Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  “The –? Yes, of course. If you say so.” He added to Araminta, “It’s not very pretty.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t imagine it is.”

  We went over to the wall of cabinet doors. Harry opened one and slid out the tray inside. He looked at us for a moment, then turned down the sheet covering the body underneath.

  “Fuck me,” said Araminta.

  The man with wings was actually a boy. He didn’t look much more than twelve. He lay on his side because the great white-feathered wings on his back would have made it impossible to lie flat. His arms and legs were stick-thin and overlong, and there were three closely-grouped bullet-holes in the great bulging prow of his chest.

  “Oh, you poor bastard,” Araminta murmured, leaning down close to the body to examine the roots of the wings. She stroked the feathers gently. “But I bet you looked fantastic in the air, didn’t you.”

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked.

  “No, but I know what it is.” She looked at Harry. “No signs of surgery?”

  He shook his head.

  “My best guess is that this is genetic engineering,” she said to me. “Someone custom-built this poor boy before he was even born. We don’t have anything like this. We have rules against it.”

  Harry was looking from her to me and back again. “Could someone explain what you’re talking about, please?” he said.

  “Tell him,” I said to her. “Tell him about the flu.”

  It was obvious that Harry was rapidly approaching the point where he would be unable to cope with any more of this madness. He said, “What about the flu?”

  Araminta looked sadly at me. She said to Harry, “A few years ago there was a flu epidemic in my... world. Tens of millions of people died, but Europe was hit hardest. There were rumours that the virus wasn’t natural, that it was deliberately engineered.”

  Harry looked at her, at me, back at her. “Are you trying to tell me,” he said carefully, “that it was made here?”

  She rubbed her eyes and looked at the boy on the tray. “This all starts with my brother,” she said.

  “RAFE’S THE SMART one in the family,” she told us. “Double First at Oxford, good job with a biotech startup.”

  “In English, please,” I said gently.

  She smiled. She looked worn out and she kept glancing across the room to the wall of freezers. “He’s very clever. Let’s leave it at that. A year ago, he disappeared. Just vanished. The police couldn’t find him, the private investigator we hired couldn’t find him. We put out appeals on the tele – we put out appeals. But he was gone. No note, no clue, no nothing.

  “About eight months ago his girlfriend got in touch with my parents. She’d been going through some stuff Rafe had left at her flat and she found a hard dr –” She stopped and looked at me. “It’s not easy telling you this stuff; half of it, you haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about.”

  “You’re doing all right,” I told her. “I’m getting the gist.”

  “Emily found this folder,” she said. “Tucked away under the flap at the bottom of a cardboard box full of bits and pieces. The folder was full of documents. Rafe had met these people in London and they’d told him about this place and Ernshire. There were photographs of maps, drawings of paths into here and Ernshire from England,” she went on. “There’s an old abandoned railway line out of Paddington that leads to Stanhurst. Here, you can get in and out on the River.”

  I said, “And you think your brother is here.”

  “Or in Ernshire. I had to start somewhere.”

  Harry came back with our drinks, and he and I exchanged glances. He said to her, “If he went missing a year ago, you’d better hope he didn’t come here.”

  Araminta looked at us. “Rafe works with viruses,” she said.

  Harry sat down and nodded at the mobile phone on his desktop. “May I look at that again, please?”

  She got up and took the little device over to him, showed him how to make the front light up and where to touch it. A few moments later, the phone on the desk in front of him started to ring. Harry looked at it, then at the mobile phone, then at his desk phone. He sucked his teeth and looked at me.

  “I believe her,” he said.

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  He waved the mobile phone at me. “This is real. How do I stop it? Oh, right.” His desk phone stopped ringing. “It works on some kind of system that only the Science Faculty could have developed, and which they’ve never told us about. Radio, did you say?”

  Araminta nodded.

  Harry said, “Radio,” again, as if tasting the word. “Extraordinary. And this internet thing?”

  “It’s complicated, Harry.”

  “I’m not a stupid man, Araminta. Please credit me with that at least.”

  She thought for a moment. “Computers,” she said. “They’re... they’re sort of like calculating machines, but they carry out thousands of calculations a second. You can make them do all kinds of stuff, and they can be linked together by radio so they can talk to each other.”

  Harry looked at me. “Computers,” he said, “radio. Mobile phones. What did you call it? Genetic engineering?”

  “That’s really complicated, Harry,” she said. “I can’t explain it to you.”

  “How do you know all that stuff about the Science Faculty?” he asked her.

  “I don’t,” she said. “Not for certain. But it’s obvious.” She looked at me and said, “It’s obvious, Rupe. All your technology comes from the Science Faculty and they’ve been keeping most of it from you. There’s a mobile network here and you didn’t know about it. Your population’s been microchipped.” She looked at Harry. “It’s just obvious.”

  For a long time, the only sound in the room was the quiet hum of the freezers, preserving the Medical Faculty’s experiments.

  Harry said, “What are we going to do?”

