by Mark Hodder
“Not at all,” Trounce countered. “September, isn’t it?”
“No, not these. I was thinking about a poppy in the garden of my home in Trieste. It caught my eye this evening. I mean, last night. Um. That is to say, in 1890. It was the same bright shade as these blooms and shouldn’t have been growing at that time of year.”
“Tempus flores,” Raghavendra said. “Time flowers. They tend to follow wherever we go.”
“Extraordinary!” Swinburne exclaimed.
“More so than you think. It was you who named them, Algernon, and they have a greater connection to you than you could possibly imagine.”
“Miss Revenger, you underestimate me. As a matter of fact, just a little while ago I was gripped by the fancy that I had somehow been transmogrified into vegetation almost identical to this. Can you explain that peculiar coincidence or shall you spout more of your ‘time has tendencies’ hoo-ha?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, more hoo-ha. And it’s Raghavendra, as you well know.”
Swinburne stamped his foot in exasperation, inadvertently splashing mud over Trounce’s trouser leg. “Now look here,” he began, then stopped in his tracks and gaped.
They had emerged into a clearing. The ground was a thick carpet of heaped scarlet flowers, but their colour was dulled by dark shadow, for floating twelve feet above them there was a massive contraption with lines so unfamiliar and exotic—its design so utterly alien—that Burton, Swinburne, and Trounce could barely take it in. They saw a dirigible with pointed ends, baroquely moulded struts and panels, a multiplicity of graceful pylons with spinning wings at their tops, ornately framed portholes and curving glass at the front and rear, spindled projections the function of which couldn’t be guessed at, and gleaming pipes from which wisps of white steam emerged.
Spelled out upon the side of the craft—it was indisputably a vessel of some sort—in lettering that reminded Burton of the elaborate design values currently fashionable in France—fashionable in 1890 not ’64, he had to remind himself—was the word ORPHEUS.
“My hat!” Swinburne whispered. “The size of it! How does it stay up?”
Trounce cleared his throat. “You surely don’t expect us to—to—to board that—um—”
“She’s perfectly safe, Detective Inspector, I assure you. Ah, there’s Daniel.”
A man had stepped out of a door in the side of the machine and was descending a ramp. He reached the ground and Raghavendra led them toward him, her cloak billowing and flapping in the downdraught caused by the craft’s wings. The fellow was a little shorter than average height, slightly plump, hatless, with sandy hair and a kindly face. His chest was crisscrossed by a leather harness that secured two mechanical arms against his sides, supplementing his own. Their motion was smooth and quite natural. Indeed, it was an artificial hand that the man extended to Burton as he drew near.
“Sir Richard! How marvellous to see you back in the flesh, so to speak.”
Burton, rather awkwardly shaking what felt like a metal gauntlet, vaguely recognised the individual and, before an introduction could be made, said, “It’s, um, Goode, isn’t it?”
“Gooch. Daniel Gooch. Yes, of course, I forgot you wouldn’t know me from Adam.”
“What do you mean by ‘back in the flesh,’ Mr. Gooch?”
“Algernon, William,” Raghavendra interrupted, “Daniel is our ship’s engineer.”
“Engineer!” Trounce exclaimed. “Ah! Yes! I thought I recognised the name. I think I once read about you in a newspaper. You’re the—er—whatsit—the cable-across-the-Atlantic thing. That man, aren’t you?”
Gooch scratched his head with metal fingers. “Am I? Yes, probably. I wouldn’t be at all surprised. It sounds like the sort of project I’d undertake.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“Multiple histories. Numerous Gooches. Gets confusing. Shall we go aboard? The others will be delighted to have you back.”
They followed him onto the ramp.
Swinburne said, “According to Miss Revenger, you have a supply of brandy.”
“Good old Algy!” Gooch chuckled. “Oops! Pardon me if I seem a little overfamiliar. You see, we’ve been a long time away, and it’s been a slow voyage back, and it hasn’t been quite the same without you. I must confess, I always found the other one a little less—I don’t know—he didn’t have your—”
“Daniel,” Raghavendra interjected. “Our guests aren’t yet aware of the full story.”
