Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) (11 page)

“
Which side would this people take, if pressed? The Coalition’s? The Subterraneans’ origins would certainly come into question, and like the Westminster disaster, that would raise all sorts of concerns about the wisdom of pursuing such risky scientific endeavours as time travel. For how else could this people have come into being so long ago, while also possessing advanced technology
and
the English language? And lest we forget, funnelling scientific progress is the Council’s bread and butter. People must trust in the efficacy of that pursuit, and of the Council’s sovereignty, or else the Leviacrum has no reason for being.”

He paused to connect, with wiring, the six projectors perched on
wooden stands he’d erected around the room. They all pointed to the centre, a few feet above a fumigation capsule standing upright on the carpet. Behind that, a silver canvas projection screen, similar to the one they’d used to shame the Sorensen cousins in Niflheim, reflected a slit of sunlight from between the drawn curtains. Sonja jumped up and closed them fully. “Is it just me, or is it all starting to fit?”

“
What do you mean?” asked Meredith.

“
I mean Professor Reardon and his Westminster time jump, the rumours of collapsed Leviacrum towers already waiting for them there in prehistory. Someone, sometime in the future figures out how to send these blasted towers back in time, for whatever reason, but it all goes wrong. The people are stuck there in a world ruled by hostile creatures. To survive, maybe they had no choice but to go underground and start civilization anew.”

“
And they just eked out a living there, not venturing to the surface for millions of years?”

“
Not necessarily.” Sonja ran the point of her finger through midair, as if feeling out her theory. As much as Meredith admired her younger sister’s intellect, sometimes it annoyed her that Sonja was more like Father than she was, blessed with that ability to make uncanny leaps of logic while still keeping both feet on the ground. “Maybe they found a way to really thrive down there, using artificial light and some sort of hydro-electric power. For all we know, Subterranea’s a vast, teeming world, ‘eloquent of fertility’, as Wells put it.”

“
That was War of the Worlds,” Father reminded her.

“
Correct. And let’s hope that’s not what your expedition starts.”

Father lightly wagged a finger at her, as if to s
ay,
That’s exactly what the Leviacrum Council is afraid of.

“
Okay, are you ready?” He donned his padded work gloves and shoved several coal bricks into the fuming portable boiler that powered all six projectors.

The butterflies under her
tight corset made Meredith feel six years old again, out of control, breathless. Sonja nodded for them both.

Father opened the fumigation c
anister and hurried away. “Don’t worry, it’s only a steam-based gas with a light-sensitive compound.” He lit the projectors in turn. A slivery phantom figure, clutching a parasol, seeped into existence inside the columning steam. It fidgeted to one side, as real as life, making them both gasp. “I’ll leave you to her,” Father said from behind, and started his gramophone player with its familiar soft crackle. “This is for your eyes and ears only.” He left the room.

 
Meredith’s curiosity wanted to lift her from the settee, while a fear of this oily apparition sank her back into the cushion; it was something she must not see yet positively
had
to see, as though her life depended on it either way. She linked arms with Sonja, and waited.

“
Is it recording, darling? The machine’s spin doesn’t appear—oh, good, fine—should I begin then?” Mother’s delicate voice was even more distant, even more dampened than Meredith remembered, as though she’d had a really bad sore throat as a girl and had been forced to speak softly ever since. She sat upright on her stool, gazing out from the flickering fumes. As the projector beams converged, they stretched and distorted her outline in the columning gas, denying her a completely real presence. The effect was spooky enough, but thank goodness it
wasn’t
photograph-real—Meredith glanced to the wall portrait and reassured herself this was only an illusion.

“
Hello, Merry. Hello, Sonja. How are you, my loves? By the time you hear this, and indeed
see it—
what magic!—you will have already braved your first seasons, and will, I am quite sure, have enough suitors to start your own regiments. Are any of them scientific?” She appeared to wink across the room, perhaps to Father.

Meredith squ
irmed, as though Mother were gazing right through
her,
as though
she
were the translucent one.

“
We have had precious little time, my darlings. And sadly these few minutes are all I can give you now. Would that it were not so, but despite your father’s bravest efforts, my illness has no cure in this world. Perhaps it exists in another world, a lost world far, far beneath us. That, however, is for your father to discover. I will no longer be here, yet his adventures will be our adventures, maybe the most important expeditions ever undertaken, to find out where I came from, and how my people came to be. Which people, you ask? Very well. Let me start at the end of my beginning, then, and let this be the real story of Moon and Meridian.

“
I remember waiting forever in a firelit room with no windows. It may have been a cave. My feet were bandaged, and I lay on my side listening to the sound of running water overhead. The room shook periodically, as though a giant with a club was thumping the ground outside. I licked at the seepage that came through the rock, to keep myself alive, but barely. At length the fire went out and I shivered until I couldn’t tell whether I was awake or asleep. The thumps grew nearer. Louder. I thought I heard voices through the rock.”

Meredith was four years old again, and spellbound.

“One day the room leapt and the running water overhead became a thunderous torrent all around. I clung tightly to the book I was holding in the dark. Pieces of the roof and the wall began to collapse. One of them struck my foot and I cried out—exactly what, I can’t remember. As if in answer, a slender shoot of yellow light appeared high up above me, piercing the wall from outside. It illuminated a spot on the ground half way across the room. As I watched, the spot moved away from me, not in jerks but smoothly, slowly, until at length it climbed the far wall and turned blood red, finally dimmed and went out. It was soon replaced by a pale, silver beam that I fell asleep watching.

