The Gone-Away World

Chapter Seven

ZAHER BEY’S nth forefather was a Turkish Mameluke named Mustafa, a slave-soldier who served in Egypt until his particular genius in planning rather than personally inflicting massive casualties caused him to be raised above his schoolmates and made a general. Of this gentleman (who had lost an ear in his early career and wore a golden prosthesis in its place) no contemporary images survive, such being a violation of strict Islamic law as it was understood by Mustafa, but he is described by a contemporary diarist (freely translated) as a “chippy, murderous shortarse.” His tenure as a general was quietly successful until 1798, when an army of Frenchmen led by a similarly chippy and shortarsed Corsican marched into Egypt in the hope of carving out a bit of the region and breaking the British stranglehold on India. Mustafa of the Golden Ear duly mustered his army and went out to meet the dastardly Frog, who despite having suffered an egregious defeat at the hands of Horatio Nelson still contrived to rout the Mameluke forces and capture the Bey himself.

Expecting only death and ridicule, Mustafa was pleasantly surprised to find himself an honoured guest, and even more delighted to discover that the reason for this was his hitherto injurious lack of vertical prominence. The Corsican, in turn, was much pleased to have created not a lifetime foe but a genuine admirer. Amid discussions about how exactly the victory had been achieved and what was to happen now, Napoléon and the Bey got blasted on a mixture of insanely strong coffee, French cognac and suspiciously fragrant pipe tobacco, and when the night was over (about a week later), Napoléon was sneaked through the British pickets to the coast by Mustafa Bey’s scouts and returned to France to tell everyone about how he kicked some Anglo-Arab backside before heroically running home again. Mustafa Bey went back to his castle in the company of a formidable adventuress named Camille de la Saint-Vièrge, who shortly thereafter bore a son, the first of his get, and that son studied not only at the Mameluke school, but also with the British (on the basis that while it’s always nice to study with the person who beat you, it’s more practical to learn the trade from someone who handed him his hat with his teeth in it).

From these roots grew a seafaring family of Beys, international and sophisticated, fiercely independent and often at odds with their notional masters. These quibblings over chain of command might have made them natural Americans, save that Solomon Bey (1901–1947) eschewed all manner of religion after some time at the Sorbonne, and felt that the United States was by far the most devout nation on Earth. At the same time the Maharaja of Addeh Katir, Ranjit Rhoi—known as Doubtful Randy—felt an overpowering need for military men of good family, and invited Solomon, Zaher Bey’s father, to create a river navy and a Katiri defence force for his Raj, a decision which the maharaja uncharacteristically stuck to, even when all else fell apart around him. Solomon perforce relocated his young, pregnant wife to an immensely beautiful hill fort just in time for the British empire to fall into horrible and bloody strife and remove itself from the subcontinent. Zaher Bey was born on a cloudy Sunday in June 1947, and orphaned on Wednesday the following week when representatives of a local crime syndicate decided to throw off the yoke of British oppression by killing Solomon and his recovering bride and coincidentally moving a huge shipment of opium from Afghanistan in the ensuing confusion. Zaher Bey was smuggled to London by an aide to Mountbatten, most likely with that great man’s connivance, since very little escaped him at any time.

Thus came the Bey, swaddled in a goat blanket and bedded on a considerable fortune, to London, and in due time to Oxford University, where he raised some serious hell, drank and rowed for his college and was caught in flagrante with the daughter of the Dean of Balliol, all before taking an upper second class degree, which achievement is still regarded as something of a miracle by those who witnessed his blazing passage through Oxford’s watering holes and comely undergraduettes. His companion and occasional bail bondsman was a slender Katiri scion named Nq’ula Jann, formidable polymath and intellectual snob, last seen driving the Roller at the evacuation of Fudin, and now charged with working out with all due speed what the hell is going on. These two, thus armed with a full education, returned to the Bey’s native land with every intention of living soft and growing mighty fat. They arrived just in time for the removal of the last maharaja and the installation of Erwin Magnificat Kumar as puppet and president, whereupon they saw the way of things and the unpleasant nature of the new regime, and straightaway resolved to circumvent and vex it to the utmost of their considerable ability.

