“Your cars appear more efficient than those from my time,” Farren noted, “but why are they moving so slowly?”
“You’ll see,” Bendyshe said mysteriously.
They crossed the river and drove in a north-easterly direction. Though the vehicle’s windows were opaque from the outside, they were transparent from within, and its passengers stared out in awe at the buildings that soared to either side of the road. High above the city, a network of thin bridges and walkways spanned the distances between the spindly towers, and many were hung with garish flags, vaguely reminiscent of the Union Jack but made much more complex by additional stripes and colours.
The king’s agent gazed out of the window and wondered how he could fight an intelligence around which a whole society was forming. This London was virtually unrecognisable to him. Its citizens, who thronged the pavements in astonishing numbers—the population appeared to have increased tenfold—were all dressed in grey. The streets along which they moved, illuminated by electric lights despite it being early morning, were drab and characterless. There were none of the hawkers and performers of his time, no stalls or braziers, no dollymops or beggars, no ragamuffins or newsboys. It was all steel and glass and crowds of grey, grey, grey.
And there were constables everywhere, tottering along on their stilts, their pig faces now hidden behind blank white masks, their limbs longer and more human in form than their 1968 or 2022 counterparts, so they much more resembled the Spring Heeled Jacks who’d assaulted him back in 1860.
“It’s a nightmare,” he murmured.
“You’re not wrong,” Farren agreed.
They steered into Buckingham Palace Road, drove between Hyde and Green Parks—the whole area struck Burton as being oddly dark despite the clear sky and open spaces—and proceeded along the Mall. The thoroughfare, once the tree-lined haunt of the well-to-do, was now made distinct only by virtue of the park on the right. On its left, there were the same towers, the same glass, the same grey, and the same patrolling pig men.
Burton shook his head in disbelief.
This isn’t real. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t look real. It’s like a desert mirage, seemingly solid, seemingly close, but when you try to reach it, it moves away from you. What is going on here? What kind of Jahannam has the Empire become?
Up Charing Cross Road to Tottenham Court Road, and there the vehicle came to a halt, stopping among many similar machines in a rectangular plot of land beside an extraordinarily tall cylindrical edifice that appeared to have been constructed from diamond-shaped windows and little else.
“What ho! What ho! This all feels oddly familiar,” Swinburne noted as he clambered out.
“New Centre Point,” Bendyshe said. “Built on the site of the old one, which was bombed during the uprisings. It’s a monitoring station.”
“What does it monitor?” the poet asked.
“People.”
Odessa Penniforth leaned out of the vehicle and said, “I’ll wait for you here. Enjoy the revelation, everyone.”
“I wish I knew what was going on,” Swinburne exclaimed. “My hat! Do they still have public houses in 2130?”
“They do,” Bendyshe confirmed. “The government came close to making them illegal but then realised that people speak before they think when under the influence.”
“Must you keep calling upon your hat, Algernon?” Trounce complained. “Confound it! Why does no one wear them anymore? I feel naked without my bowler.”
Farren looked this way and that, frowned at the hissing traffic, and muttered, “Is that music?”
“I hear it too,” Herbert Wells said. “In the background.”
“Muzak,” Bendyshe said. “Ubiquitous, bland and characterless.” He said to Farren, “You thought rock and roll would conquer the world. It didn’t. Muzak did. It’s the universal temper suppressant. An insidious tranquilliser.”
“A horrendous hum,” Swinburne added. “A detrimental drone.”
Bendyshe nodded his agreement. “A puerile pacifier.”
Farren gritted his teeth and fisted his hands. “Oh man,” he growled. “What I wouldn’t give for a Deviants gig, right here, right now!”
“You’d be shot dead on the spot,” Bendyshe said.
Farren suddenly relaxed and chuckled. “Yeah, that was always the risk when I got on stage.”
Staying close together they moved away from the minibus and joined the pedestrians flocking into Oxford Street. To Burton, it felt just as if they were joining the protest again, except the people—rather than being a noisy and colourful gathering with a purpose—were nothing more than innumerable and near-silent citizens squeezing along a highway too narrow for such a dense crowd.
Sadhvi walked at his side. Wells and Swinburne were just in front; both small, both squeaky-voiced, both looking eagerly back and forth, weathering the assault on their senses. Behind the king’s agent, Trounce and Farren made quiet comments to one another; an odd combination, a police detective and a proto-revolutionary, united by a mutual disapproval of this confusing future world.
Guided by Thomas Bendyshe and jostled by the city’s denizens, they shouldered past glass-faced shop fronts and comprehended nothing of what was displayed within, saw peculiar vehicles slide by and had no understanding of what their function might be, read signs and posters the words of which signified nothing to them, and were, without respite, subjected to the steady beat and sinuous melodies of soft and relentlessly insipid “Muzak.”
Burton looked into the faces of the people and observed an incongruous mix of contented smiles and shifty eyes. Some, who were either tall or short or thin or fat, somehow left him with the impression they were just the opposite of what they appeared, as if a slender passerby was secretly obese, or a diminutive person a covert giant. This, together with the unaccustomed cleanliness of the city, gave the sense that he was among actors and moving amid a stage’s cardboard scenery. There was no depth. No connection. No meaning.
Why was the traffic moving at such a sluggish velocity? Why did the quiet hiss of the vehicles, the subdued murmur of the pedestrians, and the steady low drone of the Muzak, amount to so much silence? Where was the life?
“The shadows,” Sadhvi whispered.
“What about them?” he asked.
“They don’t match.”
She was right. The many electric street lamps, cutting through the permanent gloom at the base of the towers, endowed every individual with multiple shadows. For the most part, due to the crush of people, these couldn’t be seen separately, but occasionally there came a break in the crowd and the shadows were made visible. Burton saw them and was horrified. Most were normal but many were misshapen blots or spiked puddles or stringy smears or snarled scribbles—not at all the contours of human beings.
“By Allah’s beard!” he hissed. “What are we looking at?”
Wells glanced back at him and made a gesture, obviously having noticed the same. Burton responded with a curt nod and swallowed nervously.
They walked on. The king’s agent kept feeling things bumping against his boots, as if the pavement was as littered as those of the old East End, but when he looked down, there was nothing there.
Now and then, he became aware of apparently sourceless sounds—creaks and snaps and groans, the clip clop of horses’ hooves, the clank of a misaligned crankshaft, a hiss of pressurised steam—as though noises from his own London were somehow penetrating into this.
It’s my expectations, he thought. They’re imposing what I’m familiar with onto this wholly unfamiliar city.
He was unnerved and disoriented. There was a lump in his throat. He longed to see top hats and canes, parasols and bonnets, hansom cabs and horses, chugging steam engines and wobbling velocipedes.