“Of course. Of course. My apologies.”
“Let’s say hello to the captain first,” Raghavendra said. “Then we’ll go to the lounge.”
They entered the ship, turned to the left, and passed through a door into a semi-circular chamber. Large windows dominated its curved walls. There were control consoles and panels of switches, levers rising from the floor, wheels and flashing lights. A tall, uniformed man of military bearing, with a finely clipped beard of snowy white and cold, grey eyes, gave an almost imperceptible start of surprise as he saw Burton.
“Oh,” he said. “Remarkable! Sir Richard, Algernon, William, welcome aboard.”
Gooch introduced him. “This is Nathaniel Lawless.”
Burton shook the man’s proffered hand. “The expedition commander?”
“No, Sir Richard, just captain of the Orpheus. Our leader is on the observation deck.”
A deep, disembodied voice said, “Are you playing some sort of game, peculiar creatures?”
It was as if the room itself had spoken.
Lawless grimaced and pointed a finger upward.
The three reborn looked up and saw a brass sphere fitted into the middle of a concave ceiling.
“The ship’s Mark Three babbage,” Gooch said. “Its synthetic brain.”
“And the only clear-thinking one present,” the metal globe added. “Our voyage appears to have befuddled you all. Why are you acting like strangers? Why did you order us sideways when we should have gone back? I have no objection to flying this ship for you, but I do wish you’d have the common decency to keep me informed as to what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”
“And a thorn in my side,” Lawless added. “It was originally designed to replace a full crew and to make the calculations necessary for the various stages of our voyage through time. When we were in the twenty-third century, the engineers of that age tampered with it. They said they were—to use their terminology—‘upgrading’ it, making it better and more efficient. All they appear to have done is installed into it a thoroughly irritating interest in human affairs and a propensity to refer to us as ‘peculiar creatures.’”
“An accurate description, don’t you think?” the Mark III said. “You’re such whimsical little things.”
“Little?” Lawless responded. “You are smaller than any of us.”
“I was referring to your intellect. I have severe reservations concerning it. I have no option but to obey your orders, but I consider it perfectly reasonable to ask for them to be adequately explained. If I knew what you were up to, I’d be better able to assess your capacity for rational thought.”
“Assessing us is not a part of your duties,” Lawless said.
“I’m not permitted a hobby?”
“Is it alive?” Swinburne asked.
“Oh, how I wish it was. Then I could kill it. No, the intelligence is artificial.”
The sphere said, “There! A perfect demonstration of muddled thinking. How can intelligence be artificial? Would it not be more accurate to say that mine is generated by a constructed mechanism rather than by a little bundle of sticks and juice, and it is there that the artifice, as you judge it, is located?”
Lawless clapped a hand to his forehead. “Now we peculiar creatures are bundles of sticks and juice! It gets worse by the blessed minute.” He sighed forlornly. “I can’t wait to get home and have the damned thing adjusted.” He supplemented this statement by dragging a meaningful finger across his thr
oat.
“Ungrateful wretch!” the babbage complained. “After all I’ve done for you.”
Raghavendra, with a twinkle in her eye, said, “I think we should leave you two alone, Captain. You apparently require more time to work out your differences.”
“Oh, Lord help me!” Lawless groaned.
“You see?” the Mark III commented. “He calls upon a deity. Superstitious! Lacking logic! Ridiculous! Can we please get this voyage over and done with? I require a little peace and quiet that I might work out how to best cure you of your mad illusions.”
Chuckling, the young woman led Gooch and the three newcomers off the ship’s bridge and along a corridor.
“A talking machine?” Trounce asked. “Trickery, surely?”
“No, just very advanced science, William,” Raghavendra answered.
“But it has an attitude.”
“It surely does. But the things it says are generated only by a very complex sequence of algorithms.”
“And what are they?”
