The Return of the Discontinued Man

Burton’s scientific detachment had become rather more pathological. He felt as if a thick pane of glass separated him from the environment, and, increasingly, when anyone addressed him, an expanding distance inserted itself between him and them. Remotely, he recognised that Swinburne was starting to experience the same, and when von Lessing and Raghavendra greeted them at the vehicles, he saw that the latter, too, was suffering this insidious entrancement. As for Trounce, he was virtually catatonic, sitting in the back of one of the cars with wide, fixed eyes and a slack mouth.

“It’s too much,” Sadhvi mumbled. “We’re losing our minds.”

Burton turned to Farren. “Mick, we can’t hold out for another day. Not without a dose of Saltzmann’s. You have to get us back to the Orpheus. We’ll stay aboard her until the refit is completed.”

Farren gave a curt nod. “I’ll drive you back to the yacht.” He addressed von Lessing. “Karl, Eddie’s with Jane. She’s badly hurt. Maybe even—maybe even dead. Will you stay and track them down?”

Von Lessing paled. “Yeah. I’ll check the hospitals. What a bloody mess.”

They bid him farewell. Raghavendra and Wells joined Trounce in the back of the car while Burton climbed into the front with Farren. They set off back toward Margate. No one spoke. Farren was lost in his own thoughts, and as for the chrononauts—

They just felt lost.

It was evening by the time they boarded the yacht. Burton and his companions had little idea of where they were or what they were doing. The Cannibals guided them to bunks, and they all fell into an instant and profound sleep.

Burton awoke at noon on the following day in an unfamiliar room and with the taste of Saltzmann’s haunting the back of his throat. He was lying on a bed—more like a shelf projecting from a concave wall—and still wearing yesterday’s clothes, which were torn and stained with blood and dust.

He sat up, looked at his hands, and noted that the knuckles were cut and bruised. Slowly, recent memories seeped back into his conscious mind.

Standing, he looked out of a porthole and saw a broad triangular wing beyond which, past a narrow strip of coastline, the sea sparkled brightly. He was obviously on the Concorde—the new Orpheus—and when he turned to face the tiny cabin, he saw that his suitcases had been transferred to it from the old ship. He opened an inner door and found an en suite bathroom. Forty minutes later, he was clean, dressed in fresh clothes, and feeling a great deal better.

Burton exited into a very narrow corridor with doors running down either side of it. He’d asserted from the shape of the wing that the prow was to his left, so he followed the passage along to a door. It opened onto a long, narrow tubular lounge. A group rose to greet him: Captain Lawless, Gooch, Krishnamurthy, Raghavendra, Mick Farren, Patricia Honesty, Trevor Penniforth, and Jason Griffith.

“How do you feel?” Sadhvi asked.

“Fair to middling,” he answered, taking a seat and fishing a cheroot from his pocket. “Much more myself. The others?”

“Still in their beds. Algy is in good shape. Mr. Wells required stitches and will need to rest a while. William had a hard time of it. I’ve sedated him and dosed him with more of that accursed Saltzmann’s than my principles should allow, but without it I’m concerned he might lose his sanity.”

“And with it?”

“After plenty of sleep, I think he’ll return to us.”

“I’m sorry, man,” Farren murmured. “My fault. I could have summoned the Orpheus to any day, and I went and picked the day of a bloody riot.”

“We couldn’t have known, Mick,” Patricia Honesty put in.

“It doesn’t matter,” Burton said, lighting his Manila. “What’s important is that we saw evidence of Spring Heeled Jack’s presence.”

Krishnamurthy frowned. “I don’t understand. If he’s here in 1968, how and why and where?”

Burton gave a nod of thanks to Griffith, who’d placed a plate of sandwiches and a cup of coffee before him.

“Conspiracy theory,” Farren muttered.

“Mr. Farren?” Burton said.

“The Automatic Computing Engine.”

“And what is that?”

“There was this dude, Alan Turing, who I guess you could call Charles Babbage’s successor. He was a genius mathematician who, in 1950, is rumoured to have invented an equivalent to one of the old babbage probability calculators, except using a different and more powerful technology. Turing claimed great things for his machine, and for a few years he was the toast of the Anglo-Saxon Empire. His device would return to us the global dominance we enjoyed back in your age, and which we’d been steadily losing to our allies, the Americans. It would lead to the total mechanisation of our industries, allowing each and every one of us to live comfortably, pursuing our individual interests. No more drudgery. No more working classes being oppressed by the system.” He finished sarcastically, “Yeah, right on!”

“It didn’t happen?”

“In 1952, he was prosecuted for being a homosexual.”

Burton raised an eyebrow. “The state takes an interest in people’s sexual preferences?”

“Obsessively. He was publicly humiliated, experimented on, and two years later died from cyanide poisoning. Suicide, apparently, but there are those—the Cannibal Club among them—who think he was murdered.”

“Because?”

“Because the Automatic Computing Engine never appeared. The government claimed they examined it and found nothing but a prototype based on dodgy theoretical work. It was unsound and unworkable.”

Gooch interjected, “But you have other ideas?”

“Too right. I think the government lied and continued to develop it in secret. I think fourteen years after its inventor’s death, the Automatic Computing Engine is something quite different to what he intended. He envisioned a Utopia. The government, I suspect, has plans for exactly the opposite. If the machine really exists, I don’t know how it’s being used, but something very bad is happening behind the scenes, and if you discover that the crazy presence of Edward Oxford has somehow infiltrated the device, and that it’s manipulating government policies, then I won’t be the slightest bit surprised.”

“By God,” Krishnamurthy muttered. “How can we fight something we can’t see?”

Burton responded, “By moving forward through time until it’s in plain sight.”

Sadhvi Raghavendra sighed and held up a hand, palm toward him. “I understand your impatience and the sense of urgency, but remember, Richard, that the advantage of our ability to transcend the limitations of time is that we aren’t required to hurry. I insist that we all rest for another day. We have casualties.”

Nathaniel Lawless added, “To be frank, I’m not confident I’m sufficiently au fait with this new ship’s systems, either. I’d like to study her for a while longer before our next hop.”

Penniforth smiled and rumbled, “Your Mark Three ain’t comfortable, neither, Cap’n. Without Mr. Gooch, we wouldn’t ’ave known how to connect the thing, an’ we certainly don’t know how to tell it what’s what.”

Gooch added, “The babbage will work it out for itself, but it’ll have to experiment for a bit, so yes, I agree, we should stay put for another day.”

“We’re still on the Dutch coast?” Burton asked.

Patricia Honesty answered, “Yep. This is Bendyshe Bay—private land owned by the Foundation. We’re secluded and perfectly safe.”

“Good. In that case, by all means, we’ll rest before we make our next foray into the future.”

“The year 2000?” Lawless asked.

Burton shook his head. “No. Change of plan. Our first two legs consisted of fifty-four years each. Let’s add another fifty-four. Next stop, 2022.”

Jason Griffith stood and fetched a file from a bookshelf. He handed it to Burton. “A little something to keep you occupied. The History of the Future, volume two.”

Burton groaned. “I haven’t read a single page of volume one, yet.”

“Karl is our historian,” Griffith said, “but he’s not as meticulous as your brother was, which is why the second chunk of history you jumped through has made for a slimmer file. Easier to read, man.”

Burton hummed his acknowledgement and asked, “Where is Mr. von Lessing?”

The group became silent. Farren broke it. “Still in London. He got word to us. Jane was killed by that bloody pig.”

Henry Murray’s great-granddaughter, Burton thought. Dead.

It was Henry who’d introduced Burton to Richard Monckton Milnes. Both men were—had been?—a decade older than him and had greatly influenced his decision to make the famous pilgrimage to Mecca. By God!—how different might Burton’s life be had he never met the man!

Suddenly, the warmth of Saltzmann’s throbbed in his temples, and the lounge appeared to drop away from him. He envisioned the path his life had taken as a shimmering ribbon of light. It wound through an infinite tangle of other ribbons; crossing some; running parallel to others for short and long distances; coiling around and even knotting with a few. It weaved in and out, and as his imagination—or was it his insight?—gained clarity, he sank into it until the ribbon streamed through and around him, and he saw that it was comprised of mathematical formulae.

Tumbling helplessly, he was inundated by outlandish algebraic geometries; he folded into obtuse equations; he sped along lines of esoteric calculus. He dissolved into such contorted topologies that for an instant and an eternity, he was nowhere and everywhere.

Burton reconstituted around a bunched segment of probabilities that he somehow recognised as personality traits. They manifested as an utterly unique individual. He collided with its dazzling nucleus, his own cluster of singularities ploughing into those of the other, and they exploded outward in an incandescent blaze of newly forming potentials.

The birth of further equations.

The forging of new paths.

The creation of a friendship.

Burton possessed no knowledge of the woman who’d borne Henry Murray’s child. Where he had come from, that event existed in the future. However, such were the intricacies of cause and effect, that he realised his mere presence in Murray’s life had been enough to contribute to the existence of Jane Murray, for he’d influenced his friend’s preferences and behaviour, caused him to make certain choices and to be at certain locations at certain times. He’d been the stimulus for steps taken, and subsequent ones had led his friend to that unknown woman, with whom Murray had created a child.

Converging ribbons.

Actions and consequences.

A child.

Descendants.

Jane Packard.

Dead.

Wordlessly, Burton jumped up and hurriedly left the lounge. He entered the passage that led to his cabin but had only just passed into it when he stumbled and was forced to lean against the bulkhead for support.

Sadhvi Raghavendra followed. She placed a hand on his shoulder and said quietly, “Richard, are you all right?”

He drew in a deep shuddering breath, fished a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped a tear from his cheek.

“I never properly mourned Isabel,” he whispered. “She was to be my wife, but she was killed, and there will never be a woman to replace her. I shall have no children. When I die, everything I am will die with me. Nothing of Richard Francis Burton will continue. I’ll have no representation in the future.”

She smiled sadly. “You’ve overlooked the obvious.”

“Which is what?”

“You don’t require representation. Where the future is concerned, you are very much in it.”

“Oops!” Orpheus said. “Watch out!”

Burton, blinking the whiteness out of his eyes, fell across the sloping cockpit and slammed into a control panel. Nathaniel Lawless landed on top of him.

The floor heaved upward, sending the two men tumbling in the other direction.

Algernon Swinburne let loose a piercing shriek. Mick Farren swore.

“Wait! Wait!” Orpheus demanded. “I’m getting the hang of it now!”

The ship lurched again.

“Stop it!” Swinburne hollered, somersaulting into Lawless.

“I’m trying! Do you think it’s easy controlling a new vessel without any practice?” Orpheus protested. “You should be singing my praises!”

Finally, the Concorde levelled out. Burton, Swinburne, Lawless and Farren got to their feet.

“Report!” the captain barked.

“Give me a moment,” Orpheus replied. “It’s rather more intricate than before. Ah. No. Yes. All right, we’re fine. We’re at five thousand feet, directly above our starting point.”

“Bendyshe Bay?” Lawless demanded.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it? I should warn you, there’s a lot of air traffic around us. I recommend an immediate landing.”

“Do it.”

“The date?” Burton asked.

“As you ordered,” Orpheus answered. “Four o’clock in the morning on Tuesday the first of February in the year 2022.”

Farren looked out of the windows. “It’s as black as pitch out there.”

Burton felt suddenly lighter as the airship sank toward the ground. “I learned my lesson,” he said. “It’s a winter new moon. It was likely to be overcast, so running without lights, as we are, makes us harder to spot.”

“Not to telemobiloscopes,” Swinburne pointed out.

“Radar,” Farren said, reminding the poet of the technology’s new name. “Getting out of the sky is a very good idea.”

“Someone’s calling,” Orpheus announced. “Really! This isn’t a good time for interruptions. How many things am I supposed to do at once?”

“Let’s hear it,” Lawless said.

The Concorde’s radio system was more sophisticated than the equipment they’d gained in 1914 and didn’t require Burton or any of the others to hold the equivalent of a speaking tube. It projected a female voice directly into the bridge.

“Captain Lawless?”

“Hello,” Lawless replied.

“Incredible! You just appeared out of thin air!”

“We’re coming down. Is it safe?”

“Yes. Is Sir Richard with you?”

“I’m here,” Burton said.

“Hello. Marianne Smith. Just a small party to meet you. We’ll come aboard.”

“Very well. We’ll see you in a moment.”

He’d hardly finished speaking before their descent slowed dramatically.

“Brace yourselves,” Orpheus warned. “I’ve not landed a Concorde before. This might be disastrous.”

“Cripes!” Swinburne muttered.

The ship bumped to a halt. The whining of its engines deepened in tone as they slowed to a stop.

“I’ll gladly accept a round of applause,” the Mark III said.

“Miss Smith?” Burton queried.

“Still here.”

“We’ll open the doors in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you.”

The radio cut off.

“I’ll stay here,” Lawless said. “I want to get the hang of the manual controls. Just in case.”

Burton nodded and gestured for the others to follow. They exited. The exterior hatch was just behind the bridge and in front of the lounge. Krishnamurthy and Gooch met them by it.

“Sadhvi’s staying with Herbert and William,” Krishnamurthy said. “They both require more time to recuperate.”

Burton took hold of the hatch’s right handle. He indicated that Krishnamurthy should take the left. In unison, they pulled and twisted, then pushed the portal open and slid it aside. A staircase automatically emerged from the base of the opening and glided down to the ground below.

Three shadowy figures were waiting. They mounted the steps, ascending to the chrononauts. The first of them to enter the ship was a short middle-aged woman with cropped grey hair and sharp features.

“Marianne,” she said, and turning, gestured an elderly woman forward. “And you know my mother, Patricia.”

“Miss Hon-Honesty!” Burton said, unable to fully disguise his shock. “We only just said good-bye.”

“It’s all right. Don’t try to hide it,” she replied. “For you, just minutes ago, I was twenty-two. For me, half a century has passed. I was Mrs. Smith for much of it, and now I’m a seventy-six-year-old widow.” She gave a cackling laugh. “Life sucks.”

“Sucks?” Swinburne interjected.

“Hello again, Mr. Swinburne. And hello, Mr. Gooch, Mr. Krishnamurthy. Yes, sucks. I’m afraid language is still degenerating.”

She turned to Farren. “Mick, you bastard.”

He gaped at her, his lips moving wordlessly.

“Look at you!” she exclaimed. “Exactly the same. My old friend, the revolutionary.” She laughed. “But not as old as me!”

They embraced, and Farren muttered, “Bloody hell! Bloody hell!”

She pushed him to arm’s length and smiled up at him. “I have excellent news for you.”

“Wh-what?” he stammered.

“Your hairstyle is back in fashion.”

Farren grinned, but Burton noticed pain in the young man’s eyes—the same pain he himself had experienced upon meeting the elderly Edward Brabrooke in 1914. There was an agonising sorrow in seeing one’s friends decay while you remained the same. Even more so, a vicious guilt.

Patricia Honesty moved aside and pulled forward the third person, a tall and gawky young woman, about eighteen years old, with fascinatingly misaligned features and a large gap between her front teeth. “This is Lorena Brabrooke.”

The introduction swept away Burton’s ruminations. Here was his old friend, again renewed, again refreshed, and again reborn.

Isabel, he thought. Ah, who might we have become together?

“Hey,” the girl said, by way of a greeting.

Burton took an instant liking to her. He smiled when she fumbled his handshake. “Young lady, I’m delighted to see the Brabrookes are still going strong.”

“Um. Thanks. I mean—wow!—it’s like, you’re a legend.”

The king’s agent chuckled. “No, I’m all too human.”

“Aren’t we all,” Patricia Honesty put in ruefully.

“I was just with your father’s friends,” Burton told Brabrooke, “back in 1968.”

“You mean my grandfather.”

“Oh. My mistake.” Burton threw out his hands. “How time flies!” He addressed Marianne Smith. “Just the three of you?”

“Yes,” she replied. “We’ll explain, but first—Lori?”

Brabrooke took something from a bag slung over her shoulder and quickly clamped it shut around Burton’s forearm. While he was still uttering, “What the devil—?” the girl administered the same treatment to Swinburne, Farren, Gooch and Krishnamurthy. The men all examined the plain black bands that now encircled their wrists.

“I can’t take it off!” Gooch grumbled.

“A blasted liberty!” Swinburne complained. “What’s the meaning of it, Miss Brabrooke?”

“T-bands,” came her mumbled response. “T for Turing.”

“Turing!” Farren cried out. “I knew it!”

“Trust us,” Patricia Honesty said. “They’re necessary. Now, Sir Richard, it’s absurdly early in the morning, we’re standing in an open doorway, and there’s a chill wind blowing on my neck. Invite us in or throw us out, one or the other.”

Burton bowed politely and waved the three visitors in. They moved through to the lounge—Gooch and Krishnamurthy followed after securing the door—and settled on the sofas. Farren got to work at the coffeepot. Burton asked Honesty, “So, ma’am, how stands the Cannibal Club?”

“Ma’am? How quaint. I like it.” The old woman gestured toward her daughter. “My child has taken the reins.”

Burton turned his eyes to Marianne, who said, “We are fewer. Twelve of us. Secrecy has become a matter of life or death. The world is vastly changed since sixty-eight.” She held up an arm to reveal that she, too, wore one of the bracelets. “These are to protect you.”

“From what?” Burton asked.

“From the government.”

“What on earth has happened?” Swinburne exclaimed.

“The Turing Fulcrum.”

Patricia Honesty, jerking her chin toward Farren, interjected, “You remember—when we last met—Mick told you about the Automatic Computing Engine? What we suspected then was true; the government was developing it in secret. During the 1980s, the technology finally saw the light of day. Turings went into mass production. Now, everybody has one.”

Krishnamurthy held up his arm and examined his bangle.

“No, Mr. Krishnamurthy,” Honesty said. “I’m not referring to T-bands.”

“Then what?” he asked.

From her bag, Lorena Brabrooke produced a thin eight-inch-long tube of what looked to Burton like brushed steel. She gave it a slight shake, and the chrononauts uttered sounds of amazement as, emitting a chime, it unfolded and, seemingly with a life of its own, snapped into a flat sheet, eight inches wide by ten long, and the thickness of a book cover. One side of it lit up, displaying colours and shapes that, when Brabrooke turned it to face them, they didn’t comprehend at all.

“This is a Turing,” she said. “It—um—I suppose it’s a bit like one of your old babbages except, rather than being a distinct device, it exists in connection with all the other Turings, forming a network. It can give you any public information you require. Look.”

Burton and the others leaned forward and watched as she moved her fingers across the screen and conjured up a mass of movement that, for a few moments, meant nothing to the king’s agent. Then he suddenly realised he was looking through a window and, amid a great deal he didn’t understand, he recognised the British Museum.

Brabrooke slid her fingertips across the screen, a little above it, and, dizzyingly, the scene rushed forward, as if the window was flying up the steps of the building. Doors whipped past. The entrance lobby—and the people in it—went blurring by. The viewpoint shot up the still-magnificent staircase.

Burton felt both absorbed and disoriented as Brabrooke moved the window through corridor after corridor, past exhibit after exhibit, until it slid into place beside a group of visitors who were standing in front of a plinth upon which there knelt a familiar figure.

“Brunel!” the chrononauts chorused.

Brabrooke touched a small circle on the screen, and a voice sounded from the device. “Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born on the ninth of April 1806, was an English mechanical and civil engineer and the founder of the Department of Guided Science. His designs, which revolutionised public transport, also allowed for the rapid expansion of the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and are generally regarded as—”

A flick of Brabrooke’s finger caused the volume to decrease until it was barely audible.

“Magic!” Swinburne whispered. “Utterly impossible!”

The girl gave a small smile. “The devices are used for work, study, communication and entertainment, and—like I said—they can access any public information. That’s the problem.”

“Ah,” Burton said. “Public.”

