Arcadia

24

Jack More was travelling back into a world which was familiar, even comforting, after the sterile, dead and entirely regimented institute that sprawled over the Island of Mull. He talked to no one as he took the old ferry across to the mainland with the workers, then the link to the transport hub fifty miles inland. He sat as inconspicuously as possible, trying to lose himself in the mass of reeking humanity which was, like him, travelling south for work, into the sprawling metropolis which extended for some two hundred miles and contained so many people that no one was even sure how many there were. Most could not move, bound for life to their factories or jobs so that production would never cease. They got up, worked, went home and thought themselves happy. Some, though, like the people now surrounding him, were floating workers, assigned to one task or another as needed; others, he suspected, had run away, hoping to hide themselves and not be noticed. He realised he had become separated from them, even felt superior to them despite being born one of them, in a housing unit of twenty thousand attached to a food processing plant where his family had worked for generations. Jack had hated it, and volunteered for military service simply to escape. Then he had gone into security, to avoid being sent back. Was his time in an institute having an effect on him? Was he getting used to the small privileges that he now possessed? How hard would he try to hang on to them, if he ever had to choose?

It was, after all, most peculiar behaviour for someone like him — someone as he was now pretending to be — to use mass transport and to travel to the grubby, dingy suburbs of the south. He was also going alone, without the usual panoply of security detail and aides which someone of his supposed rank would have insisted upon to give protection from the envious and dangerous populace.

He studied the wan reflections of his travelling companions in the coach, the lined faces, the signs of hunger, the weariness and wariness of their expressions. All were insignificant, consumers not producers, there to be controlled and monitored and to work for the greater good, even if they never knew what it was. He did not examine them directly, but rather in the window of the compartment, half steamed up from the heavy rain lashing down outside. He studied his own face and knew why they looked at him cautiously, a little suspiciously. He was too healthy, too exercised and self-confident, not like those all around him.

Some people did look at him more closely, then glanced away. He did not think any of them were excessively interested, nor did anyone follow him when he arrived at his destination. But then why should they? Cameras were following his every move anyway. He was banking on no one bothering to look at them.

For the next two days he went back to his old business, calling on former colleagues and friends who, unlike him, had remained in the front line of security and policing when he had left in disgust. He could no longer see the point of harassing and monitoring, of travelling into the heart of vast housing complexes to pick up people for trivial offences. The arrests, the interrogations, the forced re-education programmes had no purpose other than to remind people of the power of their guardians. People like him were meant to find and neutralise renegades, criminals and troublemakers, convert them into useful citizens serving the good of all. He had increasingly come to the view that it was a waste of time. Most were incorrigible, and increasingly he doubted that they were much of a threat in any case. They arrested a few to intimidate everyone else and to reassure the masses they were looked after and kept secure. Working for Hanslip was hardly exciting, in contrast, but until a couple of days ago it hadn’t required him to pretend he was doing something useful.

But his old life had at least provided the comradeship he no longer had, and he was almost nostalgic when he walked in through the doors to be greeted by the sense of purposeful activity. The building was just as run-down and decrepit as it had been the day he left, three years previously; the same mountains of files, paint peeling from the walls, overflowing rubbish bins, probably even the same dust over the stained floors. Many of the inhabitants were the same as well; he recognised several but it was strange — and annoying — to realise how easily he had been forgotten. One man, whom he had worked with on a complicated case of smuggling years back, walked past him in the corridor, stared at him with a puzzled expression, then said, ‘Hello, Jack. Been on nights?’

Others — young and new — simply had no idea who he was.

So, in a bad mood that only a sense of irrelevance can bring on, Jack wandered through the building until he came to the office which had once been his own. In fact, he had shared it with six others, all undercover operators. These were wilder, less disciplined, more irreverent, less enamoured of rules. They knew how to keep their opinions to themselves, and made fun of the authorities behind their backs even as they served them loyally. They had to understand those they lived with, and often enough came to sympathise with them. Their job was to catch subversives; frequently they ended up protecting them as well.

He spent an hour in there, talking about old times, asking after old acquaintances before getting down to business. He needed a favour, he said. A missing woman. Nothing official. No public announcements, no broadcasts of the have-you-seen-this-woman variety. Discreet. Not a word.

‘Urgent?’

‘Very.’

‘Explanation?’

He shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

They did not query, bargain, set conditions. Of course they would help. Jack handed over Angela’s basic information — all identifying qualities, numbers and back history, financial information, health data.

‘Photo?’

He handed it over.

‘Cute.’

‘She’s seventy-eight, and a psychomathematician.’

‘Ah. A nutter.’

‘So it seems, but a very intelligent one. During her training she never once scored less than 99.9 per cent on any exam. Also extravagant, emotional and high-risk. She has never held a job for more than two years, until she ended up in this institute on Mull, where she has been placated and perhaps sedated enough to function.’

‘Criminal activities?’

