He sat down, conceding a stalemate. Unschlicht followed suit, brow furrowed, and continued his lecture.
Afterwards, Peter followed him across the verdant expanse of Trinity’s grand quad.
‘Doctor Unschlicht.’
The philosopher turned around, head cocked to one side like a puzzled bird of prey.
‘I didn’t understand the point you were trying to make,’ Peter said. ‘Are you saying that mathematics is true, or that it isn’t?’
‘My point is that there is no point. I won’t say anything which anyone can dispute. Or if anyone does dispute it, I will let that point drop and pass on to say something else. Learn to embrace contradictions, young man. Once you do, perhaps we can have a serious discussion, hmm?’
He walked away and left Peter standing there, unmoored and lost, like a kite whose string had been cut.
* * *
Seven years later, Peter walked in the midst of mathematics made solid, in the heart of the Registry.
Astrid guided them to the first file with blinding speed, holding his hand in a featherlike grip. Their thought-travel blurred the colours of the files into a fuzzy grey which then resolved into a cubical space surrounded by shelves on all sides and illuminated only by amber hyperlight. The angles and the corners twisted whenever Peter turned his head. They were inside one of the countless interconnected tesseracts that made up the stacks. It was hard to believe that as little as thirty years ago, the Service had got by with a small building on Charing Cross Road.
Astrid floated up to a high shelf close to the ceiling and pulled out a thick file. She handed it to Peter.
‘There you go, Mr Bloom.’ Her blank face glowed with rosy light. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’
Peter let the file drop and drew Astrid to him. He kissed her mouthless face. Her skin felt like a soap bubble, slippery and yielding against his lips. He licked the nub of her luz and she moaned softly.
Peter had not taken many lovers in Summerland. Privately, he considered the Victorian morals that discouraged pleasures of aetheric flesh ridiculous. Except in Summerland, nakedness would have meant literally baring his soul, and his secrets with it. And so, even now, his self-image stayed clothed and distinct. He pushed his own luz deep into Astrid’s aetheric flesh, but only caressed her soul-stone without letting it in.
It would be so easy to allow them to become one. What was the Presence but the logical end point of a union like this? She pulled him closer and ground her luz against him. Her fingers melted into aetheric tendrils that flowed down his back. For a moment, it was excruciating to close himself to her. There, in his arms, was a cure to his solitude, an opportunity to share himself fully with another being. As for Astrid, she yearned for his memories of the flesh, of the living world, of all the things she had lost. And he could not give them to her.
He could only take.
While Astrid clung to him, lost in passion, he focused on his luz inside her, reached through it for the Registry index that filled her mind like sawdust packed inside a toy. He whispered the word CAMLANN, and suddenly a Hinton Cube blazed in his mind, leaping up from Astrid’s vast memory.
He continued to caress her for a few minutes, but with less enthusiasm. Astrid grew increasingly frustrated and finally pulled away.
‘I’m sorry,’ Peter said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. This isn’t right, we shouldn’t—’
Astrid’s egg-smooth face betrayed no emotion but her voice was cold.
‘It is perfectly all right, Mr Bloom,’ she said. ‘You did say you had a headache from your medium. It must be nice for you boys, being able to visit the living. I thought I could help you grow up a little, but I see I was mistaken.’
Peter blushed. Astrid gathered her flowing form into her previous prim self-image.
‘I’m sure you can find your own way back.’
The aetheric current from her sudden departure sent the pages of the file flying all over the tesseract.
Peter gathered the sheets of the Spanish file from the floor. Then he focused on the Hinton Cube from Astrid’s mind and thought-travelled. The tesseracts and files blurred. There were cross references, several streams of thought that pulled him in different directions. Lacking the archivist’s instinctive skill, he concentrated on the strongest one, holding on to the image of the Cube like a swimmer to a branch in a current.
Then he was in front of a shelf full of files. There: the pull of the Cube guided his hand to a folder with a green cover. He took out the sheaf of contents and put the empty cover back on the shelf.
For a moment, he thought about the texture of the paper between his fingers. Even now, the Empire’s aetheric technology clung desperately to the conventions of the living.
Of course, nothing was what it seemed. Somewhere within the files was a luz fragment, the ultimate result of Fading, an ancient soul-remnant brought up from the mines in the kata depths and put to use as a scaffold to hold together a bit of aether that thought it was a piece of paper and ink. Did a glimmer of the original consciousness remain? Did the old soul within feel anything when the file was read?
Too bad souls that were still human did not have their thoughts and desires spelled out so clearly.
Peter concentrated. The stack of sheets curled up as if burned by an invisible flame. It became a glowing bubble of aether around the luz shard, an apple of light and air in his hand.
He swallowed it. The tiny luz shard nestled into an orbit around his own soul-stone. Suddenly, crystalline information filled his memory: photographs, reports, transcripts. It was too much to process all at once. He would have to examine it carefully later.
At least he would carry this one Faded soul with him to join the Presence.
* * *
When Peter returned to the Reading Room, he felt thin and hollow, frayed at the edges. Obtaining more vim had to wait, however. It would not do to leave just yet. He avoided looking at Astrid, found an empty desk and made a show of reading BRIAR’s report.
It pulled his thoughts away from the tantalising weight of the CAMLANN file in his mind and back to the situation in Spain. Besides Inez, he had been running two other agents, a secretary in the POUM party and an Anarchist barber with an influential and loose-tongued clientele. Handing them over to someone else felt like a betrayal.
Peter knew his guilt was completely irrational. Shpiegelglass was undoubtedly going to try to liquidate Dzhugashvili using the information Peter had provided. That was the first step in bringing the Republic under the Presence’s influence. And surely, that was the only way to end the needless fighting in Spain.
Or was it?
‘Hullo, Blooms, old boy!’
Peter lifted his gaze and looked right into the eyes of Noel Symonds.
Noel grinned. He was lean and slight with an impish face framed by unruly curls. In death, he did not look much different from their night-climbing days together in Cambridge. Although, of course, he now worked in Section A of the Summer Court, specialising in Counter-intelligence.
‘I have been looking for you all over,’ Noel said. ‘Would you be so good as to come with me, please? We’ll get you a cup of vim on the way.’
He clapped Peter on the shoulder.
‘You look like you could use it.’
* * *
Noel’s office was in the upper floors of the Summer Court headquarters, in the warren of corridors that indicated prestige by their proximity to C’s office. It was small but tidy and decorated with colourful old adverts for Symonds Soups, Noel’s father’s company.
Peter was tense when he sat down. Noel leaned on the windowsill and looked out at the view to Albert Park.