The Gone-Away World (62 page)

Mr. Rusth (to rhyme with must) was a small, densely constructed person with a bald head. He wore a long jacket and a short collar, and his eyes regarded the world through circular glasses. These gave him the look which snowmen acquire the day after their construction, of being partly dissolved and cavernous. He asked Humbert whether he wished to be a man of small consequence or whether he would care instead to play upon the grand stage, and Humbert Pestle replied that if he had a choice, his preference would be for the latter. Eliard Rusth said that he wasn't here to talk about preferences. If preferences were all Humbert could offer, Eliard Rusth was in the wrong place and would now remove himself.

Humbert Pestle rephrased his reply in stronger terms.

Greatness, Eliard Rusth said, was not achieved by acting on one's own account. Fortunes could be made that way; professions could be conquered. But greatness required that one set aside one's own desires and become the instrument of destiny. And this, he explained, was the purpose of the Society of the Clockwork Hand. To be the instrument of destiny. The Clockwork Hand was a mechanism: once set in motion, it could not be stopped, not by time or force of arms or diplomacy. Members obeyed their instructions without question, whatever they might be, and the Master of the Hand, freed from all mundane considerations, listened in silence for the music of the great wheels of destiny.

A year later Humbert Pestle went by train and car to his father's home, the house of marvels where he grew up, and burned it to the ground. As it transpired, the house was occupied, which Humbert Pestle, watching from the great lawn, came to realise only when he spied a figure limned in fire at one of the upper windows. (Opening a window in a burning building is inadvisable. This was immediately demonstrated quite practically, and the figure—male, elderly but still strong—was consumed entirely in a wreath of fire and fell from view.) Humbert Pestle, watching these events, had expected to find in himself a great tearing and commotion. Instead, he found that all his commotions were stilled. This was a thing so huge that it implied a hidden meaning. It was too vast to be anything but part of a huge and remarkable pattern. And as Humbert Pestle stared at the flames, he believed he could see the edges of that pattern. He could hear it moving. The sound was a measured beat, an endless whirring. It was not yet a piece of music, but he knew it would be in time.

In consequence of this enlightenment, Eliard Rusth shared with Humbert Pestle the Iron Skin Meditation and the more conventional
gong fu
of the Clockwork Hand (whose name itself derived from the perfect progress of the universe as if steered by a mechanical armature) so that his student's experience as a commando was overlayed with a subtlety of technique and a terrifying endurance which allowed him, over the course of time, to advance within the Clockwork Hand to the position of
Sigung,
the most exalted of equals.

The ascent of Humbert Pestle to the leadership of the Clockwork Hand would not have been a catastrophe—save for a particular hereditary enemy of the Hand now eking out a living as a small-time instructor of the risible Voiceless Dragon style (whose tenets included a starkly
discordant
insistence on the value of a single human life) in a town almost too small for the name—had not the world suddenly collapsed upon itself in a great spasm and the lazy ascent towards
unity
come fundamentally unstuck.

The Go Away War and the Reification were a great chaos which brought an end to everything we knew. By accident or subconscious design, we destroyed the pattern of our lives, reduced our species to tiny pockets of survival and engendered a world whose very fabric responded to our thoughts. Humbert Pestle, silver at the temples and tough like a yew tree, survived the cataclysm but was appalled by the havoc that it wrought. Seeing in his mind the cogs of the great progress scattered willy-nilly all about, Pestle longed to put them back in the clockwork and make it run again. Nor was he alone. We all of us looked at the turmoil around and were afraid, and instead of going out to meet it and sniff it like good mammals, good
primates,
we got cold feet and fell back upon our cold blood; like lizards on a cloudy day, we wished ourselves back in the comfort of our holes; we wanted our finite horizons of predictable problems and predictable joys.

Humbert Pestle wandered through the chaos in despair. Discord was everywhere. The sense of destiny he had acquired in the Clockwork Hand was broken. And then one day he witnessed something which filled him with hope, something great and terrible, and Humbert Pestle looked at it and heard the first notes of the music he had been searching for. With that music sounding in his mind, he set about the creation of something great, around the remainder of the old financial system and the Society of the Clockwork Hand. He called it Jorgmund, and it would circle the world in its grip. The blood of Jorgmund was a thing called FOX, which could usher out the new and restore the old.

