Текст книги "The Return of the Discontinued Man"

Автор книги: Mark Hodder

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Babbage bared his teeth.

Gooch made an observation. “For the second time, an intelligence to which we attribute no sentience has acted independently. There has to be interference. A meddler.”

“No. I don’t believe so,” Burton said. He looked at Babbage. “Prior to the damaged suit’s disappearance, you stated that if it had been the only one in our possession—if Abdu El Yezdi had never given you a pristine version—you would have transferred power from its Nimtz generator to its helmet, hoping to instigate self-repair mode.”

Babbage put his fingertips to his chin and tapped it. “I did say that, yes. It would have been the obvious course of action.”

“Well, what if all your counterparts in all the alternate histories—none of whom had a functional suit—did exactly that, all at precisely the same moment, nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1860?”

The old man gazed at Burton, his mind obviously racing. His left eyebrow twitched upward. His mouth fell open. He put his hands together and rubbed them. “There—there—there would be the possibility that—that—by God!—that through means of resonance, the insane fragments of Edward Oxford’s consciousness would—would link together across the parallel realities.”

“And in consequence?”

Babbage suddenly clapped his hands and yelled, “By the Lord Harry! Active pathways!” He hugged himself and started to pace up and down at the foot of Burton’s bed, his eyes focused inward.

“Active pathways,” Swinburne said. “Oh, how you mingle incompatible words, Babbage. What are active pathways?”

Babbage answered as if addressing himself rather than the poet. “A thought is a burst of subtle electrical energy that flows through the brain, following paths between the cells. Every notion creates new routes. The damaged helmet couldn’t function because only one route was imprinted into the diamond dust—Spring Heeled Jack’s final thought. It is a static conceptual matrix, the frozen obsession of a dying madman. However—”

He stopped, frowned, placed his fingertips to his head and tapped away.

They waited.

“However. However. However. If a resonation spanned the different realities, then a potentially infinite number of—of—”

He stumbled to a halt again.

“I think I understand,” Daniel Gooch murmured. He turned to Burton. “Consider it three-dimensionally. From above, you could look down and see a single path following one particular route. From ground level, though, you might see that it is actually countless paths laid one atop the other, opening up countless new avenues on the vertical.”

“Enabling the synthetic intelligence to become conscious?” Burton asked.

“Trans-historically,” Gooch confirmed.

“You just made that word up!” Swinburne protested.

“I mean it to suggest the notion that the intelligence, which lacked the capacity for independent action in any single history, might have gained it by extending itself across every iteration of reality.”

Babbage whispered, “Sentient. But still insane!”

“So no one caused the damaged suit to vanish,” Gooch mused. “It did it all by itself. But where did it go?”

Burton said, “Back to where—or rather, to when—it originally came from. The year 2202.”

“You gleaned all this from the functioning helmet?” Swinburne asked. “Is it alive, too?”

Gooch answered, “Was, in a manner of speaking. Not now. Inevitably, it must have also been influenced by the resonance. Whatever intelligence has been formed by the multiple iterations of the suit, the sole undamaged helmet was probably the only sane element of it.” He narrowed his eyes at the king’s agent. “Now it appears to be a part of you. Intriguing!”

Babbage stopped pacing and peered at Burton. “Whence this theory? I demand to know!”

The king’s agent climbed out of the bed and crossed to where his clothes were folded upon a chair. He started to dress. “I have witnessed your counterparts in other histories, Charles. In all of them, he did exactly what you’ve stated you would do. I watched him connect the damaged suit’s helmet to the Nimtz generator and in every case the suit vanished.”

“You witnessed?” Gooch interjected. “Did you visit a medium?”

“No, Daniel. My mind was projected into my other selves.”

“By what means?”

“Through the influence of a medical tonic called Saltzmann’s Tincture.”

“Ridiculous!” Babbage barked. “A magical potion? Pure fantasy! And if it were true, it would imply that someone brewed the concoction specifically so you’d be warned of the advent of this new intelligence. Who? How is it possible?”

Burton buttoned his shirt. “The identity of our ally remains a mystery. It’s one I intend to solve.”

Accompanied by Swinburne, the king’s agent took a cab home. The sky was clear and the day’s cold had a sharp bite. In the hansom’s cabin, they shivered and their breath clouded from their nostrils.

While his friend waited in the vehicle, Burton entered number 14 and, two minutes later, emerged with Fidget.

