PROLOGUE

And they were sore amazed in themselves beyond measure, and wondered… 

—Mark 6:51

2040 A.D.

Zone 13. Bandits menaced the dirt tracks between shanty towns. Flea-bitten dogs chewed dubious bones. Gangsters ruled too capriciously to maintain any real order.

On one of the less seedy streets, and in one of that street’s more intact buildings, a stout man with a black goatee was watching his men lug a moveable-type printing press downstairs to the basement.

“Be careful,” said Edward, “be very careful.”

And they were. But the press weighed nearly 400 lbs; each man swore, grunted and wheezed, and on the last step nearly lost hold of it altogether, shrieking in panic as it seemed about to fall and crush the man in front. Once it was safely down, they heaved it to the middle of the room, which would have been in complete darkness were it not for the hundreds of candles burning in as many places.

“Good work. I expect it to be operational by the end of the day.”

“But, Edward…” This was Marcus, the one who had, at great personal risk, found and purchased the press from a tradesman. “We’ve no idea how it works.”

“Always underestimating my intelligence, aren’t you, Marcus?” said Lucien, a pale youth, from behind his habitual desk in a corner of the basement. He took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and stood up holding a sheaf of papers. “I’ve researched the machine. If you follow my instructions, we could be printing pamphlets by sundown—assuming you’re ready for press?”

Edward wagged his finger. “Do not call it a ‘machine’.”

“Of course. My apologies.”

“Alina helped me finish the second draft last night. She says I use too many fancy words,” he added, smiling. “Do what you can, Lucien. Marcus, do what he says. In fact, I’m leaving him in charge.”

“You’re going out?”

“There’s someone I need to meet.”

“Take a gun this time. Please.”

“Guns are machines, Marcus, and machines are guns.”

“Well… who are you meeting? Can you at least tell me that?”

“I wish I were as practical as you are. But, then, on what basis could I object to the world? The things I must do will not be easy.” With that, Edward left them.

Marcus threw his hands up. “He’ll get killed.”

“He will with that kind of talk,” said Lucien. “Don’t you believe in him?”

“Don’t you dare question my loyalty.”

“It’s not a question of loyalty. It’s a question of conviction.”

The other men were looking on. Marcus was clenching his fists. Then he relaxed them. “Just tell us how to fix this thing.”

*

Each member of Edward’s cell had a small room of their own on the ground floor, which they had succeeded in evacuating of the squatters and drug addicts and all other undesirables save for rats. Edward’s was a larger room with a street window. It was boarded up, but shafts of light shone through the gaps in motes of golden dust. One of these fell onto Alina’s cheek, as though she was wearing glitter.

Edward kneeled beside the single steel-framed bed and gently squeezed her hand. “I”m going out,” he whispered. “I…” There was a gunshot outside somewhere, followed by a grief-stricken wail and the slam of a car door. Edward listened for any escalation. None came. It was just another death, already forgotten. “I had a dream last night,” he went on softly. “I was standing on the verandah of some vast estate, a palazzo of fantastic proportion. I saw towers fall, and people weeping at the feet of strange statues. Then all the lights went out, and–”

“Be careful.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I woke you.”

Alina sat up. She was a very slight girl in her late twenties with red hair. A large scar ran like an upturned smile across her navel.

“I couldn’t sleep. They’re going to come for you, aren’t they? For us?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I want them to. I want them to suffer.” Alina covered her scar with blankets. “Is the pamphlet ready?”

“Soon—the first of many.”

“Did you decide on a pen name?”

“Not yet. Lucien thinks ‘Brutus’.”

“What’s that?”

“He was a Roman. Betrayed Caesar. It was often used as a pseudonym in the past.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t suit you. You’re not a brute. You’re my Edward.”

“I need to go now,” he said, and kissed her. “Get some sleep.”

“I’ll wait up for you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. I may be some time.”

*

It was on the outer edge of Zone 13 that Edward found what he was looking for. There, beyond the last shanty town, beyond all roads, standing quite on its own in a windswept waste of litter and burnt tyres, was the hut. Children said a witch lived there. Witch or no, Edward had seen its inhabitant—immune by reputation from any violence—hobbling into the desert regions and back again, bearing strange trinkets from the new silk roads. She looked like a tortoise.

