Page 98 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘I don’t know the details, sorry,’ the guard said.

‘Yes – it induces high blood pressure,’ Fujiwara said, frowning. ‘Which is fine for hysterics, because there’s an imbalance to even out; the effect is to allow them to sit still and regain calmer cognition by slowing the blood supply to the brain. But give this to a healthy person and you’ll eventually induce … well. Stroke, heart attack, dementia.’ He lifted his eyes on the last one. ‘Students take this all the time as a studying aid – it gives you huge concentration, you never fidget or get bored. Marvellous til you keel over. Headaches, sudden spinal pain, dizziness, any of this familiar?’

‘He wouldn’t have said if he’d had any of that,’ Mori’s guard pointed out, frowning too. ‘Our doctor said – well. It was orders from on high, you know?’

‘Bloody Tokyo. Trust them to find a piano and decide that the best way to play it is to hit it with a sledgehammer.’ Fujiwara had gone down on his knees to look into Mori’s eyes. ‘Can you tell me if you’ve been having headaches?’ he said carefully.

‘Of course I’ve been having headaches,’ Mori said, sounding, more than anything, amused. ‘What d’you expect?’

‘Oh, glorious,’ Fujiwara said. He gave the guard a black look.

Mori was looking out the window, down into the courtyard, as if he expected something to be happening there. Takiko glanced down too. The courtyard was empty.

‘Well, I received orders from Tokyo,’ the warden chirped, in a way that was clearly meant to put an end to any debate. He brought out a telegram and unfolded it to show them all. ‘The Russian fleet is still very close to Nagasaki, but, thank heaven, our new fleet is nearly here. We are to ask Mori here exactly how to form up the battle in order to see the Russians off. The Prime Minister wants every single one of their fleet sunk.’

There was a flutter outside. The owls were flying away, towards the town and the sea. Takiko looked at Mori, but he was still watching the courtyard.

FORTY-ONE

The warden opened out a maritime map on the floor. The land was marked on it – Korea, China, and Japan – but the details were about the sea; the shoals, currents where they whirled around the Sea of Okhotsk, wind direction. Its scale was big, and it took up most of the broad space by the hearth. The paper crackled, razor-sharp along its folds. It was brand new. It had come from an envelope, now open on the warden’s desk, labelled ‘The Weather Station Project’. Because the map was so big, it took four of them to flatten down the corners with cups and books.

‘Right,’ said the warden. ‘Now what does he do?’

Mori’s guard moved him carefully, tugging him down from the hearth to kneel on the floor at the edge of the map. The edge of Takiko’s skirt covered Siam. ‘You have to ask him. But – you have to be careful how you ask. It has to be precise or he doesn’t understand.’ The guard hesitated. ‘Odds are he might not anyway. You have to make sure you’ve only got one question in mind at a time. Otherwise he’ll answer what you might say in ten minutes’ time. You can’t … be in a hurry, sir.’

‘I see, I see,’ the warden said. The other Kabato guards had gathered around too, interested to see what would happen. ‘How does he know? He sees the future, yes? But not the objective future, his future. So how in the world would he know what’s going on in Busan or out to sea if he’s here with us?’

The guard nodded. ‘Newspapers. We bring in hundreds and hundreds of newspapers. They’re always old, but as long as we order them in, he can remember reading them.’

‘Miss Tsuru,’ the warden said to Takiko. ‘In that envelope is the exchange number for the department in the Home Ministry running all this. The contact is a Mr Tanaka. Get on the telegraph and ask them to send copies of every daily paper, immediately.’

Takiko nodded and found the paper that outlined how to reach the Home Ministry department. It was complicated. There were three passcode words. Everyone watched her as she sat down at the telegraph. The clattering chink of it was loud in the silent room. The buzz that came from the operator at the other end was much faster and more professional than her hesitant code. Order confirmed.

The warden nodded for too long, nervous now. ‘Let’s give it a stab, then, shall we? Mr Mori …’ He hesitated while he put together the words. ‘Show me the coordinates that must be occupied by the Japanese fleet, in order for you to read of the sinking of one hundred per cent of the Russian fleet.’

The guard put a pencil in Mori’s hand. The pencil began to move over the map while the warden was still talking, and then the room faded into a deep, attentive silence. Mori didn’t do what Takiko had expected; he didn’t just mark on some crosses straight off. Instead, he took the pencil by its very end and held it loosely, like he was scrying with it, and moved it gradually up and down the map, starting on the Korean side and moving east. His hand hitched halfway up the Sea of Japan as if he had felt the pencil lead bump something invisible on the paper. He moved the tip to and fro three or four times more, and then marked the place. It was the first cross of twenty-five, across the west side of Japan. Some of them were in a cluster off the coast of Nagasaki, and some were very close to Abashiri, hardly a mile out to sea. It looked very much like the Russians had staged a large distraction off mainland Japan to make everyone look at Nagasaki, but a wholesale invasion of Hokkaido in the north.

‘Good grief,’ the warden said quietly.

Mori was still writing. He was annotating the crosses with the names of battleships. Takao-maru, Katsuya-maru, Heian-maru. She knew most of them, from Kuroda. Mori put smaller battleships and frigates off the mainland coast. The dreadnoughts, the city-sized ships crewed by a thousand men, he stationed off Hokkaido; right by Abashiri.

‘Good thing so many prisons have had problems,’ Mori’s guard said once it was done. He sounded a little awestruck. ‘We’ve got practically our whole labour force in just the right place, if the Russians do manage to land here. Do you think … he did it on purpose, to make sure we’d be able to defend the coast?’

The warden was studying the map still. He snapped his fingers suddenly at Takiko. ‘Back on the telegraph. Send them those names and coordinates. Someone write down the coordinates for her,’ he added.

There was an unobtrusive clatter as Mori dropped the pencil. He was kneeling already, but he leaned forward with his hand flat to the floorboards again, looking dizzy. His guard looked uneasy.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ the warden demanded.

‘He … this happened before the avalanche in Kabato. He got all dizzy if he tried to walk on the north side of the cell.’

‘Why?’

The guard hesitated. ‘Well, the avalanche … it tore off the north side of the cell.’

Everyone looked round. There was no obvious avalanche coming, though, and after a moment they all laughed. Takiko sent off the coordinates and sat back in her chair, uneasy, because Mori’s guard hadn’t laughed, and he hadn’t said how far in advance Mori had felt the absence of the floor.

‘Hey,’ someone said, and nodded at the window. ‘Look.’