Farren, who’d paused in his distribution of coffee to watch the display, said, “Information is controlled?”

Marianne Smith gave confirmation. “Yes. Tightly. Extreme restrictions. Also, all activity on Turings is monitored.”

“All?” Burton asked. “But you said everybody has one. How can sense be made out of so much information?”

“By a central machine. The Turing Fulcrum. It reports to the authorities anything it interprets as illegal or suspicious activity.”

Brabrooke said, “If I used my Turing to write T-mail to a friend—”

“T-mail?” Farren interrupted.

“A message. Like a letter but without any physical existence.”

Patricia Honesty interrupted, “And you should know that there’s no longer any other way to send a written communiqué.”

“—and in it,” Brabrooke continued, “I criticised government policies, I’d soon find the authorities knocking at my door.”

“A police state?” Farren asked.

“Very much so.”

“With pigs on stilts?”

“Yes. The constables.”

Burton raised his arm. “And these bracelets?”

“They generate power from the motion of your arm and transmit it to the nearest Turing. They’re also used for communication, to transfer funds when making a purchase, and they monitor your health and location.”

“So why do I find myself with one on my wrist?”

“Because it’s illegal for any citizen of the Empire to not wear one. Anyone seen without a bracelet is immediately arrested.”

Patricia Honesty patted Brabrooke’s arm. “Lori is our technical expert, Sir Richard. She’s given each of you a false identity and a credible background. Every member of the Cannibal Club has the same. Our Turings are altered, too. They hide themselves. We—and our activities—are all invisible. That’s a far more complicated achievement than it sounds. If it wasn’t for her, you’d not be able to leave the Orpheus.”

“By which statement,” Burton said, “I presume you feel it apposite that we do.”

“Yes.” The old woman entwined her gnarled fingers and rested them on her lap. “The intelligence in each Turing is contained within microscopic squares of crystalline silicon.”

“Got him!” Daniel Gooch cried out. “Silicon crystallises in the same pattern as diamond. If it’s resonating at the same frequency as the gems in the time suits, the Oxford consciousness could easily enter it.”

She nodded. “Precisely. Silicon is at the heart of the technology Alan Turing created, so it’s quite possible that the insane intelligence which vanished from beneath your noses in 1860 has gradually been gaining influence since the 1950s.”

Mick Farren pressed a hand down onto his great bush of hair and shook his head. He glared at Patricia. “How could you have let this happen, Pat? We were meant to overthrow the straights. Now they’ve got shackles on the whole population!”

“Consumerism conquers all,” she answered. “Everything threatening was repackaged as something bright and cheerful and harmless. Whenever there’s a challenge to the system, the system transforms it into a product and uses it as a weapon to keep the people distracted. We create our own oppression. Even the war has been reduced to entertainment.”

“Whose war?” Burton asked. “America’s, still?”

“Yes. Since your last visit, it has expanded into South China. The U.S.A. and United Republics of Eurasia are at it hammer and tongs. Their economies are suffering badly.”

“And the Anglo-Saxon Empire?”

“During the seventies, the A.S.E. continued to offer cautious support to the States while managing to avoid any direct involvement with the conflict. Then Thatcher happened.” The old woman produced a handkerchief and wiped her nose. “Our politicians are entirely lacking in ethics. It’s a problem that has magnified with each subsequent generation, and it achieved its apotheosis in the last of our prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher. She came to power in 1979. Seven years later, she announced the cessation of the Empire’s trade alliance with the States. The declaration came on the same day the first Turings went on sale—the day after, we suspect, the Fulcrum was activated. In fact, we think the withdrawal from the alliance was probably its first recommendation.”

“Why?” Farren asked.

“Because it was such a contradictory turnaround. Rather than taking any notice of the people’s opposition to America’s aggression in South East Asia, the government, especially under Thatcher, had been ruthlessly curtailing the public’s right to express it. By the eighties, the authorities had the power to limit how many people could gather, where, and for how long. Protest marches were made illegal. Why then, the sudden change of policy, the sudden bowing to the will of the populace? The answer wasn’t clear until about twenty years ago, when one of our own people—a Cannibal descended from your friend, James Hunt—discovered that the British government was secretly supplying arms to both sides, to the U.S.A. and to the U.R.E.”

“Despicable!” Swinburne shrilled.

Burton slid his fingers into his hair and felt his scars. “Abdu El Yezdi worked tirelessly to create a history free of world wars. Spring Heeled Jack appears to be working equally hard to undo everything he strove for.”

“It seems so. And while we assist in our neighbours’ destruction of one another, we’ve been steadily increasing our own power, based on an industrial and agricultural foundation of genetically enhanced animals and adapted human workers. Our global dominance is rotten and immoral through and through, but, of course, we are told a different story. According to the government, we’re the bastions of civilisation, while the Americans and East Eurasians are little better than barbarians.”

“That sounds familiar,” Burton murmured. “My contemporaries depicted the Africans in the same light. It made it easier for us to justify the theft of their lands and resources.”

Honesty nodded. “The A.S.E. has consolidated its grip on almost a third of the Earth’s surface and a quarter of its total population. Its citizens are constantly warned of the threat posed by the U.S.A. and U.R.E. while also kept occupied by an endless supply of trivial entertainments and meaningless pleasures. Consumerism and war. Extremes of indulgence and fear. No one can think straight. No one has the will to muster resistance. The government can sneak in any policy it likes, and people don’t even notice.”

Burton sighed and shook his head sadly. “What did you mean by the last prime minister? What have you now? A president?”

“I meant the last of the human prime ministers,” Honesty replied. “These days, the government is formed by, and follows, the Turing Fulcrum.”

“You’ve given over governance to a machine? How could it have come to this so rapidly?”

“It may feel rapid to you, but it crept up on us like a patient and cunning predator.”

“Bloody hell,” Daniel Gooch muttered. “Spring Heeled Jack is in control.”

Krishnamurthy said, “This Turing Fulcrum—where is it?”

“Nobody knows. It’s the most closely guarded secret in the world. I sometimes think we’d have a better chance at locating the Ark of the Covenant. Nevertheless, we must do our best, which is exactly why we want you to leave the ship and come with us to London.”

“With the intention of destroying the bloody thing, I hope,” Farren growled.

“Ultimately, yes, Mick. But one thing at a time, hey? First, let’s find it.”

“What do you propose?” Burton asked.

Patricia Honesty turned to Lorena Brabrooke, who, responding to the prompt, said, “We believe the Turing Fulcrum was first activated at nine o’clock in the evening on the fifteenth of February 1986.”

Burton started slightly. That date again! Nine on the fifteenth of February!

“Based on what evidence?” he asked.

Brabrooke held up her Turing, the flat panel of which still bore the image of the Brunel exhibit in the British Museum. “Based on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There’d been no sign of life from him since 1860, but at that precise instant, he said two words.”

The chrononauts recoiled in surprise.

“What?” Krishnamurthy whispered. “He’s alive?”

Gooch slapped his right fist into his left palm and cried out, “Good old Brunel!”

Brabrooke shrugged. “He didn’t move and he’s never spoken since. Repeated examinations have found nothing—no activity at all in his babbage.” She shrugged again. “Just two words in nearly two centuries.”

“What did he say?” Burton asked.

“I am.”

The king’s agent frowned. “I am? I am what?”

“We don’t know, but our theory is that when the Turing Fulcrum was activated it sent out a pulse of energy that resonated with the Nāga diamond fragments in Brunel’s babbage. The words might have been an echo of the machine’s first moment of self-awareness. That’s why we regard Brunel as a possible key to the Fulcrum’s location. If there’s anything of him remaining, if we could possibly wake him up, he might be able to tell us what direction and distance the pulse came from.”

“A long shot, admittedly,” Patricia Honesty murmured. “But worth a try.”

“Miss Brabrooke,” Gooch interjected. “I’m an engineer. The thing you have in your hand—the Turing—is so far beyond my understanding that I can’t even properly focus my eyes on it. What they tell me I’m seeing, my brain is trying very hard to reject. With progress having achieved such miracles, how is it you can’t revive Mr. Brunel yourselves, yet you believe that we nigh on two-hundred-year-old fossils can?”

“Fossils!” Honesty protested. “You’re younger than I am!”

“Shock,” her daughter Marianne interjected.

Gooch looked puzzled. “Pardon?”

Burton muttered, “Yes, I see it.” He addressed the engineer. “Daniel, Isambard has no notion of our mission. We’d lost him before even conceiving of it. If he has any sense of the time that’s passed, the very last thing he’ll be expecting to see is us. The surprise of it might knock the wits back into him.”

“Fair enough,” Gooch replied, after a moment’s thought. “I suppose it might work, though personally I still think it more likely that his personality was completely erased. Beyond that, however, I have another, rather more serious reservation.”

“It being?”

“That if we are so bedazzled by that,” he jabbed a finger toward Brabrooke’s Turing device, “then I fear whatever else we see might be so staggering that, before we can knock sense into Brunel, it’ll knock all the sense out of us!”

With the world having changed so dramatically, they decided to keep their expedition to London small. A large party was more liable to attract attention, and, as Gooch had suggested, the excursion could be disrupted by an occurrence of mental instability. Fewer personnel meant a lesser chance that one of them would, as Swinburne put it, “start rolling his eyes and spitting foam.”

The poet, Burton, Gooch and Farren—all well dosed with Saltzmann’s —departed Bendyshe Bay in a small boat piloted by a Penniforth. Lorena Brabrooke went with them. During the voyage across the northern stretch of the Channel, she told them about the current Cannibal Club, revealing that, though the group was still funded by Bendyshe investments—currently run by two sisters and a brother—the Foundation itself had been broken up into a large number of much smaller organisations. They were more likely to evade scrutiny than the megalithic institution the original body had become.

Membership had grown more exclusive, currently consisting only of direct descendants. Those who hadn’t been “blood members”—such as the Blanchets, von Lessings and Griffiths—were now absent.

“The younger ones in the group have all adopted the original surnames,” she said, “even those that weren’t born with them. It’s a matter of pride.”

“But why the dwindling numbers?” Burton asked.

“It got dangerously bloated back in the seventies.” She addressed Farren. “Your lot were full of zeal, but you weren’t exactly subtle.”

“We didn’t know we needed to be,” he protested.

“The system is cunning, Mr. Farren. It manipulates people’s fears and hopes, their insecurities and aspirations, and it ensures that all opposition is bogged down in a quagmire of prejudice, stupidity, propaganda and selfish motives. In your era, resistance was fun. In mine, it’s potentially a death sentence.”

“In my era?” Farren said. “The sixties weren’t so long ago. How old do you think I am?”

“In your seventies, I guess.”

“Christ! I’m twenty-five!”

“Anyway, like I was saying, the methodology the Cannibal Club employs to evade detection and keep an objective eye on developing history has had to change. It’s all digital now.”

“Something to do with fingers?” Gooch said. “The way you used your Turing device?”

“It’s technical term. It refers to an extension of the systems your Mr. Babbage devised. Thanks to him, nowadays oppression and resistance do battle in the same arena, it being the realm of information, which he, after a fashion, created.”

“Do you regard Babbage as a villain, then?” Gooch asked. “I’ve always thought of him as a hero, if a rather unpredictable one.”

“I think of him as a genius, sir. If he knew how his systems were eventually employed, I expect he’d be horrified.” An expression of pain crossed her features. “But I wish I’d never read Abdu El Yezdi’s second report.”

Burton, who’d been listening to the conversation with interest, said, “The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. I can understand your reservation. The affair was initiated when a different iteration of Charles Babbage, in a variant history, attempted to achieve immortality in order to pursue his intention to eliminate the working classes. He wanted to replace them with machines. The idea might not have been wholly villainous, but it was certainly inhumane.”

Gooch looked thoughtful and muttered, “If we return, perhaps we should refrain from telling him about the path his work has taken. It might send him over the edge.”

“We already know something will,” Burton observed.

Swinburne, who was gazing ahead with Saltzmann’s dilated pupils at the east coast of England—grey beneath a grey dawn—said, “He’s already loopy, if you ask me. But Babbage aside, you say there’s a sort of information war being waged, Miss Brabrooke? Surely, if this horrible government of yours is to be overthrown, there’ll be a need for something more substantial. Armed revolutionaries.”

“I’m an armed revolutionary,” Brabrooke replied. “But people like me don’t shoot anymore, we just aim.”

Burton frowned. “Aim?”

“Access. Infiltrate. Manipulate.” Brabrooke offered a crooked and gappy smile. “I acquire information I’m not supposed to have, I alter it without being detected, and I withdraw leaving no evidence that anything untoward has occurred. That’s how I registered you all with the Department of Citizenship.” The boat bounced and she put a hand to her midriff. “Ugh! I hate the sea. Would that Saltzmann’s stuff of yours settle my stomach?”

The king’s agent curled his upper lip, exposing a long canine in what might have been a smile but more resembled a sneer. “Do you know what it is?”

“Oh. Yes. It’s—” she swallowed and went very pale. “Swinburne juice.”

Mick Farren groaned. “Yeah, what was all that about? A red jungle?”

Burton gestured toward the poet. “You can ask it in person.”

Swinburne smiled happily and winked. “Alternate futures! Strange events! Ripping adventures!”

“And in one of them you turned into a gigantic plant,” Farren said flatly. “Weird.”

“Indeed so,” Burton agreed. “But my companions and I are here—and on our way to 2202—at the jungle’s behest.”

“Okay,” Farren replied. “Weirder.”

Perhaps appropriately, that was the last word the chrononauts were properly aware of for the duration of the next ninety minutes. From the moment the boat docked at Gravesend, time passed in an unintelligible smudge of sensations that overburdened them to the point where the king’s agent—in a brief interval of near clarity—had no option but to dazedly pass around a bottle of the tincture that they might further dose themselves.

As the liquid radiated through him, he found himself gradually able to separate one thing from another, dragging from his jumbled senses first sound—mainly the roar of traffic—then smell, which delivered oily odours, and finally sight. This latter, a fragmentary mass, slowly congealed into the shape of the British Museum, though the blocky structure appeared to be floating amid a whirling storm of utterly indecipherable objects.

He realised that Lorena Brabrooke was peering up at him. “Sir?” She clapped her hands in front of his face. “Please. Say something. Snap out of it. I don’t think I can do this for much longer.”

He turned his head aside, coughed, closed and opened his eyes, looked back at her, and said, “Do what?”

“Lead you around like you’re a pack of zombies.”

“Zombie. Haitian. Supposedly an animated—” He stopped and blinked again. “Miss Brabrooke. We were on a train.”

“Yes, we were. From Gravesend. Then we took the London Underground.”

He shuddered. “Underground? No. I won’t go underground. I can’t bear to be enclosed.”

She displayed the gap in her teeth. “We’ve already done it. Look, you see? We’re at the museum.”

Burton heard Swinburne’s voice. “My hat! Where’s a good peasouper when you need one? My eyes are too full. Look at all these people. How did the city become so overcrowded?”

Algernon. And Daniel Gooch. Mick Farren, too.

The latter shook his head at Burton. “It’s doing my head in, man. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.”

The king’s agent straightened and squared his shoulders. “I’m quite all right, Mr. Farren. Quite all right. Shall we proceed?”

“Yes!” Swinburne and Gooch pleaded in unison.

Lorena Brabrooke led them up the museum’s steps and into the entrance hall. It was like reliving the scene they’d earlier viewed on her Turing—an eerie repetition—and it continued as they ascended the stairs and navigated through corridors toward the Isambard Kingdom Brunel display.

And there he was.

The great engineer.

The brass man.

Suddenly, Burton felt perfectly fine.

It was a winter Tuesday, and early in the morning, so there were few other people around, and none near this particular exhibit.

Burton, Swinburne and Gooch stood and gazed at their old friend. Acting on an instinctive respect, Farren and Brabrooke withdrew a little.

Brunel, kneeling on one knee, was posed on a plinth in such a manner as to appear deep in contemplation. His hulking body was clean, polished, and glinting beneath a spotlight, which threw the eye sockets of his mask into deep shadow, serving to emphasise his stillness, as if his mind was so far withdrawn that a void had taken its place.

The big Gatling gun was raised up.

Tools extended from his wrists and fingers.

One of his arms ended in a stump.

He was just as he’d been a hundred and sixty-two years ago.

Brunel! The man around whom a cult of science and engineering had grown; the man they called “the Empire Builder,” who upon receiving hints of future technologies had used his boundless imagination and the materials of his era to reproduce ingenious approximations of them, transforming the civilised world, initiating the Great Age of Steam.

“He’s regarded as a national treasure,” Lorena Brabrooke said.

Burton glanced back at her. “The Anglo-Saxon Empire wouldn’t have existed without him, Miss Brabrooke. He was there at its inception, fighting alongside us to prevent the sabotage of the alliance between Britain and the Central German Confederation.”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the exhibit.

The king’s agent stepped closer to the plinth. He leaned forward and peered up into Brunel’s eyes.

“Hello, my friend. It’s been quite some time.”

Nothing.

Swinburne asked, “Shall I kick him?”

Farren whispered, “Look to your right.”

The poet did so. Burton followed his gaze. On the other side of the large chamber, a constable was standing guard beside a door, its hands clasped behind its back, its small glittering black eyes upon the visitors. The pig creature was identical to the ones they’d seen in 1968, except that its stilted uniform was white.

They hastily turned their faces away from it.

Swinburne mumbled, “All right. No kicking.”

Brabrooke said, “Try again, Sir Richard.”

Conscious of the guard’s scrutiny, Burton kept his voice low. “Isambard, do you recognise me? It’s Burton. I’m here with Algernon Swinburne and Daniel Gooch. You remember Gooch, don’t you? All those projects you worked on together? The transatlantic liners? The atmospheric railways? Hydroham City? By heavens, man, he built your body!”

Gooch moved to Burton’s side. “Mr. Brunel, what happened to you? Won’t you speak? We’ve come a long way to see you. Do you know what year it is? 2022!”

“Babbage helped us,” Burton went on. “He designed a Nimtz generator. It allows the Orpheus to travel in time. What an undertaking that project was! The whole of the Department of Guided Science was given over to the job. All of your people laboured on it night and day, every man and every woman; that’s the measure of their loyalty to you, old man.”

Brunel didn’t respond, didn’t move. Not even a click emerged from him.

Swinburne pushed between them, stood on tiptoe, reached up, and snapped his fingers inches from the brass face. “Wake up, you confounded lazybones!” he demanded. “Get off your metal arse. We need your help.”

The chamber suddenly echoed with the tock tock tock of stilts as the guard crossed it.

“Now you’ve done it,” Lorena Brabrooke said. Under her breath, she continued, “Just follow its orders and, without incriminating yourselves, agree with whatever it says. Be careful.”

As the pig man drew closer, Burton whispered, “Behave, Algy.”

The constable stopped in front of them and snarled, “Don’t touch the exhibit.”

“I didn’t,” Swinburne objected. “I was just seeing how my hand reflected in its face.”

“T-bands,” the pig said. “All of you.”

Lorena Brabrooke stretched out her arm, showing the bracelet. Burton, Swinburne, Gooch and Farren followed her lead.

The guard reached out and knocked his own bracelet against theirs, one after the other.

“Jeremy Swinburne,” he stated. “Scriptwriter. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“Um. Yes,” Swinburne agreed.

“Richard Burton. Actor. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“Yes,” Burton said.

“Daniel Gooch. Director. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“That’s me.”

“Michael Farren. Producer. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

Farren coughed. “Yeah.”

“Lorena Brabrooke. Production Assistant. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

“Yes, sir. We’re doing the initial research for a docudrama about Isambard Kingdom Brunel. We have to study him closely, but we won’t interfere with the display.”

The guard wrinkled its snout. “Shut up. I’m doing a background check.” Its beadlike eyes focused inward for a couple of seconds. “All right. You’re clear. Continue. Don’t touch.”

