The Gone-Away World

Chapter Eight

I GREW UP with the Nuclear Threat. It lived on the corner of my street and it walked with me to school. Gonzo and I used to play with it when none of the other kids wanted to talk to us. We got so tired of playing Armageddon with that damn unimaginative Nuclear Threat that we implored it to learn another game, but it never did. Mostly it just sat there in the back of the classroom and glowered. And then one day we heard it was dead. Some people seemed pretty upset about this, but I was just glad I didn’t have to carry it around any more. Kids are selfish.

Human beings can get used to just about anything, given time. They can get to the point where not living on the brink of being converted to fusing plasma at any time in an argument over economic theory and practice is a bad thing, a scary, uncomfortable, unimaginably dangerous thing. This is the gift of focus, or wilful denial, and it is something boys are particularly good at. Girls—at least where I grew up—tend to be more emotionally balanced and sane, and therefore find the kind of all-excluding concentration you need to care about dinosaurs, taxonomy, philately and geopolitical schemes a bit worrying and sad. Girls can grasp the bigger picture (i.e., it might be better not to destroy the world over this), where boys have a perfect grip on the fine print (i.e., this insidious idea is antithetical to our existence and cannot be allowed to flourish alongside our peace-loving, free society). Note carefully how it is probably better to let the girls deal with weapons of mass destruction.

In any case, we are almost offended when our doomed last stand comes to an end and we are rescued. We were doing so well. Granted, we had food rationing and medical shortages and nowhere to sleep; we were under sporadic attack by monsters (reified from the compounded nightmares of lots of different people and cultures), chimeras (people and animals twisted by Stuff), bifurcates (really creepy human-like things splintered off when a real person falls into a big vat of concentrated Stuff, such as happened to Ben Carsville) and other ills of varying sorts. We were, in other words, screwed. But we were on top of the situation. We knew we were screwed, and we had chosen the manner of our screwedness. We understood it and to that extent we controlled it. It was like the Nuclear Threat—while it was going on, we didn’t have to think about any other kinds of screwed we might be.

And then we were saved.

We woke one morning, and there was a thunder in the valley and a great muttering, and something was rolling towards us which was much, much bigger than our castle. In fact, it was bigger than our mountain and our castle. The top of it was lofted way up above our heads, and it was broad and oily and smelly, and all around it was a cloud of strange, slick gunk. Where this gunk touched the puddles of leftover Stuff down on the valley floor, it sparkled and flashed, and then there was nothing there. Where the cloud of gunk met little wisps of Stuff drifting out of the forest, the wisps withered and fell to earth like rain. This big, remarkably ugly thing was immune, and there were people on it, and they were waving like they expected us to be glad to see them.

Resentfully, we acknowledged that we were. A man called Huster came to talk to us, very cautious, but when we let him in and he saw how we lived, he started to swear, and there was nearly a fight. Shangri-La was a mess, but it was our home.

No, Huster said, you don’t understand. We’ve been going for months now, and we’ve never found this many people still alive in one place. You guys are . . . He swallowed. His face was openly awestruck, and then he grinned. I will be damned, Huster said. I will be damned. And he laughed and laughed until someone brought him a beer.

We decided Huster was okay. And then we gathered up everything we had and went with him back to his rolling fortress, because ours was all done in.

. . .

I AM LYING on a tartan blanket on top of the man-made mountain called Piper 90; a vast industrial edifice stained black and striped by rain and grime. It looks like a cubist interpretation of a giant mechanical snail, laying out a silvery trail behind it: a power station on top of a hotel on top of an oil rig with caterpillar tracks. This is Huster’s castle, and with it we are reclaiming the world. Or perhaps remaking it. The bits we find and join together do not seem to follow sequentially on our maps.

The blanket smells strongly of garlic sausage. This leads me to believe that one of Vasille’s men has been using it. Only the French still have any garlic sausage. Their military ration packs were full of it: strange, freeze-dried, wind-cured, vitamin-enriched, pasteurised sausage, good for a hundred years. You can use it as a life preserver or beat your enemy to death with it, ski on it, burn it (the skin makes an excellent wick) or build fortifications with it. I have heard a rumour that, if combined in appropriate proportions with vinegar and certain human waste products, it can be transformed into an adequate explosive. Both disgusting and ingenious, if true, although it raises the alarming possibility of Vasille’s men drinking vinegar and going off like fireworks, up and down the line. Perhaps there is a secret admixture contained in one of the seasonings they carry which nullifies the effect—I decide never to ask. The point is that you can put your sausage through the wringer, and when you’re done you can still boil it up and eat it one-handed while you gesture expansively or hold a long gun steady with the other, and this, quite apparently, someone has been doing while lying on this blanket.

Through the extremely powerful telescopic sight of my long gun I can see Gonzo Lubitsch’s familiar head as he rides out in front on a sort of kludged-together dune buggy. Like Piper 90 (although much, much, much smaller) Gonzo’s ride is a bodger special, a lawnmower frame with the electrical engine from a milk float drilled onto it. This engine has an absolutely unfeasible amount of torque. Milk is an emulsion of butterfat in a water-based liquid, and the weight of a cubic metre of water defines the metric tonne; a milk float has to be able to carry an insane amount of weight, the kind which would kill your suspension and lay your chassis flat against the road. Strip away these encumbrances—and the monstrously heavy flatbed which is needed to maintain stability—and the humble milk float is a battery-powered rocketship with a whole lot of pent-up rage. Gonzo’s dune buggy is unable to achieve lift-off only because no one has the time or the energy to put wings on it. If he needed to, he could fit spikes to his wheels and tow a tank.

Piper 90 is laying the Pipe. The Pipe contains the magic gunk which makes Stuff disappear. We spray the gunk (called FOX, for inFOrmationally eXtra-saturated matter) into the air, and it meets the Stuff and neutralises it. Behind us, the Pipe does the same thing, all the time, so that we are drawing a line across the world, making a strip of land which is safe to live in. FOX carries a load of junk information, so that Stuff which mixes with FOX becomes dust and air, and not monsters.

There was a moment, not long ago, when we thought Stuff itself might be a blessing in disguise; how wonderful to have discovered a substance which responds to thought. The end of scarcity and hunger. We allowed tiny streams of Stuff to stretch towards Piper 90 in the hope that we might mould them. But Stuff is nothing if not truthful, and the truth is that our strongest drives are not our most creditable. Our experiments produced swarms of tiny half-finished fiends and tortured flobbering wrecks, animated bread rolls and lethal candyfloss. We picked them off one by one, then sluiced the little rivulets with FOX to prevent a repeat.

It’s important to remember that FOX itself won’t stop monsters which have already been made. That’s why I’m sitting up here with a rifle prepared to shoot anything with two heads which tries to swallow my friends. Still, FOX is more than a little bit vital. Also important to remember is why it’s an aerosol. According to Huster, too much FOX and too much Stuff in one place at one time can go boom, and the boom in question is, while not revolutionary, respectably huge. It’s more of a BOOOMM-BADADA-THRUMMMM-mmm. It is therefore best to use the FOX like a screen or a sandblasting tool, rather than a fire hose. A thousand kilometres back along the Pipe there’s a hole in the ground the size of a football field which marks the spot where this fact came to light. Piper 90 has a matching scar, a big, black scorch mark along its southern face.

