Against the Day (122 page)

“An
ancient metropolis of the spiritual, some say inhabited by the living, others
say empty, in ruins, buried someplace beneath the desert sands of Inner Asia.
And of course there are always those who’ll tell you that the true Shambhala
lies within.”

   
“And?
Which is it?”

She
frowned quickly. “I suppose it is a real place on the globe, in the sense that
the Point at Infinity is a place ‘on’ the Riemann sphere. The money invested to
date by the Powers in expeditions to ‘discover’ the place is certainly real
enough. The political forces being deployed
. . .
political and military as well . . .”

   
“But
not specially your mug of beer.”

“My—”
She allowed a dotted quarterrest. “Colonel Halfcourt is involved. If I’m
deciphering this properly.”

   
“In
trouble?”

“No
one is sure.” Not for the first time, he had the dispirited feeling that she
was expecting something from him he couldn’t even name, let alone provide.
“There are a hundred reasons why I should be
out there with him
. . . .
”

   
“And
just one that you shouldn’t.” Was he supposed to try and guess?

They
stared at each other over what might have been Ætheric distances. “At your
level of intuition, Kit,” with a troubled smile at last, “we might be here for
hours.”

   
“Who
could object to hours spent in charming company?”

   
“I
think that’s supposed to be ‘in
such
charming company.
’ ”

   
“Whoops.”

   
“We
spoke last time of employment with the T.W.I.T.”

   
“That’s
who got me out of the
Klapsmühle?
”

   
“Lionel
Swome. You’re about to meet him. What were you doing in there?”

   
“Hiding,
I guess.” He told her about Foley’s night visit.

   
“It
sounds like you dreamed it.”

“Makes
no difference. The message he was delivering was the thing. Sooner I’m out of
here the better.”

 
“Let’s stroll up the Hainberg for a bit,
shall we.” Both of them scanning ahead and behind, she brought him presently to
a restaurant on a hillside, with a view of the walls of the tranquil town,
where sat T.W.I.T. travel coordinator Lionel Swome at a table under an umbrella
for the afternoon light, with a bottle of Rheinpfalz from last autumn, and two
glasses. After introductions, Yashmeen flourished her parasol and was off down
the mountain again.

   
“Right,”
said Swome. “You’re about to do a bunk, I’m told.”

“Amazing!
I only just decided a couple minutes ago, on the way up here— but you
people with your mental telepathy, I keep forgetting.”

   
“And
you’ve no restrictions as to where you go.”

Kit
shrugged. “Further away the better, doesn’t matter to me—why? does it to
you?”

   
“Inner
Asia?”

   
“Just
fine.”

Swome
studied his wineglass, not drinking. “There are those who prefer other
Deidesheimers—Herrgottsackers and such—to those of the Hofstück.
But year for year, if one takes the time to—”

   
“Mr.
Swome.”

A
shrug, as if having come to an understanding with himself. “Very well—
Miss Halfcourt being in a comparable situation, you two are about to solve your
mutual difficulties—by eloping together to Switzerland.”

Kit
tugged an invisible hatbrim down over his face. “Sure. Everybody’s going to
believe that.”

“Maybe
nobody you know. But those we seek to deceive just might, especially when we
provide abundant evidence—travel permits, hotel reservations, bank
correspondence, and so on. Up to a point you and the young lady will carry on
in as obviously newlywed a manner as possible—Mr. Traverse? you are with
me here? good—and the next moment, presto—you shall each have
disappeared in a different direction, in your own case, eastward.”

Kit waited for him to go on. Finally,
“And
. . .
?”

“The
exbridetobe? Hmm, no idea. Someone else’s desk really. Meanwhile, as you’ll be
out there, perhaps there is one small errand you wouldn’t mind having a bash at
for us.”

   
“And
. . .
that would be to do with um, what’s
its name again . . .”

   
“Shambhala.
Yes, in a way.”

   
“I’m
not a Theosophist or even much of a world traveler, I hope somebody’s

mentioned that to you. Maybe you’ll want at least a little
field experience here.”

“Your
chief virtue, precisely. No one out there knows a blessed thing about you.
We’ve any number of old Inner Asia hands on the lurk at the usual oases and
bazaars, but everyone there knows everyone else’s story, it’s all a stalemate,
best thing now is to inject some element of the unknown.”

   
“Me.”

   
“And
you come well recommended by Sidney Reilly.”

   
“Um .
. .”

   
“No
doubt you’ll recall him as ‘Chong.
’ ”

“That
guy? went around in that turban all the time? Well I’m sure a hoosier, I
thought he was the real thing.”

“Oh,
Sidney’s that, all right. You may run into him again while you’re out in the
’stans, as he’s forever to and fro, but you probably won’t recognize him then
either.”

   
“So
if I should get in trouble—”

“He
wouldn’t be the one to see about that.” A keen gaze. “You don’t suffer from
‘nerves,’ I hope.”

“Do
I seem a little jumpy right now? must be these folks that are after me, no
telling what they’re fixing to do and so forth. But out there? Inner Asia,
million miles from nowhere? hell I’ll be just dandy.”

“Here’s
what we’d like you to do for us, then.” The T.W.I.T. functionary, nodding,
produced a map from a notecase and spread it on the table. “We have our
longstanding arrangements—Colonial Office, One Savile Row, other less
official tieins. We can clear you”—tracing out with his fingertip a
tentative route—“at least to Kashgar.”

   
“That’s
where Miss Halfcourt’s father is stationed.”

   
“Now
and then. He leads a peripatetic life. But as you’ll be out his way . . .”

