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  INTRODUCTION

  BY CHARLES STROSS

  In his forty-nine years, John M. (“Mike” to his friends and colleagues) Ford proved himself to be bewilderingly versatile. He wrote poetry; he wrote extensively for the Traveller and GURPS tabletop role- playing games; he published children’s fiction; he emitted novels. And what novels! How Much for Just the Planet? stands out as being both a Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta and a Star Trek novel. Web of Angels, published when he was twenty-three, invented most of the tropes that later became recognized as cyberpunk a few years ahead of schedule—a prodigious, precocious feat. As for The Dragon Waiting, words fail me: just read it. (It won the World Fantasy Award in 1984.) And then we come to The Scholars of Night.

  The Scholars of Night is a classic British Cold War spy novel—ironic, for Mike was American through and through—written in the mold of a forgotten master of the field, Anthony Price. (John le Carré is best remembered today, and indeed gets a tip of the hat in the narrative, but Price was at the top of his game in the 1980s and stands up to comparison with le Carré and Len Deighton.) Price was all about the intricate and lethal games historians and academics play, the scholars of night who plot treason and sell their souls to the agencies of state power. Mike follows his scholars, Allan Berenson and his protégé Nicholas Hansard, back to the roots of their profession—to the Elizabethan playwright and libertine Christopher Marlowe, reputedly one of Sir Francis Walsingham’s spies during the cold war between Protestant Tudor England and the Catholic French and Spanish empires. Not only is the entire novel a meditation on Marlowe’s precious but murderously truncated career, Ford’s plot hinges on a long-lost and lately rediscovered play of Marlowe’s: its discovery precipitates a terrible and potentially world-ending act of revenge, a tragic game of sixteenth-century assassins that plays out anew in the fever-and-chills atmosphere of the mid-1980s.

  The Scholars of Night was first published in 1988, which means, knowing how publishing schedules work, that it was probably written in 1986. If you’re under fifty years old you don’t remember that period clearly. (If you’re under thirty, it ended before you were born.)

  On the assumption that you’re under fifty years old, I’d like to give you an ideological Rosetta Stone for the world in which The Scholars of Night is set—a world that now reads as being as science-fictional as anything else Mike wrote.

  Let’s set the controls of our time machine back to 1986, when Mike Ford was writing about The White Group and their deadly game of analysts. This book is a time capsule from a half-forgotten, bafflingly alien world: a world before laptops, internet, and smartphones, bizarrely overflowing with nuclear weapons and coin-operated phones bolted to the walls. It was a nail-biting period to live through if you paid any attention whatsoever to the news. I suspect that most of us who were adults when the wall came down were traumatized by the experience of growing up knowing that we could be flash-fried or poisoned with radioactive fallout at fifteen minutes’ notice, all because of a faulty sensor or a diplomatic game of chicken gone wrong. I had nightmares at the time, and almost every contemporary I’ve checked with had the same experience of creeping terror combined with fatalism. (The psychology of the school active-shooter drill and the creeping dread of climate change renew the trauma for the younger generations.)

  Nor is it only the technology and the nuclear nightmares that have changed. The Scholars of Night unblinkingly reflects the unremarked homophobia and sexism of the 1980s. It was a decade when antibiotics still mostly worked, but AIDS was a death sentence and being openly gay was perilous—if you were in government service you would be prosecuted or fired as a security risk if you were outed.

  In 1986 Ronald Reagan was midway through his second term as president of the United States. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the UK, and a very new and perplexingly different general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had just come to power. The word “perestroika” had just begun to be heard in the USSR; superpower relations were still in the deep freeze they’d descended into after the death of Leonid Brezhnev. By accident, during the Able Archer 83 exercise of November 1983, NATO forces in Western Europe nearly precipitated an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Subsequently both superpowers backed away from the brink—nobody actually wanted the world to end—but like two cats sizing one another up, they were both primed and expecting an attack. In 1986 the USSR was seen by many in the West as an existential threat, and the existence of roughly 60 thousand thermonuclear weapons underlined how seriously the threat was taken by both sides.

  Perhaps the weirdest, most alienating difference a time traveler from the world of 2021 to that of 1986 would notice is not the bipolar macho politics of nuclear superpower confrontation, but that nobody saw the victory of capitalism as inevitable. History had not yet turned a very important corner. In 1986 there existed a globe-straddling colossus, a revolutionary superpower that—with its satellite states and fellow travelers like China—represented a third of the planetary population and held two-thirds of its weapons. The Soviet Union was a utopian project gone to seed, but nevertheless it saw itself as blazing the way for the true future of humanity. Despite all the terror and purges, despite the famines and concentration camps along the way, the communist states were founded to pursue the goal of building a better future for everyone, and even in 1986 not all the gold leaf had worn off the skeletal saint’s relic beneath the bejeweled rhetoric.

