The Return of the Discontinued Man

Swinburne continued, “But the mixed recollections were soon reconciled by the awareness of our mission. It helped to keep me on the straight and narrow.”

“Plus,” Trounce said, “we were both carefully fostered by Father—Tom Bendyshe—and knew from an early age that we’d find our purpose on the fifteenth of February, 2202—today—with the arrival of the Orpheus.”

“That must have been strange,” Raghavendra murmured.

“Oh, it hasn’t been so bad,” Swinburne responded. “Of course, we looked forward to seeing you all again, and I must confess, I’ve felt rather a fish out of water in this age. The nineteenth century always felt more like home, and I’ve missed it.”

“Likewise,” Trounce grunted.

“But the blinkers?” Burton asked.

“An impression that William and I never possessed before we died,” the poet answered. “A constant suspicion that what we sense is only a fraction of the full picture. That there’s a greater truth.”

“A feeling that we’ve forgotten something,” Trounce said. He raised a hand and slowed his pace. “Stay quiet now. We’re coming to a monitoring station. There may be someone in it.”

They crept ahead in silence until they were brought to a halt by a round metal door. Trounce put his ear to it and was motionless for two minutes. He stepped back, said softly, “I can’t hear anyone,” then turned the handle and pushed the portal open.

The room beyond was empty. It was also small but nevertheless came as a relief to Burton. Little more than a metal box, with a second door leading to the next section of the tunnel, it was at least well lit. In one wall—the one closest to the sewer—there were mounted a number of flat screens from which unfathomable displays glowed, charts and diagrams and rows of numbers.

Trounce started slightly, put his finger to his ear, motioned them all to stay silent, and murmured, “It’s Lorena. This must be important. We’re supposed to maintain network silence.”

He listened, his head cocked to the side, his eyebrows low over his eyes.

Slowly, the colour drained from his face.

“Bloody hell,” he mumbled. “You’re certain?”

His lips whitened as he received the reply.

“Confound it! Do what you can, all right?”

He lowered his hand. It was shaking. He used the edge of his cloak to wipe his forehead and glanced at Swinburne, who said, “What’s happened?”

“Father has been captured.”

Swinburne gasped.

“Bendyshe?” Burton asked.

Trounce nodded. “After planting the bomb in the Embassy. He ran straight into a group of constables.”

“Where have they taken him?” Swinburne asked.

Trounce reached up as if feeling for his bowler hat and looked irritated when he failed to find it. He sighed. “We don’t know. She’s lost track of him.”

Burton asked, “She can’t locate his position via his nanomechs?”

“They must have realised his nanomechs aren’t under government control, so they’ll have passed a nonlethal but very painful electric current through him to destroy them all prior to interrogation. It’s left him totally isolated.”

“Interrogation? Where would that occur? At police headquarters? Is there still a Scotland Yard?”

“No headquarters. There aren’t even police stations. The constables don’t require them.”

“Then where are crime suspects held?”

“Suspects aren’t held. They’re executed. Immediately. Without trial.”

“So—I’m sorry, William, Algy, I know he’s your father—” Burton blinked rapidly. He still couldn’t get to grips with that idea. “But if this age has such a barbaric policy, why do you think Tom Bendyshe will be interrogated rather than killed?”

Trounce and Swinburne exchanged a glance.

“I told you Lorena Brabrooke is a genius,” Trounce said. “And she is. With her every successive clone, she’s increased her skills. But the problem with keeping the Cannibal Club off the surveillance net—with making us invisible—is that it creates holes. Lorena can’t fill those holes, but she can relocate them, so what you might term ‘the absences we make’ are not in the same places as we are. That’s how we evade detection.”

The king’s agent dwelled on this for a moment, struggling slightly with concepts that remained highly abstruse to his nineteenth-century intellect. Before he’d properly formulated his next question, Raghavendra asked it. “Does Spring Heeled Jack suspect the existence of the Cannibal Club?”

“Until nine o’clock this evening, for all these years, we’ve resisted taking any action against him,” Trounce replied. “We’ve been wary of drawing attention to ourselves. Had we done so, he might have hunted us to extinction, and your mission would be jeopardised. Nevertheless, he’s known for some considerable time that something was evading him, and tonight—the date being what it is—we suspected his paranoia would be at its most extreme. That’s why we feared your arrival would be detected and why we finally made a move.”

“So where will they take Bendyshe?” Burton asked.

“I don’t know,” Trounce said. Frustrated, he slapped his right fist into his left palm. “Let’s get going. Not a word in this next section. The pump room at its end is almost certainly occupied by a technician.” He turned to the door that opened onto the second length of tunnel, twisted its handle, swung it wide, and holding his torch before him, led the way in.

Burton, Swinburne, Wells and Raghavendra followed.

This stretch proved longer than the first. They traversed it as rapidly as they could until they neared the pump room, at which point they slowed down and trod with care so their footfalls wouldn’t echo. By the time the light shone upon another door, Burton’s clothes were damp with perspiration and his eyes were slightly wild. He’d been clenching his teeth so hard that his whole face ached, and he felt as if his sanity might break at any moment.

Get me out. Get me out. Get me out.

Trounce looked back and put a finger to his lips. He passed the torch to the king’s agent, but Burton’s hand was trembling so much that the illumination shuddered back and forth until Swinburne reached out and took hold of the device.

Pulling his pistol from his waistband, the cloned Scotland Yard man wrapped his fingers around the door handle, clicked it down, and put his shoulder to the portal. It swept open and he hurtled in, brandishing his gun.

The room beyond was large and humming with machinery. The wall to the right of the door was entirely covered with buttons, screens, levers and projecting valve wheels. A woman with pale, wormy blue skin was sitting on a high stool facing it. Her limbs—two legs and eight arms—were exceedingly long, thin and multi-jointed. Her slender hands bore fingers of outlandish length, extending across different sections of the control panel.

She turned her head as Trounce barrelled in. Her skull, horribly narrow and drawn upward into a pointed cranium, was dotted with a plethora of glittering black eyes. Her mouth, packed with crooked and spiny teeth, opened and produced an uncanny whistling as the detective inspector, having misjudged the force of his entry, collided with her and knocked her from her seat. She hit the floor with Trounce on top of her but immediately thrust him off with such force that he flew into the air, hit the low ceiling, and crashed back down with a loud grunt, the breath thumped out of him. His Penniforth Mark II went skittering across the floor into a corner. The woman scrabbled up, employing her arms as extra legs to quickly back away, like a monstrous arachnid.

“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ but me job, m’lords,” she hissed. “I keep to the law, so I does.”

Burton stepped in and drew his weapon. “I have to render you unconscious, madam. It won’t hurt and you’ll recover in a little while.”

“Unconscious? Unconscious? I doesn’t want to be unconscious, m’lord, and I ain’t no madam.” Shook her head and put her hands to it. “I’m confused. Scared. Me head hurts.”

“The nanomechs in your system have stopped working,” Swinburne told her. “You can think freely.”

“I doesn’t want to think. You shouldn’t be ’ere. It’s the rules, m’lords.” She looked at Burton, at his uncovered face. “Oh gawd ’elp me, it’s you, ain’t it! I dunno what to do. I dunno. I dunno. I ain’t ready fer no revolution. I’m just a simple girl. I does me job an’ nuffink else. What should I do, m’lord?”

“Just sleep,” Burton said. He pointed his pistol and added, “Stun.”

Ptooff!

The technician fell backward. Her limbs spread outward. She twitched and became still.

“Poor thing,” Raghavendra said.

“The Lowlies are getting muddle-headed,” Swinburne observed. “We have to work as fast as we can. If we gain control of the Turing Fulcrum, maybe Lorena will find a way to use it to broadcast an encouraging message to them, something to calm them down.”

“And if we have to destroy it?” Burton asked.

“Then we’ll have to employ the old-fashioned method of word of mouth. We’ll recruit Mr. Grub. His was big and loud enough.”

Trounce retrieved his pistol. They moved past the prone woman and walked between two horizontal groupings of pipes to where a flat platform was positioned beneath a square hole in the ceiling.

Trounce said, “This lift will take us straight up to the second pump room on the palace roof. Inside, the air is heated and pressurised, but when we exit we’ll find the atmosphere too thin to breathe and freezing cold. Lorena will cause our BioProcs to compensate, but we’ll have to move fast, else the strain on our bodies will kill us.”

“It’s one thrill after another, isn’t it?” Swinburne commented.

The chrononauts mounted the platform, Trounce depressed a switch, and it rose through the opening into a dimly lit shaft. Looking up, Burton saw its four sides converging toward a far-distant vanishing point.

“It’s quite a way,” Trounce warned them all.

“And bloody slow,” Swinburne complained.

“When this is all over and done with,” Burton muttered, “I shall return to the desert where, in every direction, there’ll be nothing between me and the horizon.”

“Do you mean that?” Raghavendra asked. “Will you really go back?”

Burton looked into her eyes and felt a strange sensation in the middle of his chest, as if the lift was sinking rather than rising. “No,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose I ever will.”

He turned away from her.

Up and up the lift rose. After a while, the chrononauts became tired of standing, so sat and waited, glancing up frequently, hoping they’d see the top of the shaft.

“We must have travelled for miles,” Wells exclaimed after what felt like hours had passed.

“Up through the Underground,” Trounce said, “then out over the upper city, through the level of the royal parks, and on to the top of the palace. I doubt we’ve travelled a third of that distance yet, and we’ve been going for about thirty minutes, I’ll wager.”

“Just half an hour?” Swinburne protested. “Half a day, more like!”

“Funny,” Wells said, “how time feels different for everyone. I might say the day has dragged by, while you’ll say it’s raced. One man of fifty might feel sprightly, another feel that he’s in his dotage. I often wonder whether Chronos exists at all. Might it not be a figment of our imagination?”

“Could our imagination be the seed of all existence?” Burton added, remembering his earlier meditation—though it had occurred seventy-two years ago. “Is there any reality outside of it?”

“Is it possible,” Swinburne mused, “that the altitude is making you both delirious?”

Trounce chuckled. “And so the conversation is brought down to earth.”

“Great heavens!” Sadhvi Raghavendra cried out. “That’s a singularly inappropriate expression to use under our current circumstances.” She looked up. “No sign of our destination. It’s well past midnight already. It’ll be the small hours by the time we get to the roof. What can we expect, William?”

“We’re unlikely to find the greenhouse occupied at this time of night, so we’ll use it as our base of operations. Once we’re inside, I suggest you hold the fort, Sadhvi, while Carrots and I, and Richard and Bertie, split up and reconnoitre with the aim of establishing Her Majesty’s whereabouts. We may have to abduct a member of staff and drag them back for questioning.”

Raghavendra used her forefinger to give Trounce’s arm a hard prod. “So despite your childhood here in the twenty-third century, your nineteenth-century sensibilities haven’t seen any advancement. You still feel it necessary to deny the woman a meaningful role. Really, you’re thoroughly backward.”

“Not at all,” Trounce protested. “Any good general will tell you that the path of retreat must remain well guarded. If I were a chauvinist, I wouldn’t trust to leave the responsibility to you alone. If you want to exchange places with Carrots, I’ll be just as confident with you at my side.”

Raghavendra eyed Swinburne, who was compulsively drumming his left foot and wiggling his fingers.

“Thank you,” she said somewhat wryly. “I accept.”

The minutes ticked by, their number impossible to judge.

Burton squeezed his eyes shut.

You’re not underground. You’re rising high above it.

But I’m enclosed.

Not for much longer.

What if the lift mechanism freezes? What if we get stuck?

It won’t. This will end soon.

“The roof!” Wells exclaimed.

