The Return of the Discontinued Man

by Mark Hodder

  The Orpheus lurched as the Mark III steered it sharply to the left. Burton and the others staggered. “Oops! Sorry about that!” the babbage said. “The conditions are interfering with my radar, and I didn’t anticipate there being towers in the clouds.”

  “Towers?” Lawless asked. “At this altitude? This far out from the city? What do you—?” He fell silent as the rotorship emerged from the dense canopy into a forest of brightly illuminated obelisks.

  “My word!” Wells cried out. “London must cover the whole of the southeast!”

  They gazed out at what had once been Whitstable, a small and sleepy coastal town, now apparently a borough of the capital, having been engulfed by the ever-spreading metropolis.

  “I’m reducing speed,” Orpheus said. “Some of those towers are touching three and a half thousand feet. I have to steer us between them.”

  “Do it!” Lawless snapped.

  “I am,” the Mark III replied testily. “Didn’t I just say so?”

  “It’s incredible,” Raghavendra exclaimed. “I could never have imagined such a city. The size of it! The height!”

  The engines hummed as the rotorship weaved back and forth between the vertical edifices, moving through the mammoth metropolis, travelling in a westerly direction.

  “I can barely take it all in,” Lawless said. “Is it possible that people built such a marvel? It’s the eighth wonder of the world!”

  They saw the mouth of the Thames, but of the river itself there was no sign.

  “Gone!” Wells cried out.

  “Maybe not gone,” Burton said. “Perhaps just built over. Even in the nineteenth century many of the city’s waterways had been forced beneath the streets. The Tyburn, Fleet and Effra, for example, were all incorporated into Bazalgette’s sewer system.” He shivered, recalling bad experiences in those subterranean burrows.

  They marvelled at the columns, which loomed out of the falling curtain of snow, all spanned by walkways, making London resemble a great hive through which many more flying machines floated, glimmering like fireflies.

  “There’s something ablaze,” Lawless noted. He pointed. “Down there.”

  As the Orpheus altered course, swinging southward, Sadhvi drew their attention to three large lesser-lit areas, like linked hollows in the dazzling display.

  “Hyde Park, Green Park and Saint James Park,” Burton observed. “Still there and still the same shape after all these years.” He grunted. “Which, if I’m judging it correctly, means that fire is in, or close to, Grosvenor Square.”

  Recurrences. Patterns.

  “Descending,” the Mark III announced. “Battersea Airfield ahead. I should warn you that I’m having problems with my altitude sensors. There’s a peculiar echo.”

  “Clarify, please,” Lawless demanded.

  “A double reading. I’m not certain which of them is accurate.”

  “Everyone stay by the window,” Lawless ordered. “We’ll give visual assistance.”

  They saw other rotorships gliding past. In design, they differed little to their own vessel. If anything, they were slightly more primitive. However, as in 2130, there were also other flying craft—disks and needles and cones—that were obviously far more advanced.

  “Apparently the divide continues,” Wells said. “Progress for some, retrogression for others.”

  Burton felt a lightness as the Orpheus dropped, increased weight as it slowed and stopped.

  “Is the ground fifty feet below us or a thousand?” the Mark III asked.

  Lawless peered down and said, “Fifty.”

  The ship dropped, and they were all jogged slightly as it landed.

  “Elegantly done as usual, despite the confusion,” the babbage declared. “You may congratulate me.”

  “Consider your back patted,” Lawless replied.

  “Cannibal Club representatives are waiting outside.”

  “Thank you, Orpheus. Sir Richard, Herbert, Sadhvi, I wish you every success in your mission. Daniel, Maneesh and I will keep the ship ticking over, ready to respond in an instant should you require our assistance.”

  Burton said, “Thank you, Captain.”

  They clasped hands.

  Burton, Wells and Raghavendra left the bridge and were met by Gooch and Krishnamurthy at the hatch.

  “Ready?” Gooch asked.

  Burton jerked his head in affirmation.

  “A new Thomas Bendyshe,” Wells mused. “I wonder how identical he’ll be to the other?”

