There are ten or so of them, tall, short, thin, fat, and all white-faced and black-clothed, and surely about to die. Not white-faced like skin pigment, but white-faced like wearing full stage make-up. They are clowns. Worse than that. They are mimes. As I approach the circle to say that maybe we should just leave quietly and of course this will be something they are quite good at, being what they are, the mime-in-chief spins to the bar and leans over it, and under the eyes of seventeen of the most dangerous men in Matchingham, he orders a glass of milk.
In sign language.
This involves miming milking a cow.
The whole bar is so stunned by this that he does not immediately die. The barman, very much to his own surprise, locates a carton of the white stuff (this milk belongs to marbella, it’s for my snake, okay?) and pours a half-pint into a glass. Ike—on his chest is a narrow conference badge which reads “Ike Thermite”—gets into a brief Three Stooges thing with the mimes next to him about who’s buying. He concludes it by stamping sharply on the foot of Mime A, while at the same time sharply twisting the nose of Mime B, so that A lurches back and B folds over, and the two of them meet midway and bounce off each other, jolting other mimes in a kind of robotic, mechanical pratfall which culminates in every single mime knocking into every other in a circle, until the penultimate mimes on each side of the circle jolt A and B again and their left and right hands respectively fly up in perfect unison to present Ike Thermite with a bill each, and he pays. It’s brilliantly done.
It is probably the last thing they will ever do. Half a dozen thugs are trying to figure out when is the appropriate moment to break into this baroque suicide attempt and do some actual killing, but the tempo is off and they simply can’t get to the threshold required for homicidal violence. Ike knocks back his milk and makes a silent sigh. Then he collapses onto his chair and puts his feet up on an imaginary footrest. They do not waver. His control is absolute. The half-dozen thugs make a mental note that, when they kill him, they will not kill him by hitting him in the stomach, because that would be long and boring. They will kill him by ripping his head off instead. Still his feet do not wobble. He shuts his eyes and gives every appearance of going to sleep. No one moves. He commences to snore silently; his chest heaves and his lips flutter, all with nary a sound. Some alteration of posture suggests he has farted. His mouth crooks in a satisfied, post-flatulent smile. Someone snickers, and suddenly there is a collective realisation that the moment has gone. Somehow, Mr. Thermite and his greasepaint pals are going to live. No one is going to kill them today; tomorrow, if they come back, this bar will tear them apart as if they were candyfloss. Tonight, everyone’s just going to go back to what they were doing. Ike Thermite feels the tension drain away, and he hears the sound of a room full of bastards and minor felons getting on with their lawful business. After a moment, when all their backs are turned and they are settled to their large yellow ales, he swings his feet slowly to the floor and opens his eyes.
“Hi,” he says. “I’m Ike Thermite.” He extends a single gloved hand. I shake it, and he takes it back to light a roll-up. “And we,” he adds, “are the Matahuxee Mime Combine.” He nods. Several members of the Matahuxee Mime Combine nod too, in unison. The others follow suit, and finally I’m surrounded by a small sea of nodding clown faces. It is not a memory I will treasure. I look away, and my retinas are blasted by a glimpse of Marbella doing her thing with a boa constrictor. Clearly, this is not the act with the starfish promised by the place two doors back along the road, because 1) there are no cowboys, 2) the snake is from Madagascar rather than South America, and 3) while it is notably obscene, it does not actually send me mad to watch it.
I nod back at the Matahuxee Mime Combine, and Ike Thermite smiles broadly, and Jim Hepsobah claps Ike on the back and says any man who is arsehole enough to order milk in a dive like this one is a man indeed. I was not aware of this verse in Kipling’s poem, but sure, if Jim says, it must be so. The mimes are adopted into our company, and they come to our table in a long line, each with a beer or a drink with a cherry or a clear spirit, unsmiling, like the Charge of the Existentialist Brigade.
Ike Thermite raises his glass.
“To the man of the hour,” he cries. Two of his buddies stand up and mime this, but they are by now seriously drunk, and the whole clockface thing devolves into farce and they sit down again, howling with silent laughter.
I ask Ike why it is that he is allowed to speak.
“It’s like Trappists,” he says.
