The Gone-Away World (27 page)

“Wind?” Gonzo demands.

“Twenty-five off,” Eagle tells him, which is worse than it was.

“Time to contact?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Calling it five hundred and forty seconds . . . mark.”

This means that there's still plenty of time to get soldiers kitted up and even enough time to evacuate most of the Katiris, although they'll have to drive very, very fast on some fairly nasty roads. Gonzo is counting as we go through ID checks, counting as we get confirmation, counting as we approach the captain's position, counting as Ben Carsville still doesn't issue the order and counting out loud as he storms into the command tent with his rank insignia in one hand and the gas detector badge from his reconnaissance in the other. Gonzo stood in a cloud of gas and watched the chemical film react to the stuff. He knows he has not been misled or hornswaggled. He
has no time for this shit.
In fact, he knows exactly how little time he has, because he is counting it down out loud.

“(Four hundred and twenty-five seconds), Carsville, you are a fucking
arsewart,
what the
fuck
do you think you are doing? Are you (four hundred and twenty) out of your miserable fucking mind? There is a major, for real, treaty-busting, huge goatfuck disaster of a gas attack and you are right in the middle of it and you are wearing your (four hundred and fifteen) forgodsakes
dressing gown
and where the
fuck
did you get that, you mad-crazy
prick
? (Four hundred and ten) you unbelievable
idiot
!”

Carsville doesn't pay any attention to the language because Gonzo is special forces and Carsville knows he won't get anywhere with arguing about a few curses, but he leans back photogenically and demands to
know what those numbers are, soldier
and
what the hell do you know about it,
and when Gonzo lunges forward to grab him by the ears and beat him sensible, Carsville pulls a pistol from his dressing gown and flicks his thumb across the safety to release it. The outcomes of close combat with a loaded handgun are also distressingly unpredictable. Not even Gonzo can dodge bullets and while Carsville may be an idiot he's not a bad shot or even necessarily a bad fighter, so we all stand there like stalagmites while Gonzo mutters, “Four hundred oh oh, arsehole arsehole arsehole!”

Gonzo turns sharply on his heel as if Carsville has ceased to exist, walks out of the command tent and grabs the nearest grunt and tells him there's a chemical shitstorm coming down and to sound the alarm and tell the Katiris to evac and that he has at best three hundred and fifty-five seconds before this pleasant spot turns into a field of the dead. And Carsville, who has followed him out, points his gun at his own sentry and tells him to belay that order, and here we are again, only this time he's also telling Gonzo to get out of his moonsuit. Gonzo pulls the mask of the moonsuit up. Carsville shifts his aim and cocks the hammer, and everything is buggered up.

I step sideways, and say something like, “Gonzo, take the goddam suit off, man,” secure in the knowledge that Gonzo is not about to do anything of the kind, because getting shot is one kind of bad, but getting gassed is quite another. Carsville cannot see my eyes, or detect the smooth current of information passing between myself and my oldest friend. He cannot hear the dialogue we do not speak.

Gonzo yells at me to shut up. I call him some unpleasant names. He takes offence, gets in my face and, when I won't give way, he shoves me. This puts me between him and Carsville, who lowers his gun slightly because I am on his side and he doesn't want to shoot me. Alas, I am suddenly very clumsy—
Oh, my stars and garters, what have I done?
I stumble into the captain. He discharges his weapon at the ground and I (with more than moderate satisfaction) smack Captain Ben Carsville's idiot mouth as hard as I can without breaking my hand, and crack his arm like a whip, so that it comes unstuck in some fundamental way and he drops the gun.

Carsville whimpers and the sentry goggles at me. My military career looks a bit rocky, because this does not even slightly qualify as a legitimate action, but if I am court-martialled I will go out saving a bunch of lives instead of ending them, and this has a certain charm. The military has dealt with this kind of court martial before. People get sternly reprimanded and thrown out with a promotion and a medal, and
let that be a lesson
! Leah is staring at me with wide eyes which have more than a little approval in them, and she hastens to reassemble Carsville's arm in what I suspect may be an unnecessarily painful way, because he passes out and therefore cannot give countervailing orders to his men, who snap into action as Gonzo tells them to move out. His tone implies that, having broken one arm today, I may suddenly have developed a taste for arms in general, but also is so honestly urgent that the threat is unnecessary and perhaps even unnoticed. Ben Carsville is bundled into his own staff car and driven away at speed. We get back in our RVs and charge on to Fudin.

