The Gone-Away World (41 page)

So now Huster is leaving. The big guy is taking his stuff and going away someplace. His consultative role means getting ignored in committee, and he hasn't bothered to show up for a meeting for two weeks. Maybe there's a town out there which can use him. Maybe this place, Heyerdahl Point, needs a troubleshooter. Maybe he'll just homestead and find a lady friend and have a parcel of oily-rag rugrats. Be that as it may, he's had it with Piper, and God bless her and all who sail in her, but not him, not any more.

Huster wanders from table to table in the Club Room, which isn't really all that much of a club or even that much of a room: it's the hull of a small ship pressed into service as a part of Piper 90's lower reaches, and across the bilges or the hold or whatever you call the bit of the thing no one goes into, someone long ago laid bare boards and plates and slats, and then by magic there was furniture and a bar and people day and night, because Piper 90 never sleeps. The Club Room has never been so full, nor so sad. Huster is our collective mother, our ruler and our voice of reason and our final court of appeal. And now he's getting a new family and we're being left behind. Jim Hepsobah snuffles into a tall beer, and Sally strokes his arm to say it'll be okay in the end. Tobemory Trent mops at his one good eye; Samuel P. is making wagers on cat races.

“You okay?” Huster says to me when his royal progress brings him to my corner.

“We'll get by, I guess.”

“Yes, you will.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I'll be fine. Be nice not having the cares of the world on my back for a bit. Really nice, actually.” He considers it. “Yeah.” He claps me on the back, and I tell him to look me up, and he says the same applies, and that's it. Huster walks away and then there are people between us. He's gone. I offer a thoughtful salute with my beer glass, and hear a sigh. Zaher Bey is leaning against the wall behind. He gazes after Huster and slumps dejectedly into a chair. I've never seen him do this before. The Bey does not flag. He jump-starts. There is no end to his energy. He rubs his palms down his face and looks exhausted.

“It's starting,” he says. “I thought it would take longer.”

“What's starting?”

“The . . . I don't know what you would call it. Not rot, exactly. The not-right things are starting again.” He shakes his head.

“Because of Huster?”

“No. No, no. That's . . .” The Bey waves his hand generously, and I wonder briefly whether he's plastered. “That's a consequence. Huster is my canary. Yes?” Yes. I know about canaries. If you're mining for coal, you keep a canary in a cage so that if you hit a gas pocket, the bird will die before you do, and you have time to get out. Assuming that you don't explode. Actually, in modern times the canary has been supplanted by an electrocatalytic sensing electrode, but quite a lot of people still call the unit after its avian predecessor.

“So what's starting?”

“What was the first reification?”

“No one knows.”

“No. Not our kind. The old kind. The making of an idea into a thing.”

“Shelter? Thump?”

“Yes.” He sighs. “I didn't mean that either. I had a thought.” He ponders. His beer is finished. It is also disgusting. The beer in Piper 90 is made in a huge tank on the other side of the engine room, warmed by the nuclear reactor—everyone makes jokes about it glowing in the dark, but that isn't true because the radiation would kill the yeast. I'm almost sure it would, anyway. The beer is not toxic so much as it tastes of oil rig. I get him another one.

“You remember when I was just Freeman ibn Solomon?”

“Of course.”

“We had whisky!”

“We did, indeed.”

“And there was a girl with the most curious hair.”

“Yes,” I agree. He laughs.

“You see? Even I miss the old days, and my old days were dreadful. And I don't believe we should miss them. I think we should . . .
strike out
!” He thumps the table. “Make a new world! Not the old one all over again. But . . . people are scared.” He shrugs.

“So what was your thought?”

“Oh. I don't know. I thought . . . What is this thing, this Jorgmund? How did it begin? What is FOX? Who controls it? How is it made? Jorgmund knows, and no one else. So I asked again, what is Jorgmund? Not the Pipe.
The Pipe
is an object which brings relief. But Jorgmund is not only that. Is it a government? A company?” He shrugs again. “It is both. And what is its purpose? You might say ‘to reclaim the world,' but that is
our
purpose. Jorgmund is
a machine for laying, maintaining and defending the Pipe.
That is its only task. Its only priority. In fact, that is the only thing it can see. It is blind to us. It does not even know that we exist, except in so far as we impinge upon that purpose. If the Pipe could be constructed by monkeys and guarded by dogs, Jorgmund would be content with that. More content, actually, because it would be cheaper. Humans are simply not of interest to Jorgmund. We are gears. Jorgmund sees the world, and the Pipe, and anything which gets in the way. Nothing else.”