‘None that we know of. No history of violence beyond once threatening her employer with a broken bottle, although, from what I know of him, that might well have been entirely justifiable. She’s gone missing, and she won’t be easily found. There may be a connection to renegade groupings. Retreats. Leave that to me. Don’t go near them or alarm them. I do want the current inventory of people in Retreats near here, though.’

‘Why?’

‘Just in case something strikes me.’

‘Then you might as well do the work yourself. You know where the files are. Most haven’t even been touched since you left.’

He read carefully for four hours, both the dossier on Emily Strang and the reports on the Retreat where she was registered. It was routine stuff, for the most part. The Retreat was about thirty years old, a breakaway from another one because of internal faction fighting. They probably split into warring fragments, he thought, over the best way of baking bread or something like that. Few Retreats lasted for very long before they broke into pieces over some minor dispute. It was one reason why they were tolerated — you see what freedom of expression gets you? Chaos. You want to be like these people, wasting your energies in pointless argument over trivia?

What this one did was not mentioned, as any activities the inmates were likely to indulge in were, almost by definition, pointless. The only question was whether they were dangerous in any way. In this case the answer was no. No more needed to be said, which was a pity; it would have been useful to have had some idea of their internal philosophy before he approached.

The inmates were the usual collection of misfits. Some had been born in Retreats and scarcely knew what they were missing; others had gone there of their own accord after some display of egotistical individuality — refusing drugs, venturing opinions, discontent or semi-criminal activity. To Jack’s practised eye, none seemed either remarkable or difficult to deal with. Merely people who thought their opinion was better than the collective wisdom of the best scientific minds on the planet. The nominal head, Sylvia Glass, was a woman with the prospect of a great career in administration until, one day, she simply walked out when disciplined for singing to herself. A few others had been promising scientists or managers. All had rebelled and been isolated and barred from contact with others in case they spread the infection.

As for Emily Strang, the record was much too simple to be convincing. If she was indeed the daughter of Angela Meerson, then someone had evidently doctored the records very carefully. She appeared as the child of two renegades, flagged as unremarkable but — and this was the interesting bit — given the highest rating at the assessment all infants were subjected to at the age of six weeks. It was, so they said, an infallible way of determining intelligence and future usefulness to society. Emily was assessed at level one, which would ordinarily have meant instant accept ance into the elite training system. She would have been taken off and put into special schools, given every comfort and resource to develop her mind and skills. Jack had been assessed at level six and he knew — because he had looked — that even Hanslip himself had been assigned only level two status. But there she was in a Retreat, and nothing in the dossier suggested this was in any way remarkable.

Jack finished reading in the comfort of his room, as he had decided that he would stay in the sort of accommodation suitable to his new rank, just to see what it was like. The journey from the police headquarters through the filthy streets, never-ending in their squalor, took nearly an hour, until he got to the heavily guarded outer perimeter of the compound and was allowed through after a detailed check of his credentials. They worked flawlessly.

The room he was given was grand. He was impressed; he had never been in such a place before. The luxury was extraordinary. He could go out into the open, under the huge glass dome which stretched as far as he could see, and breathe in the carefully filtered and cleaned air almost as though it was natural. He could walk without protection and have no fear of being shot or kidnapped. There wasn’t even any overhead surveillance. The security guards were placed discreetly so they wouldn’t be seen, and there were no billboards or loudspeakers to encourage loyalty and effort. There was grass, and a tree. Most wouldn’t care for trees, but they symbolised space and luxury and safety. There was a lot to be said for making it into the elite. He wasn’t sure whether the security was to protect the guests or to make sure that the outside world had no idea how well their masters lived.

He ordered a meal, showered and relaxed. He decided against signalling his intentions of going to the National Depository, just in case someone was listening in, and finished his evening by reading about the place instead.

The chances of finding anything in there without specialised knowledge was minimal. It only existed because of a dispute between various committees of scientists; one wanted to destroy all records of the past entirely on the grounds of redundancy, the other wished to preserve them for the same reason that plants were preserved, in case future generations found a use for the information.

When all libraries and archives and museums had been forcibly closed eighty years ago, their contents had been transferred to a single building twenty miles long, four wide and twelve storeys high. It had been promoted as a demonstration of how much the government cared about the cultural heritage of the world, while the real reason was to keep it under guard. It was said to contain every piece of paper, every book, every painting or print that still existed in what had been known as the British Isles. Almost no one wanted to go there, only a few renegades, and even they were now banned from the place. Many thought that keeping it was a waste of resources and wanted to burn the Depository to the ground. No doubt in due course that would happen. It would be easy to set a fire, blame it on terrorists and sweep them all up. There had been a proposal to do just that a few years ago; the plans had been laid out and Jack and his comrades had even been sent off for training in how to round up so many people quickly and efficiently. The internment camps were prepared, courts readied to give them mass trials and find them guilty.

It had all faded away, as the more cynical of his comrades said it would. Budget cuts and lack of interest, a game of politics won and lost. In the last few months, though, it had suddenly been revived; this time, some said, the authorities were serious.