Early Riser

Merthyr

The Winter thespian had listened intently as I told her how I’d gone from Assistant House Manager at St Granata’s to Winter Consul Novice in an afternoon. I didn’t name Jack Logan as my mentor, but she’d understood the discretion. I hadn’t told her about Toccata’s stories regarding viral dreams owing to operational security, nor Mother Fallopia’s unkindness, this time out of misplaced loyalty, but I told her all about the Beryl Cook overheat and Oliver Tiffen’s sacrifice, which seemed to strike a chord.

‘A brave man,’ she murmured. ‘Anyone close to you ever tripped the Night Fandango?’

‘There was Sister Oesterious at St Granata’s,’ I replied. ‘She’d been taken off to be thumped and dumped in the local pit only they hadn’t hit her hard enough and she turned up three days later covered in fish-heads, old cabbage leaves and soggy newspaper. Looking back it seems kind of darkly comical, her lumbering in through the front gates with everyone screaming. Mother Fallopia was made of sterner stuff and retired her properly with a rounders bat behind the bike sheds. Lucy Knapp had nightmares for a week, but in general I think everyone was okay about it. What about you? Know anyone who nightwalked?’ She rubbed her temple thoughtfully.

‘My husband, Geoffrey. We met when performing as the front and back halves of a pantomime horse, and bonded over the “equestrian gavotte”. It’s a tricky dance to synchronise, especially as I had done the decent thing and took the rear half.’

She laughed.

‘Geoffrey said it suited me as I was a horse’s arse. I had to marry him, of course, and we had seventeen years of unbridled joy. He was my Romeo and my Macbeth, my Rochester and my Desmond. But we still donned the panto horse outfit and performed the equestrian gavotte at parties, just for kicks and giggles.’

She paused, and the smile dropped from her face.

‘At Springrise five seasons ago I thought he was just having a foggy morning, but his light through yonder window never broke. He did a post-mortem trick, too: Romeo, the balcony scene. Over and over again. I thought he was still in there, too. Not unusual to believe so, I’m told. I didn’t keep him for five years, though – he ate my sister’s Norfolk terrier the following Tuesday and that was it. I called the HiberTech hotline and they took him away.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘He was redeployed as a road sweeper and I saw him once, I think, in Lee-on-the-Solent. Well, I thought it was him. HiberTech have a Redeployment Centre there, so it could have been one of many, I suppose. He was parted out the next Winter. His legs are on a gardener in Stourbridge right now and his eyes are currently looking across the Sound of Mull, which he would have liked. I don’t know about the rest of him…’

She lapsed into silence. Best not to dwell, no matter how hard that can be.

I turned to the train window and stared out at a landscape that, while constantly changing in detail, remained much the same in aspect: snow and ice, bleak and empty, cold and unwelcoming. The Winter. There was a very good reason most of us slept through it.

Mrs Tiffen stopped playing and dropped into the rigid state peculiar to nightwalkers known as Rigor torpis. It was a welcome respite from the playing, and although she could play ‘Help Yourself’ quite well, it was motor memory only – there was nothing in or on her mind at all.

‘That’s a relief,’ said the actor, and for the remainder of the journey she imparted to me some tips about the Winter: primarily to resist borrowing money from bondsmen,[27] shun all contact with anyone of ‘low, questionable or financially-negotiable morals’ and to avoid the drowsies.

‘One moment you’re transfixed by their large eyes and honeyed words and wondering if there is anywhere you’d rather be,’ she told me, ‘and the next you’re paying off the Debt from the hock-house wondering how you could have been so stupid.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

The train slowed as we approached Merthyr, the disused pit-workings silhouetted against the afternoon sky, the streetlights already on. This was as far as we went on the local train; we’d need a transregional fitted with a snowplough to take us ‘over the hump’ to Sector Twelve.

The actor stood up to retrieve her bags from the rack while I smeared a finger-full of peanut butter on the roof of Mrs Tiffen’s mouth to keep her occupied. The actor opened the door to the compartment and stepped down onto the recently gritted platform.

‘Well, good luck with your first season,’ she said. ‘Keep your wits about you, and be prepared in case Hydra comes knocking. Whenever I took on a part, I always made sure I knew the lines of the next one up the ladder. I bagged my first Hamlet that way.’

