Through the extremely powerful telescopic sight of my long gun I can see Gonzo Lubitsch’s familiar head as he rides out in front on a sort of kludged-together dune buggy. Like Piper 90 (although much, much, much smaller) Gonzo’s ride is a bodger special, a lawnmower frame with the electrical engine from a milk float drilled onto it. This engine has an absolutely unfeasible amount of torque. Milk is an emulsion of butterfat in a water-based liquid, and the weight of a cubic metre of water defines the metric tonne; a milk float has to be able to carry an insane amount of weight, the kind which would kill your suspension and lay your chassis flat against the road. Strip away these encumbrances—and the monstrously heavy flatbed which is needed to maintain stability—and the humble milk float is a battery-powered rocketship with a whole lot of pent-up rage. Gonzo’s dune buggy is unable to achieve lift-off only because no one has the time or the energy to put wings on it. If he needed to, he could fit spikes to his wheels and tow a tank.
Piper 90 is laying the Pipe. The Pipe contains the magic gunk which makes Stuff disappear. We spray the gunk (called FOX, for inFOrmationally eXtra-saturated matter) into the air, and it meets the Stuff and neutralises it. Behind us, the Pipe does the same thing, all the time, so that we are drawing a line across the world, making a strip of land which is safe to live in. FOX carries a load of junk information, so that Stuff which mixes with FOX becomes dust and air, and not monsters.
There was a moment, not long ago, when we thought Stuff itself might be a blessing in disguise; how wonderful to have discovered a substance which responds to thought. The end of scarcity and hunger. We allowed tiny streams of Stuff to stretch towards Piper 90 in the hope that we might mould them. But Stuff is nothing if not truthful, and the truth is that our strongest drives are not our most creditable. Our experiments produced swarms of tiny half-finished fiends and tortured flobbering wrecks, animated bread rolls and lethal candyfloss. We picked them off one by one, then sluiced the little rivulets with FOX to prevent a repeat.
It’s important to remember that FOX itself won’t stop monsters which have already been made. That’s why I’m sitting up here with a rifle prepared to shoot anything with two heads which tries to swallow my friends. Still, FOX is more than a little bit vital. Also important to remember is why it’s an aerosol. According to Huster, too much FOX and too much Stuff in one place at one time can go boom, and the boom in question is, while not revolutionary, respectably huge. It’s more of a BOOOMM-BADADA-THRUMMMM-mmm. It is therefore best to use the FOX like a screen or a sandblasting tool, rather than a fire hose. A thousand kilometres back along the Pipe there’s a hole in the ground the size of a football field which marks the spot where this fact came to light. Piper 90 has a matching scar, a big, black scorch mark along its southern face.
Gonzo sweeps wide to one side, and Jim Hepsobah and Samuel P. cross him. I keep Gonzo’s head in frame at all times, but—since I don’t want to shoot him, even accidentally—I don’t let his noggin occupy the crosshairs. The point is to protect Gonzo while Gonzo and the others protect Piper 90, and Piper 90 gets on with the business of remaking the world. On three other ledges spread wide across the arc of Piper 90’s east face (compass bearings are pretty arbitrary, but the sun still rises from approximately this direction, and it is the direction in which Piper is heading, and therefore it is unanimously declared east until someone can prove otherwise) Sally Culpepper, Tommy Lapland and Annie the Ox are also following the progress on the ground, also armed, and also looking for monsters.
Piper 90 has been attacked thirty-seven times in the last month. The broad metal armatures which support the aerosol nozzles are scratched and pitted. Bullets have been fired at them. Knives and even makeshift swords have slashed them. Bludgeons and clubs have thundered down on them. More unsettling, they have been chewed by large, impressive teeth. The northernmost arm has been crushed between the jaws of something big enough to be a great white shark, except that Piper 90, while parts of it started out as an oil platform, hasn’t been in the water since before the arm was bolted on to its side.
