The Gone-Away World (28 page)

P
LASTIC HANDCUFF STRIPS
and “Fall in two men, left right left right!” It is not quite the hero's welcome, but nor is it an actual firing squad, and since I arrived in the Elective Theatre I have learned that very few people share our perceptions of when they should be grateful to us. Gonzo's guys do not officially exist at all and therefore cannot be tried in a court martial without compromising national security. Leah is a civilian nurse, leaving only me for Carsville's wrath, which is fine by him anyway because I'm the one who messed up his arm. The fact that I was right to do so, that a lethal gas attack
was
in fact taking place, probably makes it worse. And thus my tickertape parade takes the form of two large military policemen with sidearms and blank faces. But Carsville too must be feeling the bite of disappointment, because there's a lack of enthusiasm about the MPs and they don't mock me or rough me up; they just clap me in irons in a mildly apologetic way, and manage not to pat me on the back or give me a hug.

Ben Carsville is not well liked, and his attempt to force his unit to commit gas seppuku has not improved his position with the men. Also, while I was out of line, my rank status is blurry and Carsville was wrong. Thus, Copsen's office not the stockade. General Copsen looks tense and distracted. There is a red phone on his desk and he has moved it to a convenient position, and this I take to mean that our considered response is right now being reconsidered. George Copsen is a man with a lot of other things to do, and this whole subplot involving one of his picked guys and some Ride of the Valkyries wannabe is ticking him off. There's serious things happening. For any number of years, the doctrine has been the same: we answer weapons of mass destruction with payment in kind, and ours are bigger than yours, so watch it. To do this now could change the face of the world, because General George didn't bother to bring any of the staples of unconventional war to this front. He left the deniable biologicals and the mislabelled chemicals and the acknowledged-but-downplayed nuclear deterrents at home, and brought his newest and his best: Professor Derek's baby. But when he uses it, people are definitely going to go apeshit and get nervous, and activate missile defences all around the world, because making the bad guys vanish entirely is going to put the wind up our friends and enemies alike. The world will change, just as it did on 6th August 1945. It's good to know he and his bosses are taking a couple of hours to chew it over, maybe even wondering whether it's a good idea.

Copsen waves at me to sit. He waves at Carsville to sit. He does not need this right now. He does not want us here. He has nothing to do until the phone rings, but by the same token he needs to be composed. He is in a very big, very lofty, very cold chair.

“Tell me,” George Copsen says tiredly, “what you thought you were doing?”

I have no idea. I do not say anything. I stare back at him, voiceless. Gonzo would know what to say. Gonzo would be forthright. Gonzo would explain in manly tones and make it all okay with General George.

“I exercised my discretion as area commander,” says Ben Carsville in manly tones. George Copsen's face goes quite opaque. He was not talking to Carsville. His anger was directed at me—at least for the moment. I have been irresponsible, and having shanghaied me and trained me and godfathered my admittance to the general staff, he is feeling betrayed and let down. He had it in mind to give me a paternal chewing-out before letting me go back to my tent to consider my faults. His game plan for this meeting was to let off some steam dressing me down and then accept Carsville's apology for bad judgement and parlay that into a let-off for me. Carsville would have done better to stay shut up. The notion that he might actually be unrepentant had clearly not occurred to General George, and it does not sit well with him.

“I understand that you . . . elected to disregard a gas alert?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That seems like a curious decision, Captain Carsville.”

“I considered it probably a ruse, sir.”

George Copsen clambers to his feet and walks around his desk to get a clear view.

“A ruse.”

“Yes, sir.”

George Copsen has a certain look about him. It starts at his epicanthic folds and whispers down around his mouth. It invites clarification. It is familiar to me from a certain room with a particular piece of furniture. It is not a look you want to ignore or trifle with. But Ben Carsville, even now, does not explain. He lets his honesty shine through, and his earnestness and his loyalty. He has taken a decision as the man on the ground. His decision—and his reasoning—need no explanation. He is Ben Carsville. He is still wearing a silk dressing gown.

“You,” says George Copsen, with some emphasis, “are a fucking liability. Lieutenant.” And as Carsville boggles at him, General George makes a little flicking gesture, so to say “I'm done with you.”

Lieutenant Carsville departs, pursued by bears.

George Copsen collapses into his chair and broods, and ignores me. He is staring at the red phone, daring it to ring. Finally he looks over at me and sighs.