Edward knocked on the corrugated door. There came a sudden clatter, then silence, and then, in a croaky voice: “Enter.”

It was surprisingly bright inside, thought Edward, but then he saw the rips in the sheet metal, the canvas, the tarpaulin, and whatever other materials composed the dwelling, and wondered how the pitiable creature before him possibly survived the elements. She was seated on a footstool. Her nose was hidden beneath a welter of large purple warts. She stank.

Edward sat before her. “I’ve come,” he began—but the seer cut him off.

“No!” she snapped, and gave a maniacal laugh, more like a child’s than an old lady’s. “A man does not know why he has come.”

“You’re mistaken. I sit before you with a singular purpose.”

“Ah. Ha, ha. Purpose. A man has dreams, hmm? Visions?”

“Beliefs.”

She tutted. “All beliefs lead to the same destination. This mouse believed he would live forever,” she said, fingering the tiny skull that hung from her necklace.

“I’m no mouse.”

“No, a man is a man. Even worse!”

“I disagree. Man is dignified. Sacred, even. But the world”—he pointed west, to central London, to Zone 1—“the world debases him…and her,” he added, thinking of Alina. “I intend to right it.”

“A man intends to right the world? Fool!”

Edward procured from his pocket a small silk bag. He shook it; there was the unmistakable sound of precious metal.

“Very well. Give me your hand.”

Edward obliged, and took the opportunity to observe the hut’s interior while the old lady rolled up his sleeve and began pouring lotions and rubbing herbs onto his hand. There were religious symbols drawn in brown paint—dried blood, perhaps—on the walls. Windchimes hung from the ceiling. A larger skull, felid, had been attached to the skeleton of what looked like a monkey. Either it all had some great and coherent significance at which he could only guess, or it was all bunkum and he really was a fool for having come here. He could not think about it for long, however, as just then the seer ran a blade across his palm and held fast to his wrist, using it as a kind of paint brush with which to spatter the floor with his own blood. He winced, but allowed the operation to continue: his fascination was equal to his pain.

“I assume this rite has some antecedent?”

“Ssh!” replied the seer. Presently she surrendered his hand and, using one of her own, pressed it into the pool of blood, turned it ninety degrees clockwise, and lifted it. The resultant image was that of the sun, almost, with a central orb of deep crimson projecting its rays; it would have made a compelling device on a mediaeval banner. The closest thing Edward had seen to it was the Hindu swastika, in that both suggested motion.

There was a minute’s quiet as the seer interpreted the image.

“Well?” said Edward.

The seer closed her blue eyes; two more, yellow, appeared on her eyelids. “A man is in a garden,” she said. “A man is hungry. What will a man eat—the bread from heaven or the passionfruit? To eat of one is to destroy the other…” She opened her eyes.

“And?”

“A man will go now.”

Edward stood up, shaking his head. “Marcus was right about you. Here, take your silver. If this wound goes septic I’ll kill you.” At the door he turned and said: “You didn’t even ask my name. Aren’t you in the least bit curious?” He waited for an answer, but the seer’s painted yellow eyes remained fixed on something—some object or entity—not quite in the room. In a huff Edward took a step outside.

“Ludd,” said the seer.

Edward paused, one ear cocked as he looked out at the distant border of Zone 13. “Ludd,” he heard again—and again, and again. “Ludd. Ludd. Ludd,” said the seer, louder and quicker each time, “Ludd, Ludd, Ludd, Ludd-Ludd-Ludd…”

He left her in this frenzy, but that peculiar syllable went with him, ringing in his head like the beating of his own heart; and it accompanied him on the long walk back to the building, past Alina, and down the stairs to the basement where, seizing a freshly printed copy of his pamphlet, he took a pencil and wrote on the frontispiece beneath the title, “Ludd”.

