Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

Wallop. Something hits me between the shoulder blades. It’s about the size of a human hand, but it seems to be made of rock, and it is powered by some kind of pneumatic press. It doesn’t hurt, but it shocks me, and my muscles all freeze up.

“Hey there, stranger! Let’s talk turkey!” Humbert Pestle. I hope he really does want to talk turkey. If we’re going to roister now, if he’s got some line-up of corporate houris we need to check out while drinking some faux-frontiersman drink he got to like back in the day, he’s going to kill me. He’s about twice my weight and he spends way too much time in the executive gym. On the other hand, if he’s going to fall into the mystery of who is this bright young executive and why haven’t I seen his file, I may be able to find out where he and Dick Washburn fit into the screw-up which has become my life, and maybe what he intends for Gonzo, my idiot brother, progenitor, pal and would-be murderer.

“Let’s walk the parapet,” Humbert Pestle says, and then glances at Dick Washburn. “You do have a parapet, don’t you?”

“Only the terrace,” says Dick. And he points out to the pool, and Dr. Andromas. Everyone looks.

“Now that is a pool, Richard,” says Humbert Pestle after a moment. “Pink as hell.” I open one eye (apparently I had shut both at some point) and find that Andromas has gone. Of course. “Can we have the terrace a moment, Richard?” And Dick Washburn says of course, and it turns out there’s a magic button which makes the glass opaque. Very space age. Humbert Pestle makes a noise which might be “I haveta git me some o’ those fer mah own place” or it might be “Boys and their toys” and then points me out onto the terrace. We walk out. It’s cool, but warmer than I expected because the steam from the pool is hanging over the terrace.

“You made me laugh back there,” murmurs Humbert Pestle gently, “and that is a rare, rare thing. Now maybe that’s because I rule too much with a rod of iron or maybe it’s just I have a low sense of humour and so do you. But I don’t know your face, young sir, and so I have to ask you where you heard me say that before we get to the meat.”

Direct, of course. Naturally he is direct. Look at him. He’s got a big cigar in his free hand and shoulders like a door. This is a man who believes in frontal assault. All right then. Answer the question, but dodge the truth.

“At a briefing, few months back.”

“What briefing?”

“On the Lubitsch thing.”

“Oh,” says Humbert Pestle, nodding. “That briefing. Yeah. I figured.” And I realise that I have made a very large mistake. I realise this because I am not a total idiot, despite how it might occasionally appear, and because Humbert Pestle hits me like water from a fire hose. I fly backwards. I don’t know where he hit me. It doesn’t matter. If it’s broken, I will find out. If it’s not, I can worry about it later. I roll. He’s fast, though. He catches me just as I’m coming up. I slip the punch, but the kick gets me and I go into the air again.

There are fights, and there are fights. The first kind is dialogue: boxing matches, sparring, even rhinos’ mating fights. It’s all dialogue. Am I better? Am I faster? The second kind—and it’s not that the first kind can’t go this way if someone doesn’t like the way a point is expressed—the second kind is about erasure. It is the urge behind the gun with which Gonzo shot me, and behind the Go Away Bomb. It is the desire that the enemy not be a consideration any more, ever, that the world no longer contain them. Humbert Pestle is fighting this kind of fight right now, and he will kill me very thoroughly if I don’t stop him. The thing is, I don’t know how.

Pestle fires off a few jabs at me with his good hand. He has the other one wrapped around his body now, tucked behind his back. Warning: that means he has a weapon. He came prepared. He intends to surprise me with it. Or alternatively he wants me to believe that, to pay undue attention to the missing hand. It’s easy to get knocked unconscious because the other guy is waving a broken bottle, and the sharp edges are hypnotic with the promise of laceration, and then the other hand is just a blur of one, two, three, good night. So, I don’t get distracted. I don’t assume. Move. Evade. The enemy attacks in arcs and straight lines. Your body has joints. Use them. I rock, bend, twist. My arms stop moving like windmills and start to make themselves useful. I do not try to block directly. Ronnie Cheung might be able to do that. Gonzo might. I can’t. I guide the heavy hand past me, step so that the attacks are in the wrong place. Move. Step. Brush. Twist. Yes. He cannot touch me. I remember this. One opponent is not hard. He has limited options. And he’s still hiding that hand.

But Humbert Pestle is watching. He is watching with a kind of anticipation. And as I get the better of his one-armed attack, he starts to pay more attention. He watches my feet. I chop and change my evasions, looking for the best one: Nine Palace Shuffle; Five Element Foot; Walk Like Elvis. Walk Like Elvis. He breathes out faster, as if he’s hungry. Walk Like Elvis. His face twists in a little sneer, or maybe a smile. Humbert Pestle meets my eyes and now he is definitely grinning. He is not smiling at me. We are not friends. We are un-friends. He is smiling at my Walk Like Elvis as if it is the last kitten in a litter he was intending to drown. He recognises it. And like a nightmare, he gets bigger and badder just as I’m on top.

His left hand comes around out from behind his back, and it’s not a prosthetic at all. It’s just that it’s made almost entirely of knotted bone. It’s like a club. Ronnie Cheung’s hands were big and solid. They were as strong as you could possibly need, and obviously they maintained some utility as tools for eating and carrying stuff. More important, Ronnie had made a choice about how far down the road of becoming a human killing machine he was prepared to go, and allowing his training to warp his body to the point where he was in some measure only suited to that task was exactly where he drew the line. Ronnie was all in favour of necessary violence, but he was as a consequence particularly venomous about the other kind. I do not train ninjas, he told Riley Tench, and it was a statement of his creed. But you heard stories. One of those stories concerned the Iron Skin Meditation.

The idea is that you forge your whole body into a weapon. For example, you take an ordinary hand and you use it to hit stuff. You start with sackcloth filled with wool, then with sawdust, then with wire wool, then iron filings. Then you just use a wooden board. Then a stone. You just keep hitting. When you can do that, you heat the stone until you can cook an egg on it. And you keep hitting. You do this until pain becomes a thing of memory and your hand is broken and remade and finally it is a solid weapon with which you might punch your way out of a bank vault or splinter someone’s ribs with a single blow. There are various ways of describing this kind of behaviour. One would be “single-minded.” Another would be “stark raving mad.” “Single-minded” is quite revealing, actually, because to do this to yourself requires a negation of everything else it is to be human. It’s about becoming a thing with a single purpose, whereas people are usually a bit more generalised—hence Ronnie never bothered, or wanted to, or really considered it. Also, Ronnie was not stark raving mad.

Humbert Pestle has engaged in some variant of the Iron Skin Meditation. And he is about to hit me with the consequence.

He doesn’t. He suckers me with his other hand. I even saw it coming. And now he comes after me with his left. Of course he’s left-handed. The object (can’t think of it as a hand, somehow it’s too alien) comes towards my head. I duck, guide the punch past me and, since the opportunity is there, I hit him back. It gets even less result than I was hoping for, and all I was hoping for was a breathing space. It hurts me more than him. Like Ronnie, he has been struck so many times there’s not much left in the way of capillaries to break.