Praise Allah. Praise Jehovah. Praise Zeus. Praise every god that has or hasn’t ever existed.

The chrononauts got to their feet.

“Be ready,” Trounce whispered. “There might be another technician ahead of us.”

The platform slowed, slid up level with a floor, and came to a halt. They found themselves in a room very similar to the one they’d departed. It was unoccupied.

“Luck is with us,” Trounce muttered. He led them past heavy pipes, past a glowing control panel, and to a door. “This opens onto the roof. There’s a short distance to cross to the greenhouse.” He drew his pistol and put his finger to his earlobe. “Lorena?” then, after a pause, “We’re on the roof.” He listened to her reply then addressed his companions. “Our BioProcs are about to drive up our body temperatures and maximise our lung efficiency. It won’t feel pleasant. Follow my instructions exactly.”

Swinburne pulled his handgun from his waistband. Burton raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you sure, Algy? You’re a rotten shot.”

“Not with a pistol that does whatever I tell it.”

Suddenly, Burton felt overheated. His heart hammered. Dizziness and exhilaration gripped him. Too much oxygen!

Trounce eased open the door and led them through it. The roof beyond was clear of snow, being well above the clouds, and was illuminated by the lamps of the nearby greenhouse. The structure’s various angles and planes stood out with startling clarity in the frigid, still, and thin air.

“Softly, softly,” Trounce whispered.

Slowly, they proceeded toward the large rectangular block of glass. The light that shone from within it dazzled them, and Burton found himself squinting and averting his eyes. Nevertheless, he noticed that a plume of what appeared to be dense smoke was rising from the greenhouse’s roof.

Burton’s skin was burning, and his chest rose and fell with great rapidity, as if he was struggling for breath, though he felt no discomfort.

Swinburne whispered to him, “The upper city isn’t as closely monitored as the Underground and, as far as Lorena has been able to ascertain, the palace complex even less so. One of the benefits of elitism is that you’re granted a measure of privacy. Nevertheless, we’d be triggering alarms right now were it not for the destruction of the Embassy. Also, a full-scale information war has just commenced.”

“Information war? You mean Miss Brabrooke is accessing, infiltrating and manipulating?”

“Exactly that. She and her people are hard at work. Communications are being disrupted, reports falsified, files corrupted, diversions planted. If she’s judged it correctly—and I don’t doubt that she has—even a synthetic intelligence as powerful as the Turing Fulcrum will be thrown into confusion.”

“If the Fulcrum and Spring Heeled Jack are one and the same,” Burton responded, “then there’s a deal of confusion in it, anyway.”

“Yet still it has managed to create this ghastly world,” Wells interjected.

Trounce signalled for them to be quiet as they reached the side of the greenhouse. Crouching down, they peered through the glass.

“My hat!” Swinburne hissed. “I’m already here.”

Inside, from the waist-high growing troughs up to the high ceiling, from one side of the interior space to the other, there was a mass of red foliage, a great aggregation of fleshy leaves, tangled branches, exotic flowers, bulging pods, heavy gourds, luminescent fruits, and—especially in the upper reaches—thousands of huge fluffy seed heads. These were noticeably disintegrating, bits of them breaking off and floating out though ventilation grills to form the cloud Burton had noticed—not smoke, but seeds, red but rendered black by the starlight.

“I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by its presence,” the king’s agent murmured. “After all, it was the jungle that brought Spring Heeled Jack’s dictatorship to my attention. We wouldn’t be here were it not for the experiences it foisted upon me.”

“I don’t see anyone inside,” Trounce said.

He moved to the right until he came to a door, opened it, and quietly entered. Burton and the others filed in after him, senses alert. The change from frigid cloud to humid steam caused them to gasp and breathe heavily. Burton’s dizziness increased, and he felt blackness pressing in at the edges of his vision.

Trounce put his finger to his ear and murmured, “We’re in.”

Burton clutched his chest as his heart skipped arrhythmically. He sucked damp air into his lungs and fought to stay on his feet.

The discomfort passed. His body stabilised. The chrononauts glanced at one another, satisfying themselves that all were well. They discarded their robes.

“Let’s make certain we’re alone,” Trounce whispered.

Carefully, without a sound, they spread out and moved through the verdant corridors, passing back and forth between the troughs. Pungent fragrances filled their lungs, and Burton felt a slight headiness, though it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as that which he’d experienced in the Beetle’s factory.

No one else was present.

The king’s agent found a door that, when he cracked it open an inch, proved to be at the top of a stairwell. He closed it and turned to Trounce. “Here’s our route in.”

“A preliminary survey then. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“We’ll go down to the next floor, split into two teams, and separate. Let’s assess how populated it is downstairs. If you can render a member of the queen’s staff unconscious without detection, do so and bring them back here.” Trounce said to Swinburne, “You stay here, Carrots. If anyone enters, stun ’em.”

“Rightio.”

Burton turned and reached for the door handle again, but before he could grasp it, it suddenly moved and the door swung inward, bumping against him. With an exclamation, he stepped back and fumbled for his pistol. Before he could retrieve it, a young woman stepped in. She uttered a small exclamation and stared at them bemusedly.

“Hallo, hallo!” Swinburne cried out. “What ho!”

Burton gasped. His mouth fell open. He was overcome by an urge to rush forward and embrace her. His heart filled with love. Tears blurred his vision.

Isabel! he thought. Isabel!

But it wasn’t Isabel. The girl was short and broad rather than tall and graceful, dark rather than golden-haired. Though curvaceous and attractive, she couldn’t match his fiancée’s beauty.

This love isn’t mine. It’s Oxford’s.

A name popped into his mind.

“Jessica,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “You—you know me, sir? My real name?”

“Jessica,” he repeated. “Jessica Cornish.”

“But—but—I haven’t been called that for—for—” She moved forward, put her hands out toward him and hesitated, her expression alternating between fear and wonder. “How?”

Trounce said gruffly, “Queen Victoria.”

“Yes.” Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “They—he—calls me Victoria. But I’m—I’m Jessica Cornish. How do you know me? Who are you people? Why are you here?”

Trounce slipped behind her and pushed the door shut. He levelled his pistol and muttered, “This is a spot of luck. But be careful, Richard.”

“Lower your weapon,” Burton said. He looked down at the queen. “For how long have you been the monarch, Miss Cornish—Your Majesty?”

“Jessica, please. Just Jessica. It feels—it’s so good to hear that name again. I was chosen five years ago.”

“And prior to that?”

“I lived in Aldershot. I was nobody. A nanny.” She clenched her hands beneath her chin. “Who are you? Can you help me?”

“Help you?”

“I never wanted to be the queen. I don’t know why I am.”

“Miss Cornish,” Swinburne said. “The proclamations. The ones you issue. Might I ask where they come from?”

“Him.”

“Him?”

“The prime minister.”

Swinburne looked at Trounce. “A prime minister? I didn’t know we had one.”

“It’s news to me,” Trounce said. “What of the Turing Fulcrum, Miss Cornish?”

“The—what?”

“The device that guides the government. Perhaps it advises the prime minister?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Trounce’s eyes moved from Jessica Cornish to Swinburne to Burton.

The queen stepped closer to Sadhvi Raghavendra, instinctively seeking the support of her own gender. Raghavendra smiled at her, laid a hand gently on her upper arm, and said to Trounce, “She’s innocent, William. A victim. It’s plain to see.”

The queen nodded. There was an almost childish pleading in her eyes, helplessness.

Burton asked, “This prime minster, when was he elected?”

“He never was.”

“I mean, when did he assume his position?”

The queen leaned closer to Raghavendra. “Um. Forty years ago, I think.”

“2162?”

“Yes.”

“The year the original Edward Oxford was born,” Burton mused.

“He’ll be angry,” the queen said. “You shouldn’t be here. When they finish with that poor man, he’ll come looking.”

“Who are they?” Burton asked. “And what man?”

“The ministers. The traitor.”

“I don’t understand you.”

She put her hands over her face and emitted a quavering moan. “Oh. Oh. They are terrible. Terrible! Their entertainments. So cruel. Torture!”

Trounce reached out and gripped her wrist, not gently. “They have a captive?” he rasped. “What are they doing to him? Tell me!”

“Steady,” Burton murmured.

Recoiling from Trounce, the queen said, “He blew up the American Embassy.”

“Father!” Swinburne croaked.

“They injected him with nanomechs. The machines are eating him from the inside.”

“And they call it entertainment?” Trounce snarled. “By God! Where?”

“In the House of Lords. Five floors down.”

Trounce’s eyes blazed. Jessica Cornish moaned. “I have to go. I shouldn’t be talking to you. I’ll be punished. Let me go. Let me go.”

“It’s all right,” Raghavendra said soothingly. “We’re here to help you, Jessica. Will you trust us? Perhaps we can give you your freedom.”

“He won’t let you. He’ll kill you all. He’ll punish me for speaking with you. You don’t understand. The prime minister is dangerous. Very dangerous.”

“Miss Cornish,” Swinburne said. “What happens here tonight will be the culmination of events that date all the way back to 1837. No danger will dissuade us from doing what must be done.”

Burton turned to speak to Trounce but stopped when he saw his friend’s eyes. The former detective appeared to be almost paralysed by anger, as if he could think only of charging down the stairs with his pistol blazing, yet knew this would be a fatal error. He stood battling with himself, trembling with fury, his mouth opening and closing.

Since being reunited with him, Burton had allowed Trounce to take the lead, conceding to his greater knowledge of this future world. Burton, though, was the commander of the mission, and he saw that he must now reassert himself in that position.

“Sadhvi,” he said, “Miss Cornish will feel undoubtedly more comfortable with you. Take her across to the pump room and wait for us there. We’ll either join you or send for you when our business is done. If neither of those happens and you judge that you’ve waited long enough, make your way back, with our guest, to the Orpheus. In the meantime, describe to her who we are and why we are here.”

The queen moaned and shook her head. “They’ll send equerries to search for me.”

“We’ll take care of that. Sadhvi, go.”

Swinburne added, “Cross the roof as rapidly as possible. Remember, the queen has no adapted nanomechs in her system. Miss Cornish, you’ll experience considerable discomfort outside. It’s extremely cold and the air is thin. Have courage. You’ll only have to traverse a short distance.”

With a brusque nod of acknowledgment, Raghavendra pulled the queen away through the foliage and toward the door to the palace roof.

Swinburne put his finger to his ear and muttered instructions to Lorena Brabrooke. Sadhvi Raghavendra, at least, would be protected out there.

“It’ll be a while before we can speak with Lorena again,” he told them when he’d finished. “She’s now setting out to disrupt all the palace’s internal communications. Our BioProcs won’t escape the effects.”

Burton raised his pistol. “We four shall stay together. The Turing Fulcrum may have been using the faux queen as its public mouthpiece, but apparently a prime minister is providing a rather more assertive one, too. We need to get at him. First, though, let’s rescue Tom Bendyshe.”

Trounce growled, “And if anyone stands in our way, by God, I’ll kill them.”

Burton, Swinburne, Trounce and Wells quietly descended from the rooftop greenhouse to Buckingham Palace’s uppermost storey. The staircase, being more of a service route than a feature of the palace’s opulent interior, did not go down any farther. In order to reach the next floors, they needed to find the grand central stairwell. There were lifts, of course, but these were more often used by the palace’s inhabitants and thus presented the chrononauts with a greater danger of discovery and entrapment.

Trounce and Swinburne both recalled from the architectural plans that the main staircase ran through the middle of the building and was located somewhere to their left. It was more for show than function, so they hoped to use it without being detected.

