The Gone-Away World Page 2

  The roar of the convoy was close now, and the big spots from the command car were sweeping back and forth, sometimes lighting us up and sometimes showing us the sand and grit all around. Deserts in wildlife shows are sweeping, noble places of savage majesty: photogenic ants and awesome spiders, all clean and sheer, because at that magnification the dirt looks like boulders. Our desert was kind of a dump. When the wind blew from the west, it carried the smell of hot metal and diesel and combat-ready men. When it blew from the east, it carried the distinctive flavour of recently exercised pig. Neither was the kind of smell anyone was going to put in a bottle with a flower on it and market with an expensive and strategically-not-quite-nude super-model. They were real smells, living and nasty and oddly comforting on a night when the world was on fire. So we stood there in the dark, away from the TV and the Spawn of Flynn and the pool table, and we all breathed in and grinned at one another and we were us, very us. Jim Hepsobah took Sally Culpepper’s hand and we pretended we couldn’t see. Annie the Ox murmured something to Egon Schlender; Samuel P. cursed and muttered; Tobemory Trent did nothing at all, still and silent like a grave marker. I thought about my personal version of heaven, which is small and calm and features only one angel, who cannot sing.

  Close your eyes and think of a house on the side of a mountain, made of stone and wood. The air is clear and cold and flavoured with snow, and the sounds you hear are the sounds of real people working hard on things they can hold, eat and use. There is woodsmoke, and that woodsmoke is touched with tonight’s dinner and an open bottle of the good stuff. The woman in the doorway wears blue jeans and a white shirt and a pair of cowboy boots, and she has eyes the colour of lake water. This is my wife, and yes, she is as beautiful as all that surrounds her. This is my heart, and it is the one thing I have that Gonzo Lubitsch does not.

  The convoy roared in, big and loud and adolescent, and everyone was trying very hard not to snigger, because under the best circumstances you don’t really want to snigger at a full armoured unit, and this was an emergency and these were some nervous young men and women with guns. So we looked very serious and churchy and respectful and wondered what the hell was going on. And then the lead tank stopped in the “reserved” parking space and the lid flipped up, and instead of some grizzled bastard with a regulation sneer there was a pencilneck, a slender, coiffured sonuvabitch, and you could smell his come-fuck-me cologne and the hand-tooled leather briefcase he was carrying.

  “Hi,” the pencilneck said. And then, because it wasn’t enough that he should be a management guy, he had to be a doofus as well, he added, “Could someone give me a hand here? I’m stuck in the porthole!” and laughed.

  When they send you an escort, it means you need to be somewhere fast, and that’s not so bad. When they send you your own personal pencilneck, it means blame and skulduggery and contractual folderol, and everything you should be able to count on will be all screwed up. It means they intend to lie to you, and they want one of their own on hand to emphasise how open and truthful they are. Sally Culpepper went to condition red, and Jim Hepsobah let go of her hand so that she could go back to being a CEO and a player and not a girl from Darzet who’s waiting with surprising patience for her big, loving lug of a boyfriend to get down on one knee.

  The pencilneck rose slowly into the night like the villain in an old spy movie on some kind of personal elevator, except that when his shins were about level with the rim of the hatch (not “porthole”) you could see a couple of nobbled hands, and then forearms almost as big as Jim’s, and then Bone Briskett’s ugly face came in sight, so there was a grizzled bastard in residence as well. He put the pencilneck down on the front of the tank and didn’t say anything, in such a way as to imply that he, Bone, thought the pencilneck was seriously pointless, and would happily run him over if we gave the word. We could all pretend it was an accident and there’d be one less layer of bureaucracy between us and whatever we needed to get this job done.

