The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (13 page)

Wait! I'm in here, too! Don't put me back in that body! You don't understand! It's old! It aches! It's going to die! Not again! Better this machine than that!

At the periphery of his vision, he saw Gooch's hand place something that resembled a brass skullcap onto the grass. There came a slight grinding sound followed by a click.

What are you doing? Stop! Stop!

“I'm going to extract the first stone. Are you ready?” Gooch asked.

“Yes. Proceed,” Burton said.

No!

Half a minute, then, “It's out. How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

“Good show. Now for the second.”

Suddenly, the sensation of floating.

“And now, Sir Richard?”

“I don't think I can move.”

“As expected. Let's do the next.”

Click. Click.

“Done.”

Stop! I don't like it! I'm afraid!

“I just—clang!—zzzzzz!—went blind.”

“You've apparently lost some control over your vocal apparatus, too. In a minute, we won't be able to communicate. I'll keep talking, but you may not comprehend my words. Don't be concerned.”

Perhaps I'll survive this. I'm not this Burton. I'm a visitor. What happens to him doesn't necessarily happen to medicinal. Medicinal? Why shell me that behind?

“Are you still able to think?”

“Basking yellow in my—zzzzzz!—fretwork,” Burton clanked.

Sadhvi Raghavendra's voice: “What did he say?”

“Nothing intelligible. I've removed his ability to express himself through language.”

“Can he understand us?”

“If he can, it won't be for much longer.”

Wooden highest of table momentum!

“Fifth one out,” Gooch said. “The babbage is processing just half of the electromagnetic field that comprises his mind now. Let's do the next.”

Burton tried to summon an image of Isabel but couldn't work out how her vision locations related to her head-shape space. His experience, he knew, needed to be otherwise.

Tonic. All of you chicken cold.

Colours suddenly slantwise wrong.

“Light master.” Gooch noise. “Earlier garnish is that much off.”

Intonation: “Friendly beneath in stacked embarrassments. Slowly?”

“Barleycorn.”

Level level level.

Shake. Hardly the Trounce.

Hello.

A desert. He stepped out of his tent.

The horizon.

CONCERNING IMPROBABILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.

—Polybius

Burton opened his eyes and saw the Beetle and the glass walls of the
Orpheus
's observation deck.

To his right, William Trounce groaned and muttered, “Drugged!”

To his left, Algernon Swinburne was moving his lips as if attempting to give form to words that wouldn't come.

The Beetle's eyes were dark and penetrating, with dilated black irises surrounded by a thin and glittering silver border. Burton felt as if they could perceive his every thought.

There were eleven lumps circling the hairless head.

Or heads.

One. Three. Five. One.

Strain as he might, Burton couldn't properly distinguish the features. Only the eyes appeared fixed; every other element of the man's countenance was multiplying, unifying, and sliding in and out of perception, as if both there and elsewhere. Unquestionably, though, this was the same person whose abnormal birth he'd just witnessed, except—

Very quietly, he said, “You are considerably younger.”

“Yes,” the Beetle responded. “My course through time is the reverse of normal and is very rapid.”

“You are me?”

“I can't deny it. Though it's not wholly accurate. The concept of a
you
and a
me
no longer properly applies. I might just as easily claim to be a Swinburne or sentient vegetation or an intelligent machine. I am—” He paused, then recited:

“All Faith is false, all Faith is true:

Truth is the shattered mirror strown

In myriad bits; while each believes

his little bit the whole to own.”

Burton said, “From my
Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî
. I wrote it in 1880.”

“And in 1859,” the Beetle rejoined, “after meeting Abdu El Yezdi in person.”

“There is no such person. I invented him.”

“You did, indeed. I might claim that you invented me, too.”

“Then you are confirming my suspicion that this is all an hallucination? That I am still in the throes of a heart attack in Trieste?”

“No, Sir Richard, this is real. At least, as much so as anything else in a universe whose very fabric is woven out of imagination, projection, interpretation, and belief; a universe that is nothing but a reflection of the sentience that discerns it.”

Trounce let loose a deep breath, leaned forward, and rapped his knuckles against the floor. “Enough of this gibberish! And will you please keep your confounded head still, man!”

“I'm sorry, William, I can't alter your sensory limitations.”

“What the blazes do you mean by that? Are you insulting me?”

“I'm not. It is merely that the human mind is conditioned to apprehend only one possible path at once—one fragment, if you will. In me, all of them are made apparent. That is why I quoted Sir Richard's poem. I am the mirror reconstructed.”

“Humph! Paths. Fragments. Mirrors. Mumbo jumbo. Is there a single occupant of this flying contraption who can resist the temptation to speak in riddles?”

The Beetle gave vent to a rustling laugh, his head—or heads—blurring as he tipped it—or them—back. “Hah! Good old Trounce! I apologise if my answers feel to you like obfuscation.”

“They don't feel like anything at all, least of all answers.”

