CHAPTER 10
Sangfroid checked out the Prometheus’s reading room from over the rim of her snifter with a certain amount of satisfaction. This was definitely a bar. Okay, so there weren’t any bar girls or even a dice table, but not all bars promoted prostitution, and they had passed a huge billiard room on the way in, so some gaming was allowed.
The journey over had been fascinating. Hubert had hailed a transport vehicle pulled by horses! A hansom cab, he’d called it. Sangfroid hadn’t seen horses since a childhood visit to a zoological garden. Though a few of the very privileged patricians kept them as pets.
She’d stuck her head out the window for the entire ride. Hubert had complained about the chill, but she’d loved sucking in the damp night air with its smoky smells and the sharp sourness that came after a rainfall in the city. Hubert told her there was a river nearby, the Thames, and she thought she could detect the oily stench of it. Gas lights gave the streets a sickly glow. The houses were tall and cramped together, and the thoroughfares were cobbled and narrow as if they had run out of room to build. The city shadows were long, and anyone who emerged from them walked quickly, bundled up in warm clothing with their heads covered against the cold. They seemed anxious to reach their destinations. Everything was exciting and intriguing, and for once, Sangfroid felt part of the foreign cityscape. Usually, she was stomping all over it as part of a war machine. This time she was like a tourist, a kinder version of invader.
They alighted at the Prometheus club. A low, unadorned building as square and solid as the men who frequented it. It smelled of leather and tobacco and the mustiness of too much thought and too little action. Sangfroid approved. A centurion could truly relax here, and a recuperating one could rally her energies before the next campaign. Just like at the Parabellum. The thought brought her full circle to her current problem. Millicent’s story had confounded her and she needed to consider the implications. The choice being she was either mad, dead, or had indeed time travelled. And each possibility needed a stiff drink to accompany any in-depth contemplation. Sangfroid found a certain relief in the austere furnishings of the Prometheus club after the feminine clutter of the house. There was something refreshingly solid and right about the wingback chairs Hubert had claimed for them.
The room was eerily quiet with only the occasional cough and the rustle of newspapers. Sangfroid found it quaint that the news of the day was circulated on sheets of printed paper, and that there were places like this to just sit and read them. It was a nicer way to assimilate information than the constant stream of senate propaganda that poured through her comm-piece night and day. She took an appreciative sip from her glass. The brandy was exceptional. She’d noticed that the wine she had served Millicent earlier was also excellent. Hubert’s timeline obviously didn’t stoop to the bland but potent synthetic alcohols that hers did.
“What are your intentions regarding my sister?”
Sangfroid’s brandy shot down her nose. “What?” she asked, pinching her stinging nostrils as she regarded Hubert through watery eyes.
“After all, Millicent has died for you on countless occasions. That says something about a gal, you know.” Hubert’s cheeks were bright pink, and his nose glowed rosily. Sangfroid doubted the man’s capacity for drink and wondered why he was forcing this bonhomie over a brandy.
“You mean Millicent’s dead, too?” She didn’t like that idea. Not at all. It was okay for her to be dead. After all, she was a soldier. It was in the small print. But she didn’t want anything or anybody to hurt Millicent. Millicent was her secret love, and she’d be damned if she was harmed in anyway.
“Not at the moment. But she has passed away on several occasions trying to rescue you on the Amoebas.” Hubert stretched out his short legs in front of the fireplace. Sangfroid wished she could do the same, but her borrowed pant legs only came halfway up her shins and had to be tucked into her boot tops. She felt pinched in by the scratchy, irritating fabrics of this world. One miscalculated stretch, scratch, or yawn, and they’d burst apart.
“What do you mean she’s passed away on several occasions? Hey, you know about the Amoebas?” she asked, then realized what a stupid question it was. Of course Hubert would know. Millicent would have told him everything.
“I have been on the Amoebas,” Hubert informed her. He looked excited as if he was itching to talk about it. “Wonderful vessel. I’d loved to have seen her in her hay day, and not when she was being torn apart.”