THE FIRST DAYS are very hard and strange. We find places to slump and even doze. There are people on every flagstone and in every alcove. Sally Culpepper and Jim Hepsobah make hammocks and sleep in them, high above the stone floor. I try this. It hurts my back. I wander at night and sleep in daylight, when there’s room on the floor. The castle seems to come in three parts—Zaher Bey and his monks have the upper floor, near the temple spire; Gonzo’s gang, including us, are in the entrance hall and on the blasted balcony; and the refugee Katiris are scattered through the interior of the building, although “scattered” makes them sound more sparsely distributed than they are. Leah and I revisit the room in which we spent the night. It is home now to three Katiri families, among them two injured men and an old lady whose rage causes her to spit and stammer. We nod respectfully as she tells us that our mothers were covered by wild dogs, and we do our best not to inhale the smell of blood and sweat coming from her nephew and his friend. The crone—although a few days ago she was probably a matron, maybe still is beneath the dirt and the exhaustion—bellows at us, and the nephew translates in a helpful monotone. He doesn’t bother to stress any of the English words, just lays them before us so we can accuse ourselves at leisure.

“My sons. You took my sons. And for what? For what? They were my sons and I loved them. They were my only sons. I have no others. I have no daughters either, not any more. All gone. You took them. They are gone.” And so he goes on, as if bored, and does not editorialise until she comes to a culmination, a long string of curses upon our seed, our land, our homes and our houses, for ever until the red blood of God washes clean the sky and judgement is issued in great gouts of fire. At this point he informs us that his aunt is angry. And he is angry too, of course. He lifts up his face to show us, but mostly in his eyes there’s just emptiness, and he sees that we see it, and shrugs.

“I saw the land eaten,” he says, as if that explains it, and holds his aunt in a gentle cage of arms and hugs until she weeps snot and saliva into his chest. As we go to leave, she breaks free of him and chases us in little lunges down the corridor, like a furious housecat. Leah leads me away, but the aunt persists, following in sharp jerks, as if dragged along by a lead. She sets up a new, gut-wrenching wail, and soon we are gathering a crowd of saturnine men and sullen women in our wake.

Our flight takes us to an inner courtyard, flagged and smooth. There is a well amid the wreck of a tiled fountain, and of course everyone who is not following menacingly behind us is sitting here, higgledy-piggledy, around and on top of one another, in box crates and bunk beds making up a great beehive town. As we enter, it gets quite still, and the aunt screeches hoarsely into the quiet. For the first time I am seeing the people of Addeh Katir from street level, not from the safe heights of an armoured convoy, and it occurs to me that they may be more forthcoming with their fury in this situation. One of the younger men moves to pick up a sort of stick, a farmer’s tool good for threshing and minding animals, and beating enemies to death, and then there is a bellow of outrage from the middle of the courtyard, and everyone turns to look.

“Fornicatress! What is that?” A familiar figure is glaring in horror at a toddler in ragged blue pyjamas. If the child were eating raw meat, it could not merit such ghastly dismay.

“It’s hideous! Unnatural! Where did it come from? No, no, don’t tell me—this house is filled with likely men. I shall simply seek out the one who is broken and bleeding and know him for the idiot who took you to his bed. Or was it mine? My bed? And how did you birth it so quickly? Eh? Answer me that? No nine months for you, you unmarked harlot, no indeed, scant hours to produce another malignant brat! If I look around I will no doubt find the shell it hatched from. You’re a demon, is what it is! A thing from the red inferno, where dwell incubi and satyrs and women with the legs of spiders, all coddled in a fetid mist! Oh, poor Rao Tsur, married to a sulphurous, rutting fiend! It wouldn’t be so bad if she could cook, but as it is . . .”

