Praise for Europe in Autumn
‘The author’s authoritative prose, intimate knowledge of eastern Europe, and his fusion of Kafka with Len Deighton, combine to create a spellbinding novel of intrigue and paranoia.’
The Guardian
‘This awesome concoction of sci-fi and spies—picture John le Carré meets Christopher Priest—is an early favourite of the year for me.’
Tor.com
‘The map of Europe has been redrawn, and its cartographers remain at work... the continent now exists as a patchwork of small nations and polities... for all that people want to carve out their own discrete realms, perhaps the greatest gift in Dave Hutchinson’s future Europe is the ability to cross borders.’
Strange Horizons
‘Thundering through endless crosses and double-crosses, Europe in Autumn is pretty much unlike anything else I have ever read.’
Upcoming4me
‘Put simply, Europe in Autumn is an astounding piece of fiction.’
SFBook Review
‘My best reads from the past year... [include] Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson, set in a future Europe fragmented into mini-states.’
Derek Shearer, Huffington Post
First published 2015 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-84997-921-4
Copyright © 2015 Dave Hutchinson
Cover art by Clint Langley
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
For Bogna
1
ON CHILL MISTY mornings, I liked to walk down to the river and fish for a while. I never caught anything, but that didn’t matter, particularly. It was relaxing just to stand on the bank and cast and watch the bright orange tip of my float drift downstream. Arblaster, my Residence’s Porter, provided me with sandwiches and a Thermos, and I could quite happily stay there all day. Sometimes I could almost forget about the other things I should have been doing.
One day the hook snagged on something huge and sluggish. I fought it up from the bed of the river, thinking about dead logs and old bicycles. There was said to be a huge pike on this stretch of the river, almost a century old and well over six feet long, but this wasn’t him. What bobbed to the surface instead was one of the Escaped, bloated up with rot, its thick coat stretched tight across the shoulders and punctured by six ragged holes.
I had that part of the river dragged, and three more bodies came to the surface, all of them similarly swollen, all of them similarly holed.
“There’s supposed to be some big old fucking pike around here somewhere,” John Holden told me as we watched his team casting the drag into the river again.
I nodded. “I heard that.”
“I bet we scared that old sod away today.”
“If he’s got any sense he’s gone somewhere else.”
I heard his waders make a sucking sound in the mud below the riverbank. “There’s fuck all to eat around here, that’s true enough. I don’t know why you bother fishing here.”
“It helps me think.”
John sucked on his pipe and watched his team scrambling around on their flatboat. The drag, mounted at the stern, consisted of a steam-driven winch from which dangled a long chain. At the end of the chain was an old brass bedstead with huge blunt hooks brazed to it. John and I had been standing here on the bank watching the operation for three hours, and in that time two of his students had fallen into the river and one of them had had to be taken off duty because the things that came up on the drag kept making him sick.
“Silly sods,” John said, shaking his head, and I didn’t know if he meant the students or the bodies we were bringing up out of the weeds.
“They might have made it,” I said, deciding to be charitable towards the boys and girls on the boat. “It was always worth a try.”
John shook his head. He took his pipe out of his mouth and gestured with it across the river. “Even the kiddies knew not to try a blitz here.”
A long time ago, someone had dubbed this part of the river Runway Four, a virtual highway of failed escape attempts even before I was born. The river was broad and slow here, easily swimmable. The meadows on the other side, prettily hidden beneath drifting horizontal panes of mist, were full of boobytraps that we still hadn’t got around to clearing. Thirty or forty miles beyond them was the Abbotsbury Forest, of which there may or may not have been maps somewhere in the Apocrypha, and which was similarly boobytrapped. And beyond them were the Mountains. From my office in the Administration Building I could sometimes see, if the weather was right and the air was particularly still, snow on high peaks. Only a lunatic would have tried Runway Four. And the files I had inherited from my predecessor recorded that we had produced plenty of lunatics. More than seventy people had lost their lives here, or in the meadows, or in the forest, in the past two decades. Nobody had made it as far as the Mountains.
“I don’t understand why they kept trying,” I said.
John looked up at me. “What do you mean you don’t understand?”
Well exactly. I put in a request to the Apocrypha, and to my surprise within a month a slim extract file landed on my desk. Bound in a buff folder with a red Restricted stripe across one corner, it detailed the exploits of one ‘Escape Group 9’, who had decided to use the chaos of the Fall to cover their blitz.
It was a sad read. You had to take the Apocrypha with a pinch of salt, but if the file was even remotely accurate Escape Group 9 might have been our very last attempted escapees. If they had waited a few more weeks they might not have bothered, but I remembered those weeks and I couldn’t blame them for trying.
I put the folder away, thinking it would make a sad little footnote to our collective History, but at the next Board meeting Chris Davenport said, “If this was Escape Group 9, what happened to the other eight?”
