Summerland

9 SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON THE IBERIAN PROBLEM, 11TH NOVEMBER 1938

The Special Committee on the Iberian Problem met the following evening, and Peter Bloom arrived late.

He signed the Summer Court entrance book hastily, violated protocol by not waiting for the attendant and nearly got lost on his way to the Chimney.

He had spent the last few hours in intense preparation that had left him feeling transparent and thin, a warning sign of Fading. His work had been interrupted by a furious Pendlebury, who sent him a tart ectomail complaining about soiled clothes and a headache from a poorly tuned spirit crown. Placating him required an ectophone call—another vim-costly journey to listen to the medium’s nasal voice listing his grievances.

But exhaustion and an irate medium were minor worries compared to what waited for him at the top of the tower. Standing in the Chimney’s aethervator, which was propelled to Whitehall by a massive luz counterweight, he wondered if this was what Fascist prisoners in Spain felt like when the firing squad raised their rifles.

He tried to stay calm. The Presence had a plan for him. And surely he would not be permitted in the PM’s presence if the SIS knew about his true loyalties? Unless this was all elaborate theatre to feed the Presence misinformation. And maybe the god-mind knew that, and was playing a deeper game.

He remembered the chill of its rejection, and shuddered.

The journey ana-wards took only a minute. The top of the Chimney overlapped with an electromagnetically shielded room in Whitehall. Peter stepped out of the aethervator into a glowing cylindrical Faraday cage, where C and his stone-faced deputy chief George Hill were already standing around an ectophone’s prismatic circuit. It was strange to see their usual impeccable self-images, nearly identical to the way they had looked in life, superimposed against the stark electrical geometry of the living world.

C frowned at Peter. ‘Kind of you to join us, Bloom,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, His Nibs is running behind as well.’

Peter took his place next to the two older spies. Hill was a lantern-jawed old soldier, a veteran of pre-Revolutionary Russian operations. Rumour had it he was there on the night Rasputin died. Although his face was impassive, hostility radiated from him in chilly waves. Peter gave him a smile and arranged his notes in mid-air into a floating wall of imprinted aether between them.

Then Prime Minister Herbert Blanco West entered the room.

His soul-spark was one of the largest Peter had ever seen and took up nearly half of the Faraday cage. It was a kaleidoscope of thought-forms so vivid you could almost glimpse actual images of what the great man thought and saw. Peter spotted a ship made of blue light, and faces, but they changed too quickly for him to recognise, like flames.

Another living soul accompanied him. This had to be Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of the Winter Court, the terrestrial branch of the SIS. Next to the PM, his mind was a tiny moon orbiting a huge primordial planet.

‘Gentlemen,’ West said. His voice was in sharp contrast to the soul-spark, a little wheezy, an old man’s voice. ‘Apologies for my tardiness. Parliament was murder today. I understand you have found a sword to cut through this Gordian tangle of ours. Let us find out how sharp it is.’

As C started laying out the facts of the Spanish situation, Peter could not help staring at the blaze of the prime minister’s thoughts. They reminded him of another fire, and of the night he first heard Herbert West’s name.

* * *

It was 1916, towards the end of the war. Peter was five years old.

His family sat in front of the fireplace in the cosy drawing room, one of the few in the huge Palace Gardens Terrace house they actually used. Peter’s father had just returned from the Office of Communications where he worked. His mother had spent the evening writing poetry. There were stacks of small notebooks at her feet. Peter lay on his special flying carpet—the old velvety rug behind his mother’s chair—almost asleep in the comforting murmur of his parents’ voices.

Later, he picked their actual words from his memory like shards of glass and dissected the details of the scene. The auburn sweep of his mother’s hair, his father’s round face, made apple-like by the soft light from the fire, and the plumpness that would stay with him until the illness and the end.

‘West came by the Office today.’ His father’s smell was overpowering and sweet, but that evening it was still as safe and familiar as his baritone voice.

‘Oh,’ Peter’s mother said.

‘He wants to do some war work. War work! Can you believe him? After everything his Dimensionists have done to get us into that mess in the first place.’

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Well, no matter what I think about the old boy’s politics, he is Herbert Blanco West. I could hardly refuse him.’ Peter’s father leaned back. ‘I said that if he was not too busy with campaigning, we would be happy to have a few morale pieces from him. He was very enthusiastic, kept saying how he wants to do his part. I wanted to tell him, HB, you did your part already by persuading Marconi to give us those ghastly ectotanks, but I bit my tongue. Just tried to play it like it was the good old days.’

