The Return of the Discontinued Man

by Mark Hodder

  “I can see why you’ve delayed your translating of A Thousand Nights and a Night,” Swinburne said. “You must find its tales positively pedestrian.” He produced a flask from inside his coat and unscrewed its top.

  Burton grunted his agreement. “Oxford leaped back to the year 1840 to observe his ancestor’s failed attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria. He intervened, inadvertently caused the assassination to succeed, and accidentally killed his forebear. His suit, badly damaged, then threw him farther back through time to 1837.”

  Swinburne took a swig, smacked his lips, and passed the flask to Burton. “He changed history and wiped himself out of the future. What an idiot.”

  “Indeed,” Burton agreed. He took a drink and returned the vessel to the poet, wincing as brandy burned the cuts where the insides of his cheeks had been mashed against his teeth. He sucked at his cigar. His ribs creaked. They were badly bruised. Through billowing smoke, he went on, “Oxford had caused time to bifurcate. There was now the original history and, running parallel to it, a new one in which he was trapped. His prolonged exposure to the past caused him to rapidly lose his mind. He embarked upon a desperate hunt for the woman his ancestor would have married.”

  “Meaning to impregnate her in order to reestablish the chain of descent that would eventually lead to his own birth,” Swinburne said. He giggled and hiccupped. “Only a lunatic could conceive of such a scheme! Please forgive the rotten pun.”

  Burton waited for the landau to pass a loudly clanking pantechnicon. When he could again be heard, he said, “He was repeatedly spotted by the public, who regarded him as something of a bogeyman and named him Spring Heeled Jack. Meanwhile, the man who gave him shelter relayed to Isambard Kingdom Brunel some of Oxford’s hints about the machineries of 2202. Employing the materials and knowledge of our age, the great engineer acted upon this information, and, over the course of two decades, the British Empire quickly filled with his diverse and ever more eccentric inventions.”

  Swinburne gestured at the interior of the landau. “Behold! A horseless carriage! The great age of steam!”

  The vehicle’s motor produced a horrible grinding noise followed by a thunderous belch. They heard their driver swearing at it.

  “Yes, but our history is not the one we’re discussing. For us, now, it is 1860. Where Oxford was trapped, the next significant event takes place a year hence, when a version of me—who, to avoid confusion, we shall refer to by the name he’ll later adopt, Abdu El Yezdi—will learn the truth about Oxford. He’ll also discover that a cabal of scientists intends to seize the time suit, repair it, and use it to create multiple histories in which to experiment with evolution and eugenic manipulation. To prevent this, and hoping to forestall any further interference with the flow of time, he’ll break Oxford’s neck and will take possession of the suit.”

  “What a brute!” Swinburne muttered.

  “He is—or was—or will be—me.”

  “As I said.”

  “Oaf.”

  “I hope they have some brandy at the power station. My supply is dwindling fast. Are we nearly there?”

  Burton peered out of the window. “We’re on Piccadilly. Just passing Green Park.”

  “How very germane. That’s where Victoria was gunned down.”

  “It’s snowing again.”

  “Red?”

  “White.” Burton considered his cigar and calculated how many more puffs he could drag out of it. It was, he concluded, good for another four or five. He moved his wounded arm and winced, tried and failed to position it in a manner that hurt less. The pain of his wounds was intensifying. It caused him to lose track of his thoughts. He furrowed his brow, gritted his teeth, and tried to battle through the discomfort.

  “1862,” Swinburne prompted.

  “Ah yes, a year after Oxford’s death. El Yezdi will discover that parts of the suit contain tiny shards taken from one of the three mythical “Eyes of Nāga,” rare black diamonds, each a fragment of a fallen aerolite. Remarkably, they’re able to store and maintain subtle electrical fields, such as those generated by the human brain. My doppelgänger, setting out to find all three stones, will learn that in every existing variation of history, a devastating world war is coming. During that conflict, the diamonds will be used to psychically enhance three great dictators: Britain’s Aleister Crowley, Prussia’s Friedrich Nietzsche, and Russia’s Grigori Rasputin. One of those men, Rasputin, will send his mind back through time from the year 1914 in order to alter the course of the war.”

