The Gone-Away World (32 page)

One of the blue helmets walks out towards us, cautious. He's a brave little guy, probably Puerto Rican on secondment. It takes some chutzpah to leave your own gate and walk up to an armoured column—even one as ragtag as ours—and tell them to behave or face the consequences of your displeasure. That is what he is coming to do, and he knows—and he knows that we know—that those consequences are basically him being extremely stern and maybe his commander giving us a sound talking-to. Or, I realise, a blonde civilian with a too-long face coming out and stamping her foot—but Elisabeth is nowhere to be seen. I hope she has already gone home.

“Who the hell are you?” the UN guy wants to know.

“We're a travelling circus,” Gonzo says acidly. “I'm the bearded lady and these here”—he points to Jim Hepsobah and Sally and me—“are my clowns.” The UN guy doesn't think much of that.

“Fine,” he says. “Take me to the ringmaster.” And Gonzo says that's him too.

“Turn around,” the UN guy says. “There's an armed camp maybe six or seven hours that way. They can help you better than we can.”

“We need evac,” Gonzo replies, “and so do you.”

“Turn around,” the UN guy says again. Gonzo looks thunderous and pissed off, and he's about to share his feelings when the gate opens and the other UN guy waves us in. Our guy looks pretty disgusted and steps out of the way. Gonzo throws him a little grin and we all cruise merrily past him, through the gates, and the last we see of him is a single figure trudging slowly back to his position. We don't pay him much attention, though, because by this time we realise how badly we have been fucked. We realise this because once everyone is inside the compound and outside their vehicles, soldiers who are emphatically not with the UN step out from the low buildings of Corvid's Field and point their guns at us, and unlike George Copsen's bastard squad at Jarndice, they don't bother to tell us we are prisoners, because that sort of speaks for itself. And after patting us down and disarming us quite thoroughly, they take us to their leader. Vasille makes a face:
merde.

Ruth Kemner.

She has taken the small departures hall for her own. It is a high room with narrow vertical windows in frosted glass intended to let the light through but not the glare. There's a beaten-up luggage carousel by the door and a bar on one side, but the main event is at the far end under the sign saying
Embarquement
and the same in a variety of languages. Men stand in precise parade-ground formation, port arms. A moth-eaten red carpet has been layed out in strips across the floor, and a few rostra have been shoved together to make a dais. As in a place where a monarch sits—which is where the whole thing goes absolutely to the bad.

Ruth Kemner is sitting on a throne. It is not a very special throne, as these things go. It is the control chair of an assault helicopter welded to a metal frame, the whole thing draped over with a leopard skin which might have come from an actual leopard, but probably didn't. The setup looks like some seventies movie in which warrior women, played by bathing beauties, capture and threaten to execute a group of male castaways, before melting blissfully into the arms of the square-jawed and plucky chaps, who stand for no sapphic nonsense and know that every good girl wants a firm hand. It's ludicrous.

That's probably why she has added the two severed heads to the uprights of the throne. They lend her an undeniable air of not screwing around. Her eyes look completely ordinary, which is what eyes do, but the face in which they rest, the network of small muscles which are used, voluntarily and otherwise, to produce expressions and communicate mood, is broadcasting that she's dangerously psychotic. She sits forward, and she turns her head slowly so we can see that someone has taken a knife to her. They have attempted to open her throat, but they have failed, and there is a cut along her jaw which must have been painful and bloody, but which is now nicely stitched up. The surgeon has also put the lower half of her ear back, but it's not looking too hopeful. As she looks at us, her face is in precisely the same position as head number 2, and the resemblance is uncanny. Unless Ruth Kemner has a sister, she's gone and murdered someone who looks very like her, and used that person as part of the furnishings. It hardly matters which. Kemner has, as advertised, gone batshit. And from the old newspaper stand at the far end of the room her flunky brings out a muffled, furious figure, thrashing and bucking and roaring for a fair shot, or possibly for justice and freedom, and when they whip off his hood, we are all able to recognise Ben Carsville. If that scar is his work, it says a great deal for the unvarnished power of idiocy. It also explains why Kemner isn't dead, and foreshadows a very bad ending to the story of the most handsome soldier in the Elective Theatre.

