The Gone-Away World (42 page)

Svetlana Yegorova would have loved this forest.

We push through the undergrowth, all of us feeling that we are undressing someone we shouldn't be. We aren't exactly hiding, not after Samuel P.'s clarion call shot; we just go cautiously, as you might in the new world. We check in with one another, covering our backs. We retain a knowledge of where we might defend ourselves, where we might fall back, and where not to get stuck. And then we round a corner and there is a clearing and a small fortified village with little neat houses crouched behind a stone and wood stockade. It is—and this is not usually the case with fortified settlements in the new world—pretty. The houses are solid and strong, but they are also quaint. I find myself looking for bric-a-brac in the windows. People who live in lovely small houses inevitably feel the urge to line their windows with primary school paintings and china dogs from the seaside. The rich woodwork and weathered stone vanishes under strata of postcards, biscuit crumbs, carpet fluff and cat hair.

No bric-a-brac. But that's hardly surprising. These houses are recent, and it's not as if there's been either the time or—as I look at them—the leisure to assemble that kind of crap. These houses are scarred and pocked. They have seen hard use. They have been shot at, bludgeoned and burned. Little pig, little pig . . . Was the first version of this village made of thatch? How many householders got roasted by the local bad guys (perhaps adult rabbit-fish breathe fire) before they managed to put this place together? Because the more I look at it, the more I realise that this is a
defensible
village, and it has
been defended.
Those little ripples in the grass have grown up around sharpened pegs protruding a few inches from the soil. No fun at all charging the walls over a field of those. You'd want very heavy boots, or caterpillar tracks. Shoes or tyres would be pierced, with obvious consequences. There is a safe path, but it curves and winds in on itself. Plenty of time for the defenders to pick you off if there is need. And once you are inside the wall—no mean feat—there are no sight lines except from the roofs. The houses create a winding maze of streets around the centre of the village. You'd pay for every metre.

Real go-getters, then. Real survivors. People who have had it rough and come through.
Our
kind of people, in fact. Gonzo is grinning widely as he threads his way to the gate and bangs on it. It makes the kind of dull noise which very, very solid things make. He bangs louder. There is a small door set into the main one, a Judas port. In the Judas port there is a viewing slot. It opens, and someone views us. Then she speaks.

“Go away.”

“We're not bandits,” Gonzo says. “We don't need supplies. We're not looking to move in either. We've got some good news.” He's almost embarrassed, and you can hear it in his voice.

“And who are you?” she says.

“My name's Gonzo Lubitsch,” Gonzo replies, and in for a penny, in for a pound: “I'm here to rescue you. We can take you to a safe place. No monsters. We're making the world right again.”

There is a sort of choked snort from the other side of the door.

“Is that so?”

“Yes!”

She chuckles.

“We have a safe place, Gonzo-Lubitsch-I'm-here-to-rescue-you,” says the lady behind the grille. “We don't need yours. So why don't you walk back down the path, and run back through the forest, and go rescue someone else? We won't hold it against you. We'll be fine. Thanks, though.”

She shuts the grille firmly, though not rudely, and not all of our polite knockings can draw her back again. We hang around for a while feeling stupid and then go back to Piper 90.

Hellen Fust and Ricardo van Meents are not pleased.

The problem is a small one, but it comes at a key point. The village is in a strategically and logistically important location. To the south, there's a stretch of water tentatively identified as a major sea. To the north, the land becomes rugged and mountainous, so that while we could build the Pipe through it, we couldn't actually take Piper 90 up there, so we'd have to slow down and do it at one remove, the leading end of the construction moving farther and farther from our base of operations, becoming more and more exposed, until a midway point where Piper 90 would move around to the far end and all work would have to stop until contact was re-established, some five weeks later (one kilometre per hour times twenty-four hours times seven days times fives weeks is eight hundred and forty kilometres), putting us way behind, even without factoring in the extra distance and the fact that the final route of the Pipe would be inaccessible, unmaintainable and indefensible.

