There Will Be Phlogiston (37 page)

Such a man could prove useful.

Necessary actions: Send aetherogram to regimental
headquarters explaining necessity of secondment. Arrange
transportation from India against the eventuality that Captain
England proves a satisfactory candidate.
[Here Mr. Hardinge
appears to laugh to himself.]
Transportation to England, for
England. Fly to India. The aetherways are clear, and seem set to
remain so. The time it takes for my message to arrive will be
enough to finish what business remains in the department, and the
journey will be brief.

[Footsteps audible, the scratch of a needle
being removed. The log ends.]

Record of interview between Samuel Hardinge, late of
the Department of Aethermantic Operations and Intelligence, and
Captain George England of the 17th Lancers. Record dated 21 January
1858, Dehli, 3:02 p.m.

This log presented unexpurgated.

[The scratch of a needle being set on a wax
cylinder.]

E: I was asked to report to this office, sir.

[Witnesses identify this as the voice of Captain
George England.]

H: I am not a knight, nor an officer, nor a
schoolmaster, Captain England. Mr. Hardinge will suffice.

[Witnesses identify this as the voice of Samuel
Hardinge.]

H: Please take a seat.

[The sound of a chair being scraped across the
floor.]

H: Do you know who I am?

E: No, Mr. Hardinge.

H: Would you care to take a guess?

[Here there is some manner of interference on the
recording, as if the needle became suddenly agitated, or was
detecting vibrations of an alien nature.]

E:
[Inaudible over interference]
. . . but I
have only heard rumours of such things.

H: Are you a man who puts great store in rumours?

E: No, Mr. Hardinge.

H: Commendable. But as you see in this instance the
rumours were well-founded. I am what the world has taken to calling
an aethermancer. When I worked with the War Office, I oversaw Mr.
Lovelace’s ill-fated voyage to the upper skies, and when the lights
of the aurora bathed our vessel I became
[there is more
interference]
as you see now.

[There is silence on the cylinder for some time.]

H: Have you nothing to say, Captain England?

E: In the Lancers, sir, a man does not give his
opinion unless he is asked for it.

H: I am asking you for it.

E: I fear that I have none. I had always taken the
story of Mr. Lovelace’s last voyage to be a fanciful one, but your
presence here would seem to show that there is some truth to
it.

H: I cannot tell if you are mocking me.

E: Sir! I would do no such thing.

H: I shall come to the point. I have secured funding
from Her Majesty’s Government to re-create the final voyage of the
Endeavour
with the express purpose of fashioning more
individuals who are as I now am.

E: To what end?

H: To the only end that matters. The defence of the
realm, the advancement of the Empire. Surely you saw for yourself
the atrocities carried out last year, in this very country? The
destruction that the mutineers brought down on honest British women
and children? Why, it can scarcely be borne!

E: But what does a rebellion in India have to do with
a flight to the upper skies?

[Again, the recording dissolves to static. The
previous transcriber insisted that—if this section of the cylinder
is played back and the listener pays close attention to sounds on
the edge of hearing—ancient and blasphemous voices can be heard in
the chaos. The previous transcriber has since been committed to a
sanatorium, and no attempt has been made to confirm his
claims.]

H:
[Inaudible]
. . . dare to stand against us?
What rebel? What empire? I have stared into the heart of the aether
and witnessed its limitless power, and it showed to me a great and
simple truth. That the nation that rules the aether rules the
world. That the wars of the future will be fought not by men on
horseback, not with lances or with cannon or with ships or even
with airships, but with weapons fashioned from the very stuff of
creation. Weapons that burst like stars over cities, that do not
merely destroy, but
transform
the land that they touch.
Weapons so terrible that they will kill war itself and allow the
empire that wields them to build a glorious peace the like of which
has not been seen since the days of Rome itself.

[The previous transcriber also insisted that when he
played this section of the cylinder backwards it instructed him to
build a mighty tower of stone and to stand atop it calling out to
the blind God-King who dwells in a seething furnace at the heart of
the universe. The truth of this assertion remains untested as it is
the opinion of the court that only the content of Mr. Hardinge’s
conversation with Captain England is pertinent to the current
case.]

