The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

  The man—if the street vendor could be so classified—suddenly expanded his throat and cheeks, puffing them out tremendously, like a balloon, so that he even more resembled a bullfrog, and opened the phenomenal mouth to blast, “Hear the word! Hear the word! Land for all! Homes for all! Food for all! Sky for all! The rapture is just minutes away!”

  “Ouch!” Swinburne muttered, putting his fingers into his ears. “What ho, Mr. Grub! What ho! Put a sock in it, will you, old fellow!”

  “Hallo, Mr. Swinburne,” the living trumpet responded. “Hallo, Mr. Trounce. Hallo, guv’nor.” His head split into so broad a smile that Burton marvelled the top half of it didn’t fall off.

  “You’ve not joined the exodus, then?” Trounce asked.

  “Me, sir? No, sir! This is me patch. There’s been a Grub a-standin’ ’ere since time immum—immim—imm—umm—”

  “Immemorial,” Swinburne offered.

  “Aye, that’s the word. Since time immaterial. I’ll not abandon it fer nuthink, even if it means I’ll be the last bloke livin’ in London.”

  “I doubt it’ll come to that,” Trounce said. “There’s plenty content to stay.”

  “True enough, sir, true enough. It’ll be a different sort a London, though, won’t it?”

  “It already is.”

  “Aye, but I ain’t referrin’ to the jungle. What I mean to say is, it’ll not be a city no more. Soon, there’ll be no such thing anywheres.”

  Burton chimed, “You can confirm it? Cities are decentralising?”

  Grub bent an arm upward and scratched the side of his jaw. “If’n I take yer meanin’ correctly, guv’nor, yes, that’s the word. People is leavin’ all the old cities an’ spreadin’ outward into smaller communities.” He gestured around at the vegetation. “Homes for all. Food for all. Anywhere. Least there will be once the jungle covers the globe.”

  “And governance?”

  “Takes care o’ itself, don’t it?”

  “Smaller settlements,” Swinburne mused. “Microcommunities. Easily maintained by their population. With no competition for resources, there’s little motive for crime or warfare. The jungle is bringing peace to the world.”

  “And ’appiness,” Grub said. “I ain’t never imagined it could be like this, sir.” He turned his face upward. The red foliage reflected in the outer edges of his little protuberant eyes and stars were mirrored in the pupils. “One more piece left to place in the jigsaw, if’n I might put it like that, an’ it’s a-comin’ this very evenin’.” To Burton, he said, “All o’ this is ’cos of you, guv’nor. Folks hold you as their champion.”

  Burton shook his head, his neck ratcheting. “No, I mustn’t be idolised. The people were, for too long, dominated by those who held themselves as better than the rest, and they, in turn, were presided over by the mind of a single man—and he a lunatic. You are free now. The world is yours. As for me—” He held out his six arms. “I have no place here. I’m not even human.”

  “You’re the most ’uman of us all,” Grub protested. “You sacrificed your life for us. Sort of. If’n yer know what I mean.”

  “Whether that’s true or not, I don’t belong here. I have to take my leave of you. I’ve come to say good-bye, Mr. Grub. Tonight, I shall witness the rapture, whatever it may be, and afterward, my friends and I will board the Orpheus and return to our own time.”

  Grub scratched his head. “I’ve asked you before an’ I’ll ask you again, ’cos I can’t get me noggin’ around such wonders—you’re really from the past?”

  “We are, and it’s high time we went back to it.”

  “I’ll spread the word, then. The people will want to see you off.”

  “I’d prefer it otherwise. I can’t bear partings and I have a distaste for ceremony. Will you delay any pronouncement until the morning?”

  “If that’s what you ask, that’s what I’ll do, of course.”

  “Thank you. And thank you, too, for the part you played in the revolution. It was you who mobilised the people and you who prevented them from running wild after we defeated those who ruled over you.”

