The lead bastard is a hundred yards away from us and coming on strong when Tobemory Trent emerges from the forest with a jaunty smile upon his face.
“Let’em through,” he says.
We stare at him. Trent can barely contain his laughter.
“Seriously. Let’em through. It’ll be fine.” And so we do. We turn and walk towards the village in tandem with its putative destroyers. When we reach the pickets, we get the joke.
In the main square and everywhere there are traces. There are signs of heavy trunks being dragged and wheels spinning. Rubber has been laid by squealing tyres. A wide dirty track has been created at the back of the village, leading out and away into the unreal world beyond, where we will not go. It is all very familiar. This place has been evacuated by an army in small city cars, perfectly coordinated and swift. In my mind’s eye I can see the riot of colour, the deep burgundy of the Rolls-Royce amid the Subarus and Skodas, and the cheerful singing of the pirates and their leader as they steal the Found Thousand from under the eyes of the system. Fust and van Meents stamp furiously through the wreckage. They are looking for something to persecute or yell at. It’s not rational, but it’s predictable. Most people would do the same.
“In there,” says Hellen Fust, “I heard something.” Ricardo van Meents, for some reason wearing desert camo, marches into the house.
The scene is weirdly familiar. I consider it: an armed force in fruitless pursuit of the Bey and his scoundrels. Searching an empty house. An old scar on my scalp is itching. Oh. I watch Ricardo van Meents with something approaching sympathy. Visible inside the doorway for a moment, just under the lintel: a flicker of angry, bottlebrush tail. Van Meents doesn’t notice.
I close my eyes for a moment and count to three. I wait until I hear the sound of an expensive executive screaming as a sexually frustrated, rabid cat falls on him from above. I wonder briefly whether it is the same cat, imported for this purpose. And then I start to laugh.
Ricardo van Meents comes running out, wearing on his head a furious feral tom with one ear and no nose to speak of. Hellen Fust glares at me, then stalks after him. I am so fired. But since I quit anyway, that’s hardly a problem.
That night we pack our things and leave Piper 90. We roll back along the Pipe, sleeping in our cars. We just keep going for days through the patchwork landscape, along tributaries and back to the main Pipe, until we come at last to a noisome little bar on the edge of a collection of shacks masquerading as a town. A sign reads “Exmoor welcomes you.” This seems unlikely. It is more probable that Exmoor doesn’t like your face but has decided for the moment not to hit you with an axe handle. This place, at last, is somewhere we can stop and wonder what we have become.
We park up and stretch, and we stare around us at this ugly little place. There’s a strong smell of pigs and a nasty-looking bar at one end of town. Sally Culpepper, who has in some measure understood for months that the end must come, and who understands further that with people like van Meents and Fust in charge there will always be a need for actual competence in the form of contractors, sits us in the saloon and puts the beers on the table and tells us that we are, as of now, the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company, head office tbc, and we can call her “sir.” And Jim Hepsobah lifts her up in his arms and then onto his shoulders, and we mourn our lost jobs by dancing on the pool table (amid a collection of alarming stains) and around this ghastly, nameless dive we’re in, until the barman starts swearing at us with such depth and natural talent that we all stop to take note.
ZAHER BEY’S LETTER ARRIVES by means unknown and unimaginable, left resting against the door of the Nameless Bar along with a basket of weird-looking fruit and the first decent cheese I have seen since the Go Away War. The paper is rough, and the words perfectly formed. It is the handwriting of someone who has learned the Roman alphabet as a second script, and as a consequence makes his words reverently, like a visitor in a house with a pale carpet.
Dear Friends,
My profoundest apologies for not saying a proper goodbye. Nq’ula was most adamant that our departure must come as a surprise so that the greatest possible time might elapse before pursuit could be fielded by those we must now regard as enemies. He begs me to convey that there was no lack of trust in this insistence, but that it was rather a gesture of respect for your honesty, and for your belief in the great project of which we were all a part: the creation of a better world. Even my people were ignorant of the full scope of our plan. I longed to discuss the matter with you, but dared not assume your complicity in deceiving those who must remain ignorant of my design. This posture deprived me of the opportunity for farewells which I wanted very much to make—and at the same time I could not hope to enlist you or to offer you the hospitality of my hearth, wherever it eventually may be. Rest assured, the House of the Bey will always open its doors to you.