They moved out of the shadows at the end of the stairs and along a corridor, past the entrance to an elevator, and on to a junction with a much larger and more elegantly decorated passageway. There was a purple carpet running along its floor, its walls bore countless portraits—all of Jessica Cornish—and crystal chandeliers hung from its ceiling every twenty feet along its length. Doors gave way to rooms on either side. Narrow, baroquely carved sideboards stood between them, holding vases of red flowers, small statuettes and framed pictures, all of the queen.

Burton put his head around the corner and looked to the right. Far away, the hallway ended at double doors. He looked to the left. A white stilted figure was striding toward him.

“Stay where you are!” it shouted. “You are not recognised. Your presence is unauthorised.”

“Damn!” Burton cursed. “We’re discovered.”

Swinburne stepped past him and raised his Penniforth Mark II.

“Head. Kill.”

The pistol spat—ptooff!—and the stilted figure fell to the floor. They ran to it, and Burton saw a round hole exactly between where its eyes would be had it a human face. He stepped to a door and, holding his own weapon ready, opened it, revealing an unoccupied bedchamber.

“Drag it in here, we’ll hide it under the bed.”

While this was being done, he asked, “So constables patrol the palace, William?”

“This isn’t a constable,” Trounce responded. “It’s an equerry, one of her majesty’s personal attendants. Basically, it’s exactly the same thing but with a different title. As you can see, it’s identical to the creatures that started appearing in London back in 1860. Fortunately, they don’t carry truncheons, which makes it a little easier for us.”

“Who, besides the queen, lives here?”

“All the ministers of the government and their lackeys. The higher echelons of the Uppers. Also, I presume, our mysterious prime minister, whomever he might be.”

They closed the bedroom door and continued on along the hallway. It ended at another junction. Burton whipped around the corner, facing to the right, gun raised. Trounce did the same, facing left.

“Head! Kill!” they chorused.

Ptooff! Ptooff!

Wells helped Burton to retrieve his victim while Swinburne assisted Trounce. They hoisted the equerries back to the junction and barged into what proved to be another sleeping chamber. A man, on the bed, sat up. He was bald-headed, attired in bright-pink pyjamas, and so morbidly obese that he resembled a gigantic wobbling blancmange. In a bizarrely singsong voice, he warbled, “Hey there! What’s this all about, then?”

Swinburne pointed his pistol. “Stun.”

Outspreading ripples marked the point of impact. The man looked down at his stomach. “Ouch! That hurt! How dare you!”

His eyes rolled up into his head, and he plopped backward onto his pillows.

The chrononauts discovered that the mattress, straining beneath its occupant’s weight, was too close to the floor to provide a hiding space, so instead shoved the two equerries into a wardrobe.

“For how long will Mr. Humpty Dumpty remain unconscious?” Wells enquired.

“Long enough,” Swinburne replied. “I expect he’ll be famished when he wakes up.”

They returned to the junction. Halfway along the left-hand branch, they saw the head of the main stairwell and ran toward it, their feet padding on the soft, luxurious carpet.

They jerked to a stop at the top of the steps, weapons directed downward, but no one was ascending.

Faintly, from far below, an incoherent shout echoed, whether one of anger or merriment, pleasure or pain, they couldn’t discern.

Treading carefully, they went down, passing polished suits of armour standing on display to either side of every tenth step, gauntlets clasped around the grips of broadswords, the blades’ tips resting between pointed sollerets.

A Grecian-style statue dominated the landing of the next floor. It portrayed Jessica Cornish, naked but for flowing material around her hips and a laurel wreath on her head.

As they rounded to the next flight, two female voices floated up to them.

“Why, my dear Baroness, I feel thoroughly wearied to the bone.”

“Of course you do, my lady. It is exceedingly late. I, too, must take to my bed. This whole business has quite exhausted me. I’m certain I’ll lie awake fretting over it.”

“Nonsense! You’re being far too theatrical. It will blow over. It’s merely a hiccup of some sort.”

“Hiccup? How can a hiccup so thoroughly detach the government from its people? Do you not perceive the seriousness of our position? The palace is utterly cut off, dear thing. Utterly! Worse still, we’ve lost all control over the commoners. The implications are frightful.”

“You suggest they might break the law, Baroness?”

“No. I suggest they might indulge in unfettered breeding.”

“Heaven forbid! Now I shall have nightmares.”

Burton said, “Good evening, ladies.”

The two Uppers stopped in their tracks and looked at him. He saw them register, with mutual gasps of consternation, the pistol he was brandishing at them. Their eyes flickered as they took in Swinburne, Trounce and Wells, all standing at his back.

“If you attempt to call for help, I’ll shoot you,” he said.

Both women were exceedingly skinny—almost emaciated—and possessed of protruding joints and absurdly large breasts. Their faces were painted so heavily they resembled masks, and they had ridiculously tall and extravagant wigs balanced precariously on their heads. The pair wore gowns of a vaguely Elizabethan design.

“Who on earth are you?” the one on the left asked.

“My name is Burton. And you are?”

“I am the Baroness Hume of Goldaming, heiress to the sugar beet estates of Sir Jacquard Hume, the Marquis of Norwich and the Norfolk Broads. My companion is Lady Felicity Pye of the Brick Lane Pyes, wife of Earl John Pye, overseer of Bethnal Green Road and chairman of the Pye and Keating Corporation. Burton, you say? What more? Your title, if you please.”

“I am Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Knight of the Order of St Michael and St George, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.”

“Oh my dear thing!” Lady Felicity Pye cried out. “Why didn’t you say so? Can we be of some assistance?”

“You could tell me how to find the House of Lords.”

“You don’t know? How marvellously extraordinary! Why, you must go down another three flights, turn right, go all the way to the end of the hallway, right again, and it’s straight ahead. The entertainment is already under way, so you’d better hurry up.”

“Forgive me for asking,” Baroness Hume said, “but is that a gun? Why are you pointing it at us?”

“To assure you both of a thoroughly good night’s sleep.”

“Oh, how perfectly terrific!”

“Would you both sit down, please?”

“Sit down? On the stairs? Is it a game?”

“It is.”

“Hooray!”

The women sat and clapped their hands eagerly.

Burton said, “Stun both.”

Ptooff! Ptooff!

“Take one of them over your shoulder, William. Algy, Bertie, you carry the other. I’ll find a room in which to deposit them.”

While his companions took up the two limp ladies, Burton stepped down into a vestibule from which three corridors extended. In the one to his right, two equerries were walking, heading away. They turned a corner and vanished from sight, not having spotted him.

Turning back, he gestured for his friends to follow, moved to the left, and opened a door. On the other side of it, in a room filled with what looked to be shelves of bottled cleaning fluids, an equerry stood facing him, a heavy metal case—perhaps a toolbox—in its right hand.

“You are not—” it began.

The king’s agent whipped up his pistol, saw the red dot on the creature’s face, and pulled the trigger.

The creature’s head snapped back, and its knees buckled. The case fell from its grip and hit the ground with an almighty crash. Tottering backward, the equerry fell into shelves and slid to the floor, taking bottles with it. They smashed and clattered noisily around it.

“Damnation,” Burton hissed.

“That,” Swinburne commented, “was an unholy racket.”

Wells, who was holding Lady Felicity Pye’s ankles, dropped them and announced, “We have company.”

Burton turned. The two Spring Heeled Jacks he’d seen a moment ago were returning, bounding along the corridor. Wells and Trounce shot them down.

“There’s more!” Trounce said. He lowered Baroness Hume to the floor and, kneeling, raised his pistol and started shooting.

“By Allah’s beard!” Burton cursed, as he saw equerries appearing in all three corridors, rounding corners and stepping from rooms. “There’s a lot of them! Back to the stairs, quickly.”

Leaving the two Uppers where they were lying, the chrononauts raced to the landing.

“Intruders! Intruders! Intruders!” the equerries shouted.

“Head, kill,” the men responded. “Head, kill. Head, kill.”

Ptooff! Ptooff! Ptooff!

One after the other, the spring heeled creatures went down.

With his companions at his back, Burton sprinted down the stairs to the next floor, where, before he saw it, an equerry pounced on him and bore him to the carpet.

“Off him! Off him!” Swinburne shrieked. He kicked the side of the creature’s head and, as its chin jerked around, pressed his pistol to where an ear should have been and pulled the trigger. Plastic, bone and pig brains splattered outward.

Burton heaved the corpse to one side and regained his feet in time to kill another of the stilt men before it managed to grab Wells.

“I have the distinct impression,” Swinburne said, “that our presence is no longer a secret.”

Their destination was one flight of stairs away, but the steps were fast crowding with equerries, all yelling, “Intruders! Intruders!”

“You may be right,” Burton said breathlessly.

Now there was no time even for the order Head! Kill! They simply pointed their weapons, fired into the mass of white figures, and forced their way forward.

“No!” Trounce yelled.

It was too late. Swinburne’s pistol gave a deep cough, and, with a deafening bang, equerries flew into pieces, those at the front being hurled forward onto the chrononauts.

Burton’s ears jangled. Pinned down by a struggling figure, he jammed the barrel of his Penniforth Mark II under its chin, averted his face, and fired. Its head exploded. He shoved the twitching carcass to one side and raised his pistol to shoot another, which was looming over him, its cranium already half shorn off, blue fire playing about the horrible wound. Before he could pull the trigger, it knocked the pistol from his hand. The weapon went spinning away over the banister and clattered out of sight.

Burton drew up his knees and kicked out, his heels thumping into his opponent’s stomach. The equerry keeled over, already dead from the damage to its skull.

Struggling to his feet, half deaf, the king’s agent fell over prone bodies, pushed himself back up, and was suddenly gripped from behind, iron-hard arms closing around him, crushing his rib cage until he couldn’t draw breath.

His right ear popped as a voice, right beside it, said, “Your presence is unauthorised.”

Something cracked behind his head. The constricting arms fell away. He turned and saw an equerry dropping to the floor, a hole through its brain. Another was ploughing through the carnage towards him. It, too, went down.

“Splendid weapons, these!” Herbert Wells called.

For the briefest of moments, there came a lull in the fighting. The stairs around Burton were buried beneath limp stilt men, shattered pictures and fallen armour. The walls were scorch-marked, the bannisters broken.

“So much for stealth,” the king’s agent muttered.

From the hallway below, more equerries came hopping.

He reached down and pulled a broadsword from a collapsed suit, hefted it, and found it to be well balanced.

Swinburne, a couple of steps above him, grinned down. “Uh ho! Now they’re in trouble.”

“Stand well back,” Burton said. “And for pity’s sake, don’t fire another explosive.”

“Sorry. It was more powerful than I—”

The poet’s words were drowned out by cries of “Intruders!” as the Spring Heeled Jacks came vaulting up the stairs. Burton swung the sword up and behind his right shoulder then, timing it perfectly, swiped it forward horizontally, decapitating three stilted figures with the single stroke. With Swinburne, Trounce and Wells following, each of them firing shot after shot, he descended the last remaining stairs to the next landing.

Burton’s expertise with the blade astounded his fellows. Weaving a web of steel about himself, he sliced, blocked and stabbed with such speed the weapon became nothing but a blur. Like a scythe through wheat, it carved a path before him. He battled his way to the mouth of the right-hand hallway and—while those equerries that avoided him fell to his companions’ bullets—moved into it. Severed limbs fell and twitched. Heads bounced to the floor. Blue flame, spurting out of lacerations and stumps, arced around him, following his blade, and to Swinburne, the Romantic poet, it looked like his friend had been enclosed within a shield of light, as if the ancient gods had bestowed upon him magical protection.

