(And Gonzo, of course, knows first-hand that this is true. Because I tried to take his wife.)
H.P.: I need to have a talk with this good gentleman. I need him to come to me to discuss this situation. I need to have a free hand at those discussions.
Gonzo: I see.
H.P.: Now, the Bey won’t come out to play. But I have reason to believe that if you went and asked him, he might reconsider. You knew him in the Reification, I gather.
Gonzo: Yes, I did.
H.P.: He trusts your word, Mr. Lubitsch. If he has your assurance of his safety, I believe he would come.
Gonzo: And then you would talk to him.
H.P.: You would not be required to be part of the conversation, Mr. Lubitsch. Only to bring him to me.
(And Gonzo knows, really, that he is being invited to weasel. His responsibility is sharply bounded. Get the Bey. Bring him to the place. That is all he will have done. This is the seduction of Humbert Pestle’s proposition: the idea of limited consequence. The dark deeds which will be done after Gonzo hands over his trusting companion will be someone else’s burden. He cannot know, not really, that they will take place. Humbert Pestle—a very respectable man—is requesting a specific task of him, a noble task. He has no reason to doubt. And even if these dark deeds are done, would that be so bad? Certain prices must be paid, after all. We’re all grown-ups here.)
Gonzo: All right, then.
Because this was always the plan. Humbert Pestle sent Moustache the ninja to set the Pipe on fire, dispatched Dick Washburn to hire the Free Company to put it out. He had Moustache wait and try to kill us, knowing the ninja could not possibly succeed. He sent men to kill Gonzo’s parents and Leah. All to destabilise Gonzo, to make him so angry that Pestle could throw the blame at Zaher Bey and let fear and panic make it stick. The Found Thousand are coming! The enemy is at the gate! Fight them! Kill them! Hesitation is death to those you love. And then offer this grimy solution, a sordid, appealing little deal to take away the fear. Leave it all to Humbert.
Pestle must have been thrilled when he heard about me. The ideal whip to drive Gonzo with. The perfect cat’s paw. They want our lives.
Gonzo will bring the Bey, and Humbert Pestle will kill him. I cannot allow it. It will damn Gonzo, of course. He will not recover from having lent himself to such a thing. He will become, gradually, a pencilneck, and he will lend himself to more and more until finally he is no one I know. But more, I cannot allow it because the Bey is not really trusting Gonzo. He is trusting the portable Gonzo he carries in his head, the image of the person who brought him to Caucus and hung on his every word; of the castaway who washed up on his shore with a broken hand and confessed his part in the Go Away War, and who became part of the Bey’s extended family in Shangri-La. And that person is not Gonzo Lubitsch. It is me. If Gonzo delivers Zaher Bey to Humbert Pestle, he will do it in my colours.
That is the least awful thing I read in Humbert Pestle’s secret file.
I AM in the corridor again, and I have not been blown up. I am walking back the way I came. I do not remember leaving the room. I know that I wanted to. I also wanted to be sick, but I think—I hope—that I managed not to do that. I am full of answers, but I don’t understand them. I still don’t know the why. And I no longer know where to look. I have seen the Core. I have seen the file. I just don’t get it.
Maybe I’m ignoring the obvious. Perhaps Pestle is insane. He seems to be: set the Pipe on fire to recruit Gonzo; risk the entire world for a chance to kill the Bey. And somewhere in there cause the Vanishings as well, if his cleat is anything to go by. The scales are not balanced, but maybe Pestle just hates Zaher Bey so much (and why? again) that he doesn’t care.
I have gone the wrong way somewhere. Elisabeth is tapping on the ceiling, tra-tratratra. This way.
I don’t go that way. I have seen something. In for a penny. One more room. The door is half-open, and there’s a soft light coming out, maybe a television screen or a computer. I look in.
