The Gone-Away World (65 page)

What the hell do you say? I ought to be getting better at it. “Hi, I'm . . .
oh, bugger
. . .” (Note to self: must get a name.) “And it's really good to see you all here this evening, because . . .”

Lynch me now. It'll be kinder. I clear my throat. Everyone looks at me. Whatever I was going to say sticks and then goes right out of my head. These people are going to risk everything for me, but I can't give them as much as a greeting. I could weep, if I could make any sound at all.

The noise which saves me is quite possibly the most awful noise I have ever heard. It is a high scream of porcine affront, a vast, earsplitting yowl of shock and alarm which vibrates the glasses and rattles the windows. It sounds for all the world like murder in one of those old black-and-white mystery movies where the heroine's chest was all covered up but could at least be brought to the viewer's attention by some serious heaving, and many a career was made by impressive lungs.

Flynn the Barman leaps up and charges for the back door, which slams open to reveal a figure in a raincoat and a fanciful pirate's hat.

“Sorry!” cries the apparition cheerfully. “K's strong-eye dog has just terrorised your pigs and they seem to be running around in circles. The dogs are being hosed down; they got stuck in the wallow, which apparently upset the pigs even more. Still, no harm done, medals all round, not that pigs really care.”

Ike Thermite waves at everyone, even the mimes, who look back at him and think whatever thoughts mimes do think when considering the one of their number who is permitted speech. And behind Ike there is a small, disenchanted old man with leather skin and a fighter's frame, weathered but undefeated, and possessed of a deep well of vile temper.

“Those are not pigs,” this person says firmly, “those are the gatekeepers of the Hell of Flying Shite. It is not enough that I have been dragged from acts of considerable obscenity in a place we shall not name with women whose sole object in life was to make my final years a great celebration of my dwindling sexual resources; I must also be showered in pig poo. Thus, we shall not discuss the charmingness of the day or the cool night breezes any more than we absolutely have to, Mr.
Ike Thermite
of the
Matahuxee Mime Combine;
we shall proceed to the main event, eftsoons and right speedily, with all due dispatch, lest I become bad-tempered and profane. Now,” he says, “where is this bumhole we're so excited about?”

I step forward through the crowd, pushing people out of the way, and I hug him. His chest, beneath his flannel shirt, feels like metal plate covered in uncooked veal. Ronnie Cheung has aged well, but he has aged fully, and even stone is eroded by time and water. After a moment, he speaks.

“Bumhole,” he says, “you are standing on my corn.”

I
HAVE
made up my own five-step plan for public speaking, loosely adapted from Hellen Fust's let's-have-an-atrocity speech. It is intended to be brief, but as I start speaking I find that I have quite a lot to say and that all of it is relevant, so the story grows in the telling and the speech in the making, and Elisabeth spirits a glass of something sharp and wet from the bar to moisten my tongue.

I tell them who I am and where I come from; I tell them about Marcus Maximus Lubitsch and the foreign field, and Gonzo's game and his sorrow, and about how he made a new friend. I tell them about getting shot. I do not look at Leah as I talk about the hard surface of the road.
This is who I am, what I am. That's all there is.

Then I go back in time and tell them things they already know about the Go Away War and the Reification, and how Zaher Bey gave shelter to a small group of desperate people, and fed them, and how we'd have died without him and his people, or maybe drowned in a sea of Stuff.
We have a debt.

And because I cannot hold it in any longer, I tell them the last of Humbert Pestle's awful secrets, the worm in the apple of the world. It goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a boy named Bobby Shank. Bobby was near-sighted and not too bright, but he had good intentions and an empty bank account, so it came to him that he might do worse than sign up for a tour with the forces. He was a lousy shot, but he had a strong back and a willing heart, and he was good-natured and maybe a bit too stupid to be scared. He dug earthworks in Addeh Katir and toiled and tramped and carried things back and forth until Riley Tench assigned him permanently to the medical corps. And finally he happened to be in a certain street in a combat zone mostly by accident when his own side started shelling the place and a big, improbable window shattered, and the fragments flew about like rainbow insects with scalpel wings.

