Peter felt hollow and weak. He had been so depleted of vim that he had fallen into a brief torpor, allowing the house to run out of control. But why? With sudden horror, he realised his memories of the previous day were sparse, the first sign of Fading. He knew he had gone to Madrid. But had he learned key information he had already forgotten?
Fortunately, the Fountain was still in its place: a lamp-like stand with a brass nozzle surrounded by dials, connected to the wall by a tube. He turned a dial. Bright vim poured out, expanding into a sphere the size of a candle flame that lit up the room and radiated warmth.
Peter cupped his hands and a tendril of the liquid light flowed out of the bright sphere and into them. He drank it, and his thoughts turned its un-taste into honeyed porridge. As the distilled life essence filled him, his memory gradually returned, like photographs being developed. He ran through the previous day in his mind, and was relieved to find there were no gaps.
Tired from meeting Inez, he had nevertheless forced himself to write his usual two reports, one to his handler George in cipher, and one to C, the Chief, at the Summer Court. Usually, the two documents were identical, but Dzhugashvili’s presence in Spain warranted consulting with George before sending the report to C.
Peter had tried to thought-travel to one of their dead drops—a battery-powered ectophone for recording messages—but had found the beacon inactive. That was not unusuaclass="underline" the ectophone batteries lasted less than a week and had to be manually replaced. However, the beacons for the two fallback phones were dark as well. George had to be out of the country, and his operatives had neglected to maintain the dead drops. Completely drained by the thought-travel attempts, Peter had no choice but to ectomail his report to C uncensored. A reply arrived almost immediately by spirit courier, requesting his presence at 9 a.m. sharp. In death, the old spymaster never slept—unlike Peter, who had been overcome by his exertions.
Fully awake and filled with the luminescent power of the vim, Peter hurled a thought at the rough-hewn walls. The torture chamber wavered as if giving an embarrassed shrug and was replaced by a pleasant room with white wallpaper, a soft tan carpet and a curtained window. It was small and bare, modelled after his old rooms at Cambridge, with little in the way of personal items except for his ledger-sized diary on a writing desk, closed with a soul lock that only his own luz could open.
In a way, he felt sorry for the house, forced to wear a mask. What did it really matter what it looked like, when ultimately all was aether and souls? For decades, physicists had known that even what the living thought of as solid matter was only knotted vortices in the aether. In the four dimensions of Summerland, any knot could be undone, and thus a spirit could reshape reality with a thought—but maintaining any given configuration took energy.
The small aetheric clock on the desk showed 8.10 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. He could still make it to the Summer Court by 9 a.m.
He glanced at the hypermirror, a tall, silver-framed prism of polished luz that was his only other piece of furniture. A hyperlight reflection provided a three-dimensional image that could be studied from all sides. Inside the prism, there was a serious-looking naked boy of perhaps eleven years old, dark-haired, round-faced, with striking silver-grey eyes.
He stared at the image and concentrated. The boy grew up in an instant and became a young man with a more rounded paunch than he would have liked, a widow’s peak in his dark hair, and a thoughtful expression. Peter shaped himself clothes from the aether, a charcoal pinstriped suit, Oxford shoes, a tie in Trinity colours and a golden watch chain. With a flick of his wrist, he completed his wardrobe with a hat and a raincoat. Satisfied, he headed for the door and stepped on something hard and angular.
Thought-chaff had accumulated on the floor during his sleep. It could be dangerous to dream in Summerland, where the pliable aether might give your nightmares form. This time, the things his subconscious mind had birthed looked harmless enough: an abstract, spiralling ribbon, a few dead white-winged moths and a toy soldier.
On impulse, he picked the soldier up. It was crudely cast tin but lovingly painted in khaki and green. He put it in his pocket. It could sit on his desk at work, until it Faded away.
* * *
Rows of marble facades blushed pink in Summerland’s unchanging twilight glow as Peter walked down Ear Street.
The aethertects had done their jobs well. The Summer City housed millions of New Dead with Tickets in surroundings designed to evoke the best of what the British Empire had to offer, spun from aether and made solid by collective belief. When Peter first moved to Undermay, he could have mistaken the borough for Mayfair, if not for the lack of birdsong and the absence of nights and days.
Yet the longer you lived in Summerland, the stranger things became. Your hypersight grew more acute, and little by little, you developed an awareness of two additional directions that were invisible to the living.
One was the ana direction, or four-up. Towards ana lay the world of the living, in its own thin slice of the aether. It was the direction of the Unseen, the mysterious source of hyperlight and souls. Luz stones fell from ana, lodged themselves in dense aetheric configurations like brains at birth.
Upon death, the luz detached and fell below the plane of the living world in the kata direction—the equivalent of down in the fourth dimension. The soul-stone took the person’s memories with it to Summerland like mud stuck in the roots of an uprooted tree. It was only Fading that shed them away until only the luz remained.
Peter often wondered how most spirits were able to simply ignore the infinite kata beneath them. Even now, as he walked through the small but perfectly groomed Adelphi Park towards the fourtube station at the corner of Fortress Road and Echoes, he felt as if he were crossing a theatre set made of papier mâché, something he could rupture with one sharp poke.
Much like what would happen to his entire existence, if he made a single misstep with C.
It was peak commuting time. The fourtube stop was crowded, mostly affluent New Dead who worked in the ana-higher levels of the city. Some of the besuited men had been deceased long enough to have given up walking, moving instead in a peculiar gliding motion, polished shoes barely touching the cobblestones.
Peter took the steps down to the station and joined the orderly queue on the circular platform encircling the dome-shaped tunnel head. The fourtube car arrived—a large crystal hemisphere that shimmered into existence. Peter filed in with the rest of the commuters, grasped a bar fixed to the ceiling and held on tight as the vessel shot in the ana direction.
Thought-travel would have been faster, but public transport was a good way to conserve vim, and the hypersight views through the crystal gave you a glimpse of the four-dimensional nature of the city. In the fourth direction, buildings were stacked on top of each other like layers in a wedding cake. The attics and purely decorative chimneys merged with the basements of the adjacent ana or kata level, or kissed each other’s walls or roofs in Escher-ian angles. Not for the first time, Peter thought it resembled a honeycomb.
He glanced at the impassive faces of the commuters, who opened their newspapers with the rustle of dead insect wings. What would Inez think of this bourgeois afterlife, where the dead still repeated the routines of life like reanimated worker bees? Perhaps she would realise that her very struggle for something greater than herself was itself a kind of Heaven. As the train climbed ana-wards and the light of the Unseen brightened, Peter found himself fervently wishing that he would not have to take that away from her.