The Hydra system wasn’t just for actors, it was for all of us. She gave me a Winter hug.

‘May the Spring embrace you.’

‘And embrace you, too.’

‘Who was that?’ asked Logan, who joined Mrs Tiffen and me from where he’d been travelling in first class.

‘I didn’t get her name,’ I said, ‘a thespian readying herself for a Winter tour.’

‘A noble servant of the Winter,’ said Logan, ‘like us. Now listen: we’ve got just over an hour before our connection and I have to go and see someone. I’ll meet you in Mrs Nesbit’s in about fifty minutes. Order me a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea to go.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Oh, and Worthing?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t lose the Vacant.’

And he was gone, walking briskly towards the exit. I stood on the platform for a moment in the gently falling snow, the air heavy with the pleasing odour of coal-smoke. By rights, you shouldn’t smell smoke two weeks after industrial shutdown, but most of the coalfields under Tredegar, Rhondda and in the Taff Valley north of Merthyr were now burning underground, the hills leaking smoke through fissures in the ground, the intense heat transforming trees into twisted relics of charcoal. The boffins had said it was only a matter of time before the gases managed to lock in some global heat, but every year it grew colder, the glaciers advanced some more, the growing season shortened. But for us, at least there was a positive: Wales derived much of its revenue from the CO₂ release tariffs, negotiated early on, when six times higher than they are now.

I couldn’t find a guard so walked towards the only train in the station. The engine had not yet arrived, and behind the single coach were two flat-bed railcars being loaded by a freightmaster in a forklift. He had the exhausted demeanour of a long-time Winterer; dark-rimmed eyes and slack, pale skin. Overwintering accelerated ageing by a factor of at least one and a half. When you committed your professional life to a Wintering career, you gave part of your physical life, too.

The wooden crates were marked Ambrosia Creamed Rice, Wagon Wheels, Mini-rolls and Dream Topping. Like much else, sound nutritional sense was suspended during Winter. From a morale point of view, eating comfort food made Winters seem less like cold purgatory, and more like a kid’s party. More relevantly, the cases also had ‘HiberTech Industries – Sector 12 – Winter Urgent’ stencilled on the side. I knew it was the right train, but in time-honoured tradition asked the freightmaster to confirm it anyway.

His name, I learned, was Moody.

‘I’d like us to be off as soon as the engine arrives and is coupled,’ he said, glancing nervously at the sky from where snow was falling in broad, languid spirals, ‘but the stationmaster is a stickler for punctuality, so it’ll leave when it’s scheduled: in fifty-eight minutes’ time. Returning or staying over?’

‘Definitely returning,’ I replied.

‘Wise move. Sector Twelve’s not for the faint-hearted.’

‘Do I look faint-hearted?’

‘When it comes to Sector Twelve, everyone’s faint-hearted.’

There was no real answer to this, and knowing the dead woman was going to get hungry again pretty soon, I took her with me to the one watering hole still open: Mrs Nesbit’s Traditional Tearooms. At the last count there were eight thousand outlets of the popular eatery across the Northern Fed, with four hundred and six open throughout the Winter.[28] The establishment had a cosy familiarity about it: the logo of the company, here emblazoned bright and proud on the window, was the eponymous and wholly invented character of Mrs Nesbit herself. She had a winning folksy smile, a swirl of grey hair tied up in a bun and was wearing an old-style blouse and red dress beneath a kitchen apron. For reasons of familiarity and convenience – both ruthlessly exploited by NesCorp – it was the default snack bar for almost everyone, irrespective of social class or cultural background.

I walked inside, the bouzouki across my shoulder, the dead woman shambling in front of me, still occupied with trying to lick the peanut butter from the roof of her mouth. Inside the tearooms the air was heavy with the smell of baking, cheap jam and chicory-laced coffee, and predictably, the rooms were not busy. There were only six customers in an establishment big enough for ten times that number.

‘We don’t serve the dead in here.’

The comment came from a woman who I guessed by her almost translucent pallor and two Gold Solstice stars was a long-time Winterer. Most Winter branches of Mrs Nesbit’s were run by burned-out ex-Consuls who would keep the supply of tea and fresh scones uninterrupted until their decades-long sleep deficit finally caught up with them.

