Early Riser

Oliver Tiffen goes hot

We drove across the city at daybreak, the tracks of the Sno-Trac clean and sharp over a fresh fall of snow, the sky slate-grey. Only the thin trails of vapour rising from the numerous Dormitoria gave any clue that we were in a city of almost half a million people.

Despite it being two days before Winter officially began, most people had already hunkered down, and anyone who wasn’t yet asleep would be going through their pre-hibernatory nesting rituals. Yoga and Gregorian chants were always popular, with yoyo, tango, humming, bezique and watercolouring going in and out of favour as the vagaries of fashion saw fit. But for most people it was a simple slowing of activity, purposefully avoiding anything exciting. This was a winding down, a relaxing of mind and spirit.

To assist initial descent and a free return in case of an accidental awakening, the networks ran looped repeats of Bonanza throughout the Winter. Residents with Random Waking Syndrome kept a TV switched on at the foot of their bed, sound turned down low, the picture dimmed.

‘It’s only dull by endless repetition,’ Logan had explained earlier, while we discussed strategies to ease anomalous wakers back to sleep, ‘and the close familiarity of the characters and situations make for an often transcendental drifting of the mind.’

No one quite knew why Bonanza had become the TV series of choice for the Winter, but the more it was watched, the more suited to easement it became. If the machinations of the Cartwright family didn’t work, you could always watch reruns of Crossroads or resort to the default entry-level route to welcome catatonia: Ulysses, Moby Dick or War and Peace.

I halted the Sno-Trac outside the Beryl Cook Dormitorium, the largest of twenty-seven Kipshops[21] on the seafront at Penarth. I made sure the compressed air tank was in the green so I could effect a restart, then stopped the engine and climbed out of the rear door. The recent fall of snow had partially melted in the morning sun then refrozen, and the ground felt like Rice Krispies beneath our boots.

‘We’ve got the control rods fully in and the core temperature is still wavering on the red,’ said the porter in an oddly enthusiastic way, as though a reactor fire would be a welcome diversion from the Winter boredom. He beckoned us in to the small control room just behind the reception and we all stared at the core temperature dial, which was indeed wavering on the danger level.

The heat sources that kept Dormitoria at Low Ideal[22] throughout the Winter were now Uranium Reactor Piles rather than the sometimes erratic and unreliable ‘GlowPits’ of layered peat, pitchblende, coal and hardwood. By contrast, the uranium/graphite ‘HotPots’ were efficient and generally maintenance free, but could sometimes – very rarely, it was often stressed by Albion Nuclear – be temperamental in a dramatically showy kind of way.

‘I can’t go into the Winter with a potential reactor overheat and auto-shutdown on my hands,’ said the porter. ‘Who’s going to pay for the rehoming if the Beryl goes dark midwinter? Not me.’

I looked down at the floor with, I think, a sense of mild concern.

‘Fully shielded when they converted the GlowPit to a HotPot,’ said Logan, sensing my disquiet. ‘Twelve inches of lead between us and the stack. Of all the reactor-equipped Kipshops in Cardiff, none has failed any higher than a Code Orange, and that was in the Cary Grant.’

‘The control rods jammed,’ said the porter, ‘but failsafes prevailed,’ he added, with an air of disappointment.

We’d called the Duty Officer at Albion Nuclear, who initially suggested that we should wait ‘until it got really bad’ before doing something. After more urgent pressing, he concurred between yawns that someone should go down and have a look and to get back to him ‘if we thought it looked serious’.

Logan asked me to find the nearest technician on the High Octane list but the porter saved me a call.

‘We have Oliver Tiffen on the tenth floor,’ he said. ‘Nice chap. I’ll get him down.’

For emergency scrams,[23] visual inspections or other potentially fatal situations, there was a list of sprightly reactor-savvy octogenarians for whom a fatal dose of radioactivity would not radically shorten their lives. They were paid handsomely for their services and there was a medal in it somewhere if you were needed, but owing to reasonably robust safety precautions and the low wattage of the piles, most weren’t.

Mr Tiffen appeared in ten minutes, incongruously dressed in tweeds and plus-fours, and surprisingly underage – he looked barely forty-five. True, you could be any age to volunteer, but no matter what, members of the High Octane Group had to be at half-hour readiness at all times. Oliver Tiffen stared at the gauges in the control room and grimaced as the core temperature rose a few more degrees.

‘This looks like fun and games,’ he said, donning gardening gloves, a pair of goggles and a crude telephone headset. He wore a respirator around his neck in an old bag with an oxygen bottle strapped to the front, and carried a Gladstone bag full of spanners that jangled as he walked.