“Then I shall attempt to clarify. Let's start with a question. Can you agree, William, that at its heart, the universe turns on a single question, it being that either things exist or they don't?”

“I suppose.”

“If the answer is that things don't exist, then we need go no further. Indeed, we cannot, for we aren't here. Since we patently are, then the answer is that things
do
exist. From that circumstance, further questions unfold. Is a thing this or is it that? Is it likely to do this or likely to do that? I put it to you that the answers to those questions are wholly dependent upon there being a conscious observer, that if no one is present to witness a thing be or a thing happen, it cannot be or happen at all, but must remain suspended between possibilities.”

“Rhubarb!” Trounce put in impatiently. “The notion is preposterous.”

“Is it? Then you suggest that when a tree falls in a forest, it makes a noise even if there's no one within hearing range?”

“Of course it bloody well does.”

“Yet sound is merely a certain range of vibrations in the air—among many other vibrations—that impact against the ear and are then interpreted by the brain. If no ear is within range, there can be no interpretation, thus there are vibrations but no sound.”

“Phonographic recording. A device left in the forest.”

“Merely a bridge—a surrogate ear designed to document and reproduce the disturbance in the air, and one that, ultimately, still requires a real ear attached to a conscious mind.”

Trounce scowled and squinted at the Beetle, as if, by sheer willpower, he could overcome the elusive quality of the man's head. “What will you claim next? That the tree cannot be seen if there's no one there to look at it? That it cannot be touched?”

“Quite so. All our senses operate within an extremely constrained sphere. What you see is a narrow range amid a vast sea of light, and if you were able to perceive the tiniest components of a substance, you would find no difference between what is solid and what is not, between what is considered an object and what is considered space.” A slight shrug. Five heads. Three heads. One head. “It takes us back to the root question. Do things exist independently of us or do they not? Yes, they do, but only in the form of probability, neither this nor that until we decide.”

Trounce gave a snort of derision. He cocked a thumb at Burton. “So the source of the Nile wasn't there until Sir Richard found it?”

Burton murmured, “I didn't find it. Speke did.”

“It was believed to be there because we subjected the Nile to the most common of the narratives we habitually employ, it being that everything has its origin, its period of life, and its end; in the case of a river, its source, its course, and its mouth. The question was whether any European could reach the source, which for centuries was considered an impossibility. However, when something becomes more plausible to the observing mind than the opposite, then it is made actual. By the same token, we do not travel to the moon because such an achievement is inconceivable. One day, we'll think otherwise, and merely by thinking it, we'll sow the seeds that will ultimately make it not just possible but inevitable.”

Trounce lowered his face into his hands. “By Jove!” came his muffled voice. “Now we're off to the blessed moon!”

Swinburne, who'd been sitting quietly with his brows drawn together, said, “Habitual narratives? You touch upon a matter I've oft considered. It strikes me that the human organism has a tendency to shoehorn all that's perceived into a limited number of preconstructed sequences, the most common of them being—as you suggest—that of a beginning, a middle, and an end. These are then endowed with an unwarranted veracity, as if the framework holds greater truth than the elements that are hung upon it.”

“Bravo, Algy!” the Beetle replied. “You have pierced the heart of the matter, for sequences—narratives—when applied to a probability, either extinguish it or cause it to blossom into being. The notion of sequence is the notion of Time. Time is the factory of consciousness and reality is its product.”

Burton opened his mouth to speak but, before he could utter a sound, Swinburne interrupted him.

“As a poet, I seek to write that which is timeless. I do so by employing structures based not upon sequence but on meter, juxtaposition, and rhyme.”

“And that is how the mirror is repaired,” the Beetle responded. “Not by forcing its fragments into a linear sequence but by piecing together corresponding edges and angles. Practically speaking—”

Trounce dropped his hands from his face and arched a sceptical eyebrow.

“—one must seek the truth through coincidences, patterns, themes, symbolic harmonies, and nonlinear correlations. In these, a unity can be apprehended, and in that can be seen a reflection of the self.”

Burton said, “And your identity? The mirror reconstructed?”

He detected a slight smile amid the confusion of the Beetle's features, and for the briefest of instances, recognised his own face looking back at him.

“In all the many histories, Sir Richard, different versions of you have struggled with the consequences of Spring Heeled Jack's meddling. Across those time streams, your unified mind—shared between all your iterations and operating at an unconscious level where the only language is that of symbolism—has assembled and understood the meaning of events. In the mirror thus made manifest—in me—the totality of you is reflected. Swinburne is part of you. Trounce is part of you. Everything is part of you.” The Beetle gave a dry chuckle. “If you divide the elements of that truth into sequence, you will render me an impossibility, for I obviously defy narratives—how can I be the consequence of an expedition that I myself instigated and which I'm now travelling back to instigate all over again?” He placed a hand over his heart. “I am a closed loop, an utter paradox that consumes itself until it is gone. In the normal manner of thinking, I am inconceivable. However, the intellects of many Burtons have been forced along strange routes to unusual conclusions, and thus was I made.”