Текст книги "The Return of the Discontinued Man"

Автор книги: Mark Hodder

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“Fetch her. Bring her here.”

“Me, sir? Surely it would be more appropriate for one of the royal equerries to—”

“Go, damn you, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

Beresford gave a submissive bob, ran from his seat across the floor, and exited through the double door.

Brunel surveyed the benches, and Burton sensed that, if the metal face had been capable of it, it would have been sneering.

The polished visage turned and lowered to regard him again.

“My sixth birth came at nine o’clock this very night, the fifteenth of February, 2202, when, while I was instructing my Parliament to vote in favour of an attack against our rival empires, I suddenly perceived six events occurring simultaneously and knew there must come a seventh. Seven births, seven events. Such are the intricate synchronies of time, such its patterns and echoes.” Brunel raised a fist and extended from it a metal thumb. “A red snow began to fall, and I knew it to be from a different history.” He unfolded the forefinger. “An explosion crippled the city, and I knew the enemy long hidden within the populace had finally made a move.” His middle finger. “I remembered that it was you whom I fear, who you are, and where you are from.” The fourth finger. “I felt time fold, and I knew you had arrived.” The fifth finger. “I recalled my many births, and I knew I was almost complete.” He extended an adjustable spanner from his wrist to make the sixth digit. “And I became fully myself when, out of time, all around me, there arrived these—”

He threw back his head and opened his arms wide. The dome of energy started to slowly drop down, and, as it did so, lights flared in the ceiling above it, in the walls, and from the edge of the circular floor.

Burton squinted and shielded his eyes from the glare, blinked, dropped his hands, and stared dumbfounded as the true nature of the storm was revealed. He saw burned, torn and blistered time suits—hundreds and hundreds of garments and helmets and stilted boots—all identical, all floating just inches apart and forming a downturned hemisphere. Chronostatic energy blazed from their Nimtz generators, connecting them all and flowing down into Brunel’s babbage. As they gradually dropped, they rotated around a vertical axis, increasing speed, and now the air was moving faster too, quickly turning from a breeze into a wind.

“Power over time itself!” Brunel clanged loudly. “Now I could rid myself of that which has haunted me. Of you! Now I could send my equerries back to the source, back to 1860, where lay my genesis and my potential nemesis, there to hunt you, there to kill you. They never returned. Did you destroy them, killer? Murderer? Assassin?”

“Some,” Burton shouted above the increasing din of the lightning. “Most vanished of their own accord. They were confused. Disoriented.”

“Ah. Unfortunate. Perhaps when they leave my circle of influence they become erratic. I suppose those you allowed to live are lost amid the interstices of time. They have fallen between the lines of the equation.”

“How did you send them?” Burton demanded. “By what method? Surely you couldn’t—since nine o’clock this evening—so quickly have adapted them to travel through history?”

“No adaptation necessary.” The brass man pointed a hand at the benches. From his fingers, zig-zagging lines of chronostatic energy lashed out and hit the woman who’d announced herself as Lady Dolores Paddington Station, the Minister of War, Death and Destruction. She screamed as it first enshrouded her then expanded to form a bubble. It popped and she vanished, as did a section of the bench and the arm of the man beside her. He shrieked, stood up, and fainted.

“I sent her to 1860,” Brunel said. “She should have returned instantaneously. She hasn’t. It appears that, like my equerries, she didn’t fare too well there.” He looked back at Burton. “I’m right to fear you. You are indeed dangerous.”

Now Burton understood why he’d half-recognised the woman. “You deposited her right in the middle of a thoroughfare. She was hit by a vehicle.”

He felt it apposite to exclude the fact that he’d been driving it.

“It doesn’t matter. She was disposable. The demonstration is done.” Brunel turned a hand in front of Burton’s face. Blue sparks crawled up and down the fingers. “The stuff of time. I command it.”

