The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (43 page)

Swinburne called, “Don't turn your back on him, Thresher. He has unnatural tendencies. You'll be—” The door of cell three slammed shut.

Burton was thrust into the next chamber. Rigby stood in its doorway and contemplated his old enemy for a moment. Then he smiled, said, “You're finished,” and pushed the door shut. Burton heard the key turn in its lock.

He was alone.

The chamber more resembled a sitting room than a prison. It was carpeted. There were shelves of books, a desk, a bureau, a couch and armchairs, ornaments on a mantelpiece, and pictures on the wall. A door to the right opened onto a bedchamber. He could see fresh clothes laid out on the bed.

“A considerable improvement over hut zero,” he murmured.

Limping to the wall that separated his cell from Swinburne's, he hammered on it with his fist. It felt solid and thick. There was no way to communicate through it, that much was immediately obvious.

He crossed to an armchair and gingerly sat, his raw back forcing a moan out of him.

An occasional table was positioned beside the seat. On it, there was a box of cigars, a glass, and a decanter of port. When he attempted to pour himself a drink, his hands started to tremble violently, causing the neck of the decanter to rattle against the glass, spilling the liquor.

He gave up and instead braced his forearms on his knees and abandoned himself to the reaction that now took hold.

His teeth chattered, and his respiration came in sharp gasps.

Darkness pushed in.

“Bismillah!” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. That was a mistake. He saw again the blade sliding into Doctor Quaint's brain, the bullet shattering Henry Ashbee's skull, and the swollen flesh of Tom Bendyshe's battered countenance.

The barbarity! If Disraeli must resort to animals like Rigby and Kidd to maintain his regime then the empire is sick beyond saving.

With an effort, he hauled his thoughts into order and tried to direct them toward a contemplation of his brother's deceit. Since joining the government, Edward had become a cold, calculating machine, his body regarded as little more than an inconvenience, his existence defined solely by his stratagems and wiles, by his ability to collect, process, and cunningly employ information. In many regards, he was already a corporeal rendition of a babbage probability calculator, so was it particularly surprising that he should now choose to go all the way and abandon his flesh? His body had, after all, failed to emerge undamaged from the devastating beating he'd suffered in Ceylon and was now proving itself deficient once again. Logic dictated that if given the opportunity to survive its demise, he should take it.

Burton put his fingertips to his neck and felt the abrasions upon it. Beaten half to death and almost hanged, and all so he'd have unquestioning faith in his apparent saviour.

“I would have had faith in you anyway, Edward,” he whispered. “You're my brother, damn it.”

Overcome by an inner pain far worse than that of his sore neck, burned hand, striped back, and bruised ribcage, he attempted to occupy himself with thoughts of escape, but, again, the mental path led only to torment, this time the guilt he felt at abandoning the occupants of hut 0.

I had no choice in the matter. Besides, they were tortured only as a means to force me to speak. Now that I'm gone, they'll be left alone.

He wished he knew what secret Edward thought he was withholding. If he did, he'd gladly divulge it.

Why does he question my identity? Why am I reluctant to tell him how I defeated Spring Heeled Jack? How—how did I liberate myself from the Brunel machine?

There was a gaping hole in his memory.

Pressing his palm against his forehead, frowning, he strained to penetrate the absence. He wondered whether he, too, had been affected by the black diamonds. Up until now, after the crew of the
Orpheus
had been exposed to the gems for so long—taking Saltzmann's Tincture to counteract their deleterious influence—that he'd thought he and they had become virtually immune.

What have I forgotten? If only I could remember. I could tell Edward, be sent to the Indian labour camps, escape from them, lose myself among the natives like I used to do twenty years ago. Go back to the beginning. Disguises. Perfected accents. Accurately mimicked manners. Become someone other than me. Total immersion. Never come back. Never be Burton again. Change into someone utterly different.

He wondered whether he was already somebody utterly different.

Exhausted, he drifted into an uneasy sleep and dreamed of porridge and gritty coffee.