“Wait
a minute.” Kit reached to take one of Swome’s cigarettes from his case on the
table. “They don’t have any idea where he is, do they.”

“The
lines have been down, in a way. Temporary but bothersome. There’s never been a
revolution in Russia on quite that scale, you see, and it’s followed the
railroads out into Asia as well, and the consequences are still unrolling.
Auberon Halfcourt has been out there trooping since the Afghan difficulties,
there’s no predicament he can’t get himself out of. We’re not worried so much
about his safety . . .” pausing, as if Kit was supposed to finish the thought.
Kit did not oblige him. “. . . as about getting hold of his report on whatever
just happened at Shambhala—apparently all the Powers were in on
it—inconceivable that he should have missed it. And time being of the

essence, obviously—we don’t want the others, Germany or
Austria in particular, jumping in with their version of events, we need to keep
some control over the history
. . . .
”

“I’ve noticed a lot of Russians in
town,” Kit said, expecting to be told to mind his own business, but Swome had
been brooding about Otzovists, it seemed.

“These antiLeninist Bolshies, I
suppose you mean. Dear oh dear yes. In their singleminded concentration on Miss
Halfcourt and her fourdimensional skills, they seem willing to ignore all secular
risks, especially to the recent AngloRussian Entente. A degree of deception has
accordingly become necessary, though the T.W.I.T. in theory are supposed to be
above international politics.

“One must be ever so careful. They’re
not always what they appear, these seekers. Too often they prove far less
metaphysical than you’d hope, in fact so sworn to the solid world that
you
begin
to feel like a mystic, just by default. Madam Blavatsky herself, recall, was
working for the Tsarist secret service, known back then as Third Section,
before it became the Okhrana
. . . .
And
what’s it matter really, materialist or spiritualist, they’re all bloody
bombchuckers aren’t they. Easy enough to deal with of course, one more benefit
of the Entente, a word dropped in the right ear and it’s run Bolshie run.”

“Will I have trouble with them,
seeing ’s how I’m headed out that way, ’s what I was getting at.”

“To me they seem a bit too European
for Kashgar, not quite up to it, more comfortable really here or Switzerland.
Kashgar is the spiritual capital of Inner Asia, as ‘interior’ as one can get,
and not only geographically. As for what lies beneath those sands, you’ve your
choice—either Shambhala, as close to the Heavenly City as Earth has
known, or Baku and Johannesburg all over again, unexplored reserves of gold,
oil, Plutonian wealth, and the prospect of creating yet another subhuman class
of workers to extract it. One vision, if you like, spiritual, and the other,
capitalist. Incommensurable, of course.”

   
“So
the job—”

“Is to find Auberon Halfcourt, see
what he has to report, get it back to us in as much detail and as soon as
possible.”

   
“In
person?”

“Isn’t necessary. We appreciate your
need to lie doggo for a bit. We’ll give you a list of runners between there and
here, reliables every one
. . . .
Oh,
and if you do have to come out quickly yourself, we’d suggest making it via
Constantinople, because our lines through there are a bit more secure.”

   
“Why
would I have to come out quickly?”

   
“Any
number of reasons, take your pick. Another revolution, tribal uprisings,
natural disasters, good heavens man, if we had to cover every contingency we
might as well be writing espionage novels.”

   
Yashmeen
was waiting at the edge of town.

“So”—Kit
with what he hoped was a cheerful tone—“we’re running off together.”

   
“You’re
not angry, I hope. Kit?”

   
“Oh
don’t worry, Yash—we’ll see it through.”

   
“It’s
how their minds work.”

   
“It’ll
be fun.”

Her
quick glance was only with difficulty to be distinguished from alarm.
   

“ ‘
Fun.
’ ”

Having a day free
, Kit, Yashmeen, and Günther decided
to make a farewell visit to the littleknown but rewarding Museum der
Monstrositäten, a sort of nocturnal equivalent of Professor Klein’s huge
collection of mathematical models on the third floor of the Auditorienhaus.
They traveled in a motordiligence out toward the Brocken. The brushland grew
hilly and witchlike, clouds came from directions indeterminate and covered the
sun. “An older sort of Germany,” commented Günther, with a lessthanreassuring
smile. “Deeper.”

It
was not so much a conventional museum as a strange underground temple, or
countertemple, dedicated to the current “Crisis” in European mathematics
. . .
whether intended for exhibition,
worship, study, or initiation could not be read from any exterior, because
there was none, beyond an entranceway framing a flight of coalblack steps
sloping downward in a fathomless tunnel to crypts unknown. As if to express the
“imaginary” (or, as Clifford had termed it, “invisible”) realm of numbers, the
black substance from which it was constructed seemed not so much a known
mineral as the residue of a nameless one, after light, through some undisclosed
process, had been removed. Now and then a loadbearing statue was visible in the
form of an angel, wings, faces, and garments streamlined almost to pure
geometry, and brandishing weapons somehow
not yet decipherable,
featuring
electrodes and cooling fins and so forth.

They
found the inside strangely deserted, lit only by a few whispering gassconces
which receded down the corridors leading away from the shadows of the
entrancehall. Yet there was the smell of German tidiness constantly exercised,
of Sapoleum and floorwax, of massive applications of formalin gas still
pungently lingering. The corridors seemed swept by generations of sighing,

which occasionally had reached wind
force—a sadness, a wild exclusion from the primly orthogonal floorplans
of academic endeavor
. . . .

   
“Somebody
must be in here, at work?” it seemed to Kit. “Guards, staff?”