The Gone-Away World (35 page)

“Back of the throat,” Sam says, and Jim Hepsobah calls him a show-boat. Sam shrugs. “Target of opportunity,” he replies, and is gone again.

Eight minutes, give or take. Remaining issues: the sniper in the control tower. Evade or remove? Both are difficult. Summit conference behind the crates. Limited time before we are discovered.

At ten minutes on the dot, a grimy figure in orange tosses the sniper through the gaping windows of the tower and vanishes again. The sniper falls silently to the ground and hits, hard. He bounces, although it would be more correct to say that his body bounces, because he lands on his head and leaves most of it on the concrete. A few seconds later a plume of black smoke boils out of the tower. Kemner's guys come streaming out of the departures hall, and she runs out behind them yelling “Stop,” which they don't. They run towards the tower to extinguish the blaze, so about ten of them are right next to it when it blows up. A second or so later several outbuildings and the remaining planes go up too. Corvid's Field gets loud and hot. I look around for dark clouds and dapple, but this is the ordinary sort of hell, man-made and reliable. Almost cosy. Kemner, with her remaining guys all around her, screams curses. Something screams back, bullets and rage, and the orange person emerges from a hangar and charges towards her, one leg twisted up and bullets going all over.

Kemner sees him. She doesn't do the sensible thing, or even the sane thing. She starts screaming and yelling and shooting, and runs towards him. They both get hit. Neither of them cares. Bloodspray and anger. They are doing their own personal, totally deranged
High Noon.
This is a very private thing. We leave them to it.

Gonzo grabs me by the neck and hurls me out into the road, and Sam the Killer and Jim Hepsobah lead us fast and low to the vehicle depot. Gonzo has Egon on his shoulders now, and he's running as fast as I am. Leah struggles along, but I cannot carry her. I am not Gonzo. My hand is broken. I drag her as fast as I dare and pray she will forgive me for not being bigger and stronger.

We reach the depot and we get our stuff. We run away. Kemner and the crazy orange person can have their last battle. We've had ours, and it's over now. It's not bold or heroic, but it's how you stay alive.

W
E DRIVE
for hours, just heading away. The orange person helped us considerably, but also blew up our way home on the runway. I hum, out loud, because Ruth Kemner is not coming to find me any more. Leah finds her medical kit and shoots me full of something nice. The sound of it all is still in our heads (don't mention heads) and the smell is in our noses. I watch the world go past outside, and realise where we are going. Gonzo is taking us to Shangri-La. Defensible. Perhaps even safe. But Addeh Katir is not the way it was. The whole landscape is grimmer and greyer, as if someone has dusted it with iron filings. There are buzzards and vultures in the sky, and even crows. The trees are dead. The sheep, most definitely, are dead; they have in fact been spread liberally around the place. Half of one gazes reproachfully from the roadside, mouth open in a despairing final “baaaa.” The road is busted up. And by this time I have begun to realise that Professor Derek, like many other brilliant men before him, is a fucking idiot of the first water. The beauty of the Go Away Bomb was always supposed to be that it was clean—but this has the feeling of fallout. It has the feeling of aftermath. And it definitely feels like the kind of thing Professor Derek was adamant could not happen.

We ride through the grimy day. Occasionally we see people, or things which might be people, but they hide and we don't stop. Every so often we hear gunfire and explosions. Flashes of curiously bright colours, out of place, appear and disappear: Day-Glo green and gymnasium yellow flicker from around corners half a mile away, and then something goes
whump
or
kKRrrssst,
and then it's quiet. There's something familiar about those colours. We drive on. No one tries to kill us. We are in the eye of the storm, somehow. More glints among the trees, very unnatural pink. Far away, the sound of engines.

The road is gradually ceasing to be worthy of the name. A week ago it was a halfway decent piece of infrastructure, now it looks as if hailstones the size of footballs have been falling on it, and there are deep cracks and miniature ravines running through it. By the time we reach the mountains, it has given up and we're following a riverbed. The RVs and the jeep make more noise than we want them to, and the tank won't quite straddle the stream and either the left or the right caterpillar is constantly in the water, churning away and making a rut. We make Vasille drive at the back of the little convoy. The stream bed leads us around the back of the mesa (that's probably not what it is, or what it's called, but it's close enough that I've started thinking of it in that way and maybe that's a cowboy movie reference; maybe we're the gang running from the law) and it doesn't go conveniently up the mountain, it runs from a deep pool at the foot of a waterfall. There's a goat track which
does
go up the mountain. At least Vasille claims it's a goat track. There are nearly three times as many species of sheep as goats in this area, so the odds are against him. The point is that it's a path, of sorts, and there is a musty cave behind the waterfall just big enough to hide the RVs. The tank we leave in the open; it has a nifty anti-theft device now attached to a largish bomb. Vasille is not someone who gets caught the same way twice.