Everybody looked at me, and I responded by groaning and leaning forward until my forehead touched the tabletop.
“You’re supposed to think about this kind of thing,” Rossiter told me mildly.
“Yes,” I said, sitting up and making a note. “Yes, I’m sorry.”
“Because the other eight might have made it,” Chris went on, not caring that he was further complicating my life, which was already complicated enough.
I made another note. “I’ll have the river dragged again.”
“I mean,” said Chris, “why call yourself Escape Group 9 if there haven’t already been eight of them?”
I looked around the table. Everyone was looking at me. “Why not?” I tried weakly.
Everyone started to talk at once, but Rossiter raised a hand for silence. When everyone had quieted down, he looked at me.
“All we’ve got is a reference,” I said. “It’s from an unattributed Residence History; we don’t know where it came from and we don’t have names.”
Rossiter caught on to what I was talking about, and he said, “No.”
I put down my pencil and clasped my hands on the table in front of me. “I can’t spare anyone, Richard, and I can’t do it myself. I’m busy.”
“We’re all busy,” he told me. “I’ve a stack of memos from Harry Pool wanting people to go out and deal with the flu thing on the South Side.”
“I’ll do it when I have t
ime,” I promised.
“This is the sort of loose end that causes all kinds of trouble,” he said, looking at me over the top of his spectacles.
“Yes, sir.”
“And stop calling me ‘sir.’”
I DIDN’T HAVE time to worry about Escape Group 9. There was always too much to do, and every time I made anything more than tangential contact with my in-tray it seemed that there was more work waiting for me. I put in another request for the Apocrypha to be checked for anything and everything that might give us a clue to the names of EG9’s personnel, but nothing came up. A month or so after my ill-fated fishing expedition, it started to look as if EG9’s security had been better than most. Which made it all the more a shame that they hadn’t managed a home run.
It was around that time that I went back to the river. The first morning, watching the float bob gently on the surface, a rhythmic splash-splash from upstream announced the appearance of a young woman single-mindedly paddling a canoe. I sat where I was and the canoe shot past me and ran my float down.
The canoe splashed away downstream and out of sight round a curve in the river, and I was left to reel in. At the end of the line was nothing but an end of line, curling like a pubic hair. Hook, float, shot and about a foot of leader had been torn clean off.
While I was packing to go, the splash-splash came back. She paddled in to the bank and grabbed at a protruding root to stop herself floating away.
“Hey.”
“Hey what,” I said.
She gave a little jerk of the chin towards my fishing gear. “Catch anything?”
“Not a thing, no.”
She looked about her, at the river, at the bushes along the banks. “Ever catch anything?”
“Not a thing, no.”
She wrinkled her nose at me in a fashion I found rather attractive. “Not much of a fisherman, are you.”
I did up the buckles of my fishing bag and slung it over my shoulder. “There is a school of thought,” I told her, picking up my fishing rod, “which teaches that fish are actually more intelligent than people, but, having only short-term memories, keep forgetting how bright they are. The task of the angler is, therefore, to judge when the fish are at their stupidest and most easily caught.”
I’ll give her her due; she thought about it. “But that’s bollocks!” she said.
“There are also no fish in this part of the river. It helps me to think,” I added, in case she thought I was crazy. “Where were you going?”
“I’m looking for a job.”
“What do you do?”
“I teach Literature. Is there a post here?”
I laid my rod aside. “What’s your name?”
“Araminta Delahunty. What’s yours?”
“Rupert of Hentzau.” I’d been reading too much Anthony Hope in the recent past. I reached a hand down to help her from the canoe. “I’m sure we can find some space for you somewhere.”
I LEARNED TO regret my choice of introduction. She cracked seemingly inexhaustible jokes about The Prisoner Of Zenda. She refused to use my real name, preferring to call me ‘Rupe’ instead. She taught with a passion and ferocity which unnerved and entranced her students by turns. She wouldn’t sleep with me, but persisted in wandering naked about my rooms, and saw nothing out of the ordinary in coming into the bathroom and engaging me in conversation while I was on the toilet.
She said she had canoed almost a hundred miles from School 902, on the East Side, and she had something of the long vowels of the Eastern accent in her voice. She was always full of questions. She wanted to know how the Fall had taken place on this part of the Campus, what last Winter had been like, how the Residence records were organised. She had a terrible sense of direction – “The only way I got out of that fucking place was on the river, Rupe,” she told me one day. “You can’t get lost on a river.” – and gathered maps in bewildering numbers. “Just getting my bearings,” she called it.
From the East, she brought four changes of clothing and a locked metal briefcase. She read voraciously, putting in four and five hours in the Library after a full day of classes. She meditated in the mornings, and in the evenings she practiced a form of dance called something like ‘capybara,’ which she claimed was also a species of unarmed combat.
