"For sure, Darwin has demonstrated that Nature is a brutal and entirely pitiless process, but you seem to forget, Milnes, that the animal which kills is most often, in turn, itself killed by another animal, just as the murderer, in a supposedly civilised country, is hanged for his crime!"
"Then you propose an innate natural law of justice from which we can never break free, a law that transcends culture, whatever its stage of development?"
James Hunt, passing to join a conversation between Bradlaugh and Brabrooke on the other side of the room, stopped long enough to refill Burton's glass.
"Yes, I do believe some such law exists," said Burton. "I find the Hindu notion of karma more alluring than the Catholic absurdity of original sin."
"How is Isabel?" put in Bendyshe, who'd stepped across to join them.
Burton ignored the mischievous question and went on, "At least karma provides a counterbalance-a penalty or reward, if you like-to acts we actually perform and thoughts we actually think, rather than punishing us for the supposed sin of our actual existence or for a transgression against a wholly artificial dictate of so-called morality. It is a function of Nature rather than a judgement of an unproven God."
"By Jove! Stanley was correct when he wrote that you're a heathen!" mocked Bendyshe. "Burton joins with Darwin and says there is no God!"
"Actually, Darwin hasn't suggested any such thing. It is others who have imposed that interpretation upon his Origin of Species."
"`There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise bath she need of an author,"' quoted Swinburne. "De Sade again."
"In many respects I consider him laughable," commented Burton, "but in that instance, I wholeheartedly agree. The more I study religions, the more I'm convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."
He quoted his own poetry: "Man worships self his God is man; the struggling of the mortal mind to firm its model as 'twould be, the pea fect of itself to find. "
Milnes took a drag from his cigar and blew a smoke ring, which rose lazily into the air. He watched it slowly disperse and said, "But this karma business, Richard-what you are proposing is that one way or another, through some sort of entirely natural process, a murderer will receive retribution. Do you then count man's judgement-the death penalty-to be natural?"
"We are natural beings, are we not?"
"Well," interrupted Bendyshe, "I sometimes wonder about Swinburne."
It was a fair point, thought Burton, for Swinburne was a very unnaturallooking man. At just five-foot-two, he had a strangely tiny body. His limbs were small and delicate, with sloping shoulders and a very long neck upon which sat a large head made even bigger by a tousled mass of carroty-red hair standing almost at right angles to it. His mouth was weak and effeminate; his eyes huge, pale green, and dreamy.
Few poets looked so much a poet as Algernon Charles Swinburne.
"But that aside," said Bendyshe, "what if the murderer avoids the noose?"
"Guilt," proposed Burton. "A gradual but inescapable degradation of the character. A degenerative disease of the mind. Maybe a descent into madness and self-destruction."
"Or perhaps," offered Swinburne, "a tendency to mix with criminal types until the murderer is himself, inevitably, murdered."
"Well put!" agreed the famous adventurer.
"Interesting," pondered Milnes, "but, I say, we all know that murders are committed either in the heat of passion, or else with intent by an individual who's already in an advanced-if that's the appropriate word-state of mental decay. What if, though, a murder was calculated and committed by an intelligent man who performs the act only out of scientific curiosity? What if it were done only to transcend the limitations that tell us it shouldn't be done?"
"An idle motive," suggested Burton.
"Not at all, dear boy!" declared Milnes. "It's a magnificent motive! Why, the man who would undertake such an act would risk his immortal soul for science!"
"He would undoubtedly see sense and back away from the experiment," said Burton, his voice slurring slightly, "for once crossed, that barrier allows no return. However, his decision would be based on self-determined standards of behaviour rather than on any set out by civilisation or on notions of an immortal soul; for as you say, he's an intelligent man."
"It's strange," said Henry Murray, who up until now had listened in silence. "I thought that you, of all of us, would be the one most likely to approve the experiment."
"You should take my reputation with a pinch of salt."
"Must we? I rather enjoy having a devil in our midst." Swinburne grinned.
Sir Richard Francis Burton considered the susceptible young poet and wondered how to keep him out of trouble.
Burton was not a Libertine himself, but they considered him an honorary member of the caste and delighted in his knowledge of exotic cultures, where the stifling laws of civilisation were remarkable only by their seeming absence. He enjoyed drinking and debating with them, especially this evening, for it kept his mind engaged and helped to stave off the despondency that had been creeping over him since he'd returned from Bath.
By one o'clock in the morning, though, it was dragging at him again, made worse by alcohol and exhaustion, so he bid his friends farewell and left the club.
The evening was bitterly cold-unusual for September-and the roads glistened wetly. The thickening pall wrapped each gas lamp in its own golden aureole. Burton held his overcoat tight with one hand and swung his cane with the other. London rustled and murmured around him as he walked unsteadily homewards.
A velocipede chattered past. They had started to appear on the streets two years ago, these steam-driven, one-man vehicles, and were popularly known as "penny-farthings" due to their odd design, for the front wheel was nearly as tall as a man, while the back wheel was just eighteen inches in diameter.
The rider was seated high on a leather saddle, situated slightly behind the crown of the front wheel, with his feet resting in stirrups to either side, his legs held away from the piston arm and crank which pumped and spun to the left of the axle. The tiny, boxlike engine was attached to the frame behind and below the saddle; the small boiler, with its furnace, was under this, and the coal scuttle under that; the three elements arranged in a segmented arc over the top-rear section of the main wheel. As well as providing the motive power, they were also the machine's centre of gravity and, together with the engine's internal gyroscope, made the vehicle almost impossible to knock over, despite its ungainly appearance.
By far the most remarkable feature of the penny-farthing was its extraordinary efficiency. It could complete a twenty-mile journey in about an hour on just one fist-sized lump of coal. With the furnace able to hold up to four pieces and with the same number stored in the scuttle, it had a maximum range of 160 miles and could operate for about twenty hours before needing to refuel. The vehicle's main flaw, aside from the thorough shaking it meted out to the driver, was that the two slim funnels, which rose up behind the saddle, belched smoke into the miasmal atmosphere of England's capital, adding to an already bad situation. Nevertheless, the vehicles were currently all the rage and had done much to restore the public's faith in the Engineering faction of the Technologist caste, a group that had been much maligned of late after the disastrous flooding of the undersea town of Hydroham off the Norfolk coast, and a number of fatal crashes during the attempted-and ultimately abandoned-development of gas-filled airships.
Burton watched the contraption disappear into the mist.
London had transformed while he'd been in Africa. It had filled with new machines and new breeds of animal. The Engineers and Eugenicists-the main branches of the Technologist caste-seemed unstoppable, despite protests from the Libertines, who felt that art, beauty, and nobility of spirit were more essential than material progress.