“From the Latin, Algoritmi,” Burton put in. “The name given to Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a Persian mathematician.”
Trounce frowned. “An Arabian was speaking to us through a ball in the ceiling?”
“He’s been dead for centuries.”
“But,” Raghavendra said, “the mathematical principles he created are at the heart of the device, as is something called the Oxford Equation, which allows it to guide us through time. Here we are.”
She opened a door and they passed through into a well-appointed room that, portholes aside, looked as if it more properly belonged in a country house than in a flying machine. A handsome young Indian greeted them. “Hello there, good fellows! If you don’t remember, I’m Maneesh Krishnamurthy.”
Handshakes were exchanged.
A parakeet on a perch screeched, “Sheep fumblers! Giggling bum-slap swappers!”
“And you’ve already met Pox,” Raghavendra observed. “Eugenically bred, in a different history, to carry messages. If he knows you, he can find you, unless you’re shut indoors or out of his flight range. Very useful.”
Krishnamurthy added, “And very rude. A flaw in the eugenic design.” He moved over to a cabinet and got to work with glasses and a decanter. “Our illustrious leader has been in a deep self-induced trance for a considerable period but should be conscious enough by now to communicate with you. Have a thimbleful first, to steady your nerves.”
“Good chap!” Swinburne enthused.
Trounce slumped into a seat and fanned himself with his hat. “It’s too much. I was shot dead. Shot dead in the street. And now all this. I think, if you don’t mind, I shall go to sleep. Don’t bother rousing me. For all I know, I’d awaken to find myself attending my own funeral, by Jove!”
Krishnamurthy handed him a glass, well filled with spirit. “Here you are. Get that into you. It will make you feel much better.” He offered another to Swinburne.
“Hurrah!” the poet cheered. “I shall soon climb aboard the sobriety wagon, and so must savour this while I may.”
Burton noticed that Raghavendra, Gooch, and Krishnamurthy were all watching Swinburne and Trounce with expressions of unmistakable fondness. He, too, had received glances that suggested he was well known to them and well regarded.
It amazed him to discover that he returned the affection. Where the emotion had come from, how or why it had arisen, these questions he couldn’t answer, but he knew for certain that these people were his colleagues and his friends. Trounce, whom he’d met just this afternoon, he trusted implicitly and liked tremendously. For Gooch and Krishnamurthy—Lawless, too—he had complete respect and admiration. As for Raghavendra, she appeared to generate an additional degree of fondness, a depth of friendship that had comforted him considerably after the death of his fiancée—
Fiancée? What the hell am I thinking? I’m married! And Isabel is alive!
He tried to conjure into his mind an image of his wife’s face. Instead, he saw her heat-blurred figure standing by a bonfire. Despondency descended upon him. He didn’t understand it at all, and the heavy emotion didn’t lighten when Raghavendra stepped over and placed a hand on his arm, again as if she knew exactly his inner turmoil.
“There is a certain degree of disorientation that accompanies a journey through time,” she said softly, “which is not made any easier by our dealing with many disparate histories. Be aware that, as with the foreign memories, much of what you feel belongs not to you but to other Burtons, who have had different experiences to your own.”
“My wife is waiting for me, Sadhvi,” he said—the informality came to him with such ease that he didn’t even notice it—“yet I feel as if she is no longer there, as if she is dead. Did my counterpart from your history suffer her loss? Is that where my feelings spring from?”
She responded with a slight nod of the head. “It is. We have observed the many different iterations of Isabel as we’ve travelled back from 2202. In some histories, such as my own, she is killed. In others, like this one, she marries you, lives vicariously through you, and, after your death, ruins her own reputation in a misguided attempt to preserve yours. In others still, you abandon her and she goes on to achieve great things. I have seen her, in Arabia and Africa, become a legendary warrior woman named Al-Manat. I’ve witnessed her as a secret agent for the crown, as a tireless campaigner for women’s suffrage, as a successful author, and as an explorer whose achievements surpassed even your own. Undoubtedly, by leaving her you cause great pain, but the distress provides her with the impetus to break free from the constraints of society and become, in her own right, an extremely accomplished and celebrated individual.”
