The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (48 page)

Burton heard Tom Bendyshe groan and from the corner of his eye saw him buckle and fall to his knees. Trounce and Swinburne crouched and held him by the shoulders.

“Brunel! Stop this!” Trounce yelled. “For pity’s sake! He’s in agony!”

The gathered politicians bleated their objection to the interruption.

Without turning his head, Brunel extended his Gatling gun toward the three Cannibals. He didn’t fire it, but the threat was enough to quieten the former Scotland Yard man.

Holding the pose, he went on, “My second birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1950. A glimmering of awareness. A vague sense of being. Perhaps a dream.”

Burton lowered his sword. “Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine. Your presence, as you moved forward through time, resonated with its silicon components. It expanded your capacity to think.” He took two paces to the left to avoid the pool of blood that was spreading from Wells’s corpse.

Brunel raised his face and looked directly at the king’s agent. “And it gave me a means to influence events as they unfolded.” Without moving his levelled gun, he unfolded his remaining arms and held their four hands and one stump before his eyes, examining them, moving his fingers, extending the tools from the top of his wrists, making drill bits and screwdrivers spin, clamps and pliers open and close. “But what was I? My body—this body—was in one place, my mind in another. I was disjointed. Incomplete. Scattered. And there were memories, nightmarish memories. I felt myself strapped down, at the mercy of a dreadful man with a swollen cranium. I saw an orangutan with the top of its head replaced by glass through which its living brain was visible. I was aboard a flying ship that was plummeting to earth. There were gunshots. And—”

An arm suddenly jerked forward, and a forefinger jabbed toward Burton’s left eye, stopping less than an inch from it. Burton stumbled back.

“And there was you. Sir Richard Francis Burton. The killer. The murderer. The assassin.”

“No. Those events occurred in a different history and involved a different me.”

For a moment, Brunel stood absolutely motionless.

“Ah, yes,” he said. He drew in his limbs, turned his palms upward, and raised his face to the crackling storm. Ribbons of energy danced across his brow and reflected on the curved planes of his cheeks. “Time. So vast and complex and delicate. Do you feel it as I do, then? Stretching away in every direction? History upon history? Variation upon variation? So many causes. So many effects. Innumerable consequences blossoming from each and every action. Possibilities and probabilities. What a beautiful, awe-inspiring, and truly terrifying equation.”

Another pause; a silence broken only by the relentless lightning, a cough from the audience, and an agonised moan from Bendyshe.

Again, Brunel regarded Burton.

“A pattern. A rhythm. A third birth, this at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1986.”

“The Turing Fulcrum.”

“Awake. Fully awake.” Brunel fisted a gauntlet-like hand. “In a world gone wrong.” He emitted a clangourous chuckle. “But wrong how? I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

He reached out. Burton tried to dodge away, but the brass man was too fast. The king’s agent felt metal fingers close around his cheeks and jaw. The grip was surprisingly gentle, almost a caress.

“I dreamed that I was in a museum,” Brunel chimed. “And you—
you!
—stood before me. I thought I had escaped, but here you were, in pursuit, determined to terrorise and destroy me. Burton. The man from the past. My demon. My would-be nemesis.”

The fingers opened and withdrew. Burton glanced at his companions. Swinburne and Trounce were holding Bendyshe and gazing at Brunel. Their father was white-faced, glaze-eyed and trembling.

“My fourth birthday was at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 2162. By then, my presence had been in every Turing device for a hundred and seventy-six years, yet I had no individuality. No Self.” Brunel touched his own face, running fingertips over the line of his jaw, across the immobile lips, around the deeply shadowed eye sockets. “Suddenly, it came. I was me, in this body, half submerged in the mud of a narrow subterranean stream—a tributary of the Fleet River—beneath the ruins of the British Museum. Buried alive! Buried alive! A birth into primordial horror! Inch by frightful inch I pulled myself through that narrow tunnel, feeling my battery draining, until at last I came to the Fleet, which had become a part of the sewer system, and from there climbed to the surface to claim my rightful place. It was not difficult to convince those in power that I was the Turing Fulcrum incarnate. They were weak, while I was integral to every item of technology, and had long employed it to prepare them for my advent.”

