“It is the making of an idea into a thing, Prince of Men,” replies Nq’ula, v. formal, because this is not merely council, it is performance. Zaher Bey is turning a refugee plethora into an entity of its own: the Shangri-La Survivors, and in order to do that, he has to give them a stake. Gonzo offered flapjacks (and normality) in exchange for allegiance. The Bey is trading in answers.
Nq’ula lectures and theorises, and the Bey makes like he doesn’t understand a word of it, which endears him to the rest of us. And if anyone has anything to add to what Nq’ula is saying, that’s fine too, because we’re all in this together, and two heads, or two hundred, are better than one. Nq’ula looks around, and notes that everyone is paying close attention. His friend makes a face suggesting that his explanation is not sufficient unto itself, so Nq’ula goes right ahead and unpacks it a bit.
“If you would be so kind, conjure before your mind’s eye the image of a florid and uncouth man of the prehistoric wilderness.”
Zaher Bey screws up his face and devotes himself to his task. There is a pause. Nq’ula taps impatiently. I look around. Exhausted though we are, everyone is concentrating on the shared image of our distant ancestor.
“If you are ready?”
“I am.”
“Very good. What is most obvious about him?”
“Why is it, Nq’ula, that your explanations always involve me feeling like an eight-year-old?”
“Possibly, Prince of Men, it is the nature of learning.”
“I think not.”
“That, alas, is often the case.” This gets a bit of a giggle. The Bey as intellectual underdog. “Leaving the long brown envelope of home truths sealed for the moment, however, let us return to our Cro-Magnon friend. So?”
“He appears to be naked.”
“Indeed, Prince of Men. Indeed. And it is his nakedness which he even now seeks to mend.”
“Are you sure? It appears to me that he is content in hoggish and unclean wallowing and lusty animalism. Yes, I am certain of it. See there, where his women gather. Are they not equally nude?”
Nq’ula allows himself to breathe out. He gives the impression that he is not a man who sighs at those above him, but that he is quite clearly a man who often wishes to.
“I had not mentioned his womenfolk, Prince of Men, lest their undress affright you.”
“Oh it does, but they are at least more comely than that log of a penis which swings unlimbered beneath his belly.”
This gets a big laugh, most especially from the scandalised village elder last seen being hoiked into the Bey’s limousine amid a flurry of outdated undergarments. Now she eyes her hero with a wistful smile, content with hopeless admiration. Nq’ula rides out the giggling in good order and carries on.
“I had not hitherto observed it, Prince of Men, yet now I see the object of which you speak, and I must concur that it is far from easy on the eye. But returning to the women, do you not observe that they are cold?”
“The slender ones are shivering. The more curvaceous, I note, are yet insulated from the evening chill.”
“Indeed. But even these register some trepidation at the onset of night and the concomitant drop in ambient temperature, for experience, that most harsh of magisterial reflections, causes them to believe that in the small hours of the clock—”
“Which they do not possess.”
“Quite so, Prince of Men, for the technology of acquisition of such commonplaces is the burden of this history, and thus I amend my description of their thought as follows: in the deepest dark of the circadian cycle of which they, as primitive hunter-gatherers in tune with the ineffable wonders of the divine work and most specifically the unmeasured-but-measurable cooling of the air and earth during the primal night, are acutely aware, they will be assailed during their slumber by feelings of discomfort related to cold. Are you appeased?”
“I am.”
“Behold then, Prince of Men, as these ignorant domestics set about the prodigiously endowed master of the pack or herd—”
“Not ‘pride’?”
“These are not your actual forebears, Prince of Men, but figments, and hence I do not dignify them by comparing them with lions, but rather consider them as dogs or cattle to be ruled, not venerated, by your good self.”
“Ah. Very well. Shall we consider them as dogs, then?”
“I thank you, we shall. To continue: these rude females assail their mate with much wailing and shrieking, so that his aural equilibrium is quite undone.”
“Do they also deny him that satisfaction of his feral desires which is so obviously necessary for his mental and libidinous good health?”
“We may assume that they do.”
