She steered them to the side of the town’s promenade and, as they ascended a slippery set of stone steps, said, “See you when you get back.”
Burton stood and examined with interest the people who were strolling along the seafront. Though many of the men were suited, the overall impression was of a major drop in the standards he was used to, both in terms of attire and manner. As for the women, there was a scandalous amount of flesh on display. Dresses and skirts, which never revealed even an ankle in his era, had diminished in size so radically that even naked thighs were unashamedly exposed for all to see.
“Hardly the Utopia I was hoping for,” Wells muttered. “It smacks more of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Indeed,” the king’s agent agreed.
Don’t be judgemental, he told himself. Don’t think of them as English. Be the ethnologist.
“There’s Mick,” von Lessing said, waving at man who was striding toward them.
“Lord help us,” Trounce muttered.
Mick Farren was all hair. It framed his face in a great bushy nimbus. The detective inspector couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Burton, whose travels had exposed him to an endless variety of strange sights, was able to look beyond the extravagant halo. He saw a slim youth of medium height, dressed in worn blue canvas trousers—perhaps the uniform of his generation—a black shirt, a short black jacket made from leather, and boots that reminded the king’s agent of those worn by Spain’s vaqueros. Farren’s long and, by the looks of it, oft-broken nose might have dominated the face of another man, but in him it was eclipsed by the eyes, which, as he came closer, were revealed to be direct, sullen and challenging.
“Sir Richard,” he said, shaking Burton’s hand.
“Mr. Farren.”
Few people could meet and hold Burton’s gaze. Farren did. The king’s agent felt himself being assessed.
He passed the test.
In a surprisingly soft and cultured tone—Burton was half expecting a cockney accent—Farren continued, “The Orpheus was called to 1968 because I recommended it. I hope what you see today will justify my decision.” He turned to the others. “Miss Raghavendra, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Trounce, Mr. Wells—I’m honoured to meet you all. I expect this time period will strike you as lurid and uncultured. That’s because it is.” He smiled slightly. “If you’ll follow me, I have a couple of cars parked around the corner. We’ll drive you to London.”
“What are cars?” Trounce asked as they followed Farren away from the promenade and into a street lined with shops.
“Diminutive of ‘autocarriage,’” Herbert Wells put in. “They were invented during my childhood as an alternative to the old steam spheres.” He pointed to a yellow metal box at the side of the road a little way ahead. It was mounted on four wheels and had glass windows. “By the looks of it they’ve become rather more sophisticated than the rickety contraptions of 1914.”
As they emerged onto a wider thoroughfare, five of the vehicles whipped past at a tremendous velocity, steam whistling from pipes at their rear.
“Like a landau,” Swinburne observed, “but with the driver and the engine inside.”
It being Sunday, the town was fairly quiet and the shops were closed. Burton examined the contents of their display windows and only understood half of what he saw. Everything appeared garish, plentiful, and cheaply manufactured.
“What are those rods?” Sadhvi enquired, pointing at the rooftops.
Karl von Lessing answered, “Television aerials, Miss Raghavendra. Television is like radio but with moving pictures, a little theatre in your sitting room. The aerials pick up the signals.”
“Moving pictures?” Swinburne exclaimed. “You mean, like a zoetrope?”
“A what?” von Lessing asked.
The poet cried out and aimed a kick at thin air. “How are we ever to communicate?”
The group came to two parked cars. Trounce and Raghavendra joined Eddie Brabrooke and Karl von Lessing in one, while Swinburne, Wells and Jane Packard squeezed into the back of the other, with Burton in the front beside Farren. The king’s agent watched closely as Farren manipulated steering rods and a footplate—a very similar arrangement to that of the old steam spheres and rotorchairs.
“Steam?” Burton asked, as the car rolled out into the road.
“Yep,” Farren responded. “The Yanks favour petroleum engines, but they’re unreliable as hell. Anglo-Saxon steam technology is still where it’s at. Over the past century or so, we’ve learned how to squeeze the most out of the least. It was Formby coal in your day, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“We use a process called muon-catalysation now, which is powered by an extension of the Formby treatment. We can make a marble-sized lump of coal blaze like a sun for a whole day, and a vehicle can run on twelve gallons of heavy water for almost two hundred miles at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour.”
“Heavy water?”
“Yeah, man. That’d take me a week to explain.”
The car accelerated, and Margate was quickly left behind. As the vehicle swept westward, Burton and Swinburne saw that the little seaside towns—Herne Bay and Whitstable—which had flourished in the mid-1800s, were now, like Margate, in a sad state of dilapidation, while the countryside between them had been rendered a characterless patchwork by intensive farming.
Further inland, the Kentish towns of Faversham, Sittingbourne and Gillingham were vastly expanded, but the new buildings struck the chrononauts as soulless and unprepossessing, and by the time they reached Gravesend they were shocked to find themselves already on the outskirts of the capital. London was immensely expanded.
As they swept into the densely built-up outer reaches of the city, with other vehicles flowing around them, Burton asked, “You are a musician, Mr. Farren?”
“Mick, please. I’m a singer and songwriter, among other things.”
“In a band?”
“The Deviants.”
“And music has become a political force?”
“Uh-huh.”
Farren reached down to a knob on the control panel in front of him and gave it a twist. The car’s cabin was immediately filled with a harsh blend of trumpets, guitars and other instruments that Burton couldn’t identify. The cacophony sounded vaguely Spanish and was accompanied by three or four male voices singing in harmony.
“Ouch!” Swinburne exclaimed. “What a racket!”
“The song is called ‘The Legend of Xanadu,’ Mr. Swinburne,” Farren said. “By Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.”
“My hat! What are they? Dwarfs? What happened to the seventh?”
Farren gave a throaty chuckle.
“I presume the song refers to the Empire’s difficulties with China,” Burton said. “Though I fail to understand the Spanish motif.”
Farren shook his bushy head. “No, Sir Richard. This is what’s known as pop music—pop, short for popular. Its only function is as commercial entertainment. It has very little meaning. I doubt the kids even know where Xanadu is. Let’s try a different station.”
Keeping his eyes on the road ahead, Farren twisted another control knob. The music dissolved into crackles, whines, howls and snatches of conversation before settling into an urgent and primitive-sounding rhythm over which an American-accented voice sang about “breaking on through to the other side.”
“Rock music,” Farren revealed. “This band is called The Doors.”
“How is it different to pop?” Burton asked.
Farren thought for a moment. “I guess rock music is less about commerce and more about cutting through the surface of civilisation to find an authenticity within each of us.”