The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (40 page)

Burton suddenly pounced forward, caught the poet under the arms, yanked him off his feet, and whirled him around. “Algy! Algy! Bismillah! Algy!” He dropped him and lunged at Trounce, embracing him in a bear hug. “William, you old goat!”

“Steady on!” Trounce protested.

Swinburne screeched with laughter. “Three hundred and forty-two years!” he crowed. “That’s how long it’s taken!”

“To get here?” Sadhvi asked.

“No! For Beastly Burton to go soft!”

“Idiot!” Burton protested. “By Allah’s beard! Exactly the
same
idiot!”

“At your service,” Swinburne said with a melodramatic curtsey. “I say! Did someone mention a toast?”

“You did. And I wholeheartedly second the motion.”

Grinning helplessly, the reunited chrononauts closed the hatch and reconvened in the ship’s lounge where, to Swinburne’s evident delight, a decanter of brandy was produced. Swallowing his measure, the poet smacked his lips, gave a sigh of pleasure, and said, “At last. There are chemicals in everything, these days. Ruins the taste.” He sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, kicked out the right, twitched his shoulders, raised his glass, and added, “I appear to be empty.”

Gooch provided a refill.

“Cloned,” Burton said. “Are you, then, your own son, Algy? Grandson?”

“Neither. I’m me. The same person, the same memories, an exact copy of the body. The only difference is that I’ve lived a second childhood and have a brother I never had before.”

“Brother?”

“This old duffer,” Swinburne said, cocking a thumb at Trounce.

Burton’s right eyebrow went up.

Trounce said, “Back in 2130, the Cannibals indulged in a little body snatching. Just like the old days, hey? Resurrectionists! DNA from our corpses was put on ice. Thirty-eight years ago, mine was used to create yours truly. Thus you now find me exactly the age I was when you last saw me. My great-grandfather was the Thomas Bendyshe you met; my father his clone, also named Thomas. My mother is Marianne Monckton Milnes. Of course, they’re not strictly speaking my biological parents, but she bore me and they both raised me. In 2179, this scallywag was created—” He indicated Swinburne. “Fifteen years my junior. Same surrogate parents. The timing was carefully arranged so that he, too, would today be the age he was when you saw him last.”

Burton pulled a cigar from his pocket, fumbled and dropped it into his lap, retrieved it, looked at it, then blinked at Trounce and said, “You—you spent a childhood together?”

“Yes!” Swinburne said. “You should have seen how skinny he was. And stubborn. An absolute mule.”

“As you can see,” Trounce said. “Carrots is every bit as loony as his previous incarnation.”

Burton smiled at the nickname, which he’d heard used before in reference to his redheaded friend, though never by Trounce.

“I was somewhat past my childhood when he was born,” the ex-detective went on, “but, yes, we were raised together, and for a specific purpose.”

“It being our arrival?” Krishnamurthy ventured.

“Exactly. Algy and I are now the leaders of the Cannibal Club.”

Sadhvi said, “What of Mick Farren, William. Was he also—um— reborn?”

Trounce sighed. “I’m afraid not. There was nothing left of him. I heard what he did. Brave chap! Funny, back in 1968, he scared me silly with that wild hair of his, but I came to like him more and more. A bad loss.”

“And Thomas Bendyshe?” Burton asked.

An expression of uneasiness passed across Trounce’s and Swinburne’s faces.

The poet said, “Offshoots of the family still oversee our finances. As for the direct line, Father—”

“A distraction was necessary,” Trounce put in.

“Distraction?”

“Spring Heeled Jack is in control of the Empire, there can be no doubt about it. You arrived at nine tonight, the fifteenth of February 2202, which as we know is a significant moment for him. For reasons that will become clear to you, we were concerned that he might be watching out for your arrival. Father gave him something else to think about.”

“What?” Burton asked.

“The destruction of the American Embassy. The Cannibals have bombed it.”

