One night, Cedric tried to solo-climb one of King’s College Chapel’s spires. It started to rain, he lost his footing and fell more than a hundred feet. A proctor found his body lying in the courtyard the next morning.
Two days after his funeral, Noel organised a night expedition to scale the spires of the Chapel in Cedric’s honour. The party got their hands on an ectophone and ran the wire up all the way to the top. The climb was difficult—the first frost had settled—but there were ten of them, with lots of ropes. They attacked the Chapel as if it was a mammoth, to be tied down and sacrificed in their comrade’s memory.
At the top, Noel called the ectophone exchange and waited. The sombre mood evaporated when Cedric answered from Summerland. Noel sat atop a gargoyle like some sort of demonic cowboy, lifted the phone and hooted.
‘Here we are, old boy! Here we are!’
Down on the rooftops, the other climbers patted each other on the back and shouted greetings.
Noel waved at Peter, inviting him up to speak to Cedric. He climbed the spire accompanied by the climbers’ cheers, joined Noel at the top and accepted the heavy handset.
‘How are you?’ he asked Cedric.
There was static on the line. Then the dead boy’s voice spoke, more hollow than in real life, but recognisably Cedric.
‘It’s great here, actually. The lectures are still boring even via ectophone. Not much climbing going on. But thought-travel is amazing. And you can shape things with your mind. Need to pay attention, though. If I’m not careful, my head starts to look like a crushed plum. I kind of wish I had got here sooner, to be honest, just not by falling on my noggin.’
As Peter listened, it suddenly felt like the spire was inverted, and the night sky was some unfathomable abyss below him.
‘I’m happy for you,’ he whispered and passed the handset back to Noel.
Ignoring his friend’s surprised look, he descended alone, all the way to the alley behind the Chapel, and ran to Trinity without stopping.
Back in his room, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. It was so unfair. His father had tried to make a difference all his life and disappeared without a trace. Cedric had just drifted through life without purpose, and to him, Summerland was like a holiday resort.
Was this what his mother had tried to tell him? There was no point in climbing when nothing changed if you fell. There was no point in mathematics if it was just a game, with no stone-hard truth beneath.
Noel and Cedric and the others would never understand that.
For the first time since he started night-climbing, Peter felt completely alone.
* * *
During the years that followed, Peter had come to terms with solitude, but it still stung a little to sit with an old friend over cups of vim, conscious that a slip of the tongue would open up an abyss beneath him.
‘I’m glad you came to me with this,’ he told Noel. ‘Do keep me posted.’
‘Of course.’
‘Incidentally, did your source find out anything more about this defector character?’
‘Not much. The Watcher he spoke to said the Russian was a rowdy blighter. Punched a poet, apparently.’
Peter forced a smile. ‘Punched a poet? That’s a good start. I don’t remember anyone ever punching you.’
‘Well, there was that scoundrel Caldecott. But that was over a girl.’
They both laughed at the memory.
‘We should really get together after work sometime,’ Noel said. ‘Maybe even bring Cedric along. Say what you want about the Winter Court, but at least they don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for a medium to get a drink.’
‘How is the old devil?’
‘Oh, you know. All business these days. Always asks about you.’
‘We had some good times, didn’t we? Once in a while, I still think about that night we climbed the Tottering Tower. Are you going to put that in your book?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Noel said. ‘Some things people have to discover for themselves.’
* * *
The rest of the twilight day in Peter’s own Section lasted forever. He had to finish his briefing for the Winter Court but it was difficult to concentrate. The CAMLANN file burned in his mind like a tantalising hot coal, but he did not dare to examine it in his office. More than once, the words flowing from his aetherpen became complete nonsense and he had to put it down.
Finally, he was done and sealed the ectomails to Hollis with his luz.
On his way back to Undermay, standing in the fourtube car, he kept hearing Noel’s words over and over again.
I thought you should know, in case a witch hunt is imminent.
Every evening commuter who threw him a passing glance looked like a Watcher. Once, his hands on the bar near the ceiling became those of a young boy again, small and pale, with chewed fingernails. He quickly stuffed them in his pockets until he had his self-image under control. It was impolite to remark on drifting appearances, but it would not do if someone who knew him noticed he was in distress.
His luz pulsed with fear to the rhythm of the four-rail’s clatter. The Summer Court had soul-surgeries that could dig secrets from his mind, no matter how well he hid them. And after he was bled dry, there was the judgment of kata, the abyss from which no one had ever returned.
For the first time in seven years, doubt crept into his mind. Not only had George fled the Termin Procedure, he had killed himself. Why would anyone choose a Ticketless journey into the kata depths over joining the Presence?
Peter really had not known George at all.
You can prove anything from a contradiction.
Was it possible that it had not been a suicide after all, that Shpiegelglass or someone else had liquidated George and the Winter Court was covering it up? But why would Shpiegelglass keep that from him?
Peter sat down and watched the fourtube’s pale, dark-suited men and women returning from the upper ana levels, or from long, tiring journeys to do aetheric work in the living world, and felt jealous. Their lives might be meaningless, but at least they weren’t troubled by unanswerable questions.
Back in his flat, he finally took out the CAMLANN file. It was not so much like unwrapping a present as he had anticipated, but rather pulling out a tooth: it had tangled up with the doubts and fears in his mind during the course of the day. He focused on the bubble of aether with its tiny luz kernel and fanned out the documents it contained like a magician’s oversized playing cards.
There was a budget with deliberately obscure line items, a list of personnel—twenty researchers and support staff, both living and spirits—and a contract with Marconi for aetheric instruments. No names of the staff were included, a standard practice in defence-related contracts. Still, it looked like a significant effort: the total cost was more than a million pounds. An impenetrable one-page executive summary talked about research into ‘deep kata phenomena,’ whatever those were.
The project was commissioned by West himself in January 1928—then a freshly minted prime minister—and terminated in August 1928. It had been supervised by a steering committee including West, the Royal Eschatologist Sir Oliver Lodge and Guglielmo Marconi. The minutes from the committee’s final meeting were sparse but indicated that the project had been shut down due to ‘inconclusive’ results—Lodge and Marconi had overruled West. Peter perked up at that. There were rumours that the original three who were present during Colonel Bedford’s first journey to the afterlife in the late 1890s had suffered a falling out. It was certainly true that West, Lodge and Marconi had not been seen together for a while.
The rest of the file—the actual research—was a blur. Peter swore. Either the aetheric record had degraded over time, or the Zöllner camera—which recorded images in aetheric patterns that could be transported to Summerland—had not worked properly.