Summerland

11 AN AFFAIR IN THE REGISTRY, 14TH NOVEMBER 1938

Peter Bloom entered the Reading Room of the Summer Court Registry to look for the file on the last battle.

Only a handful of the thirty ink-spattered desks were occupied. There were four archivists’ counters and a small break area. It could have been a library in any civil service building of the living, unless one looked to ana or kata. Even rudimentary hypersight revealed the endless spiralling stacks with their labyrinth of secrets. Peter liked the Registry; it reminded him of the college library in Trinity, although it lacked the smell of paper and dust.

Ostensibly, he was here to compile material for the briefing on Spain for the Winter Court. C had been furious after Peter reported the outcome of his private session with West. The old man sealed himself into his office for two days, refusing to see anyone except the stone-faced Hill. The Special Committee was due to meet in another week, November 21st, and Peter suspected the Chief was girding himself for another confrontation with Sir Stewart. His absence left Peter to deal with the details of transferring the operation over to the Winter Court. A young officer called Hollis kept bombarding him with requests for information. Dutifully, Peter was in the process of preparing an information package—which would also be delivered to Otto and Nora via the Listener.

But the real reason he was in the Registry was the word West had spoken: Camlann.

Camlann was the battlefield where King Arthur and evil Mordred perished by each other’s hand, ending the golden age of Camelot. Was West haunted by the possibility of a world war precipitated by conflict between the Soviet Union and Britain? Did the image represent the Presence invading the Summer City?

Yet that did not explain the guilt West felt. Camlann—or CAMLANN—had the ring of a code name for an operation or an asset. Arthurian code names had been a fad in the early days of the SIS.

If there was an SIS file documenting plans of a war with the Soviet Union, obtaining it was of paramount importance—especially if there was a risk that the fire burning in Spain would spread to the rest of the world, and Summerland itself.

It had to be worth the price he was going to pay for it.

Peter went up to one of the archivists, Astrid, a young woman who had gone through a premature Fading during her time at the Registry. When he joined the Court, she had been pretty, with auburn hair, a prim figure and legs with the perfect geometry of sharpened pencils. She still wore white blouses and short skirts, but her hair was now colourless and her face had become a translucent oval, illuminated from within by the faint prismatic glow of her luz stone.

‘Mr Bloom,’ Astrid whispered. Her voice was nearly gone as well, a barely audible vibration in the aether. ‘How have you been?’

‘Too busy to see you, I’m afraid. Visiting the living.’

‘No wonder you look pale.’ In spite of her condition, Astrid was sharp as a tack, and even liked to joke about it.

‘Merely looking forward to forgetting our first meeting so I can experience meeting you again.’

Astrid laughed, a gentle, tickling sensation in the aether, like leaves brushing Peter’s face.

‘And here I thought today might finally be the day.’

Fading affected everyone differently, and even a regular intake of vim did not necessarily protect you from it in the long run. Before Tickets, it happened very quickly, and it was no wonder that early mediums were accused of being charlatans when the spirits they channelled could only recall fragments of their past lives. Sometimes Peter wondered what it had been like for his father, and what was the last thing that had remained with Mr Bloom at the very end.

Peter sighed. ‘I’m afraid not. I need a couple of files.’

‘I heard you were moving up in the world.’

‘I wish. If I make a mess of this one, C will have my head.’

‘Only your head? He is getting soft in his dotage.’

Peter grinned and took a request slip from Astrid’s desk. He scribbled keywords and an operation code on it and signed it with his luz. It was for an early report from BRIAR.

Astrid glanced at the slip briefly and stood still for a moment. The memories she had lost via Fading had largely been replaced by the vast and complex index of the Registry.

She conjured a Hinton Cube from the aether, a flowing, shifting crystal the size of a small die. It represented a unique four-dimensional address that one could thought-travel to, just like the Tickets and ectophone beacons.

Peter made a show of frowning at the Cube. ‘You know, Astrid, I am not feeling terribly well. I had a bad connection with a medium, gave us both a headache the size of Gibraltar. Would you mind helping me with this?’

‘Of course,’ Astrid said. She leaned closer. ‘It would be my pleasure.’

Peter winked at her. You could find a flaw in any system, no matter how carefully constructed. That was what the philosopher Ludwig Unschlicht had taught him.

* * *

It was seven years ago, during Peter’s second year in Cambridge.

