Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

4. making enough money to buy a small nation-state, farm watawabas and eat mango all day long ( boo-yah, sing hallelujah, we didn’t die ).

The question I should have been asking all this time—the thing which we all should have been wanting to know, pressingly and insistently—is this: how the hell did part of the Pipe, the all-ways-up most enduring and secure object ever manufactured by human hands and human engineering; the triple-redundant, safe-tastic product of the most profoundly dedicated collaboration in history; how did this invulnerable thing come to catch fire at all? And when you put it like that, the answer is obvious:

Someone made it so.

But hey. We’re not those kindsa people. We are can-do, not what-about—except for me, maybe. The pencilneck smiled at Sally Culpepper, and his victory grin went a bit slack as he realised we’d never had any intention of saying no, and we knew that he knew that we were expected to lose people. Just for a second I thought perhaps he was ashamed. And then he looked down at his feet and caught a glimpse of his messed up year’s-salary shoes, and he hated this stupid, ugly and above all cheap place, and his pencilneckhood rolled back as he found that part of himself which was indifferent, and he slipped gently into the warm water of not giving a damn.

Look at him again: this is not Dick Washburn you’re seeing, not exactly. Dick has vacated possession for this bit of chat. Standing here is not Richard Godspeed Washburn, who sustained a nasty concussion on his fifteenth birthday, the very eve of the Go Away War, and who spent his next weeks in darkness and candlelight as the hospital he had gone to slowly shut down and ran out and fell apart, then grew to manhood in the new, broken world. This is not Quick Dick of the Harley Street Boys, who—before the orphanfinders came and settled him in a home of sorts and things got somewhat normal once again—could open the rear door of an army truck and pinch a pound of chocolate before the soldiers ever knew. This is Jorgmund itself, staring through Dick’s eyes and measuring things as numbers and profit margins. Of course, Jorgmund is nothing more than a shared hallucination, a set of rules which make up Richard Washburn’s job, and every time he does this—slips away from a human situation and lets the pattern use his mind and his mouth because he’d rather not make the decision himself—he edges a little closer to being a type C pencilneck. He loses a bit of his soul. There’s a flicker of pain and anger in him as the animal he is feels the machine he is becoming take another bite, and snarls in its cage, deep down beneath his waxed, buff pectorals and his second-best (or ninth-best) suit. But it’s really a very small animal, and not one of the fiercer ones.

And then it was over. Deal done. Job on. I sidled over to Sally and murmured in her ear.

“So, before Dickwash showed up . . .”

“Hm.”

“Phone call.”

“Yes.”

“Wrong number?”

Sally shook her head. “I lied,” she murmured, just as quiet. “It was a woman. Didn’t know her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said not to take the job.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Sally said. “She asked for you, in particular.”

And Sally didn’t say “Keep your eyes open” because she knew me, and that was fine. She nodded once and took the keys to her new truck from the pencilneck’s unresisting fingers.

Sally and Jim in the first rig, me and Gonzo in the second, Tommy Lapland and Roy Roam in the third, and on to the back of the line. Twenty of us, two to a cab, ten trucks of bad hair, denim and spurs, with Tobemory Trent wearing his special-occasions eyepatch bringing up the rear. Trent was from Preston, born and bred in pork pie country with coal dust in his blood. He lost that eye in the Go Away War, had it taken out in a hurry so he wouldn’t die or worse. Trent spat on the road and roared, Captain goddam Ahab of the new highways, harpoon rack over the driver’s seat in case of trouble. He vaulted into the big chair and slammed the door hard enough to make the rig rock, and there was only one really important thing left to do. Sally and the pencilneck shook hands, Sally turned to look at us from the running board of her truck and there we were, proud and wired and dumb with eighteen-wheel delight. And Gonzo William Lubitsch of Cricklewood Cove, five foot eleven and broad like a Swiss Alp, dropped his trousers and pissed on our front right tyre for luck. Annie the Ox and Egon Schlender hollered and hallooed from number six, and Gonzo dropped his shorts too, exposing a muscular arse in their direction, then leaped into the truck and punched the starter. I had my feet on the dash and I was sending up a tiny prayer to the God who ruled my personal heaven.

Lord, I want to come home.

MOSTLY when we left the Nameless Bar, we headed westwards along the Pipe. Exmoor was a mile or so south of the main trunk road, and the mountains kicked up funny weather, so eighty or ninety miles in the other direction was one of the pinch points in the Zone where you paid close attention to the people you saw in case they weren’t really people at all. Every so often, traders came through town, and there was a special guesthouse in the back of the Nameless Bar where Flynn put the ones he wasn’t sure about. It was comfortable and safe, but it was further from his family. Flynn’s a decent man, but a cautious one.

This time, we went east, very fast. Bone Briskett’s tank was the kind with wheels which can do a decent speed, and he was getting everything he could out of it and asking for more. We drove through the night, and either they’d cleared the road or no one was coming the other way. We hurtled through a steep-sided valley and on along the pinch. The wind was blowing in our favour, off the mountains and away, but even so you could see a broad misty curtain to the south, maybe five miles distant, strange shadows twisting and turning. In a few miles, we could turn left, under the Pipe, and there was a loop of road which would bring us north-eastwards fast. I waited. We didn’t take it.

Instead we drove on, and on, and on, and the dawn was building in the sky, and I started to get that feeling which says “Be ready” because there was one route out here which would bring us over towards Haviland City and full onto a big thick section of the main Pipe. It was an old road, and it would get us there damn fast, but we’d never taken it before because it went through Drowned Cross. I nudged Gonzo and he glanced at me, then shrugged. Drowned Cross was bad country, the far edge of the Border. That was why it was empty, and dead.

We rolled out onto a flat meadow, and there was no more desert. A wide green plain stretched into the distance in front of us, cut by a grey line like a dowager’s eyebrow which departed from the main trunk and headed south. Bone Briskett’s tank took the corner without slowing, and Gonzo tutted—whether at this haste or at our destination, I didn’t know, but I could feel him paying more attention, looking at narrow places on the road and measuring them with his eyes, checking the escort and wondering whether they were good enough.

Right after the Reification and the Go Away War, there was a period of what you might call undue optimism. One particular town was built with two fingers up to the recent past, first of a new breed of bright, safe places where we could all get on with real life again, pay tax and worry about our hairlines and middle-aged spread, and is the guy next door flouting the hosepipe ban during the summer heat? They called it Heyerdahl Point, and they sold it as an adventure in neo-suburban frontiersmanship. About five thousand people lived there. It had its own little capillary of the Jorgmund Pipe making it secure, and it perched on a hilltop so the people there could look down on the valleys below, and out into the dangerous mists of the unreal, and know that they were pushing back the boundary just by being here.