Prelude to Eternity. Brian Stableford
on the floor or on the passengers’ laps. Signor Monticarlo, a short and delicate man with an abundance of sleek black hair and a moustache, was clutching one of his violin-cases. In spite of the capacious bandage she was sporting on her wrist, Carmela, who was a little taller and wirier than her father, was cradling another. Lady Phythian, who seemed rather large by comparison with the two Italians, had a proportionately enormous handbag on her lap. Michael had to maneuver his way to his seat with some skill, and felt that he was easing himself into a narrow gap as he sat down. Compared to conditions in a second-class compartment, however, the plushness and softness of the seats were sheer luxury.
Michael resolved to accept the inevitable with a good grace, sit back, and do his level best to enjoy the hectic journey to come.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY
“Well,” said Quentin Hope, as the train drew away from the platform, while the crowd left behind cheered and waved, “here we are in the very bosom of a mechanical miracle, participating in the latest glory of English science. Long live the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy!”
“”If ever there were a Ship of Fools…,” Escott began, pitching straight in with evident relish—but he was immediately interrupted by Lady Phythian, who had obviously been present at more than one of Hope and Escott’s showpiece arguments and was nursing a faint hope of being able to derail this one.
“I must be mad to have let young Langstrade talk me into this,” the dowager pronounced, striking a melodramatic pose. “At my age, given my delicate health, the excessive speed is sure to prove fatal!”
Lady Phythian certainly did not seem to be in delicate health, in Michael’s non-expert opinion. She was short of stature, but her embonpoint was robust, and her lungs were obviously in very good order indeed. In truth, she was not so very old, although she gave an impression of antiquity. She was probably no more than sixty, if that, but widowhood had conferred a particular stamp of authority upon her attitude and manner as well as her perceived status. As daughters and wives, however rich or aristocratic, Englishwomen were necessarily subservient, but if and when they became widows they acquired an independent authority that was somehow beyond challenge. Michael’s mother had responded to her own widowhood by assuming an exaggerated concern for his well-being, but Lady Phythian had given birth to two sons and a daughter, and had married them all off successfully, so her widowhood had given her a far more general imperiousness reminiscent of the mythical Britannia in whose name the Admiralty ruled the waves.
Michael knew, by virtue of society chatter, that Lady Phythian had been relatively humbly born, as Ariadne Potts, but that she took great pride in the facts that her grandmother had been an Asherson, and that her husband, the late Viscount Phythian, had been a cousin of the Lowthers—a family that included the Earls of Lonsdale as well as several baronets of no particular significance. She had once been the evident social superior of her close friend Millicent Houghton, although the latter had overtaken her when her husband, Harold Langstrade, had been elevated to the peerage as the first Earl of Langstrade, reconnecting his surname to the Yorkshire village from which his ancestors supposedly hailed, and whose ancient manor he had bought from the Lords Office. Michael was not at all surprised, therefore, that Lady Phythian seemed to be looking down at him as he sat by her side, even though he was a head taller than she was. There was no hostility or contempt in her gaze when she deigned to turn in his direction, though; she was evidently reserving her judgment as to whether he was to be placed in the same “naughty boy” category to which she had long ago consigned Hope and Escott.
Michael guessed that the dowager’s objection to high-speed travel was more a matter of conformity to expectation than genuine terror. He knew that there were legions of diehard conservatives in the land, who swore that nothing on Earth would ever tempt them to step aboard a carriage pulled by a steam locomotive. Such people were wont to opine that the human body had not been designed—whether by God or Evolution—to withstand the stresses of movement at such terrifying velocities, and that, in any case, such a mode of transportation had none of the camaraderie, romance and history of a journey by road. No one in his right mind, such skeptics stoutly maintained, wanted to live life at such an insane pace that a journey that had always taken at least two days was now crammed into a mere four and a half hours. He suspected, however, that Lady Phythian was not of that company. There was a slight twinkle in her eye when she made her dramatic gesture, and she pronounced her complaint as if she were reciting a line in a play.
“Reassure yourself, Lady Phythian,” said Hope, serenely. “Destiny is on our side. The Commonwealth has long enjoyed the Empire of the Oceans, and now it has the means to exercise the same authority on land. Just as John Dee’s telescope and Cornelius Drebbel’s submarine paved the way for England to rule the waves, Dick Trevithick’s Cornish Engines will make us masters of the Earth’s surface, and its bowels too!”
Lady Phythian frowned at the use of the word “bowels” in a mixed carriage, but she was insufficiently quick off the mark to seize the initiative again by means of a further melodramatic pronouncement. Escott was not about to be forestalled for a second time.
“Steam will be the nation’s ruin,” Hope’s rival stated, sententiously. “Using powerful engines to pump water out of mines will only encourage miners to dig deeper, so that the inevitable collapses will be all the more disastrous when they occur. Using those same engines to power mills has already thrown tens of thousands of craftsmen out of work, and reduced the remaining mill-workers to mere mechanical hands, rude slaves of machinery. The displaced and dispossessed will accumulate into a revolutionary rabble the likes of which England has not seen since the monarchy was toppled. Locomotives are direly dangerous even now, while they run on tracks and carry goods and innocent passengers, but when they’re adapted for use in war—their engines fitted with cannon and their carriages filled with artillerists—they’ll be so destructive that indiscriminate mechanized massacre will become routine. Enjoy your mechanical honeymoon, Hope—it can’t and won’t last.”
“The days of warfare are numbered, Escott,” Hope affirmed, confidently. “The Pax Romana was a feeble affair compared to the Pax Anglica. The world has never seen an alliance like that between the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy, and their association will make certain that social progress advances hand in hand with technological progress. We are privileged to be alive at the dawn of the Euchronian Era, and hands that are idle today, or reduced to mindlessly repetitive labor because their old skills have become redundant, will not need the Devil to find them clever work. The march of science will do that, infallibly and triumphantly. Future generations of laborers will not be akin to slaves, even in careless metaphor; they will be true collaborators with machinery, participating in a marvelous complementarity of skills. Steam is brute force, but electricity is art, and electricity will be the foundation of the next technological revolution—as witness the telegraphic systems that control the signals distributed along the railway.”
Michael observed that the Monticarlos had already lost the thread of the argument; although they both spoke conversational English with commendable fluency, and hardly any accent, the terms in which Hope and Escott were pontificating were too esoteric to be easily comprehensible. Carmela whispered something to her father in Italian, as if to start up a second, rival conversation, but the violinist frowned at her and shook his head, instructing her not to be impolite.
Having heard such exchanges a dozen times before, Lady Phythian obviously had no desire to listen to another, but it seemed that she had already despaired of any possibility of controlling such disobedient individuals. For the moment, she contented herself with making her disinterest in the argument manifest, turning away from Michael and Hope alike to gaze loftily out of the widow, as if she were indeed Britannia reviewing her estates.
Michael was now convinced that Hope and Escott had only been eager to invite him to join them in their carriage in order that they might obtain a relatively fresh audience for their eternal quarrel rather than to invite any contribution to their discussion, but he did not hold it against them. The same chatter that had informed him so fully of Lady Phythian’s history and character had filled in their background for him. They had gone on from Eton to Balliol, and then—having come into their