Summerland

14 THE FINAL EXAM, 29TH NOVEMBER 1938

Most of the high-level intelligence briefings Peter Bloom had attended during his career would have sounded dreadfully dull to an outsider. No raised voices, a careful consideration of facts, all the passion and excitement of a Tuesday morning meeting in an insurance company.

The second session of the Special Committee for the Iberian Problem was not like those meetings.

‘You are telling me we just handed you our best Spanish assets, and you, you—’

C’s fury was beyond belief. Peter had never seen him lose control of his self-image, but right now the Chief of the Summer Court was a pale, mangled corpse whose right leg ended in a chewed stump crusted with black blood.

Sir Stewart’s soul-spark was tiny and fearfully blue. ‘We used the intelligence we were given,’ he said, mock bravado in his voice. ‘It is not our fault if it was not particularly intelligent.’

‘Gentlemen,’ the prime minister said wearily, ‘stop arguing and explain to me how this happened.’ There was a shrill note to his voice on the ectophone. This time, Peter Bloom could actually see his round, blurry figure, drawn in the aether by the vortex lines of the nyctoscope in his office, like looking through a grilled window into a black-and-white version of the world of the living. It was hard to make out his face, but as he paced around, Peter recognised his familiar waddle.

‘We are still trying to compile a full picture,’ Sir Stewart said. ‘It is true that we … no longer have many intelligence assets in the region. It appears that a power struggle has erupted in the Republican Party between POUM—where our asset CARRASCOS operated and which supported Dzhugashvili and the Communists. The meeting between Mr Dzhugashvili and our delegation, led by Mr Nicholson here, was disrupted by a shoot-out between the two factions. There is now open fighting between Republicans on the streets, and the Communists are purging anyone with suspected ties to Dzhugashvili—’

‘I say it appears there is a leak in the Winter Court,’ C interrupted. ‘This was no power struggle. The NKVD engineered it and used our meeting with Dzhugashvili as an excuse to eliminate the opposition to the Communists.’

‘Where is your evidence for that?’ Sir Stewart said. ‘The Republic has been a gunpowder keg for years! We just stumbled into it when the fuse was burning.’

This was not how it was supposed to go. Peter had thought Shpiegelglass would use Inez and the rest of the information he had provided to liquidate Dzhugashvili, with no collateral damage necessary. Instead, the NKVD enforcer had somehow poured gasoline into the fire and started a civil war within a civil war.

‘Harold, what do you think?’ West asked.

Harold Nicolson was a career politician and a long-time friend of the prime minister who had been sent to Spain to treat with Dzhugashvili. His self-image was that of a fresh corpse, wearing a white linen suit riddled with crimson bullet holes. The aetheric image of a cigarette dangled from his fingers.

‘Something was off, HB,’ he said, using the prime minister’s famous nickname. ‘We waited at the Telefónica for hours, but Dzhugashvili did not even show. A young Spanish lady was there, a POUM member. I talked to her through an interpreter, she kept assuring us the great man would be there any minute. Then the Communists stormed the building and the shooting started. Nobody from our party or POUM made it out alive.’

In a Small War game, Peter knew, you did not mourn the loss of an individual piece, but he could not help seeing Inez’s soul-spark, the green sphere of trust and certainty, when he promised her there would be peace in Spain.

The Presence must have known this would happen. It would have calculated the best outcome already. Surely that was the case. The Communist Party would stabilise Spain and defeat the Francoists. It would all turn out fine.

Only … human error was always possible. Shpiegelglass could have misinterpreted the Presence’s instructions. Peter shuddered at the thought.

‘What about Dzhugashvili?’ West asked.

‘We are looking for him,’ Sir Stewart replied, ‘but like I said, we need more assets in the area before—’

‘Please,’ C said. ‘We are scouring the aetheric landscape for signals intelligence. We are going to find him.’

Peter frowned. Dzhugashvili had a legendary ability to avoid capture, but Spain should have been a large enough prize to lure him out of hiding. Had he been warned? Who could possibly have known about the meeting?

‘So, we are down to reading newspapers,’ West said. ‘Let me give you a few headlines.’ The tiny figure in the nyctoscope image put on round glasses and studied a pile of news-sheets. ‘COMMUNISTS TAKE OVER MADRID. MADRID PAINTED RED. SOVIET SPAIN. And so on and so on. That is, I believe, roughly what you gentlemen are saying.’

The prime minister’s soul-spark was wrapped in an opaque shell, but hair-thin cracks ran through it, and an ominous red light emanated from them.