Sixpence none the wiser.
“Trappists,” Ike Thermite says, because we are now friends for life, owing to beer and male bonding and women in sequins breathing throatily on us like inexpensive Lauren Bacalls (Lauren in that movie with Humphrey Bogart where she was just heart-stoppingly, rudely sexy, rather than in the ones where she was cool and beautiful and somewhat reserved).
“Trappists are monks,” Ike Thermite says redundantly, with owlish precision. “They take a vow of silence. They have one person who’s allowed to talk, so that the others don’t have to. Like an appointed voice? It has to be someone who isn’t going to be corrupted by speaking—someone who’s so deep in the thing that silence is irrelevant. Someone whose inner silence is so damn profound that just actually saying something isn’t going to disturb it.”
“And that’s you?”
Ike Thermite nods.
“I am totally serene,” he says.
I do not comment on this directly, because I cannot think of anything I could say about it which would not be unkind.
“Y’know,” Ike Thermite says, “it would be nice if you would pretend to buy my bullshit just a little. Otherwise I feel kind of small. Oh dear.” This last because a very small mime with glasses is even now poking his finger pugnaciously into the chest of the nearest bouncer and telling him something very impolite by means of a universally recognised piece of sign language.
“I’ll deal with this,” Ike Thermite says, and falls over. After a moment he snores. It is not a mime snore. It is a loud, ugly, chainsaw snore, with drooling.
Annie the Ox slips into his place and eyes me firmly.
“Right then, Tiger,” she says. “That lady over there is going to dance for you in the most vulgar possible way, which you and I will both enjoy without really giving a damn one way or the other, and then I’m going to take you home and give you back to the nearly-wife before this gets gnarly, okay?”
Annie the Ox is an angel of mercy with size-ten feet.
From somewhere across the room comes the sound of a mime getting beaten up.
LEAH AND I get married in the old church by the Soames School. It’s a long way from Piper 90, so we have to take almost all our holiday in one block, and even then we won’t get much of a honeymoon. I don’t care. She walks through the doors of the church and all I see is light. She smells of jasmine and clean lace. The church smells of oldfashioned furniture polish. Everything is so shiny. The pews, the candlesticks and even the air seem to be glowing. The altar rail is made of gold, which is curious, because I distinctly recall it being an iffy tinted oak. Leah is so bright that I am concerned that she has inadvertently set herself on fire during her journey down the aisle, and only Gonzo’s firm reassurances from somewhere nearby prevent me from rushing to the font and putting her out.
Assumption Soames sits in the back and I swear she cries, quietly, over an embroidered kneeler. Elisabeth is still missing. I’m terribly worried about her but very glad she isn’t here. Zaher Bey, in his Freeman ibn Solomon drag, sits behind a pillar and grins at everyone. A clump of soldiers and oily-rag men occupy the middle of the church, openly amazed that two of their number are actually doing this extraordinary thing. Old Man Lubitsch reads a poem he has written. It is very moving, even though no one except Ma Lubitsch speaks Polish, so we have no clue what it means. At some point we kneel and are tied together with a bit of embroidered silk, and then the vicar says we’re married. It seems a bit easy for such a momentous
thing, but everyone claps and cheers, so it must be true. I look round and realise that I am now all shiny too. An enormous number of people want to hug me. Assumption Soames holds me at arm’s length, and buries her tiny face in my chest for a moment, and wishes me long life and simplicity. Then she flees and is replaced by Zaher Bey, and the last I see of Elisabeth’s mother is the ragged end of her shawl floating in the doorway of the church.
We spend our wedding night in an empty house in Cricklewood Cove. There are many of these. The Reification was a bad time here. Things came up out of the creek with muddy eyes, and the incidence of kuru was awfully high among the townsfolk. Some bandits passed through a few months before contact was re-established, and took several families away with them for purposes unknown. The house we are in does not have an unhappy history—it was for sale when the Go Away War began. It’s not a grave, just a sweet little two-bedroom with an insignificant kitchen and a log stove. Leah and I make love on the sofa and fall off onto the floor. Laughing, she drags me upstairs to a preposterous four-poster bed with pink lace and heavy curtains. In the morning a discreet lady from around the corner arrives to make us breakfast, then vanishes again with a sad, soft smile.
