He slid The Science of Death across the table to Peter.
‘Oh, before I completely forget, please give Mansfeld—I never could call him C—my best regards. In fact, I have something for his collection, too.’
After another expedition into the clutter on his desk, West handed Peter a small vial filled with a bluish liquid. ‘I fully understand his fascination with the invisible. You probably never read this early fanciful work of mine.’ He waved at a slim green volume on a shelf. ‘It feels so outdated now. But I really enjoyed writing that last chapter, where Giffen the Invisible Man slowly becomes visible.’
Then he stood up and clapped Peter on the shoulder clumsily.
‘Now go. If you can, come and visit me again.’
Peter forced a small smile. ‘I will. Thank you. Maybe we can play, next time.’
West stroked his moustache and tapped the map on the table, on which the toy soldiers stood. It was a Small Wars rendering of Spain.
‘My dear boy, what do you think we have been doing, all these years?’
* * *
Peter emerged from Downing Street into the gloomy pearl-grey afternoon, blinking and shaken, The Science of Death under one arm and a vial in his pocket.
Read between the lines, West had said. The Invisible Man slowly becomes visible.
He found a corner table in a bustling café full of civil servants and started leafing through the book. The old paper smelled of nights spent reading up in his room in Palace Gardens Terrace. He opened the last chapter and flicked a drop of the blue liquid from the vial onto the page.
Instantly, small, precise handwriting in blue ink appeared between the typeset lines. Carefully, he dabbed the chemical onto his handkerchief and rubbed the pages until the entire message was visible.
Dear Peter,
If you are reading this, I know your loyalties lie with the Soviet Union. I have known ever since I read Max Chevalier’s evaluation of you, years ago.
I admit that this caused me some discomfort at first, but it is not my intention to judge you. I can see the appeal of a perfectly ordered, rational system to a young man of your character. After all, I was drawn to it myself, in a more innocent time.
I also know that you are the person to whom I have now entrusted the task of saving the afterlife.
Let me tell the tale from the beginning. You’re probably aware that I started out as a draper’s apprentice. I know what it was like to serve those who had more than I did, and I dreamed of a better world. With dreams came visions, Martian invasions, invisible men. Embarrassing, really. Many of them were just power fantasies. People embraced those, so I started to wonder if I could create better dreams, ones that would truly change the world.
Along with everyone else, I learned of Sir Oliver Lodge’s moment of great insight on the Ile Roubaud, where he attended a seance with the medium Eusapia Palladino, and through her asked a spirit to disturb a circuit with a coherer he had invented for his radio experiments. The spirit succeeded and rang a bell, heralding the arrival of the Aetheric Age. The great scientist put aside his rivalry with Guglielmo Marconi, and the two set out to perfect an instrument for communication with the afterlife.
When Lodge and Marconi started their experiments with poor Colonel Bedford, they brought me in as a chronicler, to tell the great story of our age. I was so proud that they chose me and not that fraud Doyle. Oh, the book I imagined then! First Men in the Afterlife, I was going to call it. Or The Aether Machine.
You will have read the broad outline of the story in the very volume you hold in your hands. The early problems we had just talking to Bedford, how he nearly Faded from lack of vim, how we brought in Hinton to help him visualise where he was and navigate. How Bedford found the Summer City and the Fortress, tapping his reports using Morse code while the three of us huddled in that house in Sussex, with Marconi’s giant antenna surrounding us like a metallic spiderweb.
My fellow eschatologists had different motives for exploring the afterlife. Lodge wanted to find his son, while Marconi was simply lost in the vision of what his technology could do. I wanted to tell a story about conquering death that would unify mankind.
And so I was the first of us to worry about what had happened to the Old Dead.
Bedford encountered a number of Faded souls—but even the most ancient of them were less than a century old. The aetherbeasts we reasoned to be remnants of higher animal souls, some of which had consumed remnants of human spirits. Apart from the Fortress and the city, we found no signs of a higher civilization.
If anything, technological progress in Summerland should have been easier than here in the First Aether, limited only by imagination and availability of vim.
Where, then, were all the great aetheric civilisations? Why did Bedford not encounter beings far superior to ourselves, far more numerous, not bound by the chains of crude matter? What about alien afterlives? Why were they absent when one could instantly travel anywhere with the power of thought?
We came up with endless theories. Marconi suggested the fourth dimension was simply so vast that the advanced civilizations had already moved on to vistas we could not imagine or reach—a plausible argument given that thought-travel is limited by one’s ability to visualise. As a Catholic, he was drawn to Teilhard’s theories about spiritual evolution and eventual transcendence. Lodge argued that they had experienced a civilizational collapse like the Mayans, and the natural entropic forces had done the rest.
When Bedford mapped out the oldest parts of the Summer City, I started to see the glimmers of an answer. If you look at the city closely enough, with the wisdom of hindsight, it becomes clear that it is not a city at all. It is a citadel, built for war.
Still, it was all just speculation until Bedford stumbled across a hidden chamber in the Fortress, containing a few ancient spirits in hiding. They were almost entirely Faded; the only coherent thing that remained was their utter and complete terror of the beings they were hiding from. They painted aetheric images of unimaginable things that rose from the abyss below the luz mines, nearly driving Bedford mad.
The Old Dead called them the Cullers: ancient aetheric predators that devoured souls and maybe even luz itself, who rose from kata to feed on any aetheric civilisation that was unlucky enough to attract their attention. The Old Dead had tried to build something that would withstand them and had almost succeeded. Almost.
Lodge claimed it was a myth, a fabrication created by Faded souls who had suffered too long in isolation. Even I was tempted to dismiss the idea of the Cullers at the time. I was too full of fire to tell a story about my better world.
For what it is worth, it was around then that I first met your mother. While she did not entirely share my views, she, too, wanted to see the world changed.
Together, we imagined a new world ruled by rational science, where our greatest minds could be made immortal and given aetheric tools to achieve ever higher realms of thought. Hence the Tickets, a meritocratic system for providing afterlives to those who deserved them and were willing to work for them. A perfect cabal of Samurai of the aether, who would see everything and know everything. It was Ann Veronica who shaped the doctrine of Dimensionism more than anyone else.
And then you came along, and we had to choose between our dream and parting ways. My friend Charles Bloom was a true friend in ensuring that you were born in wedlock, even if that drove a wedge between the two of us. I understand your mother and Charles later found a common purpose and true affection, and I am grateful for that.
I admit the vision of the God-Builders in Russia resonated with me, even if they went too far. I did not like the complete surrender of individuality, rational as it may have been. And to me, Lenin will always be that driven, balding man I argued with in 1916.