Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (51 page)

The Nāga priest finished painting, put the bowl aside, and reversed the instrument he was holding. Its other end was needle-sharp.

“This will hurt,” he said, and started to jab the point over and over into Burton's skin, working at such speed that his hand became a blur.

Burton groaned and writhed in pain.

“Time, Sir Richard. Time. Time. Time. You soft skins have such a limited sense of it. You think it's the beat of a heart, that its pulses are regular, that it marches from A to B to C. But there's much more to time than mere rhythm and sequence. There's a melody. There are refrains that arise and fade and arise again. Time can change pitch and timbre and texture. Time has harmonies. It has volume. It has accents and pauses. It has verses and choruses. Your understanding of it is tediously horizontal, but it has all these vertical aspects, too.”

William Trounce snorted. “Even if all that gobbledegook is true,” he growled, “so bloody well what?”

“Just this, Detective Inspector: when the ripples of consequence spread out from an action taken, they go in all directions, not just forward, as you soft skins would have it. All directions.”

“Ruddy nonsense!”

K'k'thyima straightened up from his task and said, “Do you happen to have a handkerchief?”

Trounce shook his head, but Speke reached into his pocket, pulled out a square of cotton, and passed it to the clockwork priest. K'k'thyima used it to wipe the blood and excess paste from the explorer's freshly etched tattoo.

“All done,” he announced. He picked up his revolver. “We shall now send our friend Sir Richard Francis Burton into the future, where he'll witness the music of time in all its glory. It is a gift from the Nāga to the race that destroyed us.”

Burton said, “Why?”

“Because you have to learn! If you don't, this world is doomed! It is in your hands now, soft skin—teach the lesson you learn today.”

“Hogwash!” Trounce spat.

“It's a terrible shame,” K'k'thyima said, “and I'm truly sorry, but, as has ever been the case, the Eye requires a sacrifice to activate it. Your essence will, however, be imprinted on the stone, if that's any consolation, William.”

He raised the pistol and shot Trounce through the head.

Burton screamed.

There was a blinding white flash.

“In despair are many hopes.”

–A
RABIC
PROVERB

T
he prodigious plant quivered and the huge red flower swung upward into a sunbeam and unfurled its outer layer of spiny petals to soak in the light and heat. The air bladders at the top of its stalk expanded like balloons then contracted, and the resultant squeak possessed an oddly dreamy tone.

“One, who is not, we see; but one, whom we see not, is;

Surely this is not that; but that is assuredly this.

“What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under;

If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without
      thunder.”

The bloom shifted again with a woody creak and appeared to look back down at the two men, who sat on their harvestmen and gaped at it in utter astonishment.

Bertie Wells whispered the obvious: “It's a talking plant. A talking bloody plant!”

Two long narrow leaves, positioned a little way below the petals, stretched and curled in a gesture that resembled a man throwing out his hands. “So explain yourself, you rotter! Why did you ignore me for so long? Wasn't it obvious that I was calling you back? The poppies, Richard! The poppies!”

Burton turned off his harvestman's steam engine, toppled from his saddle, thumped onto the ground, and lay still.

Behind him, Wells hurriedly stopped his own machine, dismounted, and ran over to kneel at his friend's side.

“I say!” the flower exclaimed. “Who are you? What's wrong with Richard?”

“I'm Bertie Wells, and I think he's fainted. Probably out of sheer disbelief!”

“Ah,” said the bloom, and added:

“Doubt is faith in the main; but faith, on the whole, is doubt;
We cannot believe by proof; but could we believe without?

“Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are not clover;
Neither are straight lines curves; yet over is under and over.

“Two and two may be four; but four and four are not eight;
Fate and God may be twain; but God is the same as fate.”

“God is a proven fallacy,” Wells muttered distractedly as he took a flask from his belt and splashed water onto Burton's face.

“Indeed he is,” the plant agreed. “Darwin drove the sword home and left us with a void. What now, hey? What now? I say we should fill it with a higher sort of pantheism. What do you think, Mr. Wells?”

Without considering the fact that he'd somehow become engaged in a theological discussion with oversized vegetation—for he felt that to do so would lead to the inevitable conclusion that he'd gone completely barmy—Wells replied: “I feel man would be wise to work at correcting his own mistakes instead of waiting for intervention from on high, and should replace faith in an unknowable divine plan with a well-thought-out scheme of his own.”

“I say! Bravo! Bravo!” the plant cheered.

“Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels;
God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels.”

