To get to the cemetery, one had to pass through the visitor centre. Admission was free, but donations were welcomed. I dropped a ten-pound coin into the box, my own inadequate mark of respect for the millions my people had murdered.
A group of schoolchildren was being shepherded through the quiet rooms of the centre, although most of them were playing with the interactive displays showing the progress of the flu from its first outbreak in China – the Europeans assumed it had come from China – through scenes of hospitals across the world swamped and unable to cope with the sheer number of cases, to clips of statesmen – I had no idea who any of them were – making sombre statements on the news, to a short documentary about the creation of the cemetery itself. The children didn’t seem particularly interested, but as Araminta said, you can’t tell kiddies anything.
On the other side of the centre, a pair of doors opened onto a long straight path that ran between an avenue of trees. Whoever had designed this place had wanted to increase the sense of anticipation – it was a five-minute drive from the main road to the car park, and a good ten minutes from the centre to the cemetery itself, screened off behind a wall of conifers.
Finally, though, I found myself standing at the edge of a huge expanse of concrete, the size of a football stadium. It was so large, I was told, that it was visible from space, although I had also been told that there were satellites which could read a car number plate from orbit.
Set into the concrete was a grid pattern of rose-coloured marble squares, with wide paths between them. I stepped onto the nearest path and looked down at the first square I came to. Carved into its surface were the words ELAINE KATHERINE HARVEY. SWINDON and a pair of dates, one for her birth and one for her death. The birth dates on all the stones were different, but the dates of death were all within a range of about eight months. I looked out across the colossal gravestone. Each of the marble squares marked the final resting place of the cremated remains of one of the flu’s victims. Almost two hundred thousand of them, neatly interred and obsessively-documented, the biggest mass grave in the country, although it was small compared to the one outside Eindhoven. More than fifty million dead in Europe alone.
There was an index in the visitor centre which you could use to look up which row and column in this great chequerboard hid your nearest and dearest, but I didn’t need it because the place was almost deserted, and I could easily see him, some distance away, leaning on his crutches, head bowed.
He heard my footsteps on the concrete path as I approached and looked up. He tried a smile, but he looked terrible. He’d grown old and sick while I was away; the treatment he was having had cost him his hair and his eyebrows and he seemed twisted in a constant and invisible pain.
“I haven’t been here in years,” he said, and his voice at least sounded strong. “There never seemed any point.”
I looked down at the stones at his feet. Frost and sun and wind were chipping away at the edges and blurring the incised words, but it was still easy to read KENNETH JAMES RUSSELL and JANIS WILSON RUSSELL. Their dates of death had been just days apart. His mother had been the elder by two years.
“No one has real names anymore,” I said.
“I remember a point,” he said, looking at the little memorials, “I think it was the October or perhaps the December, when we actually thought the world was going to end. The Low Countries were a charnel house, there was civil war in the United States, no one seemed to have the first idea about how to stop the flu, none of the remedies the governments had been stockpiling against something like that worked.” He looked out across the cemetery. “End of days. Things became very... millennial.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. There seemed nothing else to say, and even that was inadequate.
He looked at me and smiled. “Not your fault, old chap. It’s good to see you. You look well.”
“I’m doing all right,” I said.
“The Service would appreciate your appearing before them in person, you know,” he told me.
“They’ll have to make do,” I said. “I’m done.”
“Well,” he said, “you’re not
really
, are you.”
“Are they here?” I asked.
“Of course they’re not,” he said. “As you well know.” He looked about him. “Adele’s dead,” he said. “Professor Bevan. Suicide, officially.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I liked her.”
He nodded. “Yes, so did I. Sometimes I think she was the only sane person in this whole mess.”
“Was it?” I asked. “A mess?”
