Summerland

by Hannu Rajaniemi

  Convince the prime minister.

  This time, Peter nearly lost control over his aetheric self. Suddenly, the hands resting on his pinstriped knees were a small boy’s, sticking out from oversized sleeves. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on his self-image. Something pressed painfully against his thigh in his pocket, and he remembered the toy soldier.

  ‘Bloom? Are you all right?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I’m quite all right, sir. Just … surprised.’

  ‘I can send for some vim if you want.’

  Peter shook his head. C steepled his fingers and looked at him.

  ‘Bloom, I was expecting a slightly different reaction from you.’

  ‘Sir … I am honoured. Truly, I am. It’s just that … Sir, as you saw from my report, BRIAR moved too quickly with CARRASCOS, and it was through pure luck that I was able to find something that resonated with her. My recommendation would be to spend more time developing her before involving her in a major operation. And with all due respect, sir, right now I am best qualified to do that.’

  Besides the overflowing paperwork, there were a number of small glass vials containing coloured liquids in a wooden rack on the edge of C’s desk. Supposedly, they were mementos of the invisible inks that the SIS had relied upon in the living world, in the days before the Summer Court. C picked one up and examined it carefully.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that one of the best inks we had early on was semen?’ The Chief smiled wryly. ‘No, really. It worked quite well, and the operator had, ah, a reliable supply. One of our lads in Russia tried to store it up in advance, and his letters stank to high heaven. We had to tell him that a fresh supply was needed for each communication. You may laugh, but I always thought it was rather poetic. Our soldiers bleed, but how many times are we asked to give that particular bodily fluid for Her Majesty? You never served, did you, Bloom?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then you may not fully understand the sacrifices we are sometimes asked to make.’

  C leaned back and massaged his left leg absently. The Chief had passed over in a horrific car accident that also cost the life of his son—who hadn’t possessed a Ticket. C’s mangled leg had been stuck in the wreckage. He sawed it off with a penknife and crawled to the boy. Their bodies were found together, the father holding the son.

  C had been back at work a month later.

  ‘I will be candid with you, Bloom. Your Section could have done its job more effectively, and we have a bloody mess on our hands. The Admiralty is baying for war. This is going to get worse before it gets better. The PM explicitly said he wants first-hand information, so your number’s up. We have some very difficult things to tell him. If hearing them from you makes it easier to stop a war, you will show up and talk until your face turns blue. BRIAR can handle your new source. Is that understood?’

  Peter swallowed. ‘Yes, sir.’

  C’s gruff voice was gentler this time. ‘You’ll do, Bloom,’ he said. ‘You’ll do.’

  * * *

  Peter left C’s office in a daze. His own office was on the fourth ana floor. He made his way through the Polish and Italian Sections and past the entrance to the Chimney—a luz tower that reached all the way to the aether of the living world and allowed you to make secure ectophone calls to Whitehall and Blenheim without leaving the confines of the Summer Court.

  He closed the door, sat down at his desk and leaned back. Notes and diagrams for the Spanish operation, written in aether itself with a thought, floated everywhere like cobwebs. Inez’s picture from BRIAR was at the centre of it all, and if possible, her gaze looked even fiercer than he remembered. In frustration, Peter waved a hand. The rows of neat white writing, lines and boxes wavered and evaporated like smoke.

  In theory, he should have been delighted. He would have unprecedented access to the highest levels of power in the Empire at a critical time when he could be extremely valuable to the Presence’s cause. George would be overjoyed.

  So why was he utterly and completely terrified?

  Peter took the tin soldier from his pocket and set it on his desk. It looked at him expectantly, rough, fingerless hands gripping the rifle. He remembered a game played on his parents’ living room floor a long time ago, a round-bellied man setting up armies of tiny troops, crawling on all fours, a red-faced Gulliver hovering over a Lilliputian nation.

  The prime minister.

  Suddenly, he felt the tight luz grip of the Summer Court’s walls all around him like a vice. He was supposed to work—C had told him to prepare an overview for the PM in two days’ time—but it was impossible to concentrate.

