by Mark Hodder
She was right. The thrusting jaw, hard mouth, sharp cheekbones, and deep-set eyes were unmistakably those of Sir Richard Francis Burton, though very aged. About seventy, Burton automatically estimated.
What the hell? That’s the face I see in the mirror! That’s the man I was in Trieste, when I died!
With a hiss of pistons, he took a step backward. He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come, his voice generator producing nothing but a discordant tone, almost a whine. Through mechanical eyes, the passenger, the old man reborn, watched incredulously as Raghavendra eased her arms beneath his unconscious double and lifted it until the naked figure was sitting up. The hairless head rolled forward and white fluid spilled from its mouth. There were no signs of consciousness.
“Look,” she said, indicating, with a jerk of her chin, the liver-spotted cranium.
Burton saw eleven small bumps circling the scalp like a crown.
“What are they?” he managed to clang.
“I have no idea. But—” She fell silent.
“But what?”
“This fellow looks like an older you, but it goes no further than that. He’s empty. I feel no presence.”
Daniel Gooch peered at the unconscious man’s face. “But not dead? Then who is he?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody, Sadhvi? He must be somebody.”
“There’s nothing. A complete absence of—of mind.”
“How can you know that?”
Krishnamurthy said, “She’s a Sister of Noble Benevolence, Daniel. You know what that means.”
“I’ve never really understood it.”
Over their heads, the flower purred:
“Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew:
You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you.”
Raghavendra said, “Oh!” as, one after the other, the bumps on the old man’s head split, their edges puckering open to reveal deep cavities.
In unison, Swinburne, Trounce, and Bendyshe said, “Half past nine. Happy birthday. A gift of diamonds.”
Burton looked at them. “Are you still with us?”
They didn’t respond.
“Diamonds? Where? What of them?”
No answer.
Gooch moved closer to the sagging form and, bending over Raghavendra’s shoulder, peered into the eleven holes. He pulled a box of lucifers from his waistcoat pocket, lit one, and held its flame close to the man’s head, illuminating the openings. “They have irregularly faceted sides,” he said. “Something occurs to me. You’ll consider me loopy.”
Nathaniel Lawless gave a wry laugh. “Daniel, we’re three and a half centuries in the future, standing beside a giant talking flower that just gave birth to a fully formed old man. Nothing you say can possibly compete with that for lunacy.”
Burton asked, “What are you thinking, Daniel?”
“A gift of diamonds.”
“You understand the significance?”
Gooch straightened, folded his mechanical arms across his chest, and ran the fingers of his natural right hand through his sandy blonde hair. “We’re up to our eyes in bloody diamonds—black ones that, at a certain time and in a certain place, were considered extremely rare. Thanks to Edward Oxford’s various exploits, those same stones now exist in the here and now many times over, having arrived in the Nimtz generators attached to the multiple iterations of his time travelling suit. Personally, I’d like to chuck all the bloody things into a pressure furnace. They give me a headache.”
“They give everyone a headache,” Raghavendra said. “Pressure furnace? What would that achieve?”
“It would reduce them to carbon dioxide. However, since we’ll never make it home without our ship’s Nimtz and the Mark Three babbage, both of which contain such diamonds, I’m loath to reduce our supply until we’re back where we belong. It’s a maxim of engineering that machines only ever require spare parts when there are none available.”
“Your point?” Burton asked.
“My point is that the gems in the machinery aren’t the only ones. There are also eleven in your head, Sir Richard. They used to hold Brunel’s consciousness. It was overwritten by Spring Heeled Jack’s which, in turn, was erased by yours.” With his left hand, Gooch indicated the unconscious man’s head. “Eleven diamonds and eleven faceted openings in this chap’s skull. What’s the betting they’re a perfect fit?”
“Are you suggesting that—that—” Burton began. His mechanical voice petered out.
“That we remove the stones from your body’s probability calculator and fit them into the cranium of this new Sir Richard? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.” Gooch rubbed his chin. “I think the jungle just gave you the opportunity to be human again.”
“Human? Born from a plant?”
“Near enough human, anyway. More so than the contraption you currently occupy, that’s for certain.”
“But he’s old.”
“He’s flesh. You’ll regain your lost senses. Taste. Smell.”
The plant whispered, “Birth day.”
Gooch continued, “Providing we keep the diamonds in close proximity to each other while moving them, you’ll not be in any danger, and if there’s no result, we can easily return them.”
Raghavendra, still supporting the limp body, looked up at Burton. He was surprised to see that her eyes were brimming with tears. “Richard, we have to try!”
Burton turned his eyes from Raghavendra to Lawless, from Lawless to Krishnamurthy, from Krishnamurthy to Gooch, from Gooch to Swinburne, Trounce, and Bendyshe—these three standing together, frozen, poised as if waiting, their thought processes somehow suspended.
“How,” he asked, “does any of this relate to the rapture?”
“I don’t know,” Gooch responded. “But somehow it must. The contemporaneity of events is too extraordinary to ignore.”