Piper 90 is going through that village, one way or another. And since Piper 90 is a large heavy thing made of steel, and it is wider than the whole of the town, that pretty much means the village will cease to exist.

The Advisory Panel is asked if there's any way around this. Hellen Fust comes all the way down from a meeting in the top level. She asks, politely, if anyone has a remedy for the situation. She asks most particularly of Zaher Bey. He doesn't answer. He just sits and glowers from beneath his brows, and contemplates her as if she is a moderately noxious insect.

“I don't see any alternative,” Hellen Fust says.

“It's very upsetting,” Hellen Fust says.

“If there were a more
holistically appealing
way of dealing with the situation which was satisfying to everyone, I'd be the first to advocate it,” Hellen Fust says.

“But without that I'm going to have to recommend that we continue as planned, and inform these people—with regret—that we're going to have to
relocate
them,” Hellen Fust says.

“You mean we should just roll right on over their homes,” Zaher Bey says abruptly. Hellen Fust looks at him as if he's being insufferably rude. The Bey looks across at me. His dark, angry eyes rest on mine. I look away.

Huster could not have solved this either, I am telling myself. He would have had to make the same choice, although maybe he could have persuaded those people it was for the best. Perhaps the difference, in the end, is that Hellen Fust does not go out to the village to tell the inhabitants what is going to happen. She sends us instead.

“I
APPRECIATE
you've had some bad experiences,” Gonzo says persuasively. “A lot of people have. But we're here to make it all okay again. You don't have to be afraid. We'll take care of you.”

“We don't need taking care of,” says the woman behind the grille patiently. “We can take care of ourselves. We are alive, after all.”

Gonzo is soft-pedalling. He wants to make this their choice, so that he doesn't have to be a stormtrooper. It's not working for him. Perhaps the woman—her name is Dina—perhaps she is used to smooth-talking men at her door. Or perhaps she can hear in Gonzo's voice the tension and the regret, and she's torturing him a little before giving in to the inevitable. Gonzo waves me over.
Take charge,
he is saying, and more quietly,
do the deed.

Because my honour is negotiable, and his is not.

I take his place in front of the grille.

“Hi,” Dina says chirpily. I smile at her. I sit down on the ground and look up at the doors, and she has to stand on tiptoe (I know this because I can see her eyes drop out of sight and then hop back into view as she looks for me again) to see me.

“Your houses look pretty solid,” I say after a bit.

“Yes. They are.”

“Taken a beating too.”

“They have.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Lots of kinds.”

I was hoping to get more out of that line of questioning, to be honest. After a second or two of silence, Dina continues.

“Shark things. With legs.”

“Nasty.”

“Very.”

“And some soldiers.”

“Real ones?”

Dina sighs.

“Mostly, it's been desperate people. They see what we have and they think they can just have it. We show them otherwise.”

“Yeah. I'm sure.” Just as I'm sure they can't stop Piper 90, when it comes. The stone I'm sitting on is quite comfy. I shuffle on it, using the roughness to scratch an itch on my leg.

“We wondered, when you came, whether you were real. Or whether you were new.”

“New?”

“Made. It's what we call the people who weren't born, who were just made up or who are split in half so that there's two of them. Or more.”

“More?”

“There was an old man from over in Gondry turned out to have four whole people running around in his head. One of 'em was a dangerous bastard. Others were just scared. We call that kind of person
new.
”

“Have you seen a lot of them?”

“Yes, I would say that we have.”

“We've seen only a few.”

“How did that go?”

So I tell her about Pascal Timbery and Larry Tusk's dog, and the fear.

“But you'd be safe from all of that, with us.”

“So you say.”

There's a pause.

“I know this region pretty well,” Dina says. “I was thinking about it last night.”

Oh crap.

“You can't go south, because of the water.”

“No.”

“And I guess you could go north. But it would be hard.”

“Not impossible.”

“Really?”

“Probably.”

“But the truth is, you're coming through my town. Aren't you?”