E
LISABETH
S
OAMES
coughs. She has been speaking for a long time. I pass her some water from the plastic bucket in the corner. She has wrapped the bucket in blankets because it is a dreadful colour, a sort of chartreuse. The result looks a lot like something you would find in a Bedouin hut if the Bedu shopped at Ikea. She sips at the water and presses closer to me.

“What did he see?” I ask.

“I don't know.”

It is the heart of all of this. It is the engine in Humbert's machine, his
enemy plan.
Jorgmund. FOX. Gonzo. All of a piece. Find the connections. Find out why. What does Jorgmund want with Gonzo? Old questions:
What is this thing called Jorgmund? What does it want? What is my place in the pattern?

“I need to see the Core,” I tell Elisabeth Soames. She does not say “Are you up to it?” or “If they catch you . . .” (which would be another rhetorical ellipsis, of course, and thus far, far beneath her). She seems to review everything which has happened, and herself and me, and weigh it all, and in that light she opens her eyes again, and she nods once, sharply.

“Okay.”

Chapter Fifteen

Empires and rooftops;
pussy willow;
the face of my enemy.

U
NTIL RECENTLY
, the great Empire of Sartoria—the continent of style whence come all manner of dinner suits, morning coats, Edwards, Ascots, Lichfields, smokings and casuals—was marked on my personal map as a small island just to windward of the Useless Archipelago. It was populated with skilled but pointless individuals disconnected from the ebb and flow of living. An hour spent with Royce Allen has disabused me of that notion. Tailors are vital. Royce Allen is a receiving and transmitting station for news and storm warnings of various kinds, and a voice of stark truth to those whose importance is such that they generally hear none. Men of his profession have been quietly saving the world for years.

“No, sir, the chartreuse is a disaster. It makes you look like the Wampyr. As in the Undead. Yes. A cartoonist's dream, sir. No, not pale and aristocratic, I fear, though one can see how you might imagine that, but more on the deliquescent side of things. On the whole, sir, the pink. If you absolutely must, sir, then the russet, but it has to my mind a hint of the dung heap about it. Yes. Oh, and regarding the economy, sir? Parlous. Yes, I am aware of your new proposals, sir. They are, if you will forgive me, worse than that burlap sack your missus was wearing on the telly last night. Yes. Mass unemployment in days, I should imagine. Well, might I propose that you just leave bloody well alone, sir—let the housing market settle and the banks get over their alarm, and pop in in a week for another fitting? Very good. Now, as to footwear—might I venture that you've been taking advice on this topic from the defence secretary, sir? Only these would appear to be Cuban heels.”

The items I am currently wearing come from a different stable. The same expertise has been applied to their making, the same exacting standards, but the intent behind their construction is less benign. The trousers are double lined: the inner layer is a sheer silk which instantly clings to the leg; the outer one is coarser, and slides over the silk without catching or making a noise. The final layer of fabric is not strictly black, but mottled midnight-on-anthracite—night-time camouflage. The jacket is the same. It tugs a little over the shoulders because I am an inch or so larger about the torso than the previous occupant. This is a suit intended to facilitate mayhem and violence in silence.

I'm wearing a ninja outfit. When I put it on there was a single, enormous bee corpse in the crotch. I didn't scream because I am a man of action and a serious person engaged in serious business. Also because Elisabeth Soames was watching. I did, however, pick it up by one huge wing and drop it with a sardonic smile into the wastepaper basket in pigeon coop number one. And my whole nether region went cold as ice. This was probably a good thing. Until then I had been watching Elisabeth Soames wriggle into her own ninja gear (at some point one of them has run afoul of her and been denuded; I don't know whether this was post-mortem and I don't necessarily want to) and thinking that maybe this could wait until I'd taken her back to bed. It's time to concentrate. I long to contemplate her in a vastly more tactile and rewarding fashion, and this would be a bad idea. Bad, bad, bad. I growl out loud. She turns round.