  Grub bobbed his flat head and gave a loose salute. “The workers ain’t inclined to riot, sir. They are too busy gettin’ on with gettin’ on. Always ’ave been.” He turned to Swinburne and Trounce. “But you two gents—surely you’ll stay?”

  “We shall,” Swinburne answered. “Though we possess the memories of the men from whom we were cloned—that is to say, the Swinburne and Trounce from 1860—we are native to this time and will, we’re certain, be subject to the rapture.”

  “You feel it in you? The expectation? It’s powerful, hey? I feel an imm—immin—”

  “Yes, we do, and ‘imminence’ is the word you’re looking for. In fact, we should get back to our friends, before it’s too late. We’ll seek you out again tomorrow, old chap.”

  “Right you are, sir.” The vendor again addressed Burton. “Good-bye. Thank you. From every single one of us.”

  After handshakes were exchanged, Burton, Swinburne, and Trounce turned and retraced their steps, following Gloucester Place down to a barely recognisable Portman Square—it being little more than a clearing in the jungle, though one of unnaturally angular dimensions. In its centre, the Orpheus was floating a little above the rust-coloured and mushroom-dotted lichen that covered the ground.

  They boarded it and joined Captain Lawless on the bridge.

  Swinburne said to him, “The others will be at the Monument Flower by now. Let’s go straight there.”

  Lawless looked up at the ceiling. “You heard the man, Orpheus.”

  “I’m busy,” the Mark III said. “Why don’t you walk? It’s hardly any distance.”

  “Busy doing what?”

  “Contemplating.”

  Lawless looked at Burton with an expression of exasperation. “I’m sure the bloody thing is getting worse every day. Babbage created it as a calculating machine. This era’s scientists have made of it a thinking machine. And a thoroughly irritating one, at that.”

  “What are you contemplating, Orpheus?” Swinburne asked.

  “My own existence.”

  “Oof!” Lawless exclaimed. “That is easily explained. You were built. Built to operate this ship. At my command. And I command you to fly it to Green Park. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly. Though none of that explains your existence.”

  “How about leaving me to worry about that?”

  “Hurry,” Trounce put in. “The rapture is almost here. I feel fit to burst.”

  Swinburne put a hand to his brother’s elbow. “Don’t worry, Pouncer. Nothing will happen without us.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I just do.”

  The Orpheus eased smoothly into the air. Burton looked out through the window and watched the jungle sinking past. It thinned, dropped out of sight, and he was suddenly looking at a half-moon, visible through a forest of black columns that rose from a twinkling blanket, the speckled lights of which appeared as a counterpoint to the stars above. The glowing jungle swathed the land for as far as the eye could see, from horizon to horizon.

  The rotorship steered a course southeastward then circled a colossal obelisk—a knotted trunk half a mile in circumference and so inconceivably tall that its upper reaches were lost from view.

  New Buckingham Palace.

  Orpheus sank down just to the north of it, coming to rest on the eastern slope of Green Park.

  The small expanse of land, uncluttered by jungle, consisted of a lawn dotted only by a few isolated bushes, the berries of which offered a paltry illumination, and thickets of trees around its fringe, which also offered some measure of light. As Burton, Swinburne, Trounce, and Lawless disembarked and started down the shallow slope, the explorer was able to make out Queen Victoria’s monument silhouetted ahead of them. It had been erected, he recalled, in 1842 on the spot where, two years before, a bullet had killed the monarch. Designed by a little-know
n artist named Henry Corbould, and, according to its creator, based on a vivid dream, it took the form of a huge flower of no identifiable species, though it somewhat resembled a cross between a rose and a tulip.

  Controversial when erected, the memorial had weathered the storm of criticism and, by the time of Burton’s death in 1890, was an accepted and celebrated element of London’s landscape. The monument was twenty feet in height but appeared considerably larger to the explorer as he now approached it. Were he able to frown in puzzlement, he would have done so, for a trick of the light made it look as if the monument was slowly swaying, its spiny petals gently curling and uncurling.

