The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

by Mark Hodder

  Too much to take in.

  His eyelids drooped.

  He saw Isabel.

  He saw flames.

  He saw his young self, gazing, with haunted eyes, out from a mirror. Behind his reflection, there was a medium-sized chamber containing a bed. Barely recalling the end of the meal and not sure how he’d ended up in the room—and not caring—Burton turned, stumbled across the floor, collapsed fully clothed onto the blankets, and immediately dropped into the deepest of sleeps.

  He dreamed that his reflection remained in the mirror and stared at him as he slumbered and that the room behind the watcher was as real as the one it reflected.

  THE MINISTER AND A MECHANICAL IRREGULARITY

  The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

  —Benjamin Disraeli

  Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

  “By my Aunt Blodwyn’s bulging bustle!”

  Swinburne’s exclamation broke into Burton’s internal chant. The explorer opened his eyes and sighed. The world would not be ignored. There was no escaping it.

  Trounce was sitting beside him in a landau, Swinburne and Gooch opposite.

  They’d departed Battersea Power Station half an hour ago—at around nine o’clock—and were being followed by a second carriage carrying Raghavendra, Krishnamurthy, and Lawless.

  The explorer moved his tongue around his mouth, feeling the gaps where the spear had, in Berbera, knocked out a couple of his molars. None of the remaining teeth were rotten or worn.

  He was still young.

  It’s not going away.

  “What is it now, Algy?” he murmured.

  “A two-legged vehicle,” Swinburne answered. “Walking!”

  “A stamper,” Gooch said. “Put into commission far more quickly than I anticipated. I thought they’d take at least another couple of years to develop.” He clicked his tongue forlornly. “With Brunel dead and Babbage gone astray, it might be the DOGS’ last innovation for some considerable time. By golly, I’ve never known the station to be so badly attended. There are more clockwork people in it than fleshy ones. It’s as if the heart’s gone out of the place.”

  “Dogs?” Swinburne asked, and answered himself. “Ah, yes, the Department of Guided Science.”

  Looking out of the window, Burton wondered whether a cessation of Battersea Power Station’s operations might not be a good thing for London. He’d always considered the capital too overcrowded and noisy, but the metropolis he remembered paled in comparison to what he saw now. The drizzle, the chill, and the buildings were all familiar, but the streets were another story entirely. Their fringes were seething with people: lords and ladies, vagabonds and thieves, vendors and entertainers, clerks and businessmen, urchins and prostitutes; while throbbing and rumbling through the middle of the city’s swollen arteries there was such a heterogeneous jumble of vehicles that the explorer was hard put to separate them from one another. Horse-drawn carts, cabs, and carriages were present in profusion, but clanking and grinding and rattling among them were contraptions of outlandish and in some cases ludicrous design, all powered by steam, and all pumping a billowing veil of vapour across the scene, so that they waxed and waned in and out of sight, as if uncertain of their own essence. The stamper was there—a brass-bound and studded box of polished oak with windows and doors, carrying passengers inside, the whole of it raised up on mighty legs of metal with backward-pointing knees. The thing pounded along, honking and hissing like an enraged goose, sending cursing people and whinnying horses scattering from its path. Too, there were many mechanical carriages like the one in which Burton rode, identical in form to the usual landaus, hansoms, growlers, and phaetons, but each was pulled, rather than by a horse, by a small tall-chimneyed locomotive similar in design to Stephenson’s famous Rocket, though less than half the size. Of “penny farthing” bicycles, there were countless, but instead of relying on their riders’ leg muscles for momentum, they were powered by miniature engines. There were also metal spheres, their motive force being a vertical band that rotated vertically from the back to the front around their circumference. They were rolling in and out of the traffic like giant marbles.

  Those were the means of transportation that Burton managed to at least half comprehend, but there were others which he did not: contrivances that banged and groaned, jiggled and bounced; that jerked or lurched or rolled or hopped along in a manner that couldn’t possibly offer anything resembling comfort to their drivers and passengers. He wondered why anyone had bothered to create such impractical machines. The answer came to him in the form of a maxim commonly quoted in this world: The DOGS bark, “Because we can!”

  The madness wasn’t confined to the ground; the sky was teeming with it, too. There were leather armchairs with spinning wings somehow keeping them aloft, titanic rotorships like the Orpheus, and unsteady-looking constructions that flapped metal wings and dipped and bobbed through the air. Of the latter, Gooch noted, “Ornithopters! My colleagues must have solved the problems. The damned things were always impossible to control.”

  “How are collisions avoided?” Burton asked.

  “There’s a lot of sky. Unlike ground travel, one has altitude to play with. Nevertheless, flight remains hazardous. There’s an average of three smashes per day. Probably more now. It appears considerably busier up there than it was a year ago.”

  Their landau steered into Trafalgar Square and entered the Strand. Burton looked with interest at Parliament’s clock tower, the home of the famous Big Ben bell. Partially concealed by a web of scaffolding, it was almost twice as tall as he remembered, and its architecture was considerably altered. Upon making an enquiry about it to Gooch, he was told, “The old one was destroyed by a bomb.” Immediately, the explorer recalled the event as if he’d been there.