‘It is a bit unfair to hold that against him, Charles. You know what I think about the Dimensionists, but it is wartime. We need all the weapons we can get.’

‘Well, that is exactly what they want us to think, isn’t it?’

‘Charles, we are both tired, let us not argue politics, please. How was HB otherwise?’

‘Looked a bit fatigued, but hale as a horse. Would not shut up about his new book. Another history thing. A “joint symphony of the living and the dead,” he called it. A bit grandiose, if you ask me.’

‘Well, if there is anyone who can succeed in something like that, it’s him. Did he say anything else?’

‘He did hint at some new affair, if that is what you want to know. But I think he has to be more careful now that he is planning to run for office.’

Peter’s mother closed her book slowly and put away her pen.

‘In fact, I did not want to know that, Charles. But thank you.’

‘I am sorry. It was unkind of me. It’s just that whenever I see him, I wonder—’

‘Well, you have nothing to wonder about,’ Peter’s mother said gently. She stood up, walked over to the other chair and stroked the man’s cheek.

‘It has been a while,’ she said.

‘Not in front of the boy, Ann.’

‘The poor boy is fast asleep. Perhaps we could—’

The electric lamp in the corner flickered and went out. A thunder-like rumble woke Peter up fully.

‘Who is Mr West?’ he asked.

* * *

‘So, who is this Dzhugashvili chap, then?’ the prime minister asked.

His voice brought Peter back to the present, and he blinked owlishly at his notes.

C rolled his eyes at him. ‘I believe that is your cue, Bloom.’

‘Dzhugashvili, Iosif, also known as Josif Stalin,’ Peter read from his notes. ‘Born in Georgia. Instrumental in obtaining early funds for the Revolution, often via criminal means. One of the contenders to succeed Lenin until the God-Builders drove him into exile.’ Peter recited Dzhugashvili’s biography while pondering the question that had troubled him since the meeting with C.

Why had West requested him, after all these years?

Even though the PM could not see spirits, Peter felt the soul-spark’s attention directed at him. It was like standing next to a bonfire.

‘Over the last decade, Dzhugashvili has been creating a network of agents and counter-revolutionary cells all over Europe, notably in Paris, Prague and Rotterdam. However, Spain is the first region where he has operated this openly. Given extensive NKVD penetration of the Communist parties of the Republic, he is taking a considerable risk. He may be genuinely trying to establish a power base in the Iberian Peninsula. It could well be in our interest to aid him.’

‘I think I met this Dzhugashvili once, in Petrograd,’ the prime minister said wistfully. ‘Back then, he wrote poetry. Not bad, if I recall correctly.’

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ Sir Stewart said, ‘but poets rarely make the best statesmen. Present company excepted, of course.’

The PM chuckled. ‘I was never much of a poet.’

‘That just proves my point, eh? Our aetheric colleagues have obviously discovered something interesting—with the help of our own BRIAR, of course. But they lack the perspective to understand the bigger picture. They just dance around Communists. We hunt down agitators infiltrating the unions.

‘I say that a Communist is a Communist, and this Dzhugashvili is no different. If he fails, we have the same situation as before—a Soviet puppet state on our doorstep. If he succeeds, it is conceivably even worse: an ideologue strongman setting an example to both our workers and the rest of Europe.

‘No, gentlemen, I propose we stick to the devil we know and support Franco. Maybe your chap can create pandemonium on the Republic side, but there is no need to get our own hands dirty. Besides, that did not work out too well last time, as Mr Hill well knows.’

Hill’s self-image grew pale with rage, but C raised a hand to silence him.

‘Sir Stewart is droll, as always,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he was too busy chasing agitators to read Mr Bloom’s report? Or maybe the subtle implications simply eluded him.’

It did not take an experienced soul-reader to interpret the forest of red crystal spikes that appeared in Sir Stewart’s soul-spark.

‘Look here—’ Sir Stewart started.

‘My apologies,’ C said. ‘I spoke out of turn. But I would do Her Majesty’s government a disservice if I failed to emphasise the seriousness of the matter. Previously, I also agreed to support the Fascists, but now the Soviets have upped the game twofold. First, their agents are rapidly infiltrating the Republic’s government. Second, they are providing the Republic with aetherguns to counter Franco’s ectotanks. That means sending Russian officers to train the Spanish forces. We are one escalation step away from actual war.

