Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Until we have something better to deal with this kind of thing, no.”

  We stared at each other for a while. Finally, he said, “I’ll make my own inquiries.”

  “And you’ll report back to me.”

  “And I’ll report back to you. By the end of the week.”

  “I want this thing shut down,” I told him. “No more whisky, no more drugs. If you can’t do it yourself, I’ll do it for you. I have plenty of time on my hands.”

  He laughed, but it sounded forced. “All right,” he said.

  “And the Faculty records, Callum.”

  “I’ll make sure you get them,” he said. His smile returned. “You know, you could have done all this by letter.”

  “I tried to do that,” I told him.

  He nodded. “Fair point. I apologise. Is there anything else I can do for you, while you’re here?”

  “You can give me that bottle of whisky you’ve got in your office.”

  It was worth a try, but Callum was too good. We looked at each other for a few moments, then he chuckled, and after a moment I chuckled too. He said, “I have half a bottle of single malt that my predecessor left behind. I was keeping it for a special occasion, but you’re welcome to take it with you.”

  “Thanks,” I told him. “But I need to keep a clear head.”

  He stood up. “So, are we friends again?”

  We had never been friends to start with, but it wasn’t worth quibbling about. “Just get those files to me, Callum. And sort out this whisky thing.”

  He nodded. “Right at the top of my to-do list. Trust me.”

  He walked me back down to the foyer. The glass staircase was even more nerve-wracking going down than going up, but I thought I managed to hide my discomfort. I nodded pleasantly to Claire as we went by, but she had her head buried in her appointment book and seemed not to notice. Half past four. Subject leaves.

  Outside, Callum looked at my bicycle. “I wish you wouldn’t chain it to this,” he said, nodding at the sculpture. “We have bicycle racks, you know.”

  The nearest bicycle rack was almost a quarter of a mile away across a series of barren plazas. The walk across the ground floor of the Faculty was bad enough, without having to go any further. I said, “I’ll remember, next time.”

  “You’re always welcome, you know,” he told me. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  As lies went, it was one of the more transparent anyone had ever told me, but I smiled. “Thanks. I’ll take you up on that.”

  “You do that.”

  We shook hands, and I got on my bike and rode off into the windy wilderness of Science City.

  THE DAYS WERE still short at this time of year, and I had a long way to go. Late afternoon dusk was beginning to gather before I even reached the edge of Science City, and I switched on the little dynamo-driven lamp on the front of the bike, even though it hardly gave out any illumination at all.

  What I’d told Callum was true. The last thing we needed right now was some kind of alcohol and drugs gang operating out of Science City. Quite apart from the criminality it was bound to cause, I didn’t want the Scientists having any kind of leverage over the rest of us. On the face of it, the Science Faculty was blameless with regard to the Old Board – they wanted to remain autonomous no matter who was running things, and resented official interference of any kind – but I kept thinking of the thing I had seen in the morgue, the young woman who had been breathing water, and I realised there was no longer any way to tell who had been doing what.

  On one side of Science City there was a long, fairly steep hill running down to the River. I always went back that way because I could freewheel all the way down and then it was a long, but flat, ride out as far as University Avenue, after which it was downhill all the way home.

  I was freewheeling down the hill, thinking about women with gills and men with wings and wondering whether it was possible at all to give the Old Board a fair trial, and the next moment I was rolling along the road, the bike clattering to a halt somewhere ahead of me.

  I came to a stop and lay on my back, breathing hard. My chest hurt, and the back of my head, but I didn’t seem to be seriously injured, so I sat up and looked about me. I couldn’t see anything in the gloom.

  I got up and walked over to the bike. The handlebars were twisted round until they were parallel with the front wheel, which wasn’t so much of a problem. The problem was the rear wheel, which was bent entirely out of true.

  There was no way of fixing it. Not here, anyway. I picked it up and carried it over to the side of the road and dropped it in the long grass. Then I walked slowly back up the hill with my hands stretched out in front of me.

  About fifty feet further uphill, my palms encountered a rope strung taut across the road. I stood where I was for a little while, leaning against it, then I followed it off to one side until I found the tree it was tied to. I stood there thinking for quite a long time.

  Rope boobytraps were some of the least sophisticated, and oddly most-effective, antipersonnel devices in existence. They slowed down the advance of a group of people on bicycles, and if you were lucky you caught some of the unsuspecting vanguard and incapacitated or killed them outright. This one had been strung too low; it had caught me across the chest and bowled me off the bike rather than across the neck, killing me.

  No way to prove who had done it, of course, but it did cross my mind that Callum’s eager Students would know this was my favoured route home.

  I went back to the road and muttered one of Araminta’s favourite swearwords as I started to walk. There was a Residence on the way where I could borrow a bike, but this was still going to take me most of the night.

  “Cockwomble,” I said.

  3

  INCLUDING MYSELF, THE New Board’s Intelligence Faculty comprised thirty-three persons. The thirty-third and newest member of the team was a sulky, slightly bovine young Student in a pair of greasy overalls. She was waiting outside my office when I arrived one morning a couple of days after my meeting with Callum.