  Utopian ideals are both desperately dangerous and terribly attractive to a certain mindset. There was a reason why many in the West were willing to work to bring about the workers’ paradise. (And the echoes of that idealism can still be seen today. We all measure our politics using a yardstick that is part of the ideological payload of the French Revolution—the dialectic of left versus right—even though the revolution appeared to be dead only three decades after the storming of the Bastille. Who today can confidently assert that Lenin’s children won’t ever find their way to a new October, and get it right the second time round?)

  History has a way of brutally and rapidly rearranging your understanding of the parameters of life. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a Whiggish triumphalism about capitalism’s victory over socialism has come to be the norm in the United States. But this state of unquestioned supremacy seemed anything but inevitable at the time in question. The attitudes of 1986 seem as bafflingly alien as the world before COVID-19, or before 9/11.

  Which brings me full circle to a reappraisal of The Scholars of Night. This is a multilayered book: on the surface, a gripping spy thriller and a traged
y of revenge from beyond the grave. But on another level, it’s a commentary on the deadly games academics play—games which spill over into real life (and death) when the players undertake work for their peers in the intelligence services. It’s an old, old game—one Christopher Marlowe reportedly played himself—as the dissident freethinkers and heretic intelligentsia lock the doors and freely play what-ifs with human lives as counters, and the timeless nature of the game is reflected down the hall of mirrors from the 1580s to the 1980s.

  Read it as a historical artifact of a bygone age, or read it as one of Mike’s most enigmatic science-fictional tragedies. It works well either way.

  FIRST ACT

  THE

  DEATH

  OF

  SOCRATES

  PART ONE

  FAUSTUS MUST BE DAMNED

  The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

  The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

  —Doctor Faustus, V, II

  Nicholas Hansard knew that he was trapped. He looked into the face of the last heir of the House of York, and knew that Richard Duke of Gloucester meant to be King of all England; he saw the naked dagger in Richard’s hand, and knew the duke meant to stop at nothing. There was no way to fight his way clear; Richard had twenty picked men behind him. But maybe there was a way out.

  “You don’t want to kill me, Your Grace,” Hansard said calmly.

  “I don’t? Tell me why I don’t.”

  Hansard kept himself from smiling. Richard was given to striking in haste; making him pause was half the battle, if not much of the war. “Because of what I can give you, Your Grace. I have some wealth, I have houses that can shelter and feed you—”

  “All of which will belong to me anyway.”

  “The gold, the stones, yes, but the people within? And the people without—in one of those houses is the contract for a hundred Burgundian crossbowmen and fifty lances of horse.”

  “They’ll fight for me as well as you, if I pay them.”

  “Indeed, indeed—or anyone else, if he pays them. And I regret to say that on my death that contract will most swiftly be delivered to—well—another, who also has the means to pay them.”

  “You’re trying to blackmail me for your own life.”

  “A man might have worse reasons for it.”

  “True enough,” Richard said. “But do you know, I’d rather take the chance of having a bunch of fickle Burgundians against me than your fickle self with me. I’m going to kill you.”

  “Christ, Rich.”

  “Praying won’t help, Professor Hansard. You’re dead.”

  “Well, you’re in character, Rich,” Hansard said, reaching out to the table and picking a piece from the gameboard. “Okay, I die, I sink.” Hansard scooped a stack of cards from the table on his side of the board, and handed them to Richard Sears. The twenty-year-old Duke of Gloucester was wearing black twill jeans and a VALENTINE COLLEGE: You Gotta Have Heart T-shirt. “All my transferable properties and estates.” Hansard picked up another card, held it out to another player. “But Lady Anna gets the Burgundians.”

  Anna Romano, the senior surviving Lancastrian heir, was a graduate student, a small, slim woman with short dark hair. She took the card representing the mercenary troops and added it to the stack of her faction’s forces. “Thank you, Professor. We shall offer prayers for your departed soul.”

  “Watch the ‘we’ until you’re crowned,” Richard said, and sat back in his chair. “I thought he was bluffing about the Burgundians.”

  Hansard turned to Paul Ogden, the fourth player. Paul was seventeen, just out of high school and visiting the Valentine campus before starting classes in the fall. “Well, Paul, we now have the classical three-way endgame of a strong faction from each royal house and a third party—you—in control of Parliament. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I could use a beer,” Paul said.

  The other students laughed; Hansard said quite seriously, “Bad enough that you’d concede the game for it?”

  “What?” Paul said, then, “Oh, I get it. As Chancellor of England, I could call a Parliamentary vote on the kingship, and I control enough votes in both houses to force the outcome … but I can only make Rich or Anna win, I can’t do it myself.”

  “Go on,” Hansard said. He scratched at his blond hair and rubbed his sharp chin.

  “To win for myself, first I’d have to get a senior heir away from one of them … and that could take years. I mean, hours.”