  George. He had to see George. His handler must be told about Djugashvili and the opportunity. It was more than enough grounds for a face-to-face meeting in the world of the living.

  For a moment, he even managed to convince himself that was the real reason he wanted to see George.

  Peter took his coat and hat and headed back out.

  * * *

  Once he was safely outside the Court and on the wide walking avenue through the resplendent green of Albert Park, amber-tinted in the unchanging Unseen light, he considered his options. It was nearly a month before their next meeting was due. He would have to use the protocol for an emergency meeting, something he had never done before. George had emphasised that it was to be employed only for the gravest of reasons.

  Peter concentrated, pictured a statue of a lion at the end of Fortress Road and thought-travelled.

  Albert Park blurred into an orange haze as the image of the lion pulled him through the aether. Or perhaps he stayed still and the aether flowed around him and through him like cold water, taking vim with it until the distinction between the vision and reality disappeared.

  Peter stood between the forepaws of a marble lion statue. He turned around, and in front of him loomed the enormous black half-pearl of the Fortress, the oldest structure in the city. The Fortress dwarfed all the fanciful aethertect creations near Albert Park. Its dark, hemispherical mass was present in all the levels of the city. There had been proposals to dismantle the ancient structure and use its uncountable luz stones elsewhere, but so far the Empire’s scientists had been unable to unravel the lost aetheric arts used to build it millennia ago.

  A small crowd was gathered in the square. The Fortress attracted visitors, especially the newly dead taking in the sights of the city. Peter passed groups of deceased children whose undisciplined soul-sparks blazed with wonder and terror, and raucous soldiers whose aetheric bodies openly flaunted the horrific injuries that had ended their lives. He followed the rim of the Fortress until he found the Listener.

  The Listener was a pale man who had Faded to the point where his luz was a bright star in his chest and his face was barely visible. He ran grey, smokelike fingers along the black tiles of the curving wall and whispered faintly to himself, echoing the inaudible whispers of the ancient soul-stones. His hat lay on the ground. A handful of luz shillings and pence gleamed inside it.

  Peter gave him a look of genuine pity. Although in theory the National Death Service guaranteed a minimum supply of vim and accommodation in the ever-expanding Summer City to anyone with a Ticket, occasionally premature Fading meant that a spirit simply forgot to be a part of the system any longer. It was an unpredictable process. Many Faded retained a single memory or an obsession that defined their entire existence.

  ‘The old soul-stones speak,’ the Listener said in a reed-thin voice. ‘They tell your past and your future. One vim shilling to find out.’

  Peter smiled and shook his head. ‘No, thank you. I prefer to find out the old-fashioned way.’

  Peter wondered if the man truly served the Presence, or if he was an intermediary for another agent. Was the Listening simply an act, or had he sacrificed his memories, his very self, for the cause? Yet there was something familiar in the Listener’s utter dedication to things others could not see or hear.

  Using a simple code agreed with George, Pe
ter measured out the desired date of their meeting—tomorrow—in luz coins. As the bright discs clinked into the hat, the weight on his shoulders vanished.

  His handler would know what to do.

  The Listener ignored him and returned to his work. Peter walked on until he found a section of the wall with no one nearby. Then he pressed his ear against the smooth, cold surface, closed his eyes and listened.

  6

  HOW TO TAME AN ELEPHANT, 5TH NOVEMBER 1938

  On Saturday, Rachel White was on her way to meet the dead spymaster when she realised she was being followed.

  It was little more than instinct at first, a glimpse of a familiar gait, face or hat. The crowd in Charing Cross was thick, drawn out by the sunny autumn afternoon. She stopped at a booth that sold old records, pretended to study the cover of a Schubert music sheet, and watched the passers-by.