“I see,” Burton responded. “And now you also have the ability to defy gravity. Floating down from the ceiling? Impressive, if somewhat theatrical.”

“Time and space are indivisible, Burton. The accretion of time suits has endowed me with dominion over both. Once I’ve properly learned how to employ the power—”

“Employ it? What do you intend to do with it?”

Brunel chimed a chuckle. “You said you came here to locate the Turing Fulcrum? The device you refer to is long obsolete. Its functions became spread across millions of devices, which grew in number and shrank in size. Now they number in trillions and are naked to the human eye.”

“Nanomechs.”

“Yes, and this—” The brass man gestured at the suits, which were now blurring around them. “This is in them all. And this is me.” He thumped a fist into his chest. “What shall I do? I have come home. I have fashioned the world. I am everything, and now I shall expand into the other histories and shape them, too. Every variant of every person will know their place; they will know where they belong and how they must contribute. They will feel safe. They will be content. They will have purpose.”

Burton leaned into the air as it rushed around him. Above its howling, he yelled, “They will be enslaved. They will be subject to your insane whims. What of freedom?”

“A myth!” Brunel answered. “None of us are free. We are forever chained to the consequences of our actions. Time rules all. But I—” He put his head back and loosed a peal of demented laughter. “I rule time.”

A hand closed around Burton’s arm. He looked down and saw Swinburne at his side. His friend’s red hair was whipping about his head like an inferno.

“Hey!” the poet screeched at Brunel. “Hey! What of the seventh?”

Brunel lowered his face. “You are Swinburne, I believe?”

“How do you do. Pleased to meet you. Charmed, I’m sure. What of the seventh? You said seven births and seven events. You’ve only ranted about six.”

“Ranted?”

“Like a nutcase of the first order.”

“Obviously, you don’t value your life, little man.”

“And obviously you don’t value rationality. But enough of this delightful flirting. Number seven? Spit it out, old thing. I’m on the edge of my seat.”

The engineer swung up his Gatling gun and pointed it at the poet. “The final birth is yet to come, and with it the final event.” He slid the weapon sideways until it was aimed at the king’s agent. “You will initiate them, Burton.”

Burton raised a questioning eyebrow.

“As I have stated, I shall ask you a question,” Brunel said. “Through your answer, I will be completed, and the seventh event will be your death, quick and complete or slow and recurring, as you please.”

“Answer a question then die?” the king’s agent said. “That doesn’t sound like a particularly attractive deal. Why should I cooperate?”

“If you do not, I’ll torture your friends in front of you.”

“I thought you might say something like that. Very well, let’s get it over with. Ask.”

Brunel stepped closer and leaned down until his blank face was almost touching Burton’s. From the dark eye sockets, his red mechanical eyes burned.

“Tell me. What is my name? Who am I?”

“My hat!” Swinburne cried out. “You don’t know?”

Burton looked down and saw that one of Brunel’s hands was gripping the blade of his sword. He felt cold fingers slide around his throat, holding it gently but—he knew—able to close with such speed and force that he’d be decapitated in an instant.

He gazed into the glaring eyes.

“You were once a good man, a historian, philosopher, engineer, inventor, and genius. You wanted the human race to be the best it could be. The things you created were helping it to achieve a new kind of consciousness. In addition to such an incredible contribution to the welfare of all, you also had personal contentment. You were married to a woman named Jessica Cornish, and your first baby was just weeks away from birth. However, you became obsessed with a crime committed by a distant ancestor, an impulsive and irresponsible act that was forever recorded in history. That preoccupation was your route into madness and death and this dreadful rebirth.”

“What is my name?” Brunel repeated, so quietly that his voice was barely audible above the din of the chronostatic storm.

“It is the same as your ancestor’s. It is Edward Oxford.”

The air screamed around them. Time suits hurtled past, spinning ever faster, energy tearing from one to the next, flooding down into the motionless brass man.