The man sitting at the desk is huge. I do not immediately recognise him because he is so still. He is lit from a single monitor screen, a pale blueish luminescence which casts long shadows over his face. Always before when I have seen him, he has been speaking with his whole body, using his physicality for all it’s worth. Now he sits, slack, in this chair in this featureless box. His eyes are open, and he is looking straight ahead. It seems at first that he is dead. If so, he has gone into rigor in place; they will never be able to get him out of the chair without bolt cutters (the dirty secret of undertakers). On the other hand, with the muscle he has, I’d expect him to be more contorted. He should be all wrapped around himself, like a spider in the rain. He is not. If anything, he’s like a sleeper. If I lean my head, I can see his chest move slowly, in and out. Humbert Pestle is not dead. He has been put away. This is how he is when he is not the Boss. When he has no purpose. Humbert Pestle is a type A pencilneck, and this is what he is when there is no work to be done.
I think of Robert Crabtree and of the maps and graphs in the operations room, of the secret file and Humbert Pestle’s vacant eyes, and now I do understand. At last, in the cold light of the screen, I see the face of my enemy.
Chapter Sixteen
Fear and marine biology;
just like old times;
it all goes wrong.
FEAR is an emotion with many shapes. It can be a thing of jolts and shudders, like an electric shock, or it can be like the tendril of cold night air which reaches you in your bed when all your doors and windows should be closed. It can come in the shape of a well-known footstep in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a foreign one in a familiar room. But all fear is connected, a susurrus which plays around you in the dark and brushes against your skin, pushes the hair back from your face like an uninvited guest, and slips away before you dare to open your eyes. Also, fear is sneaky. It establishes a foothold and sits, content. While you confront it, it is small and weak, and looks back at you with timorous eyes, so that you wonder how it could ever stir you for more than a moment. Turn your back, and it waxes, casting giant shadows and flickering in the corner of your eye, leaning lingeringly on the creaky floorboard. It inflates and bursts, propelling fragments of itself to the far corners of your mind, where they grow again until you are inundated, and you drown.
I am not afraid as I stare at Humbert Pestle. He is there, in front of me, and he does not see me. It’s like seeing the wolf padding through the forest: you know it is there, it’s just an animal, and it’s not coming your way. Good. I slip out, and down the corridor, and Elisabeth’s tratratra guides me to the grille. I am not afraid as we climb onto the roof and head back the way we came. I am not afraid in the moonlight as we winch ourselves back up, yard by yard, away from Pestle and his vacant gaze.
And then, once we are over the Jorgmund building, with its snake badge in silly neon, I make a mistake. I start to pick up the pace. I am impatient, and the longer we are exposed like this, the greater our risk. The consequences of discovery are very grave—no sense in taking more chances than we have to. I trot. He saw me. He will send men. They will follow, and they will catch Elisabeth, and it will be my fault. The trot becomes a run. Elisabeth is ahead of me, and they will take her and erase her and it will all be my fault. Then they will come for me, and do terrible things, and I will die and be gone, extinguished, after so little time to be at all. The sky yawns above me, and for a second it is a chasm into which I may fall, an impossible depth, and I am looking not up into it but down onto it, and the threads of gravity and atmosphere which tie me to it are very slender and I am very, very small.
Fear is not rational. A moment later the run becomes a sprint, and a panic, and I am afraid of everything I have ever been afraid of. I am afraid that I will be hauled up on charges for terrible crimes I have not committed, or that I have, and I will be an outcast and a pariah, and Old Man Lubitsch will shake his head and turn away, and be appalled. I am afraid that Elisabeth will despise
me, leave me, attack me, and I will not know how to stop her without killing her and then I will be a murderer. I am afraid of falling, of fire, of torture and monsters and infestations of spiders and wild dogs and cancer and the End of the World (a proper one, without a sequel) and everything else I have imagined in the small hours between two and four, when unreasonable, improbable waking nightmares can attain solidity and bulk.
I overtake Elisabeth, grab her hand and drag her along with me, plunge and weave across the rooftops. She calls to me to stop, stop, and when I do it is because we have arrived, and I dive through the open door and into the pigeon loft and begin to pack. We cannot stay, cannot stop, not now, never again, until this is done. Fear has given way to horror. It is the animal in me, seeing the thing which is my foe, and that thing is not like me. The face of my enemy.