  “Lou,” she said by way of introduction. She didn’t bother to get up from her chair, so I didn’t bother to offer to shake hands, and that established our relationship more or less immediately. “Got a message from the Chancellor’s office. Said you wanted to talk to me.”

  Well, at least I couldn’t complain that Rossiter wasted his time. “Did the message say what I wanted?”

  She shook her head as if she neither knew nor cared.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  “Black,” she told me. “Three sugars.”

  I unlocked my office door. “Come on in.”

  We had planned for the Admin Building to fall intact, and that was more or less how it had happened, apart from some smoke damage and the odd bloodstain, so the members of the New Board had been able to pick and choose which offices they wanted to occupy. I hadn’t had that luxury. My less-than-esteemed predecessor had installed secure direct telephone lines, combination-lock cupboards, and safes in the walls, floor and ceiling. It was the office of the Professor Of Intelligence, and I had inherited it.

  I had also inherited the large cat-shaped stain on the floorboards where my predecessor had sat, in the last few minutes of the Fall, and blown his brains out after setting fire to all his files. We had managed to break down the door a minute or so after hearing the gunshot, and we had extinguished the fire without losing too many documents. The office still smelled faintly of burned paper, but I supposed it was preferable to the smell of old blood.

  The office was dark and wood-panelled and the ceiling was still stained from my predecessor’s abortive funeral pyre, but I had managed to add a homely touch by bringing in a kettle, a teapot and some cups. My Secretary and Rossiter’s Secretary could occasionally collaborate to let me have some scones if I was having an important meeting, but Lou was out of luck today.

  While she wandered about the office, sniffing at the faint smell of burning and trying to open
the filing cabinets, I switched on the kettle and searched for a couple of clean cups.

  “Do you think you’d do that?” she asked.

  I looked round. There was no need to ask what she meant; she was looking at the stain on the floor.

  “That’s a hard question to answer,” I said. “He was a professional.”

  She snorted, and rightly so; it was no kind of answer. I said, “He spent all his life working in Intelligence. He worked his way up from Student to Full Professor, and there he was watching the barbarians storming the gates. He saw it was hopeless and he killed himself.”

  “You still haven’t answered the question.”

  Indeed. And if Lou was going to have any kind of career on my staff, she was going to have to learn to bite her tongue. “I have no idea if I would have done what he did,” I told her. “I can’t imagine being in that position.”

  She sniffed. “Neither could he, probably.”

  I looked at her. Rossiter had dragged her away from some reconstruction project in the East, had her come here on some shitty overcrowded overnight train so that she could present herself to me first thing in the morning. She was tired and annoyed and she needed a bath, and I was about to ask her to take on what was at best a pointless task. But I had limits, particularly first thing in the morning. I glared at her, and bless her she glared right back.

  I asked, “How long have your family been Students?”

  She shrugged. “For ever.”

  “And now you’re a Research Assistant.”

  She made a peculiar noise with her mouth that I later discovered involved sucking at a hollow tooth. She did it when something failed to impress her, or when she wanted to annoy me, or occasionally both.

  For Lou, this was a promotion, a step up in the social order, and if she was at all excited by the new course of her life she was doing an excellent job of hiding it.

  I was completely at a loss. It had taken four generations for my family to rise from Student to Research Assistant. We had then made the dizzy jump to Doctor in less than eighteen years, and had been stuck there ever since, generation after generation, an amiably unambitious family. So I was a bit bemused that Lou seemed not to care about her sudden elevation in social status.

  On the other hand, in my predecessor’s day, this office carried with it the status of Full Professor, but one of the first things I had done on being landed with the job was turn down the title. I’d tried to explain it to Rossiter, but he refused to understand. Everyone called me ‘Professor’ anyway.

  I heard the kettle boil, and I sighed. “How many sugars did you say?”

  TO GET TO the Apocrypha, you had to pass through a locked and guarded door on the ground floor of the Admin Building, then go down several flights of stairs to an anteroom where there was another guard and locked door. The guards were my idea; a lot of people wanted to get into the Apocrypha. Many of them wanted to look for the files the Old Board had kept on them. Some of them wanted to set fire to it.

  The upper cellar level of the Admin Building was one huge room, bigger than a football pitch, and it contained thousands of floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets. It was here that successive Boards had indulged their bewildering passion for bureaucracy, storing at least one duplicate of every list, memo, directive and official piece of paper they produced. To this monstrous collection of memorabilia – mainly because there was no other logical place for it – the New Board had added unofficial Residence histories, details of plans and worksheets for reconstruction, its own bureaucratic product, rumours, half-truths and gossip. None of it was in any recognisable order; ever since the Fall a group of Librarians had been working down here to try and index what was in these cabinets, but nobody had been able to discover the secret of the Old Board’s filing system – if indeed they’d had one – and so far only a fraction of the Apocrypha had even been looked at.

  My newest recruit and I went through the door and down a set of stairs. A table had been set up at the bottom, and behind it sat another guard. I signed us through and we went out into the cellar.