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN while we were with Harry. I paused outside his building and closed my eyes and just tried to concentrate on breathing. Everything seemed very still, very peaceful, as if I hadn’t just been told that my entire world was a fantasy.

  I opened my eyes. It was a clear night and the sky was full of stars. I said, “What about the stars? Did the Whitton-Whytes create them too?”

  “I don’t know, Rupe,” Araminta said beside me. “I don’t know how they did it. Nobody does. I’m sorry.”

  I said, “Do you –” and there was a sudden sound in the sky like steam escaping from a small locomotive. I’d heard it before, and so apparently had Araminta, because we both started to run. The sound rushed towards us and I threw Araminta into the ditch at the side of the road and threw myself after her. A moment later there was a huge noise behind us, the air itself seemed to thicken and pulse, and a wave of heat and heavy things passed over us, followed a moment later by the pattering of smaller things falling out of the sky.

  “Are you all right?” I shouted, and realised I could barely hear my own voice for the mushy roaring in my ears. I turned and shook Araminta and she looked up groggily and blinked at me.

  I sat up. Harry’s building was gone. It looked as if it had shrugged itself to pieces and then burst into flames. Bits of flying glass and masonry had chopped twigs and branches off the trees all around us.

  I got up and started to stagger back towards the building, but Araminta held me back. “We have to go!” she yelled.

  “Harry –!”

  She shook her head and tugged me away from the burning building. “We have to go, Rupe!”

  I turned to run, but she went in the opposite direction. I stopped, saw her run close to the ruins, and throw something into the flames, then she trotted back to me.

  “What was that?”

  “Phone.”

  “What? What did you do that for?”

  “Tell you later. Let’s go; they’ll be coming.”

  BY THE TIME we got back to my Residence, my ears had recove
red enough for me to be able to hear the commotion outside the building. Araminta and I struck off from the road and approached from the other side until I could see in the moonlight a large group of armed people standing outside. Residents in various states of night dress were being brought outside and forced to sit on the pavement. I couldn’t see properly from this distance, but the guns carried by the armed people looked wrong, too short and stubby.

  We made a big loop through the grounds and around to Admin, where it was the same story. People with guns everywhere, members of Security rounded up and held captive. Every window in the building was lit up, and I could see people moving about inside. Someone was standing at the window of my office, looking out.

  “It’s a coup,” Araminta said softly beside me. “A counter-revolution. By the time everybody wakes up in the morning the New Board won’t be in charge anymore.”

  We made our way cautiously over to Security, but the place was surrounded, and we turned away and moved off into the countryside.

  DAWN FOUND US sitting in a copse of trees not far from the River. Araminta had fallen asleep huddled up against me, but I didn’t feel remotely tired. All night long we had heard, far away, the sounds of shouting and shots being fired, while we hid in the darkness, but everything seemed to be quiet now. I felt cold and bruised all over, and my clothes were wet with dew. I had no idea what to do next.

  Araminta stirred against my side, coughed, opened her eyes. She looked at me for a while, then she sat up. “Morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  She rubbed her face. “Must’ve fallen asleep.”

  “That’s all right; you were tired.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I ought to go and find out.”

  She got up on her knees and peered out of the trees, but it wasn’t possible to see any buildings from here. She said, “We ought to get out of here.”

  “Why did you throw the phone away?”

  She yawned and sat back on her heels. She looked exhausted and crestfallen and very young and frightened. “I’m sorry, Rupe. I should have thought. That was my fault. When we were messing about with it in there someone must have noticed a strange phone on the network; they used the signal to target that missile.”

  I just looked at her and shook my head tiredly.

  “You know you were telling me about that thing that destroys your balloons? That’s a missile. An airborne explosive device. Probably not very big; detects body heat or something, I think. The Campus must be surrounded by missile launchers. What happened last night is that whoever runs the mobile network noticed and they fired a missile – a bigger missile – that homed in on the signal from my phone.”

  “It missed us.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe their targeting isn’t very good. Maybe they only zeroed the building we were in. I don’t know. But it was my fault. I’m sorry, Rupe.”

  I sighed. “It’s done now. We have more pressing problems.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “First thing, let’s find somewhere else to hide.”

  ON THE GROUNDS that whatever coup had taken place would have mainly involved taking over Admin, we walked for several hours parallel to the river. We were trying to stay away from habitation, but in the event we didn’t see another soul the whole time. We finally came to the ruins of a small building. I couldn’t remember what it had housed, or why it had been wrecked. There were a couple of offices inside which weren’t wide open to the elements, and I settled Araminta in one of them and went out again.

  School 1 was under armed guard. The only people I saw were carrying those odd stubby rifles. They were patrolling outside the main administrative buildings, the various Faculties and Residences. None of them was in uniform, but otherwise they seemed to be behaving like a well-drilled force. I didn’t see a single person who wasn’t carrying some kind of weapon.

