The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (28 page)

It being Sunday, the town was fairly quiet and the shops were closed. Burton examined the contents of their display windows and only understood half of what he saw. Everything appeared garish, plentiful, and cheaply manufactured.

“What are those rods?” Sadhvi enquired, pointing at the rooftops.

Karl von Lessing answered, “Television aerials, Miss Raghavendra. Television is like radio but with moving pictures, a little theatre in your sitting room. The aerials pick up the signals.”

“Moving pictures?” Swinburne exclaimed. “You mean, like a zoetrope?”

“A what?” von Lessing asked.

The poet cried out and aimed a kick at thin air. “How are we ever to communicate?”

The group came to two parked cars. Trounce and Raghavendra joined Eddie Brabrooke and Karl von Lessing in one, while Swinburne, Wells and Jane Packard squeezed into the back of the other, with Burton in the front beside Farren. The king’s agent watched closely as Farren manipulated steering rods and a footplate—a very similar arrangement to that of the old steam spheres and rotorchairs.

“Steam?” Burton asked, as the car rolled out into the road.

“Yep,” Farren responded. “The Yanks favour petroleum engines, but they’re unreliable as hell. Anglo-Saxon steam technology is still where it’s at. Over the past century or so, we’ve learned how to squeeze the most out of the least. It was Formby coal in your day, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“We use a process called muon-catalysation now, which is powered by an extension of the Formby treatment. We can make a marble-sized lump of coal blaze like a sun for a whole day, and a vehicle can run on twelve gallons of heavy water for almost two hundred miles at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour.”

“Heavy water?”

“Yeah, man. That’d take me a week to explain.”

The car accelerated, and Margate was quickly left behind. As the vehicle swept westward, Burton and Swinburne saw that the little seaside towns—Herne Bay and Whitstable—which had flourished in the mid-1800s, were now, like Margate, in a sad state of dilapidation, while the countryside between them had been rendered a characterless patchwork by intensive farming.

Further inland, the Kentish towns of Faversham, Sittingbourne and Gillingham were vastly expanded, but the new buildings struck the chrononauts as soulless and unprepossessing, and by the time they reached Gravesend they were shocked to find themselves already on the outskirts of the capital. London was immensely expanded.

As they swept into the densely built-up outer reaches of the city, with other vehicles flowing around them, Burton asked, “You are a musician, Mr. Farren?”

“Mick, please. I’m a singer and songwriter, among other things.”

“In a band?”

“The Deviants.”

“And music has become a political force?”

“Uh-huh.”

Farren reached down to a knob on the control panel in front of him and gave it a twist. The car’s cabin was immediately filled with a harsh blend of trumpets, guitars and other instruments that Burton couldn’t identify. The cacophony sounded vaguely Spanish and was accompanied by three or four male voices singing in harmony.

“Ouch!” Swinburne exclaimed. “What a racket!”

“The song is called ‘The Legend of Xanadu,’ Mr. Swinburne,” Farren said. “By Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.”

“My hat! What are they? Dwarfs? What happened to the seventh?”

Farren gave a throaty chuckle.

“I presume the song refers to the Empire’s difficulties with China,” Burton said. “Though I fail to understand the Spanish motif.”

Farren shook his bushy head. “No, Sir Richard. This is what’s known as pop music—pop, short for
popular
. Its only function is as commercial entertainment. It has very little meaning. I doubt the kids even know where Xanadu is. Let’s try a different station.”

Keeping his eyes on the road ahead, Farren twisted another control knob. The music dissolved into crackles, whines, howls and snatches of conversation before settling into an urgent and primitive-sounding rhythm over which an American-accented voice sang about “breaking on through to the other side.”

“Rock music,” Farren revealed. “This band is called
The Doors
.”

“How is it different to pop?” Burton asked.

Farren thought for a moment. “I guess rock music is less about commerce and more about cutting through the surface of civilisation to find an authenticity within each of us.”

Burton considered this and said, “That was one of the aims of the original Cannibal Club when Doctor James Hunt and I first founded it. I must admit, we didn’t much pursue the objective.”

“We were too busy getting three sheets to the wind,” Swinburne added.

“Nevertheless, it’s yet another curious coincidence,” the king’s agent muttered.

Farren said, “What you intended at the club’s inception is now more important than you ever envisioned. The people are so distracted by bread and circuses they’ve lost any sense of themselves. They don’t realise they’re being enslaved by the system.”

Swinburne leaned forward. “By which you mean the system of governance established and run by the upper classes?”

“Exactly,” Farren answered. “Except, if you scrape away the layers of illusion, I’m pretty sure you’ll find a single presence at the rotten core of it.”

Burton looked at him. “Edward Oxford?”

“Yep.”

They caught their first glimpse of police constables at the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. A tower—the tallest any of the chrononauts had ever seen—dominated the area, an unsightly edifice of concrete and glass.

“Centre Point,” Mick Farren said. “Completed last year. Thirty-two storeys, all completely empty. An eyesore and total waste of money.”

It was a dramatic example of how the capital had altered. Buildings crowded against each other, pushed upward into the sky, and appeared to occupy every available space. Here and there among their ill-designed and blocky facades, segments of the nineteenth century could occasionally be spotted, like broken memories clinging to existence, but little of Burton and Swinburne’s world remained beyond the major monuments, and to the king’s agent, even the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral—which bulged up into the crystal-clear air—looked suddenly small, helpless and insignificant.