  Gooch took hold of one hatch lever while Krishnamurthy gripped the other. They pulled, the portal opened, and the ramp slid down. A flurry of scarlet snow billowed in. They stood back.

  Burton watched as two figures ascended toward him, an adult—male, to judge by the gait—and a child, both wrapped in ankle-length cloaks with wide cowls that kept their faces shielded from the downpour.

  The visitors stopped in front of him. The adult snapped, “Government inspection. Do not resist. Let us aboard.”

  “We’re a cargo ship,” Burton said. “Empty.”

  “Nonsense. You’re a vessel from the distant past and you’re carrying enemies of the state.”

  “From the past?” Burton replied. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You are chrononauts from the year 1860. And you, old son, are Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous explorer.”

  “Old son?”

  The figure gave a bark of laughter. He and his companion reached up and pulled back their hoods.

  “I’ve always been absolutely hopeless at playacting,” said Detective Inspector William Trounce.

  “What ho! What ho! What ho!” cheered Algernon Charles Swinburne.

  “Cloned!” Swinburne declared with an extravagant wave of his arms. “We were jolly well cloned!”

  Sadhvi stammered, “But—but are you the same?”

  Trounce tapped his head. “Humph! Memories and personalities intact. We recall everything. Is my bowler aboard? I still miss it.”

  Bemusedly, unable to stop staring, Burton nodded.

  Trounce reached up to smooth his moustache, even though it wasn’t there anymore. “By Jove, it’s good to see you after all this time.”

  “Death defied,” Wells whispered in awe.

  “To the lounge!” Swinburne exclaimed, stepping forward and giving a mighty jerk of his left elbow. “A toast to old friendships renewed. Nineteenth-century brandy, hurrah! Believe me, they don’t make it like they used to. By golly, I’ve missed it terribly. And all of you, too, of course. How the very devil are you?”

  Burton suddenly pounced forward, caught the poet under the arms, yanked him off his feet, and whirled him around. “Algy! Algy! Bismillah! Algy!” He dropped him and lunged at Trounce, embracing him in a bear hug. “William, you old goat!”

  “Steady on!” Trounce protested.

  Swinburne screeched with laughter. “Three hundred and forty-two years!” he crowed. “That’s how long it’s taken!”

  “To get here?” Sadhvi asked.

  “No! For Beastly Burton to go soft!”

  “Idiot!” Burton protested. “By Allah’s beard! Exactly the same idiot!”

  “At your service,” Swinburne said with a melodramatic curtsey. “I say! Did someone mention a toast?”

  “You did. And I wholeheartedly second the motion.”

  Grinning helplessly, the reunited chrononauts closed the hatch and reconvened in the ship’s lounge where, to Swinburne’s evident delight, a decanter of brandy was produced. Swallowing his measure, the poet smacked his lips, gave a sigh of pleasure, and said, “At last. There are chemicals in everything, these days. Ruins the taste.” He sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, kicked out the right, twitched his shoulders, raised his glass, and added, “I appear to be empty.”

  Gooch provided a refill.

  “Cloned,” Burton said. “Are you, then, your own son, Algy? Grandson?”

  “Neither. I’m me. The same person, the same memori
es, an exact copy of the body. The only difference is that I’ve lived a second childhood and have a brother I never had before.”

  “Brother?”

  “This old duffer,” Swinburne said, cocking a thumb at Trounce.

  Burton’s right eyebrow went up.

  Trounce said, “Back in 2130, the Cannibals indulged in a little body snatching. Just like the old days, hey? Resurrectionists! DNA from our corpses was put on ice. Thirty-eight years ago, mine was used to create yours truly. Thus you now find me exactly the age I was when you last saw me. My great-grandfather was the Thomas Bendyshe you met; my father his clone, also named Thomas. My mother is Marianne Monckton Milnes. Of course, they’re not strictly speaking my biological parents, but she bore me and they both raised me. In 2179, this scallywag was created—” He indicated Swinburne. “Fifteen years my junior. Same surrogate parents. The timing was carefully arranged so that he, too, would today be the age he was when you saw him last.”

