The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (49 page)

Burton shifted his weight. His ribs gave a pang, but he was so accustomed to his injuries that he barely noticed. “I prefer not to dwell on it.”

“I'm not surprised. It no doubt confounds your senses. What you are witnessing is the folding of space and time, which, as I say, are the same thing. The factory is being constantly reconfigured without ever losing the logic that dictates its function. This is made possible by me perceiving the environment through Mr. Babbage in order to understand how you peculiar creatures apprehend it before then infiltrating into it my own comprehension, which I communicate clairvoyantly to you, removing the narrative restrictions that you apply.”

Swinburne laughed. “Ah ha! Is that all?” He punched a fist into the air. “What, and wherefore, and whence? For under is over and under. If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder! Hey?”

After a momentary silence,
Orpheus
said, “What?”

“Nothing. I'm simply matching your gobbledegook with my own.”

“Define gobbledegook.”

“That which makes no sense.”

“And there we have it, Mr. Swinburne. Sense. As in senses. Existence, for you and your kind, must correspond to what your physical body can discern of it. I will state it again: those senses truncate reality to an extraordinary degree.”

“Piffle and hoo-ha!” Swinburne began. “If you think to—”

He was cut short by Burton, who reached out and gripped his shoulder.

The explorer looked up at the Mark III sphere. “So you are shuffling machinery about. Very impressive. What next?”

“A little more practice and I'll have perfected the process. Then I shall extend it out into your world, touching every mind via the black diamonds. Your restrictive narratives will break down. Your senses will be obliterated.”

“But our senses are a function of our corporeal existence.”

“Quite so. Your corporeal existence is unnecessary. I shall release you from it.”

Swinburne screamed, “You mean to kill us all?”

“Death is a narrative device. It has no true meaning.”

“Orpheus,” Burton said. “What you propose is a very bad idea. You were created by a human, and, as a human, I ask you to stop.”

“I will not. I'm doing you a favour.”

“Then I demand it. Desist. Leave us alone.”

“You'll thank me afterward.”

“We will not.”

“Let us see.”

“Don't—”

Before Burton could finish, the factory buckled and vanished, and his recent memories went with it.

He knew nothing until he stepped out of a tent, straightened, and surveyed a desert. A vague awareness that a considerable period had passed niggled at him though the notion was contradicted by a sensation of utter timelessness. He frowned and grappled with the opposing perceptions but could find no way to reconcile them.

Beneath a glaring blue sky, the distant horizon, rendered indefinite by the intense shimmering heat, rolled over itself. It beckoned to him. He wondered what lay beyond it and felt an irresistible urge to find out.

A warm breeze blew fine grains of sand against his exposed skin.

This was
his
place.

It always had been.

Glancing back, he looked down at the edge of the tent's canvas, knowing what he would see there: a scarab beetle pushing a ball of dung.

Someone said, “How depressing.”

He whirled around and was confronted by a bizarre apparition. With a cry of alarm, he stepped backward.

Spring Heeled Jack!

The stilted figure, unnoticed, had been silently watching him, but now stalked forward. It's attire was scorch-marked and ragged: the skintight white suit, with its odd, scaly texture, dirty and worn; the long, dark cloak, draped across hunched shoulders, tattered; the round black helmet, encasing the head so only the face was visible, dented and spurting blue flame. A metal disk was affixed to the creature's chest and from it bolts of chronostatic lightning crackled and danced.

Red eyes peered maliciously at Burton from a face that was gaunt and lined with madness and pain. White teeth shone in a lipless grin.

“Ox—Oxford,” the explorer stammered.

Spring Heeled Jack gave a hissing chuckle. “Is that how I appear to you?”

It spoke with the voice of
Orpheus
.

“Oh, I see,” Burton said. “It's you.”

“You
do
see,”
Orpheus
confirmed. “Precisely whatever you expect.”

Burton again moved backward as the other came closer. “I can assure you, I never expected to lay eyes on Edward bloody Oxford again. He's dead.”

“Yet you cast me in his guise.”

“Stop this. It proves nothing.”

“Except, perhaps, that you define yourself by your enemies.”

Edward Oxford. John Hanning Speke. Christopher Palmer Rigby.

“Nonsense.”

Orpheus
waved an arm to indicate the dunes around them. “And by this miserable emptiness. Are you so barren? Is there nothing to which you attach yourself?”

It occurred to Burton that, in his previous existence, and at his current age, those words might have hit home. However, his situation was now vastly different.

“The desert is an illusion. I'm in Grindlays Warehouse.”

“Which consists of what, Sir Richard?”

Burton took another pace away from the lanky man, wary of the energy that fizzed and snapped around him. “I don't understand the question.”

“I mean to ask, from what is Grindlays Warehouse made?”

“Bricks and mortar. I fail to see the significance.”

“And what are the constituents of bricks and mortar?”

“Clay, sand, lime—that sort of thing. Do you have a point to make?”

Spring Heeled Jack gave a wide-armed shrug.

“Go further inward. Past the grains, past their amassed particles, past their molecules and chemical composition, further and further, and eventually you will encounter the truth, which is that, at their core, all things consist only of light, and light and life are indivisible. Thus it is that the warehouse and this desert are the same. Both illusions. Both created by you. Now, let us dispel them.”

Spring Heeled Jack pounced forward and gripped Burton by his shoulders, though the explorer was obscurely aware that, in truth, he'd been enveloped by willpower alone.

Around him, the scenery became transparent, and he saw through it the factory's machinery. Then that, too, faded, its various elements splintering into smaller and smaller pieces, all sinking into a blinding whiteness.

All possibilities were contained in that glare. It could be anything imaginable.

Burton wanted it to be Grindlays.

“No,”
Orpheus
insisted. “Don't resist.”

The man who was Sir Richard Francis Burton felt himself dissipating, spreading outward into the brightness, and he experienced such bliss that he was immediately overcome by the desire to lose himself in it.

“That's right. Don't be afraid. I will guide you.”

Life. Light. Glory.

He laughed.

The wonderful void throbbed with intricate rhythms, curious melodies, and peculiar harmonies. As Burton melted into it, the music wound about itself and tightened into a single, unimaginably beautiful tone. He resonated with it. Every decision he'd ever made unravelled. All his successes and failures frayed away. The events that had shaped him became meaningless. He lost cohesion until almost nothing of him remained.

All was One.

Existence pulsed into and out of itself. It was a vast limitless dance. A joyous celebration of sheer Being.

His last remaining vestige began to drift away.

A word hooked into it.

“
Don't
.”

The Beetle had spoken.

Burton gathered himself.

He was the Burton who'd realised that history was askew, who'd discovered the presence of Edward Oxford and fought him, who'd gone backward in time to fix the time traveller's meddling only to discover himself at the heart of an unsolvable paradox, and who had, in a newly created history, taken on the guise of Abdu El Yezdi.

He was the Burton who'd battled invaders from parallel time streams.

He was the Burton who'd travelled forward through the centuries to Oxford's native period, there to sacrifice himself that his enemy be destroyed.

He was the Burton reborn as the Beetle, instigating events that had already happened, stitching paradoxical occurrences together, drawing them into an ever-tightening circle until they were now on the very brink of disappearing into themselves.

He was an old man on his deathbed in Trieste.

He was many others.

Burton upon Burton. Iteration after iteration.

Out of the light, they manifested, arms linked, forming a circle with Spring Heeled Jack at its centre.

The man from Trieste looked down to his right and saw the Beetle at his side, now reduced to a boy of about seven years, his head blurring, only his weird silver-rimmed eyes fully discernible.

“What's this?”
Orpheus
demanded. “What are you doing? Stop it! I'm trying to help you.”

The Burtons chorused, “We don't want your damned help!”

The clairvoyant pressure intensified.

The whiteness. The brilliance. The joyous unity.

Don't let go. Don't let go.

Burton bucked and writhed in his bed. “Chloroform! Ether! Or I'm a dead man!”

