The Gone-Away World (38 page)

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.

G
ONZO 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.