  “All they have to do is take over School 1,” Araminta said when I got back. “There’ll be some resistance, but you’ve got revolvers and bolt-action rifles and they’ve got semiautomatic rifles and guided missiles and god only knows what else and it won’t last long.”

  “If it’s just the Science Faculty, there’s only a couple of thousand of them,” I said. “They can’t hope to keep control.”

  “Your people are starving, Rupe. They’ll follow anybody who promises them a square meal. I’m sorry. It’s fine banging on about freedom and dignity when you’ve got a full stomach. If you’re hoping for a popular uprising, forget it; that train isn’t coming.”

  I picked up a shattered piece of chair and threw it across the room. “Fucking hell!”

  “Rupe,” she said calmly, “you and your people have been the victims of an incredibly cruel trick. You’ve been stuck here for two hundred-odd years, mostly cut off from the outside world, and all that time people from outside – from Europe – have been watching you. It’s all been quite deliberate; I knew that the first time I read one of your books. Someone had to sit down and do all that, Rupe.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why?”

  She sighed. “As I said, I think the Whitton-Whytes genuinely wanted the Campus to be a seat of learning. But they went away and someone else took over, and they’re the ones who’ve been watching you. They’ve been watching the research the Science Faculty’s been doing, nudging them along, cherrypicking the best stuff. I think there’s been continuing contact between the Faculty and Europe – there’s too much modern idiom in your language. I’m willing to bet there are Europeans in the Science Faculty right now, running things, making sure their investment’s safe.”

  It was all too much to take in. I hugged my knees to my chest and said, “I’ve been living here all my life. I work in Intelligence, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Rupe, I know what to look for – the mobile network, the internet, the maps, the books. You can’t see it because you’re inside the picture. You’ve never had any reason to doubt it. That’s how they’ve got away with it for so long.”

  I said, “Show me. Show me Europe. Then I’ll believe you.”

  SHE KEPT HER canoe – she called it a kayak – by the riverbank not far from where I had first met her, about a million years ago. We had some small advantage in that, until they were able to search Harry’s building, the Science Faculty would assume we were dead. And even when they did search the wreckage, they would find the parts of dozens of bodies in the rubble. It was going to take them a while to work out who was who. Still, School 1was under martial law and it seemed that only essential people were being allowed out and about, and those under armed guard, and from time to time we saw patrols, presumably out looking for stragglers. It took us most of the morning to travel the couple of miles to where the kayak was hidden.

  “There’s only room for one in the boat,” she told me as we manhandled it into the River. “So you’ll have to go and then come back.”

  “All right,” I said, settling myself in the canoe. It was a tight fit.

  “Just paddle along this side,” she said, handing me the oar. “Stay close in to the bank and follow it. You’ll reach a bit where the river seems to run straight, but the bank actually bends around to the right slightly. Keep following the bank and you’ll come to a little inlet. Row up there. There’s quite a current, but around halfway along it reverses and it’ll carry you out the other side.”

  “Right.”

  “Just go out, look around for five minutes, and then come back,” she said. “Then we’ll work out what to do. I still have to find Rafe.”

  “Right,” I said again. “Find somewhere to hide; come back in fifteen minutes or so. If I’m not here, keep coming back every half an hour.”

  “Rupe –”

  “I’ve every intention of coming back,” I told her. “But just in case, eh?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I pushed off from the bank and started to paddle.

  It was a lot harder than Araminta
had made it look. The canoe continually felt as if it was about to capsize, and it took an appreciable effort to row, but once I found a rhythm the boat moved easily enough through the water. I glanced back once, but Araminta was nowhere to be seen.

  Following her instructions, I stayed close in to the bank. I rowed quite a distance. So far that I thought I had missed what she had told me to look out for. But then there was a strange moment when my eyes told me that the river was continuing perfectly straight, while my balance told me that it was describing a slight curve, and a minute or so later I came to the mouth of a smaller river.

  The current here was very strong; so strong that I thought for a moment I wouldn’t be able to fight it. My arms and back hurt as I dug in the blades of the paddle and hauled myself, foot by foot, through the water.

  And then the current lessened, and for a moment seemed to disappear altogether. I stopped paddling and floated beside the bank, looking around me. All I could see was the little river, curving away behind and in front of me. The opposite bank was topped with long grass, and I saw the blue flash of a kingfisher dip to the surface of the water and swoop away again. I blew on my blistered palms, took up the paddle once more, and started to row again.

  This time, it seemed easier. A minute later, I was caught in another current, this one going in the opposite direction. I stopped paddling and the current carried me along at more than walking pace and a few moments later it swept me out onto another river.

  Two things struck me at once. The air smelled very strange, and it was suddenly very noisy, sounds I couldn’t recognise at all. Then something splashed into the river beside me, and something else. A third object hit the canoe, and another.

  I looked around and saw three children standing on the bank of the river. They were strangely-dressed and they were throwing things at me.

  “Fuck off!” they shouted. “Fuck off out of it, cunt!” They appeared to be about eight years old.