“They made fools of us,” he said. “They’ve been running the Service for... oh, at least seven years now. There’s no way to know how many more of them are in positions of authority, or how long they’ve been there. Adele went to see the Director-General to complain about something quite different, and she must have told her and Adele couldn’t take it. Her life’s work, just pointless really. Or perhaps they killed her to shut her up. They didn’t need to waste the effort with me, of course. They just left me in the rain. Doesn’t matter now, I suppose.” He turned with obvious difficulty and started to walk back towards the line of conifers beyond the edge of the cemetery. “They say the Campus discovered a cure for cancer,” he said. “Do you think that’s true?”
“I have no idea,” I told him. “We discovered a lot of things. Not all of them beneficial.”
He smiled and seemed to lose his footing for a moment. One of his crutches came down hard on the path and his smile turned into a grimace. I stepped forward to help him, but he shook his head and waved me away. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “I just need a moment. I get very tired.” He leaned on the crutches and looked about him. “They say no birds sing here, but I can hear them. Can you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You were gone fifteen years.”
That had been a shock. To me, only seven years or so had passed in the Community. I didn’t know whether anyone understood how this could be so, but trying to speak to them would mean making contact with the Service again, so I was just going to have to live in ignorance. It was hardly a new sensation. “It was complicated.”
“I know.” He reached over and patted my arm. “I know.” He sighed. “Do you know where Professor Mundt is?”
“No. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
He chuckled. “No, of course not.” He seemed to gather some strength. “Would you like a cup of tea? They have a rather nice café.”
“I’d love one,” I said.
I
T TOOK US
about forty minutes to walk back to the visitor centre. In the café, the school children were eating packed lunches, goodnaturedly boisterous. We found a corner table and I went to buy tea and some biscuits. When I returned, he had taken off his jacket and rolled up one of his shirt sleeves and was pasting what looked like a large plaster on the inside of his forearm.
“Chemotherapy,” he explained as I put the tray down on the table and sat down opposite him. “Absorbs through the skin. I’m not sure how much good it’s doing, to be honest. I’m told it’ll give me an extra six months, but what’s the point?”
“You mustn’t think like that,” I said.
“No,” he said. “No, I suppose not.” He buttoned his cuff and struggled back into his jacket. “Would you pour?”
I picked up the little teapot and poured tea into the cups, added milk for him. The café couldn’t provide lemon, so I had mine black. Then we just sat looking at each other.
“Well,” he said finally, “if this is to be your only debriefing I suppose one ought to make the best of the opportunity.”
“I wish you all the luck in the world with that,” I said.
“They showed me the letter you sent in lieu of a debriefing,” he said, and he shook his head. “Very cheeky. It was heavily redacted, of course.”
“We made the virus,” I said. “The flu virus. Rafe Delahunty was making improvements to it.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Ah. Yes, that will have been one of the redacted parts. And now I’m party to a Secret easily large enough to get us both killed. Thank you for that.”
“You wanted a debriefing.”
He chuckled. “One should always be wary of getting what one wishes for.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never got anything I wished for.”
He smiled. “Can we trust them?”
“The Community?” I thought about it. “If Michael hadn’t intervened, Ruston and his colleagues would have been killed, a conservative faction would have used the deaths as a pretext to take over the Committee, and you and I would be having this conversation in the middle of a flu epidemic that would have made the last one look like a bit of a sniffle. Rafe’s flu epidemic.”
He made a rude noise and said, “Hm, Delahunty. We really should have kept an eye on that one.”
“Just because Ruston’s still in charge, it doesn’t mean you can trust them, though.”
He was silent for a while. “I wanted to apologise to you,” he said finally. “We didn’t treat you particularly well.”
“You did save my life,” I reminded him. “Twice.”
He snorted. “Twice. All you had to do was wait another year or so and you could have walked out.”
“It’s still not that easy. They’re controlling the people who visit; according to the news there’s only one train a day from Paddington to Stanhurst.”
He shook his head. “That will change.” He looked at my face for a long time, as if committing it to memory. “What’s it like? Over there?”
“The pictures have been on the news.”
“It’s not the same.”
