Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

All right then. That’s where I’m going.

It’s probably my nose doing this to me. Your nose can do all kinds of clever things; the trouble is, we’re so unused to accepting olfactory assistance that we tend to misinterpret it. Assumption Soames told me that she could smell something wrong on Dr. Evander John when he came home from Cricklewood Fen; she assumed it was a stinky swamp plant or something the dog had rolled in. It faded away after a few days. When the good doctor got kuru and died, she realised she’d been smelling his recent diet in his sweat. So I pay close attention: what am I smelling?

Faint perfume. Faint cologne. Cigars, a while ago. Human smells—skin, sweat. All old. Beneath them industrial cleaner. Polish. Bleach. Blood, very faint—the ninjas’ first aid station, maybe, back by the temple. Rubber, iron, fresh paint. Something else, old and familiar, out of place.

Ahead of me is a doorway. More than a doorway. A double door, framed in lustre and marble.

It looks like a boardroom door. On the other hand, the Core Committee Room is back that way. This is something else. I go in.

No, I don’t. I start to take a step but I can’t. In my head alarms are screaming, dive klaxons are whooping. My right foot peels itself halfway off the floor and stops, then slowly falls back. My body locks in place, retreats with painful caution. My head looks at the carpet. It is predictably unpleasant and hard-wearing. Office carpet. And yet it looks very clean. Everywhere else there are trolley tracks: a hundred days of Robert Crabtree, to and fro. Not here. My body stares. Then (without asking me for permission) it gets down low to the ground and stares fixedly ahead at . . . not quite nothing. Something. I smell dried flowers and carpet and that out-of-place note which I can’t place. Yes, place. Exactly. It’s too cool and too urban here. That smell belongs in forests and mountains. My body allows me back into the driving seat, but not without misgivings. Pay attention.

In front of me there is a fine, silver thread, like a cobweb. I don’t touch it. I sniff. Yes. That scent, like almond and playdough and solvent. I used to smell it from time to time in Addeh Katir, when the combat engineers were coming in. And before that, in the armoury at Project Albumen. With just my eyes, I follow the thread to the wall. It’s stuck to the plaster with a minute drop of clear glue. So. I follow it the other way. It vanishes into a vase of pussy willow. Very authentic, except that spiders don’t carry adhesive around in a little tube, they make their own. I peer a little closer. Yes. There is a shape in the pussy willow, like one of those mean, two-pronged signs in upmarket parks which say PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS. This one does not say PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS. It says instead FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY. The letters are embossed or moulded onto the grey-green metal casing, along with (I know this, though I cannot see it) a similar piece of wisdom on the back which reads: REAR—OTHER SIDE FRONT. If the gossamer line is broken, a switch trips inside the device, and it explodes. The casing turns into shrapnel, and anyone inside its radius turns into something which looks like jambalaya, except that the head parts sometimes look like shrimp. Every time I see one of these things, I think of how it must be to have one of them go off nearby, to have those idiotic words fly towards you and then through you; to be killed by Times New Roman font.

Somewhere there is a keyhole into which you can put a key and disarm the thing. I do not have a key. On the other hand: a landmine in an office block. I’m in the right place.

I look at the line. It is very slender. It is alone. I peer at the carpet. No pressure pad. So. Deep breath. In, out. I step over the thread. I don’t die. I go through the door.

The room beyond is not a boardroom. Or not only a boardroom. Boardrooms are rooms to show how important you are. This is an operations room. It is a place where you do important things. This room is lined with maps, papered with graphs. Item the first, old business: a family tree of the Jorgmund Company. At the top, the Core, in its own bubble. Depending from the bubble, the Senior Board and its sub-committees; the Executive Branch with its various teams and specialists, and on the far left, the Clockwork Hand Society, co-equal, separate except for a small area of overlap marked H.P. Below the Clockwork Hand there’s nothing. It is self-contained. All around the family tree are displays showing that all of these various committees are vital to the continued good health of the firm (and hence the world) and run by terribly competent people who are essentially irreplaceable. (Apparently the ninjas don’t really feel the need to submit reports. It’s reasonable. If you can kill a man with a paper clip and inflict horrible pain using only your finger, the corporate hierarchy is pretty much prepared to assume no one else could do your job.)

The charts are fresh and laminated. They have been amended with markers, adjusted to show even more spectacular profits and accomplishments. Pins have been shoved heedlessly through into the soft wood behind. Ribbons stretch across charts—predicted and actual profit, objectives, needs, acquisitions, outlays.

And enemies.

On a glass gallery-stand in the middle of the room, enemies. Master Wu, in a grainy picture. He is holding tea in one hand, and he looks old and sad. His other hand is out of frame, but I suspect it holds apple cake. Someone has scraped an X in red felt-tip across his face. They have started at the top right, above his ear, and stabbed down hard to his chin, pressing over his eyes and nose. The pen was held left-handed. The second stroke starts top left, and drives bottom right. It is angry, vindictive. The place where they cross is almost black. The end of the second stroke has a little tail, as if the author was shaking. Or as if his hand was clumsy. Or both.

On the board with Master Wu are other pictures. One small one looks like a blurred image of Dr. Andromas; next to it there is a clearer, but much older, picture of Elisabeth. On the other side, Zaher Bey. Someone dislikes the Bey intensely, because there are quite a lot of photos of him. There is a new picture of me, taken by some sort of security camera at Station 9. I look surprised and a bit fatter than I would like. And finally there is Gonzo, looking moody. I don’t recognise the picture. Perhaps they took it while he was here. He is an enemy, but at the same time not. There is red ink down one edge of his picture, but it’s a wiggly line, ever so slightly smug. A Latin teacher’s correction: not agricola, but agricolam. From the picture emerges a red, greasy slash, a problem-solving arrow. A Go Away arrow. It points from Gonzo’s upper right canine to the Bey’s left eye. It is, in the grand old phrase, a line of death. Fear this line and what it may mean.

Beyond the stand there is a table, and on the table there is a file. It has all manner of stamps on it meaning that no one should read it, ever, and if they do they should do so only after putting out their eyes. I look around at the room. I sit down and start to read.

HUMBERT PESTLE, friend to all mankind; I suspect he was avuncular or even headmasterly. Gonzo the hellraiser has always had a sneaking respect for headmasters, as long as they were someone else’s. And remember, this was a new Gonzo, naked in the world, his cynicism and his second thoughts embodied in me, asleep in K’s Airstream and presumed dead, all those miles away. His psyche must have looked like a diver after a moderately bad shark attack. He had survived, but you could see the bones. His brain was limping and his ego hurt like hell. More, he was filled with a secret terror, a 3 a.m. anguish, confided to Leah at the last minute and from her to me as an earnest of trust and a demand for help: he feared he had somehow lost part of his capacity to love his wife. The hero could feel passion but not domestic bliss. He was terrified that he might lose her too, that she would hate him, that she must already be disgusted. He needed to act, to regain his self-respect and wash away this taint.