  The Jorgmund Company spanned the world, and it was old and wise and cautious, evolved out of other companies from back before the Go Away War. That meant it took care of itself, protected itself, and that was annoying but probably necessary. There were mayoralties and city states and the like, making up a mosaic of power we called the System, and the idea was that they upheld the law and maintained the army—the people like Bone, who patrolled the edges of the Livable Zone and chased off bandits and worse things than bandits. But in the end Jorgmund ran the show, because Jorgmund had—was—the Pipe, and that was the thing we couldn’t do without. The circle-snake logo of Jorgmund was everywhere, or at least everywhere that mattered. So here we were, and here was this guy, the pencilneck: he had a boss, sure as anything, because men without bosses do not come to Exmoor, not even when the sky is falling. And in the interest of his boss, and his promotion, and all good things, he was out to screw us.

  The pencilneck landed on the sand like he was expecting it to swallow him, and it flipped up and over his brogues as he walked and got inside his shoes and dusted his silk socks, so by the time he reached us and looked at Jim Hepsobah and stuck out his hand, and Jim kept his arms folded and Sally shook hands with the pencilneck in a way which said “strike one,” the man from Haviland City looked as if he’d been bleached or whitewashed to the knee.

  “Dick Washburn,” the pencilneck said, and right away we were all trying to smother a laugh, and Samuel P. bustled forward and leaned over his paunch and stuck out his hand and said “Dickwash what?” which didn’t faze the pencilneck at all. Richard Washburn, Snr VP i/c whateveritis, gave his name for a second time, clear and sharp, and nailed Samuel P. with a look which said he could take a joke as well as the next man but don’t think he was gonna laugh that one off, and we all revised our opinion slightly upward. Pencilneck, perhaps, but not invertebrate. If Dick Washburn could show some iron here and now, then back home he was near enough an alpha male, and one of the ones the silverbacks kept an eye on in case they caught him sizing up their offices and nodding at the view. In fact, they probably had, and here he was, pointman and focus of all and any ensuing litigation in the matter of the People vs. the Jorgmund Company . A prince who becomes too popular is best destroyed with insoluble opportunities.

  We all went inside while the troopers did their hard perimeter thing, and did it pretty well, although they looked confused and unhappy about taking up defensive positions around a building which appeared to be made from cardboard and snot, stuck out on the edge of the civilised world and populated by folk like us, and which would probably be rendered unto box clippings by the recoil from one of the big guns mounted on the armoured personnel carrier. There was a bad moment when four large shapes showed up on the infrared, moving in a rapid arc towards the rear of the Nameless Bar, and two sets of heavy weapons came online and tracked them: shwoopHUNKdzzzunnn! and Sir, contact, sir! followed by Soldier, if you fire that weapon I will stick it up your and guboozzznn as the turrets moved, probable field of fire going through Flynn’s living room and the saloon. Of course, the enemy was the desert pig generator system, currently labouring to produce enough power to run the kitchen and the TV all at once. So the pigs hovered on the brink of spectacular annihilation for a few seconds, and then were classed as zero threat, the guns went zugug-slrrrmm and back to first positions. Bone Briskett (Colonel Briskett) handed over to his second, a scrawny bloke who was probably as dangerous as the whole rest of them put together, then followed us in and shut the door.

  Dick Washburn stood in the middle of the room, and we all looked at him. He tried to look back at everyone at once and bottled it. He was surrounded. He looked at Bone Briskett, but Bone was contemplating the awful reality of the Spawn of Flynn and having some kind of god-forsaken epiphany of his own. He glanced at Sally, but she was paying him back for the handshake thing and waiting with everyone else, so he stood there in his ruined mortgage-your-house shoes and his manly yet sensitive yet raunchy aftershave in a room flavoured with stale beer and the arom
a of drivers and cheese rolls and pig power, and tried like hell not to look like he was out of his depth.