‘I’m not asking you to serve her,’ I retorted, ‘I’m asking you to serve me… who will then serve her.’

‘The answer’s no. Her dead body in here over my dead body in here.’

‘Linguistically that was quite… poetic,’ I conceded. ‘A chiasmus, I think?’

‘Closer to polyptoton, my guess. Now why don’t you take the abomination and piss off?’

‘I’m a Winter Consul,’ I said, flashing my badge.

‘My sincere apologies,’ said the proprietress. ‘Piss off… with all due respect.’

She held me in about as much esteem as a nightwalker. Just as I was wondering if I could fit Mrs Tiffen into a left-luggage locker for an hour and whether that was ethical or not, a voice piped up.

‘Is that bouzouki tetrachordo or trichordo?’

It was a man’s voice, low and confident.

‘I have no idea,’ I said, still staring at the proprietress but jabbing a thumb in Mrs Tiffen’s direction, ‘it belongs to her.’

The proprietress grimaced.

‘It’s worse when they’re Tricksy. Like they’re pretending they’re alive.’

‘It’s called Nonsentient Vestigial Memory,’ I said, ‘and they can’t pretend to be anything. But yes, she plays the bouzouki. And quite well, if you’re interested.’

As if in response, the dead woman’s fingers felt across me for the instrument. As soon as I handed it to her she launched once again into ‘Help Yourself’.

‘Why not let them stay?’ said the man who had asked the bouzouki question. ‘The deadhead can play for us. Besides, service retired look after service active.’

It was one of those adages that was based more on hope than reality, but I liked the sound of it.

‘Very well,’ said the proprietress at length, ‘you and the Vacant can stay. But if it starts freaking out my customers, it’s history.’

I thought of insisting Mrs Tiffen was a ‘she’ and not an ‘it’, but decided instead to take my small victory with quiet grace and say nothing. I ordered two bacon sandwiches – one for me, one to go, two coffees, same – then sausages, Jaffa cakes and marshmallows for Mrs Tiffen.

‘With apricot jam,’ I added.

‘On what?’

‘On everything of hers and quite thick.’

The proprietress growled at me and lumbered off. I pushed Mrs Tiffen into a booth and shoved her across so I could sit, then gave her the sugar lumps to eat.

‘Mind if I join you?’

It was my benefactor from the other side of the room.

‘Please do,’ I said, welcoming the company.

He was, I guessed, somewhere between his fourth and fifth decade. His hair was already fully white and he was dressed in the solidly tailored clothes of a career Winterer. He sported a lopsided jaw from a poorly-healed break and he had a balding patch on the side of his head – follicle frost damage, most likely. Most noticeably, he was at Spring weight. In any other context he’d appear almost obscenely underweight. He might once have been Consular staff, but I had a pretty good idea of what he was now.

‘She plays it quite well, doesn’t she?’ he said.

‘If you like to listen to a short instrumental of a Tom Jones hit from the sixties and nothing else,’ I said, ‘it could become tolerable, given time.’

‘Does she play “Delilah”?’

‘Everyone asks that. No. And thanks for just now.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ he said with a boyish smile. ‘You taking her up to HiberTech to be redeployed?’

‘Yes; do you know how they do it?’

‘No idea. HiberTech guard their secrets aggressively. The name’s Hugo Foulnap.’

‘Charlie Worthing,’ I said, taking the calling card he’d offered me. I’d guessed correct – he was a Footman. He’d do anything for anybody, so long as you paid his hourly rate. They were mercenaries, Dormeopaths, odd-job men, nannies and bounty hunters all rolled into one. They’d even play Scrabble with you if you paid their rate, but only to win. Like most Winterers, Footmen took pride in their work.

‘First Winter?’ he asked.

‘Do I wear it that badly?’

‘Yup,’ he said, ‘I can see the fatigue on you already.’

I could feel it too, a dull ache that gnawed in my joints, and the deep-seated sense of nausea that belongs only with consciously delaying hibernation.

The coffees arrived. The proprietress scowled at me, stared daggers at the dead woman, then departed again.