It turned and stalked back to its post. Tock tock tock.

“Phew!” Swinburne said. “What a perfectly dreadful brute.” He addressed Brabrooke. “Bendyshe Entertainments? We’re doing what with the what for the what?”

“Never mind,” she said. “It’s all a fiction.” She frowned at Burton, who was staring wide-eyed at Brunel. “Sir Richard?”

He didn’t reply.

She touched his arm. “Sir Richard?”

“It’s really over,” Burton murmured. “My world. The time I inhabited. He built it and now it’s all ended.”

They considered Brunel.

“A brief span and then we are gone,” Burton said. “Time is cruel.” He straightened and sighed. “I thought he, of all of us, would live forever.”

They remained in the museum for a further thirty minutes, standing close to Brunel, discussing his many projects and the people he’d known, hoping that Gooch was wrong and a spark of life remained, that the reminiscing would sink into the engineer and hook a memory, something to bring him out of his long, long fugue.

It didn’t work, and when the guard showed signs of renewed suspicion, they gave up.

Led by Brabrooke, the chrononauts left the exhibition hall.

Behind them, Brunel remained silent and frozen.

When Burton glanced back before passing through a doorway, it was from such an angle that, due to the spotlight reflecting into the engineer’s shadowed eye sockets, it almost appeared as if two little glowing pupils were watching them depart.

An illusion.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was dead.

“What’s your opinion, Sadhvi?” Burton asked.

The king’s agent was sitting in the lounge of the Orpheus with Raghavendra, Swinburne, Gooch, Trounce, Krishnamurthy, Lawless, Wells, Farren, and the Cannibals—Patricia Honesty, Marianne Smith and Lorena Brabrooke.

“Daniel was worst affected,” Raghavendra said. “You, Richard, considerably less so, while Algy and Mick were dazed but remained coherent.” She patted Swinburne’s knee. “Our resident poet appears to have a strong resistance to what Mr. Wells has dubbed time shock.”

Wells said, “I compare it to the disorientation one experiences when travelling in an exotic culture, but it’s far more pernicious.”

Raghavendra said to Burton, “Your history as an explorer has given you a degree of resilience—”

“Not enough,” he interrupted. “I don’t recall a damned thing about our return from the museum.”

“Whereas Mick,” she pressed on, “is only fifty-four years ahead of his native time period, so 2022 feels a little more familiar to him.”

Farren blew cigarette smoke out through his nostrils, obviously not in full agreement.

“On this occasion, poor Daniel bore the brunt,” Raghavendra said.

Trounce looked across to Gooch and muttered, “And I know exactly how you felt.”

Gooch compressed his lips, nodded at the detective inspector, and asked Raghavendra, “What makes Algernon more resilient, do you think?”

“He has a unique brain,” she responded. “He’s extremely odd.”

“Steady on!” the poet squealed. He jerked his leg, convulsed an elbow, and crossed his eyes.

“It’s apparent to us all,” Burton observed, “that his brain is arranged in a different manner to the normal.”

“Disarranged, I should say,” Trounce muttered.

“I say! Let’s settle with unique, shall we?”

Burton continued, “My fear is that, for the rest of us, the effects are liable to get worse and the recovery time—providing we can recover—considerably extended. On this occasion, it’s taken five days for us to properly regain our faculties. We’ve been safe enough, cooped up aboard this Concorde, hidden away in Bendyshe Bay—but what will we find at our next stop? What if the bay no longer belongs to the Cannibal Club?”

“The groundwork laid by your brother and Thomas Bendyshe back in the 1860s was pure genius,” Patricia Honesty said. “It’s endured all this time, and, with each successive generation, the Bendyshes have developed it and adjusted it to suit the period. I’m pretty certain the bay will stay in our hands, and if it doesn’t, the Cannibals will have plenty of time to find another means to keep you safe.”

“Be that as it may, we need our wits about us, and we’ve come to the point where the doses of Saltzmann’s required to counter the time shock are almost as ruinous as the condition itself. The bottles delivered in the Beetle’s final shipment aren’t nearly as addictive as those that preceded them, but we still have to be cautious with the medicine.”

“Ha!” Swinburne cried out. “You’ve changed your tune.”

Sadhvi Raghavendra nodded her agreement.

“Nevertheless,” Burton said.

“We’re not even halfway through our voyage,” Trounce observed. “How are we to endure the rest?”

“Nine years away from the halfway mark,” Krishnamurthy added. “A hundred and eighty years until 2202, and I doubt our stay there will be brief.”

“Give me a bottle of the tincture,” Patricia Honesty interrupted. “I should have thought of this before. Chemistry has advanced. We’ll analyse it. Reproduce it. Or something similar.”

Her daughter gave a gesture of approval. “In the space of fifty-four years, we’ll probably create something considerably more effective and without any addictive qualities.”

“You’ll have twice as long,” Burton said. “I intend just one more stop before our target date. If Spring Heeled Jack has integrated himself with this Turing Fulcrum of yours, he has power over a considerable portion of the world. Let’s see what he makes of it by 2130. Will one of your number join us?”

“Not this time,” Patricia Honesty said. She handed him The History of the Future, volume three. “We haven’t the personnel to spare. Besides, there’s a little something we’ve been experimenting with that makes it unnecessary for us to supplement your crew. Hopefully, you’ll see what I mean a hundred and eight years from now.”

A little over a century later, the chrononauts gathered by the ship’s hatch and welcomed a single Cannibal aboard. His name was Thomas Bendyshe.

“You’re the spitting image of your ancestor!” Burton exclaimed as he shook the man’s hand.

“Hallo!” Bendyshe said. “I’m a great deal of him, but explanations must wait until later. First, let’s replace your bracelets and transfer you to the new Orpheus.”

Though he didn’t appear to do anything to prompt it, the bands around the chrononauts’ wrists instantly snapped open and slid down to their knuckles. Bendyshe collected the bracelets and put them into a cloth bag. Setting this aside, he then took a small container of pills from his pocket and distributed them among the chrononauts, two each, a blue one and a yellow one. “Swallow. They’ll release AugMems, CellComps, BioProcs and other nanomechs into your bloodstream.”

From his visions of Edward Oxford, Burton vaguely comprehended these terms. He knew that AugMems were capable of overlaying a man’s perception of reality with an artifice. Oxford had used them in his suit’s helmet, so when he arrived in 1840 to observe the attempt on Queen Victoria’s life, it would initially resemble his own time. He’d planned to slowly reduce the AugMems’ influence, revealing the reality of the past little by little. In the event, he’d acted too eagerly, removing his headpiece moments after his arrival, exposing himself to the past all at once. Burton was sure the resultant shock played its part in Oxford’s subsequent decision to interfere with his ancestor’s assassination attempt.

“Nanomechs,” he said, testing the word. Its meaning played at the peripheries of his mind; Oxford’s knowledge, not his own.

“Molecular-sized technology,” Bendyshe said, “blending biological and artificial components.”

“By Jove!” Trounce muttered in a sarcastic tone. “I’m glad you’ve cleared that up.”

“Are they safe?” Herbert Wells—now fully recovered—asked.

“Perfectly,” Bendyshe responded. “They’ll integrate without any ill effects. They’ll carry your false identities, in case the authorities check, and will also enhance your senses.”

“I’m in,” Mick Farren announced. He swallowed the pills.

“Ah yes, the 1960s,” Bendyshe said. He laughed. “I’m afraid they’re not recreational pharmaceuticals, Mr. Farren.”

“No? Enhance in what way, then?”

“They’ll show you whatever the government wants you to see.”

Farren made a noise as if choking and stuck out his tongue, trying to regurgitate the pills. He spat an epithet that caused Sadhvi Raghavendra’s eyes to widen. “Now you bloody well tell me!”

“Mr. Farren, your misgivings are entirely justified,” Bendyshe said. “Fortunately, we Cannibals have developed a means to intercede with the nanomechs’ functioning and turn them to our advantage. Provided you behave normally, nothing about you will raise suspicion. In addition, you’ll not register on any surveillance net, your movements will be cloaked, and communications between us will evade all monitoring.”

“That,” Farren replied, “I like.”

“Providing we behave normally,” Swinburne echoed doubtfully.

“Algy has a point,” Burton said. “To us, what you might regard as normal becomes ever more abnormal the farther forward into history we travel. There is also the matter of our behaviour being affected by the environment. Will the AugMems cause us to perceive this future world as a copy of our own? Do they render Saltzmann’s Tincture unnecessary?”

“No, Sir Richard, there’s a very good reason why they can’t give you an illusion of 1860s London. You’ll understand why later. However, there’s a compound in the yellow pill that’ll act much like Saltzmann’s, only without the side effects. You’ll need to take one every twenty-fours hours. I’ll leave you with a supply.”

“Then Patricia Honesty was true to her word,” Burton noted.

“She was always the most reliable of us,” Farren murmured. A strange expression crossed his face. Burton sympathised. It was difficult to process the notion that people who were alive yesterday were now long gone.

“If you all follow my lead,” Bendyshe said, “you’ll be fine.”

Sadhvi Raghavendra sighed. “I’m not wildly enthused by the prospect, gentlemen, but nothing ventured—” She swallowed the pills. Her colleagues followed suit.

Bendyshe stepped back to the hatch. He signalled to a group waiting outside the Concorde. They responded by ascending the stairs, entering the ship, and silently filing past the chrononauts.

“My team will carry your luggage to the new ship before transplanting the Nimtz generator and the babbage. Captain Lawless, Mr. Gooch, Mr. Krishnamurthy, will you assist with the engineering?”

“Of course,” Lawless said. “We’re becoming rather adept at it.”

“For the rest of you, it’s off to London we go.”

“Our third visit to the capital of the future,” Burton commented. “What shall we find there this time?”

“You’ll see indisputable evidence that Spring Heeled Jack is manipulating history. It will, I hope, give you some idea of what you’ll face when you reach 2202. As for whether it’s safe or not, we’ve done everything we can to disguise your presence. You should be able to move around freely and undisturbed. I do urge you, though, to watch your words in any circumstance where you might be overheard. Information is currency, and informers are everywhere.”

Burton gestured for Bendyshe to proceed. The Cannibal led them outside. It was an overcast night, and Bendyshe Bay was ill lit. They could see nothing beyond the field in which the Concorde had landed, though, in truth, they didn’t try, for their eyes were fixed in incredulity upon the two flying vessels beside which their own had landed.

“Rotorships!” Captain Lawless exclaimed.

Bendyshe pointed to the vessel on their left. “The Orpheus.”

“But it looks identical my old ship,” the airman observed.

“It is your old ship, sir. We have preserved it all these years. And it’s a good thing we did. Nowadays, that is the standard of technology available to the masses.”

Burton and Lawless exchanged a puzzled look. The king’s agent said, “Has there been some manner of reversal?”

“There has—a result of the failed uprising of the 2080s,” the Cannibal responded. They started across the grass toward the vessel. “The Empire was torn apart by seven years of rioting and civil disobedience. The people attempted to throw off the shackles imposed on them—literally, in the form of the bracelets—by the government. They failed. As a consequence of their actions, the division between the privileged minority and the underprivileged masses widened even farther. The latter were denied most of the advanced technologies. For them, it went retrograde. The more primitive varieties of steam machines were resurrected. The underclass has become very much like the workers of your own period, except they hardly know it.”

“Do you mean they’re drugged?” Wells asked.

“After a fashion. AugMems, which are injected at birth, enforce upon them an illusion of contentment. Their gruel tastes to them like honey, their relentless toil is imbued with false meaning, the filth in which they exist is perceived as comfort, and their empty lives are filled with distracting entertainments. They are happy because they are unable to recognise the severity of the limitations under which they labour.”

A man and three women met them at the foot of the old Orpheus’s boarding ramp. Bendyshe turned to Lawless, Gooch and Krishnamurthy. “You three will not witness the truth. Think yourselves lucky. May I introduce Jacob Hunt, Carolyn Slaughter, and Rebecca and Ben Murray? They’re overseeing the refit of the ship. If you’ll accompany them, please.”

“You won’t have any problems understanding the Orpheus, sirs,” Carolyn Slaughter said. “She’s hardly changed. Just a few additions.” She smiled at Lawless. “It’ll feel like coming home for you, I expect, Captain.”

Lawless, Gooch and Krishnamurthy bid their colleagues farewell and followed the Cannibals into the familiar ship. Bendyshe led the rest toward the other. “The Mary Seacole. We’ll fly her to the Battersea airfield.”

“It’s still there?” Detective Inspector Trounce exclaimed.

“Greatly expanded.”

“Mr. Bendyshe,” Wells said. “What did you mean by that comment, think yourselves lucky?”

“Only that the truth is rather disturbing.”

They ascended the ramp, entered the ship, and were escorted to its lounge where they settled on chairs and sofas and were served food and beverages by Bendyshe. Burton felt uncomfortable eating once again in such an informal manner, and suddenly longed for Mrs. Angell. You’ll not take your supper in the study, sir! Not again! If you want to eat, you’ll find your plate on the table in the dining room, where it bloomin’ well belongs!

“You spoke of the privileged and the underprivileged,” Wells said to Bendyshe, “but what has become of the middle class? Back in 1914, I thought they were poised to take over the Empire.”

“They were a relatively brief phenomenon,” Bendyshe answered. “They grew throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but proved ungovernable. Before, in Sir Richard’s time, when there were simply the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have Nots,’ each individual knew his or her place in the world, and society, though not in the slightest bit fair, was at least stable. The middle classes were problematical. They always wanted more. They developed the notion that they could better themselves. They sought control. They felt they could be raised to the level of the elite, though they were rather less supportive of the idea that the lower classes might be raised to the middle. Such aspirations led them to instigate the failed revolution of the 2080s. Victory, they thought, was assured, for surely the minority wouldn’t employ brute force against a vast majority.”

Burton said, “They miscalculated?”

“Very. They didn’t know what we know, that those in power were under the sway of Spring Heeled Jack. The crackdown, when it came, was ferocious beyond belief. The constables killed millions. Literally millions.”

“Still stilted pigs?” Farren asked.

“Yes. Rather more mechanised than they were when they made their debut in the 1960s but essentially the same. They overwhelmed the rebellion, AugMems were employed to control the population, and the middle classes were forcibly thrust into the lower.”

“I don’t mean any offence,” Sadhvi said, “but to which class do you belong, Mr. Bendyshe?”

Bendyshe grinned and for an instant looked almost identical to his ancestor. “By virtue of our ability to evade government influence, the members of the Cannibal Club cannot be classified. We are fugitives. Ghosts. We inhabit the cracks in the system.”

The floor vibrated, and a rumble signified the starting of the ship’s engines.

Having been reminded of the original Thomas Bendyshe, Burton said, “You hinted at some reason for your resemblance to your—what?— great-great-great-grandfather?”

“Seven greats.”

“By my Aunt Gwendolyn’s woefully woven wig!” Swinburne cried out. “Have we really come so far?”

“You are two hundred and seventy years from home. Yes, Sir Richard, I resemble him because my father’s DNA was manipulated to accentuate the Bendyshe inheritance, and I am his—my father’s, I mean—clone.”

The floor tilted slightly as the Mary Seacole rose into the air and turned.

“You’ve lost me,” Burton said. “I understand what DNA is, having briefly inhabited the mind of the sane Edward Oxford, but—”

“That doesn’t help me,” Trounce grumbled. “I hardly understand a bloody word. You might as well speak in Greek.”

Burton looked at his friend, thought for a moment, then said, “DNA is a component of the cells in your body. It dictates how you will grow, what you will look like, what strengths and weaknesses you possess, and to some extent, how you will behave.” He turned back to Bendyshe. “Correct?”

“In a nutshell.”

“But clone?”

“Cloning involves the exact reproduction of DNA. I am not my father’s son. I am his replica, as he was of his father. All the current Cannibals are identical to their immediate forebears. You see, it was discovered during the twenty-first century that memories are inscribed into DNA and can be passed on to clones, though it requires medical intercession to make those from earlier generations available. My father had many of his ancestors’ recollections brought to the fore. They’ve been passed on to me. The Cannibal Club’s mission is one that spans centuries, so we felt it would be advantageous to have this continuity.” He stopped, peered at Burton, and went on, “For example, I vaguely recall your last meeting with my namesake. I believe we—I mean, you and he—took lunch at the Athenaeum and were interrupted by the arrival of a constable?”

“Bismillah! How is it possible?”

“It must seem miraculous, I know, but it’s only science.”

“Only!” Herbert Wells cried out. “What miracles Man has achieved!”

“Woman, actually,” Bendyshe corrected. “The inscription of memory and character on DNA was proven by Doctor Hildegunn Skogstad in 2093. She then went on to develop the techniques we use to retrieve it.”

Swinburne scratched his head vigorously, crossed his legs, and uncrossed them. “I must say, old chap, despite the similarity of appearance, you’re considerably more subdued than the Tom Bendyshe I knew. You must count yourself fortunate. He was an utter ass. Loveable. But an ass. My goodness, I saw him—what?—last week and suddenly miss him terribly!”

“I’m my own man,” Bendyshe said. “I’m writing my own memories.”

“This must be what Patricia Honesty was referring to when she said we’d no longer need to take a new Cannibal aboard at each stop,” Burton murmured. “You’re better placed to advise us.”

“Yes, because I have the history you hopped over stored away in here,” Bendyshe said with a tap to his head.

“I’m tripping,” Mick Farren declared, then clarified, “Hallucinating. You’re talking about stuff that’s so far out there it’s like, y’know, just plain crazy, man. And suddenly you’re all wearing the same clothes. What’s up with that?”

“Democratic greys,” Bendyshe said. “Your AugMems are taking effect. We won’t block the government’s broadcast yet. I want you to see what they want you to see before you’re exposed to the truth.”

“Riddles,” Trounce murmured. “I bloody hate them. It’s why I became a detective. To solve the bloody things until there were none left.”

Burton blinked. A moment ago, the Scotland Yard man had been wearing a dark suit. Now he was in a grey and very utilitarian one. The chrononauts uttered cries of astonishment as they, too, experienced the odd transition. In a matter of moments, they were all attired in identical outfits. Yet they discovered that, when they looked down at themselves, they perceived their own clothes.

“Much of the Empire is in the same way illusory,” Bendyshe explained. He stood and stepped over to a porthole. “We’re crossing the Channel. The Mary Seacole is registered as a freighter. She’ll not raise suspicion. We’ll land in fifteen minutes or so.”

“Our agenda?” Burton asked.

“I understand you were involved in the Grosvenor Square riot of 1968?”

“We were, unfortunately.”

“We’ll revisit the scene. Don’t worry. There won’t be any trouble this time. I simply want you to compare the present with what you’ve already experienced. On the way there, you’ll be exposed to the lie generated by the Turing Fulcrum. On the way back, I’ll reveal to you the reality of the world.”

Fifteen minutes later, the chrononauts crowded around the portholes and gazed in wonder as dawn broke over the substantially expanded London of 2130. The city sprawled from horizon to horizon and stretched its thousands of towers high into the sky. It was a glittering, shining, blinking, reflecting, dazzling, multifaceted jewel cut through by the meandering Thames, the only part of it instantly recognisable to the travellers, though they eventually spotted the tiny-looking but apparently timeless landmarks of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, and the parks—Hyde, Green, Regent’s, and Hampstead Heath.

Gone, though, was the Battersea Power Station. Where it had once stood, and extending across all of Battersea Fields, there was now a massive aerodrome. As the Mary Seacole sank toward it, Bendyshe said, “The station was demolished in 2040. It had been standing derelict since the old Department of Guided Science was disbanded in the 1880s.”

“I thought it a permanent fixture,” Burton murmured.

“Nothing is,” Bendyshe responded. “Only Time has dominion.”

The rotors moaned, and the ship settled with a slight bump.

