The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (32 page)

“It being?”

“That if we are so bedazzled by
that
,” he jabbed a finger toward Brabrooke’s Turing device, “then I fear whatever else we see might be so staggering that, before we can knock sense into Brunel, it’ll knock all the sense out of us!”

With the world having changed so dramatically, they decided to keep their expedition to London small. A large party was more liable to attract attention, and, as Gooch had suggested, the excursion could be disrupted by an occurrence of mental instability. Fewer personnel meant a lesser chance that one of them would, as Swinburne put it, “start rolling his eyes and spitting foam.”

The poet, Burton, Gooch and Farren—all well dosed with Saltzmann’s —departed Bendyshe Bay in a small boat piloted by a Penniforth. Lorena Brabrooke went with them. During the voyage across the northern stretch of the Channel, she told them about the current Cannibal Club, revealing that, though the group was still funded by Bendyshe investments—currently run by two sisters and a brother—the Foundation itself had been broken up into a large number of much smaller organisations. They were more likely to evade scrutiny than the megalithic institution the original body had become.

Membership had grown more exclusive, currently consisting only of direct descendants. Those who hadn’t been “blood members”—such as the Blanchets, von Lessings and Griffiths—were now absent.

“The younger ones in the group have all adopted the original surnames,” she said, “even those that weren’t born with them. It’s a matter of pride.”

“But why the dwindling numbers?” Burton asked.

“It got dangerously bloated back in the seventies.” She addressed Farren. “Your lot were full of zeal, but you weren’t exactly subtle.”

“We didn’t know we needed to be,” he protested.

“The system is cunning, Mr. Farren. It manipulates people’s fears and hopes, their insecurities and aspirations, and it ensures that all opposition is bogged down in a quagmire of prejudice, stupidity, propaganda and selfish motives. In your era, resistance was fun. In mine, it’s potentially a death sentence.”

“In my era?” Farren said. “The sixties weren’t so long ago. How old do you think I am?”

“In your seventies, I guess.”

“Christ! I’m twenty-five!”

“Anyway, like I was saying, the methodology the Cannibal Club employs to evade detection and keep an objective eye on developing history has had to change. It’s all digital now.”

“Something to do with fingers?” Gooch said. “The way you used your Turing device?”

“It’s technical term. It refers to an extension of the systems your Mr. Babbage devised. Thanks to him, nowadays oppression and resistance do battle in the same arena, it being the realm of information, which he, after a fashion, created.”

“Do you regard Babbage as a villain, then?” Gooch asked. “I’ve always thought of him as a hero, if a rather unpredictable one.”

“I think of him as a genius, sir. If he knew how his systems were eventually employed, I expect he’d be horrified.” An expression of pain crossed her features. “But I wish I’d never read Abdu El Yezdi’s second report.”

Burton, who’d been listening to the conversation with interest, said, “
The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man
. I can understand your reservation. The affair was initiated when a different iteration of Charles Babbage, in a variant history, attempted to achieve immortality in order to pursue his intention to eliminate the working classes. He wanted to replace them with machines. The idea might not have been wholly villainous, but it was certainly inhumane.”

Gooch looked thoughtful and muttered, “If we return, perhaps we should refrain from telling him about the path his work has taken. It might send him over the edge.”

“We already know something will,” Burton observed.

Swinburne, who was gazing ahead with Saltzmann’s dilated pupils at the east coast of England—grey beneath a grey dawn—said, “He’s already loopy, if you ask me. But Babbage aside, you say there’s a sort of information war being waged, Miss Brabrooke? Surely, if this horrible government of yours is to be overthrown, there’ll be a need for something more substantial. Armed revolutionaries.”

“
I’m
an armed revolutionary,” Brabrooke replied. “But people like me don’t shoot anymore, we just aim.”

Burton frowned. “Aim?”

“Access. Infiltrate. Manipulate.” Brabrooke offered a crooked and gappy smile. “I acquire information I’m not supposed to have, I alter it without being detected, and I withdraw leaving no evidence that anything untoward has occurred. That’s how I registered you all with the Department of Citizenship.” The boat bounced and she put a hand to her midriff. “Ugh! I hate the sea. Would that Saltzmann’s stuff of yours settle my stomach?”

