Eventually, without any warning or fanfare, the visits from the amiable professional people simply stopped. I mentally braced myself for whatever was about to happen, but nothing did. My days went on as before, except I had more time to read. I asked one of the house’s staff if there was anywhere nearby I could go fishing, and she said she’d ask, but that was the last I heard of it. I entertained a fantasy of a committee somewhere, meeting late at night in an atmosphere of tension and tobacco smoke, making decisions about my future, but if the committee really did exist it was in no hurry to make up its mind. A month went by. Then two. Summer turned to Autumn; the trees in the grounds decked themselves out in a spectacular display of colours, and then, with the first strong winds of the year, divested themselves of all their leaves.
There was frost on the lawns and along the spindly bare branches of the trees before anyone else came to see me. He was a slightly apologetic man named Michael.
“You must think we’d forgotten all about you,” he said to me in one of the house’s drawing rooms, sitting beside a blazing fire and drinking tea.
“Not for a moment,” I said.
He smiled. “Of course not. You’re in my line of work, aren’t you. A Doctor of Intelligence. What a wonderful title. Almost makes one wonder if there are Doctors of Stupidity.”
“I’ve known a few.”
He nodded happily. “As have I.”
I sat forward in my armchair. “Michael,” I said. “As one professional to another, could you please tell me when I can go home?”
He sat back and crossed his legs and looked sad. “I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible,” he told me. “Not at the moment, anyway. Never, possibly. Probably.”
“Why not?”
He sniffed. “There was an accident. A terrible accident. The Campus is uninhabitable now.”
I stared at him. I had thought that, whenever I heard this news from someone else, it would be hard for me to feign shock, but it wasn’t hard at all. I felt the sheer weight of loss well up from some awful depth in which I had hidden it from myself. When Baines had given me the news the shock had numbed me. He and Bevan had shown me pictures of
nuclear
explosions and their aftermath, and explained, as well as they could, the effects of
radiation
, and afterward I thought I had come to terms with it. But I hadn’t. The pain of losing Araminta was almost beyond belief. I felt it start to overwhelm me, and I let it.
When it was over, and I was sitting there sniffing and shivering and Michael had given me a hankie to dry my tears and a glass of Scotch to stiffen my spirits, he said, “I really am sorry, old chap.”
“Everyone?” I said quietly.
“So far as we can judge. I’m sorry,” he said again.
“I can’t believe it,” I said, and I meant it. I had shunted everything to the back of my mind in a simple attempt to cope with it. I had never addressed it head-on. I felt rising waves of despair and anger. I could never go back to the place I came from, because it no longer existed. I was, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the last representative of an extinct species. I wanted to punish the people who had destroyed my world, to punish them hard, bring their own world down around their ears. And I knew that was hopeless. Unless I ever got my hands on one of these
nuclear weapons
, there was nothing I could do.
I said, “The Professor said the Science Faculty were making things. I didn’t realise he meant
bombs
.”
Michael looked a little uncomfortable. “It’s a long and tragic story,” he said. He brightened a little. “But you’re here now, and we’ll look after you.”
“How?”
He crossed his legs and regarded me for a while. “Well, you have an Intelligence background. How would you like a job?”
T
HE
C
OMMUNITY STRETCHED
from what would have been the Iberian Peninsula in Europe, to a little east of where Moscow was, and from the Scandinavian coast as far south as Sicily. The bulk of the population was gathered in a handful of towns and cities across the Continent, connected by a vast network of railways. The rest of the land was agricultural, with some heavy industrial areas in the West and East. Sparsely-populated and rich in natural resources, it was, compared to Europe, a phenomenally wealthy nation. There was full employment, there was no poverty, everyone had plenty to eat. Great electricity pylons towered over the countryside, carrying current from coal-fired power stations to homes everywhere. The people drove electric cars.
It was very, very quiet.
