Early Riser

Fired & filing

The sky had lowered while I’d been in the Wincarnis, and a stiff breeze was now stirring the snow into a cloud of flakes that swirled randomly in the air without settling. The visibility was still at least fair, although I don’t think anyone expected it to stay that way for long: Jonesy had attached a fixed line from her Sno-Trac to the large brass ring fixed to the outside of the Consulate, so she could find either if things got bad.

As I entered, there seemed to be a sense of unhurried languor inside, as though everyone were getting ready for a damp Sunday indoors. Treacle was typing out a form on a large typewriter in an unhurried manner, and Jonesy was reading a report while leaning on the desk. Fodder was standing next to the coffee machine, lost in his own thoughts, staring off into the middle distance. Probably thinking about babies. Or maybe some military defeat he’d been involved in. Or a love lost. Or steak pie with peas and chips. Actually, I had no idea. The way he looked, impossible to tell.

I heard Toccata swearing at someone down the telephone from the comfort of her office, but now that I’d become accustomed to the idiosyncratic ways of Sector Twelve, the whole Aurora/Toccata issue hardly seemed unusual at all, and I could see why none of the crew saw any of it as particularly weird.

‘The Chief said she wants to see you,’ said Jonesy, looking up.

‘Now?’

‘Yes, now. She saw you come in, so it’s too late to sneak away. Good luck.’

I walked slowly up to Toccata’s office door, straightened my jacket and knocked politely. She bade me enter and I pushed open the door.

She was standing behind her desk, leaning on the chair-back.

‘Close the door,’ she said, and I did so.

‘Sit down.’

I did that, too.

‘You acquitted yourself well yesterday,’ she said. ‘Killing Ned Farnesworth was a foolish and impetuous move, but luckily, owing to Fodder’s considerable negotiating skills, the truce is holding.’

‘I didn’t kill him.’

She nodded quietly to herself and then held up a gold-edged gift certificate with a lot of zeros on it.

‘Then you won’t want the ten-thousand-euro reward?’

I felt, all of a sudden, conflicted. It would pay for Birgitta to see Springrise, but it somehow didn’t seem right taking it. I had an idea.

‘Can we assign it to Fodder? I think he wants to take a couple of years’ sabbatical and doesn’t have a lot of cash.’

Toccata stared at me for a while.

‘It wasn’t Debts and Nesquik that carried the truce, was it?’

‘No, ma’am.’

She pushed the certificate across the desk.

‘Sign it on the back.’

I did so and my obligation to Fodder, I felt, was at least partly resolved.

‘Now,’ said Toccata, ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’m being so nice to you?’

To be honest, I hadn’t actually noticed.

‘It’s because you don’t work for us any more. I’m only hideously offensive to my own.’

I thought this might be about Aurora having completed my job application without my say-so, but it wasn’t.

‘Here,’ she said, passing me a fax. ‘Looks like your Acting Sector Chief has requested me to return you to Cardiff. They’re short staffed there, too. Unpaid leave can commence immediately; you can sit out this storm in the safety of the Siddons and once the weather breaks Jonesy will run you into Hereford and you can ride the Railplane home.’

I read the fax. It was from Vice-Consul Pryce and made reference to Logan’s death ‘at Aurora’s hands in the defence of Novice Worthing’, so at least I wasn’t being held to account for that.

‘Goodbye, Worthing. I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure – but I can’t.’

I paused. Sure, this was a far riskier place than Cardiff what with volatile Chief Consuls, homicidal HiberTech agents, Wintervolk and the subzero temperatures. But I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be. Besides, there was Birgitta. Sure, she might be only three jam doughnuts from turning cannibal, but she was still my responsibility.

‘I’d like to stay, ma’am.’

Toccata’s eyebrow twitched.

‘You don’t want to be in Sector Twelve, I don’t want you in Sector Twelve. You’re a liability and a wild card and trouble seems to follow you like a homesick spaniel. And you’re bundling with Aurora, and no one who ever did that came to anything but grief.’

‘No, really, I feel at home here. First time since leaving the Pool. First time ever.’

‘You’re breaking my heart. Okay, let me spell it out: you’re fired. You’ve been lucky so far, but that’s going to run out, and when it does you’ll be taking good agents with you.’

She sat in her chair and stared up at me with her good eye, while the other contorted in its socket.

‘You’re done. We’re done. Go.’

I walked to the door, the heady buzz of comradeship I’d felt so strongly that morning now cracked and forlorn.

But I had an idea, and turned back.

‘You’re still here,’ she said, not looking up from her desk.

‘I think you should know,’ I said, ‘I was offered a job at HiberTech this morning.’

She slowly looked up at me and a red flush spread rapidly across her neck and cheeks. Any last vestige of friendliness she might have had seemed to vanish.

‘You wonky-faced piece of crap. You’re kidding me, right?’

‘No,’ I said, as innocently as I could. ‘Two-year contract, cash signing bonus, free puddings, apartment facing the quad – and a Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut allocation.’