“Is the beast really necessary?” Swinburne huffed, folding his legs up onto the seat as Burton climbed in. “Haven’t I suffered enough?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Burton said, “but you haven’t been beaten black and blue, rendered unconscious, and tattooed against your will.”

“Nevertheless, I value my ankles. They’re a vital part of me. They keep my feet attached to my legs.”

Burton bumped his cane against the roof of the cabin. The hansom jolted into motion.

“I say, Richard, are we caught up in a feud between two Edward Oxfords, one demented and the other with his marbles intact?”

“I posit but a single Oxford consciousness. One that betrayed itself when its single fragment of sanity indicated to me where the rest had fled.”

“That’s how you interpret what you saw?”

“With regard to the initial vision of Oxford’s pregnant wife, certainly. The longing for her was overwhelming.”

“So he’s jumped back to 2202 to find her,” Swinburne mused.

“The tragedy of it being that he won’t arrive in the 2202 from which he came, for it no longer exists. He wiped it out of existence when he changed the past. That, I believe, is what the second part of the vision was attempting to show me.”

“Surely he must know? Isn’t it the very fact that sent him over the edge?”

“It is, but perhaps 2202 is the only point of reference remaining to him.”

“No,” Swinburne said. “There’s another.”

“What?”

“The man who killed him. Sir Richard Francis Burton. Which might explain why he’s sending his henchmen back in time to beat seven bells out of you.”

“I should consult with Doctor Monroe at Bethlem Hospital,” Burton murmured. “He might offer useful insight into the workings of an unsound mind.”

The king’s agent looked out of the cab’s window. Flowers crammed the city’s every nook and cranny, clung to every untrodden surface. He murmured, “Are we to be overgrown? I wonder how this foliage fits into the picture?”

They travelled to Oxford Street and disembarked outside Shudders’ Pharmacy.

“I just sent a boy with a message for you,” the old man exclaimed as they entered his shop. “A box of two hundred bottles was dropped off an hour ago. An extraordinary amount. They normally only bring twenty at a time.”

“Dropped off by whom, Mr. Shudders?”

“The usual young lads.”

“By wagon?”

“Yes. Why such a large delivery, though? I’m most puzzled.”

“Will you take us through to the back yard, please?”

The pharmacist gestured for them to follow and led them out into the little cobbled area.

“Did the wagon come in?” Burton asked.

“It did.”

“Then it’ll have some of that anise adhered to its wheels.” Burton turned to Swinburne, “Let’s see if Fidget can earn back the money I paid for him.”

“And once he’s done his job,” the poet responded, “perhaps you’ll return him to Mr. Toppletree?”

“I think not.”

Burton pulled the basset hound across to the gates, squatted, and watched the dog as it snuffled around, tail wagging, obviously excited by the strong odour.

“Follow, Fidget! Follow!”

The hound strained at its lead and loosed a gruff bark.

“Come on!” Burton called. “He’s caught the scent! Thank you, Mr. Shudders.”

“My pleasure,” Shudders mouthed, looking thoroughly perplexed.

Burton and Swinburne raced after Fidget as he plunged out of the gate and into Poland Street.

“He’s taking us to the last piece of the puzzle!” Burton cried out. “I feel sure of it!”

It was quite the foot-slog. Fidget dragged them out into Oxford Street’s traffic, and amid the cursing of indignant drivers they wove their way through panting vehicles and whinnying horses, in and out of billowing clouds of hot steam and gritty smoke, along to Holborn and up onto the Hackney Road. They arced around the northern border of the fire-ravaged and now overgrown Cauldron, then south down Saint Leonard Street all the way to Limehouse Cut Canal.

“Back into the East End!” Swinburne cried out.

The waterway marked a straight border at the edge of the vanished slums, the ruins of which were now completely buried beneath an amassed tangle of red. Facing the jungle, the flame-blackened sides of factories loomed over the channel.

All but one of the buildings were active, with fumes belching out of their towering chimneys and wagons arriving and departing from their loading bays. The exception was a seven-storeys-high derelict with nary a windowpane that wasn’t either cracked or broken.

“My hat, Richard!” Swinburne said. “Isn’t that the place Abdu El Yezdi wrote of in his first account? The home of the mysterious boy known as the Beetle?”

“It is. In the history El Yezdi came from, the lad was head of the League of Chimney Sweeps, which doesn’t exist in our variant of reality.”

“Yet we have Locks Limited,” the poet murmured. “Without the K, I’ll warrant. L.O.C.S.—League of Chimney Sweeps.”

Fidget guided them around to the front of the abandoned factory, and there they found a wagon parked by a double door. The basset hound stopped by one of its wheels, pressed his nose against its rim, gave a bark, then cocked his leg and wetted it.

“Phew! There’s nothing like a fast hike across the city to keep the cold at bay. We must have walked five miles, at least,” Swinburne said. “What a nose the little devil possesses, to have followed the trail all that way.”

He paced over to a dirty window and squinted through the fractured glass. “Have a look at this!”

Burton joined him and saw that thick scarlet leaves completely blocked the view. The jungle was inside the building.

The king’s agent moved to the doors, tried them, and found them to be secured. He rapped on the portal with the head of his cane.

No response.

Swinburne hammered his knuckles against the window. “Hallo! Hallo! Anyone at home?” A narrow wedge of glass toppled from the pane and clinked onto the ground by his feet.

They waited. Nothing.

Burton bent and examined the door’s keyhole. “It’s a basic deadlock. I’ll have it open in a jiffy.”

He retrieved a set of picks from his pocket and got to work. It took him less than a minute. There came two clicks, a clunk, and a loud creak as he pulled the doors open.

His breath hissed out through his teeth in a little cloud.

Swinburne gave a squawk of surprise.

The doors opened onto a tunnel through dense vermilion vegetation. Very little light filtered in through the factory’s dirty windows, but among the crowded leaves and tangled branches, strange fruits hung, glowing like little lanterns.

“A fairy grotto!” Swinburne exclaimed.

“A fiery grotto,” Burton corrected. He took a cautious step forward. “This tunnel hasn’t been cut or even cultivated. The plant appears to have grown into an arched pathway quite naturally. How thoroughly odd.” He moved a little farther into the building. “Shall we see where it goes?”

He closed the door behind them and tied the end of his dog’s lead to its latch. “Wait here, Fidget.”

Very slowly, listening for any sound, they proceeded through the closely packed verdure.

The jungle’s leaves showed enormous variety, some being smooth-edged, others crinkly. Its flowers ranged from tightly bunched petals to splayed blooms, some as small as daisies, others wider than Burton’s arm span. Branches went from bulky limbs to spindly twigs. All were contorted and twisted, curling this way and that, corkscrewing, bending and dividing in every direction, ending in buds and fruits and big gourd-like growths.

The scent was delicious, heady, and intoxicating. Burton started to feel—albeit faintly—the same euphoria that Saltzmann’s gave him, and, as they moved forward into the factory, he noted that Swinburne appeared to be fast slipping into a state of reverie.

They rounded one tight bend after another.

“A labyrinth?” Swinburne whispered. His voice was slurred.

“A single path,” Burton noted, “folding back and forth but gradually guiding us to the centre.”

“What Minotaur awaits us, I wonder?”

They kept going.

Burton noted that the floor was carpeted with a springy layer of fibrous roots, all matted together, and that the plant was somehow generating heat, for the atmosphere felt warm and humid.

“I feel very peculiar,” Swinburne mumbled.

“The aroma,” the king’s agent responded.

“It’s affecting you the same way, Richard? You feel a sense of—of—?”

Burton glanced at his colleague. “Endless possibilities?”

“Yes, that’s it. I find myself so relaxed that poetry is positively flooding from me. By golly! Such inspiration!”

Throwing his head back, he sleepily declaimed:

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,

Out of the sun’s way, hidden apart;

In a softer bed than the soft white snow’s is,

Under the roses I hid my heart.

He stopped and gave a dopey grin, then his eyes widened and he emitted a gasp as a voice whispered:

Why would it sleep not? Why should it start,

When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?

What made sleep flutter his wings and part?

Only the song of a secret bird.

“My hat! Who said that?”

Burton pointed up into the branches to their right. “There’s someone there. A child, I think.”

The voice, susurrating like leaves in a breeze, said, “Please. Don’t look at me. Walk on. The path is nearly ended. You are expected and welcome.”

“I can’t make him out in the—in the—” Swinburne said. He suddenly yawned, before finishing, “in the gloom.”

“Hey, lad!” Burton called. “Come out of there. We mean no harm.”

“How did you finish my verse?” Swinburne added, speaking very slowly. “I only just thought of it.”

“It is the song of the rose,” came the reply. “Follow the path.”

The king’s agent looked at his companion, shrugged, and continued on. They walked, aware that the small figure was scrambling from branch to branch and keeping pace with them. Burton tried to catch sight of the boy, but the leaves were so densely packed, and the red light so deep and shadow-filled, that he could discern little of him.

Rounding a bend, they stepped out into a clearing; a domed space completely enclosed by foliage from which hundreds of glowing fruits dangled in clusters, like fat grapes. In its middle, a bush humped up from the floor, and at its top a single flower blossomed, a red rose of phenomenal proportions, almost three feet in circumference, with fat bees and colourful butterflies and bright motes drifting lazily in the air around it.

The perfume was thick and cloying. Burton staggered and sank to his knees.

Leaves rustled as their escort moved around the edge of the glade.

“Are you the Beetle?” Burton murmured.

“Yes,” came the whispered reply.

“You manufacture Saltzmann’s Tincture?”

“It comes from the gourds.”

“Then this vegetation has been here for some considerable time?” Like Swinburne, Burton had to stop to yawn. “Long before the seeds fell?”

“It began to grow up through the planks of the floor a little more than five years ago. This Wednesday past, it produced the seeds and sent them out of the factory’s chimneys to summon you here.”

“To summon me?”

“To summon your companion. The poet is the key.”

“Hallo? Excuse me? What? What?” Swinburne drawled.

From the amid the crowded leaves, and with much creaking and squeaking, two slim branches extended, heavy gourds drooping from each.

“Moving?” Swinburne slurred. “Is the jungle moving?”

The gourds dropped and cracked at Burton’s and Swinburne’s feet. Thick honey-coloured liquid oozed from them.

“Drink, Mr. Swinburne,” the Beetle whispered. “You too, Sir Richard.”

Swinburne sat cross-legged on the carpet of roots, between Burton and the rose, with the gourd in front of him. Burton, with his unswollen eye blurring, tried to focus on his friend. For a brief moment, he saw him clearly. Swinburne’s green eyes were wide. His pupils were distended. He appeared to be in a trance. Pink butterflies were fluttering around him and settling on his shoulders. Burton thought he might be hallucinating. He looked up and felt sure that, in the small gaps between the vegetation above, he could glimpse a night sky milky with stars.

Impossible.

Swinburne closed his eyes, a slight smile on his face, raised the gourd, and drank from it.

Burton fought to make sense of what he was seeing. The poet resembled a dreaming Buddha, the red of his hair merging with the red of the rose behind him, until the poet and the blossom appeared to merge into one.

Though he didn’t will them to do so, Burton’s hands grasped the gourd and raised it to his mouth. He swallowed sweet viscous liquid.

A voice, like Swinburne’s but reverberating as if spoken into an echoing cavern, sounded in his mind:

Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken

Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame

Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,

Time, thy name.

“Algy, get out of my damned head!” Burton moaned.

From the vegetation, the Beetle urged, “Don’t resist it. The weight of ages is upon you.”

What the hell does that mean?

The voice continued:

Girt about with shadow, blind and lame,

Ghosts of things that smite and thoughts that sicken

Hunt and hound thee down to death and shame.

The unaccountable sense that he was not in an East London factory but deep in Central Africa swept through him. The Mountains of the Moon!

Eyes of hours whose paces halt or quicken

Read in blood-red lines of loss and blame,

Writ where cloud and darkness round it thicken,

Time, thy name.

Was the rose reciting the verse? A talking flower?

Nay, but rest is born of me for healing,

—So might haply time, with voice represt,

Speak: is grief the last gift of my dealing?

Nay, but rest.

Petals unfurling. Ages unfolding. Time, curling around itself, opening its secrets.

Petal layered upon petal. History layered upon history.

What am I seeing?

The Beetle’s voice: “The world’s narrative.”

All the world is wearied, east and west,

Tired with toil to watch the slow sun wheeling,

Twelve loud hours of life’s laborious quest.

Burton tried to distinguish between his vision and his imagination. He couldn’t. Jumbled sensations bubbled and swirled through him. A rose, a poet, a rhythm, an utterance that chanted through eternity, sprouting from within itself—the seed as the verbalisation, the shoot as the emerging verse, the blossom as signification, the pollination as cognisance, the fruit of understanding, again the seed.

Time is a form of expression? A language? A lyric? The words sung to a tune? A dance?

Pulsating colours. Stratified harmonies. Invasive fragrances.

Eyes forespent with vigil, faint and reeling,

Find at last my comfort, and are blest,

Not with rapturous light of life’s revealing—

Nay, but rest.