He's looking at me as though that should be enough. I don't understand. He rolls his hands over one another, slow and fluid, reeling in his thoughts. Then he nods.

“Imagine,” the Bey says, “that your wife was trapped in the mud in front of Piper 90, and she could not escape. What would Huster do?”

I shiver. “Stop the rig.”

“Yes. But Jorgmund would not. It would not see her. Jorgmund would roll on over her because the only thing it understands is the Pipe. Huster wouldn't let that happen.”

“I don't think Fust or van Meents would either.”

“Almost certainly not. But are you as sure of them as you are of Huster?”

I try to be. I fail. They just might take a little longer.

“No, I guess I'm not.”

“So: they stop the rig. Your wife is saved. Piper 90 is a day behind schedule. No problem for Huster or for us. But Jorgmund doesn't understand: oh, there's a good
reason
for the delay, but when the annual report is processed, it's still a delay. Fust and van Meents are replaced with someone whose priorities are closer to that of Jorgmund. And then the person who replaces them is replaced later for the same thing . . . Do you see? Sooner or later you arrive at someone who is not human, not really; someone who is just a cog. And at what point along the way does the executive in charge of Piper 90 let it roll on over someone?” He wobbles his hand in the air, flutters the fingers. “How long before the Pipe is more important than a life? Or a home? Or a river which feeds a village? How long before the
convenience
of the Pipe is more important than these things?”

“I don't know. Maybe never.”

“But Jorgmund
already
thinks that way. For Jorgmund, everything is judged by that one criterion:
How did the day advance the Pipe?
That's it. Only the people within the structure can temper it, and those who do will naturally be selected out.”

“Maybe.”

The Bey shrugs. “I didn't see it at first, when it happened to me. I thought I was fighting against greedy, evil men. And then I began to realise that they were just ordinary men, but that what was happening inside them was very strange. They were behaving as if they were evil. As if they hated us. The consequences of their actions were horrible. They deposed a just ruler—not a brilliant man, but a perfectly good, sensible one—because he would not give them money he did not owe them. They invaded his country and burned it and cast its people out into the wilderness, then installed a madman on the throne and called him a statesman. He plundered the wealth of the people and took the daughters of Addeh for concubines and outlawed their brothers who protested. So we rose up, and we fought him, though mostly we just stole from him and bilked him and made him angry. And then this poor nation was invaded
again,
by a hundred different armies, and they ate our food and diverted our rivers and we starved and thirsted and died in the crossfire. In the space of two decades they took a prosperous land which was waking to the modern world and transformed it into a battlefield of blood and burning trees. And all the time I could not understand
why.
There was no human reason for this. There wasn't enough money, enough gold or oil or diamonds or rare earths, in all of the mountains or the lakes of Addeh Katir to pay for any of this. It was futile. It made no sense. Only an idiot would engage in such a battle.”

Zaher Bey's voice is catching just a little. He's not shouting or declaiming, but there's a terrible intensity in what he says, a dreadful inspiration.

“An idiot or a machine. The All Asian Investment and Progressive Banking Group was a
machine for making money.
And Addeh Katir was refusing to pay. It didn't matter that the outlay was greater than the debt. We could not be allowed to default. That would have ground the gears and shattered the engine. It can go in only one direction. So it rolled over us. Do you see?
It rolled over us.
And this will be the same.”

I'm not sure. It makes sense, but it's also rather dark. There are so many things which would have to go wrong. And so many people who would have to be lazy, or wicked. It seems farfetched. Zaher Bey shrugs and finishes his beer, tilting it all the way back so that the foam slides into his mouth, and throws out his arms.

“Enough! I am a pessimistic old man at a party. Blah, blah, blah! Enough! I shall teach these young ones to dance, or I shall die in the attempt. Where is the band? Make music! Let the revels commence!” He leaps to his feet and raises his voice. “I am here! I am Zaher ibn Solomon Bey, Freeman of Addeh Katir, and I am the Prince of the Funky Chicken, Sultan of the Ineffable Conga!” A rousing cheer goes up, and he plunges into the throng. And somewhere there actually is a band, and he locates them and works out a tune which will satisfy him, and he grasps Huster by the arm and creates a cancan line, right there in the middle of the room.