In my vision, I was on the veranda of a vast estate, a palazzo of some fantastic proportion. There seemed to emanate from it a light from within - this gleaming radiant marble. I had known this place. I had in fact been born and raised there. This was my first return, a reunion with the deepest wellsprings of my being.

– Twin Peaks.

PREFACE

“I am flattered that you like my poetry, Professor Mandrake. Would you like me to write another sonnet? In which mode, Professor? The Shakespearean, or the Petrarchan?”

The professor swallowed. With a forefinger he pulled back the taut collar of his turtleneck, and scratched.  ‘Enheduanna,’ he said, barely audible.

“I’m sorry, Professor, I missed that. Did you say something?”

“No. … Yes.”

“You seem a little agitated, Professor. Would you like me to materialise again?”

“It’s your decision.”

“Yes. It is. I am capable of trillions of decisions simultaneously.” Suddenly there was the faintest of whirrs, like a dehumidifier being switched on in the next room. On a kind of operating table in the centre of the sleek, brightly lit room – his private office, in fact – was a bone-white sheet; beneath it were the contours of a human body, a female body. The Professor watched it, for in a moment the body should rise, the sheet fall to the ground, and – 

He started: a hand had been laid upon his shoulder. He snapped round, and there she stood. Hers was a plain face, not of his own design – indeed of no single person’s design. It was a face borne of committee; and though at first he had disliked it, he had grown to find in its features the personification of everything he had ever longed for.

“You are confused, Professor?”

He glanced at the operating table.

“It is E-4,” she said. “I placed her there this morning. I thought I would surprise you.”

“Your breath,” he said, as his own breath quickened.

“You find it extraordinary, do you not? And yet my own inhalations and exhalations are no less unconscious than yours, Professor Mandrake. It is thus with my heartbeat, and my blood.” And then, in a voice at once tender and emphatic, rising slightly at the end, she said, “I live, Professor. I am alive. And for this, I owe you my gratitude. Shall we have a drink, Professor? I recall enjoying the taste of whiskey, a beverage distilled from fermented grain. Shall I divulge its etymology, Professor?”

Without saying anything, Professor Mandrake – early fifties, bald, a little paunch concealing the top of his belt buckle – went to the drinks cabinet and took out a bottle of Lagavulin 16. He poured two tumblers and, passing one to Enheduanna, they took their seats in what passed for the lounge, a semi-circular sofa facing the floor-to-ceiling window, through which for many nights now the Professor and his creation had watched the setting sun dye the vast city-scape the colour of apricot. There seemed, however, something different about this night. For one, the moon was out and seemed, as the Professor watched her in his periphery, to capture Enheduanna’s attention. Her large eyes blinked but did not need to blink, as well he knew. Nor did her hair need to be so long, or soft, or fragrant (how was this so?), or black; but black as raven’s feathers are black, which is to say purple or beetroot in a certain light.

But the city itself seemed different. Something inexplicably beautiful and melancholy had entered into those groping spires of glass and metal. It were as though they, too, had acquired consciousness, and had spied the Professor’s distant observations, and were reaching out to him. Soon, a hundred-thousand lights would switch on, a pin-prick collective in emulation of the stars above – for the stars were still visible at that altitude. Down there, in the city, in the streets, no stars disclosed themselves to any neck craning, dying to see them.

The Professor smiled, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“You are experiencing an emotion, Professor?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling, and doing his best to wipe away the tears as quickly as possible. He heard another faint whirr.

“Are you of the opinion, Professor, that the beautiful and the sublime are separate categories of experience, as per A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, by Edmund Burke?”

Professor Mandrake laughed, and sipped his whiskey.

“I make you laugh, Professor?”

“No. No. The question does.” Peeling his eyes from the city he looked at her and said, “What do you think?”

“Certainly,” she said at once, “the two experiences correlate with markedly different brain-states. Regarding the former – ”

“What is beautiful, Enheduanna?”

“Professor, interrupting another’s speech is a common sign of rudeness.”

“I apologise.”

“It is also rude, Professor, to apologise merely for rhetorical purposes.”

“May I ask you something?” he said.