In the sea, there are creatures like this. Physalia physalis is an individual, but it is also a colony. It is a floating sack of gas composed of a million little polyps, of four different kinds. Some of them digest and some of them sting, and some of them are for breeding, and some for keeping the others from sinking down into the sea. I met a sailor once, a woman from Redyard, who had been stung by one. She said it was like being scraped with hot wire, and she screamed and drank down brine, but the worst part was being tangled in the tendrils of the monster, brushing against them and recoiling into more, and gasping, and swallowing them, being wrapped about and snuggled and invaded by something alien and awful which had no eyes and yet knew she was there.
The gas bag was barely as big as her head. It could no more consume her than it could get up and dance—but it was trying, oh yes, and if she sank, then she would die, and her assailant would devour her slowly, gram by gram. She had weals upon her arms and neck, livid scars like the marks of a whip or a brand, and she favoured one hand. The doctors said her survival was a miracle, that she must have a giant’s heart. She spoke as if she’d been smoking with every breath, her larynx coarsened by scars. When they pulled her out of the water, the thing came too, all blue-grey and appalling, half-liquid. On dry land it couldn’t move—no muscles at all. They unwrapped her from it and she spasmed away across the deck, but she wouldn’t let them throw it back. She made them keep it, and when she was well, weeks later, she burned it in her yard and vomited for two straight days. She didn’t drink; alcohol, she said, gave her dreams of polyp arms about her, and made her wake up screaming. Her husband put his thick, dry hands on her shoulders and stroked gently at the places where she was marked, and the revulsion faded from her as she relaxed against him.
Jorgmund is like that. It is one thing, made from many. It does not think; it exists and it reacts and it expands, and that is all. The people who work for it are like the polyps, neither entirely individual nor entirely subsumed. They carry the monster in their minds, and they cannot see the whole. They give themselves to it, time-share, and slip into the body of the beast when they prefer not to be human. The ninjas are the stinging cells, reaching out and destroying enemies, killing food. Of all of them, Humbert Pestle is the greatest and the worst. He has made himself one with the machine, the monster. He sees it, and it does not appall him. He carries it in his head all the time, to the point where it is impossible to say whether he still exists separate from the thing.
I feel as if I have overturned a stone, expecting insects, and discovered that the stone itself is nothing but a vast mass of bugs.
. . .
IN ACTION MOVIES the hero can explain the danger in a few cogent sentences, and (aside from a token person who later gets eaten or has to apologise) everyone immediately accepts the reality of what he says and understands its significance. Monkey reflex is churning in me: flee, seek advantage, fight. Hit small, soft things with your hands. If you want to kill something big and tough, you need a stick with a rock on the end, or a sharp piece of bone. And I want to kill it, just as badly as it wants to kill me—or the Bey, or the Found Thousand, or anyone who sees it for what it is. Everything must function in a way which is compatible with Jorgmund. Anything which does not, may not persist. Evolution is not fuzzy or kind; DNA does not negotiate. This thing is like that: too basic, too young, too simple of its type to permit difference.
Elisabeth Soames does not quibble. She gauges me with rapid glances. She hears the words which do not come out, apprehends the ideas foaming behind them. She tosses our belongings into a bag, turns out the lights in the pigeon loft and unplugs the electric fire, then leads me rapidly away. She does not look back at the place which has been her home for twenty months or more. She does not allow herself to miss it. Her hand tightens in mine, just a little, as we drop down below the roof level, and we leave the cosy, ramshackle building behind.
WE TAKE the main road, along the Pipe. I drive. We have left the Magic of Andromas under wraps in Haviland. It is conspicuous where Annabelle is anonymous, just another big, creaky truck. If we are lucky, they believe I am dead. They won’t find my body, but there are many reasons why that might be so. Perhaps jackals have devoured me, or starving children of the street. Perhaps I rolled or crawled, broken, to the road, and was flattened by a succession of buses. Maybe—and I am particularly proud of this one—my body has been washed into a storm drain and is slowly leaching into the city’s water.
“No,” says Elisabeth Soames, as I continue in this vein, “enough. Enough and more than enough.” Because I have been sharing these brilliant thoughts with her for several hours, and she has winced and gagged her way through quite some few of them in that time.
