She stopped, looked down at her hands, and the muscles at the sides of her jaw pulsed.
She flexed her fingers and went on, “This invisible presence introduced itself as Abdu El Yezdi. I could not converse with him, for as I say, he appropriated my inner voice in order to address me. At first, he spoke only in my dreams, assuring me that he was real, would not harm me, was my friend, but required my assistance in order to achieve a great purpose. He then started to communicate during my waking hours, though when he did so, I would inevitably slip into a trance. He told me that The Assassination of Queen Victoria was never meant to happen; that it had been caused by a man who stepped out of his own position in history and into ours.”
“What?” Burton interrupted. “I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
“Bear with me, Sir Richard; I shall try to explain.” She ruminated for a few seconds before asking, “Will you consider that in every circumstance there is inherent at least one alternate action? For example, one can respond to an opportunity or challenge with acceptance or refusal; one can react to an event aggressively, passively, evasively, or engagingly; one can choose to walk straight on, or turn back, or go to the left, or to the right.”
Burton gave a curt nod of acknowledgement.
“In a coherent world,” she said, “the option selected obliterates the rest; the alternatives may exist for a little while longer, but as the consequences of the decision taken develop, those alternatives become irrelevant and inapplicable.”
She waited for Burton to again indicate that he comprehended. He said, “Very well. Pray, continue.”
“When the most appropriate decisions are taken—that is to say, the most appropriate within the context of the situation—a chain of consequences develops far into the future, knitting together with other chains to form a strong cohesive whole.” Countess Sabina place her right elbow on the table with her forearm pointing straight upward and her hand fisted. “Like the trunk of a tree,” she said, holding the pose, “from which no deviations sprout, for inappropriate decisions are either corrected by subsequent ones or their consequences lead nowhere, while the alternate decisions—the ones not taken—have no consequences at all.” She lifted her arm slightly then banged her elbow back down to emphasise the verticality of her forearm. “This is what we call history.”
Burton thought of Darwin and murmured, “You propose a sort of natural selection, wherein decisions are a response to context, and consequences evolve, and only the fittest of them survive to contribute to the ongoing narrative?”
“Good!” the countess exclaimed. “You have it, sir! You have it! But make no mistake—there are no moralities or ethics involved. An appropriate decision isn’t necessarily a good or right or nice one. It is merely the decision whose consequences will survive for the longest. Time has no virtue.”
“Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,” Burton quoted.
“Precisely so.” Again, she raised and thudded down her elbow. “This, as I say, is the mechanism of a coherent world.” She suddenly splayed her fingers wide. “But The Assassination caused history to divide into branches. There is no more coherence.”
“Why?”
“Because there was interference from outside the context; from a presence that bore no relation at all to the chains of causes and effects that were active at just after six o’clock on the tenth of June 1840; from a man whose rightful place was in the far, far future.”
Burton momentarily closed his eyes and tried to digest this. When he opened them, Countess Sabina was still fixed in her pose.
“A man from the future,” she repeated, “who somehow travelled backward through time to observe the failure of The Assassination, only to find that his presence changed the outcome. Existence bifurcated. There were now two histories. In one—the original—Edward Oxford failed to shoot the queen. In the other—in our version—he didn’t.”
“Was Abdu El Yezdi the man?” Burton whispered.
“No. The traveller was a descendent of the assassin, Oxford, and was called by the same name.”
“But how could Oxford have descendants? He was killed at the scene. He had no children.”
“In our history, yes. In the original, no.”
Burton gestured weakly for the countess to stop. She waited patiently, holding her pose, while he struggled to process the revelation. When he indicated that he was ready for more, she went on:
“The traveller was in a bind. He couldn’t return to his own time, for his own ancestor was dead, meaning he no longer existed there. This paradox, along with prolonged exposure to what, for him, was the distant past, drove him insane. He died.”
For a third time, Countess Sabina bumped her elbow, drawing attention back to her raised forearm and widely spread digits.
“It made no difference. The bifurcation he caused had already broken the mechanism of Time. Paths not taken and decisions not made no longer faded into non-existence but instead gave rise to multiple consequences.” She wiggled her fingers. “History splits and splits and splits again, and the farther these multiplicities grow from the path the single original history should have taken, the weaker the barrier between them becomes. Picture it as a tree, if you will, whose branches extend away from the trunk and keep dividing until they blur into a mass of twigs.”
Burton raised a hand in protest. “Wait. Let us suppose I accept all this. Where does Abdu El Yezdi fit into it? Who is he? What is this great purpose he spoke of?”
“I do not know who he is. He’s as much a mystery to me as he is to you. But I know he’s aware of you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he told me many times that I would one day meet you, and that I must tell you to seek out the poet, who will lead you to the truth.”
“You refer to Algernon Swinburne?”
She responded with a small shrug. “As for Abdu El Yezdi’s purpose—his use of me, and now of your brother, as a means to communicate with the government and influence individuals—it is to prevent a war.”
“A war between whom?”
“Everybody. It will engulf the planet and barely a single country will escape it. He has seen it, sir. In some histories it comes sooner, in others later, but in all of them it comes, and entire generations of men are lost. Only in ours, perhaps, will it be avoided, for Abdu El Yezdi has guided us carefully.”
“Maybe so,” Burton responded grimly, “but he doesn’t guide us any more. He’s fallen silent.”
“I am aware of that.” She finally lowered her arm. “It is because the storm comes. The continuing deterioration of Time has made it possible for—” a tremor ran through her and she hugged herself, “—for a man to hop from one twig to another; to break through from his own version of existence into ours. You saw the lights that turned night into day. They marked his arrival. He is in our world, and Abdu El Yezdi must remain hidden from him.”
“This man is the storm? Who is he? What does he want?”
The seer shook her head wordlessly.
“Then where is he? How can I locate him?”
Countess Sabina’s lips stretched against her teeth. She rocked back and forth. When she answered, her voice was hoarse and quavered. “If I reach out my mind to search, he will find me. Others have attempted it. They sensed his arrival and tried to contact him. They died.”
Burton remembered the newspaper headlines—the twelve dead mediums.
“But Abdu El Yezdi has made me stronger than most,” she went on. “And you are you, so I shall try.”
“Wait! ‘You are you’—what do you mean by that? What is my significance in this affair?”