Europe at Midnight (16 page)

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

D
AWN 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.”

O
N 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.”

S
HE 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.

While my mind attempted to process this, there was a terrible noise and something like a howling box crossed the sky. As I watched, slack-jawed, the children threw more stones at me. I was in Europe, and it was a madhouse.

T
HE CHILDREN EVENTUALLY
got bored, or tired, or hungry, and went away. The flying box returned, came to an impossible complete stop in mid-air for a few moments, then flew off again, and I was alone on the river. On the other bank, I saw a man and a woman walking along holding hands, and another younger woman pushing some kind of small cart. They barely spared me a glance.

I had no idea what the air smelled of. There was an underlying acridness to it, below other more familiar smells of river and mud and grass. The noise was an unending rumble, low and quiet, and it seemed to come from all directions, broken occasionally by louder but no more identifiable sounds.

I couldn’t find my way back.

I paddled back the way I had come and went back and forth along the riverbank, but I couldn’t find the little river. I rowed out into the middle of the stream and sat there, looking at the bank, trying to find some clue, but I couldn’t see anything. I moved back in and tried again. Nothing.

After an hour or so of rising panic, I was exhausted. I could barely raise my arms to paddle. I let myself drift along until I came to a place where the bank had collapsed, and I pulled in, got out of the canoe, and with the last of my strength dragged it as far from the water as I could. I took a few steps up the slope of collapsed mud and froze.

The river – the
Trent
– ran through an area of scrubby grass, and beyond that was a tide of houses as far as the eye could see, all of them identical. It was the same on the other side of the river. I sank to my knees, and then I must have passed out for a while.

4

I
ALMOST LOST
my mind in the first few hours. And then I almost got myself killed.

It was called
Nottingham
and there were more people here than on the entire Campus. I had never seen so many people in one place before. More people than in my universe. They were loud and rude and careless and oddly-dressed and they had strange accents, but they spoke recognisable English. The roads were full of... vehicles. Large and small, in many colours, noisy and apparently self-propelled. Some of the large ones seemed to be public transport of some kind – at least, they were transporting lots of people. I should have stayed by the river, tried again to find my way back home, but I was overwhelmed by
Europe
. It terrified me and fascinated me, and I wanted to see more, and I wandered off.

When I came to my senses again, I had no idea where I was or how to get back to the Trent. I was standing in a sort of pedestrian arcade, with tall buildings on either side of me. Crowds were bustling by around me, some of them looking at me, most of them not. Everyone looked sleek and well-fed, often to the point of being fat. Many of them had very dark skin. I tried not to stare.

I went over to one of the buildings. The ground floor had one enormous window, through which I could see more people browsing through racks of clothes. My reflection in the window looked awful. The side of my face was bruised, my hair was all over the place, my clothes looked
wrong
. Compared to the other people here I looked scrawny, like a stick man. I had the wide-eyed look of a lunatic, and I was dressed to match.

I kept moving, and came to a large square with an impressive-looking building on one side. There were benches around the edge of the square, and I sat down on one and tried to will my heart to slow down. As I watched, something not unlike a small train but without a locomotive rumbled along the street alongside the square. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing. Araminta had come to the Campus and she had fitted right in, but I could barely cope with what I was seeing, let alone function in any meaningful way. I thought of her, waiting by the river. Going away. Coming back half an hour or so later. And again, and again.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Panic got the better of me. I surged to my feet and turned and walked out of the square, stepped out across the road without bothering to look, and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back with a ring of concerned faces looking down at me.

“It’s all right, mate,” said one of the faces. “Just lie there. Ambulance is coming.”

I tried to sit up, but my arms and legs seemed uncoordinated. My whole right side hurt.

“Stupid fucker just stepped right out in front of me,” said another of the faces. “You saw him, didn’t you? Wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t stop.”

“Bet he’s drunk,” said another.

“He doesn’t smell of alcohol,” said another. “Maybe he’s sick. Are you not feeling very well, lovey?” This last addressed to me.

“I have to go home,” I said weakly. “I can’t stay here.”