Gonzo sweeps wide to one side, and Jim Hepsobah and Samuel P. cross him. I keep Gonzo’s head in frame at all times, but—since I don’t want to shoot him, even accidentally—I don’t let his noggin occupy the crosshairs. The point is to protect Gonzo while Gonzo and the others protect Piper 90, and Piper 90 gets on with the business of remaking the world. On three other ledges spread wide across the arc of Piper 90’s east face (compass bearings are pretty arbitrary, but the sun still rises from approximately this direction, and it is the direction in which Piper is heading, and therefore it is unanimously declared east until someone can prove otherwise) Sally Culpepper, Tommy Lapland and Annie the Ox are also following the progress on the ground, also armed, and also looking for monsters.

Piper 90 has been attacked thirty-seven times in the last month. The broad metal armatures which support the aerosol nozzles are scratched and pitted. Bullets have been fired at them. Knives and even makeshift swords have slashed them. Bludgeons and clubs have thundered down on them. More unsettling, they have been chewed by large, impressive teeth. The northernmost arm has been crushed between the jaws of something big enough to be a great white shark, except that Piper 90, while parts of it started out as an oil platform, hasn’t been in the water since before the arm was bolted on to its side.

Piper 90 isn’t called that because it lays Pipe, by the way. That just happened. The superstructure around which this thing was built is a series of retooled oil platforms, and the original Piper 90 is actually just the first one of these. Its full name was Piper Nine Zero Bravo One One Uniform, which means, if you assume that each section of that designation could be either a number from zero to nine or a letter of the alphabet (as represented by the Alpha Bravo Charlie code beloved of gun nuts everywhere) that it was potentially one of 78,364,164,096 units. No one knows why any company on Earth could need that many possible serial numbers. Every model of mobile phone and video recorder has a number like this, most of them offering so many possible iterations of the technology that at the usual rate of product release—say, between three and fifty distinct products per line per year—the people making them will still have plenty of serial numbers left when humans are so highly evolved and so thoroughly integrated with their own technology that the idea of a phone as distinct from the organism is disturbing in the same way that carrying your lung around in your pocket seems a little freaky now. It may well be something to do with that boy-taxonomy-focus thing.

So Piper 90 has a totally dumb name, and it looks like the love child of a bulldozer and a shopping mall after someone has poured several thousand tonnes of yoghurt over it and left it out in the garden for a month. The people who built it were not worried about aesthetics; they were looking to make something survivable and strong. They took those oil platforms and they welded on huge, train-sized caterpillar tracks. They stuffed reactors from submarines in the basement to power the whole thing, and drive systems ripped out of aircraft carriers, and they synched the whole disaster together using matchbook maths, the gears from some defunct ultra-large crude carriers and a lot of duct tape. There are rooms, down there in the machine layer, which have nothing in them but huge toothed wheels going round and round, and even now there are people crawling through ducting and service tunnels and into dead spaces, just mapping the thing. There are bits of Piper 90 no one knows about because there simply wasn’t time to work out they’d be there. You could hide a city in the gaps, below the city that’s already bubbling away in the habitation section.

The whole catastrophe has a top speed of about a kilometre an hour, but no one is insane enough to make it go that fast. For something this size, on land, that is alarmingly quick. So Piper 90 trundles along at “barely noticeable” speed, and behind it there emerges a long, thick trail of Pipe, and around the Pipe our world is real again.

The Pipe runs all the way back to some distant laboratory, and along its path there are pumping stations, storage tanks, depots and maintenance caches, all demanded by people in some vestigial place of sanity where they have figured out what the hell is going on. Perhaps Professor Derek—accursed be his name and his seed in eternity, and may giant badgers pursue him for ever through the Bewildering Hell of Fire Ants, Soap Opera and Urethral Infections—is still alive and trying to clean up his mess.

Lots of people, given the choice, would leave Piper 90 and settle in one of the new towns which are springing up in our wake. There’s rumour of a bright bulwark being constructed, a place called Heyerdahl Point, which is going to herald a new age of us being on top of the situation: back to real life. It’s a powerful draw. Many of the survivors from our army have moved to the town of Matchingham, which is reputedly a serious hellhole. They claim it’s like heaven. But Piper 90 is my favourite place in our small new world. Close to, you can see windows and lights and people wandering the glass-walled corridors and taking the slow, clanking lifts—they’re mismatched; some are shiny executive things, some are old service elevators—from the ground floors to the roof. On the roof (a few levels below where I am now) there’s a sort of park, a big open green space which doesn’t have monsters in it. Children play in some of it; executives lounge in the rest.

So far, these executives are actually useful; we need people who can do quantities and manage resources, and they need everything to work. The profit motive is in abeyance—just—because we don’t have surplus. And because anyone who gets caught making a buck on the back of human survival on this planet—if it still is one—is liable to be thrown down the top cooling tower into the steam vents. Liable, as in it’s in the contract. All the organisations in the world which still existed at the end of the GA War and survived the first days of the Reification got together to make this happen. We’re throwing everything we have at it. No messing.

Looking at the garden from up here, it’s hard to tell the difference between the grown-ups and the kids, except maybe the children are better dressed. For some reason, the execs all wear chinos.

On the other side of Piper 90 is my apartment. Sally Culpepper is actually lying on my roof, and every so often Leah knocks on the ceiling and Sally clicks her radio and I click back, and Sally knocks on the floor and Leah knows that I’m fine, that I miss her and that I’ll be home soon. We live in the top layer of the housing section, and the room looks out into the vast, bleak desert of the Unreal, which is what we call anything ahead of us or more than a few miles on either side. Our home is a strange, awkward shape. It is open plan (no spare materials for cosmetic walling) and shaped like two pieces of cake meeting at the pointy ends, or like the bars (but not the upright) of the letter k. The lower cake slice contains the bathroom, which is a metal tub with huge, heavy tubes going into it and some uneven stopcock taps. When I am off duty, I can sit in my bath and watch, through my picture windows, storms of matter being sundered and reconstituted, ghostly shapes and fires dancing or squabbling, temporary landscapes rising and falling with the prevailing wind. I think—I hope—that it’s calming down out there. Maybe.

The execs all have the rooms looking the other way, back along the reassuring solidity of the area we have reclaimed. They gather each evening for a self-congratulatory cocktail party (although there are no cocktails) and stare out at the metal of the Pipe, at the post-industrial sludge we leave behind, and at the dry, dusty plains of the uncolonised Livable Zone. Farther back down the line, they can see something like soil, and twinkling lights. It makes them warm and they drink cheap white wine as if it were the good stuff (all of which is gone for the moment) and fuck one another in little cubicles no bigger than a wardrobe, because Pipeside rooms with a decent view are scarce and mostly given over to the orphanage and the hospital wards. That’s why the execs running Piper 90 put hot tubs into the Stormside rooms (that and the fact that there’s no space for them in Pipeside rooms anyway)—to encourage other people to live there. The rumour is that seeing the Unreal drives you mad, even from this distance (if that’s true, a hot tub seems scant compensation, but since I don’t believe it is, I feel I’m cheating the Man in a small, painless way; the execs believe they’re putting one over on me, but know that I don’t think so, and wouldn’t have one of those cubbies for all the tea in Storage Bay 7A, and so everyone’s happy).

