Summerland

3 SMALL WARS, 8TH NOVEMBER 1938

Peter Bloom found himself haunting an ammunition truck while Madrid burned.

He could not see the flames. To a ghost, the material world was invisible, except for electricity and the soul-sparks of the living. Buildings and streets were skeletons of luminescent wiring. Human brains glowed like paper lanterns. Everything else was a pale grey mist. He would have been hopelessly lost if not for the beacon in his agent Inez Giral’s ectophone that had guided him here from Summerland for their meeting.

Now he hung on to the bright coils of the phone’s circuitry like a small boy gripping the hem of his mother’s dress, and listened to Inez describe the world of the living.

‘The Gran Vía rooftops are on fire,’ she said. ‘And the bombs, they fall like black pears. Big ones first, to knock buildings down. Incendiaries to light them. Shrapnel to keep the firemen away. Same thing every night. Soon there will be nothing left to burn.’

For a woman driving a truck loaded with high explosives through a city being firebombed at night, her voice was remarkably calm.

‘During the day, when we try to sleep, the planes drop leaflets on us, like seagulls shitting. Propaganda and Tickets to Franco’s fake paradise. The Fascists are losing, so they try to kill us all and lure our souls into their false Heaven.’

Peter heard distant thunderclaps.

‘What is that noise?’ he asked.

‘They are firing at the Telefónica again.’

‘A reporter told me the Fascists are using it for target practice.’

The Telefónica was a solidly built skyscraper standing on the highest spot in Madrid. To Peter’s hypersight, it was a stick figure, all wire and gossamer. He could imagine an artillery officer’s delight in knocking it down, like he used to demolish the card fortifications he built for his war games as a child.

‘Let them,’ Inez said. ‘It shrugs off shells.’

She might have been talking about the Spanish Republic itself. Two years ago, a mining rebellion and anger against a Church no longer able to offer answers about death had created a strange, Utopian state on the Iberian Peninsula. A coalition of generals led by Francisco Franco had decided to restore the natural order of things. Reluctantly, Britain had supported Franco. In turn, the Soviet Union had thrown its weight behind the Republic’s Communist factions. And so Spain had become a petri dish of war, a miniature of greater conflicts to come.

That was why Peter was here. Franco was losing. The SIS needed to understand why. They needed more Republic intelligence assets like Inez.

The problem was that he had no idea what she needed.

They drove through the ghost city in silence. He tried to picture what she looked like. BRIAR, the local SIS recruiter she knew as Comrade Eric, had wired him a photograph. A fierce young woman in neat blue coveralls, with pencil-line eyebrows and a striking wide mouth. She did not look like she suffered fools gladly.

He cleared his immaterial throat—the habits of the living were hard to break.

‘Señorita—’

‘Just comrade, like everybody else. Although we are not really comrades, are we?’

‘I hope we can be,’ Peter said. ‘It’s a very brave thing you are doing.’

Inez laughed a short, bitter laugh. ‘You flatter me, Comrade Ghost. Bravery is for mortals. I have a Ticket to our Republic’s Heaven, to the Heaven of the people. Every night I memorise it, all the weird little shapes that tickle my brain, like I’m saying paternoster. If I get hit by a shell, the Ticket will take me where all the good revolutionaries go.’

Her voice was flat. Peter considered her soul-spark, itself a miniature city of flame: a glowing flower the size of his hand, with intertwined petals of blue and red. He wished he had more experience in soul-reading. The only hues he recognised in Inez’s mind were anger and frustration.

‘That was not what I meant,’ he said. ‘Just talking to me could get you in worse trouble than being killed. It is a brave thing to risk your soul for peace.’

Inez spat. Through the microphone, it sounded like a muffled gunshot. Her soul-spark flashed cherry-red.

‘Who says I want peace? Let the Fascists light the city. The fire will make us pure, and they will burn in hotter flames in Hell. When Comrade Eric says to talk to you and gave me the phone, I say why not, I get bored when I drive, I can talk and drive at the same time, no? But I don’t like listening to lies. So don’t talk to me about peace. Maybe I will decide I prefer the sound of guns to your voice.’

Peter swore. Clearly, BRIAR had misjudged Inez and failed to develop her properly. His report had described her frustration with how the Republic treated the Church, but that was not enough. She was not ready to be handled yet.

‘Inez,’ he said, ‘please listen to me. Comrade Eric was right. We can just talk, about anything you want. Just—’

She hung up on him. The circuit anchoring Peter to the phone disappeared and he was ejected back into the cold grey mist.

He spun, disorientated. Inez’s beacon receded into the distance. For a ghost, movement and thought were the same thing. Peter concentrated on the shape of the beacon and dashed after it in effortless, bodiless flight.

He could return to the Summer Court and blame the whole thing on BRIAR. It was tempting, if not for the fact that the Iberian Section, which Peter headed, could not afford to make yet another blunder without attracting scrutiny from C, the SIS chief.

Especially when Peter himself was the ultimate cause of their blunders. They were comrades, even if his job was to persuade her to betray the cause they both served.

He had to get something report-worthy out of her, but how?