  “My head hurts,” Swinburne complained.

  “My everything hurts,” Burton responded. His hand drifted to a pocket. He felt the outline of the Saltzmann’s bottle.

  Don’t. You gave your word.

  Swinburne said, “Your counterpart will defeat the Russian and cause him to die in 1914, two years earlier than he would otherwise have done.”

  “Resulting in yet another split in history. El Yezdi will become aware that such bifurcations can’t be controlled and are occurring in profusion.”

  A flurry of snow blew in through the jammed window. Swinburne lifted his top hat from his knees, upended it, and tapped it with his knuckles. Snowflakes rained onto his boots. “Really,” he muttered. “We might just as well sit on the roof.”

  “So,” Burton said, “having gained through his battle with Rasputin two of the Eyes of Nāga, El Yezdi will organise an expedition to recover the third, which is located in the Mountains of the Moon close to the source of the Nile. He’ll be challenged by a rival group financed by Prussia, and the two safaris will fight their way across Africa, unaware that they’re both being manipulated by the Nāga, a prehistoric race of intelligent reptiles whose consciousness has been trapped in the stones for millennia.”

  “As if all the rest wasn’t sufficiently fantastic,” Swinburne said, “now we have lizard men. Shall we get drunk and forget all this nonsense, Richard? We could live out our remaining days in a pleasant haze, oblivious to all absurdities bar our own.”

  Burton dropped his cigar stub and crushed it beneath his heel. “Pass that flask.”

  “Hurrah! He toasts the motion!”

  The king’s agent imbibed and returned the near-empty container. “I might be tempted, but I fear the absurd has a tendency to seek us out wherever we might be, as the events of this evening have demonstrated.”

  The landau lurched to a halt, there came a knock on the roof, a hatch lifted, and the driver looked down at them. “’Scuse us, gents. Won’t be two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Got to shovel more coal into the furnace. Just a tick. Half a minute. Quick as a flash, like. I shan’t keep you. It won’t take long.”

  The hatch slammed shut.

  “He certainly took his time telling us how fast he’s going to be,” Swinburne observed. “Where were we? Ah, yes, Abdu El Yezdi is going to realise that the Nāga arranged his experiences from the start. That’s when his trials will really begin.”

  “Quite so. The reptiles will tattoo black diamond dust into his scalp, it being required for a technique they’ll then employ to send him forward through time to 1914, where for five years he’ll endure the terrible global conflict and witness its devastating effect on Africa. Traumatised, with his memory in pieces, he’ll evade the British psychic Aleister Crowley and make his way back to the Mountains of the Moon, there to return to 1863. The Nāga will inform him that the experience was a parting gift, intended to give him a better understanding of the nature of time. They’ll then be liberated from the diamond, which El Yezdi will take back with him to England.”

  “As gifts go, that one was lousy.”

  “I can’t disagree. It certainly influences his subsequent determination to restore history to its original single stream. Emulating the Nāga’s method, and taking the diamonds and damaged time suit with him, he’ll travel back to Green Park in 1840.”

  “Hooray! We can return to the past tense. It feels so much more normal.”

  “I quite agree.”
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  The carriage rocked as the driver climbed back up to his seat. The engine gave a roar, settled into a more subdued chugging, and the vehicle jerked back into motion. Burton hissed and clutched at his arm.

  “All right?” Swinburne murmured.

  “Yes. So my counterpart waited for history to repeat itself, which it did: Edward Oxford arrived in 1840, having jumped from 2202. My other self immediately killed him and took possession of his undamaged suit. Thus Oxford couldn’t be thrown to 1837, history wouldn’t be altered, and everything would be back as it should be.”

  “Except it wasn’t. Somehow, he failed to prevent Victoria’s assassination.” Swinburne shook the now empty flask and heaved a forlorn sigh.