Burton blinked, sneezed, lay still for a moment, then scrambled to his feet, swayed, and grabbed at one of his harvestman's legs for support.

He looked up at the flower.

It angled itself downward and squealed, “I didn't think you were the fainting type, Richard! A hangover, I suspect! Did you drink too much of my brandy? I exude it like sap, you know! A very ingenious process, even if I do say so myself!”

Very slowly, Burton replied, “You, Algernon, have
got
to be bloody joking.”

“What? What? Why?”

“A
flower?”

“Oh! Ha-ha! Not just a flower—a whole bally jungle! What a wheeze, hey?”

“But is it—is it really you?”

The blossom twisted slightly, a gesture like a man angling his head to one side in contemplation. It refilled its air bladders and squeaked:

“Body and spirit are twins; God only knows which is which;
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch.

“More is the whole than a part; but half is more than the whole;
Clearly, the soul is the body; but is not the body the soul?”

With a sudden jerk, the flower dropped until it was just inches from Burton's face.

“Is there something wrong with your memory, old horse?”

“Yes. There's a lot wrong with it. I've spent the past five years trying to piece it together while being pursued, shot at, and bombed.”

“And I suppose you've forgotten the poppy that sprouted from my hand?”

Burton flinched and put a hand to his head as an image flashed into his mind, bringing with it an overwhelming sense of loss. “Bismillah! I had! But I—wait! I think—I think—Culver Cliff!”

Swinburne shivered and rustled. “Unfortunately so.”

With watering eyes, Burton squinted at the surrounding rock face.

“I know this place. There's—”

He looked to his right, to where one of the plant's thick limbs crossed the ground and dug into the surrounding cliff. There was a dark opening in the root-like growth, and he could see that it was hollow.

Disparate recollections slotted together.

“There's a cave,” he said, hoarsely. “It's there! I remember now. A grotto! You killed Count Zeppelin!”

“Yes! The golden arrow of Eros straight into his eyeball! Good old Tom Bendyshe avenged! But the Prussian injected me with that horrible venom of his and the next thing I knew I was falling. It took me an age to grow back out of that pit and into daylight, I can tell you! Lucky for me that Zeppelin fell into it, too. He made very good fertilizer!”

A black pit.

Algernon Swinburne hanging by his fingertips.

A green shoot emerging from the back of the poet's hand. Petals unfurling. A red poppy.

“The poppies,” Burton whispered. “Now I understand.”

“Bloody typical!” the poet trumpeted. “I stretched myself to the absolute giddy limit to signpost the way back here, and you didn't even recognise what the confounded signs meant!”

“I'm sorry, Algy. Something happened to me in that cave—in Lettow-Vorbeck's temple! Yes, I remember now! It's in there, beyond the grotto!”

“Lettow-Vorbeck?” Swinburne asked.

Wells answered, “A German general, Mr. Swinburne. Apparently he's been trying to burn his way through your jungle to find this place.”

“The swine! I felt it, too! Very unpleasant!”

Burton murmured, “I lost my memory in that temple. The shock of your death was part of it, Algy, but there was more. And it ended with me being projected through time.”

Swinburne inflated his bladders, fluttered his petals, and said, “I know. You can imagine my surprise when, after having had nothing but Pox and Malady's foul-mouthed descendants for company for decade after decade, I suddenly saw you come stumbling into this clearing! You were ranting and raving like a Bedlam inmate! I tried to speak to you but you legged it through the gorge and out of the mountains like a man with the devil himself at his heels. By the way, what year is this?”

“I arrived in 1914. It's now 1918.”

“My hat! Really?”

The flower angled upward as if regarding the sky.

“One and two are not one; but one and nothing is two;
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.”

It turned back to the two men.

“I find it rather difficult to measure time these days. I've had such a different sense of it since I—er—took root, so to speak. It's not at all the way I used to think of it. Can you conceive of time as a thing filled with paradoxes and echoes? What a magnificent poem it would make!

“Once the mastodon was; pterodactyls were common as cocks;
Then the mammoth was God; now is He a prize ox.

“Parallels all things are; yet many of these are askew;
You are certainly I; but certainly I am not you.

“Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock;
Cocks exist for the hen; but hens exist for the cock.

“God, whom we see not, is; and God, who is not, we see;
Fiddle, we know, is diddle, and diddle, we take it, is dee.”

Swinburne arched his thick stalk and shook with a peal of high-pitched laughter. Leaves drifted down from his higher branches.