From the gathered politicians, a voice shouted, “Three cheers for the prime minister!”

Brunel whipped around his Gatling gun and pointed it at the man. “Shut your damned mouth, you cretinous heap. All of you. Not another word.”

After a moment, satisfied that he’d not be interrupted again, he lowered his gun. Though his mask was fixed and incapable of showing emotion, he appeared to withdraw into himself and was silent.

Burton waited. A breeze brushed his skin. He looked at the dome of blue fire and noticed that the tendrils of energy were streaming from a great many nodes, flashing upward from one to the next before descending from the apogee in a long, twisting funnel to Brunel’s cranium. The hissing storm, he felt sure, was increasing in power, and the air in the chamber was starting to move, as if being dragged slowly around the centre.

Brunel resumed his narrative.

“My fifth birth occurred five years ago, at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 2197, when, amid the boundless chatter of information that passes through me, I discovered my queen. My saviour. Is it not said that only love can conquer fear? I know I have loved her before, though how and when eludes me. Perhaps I shall love her again, and the terror that drives me will finally be dispelled.”

“You do not feel that love now?” Burton asked.

“While you—the source of my dread—are alive? No, I have no love. Only the hope that it will come when you are gone.”

Brunel’s head jerked, as if he’d just realised something. He turned to the benches. “Beresford, where is the queen?”

Lord Robert Forest Beresford stood and nodded toward Thomas Bendyshe. “The entertainments upset her, My Lord Prime Minister. She left the chamber and went to tend her flowers in the palace greenhouse.”

“Fetch her. Bring her here.”

“Me, sir? Surely it would be more appropriate for one of the royal equerries to—”

“Go, damn you, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

Beresford gave a submissive bob, ran from his seat across the floor, and exited through the double door.

Brunel surveyed the benches, and Burton sensed that, if the metal face had been capable of it, it would have been sneering.

The polished visage turned and lowered to regard him again.

“My sixth birth came at nine o’clock this very night, the fifteenth of February, 2202, when, while I was instructing my Parliament to vote in favour of an attack against our rival empires, I suddenly perceived six events occurring simultaneously and knew there must come a seventh. Seven births, seven events. Such are the intricate synchronies of time, such its patterns and echoes.” Brunel raised a fist and extended from it a metal thumb. “A red snow began to fall, and I knew it to be from a different history.” He unfolded the forefinger. “An explosion crippled the city, and I knew the enemy long hidden within the populace had finally made a move.” His middle finger. “I remembered that it was you whom I fear, who you are, and where you are from.” The fourth finger. “I felt time fold, and I knew you had arrived.” The fifth finger. “I recalled my many births, and I knew I was almost complete.” He extended an adjustable spanner from his wrist to make the sixth digit. “And I became fully myself when, out of time, all around me, there arrived these—”

He threw back his head and opened his arms wide. The dome of energy started to slowly drop down, and, as it did so, lights flared in the ceiling above it, in the walls, and from the edge of the circular floor.

Burton squinted and shielded his eyes from the glare, blinked, dropped his hands, and stared dumbfounded as the true nature of the storm was revealed. He saw burned, torn and blistered time suits—hundreds and hundreds of garments and helmets and stilted boots—all identical, all floating just inches apart and forming a downturned hemisphere. Chronostatic energy blazed from their Nimtz generators, connecting them all and flowing down into Brunel’s babbage. As they gradually dropped, they rotated around a vertical axis, increasing speed, and now the air was moving faster too, quickly turning from a breeze into a wind.

“Power over time itself!” Brunel clanged loudly. “Now I could rid myself of that which has haunted me. Of you! Now I could send my equerries back to the source, back to 1860, where lay my genesis and my potential nemesis, there to hunt you, there to kill you. They never returned. Did you destroy them, killer? Murderer? Assassin?”

“Some,” Burton shouted above the increasing din of the lightning. “Most vanished of their own accord. They were confused. Disoriented.”

“Ah. Unfortunate. Perhaps when they leave my circle of influence they become erratic. I suppose those you allowed to live are lost amid the interstices of time. They have fallen between the lines of the equation.”