We climb. Slowly. Fearfully. We shoot at shadows, and once someone from down in the valley fires on us, and we all scurry for cover, and I think of Butch and Sundance, but nothing else happens. We hide for about half an hour anyway.

Halfway up, we come over a crest, all secret and seriously covert, and there are sheep. Not dead, but alive and not alone. There are shepherds too, armed and dangerous, Katiris from one army or another doing exactly what we are doing: running like hell from the most mad part of the world and looking for a place which is less mad. And here they are, and here we are, and there's lots of fear and guns and not much in the way of an exit strategy.

The tallest of them is also the leader, and he has a big, big handgun pointed at us, a Magnum or some other macho thing, and his friends all have AKs, probably Chinese AK-03s, basically the 74 model which everyone thinks of as an AK-47, plus a bottle opener and some extra seals to make them work better in the monsoon season. And this, right here, is a total goatfuck in the making, a big old mess of about-to-be-dead people. Gonzo and Jim Hepsobah are ready to go—they're doing casualty estimates in their heads—and Eagle Culpepper has recovered her functionality if not her sanity and is lined up on the leader, and every one of them is ready to shoot right back at us. We're staring into the eyes of universal casualties. It is entirely possible that we will be able to tell who wins the fight which is about to happen only by timing who dies last.

“Hugwughugwug!” says their boss man angrily, waving his gun around like it's a sceptre, although of course he actually asks us something perfectly sensible, he just asks it in his own language, which none of us can speak. His voice is liquid and lambent and beautiful. This does not alter the fact that he is very pissed off and upset. “Hug! Hugwug, hug wug wuggah ughug? Huuuugwuggah!” This last comes out a bit shrill as Leah slowly puts her shotgun on the ground in front of her. This is such a sensible thing to do that no one shoots anyone, mostly out of shock, and then we all continue not to shoot one another because it seems there may, possibly, be a way out of this. She walks slowly, prettily, across the gap between us and them, shunting a more-than-usually-suicidal sheep out of the way with her knee, which gets a big laugh. The Katiris do not stop pointing their guns at us, but nor does any one of them specifically cover her either. Leah walks until she's right in front of the leader, and his Desert Eagle is pointed at us over her shoulder. She leaves her hands by her sides, palms out, so as not to give anyone any mistaken impressions about subtle and terrifying
gong fu,
and she kisses him lightly on his right cheek, then on his left. As gestures go, it's unambiguous: let's all be friends. Then she turns her back and walks off to one side, and sits down on a rock, and looks at us all like we're being a bunch of total arseholes, which we are. This is also unambiguous, but it takes longer to work out because it runs counter to what you might charitably call the prevailing logic of the situation.

Leaderboy gets it slightly before Gonzo does, or maybe he just isn't a great card player, and he smiles cartoonishly, and very slowly and clearly holsters his gun and bows in Leah's direction, waits for her nod, and goes to sit with her. At this point there's a kind of general acknowledgement that no one wants to get annihilated here today, and a lot of weapons are lowered and put away and people embrace cautiously and laugh a bit and one of their soldiers even has a little cry. We say “Hooray” to them and they say “Hugwugwughug” to us, and we try to copy them and get it wrong, and everyone finds this enormously amusing, until one of the sheep wanders over to the left of where we're all leaping around and laughing and explodes with considerable emphasis, and we realise that we are doing all our hugwughugging on the edge of a minefield. At that point the whole business of whether we are allies or sort of neutral goes by the wayside, and we all fall into line and carefully tread in one another's footsteps while Gonzo, on his knees, pokes down into the soil with Sam's knife, and leads us through.

By the time we reach Shangri-La—us and the Katiris, both—we are thirsty and hungry, which is good because before we were just surviving—we didn't know about hungry any more. The castle is a ruin. Cracked walls and bullet holes. The long balcony is shattered and tumbled down, and the rolling meadows are a scrub. Fires are burning somewhere down in the valley. At the far end of the courtyard there's a row of tyre tracks—not ours. Someone has been here. Maybe is here. But they came here to hide, and they are not Ruth Kemner. In fact, I have an inkling who it must be. A Honda Civic with Day-Glo green paint and a whale-tail is parked just poking out from behind an outhouse. Day-Glo—like the flashes we have been seeing since we escaped from Corvid's Field. There's a pink Mitsubishi Evo against one wall. And off to one side, like a boarding school matron with her girls around her, the nose of a maroon Rolls-Royce. I think . . . I think we were invited to come here; even
escorted.
And so I walk to the main entrance and reach for the big, solid doors.