Piper 90 isn’t called that because it lays Pipe, by the way. That just happened. The superstructure around which this thing was built is a series of retooled oil platforms, and the original Piper 90 is actually just the first one of these. Its full name was Piper Nine Zero Bravo One One Uniform, which means, if you assume that each section of that designation could be either a number from zero to nine or a letter of the alphabet (as represented by the Alpha Bravo Charlie code beloved of gun nuts everywhere) that it was potentially one of 78,364,164,096 units. No one knows why any company on Earth could need that many possible serial numbers. Every model of mobile phone and video recorder has a number like this, most of them offering so many possible iterations of the technology that at the usual rate of product release—say, between three and fifty distinct products per line per year—the people making them will still have plenty of serial numbers left when humans are so highly evolved and so thoroughly integrated with their own technology that the idea of a phone as distinct from the organism is disturbing in the same way that carrying your lung around in your pocket seems a little freaky now. It may well be something to do with that boy-taxonomy-focus thing.
So Piper 90 has a totally dumb name, and it looks like the love child of a bulldozer and a shopping mall after someone has poured several thousand tonnes of yoghurt over it and left it out in the garden for a month. The people who built it were not worried about aesthetics; they were looking to make something survivable and strong. They took those oil platforms and they welded on huge, train-sized caterpillar tracks. They stuffed reactors from submarines in the basement to power the whole thing, and drive systems ripped out of aircraft carriers, and they synched the whole disaster together using matchbook maths, the gears from some defunct ultra-large crude carriers and a lot of duct tape. There are rooms, down there in the machine layer, which have nothing in them but huge toothed wheels going round and round, and even now there are people crawling through ducting and service tunnels and into dead spaces, just mapping the thing. There are bits of Piper 90 no one knows about because there simply wasn’t time to work out they’d be there. You could hide a city in the gaps, below the city that’s already bubbling away in the habitation section.
The whole catastrophe has a top speed of about a kilometre an hour, but no one is insane enough to make it go that fast. For something this size, on land, that is alarmingly quick. So Piper 90 trundles along at “barely noticeable” speed, and behind it there emerges a long, thick trail of Pipe, and around the Pipe our world is real again.
The Pipe runs all the way back to some distant laboratory, and along its path there are pumping stations, storage tanks, depots and maintenance caches, all demanded by people in some vestigial place of sanity where they have figured out what the hell is going on. Perhaps Professor Derek—accursed be his name and his seed in eternity, and may giant badgers pursue him for ever through the Bewildering Hell of Fire Ants, Soap Opera and Urethral Infections—is still alive and trying to clean up his mess.
Lots of people, given the choice, would leave Piper 90 and settle in one of the new towns which are springing up in our wake. There’s rumour of a bright bulwark being constructed, a place called Heyerdahl Point, which is going to herald a new age of us being on top of the situation: back to real life. It’s a powerful draw. Many of the survivors from our army have moved to the town of Matchingham, which is reputedly a serious hellhole. They claim it’s like heaven. But Piper 90 is my favourite place in our small new world. Close to, you can see windows and lights and people wandering the glass-walled corridors and taking the slow, clanking lifts—they’re mismatched; some are shiny executive things, some are old service elevators—from the ground floors to the roof. On the roof (a few levels below where I am now) there’s a sort of park, a big open green space which doesn’t have monsters in it. Children play in some of it; executives lounge in the rest.
So far, these executives are actu
ally useful; we need people who can do quantities and manage resources, and they need everything to work. The profit motive is in abeyance—just—because we don’t have surplus. And because anyone who gets caught making a buck on the back of human survival on this planet—if it still is one—is liable to be thrown down the top cooling tower into the steam vents. Liable, as in it’s in the contract. All the organisations in the world which still existed at the end of the GA War and survived the first days of the Reification got together to make this happen. We’re throwing everything we have at it. No messing.