The rumour is that the clean-up crews, even under the protective spray of aerosol FOX, are being saturated with Stuff, and we will have strange, dangerous children with unlikely destinies and curious names. The rumour is that we will never be allowed to live in the Livable Zone because we are tainted; the Zone will be pure, for real people only, and we’re on the cusp now because we’ve been exposed for too long. The rumour is that they will exile us to the edges or make us disappear. Gonzo tells these rumours to each new recruit as he walks them out along the edge of the Piper roof terrace, and then waits for them to draw breath. Then he lunges at them and yells, “BOOOOGIEBOOGIE-boogie-boogie!”

Anyone who does not actually pee gets the job. It’s all hogwash, most likely—the kind of myth you get at times like this—but it’s true that there are things out there. And it’s true that they are terrible.

Last week the monsters looked like buffalo. They were huge and brown, and they stank. They came out of the north-east like a bass drum, and they brought a cloud of choking dust. They stared and bellowed and charged at Piper 90, gored it and slashed at it. We shot them from a distance, one by one, and they died easily. Jim Hepsobah thought they had probably been real buffalo at one time. Not any more; they were bigger and heavier, with hoofed feet like lead and horns which bent and scissored. They could jump, too, almost like flying. The dreamshape of an angry cow. But animals are okay, really. Stuff makes them more like what they are, maybe, or bigger and badder, but an animal is not all that creative. A buffalo wants to be meaner than other buffalo, meaner than a wolf pack, or he wants to be able to get up a cliff face which is in his way. That’s not much. Human thoughts are the problem. Stuff bonded to a human can be more complex, more weird and more awful.

For the most part, a human mind is not a concentrated thing. A mind at rest is a mind considering a hundred things with only the faintest intensity, and Stuff touching it ends up making biscuits, agendas, fleeting images of past times, random smells. No problem. They go into the great muddle of the Unreal, and mostly they just fade away. A mind under stress, afraid of dying, is a different thing. That kind of mind is very concentrated, and it makes far more vivid impressions. It can make monsters. Birds like flying piranhas, shadowmen with smooth faces like eggshells which somehow see you anyway and turn towards you like snakes. Or perhaps these are the product of more than one person; perhaps these things are made when nightmares blend together in the moment of creation. I do not know, or care. I know they are awful.

The week before, when we crossed a small stretch of brackish water, it was mermaids—although actually there were men and women both. They were slender and greenish, and they came up out of the water on the crests of the waves and climbed the outside of Piper 90 with long monkey fingers. Wide fishy mouths with too many teeth gaped open and swallowed in short order two technicians and the entirety of Delta Team. The mermaids had soft fluting voices and they gabbled nonsense which sounded like real speech: “Ho there, Foster! The lady wearing postulates; is it laudable or trout?” And while you stared at them and wondered what in all the hell that meant, another one was sneaking up behind you on its single, snailish foot, and biting out the back of your head to slurp the brainstem, which is apparently what they eat. We fought them to a standstill by the side of the clothing depot on B deck, and threw the remains over the side. I think Samuel P. had a mind to keep some tail fin for steaks, but Leah confiscated it and sent it back down the line. Maybe they were human, she said, maybe they weren’t, but we’ll ask the scientists first and eat them later, if that turns out to be appropriate.

The new monsters—fresh from some pool like the one at Corvid’s Field, or after a storm brings horizontal, unreal rain and everything for miles around is drenched in Stuff—are hard to take down. They seem not to understand the rules: get shot in a vital spot, die. Perhaps they simply don’t have enough experience of reality to recognise what’s happening to them, and so their bodies just repair themselves (if there’s enough spare Stuff around or in them) and up they get, snarling and leaking and ready for round two. There was a slug-thing a while back which took hours, because we absolutely could not find its brain. Gonzo solved the problem by setting it on fire, and the countryside stank for days.

In truth, the obvious ones are not the bad ones. The worst are the subtle ones, the seemingly unchanged ones which are all unnatural inside—or maybe they’re not unchanged at all, but new. My nightmares always used to have real people in them, so no doubt there are plenty of things running around out there looking like human beings, colliding and merging with one another and finally becoming something solid enough to obtrude upon our notice. But it’s the ones which you know, somehow, are ordinary men and women gone askew, which are the saddest and the strangest. Perhaps because of what happened to poor Ben Carsville, killed by something split off from himself, bifurcated in that pond of bloody Ruth Kemner’s, they make me shudder. At a level beneath words, I know that they are wrong. I have known this for ever—we all have—but most particularly since the business with Pascal Timbery and Dora the dog.

GONZO AND I were scouting, maybe three miles ahead of Piper 90. We do this because there are still obstacles in the world, still cliffs and ravines and scarred little towns. Towns we go through, or near to, in case there are survivors, and mostly there are. Cliffs and ravines we go around, because Piper 90 is not a hot rod. We haven’t seen a city yet, most likely because they’re all Gone Away. Sometimes it’s clear we’re uncovering what was there before, and sometimes it seems like it’s either brand new or jumbled up from somewhere else. I don’t know how that works, and I don’t much care, as long as we can live.

We came upon a place the size of Cricklewood Cove (another nightmare, to come upon one’s own home rendered awful) and Pascal Timbery was sitting outside a grocer’s shop, rocking and smiling and waiting for us. The grocer’s shop was full of sprouting veg, the inmates taking over the asylum. There were potatoes in there with spindly legs like spiders, and I absolutely wasn’t going to think about that in case it was the literal truth. Or became it.

“Welcome!” Pascal Timbery said, and, “You took your goddam time!” But he was smiling. He had a couple of spare chairs—they were deckchairs, actually, one red and white, one blue and white, and his, which was green and white—and we sat down. Pascal Timbery had his feet flat on the ground, as if he were scared the whole place might tilt under him and tip him into the sky. He waited until we leaned back in our chairs.

“It was bad,” Pascal Timbery said. “It was really bad. But you’re here now. So it’s all all right.” And he choked a little bit, not like hysteria but like happiness, as if someone were getting married.

Gonzo passed him a chocolate bar, and he sort of enveloped it, didn’t even seem to bite it, just shoved the whole thing into his face and swallowed, and there was a bit of brown spittle on the corner of his mouth, and his tongue picked that up, and that was Gonzo’s chocolate bar all done. Pascal Timbery didn’t say anything like “Thank you” or “That’s good” but it seemed to make him happier. Sometimes these survivors can’t say thank you, or really anything like it, because if they do they just come apart at the seams.

So Piper 90 checked in, which is to say Sally Culpepper and Jim Hepsobah checked in from a position a shade to our right, and Annie the Ox and Tobemory Trent called in from somewhere to the left, and Samuel P. was watching all of us from the high tower and relaying what he saw to a few more guys with long guns and we were fairly well covered, and we told Pascal Timbery that there’d be rescue on the way any time now, and could he see that big old rotten tooth of a thing coming around the hill? That was Piper 90. And Pascal Timbery said he could, and finally he said thank you and started to cry, which was a big relief to all of us, and got up out of his deckchair and hugged us, which was moderately snotty and disgusting, but nice too.