  Burton pulled a cigar from his pocket, fumbled and dropped it into his lap, retrieved it, looked at it, then blinked at Trounce and said, “You—you spent a childhood together?”

  “Yes!” Swinburne said. “You should have seen how skinny he was. And stubborn. An absolute mule.”

  “As you can see,” Trounce said. “Carrots is every bit as loony as his previous incarnation.”

  Burton smiled at the nickname, which he’d heard used before in reference to his redheaded friend, though never by Trounce.

  “I was somewhat past my childhood when he was born,” the ex-detective went on, “but, yes, we were raised together, and for a specific purpose.”

  “It being our arrival?” Krishnamurthy ventured.

  “Exactly. Algy and I are now the leaders of the Cannibal Club.”

  Sadhvi said, “What of Mick Farren, William. Was he also—um— reborn?”

  Trounce sighed. “I’m afraid not. There was nothing left of him. I heard what he did. Brave chap! Funny, back in 1968, he scared me silly with that wild hair of his, but I came to like him more and more. A bad loss.”

  “And Thomas Bendyshe?” Burton asked.

  An expression of uneasiness passed across Trounce’s and Swinburne’s faces.

  The poet said, “Offshoots of the family still oversee our finances. As for the direct line, Father—”

  “A distraction was necessary,” Trounce put in.

  “Distraction?”

  “Spring Heeled Jack is in control of the Empire, there can be no doubt about it. You arrived at nine tonight, the fifteenth of February 2202, which as we know is a significant moment for him. For reasons that will become clear to you, we were concerned that he might be watching out for your arrival. Father gave him something else to think about.”

  “What?” Burton asked.

  “The destruction of the American Embassy. The Cannibals have bombed it.”

  The king’s agent again looked at his unlit cigar. He bit his lip and returned it to his pocket. “William, don’t tell me the club is resorting to violence.”

  “Humph! The embassy has been a fully automated affair for many years. There was no one in it. Even so, it’s a crucial hub in New Buckingham Palace’s surveillance network, and its destruction will have caused considerable disruption throughout the city.”

  Burton said, “I see.” He considered his old friend. Trounce looked the same, though clean-shaven and with slightly longer hair, but his manner was rather less gruff, and his diction a little different. The king’s agent found it disconcerting.

  Daniel Gooch poured Swinburne a third brandy and said, “I take it the Turing Fulcrum is still in operation?”

  “It is,” Trounce confirmed. “There’s been no real progress for well over a century. Everyone is watched. Everything is recorded. Creativity is suppressed. Fortunately, we Cannibals have Lorena Brabrooke.”

  “We met her ancestor in 2022,” Burton said.

  “The same. Cloned. A bloomin’ prodigy. Her ability to evade detection and construct false identities borders on the artistic. Your nanomechs were automatically updated the moment you appeared over Bendyshe Bay. By now, the Turing Fulcrum has already registered you as non-threats. If we exercise due caution, we can leave the ship and proceed with the mission.”

  “To locate and destroy the damn thing,” Burton said.

  “Quite so. There’s no question that Spring Heeled Jack has infiltrated it, exists within it, and through it has taken complete control of the Empire, yet for all Lorena’s ability to interfere with what the Fulcrum does, she’s never been able to identify exactly where it is. It, on the other hand, has on a number of occasions got dangerously close to locating her, which is why we’ve until now hesitated to mount an all-out assault against it. Tonight will be different. She’ll employ her talents to the full to confuse it while we set out to finally run Spring Heeled Jack to ground.”

  “By what means are we to do that?”

  The detective opened his mouth to continue, but before he could utter a further word, Swinburne leaped up, punched the air, and shouted, “We’re going to kidnap Queen Victoria! Hurrah!”

  Sir Richard Francis Burton, Algernon Swinburne, Sadhvi Raghavendra and Herbert Wells were sitting in a medium-sized flier, a tubular craft with four flat disk-shaped wings. William Trounce was at the controls. They were in the air two miles west of Battersea Airfield on the other side of the now subterranean River Thames.