I thought of Eleanor and Michael, and the shop on Poe Street, and Władysław, and the countryside around Hemingsley-under-the-Hill. “Some of it’s lovely,” I told him. “Whatever else they were, the Whitton-Whytes were artists. But apart from technologies, it’s not that different from here. People are still people.”
“What do they want?”
“Is this an official question? Because I answered it in my letter. They want what you want. Security. They want to run things.”
He shook his head. “Just curiosity. I saw President Ruston’s speech in Strasbourg on the news this morning, while I was getting ready to go out. ‘A new age for Europe and the Community.’ ‘Brothers and sisters finally reunited.’” He shook his head again.
“How are the Americans taking it?”
He shrugged. “I really don’t know much more than you see on the news. They’ve resisted the urge to launch a massive preemptive nuclear strike, which is a heartening start. It’s still early days; nobody knows how this is all going to work out.”
I said, “They did consider an invasion. Back in the 1970s. I saw the file. They decided it would have been a catastrophe.”
He chuckled. “Gods, yes. Millions of them suddenly erupting into Cold War Europe. The world would still be glowing at night.” He folded his hands in his lap and fell silent, looking at his teacup.
I said, “Listen, I made the mistake of thinking they were a bunch of dull bureaucrats living in some kind of fantasy England, and they’re not. They’re very dangerous. They killed everyone in the Campus to stop the flu spreading across the border. The people who are running things over there now are a bit more progressive than before, but they’re still dangerous. They want security and they think they can only get that by running everything.”
“So why this...?”
I said, “The opportunity is there. The Community could never have negotiated with the old European Union, not to their satisfaction. Now, the EU barely exists, the United States have withdrawn from NATO. The Community has to sign treaties with lots of countries and national entities, and that’s going to be a chore, but it will always be negotiating from a position of unity. It’s an ideal time, for them.”
He looked at me. “Is it a bad thing? Necessarily?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know.” I thought I should have that phrase printed on a little flag, I was using it so often.
“I’m sure the powers that be have thought very carefully about as many scenarios as they can imagine. All you and I can say is that the world is a very different place to the world we lived in four months ago. So far we’ve come through it without bloodshed and serious social disorder. We can only hope that continues. It’s not as if we’ve been invaded by Martians; the Community, for all its origins, is still just another country.”
“You don’t believe a single word of that.”
“Don’t I? No. No, perhaps I don’t. But it’s not fashionable at the moment to say otherwise. Not out loud, anyway.”
“They think differently,” I said. “They look like you, and they speak like you, mostly, but they are
not
like you. They might as
well
be Martians.”
He smiled. “I was talking to one of my former colleagues a month or so ago – she came to visit me in hospital. She said she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. ‘They’re just English people, after all,’ she said.”
“Your colleague sounds remarkably stupid.”
“The Community is very attractive to a certain type of English person. I know Tory politicians who are delighted that there’s a version of Europe where we conquered the Continent.”
“They are
not English
.”
“No, I know. But to the media – parts of it, anyway – that’s how they look. Imagine a world where there are no
French
people.” He chuckled again. “As far as some of our news organisations are concerned, the Community is the Promised Land.”
“Don’t fall for all that brothers-and-sisters-reunited stuff,” I told him. “Your people are at the negotiating table with them because they can put a nuclear weapon on the back of a lorry and drive it across the border anywhere in Europe. There’s no way to defend against it. And they still have the flu virus.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, one does get that impression, rather.” He looked around the café. Some of the children were getting restless, chasing each other between the tables to the chagrin of their teachers. “What’s happening now, that might end well, it might not. We live in miraculous times. The inhabitants of a parallel universe walk among us, there’s a whole new Europe to explore.”
“They killed everyone I knew,” I told him.
He looked sadly at me, and there was another silence. We sat watching the children. Beyond the big picture windows of the café, the late afternoon sun came out from behind the clouds. From here, all you could see was trees and parkland. It all looked very peaceful and very pretty, until you remembered what was underneath.