“How did you send them?” Burton demanded. “By what method? Surely you couldn’t—since nine o’clock this evening—so quickly have adapted them to travel through history?”

“No adaptation necessary.” The brass man pointed a hand at the benches. From his fingers, zig-zagging lines of chronostatic energy lashed out and hit the woman who’d announced herself as Lady Dolores Paddington Station, the Minister of War, Death and Destruction. She screamed as it first enshrouded her then expanded to form a bubble. It popped and she vanished, as did a section of the bench and the arm of the man beside her. He shrieked, stood up, and fainted.

“I sent her to 1860,” Brunel said. “She should have returned instantaneously. She hasn’t. It appears that, like my equerries, she didn’t fare too well there.” He looked back at Burton. “I’m right to fear you. You are indeed dangerous.”

Now Burton understood why he’d half-recognised the woman. “You deposited her right in the middle of a thoroughfare. She was hit by a vehicle.”

He felt it apposite to exclude the fact that he’d been driving it.

“It doesn’t matter. She was disposable. The demonstration is done.” Brunel turned a hand in front of Burton’s face. Blue sparks crawled up and down the fingers. “The stuff of time. I command it.”

“I see,” Burton responded. “And now you also have the ability to defy gravity. Floating down from the ceiling? Impressive, if somewhat theatrical.”

“Time and space are indivisible, Burton. The accretion of time suits has endowed me with dominion over both. Once I’ve properly learned how to employ the power—”

“Employ it? What do you intend to do with it?”

Brunel chimed a chuckle. “You said you came here to locate the Turing Fulcrum? The device you refer to is long obsolete. Its functions became spread across millions of devices, which grew in number and shrank in size. Now they number in trillions and are naked to the human eye.”

“Nanomechs.”

“Yes, and this—” The brass man gestured at the suits, which were now blurring around them. “This is in them all. And this is
me
.” He thumped a fist into his chest. “What shall I do? I have come home. I have fashioned the world. I am
everything
, and now I shall expand into the other histories and shape them, too. Every variant of every person will know their place; they will know where they belong and how they must contribute. They will feel safe. They will be content. They will have purpose.”

Burton leaned into the air as it rushed around him. Above its howling, he yelled, “They will be enslaved. They will be subject to your insane whims. What of freedom?”

“A myth!” Brunel answered. “None of us are free. We are forever chained to the consequences of our actions. Time rules all. But I—” He put his head back and loosed a peal of demented laughter. “I rule time.”

A hand closed around Burton’s arm. He looked down and saw Swinburne at his side. His friend’s red hair was whipping about his head like an inferno.

“Hey!” the poet screeched at Brunel. “Hey! What of the seventh?”

Brunel lowered his face. “You are Swinburne, I believe?”

“How do you do. Pleased to meet you. Charmed, I’m sure. What of the seventh? You said seven births and seven events. You’ve only ranted about six.”

“Ranted?”

“Like a nutcase of the first order.”

“Obviously, you don’t value your life, little man.”

“And obviously you don’t value rationality. But enough of this delightful flirting. Number seven? Spit it out, old thing. I’m on the edge of my seat.”

The engineer swung up his Gatling gun and pointed it at the poet. “The final birth is yet to come, and with it the final event.” He slid the weapon sideways until it was aimed at the king’s agent. “You will initiate them, Burton.”

Burton raised a questioning eyebrow.

“As I have stated, I shall ask you a question,” Brunel said. “Through your answer, I will be completed, and the seventh event will be your death, quick and complete or slow and recurring, as you please.”

“Answer a question then die?” the king’s agent said. “That doesn’t sound like a particularly attractive deal. Why should I cooperate?”

“If you do not, I’ll torture your friends in front of you.”

“I thought you might say something like that. Very well, let’s get it over with. Ask.”

Brunel stepped closer and leaned down until his blank face was almost touching Burton’s. From the dark eye sockets, his red mechanical eyes burned.

“Tell me. What is my name? Who am I?”

“My hat!” Swinburne cried out. “You don’t know?”

Burton looked down and saw that one of Brunel’s hands was gripping the blade of his sword. He felt cold fingers slide around his throat, holding it gently but—he knew—able to close with such speed and force that he’d be decapitated in an instant.