‘Prime Minister, sir, let us do this. We have an opportunity to turn the tables on the Soviets. We make Dzhugashvili our man, and he will cut out the NKVD cancer from Spain’s flesh. We can set conditions, install observers, steer things in the right direction. And remember, the Republic will need someone to build an afterlife. Why not Marconi? Once that is in place, Dzhugashvili may find it difficult not to embrace the virtues of ectocapitalism.’

The intelligence chiefs paused and waited for the prime minister’s response. West’s thought-forms were darker now, with hues of green and deep red. The more Peter studied them, the clearer they became. He was certain he could see dark, multi-legged shapes moving through green clouds, and a burning city.

Peter thought of Madrid, of the lie he had told Inez, and the truth that lay behind it.

* * *

That evening in 1916, after Peter asked his question, Mr Bloom frowned.

‘Peter, it is not polite to listen in to grown-up conversations. You should—’

‘Let me take care of this, Charles.’

Peter’s mother took his face between her small, warm hands and looked at him seriously.

‘Mr West is a writer, like Mummy. It means he tells stories. Except that his stories are a lot sillier than Mummy’s. And he is a very silly little man, and we are not going to talk about him anymore.’

The glass in the windows tinkled and sirens started howling in the distance.

‘Oh, bloody hell, not again,’ Peter’s father said. He stood up with a jerk, walked to the window and pulled the curtain aside. A pale green light played on his features as the rumbling and the siren howls continued.

‘A zeppelin,’ he said darkly. ‘The ectoflyers are already up there. I think they are going to bring it down.’

‘I want to see!’ Peter ran to his father and held his arms out. Mr Bloom picked him up and for a moment Peter was lost in his smell and the feeling of flying. But his father’s face was not playful at all.

‘Charles,’ Peter’s mother said, with a hint of danger in her tone.

‘The boy needs to see this. Look, Peter. This is what Mr West and his friends have brought to us.’

A silvery, cigar-shaped craft drifted slowly above the jagged skyline in the distance, scissored by pale spotlight beams. Orange and golden flames bloomed beneath its bulk, and every fiery burst was followed by a delayed thunderclap that made the windows jingle. A small whimper escaped Peter’s lips.

‘Come on, now, Peter, be a brave boy, there is nothing to be afraid of. Just watch.’

A cloud of pale, fluttering things rose up around the airship, casting shadows on its gleaming hull. It was hard to see the details, but they had wings made from a translucent white substance that glowed faintly in the dark. They reminded Peter of the moths that had scared him one time when he hid in the cupboard beneath the stairs. But these were much larger, and man-shaped. Long, flexible tendrils trailed behind them.

‘Charles, you are being an ass,’ Peter’s mother said. ‘Give him to me. We are going to the basement right now.’

‘In a minute.’

As Peter watched, a moth-man swooped along the belly of the enemy vessel. One of his tendrils snaked out, hook-like, and traced a fiery wound on the silver surface. Fire poured out like blood and the nose of the airship dipped suddenly. The white moth-things swarmed around it. The pop and crackle of the distant fireworks reached a crescendo. Several of the flyers fell from the sky, their ghostly substance evaporating into nothingness as they plummeted towards the ground. Peter gasped, hot pressure in his bladder.

‘Those are ectoflyers, Peter,’ his father said. ‘The men with wings. That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Only they can’t fly unless they eat dead people. Their wings are made from the soul-stuff, which they push out through their mouths and eyes. Would you want wings like that, Peter?’

‘Charles, that is enough!’ Peter’s mother snatched Peter from his father’s arms.

‘I just wanted to make him understand how silly Mr West’s stories really are, Ann. Especially when they come true.’

Peter started crying. A warmth spread through his trousers and the shame made him cry louder. His mother carried him away, and the last thing he saw before she ran down the stairs to the basement was his father, standing at the window alone, lost in thought.

* * *

‘And what do you think about all this, Mr Bloom?’ the prime minister asked. His soul-spark had folded up like a flower closing, with only a glimmer of gold within.

‘I am not sure it is my place to say, sir,’ Peter said.

C’s monocle dropped from his eye and he gave Peter a long look.

‘Well, I am glad to hear at least one Spook has a modicum of modesty,’ Sir Stewart said.