‘I don’t know why they want you there, but it’s not for your charm, looks or experience. They’ll use you, spit you out spent. Working for HiberTech would be the worst career move you’ll ever make – and the last.’

‘You’re right,’ I replied, somewhat daringly, ‘I don’t want to work there. I want to stay in Sector Twelve, but if that’s the only option open to me, I’ll take it.’

Toccata put her pen down, leaned back in her chair and stared at me.

‘Well, I’ll be,’ she said, ‘you just played me. No one has ever dared play me.’ She looked almost impressed. ‘Okay, have it your own way: you’ve got a job. Filing duties for the next ninety-one days, inside the Consulate – and demoted from Deputy to Novice. There’ll be latrine duty in it somewhere, and you can do everyone’s washing and ironing. Pretty soon you’ll beg to go and work for Dowager Farnesworth. Okay, now piss off. Hang on, wait, one more thing.’

She got up, walked around the desk and punched me in the eye.

‘That’s for lying earlier.’

I got to my feet and she punched me a second time in the same place.

‘And that’s for bundling this morning with Aurora when you said you wouldn’t.’

I left the office, head spinning, but at least clear on two points: firstly, that I was getting better at dealing with the Winter, and secondly, that the tongue-coming-out warning had indeed been an empty threat.

‘How did that go?’ asked Jonesy when she found me holding a cold compress to my eye in the washrooms.

‘I was told to leave, said I didn’t want to, was fired, reinstated then demoted to Novice. But I played her so I think she now respects me.’

‘Is that why she punched you in the eye?’

‘No, that was for lying and bundling with Aurora.’

‘That’s true, then?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ she said, patting me on the arm and chuckling. ‘Toccata beat me so hard with a broom handle when I first arrived that I had concussion for a week. It’s just kind of her thing.’

‘I wish she would find some other thing.’

I went to look for Laura in the filing room, and when she saw me she offered me a seat at one of the desks.

‘So, tell me about the Gronk,’ she said excitedly, drawing up a chair herself. ‘Did you actually see her?’

I repeated the story with as much detail as I could, which wasn’t much. I’d been unconscious from the moment she arrived to the moment she left. Laura made notes, and nodded vigorously at the smallest detail, but when I’d finished she looked disappointed. It wasn’t the slam dunk she’d been hoping for.

‘So no pictures?’ she asked.

‘Not a single one.’

‘Treacle has already dismissed it as Hibernational Narcosis,’ she said with a sigh, ‘yours. He thinks you killed Lucky Ned and are now blanking it from your mind.’

‘Do I look like the sort of person who would bite off a finger?’

‘You bit off Gary Findlay’s ear.’

‘You heard about that?’

‘No secrets in the Twelve.’

‘So I’ve realised.’

She fell silent for a moment and stared at the floor. I looked around the room. My accelerated course at the Academy hadn’t included filing duties.

‘How does this work?’ I asked.

Laura, who seemed not to be able to feel down for more than a few moments, told me she loved filing owing to its ‘simple elegance’ and instructed me, with a worryingly high level of enthusiasm, how things should be done. Not the best or most logical way, but the SkillZero way – simple enough for everyone to use, yet complex enough to function efficiently as a usable database – and easily understandable by anyone with a pass in General Skills.

‘Shamanic Bob mentioned something called Active Control Dreaming,’ I said while we were laboriously updating minor details to the individual cards, and by a complicated series of notches and holes, allowing them to be cross-referenced in an ingenious manner.

‘Active Control is like Zebricorns and the missing 14th Ottoman,’ said Laura. ‘Myths with their roots in reality. Sure, Don Hector and HiberTech were looking into dreams you can control, but it’s difficult to gauge what success they had. After all, it’s possible you only dreamed you were controlling them.’

‘And Dreamspace?’ I asked.

‘Meeting inside dreams? Even more far-fetched. Anecdotally there were a few successes mixed heavily with an abundance of failure, but it’s a difficult area of research. Messing around with the hibernatory subconscious was never a risk-free occupation. There were stories of psychotic episodes, spontaneous sleepdeath, people supposedly trapped in the Dreamstate, stuff like that. Fortean Times talked about little else in the seventies.’

‘Trapped in the Dreamspace?’ I asked, and Laura looked at me, then shrugged.

‘It’s never been explained how the mind can return from deep hibernation; some say that the personality goes elsewhere. To a Dreamstate somewhere outside the body, perhaps – absorbed into the walls and furniture and plants.’

‘A state of displaced consciousness,’ I said, repeating what I’d heard Don Hector say in my dream. He’d been dead for two years, yet I felt part of his personality in me, alive.

‘Ghosts could be explained this way,’ said Laura, ‘and Wintervolk. An orphaned consciousness returning periodically using the power of another sleeper’s thoughts.’

At any other time I would have dismissed this as utter nonsense.

‘Lloyd thought the Gronk might be somehow related to Ichabod’s murdered daughter,’ I said.