In the evening we set off back to the giant metal snailshell which is our home. The break makes Piper 90 strange for both of us, because we see it from the outside, and start to think too much. Things have changed since we first arrived: the place has tamed and evolved, but it has also become unfamiliar in odd, unsettling ways, like the blind spots in your eyes after you look at the sun.
Now, Huster is leaving.
In the beginning, just after Piper 90 arrived and rescued us from certain death, we were somewhere between a mad dictatorship and a sort of daffy anarcho-syndicate, a cooperative venture in self-salvation and heroism. Huster (he has no other name I ever heard) was Piper’s captain, her pilot, her master: a grizzled old fart who had managed an oil platform and knew engineers and tolerances and red lines and tipping points, and who got on well with just about anyone. Huster had never been military because he had some fever or ague as a kid which rendered him infirm—the kind of infirm which works thirty hours without a break and can arm-wrestle a bear. His word was law, and the various bean counters—really quartermasters—bowed to him and were glad of him, because they could see what he was about, and from an intellectual distance they respected it. They were survivors too, and content to facilitate and function and be part of his show. He’d fought wars of attrition against rust and salt water and hurricane winds, and drunkards with pneumatic tools, and just about every form of screwup you could name. He understood about what was going to work and what never had a chance.
Huster was technically some species of ambassador, but it was never clear for whom or to whom—“us,” I suppose, and no one really bothered to ask who that was and who it might not be. He was just the right man in the right place, and that was so obvious that no one argued about it. He never exactly gave orders or speeches, he just went ahead with the driving and let us get on with our thing—it’s not as if anyone had any doubts what the task was, after all—and when something tricky came up he wandered around Piper 90, from the roof garden to the engine level, and he talked to people. He had a sort of permanent council, composed of someone from our group (former soldiers, oilyrag men), someone from the general population (mostly a sepulchral woman named Melody with a gimlet eye for bullshit) and the Bey, to represent the Katiris, plus anyone else who wanted to come and hang around and talk, and who wasn’t a pain in the arse. Quippe might have called it a demarchy, except it was more a kind of consultative absolutism, and Sebastian would have said it was fine for a generation but the moment you had new blood it could turn on you like a scorpion and eat your brain, at which Quippe would have been diverted into a discussion about whether that was actually something scorpions did.
And then about three months ago Huster got the call. He went to a meeting back along the Pipe—all the way back, I think, where the first pump was switched on and the first section was laid on the first piece of solid earth—and they retired him. A more enlightened style of management was called for, apparently, more centralised, so that opportunities for efficacy maximation could be cross-competenced by a meritocratically upgraded leadership group. Huster, while he was a good on-the-ground man, was not in possession of the necessary secondary skills to be a full-active co-decisionist within the frame of the Re-visioning Taskforce, and therefore, while he would retain an analytical input to the forward-impetused directional committee, he would not, in fact, be invited to continue in his executive capacity at Piper 90, which was a position now requiring experience in global, holistic, trans-disciplinary interactions and pseudo-leveraged quasi-financial exchanges, and a full understanding of the management of a large collective entity with reference to dislocated populations with concomitant instabilities.
In short, Huster was fired, and our friendly quartermasterish execs were replaced with a skein of—there was no other word—pencilnecks. These pencilnecks were led by Hellen Fust and Ricardo van Meents, who seemed far too young and far too clean to have achieved anything which merited their promotion to this job. I am at this moment formulating a sketchy taxonomy of paper-pushers of this kind, and I have tentatively labelled them as type C: young and hungry, sharp elbows, excised conscience. They held on to Huster’s council, but they called it the Advisory Panel, as in advise, as in don’t have to listen to.
So now Huster is leaving. The big guy is taking his stuff and going away someplace. His consultative role means getting ignored in committee, and he hasn’t bothered to show up for a meeting for two weeks. Maybe there’s a town out there which can use him. Maybe this place, Heyerdahl Point, needs a troubleshooter. Maybe he’ll just homestead and find a lady friend and have a parcel of oily-rag rugrats. Be that as it may, he’s had it with Piper, and God bless her and all who sail in her, but not him, not any more.