Humbert Pestle’s file had a map. Quite close to Haviland, innocuous and ordinary, there’s a side turning which looks like a farm track. Turn down it and follow it, and the track becomes a lane, and then a wide, lazy road. The buildings are signposted as a synthetic milk plant. This is Jorgmund Actual, where FOX is made (I haven’t told Elisabeth yet what I know about that, the darkest of Humbert Pestle’s secrets, the black coffins burning at Station 9), and the Pipe begins and ends. The head and tail of the serpent. It is where the Bey will be. It is more than that. It is where I must go, where everything will finish.
For the moment, though, we need a place which is known, where we can meet our allies, such as they are, and if they come. So I have called Flynn the Barman’s private number and rented a room (something I have never dared to do before, lest I overhear him and Mrs. Flynn romping on the pool table or making whoopee in the master suite) at the Nameless Bar.
The desert is very much the same as it was. Deserts do change, of course. They go through subtle alterations, become more arid or more lush, favour one sly, pink-eared animal or another. It’s just very hard to tell. Deserts are like a nearly bald man having a haircut. The difference is absolutely crucial from within, but to the rest of us it’s still a dusty scrubland with little in the way of plant life. Tonight it’s cold. There’s a fine mist and a wind off the mountains which smells of snow. By contrast, the smell of pigs, warm and bilious, wafts along the road to greet us.
THE NAMELESS BAR is quiet. Not silent, but not loud. There’s no chatter of conversation, no sound of glasses being clinked. The windows are clear and bright through the mist, but there’s little sign of people passing in front of them. I wonder whether it is empty. We made our calls on the way, from a rest stop by the main Pipe. The bar should be full. If no one has come, then this is over before it begins. Elisabeth presses lightly against me. I am not alone. She at least is here, and going nowhere. Two against an army. Fine. Then the door opens, and there are Sally and Jim. Then they fall back a little, and a smaller woman steps between them: Leah.
I couldn’t ask the Free Company to come here. I couldn’t tell them what was going on and expect them to believe me. So I wasn’t going to. Elisabeth Soames is made of tougher stuff. She knew exactly how to make it happen, who would listen to me, who owed me and would feel it. She called Leah, told her who she was, and that she was with me, and what was happening and what Gonzo was really doing and how he’d been set up. Fo
r good measure she told Ma Lubitsch the same story, and Ma Lubitsch has a soft spot for Elisabeth Soames, who she considers to be, despite the evidence that Elisabeth is an itinerant magician-revenger who lives in a pigeon loft, “a nice young girl from Crick-elvud Cowff and very vell brought up.” Ma Lubitsch bent Leah’s ear on one side and Elisabeth bent the other, and Old Man Lubitsch had to intervene so that Leah could say anything at all, and when she did it was very simple, and likely what she would have said before if she could have got a word in edgewise, which was: Yes.
So Sally and Jim were interrupted once again by visitors from our house—Gonzo’s house—though thankfully this time they were eating. Leah laid it out for them, and Jim rumbled and Sally stared, and then they got up and collected their emergency bags, the ones they have kept packed every day and night since Shangri-La, from just inside the bedroom door. Jim rubbed his bald, naked head and put a hat on, and all three of them went to round up Tommy Lapland and Samuel P., who were gadding about in some place very like Matchingham. These four dragged Tobemory Trent out of a wine-tasting, and Annie the Ox and Egon Schlender from a baby shower, and so it went on until they had the whole gang assembled and ready for the job at hand, although none of them knew precisely what that was.
Jim Hepsobah gives me a look from toe to top, and finds nothing to suggest that I am actually evil. If Leah trusts me; if Ma Lubitsch (who has had words with James V. Hepsobah on the subject of his tardiness regarding marriage) accepts me, that’s good enough for Jim. Sally is cooler. She is the backstop, the sniper, the plug-puller and the outer perimeter; being the deal-maker also makes her the deal-breaker in time of need. But even Sally nods to me shortly, and then the three of them bring me into the Nameless Bar, and I find myself in front of the people I know as well as I know anyone, and they have never met me before.