The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (55 page)

“No Bram. Your time is your own unless Mrs. Angell needs you.”

“Then I'll pop out again if ye don't mind. I'd like to take me new hat for a spin, so I would.”

“You have a new hat?”

“Aye. I found it in the street not three minutes ago. A nice bowler—or it will be once I knock the dents out of it an' pad the band so it fits me.”

“Bowler?” Trounce exclaimed. “By Jove, lad, that's—”

“Absolutely splendid!” Swinburne cried out. “A new hat for nothing! Well done, lad! I'm sure you'll look perfectly spiffy in it. What do you say, Mr. Fogg?”

“Humph!”

Burton chuckled, fished in his pocket for a coin, and flipped it to the youngster, who caught it adroitly. “Go buy yourself some butterscotch, lad.”

With a grin and a salute, the boy departed.

Swinburne rocked back in his seat and squealed with laughter. Trounce glared at him.

“Serves you right,” Burton told the chief commissioner.

Trounce, by way of changing the subject, cocked a thumb at the potted plant. “What's that about?”

“A parting gift from the Beetle.”

“Parting? Then he's gone?”

“Unborn. I felt it.”

“Unborn,” Trounce muttered. “More mystical claptrap. Really, I shall never wrap my noggin around it. Nothing about the Beetle makes any sense.”

Swinburne said, “It's all fairly straightforward, Pouncer. He was born in the future. He travelled to the past to enable the circumstances that culminated in his birth. Those circumstances all involved Richard. And Richard is the Beetle.”

“Utter humbug from start to finish.”

“Ah, there's the rub,” Burton put in. “There was neither a start nor a finish, but rather a circle that turned in upon itself until it folded into the hole in its middle.”

“Eh?”

“Edward Oxford caused a paradox. It was cancelled out by another paradox.”

Swinburne kicked out a leg. “Perhaps existence possesses some manner of self-correcting mechanism.”

Impatiently, Trounce waved away the speculation and brought the conversation back down to earth. “So, it's all done and dusted. What now? I mean the practicalities. There are still clockwork men stamping around the empire.”

Burton stood up and stretched. He moved to the window and looked out. It was late afternoon, and the shadows were lengthening. “They're harmless, William. None have diamond or silicate components. They're just the standard type and, without Babbage to service them, they'll eventually either break down or be superseded. As for his other creations and his various blueprints, prototypes, and plans, they're being gathered together by Gooch and his people and will be destroyed.”

“The sooner the better.”

“September. We know that from what we were told in the future.”

Trounce drained his glass, threw the remains of his cigar into the fire, and got to his feet. “Well, gentlemen, I'd like to say it's been a pleasure but, as usual, you've left me befuddled. I'll take my leave of you. I need to clear my head of all your nonsense and apply myself to problems I can understand—the restoration of law and order being the priority. Will you loan me a hat?”

“Take one from the stand,” Burton said.

He and Swinburne bid their friend farewell. The explorer stayed at the window and watched as the Yard man left the house, crossed the street, walked to the corner, tipped his borrowed brim to Mr. Grub, and disappeared into Gloucester Place.

“A good chap, that.”

“Donkey!” Pox contributed.

“They don't come any better,” Swinburne agreed. “Of the three of us, I thought him the least likely to adapt. I was wrong.”

“The recollection of our former lives is increasingly easy to set aside, don't you find? I think Trounce has rather a compartmentalised mind. For him, that other history has been placed in a chamber and the door shut upon it.”

“And for you, Richard?”

“It's still rather a jumble, but travel always gives me clarity. My voyages to Fernando Po and Koluwai will do much to straighten me out.” He turned. “Algy, will you accompany me on a little excursion to Limehouse? Now, I mean.”

“The Beetle's factory?”

“Yes.”

“But you said he's gone. Unborn.”

“Quite so. I want to look out over the city, and there's no better vantage point.”

“Ah. Very well.”

Donning their hats and coats, they left the house, travelled by steam sphere to the Limehouse Canal, and arrived there just as the sun was setting. It was a mild and clear evening. No trace of a breeze stirred, and the smoke from the factories that lined the waterway rose straight upward.

They approached a cracked-windowed building, the only one that showed no sign of industrial activity, and strolled around the structure to its water-facing side. There, in a niche, a ladder was affixed to the brickwork. The two men climbed it to the roof. Burton pointed to a chimney. “That one.”

He led Swinburne past skylights, with panes rendered completely opaque by soot and grime, until they reached the base of the towering column, which had rungs bolted to its side.

The climb to the top was a long one, but the effort was rewarded by a magnificent view. As they both secured themselves on the lip of the chimney with one leg inside the flue and one out, they gazed in appreciation across the rooftops of the world's greatest metropolis: there, the dome of Saint Paul's reflecting the deep orange light; there, the scaffolded column of Saint Stephen's Tower, into which a new Big Ben bell was being fitted; there, the smear of smoke that marked the ashes of Tooley Street.

“London is an unpredictable beast,” Swinburne mused. “A creature of quick and ardent temper. A mysterious animal from myth and legend.”

