‘Charlie? Are you okay?’
I looked at Birgitta and she suddenly appeared older, more careworn, and in an instant she wasn’t Birgitta at all but Zsazsa, and I was back in the dining room with the Dormiselle staring at me. My hand was still gripped around the butt of the Bambi, my thumb on the safety but thankfully I hadn’t drawn the weapon – or worse. I had been seconds away from attacking an entirely imaginary foe. I carefully released my hold on the Bambi, palms damp with sweat.
‘Shit,’ I said, now knowing precisely what had taken Moody and Suzy. The blue Buick dream had swept over them, too, in a suffocating alternative reality, and they’d tried to kill the hectoring Mrs Nesbit, and been killed themselves. But I had a secret weapon: Birgitta. She’d just saved my life, and quite possibly Zsazsa’s as well.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Zsazsa again.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, the return from the event almost as rapid as the descent.
I took a drink of water and stared at Zsazsa.
‘So how did you know about Mrs Buckley and the remote farm in Lincolnshire?’
She cocked her head on one side and stared at me.
‘Information has a price, my young friend. Two thousand euros.’
We haggled for almost five minutes, and settled on eight hundred euros, a dozen Snickers, three Cornettos and a Favour. We shook hands on it, and she began.
‘It was when I was still a Mrs Nesbit, over thirty years ago. You’re too young to remember.’
‘True,’ I said, ‘but you’re still familiar.’
‘I’m glad of that. NesCorp Holdings gave a lot of funding to HiberTech in those days, so I often travelled over here for press junkets, announcing some new discovery or other. I was the face of Morphenox during its initial roll-out, and I was always treated very well.’
She looked around and lowered her voice.
‘On one of these trips Don Hector took me aside and asked if I would assist with some high-level research work. I said I would – you don’t turn down someone like Don Hector – so I signed reams and reams of non-disclosure contracts and they had me stand in a room. Lots of light, the air kind of alive with static – then they had me recite some of the usual Mrs Nesbit bullshit: products to buy, tips for the busy homemaker, how to balance your chores in the kitchen with wanting to be down the pub, advice on weight gain, that sort of stuff.’
‘So?’
‘Before we did all this, I’d been asked to do a sound check and I used the “remote farm in Lincolnshire” line as I always do. Ripple-dissolve thirty years on and Suzy Watson, Roscoe Smalls and Moody all had their dream with Mrs Nesbit saying the same thing – before the hectoring started in a voice that wasn’t mine.’
She stopped talking. I’d had exactly the same thing.
‘Did this high-level research project have a name?’
‘It was part of something called Dreamspace.’
Shamanic Bob had mentioned something by that name, but hadn’t gone into any detail.
‘What was Dreamspace meant to do?’
‘I’ve no idea, but the technician said I was going to be their first “Dream Avatar”, whatever that is. And that’s my lot. I’ll expect payment as soon as you have it.’
She stood up as Lloyd approached the table, thanked me for the coffee and moved back to her table.
The porter placed my scrambled eggs in front of me and then left. I tried the eggs. The low points were colour, taste and consistency, with warmth the only redeeming feature. True to Aurora’s demand, it was a double portion, which given the low quality of the food was not quite as good a deal as I’d hoped. But my mind, as usual, was on other matters. I reread the piece of paper Zsazsa had given me.
We know of a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs Buckley lives.
This was, I realised, the first piece of true evidence that there was a viral dream. But quite why it was featuring a line of dialogue from a decades-old sound test, I had no idea. I was still as much in the dark now as I was when I arrived – in fact, I was probably more confused.
‘Hey,’ came a voice close behind.
Jonesy
‘ . . . The temperature during a Welsh Winter fluctuated between a few degrees above zero and polar snaps that could freeze the mercury in the thermometers. The lowest temperature recorded in Wales was at Llandudno in 1976 – a marrow-freezing minus 78C . . . ’
– Handbook of Winterology, 4th edition, Hodder & Stoughton
Jonesy sat down opposite and sniffed the coffee pot gingerly.