  Consider this man, Jorgmund’s most expendable son. He wears his second-best suit (or third-best, or tenth-, who knows, but he’s surely not risking his Royce Allen bespoke in a tank, not for any kind of promotion) and his face is smooth with Botox and lotion. Without genetic engineering, without intervention or expense, the Jorgmund Company has remade him, barracked him in some halfway ville dortoir and stripped him of his connection with the world in a crash course of management schools and loyalty card deals, surrounded him with pseudo-spaces, malls and water features, so that he is allergic to pollen and pollution and dust and animal fibre and salt, gluten, bee stings, red wine, spermicidal lubricant, peanuts, sunshine, unpurified water and chocolate, and really to everything except the vaccum-packed, air-conditioned in-between where he spends his life. Dick Washburn, known for evermore as Dickwash, is a type D pencilneck: a sassy wannabe paymaster with vestigial humanity. This makes him vastly less evil than a type B pencilneck (heartless bureaucratic machine, pro-class tennis) and somewhat less evil than a type C pencilneck (chortling lackey of the dehumanising system, ambient golf), but unquestionably more evil than pencilneck types M through E (real human screaming to escape a soul-devouring professional persona, varying degrees of desperation). No one I know has ever met the type A pencilneck, in much the same way that no one ever reports their own fatal accident; a type A pencilneck would be a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separate entity. They would be odourless, faceless and undetectable, without ambition or restraint, and would take decisions entirely unfettered by human concerns, make choices for the company, of the company. A type A pencilneck would be the kind of person to sign off on torture and push the nuclear button for no more pressing reason than that it was his job—or hers—and it seemed the next logical step.

  Dickwash cleared his throat and unrolled the Mission like he’d ever done this stuff himself, spewing officer-grade profanity because, I suppose, he thought that’s what Real Men Do.

  “I guess you all know there’s a fire on the Jorgmund Pipe,” he said, giving us a determined frown. “Well, it’s more than that. It’s a pumping station, a major one. There’re thousands of barrels of FOX there and it’s going up like kerosene, burning a hole in the fucking world. ” He nodded ruefully. I think he was trying to do serious, but he just looked as if he’d dropped a load of red wine on the carpet: Christ, Vivian, what can I say? Totally my fault. No! No salt. If you just leave it they can get it out, AMAZING chemical stuff, kills all known vintages stone dead! It’s the VX gas of stains! Yah, I know, I thought so too. But helloo-oooo, sailor! That’s the most gorgeously risqué dress when you’re in that position! He didn’t get any bounce out of the audience, so he tried again, this time with emphatic clichés.

  “We’ve gotta go down there and put that fucker out, blow it out, uh, like a fucking candle, otherwise . . .” At which point he trailed his voice and let the breath flow out of him and he paused to let us construct our own metaphor for catastrophe. And that right there is what you call a rhetorical ellipsis, the cheapest device in oratory and one of the hardest to do well. An ellipsis is like a haymaker punch you throw with your mouth, and the only tricks more low rent than that are making fun of your opponent’s ugly puss and bringing up something by saying you won’t mention it. We all stared at him for a minute, and he went sort of pinkish and closed his mouth.

  “Explosives,” Gonzo said, and Jim Hepsobah nodded.

  “Have to be,” Jim said.

  “Make a vacuum?”

  “Yup.”

  “Is that going to work with FOX?”

  “Ought to.”

  “Need a very big bang,” Annie the Ox pointed out.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Gonzo.

  “Can’t have it catch again after,” Annie went on. “Helluva big bang. Can we get that big of a bang?”

  Annie the Ox was a blunt-fingered woman with big cheeks who knew about explosives. She had narrow, solid shoulders and heavy forearms and thighs, and she collected puppet heads. It was impossible to say whether Annie collected these things because she liked to have soft, plush friends to talk to, or if they were faces for the people in her life who were Gone Away. I had never asked, because some things are private, and Annie was not the kind of person who answered questions about private things.

  She looked at Jim and Gonzo. They looked at Sally. Sally looked at Dickwash.

  “Yes,” Dickwash said, with absolute certainty. “I can fix that.”

