“To be honest with you, Mr. Sson,” said Brentford, a little vexed by his own naïveté and the wizard’s ability to read the large print of his mind, “I didn’t exactly volunteer for this mission. So there are many things I am prepared not to appreciate.”
“Very well, then. Still, there is something I have decided to spare you, and that is making you explain the pilot’s, er, situation to your colleagues.”
“Is there some kind of problem with the pilot?” Brentford inquired.
“Well, yes and no,” said Sson. “There certainly was a problem, you could say, but it has been solved and, I dare to think, very satisfactorily. Nevertheless, it has been brought to my attention that the solution may take some time to be fully appreciated. But you shall see for yourselves. If you will follow me …”
He led the Most Serene Seven across the library to a double door of solid oak and opened it with a broad gesture, only to reveal a sweet-scented darkness.
“Benedict?” whispered the old man. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” answered a coarse voice that seemed to spring from the pavilion of a rusty phonograph. “What is it you want, you old fool? How could anyone get any rest with that bloody Pyrophone of yours?”
“There is a group of persons here who have a mission for you,” answered Sson, who did not seem to mind the blatant lack of respect, and even, or so Brentford thought, sounded slightly apologetic.
“It’s jolly well time. I was starting to feel ants in my legs.”
“May I turn on the light?”
“Well, it’s their choice!” the voice said, and made a noise that was halfway between hoarse laughter and a very bad cough.
“Please,” Brentford said, bracing himself for the worst.
Sson clapped his hands and the wall sconces slowly began to bathe the room in a warm, subdued light. The Seven found themselves to be standing in an orthogon covered in a muted green wallpaper and set with stained-glass panels, all decorated with stylized flowers and intricate Celtic knotwork. Potted ferns slowly swayed to some invisible birdsong, and they even heard a brook or a fountain babbling somewhere. But what knocked the wind out of Brentford and drenched him in cold sweat was the object on the round oak table in the middle of the room.
It was a human head, bald and generously moustachioed, and seemingly sprouting from the top of a wooden box sitting on the table that was studded with buttons and dials.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” said the head, in a croaking voice. “Forgive me if I don’t shake your hand.”
“Oh my god!” exclaimed Lilian, who briefly regretted not being the kind of woman who fainted easily.
The Most Serene Seven now felt anything but serene, although they were not all struck in the same way. Gabriel was fascinated by any freakish atrocity; professional interest kept Lavis’s eyes riveted on the head; Blankbate had seen more horrors than he would care to remember and so looked on calmly enough; Thomas worked hard to seem undaunted and even amused, especially when the pale Lilian looked towards him; and Tuluk, after sprinting for the elevator, decided he would not like to pass for a coward in front of the whites and shuffled back to face the head, trying not to look straight at it.
Brentford, his heart in his mouth, faintly hoped this was some parlour trick, but his own eyes could see that what was below the table was wholly different from what a wedged mirror should have reflected.
“Good evening, sir,” he managed to mutter, trying to get a grip on his nerves and his stomach. He turned towards Sson.
“Mr. Orsini, it is my … er … pleasure to introduce you to Colonel Benedict Oberon Branwell, formerly Lord Lieutenant of the Lancaster Sound Lancers, and honourary … er … head of the Septentrional Geological and Geographical Society.”
“Colonel Branwell?” asked Brentford, almost as incredulous about the name as about its owner. The man was a legend in New Venice. A veteran of the Eskimo Wars, he had also practically mapped the whole of Ellesmere Island on his own, backed by a small detachment of lancers mounted on their famous white Bactrian camels. But that was in the very early days of New Venice, and by any calendar, forward or backwards, he should have not been living—well, if you could call that living.
“Yes, this deserves a few explanations,” conceded the wizard. “Strange as it may seem today, New Venice used to be a hotbed of advanced science and daring technology. Thanks to the Seven Sleepers, a lot of research that was frowned upon elsewhere was here funded and encouraged, with results that would have not been attained by, shall we say, more conservative methods. I suppose that you’ve heard about the amazing feats that Douglas Norton-Amantidine’s work on germinative plasma accomplished in the field of animal hybridization, for instance?”