Which open, in advance of me, to reveal a glittering wall of knife blades and slender pirate-monks, and behind them a row of ceramic Glocks, and in the very centre of the scene a small, bearded figure with a glint of fire in his eye and a cutlass in either hand. He looks at us, and the Katiri shepherds behind us, and after a moment he smiles, thank God, and drops his hands, and the pirate-monks do the same, and he steps back and away and behind him we can see his few, fleabitten, terrified refugees, and their families, and their animals. And as he smiles, some trick of the light reveals him to me, shows me how his face would look unshaven, and I recognise my old friend Freeman ibn Solomon, peripatetic ambassador to student debating clubs and cancan artist extraordinaire. He smiles.

“Welcome,” says Zaher Bey.

Chapter Seven

Family history;
the sex life of Rao Tsur;
foals, monsters and dreams.

Z
AHER
B
EY'S
nth
forefather was a Turkish Mameluke named Mustafa, a slave-soldier who served in Egypt until his particular genius in planning rather than personally inflicting massive casualties caused him to be raised above his schoolmates and made a general. Of this gentleman (who had lost an ear in his early career and wore a golden prosthesis in its place) no contemporary images survive, such being a violation of strict Islamic law as it was understood by Mustafa, but he is described by a contemporary diarist (freely translated) as a “chippy, murderous shortarse.” His tenure as a general was quietly successful until 1798, when an army of Frenchmen led by a similarly chippy and shortarsed Corsican marched into Egypt in the hope of carving out a bit of the region and breaking the British stranglehold on India. Mustafa of the Golden Ear duly mustered his army and went out to meet the dastardly Frog, who despite having suffered an egregious defeat at the hands of Horatio Nelson still contrived to rout the Mameluke forces and capture the Bey himself.

Expecting only death and ridicule, Mustafa was pleasantly surprised to find himself an honoured guest, and even more delighted to discover that the reason for this was his hitherto injurious lack of vertical prominence. The Corsican, in turn, was much pleased to have created not a lifetime foe but a genuine admirer. Amid discussions about how exactly the victory had been achieved and what was to happen now, Napoléon and the Bey got blasted on a mixture of insanely strong coffee, French cognac and suspiciously fragrant pipe tobacco, and when the night was over (about a week later), Napoléon was sneaked through the British pickets to the coast by Mustafa Bey's scouts and returned to France to tell everyone about how he kicked some Anglo-Arab backside before heroically running home again. Mustafa Bey went back to his castle in the company of a formidable adventuress named Camille de la Saint-Vièrge, who shortly thereafter bore a son, the first of his get, and that son studied not only at the Mameluke school, but also with the British (on the basis that while it's always nice to study with the person who beat
you,
it's more practical to learn the trade from someone who handed
him
his hat with his teeth in it).

From these roots grew a seafaring family of Beys, international and sophisticated, fiercely independent and often at odds with their notional masters. These quibblings over chain of command might have made them natural Americans, save that Solomon Bey (1901–1947) eschewed all manner of religion after some time at the Sorbonne, and felt that the United States was by far the most devout nation on Earth. At the same time the Maharaja of Addeh Katir, Ranjit Rhoi—known as Doubtful Randy—felt an overpowering need for military men of good family, and invited Solomon, Zaher Bey's father, to create a river navy and a Katiri defence force for his Raj, a decision which the maharaja uncharacteristically stuck to, even when all else fell apart around him. Solomon perforce relocated his young, pregnant wife to an immensely beautiful hill fort just in time for the British empire to fall into horrible and bloody strife and remove itself from the subcontinent. Zaher Bey was born on a cloudy Sunday in June 1947, and orphaned on Wednesday the following week when representatives of a local crime syndicate decided to throw off the yoke of British oppression by killing Solomon and his recovering bride and coincidentally moving a huge shipment of opium from Afghanistan in the ensuing confusion. Zaher Bey was smuggled to London by an aide to Mountbatten, most likely with that great man's connivance, since very little escaped him at any time.

Thus came the Bey, swaddled in a goat blanket and bedded on a considerable fortune, to London, and in due time to Oxford University, where he raised some serious hell, drank and rowed for his college and was caught in flagrante with the daughter of the Dean of Balliol, all before taking an upper second class degree, which achievement is still regarded as something of a miracle by those who witnessed his blazing passage through Oxford's watering holes and comely undergraduettes. His companion and occasional bail bondsman was a slender Katiri scion named Nq'ula Jann, formidable polymath and intellectual snob, last seen driving the Roller at the evacuation of Fudin, and now charged with working out with all due speed what the hell is going on. These two, thus armed with a full education, returned to the Bey's native land with every intention of living soft and growing mighty fat. They arrived just in time for the removal of the last maharaja and the installation of Erwin Magnificat Kumar as puppet and president, whereupon they saw the way of things and the unpleasant nature of the new regime, and straightaway resolved to circumvent and vex it to the utmost of their considerable ability.

