If the prime minister recalled their ectophone conversation after the Special Committee meeting, he did not show it. Without the giant soul-spark, he looked much smaller than Peter remembered.
‘It is you, Peter, isn’t it? It is so hard to tell with the mask.’
‘I will keep it on if you don’t mind, sir.’
‘Of course, of course. Whatever you prefer. Please call me HB. Everyone does.’
‘With all due respect, sir, I am not everyone.’
West looked at him. His eyes were still striking, a silvery colour that reminded Peter of a wolf or a wildcat, in an otherwise unremarkable old man’s rotund face with its thinning moustache. The faint honey smell he remembered was there, too.
‘So, you still play Small Wars,’ Peter said.
‘You remember! Well, it did all right in the shops, even better after I got this big job of mine. People are looking into it for guidance for strategy, would you believe it? There is nothing that deep to it, not really. Although these days I find it calming. Building little worlds with deliberate rules. Capturing definite aspects of reality in lines of force between pieces of metal. Rolling dice to determine outcomes. Sometimes I think it is the best thing I have ever done and the thing that will truly outlive me. Imagine millions of people playing Small Wars on some future aetheric machines!’ His voice took on a shrill note that made Peter jump.
West frowned. ‘My apologies. I am rambling a bit. I do that when I am nervous. I expected you to look different, but that is not your fault. We should really have a better way of seeing into the aether. The Baird boxes are no good. Maybe some kind of Zöllner device that captures hyperlight. You know, I may even have commissioned a project like that, once. That is the problem when you get to my age: it is hard to be certain if an idea is really new, or if you just forgot that you had it already.’
West pursed his lips and carefully picked up a single fallen soldier. Then he stood, walked around the room once with hands behind his back in an old man’s waddle, locked the door and returned to his chair.
‘How is your mother?’ he asked.
‘We have not spoken for a while,’ Peter said. ‘I believe she is still with the Labour Ministry.’
‘Actually, I did know that. That is too bad. She would love to hear from you, I think.’
Peter said nothing.
‘So, what can I do for you, Peter? You have a message for me from Mansfeld, your C, I believe?’
Peter stared at the game pieces on the table. He remembered the first game with West, the one the old man let him win. This felt the same, and all his carefully planned hints and allusions melted away before the prime minister’s silver gaze.
‘It is not just that,’ he said slowly. ‘You know I have never told anyone about you and my mother,’ he said.
‘I know. We are so good at the unspoken things.’
‘There is something I need for my work. If you give it to me, I will remain silent on the … things we cannot speak of.’
West sighed. ‘I was afraid this might happen,’ he said. ‘You are angry with me.’
‘No.’ He just hated the secrets and the lies.
The prime minister leaned back. ‘I completely understand if you are. I did not treat your mother well. I have had some success with love and remain on friendly terms with most of those I have loved. But with your mother, it was a delicate time, with the Dimensionism just getting started, you understand. It probably makes little difference to you. Still, I tried to make up for it, in some small way. I have done things for you over the years, eased your path a little.’ His face darkened. ‘I never wanted the Summer Court to take you. That was a mistake. Someone thought it would please me, and it did not.’
Peter flinched. No wonder penetrating the Court had seemed easy. He had chalked it up to the SIS officers’ incompetence and the Presence’s foresight, but in fact, it was West’s invisible hand that had guided him all along. What did the old man want with him? What did he know?
‘Why was it a mistake?’ Peter asked. He felt dizzy, teetering on the edge of the abyss of paradox once again.
* * *
Years ago, in Cambridge, even before Unschlicht’s machine had finished printing its answer—DOWNING STREET—Peter already knew it was true. It meant he had been lied to ever since he was born.
He looked at Unschlicht wordlessly, tears in his eyes. The philosopher smiled sadly.
‘Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself, Mr Bloom,’ he said. ‘After that lecture, when you followed me, I thought you might be open to being undeceived. It seems I was right.’
He squeezed Peter’s shoulder. ‘Do not worry. If you are frightened of the truth, it simply means you do not grasp the whole truth, like a fly who does not understand it is trapped in a bottle. But together we can find our way out, you and I—and him.’ He pointed at the machine. ‘If you want to meet him again, that is.’
Peter nodded. ‘Will you tell me what it—he is?’ he asked.
‘Up the ladder one rung at a time, Mr Bloom.’
Peter’s finals were a blur. He was filled with a light that seemed to illuminate every problem before him. The need for food and sleep had poured out of him, leaving behind a being of luminous brilliance. He wondered if it was some after-effect of the conversation with the machine, and returned to visit Unschlicht as soon as he was done.
It took Peter several more conversations with the Presence to understand the nature of the entity he was talking to. The Being answered questions directly and always truthfully, but often so concisely it took Peter days to puzzle out the meaning of the answer. Furthermore, he could sense there were always greater vistas of truth he could not comprehend, and he left each session filled with an unsatisfied yearning that was not unlike love.
