Ghosts of things that smite and thoughts that sicken

Hunt and hound thee down to death and shame.

The unaccountable sense that he was not in an East London factory but deep in Central Africa swept through him. The Mountains of the Moon!

Eyes of hours whose paces halt or quicken

Read in blood-red lines of loss and blame,

Writ where cloud and darkness round it thicken,

Time, thy name.

Was the rose reciting the verse? A talking flower?

Nay, but rest is born of me for healing,

—So might haply time, with voice represt,

Speak: is grief the last gift of my dealing?

Nay, but rest.

Petals unfurling. Ages unfolding. Time, curling around itself, opening its secrets.

Petal layered upon petal. History layered upon history.

What am I seeing?

The Beetle’s voice: “The world’s narrative.”

All the world is wearied, east and west,

Tired with toil to watch the slow sun wheeling,

Twelve loud hours of life’s laborious quest.

Burton tried to distinguish between his vision and his imagination. He couldn’t. Jumbled sensations bubbled and swirled through him. A rose, a poet, a rhythm, an utterance that chanted through eternity, sprouting from within itself—the seed as the verbalisation, the shoot as the emerging verse, the blossom as signification, the pollination as cognisance, the fruit of understanding, again the seed.

Time is a form of expression? A language? A lyric? The words sung to a tune? A dance?

Pulsating colours. Stratified harmonies. Invasive fragrances.

Eyes forespent with vigil, faint and reeling,

Find at last my comfort, and are blest,

Not with rapturous light of life’s revealing—

Nay, but rest.

Slowly, the words metamorphosed. They became flavours. The flavours became colours. The colours became sensations. The sensations became numbers.

An equation.

It pulsed away from him, and the farther it withdrew, the more of itself it revealed, until he could see the entirety; a megalithic, looping, paradoxical mathematical structure of such esoteric intricacy that, for a moment, he viewed it with an utter lack of comprehension.

Then it slotted into place, and he understood it as Edward Oxford had understood it.

He opened his eyes, looked at the bedroom ceiling, and thought about the attempted assassination. Turning his head, he gazed at the woman who lay sleeping beside him—the woman who’d been his wife for the past two years.

She was pregnant.

I must understand my roots, he thought. Else the branches may bear bad fruit.

Later, in his laboratory, he shaved thin slivers from the side of the black diamond, hooked them up to a BioProc, marvelled at the output, and gradually realised what the data meant. His equation may have been labyrinthine in its complexity, but filtered through a BioProc, it also became practical.

He could do it.

He could travel back.

He could watch.

Sir Richard Francis Burton momentarily opened his eye. He saw red jungle but didn’t comprehend it.

Burton? Who is Burton? My name is Edward Oxford.

His eyelid slid shut, and it was six months later. During that period, he’d constructed a suit of fish-scale batteries; had connected the shards of diamond to a chain of CellComps and BioProcs, forming the heart of the main control unit—a device he named a Nimtz generator—and had embedded an AugCom and BioProcs enhanced with powdered black diamond into a helmet. It acted as an interface between his brain and the generator and would also protect him from the deep psychological shock he suspected might affect a person who stepped too far out of their native segment of history.

If the prototype worked as planned, its various elements could later be created at a cellular level and coded directly into his body. Such an augmentation could never be made public. There was only one black diamond—

There are three.

—and he could see no way to replicate its unique qualities. As it was, in order to integrate it with his biological functions, he’d have to powder some of the gem and tattoo it into his skin—a primitive solution and, obviously, one that couldn’t be applied to the entire population.

Besides, what would happen if everyone in the world could travel through time?

So, no bio-integration for the moment. And no tattooing. Just the clunky old-school technology—a thing he would wear—and if the experiment worked, he’d consider the next step afterwards.

By now, the project had kept him out of the public eye for a considerable period, and journalists were clamouring for another interview. Not wanting to arouse their suspicions, he eventually conceded. After explaining that he was working on a new theory of botanic integration, he was asked the usual questions. Did the recording of information directly into individuals’ DNA—which had commenced a century ago—mark a new step in evolution? With the old computer technologies now completely supplanted by cellular manipulation, could the human body itself be regarded as a machine? Had the replacement of the NewWeb with the Aether resulted in a new understanding of botanic sentience, and what were the implications? Might that sentience be incorporated into human consciousness?

He answered distractedly, his mind all the while considering the gravitational constants to which his calculations had to be tethered, else his jump through time would also become a disastrous jump into the far reaches of space.

Then it came again. “How does it feel to single-handedly change history?”

He offered exactly the same reply as before. “I haven’t changed history. History is the past.” Then he chuckled, and there was an edge to the sound, and the following day it was reported that Edward Oxford was obviously working too hard and needed a holiday.

Two weeks after everything else was complete, he hit upon a ridiculously simple solution to the last remaining difficulty. When the bubble of energy generated by the Nimtz formed around the suit, it was essential that it touched nothing but air, else it would carve a chunk out of whatever it was in contact with, and the shock of that could seriously injure him. Initially, Burton thought he’d have to jump off a bridge to achieve this, but then in a moment of mad inspiration, he designed boots fitted with two-foot-high spring-loaded stilts. Whimsical they may have been, but they solved the problem. Leap high into the air. Jump through time. Don’t take anything with you.

On the first day of February in the year 2202, he told his wife what he intended to do.

She rested a hand on her distended belly and said, “I’d rather you waited until our child is born.”

“Because you fear for me?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There’s no danger. If the coordinates I set are inside or contiguous with a solid object at the destination point, the device will automatically readjust them.”

“But what if you do something that interferes with events as they happened?”

“I have no intention of doing anything except watch my ancestor attempt to kill Queen Victoria then move a day or so ahead of the event to chat with him. I’ll listen to whatever he has to say but shan’t attempt to dissuade him. Besides, if I was to do anything to alter history, then time must possess some sort of mechanism to correct the interference, else we’d know about it, wouldn’t we?”

“How?”

“There would be an anomaly of some sort.”

She voiced her doubt with a hum, and added, “And what if your ancestor attacks you? He’s obviously capable of violence.”