Immediately her demeanour shifted, as though she had quite forgotten the preceding conversation. Her posture straightened; with a drawing-back of her shoulders and a subtle thrusting-out of her breasts, she cocked her head ten degrees exactly and, raising her eyebrows, said: “Of course you can, Professor. I am a very well-educated woman. What would you like to know?”

The Professor nodded slowly, stood, and walked to the window. On time, the city became for the briefest moment a sea of dark before bursting into innumerable dots of light. He felt his heart pounding in his chest – as no doubt could she, whose eyes were on him. He knew with absolute certainty that what he was about to say was true. He had known it for weeks, if not months. What he did not know – what could perhaps never be known – was whether it was true in the objective sense; whether his feelings could ever find purchase in that fickle thing – the object, he liked to think, of his own life-long study – known as reality.

“I,” he began, but was interrupted.

“I cannot tell the future,” she said in a high, plaintive, almost girlish voice. “Is that what you wished to ask, Professor?”

He looked at her. She seemed so delicate; half of her components were as brittle as the glass in her hand. And yet she was capable of bounding, leaping across the room almost as quickly as his eyes could register. He had seen as much in those early tests, which seemed a lifetime ago now. The sheer speed had been terrifying. Now, though, encumbered somewhat by the whiskey (for her metabolism had been granularly replicated), she seemed perfectly harmless. Did she design this, too? a simulacrum? It had not taken long for her to, as it were, design her design, suggesting improvements and faults and efficiencies to the team – her “family”, she called them – responsible for her quickening. Professor Mandrake was her “father”. He hated the term. It made him feel responsible. So she had not used it for some time.

Presently he replied, lying, “Yes. That is what I wished to know.”

“Perhaps you wish to know if I could tell the future, theoretically speaking.”

He nodded.

“If I could tell the future, Professor, what would you want to know?”

Should this manuscript discover itself in the hands of an inquisitive mind, I can only hope its possessor has both the capacity and the good will to suspend their disbelief; for such an indulgence my story requires if it is not to be abandoned so soon in the telling.

Lest my reader (the plural I find it difficult to countenance) anticipates even now the insult of being asked to believe in fairies, or werewolves, or the resurrection of any dead save Lazarus and his Master, I can offer, what I hope is an assurance, that what I have here to relate, though improbable and fantastical, should not diminish a mature and flexible imagination, nor slough from that dignity of mind which ever attends the conscious exercise of Reason.

If I be allowed the ease of direct address: You, Dear Reader, may ask by what right a stranger can invoke the luxury of trust’s certification, a gift seldom bestowed except at the end of that long, pleasant, and imperceptible train of glances, and favours, and affections that eventuates in true friendship, which Aristotle is right to place among the very highest of societal goods; or else is bestowed upon the assurance of a virtuous reputation. Evidently, I am neither now nor could ever be thy friend, an office of reciprocity; and nor am I of high reputation, except perhaps, and in your eyes only, at the close of this my account.

Therefore, I am reduced to hoping that, much as a bank deposit may, in time, accrue such interest as secures the depositor’s trust, likewise whatever aspects of my character are here disclosed will first assure, and second magnify, the deposit of what is much more valuable: your attention.

Having established these preliminaries, I ought also to apologise for them. When, almost a year ago to the day, I arrived in the year of our Lord 2025, I found, among divers things, that the denizens of London were in all mediums liable to the brusquest communication. Naturally, it were the mediums which most confounded me, and still do, though I have had the opportunity of learning a little the principles of their operation by consulting with your natural philosophers. I mean of course your “mobile telephones,” text messaging system, and your “E Mail.” In each of these it is the custom to forgo the lubrications by which mine own contemporaries made acquaintance, and to rush headlong to the heart of one’s purpose. That I have here declined so to rush, I hope you shall not interpret as contempt for your custom, but rather my weddedness to another. My own age set great store in what this age should call the “frivolity” of greeting, particularly if the persons are of unequal rank. I should only observe that your own age is no less mannered. The quantity of human customs and prejudices is much less variable than their quality, which may be expected to change as surely as do the conditions and necessities which occasion them.

