by Mark Hodder
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 enter
ed, 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.