“Amazing, indeed,” Brentford said approvingly, thinking how instrumental the Polar Kangaroo had been in his victory over the Council. But that, alas, was already history. The Polar Kangaroo had remained mute since then.
“Or you are perhaps familiar with Nixon-Knox’s work on biogalvanism, for instance.”
“More than I ever wished to be.” Brentford shivered as he thought of his meeting with the dreadful Phantom Patrol, which prowled the icefield to defend the North Pole from any intruders. He had thought he would never see anything worse, but the head now smirking in front of him was looking like a strong contender.
“Well, my friend Colonel Branwell happens to be the victim of one of Nixon-Knox’s first misdirected attempts. Those attempts sprang from the same need as Transpherence—namely, the concern of the Seven Sleepers to not only keep themselves alive, but to also preserve the intelligence and skills of their entourage. There were many paths to explore, but Nixon-Knox was especially fascinated by the works of a Frenchman who had allegedly connected the head of a guillotined man to the arteries of a large dog and had obtained a few signs of consciousness.”
“I have heard about that,” Lavis whispered to Gabriel, with a trace of disgust. “Laborde, in the late 1880s.” He shook his head in disbelief.
“It was very unfortunate that the Colonel, who as a man of duty had bequeathed his body to science, fell into the hands of Nixon-Knox at this very moment.”
“Aye. That fellow was seriously cobwebbed in the upper story,” mumbled the Colonel. “This was a rude awakening, I must say.”
“Nixon-Knox’s methods worked rather well, as you can see, but they were extremely crude and painful. He was already on the slippery path that would lead him to the conception of the Phantom Patrol, and then to the Haslam asylum. The Seven Sleepers would not hear of unplugging the Colonel, so they asked me if I could take care of him and alleviate his pain. Now, if you will allow me, Benedict …”
“I don’t see how I could stop you, you bloody quack,” said the Colonel in a gruff tone that was the vocal equivalent of a shrug.
Sson walked up to the Colonel and unlocked the panels of the wooden box, which was about as big as a phonograph and as complicated inside as the workings of a watch. Brentford could see things moving, turning, clicking, heaving as the wizard pointed to them, while Tuluk timidly peeped over his shoulder.
“The basis of it is a thermomagnetic gadolinium motor, which is triggered by the normal temperature of blood and has about the working cycle of the human heart. What you see here, these rubber tubes and brass pumps, are this gentleman’s vascular system, constantly irrigating the brain, thanks to these rotating disc oxygenators, with refreshed blood. The pumps also operate the bellows on each side, which, linked to these artificial rubber flaps, allow the Colonel to display the full extent of his biting wit. From time to time, a clock triggers the pistons of these little brass syringes, which are filled with nutrients. Of course, you’ll have to refill them daily, and, equally importantly, you must trim the Colonel’s moustache. The only little defect of the machine is that the Colonel, as his body has virtually no vital organs, is largely invulnerable to natural death as we understand it. Thank you for your cooperation, Benedict.”
“You
’re welcome, old chap,” said the Colonel coldly, as Sson latched the panels.
“Now, I must say the adventure has given the Colonel something of a short temper, especially when I beat him at chess, but, on the whole, we get along nicely.”
“Bloody hell! When did you last beat me at chess without cheating, you halfpenny wizard?”
Brentford was starting to relax a little, warming to their duet. He still tried not to look at the head, but he felt he was getting used to its presence. And this was, after all, Colonel Branwell, someone whose name had been a byword for reliability. You could have a worse associate than a man who could not die.