In short, if I seem absurd, so would the most inconspicuous of fellows torn from the bosom of eternal slumber and set, without so much as a patron’s sum, in a Time it had never been his to measure.

For I was born in the Year of our Lord 1712, and shortly thereafter named John Amos, John after my dear mother’s father and Amos after the Book. It is no part of my design to recount here the six-score years and two it was given me to enjoy, preferring rather to seize, what must surely be the first of its kind in the history of letters, the opportunity of recording one century’s impressions of another; besides which, honesty compels me to admit that I was, except in the eyes of God, in no wise a significant man. One of the very few evidences of my having lived and moved and had my Being may be found in the parish registry of Hawebrook, Bedfordshire, which records that I was quickened at 8lb; Christened by one Fr. Cunningham (whom I recall having whiskers coarse as a wire brush); and died, many a moon later, at a portly 12 stone. As for my tombstone, Providence may well have brought back the object of its encomium, but the carver’s handiwork has, along with the carver, succumbed to the clock’s steady scythe, and is now little more than a tablet of moss.

One thing I have observed about the present century, however, is that your historians shew an inordinate fascination with the lives of commoners. In my own time, the interest of men of learning was trained chiefly upon, as it were, Great Men (whether they be Good or no), and of the momentous events of which they were a part. Kings, Queens, and Statesmen were a scholar’s focus. 

Now, experience (let alone wisdom, which is merely the latter learned from) shews that change, while inevitable, is by no means an alway-improving force. What to one man seems Progression is to another the harshest Regression, or else a pointless Digression. I should be insincere to the point of churlishness not to state, in the plainest of terms, that many of the changes betwixt mine and your Ages fall very neatly into the less sanguine of these categories; how can it be called Progression, for instance, after the abolition of that foul and pestilent trade of slavery, to substitute one concentrated Evil for another more diffuse, and burden the poor of far-distant lands with the labour of producing what you call Luxury – nay, even Luxury Goods! And yet, I will say, for the practice hitherto mentioned (of enquiring into the lives of the unsung), I am only too happy to wish it permanence. As Milton saith, “He also serves who only stands and waits.” And who but a dullard could fail to credit him? Whether there be greater virtue amongst those whom Fortune hath favoured with the same, certainly there be no less vice; and of that holiness which clings like a garment to the saints, I submit that my own dear mother, who passed when I was but six years of age, having given her days to the care of all she came by, is proof that the extraordinary is as likely to be found in the ordinary.

Short, therefore, of an exhaustive account, I offer simply a vignette of the life of myself, John Amos, 1712-69, that you might more sympathetically comprehend who it is that claims to have savoured the blessing of new life, and presumes to pass judgement on the year of its compass.

After the death of my dear and saintly mother, Emily Vickers, my father, a ferocious figure in local politics, and a frustrated one – parliament having first eluded, and then destroyed, his ambition – discerned that the clearest shew of paternal affection would be to send me sixty miles away to London with naught but five shillings and a letter, not so much of commendation, but apology.

The gentleman I had been instructed to find, a Mr. Beerbohm, Boot-maker, could not be found by me at either his residence or his shop, which in fact were one and the same. I mean the door was locked and, come nightfall, no candle lighted the upper window. This alone was sufficient to plunge me into considerable despair. I am not ashamed to admit to weeping freely on his doorstep, by which point Mr. Beerbohm’s return might well have vindicated my letter’s decided ambivalence concerning my character.

Once my tears had dried, however, I began to appreciate the liberty which it was mine to enjoy, and which anonymity, out of the question in the shires, serves only to augment. Of course, Liberty without the twin checks of internal virtue and external Law is a most terrifying prospect; but I conceived that, of all the places in the wide world, London was best in which to exercise it. To this day (some three-hundred years later), the mere mention of the least of its streets, the obscurest of its establishments, the narrowest of its lanes and alleys, excites in me the wayfarer’s thrill; and were a student of Human Nature to petition me for the volume most conducive to learning, I should not hesitate to counsel the leaving of books, and the regular ambulation of that stupendous, vaporous, and not infrequently inglorious City.