“So what now? You check this Apocrypha thing?”
I started to take another drink of beer, but thought better of it. “The problem with the Apocrypha is that every bit of official, semi-official and unofficial paper the Old Board ever collected is there, and nobody understands their filing system. All you can do is start at Filing Cabinet A and just read the stuff until you bump into what you’re looking for. We were lucky to find that one mention of Escape Group 9.”
“So it might take a while to track the rest of the operation down, right?”
“Right.”
She shrugged and drank some beer; the appalling taste didn’t seem to bother her.
I said, “Are things this bad over on the East Side? I haven’t been there in years.”
“Missing people, you mean?” Her eyes took on a dreamy, sad expression. “Everybody knows someone who disappeared.”
“You too?”
She focused back on my face and she smiled a sad little smile. “Me too.”
This wasn’t the right time or place to ask who, so I said, “It’s a bad do. We’ll be years clearing up the mess they left.”
“I think you take too much on yourself, Rupe, you know?”
“I get it given to me.”
All of a sudden, she broke into a huge smile. “Oh, Rupe, sometimes I could just hug you, you’re such a good soul.”
I actually felt myself start to blush. “I’ve been called a lot of things...”
She laughed. “I’m sure.” Then she suddenly turned serious. “Rupe, am I cramping your style?”
“What?” She was always using unfamiliar words and phrases and sentence constructions, East Side slang. Another few years of the Old Board and we would have been speaking different languages.
“Having me living with you,” she said. She grinned slyly. “Some of my students say you’re pretty popular with the girls.”
“Oh.” I suddenly caught up. “Oh, no. No.” Shaking my head vigorously.
“I hear you have a reputation,” she said, still grinning.
“A reputation, perhaps. But no time.” I was starting to blush again. “I haven’t had time for that for a long while.”
She half-stood, bent forward across the table, and kissed me on the top of my head. “Bless you, Rupe, you’re a sweet lad.”
“Thank you,” I said, hoping nobody I knew was in the pub.
“Anyway,” she said, sitting down again. “Escape Group 9.”
“Yes.” I’d almost forgotten about them. I had also, at some point in the last couple of minutes while my attention was elsewhere, managed to drink all my beer without noticing, which was probably for the best. I looked at the bits of grey scum in the bottom of my glass. “Well, the Board are right.”
She tipped her head to one side, a gesture I’d learned to interpret as Araminta-speak for a question which did not need to be asked. You just had to work out for yourself what the question was.
“All right. Look. Four people – room-mates perhaps – take it upon themselves to try a blitz. They have a plan. They keep it to themselves, keep security tight, trust each other and no one else. Nine groups, all working on the same plan, would need an organising committee, access to workshops, secure caches of food and clothing, a whole infrastructure aside and apart from the people who were going to make the actual escape attempts.” I waved a hand in the air. “Another two or three dozen people who wouldn’t be leaving. They should still be here, and we can’t find them, or any mention of them. Good grief, they should be going around boasting about it.”
“Maybe Groups 1 to 8 were the infrastructure,” she suggested. “Maybe the whole organisation just took itself out in groups of four.”
I’d thought of that already, but the idea still made me scowl. “You can’t maintain security in a group that large. It’s impossible. Four is the classic scenario.”
“So you compartmentalise the operation, break it up into groups of four –”
I was shaking my head. “I can’t convince myself that it would work. It’s just too damn big, Araminta. If the first eight Groups made it, that’s thirty-two home runs. The biggest mass-blitz in the Campus’s history. They must have had a blazing good gag to get that many people out.” Especially if they used Runway Four; that wouldn’t just have been a good gag, it would have been a miracle.
She tipped her head to the other side.
I sighed. “What Rossiter and the rest of the Board are so exercised about is what the first eight Escape Groups imply. They imply that somewhere out there is a runway capable of taking at least thirty-two people out of here. Do you understand?”
Araminta smiled.
“It’s been four months since the Fall, and we’re still clearing boobytraps and digging out rogue Security men who don’t want to believe it’s all over. We still haven’t got anyone near the Far Fences, and we probably won’t this year, not without losing people. And here we are with Escape Group 9 and their friends and their foolproof way of getting out.”
“You could still find thirty-two bodies somewhere out there in those woods on the other side of the river,” she pointed out.
I shook my head. Somehow, I knew. Thirty-two people had escaped from the Campus, and we needed to know how they had done it.
“The thing that really worries me,” I said, “is that we can’t be certain Group 9 was the last group.”
THE JOB WAS not exciting, and I had not wanted it; I was bright enough to know that it would turn out to be a poison chalice. But I had wound up coordinating intelligence during the Fall, and when it was all over I had carried on doing that, but on a larger scale. Most of the Board members didn’t have a very high opinion of my work. One of them had called me the worst Professor of Intelligence the Campus had ever had. I was good enough that his comment found its way back to me, though.
