The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (16 page)

Gooch smiled at the other's impatience. “In a nutshell, Mr. Faraday, easily manufactured crystalline silicates will be at the heart of calculating machines in the future. The substance offers near infinite capacity for information storage and processing. The Mark Three has been supplemented with such, and now operates with greater rapidity and efficiency.”

“I say! How fascinating. Crystalline silicates, hey? I look forward to seeing them demonstrated.”

“Hmm. That might be easier said than done. Apparently the Mark Three has just lost its voice. A fault of some sort.”

Krishnamurthy said, “Mr. Faraday, what's this about Charles Babbage making off?”

“Oof!” the scientist responded, ushering them across the floor. “He hasn't been seen since—um—since—since—when was it now? Yes, November, I believe. November. He removed all his work over the course of a week. No one realised what he was doing until it was too late.”

“What on earth could have prompted that?” Gooch asked. “Was he acting abnormally in any way?”

“No more so than usual. His is a great loss, Mr. Gooch. He took all his prototypes with him, all his—you know—his—er—blueprints and notes. Made off with the things, too.”

“Things?” Gooch asked.

“The—er—the black diamonds. All of 'em.”

“I'll be damned!” Gooch shot a loaded glance at Burton, as if to ask,
Do you realise the diamonds' significance?

The explorer did, though he wasn't sure how.

“He had absolutely no right to take the stones,” Gooch protested.

“Indeed not,” Faraday agreed.

With Fiddlesticks at his side, the old man led them between coils, towers, banks of dials, and panels of switches until they came to a central area of workbenches and control consoles. Here, Krishnamurthy and Raghavendra uttered inarticulate shouts of surprise, and Gooch, stumbling to a halt, threw out his four hands and shouted, “Idiot! I'm a confounded idiot! My God! I should have realised!”

Their eyes were fixed on a giant, six-armed figure of brass, standing as motionless as a statue beside one of the benches.

Burton, too, couldn't avert his gaze. He felt as if he were somehow looking at himself, and a terrible sense of claustrophobia gripped him.

“Sir?” Faraday said to Gooch.

“Brunel. He's here.”

Faraday shrugged. “Ah. Yes. Well. Er. I'm afraid that's debatable. We've been unable to revive him. The old chap hasn't shown the slightest sign of life. He's not budged an inch.”

Gooch shook his head and took Faraday by the elbow. “No, you don't understand. My reference was to the body not to the mind. I'm sorry to have to tell you that Mr. Brunel is dead. We learned that in the future. His presence in the machine's diamonds has been overwritten by a fragment of Spring Heeled Jack's mind.” He jabbed a metal finger toward the motionless figure. “That is our enemy. He'll remain in this state for many years. They'll put him in the British Museum, and there he'll bide his time until, eventually, he'll revive and establish a foul autocracy. Spring Heeled Jack will rule the world until we defeat him.”

“Gosh! Really?”

Krishnamurthy stepped forward and peered up into the likeness of Brunel's face that adorned the front of the brass man's head. “Um, Daniel, couldn't we now prevent any of that from ever happening? What if we melted him down and found a means to drive the presence out of the diamonds?”

“That wouldn't be difficult,” Gooch responded. “A strong electrical current passed through the stones would be sufficient.”

“Phew!” Krishnamurthy said. “We could prevent everything we experienced in the future from ever happening.”

Gooch put his hands to his head. “What a paradox! It would mean we couldn't do what we've already done. Nevertheless—” He ran metal fingers along the line of his jaw.

For half a minute, no one spoke. The lightning sizzled overhead. Burton watched its light playing across Brunel's polished brass form.

Brunel's? Oxford's? Mine?

He shuddered.

“It appears, gentlemen,” Sadhvi Raghavendra said, “that our mission requires further action in order be completed. However, this is perhaps the first occasion where we can claim that time is on our side, so before we commit what remains of Spring Heeled Jack to oblivion, may I suggest we see to our own needs first? My hollow stomach requires urgent attention.”

Gooch nodded. “Quite right, Sadhvi.” He addressed Fiddlesticks. “Would you see to it that some food is brought to Mr. Brunel's office? A cold platter will do. Have rooms prepared for us, too. We'll eat, sleep, and deal with conundrums on the morrow.”

“Right away, sir.”

The next ninety minutes were, for Burton—and he could see for Swinburne and Trounce, too—exhausting. He was, he had to remind himself, an old man. Not physically any more but still mentally, for sure. It had been a long, long time since he'd had to process so much that was new and strange, and for now, at least, his capacity to do so had reached its limit. He ate without tasting and listened to Gooch, Faraday, Krishnamurthy, Raghavendra, and—a little later—Nathaniel Lawless converse without full cognisance of what they were saying. He vaguely gathered that the Mark III had altogether ceased to function, and the Beetle had somehow vanished from the
Orpheus
without so much as a good-bye. When talk turned to world affairs, he learned that Britain had established a frail peace with China, the latter caving in after Lord Elgin had bombed the Old Summer Palace; in America, Lincoln had been elected, but the states were dropping out of the union like toppling dominoes; Italy had unified; Bazalgette's London sewer system was now fully operational; the East End, which had burned to the ground almost two years ago, was now being rebuilt, its northern parts being turned into residential districts while its riverside area would—like the Tooley Street district on the opposite side of the Thames—consist mainly of wharfs and warehouses; Disraeli and Gladstone's notorious battle of wits, which in his world had commenced toward the end of the 'sixties was, in this one, already well established; and, since the signing of the trade alliance with the German Confederation, there were some who were already—and accurately—predicting that the British Empire would one day be called the Anglo-Saxon Empire.