  “Look down,” Swinburne said. He pointed out of the window. “Cheyne Walk. That’s where I lived in 1860.”

  “I don’t recognise it at all,” Burton said.

  The poet explained that London now existed on two distinct levels, thus Orpheus’s confusion. Walkways and platforms had melded together, been layered with soil, and planted with well-lit lawns and prettily landscaped gardens—all currently being coated with red snow. They separated slender towers of such height that the upper reaches of the city disappeared into the cloud cover and soared so far beyond it they came close to scraping the stratosphere. The overall effect was one of cleanliness and spaciousness, a luxurious environment unimaginable in Burton’s age.

  Despite the thousands of towers, the upper level appeared to be sparsely populated. The king’s agent had never seen London so quiet. By comparison to what he was used to—and, especially, to what he’d witnessed during the journey to this time period—very few people were strolling around below, even taking into account the weather. Those he saw were wearing the same cloaks and voluminous hoods in which Trounce and Swinburne, and now he and his fellow chrononauts, were attired.

  “You’re looking upon the city of the Uppers,” Swinburne said. “The elite. The privileged. Below it, there exists the second city, the overcrowded domain of the Lowlies.”

  “The working classes, I presume,” Wells said.

  “Yes, Bertie. They exist in dire poverty and are so terribly deformed by genetic manipulations that they barely qualify as human. The London Underground is a place of horror, and I’m afraid we have to go down there.”

  “Why?” Burton asked. He could feel perspiration starting to bead his forehead.

  Swinburne pointed to the northeast, where, at a high altitude, the edge of a platform—a third level—could be made out, its lights shining well above the upper city.

  “That’s the New Buckingham Palace complex; what used to be Hyde Park, Green Park and Saint James Park. It’s inhabited by Queen Victoria and by government ministers and their staff and is exceedingly well guarded. However, water is pumped up to it from the River Tyburn, which flows beneath the lower lever. There are access conduits running parallel to the pipes that lead up from the depths to the heights.”

  Burton groaned. “Please don’t say it.”

  “I know, Richard. You hate enclosed spaces and you have bad memories of the Tyburn tunnel—but there’s no option. You have to go down there again.”

  The flier veered northward, skirting around the western edge of the parks.

  Trounce sa
id, “In 2138, when the new palace was still being built, Lorena’s grandmother—the daughter of the Lorena Brabrooke you met in 2022—was able to access the architectural blueprints. We know from them that the conduits are connected by a lift to the upper pump room, which opens onto the palace roof where the palace greenhouses are located. They will be our point of entry.”

  “I’m still confused,” Sadhvi said. “Queen Victoria?”

  “Humph! I suppose it makes a crooked kind of sense that Oxford would re-create the monarch who lies at the heart of his madness,” Trounce answered.

  “Is she a clone, too?”

  “I very much doubt it. DNA doesn’t survive forever, and the original Victoria died three hundred and sixty-two years ago. Nor are there any descendants of the old monarchy who could convincingly claim the throne. No. I don’t know who she is or where she comes from, but, for certain, she is Spring Heeled Jack’s puppet, a figurehead enforced upon us to give a human face to his inhuman dictatorship.”

  “So she has direct communication with him?” Burton asked. “She receives her instructions from the Turing Fulcrum?”

  “I don’t see how she can perform her role otherwise.”

  “But kidnapping?” The king’s agent shook his head. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “Nor me. If there was any other way—” Trounce fell silent.

  He steered the flier between towers, and Swinburne marked off districts as they passed over them. “Earl’s Court. Kensington. Notting Hill.” The vessel veered to the east. “Bayswater. Edgware Road.”

  Smoothly, they descended and landed in a long and narrow lamp-lit public garden. As they disembarked, Wells shivered and said, “This snow is extraordinary.”

  “Blame my brother,” Trounce muttered. He raised his hood and gave a grunt of satisfaction as the others did likewise. “Even when we’re below, it’ll be best if we keep our faces covered, especially you, Richard.”

  “Why me in particular?” the king’s agent asked.