The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (6 page)

Swinburne, who’d also divested himself of his outer garments, said, “What of it, Charles?”

“Have you not read the reports Abdu El Yezdi left for us? Did he not always insist that coincidences are of crucial importance? He referred to time as having echoes and rhythms, ripples and interconnected moments. In truth, what he was clumsily expressing are matters of algorithmic probability. They cannot be ignored.”

“An anniversary strikes me as more a matter of sentiment than of mathematics,” Swinburne said.

“You are a
poet
, sir!” Babbage spat the word as if it were the worst insult in the world.

Burton addressed Gooch. “Have you a cigar, old fellow? I appear to have smoked my last.”

Gooch dug mechanical fingers into his pocket and passed a
Flor de Dindigul
to the king’s agent.

“Thank you.” After putting a flame to his smoke, Burton returned his attention to Babbage. “I take it you marked the occasion in some manner.” He gestured toward the indentation in the floor. “And perhaps that is the result?”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What doesn’t?”

Babbage started tapping his head again. “Nothing to provide the impulse, you see,” he muttered. “No one in it.”

“I don’t see.” Burton turned to Gooch. “In plain English and to the point, please, Daniel.”

The engineer grunted and said, “I’ll try.” He folded his four arms. “It concerns the multitude of histories. They must all contain Edward Oxford’s burned and malfunctioning time suit because they all originated either from the moment he caused the first division in time or from events that occurred subsequent to it. However, our iteration of history is absolutely unique in that Abdu El Yezdi brought to it a second version of the outfit.” He nodded toward the nearby bench. “The undamaged one. That’s what made Charles’s experiment possible.”

“Two suits. Where is the other?”

“We don’t know. Charles was attempting to repair it.” Gooch strode over to the bench. “The suit is comprised of four principal components.” He put a metal hand against the white fabric. “Its material absorbs light and converts it to power.” He touched the flat disk on the suit’s chest. “The Nimtz generator stores that power and converts it to what we might refer to as chronostatic energy.” He moved to the end of the worktable. “Immediately prior to the suit’s transference from one moment in history to another, the generator extends around it a pocket of the aforesaid energy. Were this to intersect with anything possessing more density than air, the object would be sliced through and part of it carried with the traveller through time. The boots, with their spring-loaded stilts, were therefore designed to thrust Oxford high above the ground so only the atmosphere surrounded him.” He waved a fleshy hand toward the other end of the bench. “Finally, the helmet contains microscopic semi-biological machinery that calculates, initiates, and directs all aspects of the journey. The crucial constituent of this machinery is called a BioProc. One word, capital
B
, capital
P
. There are thousands of BioProcs in the helmet, and every one of them contains a granule of powdered black diamond. Larger shards of the stone are also present in the generator. We are all aware of the peculiar qualities of the gem, yes?”

He received sounds of confirmation from Burton and Swinburne.

“The immense calculating power of the helmets,” Gooch went on, “is made possible by an inconceivably complex electromagnetic pattern existing within the diamond dust; a pattern that employed Edward Oxford’s mind as its template. When he was killed by El Yezdi in 1840, his terminal emanation—a powerful burst of energy from the brain—instantly overwrote it, but since this matched what was already there, there was no untoward effect.” He stood back. “The damaged suit didn’t fare so well. Its electrical composition was already badly impaired by prolonged exposure to the madness of the Oxford who’d become known as Spring Heeled Jack, and when he died, whatever vestiges of sanity that remained in it were erased by his last mental gasp.”

Passing back along the side of the bench, Gooch reached out and picked up the helmet. “This is a truly remarkable machine. It can enter a state called ‘self-repair mode,’ which allows its internal components to alter their function in order to carry out whatever maintenance is necessary. Had we, like the other histories, only the one ruined suit, we would have rerouted what power remained in its Nimtz generator to the headpiece, hoping that somehow, in its insanity, there was retained sufficient an instinct for self-preservation to instigate repairs. Perhaps it would have somehow reordered its synthetic intelligence.” He turned the helmet in his hands. “But we were lucky. We had this pristine version, which is why Mr. Babbage created that—” He jerked his chin toward the box-like affair. “A Field Amplifier.”

Burton swayed slightly, in the grip of a synaesthesia that suddenly made the sound of Gooch’s voice a floral scent, turned the scene before him into a symphony of visceral sensations, and transformed the oily odour of the workshop into a melodious purring. He glanced at the glowing tip of his cigar. It was a miniature sun.

“With it,” Gooch went on, “we intended to record the electrical pattern present in this helmet and copy it across to the defective one, replacing the insanity therein.”

“Marvellous!” Swinburne exclaimed. “What went wrong?”

“Charles has a curious sense of occasion. To him, every event is a mathematical formula and its every possible outcome an elaboration of the calculation. Applying this hypothesis to the suits, he proposes that they manipulate a single great equation—a stupendous envisioning of time’s structures and processes—and that by observing coincidences and sequences, he might one day comprehend it. This is why today’s anniversary was significant, and why he initiated the experiment at exactly nine o’clock.”

Charles Babbage suddenly came out of his self-absorption, stepped forward, and slapped a hand down onto the worktop. “The synthetic intelligence is responsive, not active. I could not have issued the command independently.”