‘By St Etienne,’ she said, pulling a face, ‘what they say about the Siddons coffee is true. Kip well?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘on the whole, yes, I think so.’
‘Good. What’s that you’re eating?’
‘It’s an indeterminate foodstuff masquerading as scrambled egg.’
Jonesy picked up a spoon and prodded the grey mass gingerly. It wobbled as though irritated by the intrusion. She pulled a face, but helped herself to a spoonful anyway.
‘I bumped into Aurora on the way over,’ she murmured.
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
‘Are you insane?’ she said. ‘Truly, I mean, out-of-your-head insane? Toccata’s going to have your tongue out.’
‘We didn’t,’ I said.
‘Then why did she tell me you did?’
‘She’s using it to annoy the Chief.’
Jonesy stared at me for a while, unsure if I was telling the truth or not.
‘Let’s get to work,’ she said finally, ‘and look, I don’t care one way or the other if the big A is using you to scratch an itch, but think very carefully of actions, Wonky. They have a dismaying tendency to be followed by consequences, and sometimes quite bad ones.’
I followed her out of the Winterlounge and, once booted and suited, we stepped outside and walked to her Sno-Trac. The temperature had fallen since the previous evening and the air was as crisp as a wafer. There was barely a breath of wind, the sky was a deep azure and ice crystals on the snow glistened like diamonds in the sunshine.
‘I thought there was a storm coming in,’ I said.
‘There is. Six hours from now you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face.’
I started the Sno-Trac and drove off in the direction of the Consulate.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ said Jonesy. ‘How many people did you tell about Lucky Ned?’
My heart sank.
‘I might have ... mentioned something to Lloyd.’
‘Here’s some advice: if you’ve got a secret that you want everyone to know about, confide in a porter. There are just over seventy porters in the sector looking after nearly two hundred Dormitoria, who are now so familiar with Bonanza, Dynasty and Crossroads that they act them out in their spare time for fun. When they’re not doing that, they’re on the Open Network, gossiping, and last night you were the hot topic. Half think that you’re an idiot to kill Ned, as retribution will surely rain upon all our heads, a little under half think that you did the right thing but were out of your tiny stupid mind, and of the remainder, three people couldn’t give a toss so long as Gaer Brills comes last in The Great Albion Sleep Off – and one was convinced that the Gronk has returned to feed on the shame of the unworthy.’
‘Was the last one Jim Treacle?’
‘Good try. No. It was Laura. How can one Novice get into so much trouble so quickly? When I began in the mobile infantry nothing exciting happened to me for weeks.’
‘Then what?’
‘I lost sixty soldiers under my command.’
‘Your fault?’ I asked.
‘No, but they were all my responsibility, so it amounts to the same thing.’
She fell silent and wiped off some condensation that had formed on the interior of her window.
‘Aurora was asking me w
here Glitzy Tiara and Eddie Tangiers ended up,’ I said. ‘She said she checked the night pit and they weren’t there.’
Jonesy stared at me.
‘They’re in the snow at the back of the car park. I couldn’t be arsed to walk them to the night pit. What does she think I did with them?’
‘She’s of the opinion that you and the Chief are running some sort of farming scam that used to include Logan.’
‘I’m glad you brought that to me,’ she said, after staring at me in silence for a while, ‘and in return, here’s something that might interest you.’
She dug a sheet of notepaper out of her top pocket and passed it across. I read it briefly while driving along. On the paper were six names, but the only one I recognised was Charles Webster.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘I was bored and in the records office. It turns out that Webster wasn’t the only employee from HiberTech who went missing at that time – every single name on that list ended up either redeployed or vanished. And get this: all had been working at the Sleep Sciences Division. Interesting?’
‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘What’s your explanation?’