“Screw-up,” says George Copsen. I am uncertain whether he means the situation or me personally. It had not crossed my mind until this moment that I gave a damn for his opinion. It appears that I do. I feel wretched for ten seconds, which is how long it takes me to stand, shakily, and make my best salute. I stand there, offering my apology in the only way which is permitted. My arm aches, and while I am apologising to the man, I cannot actually think of anything I am sorry for. George Copsen looks into my eyes, measuring, and unlike Master Wu, unlike the Evangelist, he does not seem convinced by what he sees there. On the other hand, what he is looking for may not be a thing I wish him to find. We are standing like this, assessing one another and trying to figure out what we want from one another, when a shrill, old-fashioned bleating fills the room. George Copsen beckons me sharply, because being pissed off with me is a thing which belongs in the time before the phone rang, before the crisis went live again. He lifts the red telephone and says:

“Copsen.”

Someone on the other end speaks, firmly and simply. General George either grows older or grows colder; it happens to him from within like a tall building being demolished or flowers growing in fast motion, and I realise that he is making himself into the cog, rather than the man. The saving grace of hierarchy—of the Government Machine—is this: George Copsen will execute the orders of his country, and in doing so he will kill thousands, maybe more. But it will not be his choice. It will be the action of a nation, a huge complex animal of which he is the tiniest part, albeit at this moment a significant part.
George
Copsen retreats and
General
Copsen emerges to take his place and keep him from going mad given what he will now do. This is a good thing for George. It may also be a good thing for the general, to be unhampered by his civilian self. Whether it is a good thing for anyone else is less clear.

The general squares his shoulders and begins running through his checklist. He activates my commission. I am now an officer in this war—and, as of a few moments ago, it
is
incontestably a war—with all the duties, rights and privileges pertaining thereunto. I will do what I have been trained to do. That is a little bit scary. I am assigned to Operations, which means that right now I am to go to the bank of screens on the far wall, and observe, and target, and relay my information to General Copsen (who moves from his desk to a command chair in the middle of the room) and to Colonel Tench and Brevet-Major Purvis, thus improving and refining our firing solutions, so that our use of weapons of mass destruction is accurate and irreproachable.

Together, we will make the enemy Go Away.

Chapter Six

Wheels, horror and flapjacks;
the End of the World;
Zaher Bey, at last.

T
HE ONLY PROBLEM
concerns wheels. I was barely even aware of it, but Go Away Bombs have wheels on them. This is because each one is the size of a smallish car. We don't fire them as much as drop them, out of cargo planes. The wheels have been sitting in a crate in an airfield somewhere west of here for two months. They have gotten hot, and cold, and sandy, and dry, and then hot again. They are no longer the proud wheels we once knew. They are wonky. The technicians fit them to the bombs, and the bombs sit askew on them and don't roll in the smooth, oiled fashion the deployment crews were led to expect. They have to winch the bombs up into position. Fortunately, when the time comes to drop them, gravity will be to our advantage. The most advanced weapons in the history of warfare will be bobbled into the sky over the target like a bunch of elderly shopping trolleys being tossed into a river.

That's the one thing which slows down the attack. It slows it down by about a half hour. A little while later the first plane signals “Payload delivered” and our forward spotters relay the hit back to us via a digital feed. It is rather dull. The enemy outpost is situated in a shattered township. The bomb drops out of the sky and activates. There is no explosion, no ripple of pressure through the earth. A sort of viscous absence blooms. The enemy emplacements are erased, and air flows into the space, bringing dust. A perfect, smooth crater replaces the main square and the south-western quarter of the town, and two or three hourglass buildings which were leaning on each other are suddenly deprived of support and fall over. They do this slowly and without fuss. And that's it. It's a bit unsatisfying. In Blue Sector there's a mild tremor because the excision there runs deep and releases a little tectonic pressure. Five hundred kilometres away we create a waterfall and a lake where a bubble of Professor Derek's genius transects a river, taking out at the same time a bridge and two enemy special operations units proficient in torture (just like ours).

We sit back and wait for the next round of orders and the proud consequences of our strength. We have flexed big bold political muscles. We have stripped off on the international beach and showed pumped legs and crushing arms. We are totally the Big Dog. And all around the world, right now, people are saying “What the hell?” Analysts are being asked questions and speculating and talking hogwash. In Jarndice the news will break from the Junior Library outward in a circular wave, and then it will spread through mobile telephones and email and each of these individual missives will produce ripples of its own, so that shortly the courtyards will be filled with bothered, jubilant, appalled students thronging and wondering. Only we know what has happened.