“For a man of action, he is not in the ideal situation, and it is important to keep him busy,” Sson went on. “As he is very knowledgeable about the Arctic, I thought that he could help me with mapping the area, all the more since I learned that he had undergone shamanic initiation during his trips. Indeed, he turned out to be a very gifted Od-receiver and an outstanding Psychomotive pilot. It seems that his unfortunate condition makes him impervious to the side effects that for some reason plagued many of the best pilots: spontaneous combustion, decomposition, dematerialization, and so on. Apparently having a ghost body is exactly what it takes to drive a Psychomotive—with a few prosthetic devices, that is.”
“Well, enough about me, I say!” the Colonel protested. “You’d better have a good reason for disturbing a helpless old man.”
This time Brentford could not avoid facing the head. He cleared his throat.
“Colonel, I must lead a diplomatic delegation to Paris, and I would be honoured if you agreed to take us there.”
“Paris!” croaked the Colonel. “Chase me, ladies! I’m in the cavalry! Les petits femmes, eh?”
“Oh, yes, Benedict,” said the wizard, “They’ll be dying to see you …”
And now, thought Brentford, just as the three musketeers became four, the Most Serene Seven were Eight. Well, Seven-Point-Something …
To be continued …
I
A Psychomotive Trip
On May 1, everything was ready for their departure. The Colonel was strapped to a wooden platform on the pilot’s seat, the Tarnhelm on his head, and rotating rods ending in sugar tong–like prongs connecting his box to the concentric steering wheels. Sson explained that the Psychomotive would find its way to Paris “just like an old horse trotting back to its stable.” Brentford knew it was but a figure of speech. Psychomotives, both because they were a secret and because they needed low temperatures to work properly, were not allowed to travel beyond the borders of the Northwasteland Territory. Thus, their party would have to disembark from the Psychomotive on Kolbeinsey Island, a secret maintenance station off the coast of Iceland, where Argonaut-class “submarine locomotives” would be waiting to take them on the rest of their trip. This meant that however fast they went, and even if the Psychomotive spared them weeks of uncertain sailing, the Most Serene Seven were still a long way from France.
No stands, no pennants, no brass bands, no cheering or booing crowds awaited the Seven as they stepped upon the berth, burdened with their luggage, just a few smug bureaucrats from the Regency and a fistful of embarrassed Sector Senators. Everyone had agreed that the departure should remain a low-key affair: the new Regent-Doge didn’t want to it to turn into a rally for disgruntled Orsinites, any more than Brentford wanted to make a show of his being, after all, given a nice, swift kick in the rump. As Lilian cruelly reminded him, it looked uncannily like the Council of Seven’s own inglorious retreat, and he tried not to think of how that had ended as he went on with the perfunctory salutations. Gabriel, meanwhile, not even bothering to shake hands, felt both relieved and worried that his double darlings Reginald and Geraldine had not been allowed to attend.
Still, once inside the craft, they were happy to discover that it was both cosy and surprisingly spacious, with rows of comfortable armchairs facing each other along the tubular cabin and a little washroom at the back, which even boasted a bathtub. And while some were faintly nervous about the rumoured side effects of Psychomotion, the Voda had glided off its berth and was underway before they even realized it, leaving behind a fallen zodiac of city lights as it headed smoothly towards the frozen ocean and the ghastly auroras.