“Nothing more or less than an image of our own minds, Algy. Along the broad thoroughfares much can be seen that proves the good in us, but her dark and tangled alleyways conceal a less palatable truth that persists however much we labour to eradicate it.”

“The rich and the impoverished. Is such a division inviolable?”

“I fear so. Whatever mechanisms we create to allow the destitute to climb out of the mire, there will always be those who lack the wherewithal to do so, always be those who refuse guidance, and always be those who prefer the security of what they know, no matter how dire it is, to the imagined perils of the unknown. Do we have a duty to provide for those people? I would say yes, for I remind you that some of our greatest luminaries were born of poverty. I would not condemn children for their parents' shortcomings.”

“Young England in its earliest incarnation had the right idea,” Swinburne said. “
Noblesse oblige
. Where a system allows people with ability to rise to its top, those individuals should give thanks to it by offering support to the disadvantaged who remain at its bottom.”

Burton sighed and gazed into the distance. “True enough. Unfortunately, our current system is most efficiently navigated through selfishness and ruthlessness. It singularly fails to reward the finer qualities. The seven virtues are treated as weaknesses, the seven sins as strengths.”

A rotorchair flew past, close enough that they could see the goggled face of the man in its seat. He waved at them. Swinburne waved back.

There followed a few minutes of silence, the two men wrapped in their own contemplations.

Apropos of nothing, Burton said, “My brother had Bhatti transcribe my Discontinued Man report and sent the copy to Gladstone.”

“Yes.”

“Edward was a bloody genius; a twisted cantankerous old rascal but a bloody genius. He knew before any of us that something was afoot. By God, he sensed it the moment we returned from the future. He was so finely attuned to Disraeli's behaviour that he spotted the irregularities the instant they appeared. I think his mind was, in many respects, as coldly mechanical as Orpheus's. He weighed up the options and took a course that offered, by his estimation, the most efficient means to counter the threat.”

“Despite it being one that would cause you much suffering,” Swinburne noted.

“He was prepared to sacrifice himself and, ultimately, did so. He would have expected nothing less from me.”

“I'll miss him.”

“Yes.”

“And the Ministry of Chronological Affairs, what of that?”

“From what I understand, Sadhvi Raghavendra will take control of it.”

“Safe hands, then. Her instincts are as powerful as Edward's were, though they operate in a different manner.”

Swinburne looked up and surveyed the sky. Stars were beginning to shine.

“But is it necessary? Will there be more time travellers?”

Burton followed his friend's gaze. After a pause, he said, “I speak with the Beetle's knowledge. The Oxford equation is now a part of the collective human consciousness and must inevitably emerge. One day, far into the future—farther even than we travelled—some will learn how to employ it. By then it will be properly understood that Time, Space, Light, and Life are the same thing. The equation will be used not to travel in history but, rather, to go there.” He pointed upward. “To the stars. To distant worlds.”

“It's a shame we won't be around to witness that.”

“Who says we won't? Haven't we learned that death is an illusion?”

“But we won't be Burton and Swinburne. We'll be—I don't know what.”

Burton thought a moment then murmured, “Perhaps we'll be the stars themselves, Algy. Perhaps the stars themselves.”

Meanwhile . . .

Isabel and Grenfell Baker helped him to prepare for bed. As usual, he endured their assistance with bad grace, grumbling at his immobility, feeling humiliated that he'd become such a burden, such a confounded invalid.

The doctor bid them goodnight. Burton got into bed. Isabel, with difficultly, lowered herself to her knees and said her prayers, repeatedly mentioning her husband in her long litany of requested blessings. For her sake, he tolerated it without comment.

Outside, a dog howled.

Isabel rose. “What a horrible noise.”

“The poor thing knows the unseasonal heat doesn't survive long after the sun goes down,” he said. “It's predicting a chilly night.”

“I'll fetch an extra blanket.”

“No, don't. I hate to feel swaddled.”

She joined him in bed. “Shall we read?”

He nodded. She passed him his Robert Buchanan. He opened it at random but didn't look at its pages. His mind drifted. For three hours, he thought strange thoughts. Then he made a decision.

“There's something I'd like you to do for me tomorrow.”

Isabel lowered her book. “Yes?”

“Take
The Scented Garden
from my desk and burn it.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “Burn it? But you've been working on it for so long! You said it will be—will be the crown of your—of—”

“I know. But I've had a change of heart. I don't want to be forever associated with it. If I'm remembered at all, it should be for what I really am. For what I have always been.”

His eyes drifted to the window. He looked out at the night sky, at the splatter of twinkling stars.

He smiled.

“An explorer.”

Nearly time to go.

FRAGMENT

. . . we immediately run into problems, for by its very nature, an analysis must make sense, which is to say: it must cohere to the reality that is created by our senses. The challenge we encounter when attempting to explain the function of the Oxford equation is that it concerns the transcendence of such limitations and therefore cannot be discussed within their bounds with any degree of satisfaction.

However, while it may be impossible to adequately examine the equation itself, we can at least contemplate various aspects of its manifestation and effect upon our species. To this end, in the paper that follows, I shall outline and evaluate current theories concerning: