The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (9 page)

“You see?” the Mark III commented. “He calls upon a deity. Superstitious! Lacking logic! Ridiculous! Can we please get this voyage over and done with? I require a little peace and quiet that I might work out how to best cure you of your mad illusions.”

Chuckling, the young woman led Gooch and the three newcomers off the ship's bridge and along a corridor.

“A talking machine?” Trounce asked. “Trickery, surely?”

“No, just very advanced science, William,” Raghavendra answered.

“But it has an attitude.”

“It surely does. But the things it says are generated only by a very complex sequence of algorithms.”

“And what are they?”

“From the Latin,
Algoritmi
,” Burton put in. “The name given to Mu
ḥ
ammad ibn M
Å«
s
ā
al-Khw
ā
rizm
Ä«
, a Persian mathematician.”

Trounce frowned. “An Arabian was speaking to us through a ball in the ceiling?”

“He's been dead for centuries.”

“But,” Raghavendra said, “the mathematical principles he created are at the heart of the device, as is something called the Oxford Equation, which allows it to guide us through time. Here we are.”

She opened a door and they passed through into a well-appointed room that, portholes aside, looked as if it more properly belonged in a country house than in a flying machine. A handsome young Indian greeted them. “Hello there, good fellows! If you don't remember, I'm Maneesh Krishnamurthy.”

Handshakes were exchanged.

A parakeet on a perch screeched, “Sheep fumblers! Giggling bum-slap swappers!”

“And you've already met Pox,” Raghavendra observed. “Eugenically bred, in a different history, to carry messages. If he knows you, he can find you, unless you're shut indoors or out of his flight range. Very useful.”

Krishnamurthy added, “And very rude. A flaw in the eugenic design.” He moved over to a cabinet and got to work with glasses and a decanter. “Our illustrious leader has been in a deep self-induced trance for a considerable period but should be conscious enough by now to communicate with you. Have a thimbleful first, to steady your nerves.”

“Good chap!” Swinburne enthused.

Trounce slumped into a seat and fanned himself with his hat. “It's too much. I was shot dead. Shot dead in the street. And now all this. I think, if you don't mind, I shall go to sleep. Don't bother rousing me. For all I know, I'd awaken to find myself attending my own funeral, by Jove!”

Krishnamurthy handed him a glass, well filled with spirit. “Here you are. Get that into you. It will make you feel much better.” He offered another to Swinburne.

“Hurrah!” the poet cheered. “I shall soon climb aboard the sobriety wagon, and so must savour this while I may.”

Burton noticed that Raghavendra, Gooch, and Krishnamurthy were all watching Swinburne and Trounce with expressions of unmistakable fondness. He, too, had received glances that suggested he was well known to them and well regarded.

It amazed him to discover that he returned the affection. Where the emotion had come from, how or why it had arisen, these questions he couldn't answer, but he knew for certain that these people were his colleagues and his friends. Trounce, whom he'd met just this afternoon, he trusted implicitly and liked tremendously. For Gooch and Krishnamurthy—Lawless, too—he had complete respect and admiration. As for Raghavendra, she appeared to generate an additional degree of fondness, a depth of friendship that had comforted him considerably after the death of his fiancée—

Fiancée? What the hell am I thinking? I'm married! And Isabel is alive!

He tried to conjure into his mind an image of his wife's face. Instead, he saw her heat-blurred figure standing by a bonfire. Despondency descended upon him. He didn't understand it at all, and the heavy emotion didn't lighten when Raghavendra stepped over and placed a hand on his arm, again as if she knew exactly his inner turmoil.

“There is a certain degree of disorientation that accompanies a journey through time,” she said softly, “which is not made any easier by our dealing with many disparate histories. Be aware that, as with the foreign memories, much of what you feel belongs not to you but to other Burtons, who have had different experiences to your own.”

“My wife is waiting for me, Sadhvi,” he said—the informality came to him with such ease that he didn't even notice it—“yet I feel as if she is no longer there, as if she is dead. Did my counterpart from your history suffer her loss? Is that where my feelings spring from?”

She responded with a slight nod of the head. “It is. We have observed the many different iterations of Isabel as we've travelled back from 2202. In some histories, such as my own, she is killed. In others, like this one, she marries you, lives vicariously through you, and, after your death, ruins her own reputation in a misguided attempt to preserve yours. In others still, you abandon her and she goes on to achieve great things. I have seen her, in Arabia and Africa, become a legendary warrior woman named Al-Manat. I've witnessed her as a secret agent for the crown, as a tireless campaigner for women's suffrage, as a successful author, and as an explorer whose achievements surpassed even your own. Undoubtedly, by leaving her you cause great pain, but the distress provides her with the impetus to break free from the constraints of society and become, in her own right, an extremely accomplished and celebrated individual.”

“Nevertheless,” Burton murmured after a moment of contemplation. “How could I live with myself, with the guilt, if I don't today return to her?”

“You have already grown old with her, dedicated your life to her.”

“And at its end, she betrayed me,” he whispered.

“And herself. She paid a terrible price. Now, you have the opportunity to spare her that unhappy ending. But you don't need to decide yet. Wait until you know the full truth of what we're doing.”

She turned and called to Swinburne and Trounce. “It's time. Will you accompany me, please, gentlemen?”