  Newsboys carried advert placards on their backs: THE TRUTH HURTS—THIS AWFUL TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU SCREAM. Workmen pasted down steaming, pungent asphalt. Sleek electric cars and tottering old buses huddled shoulder to shoulder in a traffic jam and blared their horns. A young man in a sweater gave her an appreciative look. Ectofactory workers wearing dishevelled coats and pasty complexions shuffled past. A cabbie union man offered her a leaflet on the evils of spirit cabs and unemployment.

  Nothing. No familiar faces, hats or gaits. Her street tradecraft—a spy’s art of clandestine encounters and surveillance evasion—was rusty but she still knew how to execute a surveillance-detection route: a logical path through the city that was designed to force any observers to reveal themselves. In the past three hours, she had criss-crossed the city on the Tube, taken several cabs and wandered through Harrods. Foyles bookstore was going to serve as her final choke point.

  Of course, it was possible for a team of agents to shadow a suspect without being spotted. More than four were practically undetectable. In addition, she had no way of sensing aetheric surveillance, although spirit Watchers were nearly useless in the daytime.

  Was she being overcautious? As far as anyone in the Winter Court knew, she was now happily working as a clerk in the Finance Section, doing exactly what Roger had advised. She shuffled dull paperwork any office girl could have handled, except for the high clearance required, approved bank wires to fund overseas operations and reconciled accounts with deliberately obscure line items. She lunched with the junior staff in the canteen, away from her former colleagues. On the rare occasions when she interacted with Liddell, Vee-Vee or other senior personnel, she gracefully accepted empty promises of support and hinted that she might want to retire early, as soon as her pension and Ticket were secure.

  Rachel might almost have believed it herself if not for the contents of the Manila folder she had taken from Wormwood Scrubs, and the response to the anonymous ectomail she had sent to the folder’s subject two days earlier.

  She crossed the road, navigated the puddles of last night’s rain and entered Foyles. She made sure to spend time in the bird section, looking for a book on feeding finches. That would come in handy for the cover story she was working on.

  Over breakfast, she had told Joe she was going shopping. He had suffered another bad night. A cold spot had appeared in the bedroom and Rachel had slept in the guest room. When she woke, she had found Joe lying down on the couch in the drawing room with curtains closed, Gertrude fussing over him.

  ‘Maybe you can bring me a new head, dear,’ he said. ‘I heard they are on sale at Harrods.’

  She felt guilty at the easy lie. ‘I like this one just fine,’ she said and kissed his forehead.

  Now, as she breathed in the smell of new books and made her way through the labyrinth of shelves, she wondered if actually getting birds would be a bad idea.

  Then she recognised the young blond man in the camel-hair coat, leafing through a book barely thirty feet away.

  Memory matched his features to other impressions from her route, like light glinting off facets of a jewel. A sandy brown coat glimpsed in Harrods. The face of a man bent over a newspaper on the Oxford Court Line. Thin blond hair, combed back from a high forehead, and improbably chiselled features.

  Rachel made sure to walk across his field of vision and then proceeded farther into the bookstore’s depths. When he turned a corner into the history section, she was waiting.

  The man froze when he saw her standing there, only a few steps away.

  Of course the Service was watching. She had been an idiot to think otherwise. Someone—probably Harker or Roger—had already passed her information to C in the Summer Court, and they were keeping an eye on her just in case she planned to do something foolish. The feeling was both reassuring and embarrassing at the same time, like when her mother had caught her as a child after she ran away with her wet nurse’s daughter in Bombay to make chapattis in the local bakery.

  The man pretended to ignore her, studied the shelves and touched the spine of a book with a gloved hand. He was remarkably handsome, too much so for the field, where the real heroes were faceless, average-looking men.

  Rachel herself, on the other hand, belonged exactly where she was. Behind a desk. On the shelf. She just refused to admit it. That was why she had saved Kulagin from the duel. She had wanted something more than the empty nursery and the haunted man in her bedroom.

  No matter. There was no arguing with tradecraft: no rendezvous under surveillance. Harker was probably laughing behind her back, but she was not going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging that she had been caught. She headed back to the bird section and bought a book on the care and breeding of Gouldian finches. There was a hollow feeling in her stomach when she walked back towards the Tube station.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs White?’ said a voice with an impeccable public-school accent.