  “Correct. El Yezdi had created yet another strand of history, this one that you and I inhabit, and he was trapped in it, knowing that a younger version of himself, the nineteen-year-old me, was already here.”

  “Two Burtons,” Swinburne mused. “How perfectly dreadful.”

  The one at his side gave a wry smile. “I’m glad I was oblivious to the fact until last year.”

  The poet held up the empty brandy flask. “I wish I was a little more oblivious. All this is giving me a terrible thirst. I also feel obliged to remind you that our current conversation was begun with the intention of perhaps shedding light on what or who it was that wrecked Bartolini’s and beat you black and blue. We appear to be no closer to any insight.”

  “I want to outline events in their proper order that we may think clearly.”

  “Where hopping through time is concerned, I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a proper order. And do you really think clarity of thought is possible after going through a window headfirst? You’re ambitious, I’ll give you that. Well, carry on. You have my undivided attention.”

  “Now that the brandy is gone.”

  “Precisely. What happened next, oh Scheherazade?”

  “With the Eyes of Nāga and the two time suits—one damaged, one not—in his possession, Abdu El Yezdi—he now took that name—went into hiding, aided by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles Babbage, and over the next two decades influenced them, along with our key thinkers and politicians, to shape our world into one that, he hoped, would avoid the terrible war he’d witnessed.”

  “The scene: 1859. Enter Richard Francis Burton, stage left, El Yezdi’s younger self, native to the history he’d created. You.”

  “And, unfortunately, enter Aleister Crowley, who sent his spirit not only backward through time but also sideways, crossing from the future where El Yezdi had encountered him into this, our history. He hunted me and—and—”

  Killed the only woman I have ever loved.

  “And kidnapped scientists and surgeons,” Swinburne interjected, “forcing them to construct a body for his disembodied spirit to inhabit.”

  “I defeated him,” Burton said flatly.

  “You met Abdu El Yezdi.”

  “My other self succumbed to old age.”

  “His allies—Brunel, Babbage, and the Department of Guided Science—are now your allies, and his reports, in which all the aforementioned is explained, and which are filled with the wealth of his experience, are at your disposal.”

  Burton was silent for a moment. The stench of the River Thames wafted in through the window. They were close to their destination.

  Three steam spheres passed the landau, their drive bands humming.

  “What’s your opinion of them, Algy—of the reports, I mean? Specifically, the manner in which the material is presented.”

  Swinburne chuckled. “I think his propensity for inflicting them with penny dreadful titles proves conclusively that he was you. The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack. The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon. They sound like the tales that young valet of yours reads in his—what’s the name of the story paper little Bram’s so addicted to?”

  “The Baker Street Detective, featuring Mr. Macallister Fogg.”

  “Sheer hokum, and I’d say the same of the reports had I not met El Yezdi in person. I must say, though, for all their outlandishness, I’m just as fascinated by what he omitted from them than by what he included, especially where the third is concerned. Was he protecting himself, do you think?”

  Burton shook his head. “I’ve been in many positions where concealing information would have been the wisest course. The report I made, at Sir Charles Napier’s behest, into male brothels in Karachi ruined my military career and my reputation because it was, quite simply, too complete. That was in 1845, when I was twenty-four years old. El Yezdi had been with us for five years by then. We know from the first of his accounts that, in his native history, he’d presented the very same report when he was twenty-four and suffered the identical consequences, yet he made no move to prevent me from repeating the mistake. It appears that he and I, being one and the same, have shared an utter lack of caution where personal reputation is concerned.”

  “So maybe the omissions were to protect others.”

  “That’s my suspicion. Perhaps there are some matters his associates are simply better off not knowing.”

  “Myself among them.”

  “Most assuredly,” Burton agreed. “He never revealed the fate of the Swinburne who, in his own variant of time, accompanied him to Africa. Exactly what happened to you amid the Mountains of the Moon?”

  “And why didn’t I return from them?”

  With a jerk and a loud detonation from its engine, the landau came to a stop. The driver shouted, “Battersea Power Station, gents!” He saluted down to his passengers as they disembarked. Burton stepped out of the cabin stiffly and with a groan.