And what quickly dawned on them was that neither privacy nor sociability were to be major issues, that the New Venetian tarot deck would remain unpacked and their books forlornly closed—for, as soon as the Colonel had steered the Psychomotive onto its course, the particular vibration of the engines and the low-frequency sound they produced, just below the threshold of hearing (and of nausea) turned the darkened cabin into a kind of dream-incubator. By and by, conversations trailed off and were replaced by contagious yawns, limbs and eyelids grew heavy, and the passengers, after tucking their boneless bodies into plaid blankets, felt themselves powerless to resist the avalanche of images and voices that tumbled through their minds, faintly but persistently. At some point, Gabriel, fighting to shake off the drowsiness, half-opened his eyelids in the dim light. His head was buzzing, and he clearly felt his blood pressure blowing his brain up like a toy balloon, pushing on his eyeballs, as precisely as a finger. Silhouettes of the others appeared to him, bathed in a blue and red auroral halo, a ragged fringe of silent little flames. It also seemed to him that hazy pictures dimly flickered around their heads in ever-changing scenes, but perhaps they were his own hypnagogic illusions, he thought, as his eyelids fell again, heavy as theatre curtains. Bathing in that fluid medium, blending blurred memories with dim futures, they all remained for hours half-consciously out of time until …
… they sensed rather than felt the Psychomotive slow down and stop. A bell rang, calling Brentford back to his senses and then to the cockpit. He struggled to get up, his mind foggy with sleep. He had just had a dream in which he was high above a ravine on a bridge that stopped right in the middle of its arc. Ghosts were lined along the bridge, luminous as a swarm of floodlit moths, watching him silently as he passed: “Students from a school of Night Architecture,” his own voice informed him. When he reached the end of the bridge, Brentford closed his eyes and went on gliding over the abyss as a faint bell tolled in the distance. The images had barely faded and the thrill of falling remained intact as he entered the cabin, still wrapped in his tartan blanket.
“We have a problem, young man,” the Psycholonel announced.
“Aren’t we at the Kolbeinsey station?”
“Aye. We are. Except there is no maintenance station. And no submarine base.”
Brentford frowned, trying to dispel the fumes in his brain. All he could see through the front porthole was a ragged black skerry barely outlined in the ash-grey dawn, covered with something white that could be snow or eiderdown.
“What do you mean, there is no station?”
“Well, it seems rather clear to me,” the Colonel answered, trying to turn his eyes towards Brentford. “It’s gone. Unless it was never there. This islet has a rather long history of being somewhat diabolical, after all.”
Brentford closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
“Aye. Many times.”
The Colonel remained silent for a while and then said:
“Maybe it’s not there yet, if you prefer.”
“Meaning?” Brentford asked, slumping into the copilot’s chair.
“Hmm … you’re not going to like this, I’m afraid. It happens very rarely, and it’s never happened to me before, but Sson warned me that Psychomotives sometimes have a certain side effect that can make them, erm … travel in time.”
Brentford turned pale.
“What? What the pole are you talking about?”
“Black Auroras, or so Sson says. You know, those dark spots between the auroras. Every characteristic of the Northern Lights reversed. Including temporal ones.”
“When was the station created?”
“In the lat
e Twenties After Backwards.”
“So, you’re telling me we’ve jumped back in time twenty years?”
“Aye. At best.”
“Is there a way to know for sure?”
The Colonel sounded calm, but Brentford noticed he was biting his moustache. “We could land on Grimsey, I’d say,” he eventually proposed. “It’s only forty-five miles south, but still in the Arctic Circle. New Venice laws forbid us to interact with the islanders, but I suppose we could make an exception, since technically these laws have not been passed yet. At least, the natives may give us the time of day.”
“And what about going back? Couldn’t we retrace our own steps, both in space and … time?”
“Well. For one thing, the Psychomotive needs to be serviced, which, without a station, is not going to be easy, eh? And even then, there is no guarantee we’d return to the right time.”
Brentford nodded, thinking hard. “What I am going to say to the others?” he asked.
“That’s your job, young man. Not mine,” replied the Psycholonel.
Brentford staggered back to the cabin, nervously scratching a one-night stubble he could have struck matches on. Alerted by the absence of motion and the growing cold, the rest of the Most Serene Seven were slowly waking up, some stretching, some yawning, some looking around as if trying to remember where they were. As if where were the problem, thought Brentford. He tried to imagine a way to break the news gently, and decided there was none. He cleared his throat.
“My dear friends, I have news for you.”
“Good morning. Are we at the station yet?” asked Lavis, who was already immaculately shaved and carefully combing his shiny fringe into place.
“In a sense, yes,” Brentford answered and took a deep breath. “But things did not turn out precisely as planned, apparently. It’s very possible that we have strayed a little out of our path. Time-wise, that is.”
New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos Page 7