Bendyshe ushered the chrononauts toward the hatch. “We’ll drive to New Centre Point then walk from there to Grosvenor Square. We’re sightseeing, nothing more. When we’re on foot, keep your voices low. Try not to be overheard. If any citizen hears you say something that can be regarded as suspicious or unusual, they will report it. Informing is a means to earn credit. The citizens of the Anglo-Saxon Empire are eager to denounce one another. Careless talk costs lives.”

He opened the hatch. A vehicle was parked at the end of the ramp, a six-wheeled contraption of smooth curves and black glass.

“Straight into the minibus, please,” Bendyshe said. “Our driver’s name is Odessa Penniforth.”

He hurried them down and into the conveyance. As they settled on the soft, well-upholstered seats, a slightly built young woman with cropped blonde hair and wide brown eyes looked back at them and said, “Hallo! I can’t believe it. Are you really from the past?”

“Miss Penniforth,” Burton replied. “We are practically dinosaurs.”

Bendyshe pulled the door shut. “Let’s go.”

Smoothly and silently, the car pulled away and headed toward Chelsea Bridge, which proved to be a different and much wider structure to the one Burton and his friends had known. It was clogged with crawling traffic.

“Your cars appear more efficient than those from my time,” Farren noted, “but why are they moving so slowly?”

“You’ll see,” Bendyshe said mysteriously.

They crossed the river and drove in a north-easterly direction. Though the vehicle’s windows were opaque from the outside, they were transparent from within, and its passengers stared out in awe at the buildings that soared to either side of the road. High above the city, a network of thin bridges and walkways spanned the distances between the spindly towers, and many were hung with garish flags, vaguely reminiscent of the Union Jack but made much more complex by additional stripes and colours.

The king’s agent gazed out of the window and wondered how he could fight an intelligence around which a whole society was forming. This London was virtually unrecognisable to him. Its citizens, who thronged the pavements in astonishing numbers—the population appeared to have increased tenfold—were all dressed in grey. The streets along which they moved, illuminated by electric lights despite it being early morning, were drab and characterless. There were none of the hawkers and performers of his time, no stalls or braziers, no dollymops or beggars, no ragamuffins or newsboys. It was all steel and glass and crowds of grey, grey, grey.

And there were constables everywhere, tottering along on their stilts, their pig faces now hidden behind blank white masks, their limbs longer and more human in form than their 1968 or 2022 counterparts, so they much more resembled the Spring Heeled Jacks who’d assaulted him back in 1860.

“It’s a nightmare,” he murmured.

“You’re not wrong,” Farren agreed.

They steered into Buckingham Palace Road, drove between Hyde and Green Parks—the whole area struck Burton as being oddly dark despite the clear sky and open spaces—and proceeded along the Mall. The thoroughfare, once the tree-lined haunt of the well-to-do, was now made distinct only by virtue of the park on the right. On its left, there were the same towers, the same glass, the same grey, and the same patrolling pig men.

Burton shook his head in disbelief.

This isn’t real. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t look real. It’s like a desert mirage, seemingly solid, seemingly close, but when you try to reach it, it moves away from you. What is going on here? What kind of Jahannam has the Empire become?

Up Charing Cross Road to Tottenham Court Road, and there the vehicle came to a halt, stopping among many similar machines in a rectangular plot of land beside an extraordinarily tall cylindrical edifice that appeared to have been constructed from diamond-shaped windows and little else.

“What ho! What ho! This all feels oddly familiar,” Swinburne noted as he clambered out.

“New Centre Point,” Bendyshe said. “Built on the site of the old one, which was bombed during the uprisings. It’s a monitoring station.”

“What does it monitor?” the poet asked.

“People.”

Odessa Penniforth leaned out of the vehicle and said, “I’ll wait for you here. Enjoy the revelation, everyone.”

“I wish I knew what was going on,” Swinburne exclaimed. “My hat! Do they still have public houses in 2130?”

“They do,” Bendyshe confirmed. “The government came close to making them illegal but then realised that people speak before they think when under the influence.”

“Must you keep calling upon your hat, Algernon?” Trounce complained. “Confound it! Why does no one wear them anymore? I feel naked without my bowler.”

Farren looked this way and that, frowned at the hissing traffic, and muttered, “Is that music?”

“I hear it too,” Herbert Wells said. “In the background.”

“Muzak,” Bendyshe said. “Ubiquitous, bland and characterless.” He said to Farren, “You thought rock and roll would conquer the world. It didn’t. Muzak did. It’s the universal temper suppressant. An insidious tranquilliser.”

“A horrendous hum,” Swinburne added. “A detrimental drone.”

Bendyshe nodded his agreement. “A puerile pacifier.”

Farren gritted his teeth and fisted his hands. “Oh man,” he growled. “What I wouldn’t give for a Deviants gig, right here, right now!”

“You’d be shot dead on the spot,” Bendyshe said.

Farren suddenly relaxed and chuckled. “Yeah, that was always the risk when I got on stage.”

Staying close together they moved away from the minibus and joined the pedestrians flocking into Oxford Street. To Burton, it felt just as if they were joining the protest again, except the people—rather than being a noisy and colourful gathering with a purpose—were nothing more than innumerable and near-silent citizens squeezing along a highway too narrow for such a dense crowd.

Sadhvi walked at his side. Wells and Swinburne were just in front; both small, both squeaky-voiced, both looking eagerly back and forth, weathering the assault on their senses. Behind the king’s agent, Trounce and Farren made quiet comments to one another; an odd combination, a police detective and a proto-revolutionary, united by a mutual disapproval of this confusing future world.

Guided by Thomas Bendyshe and jostled by the city’s denizens, they shouldered past glass-faced shop fronts and comprehended nothing of what was displayed within, saw peculiar vehicles slide by and had no understanding of what their function might be, read signs and posters the words of which signified nothing to them, and were, without respite, subjected to the steady beat and sinuous melodies of soft and relentlessly insipid “Muzak.”

Burton looked into the faces of the people and observed an incongruous mix of contented smiles and shifty eyes. Some, who were either tall or short or thin or fat, somehow left him with the impression they were just the opposite of what they appeared, as if a slender passerby was secretly obese, or a diminutive person a covert giant. This, together with the unaccustomed cleanliness of the city, gave the sense that he was among actors and moving amid a stage’s cardboard scenery. There was no depth. No connection. No meaning.

Why was the traffic moving at such a sluggish velocity? Why did the quiet hiss of the vehicles, the subdued murmur of the pedestrians, and the steady low drone of the Muzak, amount to so much silence? Where was the life?

“The shadows,” Sadhvi whispered.

“What about them?” he asked.

“They don’t match.”

She was right. The many electric street lamps, cutting through the permanent gloom at the base of the towers, endowed every individual with multiple shadows. For the most part, due to the crush of people, these couldn’t be seen separately, but occasionally there came a break in the crowd and the shadows were made visible. Burton saw them and was horrified. Most were normal but many were misshapen blots or spiked puddles or stringy smears or snarled scribbles—not at all the contours of human beings.

“By Allah’s beard!” he hissed. “What are we looking at?”

Wells glanced back at him and made a gesture, obviously having noticed the same. Burton responded with a curt nod and swallowed nervously.

They walked on. The king’s agent kept feeling things bumping against his boots, as if the pavement was as littered as those of the old East End, but when he looked down, there was nothing there.

Now and then, he became aware of apparently sourceless sounds—creaks and snaps and groans, the clip clop of horses’ hooves, the clank of a misaligned crankshaft, a hiss of pressurised steam—as though noises from his own London were somehow penetrating into this.

It’s my expectations, he thought. They’re imposing what I’m familiar with onto this wholly unfamiliar city.

He was unnerved and disoriented. There was a lump in his throat. He longed to see top hats and canes, parasols and bonnets, hansom cabs and horses, chugging steam engines and wobbling velocipedes.

Where has my London gone?

That struck him as a very uncharacteristic thought.

For all his life he’d felt an outsider. He’d cursed the ways and mores of his native land. It had rejected him, considered him too unorthodox, too untamed, and too unsophisticated. Society damned him for admiring the Arab and condemned him for mixing with African savages. Ruffian Dick! Beastly Burton!

Yet, how he wanted to be back there.

For perhaps the first time in his life, he felt helpless, and he felt humility. He realised that he had, in the past, conducted himself from a position of self-appointed superiority. Yes, he’d been an unwavering proponent of Arabic culture; yes, he’d dispassionately observed tribal societies; but he’d done so as a wayward son of the Empire, knowing that, though it looked askance upon him, it was always there as a measure by which to judge.

Fool! he thought. Fool to think that you somehow existed outside of its confines. It made you!

And now he was, at one and the same time, home but as far from it as he’d ever been.

As they shoved their way around the corner into North Audley Street—a much different junction to the one he’d seen in ’68—he remembered his parents, how they’d dragged him from one place to the next, from Torquay to Tours, from Tours to Richmond, from Richmond to Blois, from Blois to Naples, from Naples to Pau, from Pau to Lucca, always moving, always compulsively restless, never giving him a moment to stop and form attachments, never a moment in which to simply belong.

He felt anger and sadness, resentment and self-pity.

Isabel. Isabel. Isabel. You were my hope, my foundation, my stability. Only through you could I be me. Why did you have to die?

In his mind’s eye, he saw her, waiting in a garden, with a tea cloth over her arm.

You’re going now? she asked. Supper is almost ready.

Yes, he replied. But don’t worry—even if I’m gone for years, I’ll be back in five minutes.

“Damnation!” Burton muttered to himself. “Are my memories no longer my own?”

The chrononauts, led by Thomas Bendyshe, arrived once again in Grosvenor Square, the middle of which was, thankfully, a great deal less congested than last time. From here, the travellers gained a better view of the upper reaches of the city. London had achieved phenomenal heights. Its towers ascended to such a level their top storeys faded into the atmosphere and their internal heat generated clouds, which streamed from them in wispy trails.

The many walkways and—Burton now noticed—monorails were of such a multitude that it looked as if the city was entangled. Small flying machines buzzed hither and thither, and, at a higher altitude, massive airships floated. Many were like the Orpheus and Mary Seacole, airborne antiques, appearing entirely out of place. Others were smooth disks of silver or gold, their mode of propulsion invisible and mysterious.

“I see nothing of my own time,” Mick Farren said. “I might as well be on another planet.”

“I see the same shaped plot of land,” Detective Inspector Trounce observed, pointing around them. “This is still Grosvenor Square.” He shuddered. “I didn’t much enjoy what little I remember of my last visit.”

Farren indicated a tall pyramidal structure. “That’s where the American Embassy used to be.”

“It’s still the embassy,” Bendyshe said. He looked around, and when he was satisfied no one was close enough to eavesdrop, he continued, “It’s inhabited only by a few technicians nowadays. They oversee the equipment that broadcasts to your AugMems. The building is a part of an inner circle of establishments. From it and the others, a web of deception expands.”

“Inner circle,” Wells said. “And what is at its centre? The Turing Fulcrum?”

Bendyshe gazed at the embassy. “We think so.”

He waved the chrononauts across to an area beneath a leafy tree, which, when Burton placed his hand against its bark, proved to be of the material called plastic.

Nothing is real.

The king’s agent struggled to maintain a connection. His mind kept wandering, his attention being attracted by first one thing then another. His powers of analysis failed. Automatically, his hand went to his pocket, seeking Saltzmann’s. There was none.

“What you’ve seen so far is but a single layer of the illusion under which the population labours,” Bendyshe said. “I’ll now give you a taste of the rest. I’m adjusting your AugMems.”

He put his finger to his right earlobe and muttered, “Okay. Proceed.” Suddenly, he was enveloped by a colourful aura. Burton looked at his friends and saw that they, too, appeared to be generating beautiful halos.

“We are masquerading as the elite,” the Cannibal explained. “Thus we glow with the light of the upper classes. However, what we see is what the general populace sees. Look at the city’s citizens.”

Burton gazed across to the pavement. He saw, amongst the shuffling crowd, three people who were also surrounded by light. The rest were not. His eyes rested on a pedestrian. A calm voice whispered in his ear and caused him to jump in surprise. He heard the others utter sounds of astonishment.

John Thresher, cook, thirty-two years old. Three thousand two hundred and twenty-nine credits in debt. He plays poker. His wife has a lover. John hopes to win a fortune and lure her back, but he’s lost money eleven games in a row.

The king’s agent looked from person to person.

Teresa Chowdhury, child minder, nineteen years old. She is learning to read so she can train as a nurse. Her father tells her she has ideas above her station.

Cecilia Sanz Garcia, cleaner, forty-seven years old. She has pre-diabetes and a glandular disorder that causes extreme mood swings. She struggles with relationships.

Steven Powell, clerk, thirty-three years old. He suffers from shyness and has a tendency to stutter.

Blake Cresswell, baker, seventy-one years old. He’s never held a job for more than two years. He’s a convicted felon. His last crime, burglary, was committed twenty-seven years ago.

Mary Suzanne Clayton, metalsmith, twenty-four years old. She owns a small allotment from which vegetables are frequently stolen. She has hidden homemade wiretraps around its perimeter to catch the thieves.

“What’s this?” Sadhvi Raghavendra exclaimed.

“In your time,” Bendyshe replied, “I believe it was called tittle tattle.”

“Gossip?” she said.

“Yes. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. Only the upper classes are immune to the intrusion.”

“It’s a blasted liberty!” Trounce cried out. “By God! Has no one any privacy?”

“Only in their thoughts, and they have to be extremely cautious in expressing those, else they’ll certainly fall foul of informants. Anything that can possibly be interpreted as seditious is reported, and the punishments are brutal.”

“How can anyone think at all with all this horrible chattering in their ears?” Swinburne objected. “Can’t they turn it off?”

“Only the elite have that privilege. As for thinking, I suspect the system is expressly designed to discourage it.”

“Stop it, please,” Burton said. “It’s too much.”

Bendyshe touched his ear again and mumbled something. The whispering voice fell silent. The auras faded. “That,” he said, “is what the majority of the population must endure. Maximum distraction. Minimum meaning. Their existence is overflowing with inconsequential information. They drown in it. They are mesmerised by the trivial minutia of one another’s lives, and so the really big issues evade them. Questions pertaining to justice and human rights and the distribution of wealth, the preoccupations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are no longer asked.”

“This is perfectly foul,” Herbert Wells cried out.

“Shhh!” Bendyshe urged. “You’ll have the constables onto us.”

“But he’s right,” Mick Farren said. “How could it have happened?”

“People were seduced,” Bendyshe said. “The Turing devices and other technologies gave them an endless choice of entertainments, but the corporations that made those entertainments, in competing with each other for customers, rapidly reduced everything to its lowest common denominator. What might once have carried philosophical weight became nothing but empty spectacle; what stimulated the intellect now did nothing but titillate superficial emotions. By 2100, intellectual had become a pejorative term.” He stood. “Come with me. It’s time to show you the truth of the Anglo-Saxon Empire.”

They followed him across the square to the mouth of South Audley Street, coming to a halt on the exact spot where, a hundred and sixty-two years ago, they’d fought off three constables.

Bendyshe pointed along the length of the thoroughfare. “Watch the street. I’m going to temporarily deactivate your AugMems. I’ll give you a full minute of unadjusted reality. It’s risky.”

“Risky how?” Wells asked.

“AugMems work in both directions. They accept the government transmissions but also send out a signal that holds your personal details—false information in your case. If the latter is interrupted, the loss will be noted and constables will be sent to investigate. They’ll hunt for any individuals who aren’t broadcasting. It’s therefore vital that we keep moving. I should be able to restore the AugMems’ function before we’re located.”

“Is it worth endangering our mission?” Burton asked doubtfully.

“I think so. You need to see this.”

“Very well. Please proceed.”

“Start walking. Try not to react. We’re going down to Green Park to take a look at the palace grounds.”

They set off.

“Brace yourselves,” Bendyshe said. He put a hand to his ear, quietly muttered a few words, then announced, “The AugMems will disengage in three, two, one—”

Burton gasped as the world around him flexed and suddenly took on an entirely different aspect. The blazingly reflective towers still soared above him, but now they were supported upon titanic legs and arches, so that the great vertical mass of the city was raised above the ground-level structures, which were now revealed to be shabby, dilapidated, and in many cases derelict buildings. Burton saw broken and boarded-up windows, cracked doors slumping on rusty hinges, peeled paint and crumbled brickwork, collapsed walls and piles of debris. The pavements were strewn with refuse. Malodorous air assaulted his nostrils.

He realised why the traffic was moving so slowly. The polished silver vehicles, which had filled the roads, were now in the minority. Most had transformed into ramshackle steam-driven carriages—there were even a few being drawn by mangy horses—all of which appeared even less developed than those of his era.

And the people. Bismillah! The people!

Attired in ragged, patched and mismatched outfits, pock-marked, rickets-twisted, lank-haired and brutish, the population of this London reminded Burton of the very worst disease-ridden enclaves of Africa—of the places where the Empire had intruded and devastated cultures, leaving only hopelessness, starvation, and a lack of identity in their place. Shambling along streets that now struck him as being the gutters and drains of the upper city, the denizens of this—literal—lower level of society were bowed beneath the weight of palpable fear. They flinched away from the constables who strode arrogantly among them, bouncing on their stilts, white and masked and fearsome; they avoided eye contact, though they were forever casting surreptitious and cunning glances at one another. They were as close to the feral state as he’d ever seen in his own species.

In countenance, all were repellent, but some were worse than others, even to the point where Burton felt himself go cold with horror. He saw lumbering giants, tiny-eyed, massive-boned, and bloated with muscle. He saw slight little things, so small they might have been fairy folk. He saw a woman from whom spines extended, like a porcupine; a man whose lower face bulged into an exaggerated snout, his jaws like rock, his teeth huge and flat; an elderly lady with twelve-inch-long multi-jointed fingers, seven on each hand; a group of boys with freakishly enormous ears; an aged man with four legs; a young girl with innumerable spider-like eyes.

“Genetic manipulation,” Bendyshe whispered. “People artificially adapted to suit particular functions.”

“I shall faint,” Sadhvi said, her voice quavering. “Or lose the contents of my stomach.”

The few elite who moved through the crowds were unmistakable. People looked away from them, moved out of their path, hunched into pathetic servility. Tall and willowy, dressed in colourful clothes, their faces haughty and disdainful, these privileged few all carried switches, which they employed with lazy contempt to strike at those who passed too close, causing little yelps of pain followed by hastily mumbled apologies.

“The upper class,” Bendyshe said. “They inhabit the towers but sometimes venture down here on recreational jaunts and to remind themselves of their status.

“This is atrocious,” Swinburne said. “How can the Empire be so divided?”

“Empires are formed by a minority who gain a parasitical dominance over the majority. That applies inside, as well as outside of its borders.”

Burton looked ahead and saw many more overarching walkways than he’d noticed before, so numerous they appeared to blend together, forming a large platform over the centre of the city. “That explains why it became so dark when we passed between the parks,” he said.

“The parks are regarded as exclusive,” Bendyshe responded. “So they’re gradually being raised up out of the social mire. Do you see that huge framework in the middle of them? One day it will be New Buckingham Palace, the tallest building in the world. They started building it twenty-eight years ago and say it will take another seventy-two to complete.”

“Why so long?” Wells asked.

“Because every brick of it will be uniquely decorated, and because the technology built into it will make it the Parliament building and the monitoring station for the entire empire, the nucleus of a web that interconnects nodes—the American Embassy will become one such—that communicate with every existing BioProc and AugMem. Total control, all extending from that edifice.”

“Seventy-two years,” Swinburne said. “Meaning it will be completed in 2202. Interesting.”

“And in its shadow an underworld,” Wells commented. He watched an apish individual shuffle past. “Inhabited by troglodytes.”