Meanwhile, the small sad mystery of Escape Group 9 was beginning to eat up an appreciable amount of my time. The fact that we still didn’t know the identities of the four bodies brought up from the river was an irritation, true, but the Fall had left us with hundreds of unidentified and often unidentifiable corpses, and I felt that I could live, if unwillingly, with the idea of four more. There has to come a point where you stop obsessing about the dead.
“THEY MADE THEIR run four days before the Fall,” I told the Board.
“Poor buggers,” said someone.
Rossiter looked at me for a few moments. “And?”
I checked my notes and shrugged. “And.”
“That’s it? After two months?”
“It’s all I could get out of the Apocrypha,” I told him, and we engaged in a brief staring contest, which I lost.
Joe Richardson said, “If Escape Group 9 wasn’t the first, and all the others were the same size, that’s thirty-six people. Thirty-two of whom are unaccounted for.”
“That’s if they were all the same size,” Ian Daniel put in, always eager to jump on a bandwagon. “Maybe we haven’t found all the bodies from Group 9 yet.”
“I had the river dragged again, and we didn’t find any more bodies,” I said. “Don’t you lads read my reports?”
“Gentlemen,” Rossiter warned.
“This is getting ridiculous,” I told him. “I haven’t got the time to spare for this. I’m still helping to prepare the case against the Arts Faculty.”
“I’d judge this is pertinent to your work then,” said Rossiter. “Runway Four was Arts Faculty territory.”
I sighed. It wasn’t going to go away, no matter how hard I tried. “All right, I’ll look into it. But I’ll need some help. The Librarians won’t wear this one, you know what they’re like. I’m understaffed, and what staff I do have are overstretched. I can’t plough through the whole of the fucking Apocrypha on my own.”
Rossiter nodded. “All right, you get your way. I’ll see to it that you get a Research Assistant.”
“Several Research Assistants.” We stared at each other for several seconds, but I knew it was no use and finally I just took a file at random from the pile in front of me and waved it wearily at him to demonstrate my ever-increasing workload.
He nodded at the file. “This,” he said, “is exactly the same as that.”
I suddenly realised what I was waving. “It is not,” I told him. I’d read the file that morning, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before.
He ran the tip of his tongue between his top lip and his teeth. “It’s all atrocity,” he said crisply. He started to gather up his notes. “We need all our available people to help with the reconstruction over on the East Side.”
“The East Side can wait.”
He looked at me and shook his head. He tut-tutted. “Shame on you. And you living with your bit of Eastern totty.”
“She is not my totty,” I said, and there was a ripple of laughter round the table, which was what Rossiter had wanted. The atmosphere in the regular meetings had become noticeably strained in recent weeks. Nobody looked as if they were getting enough sleep. The phrase mass execution had come up more than once in relation to the Old Board. We were all finding Democracy more difficult than we’d imagined.
Rossiter smiled. “I can’t spare you half a dozen people,” he said.
“Half a dozen wouldn’t have been enough anyway,” I muttered peevishly.
“You get aResearch Assistant,” he said firmly. “Now. Drugs.”
I looked around the room. It was small and musty and smelled of cabbage, but from here the Old Board had ruled us for more than two hundred years. I tried to come here
as little as possible, for any number of reasons. “Doesn’t anyone else here do anything?”
“You wanted the exciting job,” said Ian.
“I did not want the exciting job,” I told him. “I inherited the exciting job. And it’s not that fucking exciting.”
Rossiter took off his spectacles and polished them on the hem of his cardigan. “Drugs,” he said again.
“Some of the reconstruction gangs have been caught using pep pills,” I said. “Harry Pool says they’re not standard issue.”
“Science City,” Rossiter said, and there was an almost-comical moment when the other members of the Board tried to look busy with their notes in case they got drawn into the conversation and wound up having to do something about it.
“There’s nothing to link them to the Science Faculty, but I’m going to see Callum about it,” I told him.
“I wish you all the luck in the world with that,” he said.
“If anyone has a better suggestion, I’m listening,” I said, but no one did.
“I CAN’T REALLY see the problem,” Araminta said, picking a rag of wilted lettuce from the middle of her ham salad roll and dropping it delicately into the ashtray in the middle of the table. The slice of ham underneath was almost transparent, the roll of very poor quality. “You told me yourself that the Faculty registers are full of missing people. Your thirty-six missing escapers will be in there somewhere.”
I shook my head. “The registers aren’t complete. People got into some of the Faculty offices during the Fall and made bonfires with any documentation they could get their hands on. We did our best to stop it, but we couldn’t be everywhere.” I took a sip of my beer and winced. Unlike food in general, the Administration pub’s beer was cheap and plentiful. It was also virtually undrinkable, and even if you could stomach it, it was impossible to get drunk on.
Europe at Midnight Page 1