The king’s agent curled his upper lip, exposing a long canine in what might have been a smile but more resembled a sneer. “Do you know what it is?”

“Oh. Yes. It’s—” she swallowed and went very pale. “Swinburne juice.”

Mick Farren groaned. “Yeah, what was all that about? A red jungle?”

Burton gestured toward the poet. “You can ask it in person.”

Swinburne smiled happily and winked. “Alternate futures! Strange events! Ripping adventures!”

“And in one of them you turned into a gigantic plant,” Farren said flatly. “Weird.”

“Indeed so,” Burton agreed. “But my companions and I are here—and on our way to 2202—at the jungle’s behest.”

“Okay,” Farren replied. “Weirder.”

Perhaps appropriately, that was the last word the chrononauts were properly aware of for the duration of the next ninety minutes. From the moment the boat docked at Gravesend, time passed in an unintelligible smudge of sensations that overburdened them to the point where the king’s agent—in a brief interval of near clarity—had no option but to dazedly pass around a bottle of the tincture that they might further dose themselves.

As the liquid radiated through him, he found himself gradually able to separate one thing from another, dragging from his jumbled senses first sound—mainly the roar of traffic—then smell, which delivered oily odours, and finally sight. This latter, a fragmentary mass, slowly congealed into the shape of the British Museum, though the blocky structure appeared to be floating amid a whirling storm of utterly indecipherable objects.

He realised that Lorena Brabrooke was peering up at him. “Sir?” She clapped her hands in front of his face. “Please. Say something. Snap out of it. I don’t think I can do this for much longer.”

He turned his head aside, coughed, closed and opened his eyes, looked back at her, and said, “Do what?”

“Lead you around like you’re a pack of zombies.”

“Zombie. Haitian. Supposedly an animated—” He stopped and blinked again. “Miss Brabrooke. We were on a train.”

“Yes, we were. From Gravesend. Then we took the London Underground.”

He shuddered. “Underground? No. I won’t go underground. I can’t bear to be enclosed.”

She displayed the gap in her teeth. “We’ve already done it. Look, you see? We’re at the museum.”

Burton heard Swinburne’s voice. “My hat! Where’s a good peasouper when you need one? My eyes are too full. Look at all these people. How did the city become so overcrowded?”

Algernon. And Daniel Gooch. Mick Farren, too.

The latter shook his head at Burton. “It’s doing my head in, man. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.”

The king’s agent straightened and squared his shoulders. “I’m quite all right, Mr. Farren. Quite all right. Shall we proceed?”

“Yes!” Swinburne and Gooch pleaded in unison.

Lorena Brabrooke led them up the museum’s steps and into the entrance hall. It was like reliving the scene they’d earlier viewed on her Turing—an eerie repetition—and it continued as they ascended the stairs and navigated through corridors toward the Isambard Kingdom Brunel display.

And there he was.

The great engineer.

The brass man.

Suddenly, Burton felt perfectly fine.

It was a winter Tuesday, and early in the morning, so there were few other people around, and none near this particular exhibit.

Burton, Swinburne and Gooch stood and gazed at their old friend. Acting on an instinctive respect, Farren and Brabrooke withdrew a little.

Brunel, kneeling on one knee, was posed on a plinth in such a manner as to appear deep in contemplation. His hulking body was clean, polished, and glinting beneath a spotlight, which threw the eye sockets of his mask into deep shadow, serving to emphasise his stillness, as if his mind was so far withdrawn that a void had taken its place.

The big Gatling gun was raised up.

Tools extended from his wrists and fingers.

One of his arms ended in a stump.

He was just as he’d been a hundred and sixty-two years ago.

Brunel! The man around whom a cult of science and engineering had grown; the man they called “the Empire Builder,” who upon receiving hints of future technologies had used his boundless imagination and the materials of his era to reproduce ingenious approximations of them, transforming the civilised world, initiating the Great Age of Steam.

“He’s regarded as a national treasure,” Lorena Brabrooke said.

Burton glanced back at her. “The Anglo-Saxon Empire wouldn’t have existed without him, Miss Brabrooke. He was there at its inception, fighting alongside us to prevent the sabotage of the alliance between Britain and the Central German Confederation.”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the exhibit.