[There is silence on the recording for some moments.
For accuracy, let the record show that it is indeed broken by a
faint and eldritch whispering.]

E: That sounds terrible.

H: It is terrible. But it is also true.

E: But surely such weapons would never be used by
civilised men.

H: Perhaps not. But in this world there are a great
many uncivilised men. Many of them in command of mighty nations or
empires. Once a thing is known to be possible, it is only a matter
of time before it is done. And those who hesitated, who said, “No,
that bridge is too far, that price is too high,” are left to stand,
and watch, and tremble.

E: Forgive me, but I am still uncertain what you feel
my part should be in all of this.

H: When I repeat Mr. Lovelace’s voyage, I will,
unlike that unfortunate gentleman, take only the best and the
strongest. Men who have proven themselves capable of facing the
sorts of extreme conditions that we will experience in the upper
skies. I will go not to study the aurora, but to use them, to make
for Her Majesty a new cabal of aethermancers, the first such group
in the world.

E: And I am to be stationed to this group?

H: I will not lie to you, Captain England. It will be
an arduous program of training, and a dangerous journey. You will
see things most believe live only in nightmares. But if you are
successful, you will have the opportunity to serve your country in
a manner which the men of earlier and less enlightened ages could
not even have imagined possible.

[There is silence on the record again.]

E: Thank you, Mr. Hardinge. It would be my honour to
serve.

[The sound of a chair scraping along the floor. The
sound of footsteps. A door opening and closing. The scratch of a
needle being removed from a cylinder.]

My dearest mother,

I am afraid that I can give you few details of my
present location or circumstances. I can tell you only that I have
been selected—personally mind you—to perform extremely important
work on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, and it is for that work
I am now in training.

I am presently at a facility in an undisclosed
location and in company with a very queer selection of fellows.
Indeed, I say “fellows,” but there are at least two ladies among
the company. I am not permitted to use proper names in this letter,
but Miss L—a large, matronly woman—was a nurse in her previous
occupation and served in Crimea, although I never crossed paths
with her. Miss K has an extremely shadowy background involving the
stews of Gaslight, and from the look of her, she is a stranger to
neither hardship nor violence.

I am already making friends among the gentlemen.
Several are military men, like me, although in truth we seem to be
drawn from all sorts of backgrounds. I have grown very close to a
man I shall refer to as T. An explorer and some-time employee of
the East India Company, T has led a life of adventure that quite
outstrips my own. A man of noble and rather swashbuckling bearing,
he has regaled me many a night with tales of his travels—of days
spent trekking through darkest Africa in search of forgotten gold,
of fierce battles with pirates in the South China Sea, of the great
wealth he has seen harvested and squandered.

Our training here has been quite unlike anything I
have experienced before. Where in the Lancers our focus was on
drills and parades, on learning to fight effectively and in concert
with one another, here we are made to test our pure physical and
mental endurance. We are woken at all hours of the night by H’s men
and taken to chambers where we might be exposed to extremes of
heat, or of cold, or both in quick succession. There is a deep
shaft somewhere beneath the facility along which a metal chamber is
propelled at alarming speed, such that one’s whole bodyweight seems
to vanish, and one hovers a moment like some angelic spirit, before
the cage is allowed to slow and then wound back to its point of
origin.

Sometimes we are fed medicines which cause vomiting,
or hallucination, or nightmares. Sometimes I believe I hear strange
whispers in the dark. T takes all of this in his stride. He tells
me that he has seen stranger things in Nepal. I find his presence
very comforting. Without his support, I fear I would lack the
strength to see this program through to its end. Three members of
the company have already departed, unable to take the strain of the
training.

I continue to remind myself that what I do, I do for
my country. If H is correct, we are entering a new and terrible
age, and we must all give to the utmost of our capacity if this
land we love above all else is not to be utterly annihilated by the
coming storm.

With the greatest of hope for the future,

Your loving son,

George

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There Will Be
Phlogiston
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