Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

Rumour had it some of the outlying towns had been sacked recently, split open and burned to the ground by people—or nearly-people—from beyond the Border, from the shifting places where bad things were. So the myrmidons of the company were patrolling a bit more and asking more questions, and people were sticking close to the Pipe, where it was safe. Step off the path, and maybe you’d get back and maybe you wouldn’t, but you would be changed. Which sounds like strange and awful until you realise that that’s actually pretty much how it’s always been, and if you think any different, it’s because you’ve never left that little stretch of comfort and gone someplace where what you know gets a bit thin on the ground.

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.