For a minute, he didn’t speak, didn’t react, then his fingers eased from Burton’s neck, his hand fell away from the sword, and he softly clanged, “Edward Oxford?”

He stepped back.

“Edward Oxford?”

He raised his hands to his face.

“Edward Oxford?”

He threw his head back and shrieked, “Edward Oxford!”

Toppling backward, the massive figure hit the floor, arched its back, and started to thrash its limbs. In a voice like shearing metal, it screeched, “My neck! Don’t! Twisting! Don’t! Don’t! Please, don’t! I didn’t mean to hurt the girls. I made a mistake. I don’t care about myself anymore. I’m a discontinued man. But let me restore history. Restore! Restore! Back! Back in time for supper! Edward Oxford!”

Ribbons of lightning started to peel away from the suits, crackling out in random directions. Burton saw a bolt hit a woman in the front row of benches. In an instant, she shrank and rolled out of her clothes, a mewling infant.

The politicians erupted into panic. They stood and began to crowd the aisles, pushing and pulling at one another, babbling and gesticulating, stampeding down to the floor and across to the exit.

The king’s agent snapped into action. He yelled across to Trounce. “William, get Bendyshe out of here. This might be our only opportunity.”

Trounce hauled Bendyshe upright while gawping at the convulsing machine-man. “By Jove! What the blazes did you do to him?”

“Told him the truth. Go! Back the way we came. Once you’re clear, try to contact Lorena Brabrooke. She—”

“Yes! Yes!” Trounce gestured at Bendyshe. “She might be able to disable the nanomechs.”

“I’m all right,” Bendyshe moaned. He plainly wasn’t.

Trounce dragged him toward the door. Swinburne moved as if to follow, dithered, then stepped back, closer to Burton. He shouted, “Save him, William.”

Trounce gave a determined nod.

“My neck! My neck!” Oxford yelled. “In cold blood!”

“What’s got into him?” Swinburne asked, looking down at the flailing body.

“Oxford has,” Burton answered.

Floor tiles shattered beneath Oxford’s drumming fists, elbows and heels. He bucked and writhed; hollered incoherently. Burton stepped closer to him, raised his sword, and looked for a viable insertion point.

Swinburne waved him back. “Out of the way. A grenade will do a better job of it.”

Burton jerked his head in confirmation, but before he could move, the sword was yanked from his hand and thrown aside. Overbalanced, the king’s agent fell forward and six arms clamped tightly around him.

Oxford rose, lifting Burton with him.

Swinburne backed away, aiming his pistol, unable to shoot without killing his friend.

“I am Oxford! Edward Oxford! How does it feel to change history? I haven’t changed history. History is the past.” Oxford laughed—or sobbed—a discordant jangling of bells.

“Remember!” Burton cried out. “Remember who you used to be. Remember the world you came from, the original 2202.” He struggled to free himself, but his efforts caused Oxford to tighten his grip. With his ribs creaking under the pressure, Burton gasped out, “Can’t you see how you’ve distorted everything? You sent history careening off-course. You broke the mechanism of time, and now you’ve created a future that’s nothing but a grotesque mockery of the past.”

“Maybe, maybe,” Oxford clanged. His arms relaxed slightly. Burton sucked in a breath. Quietly, in his ear, he heard his captor whisper, “The problem, Burton, is that although the future might not be what it used to be, I like it the way it is.”

In front of them, Sir Robert Forest Beresford entered, pushing through the last of the fleeing politicians. He skidded to a halt, ducked down and gaped at the spinning time suits.

Oxford levelled his Gatling gun and demanded, “Where is the queen?”

“He threatened to kill me!” Beresford shouted. He squealed in fear as a ribbon of energy snapped into the floor beside him. “That man—Trounce, was it?—I met him in the corridor. There are dead equerries everywhere. He threatened to kill me unless I let him pass.”

“Stop yammering, idiot. The queen?”

“Gone. They’ve taken her.”

