‘I’m checking on order number ZK927. This is Mrs Woods.’
‘One moment, Mrs Woods.’ There was a heavy click, silence, then a second click. ‘Duty officer.’
‘Reporting on a BCP affiliation. Jack Gould, G-O-U-L-D, resident Abingdon, resigned membership. Reason is disaffection over Hungary action. Gould is working-class, and continues to have no contact, that is zero contact, with CP-oriented intellectuals in Oxford.’
‘All right, I’ve got that.’
‘End of report.’
‘Acknowledged, and thank you.’
She pressed Button B for the change, and went out into the morning air, feeling lighter than before. Of the CP’s forty-three thousand members – the number before the recent haemorrhage – three thousand were named on a special list maintained by Five and Special Branch. On receipt of codeword HILLARY, police across the country would swoop, and if Jack were on the list – and living near Oxford intellectuals and attending Oxford meetings was a risk factor – he would end up with his fellow British internees in Epsom, the race course commandeered and transformed into a prison camp, while foreign-born Communists were imprisoned in Ascot, and those captured further north would end up in Rhyl.
Spying on her friends was the only way to remain in contact with them: the alternative was to exclude them from her life; and she did not want that.
Yet she wondered, as she walked past new council houses, heading for Rosie’s place, whether ants or termites, in their implacable aggression, ever spied on each other or caused an enemy to turn, to begin working for the other side; or whether it took sentience and civilisation to develop the concept of betrayal.
THIRTY-ONE
LUNA, 655003 AD
Fenrisulfr woke from the dream of life, and stared down at his crystalline hands. It had been so long since he had voyaged in the spirit world this way, but there was a strange ease in the way he stood, accepted that breathing was unnecessary here amid these shining halls, and set off to find the war queen Kenna, assuming she still ruled.
—You answered the call, brave Ulfr.
She was in the war-chamber he remembered, where she and her fellow warrior-leaders planned the final battles. Now, though, she was alone.
—You know better than to call me that.
—But something has changed, has it not?
He shrugged.
—I slew Stígr.
—And has killing him helped you?
—Yes, it has.
Kenna’s crystalline face shimmered. Perhaps he had not told her what she was expecting to hear. He added:
—He might have welcomed death. I do not know.
Had Stígr failed to fight back because of Fenrisulfr’s speed, coming out of nowhere? Or had the dark poet been slowed down by fatalism or the need to end his pain?
—Where are the others, War Queen?
She beckoned with one transparent hand.
—Come and see.
They walked through gleaming arched thoroughfares among giant halls, for this place had grown vast, until they finally came out on something like the balcony he had seen before. It overlooked the grey-black plain beneath the night sky, while the shining white disc, banded with scarlet, was the Middle World seen from this other realm . . . except that ‘realms’ meant something different here, and he would need to give himself fully to Kenna’s cause in order to understand.
Silver specks moved against the night.
—Those are our friends, good Ulfr. Flying vessels to the Middle World.
Fenrisulfr shook his head, for it seemed to him that such vessels were unnecessary, though he had no idea how he could know such a thing. Kenna forestalled his question by adding:
—For the armies we raise there. For the billions who will fight against the darkness.
Such numbers could not be imagined.
—Then you do not need me, War Queen.
—Every individual can help, and you are a leader.
Even without air, it was possible to laugh, or something like it. Fenrisulfr shook his head and spread his crystal arms.
—Some leader. Is there room for butchers in this realm of yours?
Again Kenna surprised him.
—I think perhaps there might be. I wish it were not so.
Fenrisulfr expanded his chest, then compressed it, though there was nothing to exhale in this strange place.
—I name the nine realms on the three levels, War Queen. They are first, Ásgarth, Alfheim and Vanaheim. Then Mithgarth hangs there in front of us, level with Utgarth, Jötunheim, Svartalfheim and Nithavellir. And finally, below or beyond, lies cold Niflheim, where Hel rules over the dead who will wage war on us, come Ragnarökkr.
Kenna answered him this way.
—All is as you say, brave Ulfr. Our fellow Council members use different words, and think of realms differently, as you suggest. Mithgarth, the Middle World, stands for more than just that disc where men and women first lived. The five middle realms are those formed of ‘baryonic matter’, but these are just words.
She seemed so implacably sure of herself.
—You see the same realms, then, War Queen? The same as poets and sorcerers and volvas from my time, just with different names?
—Indeed so.
—Then I pass onto you the words of a dead poet. People drop Múspellheim from their schemes.
Kenna’s transparent eyes widened, at the mention of a realm which was known and yet did not fit into the cosmic scheme.
—I don’t . . . know how to think about that.
—And it needs a bridge that is not Bifröst.
She shook her head, no longer looking certain.
—That I understand. The darkness needs its own Trembling Way, along which it will advance, and destroy us if we do not fight.
—Then I have helped you, as you asked.
Kenna reached out, starlight twinkling through her.
—Stay with . . .
But the dream was over, the spirit world fading into nothingness as profound and empty as Ginnungagap, the Great Void, the Abyss of Emptiness.
Nothing.
THIRTY-TWO
NULAPEIRON, 2657-2713 AD
From her distributed surveillance motes throughout Palace Avernon, Kenna watched most of the preparations, while her own hidden programme continued slowly: that work was not to be rushed. The Pilot, Caleb deVries, used a lev-platform several times to return to his ship on the surface, via a giant vertical shaft on the edge of the demesne. The first time, he had taken the crystal spearhead stolen from Avernon’s collection. Had Kenna wanted to blackmail deVries, the opportunity was gone, at least without betraying the undercover Pilot, Linda Gunnarsson, living the life of an epsilon-class servitrix in the lowest level of the Palace.
From a balcony protected by membrane, as well as the sharpest members of his personal guard, Lord Avernon watched a sequence of nine master-drones, each ten metres long, float one by one into the centre of the shaft, and then begin a slow vertical ascent to the surface a hundred metres above, there to gently glide into the cargo hold of deVries’s ship.
Kenna noted that Avernon had not proposed going into space himself. He was content for deVries, or rather the drones that deVries was due to deploy, to carry out the experiments, while he, Avernon, would wait to collect, collate and analyse the subsequent results. Realtime images and readings would be tightbeamed down to a receiver near the shaft opening on the planet’s surface. The chances of a neighbouring Lord eavesdropping on the signals were minimal; to involve oneself in tasks up above, even when others did the hard work, was scarcely thinkable, a blindspot in thinking that in the lower strata was taken to the extreme. Many were inhibited against – not to mention prohibited from – ascending to the next stratum. Such concepts as ground and sky were as little thought of as, say, a mythical hell, and exactly as frightening to someone who seriously imagined it.