T
HE FIRST DAYS
are very hard and strange. We find places to slump and even doze. There are people on every flagstone and in every alcove. Sally Culpepper and Jim Hepsobah make hammocks and sleep in them, high above the stone floor. I try this. It hurts my back. I wander at night and sleep in daylight, when there's room on the floor. The castle seems to come in three parts—Zaher Bey and his monks have the upper floor, near the temple spire; Gonzo's gang, including us, are in the entrance hall and on the blasted balcony; and the refugee Katiris are scattered through the interior of the building, although “scattered” makes them sound more sparsely distributed than they are. Leah and I revisit the room in which we spent the night. It is home now to three Katiri families, among them two injured men and an old lady whose rage causes her to spit and stammer. We nod respectfully as she tells us that our mothers were covered by wild dogs, and we do our best not to inhale the smell of blood and sweat coming from her nephew and his friend. The crone—although a few days ago she was probably a matron, maybe still is beneath the dirt and the exhaustion—bellows at us, and the nephew translates in a helpful monotone. He doesn't bother to stress any of the English words, just lays them before us so we can accuse ourselves at leisure.

“My sons. You took my sons. And for what? For what? They were my sons and I loved them. They were my only sons. I have no others. I have no daughters either, not any more. All gone. You took them. They are gone.” And so he goes on, as if bored, and does not editorialise until she comes to a culmination, a long string of curses upon our seed, our land, our homes and our houses, for ever until the red blood of God washes clean the sky and judgement is issued in great gouts of fire. At this point he informs us that his aunt is angry. And he is angry too, of course. He lifts up his face to show us, but mostly in his eyes there's just emptiness, and he sees that we see it, and shrugs.

“I saw the land eaten,” he says, as if that explains it, and holds his aunt in a gentle cage of arms and hugs until she weeps snot and saliva into his chest. As we go to leave, she breaks free of him and chases us in little lunges down the corridor, like a furious housecat. Leah leads me away, but the aunt persists, following in sharp jerks, as if dragged along by a lead. She sets up a new, gut-wrenching wail, and soon we are gathering a crowd of saturnine men and sullen women in our wake.

Our flight takes us to an inner courtyard, flagged and smooth. There is a well amid the wreck of a tiled fountain, and of course everyone who is not following menacingly behind us is sitting here, higgledy-piggledy, around and on top of one another, in box crates and bunk beds making up a great beehive town. As we enter, it gets quite still, and the aunt screeches hoarsely into the quiet. For the first time I am seeing the people of Addeh Katir from street level, not from the safe heights of an armoured convoy, and it occurs to me that they may be more forthcoming with their fury in this situation. One of the younger men moves to pick up a sort of stick, a farmer's tool good for threshing and minding animals, and beating enemies to death, and then there is a bellow of outrage from the middle of the courtyard, and everyone turns to look.

“Fornicatress! What is
that
?” A familiar figure is glaring in horror at a toddler in ragged blue pyjamas. If the child were eating raw meat, it could not merit such ghastly dismay.

“It's hideous! Unnatural! Where did it come from? No, no, don't tell me—this house is filled with likely men. I shall simply seek out the one who is broken and bleeding and know him for the idiot who took you to his bed. Or was it mine?
My
bed? And how did you birth it so quickly? Eh? Answer me that? No nine months for you, you unmarked harlot, no indeed, scant hours to produce another malignant brat! If I look around I will no doubt find the shell it hatched from. You're a demon, is what it is! A thing from the red inferno, where dwell incubi and satyrs and women with the legs of spiders, all coddled in a fetid mist! Oh, poor Rao Tsur, married to a sulphurous, rutting fiend! It wouldn't be so bad if she could cook, but as it is . . .”

“Imbecile! The child is yours, as you well know, and born two years ago. Yes, it was. Oh, for the love of . . . Must you declare your poverty of mind to the entire house? Yes, I see you must. You named him Jun, and gurgled at him like a river toad when you should have been attending to the spices. No customer was served for months but must admire the little thug. He spat at them. Vomited. Threw things unmentionable after them as they fled. A salesman like his father, yes, to hurl our clientele headlong, heaving, out into the road. Thus we live in penury and want. Yes. Penury and want. And,
oh, yes,
Rao Tsur, whose refined palate cares not for my kitchen's product any more than his empty heart has love for his enduring wife, the child is mine as well. We slept together, you and I. I say slept. In fact we copulated. Yes, you may well look abashed, it was no great matter. It barely counts. All that huffing and puffing and I swear I would have done better by myself!”