A crowd of equerries was coming from behind now, descending from above. Despite the excessive results of Swinburne’s ill-considered grenade, Trounce now resorted to another, firing it above them so it landed at their backs. The ear-splitting detonation sent dismembered torsos, pieces of banister, segments of armour, and shredded carpet raining down. Burton was far enough into the hallway to be protected from the blast, but Trounce, Swinburne and Wells all went down beneath the falling bodies.

For a moment, Burton was fighting alone.

He slashed upward from his right hip, cleaving off an equerry’s face; barged into the creature and, as it collapsed, cut horizontally back to the right, chopping off another’s head; then brought the sword swinging up and downward into the skull of a third. Momentarily, the flow of his movement was interrupted as the weapon jammed in his victim’s hard plastic cranium. A stilted figure slapped its hands to either side of Burton’s face and started to twist, attempting to break his neck. “Unauthorised!” it yelled. A hole appeared in the middle of its blank face. The hands slipped free as the figure fell.

Suddenly, there was peace.

The king’s agent wrenched his blade free and stood panting. He saw Wells, on his knees, lowering his pistol.

“Much obliged, Bertie.”

“Pardon? I’m deaf as a stone.”

Swinburne emerged from beneath a quivering cadaver. “What did you say? I can’t hear you. My ears are full of bells.”

“Exploding bullets,” Trounce grumbled as he pushed himself up. “Remind me to tell Penniforth to tone them down a little.”

“A tipple?” Swinburne responded. “I should think we’ve earned one!”

An equerry tumbled down from the shattered staircase above. It struggled to its feet. “Intruders!”

“At your service,” Trounce said. “Head. Kill.”

Climbing over the fallen, the three men joined Burton. The chrononauts were all bleeding from superficial wounds, all feeling the effects of their exertions, but also all intoxicated by the heat of battle.

Burton pointed along the corridor. Through ringing ears, the others heard him say, “To the end and turn right.”

Two equerries came leaping around the indicated corner. Swinburne and Wells shot them down.

The clamour in the chrononauts’ ears died away.

Swinburne, surveying the massacre, said, “I’m not sure we’ll find sufficient beds under which to conceal this lot.”

His friends gave barks of amusement.

They moved on, senses alert.

Twice, equerries appeared behind them and were instantly dispatched. After that, a silence fell upon the palace, bringing with it a threatening air of expectation.

The chrononauts moved forward, past closed doors and countless portraits and statuettes; Jessica Cornish repeated over and over.

Wells observed, “What a grand obsession. As a monument to a single woman, even the Taj Mahal can’t rival it.”

“The Taj Mahal speaks of a dedicated heart,” Swinburne said. “This of a magnificently sick mind.”

They reached the junction with the next hallway and turned right. Ahead, the passage dropped a level, and as they went down steps to the lower, they saw tall double doors ahead of them and heard muffled voices.

“The House of Lords,” Burton said.

“The plan?” Wells asked.

The king’s agent shrugged. “Barge in. Assess in an instant. Shoot if necessary. Rescue Tom Bendyshe. Identify the prime minister. Don’t kill him. Find out where the Turing Fulcrum is.”

“That,” Swinburne said, “is the best plan I’ve heard all day. What could possibly go wrong? We’ll be back on the jolly old Orpheus in time for breakfast.”

With his hands low, Burton raised the sword blade until it rested against his shoulder. “I’ll cut down anyone who jumps at us.” With a jerk of his chin, he indicated that Swinburne and Wells should prepare to thrust open the doors.

“It sounds like there’s a crowd in there,” Trounce said, as his fellows took hold of the gold-plated handles.

“No one with any sense would be up at this time of night,” Swinburne replied. “So they’re undoubtedly politicians. Ready?”

With his left fingers wrapped around the base of his right hand, Trounce raised his pistol, holding it poised to one side of his face. “I am.”

Burton said, “Go.”

The two smaller men threw their weight against the portal. The doors hinged inward. Burton and Trounce ran forward with Swinburne and Wells at their heels. The entrance swung shut behind them.

Their senses were assaulted.

For a moment, Burton could make nothing of the bedlam that surrounded them.

Piece by piece, it came together.

The sharp tang of ozone.

A babble of voices protesting, “Bah!” and “Boo!” and “Bad form!”

For a moment he thought himself in the midst of angry sheep.

A storm overhead. A big blue dome of crackling lightning, its jagged streaks snapping a concave course from the perimeter to the apex before streaming down into the top of a silhouetted bulk suspended in the centre; a black mass of indeterminate form.

Below the tempest, beneath Burton’s feet, a round stage-like expanse of tiled floor, unsteadily and dimly illuminated by the hissing and spitting energy. In the middle of it, an X-shaped frame to which Thomas Bendyshe was tethered, and encircling the area, row upon row of benches occupied by a braying crowd, the seats rising until they vanished into deep shadows that appeared to be immune to the strange blue illumination.

“By God!” Wells cried out. “What kind of arena is this?”

“Father!” Swinburne and Trounce yelled. They ran to Bendyshe.

A loud knocking caused Burton to spin, and he saw, on an ornate wooden chair over the door, a willowy and rather bird-like individual who was banging a gavel while shouting, “Order! Order!”

Uncertainly, the king’s agent moved to join his companions.

“Order! Order!”

The crowd quietened. A woman, three rows back, stood up. She was dressed in tight brocades, with fluffy epaulets extending from her shoulders and a conical hat upon her head.

The gavel-wielder bellowed, “Dame Pearl Marylebone, Minister for Amusements and Daily Gratifications.”

Raising her voice over the incessant sizzling from above, the woman said, “My Lord Speaker, may I, on behalf of the House, express dismay at this unwarranted intrusion and demand to know the identities of these—these—horrible ruffians!”

“Hear! Hear!” the crowd cheered.

The woman sat, a satisfied smile on her face.

Lord Speaker banged his wooden hammer again and blinked his large black eyes at the chrononauts. He pointed at Burton. “You, sir. Announce yourself.”

Burton stepped backward until he was beside Bendyshe. Without taking his eyes from the Lord Speaker, he said to the Cannibal, “Are you all right?”

After giving a nod and moistening his cracked lips with his tongue, the prisoner managed a slight smile. “Hello, Sir Richard. It’s good to see you again after all this time, though I—” He gasped and winced. “Though I regret that you find me in such a dire position. Be careful. They are all insane.”

“Sir!” the Lord Speaker insisted.

Burton raised his voice. “I am Sir Richard Francis Burton. My companions are Algernon Charles Swinburne, Detective Inspector William Trounce, and George Herbert Wells. I demand that you release this man.”

The gavel—Bang! Bang! Bang!—and, “You are in no position to make demands. You have no authority to be here. Which of the families do you represent? What corporation?”

“None and none,” Burton replied.

In a sarcastic tone, Lord Speaker said, “What are you then? Lowlies?”

The crowd laughed.

Swinburne took aim.

“Stun.”

Lord Speaker slumped.

“I’m sorry, Richard,” the poet said, “but he was being rather boorish and I thought it best we assert ourselves.”

“I say! Bad show!” a parliamentarian shouted.

“Aye!” another agreed. “Thoroughly unconventional!”

“Poor sportsmanship, I should say!” a third opined.

Above, the hemisphere of lightning turned a deeper shade of iridescent cobalt.

A man in the front row got to his feet. He was costumed as if participating in a commedia dell’arte. “My Lord Speaker appears to be resting, thus I will announce myself. I am Harold John Heck, the Duke of Deptford and Minister for Fashion, Jewellery and Accessories. Sir Richard, I demand that you explain yourself. Why have you interrupted parliamentary proceedings in such an irregular—and, frankly, thoroughly impolite—manner? You may address the House.”

Trounce and Swinburne set about untying the bonds that held their father by his wrists and ankles.

Burton put his sword point to the floor and rested both hands on the weapon’s pommel. He peered into the gloom at the edges of the circular chamber and tried to assess the size of the crowd. At least two hundred, he thought.

“We are here,” he called out, “to rescue this man and to locate a device known as the Turing Fulcrum.”

He saw little point in concealing the truth.

A woman in the front row jumped up. Burton vaguely recognised her but couldn’t think how. “Lady Dolores Paddington Station, the Minister of War, Death and Destruction. The man you refer to, and whom your companions are untethering with absolutely no leave to do so, is an enemy of the Empire. He has attacked us. We have been attempting to establish whether he represents the United Republics of Eurasia or the United States of America. Since you are obviously aligned with him—and are therefore an awfully rotten scoundrel—perhaps you’d care to answer the question. U.R.E. or U.S.A., sir?”

“We insist upon an answer,” someone yelled.

“Spill the beans!” another added.

“If we represent anyone,” Burton responded, “then it’s the majority. We represent the people. We represent what should be, but isn’t.”

“Nonsensical! You’re a bad liar, sir,” someone mocked.

“Surely you don’t refer to the inhabitants of the London Underground?” Lady Dolores exclaimed. “That would be absurd.”

Bendyshe slumped down into Trounce’s and Swinburne’s supporting arms. Struggling to raise his head, he shouted in a hoarse voice, “Neither Eurasia nor America are in any condition to attack, madam, and you bloody well know it.”

“Mind your language, sir. And you are quite wrong. Those empires despise us. They are jealous of our advanced civilisation. We have this information directly from the prime minister. Don’t you think we’re rather more likely to believe him than we are a—a—a commoner!” She spread her arms. “Parliamentarians! Plainly, we are in the presence of enemy agents. I call for the death sentence. We must do them in. Slice their necks.”

“Bravo!” someone cheered. “Hanging! Firing squad! Acid bath!”

“Could we construct an electric chair?” another shouted.

“Poison injection!”

“More of the carnivorous nanomachines! They are simply delightful!”

The crowd yelled its approval. “Huzzah! Carnivorous nanomachines! Huzzah! Huzzah!” They clapped their hands and stamped their feet.

Another women—her body and face almost entirely concealed beneath feathery garments—jumped up and cried out, “I object! I object! Let us not be impetuous!”

The hubbub subsided.

She continued, “I am Gladys Tweedy, the Marquess of Hammersmith, Minister of Language Revivification and Purification. Lady Dolores, whilst your indignation is justified, you appear to have overlooked the fact that this man claims a title. Sir Richard. If he is, indeed, a knight of the realm, then we must extend to him a modicum of courtesy. We must hear him out.”

Despite a scornful bray of “Liberal!” a number of voices were raised in agreement.

“It’s the done thing,” someone observed. “Though I must confess, I’ve never heard of the fellow.”

A man, wearing a velvet cape and tricorn hat, stood and said, “I am Lord Robert Forest Beresford of Waterford, Minister for Executions, Suppression and Random Punishments. I would hear a full and detailed statement.”

The crowd hooted its support.

“A contrary bunch of nutters, aren’t they?” Swinburne muttered.

Lord Robert said, “You and your fellows have the floor, Sir Richard. Tell us in full why you consider it desirable to release this man—” he indicated Bendyshe, “who has wreaked such terrible havoc in the Empire’s capital. Tell us what this—what did you call it? A Turning Fool? Whatever it is, tell us about it, and why you require it, and why you think we possess it, and what you intend to do with it. Speak!”

“Make it eloquent and compelling, if you please,” another parliamentarian drawled. “I’m weary and my attention is wandering.”

A ripple of laughter.

Lord Robert waved Burton forward, indicating that he should address the audience.

The king’s agent hesitated, irresolute, and turned to his colleagues. “What can I possibly say to these people? They’re like children.”

Herbert Wells said, “May I?”

“Be my guest. Keep them occupied, Bertie. I need time to think.”

“Your representative?” Lord Robert demanded, as Wells stepped forward.

“Yes,” Burton answered. “Mr. Herbert Wells.”