The poet glanced at Burton, who offered a shrug and a nod. Trounce got to his feet with a sigh almost of despair. “As if I'm not giddy enough with it already, now there's more to come.”

Raghavendra ushered them toward a door.

Daniel Gooch said, “See you later.”

Krishnamurthy added, “Don't worry. Our leader is a bit strange, but he knows what's what better than the rest of us all rolled into one.”

“Skudge puddles!” Pox squawked.

They followed the young woman into a passageway. It had no portholes but was warmly illuminated by bracket-mounted oil lamps. They walked past doors to either side. Though all were closed, Burton somehow knew they opened onto passenger cabins, and, as he passed a particular one, he was stricken by the sensation that his old colleague William Stroyan, who'd been killed in Africa forty-five years ago—

No. Now it is just nine years ago.

—was inside. He stumbled to a halt, dazedly raised a hand, knocked on the portal, and called, “Bill? I say! Stroyan?”

Raghavendra turned back, reached out, and gripped him by the wrist. “Don't. He's not in there. It's merely an echo.”

Burton blinked and pulled his hand away. He put it to his head and winced. “What?”

“You're responding to a circumstance that a different Sir Richard experienced.”

“Not a good one, by the feel of it.”

“No, not a good one. Bill Stroyan was murdered on this ship. He was my friend, too, and I miss him terribly.”

They moved on, and as they passed the various cabins, Burton thought about another man who'd gone to Africa with him—John Hanning Speke—and wondered whether he'd shot himself dead at this juncture in all the other histories, too.

They came to double doors. Raghavendra turned. “Gentlemen, I shan't enter the observation deck with you, but may I remind you that, not very long ago, you were each experiencing the end of your life. Thanks to the individual beyond these doors, you are restored to health and youth. That you might understand why, I urge you to do whatever you are instructed, without hesitation or reservation.”

She twisted a doorknob, pushed the portal open, and stepped back from it. Burton saw through the opening a large chamber with walls and ceiling made of glass and, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of it, a figure entirely enshrouded by a cloak and hood.

Burton, Swinburne, and Trounce entered the chamber.

Behind them, Raghavendra pulled the doors shut.

The scene, Burton thought, should have been rather more mystical. Candles, shadows, and the coiling smoke of incense would have been appropriate to it. Maybe a pentagram chalked onto the floor and some unfathomable hieroglyphs scrawled across the glass. But no. Broad daylight shone through the transparent ceiling, illuminating the figure that was remarkable only because it was hidden within the copious robes.

There were three small bottles on the floor. The seated form raised a sleeve-swathed arm and indicated them one after the other. A deep but whispery voice emerged from the hood. “Will you sit, please, gentlemen?”

Glancing at one another, they did so. Trounce emitted a groan as he crossed his legs then mumbled, “Sorry. Unnecessary. It slipped my mind that I'm capable.”

A rustling chuckle. “It feels good to be at your best again, yes, William?”

“Physically, I can't deny it. A darn sight worse for the brain, though. Who are you?”

Burton peered at the figure, trying to pierce the shadow cast by the hood, but could see nothing.

“I shall explain everything,” came the response. “But first, you will oblige me by drinking from the bottles. The concoction will aid your comprehension.”

“Is it alcoholic?” Swinburne asked.

“No.”

“I'll not be poisoned!” Trounce objected.

Burton looked down at the bottle in front of him. Its label bore the words,
Saltzmann's Tincture
.

The name sounded familiar.

The cloaked man whispered, “William, if I wanted you dead, I'd have left you on the pavement with Sneed's bullet in your chest.”

“Humph! I suppose.”

Swinburne uncorked his bottle and upended its contents into his mouth. He smacked his lips. “Hmm. Rather like honey or mead.”

Trounce clicked his tongue then drank.

Burton followed suit. He felt the liquid ooze down his throat.

“I asked who you are,” Trounce said. “Shall you answer?”

“It's rather complicated,” came the reply.

The tincture was having an almost instantaneous effect on Burton. He felt warmth seeping through his capillaries. He sensed countless possibilities stretching away from him into innumerable futures.

“I have my given names,” the figure said.

Sunlight coursed through the explorer, shone out through his pores.

“And I have the names that I've adopted for one reason or another.”

Colours were detected as flavours. Sounds were heard as textures. Touch was received as scent.

“And I have the names imposed upon me by others at various times in my life.”

Though he sat motionless, Burton felt himself toppling forward and backward and sideways. Time became a permeable concept. He soaked into it and found no boundaries, no channels, nothing that flowed. He was everywhere in it. He was everything of it.

“At the moment, perhaps it would be best to go by one I've recently given myself; one appropriate to the circumstances I find myself in, for I am tasked with the manipulation of time, and therefore of reality as we perceive it.”

As Burton slipped away and eased slowly into another iteration of himself, he saw arms reach up to a hood, saw strong but very pale fingers grasp the material, saw it yanked backward, and saw a face he felt he would recognise if only he could properly focus his eyes upon it. They, however, refused to cooperate, and he was possessed by the curious conviction that the man seated before him had more than one head. For an instant—or perhaps for an eternity—it appeared that three heads occupied the same space. Then five. Then one. Then three again.

“I,” the individual said, “am perfectly impossible. I am self-created. I am paradox personified. I call myself the Beetle.”

A SOJOURN IN THE FUTURE OF A DIFFERENT HISTORY