‘Not sure. A purge, perhaps – they suspected someone of industrial espionage but didn’t know who it was, so went through the lot. I’ll bet good money Hooke was involved.’
‘Why?’
‘You heard Hooke was chucked out of the intelligence services for overenthusiastic interrogation?’
I nodded.
‘The story goes that he spearheaded the military wing of HiberTech’s Dreamspace-Derived Information Extraction Technique. Quite effective, apparently, going in to people’s dreaming minds to extract intel, but with a downside: the subjects were rendered little better than nightwalkers by the process.’
‘And you think he did this to Webster and the others?’
‘HiberTech are not a pleasant company, Wonky. If they’re employing people like Hooke, trebly unpleasant. You were interested in Webster, so I thought you should know.’
I thanked her and we drove past the Ashbrook advertising hoarding and then the Cambrensis. Jonesy’s story would make a lot of sense if my dreams were real: HiberTech didn’t know who Don Hector gave the cylinder to, so they interrogated everyone they suspected. I shivered, and pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind. Dream then reality; not the other way round.
I parked the Sno-Trac next to the statue of Howell Harris and Jonesy told me to keep the engine running.
‘You’re to go on patrol with Fod,’ said Jonesy. ‘Wait here.’
She climbed out the back of the Sno-Trac and went to have a word with Fodder, who was standing outside the Consulate. While I waited I fiddled with all the controls on the dashboard. The main headlamps, H4S radar, hydraulic snowplough. Most of my Sno-Trac time was on simulators, but it wasn’t as if driving a Trac was hard – the controls were identical to those of every other road vehicle, from car to tank to coach to lorry to the biggest dumper truck. SkillZero protocols insisted upon it. ‘Drive one, drive all’ was the slogan.
‘Don’t like these things,’ said Fodder as he climbed aboard, chucking a large black holdall on the seats behind, ‘but we’ve got some distance to cover.’
His eye was badly bloodshot from the thump the previous day, but otherwise he seemed in good spirits.
‘What’s in the bag?’ I said.
‘A surprise.’
‘I like surprises.’
‘I’d hold off judgement in this particular case.’
We moved off with a low rumble from the engine and a shudder from the transmission.
‘Take it out of town past the jammed truck,’ he said, ‘but be careful.’
I did as he requested and we edged slowly across the bridge.
‘Before you ask,’ I said, ‘nothing happened between me and Aurora. She’s just causing trouble.’
‘Whether you did or didn’t,’ he said, ‘it’d still be a good idea to stay out of Toccata’s hair until this afternoon. She’s pretty grouchy in the first hour after coming on shift. We’ll take the road west out of town; the Frances Hoggan hasn’t checked in for the past three weeks, so we need to take a look.’
The Frances Hoggan, I learned, was the sole Dormitorium in a village to the west of here, and as we headed over, the Sno-Trac making easy work of the deep snow, Fodder explained procedure: all Dormitoria were required to call the Consulate on a designated day.
‘The Hoggan hasn’t checked in for the past three Wednesdays,’ he said, ‘so Winter Best Practice demands that we have a look.’
I followed Fodder’s directions while he described points of interest, of which there were many but all covered in snow, so it was mainly an exercise in imagining what was beneath the large drifts.
The day was quite beautiful, and the trip out to the Hoggan a break from Birgitta and the dream, both of which were dominating my thoughts. Fodder tired of being a tour guide after a half-hour or so and we fell to chatting about the Summer, of which my memory was as fresh as his was hazy. I told him about the warmth, and the breeze, and the harvest, and the freshness of the food. He said that this was the bit he missed the most.
‘I haven’t seen a banana for over six years,’ he said almost dreamily, ‘and I’d give my left foot for a fresh pineapple.’
No one who got cold and dirty in the Winter was ever truly welcome in the Summer. The citizenry didn’t know or care what the Consuls did during the cold to keep them safe, they just wanted to wake alive in the Spring, same as always. For many people, the Winter didn’t really exist except in an abstract sort of way, and by consequence, neither did we.