“Then the stage is yours, Mr. Wells.”

The Cannibal cleared his throat. In his thin reedy voice, raised above the fizzling from overhead, he said, “I ask you to consider a preliminary proposition before I answer the questions you have asked. Though you set yourselves apart, though you inhabit these high towers while the rest are teeming below, you are human, all of you. You are human. So it is, you are subject to the wants of our species. You seek to satisfy your hunger. You desire shelter and warmth and good health. You want your families to prosper. No doubt, you also seek the satisfaction of knowing that you have contributed something to the world; that your existence will not pass without notice or any effect.”

Someone shouted, “Dreary! Get on with it!”

“Order! Order!” another countered.

Burton moved to Swinburne, Trounce and Bendyshe. “What’s going on here, Tom?”

“They were about to approve the invasion of the rival empires when I was dragged in. My torture has delayed mobilisation.” He managed a weak grin. “At least I know the pain was useful for something.”

“Are you holding up?”

“It comes in waves. I’m all right for the moment, but the nanomechs will start on me again in a short while.”

Wells was saying, “Surely, out of this commonality, it is possible for you to find in yourselves an affinity for your fellow man? I urge you, discover your mercy. Embrace compassion. Ask what there is to admire in a world where the majority are suppressed and monitored and designedly distracted by falsehoods; where a few maintain their privileged position by deceiving the rest, by sucking at them like leeches, by looking down upon them as little better than animals, by jealously guarding their own interests at the expense of the majority. Where is your honour?” He threw up his arms. “Great heavens! My contemporaries had such high hopes for the future! We envisioned a world in which all men and women were equal; where every person would reap the rewards of their efforts and willingly make contributions toward the betterment of all. Can you people not see that the only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other? Can you not understand that, by such a measure, you have failed utterly and miserably? I beseech you; destroy these terrible divisions you’ve created!”

As a body, the audience burst into raucous laughter.

“Please!” Wells pleaded. “Listen to me!”

Burton stepped forward. “Bertie—”

A deafening roar interrupted him. A ball of ferocious white flame blazed from the black hulk suspended above them. Bullets ripped down and thudded into Wells, shredding his clothes and flesh, crushing him to the floor and smashing the tiles around him.

The fire guttered and vanished. The roar slowed to a rapid metallic clattering then stopped.

Shiny blood oozed outward from the Cannibal’s tattered corpse.

The king’s agent, numb with the shock of it, watched as the life faded from Wells’s disbelieving eyes.

The ministers’ laughter gave way to enthusiastic applause.

Burton looked up and saw two pinpricks of red light in the bulky silhouette. Slowly, the shape descended. He heard Swinburne, Trounce and Bendyshe yelling but he couldn’t process their words.

He saw the gleam of polished brass.

He saw thick legs and an armoured torso.

He saw five arms extended, Christ-like, and a sixth, to which a Gatling gun was bolted, still directed at Wells.

He saw that the red pinpricks were eyes.

He saw, floating down to the floor, with lines of energy cascading from the apex of the domed ceiling into his head, the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The House of Lords fell utterly silent as the brass man descended.

In familiar bell-like tones, he said, “The Anglo-Saxon Empire is mine. I will not have its Constitution challenged.”

His feet clunked onto the floor. He took a pace forward and looked down at Burton. The king’s agent felt his skin prickling, reacting to the ribbons of blue energy that were pouring from the ceiling into Brunel’s exposed babbage.

“Sir Richard Francis Burton,” the engineer said.

“Isambard?”

Ignoring the enquiry, Brunel cocked his head a little to one side. “So, despite my efforts to prevent it, you have followed me through time. That is unfortunate for you, for now the manner of your demise depends upon the answer to a single question.”

Burton took a step back and hefted his sword, eyeing the huge man-shaped mechanism, observing the gaps between its brass plates, wondering whether there was a part of it so vulnerable that a sword thrust could render the entirety inoperable.

“I shall tell you how I came to be,” Brunel intoned. “Then I shall ask and you will answer. If I am satisfied with your response, you will die quickly. If I am not, you will die very, very slowly.”

Burton remained silent.

“Know this, then, Burton: I have been born seven times, and through each birth this world was formed.”

“Bravo!” a minister shouted.

“My first birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February 1860. Three hundred and forty-two years ago.” With a quiet whir of gears and hiss of miniature pistons, Brunel closed his arms about himself. He lowered his face and regarded the floor. “No thought. No sensory stimulation. No knowledge of myself. What had its inception on that day was comprised of one thing and one thing only: fear.”

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.

He gazed into the glaring eyes.

“You were once a good man, a historian, philosopher, engineer, inventor, and genius. You wanted the human race to be the best it could be. The things you created were helping it to achieve a new kind of consciousness. In addition to such an incredible contribution to the welfare of all, you also had personal contentment. You were married to a woman named Jessica Cornish, and your first baby was just weeks away from birth. However, you became obsessed with a crime committed by a distant ancestor, an impulsive and irresponsible act that was forever recorded in history. That preoccupation was your route into madness and death and this dreadful rebirth.”

“What is my name?” Brunel repeated, so quietly that his voice was barely audible above the din of the chronostatic storm.

“It is the same as your ancestor’s. It is Edward Oxford.”

The air screamed around them. Time suits hurtled past, spinning ever faster, energy tearing from one to the next, flooding down into the motionless brass man.

For a minute, he didn’t speak, didn’t react, then his fingers eased from Burton’s neck, his hand fell away from the sword, and he softly clanged, “Edward Oxford?”

He stepped back.

“Edward Oxford?”

He raised his hands to his face.

“Edward Oxford?”

He threw his head back and shrieked, “Edward Oxford!”

Toppling backward, the massive figure hit the floor, arched its back, and started to thrash its limbs. In a voice like shearing metal, it screeched, “My neck! Don’t! Twisting! Don’t! Don’t! Please, don’t! I didn’t mean to hurt the girls. I made a mistake. I don’t care about myself anymore. I’m a discontinued man. But let me restore history. Restore! Restore! Back! Back in time for supper! Edward Oxford!”

Ribbons of lightning started to peel away from the suits, crackling out in random directions. Burton saw a bolt hit a woman in the front row of benches. In an instant, she shrank and rolled out of her clothes, a mewling infant.

The politicians erupted into panic. They stood and began to crowd the aisles, pushing and pulling at one another, babbling and gesticulating, stampeding down to the floor and across to the exit.

The king’s agent snapped into action. He yelled across to Trounce. “William, get Bendyshe out of here. This might be our only opportunity.”

Trounce hauled Bendyshe upright while gawping at the convulsing machine-man. “By Jove! What the blazes did you do to him?”

“Told him the truth. Go! Back the way we came. Once you’re clear, try to contact Lorena Brabrooke. She—”

“Yes! Yes!” Trounce gestured at Bendyshe. “She might be able to disable the nanomechs.”

“I’m all right,” Bendyshe moaned. He plainly wasn’t.

Trounce dragged him toward the door. Swinburne moved as if to follow, dithered, then stepped back, closer to Burton. He shouted, “Save him, William.”

Trounce gave a determined nod.

“My neck! My neck!” Oxford yelled. “In cold blood!”

“What’s got into him?” Swinburne asked, looking down at the flailing body.

“Oxford has,” Burton answered.

Floor tiles shattered beneath Oxford’s drumming fists, elbows and heels. He bucked and writhed; hollered incoherently. Burton stepped closer to him, raised his sword, and looked for a viable insertion point.

Swinburne waved him back. “Out of the way. A grenade will do a better job of it.”

Burton jerked his head in confirmation, but before he could move, the sword was yanked from his hand and thrown aside. Overbalanced, the king’s agent fell forward and six arms clamped tightly around him.

Oxford rose, lifting Burton with him.

Swinburne backed away, aiming his pistol, unable to shoot without killing his friend.

“I am Oxford! Edward Oxford! How does it feel to change history? I haven’t changed history. History is the past.” Oxford laughed—or sobbed—a discordant jangling of bells.

“Remember!” Burton cried out. “Remember who you used to be. Remember the world you came from, the original 2202.” He struggled to free himself, but his efforts caused Oxford to tighten his grip. With his ribs creaking under the pressure, Burton gasped out, “Can’t you see how you’ve distorted everything? You sent history careening off-course. You broke the mechanism of time, and now you’ve created a future that’s nothing but a grotesque mockery of the past.”

“Maybe, maybe,” Oxford clanged. His arms relaxed slightly. Burton sucked in a breath. Quietly, in his ear, he heard his captor whisper, “The problem, Burton, is that although the future might not be what it used to be, I like it the way it is.”

In front of them, Sir Robert Forest Beresford entered, pushing through the last of the fleeing politicians. He skidded to a halt, ducked down and gaped at the spinning time suits.

Oxford levelled his Gatling gun and demanded, “Where is the queen?”

“He threatened to kill me!” Beresford shouted. He squealed in fear as a ribbon of energy snapped into the floor beside him. “That man—Trounce, was it?—I met him in the corridor. There are dead equerries everywhere. He threatened to kill me unless I let him pass.”

“Stop yammering, idiot. The queen?”

“Gone. They’ve taken her.”

Oxford bellowed a deafening cry of rage. The barrels of his Gatling gun whirled and spat flame. Beresford was thrown back into the doors and out into the corridor, leaving a smear of blood on the tiles.

Burton looked down at himself and saw a red dot of light crawling over his torso, passing over Oxford’s brass plating—Swinburne, circling, trying to find a target, knowing only an exploding bullet would have any effect, knowing it would kill Burton, too.

The crushing arms closed like a vice. Fingers dug into the flesh of Burton’s limbs, turning him until he faced Brunel’s dispassionate mask.

“I’ll break you,” Oxford said.

The king’s agent screamed in agony as his right arm was forced back and his elbow snapped with an audible crunch.

“Where is she?” Oxford demanded. “What have you done with her?”

Blinded by the pain, Burton hissed, “She’s—she’s safe. Gone. You’ll never see her again, you insane bastard.”

Oxford emitted a clangour of rage. He dropped to one knee and forced his captive backward over his thigh, bending Burton’s spine to its limit. The torment was beyond anything the king’s agent had ever experienced. It obliterated every other sense.

White.

Excruciating white.

A transcendental anguish.

From far away, a voice: “You object to the history I’ve created? Let’s see how you feel about your history. Let’s see what it would have been had I changed nothing.”

He slammed a hand into Burton’s face and closed his fingers hard. Cheekbones fractured, the jaw dislocated, teeth broke. Blue fire erupted from Oxford’s digits and drilled into Burton’s skull.

White. White. White.

Fragmentation.

Pain.

Decisions unmade.

Pain.

Successes and failures dismantled.

Pain.

Characteristics disengaged.

Pain.

Cohesion lost.

Pain.

Something of Burton observed and wailed and grieved as it watched itself forcibly shredded into ever-smaller components.

Reconstitution.

Pain.

Boulogne seafront emerged from unendurable torment. Two young women came walking and giggling along it, arm in arm, moving toward him. He recognised the scene at once. This was the moment he’d first met Isabel Arundell and her sister, Blanche.

He tried to call out to them but had no control over himself. His body did what it had done that day back in the summer of 1851. It even thought the same thoughts. He was nothing but a passenger.

As they passed him, Isabel—tall and golden-haired—glanced over. Burton felt a thrill run through him. He gave a small smile. She blushed and looked away.

He walked to a wall, took a stub of chalk from his pocket, and wrote upon the brickwork, May I speak to you?

He waited for her to look back and, when she did, tapped his fingers on the message before strolling away along the promenade.

The whiteness returned.

My back is breaking. My back is breaking.