Oxford bellowed a deafening cry of rage. The barrels of his Gatling gun whirled and spat flame. Beresford was thrown back into the doors and out into the corridor, leaving a smear of blood on the tiles.

Burton looked down at himself and saw a red dot of light crawling over his torso, passing over Oxford’s brass plating—Swinburne, circling, trying to find a target, knowing only an exploding bullet would have any effect, knowing it would kill Burton, too.

The crushing arms closed like a vice. Fingers dug into the flesh of Burton’s limbs, turning him until he faced Brunel’s dispassionate mask.

“I’ll break you,” Oxford said.

The king’s agent screamed in agony as his right arm was forced back and his elbow snapped with an audible crunch.

“Where is she?” Oxford demanded. “What have you done with her?”

Blinded by the pain, Burton hissed, “She’s—she’s safe. Gone. You’ll never see her again, you insane bastard.”

Oxford emitted a clangour of rage. He dropped to one knee and forced his captive backward over his thigh, bending Burton’s spine to its limit. The torment was beyond anything the king’s agent had ever experienced. It obliterated every other sense.

White.

Excruciating white.

A transcendental anguish.

From far away, a voice: “You object to the history I’ve created? Let’s see how you feel about your history. Let’s see what it would have been had I changed nothing.”

He slammed a hand into Burton’s face and closed his fingers hard. Cheekbones fractured, the jaw dislocated, teeth broke. Blue fire erupted from Oxford’s digits and drilled into Burton’s skull.

White. White. White.

Fragmentation.

Pain.

Decisions unmade.

Pain.

Successes and failures dismantled.

Pain.

Characteristics disengaged.

Pain.

Cohesion lost.

Pain.

Something of Burton observed and wailed and grieved as it watched itself forcibly shredded into ever-smaller components.

Reconstitution.

Pain.

Boulogne seafront emerged from unendurable torment. Two young women came walking and giggling along it, arm in arm, moving toward him. He recognised the scene at once. This was the moment he’d first met Isabel Arundell and her sister, Blanche.

He tried to call out to them but had no control over himself. His body did what it had done that day back in the summer of 1851. It even thought the same thoughts. He was nothing but a passenger.

As they passed him, Isabel—tall and golden-haired—glanced over. Burton felt a thrill run through him. He gave a small smile. She blushed and looked away.

He walked to a wall, took a stub of chalk from his pocket, and wrote upon the brickwork, May I speak to you?

He waited for her to look back and, when she did, tapped his fingers on the message before strolling away along the promenade.

The whiteness returned.

My back is breaking. My back is breaking.

Suddenly it was the next day, and beneath his words, others had been added. No. Mother will be angry.

Time always finds a way.

Instances of overwhelming suffering separated disjointed scenes as Burton encountered Isabel again and again among Boulogne’s socialites. Then she was suddenly left behind, and he was no longer Richard Francis Burton. He was Abdullah, a darwaysh, embarking on a gruelling hajj to Mecca. A whole year as another man, subsumed into a character so convincing that it fooled even the pilgrims who travelled at his side.

The master of disguise felt the hot shamal blowing on his face. The desert stretched from horizon to horizon. Space. Freedom. He looked down at the sand and saw a scarab beetle rolling a ball of dung.

The beetle. That is the answer to it all. Life creates reality and rotates it through cycle after cycle.

He turned his sun-baked face to the sky and was blinded by its white glare.

White.

What is happening to me? Why am I back in Arabia?

He blinked his watering eyes and saw the low hills of Berbera, on the coast of Africa, east of forbidden Harar.

The Royal Geographical Society had given him its backing. He’d organised an expedition, recruiting William Stroyan of the Indian Navy, Lieutenant George Herne of the 1st Bombay European Regiment of Fusiliers, and Lieutenant John Hanning Speke of the 46th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry.

The mania for discovery was upon him.

All that is hidden, I shall expose.

They’d landed at Berbera and set up camp.

They were attacked.