“Poor chap. I warm to our caveman, Nq’ula.”
“Such was my hope, Bey of Addeh, for see: the wretched creature is about to bring us to the very climax and point of our discourse.”
“Is he?”
“He is.”
“How can you tell?”
“It is in his eyes.”
“So it is. And under such trying circumstances too.”
“Indeed, Prince of Men, it is the very extremis of his position which will cause his feeble cogitative apparatus to exceed the boundaries of normal function and discern a vital truth. His womenfolk demand warm dry weather, but it is cold and wet. They likewise assert their need to be protected from the many wild beasts which hunt the night, and from other packs which may be prowling nearby, but he can guard only one approach at a time, the others being as a matter of biology the ones to which he turns his back. From these insatiable desires he abstracts the notion of shelter.”
“Abstracts it?”
“Yes, Highness.”
“Does he so?”
“He does. For the first time in history, Highness, a human creature descries a mental landscape of concepts, or noosphere. He has abstracted from the specific to the general, which operation causes him to perceive that along with the physical milieu with which he is familiar he inhabits a universe of mental things, and his action is simultaneous with the apprehension.”
“What does he do?”
“He moves straightaway to the cliff face behind him, where is a cave occupied by some large animal. To this tenant he gives the thrashing of a lifetime, Highness. So much so that the animal . . . Shall we assume it is a hypothetical bear?”
“Very well.”
“The bear immediately expires. Our hero takes possession of the cave for his pack, and they achieve shelter, thus reified in three rocky walls and a ceiling. Moreover, his epiphany lasts long enough for him to communicate it to his womenfolk, who instantly comprehend it and begin considering the noosphere and what other goods and services they shall now desire of him.”
“This noosphere being, as it were, a great department store containing ideas.”
“Requiring perhaps a little more effort than the act of shopping—”
“A contention which reveals instantly that you rarely shop, Nq’ula—”
“—but nonetheless accurate in the main.”
“Hm. Dear me. I don’t see that his situation is greatly improved.”
“Social and physical pressure are ever the spurs of innovation, Highness, and we cannot waste our sympathy on this one individual merely because evolution demands that he be henpecked into his role as the spearhead of the first technological revolution. Presently, as you will observe, the caveman is clad in bearskin, thus obscuring from Your Highness’s inner sight the ithyphallic object which so offended you at first—”
“I don’t know that it was ithyphallic, Nq’ula, more pendulous—”
“In either case now mercifully and respectably concealed. He wields a bone club—”
“The reification of defence or attack—”
“Or possibly thump, Your Highness, these others being somewhat rarified for our caveman.”
“Do you think he has a name by now?”
“It is unlikely that he needs one within his pack
—which is becoming more a tribe—because he is the alpha male; he no more needs identification than does the sky or the earth. As the first modern man and the inventor of technology, however, it is perhaps fitting that he should be rewarded with an individuality.”
“I concur. Yes, we shall call him John.”
“So shall it be, Prince of Men. Observe, then: John’s shelter is now lit and heated from within by a roaring furnace—though it is somewhat smoky as no one has yet reified their desire for fresh air in the form of a chimney—and filled with the hitherto unknown but pleasing odour of baked bear; shortly we shall see the arrival of assorted other tools and furnishings which eventually come together to create what we think of as modern life.”
“These being further reifications.”
“And the consequences thereof.”
“Capital!”
“I am glad you approve, Prince of Men. Quite interestingly, however, capital is an abstraction, quite the opposite kind of thing: money is a system of tokens created to represent the transfer of value.”
“I am not sure that is as interesting as you seem to believe, Nq’ula.”
“Then let us leave aside the study of economics and the illusion of currency, and proceed with our theorising.”