‘I am going to have to take this to Parliament. This is no longer just an intelligence matter. Socialists recruiting volunteers from Britain to fight Franco is one thing. Communists shooting British diplomats is another. I wish we could be better than this. Truly, I do. My dream has always been to look beyond the small problems of humanity. But right now I see no alternative. We will have to go to war in Spain.’

West stared right at the nyctoscope, and even through the blurry vortex lines, Peter could see the pain in his silver eyes. He was sure he imagined it, but they appeared to be looking straight at Peter, expectant, as if the prime minister was a Tripos examiner and he was a student again.

* * *

Peter spent the year after Cedric’s death studying for finals in Cambridge. There was a kind of solace in the work, even though he constantly felt like he was walking on something eggshell-thin.

Perhaps that was why he forced himself to work faster and harder, studying twenty hours a day, going through the infamously challenging Tripos Part III questions, in the vain hope that something would emerge out of geometry or algebra or functional analysis to refute Unschlicht’s argument.

He kept himself awake at night by wrapping a wet towel around his head and drinking coffee until there was a constant burning feeling in his belly. When he nodded off, his fitful dreams were full of elephant pyramids and flies balancing on vibrating strings and the Chinese Remainder Theorem and its applications.

Three days before the exams, on a cool May morning, he woke up at four a.m. having hardly slept at all. He dressed and wandered through empty streets that were just starting to fill with soft light.

He found himself at St John’s Tower. It was kept locked whenever the exam period approached, but the iron railing was no obstacle to a former Night Climber of his calibre. A chimney and an open window later, he was in. At the top, there was a small ledge between the stone railing and the sloping roof of the college chapel. Peter balanced on it and walked to the edge, where the abyss waited.

As always, the world looked different from above. The faint outlines of the city had a perfect order to them, a geometry that was not apparent at night. He could almost believe that the world made sense.

But that was a lie. Reason itself was cracked like Humpty Dumpty fallen off his wall, and there was no way to put it back together again. His mother had it backwards. There was nothing in this world, either, and what awaited the Ticketless in Summerland—the forgetful sleep of Fading—was a gift.

After Cedric died, he had burned his Ticket. Now, he doubted he could recall it even if he wanted to. Just one step separated him from the place where his father had gone before him, the raw, unshaped aether without meaning.

Peter closed his eyes and took one deep breath.

Suddenly, he heard a shout from below.

‘Mr Bloom!’

It was Unschlicht, in his shirtsleeves, standing directly below him.

Suddenly, it did not feel right to jump when someone was looking; it was a private thing, between himself and the world. He thought about hiding, but it was too late.

‘Mr Bloom, if you are quite finished up there, I would like you to come with me, please.’

Unschlicht leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled, and looked into the distance with his clear bird-of-prey eyes. They sat in his rooms in one of Trinity’s towers. There was a table, two folding chairs and virtually nothing else, no curtains, and no books. On the desk rested a foolscap-sized journal, bound like a ledger, and a fountain pen.

Unschlicht was quiet and still for so long that Peter began to suspect he had been forgotten. He looked dishevelled. A leaf clung to his shirt, and the knees of his trousers had grass stains. Then the philosopher looked up and cocked his head to one side, like Peter had seen falcons do.

‘You are a very lucky boy, Mr Bloom, that my friend and I spotted you from the green. What are we going to do with you?’

‘I won’t try it again, sir,’ Peter said. ‘It was just a silly thing. A whim. A dare. I will sit my finals on Monday, like I am supposed to, I promise—’

Unschlicht made a chopping movement with one hand.

‘That is not my meaning. You appear to have taken my philosophical commentaries very seriously. That is good. That is very good. But I fear it has made you too much possessed by death.’

Peter said nothing.

‘That is foolish. We can never experience death. Death is not an event in life. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.’

‘But Summerland—’

‘Summerland makes no difference. It is merely another construct, with no true eternity. It is the board for yet another linguistic game. But tell me, Mr Bloom, who makes the rules? Who stands besides the board, watching and judging?’

‘I don’t know.’ Peter felt uncomfortable under his unblinking stare. Unschlicht smelled faintly of grass and sex, and suddenly Peter realised what he had been doing in the grounds that had stained his trousers.

‘Well, let me show you,’ Unschlicht said. ‘I am only the stepladder, boy. You must climb on your own, and then throw the stepladder away.’

He got up and pulled out a heavy-looking leather suitcase from under his bed. He lifted it with some effort and placed it on the table in front of Peter.

Then he opened it.

Inside it was God.