The people of Addeh Katir and of the Found Thousand will now embark on a great adventure. We will strike out beyond the embrace of the Pipe, and we will see what can be achieved, and how we are changed, by living with a world which can reveal us to ourselves or assail us with our fears. The Found Thousand tell me it is not so hard. And surely it cannot be more dangerous than to exist within the compass of Jorgmund’s grasp, and risk casual annihilation or disenfranchisement by faceless persons “up the line.” I beg you to consider: “What is this thing called Jorgmund, and what may it become? What is its power, and the source of that power? What is my place in the pattern?” And if ever the answers should cease to please you, seek us out, and be assured of welcome.
Rao and Veda Tsur in particular have asked me to send their love, and with it I enclose my own, in the hope that you will not find it a hollow thing. More practically, I enclose also some of our better local produce, by way of a tiny bribe. The dairy is lost to us, of course, and it will be some time before the goats recover from their journey enough for us to milk them, but this is a taste of what we will achieve, and to what we aspire. Zaher ibn Solomon, of the family of Barqooq, will take pride in his people’s cheese. I should think the Golden-Eared Bey may be spinning like a top in his vanished grave. On the other hand, I am now the leader of the only rebellion in the new world, which may serve to reduce the number of rotations per minute.
In anticipation of another meeting, I remain,
Your Friend,
Zaher ibn Solomon al-Barqooq Bey,
Freeman.
We ate the cheese, one mouthful each, and gorged on the fruit. We even shared some with Flynn the Barman, for which he swore an oath of eternal friendship in terms which made my hair stand on end. And then we put the letter away in a box behind the bar: the secret escape route, the last resort. Two weeks later Sally Culpepper’s phone rang. Some mayor of somewhere had a spillage of something, and there were brigands on horseback.
We took the job. We did it well. We got another.
From then on it was just life; each single day is short, yet when you come to count them you find that time’s strange process has forged them all together into years. We found places to live, we painted fences and front doors, and the seasons abraded the paint and we did it all again. Samuel P. proposed to Saphira one Christmas, and she turned him down. He tried again twelve months later and her uncle set the dogs on him. Tommy Lapland found a grey hair in his pubic region and rushed to the Nameless Bar to show us all, in the process exposing his legendarily ugly member and causing Tobemory Trent to remark that he’d never before been sorry to retain one eye. Sally Culpepper got sterner and more beautiful, and moved in with Jim. Baptiste Vasille built a greenhouse and made wine which tasted of ash and fishbones. We told him it was delicious and breathed a sigh of relief when he drank a great deal of the Premier Cru and reversed his tank over the vines. Annie the Ox started collecting puppet heads. She had a cat, a dog, a monkey and several bears. But her favourite was an elephant head with bent tusks made of hempcloth. On its face was a sad little smile, as if it missed the taffeta savannah
and the rolling burlap grasses of home. We never asked what they meant to her, because some things were private, however weird and unsettling it was to see her set them out in a little head-huddle over her bed. So all in all we ate and drank and loved, and passed time living the ordinary lot of people doing people things, and then one day the Pipe caught fire and the lights went out in the Nameless Bar and Gonzo Lubitsch put his big new truck into gear for the first time.
Chapter Nine
Meet Mr. Pestle;
the miracle of fire;
an act of heroism.
THE NEW truck still smelled of plastic, but now it smelled of trucker as well: of too little sleep and a lot of coffee, of paying attention and hurrying. There was a feathery smear on the windscreen where the pigeon had bounced off the cab, and Gonzo had already spilled Flynn the Barman’s espresso into the cupholder. Try as we might, though, we couldn’t quite get rid of the smell of pig. It stuck to the seats and hung in the air, and from time to time you tasted it in passing if you were eating a piece of chocolate and were rash enough to open your mouth. Give us a few days of bad terrain and no showers, and this truck would be so entirely baptised in us that you couldn’t imagine anyone else wanting to go near it, but that whisper of the wallow seemed as if it might be there for ever. I moved my feet along the dash, trying to jam my heels into the handle of the glove box, and they slipped. I lifted them back up and tried again. No good. Our old truck was just that little bit smaller, I could get purchase on the dash and wedge my spine into the seat, but this monster was more luxurious and I wasn’t quite tall enough.
