“I am.”
The king’s agent frowned. “I am? I am what?”
“We don’t know, but our theory is that when the Turing Fulcrum was activated it sent out a pulse of energy that resonated with the Nāga diamond fragments in Brunel’s babbage. The words might have been an echo of the machine’s first moment of self-awareness. That’s why we regard Brunel as a possible key to the Fulcrum’s location. If there’s anything of him remaining, if we could possibly wake him up, he might be able to tell us what direction and distance the pulse came from.”
“A long shot, admittedly,” Patricia Honesty murmured. “But worth a try.”
“Miss Brabrooke,” Gooch interjected. “I’m an engineer. The thing you have in your hand—the Turing—is so far beyond my understanding that I can’t even properly focus my eyes on it. What they tell me I’m seeing, my brain is trying very hard to reject. With progress having achieved such miracles, how is it you can’t revive Mr. Brunel yourselves, yet you believe that we nigh on two-hundred-year-old fossils can?”
“Fossils!” Honesty protested. “You’re younger than I am!”
“Shock,” her daughter Marianne interjected.
Gooch looked puzzled. “Pardon?”
Burton muttered, “Yes, I see it.” He addressed the engineer. “Daniel, Isambard has no notion of our mission. We’d lost him before even conceiving of it. If he has any sense of the time that’s passed, the very last thing he’ll be expecting to see is us. The surprise of it might knock the wits back into him.”
“Fair enough,” Gooch replied, after a moment’s thought. “I suppose it might work, though personally I still think it more likely that his personality was completely erased. Beyond that, however, I have another, rather more serious reservation.”
“It being?”
“That if we are so bedazzled by that,” he jabbed a finger toward Brabrooke’s Turing device, “then I fear whatever else we see might be so staggering that, before we can knock sense into Brunel, it’ll knock all the sense out of us!”
With the world having changed so dramatically, they decided to keep their expedition to London small. A large party was more liable to attract attention, and, as Gooch had suggested, the excursion could be disrupted by an occurrence of mental instability. Fewer personnel meant a lesser chance that one of them would, as Swinburne put it, “start rolling his eyes and spitting foam.”
The poet, Burton, Gooch and Farren—all well dosed with Saltzmann’s —departed Bendyshe Bay in a small boat piloted by a Penniforth. Lorena Brabrooke went with them. During the voyage across the northern stretch of the Channel, she told them about the current Cannibal Club, revealing that, though the group was still funded by Bendyshe investments—currently run by two sisters and a brother—the Foundation itself had been broken up into a large number of much smaller organisations. They were more likely to evade scrutiny than the megalithic institution the original body had become.
Membership had grown more exclusive, currently consisting only of direct descendants. Those who hadn’t been “blood members”—such as the Blanchets, von Lessings and Griffiths—were now absent.
“The younger ones in the group have all adopted the original surnames,” she said, “even those that weren’t born with them. It’s a matter of pride.”
“But why the dwindling numbers?” Burton asked.
“It got dangerously bloated back in the seventies.” She addressed Farren. “Your lot were full of zeal, but you weren’t exactly subtle.”
“We didn’t know we needed to be,” he protested.
“The system is cunning, Mr. Farren. It manipulates people’s fears and hopes, their insecurities and aspirations, and it ensures that all opposition is bogged down in a quagmire of prejudice, stupidity, propaganda and selfish motives. In your era, resistance was fun. In mine, it’s potentially a death sentence.”
“In my era?” Farren said. “The sixties weren’t so long ago. How old do you think I am?”
“In your seventies, I guess.”
“Christ! I’m twenty-five!”
“Anyway, like I was saying, the methodology the Cannibal Club employs to evade detection and keep an objective eye on developing history has had to change. It’s all digital now.”
“Something to do with fingers?” Gooch said. “The way you used your Turing device?”
“It’s technical term. It refers to an extension of the systems your Mr. Babbage devised. Thanks to him, nowadays oppression and resistance do battle in the same arena, it being the realm of information, which he, after a fashion, created.”
“Do you regard Babbage as a villain, then?” Gooch asked. “I’ve always thought of him as a hero, if a rather unpredictable one.”
“I think of him as a genius, sir. If he knew how his systems were eventually employed, I expect he’d be horrified.” An expression of pain crossed her features. “But I wish I’d never read Abdu El Yezdi’s second report.”
Burton, who’d been listening to the conversation with interest, said, “The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. I can understand your reservation. The affair was initiated when a different iteration of Charles Babbage, in a variant history, attempted to achieve immortality in order to pursue his intention to eliminate the working classes. He wanted to replace them with machines. The idea might not have been wholly villainous, but it was certainly inhumane.”
Gooch looked thoughtful and muttered, “If we return, perhaps we should refrain from telling him about the path his work has taken. It might send him over the edge.”
“We already know something will,” Burton observed.
Swinburne, who was gazing ahead with Saltzmann’s dilated pupils at the east coast of England—grey beneath a grey dawn—said, “He’s already loopy, if you ask me. But Babbage aside, you say there’s a sort of information war being waged, Miss Brabrooke? Surely, if this horrible government of yours is to be overthrown, there’ll be a need for something more substantial. Armed revolutionaries.”
“I’m an armed revolutionary,” Brabrooke replied. “But people like me don’t shoot anymore, we just aim.”
Burton frowned. “Aim?”
“Access. Infiltrate. Manipulate.” Brabrooke offered a crooked and gappy smile. “I acquire information I’m not supposed to have, I alter it without being detected, and I withdraw leaving no evidence that anything untoward has occurred. That’s how I registered you all with the Department of Citizenship.” The boat bounced and she put a hand to her midriff. “Ugh! I hate the sea. Would that Saltzmann’s stuff of yours settle my stomach?”
The king’s agent curled his upper lip, exposing a long canine in what might have been a smile but more resembled a sneer. “Do you know what it is?”
“Oh. Yes. It’s—” she swallowed and went very pale. “Swinburne juice.”
Mick Farren groaned. “Yeah, what was all that about? A red jungle?”
Burton gestured toward the poet. “You can ask it in person.”
Swinburne smiled happily and winked. “Alternate futures! Strange events! Ripping adventures!”
“And in one of them you turned into a gigantic plant,” Farren said flatly. “Weird.”
“Indeed so,” Burton agreed. “But my companions and I are here—and on our way to 2202—at the jungle’s behest.”
“Okay,” Farren replied. “Weirder.”
Perhaps appropriately, that was the last word the chrononauts were properly aware of for the duration of the next ninety minutes. From the moment the boat docked at Gravesend, time passed in an unintelligible smudge of sensations that overburdened them to the point where the king’s agent—in a brief interval of near clarity—had no option but to dazedly pass around a bottle of the tincture that they might further dose themselves.
As the liquid radiated through him, he found himself gradually able to separate one thing from another, dragging from his jumbled senses first sound—mainly the roar of traffic—then smell, which delivered oily odours, and finally sight. This latter, a fragmentary mass, slowly congealed into the shape of the British Museum, though the blocky structure appeared to be floating amid a whirling storm of utterly indecipherable objects.