Too much to take in.

His eyelids drooped.

He saw Isabel.

He saw flames.

He saw his young self, gazing, with haunted eyes, out from a mirror. Behind his reflection, there was a medium-sized chamber containing a bed. Barely recalling the end of the meal and not sure how he'd ended up in the room—and not caring—Burton turned, stumbled across the floor, collapsed fully clothed onto the blankets, and immediately dropped into the deepest of sleeps.

He dreamed that his reflection remained in the mirror and stared at him as he slumbered and that the room behind the watcher was as real as the one it reflected.

THE MINISTER AND A MECHANICAL IRREGULARITY

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

—Benjamin Disraeli

Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.

“By my Aunt Blodwyn's bulging bustle!”

Swinburne's exclamation broke into Burton's internal chant. The explorer opened his eyes and sighed. The world would not be ignored. There was no escaping it.

Trounce was sitting beside him in a landau, Swinburne and Gooch opposite.

They'd departed Battersea Power Station half an hour ago—at around nine o'clock—and were being followed by a second carriage carrying Raghavendra, Krishnamurthy, and Lawless.

The explorer moved his tongue around his mouth, feeling the gaps where the spear had, in Berbera, knocked out a couple of his molars. None of the remaining teeth were rotten or worn.

He was still young.

It's not going away.

“What is it now, Algy?” he murmured.

“A two-legged vehicle,” Swinburne answered. “Walking!”

“A stamper,” Gooch said. “Put into commission far more quickly than I anticipated. I thought they'd take at least another couple of years to develop.” He clicked his tongue forlornly. “With Brunel dead and Babbage gone astray, it might be the DOGS' last innovation for some considerable time. By golly, I've never known the station to be so badly attended. There are more clockwork people in it than fleshy ones. It's as if the heart's gone out of the place.”

“Dogs?” Swinburne asked, and answered himself. “Ah, yes, the Department of Guided Science.”

Looking out of the window, Burton wondered whether a cessation of Battersea Power Station's operations might not be a good thing for London. He'd always considered the capital too overcrowded and noisy, but the metropolis he remembered paled in comparison to what he saw now. The drizzle, the chill, and the buildings were all familiar, but the streets were another story entirely. Their fringes were seething with people: lords and ladies, vagabonds and thieves, vendors and entertainers, clerks and businessmen, urchins and prostitutes; while throbbing and rumbling through the middle of the city's swollen arteries there was such a heterogeneous jumble of vehicles that the explorer was hard put to separate them from one another. Horse-drawn carts, cabs, and carriages were present in profusion, but clanking and grinding and rattling among them were contraptions of outlandish and in some cases ludicrous design, all powered by steam, and all pumping a billowing veil of vapour across the scene, so that they waxed and waned in and out of sight, as if uncertain of their own essence. The stamper was there—a brass-bound and studded box of polished oak with windows and doors, carrying passengers inside, the whole of it raised up on mighty legs of metal with backward-pointing knees. The thing pounded along, honking and hissing like an enraged goose, sending cursing people and whinnying horses scattering from its path. Too, there were many mechanical carriages like the one in which Burton rode, identical in form to the usual landaus, hansoms, growlers, and phaetons, but each was pulled, rather than by a horse, by a small tall-chimneyed locomotive similar in design to Stephenson's famous
Rocket
, though less than half the size. Of “penny farthing” bicycles, there were countless, but instead of relying on their riders' leg muscles for momentum, they were powered by miniature engines. There were also metal spheres, their motive force being a vertical band that rotated vertically from the back to the front around their circumference. They were rolling in and out of the traffic like giant marbles.

Those were the means of transportation that Burton managed to at least half comprehend, but there were others which he did not: contrivances that banged and groaned, jiggled and bounced; that jerked or lurched or rolled or hopped along in a manner that couldn't possibly offer anything resembling comfort to their drivers and passengers. He wondered why anyone had bothered to create such impractical machines. The answer came to him in the form of a maxim commonly quoted in this world:
The DOGS bark, “Because we can!”

The madness wasn't confined to the ground; the sky was teeming with it, too. There were leather armchairs with spinning wings somehow keeping them aloft, titanic rotorships like the
Orpheus
, and unsteady-looking constructions that flapped metal wings and dipped and bobbed through the air. Of the latter, Gooch noted, “Ornithopters! My colleagues must have solved the problems. The damned things were always impossible to control.”

“How are collisions avoided?” Burton asked.

“There's a lot of sky. Unlike ground travel, one has altitude to play with. Nevertheless, flight remains hazardous. There's an average of three smashes per day. Probably more now. It appears considerably busier up there than it was a year ago.”