We found him a room in the south tower, and he said could he possibly have a garden allotment rather than a hot tub, and the execs said yes, and he said he’d be glad to work the rest of the garden too, and they said that would be okay as long as he took orders from Bill Sands in the horticulture department, and we settled him in. He burned his old clothes and bought a huge number of cigarettes, and that was all good. He went to the park and stared at the kids and the execs and wept a bit more, then stood looking back down the Pipe and admiring the sunset, and that was all good too. He made a few friends—another refugee called Fabian, a maintenance worker from Piper 90 called Tusk (I have no idea what kind of a name that is, but he went by Larry and had a dog called Dora) who handled the roses and a young widow called Arianne. Arianne had the strangest hair: it was thick and resilient, and she wore it short in a sort of helmet. It made her look all the time like a backing singer for one of those groups with a lava lamp fixation. Larry Tusk flirted with her and she flirted back in a very polite way, as if neither of them wanted to do anything about it but they were no way going to be so rude as to say so. Pascal Timbery didn’t flirt with anyone; he just smiled his little light smile and petted the dog. And these three sat around and stared at the horizon, and worked in the garden until it was dark, and then after hours they consulted the maps, and they got into ghost geography.

“This here,” Pascal Timbery would say, pointing at a shallow space off to one side of Piper 90, “this was Ollincester. Population fifteen thousand Light industrial. They made prefab pizza boxes and linens.” Pascal Timbery was obsessed with memory. He was never going to let those people fade. He wanted to know about all the places that weren’t there any more. And they would take a buggy, and go out with one of the teams, and stand in the space which used to be the town hall, and walk through it.

“Here, there used to be a fine example of nineteenth-century panelling. They had a painting by Stanhope Forbes here, and the council chamber here was famous for a ceiling mosaic. Here’s a postcard.” And here, truly, would be a picture of some grotty civic chamber and Pascal Timbery would point out that it was probably the most ugly example of the kind known to man, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to remember. And they’d walk through the whole non-existent town, remembering places they’d never been which weren’t there any more. Step for step. And gradually more and more people went along, as if it were a church service. This is the world, in memoriam.

But no one ever saw Pascal Timbery eat. In all that time we never did, except when he ate Gonzo’s chocolate bar in one go. It seems stupid now, but we never wondered about that. If we thought about it at all, we imagined he must have been injured during the Reification—maybe he couldn’t swallow properly; maybe his jaw was broken and he leaked. Maybe he’d eaten things which a right-thinking man normally wouldn’t eat, and now he was ashamed to eat in front of people. That was a matter for him. There were a whole lot of people round about then with a whole lot of weird problems, the kinds of problems which would have been uncommon or even alarming back before the Reification, but which now seemed just about ordinary.

And then one day Larry Tusk couldn’t find his dog. Just couldn’t find her. Went walking around the place, calling hither and yon, with a little scrap of biscuit and some cheese. That poor scrawny little dog loved cheese, even the ghastly schlop they made on Piper 90, even Rory Trevin, who was a cheesewright back in the real world, but what the hell was he supposed to use to make the stuff now, when the buffalo were evil and a cow was a distant memory? When even the grass could turn around and bite you with sharp, angry little mouths? So Larry Tusk went a-walking, and as he passed Pascal Timbery’s room he heard a familiar yip, and he figured the dog was stuck in there and Pascal didn’t know. So in he went. And there, on the bed, was Pascal Timbery, with a great bloated tummy, and from this bulge there came the barking of the dog.

Larry Tusk went crazy. It actually wasn’t about the dog. It was about this thing, lying there on the bed, a thing which looked human and talked human and hugged human, but which could open up and envelop you like a snake. Pascal Timbery made a noise as if he were trying to speak, maybe to say something like “I’m really sorry I ate your dog,” which might or might not have been a good thing to say, and surely it wouldn’t have been the most tactful sentiment at that time. But Larry Tusk didn’t give him any opportunity to discuss the dog-eating or the whole business of Pascal Timbery being a monster from beyond the fireside. The thing with the distended stomach was other, and Larry Tusk wasn’t having any of it. He just up and hit Pascal Timbery in the head with a fire extinguisher, and kept going until Pascal was basically a smear. And then he stuck his hand into Pascal Timbery’s corpse and pulled out Dora the dog, all smeared in yuck and most unhappy at the strangeness of it all. We found him in Commissary 3, feeding her little bites of meat which were worth a week’s pay to him, each and every one.

Sometimes, the nightmares look like people.

On the upside, the dog was fine. Dogs don’t fret. She hadn’t liked being swallowed and kept in a stinky, airless little place, of course, and she doesn’t like darkness to this day—Larry leaves the light on for her. But broadly speaking she was just happy to see Larry again and delighted to be bathed and fed the best food Larry could get his hands on, and for everyone to be so pleased to see her. On the downside, it raised a question no one was prepared for about the Unreal People and what they were. Because we had liked Pascal Timbery, and if someone ordinary and mad had eaten Dora the dog, and Larry Tusk had beaten them to death with a fire extinguisher, that would have been murder, albeit provoked. And the thing is that for all that Pascal was a monster, he was clearly a thinking, feeling monster, and that made him at least most of the way to being a person. And if he’d come clean about his dietary requirements, well, maybe something could have been done. Although we might just have killed him out of fear. I’m not saying Pascal Timbery was wrong to hide what he was. I’m saying that if he hadn’t, things would have gone differently.

That night we sat in the Stormside pub and argued about whether the whole thing was more or less awful and imponderable than the fact that the world had come to an end nearly a year ago and most of the people we had ever known were dead. And as we sat there concluding that whichever of these things was worse, both were irredeemably awful and would shadow our lives for ever and ever until the last syllable of recorded time (pubs are not good places for this kind of conversation) there arrived a lumpy, water-stained parcel containing an elderly cherry pie.

A cherry pie is not something which ages well. It is ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven, it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life. But this pie had been subjected to the kind of abuse which no pastry of any kind should have to put up with. It had been tempest-tossed. It had been a brave pie, but ultimately an ordinary one; it was not a pie of steel. It had split and withered. The filling had smeared the outer skin with red, sugary juices; this pie was a casualty. The only thing to be done with it was to put it in the ground with other brave pies and give it honour, and say a prayer for its humble and unselfish shortcrust soul. And that prayer would be well deserved, earned in battle and paid for in confectiony suffering, because this pie, fallible and ultimately unequal to the mighty task set before it—a task beyond what is achievable by mortal pies—bore a message from far away. The letter which accompanied it had run and bleached. Whatever was written on the paper was long vanished. But the pie itself was made of sterner stuff: it read simply “For Gonzo” and underneath “From Ma.” The parcel was stamped with the just-legible frank of Cricklewood Cove post office, and dated just a few weeks before.

Cricklewood Cove had survived the Go Away War.

That night I took Leah out into the roof garden and proposed to her. She said yes. We’re doing the deed next week. Tonight, washed of garlic sausage and clad in my finest, I’m going to Matchingham with an L-plate on my chest, and Gonzo and Bone Briskett and Jim Hepsobah (and also, at my insistence and because I value my life, Sally Culpepper and Annie the Ox) and all the boys are going to get me horribly drunk and celebrate my last days of bachelorhood.

Gonzo completes his sweep on the milk-buggy (no monsters, no refugees, just grass and trees) and Sally Culpepper calls time. Stern duties involving makeshift ales and moonshine await us. Good soldiers all, we know how to obey orders.

. . .