We are still telling ourselves this, feeling a bit superior and waiting for the order to do some more demonstrative world-editing, when our very own Green Sector vanishes from the map. Our men just aren't there any more. The satellite image shows our emplacements wobbling and vanishing like a sandcastle being washed away by the tide. On channel seven (this is our channel seven, not the news channel) there is a nightmare. The spotter above that doomed little town where Tobemory Trent tourniqueted my arm and stopped me from bleeding out is now half a spotter, or possibly two thirds of one. His face is almost all there, but when he falls forward, you can see that he has been deprived of his left ear and the outermost inch of his head, and also his arm and hip. It's impossible to tell from looking at the screen whether he is still alive, or whether his body is just juddering by way of spooky reflex. Next to him is his partner, the sniper, who is most definitely alive, although that seems to be a temporary situation. The enemy has vanished the man's lower limbs but not the rest of him, and he is bleeding out. It does not look painless and humane, which I had somehow assumed it might be. It sounds a lot like every other kind of dying I have observed since coming here. Finally, because no one objects, I switch off the screen. The silence is almost worse than the noise.

George Copsen droops in his chair. When Richard P. Purvis goes to help him, General Copsen shrugs him off, then resumes his hunched position. From behind, I can see his shoulders clench and shudder, as if he has a fever.

A few moments later we learn that the same thing is happening everywhere. Not just in the Elective Theatre: everywhere. In cities. In countries far away and countries just around the corner. Somehow, without warning (although surely quite a lot of people somewhere knew this was possible, they just didn't see fit to share or were too proud to credit it) this nice little bush war has gone global. People are deploying weapons (weapons like ours) at the strategic level, which means missiles with intercontinental reach. The upside is that no one is using nukes or germs. The downside is that our supersecret weapon turns out to be absolutely the best beloved new toy of just about every advanced nation on Earth. Major cities are getting to look like Swiss cheeses, and the Swiss have developed a sort of ray gun based on the same principle and zapped everything they can reach to the east so the Russians know not to come at them. For reasons I have never understood, the Swiss still think the Russians are going to sweep down on the European fold and devour their babies. On this basis they have erased a corridor of populous farmland and a few lakes, just to show they really mean it. The Russians have responded by removing a piece of China they never much cared for, and everyone is now perforating the map so that it is getting to be a bit like a sheet of stamps. Serious commentators (people with no vested interest in war) are going on air live asking that this stop, right now, because there seems to be some danger of the world flying apart or falling in, so much of it has been vanished in the rush to show that
everyone
is the Big Dog.

George Copsen's command chair is dark grey, and it rests on a little raised platform. It has a remote control for all the TV screens built into the arm. It is the precise focus of every image in the room. The man sitting in it can turn his head, even shake it, and still see what is happening in stereoscopic widescreen. The speakers are set up for him too, so when he shuts his eyes, as he is doing now, it doesn't make it much better. We watch Trinidad sparkle and fold away into nothing. It is unclear why anyone has a beef with Trinidad, but the beef is well and truly settled. George Copsen murmurs something like “oh” although it might be “no.”

We wait for orders, and it takes us a while to realise that we have been forgotten. The Elective Theatre has been closed down. There's absolutely no point fighting a proxy war when you're fighting a real one. This whole area was selected as a battleground because it was absolutely pointless. It just had people in it. The only reasons to fight here were social and political, nebulous things which for the moment do not matter. We are an army in the wrong place. No one cares to talk to us. They are busy fighting a real war with unreal weapons and wiping one another from the face of the Earth. It's a dream of power. Point, speak, and the thing which vexes you is unmade. It must be intoxicating; certainly, the men and women in houses of government around the world are hooked on it and reeling like drunkards.

From time to time we offer General Copsen food or drink, and once Richard P. Purvis suggests that he should address the men. The general does not respond. He does not drink the water on his left side, or eat any of the peanuts on his right. He sits, wrapped around himself, and every so often a little noise comes off him, a plaintive mew. He twitches. When I stand directly in front of him, I can see that he is not in fact curled into a foetal ball, but rather his eyes are fixed on the displays in front of him. I turn them back on. They are mostly blank, except for the one which shows this room. We all stand and look at ourselves on TV. This is me, watching me watching myself. This is my left hand waving. This is my right hand waving. This is me standing on one leg. George Copsen fumbles with his remote control, and we disappear.

Everyone in the room has a brief moment when they believe this is actually what has happened: that we too have been made to Go Away. Then we look at one another somewhat sheepishly and realise that he has simply turned the screens off again.