I drag my eyes upward, and find her face. She is looking patient. It does not look like the kind of patience which comes naturally, but the kind you adopt by choice. I mumble something. She kisses me chastely on each cheek, looks into my eyes.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

And we go out into the early dark.

Elisabeth's rooftop is only a few storeys high, and there's an iron fire escape hanging down from the building above. She has at some point tied a rope to the bottom; she drags it down, and we climb. It's a long way—this place has fifteen or more floors. We climb past windows and kitchens and feuding families; we eavesdrop on lovers and catch fragments of television shows. We climb. I begin to realise how she maintains that greyhound physique. When we get to the top, she leads me over an obstacle course, made all the more exciting by the fact that it is ever ascending, until we are at least twenty storeys up. And then her movements change, she grows cautious and I know that we are close.

This new roof is slippery, canted slightly towards a distant drop. The ninja shoes had little crampons for this kind of thing, but my donor had small feet. Girly feet. I hope he was a man. I don't want to be wearing a dead girl's clothes. At the far end of the rooftop there is another wall, and this one is vast. It goes up and up, maybe seventy floors above us. Fortunately, there is a lift, like a window cleaner's hoist. We take it all the way. The little electric motors whine and complain, and the wind blows us all over the place. In movies people have fights on these things. You just wouldn't. You'd sit there politely, talk about your favourite place to eat in the city below, maybe exchange names. You'd wait until you got to the top or the bottom and get off, then either fight in the knowledge that you had the ground under you and you'd die of violence rather than gravity, or reckon to resolve your differences over a coffee and a sandwich in the fortieth-floor bar. That model City of Lights down there is only a few seconds away by the direct route. These planks are strong enough to stand on, to sit on. But they flex when you walk. There are cracks. The planks are screwed into the frame, but one of the screws has worked loose and another is broken. Window cleaners have nerves of steel.

The roof of the Jorgmund Company, their neon logo shuddering in the wind above us. It's freezing up here. Elisabeth puts on Dr. Andromas's goggles to protect her eyes. I don't have any goggles so I put up the ninja's hood and squint. It doesn't help very much. The wind is a kind of localised hurricane, a circling snarl created by all the buildings. In daytime it would be scary. In the dark it is disorientating, misleading. You could press against it to get away from the edge, and walk clear off the other lip thinking you were still right up against the first one. Elisabeth knows the way; if you traced it on a graph, it would be a curve or part of a spiral. Up here, right now, it's a straight line across the roof to the other side. We pass under the signage and I can hear it creak. The torsion on the bolts must be tremendous. I wonder how often they have to come up here and change them, or check them for sheering. And then she clips a couple of bits of nylon around my chest and hooks us together, and we jump off.

I am acquiring a profound dislike of falling. Even in the arms of Elisabeth Soames, with her sweat still on my skin; even with the shriek of the little winch paying out a line; even knowing that we will never hit the ground, that everything is taken care of, I hate the lurch in my stomach and the wicked clawing of the air. Air should be a soft thing, a coddling thing, a breeze which wakes you in the morning, ruffles your hair and wafts the scent of summer in your face. It should bring tea. It should not rip like an angry dog at your clothes and graze your face with abrasive claws. We fall. Just enough time for a chat with my invisible life coach.

The winch slows us, and we touch down almost without a sound. Elisabeth Soames is pleased: she has estimated the distance and the weight to a fine margin. Geek fu is strong in this one. She looks at me curiously.

“Were you talking to yourself back there?”

“Taking advice from an old friend.”

She smiles.

“I do that. I talk to Master Wu and my mother and . . .” She hesitates. “Well, you, actually, now that I think about it. Or mostly you. Hm.” She frowns, then brushes this little oddness away like a cobweb. “Come on.” She slips away, soft-footed and sure. She has done this before.

Elisabeth leads the way to a curious dome or pagoda, and next to it a very ordinary door set into an equally ordinary concrete box. A rooftop door. It is padlocked. Elisabeth Soames taps the hinge sharply, and the pin falls out into her hand. She lifts the door against the catch. It opens just enough for us to slip through. She slips it back and pockets the hinge pin. I wipe away the water in my eyes and look around.

