The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (5 page)

“Precisely. What happened next, oh Scheherazade?”

“With the Eyes of Nāga and the two time suits—one damaged, one not—in his possession, Abdu El Yezdi—he now took that name—went into hiding, aided by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Babbage, and over the next two decades influenced them, along with our key thinkers and politicians, to shape our world into one that, he hoped, would avoid the terrible war he’d witnessed.”

“The scene: 1859. Enter Richard Francis Burton, stage left, El Yezdi’s younger self, native to the history he’d created. You.”

“And, unfortunately, enter Aleister Crowley, who sent his spirit not only backward through time but also sideways, crossing from the future where El Yezdi had encountered him into this, our history. He hunted me and—and—”

Killed the only woman I have ever loved.

“And kidnapped scientists and surgeons,” Swinburne interjected, “forcing them to construct a body for his disembodied spirit to inhabit.”

“I defeated him,” Burton said flatly.

“You met Abdu El Yezdi.”

“My other self succumbed to old age.”

“His allies—Brunel, Babbage, and the Department of Guided Science—are now
your
allies, and his reports, in which all the aforementioned is explained, and which are filled with the wealth of his experience, are at your disposal.”

Burton was silent for a moment. The stench of the River Thames wafted in through the window. They were close to their destination.

Three steam spheres passed the landau, their drive bands humming.

“What’s your opinion of them, Algy—of the reports, I mean? Specifically, the manner in which the material is presented.”

Swinburne chuckled. “I think his propensity for inflicting them with penny dreadful titles proves conclusively that he was you.
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack.
The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man.
Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon.
They sound like the tales that young valet of yours reads in his—what’s the name of the story paper little Bram’s so addicted to?”

“
The Baker Street Detective
, featuring Mr. Macallister Fogg.”

“Sheer hokum, and I’d say the same of the reports had I not met El Yezdi in person. I must say, though, for all their outlandishness, I’m just as fascinated by what he omitted from them than by what he included, especially where the third is concerned. Was he protecting himself, do you think?”

Burton shook his head. “I’ve been in many positions where concealing information would have been the wisest course. The report I made, at Sir Charles Napier’s behest, into male brothels in Karachi ruined my military career and my reputation because it was, quite simply, too complete. That was in 1845, when I was twenty-four years old. El Yezdi had been with us for five years by then. We know from the first of his accounts that, in his native history, he’d presented the very same report when
he
was twenty-four and suffered the identical consequences, yet he made no move to prevent me from repeating the mistake. It appears that he and I, being one and the same, have shared an utter lack of caution where personal reputation is concerned.”

“So maybe the omissions were to protect others.”

“That’s my suspicion. Perhaps there are some matters his associates are simply better off not knowing.”

“Myself among them.”

“Most assuredly,” Burton agreed. “He never revealed the fate of the Swinburne who, in his own variant of time, accompanied him to Africa. Exactly what happened to you amid the Mountains of the Moon?”

“And why didn’t I return from them?”

With a jerk and a loud detonation from its engine, the landau came to a stop. The driver shouted, “Battersea Power Station, gents!” He saluted down to his passengers as they disembarked. Burton stepped out of the cabin stiffly and with a groan.

Snow fell around them. The cabbie waved a hand at it. “At least it’s turned the right bloomin’ colour, hey? White, just as snow aught to bloomin’ well be!”

“A shilling, I take it?” Swinburne asked.

“Beg pardon?”

“The fare.”

Burton pushed his friend aside and handed up the correct coinage and a little extra. “My companion is convinced that every cab ride, no matter the destination, costs a shilling,” he explained.

“They do!” Swinburne protested. His left leg twitched, causing him to hop up and down.

“Funny in the head, is he?” the man asked.

“Extremely. He’s a poet.”

“Oh dear!”

“An unmitigated loony,” Burton clarified.

“I say!” Swinburne screeched.

The driver clicked his tongue sympathetically. “Got you into a scrap, did he? Caused a rumpus? You look proper done over, you do, if yer don’t mind me a-sayin’ so.”

“He did, I am, and I don’t. Good evening.”

“Night, sir.”