Europe had been like a huge asylum, a deafeningly noisy and busy place. The Community seemed to be in a dream, drifting along in slow gentility. My first Winter there was wet and mild, and I had a sense of a great
stillness
stretching out all around me, to the edges of the world. Because, like the Campus, the Community
was
the world. The Whitton-Whytes had not bothered to fill the rest of the map in when they were finished with their work of creation. The Community was an orphan universe. Unlike the Campus, though, everyone here understood the nature of their world.
You could travel right to the edge of the Continent, in all directions, and see the sea, and know that, apart from Ernshire to the North, that was all there was. Some of the inhabitants had set sail in great steamships to explore the oceans to the West, and had returned after months to report that the water seemed to go on into infinity. There was a series of popular novels in Europe about a world borne through space on the back of a turtle, and the Community was like that. A wealthy family’s indulgence, a toy more exquisite and complex than any Fabergé egg.
And it was beautiful. When they finally let me out of the house I was given some money and allowed to travel, chaperoned by a pleasant young man named William. William and I took trains and carriages and boats for hundreds of miles, and everywhere was like a garden, laid out with the careful formality of an English landscape gardener. It
was
a dream, the Whitton-Whytes’ dream of a perfect England.
It was all one country. There were no provinces, because provinces promoted regional identity and regional identity promoted separatism, and separatism was dangerous. The whole nation was administered by a single Presiding Authority whose President-for-life was little more than a figurehead. The real power lay with the Committee of the Presiding Authority, and the real power within the Committee lay with the Directorate.
Michael worked for the Directorate, and once I was done sightseeing and learning about my new home, so did I.
5
A
FTER THE MEETING,
Horace and I walked back to his house.
“How do you think it went?” he asked.
“It went well,” I said. “But you were among friends. Nobody there was going to argue with you.”
He nodded and turned his collar up against the chill. After the hot, charged atmosphere in the cellar the night air was bitingly cold.
“We need more people like that,” he said. “Spreading the word. Taking action.”
I settled my hat more firmly on my head. Victoria’s streets were narrow and steep; the wind blew constantly up from the harbour, sending dust and bits of rubbish spinning. In the Winter, it also blew rain and snow and sleet with the velocity of pistol bullets. Winter was still several months away, but it was already cold enough to nip your ears painfully.
I said, “What you really need to do is convince the owners.”
Horace snorted. “We’ll be waiting a long time for
that
train to arrive.”
We turned down a side-street. If anything, the wind was even stronger here; it rattled the glass enclosures of the gas-lamps lining the pavement and made their flames hiss and roar. Europe, with its bustling twenty-four-hour cities, had made the Campus seem almost deserted, but Victoria at night made the Campus seem crowded. We had not seen another living soul since leaving the meeting, unless you counted a threadbare dog which had fled at our approach.
“They’re the ones with the power here,” I said. “The owners. I’m sorry, but you can’t do anything without them.”
He looked at me, a stout, hard man, like a barrel carved from solid oak. “They won’t listen,” he said. “We’ve tried.”
“I know, old chap,” I said. “I know.”
Horace was a fisherman. Almost all the men in Victoria were fishermen, the majority of them crews on the sturdy steam-powered fishing boats which sailed from the harbour every few days and returned with holds packed with cod and haddock and plaice. Almost all the women worked in the fisheries which gutted and prepared the catch before it was taken off to Władysław – most of it went to the capital – by train. It was hard, unremitting, hazardous labour – the cemetery on the hill above the town was lined with the headstones of men who had not lived beyond their thirties – and it was criminally-underpaid. True poverty was rare in the Community, but you only had to compare the rows of fishermen’s cotes down by the harbour with the big houses of the boat owners just along the coast to know who was really profiting from the fishing industry. It had been like this for generations, and few people ever questioned it because that was the way the whole Community worked.
The fishermen in Victoria had begun to question it, though, and I had been sent by the Władysław
Intelligencer
to report on the unrest.
