The Return of the Discontinued Man

by Mark Hodder

  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 h
im, 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 o
ther 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?”