Summerland

12 THE NIGHT-CLIMBERS OF CAMBRIDGE, 14TH NOVEMBER 1938

Peter and Noel Symonds became friends seven years ago, on the same day he had attended Unschlicht’s lecture.

He spent the evening wandering around town in shock, trying to gather his thoughts. It was late when he returned and he had to pay the porters some gate money to get in.

As he stomped across the grounds towards the corner staircase where his small room was located, he heard a rasp from above. He looked up, expecting to see one of the black squirrels that lived in the college grounds.

A young man in a Trinity Hall scarf and a suit hung suspended between two thick pillars that bulged from the brick wall. It appeared he had been shimmying up the groove between them, with his back against one pillar and his feet against the other. But now he was stuck halfway up.

‘Ho, there,’ Peter whispered. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing,’ came a pained response.

‘You had better not be trying to get into my room. I will call the porters.’

‘I’m not, honest! I’m just climbing.’

‘You don’t appear to be going upwards at the moment.’

‘That’s a good point.’

‘It’s Noel, right? Noel Symonds?’ Noel had borrowed Peter’s notes once after missing a class, for ‘an important engagement,’ he’d said. Peter now suspected it had involved scaling vertical surfaces.

Noel grimaced. ‘Hullo, Blooms. Say, do you see a coil of rope there, on the ground? I don’t suppose you could be a nice chap, take it up to that window, tie one end somewhere and toss the other end to me? I don’t think I can hold on much longer.’

His legs were shaking now, and he was quite high up.

‘All right,’ Peter said. ‘But then we are both going to the roof.’

* * *

‘Like this?’ Peter asked and leaned against the rope.

He was trying to get around a statue of a saint protruding from the wall. He was high up, nearly thirty feet from the ground. He was sweating and his arms ached, but it did not seem to matter. It was all so irrational that it was as if he was outside his body, weightless.

‘Yes. No. Move your feet to that ledge. There is a drainpipe next to you, grab it with your other hand. Now let go of the rope and take my hand. Don’t worry, I’ll catch you. One, two, three—’

Peter released the rope and reached for Noel. For a terrifying moment, he clung to the wall by his toes and the drainpipe. Then their palms smacked together and Noel gripped his hand firmly. Balancing on the ledge, Peter let go of the drainpipe and caught the roof’s edge with his other hand. He pulled himself up while Noel strained under his weight, red-faced. Finally, Peter got one of his feet onto the roof, squirmed over the edge and collapsed next to Noel. A tile slid off and fell to the courtyard below with a terrific clatter. They both froze and held their breath for a moment. When no porters appeared, Noel grinned at Peter.

‘That was not bad for a first timer,’ he said appreciatively. ‘We usually do it like this, in twos, but Bunny, that bounder, thought he saw the porter coming and bolted.’

They leaned their backs against a large chimney. It was silent and the air was cool, and the lights of Cambridge shone all around.

‘So how do you get started?’ Peter asked.

‘You need to have proper gear. A smooth, good quality jacket is a must—it won’t get caught on things. And rubber-soled shoes, if you want to be serious.’

‘My God, you do this it a lot, don’t you?’

‘Nearly every night. I’m even writing a book about it.’ Noel grinned. ‘It may be the high point of my life.’

Noel was the unofficial chief of a dozen climbers who, between them, had scaled every building of note in Cambridge. Peter listened to his stories with wry amusement.

‘Why do you do it? Isn’t all this stupidly dangerous?’

‘Of course it is! But, you know, it’s not like we have that much to look forward to. I’m going to end up running a soup business, can you imagine that? I’ve been trying to write poetry, but let’s be honest, I’m no good. There’s always politics, but that sounds like an awful bore. I am, however, pretty good at climbing, in spite of the state you caught me in. It is nice to be good at something.’

Noel looked at the city lights thoughtfully. ‘You know, they say that the state you are in when you die affects what happens to you in Summerland. Sometimes I imagine it would be nice to fall, hit the ground and just keep falling, straight through the Earth. I could spend eternity trying to climb back up. That would not be so bad.’

He grinned. ‘And climbing makes it easy to impress girls, of course.’

‘Really?’

‘Not really. In fact, I have yet to encounter any lady climbers, and most members of the fairer sex tend to regard our obsession with tall, pointed objects as being rather unhealthy and something Doctor Freud would have some thoughts about.’

Peter laughed.

‘What about you?’ Noel asked. ‘Why did you climb up here? I’m sorry to be forward, but a person who takes such meticulous notes as you does not strike me as someone who suddenly has an urge to sit on a rooftop.’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

‘It’s silly. I was at this lecture earlier today and something Doctor Unschlicht said upset me.’