  He sighed and glanced at Swinburne and Trounce. The poet appeared to be enjoying himself immensely, craning his neck as he leaned out of the window, peering this way and that, taking it all in, careless of the steam and coal smoke that curled around him. Trounce, by contrast, was sitting pale faced and nervous, holding his bowler by its brim and sliding it around and around through his fingers.

  The three of them had, over breakfast at the station, shared the fact that they’d each awoken with their heads full of new information. Burton, for example, now knew that he lived not in Trieste but at 14 Montagu Place, a house he recalled having rented a room in at some point in his other life—though, peculiarly, as much as he tried, he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when. Similarly, Swinburne was currently resident at 16 Cheyne Walk, which he shared with the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it being a house he’d moved into in 1862 in his former existence but which, here, he’d apparently occupied considerably earlier.

  Burton found himself clinging to mundane information such as this, for it gave to him a sense that he’d been reborn into a proper corporeal world rather than into an unfathomable and unanticipated heaven or hell. Unfortunately, there were other recollections, which—as much as he tried to suppress them—insistently arose to suggest that hell might be a much more viable possibility.

  Isabel had been killed by a nosferatu. A vampire.

  An older Burton from yet another history had inadvertently created this one.

  There had been confrontations with crazed scientists, with clairvoyant dictators, with the rampaging forces of the Prussian Empire, with werewolves and monsters.

  It was all confused, entangled, and illogical, as if cause was refusing to always precede effect, as if an event in one history could have consequences in another.

  Time streams, Raghavendra called them, a term coined by Bertie Wells.

  He wondered who Bertie Wells was, then pictured in his mind’s eye a small man dying two nasty deaths.

  He shuddered.

&
nbsp; Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

  He couldn’t reenter the meditation, couldn’t avoid the man he was tumbling into.

  Sir Richard Francis Burton: king’s agent.

  The landau rocked to a halt, and the driver banged on the roof and called down, “Venetia Hotel, gents.”

  They exited the cabin, jumping down to the pavement. Trounce inadvertently bumped into an individual who was strapped into a machine that carried him along on four mechanical legs.

  “Watch where you’re stepping, man!” the pedestrian protested.

  The Scotland Yard man managed an uncertain “humph!” and watched incredulously as the quadruped scuttled away.

  “Three and six,” the driver told them.

  “I’ll think you’ll find it’s a shilling,” Swinburne countered.

  The corners of Burton’s mouth twitched up. Different world, same old friend. There was comfort in that, at least.

  Gooch paid the driver the proper fare, despite the poet’s further objections, and they waited while the second carriage stopped and its passengers disembarked.

  “How do you like our London?” Raghavendra asked Burton as she approached.

  “It’s an insane asylum.”

  Trounce muttered, “Seconded.”

  Captain Lawless, at her side, smiled and gave a grunt of agreement. “That’s why I used to prefer to stay in the Orpheus.”

  “Used to?” Burton asked.

  “That bloody mechanical brain has taken the pleasure out of it.”

  The group—Burton, Swinburne, Trounce, Gooch, Raghavendra, Krishnamurthy, and Lawless—mounted the steps of the Royal Venetia Hotel and were greeted at its door by a clockwork man upon whose chest plate the initials R. V. H. were engraved. “Shall I have the bellboy fetch your luggage from the vehicles, sirs?”

  “We have none,” Burton responded. “We’re merely visiting a guest.”

  The machine opened the portal to them. “Right you are, sir. Mr. Bromley, the reception clerk, is at his desk to your left as you enter. Good day to you.”

  As they walked into the lobby, the clerk looked up, recognised Burton and acknowledged him with raised brows and a polite nod, and called out, “He’s expecting you, Sir Richard. Nice to see you again.”

  Gooch murmured an explanation. “I sent Pox last night to announce our arrival.”

  “I hope the insults were pithy.”

  Burton straight away wondered why he’d expressed such a sentiment.

  They climbed the ornate staircase to the fifth floor and passed along a corridor to suite 5. Automatically, Burton took the lead, and when he arrived at the door, he eyed it for a moment before, with a mystifying reluctance, raising his panther-headed cane and rapping on it. Half a minute later, the door swung open to reveal another clockwork man.

  “Hello, Grumbles,” Burton said.

  Grumbles. My brother’s servant. Wait! My brother? My brother is—the minister?

  “Good morning, gentlemen, ma’am. Will you come in, please? The minister is in his reading room. May I take your hats, coats and canes?”

  “Nice new voice, Grumbles,” Gooch said.

  “Thank you, sir. It suits very well.”