Wells leaned close to Burton and whispered, “I'm of the opinion that your friend, the giant plant, is rip-roaringly drunk!”

The explorer appeared not to hear the little war correspondent. “Vertical as well as horizontal qualities,” he mumbled to himself. “Who else spoke to me about the nature of time?”

Swinburne loosed a sound that resembled a belch and directed his petals back at Burton.

“But for all my newfound perception,” he said, “upon your appearance, I instantly recognised that you weren't where—or, rather,
when
—you belong; and I certainly didn't relish the thought of you being out there, beyond the mountains, among the savages.”

“Actually, there aren't many left,” Wells put in. “Most of those that remain are Askaris now.”

Swinburne gave a scornful hiss. “I'm not referring to the Africans, Mr. Wells. I mean the Europeans!”

“Ah. Quite so.”

“The barbarities that have been committed on this continent in the name of one ideology or another, this social policy or that—quite dreadful! And I mean to put an end to it. I shall soon have the strength to make the German vegetation—the red weed and the venomous plants—whither and die. Already I've gained influence over those horrible things the Prussians once employed as vehicles—”

Wells cried out: “Then it was you! You took control of the lurchers! You cleared the route out of Tabora for us!”

“Is that what you call them? Yes, of course it was me. Now I shall use them to rid this land of its armies. My influence is growing, Mr. Wells. My roots will one day reach from coast to coast. And when they do, I shall make a Utopia of Africa!”

“Utopia!” Wells's eyes glistened with hope.

“For as long as this version of history exists, Africa will be an Eden.”

The flower bobbed low, until it was level with their faces.

“But,” it squeaked, “this history should
not
exist. You have to go back, Richard, and you have to put an end to all such divergences.”

Bertie Wells frowned and looked from the vermillion blossom to Burton and back again. “Mr. Swinburne,” he said, “Richard has explained the phenomenon of alternate histories to me. Why can they not exist concurrently?”

“Time is a complex thing. It is like music. In addition to its rhythm, there is—”

“A melody,” Burton interjected. “Refrains, pitch, timbre, and texture. Time has harmonies, volume, accents, and pauses. It has verses and—Bismillah! I've heard this before—from—from Herbert Spencer!” He looked confused. “But not Herbert Spencer.”

“Good old tin-head!” Swinburne exclaimed. “I wonder what became of him?”

Burton pointed to where Swinburne's hollow root blocked the cave mouth. “He's in there!”

“I say! Is he? Was he then involved in your transportation here?”

The explorer struggled for an answer. Something felt very wrong. The clockwork philosopher had been a friend and ally, yet, for reasons he couldn't determine, when he thought of him now, he felt threatened and distrustful. “He was,” he said, and immediately felt he'd uttered an untruth.

“Then you must go to him,” Swinburne said. “And he must return you to 1863. For, to answer Mr. Wells's question, these alternate histories are proliferating and turning time into a cacophony. Imagine ten orchestras playing different tunes in the same theatre. The musicians would lose their way. Some would play the wrong melody by mistake. Musical expressions would be misplaced and mixed up. There'd be pandemonium. And that is what's happening. If this situation is allowed to continue unchecked, the borders between each version of reality will be breached. Diverse technologies will become horribly intermingled. People's personalities will be bent entirely out of shape. Events will develop in increasingly eccentric directions.”

“But how can I reverse the damage?” Burton asked.

“I haven't a clue! I'm just a poet! But you'll find a way.”

The king's agent looked at the opening in Swinburne's root. He didn't want to enter the cave; didn't want to see the grotto or the temple; and, especially, he didn't want to see Herbert Spencer.

He noticed a flower-strewn mound. It looked like a grave. The back of his mind seemed to flex, as if to divulge a secret, but the information didn't come—only deep sadness.

He addressed Wells: “Algy is right, Bertie. And that means I have to leave you now. I have to enter the temple.”

“I'm coming with you.”

“There's no need, and it might be dangerous.”

“I've seen this thing through with you from the start. I need to be there at the finish.”

Burton considered a moment, then nodded.

“Algy,” he said, turning back to the vermillion blossom. “I'm sorry this happened to you.”

“Sorry?” the poet responded. “Don't be sorry! This is everything I could have hoped for! My senses are
alive
, Richard! And
what
senses! I've never felt so engaged with life! So intoxicated by it! Finally, I feel the inexpressible poetry of sheer
being!
It's wondrous!”