Slowly, the words metamorphosed. They became flavours. The flavours became colours. The colours became sensations. The sensations became numbers.

An equation.

It pulsed away from him, and the farther it withdrew, the more of itself it revealed, until he could see the entirety; a megalithic, looping, paradoxical mathematical structure of such esoteric intricacy that, for a moment, he viewed it with an utter lack of comprehension.

Then it slotted into place, and he understood it as Edward Oxford had understood it.

He opened his eyes, looked at the bedroom ceiling, and thought about the attempted assassination. Turning his head, he gazed at the woman who lay sleeping beside him—the woman who’d been his wife for the past two years.

She was pregnant.

I must understand my roots, he thought. Else the branches may bear bad fruit.

Later, in his laboratory, he shaved thin slivers from the side of the black diamond, hooked them up to a BioProc, marvelled at the output, and gradually realised what the data meant. His equation may have been labyrinthine in its complexity, but filtered through a BioProc, it also became practical.

He could do it.

He could travel back.

He could watch.

Sir Richard Francis Burton momentarily opened his eye. He saw red jungle but didn’t comprehend it.

Burton? Who is Burton? My name is Edward Oxford.

His eyelid slid shut, and it was six months later. During that period, he’d constructed a suit of fish-scale batteries; had connected the shards of diamond to a chain of CellComps and BioProcs, forming the heart of the main control unit—a device he named a Nimtz generator—and had embedded an AugCom and BioProcs enhanced with powdered black diamond into a helmet. It acted as an interface between his brain and the generator and would also protect him from the deep psychological shock he suspected might affect a person who stepped too far out of their native segment of history.

If the prototype worked as planned, its various elements could later be created at a cellular level and coded directly into his body. Such an augmentation could never be made public. There was only one black diamond—

There are three.

–and he could see no way to replicate its unique qualities. As it was, in order to integrate it with his biological functions, he’d have to powder some of the gem and tattoo it into his skin—a primitive solution and, obviously, one that couldn’t be applied to the entire population.

Besides, what would happen if everyone in the world could travel through time?

So, no bio-integration for the moment. And no tattooing. Just the clunky old-school technology—a thing he would wear—and if the experiment worked, he’d consider the next step afterwards.

By now, the project had kept him out of the public eye for a considerable period, and journalists were clamouring for another interview. Not wanting to arouse their suspicions, he eventually conceded. After explaining that he was working on a new theory of botanic integration, he was asked the usual questions. Did the recording of information directly into individuals’ DNA—which had commenced a century ago—mark a new step in evolution? With the old computer technologies now completely supplanted by cellular manipulation, could the human body itself be regarded as a machine? Had the replacement of the NewWeb with the Aether resulted in a new understanding of botanic sentience, and what were the implications? Might that sentience be incorporated into human consciousness?

He answered distractedly, his mind all the while considering the gravitational constants to which his calculations had to be tethered, else his jump through time would also become a disastrous jump into the far reaches of space.

Then it came again. “How does it feel to single-handedly change history?”

He offered exactly the same reply as before. “I haven’t changed history. History is the past.” Then he chuckled, and there was an edge to the sound, and the following day it was reported that Edward Oxford was obviously working too hard and needed a holiday.

Two weeks after everything else was complete, he hit upon a ridiculously simple solution to the last remaining difficulty. When the bubble of energy generated by the Nimtz formed around the suit, it was essential that it touched nothing but air, else it would carve a chunk out of whatever it was in contact with, and the shock of that could seriously injure him. Initially, Burton thought he’d have to jump off a bridge to achieve this, but then in a moment of mad inspiration, he designed boots fitted with two-foot-high spring-loaded stilts. Whimsical they may have been, but they solved the problem. Leap high into the air. Jump through time. Don’t take anything with you.

On the first day of February in the year 2202, he told his wife what he intended to do.

She rested a hand on her distended belly and said, “I’d rather you waited until our child is born.”

“Because you fear for me?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There’s no danger. If the coordinates I set are inside or contiguous with a solid object at the destination point, the device will automatically readjust them.”

“But what if you do something that interferes with events as they happened?”

“I have no intention of doing anything except watch my ancestor attempt to kill Queen Victoria then move a day or so ahead of the event to chat with him. I’ll listen to whatever he has to say but shan’t attempt to dissuade him. Besides, if I was to do anything to alter history, then time must possess some sort of mechanism to correct the interference, else we’d know about it, wouldn’t we?”