Burton watched and waited for Speke to die.

“Arm to defend the camp!” he yelled, as tribesmen descended upon them.

Spears flew. Scimitars slashed. Men screamed.

He looked over his shoulder just as Speke, emerging from a tent, was hit in the knee by a thrown rock. The lieutenant flinched. Burton heard himself shout, “Don’t step back! They’ll think that we’re retiring!”

This is the moment Speke propels himself in front of Stroyan and takes a spear to the heart. The moment he dies a hero’s death.

It didn’t happen.

Confused, he realised that Stroyan was on the ground behind the tents, dead.

No! It was Speke! It was Speke! He died just before—

A javelin slid through one side of his face and out the other, splitting his pallet and knocking out three of his molars. Suffering enveloped him. He felt his back breaking, his skin burning, his skull cracking.

Pain.

He had no idea why, but he thought, I’ll not be stopped.

The Crimean War. He was there, but it was over before he saw any action. Disappointed, he sailed for London and upon arrival mingled with men of influence: Sir Roderick Murchison, Francis Galton—but Galton is a madman!—Laurence Oliphant—Murderer! Stroyan didn’t die in Africa. You killed him, Oliphant! You!

Nothing felt right.

He met Isabel again. Secretly, they got engaged. Almost immediately, he left her and, with John Speke, set sail for Africa.

No! I flew to Africa aboard the Orpheus. Stroyan, Herne, Sadhvi and I discovered the source of the Nile. Speke is dead. Speke is dead.

He felt terror. He didn’t want to see this Burton’s life. He could sense horror lurking at its end.

He was helpless, forced along an unfamiliar path, spending two exhausting, disease-ridden years with a man who, increasingly, came to resent him.

“Don’t step back! They’ll think that we’re retiring!”

Those words, taken by Speke as a slight, as an accusation of cowardice, fuelled a seething hatred.

The two explorers located and mapped Lake Tanganyika. Burton was immobilised by fever. Speke left him and discovered another lake—one so large it might almost be considered an inland sea. Upon his return, he claimed it to be, for certain, the source of the Nile.

“Show me your evidence,” Burton said.

Speke had none.

Their relationship broke down. During the return journey to Zanzibar, barely a word was exchanged between them. Speke departed immediately for London. En route, he was persuaded by Oliphant to claim full credit for the expedition’s achievements. Burton, after recovering from malaria, followed, only to find himself sidelined.

He turned to Isabel for comfort.

Her parents forbid their marriage. Burton was neither Catholic nor respectable.

Everything was going wrong.

It is wrong! It didn’t happen this way!

Bitterly disappointed, angry and depressed, he embarked on a drunken tour of America with his friend John Steinhaueser. He lost track of himself; hardly knew who he was anymore. Ever since the fevers of Africa, he’d felt himself divided, two Burtons, forever disagreeing.

Burton the observer and Burton the observed.

Burton the living and Burton the dying.

No! No! Allah! Allah! He’s killing me! Oxford is breaking my back!

To hell with it.

Defiance.

He and Isabel eloped.

He prepared a devastating critique of John Speke’s claims.

Torture. His nerves afire, his vertebrae cracking, and Oxford’s clanging voice like the chimes of passing time, the tolling bell of implacable history, of relentless fate: “Thou shalt be reduced by flame to nothing.”

Burton watched as Grindlays Warehouse, where he stored his every memento, his every page of research, his journals and his notes, was consumed by fire. He was forty years old, and every recorded moment of his life prior to his marriage was turned to ash.

Now he had nothing but Isabel.

They were separated. He was made consul of Fernando Po, a tiny island off the west coast of Africa, and couldn’t take her with him. He spent the first year of his marriage alone.

I’m going to die.

It was a white man’s graveyard. No European could survive its rancid atmosphere, its infested water, or its torpid humidity. No European but Burton.

A further setback. In accepting the post, he’d inadvertently resigned from the Army and lost his pension.