‘Problematical?’ asked Logan as Tiffen stared at the service log, which looked old and mildewy and was covered in coffee stains.

‘If I’m right, we’ve got under twenty minutes before an explosion rips the building apart and scatters burning fissile material for about a thousand yards in every direction.’

‘And if you’re wrong?’ asked Logan.

‘Then it’s a failure of instrumentation or my expertise,’ he said with a grin. ‘You’d all better get clear just in case. Porter? You can stand by to flood the core chamber if I can’t shut down the reactor in time.’

‘It’s that bad?’

‘It’s that bad. Here,’ he added, passing a sealed envelope[24] to Logan, ‘take this in case everything goes balls-down, would you?’

He then told the porter to stand by, opened the core access door with a key he kept around his neck, and disappeared inside. The door slammed shut and we heard his footsteps hurrying down the spiral staircase, clanging on the steel treads as he went.

‘You should both leave if you want to,’ said the porter, his hand hovering over a large pull-down handle that was marked ‘EMERGENCY CORE FLOOD’.

As a porter he had initially seemed ineffectual and flippant, but now it had come to crunch time, he would do as all porters do – never abandon their sleeping charges and go down with their Dormitorium, if required. I was learning that the Winter had a curious integrity all of its own.

‘We’ll hang around,’ said Logan, confident, I think, that between the porter and Tiffen the issue could be resolved. He didn’t ask me if I would stay, but then as his Novice, I was kind of part of him. After a few minutes we heard Oliver Tiffen’s voice over the crackly loudspeaker, and he explained the problem, which was kind of technical, but involved a loss of water in the safety tank or something, and that everything was ‘cooking up down here’. We then heard ‘oh shit’, a few more choice swear words and then, in a calm and measured tone: ‘flood flood flood’.

The porter didn’t hesitate for an instant, and pulled the lever. There was a rumbling from somewhere deep below that sounded like rushing wet cement, then silence. The temperature gauge dropped suddenly and all the other dials slowly fell to zero.

‘Well,’ said the porter, ‘that’s me out of a job.’

The Beryl Cook had two hundred residents, and everyone still awake lent a hand to move them out. The walking awake and the dozing were sent to emergency bedrooms in other Dormitoria, but anyone in the treacly abyss of the Hib was consigned to Honeycomb Sleepshacks still in their beds, as they wouldn’t know the difference until they woke up. The mayor herself actually turned up with a retinue of large and very yawny bureaucrats, who were all eager to downplay the accident, probably because it meant returning to bed quicker and less paperwork.

‘I think we should call this a Level Three “Serious Incident”,’ she said, ‘rather than a Level Four: “An Accident with Local Consequences”. Don’t you?’

‘Didn’t the accident kill Mr Tiffen?’ asked Logan, knowing the difference.

‘Technically-speaking he wasn’t killed by the reactor – he drowned. This is really more to do with the coastguard.’

‘It was under twenty tons of boron slurry,’ Logan pointed out.

‘Agreed,’ replied the mayor. ‘They’ll dig him out in the Spring. His sacrifice will be remembered, and he will be honoured.’

And she then posed on the front steps for a lone photographer who had turned up with a disinterested-looking journalist who asked a series of lacklustre questions. It was two days before Slumberdown. No one shows much enthusiasm about anything in the last week before bedding down.

‘Come with me,’ said Logan once the mayor had departed, yawning, back to City Hall.

All Dormitoria were built to a standardised design, not refined much since initial adoption by Constantine in the fourth century. A circular building, usually capped by a steep conical roof, with twenty or more floors and a central thermal distribution shaft that ran up the centre. The stairs were either embedded in the stout and well-insulated walls, or, as here, wound their way in a spiral fashion up the central void.

Oliver Tiffen’s room was on the eighth floor and Logan used his Omnikey to gain access. The room was dimly lit, and of the standard pizza layout: a one-eighth slice of the circular floor, with the door at the truncated sharp end. The rest was divided into bathroom, bedroom and living area. Heat and light were valued commodities, but from opposite directions: heat from the central core that ran up through the building, light through triple-glazed slots in the outer wall.

We found Mrs Tiffen in the bedroom, surrounded by packing cases of food. She was well nourished, but utterly vacant – Oliver Tiffen had been harbouring his wife since she turned nightwalker. She clacked her teeth at us, then launched into a lively rendition of ‘Help Yourself’ on the bouzouki.

‘Plays it well, doesn’t she?’ said Logan.