  It always creeps me out being with pencilnecks. Anything over a type E and you can get the feeling what you’re talking to isn’t entirely human, and you’re not entirely wrong. A guy named Sebastian once explained it to me like this:

  Suppose you are Alfred Montrose Fingermuffin, capitalist. You own a factory, and your factory uses huge industrial metal presses to make Fingermuffin Thingumabobs. Great big blades powered by hydraulics come stomping down on metal ribbon (like off a giant roll of tape, only made of steel) and cut Thingumabobs out like gingerbread men. If you can run the machine at a hundred Thingumabobs per minute, six seconds for ten Thingumabobs (because the machine prints ten at a time out of the ribbon), then you’re doing fine. The trouble is that although in theory you could do that, in fact you have to stop the machine every so often so that you can check the safeties and change shifts. Each time you do, the downtime costs you, because you have the machine powered up and the crew are all there (both crews, actually, on full pay). So you want to have that happen the absolute minimum number of times per day. The only way you can know when you’re at the minimum number of times is when you start to get accidents. Of course, you’re always going to get some accidents, because human beings screw up; they get horny and think about their sweethearts and lean on the Big Red Button and someone loses a finger. So you reduce the number of shifts from five to four, and the number of safety checks from two to one, and suddenly you’re much closer to making Fingermuffin’s the market leader. Mrs. Fingermuffin gets all excited because she’s been invited to speak at the WI, and all the little Fingermuffins are happy because their daddy brings them brighter, shinier, newer toys. The downside is that your workers are working harder and having to concentrate more, and the accidents they have are just a little worse, just a little more frequent. The trouble is that you can’t go back, because now your competitors have done the same thing and the Thingumabob market has gotten a bit more aggressive, and the question comes down to this: how much further can you squeeze the margin without making your factory somewhere no one will work? And the truth is that it’s a tough environment for unskilled workers in your area and it can get pretty bad. Suddenly, because the company can’t survive any other way, soft-hearted Alf Fingermuffin is running the scariest, most dangerous factory in town. Or he’s out of business and Gerry Q. Hinderhaft has taken over, and everyone knows how hard Gerry Q. pushes his guys.

  In order to keep the company alive, safeguard his family’s happiness and his employees’ jobs, Alf Montrose Fingermuffin (that’s you) has turned into a monster. The only way he can deal with that is to separate himself into two people—Kindly Old Alf, who does the living, and Stern Mr. Fingermuffin, factory boss. His managers do the same. So when you talk to Alf Fingermuffin’s managers, you’re actually not talking to a person at all. You’re talking to a part in the machine that is Fingermuffin Ltd., and (just like the workers in the factory itself ) the ones who are best at being a part are the ones who function least like a person and most like a machine. At the factory this means doing everything at a perfect tempo, the same way each time, over and over and over. In management it means living profit, market share and graphs. The managers ditch the part of themselves which thinks, and just get on with running the programme in their heads.

  So this almost certainly wasn’t going to be easy. But unless there was an earthquake or another
war, Gonzo was going, which meant I was going, and if we were going, the chances were the crew would come with us to make sure we were okay, and incidentally to make sure we didn’t do something amazingly cool which we could then rag them about, and finally to make sure we didn’t come back zillionaires and rub their noses in it before setting them up for life. Gonzo Lubitsch is addicted to playing the lead. I work for a living, I take my bonus home to my wife, and we get drunk and naked and we act like teenagers and feed each other pizza.

  Back to the bar: Sally had Dick Washburn penned up in a farmhouse with the entire Mexican army coming down on him. He’d come in rock ’n’ roll, thought he’d wrap the truckjocks by five and get his aerobicised backside back to the city and sink a few martinis and My God, Vivian, the place was a hellhole! But Sally has negotiator gong fu of the first order. In the small world of civil freebooting companies, she is the go-to girl, the top cat, the queen bee and the wakasensei, and her eyes undress the fine print and her fingers trace its outlines and she knows it, owns it, makes it sit up and beg for her touch like a happy gimp. The pencilneck was watching his Christmas bonus shrink like a white truffle in January, and the reckless testosterone feeling he had come in with was fading with it. Vivian’s body in its Lycra workout gear was vanishing and being replaced by the possibility that Sally was handing him his head. So Dick Washburn dug deep and dark into his management-school magic set and tried an end-run, a wicked, one-pill-for-all-ills solution, which is maybe what he intended to do all along: isolate Sally and get us to make the deal for him. A type D pencilneck has vestigial humanity, which is the kind you can fit in a cigarette case and offer people at parties.

  “The trucks,” Dick Washburn said.