‘I heard that too. Want to see a picture of her?’

‘Sure.’

She pulled open a filing cabinet, rummaged for a moment and then drew out a file. She flicked through the contents, eventually showing me a family photograph. It was of Rhosilli beach in the Gower, the Argentinian Queen behind, recently wrecked. A man, thin and weaselly and with a sour, cruel face, a woman, bluff and optimistic. And Gretl, the daughter, holding a beach ball. I felt a cold chill run up my back. Yesterday – even this morning – I would have dismissed it all as a retrospective memory remapping, but now I wasn’t so sure. It was the same child as the one in the Birgitta dream, the child with the gurgle of laughter. The same gurgle of laughter I’d heard before Lucky Ned was taken.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Laura. ‘You look kind of… ill.’

‘The Gronk’s real,’ I said.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Laura, ‘that’s why I gave you the camera. To take a picture of her. The wager was always sound; it was only the evidence that was going to be a problem.’

‘I think she’s in my mind,’ I said quietly. ‘I saw her in the Dreamstate.’

‘That could mean she’s either protecting or stalking you,’ said Laura. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but there are plenty more unworthy than you. She’ll pluck the ripest fruit first. You may want to whistle “Some Enchanted Evening”[59] when she makes landfall, just to be safe.’

‘Good tip. Thanks,’ I said sarcastically.

‘You’re welcome.’

Laura tidied away the picture and made to leave as Fodder had said he’d take her around to look at some of the folded linen traps she’d set up. She gave me a cheery wave, told me to keep the Instamatic camera close by at all times, and departed.

I sat for a long time considering the Gronk, then went and made a cup of tea, sat with it until it grew cold, and searched the Sector Twelve Residents filing cabinet until I found Birgitta’s personnel file. Attached were her Spring & Autumn identity mug shots and the usual guff about hibernational intentions, National Insurance records and employment status – in her case ‘freelance’. Aside from a hefty fine for failing to properly register with OffPop and an ongoing investigation for potential childbearing evasion, there was little of note. And there was no mention of marriage, nor any link to Webster.

I replaced the file, had a thought, then pulled Webster’s file and stared at the contents curiously. Jonesy had pointed out that he and five others had either vanished or been made into nightwalkers, potentially because one of them was conducting some form of industrial espionage. And that got me to thinking that if one of them was claiming to be someone they weren’t, then their file – the one used to conduct background checks – would be fraudulent.

Webster’s name would have come back clean, but if he was an impostor, his likeness might very well show up a different result.

I unclipped the photograph from his file, attached it to a sheet of paper, wrote a request that purported to be from Toccata using a signature on another document I’d found, and sent it via fax to Central Records in Aber. I watched as the paper was slowly drawn into the machine. Sixty miles and a short time lag away it would be doing the same thing, only coming out.

As soon as it had vanished, a cold panic seized me. What was I doing? There was nothing to link Webster to, well, anything. A traitorous Don Hector mixed up with deep-cover Campaign for Real Sleep operatives battling to retrieve a missing wax cylinder existed only in my imagination. They were dreams. Fancies. Nonsense. Narcosis.

And even more stupidly, I’d just forged the Chief’s signature on an information request. A felony during the Summer, potential Frigicution in the Winter. I stared at the dormant fax machine forlornly, wondering how I could have been so stupid. I considered sending another fax countermanding the first, but thought that would probably make it worse.

But, I told myself optimistically, it was entirely possible Central Records were busy, and checking photographs could take days.

It took all of eight minutes. And I only knew that because I got a personal visit from Toccata, who arrived with Jonesy into the filing room. Toccata didn’t look very happy, but then she never looked very happy.

‘Well, Gronk’s dung in a piss-pot,’ said Toccata as soon as she saw me moving in a guilty fashion away from the fax machine, ‘I should have known it was you.’

I defaulted to stout denial, as Sister Placentia had done when eighteen empty gin bottles were found under her bed.

‘I have no idea at all what you’re talking about.’

Toccata raised an eyebrow. Oddly, over her non-seeing eye.

‘Then let me enlighten you: I just got a call from Central Records, thanking me for the very interesting picture I sent to be identified. I was surprised about the call, Wonky. Do you know why I was surprised?’

‘I’ve got a feeling you’re going to tell me.’

‘Because I never sent any picture ID request, and that must be me having a serious memory lapse, because it had my signature on it.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘really?’

‘Yes, really. Then they asked me who the man in the picture identified himself as, because they’ve been after him for twelve years and he’s on their Campaign for Real Sleep watch list. And you know what?’

‘What?’

‘I couldn’t answer that question, either. Because I hadn’t sent it and didn’t know what they were talking about. Isn’t that totally weird?’

‘Very weird – but I still have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Jonesy picked up the actual fax that I had carelessly left on my desk and showed it to Toccata, then to me.

‘You are so busted,’ said Jonesy with a smile. ‘I think you’d better tell us everything.’