The landau departed.

Battersea Power Station stood tall before them, its four copper rods rising high, like chimneys, scraping the underside of the blanketing cloud. Both men knew the rods extended even farther below the edifice, penetrating deep into the Earth’s crust. Brunel had designed the station to render geothermal energy into electricity. It was one of his few failures, and generated only sufficient power to light itself.

They started across the broad patch of wasteland that separated the station from Queenstown Road. Burton limped, pain stabbing through him with every step. Their feet sank into the snow, which was already lying a foot deep, startlingly pink beneath the illuminations of Brunel’s creation.

“Red snow,” Swinburne muttered. “Spring Heeled Jack. Men from the future. Multiple Burtons. And he calls
me
a loony!”

Off to their right, a gargantuan rotorship rose from the nearby Royal Navy Air Service Station. Light glowed from the many portholes along its sides, and its spinning wings sent a deep throbbing through the atmosphere. It powered into the sky on an expanding cone of starkly white steam until it was swallowed by the cloud. A lozenge of fuzzy luminescence marked its position as it slid southward.

“The
Sagittarius
,” Burton noted. “According to the
Daily Bugle
, it’s off to China today.”

“To bomb the Qing Dynasty into submission at the behest of Lord Elgin,” Swinburne added. “That man is the consummate politician. He possesses not one jot of conscience. Can we return to the matter at hand? Edward Oxford? Did we encounter him tonight?”

“The problem is that the apparition resembled Oxford’s time suit only in that it was mounted on stilts,” Burton responded. “It was a mechanism, not a man.”

“So if not him, what?”

“In design it appeared more advanced than Oxford’s invention. I wonder, then, whether its origins lie even farther into the future than 2202. Conversely, it said it served Queen Victoria, meaning it must have come from some point during her reign, between 1837 and 1840.”

“Which makes no sense at all.”

“As you say. And why was it hunting for me? And why didn’t it know what to do with me when it found me? And why did it—did it—wait. Stop.” Burton gasped, stumbled to a halt, and leaned heavily on his cane. “I just need a moment.”

“Not far to go,” Swinburne said. “Then warmth, brandy, and a chair to sit in. Sadhvi shouldn’t take too long to get here, either. She’ll soon have you as right as rain.”

“I share your—your faith in her abilities,” Burton mumbled. “Nevertheless—”

He fished the bottle of Saltzmann’s Tincture from his pocket.

“Please,” Swinburne pleaded. “You promised.”

“I have to break my word, Algy. I’m sorry, but my legs are folding beneath me. I can barely function.”

“Just hold on a little longer.”

“I can’t.” Burton sucked in a juddering breath, uncorked the bottled, raised it to his lips, and downed the contents.

“All of it?” Swinburne shrieked. “You’re only meant to take a teaspoonful!”

“Nonsense.”

“You’re out of your bloody mind!”

Burton felt honey-like warmth oozing through arteries and spreading into capillaries. His aches immediately shifted to one side, as if vacating his wounds. He felt the odd sensation that countless possibilities stretched away from him into an infinitude of futures.

The tincture had never acted with such rapidity.

He was thankful for it.

“Better,” he said after a minute had passed. “Let’s get out of this snow.”

They trudged onward, Swinburne glaring angrily at the explorer, and came to the power station’s big double gate, in which was set a smaller door. Burton rapped his stick against it and, within a minute, it swung inward and one of Brunel’s engineers greeted them. “You got here quickly!”

“What do you mean?” Burton asked, stepping through into the courtyard.

“Weren’t you called for?”

“No. Why? Has something happened?”

“I’ll say! You’d better go straight through to the central work area. Mr. Babbage will explain. Or more likely Mr. Gooch. Babbage—
Mr
. Babbage—is rather—um—upset.”

Puzzled, Burton and Swinburne crossed to the tall inner doors, which were standing slightly open, and entered the station’s vast cathedral-like interior. It was filled with machines whose function could only be guessed at. They pumped and hammered and sizzled and buzzed while, overhead, in glass spheres suspended from the distant ceiling, lightning flashed without surcease, casting a harsh light over the scene.