The lecture had been strange from the start. Dr Unschlicht walked into the seminar room at Trinity, pushed a chair to the centre of the small space and sat down. He sat quietly for a while, face tense in extreme concentration. The German philosopher was almost fifty but could have passed for thirty. He had an aquiline profile and a mass of brown curly hair atop a high forehead.

Finally, he began chopping the air with his right hand.

‘I shall try and try again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention.’

That made Peter grip his exercise book and fountain pen with anger. Of course mathematics was discovered, not invented! Invention was a degrading word, better suited for engineers. Mathematics was about how things were, in every possible world. He looked around at the handful of other students and fellows in the room and was disappointed when he did not see other expressions of outrage.

Still, Dr Unschlicht’s presentation was as compelling as it was strange. He had no notes; he simply talked. Every now and then he stopped and muttered briefly to himself, brow furrowed as he attempted to pull a thought from some unseen well with the sheer force of his will. When he spoke again, his next statement was perfectly coherent, logical—and to Peter’s ears, blasphemous.

‘Think of the case of the Liar’s Paradox,’ Unschlicht said. ‘It is very queer in a way that this should have puzzled anyone, because the thing works like this: if a man says I am lying, we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you are blue in the face. Why not? It doesn’t matter. It is just a useless language game. Why should anyone be excited?’

‘Because it’s a contradiction!’ Peter shouted, unable to contain himself. ‘If mathematics allows statements that can be both true and false, it all falls apart!’

Unschlicht looked at him, eyes blazing. His thin-lipped mouth curled into a smile.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why does everything fall apart? Nothing has been done wrong. Why is this young man so afraid of contradictions?’

Peter blushed. ‘Well, if you can’t build mathematics on logic, then what is it built upon?’ he asked. ‘Russell and Moore showed that—’

‘I am very familiar with their work. But you haven’t answered my question. What harm is there in a contradiction?’

‘What about a situation where you are building a bridge?’ a new voice said, high and full of enthusiasm.

The owner of the voice was one of the first New Dead Peter had seen. He, or his medium, wore full spirit armour, a bulky contraption like a diving suit covered in wires and coils. A faint smell of burning dust emanated from it.

‘If you want to build a bridge,’ the armoured stranger continued, ‘you want to make sure your calculations are correct. And how can you make sure it won’t fall down if there is a contradiction in your calculus?’

‘Doctor Morcom,’ Unschlicht said, ‘don’t you give a class on this very topic? Perhaps you would like me to enrol.’

Peter recognised the name. Dr Christopher Morcom was a mathematical prodigy who had passed over at a young age but continued his work in Summerland and even obtained a posthumous fellowship at Trinity.

‘I am indeed teaching a class on the foundations of mathematics,’ Dr Morcom said. ‘But I was intensely curious about your approach.’

‘You can educate me in turn, then! Has a bridge ever fallen down because of the Liar’s Paradox?’

‘Of course not. But mathematics and physical reality are intimately linked. At the end of the last century, we saw the Scottish mathematician Tait’s perfect correspondence between the classification of knots and the Periodic Table of elements. In Summerland, we are discovering even deeper links between geometry and the nature of souls. How can we continue this journey if our entire edifice of logic rests on a shaky foundation?’

‘Your argument is irrelevant. The process of mathematics is agnostic to its material or aetheric nature. It is a language game, nothing more than a matter of grammar, social conventions and practical demands. Doctor Morcom, you will have to agree with me that our bridges stand. If they fall, it is not due to a flaw in the foundations of calculus. Find me a perfect bridge made of mathematics in your Summerland that collapses under your weight. Then I may look at things differently.’

‘Let us hope our aetheric bridges continue to carry us, then,’ Morcom said.

He sat down, conceding a stalemate. Unschlicht followed suit, brow furrowed, and continued his lecture.

Afterwards, Peter followed him across the verdant expanse of Trinity’s grand quad.

‘Doctor Unschlicht.’

The philosopher turned around, head cocked to one side like a puzzled bird of prey.

‘I didn’t understand the point you were trying to make,’ Peter said. ‘Are you saying that mathematics is true, or that it isn’t?’

‘My point is that there is no point. I won’t say anything which anyone can dispute. Or if anyone does dispute it, I will let that point drop and pass on to say something else. Learn to embrace contradictions, young man. Once you do, perhaps we can have a serious discussion, hmm?’