  He gasped—a sound that resembled the susurration of a brushed cymbal.

  The movement was no illusion.

  A new set of facts bubbled to the front of his mind. In this version of history, Spring Heeled Jack had caused the memorial to be demolished, perhaps in an attempt to forget the crime that had contributed to his madness. Thirteen months ago, Swinburne, moved by a whim, had buried the ashes of Burton—the Burton whose consciousness now occupied this brass body—on the same spot. From those ashes, the plant had grown and flowered, its bloom remarkably similar in form to the old monument.

  The four men joined a group of people standing at its base. One of them stepped forward to greet them.

  “The blossom is getting more active by the second. I was starting to worry you might not arrive back in time. You said your farewells to Mr. Grub?”

  “We did, Tom,” Burton said. The Burton of Trieste was amazed to see, in the other’s features, echoes of his old friend Thomas Bendyshe. The Burton of brass knew him to be a cloned descendent of that man.

  Looking past him, the explorer spotted the rest of the crew of the Orpheus: Daniel Gooch, Sadhvi Raghavendra, and Maneesh Krishnamurthy.

  Trounce looked up at the massive flower. “We haven’t missed anything, then?”

  Bendyshe replied. “A lot of leaf curling and some odd pops and whistles. We all feel certain it’ll be the source of the rapture.”

  Burton said, “You base that assumption on what?”

  “The excitement we’re experiencing. The expectation. It’s definitely emanating from this thing.”

  Krishnamurthy moved closer to them and added, “Those of us from the Orpheus feel it, but it’s affecting those native to this time with much greater intensity.”

  Burton extended his arms slightly. “I sense nothing, but I trust your and the others’ instincts. So a vegetable is going to change humanity?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Maneesh?”

  “The humble potato. It could be argued that its arrival in Europe sparked the agricultural revolution, which in turn lead to the industrial revolution and the rise of empires.”

  “Hmm. I little while ago, Algy proposed that the Irish potato blight altered the course of history.”

  Krishnamurthy grinned. “Well, there you are. As hard as it may be to swallow—I refer to the fact, not to the spud—it’s from such innocuous items that the human world takes its form. We can’t discount the possible influence of—” He stopped and gaped as heavy bunches of berries hanging from the plant suddenly erupted with light.

  “Hello!” Bendyshe exclaimed. “Your arrival appears to have added to its agitation, Sir Richard!”

  Swinburne whispered, “It’s been waiting for us. Now the show can begin.”

  Above their heads, a rattle sounded, and with a creaking of its woody stalk, the flower turned and bent, giving the impression that it was looking down at them. Bladder-like organs at the back of its outermost petals expanded like balloons, then contracted, and as they did so, air was blown through the central bud, the petals of which moved like lips. A dreamy whistle emerged and was shaped into words.

  “One, who is not, we see; but one, whom we see not, is;

  Surely this is not that; but that is assuredly this.”

  “What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under;

  If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder.”

  “Bloody hell!” Daniel Gooch cried out, throwing up his supplementary arms. “Will wonders never cease? Now we have to deal with a talking flower!”

  Standing at his side, Nathaniel Lawless said, “All aboard the Orpheus. This is beyond the bounds. Too much for us. Let’s go home.”

  “Not too much for me,” Swinburne murmured.

  “Or me,” Trounce said.

  “Or me,” Bendyshe agreed.

  Sadhvi Raghavendra turned to Lawless. “I understand your reluctance to stay, Captain. I have the distinct impression that this world won’t allow those of us from the past to remain in it for very much longer. However, I also sense that we are, for the moment, perfectly safe. We can witness, but we must then depart as planned.”

  The captain jerked his chin in acknowledgement and gazed with an air of bemused disapproval at the flower.

  “Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt:

  We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without?”

  Burton wished he could control his host’s body. He wanted to say, You wrote those words, Algy. It was a poem entitled “A Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell”—your mockery of Tennyson’s “The Higher Pantheism.” When was it? 1870 or thereabouts? Is the plant really a eugenically created version of you? What lunacy am I witnessing?