Huster wanders from table to table in the Club Room, which isn’t really all that much of a club or even that much of a room: it’s the hull of a small ship pressed into service as a part of Piper 90’s lower reaches, and across the bilges or the hold or whatever you call the bit of the thing no one goes into, someone long ago laid bare boards and plates and slats, and then by magic there was furniture and a bar and people day and night, because Piper 90 never sleeps. The Club Room has never been so full, nor so sad. Huster is our collective mother, our ruler and our voice of reason and our final court of appeal. And now he’s getting a new family and we’re being left behind. Jim Hepsobah snuffles into a tall beer, and Sally strokes his arm to say it’ll be okay in the end. Tobemory Trent mops at his one good eye; Samuel P. is making wagers on cat races.
“You okay?” Huster says to me when his royal progress brings him to my corner.
“We’ll get by, I guess.”
“Yes, you will.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine. Be nice not having the cares of the world on my back for a bit. Really nice, actually.” He considers it. “Yeah.” He claps me on the back, and I tell him to look me up, and he says the same applies, and that’s it. Huster walks away and then there are people between us. He’s gone. I offer a thoughtful salute with my beer glass, and hear a sigh. Zaher Bey is leaning against the wall behind. He gazes after Huster and slumps dejectedly into a chair. I’ve never seen him do this before. The Bey does not flag. He jump-starts. There is no end to his energy. He rubs his palms down his face and looks exhausted.
“It’s starting,” he says. “I thought it would take longer.”
“What’s starting?”
“The . . . I don’t know what you would call it. Not rot, exactly. The not-right things are starting again.” He shakes his head.
“Because of Huster?”
“No. No, no. That’s . . .” The Bey waves his hand generously, and I wonder briefly whether he’s plastered. “That’s a consequence. Huster is my canary. Yes?” Yes. I know about canaries. If
you’re mining for coal, you keep a canary in a cage so that if you hit a gas pocket, the bird will die before you do, and you have time to get out. Assuming that you don’t explode. Actually, in modern times the canary has been supplanted by an electrocatalytic sensing electrode, but quite a lot of people still call the unit after its avian predecessor.
“So what’s starting?”
“What was the first reification?”
“No one knows.”
“No. Not our kind. The old kind. The making of an idea into a thing.”
“Shelter? Thump?”
“Yes.” He sighs. “I didn’t mean that either. I had a thought.” He ponders. His beer is finished. It is also disgusting. The beer in Piper 90 is made in a huge tank on the other side of the engine room, warmed by the nuclear reactor—everyone makes jokes about it glowing in the dark, but that isn’t true because the radiation would kill the yeast. I’m almost sure it would, anyway. The beer is not toxic so much as it tastes of oil rig. I get him another one.
“You remember when I was just Freeman ibn Solomon?”
“Of course.”
“We had whisky!”
“We did, indeed.”
“And there was a girl with the most curious hair.”
“Yes,” I agree. He laughs.
“You see? Even I miss the old days, and my old days were dreadful. And I don’t believe we should miss them. I think we should . . . strike out!” He thumps the table. “Make a new world! Not the old one all over again. But . . . people are scared.” He shrugs.
“So what was your thought?”
“Oh. I don’t know. I thought . . . What is this thing, this Jorgmund? How did it begin? What is FOX? Who controls it? How is it made? Jorgmund knows, and no one else. So I asked again, what is Jorgmund? Not the Pipe. The Pipe is an object which brings relief. But Jorgmund is not only that. Is it a government? A company?” He shrugs again. “It is both. And what is its purpose? You might say ‘to reclaim the world,’ but that is our purpose. Jorgmund is a machine for laying, maintaining and defending the Pipe. That is its only task. Its only priority. In fact, that is the only thing it can see. It is blind to us. It does not even know that we exist, except in so far as we impinge upon that purpose. If the Pipe could be constructed by monkeys and guarded by dogs, Jorgmund would be content with that. More content, actually, because it would be cheaper. Humans are simply not of interest to Jorgmund. We are gears. Jorgmund sees the world, and the Pipe, and anything which gets in the way. Nothing else.”