“Imbecile! The child is yours, as you well know, and born two years ago. Yes, it was. Oh, for the love of . . . Must you declare your poverty of mind to the entire house? Yes, I see you must. You named him Jun, and gurgled at him like a river toad when you should have been attending to the spices. No customer was served for months but must admire the little thug. He spat at them. Vomited. Threw things unmentionable after them as they fled. A salesman like his father, yes, to hurl our clientele headlong, heaving, out into the road. Thus we live in penury and want. Yes. Penury and want. And, oh, yes, Rao Tsur, whose refined palate cares not for my kitchen’s product any more than his empty heart has love for his enduring wife, the child is mine as well. We slept together, you and I. I say slept. In fact we copulated. Yes, you may well look abashed, it was no great matter. It barely counts. All that huffing and puffing and I swear I would have done better by myself!”

“Oh, indeed? Mistress of Onan, is Veda Tsur! Soloist! Luxuriant! And yet if I recall her spine was arched, presenting those unmentionable breasts to dread advantage, and from her open mouth proceeded such a racket as to sour milk and burst the eardrums of cats!”

“Hah! You admit it! You pounced upon me! Dark, your passions, Rao Tsur, when there was I, peaceably recalling my days of virtue. Oh yes, I’m sure I screamed! Quite likely, I called out for help! And no wonder, me being belaboured with that appalling cudgel you call a—” Her husband’s eyes grow very wide, and Veda Tsur comes sharply to a halt. She has hit that naked space in a crowded place where every conversation stops at once and yours inexorably continues, slewing secrets into a loud silence. I once said “starkers from the waist down, of course, but no one noticed because of the feathers” in a lecture hall full of my professors. I’d been talking about dinosaurs and birds and evolution, but try telling that to a hundred hooting dons.

Veda Tsur shuffles. She looks at her feet. And she lets fall from her wide, welcoming lips a sort of girlish giggle of embarrassment. Rao Tsur too shifts uncomfortably. The Katiris stare. Short of a rain of frogs or the sun rising in the north, there’s not much to top this, even now. Rao Tsur mumbles something like “Yes, well” and actually cannot think of anything to say. Awkwardly, he puts an arm around his wife and gathers up the wayward child which was the object of their debate, and quite a few others emerge from under boxes and blankets and scamper to complete the picture, until Family Tsur is fully assembled. And then, most impossible of all, Rao Tsur places a kiss upon the cheek of Veda Tsur as if they were just now stepping from a marriage service and he is afraid she will fly away if he does not occasionally soothe her and hang on to her. There is a frozen moment, then a snort from the aunt, and then the whole courtyard falls apart in a roar of laughter and cheering, like an explosion. It is the first laughter I have heard since the end of the world. (Nervous laughter and evil laughter do not count.)

Amid the laughter there is clapping, and the clapping becomes a rhythm, and the rhythm becomes a dance, and Rao Tsur by some strange coincidence is at this moment next to Leah. He seizes upon her, and Veda Tsur by way of revenge must have me, and Rao trumpets that she is making off with the hero of Fudin, and that just because I hit an idiot in the head and saved her life, she will now leave him for ever, and good riddance, faithless wench, may she bear me fine upstanding demon children. At which Veda asks tartly if Rao is not even now clutching that buxom doctor to his chest? And does he imagine she will gladly suffer his inexpert fondlings? She will run off with a handsome shepherd, and then where is Rao? Alone with his stupidity! And anyway, what nonsense! But even now they can’t stop grinning at one another.