“Oh, indeed? Mistress of Onan, is Veda Tsur! Soloist! Luxuriant! And yet if I recall her spine was arched, presenting those unmentionable breasts to dread advantage, and from her open mouth proceeded such a racket as to sour milk and burst the eardrums of cats!”

“Hah! You admit it! You pounced upon me! Dark, your passions, Rao Tsur, when there was I, peaceably recalling my days of virtue. Oh yes, I'm sure I screamed! Quite likely, I called out for help! And no wonder, me being belaboured with that appalling cudgel you call a—” Her husband's eyes grow very wide, and Veda Tsur comes sharply to a halt. She has hit that naked space in a crowded place where every conversation stops at once and yours inexorably continues, slewing secrets into a loud silence. I once said “starkers from the waist down, of course, but no one noticed because of the feathers” in a lecture hall full of my professors. I'd been talking about dinosaurs and birds and evolution, but try telling that to a hundred hooting dons.

Veda Tsur shuffles. She looks at her feet. And she lets fall from her wide, welcoming lips a sort of girlish giggle of embarrassment. Rao Tsur too shifts uncomfortably. The Katiris stare. Short of a rain of frogs or the sun rising in the north, there's not much to top this, even now. Rao Tsur mumbles something like “Yes, well” and actually
cannot think of anything to say.
Awkwardly, he puts an arm around his wife and gathers up the wayward child which was the object of their debate, and quite a few others emerge from under boxes and blankets and scamper to complete the picture, until Family Tsur is fully assembled. And then, most impossible of all, Rao Tsur places a kiss upon the cheek of Veda Tsur as if they were just now stepping from a marriage service and he is afraid she will fly away if he does not occasionally soothe her and hang on to her. There is a frozen moment, then a snort from the aunt, and then the whole courtyard falls apart in a roar of laughter and cheering, like an explosion. It is the first laughter I have heard since the end of the world. (Nervous laughter and evil laughter do not count.)

Amid the laughter there is clapping, and the clapping becomes a rhythm, and the rhythm becomes a dance, and Rao Tsur by some strange coincidence is at this moment next to Leah. He seizes upon her, and Veda Tsur by way of revenge must have me, and Rao trumpets that she is making off with the hero of Fudin, and that just because I hit an idiot in the head and saved her life, she will now leave him for ever, and good riddance, faithless wench, may she bear me fine upstanding demon children. At which Veda asks tartly if Rao is not even now clutching that buxom doctor to his chest? And does he imagine she will gladly suffer his inexpert fondlings? She will run off with a handsome shepherd, and then where is Rao? Alone with his stupidity! And anyway, what nonsense! But even now they can't stop grinning at one another.

And so it goes, around and around, clap clap clapclap clap,
laLAHlalalaLAH . . . lahdahdahDEE-YA!
until a string is stretched across some empty cases and begins to
twang
and
zoom,
and a row of empty bottles goes
ping, pang, pong
and
pung,
and voices are making up the rest of the orchestra,
hmmhhhmmaahmm, a-hooahomm,
and it's a regular rock-and-roll hoedown, only with makeshift mandolins and xylophones, and not much in the way of skiffle until Tobemory Trent starts playing tortoiseshell and bone. And when the first dance is done, there is a brief moment for the aunt, in all humility, to kiss me on both cheeks in front of the whole crowd and pat my face and tell everyone that anybody who wants to pick a fight with
me
will answer to
her,
because if Rao Tsur, saffron merchant of Fudin, says I am a good man, and if Veda Tsur is content that my lady should dance with her husband, then that is good enough on any day for her, even if I had not—according to unimpeachable sources known to her personally—punched in the head a noted idiot in an effort to safeguard the lives of the people of Fudin. At which another great cheer goes up, and it is louder, for behind us is Zaher Bey, pint-sized titan and romantic lead, and sometime debater of the Jarndice Caucus club. And also, it emerges, funky-chicken instructor to the people of Fudin, the mysterious pirates of Addeh Katir and the remnant forces of the Combined Defensive Operational Force 8th Battlegroup, G.W. Lubitsch pro tem commander. So we get funky, together, and if anyone thinks Gonzo and Leah and Jim and Sally and I, or any of the others, is less than a friend, that person forgets about it, because we're all chums together, and drunk as well.