Suddenly it was the next day, and beneath his words, others had been added. No. Mother will be angry.

Time always finds a way.

Instances of overwhelming suffering separated disjointed scenes as Burton encountered Isabel again and again among Boulogne’s socialites. Then she was suddenly left behind, and he was no longer Richard Francis Burton. He was Abdullah, a darwaysh, embarking on a gruelling hajj to Mecca. A whole year as another man, subsumed into a character so convincing that it fooled even the pilgrims who travelled at his side.

The master of disguise felt the hot shamal blowing on his face. The desert stretched from horizon to horizon. Space. Freedom. He looked down at the sand and saw a scarab beetle rolling a ball of dung.

The beetle. That is the answer to it all. Life creates reality and rotates it through cycle after cycle.

He turned his sun-baked face to the sky and was blinded by its white glare.

White.

What is happening to me? Why am I back in Arabia?

He blinked his watering eyes and saw the low hills of Berbera, on the coast of Africa, east of forbidden Harar.

The Royal Geographical Society had given him its backing. He’d organised an expedition, recruiting William Stroyan of the Indian Navy, Lieutenant George Herne of the 1st Bombay European Regiment of Fusiliers, and Lieutenant John Hanning Speke of the 46th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry.

The mania for discovery was upon him.

All that is hidden, I shall expose.

They’d landed at Berbera and set up camp.

They were attacked.

Burton watched and waited for Speke to die.

“Arm to defend the camp!” he yelled, as tribesmen descended upon them.

Spears flew. Scimitars slashed. Men screamed.

He looked over his shoulder just as Speke, emerging from a tent, was hit in the knee by a thrown rock. The lieutenant flinched. Burton heard himself shout, “Don’t step back! They’ll think that we’re retiring!”

This is the moment Speke propels himself in front of Stroyan and takes a spear to the heart. The moment he dies a hero’s death.

It didn’t happen.

Confused, he realised that Stroyan was on the ground behind the tents, dead.

No! It was Speke! It was Speke! He died just before—

A javelin slid through one side of his face and out the other, splitting his pallet and knocking out three of his molars. Suffering enveloped him. He felt his back breaking, his skin burning, his skull cracking.

Pain.

He had no idea why, but he thought, I’ll not be stopped.

The Crimean War. He was there, but it was over before he saw any action. Disappointed, he sailed for London and upon arrival mingled with men of influence: Sir Roderick Murchison, Francis Galton—but Galton is a madman!—Laurence Oliphant—Murderer! Stroyan didn’t die in Africa. You killed him, Oliphant! You!

Nothing felt right.

He met Isabel again. Secretly, they got engaged. Almost immediately, he left her and, with John Speke, set sail for Africa.

No! I flew to Africa aboard the Orpheus. Stroyan, Herne, Sadhvi and I discovered the source of the Nile. Speke is dead. Speke is dead.

He felt terror. He didn’t want to see this Burton’s life. He could sense horror lurking at its end.

He was helpless, forced along an unfamiliar path, spending two exhausting, disease-ridden years with a man who, increasingly, came to resent him.

“Don’t step back! They’ll think that we’re retiring!”

Those words, taken by Speke as a slight, as an accusation of cowardice, fuelled a seething hatred.

The two explorers located and mapped Lake Tanganyika. Burton was immobilised by fever. Speke left him and discovered another lake—one so large it might almost be considered an inland sea. Upon his return, he claimed it to be, for certain, the source of the Nile.

“Show me your evidence,” Burton said.

Speke had none.

Their relationship broke down. During the return journey to Zanzibar, barely a word was exchanged between them. Speke departed immediately for London. En route, he was persuaded by Oliphant to claim full credit for the expedition’s achievements. Burton, after recovering from malaria, followed, only to find himself sidelined.

He turned to Isabel for comfort.

Her parents forbid their marriage. Burton was neither Catholic nor respectable.

Everything was going wrong.

It is wrong! It didn’t happen this way!

Bitterly disappointed, angry and depressed, he embarked on a drunken tour of America with his friend John Steinhaueser. He lost track of himself; hardly knew who he was anymore. Ever since the fevers of Africa, he’d felt himself divided, two Burtons, forever disagreeing.

Burton the observer and Burton the observed.

Burton the living and Burton the dying.

No! No! Allah! Allah! He’s killing me! Oxford is breaking my back!

To hell with it.

Defiance.

He and Isabel eloped.

He prepared a devastating critique of John Speke’s claims.

Torture. His nerves afire, his vertebrae cracking, and Oxford’s clanging voice like the chimes of passing time, the tolling bell of implacable history, of relentless fate: “Thou shalt be reduced by flame to nothing.”

Burton watched as Grindlays Warehouse, where he stored his every memento, his every page of research, his journals and his notes, was consumed by fire. He was forty years old, and every recorded moment of his life prior to his marriage was turned to ash.

Now he had nothing but Isabel.

They were separated. He was made consul of Fernando Po, a tiny island off the west coast of Africa, and couldn’t take her with him. He spent the first year of his marriage alone.

I’m going to die.

It was a white man’s graveyard. No European could survive its rancid atmosphere, its infested water, or its torpid humidity. No European but Burton.

A further setback. In accepting the post, he’d inadvertently resigned from the Army and lost his pension.

Loss, loss, nothing but loss.

Anger. Isolation. Despair.

During his forays into the hotly dripping jungles of the mainland, he lashed out at everything he perceived as rotten and despicable in the human race. He railed at the natives, but really it was his own people who disgusted and disappointed him.

He returned to London, to Isabel, and to a final showdown with Speke.

Speke killed himself the day before the confrontation. Victory denied. Justice denied. Absolution denied. Satisfaction denied.

Is this how I die? Being dismantled piece by piece? Save me! Oh God, save me!

He was given the consulship at Santos, Brazil. Isabel joined him there. He could find no more mysteries to solve or secrets to penetrate, so wandered aimlessly, prospecting for gold, as if searching for something to value.

Patiently, Isabel waited.

A new post. Damascus. Allah be praised! How they both loved Damascus!

However, misjudgements, plots, accusations and threats soon soured their taste for the city and blackened even further Burton’s already bad reputation. He was recalled by the government and given, instead, the consulship of Trieste. It sidelined him, kept him out of the way, and in effect castrated him.

Bad health slowed him down. He threw himself into his writing, became ever more dependent on Isabel, and finally realised the depth of his love for her. They did everything together.

At last, she had him.

He found a new way to expose the hidden. He translated the forbidden: the Ananga Ranga; The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana; The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui; and, his triumph, an unexpurgated edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The books shocked his contemporaries with their explicitness but brought him further fame, notoriety, and finally, a grudging respect.

He was awarded a knighthood.

I’m already knighted.

He was content.

He wrote and wrote, and with every word he inscribed, he felt himself age, as if the ink that flowed from his pen was vitality draining from his body. His legs weakened. His hips hurt. His skin grew grey and wrinkled. His teeth fell out. His eyesight began to fail. His hair whitened. His heart struggled. His back creaked as the bones of his spine crumbled.

He began work on The Scented Garden, a book he hoped would shake the constrained and stifling morals of the British Empire to its roots; a book that would offer incontrovertible evidence that all cultures were an artifice that overlaid and suppressed the true nature of humanity.

It was his magnum opus.

At the age of sixty-nine, the day after finishing the manuscript, his heart failed. He cried out to Isabel, “Chloroform—ether—or I am a dead man!” The tinkle of camel bells filled his ears. The white sky of the desert spread over him like a shroud.

No! No! I cannot die! I cannot die!

White. White.

“Bismillah!” he shrieked. “Please! It’s all wrong! All wrong!”

Oxford’s metal hands were unremitting, the pressure on Burton’s spine tremendous, the pain far beyond the explorer’s comprehension. Chronostatic energy burned through his skull.

Now he was outside himself, watching as the remnants of his presence faded from existence like a dying echo.

Fire.

Grindlays Warehouse all over again, except this time it was Isabel, burning his every paper, his every journal, The Scented Garden.

The only thing he’d been proud to leave behind; the only thing that, after his demise, would have declared in uncompromising terms, “This is who I was. This is the essence of Sir Richard Francis Burton. By means of this, I will live through history.” That thing, Isabel turned to ash.

It was the ultimate betrayal.

No. No. No. Isabel! Why? Why?

He howled his anguish.

I cannot die! I cannot die!

Oxford’s insane laughter echoed through the domed chamber.

Swinburne screeched his terror.

Burton’s spine snapped.

Oxford stood, lifting the king’s agent like a limp rag doll, holding him face to face.

Through a fog of unutterable torment, through tunnelled vision, Burton saw himself reflected in Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s death mask. He saw that his hair was sparse and white, his fractured face was sagging and lined, his life force was spent. He had become a broken old man. Oxford had sucked the life history out of him.

With his five hands, Oxford turned him so that he hung before Swinburne. The brass man hugged Burton close to himself and stalked forward, his feet thumping on the tiled floor. With one hand, he pressed Burton’s head close to his own.

“See us together, little poet,” he chimed. “The one has made the other. Death has danced around us while we’ve duelled upon the battlefield of history. I am victorious. Death is Time’s tool, but I rule Time. I have snatched the scythe from his grisly hands. Now I apply its blade to your friend. Look upon my unchanging face and see beside it the decrepit features of he who was Burton. One gains all. The other loses everything.”

Swinburne moaned despairingly. With a shaking hand, he aimed his pistol. Tears flooded down his cheeks.

“Before I kill you,” Oxford said to him, “look into this old man’s eyes. Watch the life leave him. Know that what is lost can never return.” He crushed Burton’s broken cheek into his own, a grotesque mockery of affection. “But know, too, that I can revisit any moment of his short span and there torture him. The one life he has to live can be made ever more dreadful, in every history, until he shall scream without surcease from the moment of his birth to the moment of his demise.”

From the chest down, Burton was paralysed. Blood oozed from his face and stained his clothes.

Isabel. You betrayed me.

Weakly, he held out an aged, gnarled hand and examined in wonder its raised veins and transparent, liver-spotted skin. The targeting light from Swinburne’s pistol skittered across it.

Old. Dead. Forgotten.

He felt the cool of Oxford’s face upon his right cheek, the pressure of the brass man’s hand upon the left.

The world started to slip away.

With his last vestiges of life, Burton looked straight at Swinburne, dropped his hand to his chest, and placed his forefinger over his heart. He silently mouthed his final words. “The diamonds, Algy.”

The horror in Swinburne’s eyes gave way to puzzlement.

Oxford started to raise his Gatling gun.

The poet hesitated. He suddenly understood. A wail of anguish escaped him.

Burton winked.

Swinburne pointed the pistol at him and said, “Heart. Kill.”

An impact.

Sir Richard Francis Burton died.

Burton stepped out of his tent, straightened, stretched, and surveyed the distant horizon. It rippled and shimmered behind a curtain of heat. For a brief moment, the sea, which was many miles distant, eased into the clear sky. The mirage pulsed, folded into itself, and vanished.

Adjusting his burnoose, Burton knelt, reached into the tent, and pulled out a cloth bag. It contained cured meats, dried dates, and a flask of water. He sat cross-legged and broke his fast.

Movement caught his eye, a scarab beetle at the base of the tent’s canvas, pushing a ball of camel dung across the scorched sand.

The beetle as the motive force. The manipulator.

Time is not an independent equation. Time requires a mind to give it form.

There was work to be done.

Burton opened his eyes.

The House of Lords was wrecked, fire-blackened, smoking and empty except for Algernon Swinburne and Sadhvi Raghavendra. Standing some distance from him, they were both aiming their pistols straight at his head. The poet’s face was as white as a sheet.