And so it goes, around and around, clap clap clapclap clap, laLAHlalalaLAH . . . lahdahdahDEE-YA! until a string is stretched across some empty cases and begins to twang and zoom, and a row of empty bottles goes ping, pang, pong and pung, and voices are making up the rest of the orchestra, hmmhhhmmaahmm, a-hooahomm, and it’s a regular rock-and-roll hoedown, only with makeshift mandolins and xylophones, and not much in the way of skiffle until Tobemory Trent starts playing tortoiseshell and bone. And when the first dance is done, there is a brief moment for the aunt, in all humility, to kiss me on both cheeks in front of the whole crowd and pat my face and tell everyone that anybody who wants to pick a fight with me will answer to her, because if Rao Tsur, saffron merchant of Fudin, says I am a good man, and if Veda Tsur is content that my lady should dance with her husband, then that is good enough on any day for her, even if I had not—according to unimpeachable sources known to her personally—punched in the head a noted idiot in an effort to safeguard the lives of the people of Fudin. At which another great cheer goes up, and it is louder, for behind us is Zaher Bey, pint-sized titan and romantic lead, and sometime debater of the Jarndice Caucus club. And also, it emerges, funky-chicken instructor to the people of Fudin, the mysterious pirates of Addeh Katir and the remnant forces of the Combined Defensive Operational Force 8th Battlegroup, G.W. Lubitsch pro tem commander. So we get funky, together, and if anyone thinks Gonzo and Leah and Jim and Sally and I, or any of the others, is less than a friend, that person forgets about it, because we’re all chums together, and drunk as well.

In the morning, the war comes back, like dandelion seeds.

THE EAST WIND brings it, winsome and inexorable. The wind flickers and jiggles excitedly, rolling over the hills and dusting the forest. It is friendly. It is obviously, appealingly soft. It is Disney Dust. For miles and miles, from here all the way to Lake Addeh, perky motes and jape-some spirals flicker among the trees and fall into rivulets and streams with a noise like hot ash into snow. We stand on the long balcony and laugh, and nod good morning to one another. Today will be a good day. And then, as it draws closer, there is a sudden gust, and then another, pungent with animal smell, strange in the back of the nose and mouth, and there are birds, in their thousands, fleeing. No one kind predominates. They are not arranged in orderly flocks or even families. Swans lumber, geese flap, sparrows (or something very like them) flitter, all in one great avian mass of fear; one enormous, moderately cooperative exodus.

They crap on everything, evacuating their bowels the better to evacuate themselves. The second part of our war begins with a torrent of guano.

The Stuff rolls on towards us, and starts to change. It reaches the border of the lands we have defined for ourselves, the place of our safety, and divides around as if on a curtain rail. Wrapping around our border is a curdling shadow, from which proceed the cries of devils and the howling of the damned, or at least loud, unpleasant noises which make your hair stand on end and fill you (like a departing swan) with the desire to relieve certain internal pressures. All around me people are doing things of importance. Zaher Bey’s pirate-monks are moving with determined efficiency, calming and reassuring, herding Katiri civilians further into the castle. Gonzo’s guys—his core guys, Jim and Sally and Samuel and Annie—are rousing the others and bringing them up to speed. Leah and Tobemory Trent have gone professional, are talking triage prep and ad hoc transfusions, leaving me to watch the onset. I watch.

The Stuff is ragged and wispy. It is encountering some pressure or energy at our circumference, and responding to it. Things are happening at the meniscus: familiar shapes are appearing—armed men, vehicles, guns. They shimmer and collapse into one another, getting more solid. Some of them are ludicrous or awful. A small group charges across the border, Iwo Jima style, brothers in arms. They are too close together, weirdly awkward, and as they turn, I see that they are conjoined, all seven of them. The sergeant’s hand on his corporal’s back, urging him on, melds smoothly into the uniform and the spine. The soldier behind, supporting the sergeant, is merged with him at the hip. They struggle, scream and tumble, bringing down the others. They are an image to be seen from one side, not real men at all. They die, probably because they have not enough hearts between them, and slump to the ground, where a corpse-carpet is forming, the familiar exterior decor of modern skirmishing. I can hear the bullets whizzing, though there is as yet no one to fight. This is not an attack. It’s atmosphere. It’s war as a condition, war as furniture. We are under siege by a notion of war.