  “‘Years’ is okay,” Hansard said. “You should be thinking in game time, months and years instead of so many turns.”

  Richard said, “It’s why we play out those little scenes, instead of just saying, ‘I kill your character and take his cards.’ If you don’t think about what a real person in your situation might have been thinking, then the game’s just Kingmaker with some house rules.”

  Paul said, “In other words, do I want to give up winning because I’m tired and it’s late … or historically, let some other noble faction control England because the war’s gone on so long already.”

  “He achieves synthesis,” Anna said.

  “Of course,” Paul went on, “I’m also thinking, ‘Why not quit? After all, it’s just a game.’”

  Anna said, “Two syntheses in three minutes. Bravo, Paul.”

  Hansard said, “That’s exactly right. It is just a game, not historical fact. If Kingmaker or Diplomacy ever repeated the events of the real York-Lancaster war or World War One, I might start believing in the Tooth Fairy again. But there are lots of facts around—and lots of things pretending to be facts. I’m trying to teach process, the things that go through people’s minds at ‘historical’ points. Your desire to quit the game because you wanted a cold beer isn’t the same as wanting a long dynastic war to be over—but there is an analogy there, and I believe it’s a useful one. If you can think like a person of the fifteenth century, or whatever period you’re researching, the real facts will stand out from the fake ones, just as a man in doublet and hose would stand out in midtown Darien.”

  “In certain parts of midtown Darien, at least,” Anna said. “Are we still on the subject of a cold beer?”

  Hansard said, “It’s up to Paul and Parliament.”

  Paul said, “You’re kidding.”

  Richard said, “He isn’t, Paul. Professor Hansard is Socratic to the limit. You want a brew, you’re going to have to call Parliament.”

  Paul looked at Hansard. Hansard grinned. Paul said to Anna, “Do you want a beer badly enough to marry me for it?”

  “Marry—why, you precocious bastard,” she said, and looked at the board. She shoved the piece representing Margaret of Anjou into the Canterbury Cathedral space. “All right. Margaret marries the Chancellor of England, who had better not be a near relative, we’re in enough trouble with Rome as it is. Now call Parliament and let’s get that beer.”

  “You didn’t even send me a wedding invitation,” Richard said, and hunched his shoulders. “Oh, well, now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of … uh, Lancaster.”

  “I told you not to kill me, Rich,” Hansard said. “The beer’s in the refrigerator.”

  Back in Hansard’s den after the refrigerator raid, Richard and Paul and Anna sat on the leather couch with a beer each and a shared reefer. Hansard sat in a wood and fabric armchair, drinking coffee from a mug labeled HEMLOCK. (“I told you,” Rich told Paul, “Socratic to the max.”)

  “What happens if they catch us with this stuff?” Paul asked, between cautious tokes.

  Richard said, “This is Connecticut. They put you in the stocks.”

  “See what happens when you take up with evil companions?” Anna said. “Rich’s a junior, he can plead on his age, but me, I’m a grad student, I’ve got no excuse.” She giggled and glared at Hansard. “And don’t you dare say ‘insanity defense,’ Nicholas.”

  Paul said, “I mean, what happens to you, P
rofessor Hansard? Isn’t this like, well…”

  “Illegal? Last time I looked. But don’t worry about it, Paul. Valentine College is too liberal to push an issue like grass and too small to have a reputation to worry about. Anyway, I’m not a full professor here, I don’t have a regular course schedule. I run seminars, which are very often games—like this one, but more elaborate, with more players—and I’m away some of the year, on research.”

  “You can make money doing historical research?” Paul said, a little hazily. Richard laughed.

  Hansard said, “It can be done.” He looked at his coffee mug, at the poison label. “Are you interested in being a career historian?”

  “I didn’t know … I mean, I wasn’t sure there was such a thing.”

  “It happens. It happened to me.” Hansard tapped the mug. “Sometime I’ll tell you about the fellow who gave this to me.”

  “Homo fuge; flee, man,” Richard said in a deep voice, “flee, lest you become … a protégé!”

  Paul’s eyes were suddenly quite clear. “Would you be my faculty adviser, sir?”

  “It’s a little early for that,” Hansard said. “Fall term doesn’t start for four weeks yet, and you won’t properly be a student till then. Give it a while.”

  The beer and the conversation ran out a little before midnight. Richard and Paul were headed for the summer-residence dorm, Anna for her apartment just off campus. As Hansard closed the door behind them, he heard Paul say, “So is it always like this around here?”

  “This is just summer,” Rich said. “Wait until fall term starts. We get thirty players in a game, and it’s unbefuckinglievable.… Say, you ever been in a Civil War battle?”

  Hansard poured himself another cup of coffee and sat down by the Kingmaker board. During the game he’d had an idea for a new rule, for assassination attempts against nobles, and now he wanted to take notes before the thought passed.