Looking at the garden from up here, it’s hard to tell the difference between the grown-ups and the kids, except maybe the children are better dressed. For some reason, the execs all wear chinos.
On the other side of Piper 90 is my apartment. Sally Culpepper is actually lying on my roof, and every so often Leah knocks on the ceiling and Sally clicks her radio and I click back, and Sally knocks on the floor and Leah knows that I’m fine, that I miss her and that I’ll be home soon. We live in the top layer of the housing section, and the room looks out into the vast, bleak desert of the Unreal, which is what we call anything ahead of us or more than a few miles on either side. Our home is a strange, awkward shape. It is open plan (no spare materials for cosmetic walling) and shaped like two pieces of cake meeting at the pointy ends, or like the bars (but not the upright) of the letter k. The lower cake slice contains the bathroom, which is a metal tub with huge, heavy tubes going into it and some uneven stopcock taps. When I am off duty, I can sit in my bath and watch, through my picture windows, storms of matter being sundered and reconstituted, ghostly shapes and fires dancing or squabbling, temporary landscapes rising and falling with the prevailing wind. I think—I hope—that it’s calming down out there. Maybe.
The execs all have the rooms looking the other way, back along the reassuring solidity of the area we have reclaimed. They gather each evening for a self-congratulatory cocktail party (although there are no cocktails) and stare out at the metal of the Pipe, at the post-industrial sludge we leave behind, and at the dry, dusty plains of the uncolonised Livable Zone. Farther back down the line, they can see something like soil, and twinkling lights. It makes them warm and they drink cheap white wine as if it were the good stuff (all of which is gone for the moment) and fuck one another in little cubicles no bigger than a wardrobe, because Pipeside rooms with a decent view are scarce and mostly given over to the orphanage and the hospital wards. That’s why the execs running Piper 90 put hot tubs into the Stormside rooms (that and the fact that there’s no space for them in Pipeside rooms anyway)—to encourage other people to live there. The rumour is that seeing the Unreal drives you mad, even from this distance (if that’s true, a hot tub seems scant compensation, but since I don’t believe it is, I feel I’m cheating the Man in a small, painless way; the execs believe they’re putting one over on me, but know that I don’t think so, and wouldn’t have one of those cubbies for all the tea in Storage Bay 7A, and so everyone’s happy).
The rumour is that the clean-up crews, even under the protective spray of aerosol FOX, are being saturated with Stuff, and we will have strange, dangerous children with unlikely destinies and curious names. The rumour is that we will never be allowed to live in the Livable Zone because we are tainted; the Zone will be pure, for real people only, and we’re on the cusp now because we’ve been exposed for too long. The rumour is that they will exile us to the edges or make us disappear. Gonzo tells these rumours to each new recruit as he walks them out along the edge of the Piper roof terrace, and then waits for them to draw breath. Then he lunges at them and yells, “BOOOOGIEBOOGIE-boogie-boogie!”
Anyone who does not actually pee gets the job. It’s all hogwash, most likely—the kind of myth you get at times like this—but it’s true that there are things out there. And it’s true that they are terrible.
Last week the monsters looked like buffalo. They were huge and brown, and they stank. They came out of the north-east like a bass drum, and they brought a cloud of choking dust. They stared and bellowed and charged at Piper 90, gored it and slashed at it. We shot them from a distance, one by one, and they died easily. Jim Hepsobah thought they had probably been real buffalo at one time. Not any more; they were bigger and heavier, with hoofed feet like lead and horns which bent and scissored. They could jump, too, almost like flying. The dreamshape of an angry cow. But animals are okay, really. Stuff makes them more like what they are, maybe, or bigger and badder, but an animal is not all that creative. A buffalo wants to be meaner than other buffalo, meaner than a wolf pack, or he wants to be able to get up a cliff face which is in his way. That’s not much. Human thoughts are the problem. Stuff bonded to a human can be more complex, more weird and more awful.