Drowned Cross was a day behind us, and for all my misgivings we’d come through the Border without as much as a single monster charging from the gloom or dropping out of a tree. The road had been empty from one end to the other. Once I saw a shadowy figure off to one side, and another time a bird or a bat flittered past the truck, but that was all. The route might as well have been cleared in advance. Even Bone Briskett seemed to feel we’d made good time, and he’d slackened his breakneck pace so that the drivers could breathe a little easier, and told us we were nearly there. Dick Washburn put his head out of the tank and pointed ahead down the road as if he were in command, and Bone’s tank suddenly developed a mysterious gearbox problem which bounced him around and shook him up until he went back inside.
We came back into the solid world a little while later, and almost straight into Harrisburg, which was a no-fun town in a completely different way from Drowned Cross. It wasn’t much of a burg and there had probably never been a Harris. It was a collection of little concrete boxes for people to be kept in while they were waiting to go on duty. You could see it in the bargain-basement architecture: those neat roads and regulation fences and heartless little prefabs, laid out as if they were a real town with shops and boutiques and cafes and a future, and not just a place of preparation and storage whose tomorrows were inevitably violent and sad. This town was a body bank; the adults were the current account and the kids were on deposit, just waiting to be spent at need.
Harrisburg’s only reason to exist was on a muddy rise just beyond the tarmac square which served as the city centre: a big fat storage facility where they kept things no one who lived in Haviland City or New Paris would want to be anywhere near. Bone Briskett’s tank rolled up to the gates, and a couple of guys in suits and standard-issue sunglasses came out and looked at him. Bone glowered back and gave them his ID. The standard-issue guys huddled. Bone growled, and the pencilneck popped up next to him and yipped, and they waved us through. The convoy peeled off to one side and we were escorted through to a vast, empty hangar with a lot of soldiers and standard-issue guys around it, and in the middle of this enormous space there were ten objects arranged in a ring. Each of them was a lash-up, a thing about seven feet tall and bolted together in a hurry.
Gonzo sucked air between his teeth.
Between the crossed arms of the standard-issue guys, we could see that each charge was made up of two big containment tanks yoked together. One tank was yellow, in a loud, friendly way which nonetheless was not reassuring. The other one was red, the kind of red which means it’s best not to get near it rather than the kind which says come in and have a smoke and a fairy cake. The yellow tanks were marked with the word fox. The red ones had hazard stamps on them, and STUFF in black. These things, put together the right way, make what you might term an idiot bomb. It makes a very large bang, but you have to be stupid to want one.
Gonzo jumped down out of the truck, and sauntered over to have a look. The standard-issue guys didn’t like that, so there was a great deal of cock waving, which went like this:
Gonzo: So these are our babies?
Mr. Standard Issue: Step away from there, please, sir.
Gonzo: Gotta tell you, no one said anything about FOX . . .
Mr. Standard Issue: Step away, sir!
Gonzo: Exqueeze me?
Mr. Standard Issue: We are required to keep the tanks secured. Sir.
Gonzo: Yeah, well, not from me. I’m the guy who—
Mr. Standard Issue: Yes, sir, also from you.
Gonzo: Uh . . . Sparky? This thing and I need to get to know one another, and you’re in the way.
Mr. Standard Issue: My name is Lipton, sir.
Gonzo: Good. Well, Sparky, in a short while now I will be leaving with this appalling crap, and my friends and I will take it off somewhere and use it to do this thing which you may or may not be cleared to know about—
Mr. Standard Issue: (tetchy) I’m fully cleared for the mission, sir.