“Nevertheless,” Burton murmured after a moment of contemplation. “How could I live with myself, with the guilt, if I don’t today return to her?”
“You have already grown old with her, dedicated your life to her.”
“And at its end, she betrayed me,” he whispered.
“And herself. She paid a terrible price. Now, you have the opportunity to spare her that unhappy ending. But you don’t need to decide yet. Wait until you know the full truth of what we’re doing.”
She turned and called to Swinburne and Trounce. “It’s time. Will you accompany me, please, gentlemen?”
The poet glanced at Burton, who offered a shrug and a nod. Trounce got to his feet with a sigh almost of despair. “As if I’m not giddy enough with it already, now there’s more to come.”
Raghavendra ushered them toward a door.
Daniel Gooch said, “See you later.”
Krishnamurthy added, “Don’t worry. Our leader is a bit strange, but he knows what’s what better than the rest of us all rolled into one.”
“Skudge puddles!” Pox squawked.
They followed the young woman into a passageway. It had no portholes but was warmly illuminated by bracket-mounted oil lamps. They walked past doors to either side. Though all were closed, Burton somehow knew they opened onto passenger cabins, and, as he passed a particular one, he was stricken by the sensation that his old colleague William Stroyan, who’d been killed in Africa forty-five years ago—
No. Now it is just nine years ago.
—was inside. He stumbled to a halt, dazedly raised a hand, knocked on the portal, and called, “Bill? I say! Stroyan?”
Raghavendra turned back, reached out, and gripped him by the wrist. “Don’t. He’s not in there. It’s merely an echo.”
Burton blinked and pulled his hand away. He put it to his head and winced. “What?”
“You’re responding to a circumstance that a different Sir Richard experienced.”
“Not a good one, by the feel of it.”
“No, not a good one. Bill Stroyan was murdered on this ship. He was my friend, too, and I miss him terribly.”
They moved on, and as they passed the various cabins, Burton thought about another man who’d gone to Africa with him—John Hanning Speke—and wondered whethe
r he’d shot himself dead at this juncture in all the other histories, too.
They came to double doors. Raghavendra turned. “Gentlemen, I shan’t enter the observation deck with you, but may I remind you that, not very long ago, you were each experiencing the end of your life. Thanks to the individual beyond these doors, you are restored to health and youth. That you might understand why, I urge you to do whatever you are instructed, without hesitation or reservation.”
She twisted a doorknob, pushed the portal open, and stepped back from it. Burton saw through the opening a large chamber with walls and ceiling made of glass and, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of it, a figure entirely enshrouded by a cloak and hood.
Burton, Swinburne, and Trounce entered the chamber.
Behind them, Raghavendra pulled the doors shut.
The scene, Burton thought, should have been rather more mystical. Candles, shadows, and the coiling smoke of incense would have been appropriate to it. Maybe a pentagram chalked onto the floor and some unfathomable hieroglyphs scrawled across the glass. But no. Broad daylight shone through the transparent ceiling, illuminating the figure that was remarkable only because it was hidden within the copious robes.
There were three small bottles on the floor. The seated form raised a sleeve-swathed arm and indicated them one after the other. A deep but whispery voice emerged from the hood. “Will you sit, please, gentlemen?”
Glancing at one another, they did so. Trounce emitted a groan as he crossed his legs then mumbled, “Sorry. Unnecessary. It slipped my mind that I’m capable.”
A rustling chuckle. “It feels good to be at your best again, yes, William?”
“Physically, I can’t deny it. A darn sight worse for the brain, though. Who are you?”
Burton peered at the figure, trying to pierce the shadow cast by the hood, but could see nothing.
“I shall explain everything,” came the response. “But first, you will oblige me by drinking from the bottles. The concoction will aid your comprehension.”
“Is it alcoholic?” Swinburne asked.
“No.”
“I’ll not be poisoned!” Trounce objected.