Victoria was a long way from the capital. If it had been in Europe, it would have been somewhere on the Norwegian coast, and the people were grey and hard and taciturn, and the ‘unrest’ I had been sent to report on had turned out to be a dozen or so fishermen meeting in each others’ homes and complaining that they were not being paid enough for the risks they were taking every working day.
Compared to some of the industrial unrest I had seen on the news in Europe, it barely qualified as background grumbling, and I was finding it difficult to find the right tone for my dispatches for the
Intelligencer
. The editor, a man named Stoker who thought he was intimidating, kept sending me gruff telegrams telling me to ‘boost’ my stories. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been intimidated by true experts.
We reached Horace’s cote, where his wife, Rowena, had a late dinner of fish pie waiting for us. I’d met them a few days ago, after spending a week or so talking to fishermen about the situation up here. Rowena was as stout as Horace, and almost as strong. She worked at one of the fisheries and had, so far as I could discern, no sense of humour at all. She and Horace barely spoke to each other when I was there.
The fish pie, at least, was excellent.
After dinner, Horace and I repaired to the parlour for a smoke. Horace smoked a fierce brand of tobacco which smelled like bonfires; the whole cote stank of it. We sat by the fire for a while, listening to Rowena in the kitchen doing the dishes.
Finally, Horace said, “We’re thinking about withdrawing our labour.”
“Yes?” I said, lighting a cigarette.
“It’s as you said,” he went on. “We need to get the owners’ attention.”
“I never told you to lay down your tools,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to use the word ‘strike’ because it was almost unknown in the Community and it seemed rather pale in comparison to the million or so strikers who had taken to the streets of Albania while I was in the clinic.
“They won’t listen to us,” Horace said. “Not while we just ask nicely.”
That at least was true enough. I looked at him. He was a decent man. All he wanted was an honest wage for an honest day’s work. Now was not the time to tell him that the world didn’t work like that.
I said, “It’s a big step. They could just sack you, throw you out of your cotes, and employ someone else.”
“I’d like to see them try,” he grunted. “What are they going to do? Crew the boats with farmers?”
From what I’d seen of the hill country inland, anybody mad enough to try and farm there was mad enough to go to sea. We sat looking into the fire for a while, thinking about that.
He said, “People need to know what’s happening here.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“No,” he said. “They need to know the truth. Not some scrubbed-up version of it. They need to know how bad our lives are.”
Compared to my final few months in the Campus, Horace and Rowena and all the other fisher-folk lived like kings. There was no easy way to explain this to him, so I just said, “I’m here to tell your story.”
“We need the people on our side,” he said, and my heart almost broke.
I said, “There’s some –” and then I stopped myself by an enormous effort of will. “Horace,” I started again. “You can’t win. You’ll ruin your life and Rowena’s and everyone else’s. You’ll lose your job and your home and the owners will just go on as if you never existed.”
He didn’t reply for quite a while. He sat looking into the flames the way I had seen some people in Europe looking into their tablets. Calmly rapt, oblivious while the world went on around them.
“My dad was forty when he died,” he said. “He was washed off the deck of the
Heavenly Lucie
in a storm. My granddad was lead stoker on the
Far Horizon
. He was standing next to her boiler when it exploded. He was thirty.
His
father, my great-granddad, had his own boat. The
Lady Caroline
, after my gran.” He shrugged. “Nobody knows what happened to him. Sailed out one morning and never came back. No storm, no wreckage. Nothing. A boat and fourteen men, just gone. My great-granddad was thirty-eight.
His
father –”
“I’m following you, Horace,” I said gently.
He smiled a little. “All those dead men, none of them over forty. And for what?” He looked up from the fire and gestured at the parlour. “Look at how we live. And then go down the coast to Wrenhaven and see how the people who own the boats – who own
us
– live.” He leaned forward, took a poker from the hearth, and thrust it into the fire. A column of sparks roared up the chimney. “I go to sea and I come back and I don’t get
anywhere
. None of us do. We’re just walking on the spot. What’s the point of carrying on when the only point is to carry on?”