Gonzo:—but which you absolutely do not have the stones for. And the thing is that while you were still learning your ABC of exploding cigars, these people you see here were building the Jorgmund Pipe, and generally saving the arse of the planet . . .
Mr. Standard Issue: I’m aware of who these people are, sir.
Gonzo:And so the question is not whether you have yet had permission for me to approach that catastrophe of demolition over there, because that is the whole point of it existing. The question is whether you or any of these governmental protozoa is qualified to be anywhere near it. And the answer, unless you can show me a diploma or some relevant experience, is absolutely no fucking way. So step back, stand down and let the dog see the rabbit, okay?
Mr. Standard Issue: (leaning close and lowering his voice) Now you listen to me, you cowboy fuckstick. Mr. Pestle will be here in five minutes to release the goods to you. If you approach these tanks without clearance, I will drop the hammer on the remote detonator right now, as per my standing orders, and we will all end up as dust in the wind, which is seriously poetic but isn’t how I expect you want to spend the rest of your day. So why don’t you park your attitude in your oversized compensator back there and we’ll all wait for the authorisation code, all right?
Gonzo: (also leaning close and reaching into his coat) What, this detonator?
Mr. Standard Issue: (clutching at his left pocket) How? Ungh! (The word “ungh” should be taken to mean that Gonzo, by means of this deception and now armed with the location of the remote, has punched Mr. Standard Issue in the throat, gently enough that the guy’s just really unhappy rather than dead, and abstracted the object in that pocket, which is a scary-looking slab of plastic with a red button on it.)
Gonzo: (whistling tunelessly as he wanders over to the nearest tank) Hello, little lady! Ain’t you a fine figure of a woman? (Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.)
Gonzo’s massive testicular superiority thus established, he caressed the nearest bomb in a moderately obscene way, and the rest of us climbed out of our trucks and started figuring out how best to lift and stow them. The soldierboys had a forklift, but forklifts don’t have a whole lot of suspension and there was no way you wanted these things jolting around. In the end we rigged a set of A-frame pulleys with turntable waists, and we lifted them with actual muscle and sweat so we would be able to feel anything going wrong before it ha
ppened.
Mr. Pestle made his appearance as we were loading up the last truck, and he did it with aplomb. He was a genial old gaffer with weightlifter’s shoulders and a neat patch of silver wire on his head, and he was craggy with a man’s experience. His shoes were two-tone leather like a gangster’s in a movie, and they made little noises as he walked: tink for one and tonk for the other. He threw an arm around Gonzo, and slapped him thunderously on the shoulder with one gloved hand. He was letting us know he wasn’t Dickwash, that he was the real thing; that he had the right to tell us what to do, and just maybe he did. There was a faint scar along one side of his face, by the hairline, which might have been shrapnel, certainly wasn’t a facelift. Mr. Pestle had a voice like a town crier.
“I’m Pestle, call me Humbert! Pestle like mortar, mortar like in a wall! Ain’t that ever a regrettable name? If my mother was alive, God rest her, I’d have her walk behind me and explain herself to every Jack and Jill—especially every Jill! Dead these many years, the old monster, and tongue-lashing the Almighty in heaven or the Devil in hell, depending on her ultimate destination. So you’re the guy? Gonzo Lubitsch, man of action? And these here are your deputies! Ha! Ha? Cowboy joke, you’re too young . . . And this lady must be Sally Culpepper, who handed Washburn his papery backside and won you people a contract I’d like a piece of myself? Richard”—and by this he meant the pencilneck, probably the name Dick belonged to some crusty upper-echelon SOB and so Dick Washburn was Richard to his superiors, because there can only ever be One True Dick—“neglected to mention you had legs like the Queen of Sheba. Poor dumb animal never stood a chance, did he? Ha!” And he wrapped an arm around Sally too, with a respectful nod to Jim Hepsobah, because Humbert Pestle was not a genial old gaffer at all, he was a silverback, a pencilneck in excelsis, and he could read a personnel file and play you like a tuppenny whistle. Pestle nodded to the standard-issue guys, then turned back to us, as a group.