And so they reach the end of this edifying part of the discussion. A shovel-faced pirate lady is drummed up from somewhere and puts on a pair of spindly spectacles (the kind which are made of flexible titanium and have no screws, so that you can sit on them and all that happens is the lenses pop out, affording you ten minutes’ entertainment trying to slot them back in). Her name is Antonia Garcia, and Dr. Fortismeer, were he here, would say she was a fine figure of a woman. She is the holder of some incredibly involved qualifications and a species of religious calling which, in the course of missionary work in Addeh Katir, led her to the house of the Bey and thus to the revolution. She is science minister in the government without a country which Freeman ibn Solomon referred to as “an alternative,” before he turned out to be a sneaky pirate king who drank my booze and probably caused my arrest and ultimately my presence here. She speaks and recaps what Professor Derek told me about the nature of the universe back at Project Albumen, and she doesn’t seem to have any trouble working out Professor Derek’s theory, although her guesses about some of the specifics of the Go Away Bomb are a little askew, and someone corrects her.
The whole place stops and turns. I get the impression that Professora Garcia doesn’t often see a lot of correction of this kind, and I look around to see who was the source of the remark in question, before realising it was me. A moment later, before God and Gonzo Lubitsch and Zaher Bey, but mostly before Leah, because she is the one who must, must, must accept my confession and grant me absolution, I tell everything I know about such things, and where they come from and what they do and how there’s no fallout of any kind, a claim which, as I utter it, I realise is patently absurd and untrue. And all this of course is high treason, highest treason, but against a country which no longer exists and has in any case forfeited all allegiance owed to it by blowing up the world, even if—as it now appears—it had plenty of help from its friends.
And actually, looking around, it’s not all that hard to see what’s happened, it’s just hard to swallow—or it would be if we weren’t sitting in the middle of it getting killed and seeing ghosts and burying the dead children of myths.
Consider the world, unravelled. The Go Away Bomb is a thing of awful power, a vacuum cleaner of information, sucking the organising principle, the information, out of matter and energy. Professor Derek assumed that either of these latter two stripped of the first simply ceased to exist. It seems that he was wrong. Matter stripped of information becomes Stuff, known to me recently as Disney Dust or shadow. It hangs around, desperate for new information. It becomes hungry.
Normally speaking, this informational part would be supplied by the noosphere (not John the caveman’s department store, but rather the informational layer of the universe, the vast realm of which the department store is but a part), but of course we whisked away what ought to be there in the cause of war.
And as we have already seen, humans also have an information-y part. What has happened here, what is going on all around us, is that the human piece of the noosphere—our thoughts, and hopes, and fears—all these things are being reified. The human conceptual mish-mash is becoming physical, replacing what is Gone Away with dreams and nightmares. Like the nightmare of war which rolled down on General Copsen’s camp and then came here.
And like the little girl who wished she were a horse, and was immersed while sleeping in a storm of Stuff, and wakened to find herself transformed, hopelessly muddled with horsey parts and unable to breathe. Buried by a grieving, mangled parent walking on four legs instead of two.
“A world of dreams, Prince of Men,” Nq’ula says, by which he means of course not pleasant daydreams, but the grimy rag and bone subconscious of our race.
Zaher Bey leans back and stretches. His eyes take in the shattered walls and the cold and the mud on the floor. They take in the broken windows and the bloody people all around him, reduced by a stupid, pointless argument to freezing nights and days of desperation. He looks at his battle-worn monks and his new allies, bloodied and torn. If I were him, if I were given to such things, there would be a knot in my chest and in my gut, and a terrible slow-burning anger would be transmuting my body from flesh to molten steel. And certainly there is a hint of that manner of man in the words he says now.
“Not my dreams, Nq’ula.”
Chapter Eight
Piper 90; mimes and pornography;
the Found Thousand.
I GREW UP with the Nuclear Threat. It lived on the corner of my street and it walked with me to school. Gonzo and I used to play with it when none of the other kids wanted to talk to us. We got so tired of playing Armageddon with that damn unimaginative Nuclear Threat that we implored it to learn another game, but it never did. Mostly it just sat there in the back of the classroom and glowered. And then one day we heard it was dead. Some people seemed pretty upset about this, but I was just glad I didn’t have to carry it around any more. Kids are selfish.