The sad truth is that Ben Carsville has probably wasted too much time. Even with the company from Red Gate with us, there's no chance we can get them all out. It's going to be first come, first saved, and the rest will shift as best they can. I can't tell whether Leah has realised. Probably she has; she understands triage. Likely we will see a riot, a living mass of fear and anger composed of people no longer acting as individuals. We may have to shoot a few of them to save the rest. It's arguable whether we should attempt a rescue at all, but Gonzo has no time for arguable, and the decision is his, and no one here would quibble anyway.

It's possible that the people of Fudin will refuse our help. They may not believe us. They may choose to think we are lying when the alternative is cataclysm. We may have to leave again, abandon them to death because we are not credible, or the news we bring is too vast to be comprehensible in the time we have. We may fail without being allowed to try.

I've known this whole un-war business was stupid for a while. I've never liked it, but I haven't hated it until now. I am wondering whether Rao Tsur and his wife will greet annihilation with the same wit they showed in the marketplace; whether Mrs. Tsur will beg Jim Hepsobah to take her youngest son on his lap when there is no more space; whether she will stand like a pillar and hold her children while we depart; whether she will fling herself on us in a rage, or watch us struggle to save who we can with the eerie, patient understanding of imminent death; whether Rao will seek to reach an accommodation for the safety of his family, or whether we will see something darker and more horrible as he abandons them. Perhaps his love is a weak thing. Perhaps he does mean to exchange her for a younger model, or perhaps he simply values his own life over hers. Perhaps he will default, demand passage for himself alone, even try to bribe us. I think, if he does that, that I will kill him.

All these things and more I am prepared for in Fudin. I am
not
prepared for a stock car rally. But that is what I get.

Jim Hepsobah spins the wheel and brings us around the last bend into Fudin, and there are forty particoloured street-racers in a neat grid pattern, with families piling into them: goats and suitcases and children being loaded onto roofracks, and slender Katiri wives and tubby patriarchs and serious teenagers climbing aboard without hesitation or mishap. As soon as each car is filled it takes off, from the front of the grid, as if this were a Swiss taxi rank. Fudin is almost empty, which means that over a hundred cars have already left.

Each motor is driven by an energetic young person in a very expensive, personalised version of the suits we are wearing. Expensive, because tailored and cut to fit, and therefore figure-hugging and distinctly stylish. Their crash helmets are fitted onto the necks of their suits, so they look like science-fiction heroes or very rich technobikers from Silicon Valley, but each of them has a different pattern painted onto his or her back; they are a forest of dragons and courtesans and pirates. The word zings around inside my head:
piratespiratespirates.
Although there is more to them than yo-ho-ho. There is a deliberateness and a quiet centre. Pirate-monks, maybe.

They carry bags for their passengers, hold open doors for older ladies, and run around and zoom away, and they are managing this magic, this impossibly competent evacuation, with
music.
They clap, sing and stamp. Humanitarianism in four four time. The people of Fudin move with the beat (it's almost impossible not to) so no one trips and no one gets in anyone's way.
Load-the-roof two three four, get-in-the-car two three four, all-here? two three four, vavavoom two three four,
and another row of rescue wagons roars off the grid and now there are only thirty-two.

Standing in the middle of all this smoothly functioning chaos is a little bearded geezer with a round head and a glinting, challenging smile which would stand him in good stead in a toothpaste commercial aimed at moderately wealthy, moderately devout (moderately scandalous in youth but now moderately reformed) Asian gentlemen of good family. He is dressed in a pair of linen trousers and an open-necked shirt, over which he wears a leather jerkin. Around his middle is a red sash or cummerbund, from which depends a small collection of utilities and two items I can describe only as
cutlasses.
He is oddly and acutely familiar, but as he is at one and the same time directing refugee traffic, conducting an impromptu rhythm collective and speaking waspishly with a village elder who has taken it into her head that she will remain here, and since while he manages these small matters he is
also
fighting off the efforts of a scrawny, nervous grand-vizier-looking bloke who's trying to get him into a moonsuit, it's not easy to compare him with other memories.