When the Presence finally told Peter His name and purpose, the ideology of the Empire and Dimensionism seemed as ephemeral as spiderwebs compared to the diamond-perfect arguments that poured out of the machine. It was not that he was turned, turning was the wrong word. It felt more like escaping the fly-bottle, as Unschlicht put it, or realising that the door he had been pushing against all his life was in fact unlocked and simply opened inwards.
When he found out he had made it to the second series of exams for the contention for the title of the Wrangler, he could hardly believe it. After the further sixty-three problems, he slept for two days. In City Hall, gathered in tense silence, he learned that he was a Senior Wrangler. And when Dr Morcom came to him and asked him for help in his research for the government, he began to see the faintest outline of the Presence’s plan for him.
* * *
Seven years later, Peter wondered if the Presence’s plan had included Herbert Blanco West. As the Prime Minister hesitated, he appeared to shrink. For the first time, Peter noticed the looseness of his skin, the red in his eyes.
‘Never mind the Summer Court,’ West said. ‘Let us say that helping you made things easier for me. Now. There is no need to blackmail me, Peter, that is beneath the boy I met all those years ago, who got upset when I cheated a little in our games. What do you want me to do?’
‘I recently reread some passages in The Science of Death,’ Peter said. ‘I have a theory. I would like to test it. It concerns Martian ghosts.’
‘Let me stop you right there, Peter,’ West said, a note of urgency in his voice. ‘You know, I have a first-edition copy here somewhere.’
‘That is not what I meant,’ Peter said, hating the shrill note in his voice that echoed West’s own. This was not right. He’d prepared a multitude of excuses, a tale similar to the one he had given Rachel, about hunting down a mole and finding out what they had access to. He was expecting a battle, an epic duel of wills. A part of him knew he had been preparing for it his entire life. But the old man had no fight left in him.
‘I know it isn’t,’ West said. ‘Just wait.’
He bent over, grunted, rummaged in a desk drawer and took out a blue leatherbound volume. He pushe
d a few toy soldiers aside and set it on the table between them.
‘Do you remember what I said, all those years ago?’ he asked, placing his hands on top of the book. ‘The higher your position of power, the more closely you are watched, the less free you become. I am not free to speak of certain things, even if I wanted to. Do you understand?’
West’s gaze flickered nervously from side to side.
Peter nodded slowly. West had wanted him to find out about CAMLANN, but did not dare to mention it aloud.
You were not paranoid if any room could contain an invisible ghost, looking at your thoughts or listening to your words via a hidden ectophone.
‘You know,’ West said, ‘I was never as free as when I just had a blank sheet of paper and a fountain pen, ready to follow where my thoughts would take me. These days, I have to hope that others follow the thoughts I show them. I confess to having taken some substances that appear to make my ideas more vivid. Perfectly visible in the aether, I’m told. Too bad about the side effects—but I don’t really have enough time left to worry about them. I will join you in Summerland, soon. Our medicines are not as good as they could have been, had we not discovered the Other Side. We simply stopped caring. Your mother and I used to argue about that a lot.’
He smiled. ‘I have watched you over the years, Peter, more closely than you know. I know you can do things I cannot. I want you to have this. It may be my vanity talking, but I think it is worth rereading. Between the lines, perhaps.’
He slid The Science of Death across the table to Peter.
‘Oh, before I completely forget, please give Mansfeld—I never could call him C—my best regards. In fact, I have something for his collection, too.’
After another expedition into the clutter on his desk, West handed Peter a small vial filled with a bluish liquid. ‘I fully understand his fascination with the invisible. You probably never read this early fanciful work of mine.’ He waved at a slim green volume on a shelf. ‘It feels so outdated now. But I really enjoyed writing that last chapter, where Giffen the Invisible Man slowly becomes visible.’
Then he stood up and clapped Peter on the shoulder clumsily.
‘Now go. If you can, come and visit me again.’
Peter forced a small smile. ‘I will. Thank you. Maybe we can play, next time.’
West stroked his moustache and tapped the map on the table, on which the toy soldiers stood. It was a Small Wars rendering of Spain.
‘My dear boy, what do you think we have been doing, all these years?’
* * *
Peter emerged from Downing Street into the gloomy pearl-grey afternoon, blinking and shaken, The Science of Death under one arm and a vial in his pocket.
Read between the lines, West had said. The Invisible Man slowly becomes visible.
He found a corner table in a bustling café full of civil servants and started leafing through the book. The old paper smelled of nights spent reading up in his room in Palace Gardens Terrace. He opened the last chapter and flicked a drop of the blue liquid from the vial onto the page.
Instantly, small, precise handwriting in blue ink appeared between the typeset lines. Carefully, he dabbed the chemical onto his handkerchief and rubbed the pages until the entire message was visible.
Dear Peter,
If you are reading this, I know your loyalties lie with the Soviet Union. I have known ever since I read Max Chevalier’s evaluation of you, years ago.
I admit that this caused me some discomfort at first, but it is not my intention to judge you. I can see the appeal of a perfectly ordered, rational system to a young man of your character. After all, I was drawn to it myself, in a more innocent time.
I also know that you are the person to whom I have now entrusted the task of saving the afterlife.