  After handing over their outdoor garb, the group—the word chrononauts persistently occurred to Burton—was led by the gently whirring and ticking mechanism through a parlour and into a large library. The chamber was all books. They lined every wall from floor to ceiling, teetered in tall stacks on the deep red carpet, and were strewn haphazardly over the various tables, chairs, and sideboards. In the midst of them, by the window, a giant of a man, wrapped in a threadbare red dressing gown, occupied an enormous wing-backed armchair of scuffed and cracked leather. His hair was brown and untidy, and from it, a deep scar ran jaggedly down the broad forehead to bisect the left eyebrow. His eyes, which fixed on Burton as he entered, were intensely black. The nose, obviously once broken, had been reset crookedly, and the mouth—the upper lip cleft by another scar—was permanently twisted into a superior sneer. It was a face every bit as brutal in appearance as Burton’s own, but the heavy jaw was buried beneath bulging jowls, and the neck was lost in rolls of fat which undulated down into a vast belly sagging over thick legs. The fellow was so obese that, despite the two walking sticks propped against one of the tables, it was impossible to imagine him in motion.

  “So you’re back, at last,” the minister said. He narrowed his eyes at Burton. “You look different.”

  You can bloody well talk!

  While it was true that Burton was astonished at his sibling’s corpulence, the thought hadn’t been just a sarcastic reaction. The Edward Burton of his own history, after being severely beaten by Singhalese villagers in 1856, had become so pathologically withdrawn that, by 1858, he wasn’t speaking at all and, the following year, was committed to Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. He’d still been there in 1890.

  “We were—we were away for over a year,” the explorer stammered.

  “I’m well aware of that. Why did I have to wait? However long you spent there, you could have been back a minute after your departure. For crying out loud, if you have the ability to transcend time, why not bloody well use it? All of you, find somewhere to sit. Grumbles, serve tea, coffee, or whatever.”

  Gooch, clearing books from a chair, said, “We felt it wise to remain true to subjective time.”

  “You didn’t consider that it would be in the interests of the empire for the prime minister to know the outcome of your expedition sooner rather than later?”

  Gooch sat and, out of habit, looked at Burton for support.

  Burton spoke without thinking. “As its leader, I judged otherwise. And please bear in mind, brother, that those of us who travelled aboard the Orpheus have witnessed three and a half centuries of the empire’s future. It might be argued that we can comprehend what is best for it better than anyone else, and that includes you.”

  That’ll hit where it hurts!

  With a slight shock, he realised that he’d slipped into his counterpart’s role as if it were second nature. He knew, as if he’d always known, that Edward, in addition to being the minister of chronological affairs, was also Disraeli’s most trusted advisor. Indeed, the information at his fat fingertips was so deep and so broad ranging in nature that, on occasion, it might be justifiably suspected that Edward was the empire’s primary mover and shaker in the great games currently being played between Britain, Prussia, Russia, and China. To suggest to Edward that anyone knew more than he concerning such matters was to strike a blow where it counted.

  The minister responded with a taut silence, steepled his fingers in front of his chin, and locked eyes with Burton, who, while matching the implacable stare, realised that somewhere along the way the competitive relationship of their youth had got very, very out of hand.

  He felt that he was in over his head. He wanted to shout, Stop! I’m not who you think I am!

  Edward said, “Do you have a written report?”

  “I do.” Burton turned to Krishnamurthy. “Please, Maneesh?”

  Krishnamurthy, who had a leather satchel hanging from his shoulder, took a thick file from it and handed it to Burton who, in turn, passed it to the minister. The explorer recognised his own characteristically small handwriting upon its cover. He—the other he—had written it during his sojourn in the twenty-third century.

  Edward gave a snort of disdain. “I see you still hold the government in contempt.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The title you’ve inflicted upon the document. The Return of the Discontinued Man. Must you insist on such childishness?”

  Amusement spiked through the explorer. Suddenly, he rather liked his doppelgänger. Glancing across at Swinburne, he saw a gleeful twinkle in the poet’s eye. Trounce, too, appeared more at ease. Already the three resurrected men were settling into their new circumstances, which, just as the Beetle had predicted, felt as familiar as favoured old footwear.

  “Strange affairs and cu
rious cases require melodramatic titles,” Burton said. “They offer a forewarning of the contents.”

  “Then the future was—?”

  Swinburne offered the confirmation. “Strange and curious, Minister.”

  “Indeed. See to yourselves while I read it. Grumbles will attend you.”

  Without further word, the minister opened the file and ignored them completely.

  After a few minutes, Burton gestured for Swinburne, Trounce, and Gooch to join him in the parlour.

  There, he drew his friends closer with a waggle of his fingers and whispered, “Remember, there’s nothing in the report to suggest we’re anything other than the men he knows.”

  Swinburne grinned. “Should we continue the charade?”

  “It’s becoming less of one by the minute, don’t you think?”

  Trounce rubbed the side of his jaw. “The odd thing is, I feel like me, and I feel at home. Yesterday, I’d never have suggested that we could get away with it, but today I’d say we can.”

  “Agreed,” Swinburne said. “I find myself wondering whether I dreamt my old age.”

  Burton made a sound of agreement. “If it becomes apposite to reveal the truth, we shall, but I suspect that Edward might regard us with suspicion if he knew the full story.”