‘Really? I usually have trouble even staying awake at lectures, let alone getting upset.’

‘It’s just that…’ Peter waved his hands in the air in frustration, looking for words. ‘He was saying that mathematics does not mean anything, that it’s just a language game, that there is no truth behind it. I thought he was wrong, but it was so hard to argue with him. I wanted to be a mathematician, but now I don’t know what to believe.’

Noel looked at him curiously. ‘A mathematician? You know, a lot of the climbers are doing the Tripos. I think you lot use your brain so hard that night air does you good. Why don’t you try it?’

‘Climbing?’

‘Yes, why not? You definitely have what it takes. We’ve written a manual of sorts—I’ll bring it to you tomorrow and you can have a look.’

Noel’s teeth flashed in the dark.

‘Of course, there is one thing that every beginner has to do for themselves. An initiation ritual, if you like.’

‘What is that?’

Noel got up, gathered the rope and tied it around his waist. Then he walked to the roof edge, leaned over, grabbed a drainpipe and started climbing down as nimbly as a monkey. He paused and peeked over the edge, eyes full of mischief.

‘Getting down,’ he said. ‘Good luck!’

And then he was gone.

* * *

Sitting in Noel’s office seven years later, Peter remembered that feeling, being left on the roof all by himself. It had been a test, of course. He had got down, in the end, after crawling around the pitch-back roof on all fours for a while.

Noel liked tests. But if this was one, passing it required more than shimmying down ornamental stonework and a broken fingernail.

‘One of us playing both sides?’ Peter said finally. ‘That sounds unlikely to me. Are you sure that was not just some Russian ploy?’

‘That’s what the Winter Court bigwigs are saying, too. I just wanted to know what you think.’

‘Why me?’

‘You were always the clever one, old boy. And Spain is where we’ve been having the most trouble of late. Anybody in your Section we should be worried about?’

Peter looked at Noel. He had that same confident, carefree look as when he was making his way up the Old Library chimney all those years ago. That meant he did not entirely know what he was doing but thought he was on the right track.

‘This source was sure that the mole is in the Summer Court?’

‘I think so—why do you ask?’

‘Well, to be honest, I have been wondering about BRIAR. There is a strong NKVD presence in Madrid, and he is in a Communist volunteer unit. The Winter Court could be wanting to put the blame on us when the fox is in their own henhouse.’

‘Good point. I am going to press my source on that. Anybody else?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

‘All right, then. I just thought you should know, in case a witch hunt is imminent. We have been in this together for so long that I wanted to come to you first.’

Noel’s face was unreadable. It would be very like him to give a warning even if he suspected Peter. Or was he offering Peter a chance to come clean?

‘Does C know?’ he asked.

‘Not yet. I want to keep it that way until I have something more solid. It may turn out to be nothing.’

When their Director of Studies, Mr Jepson, had recruited Noel for the Service in their third year at Cambridge, Noel had finally found something more thrilling than night-climbing. Peter had followed him soon after.

Not for the first time, he wished things had been otherwise. Noel’s friendship was the one thing he had not wanted to sacrifice on the altar of the Presence. George had advised him to continue the camaraderie, keep as close to Noel as possible, as if nothing had changed. He had been unable to do it. Noel had felt some unspoken thing between them, a stone in the current of their friendship, and it had pushed them apart.

The irony was that it had been the night-climbing and their friend Cedric that set Peter on the path that finally led him to the Presence.

* * *

The day after their first meeting, true to his word, Noel came to see Peter and brought him the Climbers’ Guidebook, a stack of typewritten pages, handwritten notes and photographs. Try as Peter might, he could not be angry with Noel for abandoning him on the roof: the shared nocturnal activity made him feel part of something special.

Peter met Noel’s friends, James, Bunny and Cedric, who also spent their nights hanging off Cambridge’s architecture. They exuded a potent mixture of enthusiasm and sheer insanity. The climber community was small and secretive. Noel claimed that there were often climbers in the same college who never knew each other.

Under Noel’s tutelage, Peter practised on the roof of the Old Library. Noel called it the nursery for climbers: a jumbled confusion of slopes, leaded walks and iron ladders.

A month later, Noel deemed him ready to attempt the Library’s Tottering Tower. It was a twenty-five foot high structure, a thin stone needle with a collar of gargoyles and a sharp cone on top.

Peter gasped when he saw it, but it was more of a mental challenge. You had to leap across a chasm to start, but once you did so, the tower itself had miniature carvings that made the rest of the climb easy, like going up a stepladder.