The two men followed a passage through the various contraptions until they came to an area that was filled with workbenches. Normally, this part of the station was crowded with engineers and scientists, all labouring night and day over their creations, but now it was empty but for a small group of men and women among whom Burton spotted Babbage, Gooch, and Brunel. The latter was so utterly motionless that he resembled a statue.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a remarkable figure. No longer human, he stood there, a hulking man-shaped contraption, comprised of armour-like brass plating, rods, springs, pistons, and cogwheels, and etched all over with intricate decorative designs. He had six arms—one with a big Gatling gun bolted to it—and a mask-like face fashioned into a likeness of the human features he’d possessed until his death last year. The electrical fields of his conscious mind were stored in fragments of a Nāga diamond and were articulated through one of Babbage’s famous probability calculators housed in his metal skull.

As they came closer, Burton saw that one of the great engineer’s hands had been cleanly shorn off at the wrist. He also saw a workbench upon which the pristine time suit—the one Abdu El Yezdi had taken from Edward Oxford in 1840—had been laid out. Beside it, an oblong box-like contraption was hanging by long chains from the ceiling. Constructed from dark wood and polished brass, it somewhat resembled a curve-topped sea chest. Its upper surface was inset with dials, switches, and gauges. On the other side of this box, in an area that looked as if it should have been occupied by another workbench, there was a circular smooth-sided bowl-shaped depression in the floor. Though considerably smaller, it exactly resembled the one left in the paving at Leicester Square after Spring Heeled Jack had vanished.

Burton felt his skin prickling with a disconcerting presentiment.

“By God, what happened to you?” Daniel Gooch exclaimed upon spotting the king’s agent. “You look like you lost an argument with an omnibus.”

“Something like that,” Burton said. He looked at Brunel. “Isambard?”

Gooch, a short, plumpish, sandy-haired man who, as usual, was wearing a harness to which was attached a pair of mechanical arms supplementing his own, extended all four limbs in a wide shrug. “You’ll not get anything out of him, I’m afraid. I think his babbage calculator has been knocked out of whack. He’s completely paralysed. We’ve had an—er—
incident
.” He turned and called to Charles Babbage. The aged scientist, though stooped and liver spotted, had about him an air of zealous energy that belied his years. That energy was currently being expended in frenetic pacing. He was also tapping the fingers of both hands against his forehead, as if pressing imaginary buttons.

“Charles! Charles!” Gooch repeated. “Sir Richard and Mr. Swinburne are here.”

“Irrelevant!” Babbage snapped.

“I hardly think so, sir. The suit belonged to Sir Richard, after all.”

“Belonged?” Burton queried.

“The damaged one,” Swinburne said. “Where is it?”

“Ah,” Gooch answered. “That’s the question.”

“Not one we should be required to ask,” Babbage shouted in a querulous tone. “It shouldn’t be possible. Even if it had become functional, there was no one inside the blasted thing to command it. What could have instigated it to jump?”

Burton struggled to clarify his thoughts. The Saltzmann’s was sending wave after wave of heat through him, flushing out the pain of his wounds, but also causing his mind to apprehend a plethora of variations, so that when Babbage turned to face him, he was also dimly aware of the old man
not
turning to face him, and when Babbage raised his right hand with his forefinger pointing upward, Burton imagined or vaguely perceived—he wasn’t certain which—the scientist raising the left instead.

“Nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860,” Babbage announced. “Does that moment mean anything to you?”

“I’m aware that it is today’s date,” Burton responded. “And the hour of nine has made itself significant.”

“Ah! So you recognise the anniversary?”

Burton removed his top hat, shook snow from it, and placed it on a worktop. He put his cane beside it and started to unbutton his coat. “I don’t, Charles. Enlighten me.”

Babbage slapped his right fist into his left palm. “Edward Oxford! It is at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February in the year 2202—his fortieth birthday—that he’ll make his first foray into the past; departing his native time period at that precise moment, exactly three hundred and forty-two years from now.”

Stepping to a wooden stool, Burton lowered himself onto it, feeling his injured arm complaining but experiencing the pain as a somehow disassociated flare of light that didn’t properly belong to him.