MATCHINGHAM IS A SORRY excuse for a town. In fact, it is not a town at all but a collection of ramshackle houses and hotels and hostels and hostiles which has sprawled together into a sort of disurbation, stretched along the Jorgmund Pipe like towns used to stretch out along a road or a river. It has exactly nothing going for it except that it is the biggest place for a thousand miles in any direction which isn’t actually moving along on giant caterpillar tracks, and it is notionally possible to make money here so as to go back along the Pipe to a real town (there are supposed to be real towns, even cities, growing up back west) or even buy a small-holding in the new agricultural areas around the Pipe, and make some sort of life. Every town like Matchingham ever in history has had this kind of raison d’être, and few are the people who have actually made it out and done these things. It’s like the lottery. Everyone knows someone who has won something. No one actually wins themselves. Somehow or other, the big break, the dream, stays out of reach; people here just get older and greyer and a tad more bitter, and eventually they’re not around any more and no one asks why. It is the kind of place where people know how to smash a glass and use it in a fight without getting sliced to ribbons.

It is therefore not the kind of place anyone has a great deal to say about. Matchingham has less history than a Styrofoam cup, and the closest it gets to a cathedral or a historic centre is a grimy cruciform monument on the way in, an advertisement for a blasphemously themed strip club. Matchingham isn’t even a feeder town. There’s nothing for it to feed.

We are on the back of Gonzo’s buggy, destined for a bar called the Ace of Thighs, and from the name you would guess it is in the bad part of town. You would be wrong. Matchingham doesn’t have a nice part of town, but if it did, the Ace of Thighs would be in it, and the way you know that is that the name of the bar is a word game (not actually a pun as such, but getting that way), and this kind of elevated humour is restricted to Matchingham’s golden elite.

We cruise along the main street, and it’s reasonably clear how the good folk here spend their time. The female half dances nude for the male half (with a statistical variation to account for less common orientations) or wrestles in a variety of convenience foodstuffs or performs in cinematic fantasies with simple, pithy titles. Some of the inhabitants engage in unmediated physical commerce of an ancient and simple sort. The porn shops of Matchingham observe a strict progression of obscenity, beginning with an almost fluffy eroticorium (catering either to tourists, if Matchingham ever had such a thing, or to the two or three women here who think of sex as a leisure activity), and moving from the modest HARD CORE! to the more self-aggrandising X-TREME HARD CORE!!! to various delights identified by jargon at least as impenetrable as Isaac Newton’s Second Law. The pale, as it were, beyond which one may not go, is a small shop with a faded handwritten sign and quite a lot of dust in the window. It stands just past an emporium sporting a neon outline of a woman swallowing the head of a Sucuri anaconda (the distinctive markings are surprisingly well rendered in lilac tubing) while being beaten by attendant cowboys with what appear to be starfish. It seems that the people of Matchingham have attained, with their limited resources, a jaded expertise in perversity I had assumed was found only in wealthy university towns. Even for this population of mining-town Caligulas, the little boutique to the left has gone too far with its simple sign: EXPLICIT EROTIC MOVIES—WITH A STORY!!!!

Faced with this disgraceful banner, men cross to the other side of the street. Collars turn up and eyes slide away from the dusty exterior. Respectable prostitutes turn up their noses like Salem nuns. Shame! Narrative! Outcast, unclean! A bored and profoundly ugly teenager sits at a desk within, waiting for the first heavily disguised patron of the night.

Beyond this vileness lurks the Ace of Thighs, a sprawling pyramid to the dead god of desire. There’s a little alleyway in between the bar and the storyporn shop, and the name of the road actually changes, so the Ace of Thighs is not part of the sliding scale of sin which comes before. It is the beginning of a fresh new innocence, which runs from here to a bend in the road (“Wash the woman of your choice!”) and on into darker fantasies better left unplumbed. A vast papier mâché rendering of a set of meaty female legs is bolted to the side of the Ace of Thighs, a playing card strategically covering the most relevant area. It looks as if a giant strumpet sat down on the building after a tough night, and the wall yielded under her weight, throwing her backwards into the club. Her thick, poster-painted ankles are swollen around her stilettos, the westernmost of which hovers over the crossroads like a diamanté barrage balloon. If I go in the main door, I will be eye to massive eye with the fallen woman, and I have no doubt the great orb will be glassy and bloodshot, and the whole place will stink of her boozy breath. This is the least feminine place I have ever been. Only men think this way, and precious few of them at that.

There’s a queue. The guys are big, cattle-shouldered men in blue cloth caps and working men’s jeans or cotton trousers. After a moment I realise that it isn’t a queue, it’s just kinduva huddle, either a fight about to happen or a drug deal or some other thing we don’t need. So we walk along the rope line—there actually is a red carpet too, although it looks as if it maybe was ripped from the corpse of a dead hotel—and the bouncer looks me over, pronounces us good enough (Samuel P. seems to know the guy) and we go in.

Curious, I probe the dark corners of the Ace of Thighs with my eyes. There are many of these (corners, not eyes)—the building is designed to provide maximum raunch, after all—but actually once you accept that this is an awful place, it’s not that bad. It’s clean, in the sense that there is no visible dirt and no obvious bodily effluvia. The velvet couches do not have many cigarette burns. The waitresses are efficient and non-judgemental, distinguished from the dancers and hostesses (and, in a fit of inclusiveness, also hosts) by a severe and defiantly unsexy uniform which accentuates how available the entertainers are. Nudity by implication.

Gonzo hails the nearest waitress, and summons a few hostesses and hosts to distribute themselves around and flash bits of skin and bore us with made-up stories of medical degrees and sexual longings, and generally scam us. This is part of the fun. We sit at a round (red leather) table with bounteous (red velvet) chairs and gold trim. A woman perches on the arm of my chair and declaims that I’m the lucky boy. The muscles in her face barely move as she smiles. Her name, apparently, is Saphira d’Amour. She says it like da mor, which would mean “of death.” If you want love, you have to find the letter u in there somewhere. Saphira and I do not form a close natural friendship even by the standards of strip club politesse, and eventually Annie lifts her bodily and drops her on Samuel P., who is delighted. It emerges instantly that they are the same age, give or take a few years; that they attended different schools with the same name; that they both hated mathematics and institutional lunches; and that neither of them completed the full educational experience before being sent to a borstal. How strange and powerful is the synchronicity of romance in the Ace of Thighs! This calls for a drink. Samuel P. spends another impossible sum of money on Saphira’s neo-champagne, and she professes herself terribly pleased. Perhaps she actually is.

Meanwhile, something is odd. There’s a distinctive and utterly inappropriate scent underlying the badger-gland perfumes and tarpit aftershaves in here. Greasepaint. It doesn’t take long to find the source, because they are standing by the bar and there’s a kind of circle of awestruck anticipation around them made up of assorted toughs and brawlers waiting to see who will take the first bite.

There are ten or so of them, tall, short, thin, fat, and all white-faced and black-clothed, and surely about to die. Not white-faced like skin pigment, but white-faced like wearing full stage make-up. They are clowns. Worse than that. They are mimes. As I approach the circle to say that maybe we should just leave quietly and of course this will be something they are quite good at, being what they are, the mime-in-chief spins to the bar and leans over it, and under the eyes of seventeen of the most dangerous men in Matchingham, he orders a glass of milk.

In sign language.

This involves miming milking a cow.