The beacon was lost in the labyrinth of wires and soul-sparks. To get a better view, Peter descended in the kata direction—the fourth dimension where only the dead could move.

Madrid expanded into a tracery of light and flame above him, and he felt like a bird flying beneath a strange, inverted firmament. Radio waves pulsed from the Telefónica. The front was close, and he glimpsed a death—the red flash of a soul-spark leaving its body, like a rocket fired into the sky.

Then he saw the ectotank.

* * *

It looked innocent enough at first, a slowly growing white vortex in the gloom, like milk poured into tea. Closer, he saw the white was not white, but made up of countless shimmering colours. Peter felt a sudden compulsion to dive right into it, even though he knew it meant certain doom.

The ectotank ploughed through a cluster of little human lights that had to be a Republic barricade. Crimson firecrackers of dead souls bloomed in its wake, then looped back around and dived into the white whirlpool, unable to resist its allure. As the souls disappeared into the white, the ectotank vortex grew and advanced down the street like a hungry amoeba.

Inez’s beacon was headed straight towards it.

Peter launched himself at the ectophone. He gripped the phone’s bell circuit with aethereal fingers and shook it frantically. Nothing. The milky whirlwind of the ectotank loomed to the right. Clearly, Inez could not see it—a building invisible to Peter blocked her view.

Then he glimpsed the ectotank’s eye, a tiny round window in the midst of the whiteness. Within, he saw flames and street lights and broken buildings in full vivid colour, as if he had living eyes again. He was overwhelmed by an irrational need to dive through the eye. Surely he would be alive again on the other side?

Far away, some distant part of him kept clawing at the circuit, three long rings, three short, three long.

‘I am trying to drive, Comrade Ghost,’ Inez said. ‘Why don’t you—’

Her voice broke the spell. ‘Turn around!’ Peter cried. ‘There is an ectotank ahead!’

‘Jesú,’ Inez whispered. Then she let out a wordless scream.

There was static on the phone, and then the sound of screeching brakes.

The truck swerved right just as the ectotank rolled along Gran Vía like an avalanche. Inez raced down a side street like a madwoman, and even at the speed of thought, Peter had trouble keeping up. A Republic battery in the Telefónica opened fire at the ectotank with Soviet-made aetherguns. It let out a high-pitched keening that sounded like a thousand children screaming.

Finally, the truck came to a halt. Peter waited for a moment and rang again. Inez picked up, but said nothing. Her breathing was laboured and quick.

‘Are you hurt?’ Peter asked.

‘No.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘There is a hole in the road ahead. A crater where the Metro used to be, black like a gate to Hell. Maybe it is where that thing crawled out from. Madre de Dios, it was the size of a house, like a … a—’ Her voice broke. For a moment, Peter thought she had hung up again, and sighed with relief when she continued. ‘I have never seen anything like it. How can Pope Teilhard bless the Fascists when they send devils to attack us?’

‘That was no devil. There was a human being inside, a medium. What you saw was ectoplasm, spirit essence stolen from the dead, shaped by his thoughts.’

‘Then his thoughts are full of devils.’

A perversion of Lodge’s and Marconi’s original inventions, the ectotanks were created to break the deadlock of the trenches in the Great War: weapons that grew more powerful the more they killed. He had not realised the tanks Britain had supplied Franco with were already being deployed. That would make the Soviets respond in kind, escalating the conflict. It made his mission all the more urgent.

‘War brings out the devils inside us,’ Peter said.

Inez exhaled, a long sigh that turned into a sob.

‘What is it?’

‘There are devils inside me, too, Comrade Ghost. If I was truly brave, like you say, I would put my rifle in my mouth and fire, and let God judge them.’

‘And go to the Republic’s Heaven?’

She laughed mirthlessly. ‘Everyone knows it is not ready. Those who die are lost and Fade, unless they use the Fascists’ Tickets. No, it is like Father Miaja from my village said. Confession and prayer are the only ways to Heaven. When I was a child, I imagined it. A white place, with trees of candyfloss. But it is not for me, not anymore.’

How had he missed it? There was a knot in Inez’s soul-spark. Her thoughts kept winding around it, over and over. That was why she had agreed to speak to a disembodied voice on the phone. It had nothing to do with betraying the Republic.

She simply needed a confessor.

‘Why is that?’ Peter asked gently.

‘Because I was in Getafe to execute the statue of Christ.’

Far away, the screams of the ectotank faded.

‘Mateo gathered a squad that day,’ Inez said. ‘He said they were going to execute a Fascist prisoner. I wanted revenge for what they did to my mother and brother in Guernica, so I took my rifle and went along.

‘We drove to Getafe in a truck. The men laughed and boasted all the way. We climbed the hill, Cerro de los Ángeles. It was hot and dry beneath the carrascos pines. The air was clear and we could see Madrid in the distance. Only when Mateo took out a scrap of cloth and blindfolded the great statue standing there did I understand.

‘I took aim with the others. I could not fire, but I did not stop them. I watched the bullets shatter His face, and wept.’

Inez started the truck.