“There’s something else to consider,” Raghavendra put in. “Without a mind, this body will die. And soon. Already, his breathing is becoming irregular.”
Burton took two paces forward and crouched, his body buzzing and whirring. He reached out and touched the man’s face with a brass forefinger. “You’re sure?”
“I can feel the imbalance growing within him.”
After a minute of consideration, Burton clanged, “I’m heartily sick of being entombed in this machine. It has made me immortal, but I feel like I’m buried alive. I can’t bear the torture of it any more. We’ll try. Even if it gives me only a year or two of life, I’d rather die old with my senses restored than live forever without them. Daniel, what do you need?”
Gooch unfolded his metal arms and extended a set of tools—screwdrivers, spanners, and pliers—from his wrists. “Nothing more than these. We can do it right away.”
“What will I feel?”
“Physically, nothing. Mentally, your capacity to think will diminish as I remove each stone from the probability calculator. Ultimately, you’ll black out, like being chloroformed but without the unpleasantness. Providing this fellow’s brain has the ability to process the electromagnetic fields stored within them, as I place each diamond into his skull, your consciousness will gradually be restored. If it doesn’t work, we’ll put you back where you are, and you’ll wake up none the worse for the experience.”
“Very well. Let’s get on with it. I beg of you, be careful, my friend. I’m quite literally placing my life in your hands.”
“You can count on me.”
Gooch moved around Raghavendra to Burton’s side and applied his tools to the brass man’s head.
Inside Burton’s mind, and undetected by him, the second Burton wanted to scream. Everything he’d thus far witnessed was so far out of the ordinary that he thought it could only have been induced by the Saltzmann’s Tincture, which was obviously a hallucinogenic drug of particular potency. Yet it all felt horrifically real—and oddly familiar, too. Now he was about to endure some manner of brain surgery, and there was noth
ing whatever he could do to prevent it.
Wait! I’m in here, too! Don’t put me back in that body! You don’t understand! It’s old! It aches! It’s going to die! Not again! Better this machine than that!
At the periphery of his vision, he saw Gooch’s hand place something that resembled a brass skullcap onto the grass. There came a slight grinding sound followed by a click.
What are you doing? Stop! Stop!
“I’m going to extract the first stone. Are you ready?” Gooch asked.
“Yes. Proceed,” Burton said.
No!
Half a minute, then, “It’s out. How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
“Good show. Now for the second.”
Suddenly, the sensation of floating.
“And now, Sir Richard?”
“I don’t think I can move.”
“As expected. Let’s do the next.”
Click. Click.
“Done.”
Stop! I don’t like it! I’m afraid!
“I just—clang!—zzzzzz!—went blind.”
“You’ve apparently lost some control over your vocal apparatus, too. In a minute, we won’t be able to communicate. I’ll keep talking, but you may not comprehend my words. Don’t be concerned.”
Perhaps I’ll survive this. I’m not this Burton. I’m a visitor. What happens to him doesn’t necessarily happen to medicinal. Medicinal? Why shell me that behind?
“Are you still able to think?”
“Basking yellow in my—zzzzzz!—fretwork,” Burton clanked.
Sadhvi Raghavendra’s voice: “What did he say?”
“Nothing intelligible. I’ve removed his ability to express himself through language.”
“Can he understand us?”
“If he can, it won’t be for much longer.”
Wooden highest of table momentum!
“Fifth one out,” Gooch said. “The babbage is processing just half of the electromagnetic field that comprises his mind now. Let’s do the next.”
Burton tried to summon an image of Isabel but couldn’t work out how her vision locations related to her head-shape space. His experience, he knew, needed to be otherwise.
Tonic. All of you chicken cold.
Colours suddenly slantwise wrong.
“Light master.” Gooch noise. “Earlier garnish is that much off.”
Intonation: “Friendly beneath in stacked embarrassments. Slowly?”
“Barleycorn.”
Level level level.
Shake. Hardly the Trounce.
Hello.
A desert. He stepped out of his tent.
The horizon.
CONCERNING IMPROBABILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES
Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
—Polybius
Burton opened his eyes and saw the Beetle and the glass walls of the Orpheus’s observation deck.
To his right, William Trounce groaned and muttered, “Drugged!”
To his left, Algernon Swinburne was moving his lips as if attempting to give form to words that wouldn’t come.
The Beetle’s eyes were dark and penetrating, with dilated black irises surrounded by a thin and glittering silver border. Burton felt as if they could perceive his every thought.
There were eleven lumps circling the hairless head.
Or heads.
One. Three. Five. One.
Strain as he might, Burton couldn’t properly distinguish the features. Only the eyes appeared fixed; every other element of the man’s countenance was multiplying, unifying, and sliding in and out of perception, as if both there and elsewhere. Unquestionably, though, this was the same person whose abnormal birth he’d just witnessed, except—
Very quietly, he said, “You are considerably younger.”
“Yes,” the Beetle responded. “My course through time is the reverse of normal and is very rapid.”
“You are me?”