Finally, he turns to the scrawny cohort and shoos him away, grabs the matron by one bony hand and, in the face of her delighted protests, sweeps her bodily from her feet. This bundle of femininity impedes him not at all as he bolts (fifteen seconds remaining by Gonzo's original count and at most sixty-five by the new one) for the hindmost car in the grid, which stands out from the others like a falcon among sparrows.

The car is not a street-racer. None of them, of course, started out that way, but this one even less so. Unlike its gaudy brethren, it is not a Honda Civic bursting with nitrous oxide systems and warranty-voiding gearbox enhancements or a roaring Focus tooled to go like a rocketship. It is not even a frog-green Subaru with a turbo and wide wheels like a sealion's arse. It is a muted maroon colour, and it is as dignified as it is powerful. It looks distinctly bulletproof and the glass windows are smoked, but even so it's possible to see that this car has curtains. It also has a silver angel on the front end and the kind of engine they used to put in small planes. Quite possibly it will catch up with the front runners before it has to change gear. It is unmistakably a Rolls-Royce, but it is a Rolls-Royce the way Koh-i-noor is a diamond.

Into the unlikely evac vehicle goes the matron, hooting with laughter now at this scandalous chivalry, and a brief glimpse of the interior tells me that the car has an independent air supply. Once the hermetic door shuts, the passengers are safe and sound, and the vizier, who apparently doubles as driver, bundles himself aboard. With one last look to be sure the evacuation is complete, the bearded geezer glances at us and raises his hand to sign okay and possibly thank you, and dives into his car, which waits a heartbeat for the juiced-up Saab in front to make some space and then there's a noise like the old bull shaking his head at the young one (“No, son, we're not gonna
run
down and fuck
one
of those cows, we're gonna
walk
and
fuck 'em all
”) and the Roller disappears from view in a cloud of its own dust. The convoy is moving like a gazelle herd, each individual weaving around the others, evasive, chaotic, purposive. Those immensely well-dressed personages have done Ronnie Cheung's tactical automotive course, or rather they have done one very like it. An advanced one for people who are intending to spend serious time in cars getting into trouble.

Gonzo stares after the Rolls-Royce. He has
heroismus interruptus.
He was ready, right then, to coordinate four or five hundred terrified civvies, lay down his life, kill for them, make a legend of disinterested soldiering. It's not that he resents what has happened, but he's having trouble changing gear. He was expecting to take charge. Instead he is struggling to keep up with a sexagenarian Mystery Man with an Errol Flynn grin who commands a legion of pirate-monk rally drivers and sweeps formidable older women from their feet in a cloud of cologne and Asian-Monarchic style. Deep in Gonzo's medula oblongata, the lizardy brainstem which manages the most basic functions of living, part of him knows that this technique would work with equal facility on younger and more charming women, and knows this because Eagle Sally Culpepper has caught her breath and even Annie the Ox, utterly uninterested in men per se, has not stopped looking after the departing machines. Leah, forever blessed, is grinning, but her hand has not slackened in my grip and her delight is for the impish theatre of it all. Gonzo's inner reptile recognises a competitor. But, more important, he is now playing an unfamiliar game—follow-the-leader.

We rush headlong after the pirate convoy, and then—no doubt in obedience to some order from the enormous Rolls-Royce—the driver ahead of us makes a dogleg right across an area marked on our map as non-traversable. The whole cavalcade is streaming out into a snarl of underbrush and rubble and impassable ravines, the brightly coloured cars vanishing rapidly amid the crags. Their dust cloud whips away in the wind, the last Civic ducks down into a dip and they have disappeared entirely. I glance at the map. In that direction a few months ago lay a muddle of buildings, stony outcroppings and forest, a region part sparse conurbation and part mountain (“conruration?”), now riven through with burned, bombed-flat land and dried-out stream beds and air-dropped anti-personnel mines. If the road still exists, or the riverbed is solid, they might reach the mountains, or loop around to Lake Addeh and its islands. But whether that is what they will do, and whether we would be welcome if we tried to follow, we do not find out. Gonzo growls to Jim Hepsobah, and we let them go, following the road we know towards the uncertain safety of Command HQ.