When he awoke, he was in bed, though he'd no memory of leaving the armchair and moving to the bedchamber. His entire body was stiff, and he struggled to sit up, groaning as he did so. He felt as if considerable time had passed. He was ravenously hungry. After splashing water onto his face, he moved back to the main room and found, on the table, a tray holding a teapot, a cup and saucer, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar. The tea was cold. He drank it anyway.

He moved about the room, flexing his limbs, working the kinks out of his muscles, looking at the books and pausing when he found a copy of Camoens's
The Lusiads
. Taking it down, he opened it at random and read aloud.

“‘Ah, strike the notes of woe!' the siren cries;

‘A dreary vision swims before my eyes.

To Tagus' shore triumphant as he bends,

Low in the dust the hero's glory ends—'”

Giving a snort of impatience, he returned the tome to the shelf and selected another, Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
.

He crossed to the chair, sat, and started to read.

Bide my time. Let the wounds heal.

He'd reached chapter four when the door opened and a clockwork man entered. It placed a tray of food on the table.

Burton said, “What time is it? What day?”

The machine didn't answer. It departed, locking the door.

The meal was of roast beef, potatoes, carrots, peas, and Yorkshire pudding. He ate it eagerly—it was his first decent repast in weeks—then smoked a cigar and drank a glass of port.

He read. He slept again.

More food was delivered. He ate.

Hours passed, but he was hardly aware of them.

The relative luxury of his cell was, he vaguely realised, designed to lull him into apathy, to suck the fight out of him. It wouldn't work. He'd rest and recuperate and—

He slept.

Upon finishing
Vanity Fair
, he read
Tom Brown's School Days
,
The Mill on the Floss
, and
Barchester Towers
.

He sensed that days were passing but hardly cared; couldn't access the frustration he'd felt in hut 0. All emotion was held in abeyance.

His welts and bruises faded.

Very rapidly, and without him realising it, the chamber became not a prison cell but a haven. Here, there were no roll calls, no beatings, no SPG units, no lunatic prime ministers, and no treacherous brother.

He enjoyed the peace, solitude, and routine.

Read. Sleep. Eat.

Don't think.

Don't feel.

Don't remember.

There was a mirror affixed to the wall above a basin in the bedchamber. When he looked into it, he did not perceive the man who looked back, and it didn't matter.

The Woman in White.

A Tale of Two Cities.

The Cloister and the Hearth.

He started to dwell on the structure of the narratives. In a remote region of his mind, it finally occurred to him that his own story was currently suspended.

The walls started to press in.

Claustrophobia squeezed memories out of him. He resisted and clung to the false serenity his cell offered, but his period of grace was fast eroding, and he became increasingly disturbed and agitated. Recollections of his entrapment in a six-armed metal prison haunted him.

How did I escape? How am I now in my own body?

That his brother—that
anyone
—would willingly condemn themselves to such a confinement was inconceivable to him. Immortality, maybe, but also an everlasting torture. Besides—

He held up a hand and flexed his fingers, watching the skin crease and the muscle at the base of his thumb bulge.

One must age. It is a part of living. With the waxing then waning of vitality there comes a developing understanding of what it means to be human. A reassessment of values. A constantly renewing appreciation of the various elements of being. I could not lose such pliancy. Were my body permanent then surely my very essence would become fixed in place, too. These automated aristocrats will calcify. Their appreciation of life will dwindle and so will whatever little measure of decency and morals they possess. Inevitably, any ability to empathise will be lost. That will make them dangerous. Very dangerous indeed.