‘I had this call last week,’ said Foulnap, stirring his coffee, ‘from a woman who was going to go deep in the family’s traditional sleep-spot, up in the hills beyond Abergavenny. Family farm or something, near Cwmyoy. Anyway, she’d packed the car, but the duvet was sticking out and jammed the boot lid. You know what she did?’

‘What did she do?’

‘She set fire to the duvet.’

‘Did that work?’

‘Worked really well. By the time I arrived, the car was completely burned out. All her food, her bedding, Morphenox – all gone. I had to resource everything.’

‘How did you resource her Morphenox?’

‘Let’s just say I know a girl who knows a guy who knows a person who knows a girl.’

I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like last season’s acorns seared with a paraffin blowtorch.

‘This coffee’s terrible,’ I said.

‘Welcome to the Winter.’

We chatted some more. He told me an amusing story about how hibernating mammoths near Treherbert had been false-dawned[29] by the encroaching underground fires, and how they had been herded out through the snow and up and over the mountain to Hirwauna in a Hannibalesque adventure that had been the subject of a best-selling book and was soon to be a musical, using the puppeteers from Warphant.

‘Actually, the mammoths sort of did it on their own,’ said Foulnap, ‘nose to tail, like some great big shaggy-haired pachydermical charm bracelet.’

We chatted politics as the clock wound round to our departure time. I asked Foulnap where the restrooms were and after he’d told me, suggested I left Mrs Tiffen with him.

I thanked him, left the tearooms and walked down the platform to the toilets. Once I’d had a pee, I washed my hands and then soaked my face in cold water and stared in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot and seemed sunken into my head, my pallor grey. My ears had started ringing, my fingers and hands felt oddly large and I’d had several hot sweats. I’d been told to expect any or all of these symptoms as indications of Sleep Deprivation Narcosis, but as with altitude sickness, there was no good indication of who would get it, who would not, and to what degree of severity. But the thing I feared most was hallucinations. Had them once during a bad fever, and imagined myself playing pass-the-parcel – but no matter how much paper I tore off, the parcel never got any smaller.

Glad to have a few moments free of the relentless plucking of the bouzouki, I wandered absently onto the station concourse. It was a large, airy chamber with a glass ceiling now covered in snow, the light soft and directionless, the interior dim. The ticket office was still open but unmanned, and Welsh Tourist Office posters covered the walls.

I heard a shout from somewhere outside and I frowned. It sounded a lot like ‘Lobster’, but there was only one person who might be saying things like that, and they shouldn’t be anywhere but safely in Mrs Nesbit’s.

Mrs Tiffen.

With a sudden sense of foreboding I ran as fast as I could to the front entrance and pushed the heavy door open, the sharp air outside hitting me like a wall of ice. The light was failing and the wind was blowing the snow into rotating eddies among the buildings. There was no one to be seen, but I noted fresh tracks in the snow running out from the cab rank.

‘The taxi before you,’ I said to the driver of the remaining cab, an old man with a face so full of soft pendulous folds I don’t think he’d seen the Summer, ever, ‘who was in it?’

He stared at the Consul’s badge I was showing him.

‘I didn’t see the man but the woman looked kind of…’

‘…dead?’

‘Yeah.’

After asking him to find out where the cab had gone and then to stand by to take me there, I ran back towards Mrs Nesbit’s, almost slipping and falling as I trod the snow onto the marble floor. The bouzouki was still lying on the table with our half-finished plates.

I felt a nasty, hollow, sinking feeling. I’d liked Foulnap and, foolishly, trusted him. Footmen move with the prevailing cashflow, and nightwalkers can be monetarised in a number of ways. Given the dead woman’s relative youth, parting her out on the underground transplant market could be a possibility, but add her potential fertility and there was another cash possibility: he was going to farm her. I looked up as the proprietress approached.

‘Lose your date?’ she asked in a mocking tone.

‘Where will he have taken her?’

She furrowed her brow and stared at me, unsure quite what I was suggesting.

‘Wait – you’re going to try and get her back?’

‘Yes.’

‘How, exactly?’

It was a very good question. Taking on a seasoned Footman would be at best extremely foolhardy, and at worst suicidal – and in the current time frame and with my level of expertise, well on the other side of impossible.