It wasn’t unusual for nightwalkers to display skills dredged up from the tatters of their memory. Most knew a few words and could do a trick of some sort, even as mundane as finding their way to the shops or tuning a wireless. A very few, however, could do quite extraordinary things, like ice-skate and play Canasta. Mrs Tiffen was one of these, or, in the parlance of nightwalkers, ‘Tricksy’. Rumour had it the more advanced redeployed – the Edwards and Janes, for instance – were based on these individuals. More upstairs to rewire, apparently.

‘Your husband just drowned under twenty tons of boron slurry,’ said Logan to Mrs Tiffen, ‘but he fulfilled his duty without fuss or drama. If you could be proud of him, you would be.’

Mrs Tiffen didn’t react and just continued to play the bouzouki.

‘Why go to all this trouble keeping her?’ I asked as we stared at the woman, who seemed healthy enough, if a little pale in her demeanour. ‘And to volunteer yourself so young for High Octane and such a potentially gruesome death?’

In answer, Logan passed me the envelope Oliver Tiffen had given him before he went down into the HotPot chamber. The letter was not long.

‘It’s a fairly common belief,’ said Logan, retrieving the letter, ‘but understandable given the strong emotions at stake.’

‘Will you do as he suggests and retire her?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Logan, deep in thought, ‘I’m going to take her to Sector Twelve to be redeployed. It’s a good excuse to look in on Toccata and see what she wants.’

Logan told me to consult Bradshaw’s Railway Guide and I found it was possible to get to Sector Twelve and out again before Network Winter shutdown.

‘What do you want me to do while you’re away?’ I asked.

‘You’re coming too, Worthing. It will be good for your training.’

‘It will?’ I said somewhat doubtfully.

My reluctance was easily explained: Talgarth, the principal town of Sector Twelve, was the largest centre of population in an area otherwise noted for its emptiness, and high proportion of womads and Villains. Roads were impassable during the Winter and food resupply impossible. Not a place you’d want to get stranded. Not a place you’d actually want to be.[25]

The rehousing of the Beryl Cook’s residents was completed by the time we had to head off on the train, five hours later. HiberTech don’t take all Tricksy nightwalkers, so I’d filled in the paperwork and faxed off the request, and had a reply within ten minutes: deliver her to Sector Twelve in all haste.

‘May I ask a question?’ I said as we sat waiting for the train at Cardiff Central. Mrs Tiffen was sitting next to us, playing the increasingly ironic ‘Help Yourself’. Nightwalker transportation wasn’t rocket science: just keep them well fed. They only get troublesome when they get hungry; and when they get really hungry, they get really troublesome.

‘Go ahead.’

‘What does Toccata want you to help her with, and who’s Aurora?’

‘That’s two questions.’

‘I’m thinking perhaps they’re both part of the same one.’

He looked at me and smiled.

‘Very… astute. Here it is: that call from Toccata was about a viral dream that’s been sweeping around Sector Twelve. Ordinary, level-headed people are seemingly having a dream about a blue Buick, then going nuts. Psychotic episodes, trying to kill people, screaming about severed hands and oak trees, being buried alive, stuff like that. She wanted my opinion.’

‘Buicks, severed hands, oak trees and being buried alive?’

‘It’s a dream, Charlie, it’s not meant to make sense. Did you cover viral dreams when you were at the Academy?’

‘We only covered dreams as part of Module 6A: “The Physiology of non-Morphenox slumber”.’[26]

No one thought there was any need to teach any more: a dream is just the subconscious mind attempting to form a narrative from a jumble of thoughts, facts and memories and did nothing but sap the resources that led us healthily to the Spring.

‘And Aurora?’

‘Head of Security at HiberTech. A shit of the highest order. She and Toccata don’t get along. Actually, it’s worse than that; they loathe one another. When it comes to HiberTech/Consul politics and Sector Twelve, there is just one rule: avoid.’

‘Aurora,’ I murmured, ‘the goddess of the dawn.’

‘The goddess of trouble,’ said Logan, climbing to his feet as our train arrived at the station, ‘but I’d said I’d help out.’

I took a compartment with the bouzouki-playing Mrs Tiffen, fed her a bar of nutty nougat and, thus sated, she began to play. ‘Help Yourself’ on the bouzouki once again. Logan was less tolerant of bouzouki than I, so went and sat in first class.

Mrs Tiffen and I were joined by a woman who turned out to be the Winter actor, and the train left the station. I didn’t yet know it, but accompanied by a woman of no dreams, I was on the way to meet the woman of my dreams.