But that is another story.
By 1919, we had made great strides. The war was regrettable, of course, but for a while, it looked like we could actually realise a large part of the dream your mother and I had. I was able to take some time to write The Science of Death.
Revisiting all my notes and thinking made me realise how we were building a city in Summerland that looked very much like the civilization of the Old Dead. I commissioned a project called CAMLANN to develop sensitive hyperlight instruments to probe the depths of kata.
The images obtained show structures resembling tree branches, exactly like the Old Dead described to Colonel Bedford. If you compare photographic plates, you can see them moving. Of course, what we see are simply three-dimensional cross sections of something much larger. Maybe there is only one Culler, a Leviathan sleeping in kata, and woe to us if he ever wakes.
Lodge and Marconi did not believe the results. They claimed that the structures were simply a hyper-optical illusion, like Lowell’s Martian canals which provided me with so much inspiration in my youth. They insisted we terminate the project and bury the results. I objected, but at that point they had the Queen’s ear. Ever since, they have kept me on a tight leash, and I no longer know who to trust.
I should not have given up the fight so easily, but at that time, I felt revealing the truth would be pointless. It would only lead to terror and anguish: after all, we lacked effective aetheric weapons to defend ourselves with, and in any case, I feared an arms race with the Russians.
And in the end, I could not be sure. Maybe Lodge and Marconi were right.
The closer I get to death, the closer to the end of my tether, the more I think about those early days, and the visage of the Cullers in the CAMLANN images.
Now that we face the prospect of another world war that threatens to span the four dimensions and destroy souls themselves, I have started to wonder if the Cullers might be a blessing in disguise. If there is something that can prevent a clash between our two aetheric Empires, with our opposing philosophies, it is a common enemy. We are too bound by convention to scale the heights the Presence has achieved, but for all its formidable intellect, it lacks imagination.
Together, I believe that we can withstand the Cullers and unravel the mysteries of aether, time, space and souls. And even then, we will only be beginning.
If you are reading this, you have the CAMLANN file in your possession. It contains everything we know about the Cullers. The key to the cipher is on the remaining pages of the book you are holding; call that my last act of vanity, to sneak my works to the Presence’s reading list.
We may never meet again. You may be surprised to hear that I do not have a Ticket: when the time comes, I have decided to go where my imagination takes me. And if all I am and ever was is lost to Fading, I hope the last thing to go is the pride I feel in calling you my son.
H. B.
The rest of the letter consisted of pages and pages of grouped digits and letters, a cryptographic key. Peter Bloom closed the book, paid for his untouched coffee and walked out into the street.
He reeled and had to stop after a few steps. Civil servants in dark suits hurried around him as if he were a rock in a river of tweed and umbrellas. Finally, he let the crowd carry him forward until it came to a stop at a traffic light.
Everything West had written rang true. Peter had already deduced a good deal of it by himself—or at least the existence of a mysterious force that had decimated the Old Dead, and was still a threat to all of Summerland. The lack of a densely populated afterlife logically implied some kind of filter for aetheric civilizations, otherwise the Empire’s ectonauts would have found far more than the ruins of a single city. He had presented his reasoning to Otto and Nora, and had been surprised to find they agreed with him.
In any case, this was far too implausible for an SIS plot. The prime minister was a tired old man who had made peace with a decision—to use Peter as a messenger to the Presence. And the message changed everything.
The light shifted from red to green. He stepped off the kerb and saw the end of the world, the shape of things to come.
If it was true, and the Cullers came, then the Presence—along with the entire Summer City and its countless souls—would be destroyed. The British Empire might survive, but the Soviet Union would not. The world would fall once more into barbarism and darkness and the fear of death. The religions and men like Djugashvili would fill the power vacuum and use that fear to build empires of blood and terror.
Peter crossed the street and turned into Birdcage Walk. He had to get the book to Otto and Nora at all costs. The extraction protocol was ready, and if that failed, he could always walk into the Soviet Union embassy and hand himself over to the rezident—the NKVD station chief, in the country under diplomatic cover.
The wind picked up and carried the smell of dead leaves and rain. He found an empty red telephone box next to the hedge of St James’s Park. He fed the phone a sixpence and dialled a number. There were clicks on the line, and then a woman’s recorded voice read out numbers and letters: a Hinton code for a Ticket. He scribbled it down on The Science of Death’s title leaf with a pencil nub, hung up and allowed himself a brief sigh of relief. He had an aetheric destination, an escape route. Now he just needed a way to bring the book and the code with him.
He left the phone box and walked on briskly, planning a surveillance-detection route.
* * *
Rachel White did not have a nervous disposition. Leading up to her bar exam, she calmly planned her study schedule, executed it perfectly, and the night before the exam she slept a sound eight hours. But now, sitting on the passenger seat of a vintage petrol car—most vehicles had been electric for more than a decade—parked on Birdcage Walk, her stomach felt like an acid pit and she had a terrible urge to bite her fingernails.
All she had eaten after breakfast was a stodgy sausage roll from a food cart. They had been trailing Bloom—both in Summerland and the living world—for the whole afternoon, ever since he apparently deemed it necessary to go clothes shopping, then entered Number 10 and came out carrying a book.
Bloom’s distant shape vanished into a telephone box up ahead.
‘What is he doing?’ she hissed.
Joan, who was at the wheel, gave her a reproachful look.
‘He is setting up a meet,’ Roger Hollis said from the back seat. He thumbed the alphabet dials on his ectophone. ‘I am going to tell Booth and Hickson to get ready. I hope Chevalier is doing his part.’
Rachel looked at her former assistant and firmly pushed her complex emotions into a compartment inside her head and locked it. There would be time for that later. Right now, getting Bloom was what mattered, and Roger had agreed to bring two of Noel Symonds’ Summer Court spirit Watchers—Booth and Hickson—along to the operation. Besides them and Max, they had Helen and another of Max’s agents, a Mr Stokes, on the ground on foot, enough numbers to make following a single person undetectable, especially with Max passing messages back and forth and coordinating.
‘Mr Bloom just made a call,’ said Max’s calm and measured radio voice from the car’s ectophone circuit. ‘I listened on the line. The fragments that I caught sounded like a Hinton address.’
‘Get back in there!’ Roger barked. ‘He could leave that body behind any moment!’