The whole bar is so stunned by this that he does not immediately die. The barman, very much to his own surprise, locates a carton of the white stuff (this milk belongs to marbella, it’s for my snake, okay?) and pours a half-pint into a glass. Ike—on his chest is a narrow conference badge which reads “Ike Thermite”—gets into a brief Three Stooges thing with the mimes next to him about who’s buying. He concludes it by stamping sharply on the foot of Mime A, while at the same time sharply twisting the nose of Mime B, so that A lurches back and B folds over, and the two of them meet midway and bounce off each other, jolting other mimes in a kind of robotic, mechanical pratfall which culminates in every single mime knocking into every other in a circle, until the penultimate mimes on each side of the circle jolt A and B again and their left and right hands respectively fly up in perfect unison to present Ike Thermite with a bill each, and he pays. It’s brilliantly done.

It is probably the last thing they will ever do. Half a dozen thugs are trying to figure out when is the appropriate moment to break into this baroque suicide attempt and do some actual killing, but the tempo is off and they simply can’t get to the threshold required for homicidal violence. Ike knocks back his milk and makes a silent sigh. Then he collapses onto his chair and puts his feet up on an imaginary footrest. They do not waver. His control is absolute. The half-dozen thugs make a mental note that, when they kill him, they will not kill him by hitting him in the stomach, because that would be long and boring. They will kill him by ripping his head off instead. Still his feet do not wobble. He shuts his eyes and gives every appearance of going to sleep. No one moves. He commences to snore silently; his chest heaves and his lips flutter, all with nary a sound. Some alteration of posture suggests he has farted. His mouth crooks in a satisfied, post-flatulent smile. Someone snickers, and suddenly there is a collective realisation that the moment has gone. Somehow, Mr. Thermite and his greasepaint pals are going to live. No one is going to kill them today; tomorrow, if they come back, this bar will tear them apart as if they were candyfloss. Tonight, everyone’s just going to go back to what they were doing. Ike Thermite feels the tension drain away, and he hears the sound of a room full of bastards and minor felons getting on with their lawful business. After a moment, when all their backs are turned and they are settled to their large yellow ales, he swings his feet slowly to the floor and opens his eyes.

“Hi,” he says. “I’m Ike Thermite.” He extends a single gloved hand. I shake it, and he takes it back to light a roll-up. “And we,” he adds, “are the Matahuxee Mime Combine.” He nods. Several members of the Matahuxee Mime Combine nod too, in unison. The others follow suit, and finally I’m surrounded by a small sea of nodding clown faces. It is not a memory I will treasure. I look away, and my retinas are blasted by a glimpse of Marbella doing her thing with a boa constrictor. Clearly, this is not the act with the starfish promised by the place two doors back along the road, because 1) there are no cowboys, 2) the snake is from Madagascar rather than South America, and 3) while it is notably obscene, it does not actually send me mad to watch it.

I nod back at the Matahuxee Mime Combine, and Ike Thermite smiles broadly, and Jim Hepsobah claps Ike on the back and says any man who is arsehole enough to order milk in a dive like this one is a man indeed. I was not aware of this verse in Kipling’s poem, but sure, if Jim says, it must be so. The mimes are adopted into our company, and they come to our table in a long line, each with a beer or a drink with a cherry or a clear spirit, unsmiling, like the Charge of the Existentialist Brigade.

Ike Thermite raises his glass.

“To the man of the hour,” he cries. Two of his buddies stand up and mime this, but they are by now seriously drunk, and the whole clockface thing devolves into farce and they sit down again, howling with silent laughter.

I ask Ike why it is that he is allowed to speak.

“It’s like Trappists,” he says.

Sixpence none the wiser.

“Trappists,” Ike Thermite says, because we are now friends for life, owing to beer and male bonding and women in sequins breathing throatily on us like inexpensive Lauren Bacalls (Lauren in that movie with Humphrey Bogart where she was just heart-stoppingly, rudely sexy, rather than in the ones where she was cool and beautiful and somewhat reserved).

“Trappists are monks,” Ike Thermite says redundantly, with owlish precision. “They take a vow of silence. They have one person who’s allowed to talk, so that the others don’t have to. Like an appointed voice? It has to be someone who isn’t going to be corrupted by speaking—someone who’s so deep in the thing that silence is irrelevant. Someone whose inner silence is so damn profound that just actually saying something isn’t going to disturb it.”

“And that’s you?”

Ike Thermite nods.

“I am totally serene,” he says.

I do not comment on this directly, because I cannot think of anything I could say about it which would not be unkind.

“Y’know,” Ike Thermite says, “it would be nice if you would pretend to buy my bullshit just a little. Otherwise I feel kind of small. Oh dear.” This last because a very small mime with glasses is even now poking his finger pugnaciously into the chest of the nearest bouncer and telling him something very impolite by means of a universally recognised piece of sign language.

“I’ll deal with this,” Ike Thermite says, and falls over. After a moment he snores. It is not a mime snore. It is a loud, ugly, chainsaw snore, with drooling.

Annie the Ox slips into his place and eyes me firmly.

“Right then, Tiger,” she says. “That lady over there is going to dance for you in the most vulgar possible way, which you and I will both enjoy without really giving a damn one way or the other, and then I’m going to take you home and give you back to the nearly-wife before this gets gnarly, okay?”

Annie the Ox is an angel of mercy with size-ten feet.

From somewhere across the room comes the sound of a mime getting beaten up.

LEAH AND I get married in the old church by the Soames School. It’s a long way from Piper 90, so we have to take almost all our holiday in one block, and even then we won’t get much of a honeymoon. I don’t care. She walks through the doors of the church and all I see is light. She smells of jasmine and clean lace. The church smells of oldfashioned furniture polish. Everything is so shiny. The pews, the candlesticks and even the air seem to be glowing. The altar rail is made of gold, which is curious, because I distinctly recall it being an iffy tinted oak. Leah is so bright that I am concerned that she has inadvertently set herself on fire during her journey down the aisle, and only Gonzo’s firm reassurances from somewhere nearby prevent me from rushing to the font and putting her out.

Assumption Soames sits in the back and I swear she cries, quietly, over an embroidered kneeler. Elisabeth is still missing. I’m terribly worried about her but very glad she isn’t here. Zaher Bey, in his Freeman ibn Solomon drag, sits behind a pillar and grins at everyone. A clump of soldiers and oily-rag men occupy the middle of the church, openly amazed that two of their number are actually doing this extraordinary thing. Old Man Lubitsch reads a poem he has written. It is very moving, even though no one except Ma Lubitsch speaks Polish, so we have no clue what it means. At some point we kneel and are tied together with a bit of embroidered silk, and then the vicar says we’re married. It seems a bit easy for such a momentous thing, but everyone claps and cheers, so it must be true. I look round and realise that I am now all shiny too. An enormous number of people want to hug me. Assumption Soames holds me at arm’s length, and buries her tiny face in my chest for a moment, and wishes me long life and simplicity. Then she flees and is replaced by Zaher Bey, and the last I see of Elisabeth’s mother is the ragged end of her shawl floating in the doorway of the church.

We spend our wedding night in an empty house in Cricklewood Cove. There are many of these. The Reification was a bad time here. Things came up out of the creek with muddy eyes, and the incidence of kuru was awfully high among the townsfolk. Some bandits passed through a few months before contact was re-established, and took several families away with them for purposes unknown. The house we are in does not have an unhappy history—it was for sale when the Go Away War began. It’s not a grave, just a sweet little two-bedroom with an insignificant kitchen and a log stove. Leah and I make love on the sofa and fall off onto the floor. Laughing, she drags me upstairs to a preposterous four-poster bed with pink lace and heavy curtains. In the morning a discreet lady from around the corner arrives to make us breakfast, then vanishes again with a sad, soft smile.