The king’s agent again looked at his unlit cigar. He bit his lip and returned it to his pocket. “William, don’t tell me the club is resorting to violence.”

“Humph! The embassy has been a fully automated affair for many years. There was no one in it. Even so, it’s a crucial hub in New Buckingham Palace’s surveillance network, and its destruction will have caused considerable disruption throughout the city.”

Burton said, “I see.” He considered his old friend. Trounce looked the same, though clean-shaven and with slightly longer hair, but his manner was rather less gruff, and his diction a little different. The king’s agent found it disconcerting.

Daniel Gooch poured Swinburne a third brandy and said, “I take it the Turing Fulcrum is still in operation?”

“It is,” Trounce confirmed. “There’s been no real progress for well over a century. Everyone is watched. Everything is recorded. Creativity is suppressed. Fortunately, we Cannibals have Lorena Brabrooke.”

“We met her ancestor in 2022,” Burton said.

“The same. Cloned. A bloomin’ prodigy. Her ability to evade detection and construct false identities borders on the artistic. Your nanomechs were automatically updated the moment you appeared over Bendyshe Bay. By now, the Turing Fulcrum has already registered you as non-threats. If we exercise due caution, we can leave the ship and proceed with the mission.”

“To locate and destroy the damn thing,” Burton said.

“Quite so. There’s no question that Spring Heeled Jack has infiltrated it, exists within it, and through it has taken complete control of the Empire, yet for all Lorena’s ability to interfere with what the Fulcrum does, she’s never been able to identify exactly where it is. It, on the other hand, has on a number of occasions got dangerously close to locating her, which is why we’ve until now hesitated to mount an all-out assault against it. Tonight will be different. She’ll employ her talents to the full to confuse it while we set out to finally run Spring Heeled Jack to ground.”

“By what means are we to do that?”

The detective opened his mouth to continue, but before he could utter a further word, Swinburne leaped up, punched the air, and shouted, “We’re going to kidnap Queen Victoria! Hurrah!”

Sir Richard Francis Burton, Algernon Swinburne, Sadhvi Raghavendra and Herbert Wells were sitting in a medium-sized flier, a tubular craft with four flat disk-shaped wings. William Trounce was at the controls. They were in the air two miles west of Battersea Airfield on the other side of the now subterranean River Thames.

“Look down,” Swinburne said. He pointed out of the window. “Cheyne Walk. That’s where I lived in 1860.”

“I don’t recognise it at all,” Burton said.

The poet explained that London now existed on two distinct levels, thus
Orpheus
’s confusion. Walkways and platforms had melded together, been layered with soil, and planted with well-lit lawns and prettily landscaped gardens—all currently being coated with red snow. They separated slender towers of such height that the upper reaches of the city disappeared into the cloud cover and soared so far beyond it they came close to scraping the stratosphere. The overall effect was one of cleanliness and spaciousness, a luxurious environment unimaginable in Burton’s age.

Despite the thousands of towers, the upper level appeared to be sparsely populated. The king’s agent had never seen London so quiet. By comparison to what he was used to—and, especially, to what he’d witnessed during the journey to this time period—very few people were strolling around below, even taking into account the weather. Those he saw were wearing the same cloaks and voluminous hoods in which Trounce and Swinburne, and now he and his fellow chrononauts, were attired.

“You’re looking upon the city of the Uppers,” Swinburne said. “The elite. The privileged. Below it, there exists the second city, the overcrowded domain of the Lowlies.”

“The working classes, I presume,” Wells said.

“Yes, Bertie. They exist in dire poverty and are so terribly deformed by genetic manipulations that they barely qualify as human. The London Underground is a place of horror, and I’m afraid we have to go down there.”

“Why?” Burton asked. He could feel perspiration starting to bead his forehead.

Swinburne pointed to the northeast, where, at a high altitude, the edge of a platform—a third level—could be made out, its lights shining well above the upper city.