After leaving the cars in Bedford Place, the Cannibals had walked to the southern end of Tottenham Court Road where they’d joined an enormous crowd of demonstrators. Farren told them an even larger crowd was gathered in Trafalgar Square, the two groups slowly working their way toward Grosvenor Square. Burton had witnessed protests in the 1850s, but nothing to match this. People were present in their thousands, long-haired, colourfully dressed, many holding banners and placards, and all chanting, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!”

Farren put his mouth to Burton’s ear and shouted above the din, “Ho Chi Minh. Former president of Vietnam. He represents what the people of South East Asia desire for their region, as opposed to what the U.S.A. or U.R.E. wants.”

Following his lead, they pushed into the crowd, taking up position behind a group of youths holding a banner bearing the words “Merseyside Anarchist Group.”

Burton felt completely out of his depth. He obviously wasn’t alone in his sense of vulnerability; Sadhvi Raghavendra was clinging to his left elbow for security, Wells was looking nervously this way and that, and Trounce was staying very close, too, and was visibly trembling. Only Swinburne appeared at ease amid the uproar. He twitched and danced and laughed and added his shrill voice to the chanting.

Raghavendra tugged at Burton’s arm, nodded toward Trounce, and yelled, “Richard! I don’t approve of the stuff, but you have to give William another dose of Saltzmann’s. This is all too much for him.”

Burton nodded, drew a bottle from his jacket pocket, and at that moment saw the police constables. He dropped the tincture, and the glass shattered at his feet.

“Bismillah!”

There were twenty policemen standing in a row on the pavement.

But they weren’t men.

Swinburne shrieked and pointed. Trounce staggered against the king’s agent. Raghavendra put a hand to her mouth. Wells swore.

“Don’t stare at them,” Eddie Brabrooke advised. “Believe me, you don’t want them to notice you.”

“You understand now why I activated the beacon?” Farren asked.

“Yes,” Burton croaked. “By God, yes!”

The constables were humanoid in form, standing upright, with bulky torsos and short, thin limbs, but they possessed the heads of pigs. Dressed in black uniforms with silver buttons, they wore round helmets and had long boots encasing the lower part of their legs. The boots were mounted on spring-loaded, two-foot-high stilts.

“The genetically altered pigs were first introduced to the force a couple of years ago,” Farren said. “They’re strong and vicious but lack height and speed. The new uniforms were introduced last month to address that problem. The moment I saw them, I thought of Spring Heeled Jack.”

“The similarity is striking,” Burton responded. “Undoubtedly, Oxford’s influence is at work. Has the genetic manipulation resulted in the usual side effects?”

“Yes,” Farren answered. “They possess an unanticipated degree of aggression.”

The police creatures were lost to view as the crowd suddenly surged forward.

Taking their cue from some of the groups around them, the Cannibals and chrononauts linked arms—Wells, Farren, Burton and Trounce leading, with Jane Packard, Karl von Lessing, Raghavendra and Swinburne following behind.

Leaning close to Trounce, Burton shouted, “William, are you all right?”

Trounce looked at him with glazed eyes. “Too many people. Too many people.”

Burton disengaged his arm and checked his pockets. Silently, he cursed himself for not bringing more Saltzmann’s from the ship. A stupid mistake. He hooked his hand back around Trounce’s elbow. “Stay with us, old chap.”

Like a tidal wave, the crowd swept along Oxford Street.

“We’re heading to the American Embassy,” Farren announced. “A show of strength.”

For the next hour, conversation was almost impossible. The chanting increased in volume and vehemence, and an ominous air of smouldering violence pressed down upon them like a brewing storm.

Burton retreated into his role of detached observer. He took in every detail of people’s attire, of their gestures and expressions, and of the words he heard spoken—or more often shouted—around him. He recognised that the England he knew was in the grip of a deep transformation, driven by a powerful zeitgeist, and rapidly becoming almost unrecognisable to him. Individuals who thought they were in control of their actions were, he perceived, actually motivated by an almost primordial passion, something chthonic and incomprehensible, though vaguely sensed. He could see it in Mick Farren’s eyes. The songwriter appeared almost mesmerised, as if participating in a war of gods without being fully cognisant of it.

And where was the insane Edward Oxford in all of this? How much of the apparent madness Burton observed was that of the Spring Heeled Jack consciousness? Had the man from 2202 infected history like a virulent disease?

Jane Packard yelled, “This is more than we anticipated, Sir Richard. Follow us. We’re going to slip into a side street and get away from here.”

It immediately proved more easily said than done. The sheer weight of numbers made the demonstration almost impossible to navigate, and over the course of the next thirty minutes they were shoved helplessly along with it all the way to North Audley Street, forced left, and driven into Grosvenor Square. Here, the furore was overwhelming and the crush of bodies immense.

Burton managed to manoeuvre to Raghavendra’s side. He shouted into her ear, “Stay close to William, Sadhvi.”

She said something he couldn’t hear and squeezed past Packard to join the Scotland Yard man.

Farren caught Burton’s eye and nodded toward the right. Following the gesture, the king’s agent saw, through the many banners and waving placards, a huddled mass of uniformed pig men, all mounted on horses. The creatures were holding sword-length batons, and their steeds were draped with light chain mail and wore horned headpieces, making them resemble unicorns.