“Fuddle-witted ninny,” murmured Pox, his messenger parakeet. The colourful bird was sleeping on a perch near a bookcase. Like all of her kind, she delivered insults even while unconscious.
Burton leaned back, rested his head on the lip of the tub, and turned it so that he might gaze into the flickering flames of the fire.
His eyelids felt heavy.
He closed them.
His breathing slowed and deepened.
His thoughts meandered.
In his mind's eye, faces formed and faded: Lieutenant William Stroyan, Sir Roderick Murchison, Ebenezer Smike, Thomas Honesty, Edwin Brundleweed. They shifted and blended. They congealed into a single countenance, gaunt and lined, with a blade-like nose, tight lips, and insane, pain-filled eyes.
Spring Heeled Jack.
Gradually, the features grew smoother. The eyes became calmer. A younger man emerged from the terrible face.
“Oxford,” Burton muttered in his sleep. “His name is Edward Oxford.”
His name is Edward Oxford.
He is twenty-five years old and he's a genius-a physician, an engineer, a historian, and a philosopher.
He sits at a desk constructed from glass but, rather than being clear, it is somehow filled with writing and diagrams and pictures that move and wink and come and go. The surface of the desk is flat and thin, yet the information dancing within it-and Burton instinctively knows that it
A large black diamond has been placed on the desk.
Burton recognises it as the South American Eye of Naga, which he'd discovered last year beneath the Tichborne family's estate. The dream disagrees with him. The stone was not found in 1862, it says. It was found in 2068.
Oxford is fascinated by it. The structure of the stone is unique. He whispers, “Even more sensitive than a CellComp. More efficient than a ClusterComp. More capacity than GenMem.”
The dream twists away and repositions itself inside a day a few weeks later.
The diamond is filled with the remnant intelligences of a prehistoric race. They have inveigled their way into Oxford's mind.
He starts to think about time.
He becomes obsessed.
He becomes paranoid.
It happens that he shares his name with a distant ancestor who, in a fit of insanity, had attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria. A voice, from somewhere behind his conscious mind, insists: “That man besmirched your family's reputation. Change it. Correct it.”
Why does this obscure fact suddenly matter? Why should he care about a forgotten incident that occurred near three hundred and fifty years ago?
It matters.
He cares.
He can think about little else.
The reptilian intelligence plants another seed.
Slowly, in Oxford's mind, a theory concerning the nature of time blossoms like a pervasively scented exotic flower. Its roots dig deeper. Its lianas entangle him. It consumes him.
He works tirelessly.
The dream convulses and fifteen years have passed.
Oxford has cut shards from the diamond and connected them to a chain of DNA-StringComps and BioProcs. They form the heart of what he calls a Nimtz Generator. It is a flat circular device. It will enable him to move through time.
To power it, he's invented the fish-scale battery, and has fashioned thousands of these tiny solar-energy collectors into a one-piece tight-fitting suit. He's also embedded an AugCom into a round black helmet. It will act as an interface between his brain and the generator. It will also protect him from the deep psychological shock that he somehow knows will afflict anyone who steps too far out of their native time period.
The boots of the costume are fitted with two-foot-high spring-loaded stilts. They appear wildly eccentric but they offer a simple solution to a complex problem, for when the bubble of energy generated by the Nimtz forms around the suit, it must touch nothing but air.
Oxford will literally jump through time.
It is the evening of 15th February, 2202. Nine o'clock. A Monday. His fortieth birthday.
Oxford dresses in attire suitable for the 1840s. He pulls his time suit on over the top of it and clips on his stilts. He attaches the Nimtz Generator to his chest and puts the helmet on his head. He picks up a top hat and strides out of his workshop and into the long garden beyond.
His wife comes out of the house, wiping her hands on a towel.
“You're going now?” she asks. “Supper is almost ready!”
“I am,” he replies, “but don't worry-even if I'm gone for years, I'll be back in five minutes!”
“You won't return an old man, I hope!” she grumbles, and runs a hand over her distended belly. “This one will need an energetic young father.”
He laughs. “Don't be silly. It won't take long.”
Bending, he kisses her on the nose.
He instructs the suit to take him to five-thirty on the afternoon of 10th June, 1840. Location: the upper corner of Green Park, London.
He looks at the sky.
“Am I really going to do this?” he asks himself.
“Do it!” a voice whispers in his head, and before he can consciously make a decision, he takes three long strides, jumps, hits the ground with knees bent, and leaps high into the air. A bubble forms around him and he vanishes with a small detonation, like a little clap of thunder.
Sir Richard Francis Burton jerked awake and tepid water slopped over the edge of his bath.
He shivered, sat up, and looked around his study, trying to identify the source of the noise. His attention was drawn to a thin wisp of steam rising from a tubular contraption on one of his three desks. He reached for a towel then stood, stepped out of the bath, and wrapped the thick cloth around himself. He crossed to the desk. The glass and brass apparatus was his direct connection to the prime minister and the king. Burton retrieved a canister from it, snapped it open, and pulled out a sheet of paper. He read the words:
“Curse the man! That's all I need!”
Pox twitched a wing and chirped, “Stink fermenter!”
Burton looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was half-past one.
Rapidly drying himself, he went into his dressing room and put on loose white cotton trousers and a shirt, then wrapped his
By two o'clock, the bathtub had been removed, another Manila cheroot had been smoked, and Burton had sat and pondered his strange dream. There was much about it that he didn't understand-the curious glass desk, the sparsely furnished room in which it stood, some of the words that Edward Oxford had uttered-yet it seemed vividly