‘Nonsense. Of course it is your place,’ West said. ‘I would not have asked you here if I did not want your opinion. There is more to the situation on the ground than the things you can capture in writing. I remember reading Colonel Bedford’s first transmissions, trying to make sense of it all—’

His soul-spark fluttered suddenly, like a candle flame in a current of air.

‘Where was I?’ the prime minister muttered.

‘You wanted to hear what Bloom thinks about the situation in Spain,’ C said.

‘Ah yes. So I did. What shall we do with this Dzhugashvili of yours, then? What would the Spaniards have us do?’

Peter hesitated. What does he want me to say? he wondered. But the magic lantern of the old man’s soul was now dim and shrunken, and offered no hints. C was looking at Peter impatiently. There was no time for anything but the truth.

‘The Spaniards want the war to end,’ he said. ‘In places like Barcelona, the class society is already reasserting itself. Many, like CARRASCOS, are having a crisis of religious faith. There is constant infighting between the parties, much of it fed by the NKVD. The economy is in tatters.

‘Yet the Spanish are a proud people, and they hate Franco and his Moorish butchers. They will force the Fascists to turn every city into a Guernica before they give up. A quick Franco victory is only possible if we throw our full weight behind him. That means ground troops in Spain—and a Soviet response in kind.’

And there it was again, the familiar sting of a contradiction. To serve the Presence, he had to convince C of his loyalty and thus argue against the Presence’s interests in Spain. At the same time, there was a truth to the argument he could not ignore, bright like Inez’s soul-spark in the burning city.

If you started with a contradiction, you could prove anything, just like his mother taught him, long ago.

* * *

They did not sit in the drawing room again for a long time. After the war, Mrs Bloom started working for the Labour Ministry and spent all her evenings in her study. Peter’s father won a seat for the Liberal Party and was consumed by politics. Every night, he arrived home late, dishevelled and worn, and stayed up even later writing speeches with manic energy.

One bleak winter afternoon when he was ten years old, Peter returned from school and found his mother sitting in the drawing room. The crystal set he thought was safely hidden amongst his toys under his bed lay in her lap. It was the size of a cigarette box, with a frayed cardboard casing, a Bakelite tuning dial and a tinny speaker that you had to hold up against your ear. Peter had bought it from Neville, an older boy at school.

‘Nanny Schmidt found this while cleaning,’ she said, tapping the set. ‘Tell me, Peter—what do the dead say when you talk to them?’

‘You … you can’t talk to them with the basic kit, you can only listen,’ Peter said. ‘There is a lot of static. Mostly you only get the recent dead. They don’t make much sense.’

‘I see.’

‘I just wanted to understand how it worked.’

‘And do you?’

‘Of course I do, Mother, it’s all in Powell’s Aetheric Mechanics for Boys. The Zöllner crystal has a tiny four-dimensional extent and the spirits can touch it and make it vibrate, and the amplifier translates it into sound, and—’

‘I believe you, Peter. But do you understand how the world works?’

She stood up and leaned on the mantelpiece. She looked tiny, suddenly, birdlike.

‘Of course you don’t, you are too young. Do you remember Doctor Cummings who treated you when you had measles? Well, soon there will be no doctors. If you get sick, you will just pass over.’

‘If you have a Ticket,’ Peter said.

‘That’s right. And soon, having a Ticket will be the only thing anyone cares about. Not studying, not working, not doing the right thing. Nothing real.’

‘But Tickets are real!’ Peter protested. ‘Mr Hinton showed that if you imagine a four-dimensional object, it really exists in the aether. The spirits can see it, or thought-travel to it. That’s how Tickets and ectophone beacons work.’

Mrs Bloom sighed. ‘Peter, you are a very clever boy, so I know you will understand what I am going to say. Your father and I want you to grow up in a world where it matters to be alive. We want you to learn to care about this world, about sunshine, about other people. And that is why I never want to see one of these things in this house again.’

She lifted the crystal set high and smashed it against the mantelpiece. The casing crumpled and glittering fragments of the Zöllner crystal rained on the carpet.

‘Mother!’

She kneeled and started gathering the shards into a coal shovel.

‘You don’t know how lucky you are that Nanny came to me first. Your father has a temper. He would have done something he would have regretted.’

Peter made a face. But he knew his mother was right. He felt a cold flush of fear in his belly, remembering the night of the airship, his father’s unyielding grip and the anger in his voice.