  “Fucking hell,” she said when she saw the lines of filing cabinets marching away into the badly-lit distance.

  I looked at her. Lou and I had spent roughly thirty minutes in each other’s company, and so far she had managed to remind me at least once every five minutes about how low her enthusiasm for her new job was. She had also been rude about the tea.

  “Look,” I said with what I liked to think of as my Favourite Uncle tone of voice. “If I had my way there would be one person to each filing drawer, and we’d have what we want in a couple of days. But there may not be that many people on the Campus, and even if there were, the Chancellor wouldn’t let me have any of them. So here we are.”

  She shrugged and continued to look at the endless ranks of filing cabinets, an appalled expression on her face. “What did you say you were looking for?”

  One of the Librarians was walking towards us down the aisle. In the poor lighting she looked like someone walking across the bed of an ocean. I said, “Any mention of escape attempts in the last few days before the Fall. Any mention of the phrases ‘Escape Group 9’ or ‘Runway Four.’ Anything.”

  “Is that all?”

  The Librarian had almost reached us. She raised a hand and waved tiredly. I waved back. “That’s Doctor Glasgow,” I told Lou. “I’ve asked her to help you, but she’s very busy.”

  “She’s very busy,” Lou muttered.

  “Morning,” Anna said, stopping in front of us. “Is this the new body?”

  I said, “Anna Glasgow, Lou Collier. Lou Collier, Anna Glasgow.”

  Anna and Lou were roughly the same age, but the similarity ended right there. Anna was frail and willowy and her family had been Doctors when mine were still Students. She always looked exhausted, but she hadn’t missed a single day in the Apocrypha since we took the Admin Building. At one point, in the final few chaotic hours of the Fall, while I was upstairs listening to my predecessor shoot himself, she had armed herself with a rifle and stationed herself at the door to the cellar to keep out the vengeful hordes. She never had to use the gun, I think mainly because the vengeful hordes were embarrassed to find themselves harassing this young woman who looked as if she would snap in two if you used strong language in front her. She actually knew – and was more than happy to use – more strong language than they could command between them. But they didn’t know that.

  Introductions made, Lou wandered off along the stacks, shaking her head. When she was more or less out of earshot, Anna said to me, “You look terrible.”

  “I love you too.”

  “You poor thing.” She reached out and stroked my cheek. “They’re working you too hard.”

  I smiled. “You don’t exactly look well-rested yourself, Anna.”

  She hugged me close and we looked out into the heart of the bureaucratic monster that the Old Board had made of itself. “So much to do,” she murmured. “So many people to do it to.”

  “No news on EG9?”

  She shook her head. “We’ve found some stuff that might relate to Mass Grave 42, though. I had it sent to Harry Pool.”

  I nodded. I’d see it soon enough if Harry thought it was worth my attention. “Do you ever feel like giving up” I asked.

  She snuggled her head against my shoulder. “Only every day.”

  “The Revolution’s over, for fuck’s sake. We won. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  Anna straightened up and looked away into the realm she had inherited. “That’s their fault, not ours,” she said.

  “Do you think there’s anyone left alive who understands this place?”

  “This?” She waved a hand at all the paper-stuffed cabinets marching away endlessly into the dimness, the Old Board’s last army, its final line of defence. “You know what? I don’t think anyone ever did.”

  “MAPS?” ARAMINTA ASKED. She loved maps. The very mention of the subject was enough to get her undivided at
tention.

  “The theory is that somewhere in the Apocrypha there are maps of all the boobytraps,” I said. “Or at least some mention of where the maps are. Land mines, automatic guns, safe routes. Everything. A way out of here. That’s what the Librarians are looking for, really.”

  “I heard about this Glasgow bird,” she said. “You have a thing going with her or something?”

  “Once upon a time,” I admitted.

  “And she’s from a really old Family, right? Doctors from way back?”

  I nodded.

  “Wow,” she said, a word I had never heard until a couple of months ago but which was now a part of my own vocabulary. “And here am I just a humble Visiting Lecturer.”

  I looked at her, walking beside me. She was bundled up in a huge duck-down-stuffed jacket, several feet of multicoloured scarf wrapped around her neck, red knitted cap pulled down over her ears. “You look like an over-evolved jumble sale.”

  “That’s very funny,” she said. “I must write it down so I don’t forget it.”

  We were walking along the crest of the Downs towards the Arts Faculty. At the bottom of the hill the red slate roofs of the Medical Residences were just visible through drifting panes of mist. They were all still empty, despite the shortage of housing. Nobody wanted to live in them. Several buildings were burned out and missing their roofs; charred timbers peeked up out of the mist.

  A little less than a year ago, we had been planning Revolution, stockpiling weapons, coordinating action, collating intelligence reports. On a misty day not unlike this one, the Chancellor’s Autumn Term Speech had been booed by fifteen thousand students and Lecturers, and Security had turned water cannon, tear gas and finally rifle fire on the subsequent protest march.

  We had fought through a Winter so deep that I thought at one point we would have no choice but to capitulate and take the consequences; some of us might have survived, incarcerated but alive.