‘I have said enough now. The comrades at the front need my bullets and shells. Thank you for warning me about the devil machine. Perhaps we will speak again.’

At last, Peter recognised the knotted emotion in her soul. It was paradox. She was trying to believe in a contradiction.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Inez, I don’t think God is done with you yet.’

Inez paused. Anger flickered in her soul-spark.

‘And what do you know of God, Comrade Ghost?’

‘I know what it’s like to be tested. I saw a burning city, too, when I was a child.’

Inez said nothing, but her soul-spark softened, with hues of purple and green. Peter continued.

‘During the Great War, there were German air raids in London. I was five. The sirens scared me, and I would hide in the basement even after a raid was over.

‘One time, when they started, my father picked me up and took me to the window in his study. I struggled, started crying, but he held me tight. My mother begged him to come to the shelter. He would not hear of it and made me look. There was a silver cigar in the sky. Spotlight beams danced around it. Flames bloomed beneath it, bright as the sun. The windows rattled from distant booms.

‘I nearly wet myself. I wanted to hide in my mother’s lap. But my father told me to be brave.

‘The ectoflyers came. Each man had wings like a moth, white and shimmering. They brought the airship down. They swarmed around it and fired at it and cut its belly open. Burning gas spilled out. It was the most exhilarating thing I had ever seen.

‘All the while, my father held me. The airship fell, and then it was just an empty sack, floating in the Thames. I was never afraid of air raids after that.’

‘It is a nice story, Comrade Ghost,’ Inez said. ‘But I am not a frightened child anymore.’ Her voice was harsh, but her soul-spark glowed gently.

‘Aren’t we all children, in the eyes of God? I may not share your faith, Inez. But I do believe that there is something greater than us, holding us in its arms, even while the city burns. And whoever He is, Pope Teilhard’s God or your Father Miaja’s or your own, He has a plan for us. He tests us, but it is only to make us face our fears. And He always forgives.’

Inez stopped the truck again. The ectophone circuit died. Without it, Peter felt the pull of Summerland in the kata direction and had to keep himself still with sheer will, like a swimmer treading water.

He watched her thought-forms. They fragmented into a swarm of fireflies and then merged together into one glowing green orb of certainty.

Then the circuit was back and Inez picked up the ectophone again. Through the static, it sounded like she had been crying. Yet there was a steely edge to her voice.

‘Comrade Ghost,’ she said, ‘I am not stupid. You are no friend of the Republic. But maybe you are God’s final test for me. So, I am going to test you in turn.

‘The Soviets give us weapons, but they come with a blood price. Their spies are in all the parties now. They say they hunt for Fifth Columnists but take everyone who is not Communist.

‘Answer me this: would your masters tolerate a Republic without Russians? Could we truly have peace in Spain?’

Peter hesitated.

‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘You have my word.’

It was almost true, like his story about the air raid. Only the way he had told it made it a lie. And deep in the core of his immortal being, Peter Bloom hated lies.

But just this once, it was worth it. Inez’s soul-spark grew bright with hope and its echo filled Peter with joy. This was the temptation the souls who Faded fell prey to. They spent all their vim huddling close to the living, until Summerland’s relentless pull washed away their memories and thoughts and only the bare, mindless luz, the soul-stone, remained.

‘Then there is something you should know,’ Inez said. ‘Two days ago, my Mateo comes to our flat, excited. It is like a fever. He has met with a man, a Georgian, and cannot stop talking about it. This man leads a network of underground Leftist dissidents, Russians, French, Germans, Poles, all over Europe. The Soviets hunt him everywhere he goes. He claims to have come to Spain to stop the war.’

‘And how is he planning to do that?’

‘He takes over the Government, rejects the Soviets and makes a deal with the British instead. Without British support, Franco will be defeated overnight. And this man has many supporters amongst the Anarchists, our POUM and the other parties already.’

‘Did Mateo say what the man’s name was?’

‘Iosif Dzhugashvili.’ She paused. ‘Although he prefers to be called Stalin.’

Peter betrayed nothing of his surprise and delight to Inez. They talked a little more on the roadside. Inez gave him a few other names: Dzhugashvili’s supporters in the Government parties, people her lover Mateo had influence with.

They arranged another meeting in a week’s time and said goodbye. Peter watched Inez’s soul-spark and the whirring light-wheel of the truck’s engine recede towards the fireworks of the front. Then he let go of the world of the living and its illusions and sank beneath their plane.

All of Earth became visible to his hypersight. Cities were dense constellations, joined by the spiderweb of telegraph cables. Births were blue confetti. Each death was a falling star of red. They traced crimson maps of war: the Spanish fronts and the campaigns in Africa. The sight brought back another childhood memory, the game called Small Wars he used to play with Mr West, toy armies arrayed against each other on the living room floor. Wasteful deaths, he reminded himself, all unnecessary, feeding a system just as meaningless as a child’s game and needing to be put away like all childish things.

And the name Inez had given him would help him to do just that.

He summoned the image of the SIS headquarters and held it in his mind. At the speed of thought, the aether carried him kata-wards, to Summerland.