The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (12 page)

Standing at his side, Nathaniel Lawless said, “All aboard the
Orpheus
. This is beyond the bounds. Too much for us. Let's go home.”

“Not too much for me,” Swinburne murmured.

“Or me,” Trounce said.

“Or me,” Bendyshe agreed.

Sadhvi Raghavendra turned to Lawless. “I understand your reluctance to stay, Captain. I have the distinct impression that this world won't allow those of us from the past to remain in it for very much longer. However, I also sense that we are, for the moment, perfectly safe. We can witness, but we must then depart as planned.”

The captain jerked his chin in acknowledgement and gazed with an air of bemused disapproval at the flower.

“Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:

We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?”

Burton wished he could control his host's body. He wanted to say,
You wrote those words, Algy. It was a poem entitled “A Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell”—your mockery of Tennyson's “The Higher Pantheism.” When was it? 1870 or thereabouts? Is the plant really a eugenically created version of you? What lunacy am I witnessing?

He couldn't give voice to the thought. Instead, he looked down as Gooch stepped to his side.

“Why now, I wonder?” the engineer muttered.

“Why now?” Burton clanged.

“If there's one thing we've learned during our recent adventures, it's that the timing of events is meaningful. So this rapture thing—why this evening? What's the date?”

“The nineteenth of March,” Burton responded. “It has no significance I can think of, unless you count the fact that it's my birthday.”

“It is? Do you know your hour of birth?”

“Half past nine in the evening.”

“Interesting. It's close on that now.”

“I hardly think it has any bearing on the matter.” Burton paused before adding, “I just turned forty. Yet, taking the current year into consideration, I'm also three hundred and eighty-two years old.”

He watched as the flower's bladders again inflated and contracted.

“Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are not clover:

Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over.”

With a squeal of bending wood, the flower suddenly dropped down until its petals were just inches from Burton's face.

“Happy birthday, Sir Richards,” it wheezed. “Birth and birth.”

“Gad!” Gooch blurted, stumbling backward in surprise.

“Sir Richards?” Burton echoed.

“Thee and thee.”

It knows I'm in here!

The blossom chanted:

“Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight:

Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate.”

“You can converse?” Burton asked. “You understand me?”

“Better than you know.”

“Gad!” Gooch cried out again.

“Incredible!” Krishnamurthy muttered.

“Then answer me this,” Burton said. “Are you Algernon Swinburne?”

To his right, the human Swinburne had become uncharacteristically silent and motionless.

“Was. Was. Was.” The flower emitted a sound that resembled a chuckle. “What! What! What!” It leaned closer to Burton until its petals were almost touching the side of his brass face. “Many happy returns. You do
want
to return, I presume?”

Return to life? Return to the past? Return to corporeal form?

“Yes.”

“Then accept my gift.”

With much rustling and a slight screech, the plant straightened until its blossom was again directed at the sky. Burton heard it quietly recite,

“More is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole:

Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul?

“One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two:

Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.”

It fell silent.

Burton looked at Swinburne, Trounce, and Bendyshe. They were standing glassy-eyed, as if in a trance.

Sadhvi Raghavendra gestured. “There!”

“What is it?” Krishnamurthy asked, his tone subdued and hoarse.

A part of the base of the central stalk—as wide and knurled as the trunk of an ancient oak—had started to distend. It squeaked, groaned, and grew paler, the bark stretching thin, a large swelling bulging outward. There came a sharp crack and a split appeared, bisecting the protrusion vertically. It widened and, with a soft squelch, a sap-covered sac was extruded from it. The membrane flopped heavily onto the plant's exposed upper roots and rolled to the ground where, veined and translucent, it undulated as something shifted inside it.

“Is that—?” Lawless croaked.

Uttering a small cry, Raghavendra hurried forward and crouched over the quivering membrane. “Maneesh! Help me!”

Krishnamurthy hesitated, then joined her, squatting down. “It's not possible.”

“Help me get him out,” she said.

Burton chimed, “Him?”

He watched as his friends tore at the skin and heard it rip like linen.

Krishnamurthy gasped and toppled backward, sitting heavily on the ground. Mucilaginous white liquid spilled from the sac and splashed around him, soaking his trousers.

“Breathing!” Raghavendra announced.

She turned her face to Burton. Gazing past her, he saw, naked and hairless, an old man lying on his side, his legs curled up, knees against his chest, his arms folded to either side of them. His skin appeared to be a peculiar wormy-blue colour, though in the glow of the plant's fruits and berries, it was difficult to be certain.

“Who?”

Raghavendra reached down and, placing a hand to either side of the newborn's face, gently turned his head so that his features were visible to Burton. “He looks like you.”

She was right. The thrusting jaw, hard mouth, sharp cheekbones, and deep-set eyes were unmistakably those of Sir Richard Francis Burton, though very aged. About seventy, Burton automatically estimated.

What the hell? That's the face I see in the mirror! That's the man I was in Trieste, when I died!

With a hiss of pistons, he took a step backward. He tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come, his voice generator producing nothing but a discordant tone, almost a whine. Through mechanical eyes, the passenger, the old man reborn, watched incredulously as Raghavendra eased her arms beneath his unconscious double and lifted it until the naked figure was sitting up. The hairless head rolled forward and white fluid spilled from its mouth. There were no signs of consciousness.

“Look,” she said, indicating, with a jerk of her chin, the liver-spotted cranium.

Burton saw eleven small bumps circling the scalp like a crown.

“What are they?” he managed to clang.

“I have no idea. But—” She fell silent.

“But what?”

“This fellow looks like an older you, but it goes no further than that. He's empty. I feel no presence.”