“
I
'm not. I mean, if it happens, I'll be there. But I'm not . . .” I'm not the one who wants to roll on over you. I just deliver her messages. “You'll be safe. It'll be all right. Better. We really are doing a good thing.”

“Oh,” says the woman behind the grille, and her voice sounds sort of strange and weak, which is normal for persons being rescued and fills us all with a kind of relief, but also sort of lost, which isn't and doesn't. “Oh well. In that case, if you promise we'll be safe?”

“I do,” I say. And when that isn't enough for her, I say the words, slowly and out loud, so everyone can hear. She sighs again.

“Then come on in.”

And she opens the door.

We walk into the village and I know something—everything—is more wrong than right. Dina is small and spry and somewhere between thirty and sixty, with greyish hair tied back like a hippie's. Around her there are men and women in all shapes and sizes, in all kinds of clothes scavenged and pieced together. Over by the fence there's a huge man like an ape, with a bearskin around his waist and a bristling beard. His eyes are sharp and dangerous, and he stares at me all the way until I pass behind a wall. Without a word, Dina turns and leads us through the narrow streets, under the watchful eyes of the people on the rooftops, and into the main square. And that is where the wrong becomes clear. Gonzo stares. Samuel P. lifts his hands and leaves his gun very well alone. Sally Culpepper steps just a little closer to Jim, and Jim doesn't do a damn thing, just stands there and waits to see what will break.

“You promised,” the woman reminds me, and yes, I did.

Tobemory Trent turns his head to take in the whole thing, and then he steps with his left foot turned out, and lets his body carry him all the way around. One step, two, three, four. Back to where he began. His gaze takes in the men and women around us, and the children, and then it flicks over them to the others huddled in doorways and peering from around corners: the strange haunted eyes and the curious hands and all the other little things like scales and fur—these are dream people, fake people, people made real from someone's thoughts. Reification people. They are the
new.

Oh crap.

“How many of you are there?” I ask at last.

“One thousand and eight,” she says.

“And how many of those . . . ,” I begin, staring at Dina. She pushes her hair back from her ears. They have little points, like an elf's. “How many of you are . . .
new
?”

“All of us,” she says.

Crap-a-doodle-do.

Z
AHER
B
EY
is thumping the table. I have never seen him so angry. I have never really seen him angry at all. To whatever extent I have considered it, I have imagined that his anger would be cool and sophisticated, possibly barbed. It would be witty, trenchant and terribly effective. It is none of these things. His hand, with round fingers and very pink nails, hits the tabletop again. Hits it very hard. The coffee cups are jumping a little and the noise he is producing with each impact is a sort of bone-deep
BUH!
rather than the soft
pmf!
which people use for emphasis, or the
toctoctoc!
you sometimes hear when a Teutonic public speaker wants to call the room to order.

BUH! BUH! BUH!
(And
sscluttertinkledonkdonk!
—that's the coffee cups.)

It's not a noise of debate. It's a sound of fury. It's what you get when you horrify someone.

Hellen Fust convened the council as soon as she heard my report, and she and Ricardo van Meents are sitting at the top of the table in a shiny new executive meeting room. It is a very grown-up place. It makes you feel very professional, very wise and very realistic. In this room you can't cavil at necessity. It has ugly prints on the wall and coffee from a Thermos, but the Thermos isn't a solid, portable one with smooth sides; it is got up to look like a classic coffee jug. I went to pour myself some, and got scalded as the hot coffee squirted in a thin stream at right angles to the lip. Hellen Fust took it away from me and unscrewed the lid, turning it a couple of times so that the little arrow on top pointed straight ahead. She gave it back to me. The coffee came out in a broad gush, due north. I felt like an idiot. And then they started.

“I think we can all agree that this is a very significant moment,” Ricardo van Meents said, fingers flat on the table like a frog's. He rolled his thumb against the reflective surface, making a print, then scuffed at it with his sleeve. He didn't say anything else. Hellen Fust nodded. And then she began to speak, although it didn't feel like a speech. It was a series of things which had to be said before a thing is done, like the last rites before the hangman's trapdoor opens. It was an execution.