The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure) (19 page)

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.