Loss, loss, nothing but loss.

Anger. Isolation. Despair.

During his forays into the hotly dripping jungles of the mainland, he lashed out at everything he perceived as rotten and despicable in the human race. He railed at the natives, but really it was his own people who disgusted and disappointed him.

He returned to London, to Isabel, and to a final showdown with Speke.

Speke killed himself the day before the confrontation. Victory denied. Justice denied. Absolution denied. Satisfaction denied.

Is this how I die? Being dismantled piece by piece? Save me! Oh God, save me!

He was given the consulship at Santos, Brazil. Isabel joined him there. He could find no more mysteries to solve or secrets to penetrate, so wandered aimlessly, prospecting for gold, as if searching for something to value.

Patiently, Isabel waited.

A new post. Damascus. Allah be praised! How they both loved Damascus!

However, misjudgements, plots, accusations and threats soon soured their taste for the city and blackened even further Burton’s already bad reputation. He was recalled by the government and given, instead, the consulship of Trieste. It sidelined him, kept him out of the way, and in effect castrated him.

Bad health slowed him down. He threw himself into his writing, became ever more dependent on Isabel, and finally realised the depth of his love for her. They did everything together.

At last, she had him.

He found a new way to expose the hidden. He translated the forbidden: the Ananga Ranga; The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana; The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui; and, his triumph, an unexpurgated edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The books shocked his contemporaries with their explicitness but brought him further fame, notoriety, and finally, a grudging respect.

He was awarded a knighthood.

I’m already knighted.

He was content.

He wrote and wrote, and with every word he inscribed, he felt himself age, as if the ink that flowed from his pen was vitality draining from his body. His legs weakened. His hips hurt. His skin grew grey and wrinkled. His teeth fell out. His eyesight began to fail. His hair whitened. His heart struggled. His back creaked as the bones of his spine crumbled.

He began work on The Scented Garden, a book he hoped would shake the constrained and stifling morals of the British Empire to its roots; a book that would offer incontrovertible evidence that all cultures were an artifice that overlaid and suppressed the true nature of humanity.

It was his magnum opus.

At the age of sixty-nine, the day after finishing the manuscript, his heart failed. He cried out to Isabel, “Chloroform—ether—or I am a dead man!” The tinkle of camel bells filled his ears. The white sky of the desert spread over him like a shroud.

No! No! I cannot die! I cannot die!

White. White.

“Bismillah!” he shrieked. “Please! It’s all wrong! All wrong!”

Oxford’s metal hands were unremitting, the pressure on Burton’s spine tremendous, the pain far beyond the explorer’s comprehension. Chronostatic energy burned through his skull.

Now he was outside himself, watching as the remnants of his presence faded from existence like a dying echo.

Fire.

Grindlays Warehouse all over again, except this time it was Isabel, burning his every paper, his every journal, The Scented Garden.

The only thing he’d been proud to leave behind; the only thing that, after his demise, would have declared in uncompromising terms, “This is who I was. This is the essence of Sir Richard Francis Burton. By means of this, I will live through history.” That thing, Isabel turned to ash.

It was the ultimate betrayal.

No. No. No. Isabel! Why? Why?

He howled his anguish.

I cannot die! I cannot die!

Oxford’s insane laughter echoed through the domed chamber.

Swinburne screeched his terror.

Burton’s spine snapped.

Oxford stood, lifting the king’s agent like a limp rag doll, holding him face to face.

Through a fog of unutterable torment, through tunnelled vision, Burton saw himself reflected in Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s death mask. He saw that his hair was sparse and white, his fractured face was sagging and lined, his life force was spent. He had become a broken old man. Oxford had sucked the life history out of him.

With his five hands, Oxford turned him so that he hung before Swinburne. The brass man hugged Burton close to himself and stalked forward, his feet thumping on the tiled floor. With one hand, he pressed Burton’s head close to his own.

