Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘Was the last one Jim Treacle?’

‘Good try. No. It was Laura. How can one Novice get into so much trouble so quickly? When I began in the mobile infantry nothing exciting happened to me for weeks.’

‘Then what?’

‘I lost sixty soldiers under my command.’

‘Your fault?’ I asked.

‘No, but they were all my responsibility, so it amounts to the same thing.’

She fell silent and wiped off some condensation that had formed on the interior of her window.

‘Aurora was asking me where Glitzy Tiara and Eddie Tangiers ended up,’ I said. ‘She said she checked the night pit and they weren’t there.’

Jonesy stared at me.

‘They’re in the snow at the back of the car park. I couldn’t be arsed to walk them to the night pit. What does she think I did with them?’

‘She’s of the opinion that you and the Chief are running some sort of farming scam that used to include Logan.’

‘I’m glad you brought that to me,’ she said, after staring at me in silence for a while, ‘and in return, here’s something that might interest you.’

She dug a sheet of notepaper out of her top pocket and passed it across. I read it briefly while driving along. On the paper were six names, but the only one I recognised was Charles Webster.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘I was bored and in the records office. It turns out that Webster wasn’t the only employee from HiberTech who went missing at that time – every single name on that list ended up either redeployed or vanished. And get this: all had been working at the Sleep Sciences Division. Interesting?’

‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘What’s your explanation?’

‘Not sure. A purge, perhaps – they suspected someone of industrial espionage but didn’t know who it was, so went through the lot. I’ll bet good money Hooke was involved.’

‘Why?’

‘You heard Hooke was chucked out of the intelligence services for overenthusiastic interrogation?’

I nodded.

‘The story goes that he spearheaded the military wing of HiberTech’s Dreamspace-Derived Information Extraction Technique. Quite effective, apparently, going in to people’s dreaming minds to extract intel, but with a downside: the subjects were rendered little better than nightwalkers by the process.’

‘And you think he did this to Webster and the others?’

‘HiberTech are not a pleasant company, Wonky. If they’re employing people like Hooke, trebly unpleasant. You were interested in Webster, so I thought you should know.’

I thanked her and we drove past the Ashbrook advertising hoarding and then the Cambrensis . Jonesy’s story would make a lot of sense if my dreams were real: HiberTech didn’t know who Don Hector gave the cylinder to, so they interrogated everyone they suspected. I shivered, and pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind. Dream then reality; not the other way round.

I parked the Sno-Trac next to the statue of Howell Harris and Jonesy told me to keep the engine running.

‘You’re to go on patrol with Fod,’ said Jonesy. ‘Wait here.’

She climbed out the back of the Sno-Trac and went to have a word with Fodder, who was standing outside the Consulate. While I waited I fiddled with all the controls on the dashboard. The main headlamps, H4S radar, hydraulic snowplough. Most of my Sno-Trac time was on simulators, but it wasn’t as if driving a Trac was hard – the controls were identical to those of every other road vehicle, from car to tank to coach to lorry to the biggest dumper truck. SkillZero protocols insisted upon it. ‘Drive one, drive all’ was the slogan.

‘Don’t like these things,’ said Fodder as he climbed aboard, chucking a large black holdall on the seats behind, ‘but we’ve got some distance to cover.’

His eye was badly bloodshot from the thump the previous day, but otherwise he seemed in good spirits.

‘What’s in the bag?’ I said.

‘A surprise.’

‘I like surprises.’

‘I’d hold off judgement in this particular case.’

We moved off with a low rumble from the engine and a shudder from the transmission.

‘Take it out of town past the jammed truck,’ he said, ‘but be careful.’

I did as he requested and we edged slowly across the bridge.

‘Before you ask,’ I said, ‘nothing happened between me and Aurora. She’s just causing trouble.’

‘Whether you did or didn’t,’ he said, ‘it’d still be a good idea to stay out of Toccata’s hair until this afternoon. She’s pretty grouchy in the first hour after coming on shift. We’ll take the road west out of town; the Frances Hoggan hasn’t checked in for the past three weeks, so we need to take a look.’

The Frances Hoggan , I learned, was the sole Dormitorium in a village to the west of here, and as we headed over, the Sno-Trac making easy work of the deep snow, Fodder explained procedure: all Dormitoria were required to call the Consulate on a designated day.

‘The Hoggan hasn’t checked in for the past three Wednesdays,’ he said, ‘so Winter Best Practice demands that we have a look.’

I followed Fodder’s directions while he described points of interest, of which there were many but all covered in snow, so it was mainly an exercise in imagining what was beneath the large drifts.

The day was quite beautiful, and the trip out to the Hoggan a break from Birgitta and the dream, both of which were dominating my thoughts. Fodder tired of being a tour guide after a half-hour or so and we fell to chatting about the Summer, of which my memory was as fresh as his was hazy. I told him about the warmth, and the breeze, and the harvest, and the freshness of the food. He said that this was the bit he missed the most.

‘I haven’t seen a banana for over six years,’ he said almost dreamily, ‘and I’d give my left foot for a fresh pineapple.’

No one who got cold and dirty in the Winter was ever truly welcome in the Summer. The citizenry didn’t know or care what the Consuls did during the cold to keep them safe, they just wanted to wake alive in the Spring, same as always. For many people, the Winter didn’t really exist except in an abstract sort of way, and by consequence, neither did we.

‘You and Jonesy serve together?’ I asked, recalling that she’d said that she and he ‘went back a ways’.

‘Camp Firebrand,’ said Fodder, ‘second Ottoman campaign.’

‘I heard it was seriously hot out there.’

‘Our real enemy was adequate hydration. We lost more soldiers to desiccation than to enemy action. Bodies out in the sun reduced to less than one per cent moisture in forty-eight hours. You could snap off a Souther’s ear and grind it to dust in your fingers. Jonesy’s lost more comrades than you and I have had hot dinners. It’s what makes her a good Consul, especially out here – not afraid to die, and may even welcome it.’

I slowed down as we entered the village, although to the untrained eye it was simply a series of large, snow-covered lumps. Unlike Talgarth, Llangorse was a ‘sleeper’ town where no one ventured out, and the only overwinterers were the porters.

‘Go through the town and you’ll see the Hoggan . It’s on the lake.’

I followed Fodder’s directions and we were soon within sight of a circular tower sitting upon a small island within the smooth unbroken white of the frozen water. From the outside little looked remiss. The doorway was snowed in, and the thermal exhaust ports that ran in a ring beneath the top floor were clear of ice and snow, so from here all looked okay. I mentioned this to Fodder but he simply nodded.

‘Pull over anywhere in the car park, then shut down.’