We are on a gantry, a floating walkway. There is a network of them, metal grilles suspended above insulation, fibrous tiles, cables and hoses. There's even an emergency mini-Pipe system. This is the gut of the building, the gasworksish bit which doesn't mesh with the idea that everything just happens, smoothly, at will and on demand. All this is hidden so as to convey perfection without achieving it. The gantries are here to allow access when imperfection becomes too obvious to ignore. Elisabeth sets off at a swift, smooth pace. We follow the gantry for thirty metres, then it curves away left and we go right and over to a bright spot, where light filters up from the room below. More gantries converge here. If you mapped them, this place would be a node, a multiple crossroads where weary plumbers meet tilers and gaffers, drink stale tea from vacuum flasks and exchange sandwich quarters and oilyrag gossip. I look around. Yes. At the juncture of our gantry and the next there is a smooth spot, worn shiny by years of arses settling, wrapping legs around the stanchions—and there, underneath the railing, someone has scratched an obscene graffito, a ludicrously long male sexual organ chasing a pair of rudimentary breasts. It looks to have been done with a screwdriver, too big for the task. There are scratches where the artist lost traction and the tool skidded away, taking a narrow slice of plastic paint and ruining the integrity of the image. Below us there is a single piece of grillework. A vent.

Elisabeth lies on her stomach and slips her fingers slowly through the holes in the vent. She breathes in, heaves and makes a noise like “uhh-hhhhp,” very soft. The vent comes away in her hands. So now, technically, it's an
aperture:
a hatchway. Elisabeth mouths:
Down here.
She doesn't tell me to be careful. She knows me.

She braces against the gantry, and lowers me through the hatch.

I
AM
standing in a lounge sort of thing, with sofas. The lights are on. My remaining Royce Allen jacket drops beside me. I look up. Elisabeth smiles slightly, encouraging, as if I'm taking baby steps. She points to herself (Do I imagine that she is very specific about pointing to the left side of her chest, where the heart is? Or is that just because she's twisted around to hang out over the hole and see me?) and mouths:
I'll be watching.

She hoists herself up and out of the way, so I can't see her face any more, just her shoes. She wiggles a leg at me:
Get going,
or perhaps
Move it, you sexy beast!
which would be very gratifying. In either case, I obey. I remove the ninja hood. It's all very well being invisible, but it also takes away your hearing and makes you just a little bit less sensitive to noises and feelings. I put on the jacket. Now I'm not a scary ninja guy. I'm just a bloke in the office on an all-nighter. I hope.

I bend, touch my front teeth to the door handle. (Vibration in a corridor means footsteps; faint vibration is most easily felt with your teeth against metal; closest metal to reach with your mouth is a door handle; ludicrous but effective. Don't believe me? Try it.)

My incisors have nothing to report. I listen, just in case. Silence. I open the door and step through into the corridor. Above me I hear a soft sound of cloth on metal. Elisabeth is following.

It's dark, but not completely. Exit lights glimmer every five doors. I'm about midway along a windowless corridor. The way to my right is slightly lighter. Someone home, perhaps. I head in that direction, softly softly. I walk the way Gonzo used to on patrol, not on tiptoe, but putting the front outer side of the foot down, rolling back onto the heel. It's almost as fast as ordinary walking, but quiet. My ribs complain. Of course they do. Ribs are whiners. I tell them so. There's a noise now, a cranky, creaky noise, small rubber wheels. Mr. Crabtree, right on time, regular as . . . (don't say “clockwork,” not here, not now: to name the Devil is to call him . . .
Humbert Pestle.
Shhh!
Humbert! Pestle!
. . . I go back to my simile) regular as a German train. If Crabtree sees me, he may sound the alarm. On the other hand, Robert Crabtree is a very specific sort of person. His job is not security, it is paper. He may reason that if I am here, I must be meant to be here. He may show me wonders. Risk and reward.

Follow the paper.
Not Ronnie's voice. Not anyone's but mine.