He walked away and left Peter standing there, unmoored and lost, like a kite whose string had been cut.

* * *

Seven years later, Peter walked in the midst of mathematics made solid, in the heart of the Registry.

Astrid guided them to the first file with blinding speed, holding his hand in a featherlike grip. Their thought-travel blurred the colours of the files into a fuzzy grey which then resolved into a cubical space surrounded by shelves on all sides and illuminated only by amber hyperlight. The angles and the corners twisted whenever Peter turned his head. They were inside one of the countless interconnected tesseracts that made up the stacks. It was hard to believe that as little as thirty years ago, the Service had got by with a small building on Charing Cross Road.

Astrid floated up to a high shelf close to the ceiling and pulled out a thick file. She handed it to Peter.

‘There you go, Mr Bloom.’ Her blank face glowed with rosy light. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’

Peter let the file drop and drew Astrid to him. He kissed her mouthless face. Her skin felt like a soap bubble, slippery and yielding against his lips. He licked the nub of her luz and she moaned softly.

Peter had not taken many lovers in Summerland. Privately, he considered the Victorian morals that discouraged pleasures of aetheric flesh ridiculous. Except in Summerland, nakedness would have meant literally baring his soul, and his secrets with it. And so, even now, his self-image stayed clothed and distinct. He pushed his own luz deep into Astrid’s aetheric flesh, but only caressed her soul-stone without letting it in.

It would be so easy to allow them to become one. What was the Presence but the logical end point of a union like this? She pulled him closer and ground her luz against him. Her fingers melted into aetheric tendrils that flowed down his back. For a moment, it was excruciating to close himself to her. There, in his arms, was a cure to his solitude, an opportunity to share himself fully with another being. As for Astrid, she yearned for his memories of the flesh, of the living world, of all the things she had lost. And he could not give them to her.

He could only take.

While Astrid clung to him, lost in passion, he focused on his luz inside her, reached through it for the Registry index that filled her mind like sawdust packed inside a toy. He whispered the word CAMLANN, and suddenly a Hinton Cube blazed in his mind, leaping up from Astrid’s vast memory.

He continued to caress her for a few minutes, but with less enthusiasm. Astrid grew increasingly frustrated and finally pulled away.

‘I’m sorry,’ Peter said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. This isn’t right, we shouldn’t—’

Astrid’s egg-smooth face betrayed no emotion but her voice was cold.

‘It is perfectly all right, Mr Bloom,’ she said. ‘You did say you had a headache from your medium. It must be nice for you boys, being able to visit the living. I thought I could help you grow up a little, but I see I was mistaken.’

Peter blushed. Astrid gathered her flowing form into her previous prim self-image.

‘I’m sure you can find your own way back.’

The aetheric current from her sudden departure sent the pages of the file flying all over the tesseract.

Peter gathered the sheets of the Spanish file from the floor. Then he focused on the Hinton Cube from Astrid’s mind and thought-travelled. The tesseracts and files blurred. There were cross references, several streams of thought that pulled him in different directions. Lacking the archivist’s instinctive skill, he concentrated on the strongest one, holding on to the image of the Cube like a swimmer to a branch in a current.

Then he was in front of a shelf full of files. There: the pull of the Cube guided his hand to a folder with a green cover. He took out the sheaf of contents and put the empty cover back on the shelf.

For a moment, he thought about the texture of the paper between his fingers. Even now, the Empire’s aetheric technology clung desperately to the conventions of the living.

Of course, nothing was what it seemed. Somewhere within the files was a luz fragment, the ultimate result of Fading, an ancient soul-remnant brought up from the mines in the kata depths and put to use as a scaffold to hold together a bit of aether that thought it was a piece of paper and ink. Did a glimmer of the original consciousness remain? Did the old soul within feel anything when the file was read?

Too bad souls that were still human did not have their thoughts and desires spelled out so clearly.

Peter concentrated. The stack of sheets curled up as if burned by an invisible flame. It became a glowing bubble of aether around the luz shard, an apple of light and air in his hand.

He swallowed it. The tiny luz shard nestled into an orbit around his own soul-stone. Suddenly, crystalline information filled his memory: photographs, reports, transcripts. It was too much to process all at once. He would have to examine it carefully later.

At least he would carry this one Faded soul with him to join the Presence.