  Snow fell around them. The cabbie waved a hand at it. “At least it’s turned the right bloomin’ colour, hey? White, just as snow aught to bloomin’ well be!”

  “A shilling, I take it?” Swinburne asked.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The fare.”

  Burton pushed his friend aside and handed up the correct coinage and a little extra. “My companion is convinced that every cab ride, no matter the destination, costs a shilling,” he explained.

  “They do!” Swinburne protested. His left leg twitched, causing him to hop up and down.

  “Funny in the head, is he?” the man asked.

  “Extremely. He’s a poet.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “An unmitigated loony,” Burton clarified.

  “I say!” Swinburne screeched.

  The driver clicked his tongue sympathetically. “Got you into a scrap, did he? Caused a rumpus? You look proper done over, you do, if yer don’t mind me a-sayin’ so.”

  “He did, I am, and I don’t. Good evening.”

  “Night, sir.”

  The landau departed.

  Battersea Power Station stood tall before them, its four copper rods rising high, like chimneys, scraping the underside of the blanketing cloud. Both men knew the rods extended even farther below the edifice, penetrating deep into the Earth’s crust. Brunel had designed the station to render geothermal energy into electricity. It was one of his few failures, and generated only sufficient power to light itself.

  They started across the broad patch of wasteland that separated the station from Queenstown Road. Burton limped, pain stabbing through him with every step. Their feet sank into the snow, which was already lying a foot deep, startlingly pink beneath the illuminations of Brunel’s creation.

  “Red snow,” Swinburne muttered. “Spring Heeled Jack. Men from the future. Multiple Burtons. And he calls me a loony!”

  Off to their right, a gargantuan rotorship rose from the nearby Royal Navy Air Service Station. Light glowed from the many portholes along its sides, and its spinning wings sent a deep throbbing through the atmosphere. It powered into the sky on an expanding cone of starkly white steam until it was swallowed by the cloud. A lozenge of fuzzy luminescence marked its position as it slid southward.

  “The Sagittarius,” Bur
ton noted. “According to the Daily Bugle, it’s off to China today.”

  “To bomb the Qing Dynasty into submission at the behest of Lord Elgin,” Swinburne added. “That man is the consummate politician. He possesses not one jot of conscience. Can we return to the matter at hand? Edward Oxford? Did we encounter him tonight?”

  “The problem is that the apparition resembled Oxford’s time suit only in that it was mounted on stilts,” Burton responded. “It was a mechanism, not a man.”

  “So if not him, what?”

  “In design it appeared more advanced than Oxford’s invention. I wonder, then, whether its origins lie even farther into the future than 2202. Conversely, it said it served Queen Victoria, meaning it must have come from some point during her reign, between 1837 and 1840.”

  “Which makes no sense at all.”

  “As you say. And why was it hunting for me? And why didn’t it know what to do with me when it found me? And why did it—did it—wait. Stop.” Burton gasped, stumbled to a halt, and leaned heavily on his cane. “I just need a moment.”

  “Not far to go,” Swinburne said. “Then warmth, brandy, and a chair to sit in. Sadhvi shouldn’t take too long to get here, either. She’ll soon have you as right as rain.”

  “I share your—your faith in her abilities,” Burton mumbled. “Nevertheless—”

  He fished the bottle of Saltzmann’s Tincture from his pocket.

  “Please,” Swinburne pleaded. “You promised.”

  “I have to break my word, Algy. I’m sorry, but my legs are folding beneath me. I can barely function.”

  “Just hold on a little longer.”

  “I can’t.” Burton sucked in a juddering breath, uncorked the bottled, raised it to his lips, and downed the contents.

  “All of it?” Swinburne shrieked. “You’re only meant to take a teaspoonful!”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You’re out of your bloody mind!”

  Burton felt honey-like warmth oozing through arteries and spreading into capillaries. His aches immediately shifted to one side, as if vacating his wounds. He felt the odd sensation that countless possibilities stretched away from him into an infinitude of futures.