“How?”

“There would be an anomaly of some sort.”

She voiced her doubt with a hum, and added, “And what if your ancestor attacks you? He’s obviously capable of violence.”

“I’ll be careful. If he gets agitated, I’ll make a rapid departure.”

His wife chewed her lip and looked uncertain.

Burton experienced a pang of guilt. He’d told an unanticipated lie.

I’m not going to just watch him. I’m not going to just talk to him. I’m going to stop him. Yes! Stop him!

The intention was unexpected; it had come out of nowhere.

He shrugged it off and put a hand on his partner’s knee. “It’s all right. Really, it is. Nothing can possibly go wrong.”

“When?” she whispered.

“In two weeks. On my birthday.”

And so it was.

On the fifteenth of February, 2202, Burton completed his preparations. He dressed in mock Victorian clothing—with a copy of the letter from his ancestor in one of the pockets—pulled his time suit on over the outfit, affixed the Nimtz generator to his chest, strapped the boots over thinner leather ones, and lowered the round black helmet onto his head.

Intricate magnetic fields flooded through his skull. Information began to pass back and forth between his brain and the helmet’s BioProcs. The structure of his brainwaves soaked into the diamond dust.

Bouncing on the stilts, and with a top hat in his hand, he left his laboratory and tottered out into his long garden. Three centuries ago, Aldershot had been a small town twenty-five miles or so from central London. Now it was a suburb of the sprawling metropolis, the glittering spires of which could be seen in the near distance. He stood and contemplated them for a moment. They were intrusive. The advertising that flickered and flashed upon their sides struck him as ugly and psychologically aggressive. But there was change in the air. The era of consumerism had long passed, and such remnants were fast disappearing. The human species, it was generally agreed, was on the brink of becoming something rather more elegant than it had ever been before—something that, perhaps, would integrate with its environment in a subtler manner. No one knew what or how. They just knew it was going to happen.

His wife came out of the kitchen and walked over to him, wiping her hands on a tea towel.

“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.”

“You won’t return an old man, I hope,” she grumbled, and placed a hand on her stomach. “This one will need an energetic young father.”

He laughed. “Don’t be silly. This won’t take long.”

Bending, he kissed her on her freckled nose.

He straightened and instructed the suit to take him to five-thirty on the afternoon of the tenth of June, 1840, location: the upper corner of Green Park, London.

He looked at the sky.

Am I really going to do this?

An inner voice that hardly felt a part of him urged, Do it!

In answer, Burton took three long strides, hit the ground with knees bent, and launched himself high into the air. A bubble formed around him. It popped. He fell, thudded onto grass, and bounced. Glancing around, he saw a rolling park surrounded by tall towers. In the near distance, there was the ancient form of the Monarchy Museum, once known as Buckingham Palace, where the relics of England’s defunct royal families were displayed.

A thicket lay just ahead. Burton ran into it, ducking among the trees.

He reached up to his helmet and switched it off.

A foul stench assaulted his nostrils: a mix of raw sewage, rotting fish, and burning fossil fuels.

He started to cough. The air was thick and gritty. It irritated his eyes and scraped his windpipe. He fell to his knees and clutched at his throat, gasping for oxygen. Then he remembered he’d prepared for this and, after opening the suit’s front, fumbled in his jacket pocket, pulling out a small instrument, which he applied to the side of his neck. He pressed the switch, it hissed, he felt a slight stinging sensation, and instantly could breathe again.

Burton put the instrument away and rested for a moment. His inability to catch his breath had been a perceptive disorder rather than a physical one. The helmet’s AugMems had protected him from the idea that the atmosphere was unbreathable—now a sedative was doing the job.

He unclipped his boots, kicked them off, and quickly slipped out of the time suit. He stood and straightened his clothes, placed the top hat on his head, and made his way to the edge of the thicket. As he emerged from the trees, a transformed world assailed his senses, and he was immediately shaken by a profound uneasiness.

Only the grass was familiar.

Through air made hazy by burning fossil fuels, he saw a massive expanse of empty sky. The towers of his own time were absent—they’d been nothing but an illusion projected onto his senses by the headpiece. London appeared to be clinging to the ground and slumbering under a blanket of relative silence, though, from the nearby road, he could hear horses’ hooves, the rumble of wheels, and the shouts of hawkers.

Ahead, Buckingham Palace, now partially hidden by a high wall, looked brand-new.