* * *

When Peter returned to the Reading Room, he felt thin and hollow, frayed at the edges. Obtaining more vim had to wait, however. It would not do to leave just yet. He avoided looking at Astrid, found an empty desk and made a show of reading BRIAR’s report.

It pulled his thoughts away from the tantalising weight of the CAMLANN file in his mind and back to the situation in Spain. Besides Inez, he had been running two other agents, a secretary in the POUM party and an Anarchist barber with an influential and loose-tongued clientele. Handing them over to someone else felt like a betrayal.

Peter knew his guilt was completely irrational. Shpiegelglass was undoubtedly going to try to liquidate Dzhugashvili using the information Peter had provided. That was the first step in bringing the Republic under the Presence’s influence. And surely, that was the only way to end the needless fighting in Spain.

Or was it?

‘Hullo, Blooms, old boy!’

Peter lifted his gaze and looked right into the eyes of Noel Symonds.

Noel grinned. He was lean and slight with an impish face framed by unruly curls. In death, he did not look much different from their night-climbing days together in Cambridge. Although, of course, he now worked in Section A of the Summer Court, specialising in Counter-intelligence.

‘I have been looking for you all over,’ Noel said. ‘Would you be so good as to come with me, please? We’ll get you a cup of vim on the way.’

He clapped Peter on the shoulder.

‘You look like you could use it.’

* * *

Noel’s office was in the upper floors of the Summer Court headquarters, in the warren of corridors that indicated prestige by their proximity to C’s office. It was small but tidy and decorated with colourful old adverts for Symonds Soups, Noel’s father’s company.

Peter was tense when he sat down. Noel leaned on the windowsill and looked out at the view to Albert Park.

Noel was the one they would send, Peter knew. He thought about escape. He had an emergency Hinton Cube address that he could thought-travel to, given to him by George in case he needed extraction. But he was dangerously low on vim for thought-travel, and if this was going to be where they took him, there would be expert spirit Watchers everywhere, able to track him anywhere with hypersight.

He pretended it was a logic problem. Had they known he was going to use Astrid? Was it possible that West himself had set a trap for him? It seemed absurd, but not completely impossible. The CAMLANN file burned in his mind.

‘How are you, old boy?’ Noel asked.

Peter sighed. ‘Worn out. C is sulking, and now I have to hand my entire operation over to the grubby hands of the Winter Court, gift-wrapped with a bow on top. I don’t even want to know how badly they are going to bungle it.’

‘Well, Harriet is bringing you some vim to perk you up. How’s the love life?’

‘Drier than a desert, I’m afraid.’

‘I know what you mean.’ Noel sighed wistfully. ‘It’s a complete monkey show here, and Father is trying to pull me back into the soup business, would you believe it? I thought I left it all behind. People say some things you can’t escape even in death, but I didn’t think soup was one of them.’

‘How about your writing?’

‘Oh, I tried to get that book of photographs published but it didn’t work out. The editor was worried that encouraging Cambridge students to do things like climb on rooftops at night was not kosher. I may just put it out with my own money in the end.’

‘I’d love to see it. For old times’ sake.’

Noel smiled. ‘You’ll be the first one I’ll call when it’s done.’

He turned his back to the window, leaned against the glass and folded his arms.

He is about to lie politely, or get to the real business now, Peter thought.

‘Listen, there is something I would like to run past you. There is a young chap at Blenheim who occasionally tells me things, on the q.t., you know.’ Noel tapped the side of his nose. ‘So, a month back, the Winter Court catch themselves a big fish and forget to tell us about it. A defector does a walk-in. It’s all kept very hush-hush, only Section heads and the deputy director involved, and a couple of Watchers. Except it doesn’t work out. The man just tells them things they already know, strings them along for weeks.’

Peter laughed, masking his relief. ‘That sounds like business as usual at the good old Water Closet.’

‘Indeed. In any case, they are getting ready to throw the fish to the cousins for some chickenfeed, and suddenly the defector decides to off himself in his hotel. Just like that. Doesn’t have a Ticket. Disappears like a fart. The cousins get angry. Heads roll. It’s a terrible mess.’

George had killed himself? Peter reeled. He really had not known the man at all.

‘Does C know?’ he managed. ‘We should take this to the PM, to argue he can’t give our Spanish operation to these bunglers.’

‘We should! But here’s the rub. My man told me something else. Apparently the last thing the defector said was that somebody over here is playing for the wrong team. What do you think about that, old boy?’