Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘She has a pernicious influence on the rabbit,’ said Flemming, ‘and the Senior Group Leader wants her in custody to more fully ascertain her motives.’

By this he probably meant that it was actually Smethwick who wanted her for questioning, but the PM liked to stay one step removed from anything too controversial.

‘Are we thinking of snatching the Bunty from inside the colony?’ asked Boscombe, seemingly quite excited about the idea as it probably involved several helicopters, lots of hardware and a totally knock-out cool code name.

‘Eventually,’ said Whizelle, ‘but in truth it’s only rumoured she’s in Colony One, figuring out ways to “Complete the Circle”.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Boscombe.

‘We think ,’ said Flemming in the manner of someone more comfortable with conjecture than truth, ‘that it may relate to the rabbit’s plan to weaponise their reproductive capabilities in order to overrun the UK.’

‘Quite,’ said Whizelle. ‘The geographically restricting environment of MegaWarren is needed now more than ever to curb the ugly spectre of a sustained campaign of LitterBombing.’

Everyone in the room nodded sagely at this; it was an ongoing concern, but with little evidence to support it. The Council of Coneys branded the LitterBomb notion ‘patently ridiculous’, along with other leporiphobic conspiracy theories, such as a desire for ‘Universal Veganism’, a change to running the country ‘the Rabbit Way’ and a wholesale switch to the worship of Lago, the rabbit goddess.

‘The point is,’ continued Flemming, ‘that there are at least fifty miles of warren inside the colony, and we need to narrow down the search. The Rabbit Underground Movement are doubtless in constant communication with the Bunty, and that’s why we’re eager to capture and interview this individual. Get to him and we get to her. Get her and we’ve got the rabbit where we want them.’

After we’d all stared pointlessly at the Flopsy for a few minutes Lugless replaced the picture on the projector with another, this time of the high street in Ross.

‘Intel tells us Flopsy 7770 visits the post office in Ross-on-Wye every Tuesday to post letters to the other colonies. He uses the exterior pillar box and ensures he is there at the time of the four p.m. postal collection so he can add them to the mailbag directly. It’s not exactly a freshly pulled carrot, 15 15. Rabbit slang for a ‘smoking gun’, ‘dead cert’ or ‘done deal’. but I think Flopsy 7770 is acting suspiciously enough to warrant further investigation.’

‘Labstocks are almost impossible to break,’ murmured Boscombe.

This was true. When your kind were vivisected before the Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event, it kind of made the ‘continuous application of harsh coercive force’ indistinguishable from ‘last Tuesday’. Anyone in the Rabbit Underground who held sensitive material and had to go off-colony was usually Labstock for this precise reason.

‘I haven’t met a rabbit I couldn’t turn,’ said Lugless in an ominous manner. Gathering intel in the old days had been easy because rabbits were so trusting, but they had wised up over the years and now adopted a ‘blank expression while blinking’ approach to law enforcement questions which was devastatingly effective. But rabbits knew how to get to other rabbits, especially if they could feign dominance and had no ears, which was about as creepy and shocking to them as seeing someone with half a face might be to us.

‘OK then,’ said Lugless, laying another sheet of acetate on the overhead projector with his very precise plan on it, ‘this is how we’re going to do it.’

It was pretty much a standard sharp arrest. Always unexpected, always fast. An escaping rabbit might take three to five seconds to get up to a fast enough run to initiate the first bounce – and after that only an officer with a powerful net-gun could bring one down, and that was a weapon that had limited range and required the team to know in which direction the rabbit might go – an almost impossible task. ‘Trounce before Bounce’ was the guiding policy.

As Lugless outlined the plan everyone took notes. All the officers were to be in civilian clothes and ready to pounce on Flopsy 7770 the moment he posted the letters. There were questions and answers until most of the officers were satisfied. Whizelle wouldn’t be coming as he was easily recognised, but Lugless would be present, coordinating the grab – but in disguise, he said, which I was intrigued about. Rabbits had a hard time looking like anything but rabbits.

‘What’s my function in all this?’ I asked.

‘You’re our plan B,’ said Lugless. ‘You’re to get a good look at the Flopsy before the arrest, just in case he slips through our fingers. You can ID him later.’

‘I can’t guarantee that,’ I said. ‘He’s a Labstock.’

Lugless stared at me in a dangerous sort of way.

‘… but I’ll do my best,’ I added.

‘I really hope so,’ said Lugless, ‘for your sake.’

The briefing broke up ten minutes later.

Rabbity was the English word for the rabbit language; the rabbit word was ‘Niff’, one of the few pronounceable words in the rabbit language. Dismayingly, Niff could also mean, depending on context: ‘rabbit, life, wholeness, carrot (straight), warmth, sky, ratchet screwdriver, aeroplane, wagon, carrot (curved), Wensleydale cheese, hopscotch and sleeve-valve engines.’

Ross-on-Wye had a pre-rabbit population of eight thousand, all human. Today that had risen to twenty thousand, chiefly rabbits. Most were long-term residents, part of an early experiment in rabbit/human integration undertaken in the seventies by RabToil, which had initially been set up as an NGO to find employment for rabbits, but had grown and darkened over the years to control all rabbit employment and was now integrated into the Ministry for Rabbit Affairs.

The Ross integration experiment, while hugely successful at the time and still regarded as the gold standard for peaceful inter-species coexistence, was never rolled out further owing to a concerted smear campaign by UKARP, who despised the concept of integration and instigated numerous complaints about the rabbit’s ‘bacchanalian nature of rampant promiscuity that would surely corrupt the nation’s youth’. Despite no evidence that the nation’s youth needed any outside forces to help corrupt itself in the least, UKARP succeeded in casting doubt over further integration and were as surprised as anyone when their plan succeeded, and integration plans were abandoned. They used it as a springboard to further pursue their anti-rabbit agenda. No one could have foreseen that they’d actually lead the nation four decades later.

‘Before Ross we had only failure,’ said a spokesman for UKARP, ‘afterwards, only success.’

Despite the leporiphobic rhetoric, the once sleepy market town of Ross was now a bustling centre of commerce which encompassed trade, crafts and literary and artistic pursuits, as well as two centres for higher learning that revolved around philosophy, high cuisine and sustainability. While a few residents initially complained about the rabbits, all were won over by the vibrant nightlife, friendly upbeat manner of the newcomers and, of course, the trading opportunities. Although rabbits were not paid well, they liked to spend what they earned quickly. The gourmet lettuce bars did particularly well, as did the numerous greengrocers, a thriving bookstore and several hookah dens where rabbits discussed politics, economics and carrot hybridisation issues while their hookahs bubbled and puffed with the aromatic scent of a variety of rabbit tobacco: dock leaf, catnip, burdock, celeriac and dandelion. Mornings in the hookah dens were reserved for performance readings: the one we passed had a reading of The Hunchback of Notre Dame going on all week.