One of those fragments hit Bobby Shank in the head. It was not thick, but it was long and
very
sharp, and because it struck dead on, the force of the blow was transmitted along the length of it and it behaved much as if it had been a spear. It penetrated Bobby's skull and went into his brain, where it broke into several pieces which each performed distinct and unlikely surgery. The first one deflected upward and partially severed Bobby Shank's higher functions from the rest of his brain. Bobby couldn't actually see anything any more, not in real time. He could look at something and
remember
having seen it, tell you all about it. But he was not, for example, going to be playing any football anytime soon. Similarly, he couldn't smell either, but he could recall smells from about a minute ago, and at the moment what he could mostly smell was blood, which he rightly deduced was his own. He tried to scream, but this proved impossible because the second piece had deflected off the skull and gone sort of up-left, arriving at Broca's area, which deals with speech, and turning it instantly into porridge. Bobby's mouth began making sounds, long strings of word-like noises. The third piece was either the cruellest or the kindest, depending on how bleak you take your mercy. It went into his brainstem, occasionally dropping Bobby Shank into total unconsciousness, and was working slowly inward so that he would eventually die. Bobby was a stretcherman. Tobemory Trent should probably have declared him dead-at-scene, but he didn't because stretchermen didn't get left behind, not ever.

After a few days they shipped Bobby Shank back home and he lay in a hospital, drifting in and out of the world. They tried using ultrasound on the third piece of glass, because otherwise he was going to die anyway, and they broke it up real good, along with the other pieces they'd sort of hoped to leave well alone. That turned out to be a mixed blessing, because the shards went into the part of him which had long term memories and took a lot of them away. Bobby Shank forgot that he had a name, he just lived in the last five minutes. In a way it was a success, because now he'd never been anything other than what he was, a kind of dream of white walls and nice smells, slowly decohering and fading away, until Bobby was a short circuit, just a brain registering what was in front of him, and not really being aware of itself at all. He smiled more and swore less, which was nice.

And then the lights went out, and half the city was swallowed by a very large Go Away Bomb, and the machines switched off, and Bobby Shank got hungry. He crawled out into the street. I figure it must have taken him about an hour to make it that far, maybe a little more if he got knocked out or distracted by the pretty patterns on the first-floor carpet. Where he thought he was going, or even if he understood that he was moving at all, I have no idea.

Bobby Shank, who didn't know that he was Bobby Shank, crawled along Hornchurch Street, looking for pancakes. He could smell them, and while he didn't remember them, some part of him knew that was what he wanted. A miracle, he found them. He crawled into the living room of a lady named Edith MacIntyre, and when she'd finished screaming at this hairy wreck of a human life and realised that he was a gentle, suffering thing, she fed him very slowly and rocked him, because her family were all missing and more than likely Gone Away.

Over time, Edith MacIntyre's home became a hostel and a meeting place. Travellers drifted in and stayed for a few days, and talked to one another around Edith's big old breakfast table, and they worked for their keep or paid in food. It was warm and safe, and what remained of Bobby Shank liked it very much indeed. He stayed—not that he was in any shape to run away—and he sat in a chair on the veranda and got monstrously fat.

The storms came to Edith MacIntyre's place that winter, and a lot of people got turned into something strange, and a lot of houses were surrounded by chimeras and talking dogs. Half-imagined food stank in the gutters and spiders like fists skittered across roads made of gold and mud and ice. But nothing happened to Edith MacIntyre's house. When the storms came down, the Stuff trickled through the roof and into the living room, and when it fell to the floor it was water, or dust. Anywhere near Bobby Shank, Stuff just became like whatever he was looking at. Because Bobby Shank couldn't imagine anything else. He didn't have desires or dreams. He just had what was in front of him, and precious little of that.

And then one morning a man with a most unfortunate name chanced to come by and rest up with Edith MacIntyre. When he saw Bobby Shank, it was like he was looking at the face of God. He was hearing the music, he said. Edith MacIntyre didn't like this man very much, with his great bear shoulders and too-loud laugh. She'd had a husband like that, back in the day, and he'd been a bastard too.