“
Two more cycles of the yellow light and the silver light passed before I was rescued. Two black-skinned men wearing loincloths entered through the hole above and descended by rope. I’d never seen black skin before. I didn’t understand their language but they understood mine a little. We sailed in their canoe. Outside my room was a shallow lake, which had lately been vast and deep. Their leaders had emptied the majority of it, by means of explosion, to form a new river. We finally came to their camp on the lakeshore. All the while I’d had to shield my eyes from the blinding spherical light in the sky—something else I’d never seen before—until another black-skinned man, dressed in a tan uniform, gave me a pair of dark spectacles to wear.

“
He said he’d never seen a girl with such white hair before, and when my two rescuers told him where they’d found me, he said they must be mistaken. My room had been fifty feet under the surface of the lake for thousands of years, with no other known way in or out until that day! They returned to my room, where they discovered a narrow passage leading to a network of underground rivers. One of these fell into an unfathomable chasm, they said. Several lengths of frayed rope had been left near the drop, along with numerous smears of blood on the walls.

“
I never returned to that room, to my first memory. Whatever trauma I’d suffered, involving the unfathomable hole and the smears of blood on the wall, had locked away any earlier memories. The black-skinned man in the uniform took me to his barracks in a place called Benguela, where he and his wife cared for me and nursed me back to health. I was about eight years old, they said. I didn’t know what a year was. They told me about the sun and the moon and all the other things I’d never seen above ground. They took me to see a witch doctor, to try and recover my memories of life before that room, but nothing worked. Then a mesmerist tried and failed.

“
The only things I had in my possession were the book I’d clung to through everything—it was called
Moon and Meridian
—and an under-belt studded with precious gems, one of them a large amethyst. If I’d been in the charge of a less honourable man, the book may have been my only legacy, but Major Bilali protected my interests fiercely. He said my existence was a miracle, and I left Africa as wealthy as I had found it, perhaps even wealthier, for I now knew two people whom I loved. 

“
Later, my new foster parents, the Moseleys, brought me to live in England. Major Bilali and his wife were posted to the Congo, a hostile region they insisted I not be exposed to. I attended South Hampshire Grammar and quietly flourished in every way. My business investments, directed in trust by my foster parents, bore fruit, I made friends, and my academic results grew from strength to strength.

“
On my eighteenth birthday I made the two best decisions of my life. The first was to send Major Bilali and his wife the sum of five hundred thousand pounds, which enabled them to retire happily to Cape Town. The second was to accept a proposal of marriage by a debonair scientist whose fascination with geology and archaeology was second only to his devotion to me. He is my sweet Ralph, my heart’s one true companion, and I will love him always.”

She blew a kiss across the room, then gave a baleful nod. “
And now I must be brief. Be proud of his expeditions, my darlings. They may take him away from you for a time, but you will never be without him, as you will never be without me, all the days of your life. Let his quest be my quest, and when you are old enough, please help him in any way you can. My origins are your origins, and they are extraordinary—trust in that, and you will find them someday.

“
Goodbye, Merry. Goodbye, Sonja. I wish I could see you now, through time. Oh, how I wish it. But whatever happens, know that I love you. Your father loves you. And I’m so happy to know that you two will always have each other, just like Moon and Meridian. Be strong for each other, and try not to forget me?

“
I wish you all the happiness in the world.”

Mother rose
off her stool without a fuss and, after collapsing her parasol, left the limelight bearing a quivering smile. The gramophone went on crackling, the projector beams still blazed, the gas continued to column, but extraordinariness in the room was now everywhere
else
, as though Mother’s spirit had passed through into reality, encompassing Meredith and Sonja, imbuing the very air they breathed.

Neither she nor her sister cried. But they were both speechless, their gazes wandering around this newly alien living room, trying to get a handle on what was real and what wasn
’t.

Time had shuffled its deck
, and they were being asked to play a new game, the rules of which were suddenly unclear.

“
I’m sorry for springing it on you like this, but I’m convinced you’re old enough now to bear our family secret.” Father brushed past and disassembled his apparatus without care. He wasn’t interested in using the set-up ever again—this was a one-time show, the keeping of an old, dear promise. “I’ve observed your awkwardness these past several years, your anti-social habits. Deep down, I think you know you’re not like anyone else in England, that you don’t belong here. Your mother was the same. We were very happy together, true, but I’d often catch her gazing off into the distance, or daydreaming during dinner. She’d always try to explain what she was feeling—a sad sort of inadequacy, a yearning for something money couldn’t buy, that England couldn’t provide. She seemed to know there was more to life than we were privy to.

“
So we began to speculate. The gems she’d inherited were purer than anything else on the market. Then there was the unclassifiable book, her aversion to bright lights, her fascination with rain, her ivory-white hair, the story of her rescue from the African cave: these all pointed to some kind of unprecedented subterranean existence. No matter how much she wanted to ignore her past, it wouldn’t let her settle. I poured all my scientific drive, and she poured much of her wealth, into proving that theory of a world deep underground. What I discovered during my trial dig in the iron mole was beyond anything we could have imagined—a gigantic network of caves and tunnels, some of them natural, some manmade, stretching for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. A whole new ecosystem of plant life, including bioluminescent fauna, in a world far beneath our feet. Evidence of large bodies of water. And most persuasively of all, archaeological relics of a human civilization that existed there millions of years ago, long before
homo sapiens.

“
Mikael Sorensen now holds the most crucial artefacts from my discovery in secret. He is also trusted by the Leviacrum Council, and is therefore beyond suspicion.”