“Who see it through rose-tinted spectacles,” Sadhvi added. “We suspected that Spring Heeled Jack might create an insane world. We were correct.”

Quietly, Farren added, “If it’s like this now, what the hell will we find at our final destination?”

They arrived at Piccadilly and started north-eastward, following the same route they’d taken after failing to catch a bus back in ’68. The sky was almost completely obscured by the heights of the metropolis, but, as Burton gazed up, a great many of the walkways suddenly vanished and the illumination increased. He looked down and saw cleanliness and glass, gleaming cars and grey-uniformed pedestrians.

“I’ve restored the AugMems,” Bendyshe said. “And not a moment too soon. There’s activity on the police channel. We’ve been noticed. No need for panic; the constables will be alerted to an anomaly that matches the size of our group, so if we split up, we’ll be fine. Mick, Sir Richard, William, Algernon, the principal streets of the lower city haven’t much altered their topology since your time—you won’t get lost—so I suggest you head along Regent Street to Oxford Circus, and from there to New Centre Point. I’ll take Sadhvi and Herbert via Shaftsbury Avenue. We’ll meet back at the minibus.”

Farren paled slightly. He dug his fingers into his bushy hair. “Look, man, I’m all for it, but what if we’re stopped by the pigs? Things didn’t go too well last time.”

“Don’t worry. Members of the Cannibal Club are lurking nearby, ready to intercede should anything go wrong. They’ll be shadowing you.” Bendyshe tapped his ear. “CellComps have gathered in your earlobes and jawbones. It’s how I contact my colleagues, and through them I can also communicate with you. If the Cannibals have to move in and get you to safety, they will, and I’ll alert you.”

Farren looked at Burton for encouragement. The king’s agent gave him a nod and said, “North then east, straightforward and not much of a distance. I think we can manage.”

The two groups divided.

As Burton, Swinburne, Trounce and Farren entered Regent Street, Burton moved close to the Scotland Yard man. “Are you coping, William?”

Trounce grunted. “I’m still with you. These nanny-whatsits they’ve dosed us with do a better job than that Saltzmann’s of yours. By Jove, though, this world! What has the Police Force become? I joined to protect people. All I’ve seen as we’ve travelled forward through time is increasing intimidation.” He rubbed his thick fingers over his square chin. “Not that I can trust my senses anymore.” He made an all-encompassing gesture. “None of this is real.”

“I wonder,” Burton said. “How much of the world you and I have come from was real? We operated under the assumption that we were the most civilised country in the world, but I personally witnessed the destruction we wrought in India and Africa, and we know what senseless vandalism Lord Elgin inflicted upon China.” He paused and watched a very large dome-shaped vehicle pass by. What was its real form? A creaking stagecoach? A rumbling pantechnicon?

“Humph!” Trounce said. “And I saw too much of the Cauldron to believe in our claims of superiority. I see your point.”

“Perhaps Charles Darwin was too optimistic. Perhaps this world is different from ours only in that it’s cloaked in a more pervasive illusion. The only thing that’s evolved is our ability to fool ourselves.”

The four men pushed on. Two constables click-clacked past, their smooth featureless faces slowly turning toward the group before, thankfully, looking away.

“It’s weird,” Farren said. “I truly can’t believe my eyes.”

They came to Oxford Circus and bore right into Oxford Street. As in their own ages, the thoroughfare was lined with shops, and Burton and Swinburne were both astonished to see Shudders’ Pharmacy among them.

“Surely not!” the poet cried out.

“Generated by our AugMems, perhaps?” Burton theorised.

Unable to resist it, they went in. The chimeric neatness of the exterior didn’t extend to the inside. The shop was shabby and in serious disrepair. Damp plaster sagged from its walls, and its ceiling had collapsed in one corner. Makeshift shelves supported a sparse stock of bottles and cartons.

A stooped white-haired old man in a grubby laboratory coat greeted them. He smiled. His eyes were filmy and unfocused. He rubbed his hands together and bowed obsequiously. “Can I help you, my lords?” He gave an uncertain cough that sounded like “a-hoof!”

“My lords?” Swinburne whispered.

“Your name?” Burton asked.

The man looked afraid. “I’m Martin Ocean Englebert Shudders, citizen number eight triple-four seven six three nine eight. Is there—a-hoof!—a problem? My paperwork is up to date. My payments are made. My accounts are—a-hoof!—in order. I’ve re-registered my citizenship promptly every month. I’ve never spoken out of turn.”

“We haven’t any concerns about you,” Burton said. “We just wanted to see your shop. Has it been here for long?”

“Fifteen years. Perfectly legal and—a-hoof!—aboveboard. The regulations have always been adhered to. My family’s loyalty has never been in question. None of us are socialists or objectors. I hate the U.R.E. and the U.S.A. I deplore their savagery. I wish those barbarians were all dead.”

“It’s all right. As I said, we don’t doubt you. What was it before it was a pharmacy?”

“I don’t know, my lord. It was empty when I started to—a-hoof!—rent it. But my grandfather held that it was in the family many generations ago, and was a pharmacy then, too. Many of my family have been in the trade. Legally.”

“Thank you,” Burton said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” He moved toward the door, the others following.

“You don’t want to take anything?” Shudders asked. “Please.”

“No. I’m sorry. Unless—do you stock Saltzmann’s Tincture?”

“Saltzmann’s, my lord? Saltzmann’s. Saltzmann’s. No—a-hoof!—I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that. I have tranquillisers. Plenty of tranquillisers. Would you like tranquillisers? Please, have a bottle. Two bottles.”

“No thank you.”

They exited, looked back, and suddenly the windows were clean, and, through them, neat well-stocked shelves were vaguely visible.

They continued along the street.

“How very curious,” Swinburne muttered.

“Echoes, rhythms and repetitions,” Burton said. “Time is exceedingly strange.”

They hastened forward, all suddenly feeling the need for the safety of the minibus, worried by their separation from Bendyshe, Wells and Raghavendra.

“Don’t look back,” Farren said, “but those pigs that passed us earlier are following.”

“Why?” Trounce asked. “We haven’t done anything.”

“Two more on the other side of the road,” Swinburne said. “Watching.”

A third pair of constables dropped out of the sky and bounced on their stilts ahead of the group.

“Damn,” Trounce muttered. “We’re in trouble.”

“Stay calm, ignore them, and keep moving,” Burton ordered. He flinched and uttered a small cry of surprise as Bendyshe’s voice sounded in his ear.

“Sir Richard. Don’t be alarmed. You entered a shop?”

Burton murmured, “Yes.”

“But didn’t take anything. That’s not done. When the elite enter the establishments of the poor, it’s customary to remove something without paying. Your failure to do so aroused suspicion. The shopkeeper immediately reported you. Constables are now closing in on your position. Two of my colleagues are on their way to extract you. Kat Bradlaugh and Maxwell Monckton Milnes. Do whatever they say, please, without question or hesitation.”

Burton turned to address his companions, but Swinburne tapped his own ear and said, “We heard. We’re in trouble with the law because we failed to steal.”

“I wish I had my revolver,” Trounce mumbled.

New Centre Point was just ahead, but so were more constables.

“They’ll take us before we can reach the minibus,” Farren observed.

Bendyshe’s voice: “Turn right and start running. Kat will land a flier in Soho Square. Sir Richard, Algernon, get into it. The moment it departs, Maxwell will arrive in a second machine. Mick, William, that one’s for you.”

“The square’s not far,” Farren noted. “Unless it’s been moved.”

They rounded the corner into Soho Street and took to their heels. People scattered out of their path. A siren started to wail.

A constable flew through the air and landed in front of them, lowering a hand to the paving as it skidded across it. The pig creature stood, viciously swatted a young woman out of the way, and pounced onto Swinburne. The poet shrieked as solid arms clamped hard around him, catching him in mid-stride. He was lifted, legs kicking.

“Halt!” the constable commanded. “You are detained under Section Nine of the Public Order Act.”

“I don’t think so, chum,” Trounce shouted. He slammed his heel into the back of the creature’s knee. As the constable buckled, Burton piled into it and pulled it down. He ruthlessly hammered its head into the ground. The pig man went limp. Swinburne jumped to his feet.

“Run!” Burton bellowed. He saw constables springing in from all sides. One landed in front of him. He delivered a right hook to the side of its face. It staggered. He whirled away from it and sprinted after his companions.

The air vibrated, and, with a loud thrumming, a small wedge-shaped flying machine swept down between the gleaming towers and thudded into the square, landing just in front of them. Immediately, a shadow fell over it and a strong wind gusted down as a far larger vessel slid overhead. It was a white disk with six rotors set into its hull and a black-and-white chequered band decorating its outer edge. A menacing cannon-like array bulged from its underside. A deafening voice thundered from the machine. “Stay where you are. Do not resist. You are in violation of Sections Nine to Thirteen of the Public Order Act. You must submit to interrogation or forfeit your lives.”

A door in the side of the small flier hinged upward. A middle-aged woman leaned out and yelled, “Burton! Swinburne! In! Now!” She pointed a pistol and fired three shots. Three constables, on the point of grabbing Farren, Trounce and Swinburne, were thrown backward and lay twitching in the road.

Burton pushed Trounce toward the vehicle. “Go.”

In his ear, Bendyshe shouted, “No! You and Swinburne first!”

“Do as he says!” Trounce snapped. He took a pace backward and gave the king’s agent a hefty shove. Burton fell against the flier. Kat Bradlaugh grabbed him by the elbow and hauled him in. The king’s agent spat an epithet and reached out of the vehicle toward Swinburne. The poet extended his right hand. His fingertips touched Burton’s. A constable dropped down behind him. It raised a truncheon. With a loud snick, a blade slid out of the end of the weapon.

“Algy!” Burton hollered.

The stilted figure thrust the baton into the back of Swinburne’s neck. The poet opened his mouth in shock. The blade slipped out of it like a pointed tongue. Blood gushed. Swinburne’s green eyes rolled up. He crumpled to the ground.

“No!” Burton screamed. “No!”

“Kat, get him clear!”

The door dropped shut. Burton hammered his fists against it and hollered, “Let me out! Let me out!”

The flier lurched upward.

“I have to help Algy!” Burton rounded on Bradlaugh. “Take me back down, damn you!”

Through gritted teeth, she snarled, “Don’t be a fool.”

The flier tilted to the left as she turned it. Through its side window, Burton saw constables teeming around Trounce and Farren. One lashed out at the detective inspector, its truncheon cracking ferociously across his eyes. Trounce’s head snapped back, blood spraying from it. He collapsed, kicked, and lay still.

A second flier plummeted past and landed.

Kat Bradlaugh uttered a cry of dismay and grappled with the steering levers. Burton felt his stomach churning as the vehicle skewed and twisted. She shouted, “The police ship is trying to access our controls. Tom, can you help?”

“Maxwell, get Farren. Kat, I’m going to switch you to full manual.”

“I’m ready.”

“There are police ships approaching from the north and west. You’ll have to stay low to evade them. Get going.”

“We can’t leave!” Burton cried out. “My friends are injured.”

“Their nanomechs aren’t transmitting life signs, Sir Richard. I’m sorry.”

“No!” He grabbed Bradlaugh’s shoulder. “Wait! Wait! I can’t leave them! They can’t be dead!”

She ignored him. The flier suddenly fell, jerked to a stop some fifteen feet from the ground, and started to slide sideways.

“Got it!” Bradlaugh exclaimed. “Which way out?”

A constable thumped onto the front of the vehicle, causing it to rock. The creature’s fingers screeched against metal as it scrabbled for a hold.

“Off! Off!” Bradlaugh shouted.

The pig man squealed and scraped to the right. It fell out of sight.

“Follow Greek Street south,” Bendyshe instructed.

Burton glimpsed Farren at the door of the landed vessel, engulfed by constables. He was fighting like a madman, punching, kicking, somehow resisting though vastly outnumbered. Behind the Deviant, the Cannibal, Maxwell Monckton Milnes, was being dragged from the driver’s seat. His head was seized and forced all the way around. He went down.

“You bloody animals!” Burton cried out.

Farren broke free, dived into the parked flier, and yanked down the door.

“Mick,” Bendyshe said. “I’ve locked you in. Are you all right?”

Burton heard Farren panting. “No. Stabbed. Bleeding. It’s bad.”

“Can you stay conscious?”

“Not for—not for long.”

“You have to fly manually. Pull the joystick back to get her off the ground, side to side to steer, push it to descend. The footplate controls forward momentum and braking. Same as in your day.”

“Got it.”

“Hold on tight,” Kat Bradlaugh said to Burton.

He was pressed into his seat as the flier suddenly shot forward then was thrown against the Cannibal as it veered sharply. A thin beam of light sizzled past the side window just inches from his head. He felt its heat on his face. The glass blistered and cracked.

Bradlaugh cried out, “They’re firing at us!”

The second flier rose into view, weaving and bobbing as Farren struggled with the controls.

A voice blared from the police ship. “We have you contained. Land your vehicles immediately or we’ll shoot you down. You have ten seconds to comply. No further warnings.”

“Tom?” Bradlaugh asked.

“Damn it. I’m helpless. You’ll have to outmanoeuvre them.”

“I can’t.”

Mick Farren’s voice whispered in Burton’s ear. “I guess it’s time for one last gesture of defiance. It’s been fun, Sir Richard. A real pleasure to meet you. Good luck.”

“Farren!” Burton called. “What are you—?”

Before he could finish, Farren’s flying machine shot upward at a tremendous velocity, slammed into the bottom of the police vessel, and disappeared in a ball of flame. Bradlaugh screamed as the shockwave hit and the steering levers were wrenched out of her hands. Burning material rained down. The noise of tortured metal filled Soho Square, like the wails of a mortally wounded leviathan.

Bradlaugh snatched at the levers and regained control. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

She steered the flier into Greek Street and accelerated to such a breakneck velocity that Burton couldn’t draw breath. He twisted and looked to the rear just as the burning police disk went angling into a glass tower, ripped downward through its facade, broke in half, and disintegrated into the square amid a torrential downpour of fire, metal and broken glass. Then it was out of sight, and they were hurtling along, perilously close to the ground, through Charing Cross Road and into Long Acre.

“Kat, safe house eight,” Bendyshe ordered.

“Endell Street, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Got you. Half a minute.”

The flier pitched onto its side and plummeted into a narrow alleyway. Burton, unable to think, held on tightly and moaned with fright as brick walls streaked past just inches away. The machine rocketed out into a lengthy back yard, flipped to the horizontal, hit the ground, screeched along in a shower of sparks, and smacked into a wall, its nose crumpling.

“Out!” Bradlaugh barked.

Blood dribbled into Burton’s eyes. His head had impacted against the windscreen. He couldn’t move.

“Out!” the Cannibal repeated. She hit a switch, his door swung upward, and she pushed him into waiting hands.

“This way, Sir Richard,” Tom Bendyshe said. “Lean on me.”

Burton had little choice. His legs were like rubber.

Bendyshe half-dragged him across the yard, through a door, over rotting floorboards, out of another door, and into a quiet street where the minibus waited.

Sadhvi Raghavendra and Herbert Wells hauled him into the vehicle. Kat Bradlaugh followed and collapsed onto its floor. The door slid shut. Bendyshe clambered in next to Odessa Penniforth and said, “Not too fast. Don’t attract attention.”

The king’s agent felt the minibus move forward. Sadhvi applied a cloth to his forehead. He heard Wells say, “Are we going to make it, Mr. Bendyshe?”

“My colleagues are laying a false trail. Irregular BioProc signals racing westward. We, in the meantime, will be at Battersea Airfield in a few minutes.”

Sadhvi put a hand on Burton’s shoulder. “Richard?”

Sadhvi is alive. Wells is alive. Lawless is alive. Krishnamurthy is alive. Gooch is alive.

He sucked in a shuddering breath.

But Mick Farren and—

He couldn’t think it. Couldn’t allow any acknowledgment of the fact.

It came anyway.

William Trounce is dead.

Algernon Swinburne is dead.

Days went by. Sir Richard Francis Burton lost track of them. He and the surviving chrononauts were safe aboard the Orpheus in Bendyshe Bay, but their mission had come to a disastrous halt. The king’s agent remained in his quarters. He refused to speak to his colleagues. He didn’t eat. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t sleep.

He sat.

Cross-legged on the floor, eyes fixed straight ahead, for hour upon hour, he sat.

Not a thing went through his head. His thoughts were utterly paralysed.

Sadhvi Raghavendra did what she could for him. She brought food and took it away untouched. She sat beside him and spoke of the things she and the others had learned from the Cannibal Club, of the plutocracy that now ruled the Anglo-Saxon Empire, of the rapid physical and mental degeneration of the lower classes, of the many techniques employed by their overlords to keep them subservient and pliable, of the terrible destruction wrought during the failed revolution of the 2080s.

“The British Museum was among the many establishments destroyed,” she said. “Access to it had long been denied to the general public. It became a symbol of everything that was being withheld. As we saw in 2022, knowledge was distributed through the Turing devices, but it was strictly controlled, and that control became so increasingly draconian that by the 2070s even the Turings were discontinued. Not surprising, then, that the museum became, at one point, the focus of protestations. In 2083, the people, in their fury, determined that if they were to be denied the knowledge it held then the government would be, too. They blew it up. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was buried beneath the rubble.” She placed her hand on his forearm and gave it a squeeze. “It’s peculiar—I’d come to regard him as a point of consistency, an old friend who never changed. But I must contrast his loss with our encountering of all these new Bendyshes and Bradlaughs, Murrays and Monckton Milneses, Brabrookes and Hunts, Bhattis and Honestys, Slaughters and Penniforths. How oddly touching it is to see our old friends peeking out from behind all the new faces. Life goes on, Richard. Life goes on.”

This latter sentiment, expressed during her most recent visit, caused something deep inside him to stir. A thought whispered as if from an immense distance:

Not Algy’s life.

Not William’s.

Not Isabel’s.

Emotion stirred. It wasn’t grief or self-pity or despair but a black and iron-hard anger that settled upon him with such subtlety that when Raghavendra next visited she didn’t notice it at all, though she saw his dark eyes had become strangely shielded, as if he were looking out through them from much farther inside himself.

He started to take a little water, a little brandy.

Gradually, he regained awareness of who he was, where he was, and what he was supposed to be doing.

He ate a meal. He smoked a Manila cheroot. He stood, stretched his stiff legs, and regarded himself in the mirror over the basin. His internal silence was broken by two words:

King’s agent.

He snorted disdainfully.

Burton washed and started to shave, pausing frequently to gaze at his reflection.

Like an aged steam engine, his mind slowly built up heat, fuelled by his rage, its gears creakingly engaging, motion returning to it.

You failed. They were under your command and they died. You failed.

It wasn’t my fault.

Everything that makes you, you lose. Whenever you value a person, it’s their death sentence. Wherever you settle, that place will change. The things you hold dear forever slip out of your grasp.

I cannot endure such loss!

Whenever you feel certain of something, the only certainty is that it will become something else.

No!

There is only one truth, and that truth is Time, and Death is Time’s agent.

No! No! No!

He dropped the cutthroat razor and leaned with his fists against the bulkhead to either side of the mirror. He glowered at himself, one side of his jaw still frothy with shaving soap, water dripping from his moustache.

John Speke. William Stroyan. John Steinhaueser. Isabel Arundell. Algernon Swinburne. William Trounce.

He leaned forward until his forehead rested against the cool glass, shut his eyes, clenched his teeth and drew back his lips. Suddenly he was shaking and his respiration became strained. He wanted to find Edward Oxford and strangle him, hammer his face until he felt the bones fracturing beneath his knuckles, rip him apart until there was nothing remaining, but in his mind’s eye, the man he envisioned himself battering with such ferocious brutality, the man he called Oxford, possessed his own features and was named Sir Richard Francis Burton.

With an inarticulate cry, the king’s agent reeled from the basin, stumbled to a chest of drawers, snatched up a decanter, and poured himself a generous measure of brandy. He swallowed it in one and stood leaning on the furniture until he stopped trembling.

He returned to the basin to finish shaving.

He felt acutely aware of the edge of the blade as it slid across the skin of his throat.

I met Swinburne and Trounce just over half a year ago. How can I be so broken by their loss?

It felt as if he’d known them forever. They were family.

“Half a year?” he mumbled. “Nearly three hundred, more like.”

Had the attachments formed across multiple histories? Were they so important to him because they had been important to Abdu El Yezdi?

After changing his clothes, Burton crossed to a Saratoga trunk, opened it, lifted out its top tray, and took a small bottle from one of the inner compartments. He pulled the cork, downed the tincture, moved to the middle of the floor, lowered himself, and sat cross-legged again.

He didn’t need Saltzmann’s anymore. His addiction had completely left him. But he wanted it.

Closing his eyes, he focused his attention on his scalp, sensing the scars that curved through the roots of his hair, feeling the diamond dust that was etched into them.

The tincture’s glow eased him into a meditative trance. He filled his mind with a repetitive chant:

Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

He sought the Swinburne jungle, prayed that it would hear him, transcend histories, and communicate.

Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

Algy Algy Algy talk!

Algy Algy Algy talk!

Steady and persistent, like a heartbeat, the words throbbed through him until, very slightly, he started to rock backward and forward to their rhythm.

The tempo divided time—into seconds, into minutes, into hours, into days, into weeks, into months, into years, into decades, into generations, into centuries, into millennia, into ages, into epochs, into eras, into eons, into vast cycles of repetition through which the universe itself expanded and contracted like a beating heart.

Each division possessed a birth and a death, so there were births within births and deaths within deaths, from the infinitude of the microscopic to the boundlessness of the macroscopic. He recognised life as a commencement, life as a termination, life contained within a wave pattern, a vibration, a tone; a syllable through which intelligence was made manifest at every level.

The great paradox: everything in existence was imbued with intelligence, yet everything existed only because it was discerned by that intelligence. Matter, space, time and mind inextricably intertwined, creating themselves through self-recognition.

The insight blossomed in Burton like an unfurling red rose.

The jungle, its roots extending through histories, touched him for the briefest instant and delivered a truth—a stunning clarification of his earlier visions—that caused him to cry out in wonder.

“Bismillah! We have it reversed! The universe does not create life! Life creates the universe!”

The sound of his own voice intruded upon his trance. He opened his eyes but continued to sit quietly.

Twelve years ago—subjective years—he’d become a Master Sufi. Since that time, he’d been using the phrase Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq as a mantra to aid in meditation. Now, for the first time, he considered its meaning.

God is Truth.

He didn’t believe in God—not in one that responded to prayer and intervened in human affairs. However, if intelligence was the core and cause of reality, imagining it into existence and separating it into coherent parts, then might not the religious myths of a fall from “Grace” followed by a spiritual striving to return to “Him” be an allegory of humanity’s tendency to lose itself in its own narrative structures, becoming so deeply attached to its signifiers that full awareness of the signified was lost?

Burton sighed and climbed to his feet. Crossing to the mirror, he once again considered himself. He gazed into his own eyes, saw the anger in them and, beyond it, something else, something new. What was it? A deep spiritual shock? A suspension of disbelief? An abandonment of the convictions and attitudes through which he’d defined himself?

I am unmade.

He squared his shoulders, curled his fingers into fists, and left his quarters.

He found Gooch, Wells and Bendyshe in the ship’s lounge. They jumped up as he entered.

“Sir Richard!” Gooch exclaimed. “You are recovered?”

He gave a curt nod. “What’s our status?”

“We’re secure,” Bendyshe answered. “No danger of detection.”

Burton turned back to Gooch. “The Orpheus?”

“All shipshape and Bristol fashion.”

“Then we’ll get moving. Is everyone rested?”

They made sounds of affirmation.

Wells, apparently unnerved by Burton’s abrupt attitude, said in a thin voice, “Um. We can—we can certainly depart immediately if you order it, but if you—if you require more time—”

“Time? No, Herbert. Time is the last thing I need.”

Time is my enemy. Time leads only to death.

He turned back to Gooch. “The order is given. Tom, will you be coming with us?”

“No,” Bendyshe answered. “The Cannibal Club needs to be a resourceful presence in 2202 that it may support you properly when you arrive there. We have three generations in which to strengthen the organisation. I will be cloned, and I’ll see that everything that’s necessary is done.” He stood. “Sadhvi, Daniel, Herbert, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. Sir Richard, will you walk me to the hatch?”

“Certainly.”

Hands were shaken. Burton and Bendyshe left the room.

“I’m sorry for your losses,” Bendyshe said. “I feel responsible.”

“You’re not. I am. I should never have entered the pharmacy. But enough self-recrimination. The mission will continue. We’re a single step away from our destination. I’ll not be deflected from our purpose. The reckoning with Spring Heeled Jack must come. Frankly, I look forward to it.”

They reached the hatch. Bendyshe stopped and appraised Burton for a moment. “You seem somehow harder. More ruthless. I feel a little afraid of you.”

The king’s agent said nothing. He helped the Cannibal to slide open the portal. The air that gusted in was damp and bore the scent of wet grass.

Bendyshe stepped out then turned back.

“Sir Richard, we’re fighting for humanity. Don’t lose yours.”

After a slight pause, Burton answered, “I may have no option. I sense an inevitability about it.”

Suddenly, the other couldn’t meet his eyes. Bendyshe looked down at the boarding ramp, up at the clouded afternoon sky, across to the Mary Seacole. He mumbled, “My ancestor—the Thomas Bendyshe you knew—he really loved you. He’s a part of me and I can feel it.”

Burton gave a slight nod. “He’s a part of me, too.”

They said no more.

After drawing in the ramp and securing the hatch, Burton went up to the bridge and was greeted by Captain Lawless and Maneesh Krishnamurthy.

“Let’s prepare for departure, gentlemen.”

From above, the Mark III babbage said, “At last! I feared rust might set in. I’ve been bored senseless.”

Krishnamurthy, after momentarily gazing at Burton, said, “I’m glad to see you up and about,” then set off toward the generator room, leaving Lawless and Burton alone.

“Fifteen days, give or take a few hours,” the airman said. “That’s how long our voyage has taken so far, though calculating duration when you’re travelling through time is rather like trying to measure how much water a fish drinks.”

“I’m sorry I’ve delayed us,” Burton said.

“Don’t be. You had every reason. Besides, we can linger for as long as we like. It makes no difference. We’ll still arrive at nine in the evening on the fifteenth of February, 2202.” Lawless rubbed his neatly trimmed beard. “But what’s the plan? What will we do when we get there?”

“As her principal crew, you, Daniel and Maneesh will remain aboard the Orpheus. Myself, Herbert and Sadhvi will attempt to locate and destroy the Turing Fulcrum or whatever might have superseded it. If the Cannibals report to you that we’ve failed and lost our lives, then command of the expedition will fall to you. You’ll have to decide whether to make another attempt or retreat back to our native time.”

“We’ll not flee,” Lawless said.

Orpheus interrupted. “My apologies, Captain Lawless, Sir Richard. I have been readying the systems for flight.”

“Good,” Lawless responded. He looked up. “Why apologise?”

“Because I obviously misunderstood. When you said ‘prepare for departure,’ I thought you meant we might be going somewhere, not that you intended to stand around chatting.”

The airman snorted his amusement. He touched his right earlobe and said, “Mr. Wells? Would you assist us on the bridge, please?” Upon receiving a reply, he shook his head wonderingly and said to Burton, “I feel as if these CellComp thingamajigs have made me clairvoyant. Microscopic biological machines. Lord have mercy. Science or sorcery, I ask you.”

Wells arrived and took up position at the meteorological equipment. Burton moved to the Nimtz console, from which he could monitor the output of the generator.

Krishnamurthy whispered in his ear, “Captain, Sir Richard, ready when you are.”

“Are we all set, Orpheus?” Lawless asked.

“I believe I’ve already made it perfectly clear that I am,” the Mark III replied. “You’re the one who’s dawdling.”

“Then proceed, please. You know the routine.”

The familiar rumble of engines vibrated through the floor as the rotors whirled into a blur and lifted the ship.

“Now to once again discover the shape of things to come,” Wells murmured.

A minute later, Orpheus announced that the vessel was in position and ready to jump through time. Lawless issued the command.

They entered and exited whiteness.

“I’ve received instructions,” the Mark III immediately declared. “We are to set course for Battersea Airfield.”

“Go ahead,” Lawless said. “Top speed, please. Everyone all right?”

Burton and Wells nodded. The king’s agent addressed the man from 1914. “Herbert, go get yourself prepared.”

“Pistol?”

“Yes.”

Wells left the bridge. Burton looked out at the thickly clouded night sky then crossed to the console Wells had just abandoned and examined its panel. “Snow is forecast over London,” he murmured.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Lawless said.

“Not for me,” Orpheus confirmed.

Burton made a sound of acknowledgement. “I’d better get ready.”

He stepped through the door and descended to the main deck, walked along the corridor, through the lounge, and carried on until he came to Sadhvi Raghavendra’s quarters. He tapped on the door and entered at her called invitation. She was wearing baggy trousers and a loose shirt—men’s clothing.

“Richard!” she exclaimed. “How are you?”

“The walking wounded.”

He lowered himself into a chair beside her bunk. She sat on the mattress and placed a hand over his.

“As are we all.”

He rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. “I don’t know how much more I can take. Last year I lost my friends Stroyan and Steinhaueser. I lost—I lost Isabel. Now Algy and William. And seeing all these descendants of my friends, of Monckton Milnes and Bendyshe and Brabrooke and the rest, only serves to remind me of my own mortality and that, when I am gone, nothing of me will remain.”

“It’s not too late. What are you, thirty-nine years old?”

He snorted. “Three hundred and eighty-one by another reckoning.”

She smiled. “My point is that you might still, one day, father a child.”

“And see my own face somewhere in its features? An assurance of immortality? No, Sadhvi, that will never happen.”

“Your pain will subside.”

“If it does, it will make no difference. I was a young man in India. I was ravaged by fevers and subject to innumerable tropical infections. It has left me incapable of—of fathering a child.”

She nodded slowly. “Ah. I see. My native country is an unforgiving one.”

Sliding from the bunk, she squatted down in front of him so that her eyes were at a lower level than his, looked up at him, put her hands on his knees, and said, “You know the Hindu faith well.”

“I do. What of it?”

“You are aware, then, that we believe a cycle of creation, preservation and dissolution is at the heart of all things, at every level of existence.”

“It has been much on my mind. Have you been reading my thoughts?”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t dare to, even if I could.”

“Hmm. Cycles? What of them?”

“Just that, at a personal level, when one is in the midst of dissolution, when everything appears lost, there is still the promise of rebirth, of a new cycle to come, of fresh creation.”

“If one survives,” Burton rasped.

“The concept of survival exists only because we place fences around ourselves. It is easy to think that when the physical body dies, there is nothing beyond it. But that’s because we depend on our senses to tell us what’s real. Those senses are a part of the body. When it dies, so do they. They aren’t the truth, Richard. That lies outside of us. Whatever suffering you’re enduring, if you push it into a wider context, perhaps it will appear a little less overwhelming.”

“What context?”

“Think of what we’re doing. We’ve travelled many generations into the future. We should all be long dead and gone. Yet, here we are, on a voyage to help the entire human race fulfil its destiny.”

He gazed into her eyes, saw in them compassion and faith and unshakable friendship. He clicked his teeth together then gave a sharp exhalation and said, “You’re right. Of course, you’re right. What is Richard Burton in the greater scheme of things? I am but a pawn in a game far too complex for me to understand.”

“No,” she said. “You’re more than a pawn. Your life may not be what you hoped, but it is still yours. You have willpower. And you know better, perhaps, than any other man, how the actions of one person can alter the entire world.”

Burton put his hand to his scalp, felt the scars. “That’s for certain.”

He came to a decision, stood, and gave a hand to Raghavendra as she rose.

“Let’s go and discover what it is we must do.”

They left the cabin and walked to the bridge, where they found Wells waiting.

“How long to Battersea, Captain?” Burton asked.

“Twelve minutes,” Lawless responded. “We’re just passing Whitstable. Descending through the cloud cover now.”

“By heavens!” Wells exclaimed. He pointed out of the window. “Red snow!”

It was true. Bright scarlet flakes swirled thickly outside and speckled the window’s glass.

Bismillah! Did I somehow summon the jungle?

Burton stepped closer to the glass.

Algy?

He said, “Nine o’clock, same day, same month, separated by three hundred and forty-two years. Red snow on both occasions. Had I any doubts about this mission, this would have swept them away.”

The Orpheus lurched as the Mark III steered it sharply to the left. Burton and the others staggered. “Oops! Sorry about that!” the babbage said. “The conditions are interfering with my radar, and I didn’t anticipate there being towers in the clouds.”

“Towers?” Lawless asked. “At this altitude? This far out from the city? What do you—?” He fell silent as the rotorship emerged from the dense canopy into a forest of brightly illuminated obelisks.

“My word!” Wells cried out. “London must cover the whole of the southeast!”

They gazed out at what had once been Whitstable, a small and sleepy coastal town, now apparently a borough of the capital, having been engulfed by the ever-spreading metropolis.

“I’m reducing speed,” Orpheus said. “Some of those towers are touching three and a half thousand feet. I have to steer us between them.”

“Do it!” Lawless snapped.

“I am,” the Mark III replied testily. “Didn’t I just say so?”

“It’s incredible,” Raghavendra exclaimed. “I could never have imagined such a city. The size of it! The height!”

The engines hummed as the rotorship weaved back and forth between the vertical edifices, moving through the mammoth metropolis, travelling in a westerly direction.

“I can barely take it all in,” Lawless said. “Is it possible that people built such a marvel? It’s the eighth wonder of the world!”

They saw the mouth of the Thames, but of the river itself there was no sign.

“Gone!” Wells cried out.

“Maybe not gone,” Burton said. “Perhaps just built over. Even in the nineteenth century many of the city’s waterways had been forced beneath the streets. The Tyburn, Fleet and Effra, for example, were all incorporated into Bazalgette’s sewer system.” He shivered, recalling bad experiences in those subterranean burrows.

They marvelled at the columns, which loomed out of the falling curtain of snow, all spanned by walkways, making London resemble a great hive through which many more flying machines floated, glimmering like fireflies.

“There’s something ablaze,” Lawless noted. He pointed. “Down there.”

As the Orpheus altered course, swinging southward, Sadhvi drew their attention to three large lesser-lit areas, like linked hollows in the dazzling display.

“Hyde Park, Green Park and Saint James Park,” Burton observed. “Still there and still the same shape after all these years.” He grunted. “Which, if I’m judging it correctly, means that fire is in, or close to, Grosvenor Square.”

Recurrences. Patterns.

“Descending,” the Mark III announced. “Battersea Airfield ahead. I should warn you that I’m having problems with my altitude sensors. There’s a peculiar echo.”

“Clarify, please,” Lawless demanded.

“A double reading. I’m not certain which of them is accurate.”

“Everyone stay by the window,” Lawless ordered. “We’ll give visual assistance.”

They saw other rotorships gliding past. In design, they differed little to their own vessel. If anything, they were slightly more primitive. However, as in 2130, there were also other flying craft—disks and needles and cones—that were obviously far more advanced.

“Apparently the divide continues,” Wells said. “Progress for some, retrogression for others.”

Burton felt a lightness as the Orpheus dropped, increased weight as it slowed and stopped.

“Is the ground fifty feet below us or a thousand?” the Mark III asked.

Lawless peered down and said, “Fifty.”

The ship dropped, and they were all jogged slightly as it landed.

“Elegantly done as usual, despite the confusion,” the babbage declared. “You may congratulate me.”

“Consider your back patted,” Lawless replied.

“Cannibal Club representatives are waiting outside.”

“Thank you, Orpheus. Sir Richard, Herbert, Sadhvi, I wish you every success in your mission. Daniel, Maneesh and I will keep the ship ticking over, ready to respond in an instant should you require our assistance.”

Burton said, “Thank you, Captain.”

They clasped hands.

Burton, Wells and Raghavendra left the bridge and were met by Gooch and Krishnamurthy at the hatch.

“Ready?” Gooch asked.

Burton jerked his head in affirmation.

“A new Thomas Bendyshe,” Wells mused. “I wonder how identical he’ll be to the other?”

Gooch took hold of one hatch lever while Krishnamurthy gripped the other. They pulled, the portal opened, and the ramp slid down. A flurry of scarlet snow billowed in. They stood back.

Burton watched as two figures ascended toward him, an adult—male, to judge by the gait—and a child, both wrapped in ankle-length cloaks with wide cowls that kept their faces shielded from the downpour.

The visitors stopped in front of him. The adult snapped, “Government inspection. Do not resist. Let us aboard.”

“We’re a cargo ship,” Burton said. “Empty.”

“Nonsense. You’re a vessel from the distant past and you’re carrying enemies of the state.”

“From the past?” Burton replied. “What do you mean by that?”

“You are chrononauts from the year 1860. And you, old son, are Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous explorer.”

“Old son?”

The figure gave a bark of laughter. He and his companion reached up and pulled back their hoods.

“I’ve always been absolutely hopeless at playacting,” said Detective Inspector William Trounce.

“What ho! What ho! What ho!” cheered Algernon Charles Swinburne.

“Cloned!” Swinburne declared with an extravagant wave of his arms. “We were jolly well cloned!”

Sadhvi stammered, “But—but are you the same?”

Trounce tapped his head. “Humph! Memories and personalities intact. We recall everything. Is my bowler aboard? I still miss it.”

Bemusedly, unable to stop staring, Burton nodded.

Trounce reached up to smooth his moustache, even though it wasn’t there anymore. “By Jove, it’s good to see you after all this time.”

“Death defied,” Wells whispered in awe.

“To the lounge!” Swinburne exclaimed, stepping forward and giving a mighty jerk of his left elbow. “A toast to old friendships renewed. Nineteenth-century brandy, hurrah! Believe me, they don’t make it like they used to. By golly, I’ve missed it terribly. And all of you, too, of course. How the very devil are you?”

Burton suddenly pounced forward, caught the poet under the arms, yanked him off his feet, and whirled him around. “Algy! Algy! Bismillah! Algy!” He dropped him and lunged at Trounce, embracing him in a bear hug. “William, you old goat!”

“Steady on!” Trounce protested.

Swinburne screeched with laughter. “Three hundred and forty-two years!” he crowed. “That’s how long it’s taken!”

“To get here?” Sadhvi asked.

“No! For Beastly Burton to go soft!”

“Idiot!” Burton protested. “By Allah’s beard! Exactly the same idiot!”

“At your service,” Swinburne said with a melodramatic curtsey. “I say! Did someone mention a toast?”

“You did. And I wholeheartedly second the motion.”

Grinning helplessly, the reunited chrononauts closed the hatch and reconvened in the ship’s lounge where, to Swinburne’s evident delight, a decanter of brandy was produced. Swallowing his measure, the poet smacked his lips, gave a sigh of pleasure, and said, “At last. There are chemicals in everything, these days. Ruins the taste.” He sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, kicked out the right, twitched his shoulders, raised his glass, and added, “I appear to be empty.”

Gooch provided a refill.

“Cloned,” Burton said. “Are you, then, your own son, Algy? Grandson?”

“Neither. I’m me. The same person, the same memories, an exact copy of the body. The only difference is that I’ve lived a second childhood and have a brother I never had before.”

“Brother?”

“This old duffer,” Swinburne said, cocking a thumb at Trounce.

Burton’s right eyebrow went up.

Trounce said, “Back in 2130, the Cannibals indulged in a little body snatching. Just like the old days, hey? Resurrectionists! DNA from our corpses was put on ice. Thirty-eight years ago, mine was used to create yours truly. Thus you now find me exactly the age I was when you last saw me. My great-grandfather was the Thomas Bendyshe you met; my father his clone, also named Thomas. My mother is Marianne Monckton Milnes. Of course, they’re not strictly speaking my biological parents, but she bore me and they both raised me. In 2179, this scallywag was created—” He indicated Swinburne. “Fifteen years my junior. Same surrogate parents. The timing was carefully arranged so that he, too, would today be the age he was when you saw him last.”

Burton pulled a cigar from his pocket, fumbled and dropped it into his lap, retrieved it, looked at it, then blinked at Trounce and said, “You—you spent a childhood together?”

“Yes!” Swinburne said. “You should have seen how skinny he was. And stubborn. An absolute mule.”

“As you can see,” Trounce said. “Carrots is every bit as loony as his previous incarnation.”

Burton smiled at the nickname, which he’d heard used before in reference to his redheaded friend, though never by Trounce.

“I was somewhat past my childhood when he was born,” the ex-detective went on, “but, yes, we were raised together, and for a specific purpose.”

“It being our arrival?” Krishnamurthy ventured.

“Exactly. Algy and I are now the leaders of the Cannibal Club.”

Sadhvi said, “What of Mick Farren, William. Was he also—um— reborn?”

Trounce sighed. “I’m afraid not. There was nothing left of him. I heard what he did. Brave chap! Funny, back in 1968, he scared me silly with that wild hair of his, but I came to like him more and more. A bad loss.”

“And Thomas Bendyshe?” Burton asked.

An expression of uneasiness passed across Trounce’s and Swinburne’s faces.

The poet said, “Offshoots of the family still oversee our finances. As for the direct line, Father—”

“A distraction was necessary,” Trounce put in.

“Distraction?”

“Spring Heeled Jack is in control of the Empire, there can be no doubt about it. You arrived at nine tonight, the fifteenth of February 2202, which as we know is a significant moment for him. For reasons that will become clear to you, we were concerned that he might be watching out for your arrival. Father gave him something else to think about.”

“What?” Burton asked.

“The destruction of the American Embassy. The Cannibals have bombed it.”

The king’s agent again looked at his unlit cigar. He bit his lip and returned it to his pocket. “William, don’t tell me the club is resorting to violence.”

“Humph! The embassy has been a fully automated affair for many years. There was no one in it. Even so, it’s a crucial hub in New Buckingham Palace’s surveillance network, and its destruction will have caused considerable disruption throughout the city.”

Burton said, “I see.” He considered his old friend. Trounce looked the same, though clean-shaven and with slightly longer hair, but his manner was rather less gruff, and his diction a little different. The king’s agent found it disconcerting.

Daniel Gooch poured Swinburne a third brandy and said, “I take it the Turing Fulcrum is still in operation?”

“It is,” Trounce confirmed. “There’s been no real progress for well over a century. Everyone is watched. Everything is recorded. Creativity is suppressed. Fortunately, we Cannibals have Lorena Brabrooke.”

“We met her ancestor in 2022,” Burton said.

“The same. Cloned. A bloomin’ prodigy. Her ability to evade detection and construct false identities borders on the artistic. Your nanomechs were automatically updated the moment you appeared over Bendyshe Bay. By now, the Turing Fulcrum has already registered you as non-threats. If we exercise due caution, we can leave the ship and proceed with the mission.”

“To locate and destroy the damn thing,” Burton said.

“Quite so. There’s no question that Spring Heeled Jack has infiltrated it, exists within it, and through it has taken complete control of the Empire, yet for all Lorena’s ability to interfere with what the Fulcrum does, she’s never been able to identify exactly where it is. It, on the other hand, has on a number of occasions got dangerously close to locating her, which is why we’ve until now hesitated to mount an all-out assault against it. Tonight will be different. She’ll employ her talents to the full to confuse it while we set out to finally run Spring Heeled Jack to ground.”

“By what means are we to do that?”

The detective opened his mouth to continue, but before he could utter a further word, Swinburne leaped up, punched the air, and shouted, “We’re going to kidnap Queen Victoria! Hurrah!”

Sir Richard Francis Burton, Algernon Swinburne, Sadhvi Raghavendra and Herbert Wells were sitting in a medium-sized flier, a tubular craft with four flat disk-shaped wings. William Trounce was at the controls. They were in the air two miles west of Battersea Airfield on the other side of the now subterranean River Thames.

“Look down,” Swinburne said. He pointed out of the window. “Cheyne Walk. That’s where I lived in 1860.”

“I don’t recognise it at all,” Burton said.

The poet explained that London now existed on two distinct levels, thus Orpheus’s confusion. Walkways and platforms had melded together, been layered with soil, and planted with well-lit lawns and prettily landscaped gardens—all currently being coated with red snow. They separated slender towers of such height that the upper reaches of the city disappeared into the cloud cover and soared so far beyond it they came close to scraping the stratosphere. The overall effect was one of cleanliness and spaciousness, a luxurious environment unimaginable in Burton’s age.

Despite the thousands of towers, the upper level appeared to be sparsely populated. The king’s agent had never seen London so quiet. By comparison to what he was used to—and, especially, to what he’d witnessed during the journey to this time period—very few people were strolling around below, even taking into account the weather. Those he saw were wearing the same cloaks and voluminous hoods in which Trounce and Swinburne, and now he and his fellow chrononauts, were attired.

“You’re looking upon the city of the Uppers,” Swinburne said. “The elite. The privileged. Below it, there exists the second city, the overcrowded domain of the Lowlies.”

“The working classes, I presume,” Wells said.

“Yes, Bertie. They exist in dire poverty and are so terribly deformed by genetic manipulations that they barely qualify as human. The London Underground is a place of horror, and I’m afraid we have to go down there.”

“Why?” Burton asked. He could feel perspiration starting to bead his forehead.

Swinburne pointed to the northeast, where, at a high altitude, the edge of a platform—a third level—could be made out, its lights shining well above the upper city.

“That’s the New Buckingham Palace complex; what used to be Hyde Park, Green Park and Saint James Park. It’s inhabited by Queen Victoria and by government ministers and their staff and is exceedingly well guarded. However, water is pumped up to it from the River Tyburn, which flows beneath the lower lever. There are access conduits running parallel to the pipes that lead up from the depths to the heights.”

Burton groaned. “Please don’t say it.”

“I know, Richard. You hate enclosed spaces and you have bad memories of the Tyburn tunnel—but there’s no option. You have to go down there again.”

The flier veered northward, skirting around the western edge of the parks.

Trounce said, “In 2138, when the new palace was still being built, Lorena’s grandmother—the daughter of the Lorena Brabrooke you met in 2022—was able to access the architectural blueprints. We know from them that the conduits are connected by a lift to the upper pump room, which opens onto the palace roof where the palace greenhouses are located. They will be our point of entry.”

“I’m still confused,” Sadhvi said. “Queen Victoria?”

“Humph! I suppose it makes a crooked kind of sense that Oxford would re-create the monarch who lies at the heart of his madness,” Trounce answered.

“Is she a clone, too?”

“I very much doubt it. DNA doesn’t survive forever, and the original Victoria died three hundred and sixty-two years ago. Nor are there any descendants of the old monarchy who could convincingly claim the throne. No. I don’t know who she is or where she comes from, but, for certain, she is Spring Heeled Jack’s puppet, a figurehead enforced upon us to give a human face to his inhuman dictatorship.”

“So she has direct communication with him?” Burton asked. “She receives her instructions from the Turing Fulcrum?”

“I don’t see how she can perform her role otherwise.”

“But kidnapping?” The king’s agent shook his head. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”

“Nor me. If there was any other way—” Trounce fell silent.

He steered the flier between towers, and Swinburne marked off districts as they passed over them. “Earl’s Court. Kensington. Notting Hill.” The vessel veered to the east. “Bayswater. Edgware Road.”

Smoothly, they descended and landed in a long and narrow lamp-lit public garden. As they disembarked, Wells shivered and said, “This snow is extraordinary.”

“Blame my brother,” Trounce muttered. He raised his hood and gave a grunt of satisfaction as the others did likewise. “Even when we’re below, it’ll be best if we keep our faces covered, especially you, Richard.”

“Why me in particular?” the king’s agent asked.

Swinburne giggled. “You might scare the natives. Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

Burton glared at him, then his face softened and he muttered, “The same old Algy.”

Trounce pointed at the glowing glass frontage of a tall edifice. “Does the position of that tower ring any bells?”

“No,” Burton said. “Should it?”

“Its foundations are rooted in the spot once occupied by fourteen Montagu Place.”

“Home! By God!”

Swinburne grinned and nudged him with an elbow. “Good old Mother Angell, hey! Never fear, you’ll be back there soon enough.”

They fell silent as three “Uppers” walked by. Though the trio was enveloped in cloaks, sufficient of them was visible for Burton to see they were thin and willowy in stature.

Trounce waited until they’d passed then said to Burton, Wells and Raghavendra, “Hand over your guns. They’re rather too antique for our requirements.”

This was done, and he put them into a small compartment inside the vehicle, drawing from it five replacement pistols, which he distributed.

“The Underground is heavily patrolled by constables. They’re identical to the creatures that attacked you in 1860, Richard. You’ll remember how we fought them off with truncheons and revolvers. These pistols will make a better job of it.”

“How does it load?” Burton asked, examining his gun with interest. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s a Penniforth Mark Two,” the detective inspector explained. “Invented by one of Monty’s descendants. The bullets are stored in compressed form inside the grip. There are five hundred. You’re unlikely to need more.”

“Five hundred? How is that possible?”

“Humph! A nanotech thing. Quite beyond me. All I know is that after each shot a fresh bullet is squirted into the chamber where it instantaneously expands to its full form.” Raising the weapon, he continued, “The gun has a small measure of intelligence. Watch.”

He aimed at the flier. A small red dot of light slid across the vehicle.

“That marks the target, and, as you can see, I can aim just like normal. However, I can also do this. Front end.”

The dot snapped across to the flier’s prow.

“Rear nearside window.”

In a blink, the dot moved to the vehicle’s rear window.

“Ground, ten inches in front of the middle of the flier.”

The point of illumination instantly snapped to the quoted position.

“If you need to shoot a weapon out of an opponent’s hand, just tell the pistol to do so and it will take care of the aiming.”

“Impressive!” Burton exclaimed.

“Better even than that,” Trounce said. “You can instruct the bullets to kill or to stun or to explode.”

Trounce pushed the weapon into his waistband and gestured toward an oddly shaped structure. “Our access point is over there. It leads down to the corner of Gloucester Place. Up here, we’re safe enough. Down there, we won’t be. Watch what you say and keep your faces shadowed by your hoods. Your BioProcs will work to divert attention away from you, but if you’re seen to do—or heard to say—anything suspicious, the constables will be on us before you can say Jack Robinson.” Trounce started, his eyebrows going up. “By Jove! I’ve not said ‘Jack Robinson’ for nigh on three and a half centuries! Funny how memory works when you’re a clone.”

They followed him to the structure, which proved to be the top of a spiral staircase.

“What’s to stop the people down there from coming up here?” Sadhvi Raghavendra asked.

“Superstitious dread,” Trounce answered. “The maxim ‘know your place’ has been drummed into them for nigh on a century.”

“Will we attract attention by going down?”

“We’re Uppers. We can go anywhere.” He checked that their faces were all sufficiently shadowed by the hoods, gave a nod of satisfaction, and started down the metal stairs. Burton followed, Raghavendra was next, then Wells, and lastly, Swinburne.

The stairwell—a plain metal tube—was lit by a strip of light that spiralled down anticlockwise just above the handrail to their right. The illumination served only to accentuate the narrowness of the cylinder, and, as they descended, Burton’s respiration became increasingly laboured, his claustrophobia gripping him like a vice.

Their footsteps clanged and echoed.

After five minutes, an orange radiance began to swell from below.

“Is the air getting thicker?” Burton mumbled.

“Actually, yes,” Trounce said. “The Underground is hotter, made humid by steam-powered vehicles, and is pretty much a soup of nanomechs.”

“That do what?”

“That keep the Lowlies placid.”

They suddenly emerged from the tube into an open space. As they continued down the steps, Burton and his fellow chrononauts looked around in amazement. They were in Montagu Place, not far from the corner of Gloucester Place, but aside from the configuration of the roads the area was completely unrecognisable. Where Burton’s house had once stood, there was now a row of derelict—but obviously inhabited—two-storey buildings. Toward Gloucester Place, and across it, visible along Dorset Street, much larger tenement buildings huddled. They were ill-built ramshackle affairs, mostly of wood, with upper storeys that overhung the streets. They were very similar to the old “rookeries” that had once existed in the East End, reflecting the same dire poverty and hellish conditions that had made of the Cauldron such a crime- and disease-ridden district.

In stark contrast to the overground, the streets here were densely populated. Slow-moving crowds were jammed to either side of a band of clanking, growling, hissing, chugging, popping, grinding, clattering traffic. The vehicles were more primitive than those of Burton’s age, for the most part comprised of leaking boilers, smoking furnaces, chopping crankshafts, wobbling drive bands, and belching funnels. Some were pulled by horses or donkeys or, unnervingly, by gigantic dogs. That such methods of transport existed contemporaneously with the saucer-like fliers of upper London was extraordinary.

From all these contraptions, steam billowed into the air, making the atmosphere, which reeked of sweat and filth and fossil fuels, so foggy that the far ends of Montagu Place and Dorset Street were lost in the haze.

Hanging high over the thoroughfares, suspended with no visible means of support, a multitude of large flat panels glowed with letters and disturbing images. The closest, right next to the spiral staircase, portrayed a ferocious and Brobdingnagian slant-eyed panda rampaging across a city, crushing towers beneath its clawed feet, and with hundreds of tiny people dribbling from the corners of its snarling, fanged and blood-wetted mouth. “ONLY YOU CAN SAVE THE UNITED REPUBLICS OF EURASIA FROM ITS OWN BARBARISM!” the floating placard urged.

Farther along Montagu Place, another showed horned demons holding up a “monthly report” and laughing at its contents, which read, “MURDERED: BABIES . . . 2,019; CHILDREN . . . 3,345; WOMEN . . . 12,367; NONCOMBATANTS . . . 67,832. A GOOD MONTH’S BUSINESS FOR THE U.S.A.! STOP THIS HORROR!”

Over the junction with Gloucester Place, a third panel showed a man facing a Chinese firing squad. Behind him, bodies were piled so high they disappeared from view. “SERVE THE EMPIRE. MAINTAIN OUR CIVILISATION. RESIST SOCIALISM. WE ARE SUPERIOR.”

Others panels read, “ONLY ANGLO-SAXON ENLIGHTENMENT CAN SAVE THE WORLD!” and “THE HUMAN SPECIES DEPENDS ON YOUR LABOURS!” and “MUST WE ENDURE SUCH BARBARISM ON OUR DOORSTEP?” and “SOCIALISM CAUSES SPIRITUAL DECAY!”

Higher even than this floating propaganda, curving out and up from the many massive supports of the upper world’s towers, red brick ceilings arched, enclosing everything, so that the London Underground resembled a humungous series of groin vaults, lit only by the gas lamps that lined the thoroughfares and the watery illumination that leaked from many windows. At the peak of each of the arched sections, fitted into dark holes, enormous fans were spinning, sucking out sufficient pollution to render the air breathable, but not enough to adequately clear it.

The whole domain was half sunk in shadow. It was filled with dark corners and fleeting movements; a place of furtive and crafty activities; of things caught by the corner of the eye but gone when looked at square on.

The chrononauts descended down from the ceiling, turning around and around on the spiral staircase, gazing in horror first at sagging rooftops upon which occasional scuttlings could be glimpsed, as if small burglars were fleeing from those who might bear witness, then into upper-storey windows that opened onto bare rooms in which figures lay starving or drunk or exhausted or dead.

Finally, they reached the pavement, where Burton stumbled and was caught by Trounce, who murmured, “All right?”

“Yes,” Burton said. “Bismillah, William, have you brought us to Hell?”

“I’m afraid I have.”

The passing crowd recoiled from them, giving them a wide berth, for the chrononauts were obviously Uppers and thus better, thus to be respected, thus to be feared.

“Oh my God!” Sadhvi whispered.

The people weren’t people. They were less human even than the freakish pedestrians they’d seen in 2130. Shambling past, some were tall and attenuated; others short and bulbous, or bulky like boulders, or small, wispy and wraith-like, or multi-limbed, or half animal, or amoebic as if lacking skeletal structure, or padding along on all fours, or winged, or covered from head to foot in matted hair, or just so thoroughly grotesque that the senses could hardly make sense of them. Many were naked. More were dressed in rags. Most were in Army or Navy uniforms. Their language was the same rough variety of English that Burton knew from the shadier districts of his own London, though quite a few simply grunted or whined or barked or mewled.

The king’s agent turned his eyes to Trounce and they were wide with horror.

“Genetic manipulation continues,” the Cannibal said. “It’s uncontrolled. Follow me. Stay close.”

They began to move toward Gloucester Place.

Suddenly, blaring like a foghorn above the din of the traffic and clamour of voices, there came a thunderous bellowing. “Hot taters! Hot taters! Hot taters! Freshly baked for ’em what wants ’em!”

Burton peered ahead and saw, squatting on the corner, a short bulbous form in baggy garments with a flat cap upon its broad head. The creature’s face projected in a peculiar manner, thrusting forward and flat like a frog’s, with a mouth so wide that it touched the tiny lobeless ears to either side. Was it human? It appeared little more than a blob, with no visible legs or identifiable skeletal structure, and pudgy, apparently boneless arms.

The man—if it could be so classified—suddenly expanded his neck, throat and cheeks, puffing them out tremendously, like a balloon, so that he even more resembled a bullfrog, and opened that phenomenal mouth to once again blast, “Hot taters! Hot taters! Hot taters! Freshly baked for ’em what wants ’em!”

The chrononauts, their ears ringing, came abreast of him, and Burton clutched at Trounce’s arm. “Wait!”

“Don’t—” Trounce began, but it was too late.

Burton, though painfully aware of the disaster his impulsive visit to Shudders had caused, couldn’t help himself. He addressed the potato seller.

“Good evening, sir.”

“I ain’t done nuffink, yer lordship. I swears to it,” the man exclaimed, his tiny little eyes widening with fear.

“I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“But, all the same, I ain’t done a blessed thing. I’m innocent.”

“How much for a potato?”

“What? I mean, pardon? How much?”

“For a potato.”

The fellow smiled, his mouth widening to such a degree that Burton feared everything above it would be sliced off.

“Ah! I see! It’s a test, is it, yer lordship?” The man reached behind him to a brazier and pulled from it a baked potato. He wrapped it in newspaper and, with a courteous bow, held it out to Burton. “On the ’ouse, yer lordship, as is good an’ proper. Wiv me blessing.”

Burton took it. “May I ask your name?”

The other looked up and swallowed and blinked. “Please don’t report me. I really ain’t done nuffink wrong.”

“I have no intention of reporting you, my friend. I simply want to—I want to recommend you.”

A ripple passed through the globular body, and the man again grinned. “Ah! Well! Bloomin’ ’eck! That’s bloody marvellous, if you’ll pardon me language. The name’s Grub, sir. Grub the Tater Man.”

Burton turned and looked at Swinburne. The poet raised his eyebrows.

“And—and has your family traded on this corner for long?”

“Oh, forever! Since time immem—imum—”

“Immemorial.”

“Aye, immaterial! That’s the word, guvnor! It’s our patch, yer see. We was ’ere even back when there were sky.” Grub looked startled, as if realising he’d said something wrong. “Sorry, I didn’t mean anyfink by it. I knows me place.”

