn't exist. The first generation knew it did, of course, but they were forbidden to tell their children. They were happy not to: the first generation stayed in Stable because they liked it that way.
    They were all long dead now, and the sixth and seventh generations had no idea the outside world existed. As far as they knew, the whole planet apart from the area they lived in had been destroyed in a nuclear war. They could walk up to the walls and see through windows and sure enough, outside was just a barren red plain blown with radioactive sand. The windows were in fact-vidiscreens maintained by the authorities whose job it was to keep things going on the way they were.
    The very last thing those authorities want is for anyone to make it in from the outside: it would blow the whole thing and trash hundreds of years of desired deception. Desired, because I'm not talking about repression here. The Stablents aren't kept in ignorance against their will. It's all they know, and it's all they want to know.
    A couple got on the mono and tried to engage me in conversation, but as my signing isn't too hot it was a rather stilted dose of social interaction. They'd clearly been shouting, and looked flushed; and excited, obviously keen to get home and make mad, passionate, silent love. After a while they left me to my own silent devices, though they did both keep pointing at my shirt, giving me the thumbs up and smiling broadly. I couldn't work out what they meant.
    At the portal exit I stood still for a moment, gearing myself up, flexing my weirdness-resilience muscles. Sound is a weird Neighbourhood, but where I was going now was far weirder. I was going into the Cat Neighbourhood.
    A long time ago, some eccentric who'd gained control of a largely disused Neighbourhood decided to leave it to the cats. The place was a complete mess, falling down and strewn with rubbish and debris. He forced the few remaining people out, built a wall round it and then died, making it irrevocably clear in his will that no one was to live there henceforth except cats.
    Ho ho, thought everyone, what a nut. We'll leave it a couple of years, and then move in. A cat Neighbourhood, ha ha.
    And then the cats started to arrive. From all over The City, one by one at first, and then in their droves, the cats appeared. Cats who didn't have owners, or had cruel ones, cats who weren't properly looked after, or just wanted a change, cats in their hundreds, and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands, moved into the Neighbourhood.
    Interesting, everybody thought.
    After a while a few people decided to visit the Neighbourhood, and they discovered two things. Firstly, if you don't love cats, they won't let you in. They simply will not let you in. Secondly, that there was something very weird going on. The rubbish and debris had disappeared. The buildings had been cleaned. The grass in the parks was cut. The whole Neighbourhood was absolutely and immaculately clean.
    Interesting, everybody thought, slightly uneasily.
    The lights work. The plumbing works. People who go into the Neighbourhood to visit their cats sleep in rooms that are as clean as if room service has just that minute left. Each block has a small store on one corner, and there is food in that store, and