‘Now, we will tidy up,’ Mrs Bloom said. ‘Then you will sit with me and do your homework. And not a word about crystal sets, is that understood?’

‘Yes, madam,’ Peter said quietly.

His father came home two hours later. When he saw Peter and his mother by the fire, his exhausted smile was like a light shining through buttered paper.

‘What have we here?’

‘My study was very cold today,’ Peter’s mother said. ‘I asked Nanny to bring supper here instead.’

Mr Bloom sank to his chair. ‘That sounds lovely. We had a rally in the Warringdon Pump House and it was dreadfully cold.’

A coughing fit made him double over. Peter’s mother got up and covered him with a blanket.

‘What about you, Peter?’ he asked, when the fit had passed. ‘What have you been doing today?’ He leaned back in his chair, eyes already half-closed.

Peter opened his mouth, trying to think of what to say. The truth was a leaden weight in his chest. But before he could speak, a gentle snore escaped Mr Bloom’s lips.

Mrs Bloom looked at Peter, and then back at his father. She smiled sadly.

‘He tries so hard,’ she whispered. ‘Do you understand now?’

Peter did not, but nodded anyway. Suddenly, he was furious at his father. How could he spoil everything, even when he was asleep? Oblivious to Peter’s rage, his mother smiled.

After he finished his homework and supper, he excused himself. He got ready for bed and took out the book he kept in the small space between his night table and the wall. The hiding place had been too narrow for the crystal set.

The Science of Death by Herbert Blanco West, said the title page.

Peter opened the chapter he had started the previous night, the one about William Crookes’ experiment showing that luz particles had an affinity with structures of higher complexity like brains. But it was difficult to concentrate.

It was not that he did not care about being alive, of course he did. But from everything he read, in Summerland things simply made much more sense. You could fly, for one thing, or thought-travel, which was even better. You were not trapped in a pudgy body that ensured you got picked on at school. And you could see other peoples’ thoughts.

In Summerland, his mother would not have broken the crystal set. Peter would have understood why she was so angry. And there would have been no need to keep secrets from his father.

Or maybe he had it the wrong way around. Maybe it was his father who would be better off in Summerland, without Peter and his mother.

After a while, he heard his parents coming up the stairs together. His mother stifled a giggle. Peter ignored the sounds and lay awake in the dim glow of his night light, imagining what it would be like if his father was dead.

* * *

‘So, Mr Bloom, what is your recommendation?’ the prime minister asked.

‘Sir, I am with the Chief. Dzhugashvili is our best option to calm things down and avoid an all-out war.’

The prime minister paced the room. His soul-spark brightened again and bopped to the rhythm of his footsteps like some exotic sea creature in a current.

‘Sir, I do urge you to consider the alternative,’ Sir Stewart said. ‘The Admiralty considers a military victory in Spain eminently achievable. There is a need to test new weapons in the field, against a modern enemy, and in our estimation it is doubtful that the Soviets would fully commit to an armed response. The logistical challenges alone—’

‘Would be challenging to a human intellect, I agree,’ the prime minister interrupted. ‘But that is not what we are dealing with here. To the Presence, such challenges may be trivial. Naturally, many of the claims about its capabilities are propaganda, but we should not dismiss them entirely. Indeed, if we truly appreciated the possibility that we are dealing with something more than human, we would not choose such an obvious course as using Dzhugashvili. Have you factored that into your analysis, Mr Bloom?’

The Chief butted in before Peter could respond. ‘So far, the Presence’s direct contribution to intelligence matters has been limited to vetting operatives in Russia, which is the primary reason why we have not been able to infiltrate the Kremlin. In practice, it is the NKVD old guard and the God-Builders’ inner circle who make the actual operational decisions. In fact, we have reason to believe that the Soviet intelligence apparatus is currently distracted by internal purges, so it is the perfect time for decisive action.’

West’s soul-spark formed into a glowing Platonic solid of clarity.

‘As Bloom has pointed out, there is the human element to consider here as well,’ he said slowly. ‘Franco may have been the wrong horse to back in this race from the start. I was never very fond of the little general. We shall try our luck with Dzhugashvili.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ C said. ‘You will not regret it.’

‘However, I want the Winter Court to take the lead in this one. It is clear that terrestrial assets, BRIAR and CARRASCOS, were the key elements here. Sir Stewart will create a team that will assume operational control of them both. I will also instruct the Admiralty to investigate the worst-case scenario.’