  The young man in the camel-hair coat stood in front of her.

  Rachel sighed. ‘Tell Harker to send you back to Brickendomby Hall for more training,’ she said.

  ‘You misunderstand me, madam. I am not a Watcher.’

  ‘Enlighten me, then.’

  ‘My name is Henry. I am merely a messenger. Would you be so kind as to step inside for a moment?’ He gestured at the entrance to a wax museum that advertised THE HORRORS OF THE TRENCHES—OVER 100 FIGURES.

  She stared at him.

  ‘It will only take a minute,’ the man said reassuringly. ‘Allow me, please.’ He offered her his arm. ‘This is supposed to be a splendid show. Our mutual friend you worked with in Wolverhampton thinks so, too.’

  Rachel raised her eyebrows, accepted the man’s arm and allowed herself to be led inside.

  * * *

  The wax museum was crowded, hot and smelled of burning dust. The exhibits were in small, low rooms filled with sandbags to make them look like trenches. In the dim light, stiff wax figures in their broad-rimmed helmets and uniforms enacted scenes from the war.

  A medic offered a wounded soldier with a bloody bandage around his head a Ticket and a vial of cyanide. A group of Tommies huddled behind barbed wire while an old rattling newsreel played on the wall—hulking forms of ectotanks over charging soldiers, striding forward and growing bigger with every death, picking up field guns with ectoplasm tentacles. A group of doctors and technicians, white coats stained by dust and grime, doing final checks on a spirit-armoured soldier before his transformation. The metal plates and heavy coiled wire evoked a medieval knight. Rachel stared at that tableau for a long time. Was this what Joe’s nightmares were like?

  ‘Here, Mrs White,’ Henry said. He ducked under a piece of tape blocking a corridor, indicating an unfinished part of the exhibit. She followed him into a pitch-black dead end. He fumbled with a light switch. A bulb flickered into a half-hearted glow and revealed a group of naked wax dolls standing at attention.

  Henry removed his hat. Underneath, he was wearing a Crookes aetheric resonator, or a spirit crown as it was colloquially known. It was an expensive model, too: the filigreed silver net practically vanished into his hair,
and it was only now that she noticed the skin-coloured power cord that ran into the pocket of his coat. That explained the good looks: Henry was a high-class medium who rented his body to affluent spirits. He smiled a little sadly and reached into his pocket. There was a small click and his features contorted unnaturally, his eyes flickering from side to side and then rolling back in his head. No wonder mediums usually wore masks.

  ‘Mrs White,’ he said in a new voice. It was gentle and mellifluous, lower than Henry’s own, and made her think of a kindly old uncle. Children across Britain loved that voice, the voice of Max Chevalier, the famous naturalist and author whose radio shows were a part of many a family’s Sunday ritual even after his passage to Summerland. What most people did not know was that Chevalier had been the head of his own Section in the Winter Court and the most successful agent runner in the Service.

  Until he was assigned to vet Peter Bloom.

  ‘You passed the test, Mrs White,’ Chevalier said. ‘I hope you will forgive my little ruse. It is always good to observe wild animals from afar for a while before approaching.’

  Rachel stared into the medium’s white, empty eyes. Henry’s handsome features were contorted into something resembling a mischievous grin, but exaggerated, like a Mr Punch figure in a street booth.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke a pipe while we talk? It’s a pleasure I rarely experience—thought-forms simply are not the same—so I asked Henry to bring it especially.’

  Rachel nodded and waited while the medium took a curved pipe from an inside pocket and filled it. His movements were jerky and a lot of the tobacco spilled to the floor. Then he lit it, filling the corridor with pungent smoke.

  ‘Ah, that is better. Now, I have made some inquiries about you, Mrs White. I understand you had something of a career setback recently. A pity. A real pity.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke that obscured his unnatural face.