Part of the problem was that we just couldn’t trust the few members of the Intelligence Faculty who were left alive, so I’d had to rebuild it from scratch, mostly with people who immediately changed their minds when they discovered that intelligence work was less like a John Buchan novel and more like being a particularly nosy village postmaster.
I had also wound up in charge of Security, and again that had to be rebuilt from the ground up, purged root and branch of Old Board sympathisers. My one great success, although to be fair it only looked like a success to me, and then only on good days, was in setting up a force of Sergeants to enforce civil law.
The other part of the problem was the Old Board, and what they had done, and what we were going to do with them, and that was what really gave me the nightmares.
“WELL, YOU SHOULD have let me know you were coming,” said Harry. “I’d have had a reception ready. Cheese and wine. A band. Stuff like that.”
I dropped the file on one of the stainless steel dissecting tables. It made a slapping sound that echoed off the room’s white-tiled walls. I’d waved the file at Rossiter earlier in the afternoon, without knowing which one I had taken from the pile in front of me on the table; it was three centimetres thick and bound in red with a blue Top Secret stripe and the designation MG42 on the cover.
Harry leaned over to look at the file. “Oh,” he said. He nodded. “Ah.” He looked at me with an indescribably sad expression.
“I want you to tell me this is all just idle speculation,” I said, tapping the folder with a fingertip.
“This is all just idle speculation,” he said without missing a beat.
“Shit.” I turned and leaned back against the table.
“What else would you like me to tell you?” he inquired.
“That you’re wrong.”
He shook his head. “No can do, old son. Sorry.”
The Old Board had left us, like a coming-of-age present, fifty-seven mass graves for our delight and delectation. Thirty-two thousand bodies, in great pits scattered about the Campus. Some of them were very old, perhaps over a hundred years old. Most were very recent, the grass and weeds sti
ll not properly established on the earth covering them, traces of the Old Board trying to erase their past.
Mass Grave 42 was one of the smaller ones, in the grounds of the Hospital. It contained the complete bodies of fifty-one people and enough body parts to construct about thirty more. It had been so fresh that you could still see the spade-marks in the earth.
The Medical Faculty had been the last to fall. The Faculty Members had fought down to the last man. The last few survivors had barricaded themselves into the Hospital and then dynamited the building around themselves. The ruins had burned for days. When MG42 was found, I had thought it might contain the bodies of prisoners tortured at the Hospital. That would have been bad enough. But I was wrong. It was worse.
Harry ran a hand through his thinning hair. “It’s just so sad,” he said, nodding at the folder. He put his hands in the pockets of his white coat and turned away. “There were always rumours, but I never believed them. Which shows you how wrong a chap can be.”
The wall at the far end of the room was entirely composed of large metal squares. Each one had a chunky chrome pull-handle. Harry chose one at random and pulled it, swinging the door open. He reached inside and pulled the tray out on its runners. On the tray was a long cloth-covered object. Harry turned the cloth back; underneath was the naked body of a young woman with a shaved head. There were peculiar meaty-lipped slits down her sides, from just under the armpits to just above the hips. Her face was a mass of torn meat, and her body was puffed up and discoloured by decay and silvered with frost.
I leafed through the file. “Gills.”
“Female, approximately twenty-five years of age,” Harry said. “Hair shaved, hazel eyes. Height five feet six inches, weight eight stone seven ounces.” I glanced down at the file. He was quoting the autopsy report from memory. I wondered what his nightmares must be like. “Structures on either side of her body which on dissection proved to be rudimentary gills, surgically implanted roughly eighteen months before her death.” He looked at the girl’s ruined face for a moment longer, then covered her again. “Cause of death, a single pistol shot to the back of the head.” He pushed the tray back into the fridge, closed the door, and turned to look at me. “Her lungs were full of fluid, but there were none of the usual post-mortem signs of drowning; they must have had her breathing water for months.”
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“If you thought that, you wouldn’t be here,” he said. He went over to one of the benches against the far wall of the room and started to move some glassware about.
I leafed through the file again. “Richard refuses to believe this.”
“Well, I don’t blame him.” Harry turned to face me. In his hands were two beakers with half an inch or so of pale amber liquid in them. “Drink?”
I nodded, and he came over and handed me one of the beakers. I sipped at the liquid. It made me cough. “What on earth is this?”
“I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”
I put the beaker down on the table, next to the MG42 folder. “Harry, where did you get this stuff?”
“Somebody out in Science City makes it.”
The day was just going from bad to worse; every time I talked to someone my problems multiplied. On the other hand, the whisky wasn’t half bad.
Harry sipped his drink. “There was a chap with wings, did you read about that?” I nodded, and he shook his head at the thought of it. “Never seen anything like it. I can’t believe he could ever have got off the ground, but you should see him. Breastbone like the keel of a boat to anchor the flight muscles. Pectorals like steel cables. And it wasn’t surgical implantation, either, like that poor girl. He was born that way. His bones were hollow. How did they do that?” He shook his head again. “There were others...” He shrugged. “I can’t even begin to guess what they were trying to do with them. I’ve got Anna Glasgow doing a priority search for the Faculty’s notes.”