A monk, next to me, looks down in mute surprise as a bullet wound blooms on his chest. He dies calmly, maybe even affronted, but not appalled or screaming. The soldier next to him is different. He exhales a choking gas, a stink of battery acid, and with it part of a lung. He would scream, but this expression has been taken from him, so he just stares at me in horror, and I tell him I know, I know, it hurts, and you are dying. I know. I am here. He stares at me, and I cannot tell if he is thankful or if he simply cannot believe I am so damn trivial as to imagine that makes it any better. He dies while I am blinking.

A hand falls on my shoulder, rough and invasive. I slip it, twist. A flash of snaggled teeth and a whiff of halitosis. I hit out, block a weapon, push him away. He is gone. Shadowman. I crouch, ready. Nothing happens.

Up the hill, soldiers are attacking. Bad generalship, perhaps, but they are making ground. Vasille’s tank opens up, and limbs fly, slapstick. Hah. But now the enemy has tanks too, rolling up the hill, commanders looking out the top, Patton-style, and when Gonzo blows the tracks off the first one, and Vasille splatters it across the landscape, it appears that Patton is fused to the tank from the hips, a man-tank chimera. Samuel P. throws up. No one laughs at him.

It’s a game or a dream; wave upon wave, uncoordinated, endless; lethal but stupid. We fight. We die. We live. They go again. Nowhere is secure, nowhere is particularly under threat. Shadowmen flicker in corridors, half-complete, half-imagined; sometimes they kill someone, sometimes they loom and lurk and wait to be eliminated, like the guys in red shirts on Star Trek (the original one, not the later ones where no one was safe). In the infirmary there are extra patients appearing from nowhere. They cannot be healed. They just sit there and scream. Stretchermen we don’t have bring wounded we never knew, each time putting them in the same spot. The first soldier in bed three (it’s a packing case with a rug on it, but it’s bed three) has a head wound. A moment later, another is laid on top of him and they are for a moment both there, one superimposed on the other, and then the first is gone—and with him the bandages Trent slapped on that cut—and instead there’s a kid with a spurting leg, bleeding out, and then a moment later he has both injuries, and then he’s dead, and then they bring in another one and it’s a woman and then another, and another.

The sun comes out. The wind changes. We fight on. Shadowmen flail and die, and are not replaced. In the sunlight, in the ordinary world, they look pathetic: hulking, ugly brutes without advantages. Bullies. Bandits. Veda Tsur, spattered in grime and weeping, slams the last one to the ground with a copper saucepan, and Rao beats him, methodically, until he dies like a broken fly. He tried to take their children. Jun is clinging to his father’s arm, adding his weight to every blow.

In good order, and because we are very angry and afraid, we counter. We sally forth. Sallying has gone out of fashion in recent years, because it doesn’t work very well when you have gun emplacements, and anyway no one really lays siege in the traditional way any more; they blockade and they assail, but more usually they go house-to-house, because sieges kill civilians before they kill soldiers and this kind of thing is, broadly speaking, bad. It’s okay to kill huge numbers of civilians by mistake, of course, but killing them on purpose is illegal, slap-on-the-wrist time. We sally because, hell, we’ve earned it. Vasille leads, Bone Briskett brings up the rear and in the middle are an improvised mechanised infantry of hyped Ford Focuses (Foci?) and armoured RVs.

The lower slopes are a charnel house. Everything is dead. We drive through. The forest is better. The first hundred metres or so is jellied and burned. After that, it’s almost normal. The trees have been shot up a bit. One or two sheep have expired. We cruise. We do not get attacked. It rains, water. We dismount. We walk in the forest. It is nice. Leah and I hold hands. I transfer my gun to the other side and feel very protective. We lean against a pine tree and admire the flowers. We smell air which is not filled with awfulness. We live.

My radio clicks, once. It is the alert, but not the enemy action signal. It means I have found an interesting thing, approach with caution. The first click is followed by seven more in quick succession: one of the pirate-monks has the bearing seven position, to the south-south-east. We—Leah, Samuel and I—have five. We move downward.