“What the hell? When were you on the Amoebas?”
“You don’t really believe Millicent would have settled back into her own timeline knowing she had contributed to your death? Helped you get torn apart? She could never have left a thing like that alone. Oh no. She went back to save you.” Hubert took another sip of brandy. It was loosening his tongue nicely. All this time butting heads with the sister when all she had to do was pour a drink down the brother’s throat.
“She did that for me?” Sangfroid was touched and immediately felt stupid for being so sappy.
“Often. She had trouble saving you from the squid, you see, so insisted on going back time and again until it worked. Though strangely enough, it was your own interference that made it finally turn out well, in that you didn’t die, you merely turned up here.” Hubert ordered a refill of their glasses from a passing waiter then continued, “But no. Millicent would not be swayed by any argument to the contrary. She had to go back, over and over again, to try and save you. And so, you see, I had to go back with her.”
Sangfroid sank back in her chair and closed her eyes. Oh, no, not another Aberly wandering through her timeline. It was a mockery of every scientific principle she was barely able to grasp.
“Tell me everything,” she said grimly, bracing herself for the worse.
“I was just about to, old boy,” Hubert said, cheerily. He took a healthy swig of brandy and cleared his throat. “Now, where shall I begin? Ah, I know exactly the place!” And then Hubert took up his story again—
“You can’t possibly destroy it!” Millicent howled at him.
“But…but you distinctly told me to.” Hubert was confused. They had just spent a harrowing hour as Millicent recounted the events of her time travel adventure. His initial self-congratulations at the success of his invention soon dissipated at his sister’s desolation. After she had finished, he sent her away to see to her toilette and immediately began to disassemble his evil creation. She had returned with a fresh gown, redressed hair, and like any woman, a complete change of mind.
“You said to get rid of it,” he said.
Millicent removed the spanner from his hand and caressed his cheek. Her eyes still overly bright from her earlier tears.
“You truly are the most wonderful of brothers,” she said. “And I can see clearly why you flounder as lesser colleagues surge to prominence as so-called men of science. They carry not a whit of your intelligence, while you carry the morality for a thousand of them.”
“I will not wantonly hurt another creature, Millicent.” Hubert’s heart beat fast and shallow inside his chest. “And no part of this invention is to remain in this house if it has endangered or frightened you in any way.” He felt wretched for what had happened to her. “I have been selfish and blinded by stupidity. I did not foresee that we could meet with such awful monstrosity and nihilism. If any of it should return here…why, I dare not even think of the consequences! It could mean the end of civilization, Millicent.”
“In that other world, it seemed as if our civilization had not begun. Or else been totally passed over. I saw no trace of it,” Millicent said. “There were undertones of the Roman Empire everywhere. I mean their uniforms were dripping with aquiline regalia. And they’re all polytheists!” She frowned and bit her lower lip. “Perhaps there are parallel timelines. And each history wends its own course like a stream, subject wholly to the landscape, or obstacles, of the world surrounding
it. Does that sound plausible?”
“Don’t tantalize me with your provocative presuppositions, Millicent. I built this devil apparatus stimulated by nothing but the abstractions of my own mind, of parallels and paradoxes, of the limitless potential of a space-time continuum. I thought I had a vision, but now I see it for a folly.”
“Really, Hubert, stop being so poetic,” Millicent said with stern disapproval. “You had a good idea, and it worked.”
“You will not sway me. I should have seen the man in the machine. I should have realized where this would lead. Wherever mankind goes, the Four Horsemen follow.” He lifted the spanner and turned to his machine, shoulders slumped. “It has to go.”
“No.” Millicent pulled at his arm. “We cannot dismantle this machine, at least not yet. I have been the force-majeure in the untimely death of a brave soldier. We have go back and undo what I have done. She died horribly because I was meddling with her timeline like some freak of nature. I may have done irreparable damage, Hubert. Damage that may ripple on forever through time.”
“Impossible.”
“I remember the lever sequence I used to begin my journey. We need to return at a time that overlaps with my primary visit.”
“Buy why? That will mean two of you running around. Won’t that be a little grotesque, not to mention overcrowded?”
“I need to be there to make sure Sangfroid leaves the hangar by climbing along the wall, otherwise she will try and make a run for the door and die.”
“If that is to be her fate, does it really matter whether you go back or not?”
“Do you want to see this ship’s laboratory, Hubert?”
“Yes,” he admitted somewhat shamefaced.
Millicent nodded. “If you promise you can bring us back, then I am determined we go to that exact point in time and make good. I swear that Decanus Sangfroid will not go into the annex with me, we will divert her somehow—”
“And you just couldn’t say no?” Sangfroid interrupted Hubert’s story. “You couldn’t just pull the damned thing to bits right there and then? Let me tell you something, I was going to die anyway. Millicent stopped me from making a death run across the hangar. That’s when I would have died if my number was up. It makes no difference that it happened later in the lab. She had nothing to do with it. I was doomed from the moment I pulled on my boots that morning.”
“So, you’re saying Millicent is no more than a bit player in your theatre piece of doom?” Hubert asked.
“Gods, you are poetic. I dunno. Maybe.” Sangfroid was uncertain. She felt a greater pull to Millicent than she was prepared to admit to her brother.
“Good luck with that,” Hubert said. “I think you’ll find she’s given herself top billing.”
“And you let her go back?” She was still astounded. Hubert seemed like such a sensible man. “Because she told you to.”
“What could I do?” Hubert argued. “You know Millicent. She can be very stubborn. Best of all, I knew I could preset the machine to return its occupants automatically. You see, I decided it was best that I went along with her. And needless to say, I was agog to see the laboratory as she described it. I had to go.” He signalled the waiter for more brandy. “Look, let me cut to the quick of it. I persuaded Millicent to let me tweak the navigation slightly, she…we…did not need to go through the hell in the hangar; we only had to arrive at the laboratory ahead of you. It went like this—”
Hubert hung on to Millicent’s arm, still giddy from the slide of his own world distorting into this one. And what a desolate place it was. They were in a long bleak corridor built from an unidentifiable metal plate. The walls were an ugly nondescript grey colour, and the floor a very unbecoming olive green, neither colour added to his stomach’s sense of well-being.
“Are you all right, Hubert?” Millicent asked, anxiously checking out the corridor fore and aft. “We must be quick.”
“Where are we?” Hubert asked, becoming aware of a tremendous hammering and screaming from farther along. At first he thought the frightening noise was part of the travelling process, a phantasmal outpouring of his mind’s distress. Now he realized it was entirely local.
“I’m sure this is the corridor I was running along when you transported me back to my own time.” Millicent glanced around. “Yes. The exit from the annex is this way.”
“Are you sure? We seem to be moving directly towards that awful noise?”
“That’s the hangar battle. Sangfroid and the other me will be beating a retreat to the laboratory soon. We have to hurry.”
“But towards it?”
“Come along, Hubert.” Millicent tugged him by the sleeve. “Here it is.” She stopped before a huge, recessed metal door. “Something is troubling me.”
“Just something?” Hubert squeaked, and sweat coursed down his brow. He mopped at it with a large handkerchief.
“What happens if one of us dies and we return to our own time as a corpse?”
“I have no idea,” Hubert looked at her blankly. “And I hope to never find out.”
Millicent took a deep breath and slapped a green button by the door. It began to slide open, and she stepped back, tense.
“Beware,” she said. “If we’ve timed this wrong a huge severed tentacle will emerge at any moment.”
“What do we do if it does?” Hubert whispered.
“We answer the corpse question.”
The door opened fully, and nothing terrible emerged. They tentatively entered the dimly lit room.
“We’re not here yet,” Millicent whispered with relief. “The main laboratory is empty.” No sooner had she spoken that a soft pink glow began to suffuse the room. “Oh, Hubert.” She moved quickly to the central workbench. “The little squid is still here.”