Carsville sets his jaw and glances at the throne situation and the heads, and he obviously takes in the movie thing too, because he makes some off-colour joke. Ben Carsville, of course, is exactly the kind of man who would be able to win the heart of a libidinously frustrated Amazon queen. Unfortunately, Kemner isn't some busty trollop with a power complex. She
was
a respectable kind of mercenary soldier (“non-governmental military consultant”) at the bloodier end of the spectrum. What she is now, after the things which have happened since George Copsen's red telephone rang and signalled the commencement of non-conventional hostilities in the new era, is less certain.

She looks at Ben Carsville with a chilly curiosity. Whatever sassy opening he used hasn't immediately had its effect. She doesn't slap him in an affronted yet alluring way; she doesn't stare moodily into his eyes. She regards him with a kind of scientific interest, as if he were a new species ready for vivisection. She nods at her thugs. They pick Carsville up with a lot of “hur hur hur” and Kemner leads us all out around the back of the departures hall.

When you walk a prisoner at gunpoint, there is one thing you do not do. You do not poke him with your gun barrel. Every second you spend in physical contact with your prisoner is a second he is aware of the disposition of your body, and is close enough to attack you—assuming he knows where the gun is—before you can pull the trigger. Olympic athletes leaving the starting blocks are too slow to fire a gun in the time it takes a trained soldier to push the barrel to one side once he knows where it is. A gun is a weapon of medium distance, not close combat. So you don't give him the chance to map out the situation, you don't let him feel how relaxed or how tense you are and you never, ever shove him with your weapon, because if you are a fraction off centre, and he allows the barrel to pivot him, you have just put the business end of your gun right past him and he can bite your nose off or use your gun to shoot the man in front or any number of other things which are not conducive to good penal discipline.

Kemner's men are good. They keep a fluid yet constant distance between us, they do not allow us to communicate and they do not rise to baits like stumbling, slight increases or decreases in speed or comments about their hair. They imagine, therefore, that they have communicated nothing to us about themselves beyond that they are in the position to kill us all, and have no intention of reversing roles. They are mistaken. The way they have deployed is extremely revealing. Our guards are moving in a mild curve behind us, so that we are caught in the focus of their field of fire if they should choose to gun us down—so much is to be expected. Around them, however, are other men whose eyes are turned outward. They watch the hills and the trees around, and they carry long guns. They are looking out, but also at everything which is not immediately within their sphere of control. In the control tower there is a sniper. These men are not pro forma. They are paying attention in a way which is unique to people who have recently been attacked and expect to be attacked again. And they are expecting attack not just from outside, but from
within the bounds
of Corvid's Field, which by rights should be their safe zone. Their fingers rest close to their triggers, and they are intense and even a bit twitchy. In other words, someone has given them a serious case of the willies. That information is worth something, but it slips away as we come in view of our destination, and my stomach lurches and all the hairs on my neck tingle as if there were a spider walking over my lips.

Corvid's Field has been hit by a Go Away Bomb. This place was not supposed to be a target—at least, it wasn't one of our targets—but on the other hand, what is supposed to be a target and what actually gets blown up (or Gone Away) are movable feasts in war. Beside the runway, concealed from the approach road by the bulk of the tower building, the ground slopes away in a smooth line, as if excavated in a single go by a very big, curved shovel. A large section of forest and a fragment of a wooden outhouse have disappeared, along with the latter half of a cargo plane. The plane has rolled back a bit, or been pushed, so that it's now a sort of open corridor out over the excision, which unlike all the ones I have seen in testing is not empty. Bubbling up from the centre there is water, or something looking very much like it: a silvery, frictionless fluid filled with bubbles. Little waves roll out from the middle, and a fine spume drifts over the surface, making crazy shapes like giants and gurning faces.