Then they were both at the top of the tower, standing on carvings and holding on to the spike at the top.

‘Look at this view,’ Noel said. ‘It was worth the effort, wasn’t it?’

The massive edifice of King’s College Chapel loomed ahead, so gigantic that even at their height of sixty or seventy feet, Peter felt like he was still looking at it from the ground. To the north, St John’s Chapel rose above a sea of rooftops. Directly below was Trinity Hall, with the speck of a porter walking across the quad. Peter felt like a bird, soaring.

Maybe Unschlicht had done him a favour. If you were rooted in something solid, you could never truly fly.

After that, he embraced climbing wholeheartedly. It took his mind away from doubting mathematics. It was good to feel red brick against his body, and to solve one problem at a time—hand here, foot here—and see how far up he could get. His studies suffered. The days became blurry, sand-eyed intervals between climbs, and he spent more time adding entries to the Guidebook than he did with his homework.

And that was the way it was until September, when Cedric died.

* * *

After Noel, Cedric was the climber Peter came to know best. He was a tall Trinity boy who dressed in ridiculously high-waisted trousers and braces and smoked a pipe. In tutorials, he was completely silent, folded his lanky frame into his bench with great difficulty, and squeezed his pencil nub so hard it looked as if his long, flexible fingers might snap like twigs at any moment. During climbs, he became alive and talkative, telling Peter about growing up with his six rugby-playing brothers and his plans to open a store selling American comics.

One night, Cedric tried to solo-climb one of King’s College Chapel’s spires. It started to rain, he lost his footing and fell more than a hundred feet. A proctor found his body lying in the courtyard the next morning.

Two days after his funeral, Noel organised a night expedition to scale the spires of the Chapel in Cedric’s honour. The party got their hands on an ectophone and ran the wire up all the way to the top. The climb was difficult—the first frost had settled—but there were ten of them, with lots of ropes. They attacked the Chapel as if it was a mammoth, to be tied down and sacrificed in their comrade’s memory.

At the top, Noel called the ectophone exchange and waited. The sombre mood evaporated when Cedric answered from Summerland. Noel sat atop a gargoyle like some sort of demonic cowboy, lifted the phone and hooted.

‘Here we are, old boy! Here we are!’

Down on the rooftops, the other climbers patted each other on the back and shouted greetings.

Noel waved at Peter, inviting him up to speak to Cedric. He climbed the spire accompanied by the climbers’ cheers, joined Noel at the top and accepted the heavy handset.

‘How are you?’ he asked Cedric.

There was static on the line. Then the dead boy’s voice spoke, more hollow than in real life, but recognisably Cedric.

‘It’s great here, actually. The lectures are still boring even via ectophone. Not much climbing going on. But thought-travel is amazing. And you can shape things with your mind. Need to pay attention, though. If I’m not careful, my head starts to look like a crushed plum. I kind of wish I had got here sooner, to be honest, just not by falling on my noggin.’

As Peter listened, it suddenly felt like the spire was inverted, and the night sky was some unfathomable abyss below him.

‘I’m happy for you,’ he whispered and passed the handset back to Noel.

Ignoring his friend’s surprised look, he descended alone, all the way to the alley behind the Chapel, and ran to Trinity without stopping.

Back in his room, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. It was so unfair. His father had tried to make a difference all his life and disappeared without a trace. Cedric had just drifted through life without purpose, and to him, Summerland was like a holiday resort.

Was this what his mother had tried to tell him? There was no point in climbing when nothing changed if you fell. There was no point in mathematics if it was just a game, with no stone-hard truth beneath.

Noel and Cedric and the others would never understand that.

For the first time since he started night-climbing, Peter felt completely alone.

* * *

During the years that followed, Peter had come to terms with solitude, but it still stung a little to sit with an old friend over cups of vim, conscious that a slip of the tongue would open up an abyss beneath him.

‘I’m glad you came to me with this,’ he told Noel. ‘Do keep me posted.’

‘Of course.’

‘Incidentally, did your source find out anything more about this defector character?’

‘Not much. The Watcher he spoke to said the Russian was a rowdy blighter. Punched a poet, apparently.’

Peter forced a smile. ‘Punched a poet? That’s a good start. I don’t remember anyone ever punching you.’

‘Well, there was that scoundrel Caldecott. But that was over a girl.’

They both laughed at the memory.

‘We should really get together after work sometime,’ Noel said. ‘Maybe even bring Cedric along. Say what you want about the Winter Court, but at least they don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for a medium to get a drink.’