Peter could hardly believe his ears. C’s monocle came loose again and floated in front of his face like the lure of a deep-sea fish.

‘I must protest,’ Peter said. ‘I have been developing CARRASCOS so far, and it would be extremely detrimental from an operational standpoint to change handlers so abruptly. Not to mention the risk in arranging physical meetings—’

‘Your protest is noted, Mr Bloom,’ West said. He sounded tired. ‘Nevertheless, my decision is made, based on all the available information. Sir Stewart, I want a meeting with our man within the week, if possible. That will be all, gentlemen.’

C’s mouth was set in a grim line. Sir Stewart’s soul-spark was like a full moon, round and golden.

‘This is it, Bloom,’ the Chief hissed, not touching the ectophone circuit so that the PM and Sir Stewart could not hear him. ‘This whole set-up was that bastard Menzies making his move. The old man seems to listen to you. Try to see if you can make him change his mind, via any means necessary. Otherwise we are all in the shit.’

Before the ectophone circuit vanished, Peter spoke.

‘Prime Minister, sir, I would like to have a word with you in private.’

West’s voice sounded surprised, but his soul-spark shrank into solid, angular inscrutability.

‘And why is that, Mr Bloom?’

‘It concerns a conversation we had a long time ago. I feel it may shed some light on the Spanish situation.’

‘I see. And where did we have that conversation?’

‘In Palace Terrace Gardens, sir.’

The prime minister chuckled. ‘I suppose I did ask you here for your perspective. It is only fair that I give you another minute to share it. The rest of you, carry on. England needs you, and so does Spain.’

* * *

Three months after Mr Bloom’s death, in 1921, Mr West came to visit Palace Terrace Gardens, late at night.

Peter hid at the top of the stairs and watched him enter. Nanny Schmidt, their housekeeper, took Mr West’s coat and hat. Next to burly Nanny, he looked tiny and round, a bit like Humpty Dumpty. Even in the dim light, his eyes had a silver sheen. Mrs Bloom came to greet him, and they went into the drawing room together.

Peter tiptoed to the salon. The furniture there was covered in white bedsheets that made the cavernous room look like a snowy landscape. He crawled beneath the sheet thrown over a billiard table and huddled there. The musty cloth muffled the sound a bit, but he could still make out the conversation in the next room.

‘My sweet Gorgon, I am so very sorry,’ Mr West told Peter’s mother.

‘Please don’t call me that,’ she said in a small voice.

‘A thousand pardons. Also for not attending the funeral. You know how it is, right now. But I wanted to come and pay my respects.’

‘It’s fine, HB, it really is.’

‘I hoped he would have taken a Ticket.’

‘That was never an option, you know that.’

‘I suppose so. Still.’

‘HB,’ Mrs Bloom said, ‘I loved him, in the end. He worked so hard. I tried to help, but it wasn’t enough. He was trying to be you.’ She let out a sob. ‘In a way, we killed him, you and I.’

‘Don’t say that. He was a good man, but he chose his fate. I respected that. We have to respect that now.’

‘Oh, I do, more than you know. I have decided to run for his seat.’

‘I see. I did think there was something familiar in his essays. It was you all along, wasn’t it? Well, I could not wish for a worthier opponent.’

‘I know you would rather have sent him to your Summerland,’ Peter’s mother said. ‘But this way, his life means something. He will not be gone, as long as I remember him. As long as Peter does.’

‘And how is the boy?’

‘Oh, HB.’ Mrs Bloom’s voice broke. ‘He will not speak to me. I broke his crystal set, a few months before Charles passed. He thought he could have spoken to Charles, before he Faded.’

Mr West said nothing.

‘Now he sits in his room and won’t go outside. I don’t know what to do.’

‘He is young. Time heals. Let me talk to him.’

‘Do you think that is wise?’

‘Why not? I am nothing but an old friend of yours, here to pay my respects. And Charles and I were friends, too, once. What’s the harm? Besides, I brought him a gift.’

‘It’s one of your games, isn’t it?’

‘I am telling you, my dear, my games are what they will remember me for, a century hence.’

Mrs Bloom laughed. ‘I will let him decide that. Peter!’

Peter sprang up, bumped his head on the billiard table’s bottom and ran back towards his room. He made it to the top of the stairs just as Mr West and his mother appeared in the hallway.

‘There is someone I want you to meet,’ Mrs Bloom said.