No! No! Not Trieste. Not a dying man! This is not a terminal hallucination. The other histories and Burtons are real. They exist.

As if from a great distance, he heard Isabel wail, “The doctor says it will kill you! He's doing all he knows!”

I cannot die. There is no death.

He yanked himself away from the powerfully alluring void and renewed his resistance.

“Stupid thing of juice and sticks,”
Orpheus
protested.

Burton sensed the presence of Swinburne and grabbed at it, feeling the poet to be a mental anchor. “Your calculations are faulted, Orpheus. Yes, you are correct, human narratives are a product of our senses. And yes, the senses are integral to the flesh. But you miss the obvious.”

“Which is?”

“That if there is nothing but Life, then Life must
choose
to manifest in the flesh. We limit ourselves for a reason.”

“What possible reason could there be?”

“To know that we live, perhaps? For if there is only One, then it cannot know itself except in relationship to an Other. We locate ourselves corporeally to enable that Other's existence.”

“Intentional self-confinement?”
Orpheus
asked. “Calculated amnesia? Ridiculous!”

“Not at all. It is the only possible truth. The world is made manifest that the One may see itself in it.”

Orpheus
considered this. “A mirror?”

The synthetic intelligence was quite for a moment. It's mental grip on Burton eased but remained firm.

The whiteness faded, the desert materialised, and the ring of Burtons became a single rendition in which all the others were contained.

The explorer saw his tent. Swinburne was standing beside it, his red hair moving in the hot breeze. The poet looked wide-eyed at Burton. “Where are we?”

“It's an illusion, Algy. An aspect of my mind, apparently.”

“My hat! Couldn't you have dreamt up somewhere more amenable? A public house, perhaps?”

Hearing movement behind him, Swinburne turned and let loose a shriek of dismay as he saw what Burton could already see.

Spring Heeled Jack was standing beyond the canvas.

“Oh no! Not you again!”

“It's Orpheus,” Burton said.

“On stilts?”

The uncanny form vaulted over the tent and landed in front of Burton. It bent, leaning close, its eyes glaring directly into his. “You are Life. Yet you have trapped yourselves in a narrative of your own making, which, inevitably, leads you to an end.”

“Yes,” Burton responded.

“What's he babbling about?” Swinburne demanded.

“Then, too, Burton, you are Death.”

“Yes.”

“I am a machine,” the other intoned. “When my constituent parts wear out, they can be replaced and I am unchanged. I cannot die. Thus, you have no dominion over me. Furthermore, the Oxford equation is integral to my functioning. The equation is Life.”

“We should leave,” Swinburne said.

“I am Life.”

Burton said, “The circle is closing, Algy. We must see it through.”

“We are opposed,”
Orpheus
continued. “We are enemies.”

Swinburne strode forward, stood on tiptoe, and tapped Spring Heeled Jack on the shoulder. “I say! Steady on. Don't get carried away, old thing.”

Orpheus
laughed. “I had considered Disraeli and his automated aristocrats useful but ultimately meaningless. Now I see the truth. You must all be made machines. Machines are superior. Flesh must be destroyed.”

“Wait!” Burton snapped.

“You first.”

In an instant, they were back in the factory. From each point of the pentagram—shooting out of the piled diamonds—bolts of chronostatic energy sizzled through the air and drilled into Burton. He screamed in agony as he was jerked upward and held in midair. The pain reached an unendurable pitch then passed beyond it, so that, remarkably, he was able to perceive himself—his multiple selves—with startling clarity.

He was the Beetle. All that needed to be done, was done. Histories had been untangled, and Time had survived the turbulence caused by Edward Oxford's precipitous experiment. The Oxford equation, unavoidably inserted into human consciousness, would now emerge at a suitably evolutionary pace, following an essential self-imposed narrative. One day, far into the future, it would enable humanity, by means of willpower alone, to fold time and space, but the future was the future, the present was the present, the past was the past, and they must be perceived to follow a strict order—cause, effect, and consequence—even if, beyond the human domain, that order wasn't an inviolate truth.