Europe at Midnight (6 page)

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.”

“M
APS
?” A
RAMINTA ASKED.
She loved maps. The very mention of the subject was enough to get her undivided attention.

“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.

But we didn’t give up, and even now I couldn’t understand why. We spent nights huddled fully clothed in burned-out buildings, wrapped in layer after layer of blankets, afraid to sleep in case Security patrols found us. We starved, froze, went insane. There were rumours that Zoology had released their wolves and let them roam the Campus. There were rumours of cannibalism...

That last was true. A hundred and fifty people started that Winter in Hall 102. Only five saw the thaw. They were still under close psychiatric supervision.

One member of the New Board had published a paper entitled ‘Why Did We Win?’ and his conclusion seemed to be that he simply didn’t know. We were outnumbered, outgunned, and starving. We were dying. And we won anyway.

The Fall came with dizzying, incomprehensible speed, in the middle of one of the Winter’s worst blizzards. One moment we were trapped in the Geography Faculty building, with the Faculty Members variously dead or locked in the cellar. The next moment, Security were laying down their weapons and coming over to us in such bewildering numbers that I thought at first it had to be some bizarre strategy.

We heard later that, when Security started to come over to us, the Colonel instituted a purge of his staff, a purge that went on to the very last hours of the Old Board. There were stories of him striding down the corridors of the Admin Building, pearl-handled revolver in each hand, personally bestowing the fatal bullet on those who displeased him.

I suppose he was true to his lights, right to the end. When we made that final march on the Admin Building through the snow we were ten thousand strong, students and Lecturers and Security alike, armed to the teeth, the amazing scent of victory making us feel invulnerable. Seeing us coming, the ring of Security men surrounding the building simply put their rifles on the ground and fled.

The Board surrendered almost immediately, apart from the odd die-hard, like my predecessor. But the Colonel locked himself into a room in the West Wing and killed thirty people who tried to winkle him out. In the end, he was fighting with his teeth and bare hands, and he never gave up.

Those thirty lives were on my conscience; I had given the order that the Colonel was to be taken alive at all costs, and if I hadn’t been so fastidious those people wouldn’t have died. I wanted to see the bastard on trial and I wanted to hang him myself, but when I thought about it now it seemed a high price to pay for such a mean and ugly life.

“They boobytrapped the river too, you know?” Araminta told me. “About twenty miles east of School 902. You couldn’t even fish in it without getting your face blown off. Every year some little kiddie would ignore their parents’ advice and see if they could catch something and they’d wind up hooking a mine or one of those automatic shotgun things.” She looked down the hill towards the Medical Residences. “You can’t tell kiddies anything, Rupe. They never listen.”

I nodded. Araminta had spent her whole life out on the far Eastern edge of the Campus, right up against the Fences. She knew the Death Zones and the dog patrols and she had spent every day of her life looking out towards the mountains beyond which Lady’s Law might hide. Those things were more academic, if you’ll excuse the pun, to those of us living close to Admin and School 1. Our writers and artists tended to romanticise the Schools out along the Fences, but from what Araminta had told me there had been nothing romantic about growing up there. Not long before she arrived, I had gone up to the North Side, in search of a fabled poacher who was said to have discovered one of the safe routes off the Campus, and all I found were sad, apprehensive people who wore threadbare clothes and looked at me as if I was an exotic bird, fallen out of the sky.

We were still prisoners. It seemed too ludicrous for words. According to the last Census, there were a little over one hundred thousand people on the Campus. Even allowing for the very worst attrition of the Revolution, there had to be over eighty thousand of us left, and we couldn’t get out.

“We tried everything, I suppose,” she said. “Hot-air balloons. Gliders. Tunnels.” She tugged one end of her scarf, tightening it around her neck. “The balloons and gliders were all shot down. The tunnels,” she shrugged and shook her head, “well.”

Anyone wanting to tunnel out under the Fences would have to dig for well over two miles. It was impossible; the ground around the Fences was sown with mines, some of them buried ten, fifteen, twenty feet deep. You’d be digging a tunnel, stick your spade into the earth, and
bang
. The ground around the perimeter of the Campus was dotted with sad little depressions where tunnels had met an explosive end.

Eventually, of course, all those doomed escape attempts would clear a way through the Death Zones, through the Fences, through the Death Zones on the other side, and we would all be free. By then, I calculated, there would be about seven of us left to enjoy it. The joke was that two or three of the New Board had actually suggested it, just concentrating escapes in one place and keeping going until all the booby traps ran out and we could walk out over the bodies of the unfortunate. Sometimes I thought I was working for the wrong people.

The Old Board had had this
thing
, we still didn’t know what it was or where it came from. If anything larger than a seagull took to the air over the Campus there would be a line of smoke in the sky, an explosion, and an expanding ball of flame. When we had all sufficiently collected our thoughts, I had authorised an experiment using a hot-air balloon the size of a large dog. We ran the balloon and its burner up on a line to a height of roughly fifty feet before that line of smoke appeared in the sky and the balloon vanished in an immense concussion. I issued a blanket ban on escape attempts after that, but the North, West, East and South sides were still losing people who thought it was worth a try. Like Araminta said, you can’t tell kiddies anything.

“Good grief,” she said when she saw the building we were walking towards. “What did you do to
that
?”

“The Arts Faculty,” I said. “They just wouldn’t give up.”

She stood, hands in pockets, tilting her head back so that she could see the building from under the rim of her knitted hat. “Obviously.”

Gunfire and siege had made the Arts Faculty building uninhabitable, so we had imprisoned the Colonel and the Old Board there. An armed militiaman stood guard at each of the entrances; the officer on the main door knew me by sight but I made sure he checked our passes and signed us both through. Once security started to get sloppy all manner of vengeance would be coming through these doors.

The guards had taken over the old Porter’s Lodge as a shelter from the cold. I left Araminta there to have a cup of tea and a chat with some of the boys, and took one of each with me up the great echoing marble main staircase to the third floor.

We had grown strong by the time we reached the Arts Faculty, and we had done a great deal of damage to it with our Security-augmented ordnance. We had put him in one of the more damaged office suites along a length of corridor with holes blown in its outside wall, through which I could see a misty half-revealed landscape and indistinct buildings. The tea in the tin mug I carried steamed in the cold air.

The guard and I stopped before a heavy oak door sporting six hefty padlocks, hasps screwed inexpertly but very securely into the wood. The guard began the process of unlocking, selecting each separate key from the ring that hung chained to his belt. He kept fumbling the keys into the keyholes.

“One at a time,” I murmured in what I meant to be a friendly tone of voice.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and promptly dropped the key ring. I heard laughter from the other side of the door.

I walked down the corridor and stood at one of the holes in the wall and sipped my tea. In spite of the cold and the mist, it was really a very nice morning. You could almost convince yourself that Spring was coming. I listened to the guard trying to get the door open; I wondered if I made him nervous, or if he was this jumpy all the time. If he was like this all the time, I was going to have to arrange a transfer for him. Jumpy people and firearms were, in my experience, a poor combination.