Hubert could barely move. His greedy gaze devoured the wonders around him. The benches, the shelves, and even the floor were awash with the most beautiful instrumentation he had ever seen or dared to imagine. This was paradise, nirvana, and fairyland all rolled into one. To his left, his right, above, and below…everywhere he looked he saw the most magnificent scientific paraphernalia that far outstripped the meagre gruel served at his own table of knowledge.
“Hubert. Will you please wake up and come over here.” Even Millicent’s sharp call could not snap him out of his delirium. He went to her in a haze of transcendent bliss. He could not stop his gaze from roving now that the annex glowed brighter. The walls shone with a celestial pearly pink that reminded him of a glorious new dawn, and then he saw what Millicent was calling him towards. His joyful heart faltered, and he was cast from Eden into the cold world of scientific endeavour and all its demons.
A pink blob was stretched out heinously tight in a shallow tank filled with some sort of sterile electrolyte. He recognized it as a vivisection station, and his blood pressure plummeted. The inhumanity of the situation physically pained him even though the specimen pegged out before him was alien and looked nothing like any mollusc he had ever seen before.
“It’s big,” he murmured.
“Pah!” Millicent spat out, startling him. “Come closer. Tell me what you see.”
“Well. It’s obviously a member of the cephalopod family.” He began his prognosis then declared in astonishment, “It’s sentient!”
New thoughts, both radical and instinctual, exploded in his brain. If he closed his eyes and stoppered his ears, he was sure there would still be fireworks sizzling his synapses. His mind popped and fizzed as illumination flooded its darkest, dullest corners with enlightenment. “And I do believe it’s a female, though for the life of me I can’t say why? I don’t understand how I should know?”
“I think she has a sort of psychological communication ability.” Millicent was pleased with his perception.
“You mean she is communicating with us.”
“I suspect this whole
room illuminated when we entered and alerted her thought processes. It happened before when I went to turn off the current running through her tank. The front of the wiring panel fell away at my touch whereas all the others had to be shot off with laser pistols.” She was very excited about this.
“You’re right,” Hubert exclaimed with increasing awareness. His head felt as if a dozen closed doors had suddenly slammed open, and the rush of fresh air through his brain nearly blew him off his feet. “And she was waiting for us.”
“She’s communicating with you directly?”
“Yes. And her name is Weena.” Hubert was beside himself.
“Weena? How delightful. She communicates with you much better than with me.” Millicent’s eyes were alive with wonder. “Do you think she needs us to have a certain level of intelligence for satisfying discourse? She spoke to Sangfroid, and she didn’t even notice.”
“All these thoughts are flooding my head. If I look at something,” Hubert went over to an instrument on a nearby shelf and picked it up, “I can understand what it is and how it works. Not necessarily how to use it, but the basic premise behind it is in my mind.” He was awestruck. “And Weena is telling me all this.” He held up the apparatus in his hand to demonstrate. “A multimeter for measuring electrical impulses!” he announced delightedly—
“Like the one in your pocket?” Sangfroid tapped Hubert’s coat pocket. “Don’t tell me you’ve been pilfering from my timeline. How’s that going to work out?”
Hubert looked shamefaced. “Please don’t tell Millicent,” he said. “I confess I have been back many more times without her knowledge.”
“Oh, boy.”
“You see, the laboratory became like a drug to me, I had to go back and explore thoroughly. I found I could manipulate the time machine so that I had more and more freedom to browse before you entered the laboratory. And there was another reason.” He could not meet Sangfroid’s eyes. “And I am a terrible man for it. Please understand I love Sophia, but in a different way now from when I first proposed. At that time Papa was dying, and he dearly wanted to see his children settled. Millicent point-blank refused to wed. She wouldn’t even entertain the thought. Can’t say I blame her. It’s different for a woman surrendering her wealth and independence to a future husband. And with her bluestocking tendencies and Chartist politics, I can’t see that Millicent would ever have found a mate to compliment her interests.” He gave Sangfroid a beady look that made her prickle.
The Tea Machine Page 9