Mr West’s hands were plump and soft but his handshake was firm. He smelled faintly of honey.

Peter sat upright in his chair. Nanny brought them tea, but he was too nervous to touch it. Mrs Bloom wished them a good evening and retired to her study.

‘I read your book,’ Peter said.

‘Oh? Which one?’

‘The Science of Death. I liked it.’

‘Ah. Thank you. That is not the one most younger readers mention,’ Mr West said. ‘Perhaps we will not discuss it tonight, for your mother’s sake. But tell me, Peter—have you ever played at war?’

Peter shook his head. ‘I don’t feel like playing much. And that sort of thing is for little boys.’

‘Oh, I beg to differ!’

Mr West held up the brown paper bag he had brought with him and took out a large cardboard box. The cover showed a khaki-uniformed army on a battlefield, and the words SMALL WARS in large, elaborate letters.

‘If I am not too old, you are not too old. Let me show you.’

The little man opened the box. It contained painted tin soldiers and spring-loaded cannons, cardboard terrain that folded out into hills and trees, dice and sheets of paper with tables. Mr West got down on all fours and crawled around, arraying his little armies against each other on the drawing room floor. Peter watched, a tangled knot in his chest.

Mr West’s enthusiasm was infectious, and the game was sort of interesting. You rolled dice to determine the outcomes of cannon shots and encounters between units. Mr West had created it based on the Prussian Kriegspielen used to train officers in the old days.

‘It should not be random,’ Peter said, after one of his cavalry units had been annihilated by a lucky cannon shot.

‘How so?’

‘Like in your book, you say that if you have a solution to the Maxwell–Kelvin equations, you know what the aether is going to do, for all time. There is nothing random. Why should a battle be any different?’

‘Well, in theory it is the same—if we knew all the variables and the equations governing them, and their initial values. Unfortunately, we are not intelligent enough to construct such equations, and thus nothing in war—or love, for that matter—is ever certain.’

‘So you can never be certain about anything?’

‘Well, you can in pure mathematics, I suppose. You start with axioms, and you prove that certain things follow logically. In number theory, you can prove that there are an infinite number of primes, for example. Sadly, most of these true things have little practical use. It’s better to live with uncertainty and roll the dice, even if we don’t always like the outcome.’

Peter looked at the battlefield and his fallen cavalry unit.

Nanny Schmidt had found Mr Bloom in the morning after his last rally. He had stumbled home late, fallen, hit his head and then suffocated in his own vomit. The doctor explained it all cheerfully, until he learned that Mr Bloom did not have a Ticket.

Peter knew that only the strongest Ticketless spirits, one in a thousand, survived more than a day after passing over—the others got lost in their own thoughts, pursuing dreams or nightmares in the infinite aether until they Faded. His mother refused to get an ectophone to even try, adamant that it was what Mr Bloom would have wanted.

‘Peter,’ Mr West said quietly, ‘you mustn’t blame your mother for not being able to calculate the future. She did what she believed to be right. She loves you, and right now she needs you.’

‘I am not angry with Mother.’

‘Well, she certainly seems to think you are.’

‘I wished he were dead,’ Peter said. The words came out like the ball from a spring-loaded cannon. ‘I wished Father were dead and I never meant it and I never got to tell him I’m sorry.’

‘Peter,’ Mr West said in a throaty voice, ‘he knew. Of course he knew. And if I ever knew my friend Charles Bloom at all, he forgave you.’

Clumsily, he stretched out a hand and squeezed Peter’s shoulder.

‘Let me tell you a secret, Peter. Charles and I had this one big disagreement. In the end, I think he was right and I was wrong, but I just could not bring myself to admit it. And now I’ll never get to tell him. But that’s the thing about those we love. Sometimes they don’t have to be told the important things.’ Mr West’s silver eyes shimmered. ‘Now, shall we continue playing a bit? I do believe you were winning.’

Peter wiped his eyes. They finished the game, which ended in Mr West’s defeat. Peter helped him put the soldiers away.

‘Could you come and visit us again?’ he asked.

Mr West looked down and stroked his moustache.

‘I’m afraid that will not be possible, Peter.’

‘Why not?’

‘It is difficult to explain. You will understand when you are older. It is not a very good answer, I know. But I will be thinking of you, and your mother. You can keep the game.’