The king’s agent stepped closer to the plinth. He leaned forward and peered up into Brunel’s eyes.

“Hello, my friend. It’s been quite some time.”

Nothing.

Swinburne asked, “Shall I kick him?”

Farren whispered, “Look to your right.”

The poet did so. Burton followed his gaze. On the other side of the large chamber, a constable was standing guard beside a door, its hands clasped behind its back, its small glittering black eyes upon the visitors. The pig creature was identical to the ones they’d seen in 1968, except that its stilted uniform was white.

They hastily turned their faces away from it.

Swinburne mumbled, “All right. No kicking.”

Brabrooke said, “Try again, Sir Richard.”

Conscious of the guard’s scrutiny, Burton kept his voice low. “Isambard, do you recognise me? It’s Burton. I’m here with Algernon Swinburne and Daniel Gooch. You remember Gooch, don’t you? All those projects you worked on together? The transatlantic liners? The atmospheric railways? Hydroham City? By heavens, man, he built your body!”

Gooch moved to Burton’s side. “Mr. Brunel, what happened to you? Won’t you speak? We’ve come a long way to see you. Do you know what year it is? 2022!”

“Babbage helped us,” Burton went on. “He designed a Nimtz generator. It allows the
Orpheus
to travel in time. What an undertaking that project was! The whole of the Department of Guided Science was given over to the job. All of your people laboured on it night and day, every man and every woman; that’s the measure of their loyalty to you, old man.”

Brunel didn’t respond, didn’t move. Not even a click emerged from him.

Swinburne pushed between them, stood on tiptoe, reached up, and snapped his fingers inches from the brass face. “Wake up, you confounded lazybones!” he demanded. “Get off your metal arse. We need your help.”

The chamber suddenly echoed with the
tock tock tock
of stilts as the guard crossed it.

“Now you’ve done it,” Lorena Brabrooke said. Under her breath, she continued, “Just follow its orders and, without incriminating yourselves, agree with whatever it says. Be careful.”

As the pig man drew closer, Burton whispered, “Behave, Algy.”

The constable stopped in front of them and snarled, “Don’t touch the exhibit.”

“I didn’t,” Swinburne objected. “I was just seeing how my hand reflected in its face.”

“T-bands,” the pig said. “All of you.”

Lorena Brabrooke stretched out her arm, showing the bracelet. Burton, Swinburne, Gooch and Farren followed her lead.

The guard reached out and knocked his own bracelet against theirs, one after the other.

“Jeremy Swinburne,” he stated. “Scriptwriter. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“Um. Yes,” Swinburne agreed.

“Richard Burton. Actor. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“Yes,” Burton said.

“Daniel Gooch. Director. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“That’s me.”

“Michael Farren. Producer. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

Farren coughed. “Yeah.”

“Lorena Brabrooke. Production Assistant. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“Yes, sir. We’re doing the initial research for a docudrama about Isambard Kingdom Brunel. We have to study him closely, but we won’t interfere with the display.”

The guard wrinkled its snout. “Shut up. I’m doing a background check.” Its beadlike eyes focused inward for a couple of seconds. “All right. You’re clear. Continue. Don’t touch.”

It turned and stalked back to its post.
Tock tock tock
.

“Phew!” Swinburne said. “What a perfectly dreadful brute.” He addressed Brabrooke. “Bendyshe Entertainments? We’re doing what with the what for the what?”

“Never mind,” she said. “It’s all a fiction.” She frowned at Burton, who was staring wide-eyed at Brunel. “Sir Richard?”

He didn’t reply.

She touched his arm. “Sir Richard?”

“It’s really over,” Burton murmured. “My world. The time I inhabited. He built it and now it’s all ended.”

They considered Brunel.

“A brief span and then we are gone,” Burton said. “Time is cruel.” He straightened and sighed. “I thought he, of all of us, would live forever.”

They remained in the museum for a further thirty minutes, standing close to Brunel, discussing his many projects and the people he’d known, hoping that Gooch was wrong and a spark of life remained, that the reminiscing would sink into the engineer and hook a memory, something to bring him out of his long, long fugue.

It didn’t work, and when the guard showed signs of renewed suspicion, they gave up.

Led by Brabrooke, the chrononauts left the exhibition hall.

Behind them, Brunel remained silent and frozen.