“Marianne,” she said, and turning, gestured an elderly woman forward. “And you know my mother, Patricia.”
“Miss Hon-Honesty!” Burton said, unable to fully disguise his shock. “We only just said good-bye.”
“It’s all right. Don’t try to hide it,” she replied. “For you, just minutes ago, I was twenty-two. For me, half a century has passed. I was Mrs. Smith for much of it, and now I’m a seventy-six-year-old widow.” She gave a cackling laugh. “Life sucks.”
“Sucks?” Swinburne interjected.
“Hello again, Mr. Swinburne. And hello, Mr. Gooch, Mr. Krishnamurthy. Yes, sucks. I’m afraid language is still degenerating.”
She turned to Farren. “Mick, you bastard.”
He gaped at her, his lips moving wordlessly.
“Look at you!” she exclaimed. “Exactly the same. My old friend, the revolutionary.” She laughed. “But not as old as me!”
They embraced, and Farren muttered, “Bloody hell! Bloody hell!”
She pushed him to arm’s length and smiled up at him. “I have excellent news for you.”
“Wh-what?” he stammered.
“Your hairstyle is back in fashion.”
Farren grinned, but Burton noticed pain in the young man’s eyes—the same pain he himself had experienced upon meeting the elderly Edward Brabrooke in 1914. There was an agonising sorrow in seeing one’s friends decay while you remained the same. Even more so, a vicious guilt.
Patricia Honesty moved aside and pulled forward the third person, a tall and gawky young woman, about eighteen years old, with fascinatingly misaligned features and a large gap between her front teeth. “This is Lorena Brabrooke.”
The introduction swept away Burton’s ruminations. Here was his old friend, again renewed, again refreshed, and again reborn.
Isabel, he thought. Ah, who might we have become together?
“Hey,” the girl said, by way of a greeting.
Burton took an instant liking to her. He smiled when she fumbled his handshake. “Young lady, I’m delighted to see the Brabrookes are still going strong.”
“Um. Thanks. I mean—wow!—it’s like, you’re a legend.”
The king’s agent chuckled. “No, I’m all too human.”
“Aren’t we all,” Patricia Honesty put in ruefully.
“I was just with your father’s friends,” Burton told Brabrooke, “back in 1968.”
“You mean my grandfather.”
“Oh. My mistake.” Burton threw out his hands. “How time flies!” He addressed Marianne Smith. “Just the three of you?”
“Yes,” she replied. “We’ll explain, but first—Lori?”
Brabrooke took something from a bag slung over her shoulder and quickly clamped it shut around Burton’s forearm. While he was still uttering, “What the devil—?” the girl administered the same treatment to Swinburne, Farren, Gooch and Krishnamurthy. The men all examined the plain black bands that now encircled their wrists.
“I can’t take it off!” Gooch grumbled.
“A blasted liberty!” Swinburne complained. “What’s the meaning of it, Miss Brabrooke?”
“T-bands,” came her mumbled response. “T for Turing.”
“Turing!” Farren cried out. “I knew it!”
“Trust us,” Patricia Honesty said. “They’re necessary. Now, Sir Richard, it’s absurdly early in the morning, we’re standing in an open doorway, and there’s a chill wind blowing on my neck. Invite us in or throw us out, one or the other.”
Burton bowed politely and waved the three visitors in. They moved through to the lounge—Gooch and Krishnamurthy followed after securing the door—and settled on the sofas. Farren got to work at the coffeepot. Burton asked Honesty, “So, ma’am, how stands the Cannibal Club?”
“Ma’am? How quaint. I like it.” The old woman gestured toward her daughter. “My child has taken the reins.”
Burton turned his eyes to Marianne, who said, “We are fewer. Twelve of us. Secrecy has become a matter of life or death. The world is vastly changed since sixty-eight.” She held up an arm to reveal that she, too, wore one of the bracelets. “These are to protect you.”
“From what?” Burton asked.
“From the government.”
“What on earth has happened?” Swinburne exclaimed.
“The Turing Fulcrum.”
Patricia Honesty, jerking her chin toward Farren, interjected, “You remember—when we last met—Mick told you about the Automatic Computing Engine? What we suspected then was true; the government was developing it in secret. During the 1980s, the technology finally saw the light of day. Turings went into mass production. Now, everybody has one.”
Krishnamurthy held up his arm and examined his bangle.
“No, Mr. Krishnamurthy,” Honesty said. “I’m not referring to T-bands.”
“Then what?” he asked.
From her bag, Lorena Brabrooke produced a thin eight-inch-long tube of what looked to Burton like brushed steel. She gave it a slight shake, and the chrononauts uttered sounds of amazement as, emitting a chime, it unfolded and, seemingly with a life of its own, snapped into a flat sheet, eight inches wide by ten long, and the thickness of a book cover. One side of it lit up, displaying colours and shapes that, when Brabrooke turned it to face them, they didn’t comprehend at all.
“This is a Turing,” she said. “It—um—I suppose it’s a bit like one of your old babbages except, rather than being a distinct device, it exists in connection with all the other Turings, forming a network. It can give you any public information you require. Look.”
Burton and the others leaned forward and watched as she moved her fingers across the screen and conjured up a mass of movement that, for a few moments, meant nothing to the king’s agent. Then he suddenly realised he was looking through a window and, amid a great deal he didn’t understand, he recognised the British Museum.
Brabrooke slid her fingertips across the screen, a little above it, and, dizzyingly, the scene rushed forward, as if the window was flying up the steps of the building. Doors whipped past. The entrance lobby—and the people in it—went blurring by. The viewpoint shot up the still-magnificent staircase.
Burton felt both absorbed and disoriented as Brabrooke moved the window through corridor after corridor, past exhibit after exhibit, until it slid into place beside a group of visitors who were standing in front of a plinth upon which there knelt a familiar figure.
“Brunel!” the chrononauts chorused.
Brabrooke touched a small circle on the screen, and a voice sounded from the device. “Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born on the ninth of April 1806, was an English mechanical and civil engineer and the founder of the Department of Guided Science. His designs, which revolutionised public transport, also allowed for the rapid expansion of the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and are generally regarded as—”
A flick of Brabrooke’s finger caused the volume to decrease until it was barely audible.
“Magic!” Swinburne whispered. “Utterly impossible!”
The girl gave a small smile. “The devices are used for work, study, communication and entertainment, and—like I said—they can access any public information. That’s the problem.”
“Ah,” Burton said. “Public.”
Farren, who’d paused in his distribution of coffee to watch the display, said, “Information is controlled?”
Marianne Smith gave confirmation. “Yes. Tightly. Extreme restrictions. Also, all activity on Turings is monitored.”
“All?” Burton asked. “But you said everybody has one. How can sense be made out of so much information?”
“By a central machine. The Turing Fulcrum. It reports to the authorities anything it interprets as illegal or suspicious activity.”
Brabrooke said, “If I used my Turing to write T-mail to a friend—”
“T-mail?” Farren interrupted.
“A message. Like a letter but without any physical existence.”
Patricia Honesty interrupted, “And you should know that there’s no longer any other way to send a written communiqué.”