Raghavendra said, “Two grenades will certainly destroy you.”

“I don’t doubt it, Sadhvi,” Burton replied. His voice sounded like tumbling bells.

He looked down at his hands, five of them and a stump. “But you have no need to shoot.”

His friends lowered their weapons and walked cautiously toward him.

“Richard?” Swinburne asked in a quavering voice.

“Yes. Thank you, Algy. My life may not have been saved, but I am, thanks to you, at least preserved.”

The poet stumbled, dropped his weapon, fell to his knees, put his face into his hands, and began to weep. Raghavendra stepped past him, gently patting his shoulder, and stopped in front of the king’s agent. She looked up at him, frowning. “It’s really you?”

Burton tried to offer an encouraging smile but found he had no muscles with which to do so. Ruefully, he reflected that such impulses had never in the past offered much comfort to anyone, anyway. People had always found his smiles rather too predatory.

“It is,” he said. He raised a hand—feeling disconcerted by his arm’s whirs and hisses—and tapped the side of his head. “It worked. My brain’s terminal emanation overwrote the electromagnetic fields in Brunel’s diamonds. Oxford was erased from them.”

“You took quite a gamble.”

“He was holding my head right next to his own. I had no other cards to play.” He examined the room. “I appear to have been oblivious for some time. How long?”

“About twelve hours,” she replied. “There was some sort of backlash from his—from your—babbage device. The chronostatic energy ignited the room. Everything in it—apart from you, of course—burned ferociously. The time suits are destroyed.”

“Resonance, I suppose. It started all this, now it has ended it.”

With visible reluctance, Raghavendra pointed to the floor on Burton’s right. He looked and saw what appeared to be a large and twisted stick of charcoal. Horrified, he recognised it as his own corpse.

“Your and Herbert’s bodies were cremated,” Raghavendra said. “There’s little chance of cloning, apparently.”

Burton acknowledged the revelation with a grunt that came out as a clink. He extended a metal foot and dragged a line through the ash. “The diamond fragments from the Nimtz generators and helmets must be among the ashes. We’ll have to collect them. Where are Trounce and Bendyshe?”

“William went some hours ago to find Mr. Grub, the vendor. Unless someone gives the Lowlies focus, riots are inevitable. We’re hoping Grub will spread the news that the prime minister and his cronies have been overthrown. Mr. Bendyshe, meanwhile, has taken Jessica Cornish to the Orpheus. Captain Lawless flew it here and landed in Green Park. We’ve all been waiting to assess your status.”

“My status?”

“We could see the Brunel body was still functioning by the glow of its eyes, but we didn’t know whether it was you or Oxford inside it.”

“Ah, I see. And Bendyshe is all right?”

“Lorena Brabrooke did something to the nanomechs in him. ‘Deactivated’ is the word, I believe. As for the rest of it, all the equerries and constables have stopped functioning and the palace’s inhabitants are wandering around like lost children.”

“Would you see if any of them knows where Brunel’s battery pack is, Sadhvi? It must be somewhere in the palace, and I feel I might require it soon.”

She nodded, glanced at Swinburne, and looked back at Burton. “I’ll organise a search party, if necessary. There’s a well-appointed lounge one hundred floors down, which we’ve chosen as our base of operations. I suggest you settle in there to recover from your ordeal.”

She smiled at him and left the chamber.

Burton clanked over to Swinburne. He felt disoriented and clumsy.

Isabel betrayed me.

He dismissed the thought. Time for that later.

I have all the time in the world.

With a hiss and ratcheting of gears, he squatted beside his friend, reached out, and prodded the poet’s arm. “Hallo there.”

Swinburne raised his wet face from his hands and smiled weakly. “What ho.”

“Quite a rum do, hey?”

“I suppose so. You sound awful. Ding dong, ding dong. I hardly know if it’s you or Brunel or Oxford. We shall have to make it Gooch’s top priority to fashion for you a more human-sounding vocal apparatus.”

“Thank you, Algy.”

“Don’t thank me, thank Daniel, he’s the one who’ll create it.”

“I mean for what you did.”

Swinburne suddenly giggled. “My pleasure, Richard. Any time you need shooting dead, don’t hesitate to ask.”

Burton whirred upright and held out a hand. Swinburne grasped it and got to his feet. He looked over to his friend’s still-smouldering corpse and emitted a groan. “By God, Oxford aged you thirty years in a matter of minutes. I saw you become an old man.”

“And I witnessed my life as it would have been had Oxford never altered history.”

“And?”

“Let us just say, it had a theme.”

Swinburne gave an inquisitive twitch of his eyebrows.

Burton ignored it and turned toward the doors. “I want to get out of this chamber, never to see it again. Lead me to the lounge, will you?”

They left the domed room, walked to the nearest lift, and entered it, a massive man of brass and cogs and pistons, and a diminutive red-haired poet.

“What a strange insanity,” Swinburne mused as they started down, “to create a future from a jumbled, misunderstood vision of the past.”

“Isn’t that what we all do?” Burton asked.

His companion had no answer to that, and for the rest of the descent they stood in thoughtful silence.

The lift stopped, and they passed from it into a vestibule, and from there the poet led his friend to the grand lounge, which was filled with couches, armchairs, bookcases, tables, cabinets, and statuettes of the erstwhile queen. The walls were hung with portraits, every one of them depicting Jessica Cornish.

Gladys Tweedy, the Marquess of Hammersmith, Minister of Language Revivification and Purification, was the room’s sole occupant. She stood as they entered.

“Prime Minister?” she asked doubtfully.

“Dead,” the king’s agent chimed. “I’m Burton.”

“Really? How thoroughly singular. You’re joking, of course.”

“No.”

Swinburne scampered over to a drinks cabinet and eagerly examined its contents.

“But you look and sound just like the prime minister,” Tweedy protested.

“I know. I’m not particularly thrilled about it. Marquess, what is the situation with regards to the mobilisation of our troops?”

“Our forces are awaiting orders from the Minister of War, Death and Destruction, who, might I remind you, recently experienced a violent demise. You will have to appoint a successor.”

“I’ll do no such thing. The war is cancelled.”

“Hurrah!” Swinburne cheered. “Hooray and yahoo!” He held up a bottle. “Vintage brandy!”

Burton said to the marquess, “Will you convey a message to your fellow ministers?”

“If you wish,” she answered. “Or to those that survived, anyway. Quite a few didn’t get out in time.”

“Tell them that Parliament is suspended and all ministers are relieved of their duties. The people will fashion a new form of government in due course.”

She widened her eyes and put a hand to her mouth. “What people?”

“You call them Lowlies.”

She laughed. “But they’re little more than animals!”

“Do as I say.”

Gladys Tweedy swallowed, stuck out her bottom lip, put her hands on her hips, and stamped out of the room, pushing past William Trounce as he entered.

“By Jove! She looks annoyed! Have you—” He saw Burton and quickly drew his pistol.

“Steady, Pouncer!” Swinburne shrilled. “It’s Richard.”

“Richard?” Uncertainly, Trounce lowered his gun. “You mean—it—he’s in—it worked? By Jove!”

“Why don’t you stop ‘by Joving’ and have a tipple?” the poet suggested. He poured three drinks, met his companions in the middle of the room, handed a glass to Trounce, and held another out to Burton. He blinked and said, “Oops! Oh crikey. You poor thing.”

A wave of grief hit the king’s agent.

I can’t taste. There’s no physical sensation. I’m dead.

He pushed the emotion aside: something else to be dealt with later.

“Oh well,” Swinburne muttered. He looked down at the drinks. “One for each hand.”

Burton noticed, at the other end of the chamber, French doors, and beyond them, a balcony. He strode over, followed by Swinburne and Trounce, and pulled them open. Their handles snapped off in his hands.

“Damn!” he exclaimed. “I have to familiarise myself with this body. It’s fiendishly strong.”

“By my Aunt Penelope’s plentiful petticoats!” Swinburne cried out. “Close the doors. It’s freezing.”

“In a moment,” Burton said. He stepped out onto the balcony, into twelve-inch-deep scarlet snow.

Swinburne gulped one of his brandies, ran to the side of the room, and tore a couple of tapestries down from the wall. He wrapped one around himself and handed the other to Trounce, who did likewise. They joined Burton. The air at this altitude was thin but breathable.

They looked out over London.

Under a clear afternoon sky, the city sprawled, blanketed in red.

“I was born here,” Trounce said. “But it doesn’t feel like home. I miss the hustle and bustle of the nineteenth century. I even miss the smells.”

“It’s all down there,” Burton noted. “Under the ground, waiting to be liberated.”

“Humph! It is, but that hustle and bustle isn’t my hustle and bustle.”

“I miss Verbena Lodge,” Swinburne said. “Twenty-third-century bordellos are absolutely hopeless. They have no understanding of the lash.”

Burton asked, “Will you both come back to 1860?”

The question was met by a prolonged silence.

The poet broke it. “I don’t know whether I can. I feel I have an obligation to fulfill.”

“Likewise,” Trounce said. “There’s much work to be done here, Richard. I fear I may never be reunited with my bowler or with Scotland Yard.” He paused. “You’ll go?”

“I have to. My brother will expect from me a full account of what has occurred here.”

“And after that, what? Will you masquerade as Brunel?”

“I hardly know one end of a spanner from another.” Burton leaned on the balcony’s parapet then suddenly remembered his great weight and stepped back, afraid that it might give way beneath him. “I require time to adapt to this body before I return. Once I’m there—well, I’ll see what happens.”

Swinburne bent and scooped up a handful of snow. He examined it. “The seeds are sending out roots. The jungle is obviously up to something. I wonder what?”

Burton’s neck buzzed as he turned his head to look down at his friend. “It’s you.”

“But I never know what I’m going to do next, even in human form.”

Burton snorted. It sounded like the clash of a cymbal. “I can’t imagine how it feels to know you’re a vegetable.”

“Probably not much different to the awareness that you’re an accumulation of cogwheels and springs. My hat, Richard! Animal, vegetable and mineral. What are we all becoming?”

Burton looked toward the tower-forested horizon.

“Time will tell, Algy. Time will tell.”

ISABEL ARUNDELL (1831–1896)

Isabel and Richard Francis Burton met in 1851 and, after a ten-year courtship, married in 1861. Marriage brought a change of fortune for Burton, seeing him more or less abandon exploration in favour of writing and the translating of forbidden literature of anthropological interest. Notoriously, upon his death in 1890, Isabel burned her husband’s papers, journals and unfinished work. She also consigned to the flames his translation of The Scented Garden, which he considered his magnum opus, and which he’d finished just the day before his demise.

ERNEST AUGUSTUS I (1771–1851)

Ernest Augustus I was the son of George III. When his niece, Victoria, became queen of the United Kingdom in 1837, Ernest was made king of Hanover, which ended the union between Britain and Hanover that had begun in 1714. Had Victoria been assassinated, Ernest would have been a prime candidate to replace her as the United Kingdom’s monarch. With rumours of murder and incest attached to Ernest’s name, this would not have been a popular choice.

CHARLES BABBAGE (1791–1871)

Mathematician, inventor, philosopher and engineer, Charles Babbage is considered the father of modern computers. He created steam-powered devices that were the first to demonstrate that calculations could be mechanised. However, his most complex creations, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, were not completed in his lifetime due to funding and personality problems. By 1860, he was becoming increasingly eccentric, obsessive and irascible, directing his ire in particular at street musicians, commoners, and children’s hoops.