  He couldn’t give voice to the thought. Instead, he looked down as Gooch stepped to his side.

  “Why now, I wonder?” the engineer muttered.

  “Why now?” Burton clanged.

  “If there’s one thing we’ve learned during our recent adventures, it’s that the timing of events is meaningful. So this rapture thing—why this evening? What’s the date?”

  “The nineteenth of March,” Burton responded. “It has no significance I can think of, unless you count the fact that it’s my birthday.”

  “It is? Do you know your hour of birth?”

  “Half past nine in the evening.”

  “Interesting. It’s close on that now.”

  “I hardly think it has any bearing on the matter.” Burton paused before adding, “I just turned forty. Yet, taking the current year into consideration, I’m also three hundred and eighty-two years old.”

  He watched as the flower’s bladders again inflated and contracted.

  “Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are not clover:

  Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over.”

  With a squeal of bending wood, the flower suddenly dropped down until its petals were just inches from Burton’s face.

  “Happy birthday, Sir Richards,” it wheezed. “Birth and birth.”

  “Gad!” Gooch blurted, stumbling backward in surprise.

  “Sir Richards?” Burton echoed.

  “Thee and thee.”

  It knows I’m in here!

  The blossom chanted:

  “Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight:

  Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate.”

  “You can converse?” Burton asked. “You understand me?”

  “Better than you know.”

  “Gad!” Gooch cried out again.

  “Incredible!” Krishnamurthy muttered.

  “Then answer me this,” Burton said. “Are you Algernon Swinburne?”

  To his right, the human Swinburne had become uncharacteristically silent and motionless.

  “Was. Was. Was.” The flower emitted a sound that resembled a chuckle. “What! What! What!” It leaned closer to Burton until its petals were almost touching the side of his brass face. “Many happy returns. You do want to return, I presume?”

  Return to life? Return to the past? Return to corporeal form?

  “Yes.”

  “Then accept my gift.”

  With much rustling and a slight screech, the plant straightened until its blossom was again
directed at the sky. Burton heard it quietly recite,

  “More is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole:

  Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul?

  “One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two:

  Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.”

  It fell silent.

  Burton looked at Swinburne, Trounce, and Bendyshe. They were standing glassy-eyed, as if in a trance.

  Sadhvi Raghavendra gestured. “There!”

  “What is it?” Krishnamurthy asked, his tone subdued and hoarse.

  A part of the base of the central stalk—as wide and knurled as the trunk of an ancient oak—had started to distend. It squeaked, groaned, and grew paler, the bark stretching thin, a large swelling bulging outward. There came a sharp crack and a split appeared, bisecting the protrusion vertically. It widened and, with a soft squelch, a sap-covered sac was extruded from it. The membrane flopped heavily onto the plant’s exposed upper roots and rolled to the ground where, veined and translucent, it undulated as something shifted inside it.

  “Is that—?” Lawless croaked.

  Uttering a small cry, Raghavendra hurried forward and crouched over the quivering membrane. “Maneesh! Help me!”

  Krishnamurthy hesitated, then joined her, squatting down. “It’s not possible.”

  “Help me get him out,” she said.

  Burton chimed, “Him?”

  He watched as his friends tore at the skin and heard it rip like linen.

  Krishnamurthy gasped and toppled backward, sitting heavily on the ground. Mucilaginous white liquid spilled from the sac and splashed around him, soaking his trousers.

  “Breathing!” Raghavendra announced.

  She turned her face to Burton. Gazing past her, he saw, naked and hairless, an old man lying on his side, his legs curled up, knees against his chest, his arms folded to either side of them. His skin appeared to be a peculiar wormy-blue colour, though in the glow of the plant’s fruits and berries, it was difficult to be certain.

  “Who?”

  Raghavendra reached down and, placing a hand to either side of the newborn’s face, gently turned his head so that his features were visible to Burton. “He looks like you.”