For the most part, a human mind is not a concentrated thing. A mind at rest is a mind considering a hundred things with only the faintest intensity, and Stuff touching it ends up making biscuits, agendas, fleeting images of past times, random smells. No problem. They go into the great muddle of the Unreal, and mostly they just fade away. A mind under stress, afraid of dying, is a different thing. That kind of mind is very concentrated, and it makes far more vivid impressions. It can make monsters. Birds like flying piranhas, shadowmen with smooth faces like eggshells which somehow see you anyway and turn towards you like snakes. Or perhaps these are the product of more than one person; perhaps these things are made when nightmares blend together in the moment of creation. I do not know, or care. I know they are awful.
The week before, when we crossed a small stretch of brackish water, it was mermaids—although actually there were men and women both. They were slender and greenish, and they came up out of the water on the crests of the waves and climbed the outside of Piper 90 with long monkey fingers. Wide fishy mouths with too many teeth gaped open and swallowed in short order two technicians and the entirety of Delta Team. The mermaids had soft fluting voices and they gabbled nonsense which sounded like real speech: “Ho there, Foster! The lady wearing postulates; is it laudable or trout?” And while you stared at them and wondered what in all the hell that meant, another one was sneaking up behind you on its single, snailish foot, and biting out the back of your head to slurp the brainstem, which is apparently what they eat. We fought them to a standstill by the side of the clothing depot on B deck, and threw the remains over the side. I think Samuel P. had a mind to keep some tail fin for steaks, but Leah confiscated it and sent it back down the line. Maybe they were human, she said, maybe they weren’t, but we’ll ask the scientists first and eat them later, if that turns out to be appropriate.
The new monsters—fresh from some pool like the one at Corvid’s Field, or after a storm brings horizontal, unreal rain and everything for miles around is drenched in Stuff—are hard to take down. They seem not to understand the rules: get shot in a vital spot, die. Perhaps they simply don’t have enough experience of reality to recognise what’s happening to them, and so their bodies just repair themselves (if there’s enough spare Stuff around or in them) and up they get, snarling and leaking and ready for round two. There was a slug-thing a while back which took hours, because we absolutely could not find its brain. Gonzo solved the problem by setting it on fire, and the countryside stank for days.
In truth, the obvious ones are not the bad ones. The worst are the subtle ones, the seemingly unchanged ones which are all unnatural inside—or maybe they’re not unchanged at all, but new. My nightmares always used to have real people in them, so no doubt there are plenty of things running around out there looking like human beings, colliding and merging with one another and finally becoming something solid enough to obtrude upon our notice. But it’s the ones which you know, somehow, are ordinary men and women gone askew, which are the saddest and the strangest. Perhaps because of what happened to poor Ben Carsville, killed by something split off from himself, bifurcated in that pond of bloody Ruth Kemner’s, they make me shudder. At a level beneath words, I know that they are wrong. I have known this
for ever—we all have—but most particularly since the business with Pascal Timbery and Dora the dog.
GONZO AND I were scouting, maybe three miles ahead of Piper 90. We do this because there are still obstacles in the world, still cliffs and ravines and scarred little towns. Towns we go through, or near to, in case there are survivors, and mostly there are. Cliffs and ravines we go around, because Piper 90 is not a hot rod. We haven’t seen a city yet, most likely because they’re all Gone Away. Sometimes it’s clear we’re uncovering what was there before, and sometimes it seems like it’s either brand new or jumbled up from somewhere else. I don’t know how that works, and I don’t much care, as long as we can live.
We came upon a place the size of Cricklewood Cove (another nightmare, to come upon one’s own home rendered awful) and Pascal Timbery was sitting outside a grocer’s shop, rocking and smiling and waiting for us. The grocer’s shop was full of sprouting veg, the inmates taking over the asylum. There were potatoes in there with spindly legs like spiders, and I absolutely wasn’t going to think about that in case it was the literal truth. Or became it.