“I wouldn’t mind having some of that priority search time for my own stuff, Harry.”
“This is really important,” he told me. “We need those notes. I don’t know what the Medical Faculty thought it was up to, but if these poor boys and girls are anything to judge by, it was something really fundamental.”
“Something that materially advances our situation?”
He looked at me. “I don’t blame you for being bitter,” he said. “But there’s more to life than politics.”
“You might mention that to the Board.”
He snorted. “I’ve been thinking of using it as a letterhead. Refill?”
“I haven’t finished this one yet.”
“Ah.” He went back to the workbench and poured himself another drink from a two-litre specimen jar.
“I didn’t put it in my report,” he said, coming back to the table, “but the way I see it is that they were trying to destroy the evidence. The bodies on the top layer had been doused with acid, but the ones on the bottom were more or less undamaged. You remember how the Hospital chimney was pouring smoke during the Fall? I reckon a lot of bodies were just piled into the incinerator, and when they overran its capacity they had to dig this big grave. Christ only knows what went up in smoke.” He looked at me. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“You look a bit pale.”
“It’s the smell.”
“Yes, well, we keep losing power, and the freezers... well.” He gave a nervous little laugh. “I’d tell you that you stop noticing the smell after a while, but you don’t.”
“I’ll try and get someone to take care of it.”
He took another drink. “It’s good of you, but I know you have too much to do already.”
“I’ll try to sort something out. Who else knows about this?”
“The autopsies? Just me and the boys and girls.”
‘The boys and girls’ were five medical students who had volunteered to help Harry. They had all been carefully vetted, but they still existed under an almost-tangible stigma, and they lived in a fortified Residence with armed guards. The Medical Faculty had had an appalling and well-deserved reputation and more enemies than anyone could count.
“They wouldn’t have told anyone else, would they?” I asked.
“I told them not to say anything.”
“And you trust them.”
Harry drained his beaker. “No, I don’t. But they all think they’re living under a stay of execution, so I think they’ll probably do whatever I tell them. What are you so worried about?”
I picked up the MG42 folder and tucked it under my arm. “If this gets out, there’ll be a pogrom. We’ll have members of the Old Board dragged out of custody and hanged from lamp standards.”
He put the beaker down on the dissection table. “That’s what’s going to happen anyway, isn’t it?”
I almost started to tell him that it was important to have everything done legally. A fair trial, witnesses for prosecution and defence, the accused having their day in court. But I knew he didn’t want to hear about that. Behind his spectacles, Harry’s eyes were bloodshot, and his face was grey with exhaustion. He was doing a job nobody else had wanted to do, and the New Board had worked him almost to death at it.
“People are starting to get ill,” he told me. “No one’s eating properly. You’re not; I can tell just by looking at you. There’s a flu outbreak down by 223.”
“Richard mentioned it.”
“Yes, well Richard won’t give me staff to go there and try to do something about it. There’s real malnutrition down there; people are going to die.”
“I’ll have to investigate this, you realise,” I said, nodding at my beaker.
“I think, compared to some of the things I’ve seen in this room, that this is pretty small beer,” he said. “Excuse the pun.”
“We can’t afford to be sloppy,” I told him.
He gave a forced little smile. “Well, that sounds familiar.”
If anyone else had compared me to the Ol
d Board like that, I would have thumped them, or at the very least favoured them with some very harsh language. But of all of us, Harry had been brought face to face in the most basic way with the madness the Old Board had embraced, and some of it defied rational explanation.
I said, “It’s going to be all right, Harry.”
He snorted. “It’s never going to be all right.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I said again. “You wait and see.” He was right about one thing, though. The Old Board were going to get a fair trial. And then we were going to hang every single one of them.
2
IN THE OLD days, when I was still a humble Doctor Of Literature, I used to wake up the moment my alarm clock started to ring. I used to open my eyes and feel clear-headed and ready for the day, regardless of how much I had had to drink the night before.
Those days were gone. Nowadays I frequently slept through the alarm, and woke headachy and gummy-mouthed and feeling as if I had been beaten up. And it was much worse if I had been drinking.
I couldn’t understand it; I wasn’t that much older. My own private theory was that Freedom had effected some kind of chemical change on my body. When I mentioned this to Araminta, she went into paroxysms of laughter and then gave me a good solid hug of condolence.
“Good lord, Rupe,” she said. “It comes to us all.”
“I hadn’t expected it to come so soon,” I muttered.
Opening my eyes in the morning, these days, was not the most unpleasant experience of my life, but it was slowly creeping up the list. Particularly on Spring mornings when the building’s heating system had packed up during the night.
I lay where I was, huddled under the blankets, staring up at the ceiling while I took stock of the aches and pains. I could hear Araminta crashing about in the kitchen, snorting and sneezing and swearing, which was her own personal morning ritual.
Europe at Midnight Page 2