The pirate-monk is standing at the edge of a forest clearing. He has chosen his location carefully, so as to be invisible to most of the clearing while able to survey it himself through a stand of bracken. We move up.

In the glade is a man, on a horse. He is tubby, and the horse is unkempt. His hair is matted and charred, and his arms are mired with sweat and grime. He is not a creature to inspire lust. The horse is brown or chestnut or one of those other technical terms horsepeople use to make it clear that they know stuff other people don’t; the freemasonry of the hoof. “Horsepeople” is apt here, and this guy can choose his own damn nomenclature. Because he is not, in fact, a man on a horse. He is a man and a horse. A centaur, although . . . not. Centaurs, in stories, are natural horsepeople. They are born that way, made by Zeus or some other holy Fimo-kiddie, sculpted buff and ready to rumble. Deep voices and beards, testosterone stink. This one looks as if he has been welded or grafted. He looks like the compound wounded soldier in Leah’s infirmary, or the tank commander who was part of his tank. He is not doing centaur sorts of things either. They are usually to be seen playing musical instruments or running about looking noble. This one looks confused, and he is digging a hole. He bends all the way over his front hooves, and lifts a shovelful of earth out of the ground. The hole is maybe a foot deep, but he has reached the maximum extension of what must be a curiously shaped spine. The next sweep of the shovel barely scrapes the soil.

He growls, and his front legs bend and he kneels, horse fashion. This is apparently uncomfortable, and unstable, because as he leans down to dig again, he falls over. He struggles for a while on his side, then rolls to his feet and starts again, and again. And then he throws the shovel away, and lays a slender, wrapped package in the hole. It is a person-sized package, if the person were small, or truncated. He picks up the shovel again, fills in the hole and stumbles away. He walks as if he is not used to having four legs: front left and back left move together, and he has to roll his weight onto his right like a sailor so as not to fall over, and then the reverse. He coughs, and spits a clot of blood onto a nearby fern. Perhaps his tubes are not properly lined up. It seems an uncertain proposition whether he can eat anything which will sustain him; which stomach does he use? What can it digest? We watch him wander off, and we are ashamed a bit that we don’t offer to help. On the other hand, we haven’t shot him either, which was a possibility, given that he was a completely impossible, alien object in the middle of a dangerous place at a dangerous time. That sort of thing usually gets shot at. Oh yes. Pillars of virtue over here. We don’t look at one another.

The monk walks into the glade. Without fuss, and absolutely without disrespect, he digs up the package and unwraps it. His pirate-ness is in abeyance. Today he is just a monk, and very tired. Under a layer of oilcloth is a crochet blanket, and inside that is a child, or a foal. She is quite small. The transformation here has been less successful. She is—was—a horse with two legs, and arms ending in hooves. She clutches a small stuffed donkey. Her face is long and equine, with wide, black eyes. The monk nods, and buries her again, with his hands.

. . .

ZAHER BEY and Nq’ula Jann are taking council. I suppose, in a sense, it is a secret council to which everyone is invited. Zaher Bey is a wanted man, after all, and therefore his councils are perforce concealed things, but we are all allowed to know about it and contribute and listen in. Indeed, this is the essence of it. The question before the meeting is What just happened? and by and large we are in agreement that it’s a jolly good question and one which needs answering before it happens to us. This has acquired a muttered urgency because—aside from the strange and the ghastly outside—there is a creeping rot within us too. It’s more than a little bit difficult to recall the names and faces of the Gone Away. It can be done. It isn’t impossible. It’s just the difference between lifting the suitcase empty and lifting it full. And this invasion is, if anything, more horrible than the last.

This is where I first hear “Reification” in connection with the Go Away War, and I hear it because Zaher Bey is demanding to know what the hell it is. If I were not on guard against revealing that I had a rather large part in What just happened, I could tell him. Never let it be said that sociology is a useless discipline. Still, Nq’ula seems to have the concept well in hand.

“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.”