“That’s the New Buckingham Palace complex; what used to be Hyde Park, Green Park and Saint James Park. It’s inhabited by Queen Victoria and by government ministers and their staff and is exceedingly well guarded. However, water is pumped up to it from the River Tyburn, which flows beneath the lower lever. There are access conduits running parallel to the pipes that lead up from the depths to the heights.”

Burton groaned. “Please don’t say it.”

“I know, Richard. You hate enclosed spaces and you have bad memories of the Tyburn tunnel—but there’s no option. You have to go down there again.”

The flier veered northward, skirting around the western edge of the parks.

Trounce said, “In 2138, when the new palace was still being built, Lorena’s grandmother—the daughter of the Lorena Brabrooke you met in 2022—was able to access the architectural blueprints. We know from them that the conduits are connected by a lift to the upper pump room, which opens onto the palace roof where the palace greenhouses are located. They will be our point of entry.”

“I’m still confused,” Sadhvi said. “Queen Victoria?”

“Humph! I suppose it makes a crooked kind of sense that Oxford would re-create the monarch who lies at the heart of his madness,” Trounce answered.

“Is she a clone, too?”

“I very much doubt it. DNA doesn’t survive forever, and the original Victoria died three hundred and sixty-two years ago. Nor are there any descendants of the old monarchy who could convincingly claim the throne. No. I don’t know who she is or where she comes from, but, for certain, she is Spring Heeled Jack’s puppet, a figurehead enforced upon us to give a human face to his inhuman dictatorship.”

“So she has direct communication with him?” Burton asked. “She receives her instructions from the Turing Fulcrum?”

“I don’t see how she can perform her role otherwise.”

“But kidnapping?” The king’s agent shook his head. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”

“Nor me. If there was any other way—” Trounce fell silent.

He steered the flier between towers, and Swinburne marked off districts as they passed over them. “Earl’s Court. Kensington. Notting Hill.” The vessel veered to the east. “Bayswater. Edgware Road.”

Smoothly, they descended and landed in a long and narrow lamp-lit public garden. As they disembarked, Wells shivered and said, “This snow is extraordinary.”

“Blame my brother,” Trounce muttered. He raised his hood and gave a grunt of satisfaction as the others did likewise. “Even when we’re below, it’ll be best if we keep our faces covered, especially you, Richard.”

“Why me in particular?” the king’s agent asked.

Swinburne giggled. “You might scare the natives. Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

Burton glared at him, then his face softened and he muttered, “The same old Algy.”

Trounce pointed at the glowing glass frontage of a tall edifice. “Does the position of that tower ring any bells?”

“No,” Burton said. “Should it?”

“Its foundations are rooted in the spot once occupied by fourteen Montagu Place.”

“Home! By God!”

Swinburne grinned and nudged him with an elbow. “Good old Mother Angell, hey! Never fear, you’ll be back there soon enough.”

They fell silent as three “Uppers” walked by. Though the trio was enveloped in cloaks, sufficient of them was visible for Burton to see they were thin and willowy in stature.

Trounce waited until they’d passed then said to Burton, Wells and Raghavendra, “Hand over your guns. They’re rather too antique for our requirements.”

This was done, and he put them into a small compartment inside the vehicle, drawing from it five replacement pistols, which he distributed.

“The Underground is heavily patrolled by constables. They’re identical to the creatures that attacked you in 1860, Richard. You’ll remember how we fought them off with truncheons and revolvers. These pistols will make a better job of it.”

“How does it load?” Burton asked, examining his gun with interest. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s a Penniforth Mark Two,” the detective inspector explained. “Invented by one of Monty’s descendants. The bullets are stored in compressed form inside the grip. There are five hundred. You’re unlikely to need more.”

“Five hundred? How is that possible?”

“Humph! A nanotech thing. Quite beyond me. All I know is that after each shot a fresh bullet is squirted into the chamber where it instantaneously expands to its full form.” Raising the weapon, he continued, “The gun has a small measure of intelligence. Watch.”

He aimed at the flier. A small red dot of light slid across the vehicle.