A week later Humbert Pestle came back and stole Bobby Shank away, and Edith MacIntyre never saw him again. She worried about him, but after a little while she was too busy with the business of staying alive to think about it.

The station on the Jorgmund Pipe consisted of Humbert Pestle and Bobby Shank and an old sewage pump, working in a little place called Aldony. It didn't take long before they were ready to expand. Bobby could turn as much Stuff into anti-Stuff (Humbert Pestle didn't have a catchy name for it yet) as you could bring within a few feet of him. It didn't have to be there for more than a second. It just touched Bobby's tattered remnant of a mind and changed right away. And that was fine for a few months. He found the Clockwork Hand again—or they found him, the fifty or so who were still alive—and he had the beginnings of an empire. All good. Until Jorgmund got a bit bigger, and Humbert Pestle had to go looking for more like Bobby Shank. That was harder than it seemed. Very specific, strange things had happened to Bobby Shank. Humbert had to make do with approximations.

He found a woman in Bridgeport who'd been in a coma for twenty years. She was no use. Her brain didn't do anything at all.

He found a kid from Belfistry who'd broken his neck. That was a disaster. The kid made monsters and houris and terrible, giant slugs. They flickered and raged and then vanished again; his mind was all over the place.

He found an elderly man from the Punjab who was afflicted with some manner of disease. This person was quite promising until blood came out of his nose and he died. Humbert Pestle had to keep looking, but wherever he looked, he couldn't find another Bobby Shank. So he looked into his heart and listened to the music, and he knew what he had to do. He had to
make
people like Bobby Shank. After all, this was for the future of the human race.

At first he used bandits. There were plenty of them, ordinary people gone savage and angry, preying on those who'd stuck it out and living, like Ruth Kemner and her gang, in ghastly halls which stank of executions and stale beer. He got fifteen like that. Some of them he just locked away until the EEG readings went like Bobby's. Others he did things to, sharp, messy things. They didn't last long, not like Bobby, but they worked. They produced. But not fast enough. The new towns were springing up faster than he could increase his production.

That's when he went to Heyerdahl Point with the whole of the Clockwork Hand, and turned it into Drowned Cross.

He took the people of Drowned Cross, and he worked on them until he had five hundred Bobby Shanks in five hundred black boxes with hoses coming out. They still didn't last very long, but they lasted long enough. And when they were all used up, he took another town, and then another. Most recently, he took Templeton. Soon enough, he'll take another one. That's how Jorgmund saves the world. It uses people up. Feeds the princess to the dragon.

I tell them all this, and I tell them that I'm going to stop it. I don't know how I can do it without them but I will, because I care about Gonzo and I care about the Bey and I care about those however many poor broken people in boxes. I don't care if I am a monster, if what I am is the opposite of what they are. I won't sit by. No, no, no, no, no.

My hand is hurting because I have been hitting the bar for emphasis. I don't recall deciding to do that. I look down at it because it is throbbing. And then I look up at the sea of faces, and no one says a word. God. I've completely blown it. They think I'm totally insane. They despise me. It's a bust. I'm sorry, everyone, I have completely screwed the pooch.

Ronnie Cheung raises one hand to shoulder height, and then he drops it, hard, onto the table next to him. The ashtray jumps. He raises his hand again, and brings it down. Ike Thermite follows suit, and Elisabeth, and Leah, and then Jim and Sally and Tobemory Trent, and Baptiste Vasille is shaking his fist and shouting something in French, and the thrumming roar of sound washes over me like an ocean. They do not hate me. They are not laughing.

They are applauding.

I did something right.

S
AMUEL
P. is lying on his stomach on my left side, and I can smell him. It's surprisingly pleasant. Because he is wearing a frame of foliage on his body and pretending to be a small tree, Sam's body odour is essentially grass and soil, with just a whiff of bracken. Beneath that, there's a bass note of armpit, which I try to ignore. Any smell like that contains small bits of actual skin, and I don't want to think about having Samuel P.'s pits in my lungs. But funky though he is, Sam is very good at this kind of thing—“this kind of thing” being your professional-grade sneaking.