His thoughts returned again and again to the process of ageing and somehow became entwined with the structures and themes of the novels. Individuals, he realised, were defined by the stories they created about themselves, and those stories adhered closely to common motifs. His own, though, did not. It was all askew and had been from the very start. His childhood, those transient years spent being dragged by his restless parents from town to town, city to city, country to country—Tours, Richmond, Blois, Sienna, Perugia, Florence, Rome, Pisa, Naples, Pau, Lucca—had not allowed for any thematic development. Only wanderlust had been imprinted upon him, so that, in his adulthood, he'd jumped from one situation to another without any feeling of continuity. It wasn't until he'd become too physically frail to continue his compulsive travelling that he'd formed anything resembling a sense of established identity. Age had calmed him. Age had given him a story. Age had—

“Age?” he asked the room. “Age? What am I thinking? I'm forty. Why the hell do I keep imagining myself older?”

He paced up and down, his hands to his face.

His wounds were mostly healed, but his mind was feeling increasingly damaged. He didn't want to think, didn't want to confront the incongruity that lay at the heart of him.

He tried to distract himself with exercise: press-ups and jumps, lifting furniture and stretching techniques he'd learned as a youth in India, a discipline known as
hathavidya
.

Just once, he attempted to meditate, but it gave rise to such odd memories that he stopped and didn't try again.

This isolation is driving me mad. God! What of Swinburne and Trounce? How are they faring?

He raised his face and yelled, “Algy! William! Can you hear me? Are you there?”

No response.

No one but the clockwork man visited.

One day—or it may have been a night, he had no way of telling—he was lying fully clothed on the bed trying to overcome persistent insomnia when, for no apparent reason, he suddenly thought of his friend Doctor John Steinhaueser.

“Poor old Styggins!” he muttered, employing Steinhaueser's nickname.

He recalled a dream he'd had in 1860, shortly after returning from a tour of America. In it, his right canine had dropped out to fall at his feet in a splash of blood. Later, he'd learned that on the same night, Steinhaueser, who was travelling through Switzerland at the time, had suffered an embolism and died.

Wait. How could that have happened? It is 1861. I spent all of last year in the future. I never went to America.

And Steinhaueser hadn't died that way; he'd been murdered by a vampiric creature from a parallel history, the same that had killed Isabel.

Bismillah!

Burton sat up and swung his feet to the floor.

“Vampire? Styggins dead? Who was it then, at home with me in Trieste? Who at my side when we rescued a bird from—”

He stopped.

Trieste? That hadn't been Steinhaueser. It was—it was—

Trieste?

When had he ever lived in Trieste?

He jumped up and looked around the bedchamber, his eyes flicking from left to right.

Trapped! Trapped beneath the tower! Trapped in a machine! Trapped in an old decaying body! Trapped with nothing but pain!

Nothing made any sense.

He stumbled across to the water basin in the corner, gazed into the mirror on the wall above it, and saw a face that was far too young in appearance.

“By God,” he croaked. “I'm not me. I'm not me.”

Behind him, a voice said, “So the minister was correct. Who, then, are you? Which Burton—and from where and when?”

Whirling, he swayed back against the basin, his eyes wide, his mouth working silently.

Burton. I am Burton.

Colonel Rigby was standing in the doorway with a clockwork man at his shoulder—whether the one that brought the food, or another, it was impossible to tell.

“Who?” Rigby repeated. “Why are you here? Where is the man you've replaced?”

“I—I haven't—I don't know.”

“Come, come. Enough of your evasiveness. You've had plenty of time to think matters through. You surely must have realised by now that reticence will get you nowhere. Let's have it all out in the open, shall we?”

He made a gesture. His mechanical companion responded to it by striding forward, reaching out, digging his fingers into the front of Burton's shirt, and dragging him out of the bedroom and into the main chamber, thrusting him forward into its middle.

Staggering, Burton bumped into the table and almost fell.

Rigby said, “Introduce yourself. Explain it all.”

“You know who I am, damn you!”

“Perhaps I do. Perhaps I know you better than you know yourself, hey? Certainly, I know that you're less than half the man I thought you. By God! Look at you. What a wretch. What a ruin. What a pale shadow of the person who was once the king's agent.” The colonel slowly paced around his prisoner, gazing at him with disdain. “There's no life left in your eyes. Have you really broken so easily?”