Human beings can get used to just about anything, given time. They can get to the point where not living on the brink of being converted to fusing plasma at any time in an argument over economic theory and practice is a bad thing, a scary, uncomfortable, unimaginably dangerous thing. This is the gift of focus, or wilful denial, and it is something boys are particularly good at. Girls—at least where I grew up—tend to be more emotionally balanced and sane, and therefore find the kind of all-excluding concentration you need to care about dinosaurs, taxonomy, philately and geopolitical schemes a bit worrying and sad. Girls can grasp the bigger picture (i.e., it might be better not to destroy the world over this), where boys have a perfect grip on the fine print (i.e., this insidious idea is antithetical to our existence and cannot be allowed to flourish alongside our peace-loving, free society). Note carefully how it is probably better to let the girls deal with weapons of mass destruction.
In any case, we are almost offended when our doomed last stand comes to an end and we are rescued. We were doing so well. Granted, we had food rationing and medical shortages and nowhere to sleep; we were under sporadic attack by monsters (reified from the compounded nightmares of lots of different people and cultures), chimeras (people and animals twisted by Stuff), bifurcates (really creepy human-like things splintered off when a real person falls into a big vat of concentrated Stuff, such as happened to Ben Carsville) and other ills of varying sorts. We were, in other words, screwed. But we were on top of the situation. We knew we were screwed, and we had chosen the manner of our screwedness. We understood it and to that extent we controlled it. It was like the Nuclear Threat—while it was going on, we didn’t have to think about any other kinds of screwed we might be.
And then we were saved.
We woke one morning, and there was a thunder
in the valley and a great muttering, and something was rolling towards us which was much, much bigger than our castle. In fact, it was bigger than our mountain and our castle. The top of it was lofted way up above our heads, and it was broad and oily and smelly, and all around it was a cloud of strange, slick gunk. Where this gunk touched the puddles of leftover Stuff down on the valley floor, it sparkled and flashed, and then there was nothing there. Where the cloud of gunk met little wisps of Stuff drifting out of the forest, the wisps withered and fell to earth like rain. This big, remarkably ugly thing was immune, and there were people on it, and they were waving like they expected us to be glad to see them.
Resentfully, we acknowledged that we were. A man called Huster came to talk to us, very cautious, but when we let him in and he saw how we lived, he started to swear, and there was nearly a fight. Shangri-La was a mess, but it was our home.
No, Huster said, you don’t understand. We’ve been going for months now, and we’ve never found this many people still alive in one place. You guys are . . . He swallowed. His face was openly awestruck, and then he grinned. I will be damned, Huster said. I will be damned. And he laughed and laughed until someone brought him a beer.
We decided Huster was okay. And then we gathered up everything we had and went with him back to his rolling fortress, because ours was all done in.
. . .
I AM LYING on a tartan blanket on top of the man-made mountain called Piper 90; a vast industrial edifice stained black and striped by rain and grime. It looks like a cubist interpretation of a giant mechanical snail, laying out a silvery trail behind it: a power station on top of a hotel on top of an oil rig with caterpillar tracks. This is Huster’s castle, and with it we are reclaiming the world. Or perhaps remaking it. The bits we find and join together do not seem to follow sequentially on our maps.
The blanket smells strongly of garlic sausage. This leads me to believe that one of Vasille’s men has been using it. Only the French still have any garlic sausage. Their military ration packs were full of it: strange, freeze-dried, wind-cured, vitamin-enriched, pasteurised sausage, good for a hundred years. You can use it as a life preserver or beat your enemy to death with it, ski on it, burn it (the skin makes an excellent wick) or build fortifications with it. I have heard a rumour that, if combined in appropriate proportions with vinegar and certain human waste products, it can be transformed into an adequate explosive. Both disgusting and ingenious, if true, although it raises the alarming possibility of Vasille’s men drinking vinegar and going off like fireworks, up and down the line. Perhaps there is a secret admixture contained in one of the seasonings they carry which nullifies the effect—I decide never to ask. The point is that you can put your sausage through the wringer, and when you’re done you can still boil it up and eat it one-handed while you gesture expansively or hold a long gun steady with the other, and this, quite apparently, someone has been doing while lying on this blanket.