Donald prepared himself mentally for having to walk the eighty-odd miles back to London. Within the limits imposed on him, he also prepared himself physically by pacing up and down his cell and performing press-ups to stay fit. He judged that 750 lengths of the cell made a mile. There was in any case damn-all else to do but pace out endless figures of eight thinking ahead to how he would rebuild his life back in London.
*
On the seventh day, just after lunch, the sergeant fetched him out of the cell block and escorted him up to Team Lieutenant Haighman’s office. The young officer was in an upbeat mood. He barked at Cooper to bring in a chair. Donald sat in front of the desk.
“I can advise you that General Wardian has drafted a memo which will be the basis of negotiations,” he said.
Donald was almost too stunned to respond.
“Are you saying it has taken a week just for some bureaucrats to write up a summary of standard terms? I could have done that myself in five minutes.”
“That’s lightning fast by their standards—you should try wringing promotion out of the bastards.”
Haighman seemed to dawdle, as if there was something else on his mind.
“You know,” he said. “When we last met, I mentioned having met your brother Lawrence. I was not entirely candid in what I said. I knew him quite recently—up until last spring, when I transferred here to Kent because my wife got sick of the weather up north.”
Donald waited for more. He assumed the reticence was out of the naturally secretive nature of life in a glory trust. To keep Haighman going, he coached:
“Is he well?”
“Oh yes, thriving. Or, he was.”
“He’s still with General Wardian?”
“Definitely. He’s an officer. Lawrence reached cost-centre lieutenant, which is a senior rank for a guy of twenty-six. It’s not easy to get rank in any glory trust, especially if you’re like him and you started at the very bottom as a probationary basic. He made it because he’s bloody good.”
Donald was startled to learn his brother had made a successful career in General Wardian. Everything he had heard of life in a glory trust was of suffocating routine. All he had seen here in the Broadstairs garrison confirmed this. The teenaged Lawrence who vanished one sunny day back in 2096 was a boorish, rebellious lout; hardly promising material for such a life.
“Where is he based now?”
“He was based in Oban in the spring, that’s where I met him, but—"
“Where’s Oban?”
“It’s a port up on the west coast of Scotland. Personally, I loved the place. The landscapes are so beautiful, even when it’s raining, which I must admit is quite often. In May and June the sun comes out and it’s the most vivid paradise you can imagine. I can’t tell you more because it’s a closed town; the Krossingtons own Oban and the land around it.”
“Is Lawrence married? Does he have children?”
“No and no. I hesitate to call him a womaniser… He was a good friend after all. He likes the ladies but not the commitment.”
Well, that sounded Lawrence enough. The teenager had been outrageously promiscuous and with the coarsest sorts of girls.
“You know, this is a tremendous windfall,” Donald said. “I’d like to send him a letter through General Wardian’s postal system.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve picked up rumours. I don’t like rumours or the people who spread them, but I’ve heard this one from several people I trust. It seems he got pulled up for corruption. In a way, that doesn’t surprise me—not that he was corrupt, not at all. His problem was being too brutally truthful. If he held another officer in contempt, even one senior to him, he did not bother to hide his point of view. That’s a dangerous habit.
“But I suspect what really took him down was his politics. He had a wild theory about the causes of the Glorious Resolution.” Haighman got up, strode around his desk, shut the office door and sat down again. “He once told me—when he was pretty drunk—he believed the Glorious Resolution was planned. He was convinced a top clique of the Public Era contrived the collapse of affluent society to destroy the Fatted Masses and take over the world. I mean, that’s a pretty dangerous thing for a glory officer to believe. It’s possible he told the wrong person.”
“You think he could have been disciplined in some way?”
“Glory officers don’t get disciplined for that kind of opinion.”
“You think he was dismissed?”
“Glory officers don’t get dismissed either. They get fogged.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Sent to the Night and Fog.”
Donald often saw Night and Fog slave gangs at work in the Central Enclave, raking and beating the gravel