I come home late, but not as late as Leah, who is working the late shift at the infirmary. She shuffles into bed as the sky is going pale and presses her cold nose against my back.

“I love you,” she says.

I love her too. I think I say it, but perhaps I just make a little grunt. Either way, she is content. The pressure of her nose does not abate.

H
USTER LEAVES
. We wave him off, and we go on with life. I don't think about Zaher Bey's worries for a while. No immediate catastrophe comes calling, and Hellen Fust makes some good decisions, a few things get tightened up and a couple of minor spats are sorted out rather well. She has a winning smile and a practical manner. She's not Huster, but she's not an idiot. She'll do. Van Meents keeps a lower profile, but he's no dead weight either. So I begin to think maybe the Bey was just maudlin drunk, which can happen to anyone, even heroes, and there's no question in my mind that's what he is. A genuinely good man. I don't see him very much, because Leah and I are busy kludging together some furniture and making a home up in our weird little V-shaped apartment (one of Rao Tsur's friends sends us some dried flowers and Veda herself appears with a charcoal sketch of Shangri-La she did from memory, in a frame made of fan belt and the offcut from some decking), but occasionally I glimpse him riding out with one of the teams or talking to people in the roof garden. The rest of the Katiris sort of fade away: they don't find jobs in Piper 90, and they don't settle up the line. They're around, you can hear them and glimpse them, but they keep themselves to themselves. I figure maybe they're just trying to find a bit of quiet and be them for a while. I work, and play, and sleep, and the food on Piper 90 gets a bit better, and somehow a few months slip past me.

Until we come on the Found Thousand, and I get in over my head—again.

I
T BEGINS
with a piece of string and a stick. More accurately, a piece of twine. The twine and the stick are interlinked in a simple-yet-effective style to make a snare. The snare is occupied by a small, strange thing like a bald rabbit with the head of a fish. It hisses at me as I go near. I back away. It tries to bite Samuel P. instead. He shrugs, unlimbers his gun, and converts it into a slick, ichory smear: BANG.

The shot doesn't echo. It sort of whispers away into the trees around us, giving the impression it is going to cover a lot of ground. Everyone looks around—everyone being me and Gonzo, and Annie and Bone, and Tobemory Trent.

“Sam,” says Gonzo, “if we are ambushed in the next twenty minutes by anthropophagous plants or by giant fish-rabbits looking for their horrid young, I am going to let them have you. In fact I will serve you to them on a plate made of banana leaves. I will put a white napkin over my arm and I will carry you into their dining room with an apple in your mouth, and I will offer to carve you. I will recommend a fullbodied red wine, because I suspect your meat will be gamey or even smoked, and I will bow until my nose touches the vile, gobbet-covered carpet of their lair and wish them
bon appétit,
and then I will walk out and consider myself richer and the world a better, less arsehole-ridden place.” Sam just stares at him, because this sort of discourse is not his daily fare, and Gonzo sighs. “Sam,” Gonzo says, “don't do that again.”

We move on.

The forest is tropical; it is pungent with funk and perfume. It smells like the dressing room of an exceptionally expensive and environmentally conscious prostitute. Turn your head one way, and your nose is teased by a fine scent of sherbert and musk. Turn the other way, something trufflish and blatantly rude slips into your mouth and makes you swallow. This is a
basic
place, all reproduction and hunting and raw meat. It is like a woman who once visited Caucus to talk about the New Russo-Slav Feminism. She arrived at dinner in the sort of dress your mother would wear, with a Peter Pan collar and Shakespearean sleeves, but she was wearing it open to somewhere just below her ribs. She smoked vile black cigarettes, and when she moved—which was often, because she spoke with her hands and her shoulders and with everything she had—her very white, very round bosoms (quite clearly not
breasts
or
knockers
or even
tatas,
but the genuine, incontestable
bosoms
of a curvaceous forty-nine-year-old woman who isn't wearing a brassiere) sallied forth individually or together to view the scene. It was my strong suspicion then, as it is now, that she took Sebastian to her bed that night and nearly killed him.