“See us together, little poet,” he chimed. “The one has made the other. Death has danced around us while we’ve duelled upon the battlefield of history. I am victorious. Death is Time’s tool, but I rule Time. I have snatched the scythe from his grisly hands. Now I apply its blade to your friend. Look upon my unchanging face and see beside it the decrepit features of he who was Burton. One gains all. The other loses everything.”

Swinburne moaned despairingly. With a shaking hand, he aimed his pistol. Tears flooded down his cheeks.

“Before I kill you,” Oxford said to him, “look into this old man’s eyes. Watch the life leave him. Know that what is lost can never return.” He crushed Burton’s broken cheek into his own, a grotesque mockery of affection. “But know, too, that I can revisit any moment of his short span and there torture him. The one life he has to live can be made ever more dreadful, in every history, until he shall scream without surcease from the moment of his birth to the moment of his demise.”

From the chest down, Burton was paralysed. Blood oozed from his face and stained his clothes.

Isabel. You betrayed me.

Weakly, he held out an aged, gnarled hand and examined in wonder its raised veins and transparent, liver-spotted skin. The targeting light from Swinburne’s pistol skittered across it.

Old. Dead. Forgotten.

He felt the cool of Oxford’s face upon his right cheek, the pressure of the brass man’s hand upon the left.

The world started to slip away.

With his last vestiges of life, Burton looked straight at Swinburne, dropped his hand to his chest, and placed his forefinger over his heart. He silently mouthed his final words. “The diamonds, Algy.”

The horror in Swinburne’s eyes gave way to puzzlement.

Oxford started to raise his Gatling gun.

The poet hesitated. He suddenly understood. A wail of anguish escaped him.

Burton winked.

Swinburne pointed the pistol at him and said, “Heart. Kill.”

An impact.

Sir Richard Francis Burton died.

Burton stepped out of his tent, straightened, stretched, and surveyed the distant horizon. It rippled and shimmered behind a curtain of heat. For a brief moment, the sea, which was many miles distant, eased into the clear sky. The mirage pulsed, folded into itself, and vanished.

Adjusting his burnoose, Burton knelt, reached into the tent, and pulled out a cloth bag. It contained cured meats, dried dates, and a flask of water. He sat cross-legged and broke his fast.

Movement caught his eye, a scarab beetle at the base of the tent’s canvas, pushing a ball of camel dung across the scorched sand.

The beetle as the motive force. The manipulator.

Time is not an independent equation. Time requires a mind to give it form.

There was work to be done.

Burton opened his eyes.

The House of Lords was wrecked, fire-blackened, smoking and empty except for Algernon Swinburne and Sadhvi Raghavendra. Standing some distance from him, they were both aiming their pistols straight at his head. The poet’s face was as white as a sheet.

Raghavendra said, “Two grenades will certainly destroy you.”

“I don’t doubt it, Sadhvi,” Burton replied. His voice sounded like tumbling bells.

He looked down at his hands, five of them and a stump. “But you have no need to shoot.”

His friends lowered their weapons and walked cautiously toward him.

“Richard?” Swinburne asked in a quavering voice.

“Yes. Thank you, Algy. My life may not have been saved, but I am, thanks to you, at least preserved.”

The poet stumbled, dropped his weapon, fell to his knees, put his face into his hands, and began to weep. Raghavendra stepped past him, gently patting his shoulder, and stopped in front of the king’s agent. She looked up at him, frowning. “It’s really you?”

Burton tried to offer an encouraging smile but found he had no muscles with which to do so. Ruefully, he reflected that such impulses had never in the past offered much comfort to anyone, anyway. People had always found his smiles rather too predatory.

“It is,” he said. He raised a hand—feeling disconcerted by his arm’s whirs and hisses—and tapped the side of his head. “It worked. My brain’s terminal emanation overwrote the electromagnetic fields in Brunel’s diamonds. Oxford was erased from them.”