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

by Mark Hodder

  “Because you died and were resurrected.”

  “Must you remind me of my murder? It hurt.”

  “You were dead for nearly fifty years.”

  “I know. What a thoroughly beastly waste of time.”

  “But do you remember anything of it?”

  “Nothing at all. Except—”

  The poet was quiet for a moment, and the silence of the tunnel was broken only by their footsteps and Burton’s laboured respiration.

  Trounce said, “Blinkers.”

  “Yes!” Swinburne cried out. His voice echoed. “Yes. Blinkers. That’s exactly it, Pouncer.”

  “Don’t call me Pouncer. And keep your voice down, Carrots.”

  “Blinkers?” Burton asked.

  “Like racehorses wear,” Trounce said. “So they aren’t distracted by anything; so they see only the track ahead of them.”

  “Intriguing,” Herbert Wells put in. “Or it would be if it made any sense. Would you explain, William?”

  “Um. Blinkers is as far as I can get.”

  “Algy?” Burton asked.

  “Soho Square,” the poet said. “2130. I was running toward the flier, I reached out to grab your hand, there was a terrible pain, then nothing. My next memories are of my childhood, of my mother and father and old Pouncer, here and—as I matured—of a growing awareness of who I’d been before and, in fact, still was. It’s very peculiar, I can tell you, to recollect yourself as an older person in the distant past. My early teens were very difficult—”

  “Teens?” Burton interrupted, then immediately remembered what Mick Farren had told him. “Ah, yes, I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “I felt oddly divided,” Swinburne said.

  “It was the same for me,” Trounce added.

  The maintenance tunnel was curving toward their left. From the right, the muffled sound of flowing water could be heard. It sounded as if it was moving at great pressure.

  Not water. Sewerage. I am trapped. I am trapped.

  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.
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  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.”