A particularly violent bolt of lightning whipped through one of the overhanging globes. The crackling detonations echoed around the massive hall, and the white light momentarily illuminated the normally shadowed sockets of the scientist’s eyes, revealing a fanatical glint within.

Burton felt the inexplicable suspicion that, rather than being present in Battersea Power Station, he was somewhere entirely different.

From afar, he heard Swinburne cry out, “Command? What command? My hat! In all the many histories, is there a single Charles Babbage who can get to the confounded point?”

As the king’s agent splintered into innumerable renditions of himself, Gooch said, “At the exact moment the Field Amplifier accessed the ruined headpiece, a bubble of chronostatic energy formed around the damaged time suit. It sliced through Isambard’s wrist, popped, and the suit, along with our friend’s hand, vanished.”

“It travelled into time,” Babbage snarled. “Of its own accord.”

From amid the complex of jointed metal limbs that hung from the centre of the ceiling like angular jungle lianas, one emerged with a sword clutched in its mechanical digits. Gently, it tapped the blade first against Captain Richard Francis Burton’s right shoulder, then against his left.

The king’s agent stood, now a Knight of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.

Due to the damage done to the monarch’s vocal apparatus during the attack on Buckingham Palace, a white-stockinged royal equerry had spoken the words of the ceremony. Burton felt relieved by this. King Ernest Augustus I was demented at the best of times, and the past three months had been far from the best. Had he been able to express himself, he’d no doubt have ranted endlessly about the violence done to him—for the palace was, in effect, his own body; his limbs were built into every part of it, all controlled from the Crown Room, where his brain floated in a tank of vital fluids. The destruction of the western wing had been the equivalent of having an arm blown off. His Majesty was nettled, to say the least.

Burton took three steps back, bowed, and returned to his seat.

“Did your leg fall asleep?” whispered Monckton Milnes, who was sitting to his left.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“You were limping.”

Burton made a sound of puzzlement. “Was I? By Allah’s beard, I do feel a little strange. My mind was wandering all over the place. I imagined myself to be at Battersea Power Station.”

“Maybe it wasn’t just the leg, then,” his friend suggested,
sotto voce
. “Perhaps all of you fell asleep. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, despite the occasion. Not after what you’ve been through.”

“I was daydreaming, that’s all. You know I have no patience for these official functions. When can we get out of this asylum?”

“Shhh! The walls have ears.”

Burton mentally kicked himself. “I mean no disrespect to the king, but I was probably thinking of Battersea Power Station because I have to be there by nine o’clock. Babbage is activating Oxford’s suit.”

An abstruse thought intruded.
What? Again?

“These ceremonies don’t usually occur so late in the day,” Monckton Milnes observed, “but His Majesty spent all morning with his architects, and the meeting went past its allotted hours. It’s rumoured that he wants the palace rebuilt and made the tallest edifice in the city. I expect he’s eager to get back to his plans and sketches, which is why, believe it or not, formalities are proceeding at such a rapid pace.”

“This is rapid?”

“By comparison to the norm. Be patient, there are only three more to be knighted, then we’ll depart.”

One of the palace footmen gave them an uncompromising glare. They stopped their whispering.

Burton ran his forefinger around his collar. It was too tight. He’d forgotten how uncomfortable a freshly laundered army uniform could be.

Wearily, he endured the pomp and protocols.

Forty minutes later, in the reception hall, the foppishly attired Lord Palmerston approached him and drawled, “My dear Sir Richard, may I be the first to congratulate you.”

“On what, sir?”

“Your title, man! Your title!”

“Ah. Thank you, Prime Minister.”

“I’ve read your report.
The Mystery of the Malevolent Mediums.
Do you intend to give all your accounts such lurid titles?”

“I felt it appropriate. It was a dramatic affair.”

“I can’t disagree with that. Is it really over?”

“Nietzsche is dead, sir—in our time, in his own, and across all the other versions of history.”

Burton couldn’t shake a curious sensation of unfamiliarity. The environment felt unutterably askew. Even the words that came out of his mouth felt wrong.

“And the future war?” Palmerston asked.

“That rests with you. Now we know it’s coming, you have the opportunity to develop policies that will steer us along another course. There’s no need for the conflict to erupt in 1914. We have fifty-four years in which to prevent it.”

Palmerston rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hmm. Or fifty-four years in which to prepare. Perhaps it would be better to spend that time undermining Prussia and the Germanic states rather than indulging them.”

“That might send us into battle earlier.”

“Nietzsche told you the conflict is inevitable. If that’s the case, better we strike hard and when least expected than not at all.”

Burton shrugged and murmured, “As the premier, it’s your choice to make. I don’t envy you.”

Palmerston hemmed and hawed.

“I have to go,” Burton said. “There’s business to take care of at the Department of Guided Science.”

“The what?”

“The—the—I’m sorry, I meant to say, at the Federation of Mechanics.”

“A rather unusual slip of the tongue.”

“It’s this uniform. It’s too tight. I’m hot and uncomfortable. Can’t think straight.”

“Hmm. So what are the Empire’s boffins up to? Anything I should be aware of?”

“No, sir, I don’t think so.”

The prime minister nodded distractedly and waved him away.

Burton returned to Monckton Milnes, who was flirting—fruitlessly, as usual—with Nurse Florence Nightingale.