‘How is the old devil?’

‘Oh, you know. All business these days. Always asks about you.’

‘We had some good times, didn’t we? Once in a while, I still think about that night we climbed the Tottering Tower. Are you going to put that in your book?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Noel said. ‘Some things people have to discover for themselves.’

* * *

The rest of the twilight day in Peter’s own Section lasted forever. He had to finish his briefing for the Winter Court but it was difficult to concentrate. The CAMLANN file burned in his mind like a tantalising hot coal, but he did not dare to examine it in his office. More than once, the words flowing from his aetherpen became complete nonsense and he had to put it down.

Finally, he was done and sealed the ectomails to Hollis with his luz.

On his way back to Undermay, standing in the fourtube car, he kept hearing Noel’s words over and over again.

I thought you should know, in case a witch hunt is imminent.

Every evening commuter who threw him a passing glance looked like a Watcher. Once, his hands on the bar near the ceiling became those of a young boy again, small and pale, with chewed fingernails. He quickly stuffed them in his pockets until he had his self-image under control. It was impolite to remark on drifting appearances, but it would not do if someone who knew him noticed he was in distress.

His luz pulsed with fear to the rhythm of the four-rail’s clatter. The Summer Court had soul-surgeries that could dig secrets from his mind, no matter how well he hid them. And after he was bled dry, there was the judgment of kata, the abyss from which no one had ever returned.

For the first time in seven years, doubt crept into his mind. Not only had George fled the Termin Procedure, he had killed himself. Why would anyone choose a Ticketless journey into the kata depths over joining the Presence?

Peter really had not known George at all.

You can prove anything from a contradiction.

Was it possible that it had not been a suicide after all, that Shpiegelglass or someone else had liquidated George and the Winter Court was covering it up? But why would Shpiegelglass keep that from him?

Peter sat down and watched the fourtube’s pale, dark-suited men and women returning from the upper ana levels, or from long, tiring journeys to do aetheric work in the living world, and felt jealous. Their lives might be meaningless, but at least they weren’t troubled by unanswerable questions.

Back in his flat, he finally took out the CAMLANN file. It was not so much like unwrapping a present as he had anticipated, but rather pulling out a tooth: it had tangled up with the doubts and fears in his mind during the course of the day. He focused on the bubble of aether with its tiny luz kernel and fanned out the documents it contained like a magician’s oversized playing cards.

There was a budget with deliberately obscure line items, a list of personnel—twenty researchers and support staff, both living and spirits—and a contract with Marconi for aetheric instruments. No names of the staff were included, a standard practice in defence-related contracts. Still, it looked like a significant effort: the total cost was more than a million pounds. An impenetrable one-page executive summary talked about research into ‘deep kata phenomena,’ whatever those were.

The project was commissioned by West himself in January 1928—then a freshly minted prime minister—and terminated in August 1928. It had been supervised by a steering committee including West, the Royal Eschatologist Sir Oliver Lodge and Guglielmo Marconi. The minutes from the committee’s final meeting were sparse but indicated that the project had been shut down due to ‘inconclusive’ results—Lodge and Marconi had overruled West. Peter perked up at that. There were rumours that the original three who were present during Colonel Bedford’s first journey to the afterlife in the late 1890s had suffered a falling out. It was certainly true that West, Lodge and Marconi had not been seen together for a while.

The rest of the file—the actual research—was a blur. Peter swore. Either the aetheric record had degraded over time, or the Zöllner camera—which recorded images in aetheric patterns that could be transported to Summerland—had not worked properly.

Or someone had made sure it had not worked properly.

He paced around in frustration. Then it occurred to him to look at the cover sheet of the file. Yes, the file was an aetherized version of an older paper document, which was stored in the original Registry. Which was now in St Albans, a small town outside London, where it had been relocated from the original Charing Cross site in 1932.

It would not do to send an official request for the file, especially if Noel and his Section were watching him.

Then it struck him. The answer was obvious. He needed to find out what the Winter Court knew about him, and what had happened to George. He needed access to the Old Registry.

In other words, he needed a source inside the Winter Court.

He remembered the night Noel had left him on the rooftop alone. It was so dark he had crawled around on all fours, looking for routes down. Then the clouds hiding the moon passed and it became an algebra problem, putting a series of simple steps in the right order. Go down a drainpipe close to a window with ornamental stonework. Jump onto a ledge, hang from it, drop. And then his feet were on the ground.

Peter poured himself a cup of vim, sat down, took up his aetherpen and started drafting an ectomail to Rachel White.