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Very slowly, Burton replied, “You, Algernon, have gotto be bloody joking.”
“What? What? Why?”
“A flower?”
“Oh! Ha-ha! Not just a flower-a whole bally jungle! What a wheeze, hey?”
“But is it-is it really you?”
The blossom twisted slightly, a gesture like a man angling his head to one side in contemplation. It refilled its air bladders and squeaked:
“Body and spirit are twins; God only knows which is which;
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch.
“More is the whole than a part; but half is more than the whole;
Clearly, the soul is the body; but is not the body the soul?”
With a sudden jerk, the flower dropped until it was just inches from Burton's face.
“Is there something wrong with your memory, old horse?”
“Yes. There's a lot wrong with it. I've spent the past five years trying to piece it together while being pursued, shot at, and bombed.”
“And I suppose you've forgotten the poppy that sprouted from my hand?”
Burton flinched and put a hand to his head as an image flashed into his mind, bringing with it an overwhelming sense of loss. “Bismillah! I had! But I-wait! I think-I think-Culver Cliff!”
Swinburne shivered and rustled. “Unfortunately so.”
With watering eyes, Burton squinted at the surrounding rock face.
“I know this place. There's-”
He looked to his right, to where one of the plant's thick limbs crossed the ground and dug into the surrounding cliff. There was a dark opening in the root-like growth, and he could see that it was hollow.
Disparate recollections slotted together.
“There's a cave,” he said, hoarsely. “It's there! I remember now. A grotto! You killed Count Zeppelin!”
“Yes! The golden arrow of Eros straight into his eyeball! Good old Tom Bendyshe avenged! But the Prussian injected me with that horrible venom of his and the next thing I knew I was falling. It took me an age to grow back out of that pit and into daylight, I can tell you! Lucky for me that Zeppelin fell into it, too. He made very good fertilizer!”
A black pit.
Algernon Swinburne hanging by his fingertips.
A green shoot emerging from the back of the poet's hand. Petals unfurling. A red poppy.
“The poppies,” Burton whispered. “Now I understand.”
“Bloody typical!” the poet trumpeted. “I stretched myself to the absolute giddy limit to signpost the way back here, and you didn't even recognise what the confounded signs meant!”
“I'm sorry, Algy. Something happened to me in that cave-in Lettow-Vorbeck's temple! Yes, I remember now! It's in there, beyond the grotto!”
“Lettow-Vorbeck?” Swinburne asked.
Wells answered, “A German general, Mr. Swinburne. Apparently he's been trying to burn his way through your jungle to find this place.”
“The swine! I felt it, too! Very unpleasant!”
Burton murmured, “I lost my memory in that temple. The shock of your death was part of it, Algy, but there was more. And it ended with me being projected through time.”
Swinburne inflated his bladders, fluttered his petals, and said, “I know. You can imagine my surprise when, after having had nothing but Pox and Malady's foul-mouthed descendants for company for decade after decade, I suddenly saw you come stumbling into this clearing! You were ranting and raving like a Bedlam inmate! I tried to speak to you but you legged it through the gorge and out of the mountains like a man with the devil himself at his heels. By the way, what year is this?”
“I arrived in 1914. It's now 1918.”
“My hat! Really?”
The flower angled upward as if regarding the sky.
“One and two are not one; but one and nothing is two;
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood ca
It turned back to the two men.
“I find it rather difficult to measure time these days. I've had such a different sense of it since I-er-took root, so to speak. It's not at all the way I used to think of it. Can you conceive of time as a thing filled with paradoxes and echoes? What a magnificent poem it would make!
“Once the mastodon was; pterodactyls were common as cocks;
Then the mammoth was God; now is He a prize ox.
“Parallels all things are; yet many of these are askew;
You are certainly I; but certainly I am not you.
“Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock;
Cocks exist for the hen; but hens exist for the cock.
“God, whom we see not, is; and God, who is not, we see;
Fiddle, we know, is diddle, and diddle, we take it, is dee.”
Swinburne arched his thick stalk and shook with a peal of high-pitched laughter. Leaves drifted down from his higher branches.
Wells leaned close to Burton and whispered, “I'm of the opinion that your friend, the giant plant, is rip-roaringly drunk!”
The explorer appeared not to hear the little war correspondent. “Vertical as well as horizontal qualities,” he mumbled to himself. “Who else spoke to me about the nature of time?”
Swinburne loosed a sound that resembled a belch and directed his petals back at Burton.
“But for all my newfound perception,” he said, “upon your appearance, I instantly recognised that you weren't where-or, rather, when-you belong; and I certainly didn't relish the thought of you being out there, beyond the mountains, among the savages.”
“Actually, there aren't many left,” Wells put in. “Most of those that remain are Askaris now.”
Swinburne gave a scornful hiss. “I'm not referring to the Africans, Mr. Wells. I mean the Europeans!”
“Ah. Quite so.”
“The barbarities that have been committed on this continent in the name of one ideology or another, this social policy or that-quite dreadful! And I mean to put an end to it. I shall soon have the strength to make the German vegetation-the red weed and the venomous plants-whither and die. Already I've gained influence over those horrible things the Prussians once employed as vehicles-”
Wells cried out: “Then it was you! You took control of the lurchers! You cleared the route out of Tabora for us!”
“Is that what you call them? Yes, of course it was me. Now I shall use them to rid this land of its armies. My influence is growing, Mr. Wells. My roots will one day reach from coast to coast. And when they do, I shall make a Utopia of Africa!”
“Utopia!” Wells's eyes glistened with hope.
“For as long as this version of history exists, Africa will be an Eden.”
The flower bobbed low, until it was level with their faces.
“But,” it squeaked, “this history should notexist. You have to go back, Richard, and you have to put an end to all such divergences.”
Bertie Wells frowned and looked from the vermillion blossom to Burton and back again. “Mr. Swinburne,” he said, “Richard has explained the phenomenon of alternate histories to me. Why can they not exist concurrently?”
“Time is a complex thing. It is like music. In addition to its rhythm, there is-”
“A melody,” Burton interjected. “Refrains, pitch, timbre, and texture. Time has harmonies, volume, accents, and pauses. It has verses and-Bismillah! I've heard this before-from-from Herbert Spencer!” He looked confused. “But not Herbert Spencer.”
“Good old tin-head!” Swinburne exclaimed. “I wonder what became of him?”
Burton pointed to where Swinburne's hollow root blocked the cave mouth. “He's in there!”
“I say! Is he? Was he then involved in your transportation here?”
The explorer struggled for an answer. Something felt very wrong. The clockwork philosopher had been a friend and ally, yet, for reasons he couldn't determine, when he thought of him now, he felt threatened and distrustful. “He was,” he said, and immediately felt he'd uttered an untruth.