In the evening we set off back to the giant metal snailshell which is our home. The break makes Piper 90 strange for both of us, because we see it from the outside, and start to think too much. Things have changed since we first arrived: the place has tamed and evolved, but it has also become unfamiliar in odd, unsettling ways, like the blind spots in your eyes after you look at the sun.

Now, Huster is leaving.

In the beginning, just after Piper 90 arrived and rescued us from certain death, we were somewhere between a mad dictatorship and a sort of daffy anarcho-syndicate, a cooperative venture in self-salvation and heroism. Huster (he has no other name I ever heard) was Piper’s captain, her pilot, her master: a grizzled old fart who had managed an oil platform and knew engineers and tolerances and red lines and tipping points, and who got on well with just about anyone. Huster had never been military because he had some fever or ague as a kid which rendered him infirm—the kind of infirm which works thirty hours without a break and can arm-wrestle a bear. His word was law, and the various bean counters—really quartermasters—bowed to him and were glad of him, because they could see what he was about, and from an intellectual distance they respected it. They were survivors too, and content to facilitate and function and be part of his show. He’d fought wars of attrition against rust and salt water and hurricane winds, and drunkards with pneumatic tools, and just about every form of screwup you could name. He understood about what was going to work and what never had a chance.

Huster was technically some species of ambassador, but it was never clear for whom or to whom—“us,” I suppose, and no one really bothered to ask who that was and who it might not be. He was just the right man in the right place, and that was so obvious that no one argued about it. He never exactly gave orders or speeches, he just went ahead with the driving and let us get on with our thing—it’s not as if anyone had any doubts what the task was, after all—and when something tricky came up he wandered around Piper 90, from the roof garden to the engine level, and he talked to people. He had a sort of permanent council, composed of someone from our group (former soldiers, oilyrag men), someone from the general population (mostly a sepulchral woman named Melody with a gimlet eye for bullshit) and the Bey, to represent the Katiris, plus anyone else who wanted to come and hang around and talk, and who wasn’t a pain in the arse. Quippe might have called it a demarchy, except it was more a kind of consultative absolutism, and Sebastian would have said it was fine for a generation but the moment you had new blood it could turn on you like a scorpion and eat your brain, at which Quippe would have been diverted into a discussion about whether that was actually something scorpions did.

And then about three months ago Huster got the call. He went to a meeting back along the Pipe—all the way back, I think, where the first pump was switched on and the first section was laid on the first piece of solid earth—and they retired him. A more enlightened style of management was called for, apparently, more centralised, so that opportunities for efficacy maximation could be cross-competenced by a meritocratically upgraded leadership group. Huster, while he was a good on-the-ground man, was not in possession of the necessary secondary skills to be a full-active co-decisionist within the frame of the Re-visioning Taskforce, and therefore, while he would retain an analytical input to the forward-impetused directional committee, he would not, in fact, be invited to continue in his executive capacity at Piper 90, which was a position now requiring experience in global, holistic, trans-disciplinary interactions and pseudo-leveraged quasi-financial exchanges, and a full understanding of the management of a large collective entity with reference to dislocated populations with concomitant instabilities.

In short, Huster was fired, and our friendly quartermasterish execs were replaced with a skein of—there was no other word—pencilnecks. These pencilnecks were led by Hellen Fust and Ricardo van Meents, who seemed far too young and far too clean to have achieved anything which merited their promotion to this job. I am at this moment formulating a sketchy taxonomy of paper-pushers of this kind, and I have tentatively labelled them as type C: young and hungry, sharp elbows, excised conscience. They held on to Huster’s council, but they called it the Advisory Panel, as in advise, as in don’t have to listen to.

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.

HUSTER 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.

IT 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.

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.

ZAHER BEY 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.

Hellen Fust used what might be thought of as the basic five-step text for announcing an act of atrocity; she didn’t embellish or call on anyone’s patriotism, and she didn’t spew invective at the enemy or froth at the mouth. She was actually very reasonable. It was just that once you followed her reasoning all the way to the end, you found youself somewhere you didn’t want to be. It went like this:

1) She told us who we were and who she was. She regretted that the responsibility for this situation was hers, and she thanked us for seeking to lighten her burden. She admitted that she was tempted, but averred that in the end, command is not shared. Translation: this is not your decision.

2) She reminded us of the exigencies placed upon her, and upon us, by the terrible situation in which we found ourselves. She recalled to our minds the dreadful fact that the population of the world was a fraction of what it should have been. The trust of the remnant population—of all our loved ones far away—was vested in us. Translation: no one has the right to shirk what must be done.

3) She pointed out very gently that the villagers were not human. They were, by their own admission, new. They were consequences of the Go Away War, with strange powers and strange appetites which could not be detected or guarded against. They were not safe. And if they should infiltrate us, it was not clear whether this would jeopardise our survival as a species—could they breed with humans? Would they try?—but the risk was very high and the consequences appalling. The precautionary principle must be applied. In this, we stood at the gateway of our race, and we must close the door. Translation: these people are not people. They are un-people. Worse, they are pretend people. They will come for us, if once we trust them, and we will be destroyed.

4) She hung her head and allowed sorrowfully that this upset her personally very much. She had a PhD in sociology and was well aware of the perilous antecedents of such announcements. And yet, here she stood. She accepted the difficulty of the situation, and she believed that the majority of people—real people—would feel the same way as she did. Of course, that could not be allowed. The panic which would ensue at the notion of a colony of unreal people would be awful. This must remain a secret, for now. Translation: if they knew what we were doing, they would thank us out there. We keep it from them so that they may rest easy. We have the backing of the people, even if they do not know it.

5) She hoped that in future times, when this moment was discussed, it would be seen as a necessary sacrifice for the good of all, and she enjoined us to see it that way even now. We were fighting to survive. They were—however friendly they might seem—the enemy. Translation: if, which is denied, what we do now is wrong, history will understand it as a wrong chosen in extremis to prevent a greater, and God bless us, every one.

And then she said, quite simply, that the village was to be razed, and the inhabitants taken into custody for study. Given the nature of the settlement and those who lived there, however, resistance of any kind should be treated as extreme hostility. Better safe than sorry.

And it was into the silence following this pronouncement that the noise of Zaher Bey’s strong, soft palm striking the table came clamouring like an ambulance bell. He has continued to thump the table with greater and greater emphasis for some moments, and now, finally, he boils over into words:

“No, no, no, no, NO!”

His face is suffused, and his chin is tight with fury. Having captured the podium by main force, he holds it by erudition and outrage. He begins by cataloguing all the instances of mass murder and genocide he can think of, all the atrocities in the name of necessity that he can come up with. And then, into the silence this generates (because these events demand silence, in acknowledgement) he starts to throw personal abuse at evil-doers in general and Fust and van Meents in particular. They are roaches. They are parasites. They choose to crawl when they should cry out for their humanity, beg for a breath of life to make them whole. They are weak. They are wretched. May they be forgiven for countenancing the return of this kind of monstrosity into the world; may they be forgiven by some god or other, because that same deity will be well aware that such pardons will not be forthcoming from Zaher Bey (ibn Solomon ibn Hassan al-Barqooq, of the lake of Addeh and the mountains called Katir, most precious of lands and mother of peace). Then he turns on me.