It smells wrong. A lake like this should send out a rich, warm scent of water. Even if it's a burst pipe or (less appetising) a sundered septic tank, there should be a strong smell to go with it. Looking at Kemner, I wonder about aviation fuel or chemical waste—it would suit her new persona very well to have a tame lake of fire behind her throne room—but there's not a whiff of either. There is no smell of anything at all—and yet there's a great quantity of whatever it is, bubbling away in front of us. Has the excision uncovered a well of naturally distilled water? Or saline? In the centre of the lake the surface heaves, a glassy bubble pushing up and then bursting to send a column of the stuff up twenty feet into the sky. Is Addeh Katir geothermically active? I have no idea. It was not included in the briefings we were given when we arrived. On the other hand, it probably wouldn't be. But a bad feeling is creeping up on me, above and beyond the obvious dread associated with the business of being in the hands of a grade-one loon; a sense of
Oh shit.
It is visceral and possibly—in the most literal sense—
existential.
I am worried about existence.

Kemner gestures, and Carsville appears in the aisle of the truncated cargo plane. He is blindfolded, but his arms and legs are free. Piranha, I decide. She has found a breeding population of piranha, and she intends to feed us to them. Do they have piranha here? I have no idea. I know piranha are by origin South American, but on the other hand it would be quite like the imperial Brits in their day to have imported a few to add local colour.
What ho, Sergeant Daliwal, how are the fish today? Pukka, are they? Had enough goat? I swear, if I never eat goat again . . . The Italians eat it, you know, but they'll eat anything if it's got enough garlic. Can't fight, though, can they? Quality of man, Sergeant Daliwal, is what it's all about. Your lot know that. Why they signed up with us, of course. What's that? Anand lost another finger? Chap's careless. They're piranha, not bloody whelks.
It occurs to me that the man is probably an ancestor of Dr. Fortismeer. He is exactly the sort of person who would feel that a mountainous Eden was incomplete without ugly, ravenous fish in an ornamental lake.
Eat burglars, more fun than a haha! Aha, ahaha ha! Hah? Sort of a test project, y'see; if it goes well, we'll have a few more! Hah! Like to see the natives swim the moat then! Eh, Sergeant Daliwal, eh? 'Scusing your presence, of course, good man . . .

Again, the possibility was not covered in my briefings. It will almost certainly have been in Gonzo's, if it happened, but now is not the moment to ask. Kemner's head flunky appears in the plane behind Carsville, and shoves him over the lip of the plane into the lake. Pirates again, I'm thinking, but of a very different kind. Plank-walking? Join or die, perhaps. Carsville shouts, flips and lands arse first and submerges. A second later, he is bolt upright, on his feet, sputtering, then he falls over. He is about thirty feet away, maybe a little more, and this time when he comes up, he flails wildly, striking the water. The piranha theory gains currency in my mind, but I don't believe it. My existential fear is in full flood. This is a
wrong
thing. It is an
antithing.
It has the quality of
not.
I am coming to believe, because I can see familiar debris, because of the shape of the excision and what might be the rear end of a delivery-system rocket shadowed in the centre of the lake, that this water is fallout from a Go Away Bomb. This stuff I am looking at is somehow not stuff I should ever see with my eyes. That would mean that Go Away Bombs are not clean and perfect after all, and that the wanton messing we have done with the basic level of the universe is not, after all, completely free and without consequence.

And then a hand reaches up out of the water and grabs Carsville by the shoulder. He falls backwards, under the surface, which heaves and billows as the struggle begins in earnest.

Ben Carsville fights for his life. He may be an arsehole—I may have had to hit him in the jaw to save his men from a gas attack—but he's not a coward (whatever that means in the real world). Nor is he a pushover. He surges up, and roars, and pummels at the person in the lake with him. This is a new Carsville, animated and furious, and actually quite impressive. He goes under, and comes up belly first, and he seems afraid, despairing and beaten. His opponent has him in an arm-lock, and is gradually ripping the joint apart. Carsville shouts and dives beneath the surface, reappears having somehow reversed the hold. He grins fiercely, then loses his grip. His opponent springs back, throws punches which start out scientific and grow more desperate. The two men flail at one another, cling together, grapple and throttle. They are well matched. Kemner has selected her executioner (or is it another prisoner?) with ominous appropriateness. It seems that neither one can defeat the other. Is that a draw? Or will she have them both impaled? Then finally, for a moment, the two men square off, eye to eye and mano-a-mano, and one of them lifts the other up, down, and holds his head below the surface.