Let me tell the tale from the beginning. You’re probably aware that I started out as a draper’s apprentice. I know what it was like to serve those who had more than I did, and I dreamed of a better world. With dreams came visions, Martian invasions, invisible men. Embarrassing, really. Many of them were just power fantasies. People embraced those, so I started to wonder if I could create better dreams, ones that would truly change the world.
Along with everyone else, I learned of Sir Oliver Lodge’s moment of great insight on the Ile Roubaud, where he attended a seance with the medium Eusapia Palladino, and through her asked a spirit to disturb a circuit with a coherer he had invented for his radio experiments. The spirit succeeded and rang a bell, heralding the arrival of the Aetheric Age. The great scientist put aside his rivalry with Guglielmo Marconi, and the two set out to perfect an instrument for communication with the afterlife.
When Lodge and Marconi started their experiments with poor Colonel Bedford, they brought me in as a chronicler, to tell the great story of our age. I was so proud that they chose me and not that fraud Doyle. Oh, the book I imagined then! First Men in the Afterlife, I was going to call it. Or The Aether Machine.
You will have read the broad outline of the story in the very volume you hold in your hands. The early problems we had just talking to Bedford, how he nearly Faded from lack of vim, how we brought in Hinton to help him visualise where he was and navigate. How Bedford found the Summer City and the Fortress, tapping his reports using Morse code while the three of us huddled in that house in Sussex, with Marconi’s giant antenna surrounding us like a metallic spiderweb.
My fellow eschatologists had different motives for exploring the afterlife. Lodge wanted to find his son, while Marconi was simply lost in the vision of what his technology could do. I wanted to tell a story about conquering death that would unify mankind.
And so I was the first of us to worry about what had happened to the Old Dead.
Bedford encountered a number of Faded souls—but even the most ancient of them were less than a century old. The aetherbeasts we reasoned to be remnants of higher animal souls, some of which had consumed remnants of human spirits. Apart from the Fortress and the city, we found no signs of a higher civilization.
If anything, technological progress in Summerland should have been easier than here in the First Aether, limited only by imagination and availability of vim.
Where, then, were all the great aetheric civilisations? Why did Bedford not encounter beings far superior to ourselves, far more numerous, not bound by the chains of crude matter? What about alien afterlives? Why were they absent when one could instantly travel anywhere with the power of thought?
We came up with endless theories. Marconi suggested the fourth dimension was simply so vast that the advanced civilizations had already moved on to vistas we could not imagine or reach—a plausible argument given that thought-travel is limited by one’s ability to visualise. As a Catholic, he was drawn to Teilhard’s theories about spiritual evolution and eventual transcendence. Lodge argued that they had experienced a civilizational collapse like the Mayans, and the natural entropic forces had done the rest.
When Bedford mapped out the oldest parts of the Summer City, I started to see the glimmers of an answer. If you look at the city closely enough, with the wisdom of hindsight, it becomes clear that it is not a city at all. It is a citadel, built for war.
Still, it was all just speculation until Bedford stumbled across a hidden chamber in the Fortress, containing a few ancient spirits in hiding. They were almost entirely Faded; the only coherent thing that remained was their utter and complete terror of the beings they were hiding from. They painted aetheric images of unimaginable things that rose from the abyss below the luz mines, nearly driving Bedford mad.
The Old Dead called them the Cullers: ancient aetheric predators that devoured souls and maybe even luz itself, who rose from kata to feed on any aetheric civilisation that was unlucky enough to attract their attention. The Old Dead had tried to build something that would withstand them and had almost succeeded. Almost.
Lodge claimed it was a myth, a fabrication created by Faded souls who had suffered too long in isolation. Eve
n I was tempted to dismiss the idea of the Cullers at the time. I was too full of fire to tell a story about my better world.
For what it is worth, it was around then that I first met your mother. While she did not entirely share my views, she, too, wanted to see the world changed.
Together, we imagined a new world ruled by rational science, where our greatest minds could be made immortal and given aetheric tools to achieve ever higher realms of thought. Hence the Tickets, a meritocratic system for providing afterlives to those who deserved them and were willing to work for them. A perfect cabal of Samurai of the aether, who would see everything and know everything. It was Ann Veronica who shaped the doctrine of Dimensionism more than anyone else.
And then you came along, and we had to choose between our dream and parting ways. My friend Charles Bloom was a true friend in ensuring that you were born in wedlock, even if that drove a wedge between the two of us. I understand your mother and Charles later found a common purpose and true affection, and I am grateful for that.
I admit the vision of the God-Builders in Russia resonated with me, even if they went too far. I did not like the complete surrender of individuality, rational as it may have been. And to me, Lenin will always be that driven, balding man I argued with in 1916.
But that is another story.
By 1919, we had made great strides. The war was regrettable, of course, but for a while, it looked like we could actually realise a large part of the dream your mother and I had. I was able to take some time to write The Science of Death.
Revisiting all my notes and thinking made me realise how we were building a city in Summerland that looked very much like the civilization of the Old Dead. I commissioned a project called CAMLANN to develop sensitive hyperlight instruments to probe the depths of kata.