“Thank you, Mr. Grub,” Burton said. “I shall enjoy my potato later.”

He slipped the hot food into his pocket and, with the others, started to move away. They were stopped by Swinburne.

“Hold on,” he said, and turned to Trounce. “Pouncer, the embassy is destroyed. No doubt the palace will transfer its functions to New Centre Point or somewhere similar, but that’ll take time. This might be the perfect opportunity.”

“Humph!” Trounce grunted thoughtfully. “The city is unmonitored. You may be right, Carrots.”

The detective inspector addressed Burton. “Richard, show Mr. Grub your face.”

Grub looked from Trounce to Burton, his eyes wide. “Steady on,” he muttered in a worried tone. “I don’t want no trouble, gents.”

“My face?” Burton asked.

“Just momentarily,” Trounce said.

Puzzled, the king’s agent turned to face the potato seller. He reached up and pulled back his hood.

Grub’s eyes practically popped from his head. His huge mouth gaped open. “Bloody ’ell! Bloody ’ell! I’m goin’ to die! Oh no! I’m goin’ to die!”

“No, Mr. Grub,” Trounce said. “You’ll be quite alright. Hood up, Richard.”

Burton complied.

“But—but—but—” Grub stammered.

“Those who watch have been blinded,” Trounce said. “The moment is upon us, Mr. Grub.”

“But—you—aren’t you—?”

“We are not. We’re with you, sir.”

“Bloomin’ ’eck! Is it—is it that—I ’eard a whisper that the roof ’as fallen in not far from ’ere, m’lord. Is that it?”

“Yes. Certain measures have been taken. Soon, you’ll feel it. A sense of release. A need to take action. Follow the impulse.”

“Blimey.”

“You’ll spread the word? You understand who the true enemy is?”

“I does. We all does. We always ’ave done, ain’t we? But I’ll—won’t I?—I’ll not—”

“You won’t be detected.”

Grub made an indecisive movement, checked himself, then stiffened and saluted. “I’ll do me bit, sir!”

“Good man.”

Trounce returned the salute and led the chrononauts away.

“What the blazes was that all about?” Burton asked.

“You’ll soon see,” Trounce replied. He stepped out into the road. The traffic jerked to a stop. A few vehicles away, a boiler detonated and a cloud of white steam expanded from it.

They crossed Gloucester Place and moved into Dorset Street. Tenements leaned precariously over them, almost forming a tunnel. The shadows felt dirty and dangerous.

From behind came a further bellow, “Hot taters! Hot taters! Hot taters! As personally recommended by the Uppers! Come and buy and hear the word! Hear the word! Hot taters an’ hear the word!”

“A Grub,” Burton said to Swinburne. “Still there, on the same corner!”

“It’s perfectly marvellous,” the poet enthused. “Time has a little consistency, after all.” He shrieked and jumped back as a mountainous cyclopean individual lumbered past, his huge leathery hands dragging along the pavement.

Behind the beast, two constables came click-clacking on their stilts. The crowd recoiled away from them. The policemen passed the chrononauts without giving them any attention. Burton saw that, as Trounce had noted, they were exactly the same as those that attacked him in 1860.

“Sent back through history,” he whispered to himself. “And who could do that but Edward Oxford?”

Sadhvi Raghavendra stopped and knocked something unspeakable from the heel of her left boot. “Are there no street-crabs in the twenty-third century, William?”

“The nanomechs are supposed to consume waste material and use it for fuel,” Trounce responded. “Unfortunately, down here it accrues faster than even they can manage.”

“I suspect,” Swinburne added, “that Spring Heeled Jack purposely allows a measure of waste matter to accumulate. Having the inhabitants of the Underground wallow in their own detritus gives them a constant reminder of their status.”

They rounded the corner and entered Baker Street.

IT IS UP TO YOU TO RESCUE HUMANITY! TOIL FOR THE ANGLO-SAXON EMPIRE! WE MUST MARCH FORTH AND LIBERATE THE WORLD FROM THE SAVAGERY OF SOCIALISM!

“Was the world similar to this in the original 2202, Richard?” Herbert Wells asked. “In the single history that existed before time bifurcated?”

“As shown to me by the sane fragment of Oxford?” Burton responded. “No, it wasn’t like this at all. Certainly, London had greatly expanded and was filled with tall towers, but I received no impression of such an atrocious divide, no sense of this inequality.”

“Hmm. Curious. Insanity aside, if the Spring Heeled Jack intelligence has its origins in a considerably more pleasant future than this, why has he created such a dreadful alternative? Whence this twisted vision?”

“Perhaps it has its roots in my time,” Burton answered. “It was in the nineteenth century that he lost his mind. He appears to have taken what he saw there and developed it along such abhorrent lines that this,” he gestured around them, “is the result.”

“Did our world really have such evil potential in it?” Raghavendra asked. “I thought us enlightened.”

“You believed what you were told,” Burton said, “but consider the Cauldron. Was it not an aspect of London that could easily be the progenitor of this?” He glanced at a thin ten-foot-tall, six-armed, four-legged figure that came tottering by like a tumbling stack of broom handles. It was wearing Army reds and an officer’s hat, which it doffed flamboyantly to him, murmuring, “My lord.”

Burton pulled his hood more tightly over his head. From its depths, he examined the crowd as it parted in front of his group, trudging past to his left and right. He saw dull, suffering eyes and gaunt faces. A great many of the Lowlies bobbed their heads or touched their foreheads in respect. All appeared disconcerted by the presence of these “Uppers.”

Stilted figures prowled among them. The crowd shied away from the constables as they approached and cast hard looks at their backs after they’d passed. The Underground, Burton felt, was a pressure cooker, ready to explode.

“William!” he said.

Trounce halted. “What is it?”

Burton pointed across to the middle of Baker Street where a tall plinth divided the thoroughfare. It bore a large statue of a young woman. A plaque, attached to the base, declared, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, of the United Kingdoms of Europe, Africa and Australia, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India.

“Yes,” Trounce said. “That’s her. She took the throne five years ago, our first monarch since the death of King George the Fifth in 1905.”

“I know who she is,” Burton said. “I’ve seen her before. She appeared before me when I donned the time suit’s helmet.”

“I say!” Swinburne exclaimed. “Really?”

“She is—was—Edward Oxford’s wife.” Burton rubbed the sides of his head, his brow furrowing. “I should know her name. I’m positive it isn’t Victoria, but it escapes me.”

“Whatever it is,” Trounce said, “Spring Heeled Jack obviously sought her out.”

“And has literally put her on a pedestal,” Swinburne quipped. “Would she have known what—who—he was?”

“No,” Burton said. “Remember, Oxford wiped himself out of history. From her perspective, he has never existed.”

“It must have come as quite a shock to her when she ascended to the throne, then.”

“Shhh!” Trounce hissed. With his eyes, he indicated a group of constables who’d just rounded the corner from Blandford Street.

Following the former detective inspector’s lead, the chrononauts stood casually and listened while he explained to them that “the Lowlies are the workhorses of the Empire. They take pride in their practicality, in their uncompromising ability to get a job done, and benefit from the spiritual cleansing that comes with hard toil.” He continued in this vein until the stilt men had passed, then chuckled and said, “Trounce of the Yard, deceiving the police. Who’d have thought?”

“And indulging in pure fantasy, too,” Swinburne added. “Spiritual cleansing, my foot!”

“Let’s push on,” Trounce said.

“Workhorses,” Raghavendra echoed, as they resumed walking, “but why so many in military uniform?”

“The Empire is mobilising,” Swinburne answered. “We are soon to move against what used to be the United States of America and the United Republics of Eurasia.”

“War?”

“My hat! Hardly that, Sadhvi! The U.S.A. and U.R.E. are in no condition to resist. They battled each other for so long, with us supplying the munitions, that their various countries are utterly ruined. Their populations are decimated, and the old borders have gone.”

“Are they still fighting each other?”

“If you believe the propaganda.”

“Which you shouldn’t,” Trounce put in. “The Cannibal Club has infiltrated our government’s records, which offer a story far different to that given the public.”

Burton looked up at a billboard. SOCIALISM IS THE DEATH OF CIVILISATION.

Trounce followed his eyes. “There’s no socialism. There’s no longer any conflict. There hasn’t been for a long time. Those vast regions of the Earth are now occupied by countless small communities, which somehow manage to survive in unutterably harsh conditions. They function under a self-regulating anarchism somewhat similar to that which existed in Africa before the Europeans and Arabs destroyed it.”

“Why the lies?” Raghavendra asked. “Why is the Anglo-Saxon Empire telling its people that the rest of the world is filled with—with—”

“Savage socialists,” Swinburne offered. “Permanently at each other’s throats.”

She nodded.

“Simply to mesmerise everyone into believing that this—” Trounce made an all-encompassing gesture, “is the superior civilisation and that it’s threatened from without.”

Swinburne added, “And also to justify our forthcoming invasions of America and Eurasia and our subjugation of their inhabitants.”

“If we don’t destroy the Turing Fulcrum,” Trounce said, “Spring Heeled Jack will conquer the world.”

“Bloody hell!” Burton responded.

“That,” Swinburne said, “is exactly what it will be.”

The lower end of Baker Street was lined by much higher buildings than they’d seen so far in this subterranean world, some of them almost touching the brick ceiling, and was teeming with even more of the hideously deformed Lowlies. When a pack of naked goat men bundled past, drunk, rowdy, stinking, and unashamedly aroused, Sadhvi Raghavendra said, “Can’t you enable our AugMems, William, so we can share their illusion of a better world?”

Trounce looked surprised. “Like in 2130, you mean? Did I not say? This is what they see. The real world. The illusion of cleanliness was slowly phased out during the later twenty-one hundreds. It had done its job. The policy of ‘know your place’ has, through various methods, been so consistently and insidiously driven into the population over the course of three centuries that it’s now instinctive and can be maintained with just basic propaganda and mildly tranquillising BioProcs.”

“It’s—it’s repugnant!” Wells spluttered.

“But there’s hope, Bertie,” Swinburne said. “Look.”

He pointed ahead at a large placard that had emerged from the mist ahead.

Burton stumbled to a halt and gazed in shock at it.

Floating over the street, it declared, “THE ENEMY IS AMONG US! THIS IS THE FACE OF THE SOCIALIST FIEND!” Beneath the glowing words, there was a portrait of a brutal and scarred face.

It was Burton’s own.

The chrononauts uttered sounds of incredulity.

“It’s what I’ve hinted at,” Trounce said. “Spring Heeled Jack obviously remembers you, Richard. Fears you.”

“I don’t understand,” Burton said. He looked down at Swinburne. “How does this offer hope?”

The poet gave a happy smile and a compulsive jerk of his shoulder. “By nature, the human race is very, very naughty.”

“What?” The king’s agent turned to Trounce, seeking a more cogent explanation.

Trounce said, “What Algy means is that if you tell a child not to do something without properly explaining why it mustn’t be done, you can be sure that, the moment your back is turned, the child will test the prohibition.”

“Spring Heeled Jack has overplayed his hand,” Trounce continued. “It requires only a spark to light the fuse.” He pointed up at the placard. “That face is the spark.”

“I think I understand,” Wells said softly, “When the government is perceived as the people’s enemy, the enemy of the government is perceived as the people’s friend.”

Swinburne reached out and squeezed Burton’s arm. “And when BioProcs stop tranquillising because, for example, the local transmitting station has been blown up by a dastardly member of the Cannibal Club, then—”

Burton cleared his throat. “I see.”

Trounce said, “No doubt your Mr. Grub is now busily making your presence known. It adds greater urgency to our mission. We have to destroy the Fulcrum before the people drive themselves into sufficient a frenzy to take action, else there’s little doubt that wholesale slaughter will ensue, first when the government attempts to quell our own insurgents, and then when it sends them to enslave the remains of our neighbouring empires.”

“By God, Trounce. Have you loaded so much onto my shoulders? I’m just an explorer, an anthropologist, a writer.”

“You’ve become a figurehead, too.”

I just want to go home.

Burton looked at his friends, his eyes clouded with distress, aware that he’d just thought the words that had driven his enemy over the brink and into madness.

He felt his heart throbbing, moved his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and exhaled with an audible shudder.

Burton had often regarded emotions as a phenomenon of the body rather than of the mind. It was the body that instilled fear when destruction threatened and joy when survival was assured. To now achieve what was expected of him, he knew he’d have to transcend those corporeal impulses. He must become all intellect. He must be as hard and as cold as metal.

He glanced once again at the placard before saying to Trounce in a flat tone, “Let’s get going.”

They waited while a group of spiderish women herded a flock of geese past, then moved on to the junction with Oxford Street, the whole length of which appeared to be a teeming marketplace. Over the rooftops opposite, dark smoke stained the atmosphere. There was much shouting, a few screams, and many people running, scampering, hopping or scuttling back and forth.

Gesturing at the mouth of a road on the other side of the thoroughfare, Trounce said, “Here we are again. North Audley Street. If we continue straight on, we’ll be back in old Grosvenor Square, with New Grosvenor Square overhead.”

“Bad memories,” Swinburne said. “Though they belong to my predecessor.”

“I suppose the commotion is what Grub was referring to?” Wells asked.

“Yes. Aboveground, the American Embassy is a burning wreck. Beneath it, some of the Underground’s ceiling has obviously fallen in. I hope there weren’t too many casualties. We’ll skirt around it. A little way eastward through the market then south into alleyways that’ll take us to Berkeley Square.”

“I’ve had unfortunate experiences in alleyways,” Burton grumbled. “Being held at gunpoint by you being one of them.”

Trounce laughed. “I recall I was masquerading as a fictional detective named Macallister Fogg at the time. A ridiculous farce. Did I ever apologise?”

“You didn’t need to. I thumped you on the chin.”

They walked through the market, passing stalls selling fruit and vegetables, meat and fish, clothes both newly made and second hand, pots and pans, brushes and cloths, tools and furniture; passing vendors of milk and tea and coffee, mulled wine and frothy ales, tinctures and pick-me-ups; passing tarot card readers and crystal ball gazers, palmists and phrenologists, astrologers who couldn’t see the sky and numerologists who probably couldn’t add up; passing four-armed jugglers and one-legged balancing acts, swan-necked singers and multi-limbed dancers, accordionists and violinists, deep-chested trombonists and bone-fisted drummers; passing emaciated beggars and obscenely curvaceous prostitutes, tousle-haired ragamuffins and shuffling oldsters, sad-faced young women and flint-eyed young men; passing vendors of corn on the cob and baked potatoes, winkles, mussels and jellied eels, roasted nuts and toffee apples.

It was as if Burton’s London had been revived in an outrageously distorted form and buried beneath the surface of the Earth.

They walked on until they were almost opposite the spot where Shudders’ Pharmacy had once been. There was no sign of it now, a slumping tenement having occupied the site.

“Here,” Trounce said, and led them into a narrow alley between two immense arching pylons.

Rats scampered out of their path.

Trounce used the heel of his boot to shove a pile of rotting wooden crates out of the way.

They moved on in silence.

Rounding a corner, they were brought up short when a headless man jumped out of a shadowed niche and brandished a knife at them. He was naked from the waist up and had a coarse-featured face in his chest. “I durn’t bloody care. I durn’t. I’d rather cop it wiv summick in me pockits than nuffink. Give me what yer got. Anyfink. Give me. Give me, or I’ll slice the bleedin’ lot a yer.”

Swinburne stepped forward. “My dear fellow,” he said. “You have been liberated. We are your saviours, not your enemy. Do not misdirect your newfound discontent.”

“Shut yer mouth yer bleedin’ midget an’ hand summick over.”

The poet sighed. “Then with regret, I have no choice but to give you this.”

He drew his pistol from his waistband. “Between the eyes. Stun.”

The weapon made a spitting sound—ptooff!

The man flopped to the ground.

“Well done, Carrots,” Trounce muttered.

“Poor blighter,” Swinburne said.

Trounce led them around the prone form.

“He’ll wake up in due course,” the poet noted. “I can’t blame him for his actions. He’s waking from a BioProc haze; realising the unadulterated truth of his existence. There’ll be anger and violence before the people identify, and move against, their true enemy.”

They filed through a maze of twisting and turning rubbish-strewn passages, traversing a district that, in Burton’s time, had been among the most prosperous in the city, but that was now much how he imagined Hades to be: confined, hot, dangerous and seedy.

Finally, the group emerged into Berkeley Square. Once a smart area filled with the well-off, it now resembled a mist-veiled crater in the middle of a shantytown.

“You’ll recall this,” Swinburne said to the king’s agent as they reached the centre of the paved space. “Though not fondly.” He kicked the toe of his left boot against a metal manhole. “Not exactly the same one, but close enough.”

Burton remembered and felt himself go pale. Last year, or rather, three hundred and forty-three years ago, he’d climbed down through a very similar metal lid into Bazalgette’s sewers, there to have a final showdown with an invader from a parallel history.

“The sewer was rebuilt and greatly expanded many years ago,” Swinburne said, “but it still follows the course of the Tyburn River. This hatch leads down to a maintenance tunnel that runs alongside it. It’s a lot drier than the sewer but also a lot narrower.”

“We—we have to go—to go even farther underground?” Burton stammered.

“I’m afraid so.”

“We’ll be all right,” Trounce said. “As long as we don’t run into any spider sweeps.”

The diameter of the tube was such that Burton, the tallest of the group, had to bend his back in order to pass along it. The physical discomfort only added to his distress. He felt like he was in his grave. The weight of the double-layered city pressed down, liable to crush the conduit at any moment.

His jaw was clamped shut. The muscles at its sides flexed spasmodically. Sweat trickled from his brow, and his legs were trembling so much he felt sure his companions must notice.

He said nothing, just followed Trounce, putting one foot in front of the other, holding his arms out and letting his fingertips slide along the inner surface, keeping his eyes half shut and mentally chanting, Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq, which, unfortunately, quickly turned into, I am I am I am trapped.

The maintenance tunnel was dark. Trounce had produced a small mechanical torch from his pocket and with this was illuminating their path, but the blackness retreated only a little way ahead and rushed in to follow closely at their heels.

Don’t let that light go out! Don’t let it happen!

Finally, Burton couldn’t hold his curiosity at bay any longer and had to ask, “Algy, what are spider sweeps?”

“Children who’ve been genetically adapted for the purpose of keeping pipes such as this clean,” Swinburne answered.

“Children,” Burton murmured. “Good.”

“Good at their job, yes,” the poet agreed, “on account of the venom they spray to dissolve whatever dirt their coat of razor-sharp spines can’t scrape off.”

Burton’s mouth went dry. “Nevertheless, they’re just children.”

“Oh yes. There’s none above the age of ten.”

“Excellent.”

“Because the younger ones eat the elders.”

“Oh.”

“They’re extremely aggressive.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And territorial.”

“I see.”

“And, I daresay, with the effect of the nanomechs wearing off, they won’t hesitate to attack us.”

“Thank you for alerting me.”

“Beneath their spines, they’re armour-plated. I should think our bullets would just bounce off them.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“I’m thankful to be as small as I am, really. I’m just a morsel. A crumb. I wouldn’t want to encounter them if I was a big lump of juicy meat like, for example, you are.”

“That’s quite enough, thank you.”

“Don’t you want to hear about their extendible mandibles?”

“No, I think I get the picture.”

They continued on through the cramped tunnel.

Burton tried to imagine open skies, wide Arabian vistas, and distant mountains. Instead, his mind delivered a remembrance of Boulogne and Isabel. He tried to dismiss it, but each wave of claustrophobia brought it closer.

I shouldn’t be walking through a tunnel in the future. I should be strolling along a promenade with her. She should be my wife.

He felt brittle and taut, needed a distraction, something to divert his attention from the hollowness within and the constriction without.

He asked, “Algy, do you remain an atheist?”

“My hat! Of course! Why do you ask?”

“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.