There was another world, Peter suddenly knew, where things were very different. Not Summerland, but a land that lay sideways in time. As Mr West put on his coat and hat and said goodbye to his mother, Peter very much wished he could travel there, no matter how far away it was.

* * *

Once, George asked Peter if he hated Herbert West. It had been Peter’s turn to laugh. Whatever West’s faults, he was there for Peter on that evening. After that, Peter had been able to speak to his mother again. And West’s words had convinced him to read mathematics in Cambridge.

No, Peter did not hate West. Sometimes he wished he did.

Although they were alone now, the prime minister’s manner was tense. ‘Mr Bloom, I know you mean well, and no doubt my old friend Mansfeld Cumming’—he used C’s real name—‘has been pressuring you to influence me. I am afraid my decision is made and will not change.’

It had not taken Peter long to figure out why West could not visit him and his mother, especially after his political career started to take off. The continuing rule of Queen Victoria’s Summer Court guaranteed that in polite society, propriety was everything. Still, the man could at least acknowledge that a bond existed between them.

The anger gave Peter the strength to speak.

‘Perhaps you fail to recall the conversation I was referring to. You described a situation where you had been wrong, yet unable to admit it. Well, sir, in this case you still have the opportunity to do so.’

‘That is quite presumptuous of you, Mr Bloom.’ West’s soul-spark looked like a fortress now, pale grey blocks arranged in concentric rings, with faint orange light in the centre. ‘Why do you think I am unable to admit that I am wrong?’

‘Because you think the Summer Court has grown too powerful, and you need to show them that you are still in charge.’

‘Hmm.’ West sounded bemused. ‘That is an interesting argument. Unfortunately, it is also incorrect. There is a bigger picture that you cannot see, which informs my thinking. I suggest you—’

Suddenly, the prime minister’s soul-spark flickered, just as it had before. West made a small coughing sound. The thought-curtain surrounding the central spark of his mind opened.

A bigger picture, Peter thought.

And for a heartbeat, West’s thoughts were unguarded.

Peter dived forward and stared directly into the prime minister’s soul.

In Summerland, living souls were things of light: glowing polygons, flames, bubbles and very occasionally recognisable images. Soul-readers had compiled a basic dictionary of emotion over the decades, but every soul had its unique language of thought-forms.

Peter had never seen a soul like Herbert West’s.

It resembled a miniature cinema or a diorama. In the centre of it was a silver city of towers and buildings, layered like a wedding cake, with countless tiny sparks in every window and street. Giant faces hovered in the sky above the city: West himself and two others, Lodge and Marconi. Peter realised he was looking at the Summer City.

As he watched, a dark tree grew from the abyss beneath the city. Its black branches pierced the silver buildings and twisted themselves around the towers. Wherever they touched, sparks flickered and died. In moments, the city was a shrivelled husk, like an abandoned beehive stuck in a tree, grey and crumbling. A jagged, purple, insect-like thing hatched from it, and distantly, Peter recognised it as the thought-form for guilt.

Then the vision disappeared, replaced by the usual kaleidoscope of consciousness. Whatever tremor in West’s ailing brain had caused the images to manifest was over.

‘Camlann,’ West muttered. ‘Camlann, Camlann.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I am sorry, Mr Bloom. What were we discussing again?’

Peter hesitated. Then: ‘I presented my argument for allowing the Summer Court to continue running the Dzhugashvili operation and you rejected it, as is your prerogative.’

His voice was shrill. The vision in West’s soul burned with a cold fire in his mind and the fear shrank his self-image into boyhood again. He was glad West could not see into the aether.

‘Indeed. Then I think we are done. I have one more meeting tonight. No rest for the wicked, eh?’

Had Peter witnessed the fevered imaginings of a senile author? No, the images had been too powerful, too all-consuming. Somehow, they had to represent the bigger picture West had mentioned. He might have lost the operation in Spain, but perhaps gained something even more valuable to the Presence.

‘Thank you for your time, sir,’ he said aloud.

‘Mr Bloom? I do remember our conversation. You have to understand that the higher you climb, the more eager people are to push you off your pedestal. And I am presently standing on one leg. Under other circumstances, I might have viewed your argument in a different light. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Capital. Do keep up the good work.’

Peter watched the prime minister’s soul close up into a golden ovoid like a Fabergé egg, sealing away all its secrets. Then he entered the Chimney, shrugged his self-image back into adulthood and started the descent into the Summer Court to tell C the bad news.