“And you!” the Bey says, finger shaking. “You of all people! We took you in, didn’t we? When you needed a place to hide, to shelter? And you were our enemy. But we took you in. So now—and by your own admission you promised these people—people—that they would be safe—you’re prepared to let them die, kill them yourself, because you haven’t decided yet whether they’re real or not. Of course they’re real! And you made a promise! So what’s it worth?” And he throws a wad of paper at me, and we watch as the leaves tumble and drop to the ground. “Nothing!” says the Bey. And he stalks to the window and looks out.

In the silence which follows I think about that. And then I find that I am speaking. My voice is low, but it carries.

“He’s right,” I say.

I am standing. Everyone is looking at me. It is one of those moments, like the one in Crispin Hoare’s study, where I seem to have any number of options but in fact there is only one. I could, for example, stop there and slide back into the shadows. I could try to calm the Bey, build a bridge between the parties—something which would ultimately play into the hands of Fust and van Meents. But the Bey is right. This is bad. It is a clear, horrible thing and it is wrong. I don’t know whether the people of the Found Thousand (which is what we have been calling them to one another; Hellen Fust won’t say it because un-people can’t have names) can be at peace with us. I don’t know what they’re really like—whether we’re going to discover that they all live exclusively on a diet of small children with a dash of puppy juice (if they do, maybe we can find a baby substitute; as to puppies, I like them, but if the price of avoiding genocide is a hundred or so puppies a year going into a kind of monster version of Tabasco, I’m good with that). What I do know is that I won’t be a part of this. I have discovered a line in myself which I am unwilling to cross, and therefore to my own great surprise, I rip the Piper 90 badge from my shoulder and toss it onto the table. Hellen Fust starts to say something. I hold out my hand to cut her off.

“I quit,” I say. “This is wrong. Fuck you for thinking that it isn’t, and fuck you slowly for asking me to do it. This is not how you make a safe world. This is what got us here in the first place.” I look across the room at Zaher Bey, and see in his eyes a fine, bright hope and a moment of pride. I nod, and he nods back. Well, yeah. Damn right.

And I walk out, thinking that Leah will understand and that I’m so unemployed and that it’s going to be a very lonely walk home. Until I hear a strange noise behind me, a pitterpatter as of ducks in anger, and I realise that Jim, and Sally, and Tobemory Trent have all also torn the badges off, and Gonzo is here, and we are all walking out together. And as the word spreads, so does the sound of fabric ripping and voices raised in discontent, and by the end of the day everyone in our gang has quit, along with a whole bunch of other people, and everyone in Piper 90 is on strike.

IT IS a mystery of human mathematics that—however you may transect a population, whether you decimate it or cut it clean in half, whether you pick out the obvious troublemakers or collect at random some fraction of the whole—once you have set apart your chosen group, you will find among them at least two persons of otherwise gentle and accommodating mien who know in their blood and bones how to organise a strike. You need only cry the words “Aaaaaaaallll OUT!” on the factory floor and lead with confidence, and by the time you reach the outer gate there will be a woman from catering marching beside you leading the chant (“Two, four, six, eight! Down with prej’dice, down with hate! What is it that we won’t a-bide? Comp’ny men and gen-o-cide!”) and a milk-faced bloke in a knitted jumper handing out placards and telling the pickets where to stand to cause maximum disruption. By the time you get to the Club Room (ex officio HQ of the Piper 90 Strike Committee) there’s an open meeting ready to go, and milk-face has collated your grievances into an agenda and drafted a motion.

Baptiste Vasille and his boys have shown up to provide security—apparently they have done a certain amount of counter-strike work in the past, very much against their personal political convictions, he informs us stoutly, but one must make a crust, to be sure, and please put this hat on so that you’re less obvious, it’s always the figureheads we go after (pardon, they go after) first. Everyone from our old unit is here, and mutinous with it. The curious thing is that almost everyone feels ambivalent about the Found Thousand. Many people in this room are deeply suspicious of them—and they may be right. The point, as Tommy Lapland announces to a rapt audience of civilian refugees, is that we don’t go out and annihilate people just because we don’t trust them. That’s how you tell the bad guys from the good guys. And finally Larry Tusk gets up on the stand (two packing cases roped together which until two hours ago were doing duty as a table) with Dora the dog in his arms, and clears his throat.

“I don’t know much,” Larry Tusk says, and then has to repeat it because he didn’t have his megaphone on. “I say, I don’t know much! I wasn’t ever much for talking and I’m not now, either.” Dora the dog snuffles at the megaphone, and there’s a rousing cheer for the plucky canine comrade. “But you all know where I come from on this and what I did to Pascal Timbery.” Larry Tusk lowers his head for a second. He liked Pascal Timbery. When he can remember Pascal without remembering cutting Dora from Pascal’s insides, he misses him, and he’s not ashamed to tell you that over a glass of something, if you care to listen. “Now, that’s all well and good. It’s done, and I can’t promise I’d do different now. But the thing is,” and he has to stop because there’s another round of applause, “the thing is, what I did, I did on the spur of the moment. I came upon it all sudden-like, and I up and cut him open and saved Dora because she was all I had. I killed my friend because I was afraid and I was shocked and he was attacking something I loved. Well, that’s one thing. But this here is another, and it’s a whole other kind of a thing. What they’re talking about is taking people—people, same as Pascal—and crushing their homes and handing them over to some science fellas likely the same as those who did all this in the first place—not that they didn’t have all our help, and don’t you forget it—because we’re afraid. And I don’t know about you,” says Larry Tusk, “but I don’t fancy being that person and I won’t have it in my name. I won’t be afraid half my life and ashamed the other half.” And before he can sit down, Dora the dog yips sharply into the megaphone, and such a cheer goes up that the walls vibrate and Dora becomes overexcited and barks some more, and the motion is carried on a sea of indignation. Piper 90 will not give itself to this. Not today, not ever. No, no, no, no, no. Which ultimately is how all revolutions start.

I look around for Zaher Bey but cannot find him. This is his victory, as much as anyone’s. But perhaps he and the Katiris are having their own celebration, or perhaps they are working. But the open meeting is turning into a party (no one has work tomorrow), and on my shoulder there is a cool hand, and on my cheek a kiss. Leah is with me, and she is proud. I can do anything.

. . .

IT TAKES Fust and van Meents thirty hours to get a bastard squad in from elsewhere. We block them and obstruct them, we stand in front of them and make them crawl ahead of Piper 90. We will not start the fighting, if there’s going to be fighting. There is a red line on our map at the edge of the forest. If they try to come past us there, this will get bad. I take Leah’s hand on one side, and Annie the Ox’s on the other. We are the human chain. We will not break. We will stand, and if they want to come through, they must come through us. In fact, our pacifism is called somewhat into question by Vasille’s concealed tank and selection of small explosive devices we have been scattering in our wake. The strike committee is very much in favour of non-violent resolution, but there are problems with pacifism in a situation where the soldiers of the enemy are being launched upon a particular, short-duration task. They can roll over you and apologise later, when the deed is done. Passive resistance is a long-term game of sacrifice, and it works against humans, not machines.

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.