‘You and Jonesy serve together?’ I asked, recalling that she’d said that she and he ‘went back a ways’.
‘Camp Firebrand,’ said Fodder, ‘second Ottoman campaign.’
‘I heard it was seriously hot out there.’
‘Our real enemy was adequate hydration. We lost more soldiers to desiccation than to enemy action. Bodies out in the sun reduced to less than one per cent moisture in forty-eight hours. You could snap off a Souther’s ear and grind it to dust in your fingers. Jonesy’s lost more comrades than you and I have had hot dinners. It’s what makes her a good Consul, especially out here – not afraid to die, and may even welcome it.’
I slowed down as we entered the village, although to the untrained eye it was simply a series of large, snow-covered lumps. Unlike Talgarth, Llangorse was a ‘sleeper’ town where no one ventured out, and the only overwinterers were the porters.
‘Go through the town and you’ll see the Hoggan. It’s on the lake.’
I followed Fodder’s directions and we were soon within sight of a circular tower sitting upon a small island within the smooth unbroken white of the frozen water. From the outside little looked remiss. The doorway was snowed in, and the thermal exhaust ports that ran in a ring beneath the top floor were clear of ice and snow, so from here all looked okay. I mentioned this to Fodder but he simply nodded.
‘Pull over anywhere in the car park, then shut down.’
I did as he asked, and he grabbed the holdall on the way out. I followed him and we walked to the front of the Sno-Trac, the sun warming our faces. There was now a slight breeze, but little else to suggest the impending storm.
‘Give me your Bambi, Wonk.’
‘Why?’
‘Do you trust me?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then give me your Bambi.’
I handed it over, not understanding, but then saw the movement of someone in the spinney. There was another person to the right of us, then a third by one of the snow-covered cars. They were dressed in the much-mended patchwork clothes typical of womads, scavengers or cold-hermits – but they weren’t any of these: they were Villains.
And not any Villains. This was the family of the Earl of
Farnesworth.
The Farnesworths
‘ . . . Pulse weapons come in many sizes. From the Plinker used to stun rats and squirrels to the hand-held Bambis and Bumpers, the two-handed Thumper, Stubby, Cowpuncher and Big Bopper, then up to the shoulder-mounted Schtumperschreck. Various-sized Airwitzers are chassis-based, the TerraNewton Highrollers mounted on railway flatbeds . . . ’
– Handbook of Winterology, 1st edition, Hodder & Stoughton
‘What the—?’ I asked, and Fodder looked down at me with his empty dark eyes. My heart fell. There were no issues at the Frances Hoggan. We were out here for one reason and one reason only: to make amends for the loss of Lucky Ned Farnesworth and to try to broker a peace. And there was one big bargaining chip in all of this: me.
‘You shouldn’t have told Lloyd,’ said Fodder as the Villains approached. ‘News like that travels across the Sector like wildfire.’
‘Frightfully sporting of you to drop by,’ said the eldest of the Villains, a middle-aged woman with a wind-blown complexion who wore a faded twinset and pearls on the outside of her parka, ‘although I have to confess I thought you’d pass up on the invitation.’
‘And miss the finest cakes Mid-Wales has to offer?’ replied Fodder in perfect English. ‘Not a chance.’
There were eight of them, and they formed a wary half-circle about fifteen feet away. Half were armed with Thumpers, the other half with the short stabbing spear favoured by those who wish to leave no barometric fingerprint. Two were carrying cumbersome knapsacks, and one seemed to have some furniture on his back, secured by what looked like silk curtain-ties. The son we had seen the day before was there, his eyes badly bloodshot. They all looked in far worse health than the Winter alone might suggest. Fodder was taller by at least a foot, and more powerfully built than all of them put together.
‘His Lordship and his son broke the truce, ma’am,’ said Fodder, ‘and we retaliated in self-defence.’
Early Riser Page 31