‘I’m not sure.’

She stared at me for a moment, her anger mellowing to an attitude, I think, of motherly concern. She suddenly reminded me of Sister Zygotia.

‘What made you become a Consul?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

‘I needed a job that would grant me Morphenox.’

‘Makes no sense,’ she said. ‘To avoid the risks of a no-drug Winter you take on every risk the Winter can throw at you?’

‘Now you mention it,’ I said, ‘it does seem kind of dumb. But at least I’m away from St Granata’s.’

Luckily, Chief Logan chose that moment to walk in the door.

‘Hello, Fran,’ he said, moving forward to greet her with the traditional Winter embrace, then making some reference to ‘sprightly times’ they’d spent together during some Winter I-don’t-know-when in Sector something-or-other. Fran, it appeared, had been part of the established Winter crew on Logan’s first placement. Consuling was a small, close-knit family, tighter than the military, they say. They chatted for a while – reminded each other of the time they were charged by a frost-deranged glyptodon – but it was only a matter of time before he noticed me.

‘Remember my bacon sandwich, Worthing?’ he asked, then, annoyingly and predictably: ‘Where’s Mrs Tiffen?’

‘I… remembered the bacon sandwich,’ I said a bit stupidly, ‘and the tea.’

‘Good of you. And Mrs Tiffen?’

‘She was… stolen. I think she’s going to be farmed.’

Logan gave me a pained expression.

‘You bloody idiot, Worthing. Who took her?’

I explained as quickly as I could what had happened.

‘Terrific,’ said the Chief once I’d finished. ‘You should cross off “babysitting nightwalkers” from the short list of things you can do. Pull your finger out, Worthing, or you’ll be mucking out breedstock for the Winter. Fancy that?’

‘No, sir,’ I said. Looking after the Winter breedstock was a job usually reserved only for convicts and people who were, well, hated.

‘But,’ I added, ‘we have to get her back, right?’

‘No, we do not. Hold fast and think for a moment. We lose a nightwalker and HiberTech are mildly pissed off they lost a Tricksy walker, but really, who’s hurting here?’

‘Mrs Tiffen?’

‘Mrs Tiffen died five years ago. What you lost was something she used to walk around in. She’s gone, it’s done, you screwed up, move on. Let’s get on the train.’

I backed away.

‘No.’

I said it in the manner of a petulant child, and regretted it instantly. Logan stared at me with a quiet, unblinking gaze.

‘What do you reckon, Fran?’ he said. ‘Gross insubordination or the idealism of youth?’

‘Idealism of youth,’ she said. ‘In the Summer it’s perfectly harmless albeit mildly tedious – but in the Winter it’s a killer on a par with hypothermia and the measles.’

Logan moved closer and lowered his voice.

‘Listen up, Novice. Drop the high ethical stance or get out before you do something you can’t live with. And let me tell you, it’s inevitable, once the cold and the fear and the hunger get a grip. Something will go wrong, you’ll try and make the best of two bad calls, and bing: the Winter has you in its pocket, and you’re tundra. High ideals, my friend, are a luxury ill afforded.’

I stared at him and he took a deep breath.

‘Yes, okay, we try and break up farming cells, and no, we don’t like it. But the end product is a whole series of happy parents and up to a dozen children. And when it’s all over, she’ll be parted out at the end of their life. Agreed, bootleg parts – but someone benefits. We’re Consuls, Worthing. We strive to ensure the most favourable outcome is enjoyed by the majority.’

‘But the law—’

‘During the Winter, we are the law. I’ll say it again because you must have missed it: however unpleasant and barring injured pride, this is a favourable outcome. Now, we’re going to Sector Twelve, I’ll speak to Toccata and see what she has to say about this viral dream bullshit, then we come out on the last train and I try so very hard to forget this, and you try ever so hard not to screw up again. Is there any part of that you don’t understand?’

I stared at the bouzouki, a crushed, empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Failure has a taste all of its own – a sort of hot, sticky doughiness. We could tell HiberTech she died on the journey. They’d not even question it. Nightwalkers die all the time. I was right to make the point, but I wasn’t going to flush my career down the pan for her.

But then a voice rang out, clear and bright, and everything changed.