BATTERSEA POWER STATION

The station was neither designed nor built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and did not exist during the Victorian Age. Actually comprised of two stations, it was first proposed in 1927 by the London Power Company. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (who created the iconic red telephone box) designed the building’s exterior. The first station was constructed between 1929 and 1933. The second station, a mirror image of the first, was built between 1953 and 1955. Considered a London landmark, both stations are still standing but are derelict.

JAMES BRUCE, EIGHTH EARL OF ELGIN (1811–1863)

Lord Elgin, orator, humanist, and administrator, was the British governor-general of Canada and later served diplomatic posts in China, Japan, and India. He did not say, “Talk, talk, talk, and while you are talking, the Chinese are exacting yet another tax, . . .”

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL (1806–1859)

The British Empire’s most celebrated civil and mechanical engineer, Brunel designed and built dockyards, railway systems, steamships, bridges and tunnels. A very heavy smoker, in 1859 he suffered a stroke and died, at just fifty-nine years old.

EDWARD JOSEPH BURTON (1824–1895)

Richard Francis Burton’s younger brother shared his wild youth but later settled into army life. Extremely handsome and a talented violinist, he became an enthusiastic hunter, which proved his undoing—in 1856, his killing of elephants so enraged Singhalese villagers that they beat him senseless. The following year, still not properly recovered, he fought valiantly during the Indian Mutiny but was so severely affected by sunstroke that he suffered a psychotic reaction. He never spoke again. For much of the remaining thirty-seven years of his life, he was a patient in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum.

THE CANNIBAL CLUB

In 1863, Burton and Dr. James Hunt established the Anthropological Society, through which to publish books concerning ethnological and anthropological matters. As an offshoot of the society, the Cannibal Club was a dining (and drinking) club for Burton and Hunt’s closest cohorts: Richard Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne, Henry Murray, Sir Edward Brabrooke, Thomas Bendyshe, and Charles Bradlaugh.

CAPTAIN SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (1821–1890)

1860 was one of the darkest periods of Burton’s life. Having returned the previous year from his expedition to locate the source of the Nile, he was engaged in a war of words with Lieutenant John Hanning Speke, who’d accompanied him during the gruelling trek through Africa. Though the expedition was Burton’s from the outset, and Speke was the junior officer, the lieutenant returned to London ahead of Burton and laid claim to having discovered the source independent of him. Feeling sidelined and badly betrayed by a man he’d considered a friend, Burton hoped to find some happiness through marriage to Isabel Arundell. Unfortunately, her parents forbade it. With everything going wrong, Burton escaped to America and embarked on an ill-recorded and extremely drunken tour.

MICK FARREN (1943–2013)

A singer-songwriter, music journalist and science fiction author, Farren fronted the proto-punk band the Deviants. During the late sixties, he was for a brief period at the helm of the underground newspaper International Times and also ran a magazine called Nasty Tales, which he successfully defended from an obscenity charge. His essay for the New Musical Express, entitled “The Titanic Sails at Dawn,” is considered a seminal analysis of the state of the music industry during the mid-seventies and a clarion call for the birth of punk rock. Farren continued to write novels, poetry and songs, and to perform with the Deviants, right up until his death onstage at the Borderline Club in London on July 27, 2013.

GEORGE V (GEORGE FREDERICK ALEXANDER CHARLES ERNEST AUGUSTUS) (1819–1878)

George V, the son of Ernest Augustus I, was the last king of Hanover. His reign ended with the unification of Germany.

SIR DANIEL GOOCH (1816–1889)

Daniel Gooch was a railway engineer who worked with such luminaries as Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was the first chief mechanical engineer of the Great Western Railway and was later its chairman. Gooch was also involved in the laying of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable and became the chairman of the Telegraph Construction Company. Later in life he was elected to office as a parliamentary minister. He was knighted in 1866.

THE GROSVENOR SQUARE RIOT OF 1968

On March 17, Grosvenor Square, London, was the scene of an anti–Vietnam War demonstration that quickly turned into a riot due to what many regarded as heavy-handed police tactics. It ended with eighty-six people injured and two hundred demonstrators arrested. Mick Farren was present.

RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES, 1ST BARON HOUGHTON (1809–1885)

Monckton Milnes was a poet, socialite, politician, patron of the arts, and collector of erotic and esoteric literature. He was also one of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s closest friends and supporters.

JOHN HANNING SPEKE (1827–1864)

An officer in the British Indian Army, Speke accompanied Burton first on his ill-fated expedition to Somalia, which ended when their camp was attacked at Berbera. Speke was captured and pierced through the arms, side and thighs by a spear before somehow managing to escape and run away. This expedition also marked the beginning of his deep resentment of Burton, caused by his misunderstanding of a command, which he took to be a derisory comment concerning his courage. When Speke accompanied Burton on his search for the source of the Nile from 1857 to 1859, their relationship quickly broke down. Speke then returned to London ahead of his commanding officer and sought to claim sole credit for the discovery. The two men fought a bitter war of words until 1864, when Speke shot himself while out hunting.

HERBERT SPENCER (1820–1903)

One of the most influential, accomplished, and misunderstood philosophers in British history, Herbert Spencer melded Darwinism with sociology. He originated the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which was then taken up by Darwin himself. It was also adopted, misinterpreted, and misused by a number of governments, who employed it to justify their eugenics programs, culminating in the Holocaust of the 1940s. Spencer, unfortunately, thus became associated with one of the darkest periods in modern history. Bizarrely, he is also credited with the invention of the paper clip.

SPRING HEELED JACK

Spring Heeled Jack is one of the great mysteries of the Victorian age (and beyond). This ghost or apparition, creature or trickster, was able to leap to an extraordinary height. Helmeted and cloaked, it breathed blue fire and frightened unsuspecting victims, mostly young women, over a period mainly from 1837 to 1888 but also extending into the twenty-first century.

ABRAHAM "BRAM" STOKER (1847–1912)

Born in Dublin, Ireland, thirteen-year-old Stoker was still at school in 1860. In adulthood, he became the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. On August 13, 1878, Stoker met Sir Richard Francis Burton for the first time and described him as follows: “The man riveted my attention. He was dark and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance. As he spoke the upper lip rose and his canine tooth showed its full length like the gleam of a dagger.” Stoker’s novel Dracula was published in 1897.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837–1909)

A celebrated poet, playwright, novelist and critic, Swinburne was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and once more in 1909. In 1860, Swinburne returned to Balliol College, Oxford, having been rusticated the year before. He never received a degree and after leaving the college plunged into literary circles where he quickly gained a reputation as a great poet, an extreme eccentric, and a very heavy drinker. Swinburne is thought to have suffered a condition through which he sensed pain as pleasure, which might explain his masochistic tendencies. He and Burton were very close friends.

“And grief shall endure not for ever, I know . . .”

—From The Triumph of Time

“I hid my heart in a nest of roses . . .”

—From A Ballad of Dreamland, Poems & Ballads (second and third series)

TERMINAL EMANATION

Though it’s been theorised for many years, research was published during the writing of this novel that supports the proposition that the brain sends out a strong electromagnetic pulse at the moment of death. According to the Washington Post: “Scientists from the University of Michigan recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in nine anesthetized rats after inducing cardiac arrest. Within the first 30 seconds after the heart had stopped, all the mammals displayed a surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with consciousness and visual activation. The burst of electrical patterns even exceeded levels seen during a normal, awake state.” (Source: “Surge of Brain Activity May Explain Near-Death Experience, Study Says,” Washingtonpost.com, August 12, 2013.)

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS (1866–1946)

A prolific writer, Wells is best remembered for his science fiction. He was also a proponent of the idea that the world would function best under the auspices of a single state.

“The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.”

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”

“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”

—From The Invisible Man

“Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”

—From New Worlds for Old

Throughout the Burton & Swinburne series, I’ve used real people from history as the basis for many of my characters. Mostly Victorians, they are long dead and thus cannot be properly known, no matter how many biographies of them might be read. However, the truth of their many achievements can be explored, and to compensate for the liberties I’ve taken with their personalities, I’ve added to each novel an addendum to highlight aspects of their real lives, hoping that my readers are curious enough to research a little further.

With Mick Farren it’s been different. With Mick, when I started this novel, I was introducing into the series a man who still lived.

For those of you unfamiliar with him, Mick was an important voice in the UK counterculture who rose to prominence during the late 1960s. He was the editor of the alternative newspaper International Times, a songwriter and lead singer in the rock group the Deviants, a music journalist (he accurately predicted and supported the advent of punk), and a science fiction novelist.

You can probably understand that I felt rather apprehensive when I approached him and asked if I could hijack him for a work of fiction. I sent him the first three Burton & Swinburne novels to read. I told him what I intended. I made it clear that the Mick I wanted to portray would be, at best, an approximation of the real thing.

He was delighted. Really. He laughed, he enthused, and he said he was thoroughly flattered. “Damn! I love it. I’d be delighted. Do your worst. Burton has always been a major hero of mine.”

So I went ahead, got writing, and sent the early draft chapters to him. He gave me a thumbs-up. We communicated regularly over a period of about six months.

Then he died.

This man, who was one of my heroes, who was fast becoming my friend, got up on stage with the Deviants on Saturday, July 27, 2013, and, after two songs, suffered a heart attack, collapsed, and didn’t regain consciousness.

He never got to read this novel.

I never got to say thank you or good-bye.

So I’ll say it now. Thank you, Mick. You inspired me, impressed me, entertained me and intrigued me. Thank you for the Deviants. Thank you for the novels and many brilliant articles. Thank you for so enthusiastically embracing what I have done with you in The Return of the Discontinued Man.

And good-bye. I’ll miss you. I hope everybody who reads this novel looks you up on Wikipedia, listens to your music, and buys your books. I’m glad you went out rockin’.

Mark Hodder

Valencia, Spain

Photo by Yolanda Lerma Palomares

Mark Hodder was born in Southampton, England, but has lived in Winchester, Maidstone, Norwich, Herne Bay, and for many years in London. He has worked as a roadie; a pizza cook; a litter collector; a glass packer; an illustrator; a radio commercial scriptwriter; an advertising copywriter; and a BBC web producer, journalist, and editor. In 2008, he moved to Valencia, Spain, where he settled with his Spanish partner, Yolanda. Initially, he earned a living by teaching English, but then he wrote his first novel, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, which promptly won the Philip K. Dick Award 2010. Mark immediately and enthusiastically became a full-time novelist, thus fulfilling his wildest dreams, which he started having around the age of eleven after reading Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, P. G. Wodehouse, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He recently became the father of twins, Luca Max and Iris Angell.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Also by Mark Hodder

Dedication

Contents

THE FIRST PART: THE VISIONS

1 AN APPARITION IN LEICESTER SQUARE

2 AN EXPERIMENT GONE AWRY

3 AN EVENING WITH ORPHEUS

4 RECURRENCES

5 THE JUNGLE

6 THE SECOND EXPERIMENT

7 ECHOES OF OXFORD

8 THE DREAMING ROSE

9 AN UNLIKELY EXPEDITION

THE SECOND PART: THE VOYAGE

10 THE APATHY OF 1914

11 THE SQUARES, CATS AND DEVIANTS OF 1968

12 THE GROSVENOR SQUARE RIOT OF 1968

13 AN OLD FRIEND IN 2022

14 THE ILLUSORY WORLD OF 2130

15 THE TRUTH OF 2130 REVEALED

THE THIRD PART: THE FUTURE

16 ARRIVAL: 2202

17 THE UPPERS AND THE LOWLIES

18 HER MAJESTY QUEEN VICTORIA

19 A PLEA TO PARLIAMENT

20 SEVEN BIRTHS AND A DEATH

21 BODIES

APPENDIX: MEANWHILE, IN THE VICTORIAN AGE AND BEYOND . . .

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Back Cover