It is at this point that Riley Tench makes a very bad call. It's probably his duty, but it's the wrong thing to do. He tries to relieve the general. He stands in a suitably official pose, sort of manly in an asexual and impersonal way, conveying gravitas and regret, and according to whatever section of whatever rule, he informs his commanding officer that
he,
Riley Tench, has adjudged
him,
George Copsen, to be unfit to command by reason of psychological stress and collapse, and
he,
Riley Tench, for the good of the unit and by the power vested in him for this purpose, hereby assumes that role with due thought given to the gravity of the act and understanding that it may be later seen as mutiny by the assessing authority. Will George Copsen, General, accept that he is relieved in line with the protocols appertaining?

There is a longish moment of stillness and then George Copsen shoots him in the head. Riley Tench goes all over three monitors and Richard P. Purvis, who was standing in a kind of neutral way off to one side, quite possibly thinking that he wouldn't have chosen this moment to relieve his master.

And indeed, the general is not relieved. He's totally bugfuck homicidal and periodically catatonic, and that's the guy who's at the helm right now and will remain there until such time as we receive countervailing orders, amen.

F
OR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
, or thereabours, we get a break. Not much happens. We have time to wash Riley Tench off our uniforms and then we have more time with no particular activity to occupy it. George Copsen ambles around telling grunts that the situation “will soon be resolved.” This is probably supposed to be reassuring, but it isn't; it scares the bejesus out of everyone. The general's face is unshaven and pudgy, and shiny with old sweat. He looks as if he ought to be wearing a red flannel shirt and carrying a half-empty bottle of hooch. Every so often he goes and sits on a chair outside his tent and sort of zones out, glassy and slack.

I sit on my bed. I look at my letters, because they remind me of home and this has always helped before. Then I find the Evangelist's zombie letter, a frame of paper with nothing left in the middle, and I realise that home may no longer exist. I stare through the hole into space.

Gonzo wanders in and looks pretty freaked, and we drink some illicit (but excellent) special forces alcohol until Leah appears in my tent and sits down with her head resting on my chest, which makes me feel powerfully alpha male–ish. Gonzo looks a bit nervous and confused, and we all expect her bleeper to go off at any moment, but in fact no one is bringing in wounded right now because people are mostly either uninjured or non-existent. A few have had walls fall on them as a result of excisions, and some have broken limbs and cuts from the normal course of life when a whole bunch of armed men live in a smallish space and get bored and angry. For a few days everyone just coasts. This is post-traumatic stress, of course, but we don't call it that. We don't really give it a name or realise that we are doing it. Time spreads out and we see the world through a tunnel of grey. Our voices echo down it, so any serious conversation is impossible. We're in a kind of winterish Eden: not a place of innocence but exhaustion.

On the seventh day Gonzo takes matters in hand. He gathers his guys, sends them off to engage in certain necessary tasks and gets his project under way. The hero of a hundred secret battles rolls up his trouser legs and makes flapjacks.

It's a very strange thing seeing lethal men and women put aside the dagger of stealth and take up the spatula of home cooking; it wakes the sense of incongruity which has been slowly drugged insensible by months in this foreign place. Quite a lot of people come out to watch. Gonzo nods genially and goes back to treading the oats and the sugar. (This much flapjack cannot be stirred; you have to get right in there and churn it with your feet. Gonzo has established a footbath—legbath—at the entrance to his kitchen area. It is staffed by Egon and a pretty female nurse I do not recognise, but whose eyes do not leave Gonzo even as she labours over Annie the Ox's toes. For obvious reasons, anyone who joins the mixing party must have hygienic feet. The idea of hygienic feet suddenly appeals very much to all of us, so a queue is forming.) Someone in the crowd asks whether these will be
covert
flapjacks, and Gonzo says no, they will be ordinary flapjacks, but adds that it takes persons of courage and unusual skill to make flapjacks at a time like this. That gets a laugh. His mother's scowl flits across his face, and I can see her shaking her head, intangible hands reaching to restrain him.
No, schveetie, too much sugar, people will vomit.
But Gonzo, now as then, knows that the flapjack is a thing of desire rather than nutrition, and must taste like manna rather than a horse's nosebag. He does not stop with the sugar, and Ma Lubitsch huffs proudly and begins her three-point turn.

Most people in this situation would reckon to make a fair quantity of flapjacks, then a bunch more, until there were enough, but Gonzo is not most people, and in any case is working to an agenda which demands spectacle. He needs to cook these things all at once, in front of his troops (and we will all be
his
troops, if he can bring this off). The camp cooking facilities did at one time include a monster oven capable of doing this, but its gas supply was exhausted by a massive grill last month, and replacement cylinders have yet to arrive. Gonzo knew this when he chose to make flapjacks. It is part of the message he wants to send: we are still an army, and we will function like one; not everything which is not simple is actually hard; even hard things can be done fast; even things which seem impossible turn out to be doable.
We will survive.