Daniel Gooch peered at the unconscious man's face. “But not dead? Then who is he?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody, Sadhvi? He must be somebody.”

“There's nothing. A complete absence of—of mind.”

“How can you know that?”

Krishnamurthy said, “She's a Sister of Noble Benevolence, Daniel. You know what that means.”

“I've never really understood it.”

Over their heads, the flower purred:

“Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew:

You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you.”

Raghavendra said, “Oh!” as, one after the other, the bumps on the old man's head split, their edges puckering open to reveal deep cavities.

In unison, Swinburne, Trounce, and Bendyshe said, “Half past nine. Happy birthday. A gift of diamonds.”

Burton looked at them. “Are you still with us?”

They didn't respond.

“Diamonds? Where? What of them?”

No answer.

Gooch moved closer to the sagging form and, bending over Raghavendra's shoulder, peered into the eleven holes. He pulled a box of lucifers from his waistcoat pocket, lit one, and held its flame close to the man's head, illuminating the openings. “They have irregularly faceted sides,” he said. “Something occurs to me. You'll consider me loopy.”

Nathaniel Lawless gave a wry laugh. “Daniel, we're three and a half centuries in the future, standing beside a giant talking flower that just gave birth to a fully formed old man. Nothing you say can possibly compete with that for lunacy.”

Burton asked, “What are you thinking, Daniel?”

“A gift of diamonds.”

“You understand the significance?”

Gooch straightened, folded his mechanical arms across his chest, and ran the fingers of his natural right hand through his sandy blonde hair. “We're up to our eyes in bloody diamonds—black ones that, at a certain time and in a certain place, were considered extremely rare. Thanks to Edward Oxford's various exploits, those same stones now exist in the here and now many times over, having arrived in the Nimtz generators attached to the multiple iterations of his time travelling suit. Personally, I'd like to chuck all the bloody things into a pressure furnace. They give me a headache.”

“They give everyone a headache,” Raghavendra said. “Pressure furnace? What would that achieve?”

“It would reduce them to carbon dioxide. However, since we'll never make it home without our ship's Nimtz and the Mark Three babbage, both of which contain such diamonds, I'm loath to reduce our supply until we're back where we belong. It's a maxim of engineering that machines only ever require spare parts when there are none available.”

“Your point?” Burton asked.

“My point is that the gems in the machinery aren't the only ones. There are also eleven in your head, Sir Richard. They used to hold Brunel's consciousness. It was overwritten by Spring Heeled Jack's which, in turn, was erased by yours.” With his left hand, Gooch indicated the unconscious man's head. “Eleven diamonds and eleven faceted openings in this chap's skull. What's the betting they're a perfect fit?”

“Are you suggesting that—that—” Burton began. His mechanical voice petered out.

“That we remove the stones from your body's probability calculator and fit them into the cranium of this new Sir Richard? Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting.” Gooch rubbed his chin. “I think the jungle just gave you the opportunity to be human again.”

“Human? Born from a plant?”

“Near enough human, anyway. More so than the contraption you currently occupy, that's for certain.”

“But he's old.”

“He's flesh. You'll regain your lost senses. Taste. Smell.”

The plant whispered, “Birth day.”

Gooch continued, “Providing we keep the diamonds in close proximity to each other while moving them, you'll not be in any danger, and if there's no result, we can easily return them.”

Raghavendra, still supporting the limp body, looked up at Burton. He was surprised to see that her eyes were brimming with tears. “Richard, we have to try!”

Burton turned his eyes from Raghavendra to Lawless, from Lawless to Krishnamurthy, from Krishnamurthy to Gooch, from Gooch to Swinburne, Trounce, and Bendyshe—these three standing together, frozen, poised as if waiting, their thought processes somehow suspended.

“How,” he asked, “does any of this relate to the rapture?”

“I don't know,” Gooch responded. “But somehow it must. The contemporaneity of events is too extraordinary to ignore.”

“There's something else to consider,” Raghavendra put in. “Without a mind, this body will die. And soon. Already, his breathing is becoming irregular.”

Burton took two paces forward and crouched, his body buzzing and whirring. He reached out and touched the man's face with a brass forefinger. “You're sure?”

“I can feel the imbalance growing within him.”

After a minute of consideration, Burton clanged, “I'm heartily sick of being entombed in this machine. It has made me immortal, but I feel like I'm buried alive. I can't bear the torture of it any more. We'll try. Even if it gives me only a year or two of life, I'd rather die old with my senses restored than live forever without them. Daniel, what do you need?”

Gooch unfolded his metal arms and extended a set of tools—screwdrivers, spanners, and pliers—from his wrists. “Nothing more than these. We can do it right away.”

“What will I feel?”

“Physically, nothing. Mentally, your capacity to think will diminish as I remove each stone from the probability calculator. Ultimately, you'll black out, like being chloroformed but without the unpleasantness. Providing this fellow's brain has the ability to process the electromagnetic fields stored within them, as I place each diamond into his skull, your consciousness will gradually be restored. If it doesn't work, we'll put you back where you are, and you'll wake up none the worse for the experience.”

“Very well. Let's get on with it. I beg of you, be careful, my friend. I'm quite literally placing my life in your hands.”

“You can count on me.”

Gooch moved around Raghavendra to Burton's side and applied his tools to the brass man's head.

Inside Burton's mind, and undetected by him, the second Burton wanted to scream. Everything he'd thus far witnessed was so far out of the ordinary that he thought it could only have been induced by the Saltzmann's Tincture, which was obviously a hallucinogenic drug of particular potency. Yet it all felt horrifically real—and oddly familiar, too. Now he was about to endure some manner of brain surgery, and there was nothing whatever he could do to prevent it.