“I can’t deny it. Though it’s not wholly accurate. The concept of a you and a me no longer properly applies. I might just as easily claim to be a Swinburne or sentient vegetation or an intelligent machine. I am—” He paused, then recited:
“All Faith is false, all Faith is true:
Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes
his little bit the whole to own.”
Burton said, “From my Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî. I wrote it in 1880.”
“And in 1859,” the Beetle rejoined, “after meeting Abdu El Yezdi in person.”
“There is no such person. I invented him.”
“You did, indeed. I might claim that you invented me, too.”
“Then you are confirming my suspicion that this is all an hallucination? That I am still in the throes of a heart attack in Trieste?”
“No, Sir Richard, this is real. At least, as much so as anything else in a universe whose very fabric is woven out of imagination, projection, interpretation, and belief; a universe that is nothing but a reflection of the sentience that discerns it.”
Trounce let loose a deep breath, leaned forward, and rapped his knuckles against the floor. “Enough of this gibberish! And will you please keep your confounded head still, man!”
“I’m sorry, William, I can’t alter your sensory limitations.”
“What the blazes do you mean by that? Are you insulting me?”
“I’m not. It is merely that the human mind is conditioned to apprehend only one possible path at once—one fragment, if you will. In me, all of them are made apparent. That is why I quoted Sir Richard’s poem. I am the mirror reconstructed.”
“Humph! Paths. Fragments. Mirrors. Mumbo jumbo. Is there a single occupant of this flying contraption who can resist the temptation to speak in riddles?”
The Beetle gave vent to a rustling laugh, his head—or heads—blurring as he tipped it—or them—back. “Hah! Good old Trounce! I apologise if my answers feel to you like obfuscation.”
“They don’t feel like anything at all, least of all answers.”
“Then I shall attempt to clarify. Let’s start with a question. Can you agree, William, that at its heart, the universe turns on a single question, it being that either things exist or they don’t?”
“I suppose.”
“If the answer is that things don’t exist, then we need go no further. Indeed, we cannot, for we aren’t here. Since we patently are, then the answer is that things do exist. From that circumstance, further questions unfold. Is a thing this or is it that? Is it likely to do this or likely to do that? I put it to you that the answers to those questions are wholly dependent upon there being a conscious observer, that if no one is present to witness a thing be or a thing happen, it cannot be or happen at all, but must remain suspended between possibilities.”
“Rhubarb!” Trounce put in impatiently. “The notion is preposterous.”
“Is it? Then you suggest that when a tree falls in a forest, it makes a noise even if there’s no one within hearing range?”
“Of course it bloody well does.”
“Yet sound is merely a certain range of vibrations in the air—among many other vibrations—that impact against the ear and are then interpreted by the brain. If no ear is within range, there can be no interpretation, thus there are vibrations but no sound.”
“Phonographic recording. A device left in the forest.”
“Merely a bridge—a surrogate ear designed to document and reproduce the disturbance in the air, and one that, ultimately, still requires a real ear attached to a conscious mind.”
Trounce scowled and squinted at the Beetle, as if, by sheer willpower, he could overcome the elusive quality of the man’s head. “What will you claim next? That the tree cannot be seen if there’s no one there to look at it? That it cannot be touched?”
“Quite so. All our senses operate within an extremely constrained sphere. What you see
is a narrow range amid a vast sea of light, and if you were able to perceive the tiniest components of a substance, you would find no difference between what is solid and what is not, between what is considered an object and what is considered space.” A slight shrug. Five heads. Three heads. One head. “It takes us back to the root question. Do things exist independently of us or do they not? Yes, they do, but only in the form of probability, neither this nor that until we decide.”
Trounce gave a snort of derision. He cocked a thumb at Burton. “So the source of the Nile wasn’t there until Sir Richard found it?”
Burton murmured, “I didn’t find it. Speke did.”
“It was believed to be there because we subjected the Nile to the most common of the narratives we habitually employ, it being that everything has its origin, its period of life, and its end; in the case of a river, its source, its course, and its mouth. The question was whether any European could reach the source, which for centuries was considered an impossibility. However, when something becomes more plausible to the observing mind than the opposite, then it is made actual. By the same token, we do not travel to the moon because such an achievement is inconceivable. One day, we’ll think otherwise, and merely by thinking it, we’ll sow the seeds that will ultimately make it not just possible but inevitable.”
Trounce lowered his face into his hands. “By Jove!” came his muffled voice. “Now we’re off to the blessed moon!”
Swinburne, who’d been sitting quietly with his brows drawn together, said, “Habitual narratives? You touch upon a matter I’ve oft considered. It strikes me that the human organism has a tendency to shoehorn all that’s perceived into a limited number of preconstructed sequences, the most common of them being—as you suggest—that of a beginning, a middle, and an end. These are then endowed with an unwarranted veracity, as if the framework holds greater truth than the elements that are hung upon it.”
“Bravo, Algy!” the Beetle replied. “You have pierced the heart of the matter, for sequences—narratives—when applied to a probability, either extinguish it or cause it to blossom into being. The notion of sequence is the notion of Time. Time is the factory of consciousness and reality is its product.”
