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strange,” said Henry Murray, who up until now had listened in silence. “I thought that you, of all of us, would be the one most likely to approve the experiment.”
    “You should take my reputation with a pinch of salt.”
    “Must we? I rather enjoy having a devil in our midst.” Swinburne grinned.
    Sir Richard Francis Burton considered the susceptible young poet and wondered how to keep him out of trouble.
    Burton was not a Libertine himself, but they considered him an honorary member of the caste and delighted in his knowledge of exotic cultures, where the stifling laws of civilisation were remarkable only by their seeming absence. He enjoyed drinking and debating with them, especially this evening, for it kept his mind engaged and helped to stave off the despondency that had been creeping over him since he'd returned from Bath.
    By one o'clock in the morning, though, it was dragging at him again, made worse by alcohol and exhaustion, so he bid his friends farewell and left the club.
    The evening was bitterly cold-unusual for September-and the roads glistened wetly. The thickening pall wrapped each gas lamp in its own golden aureole. Burton held his overcoat tight with one hand and swung his cane with the other. London rustled and murmured around him as he walked unsteadily homewards.
    A velocipede chattered past. They had started to appear on the streets two years ago, these steam-driven, one-man vehicles, and were popularly known as “penny-farthings” due to their odd design, for the front wheel was nearly as tall as a man, while the back wheel was just eighteen inches in diameter.
    The rider was seated high on a leather saddle, situated slightly behind the crown of the front wheel, with his feet resting in stirrups to either side, his legs held away from the piston arm and crank which pumped and spun to the left of the axle. The tiny, boxlike engine was attached to the frame behind and below the saddle; the small boiler, with its furnace, was under this, and the coal scuttle under that; the three elements arranged in a segmented arc over the top-rear section of the main wheel. As well as providing the motive power, they were also the machine's centre of gravity and, together with the engine's internal gyroscope, made the vehicle almost impossible to knock over, despite its ungainly appearance.
    By far the most remarkable feature of the penny-farthing was its extraordinary efficiency. It could complete a twenty-mile journey in about an hour on just one fist-sized lump of coal. With the furnace able to hold up to four pieces and with the same number stored in the scuttle, it had a maximum range of 160 miles and could operate for about twenty hours before needing to refuel. The vehicle's main flaw, aside from the thorough shaking it meted out to the driver, was that the two slim funnels, which rose up behind the saddle, belched smoke into the miasmal atmosphere of England's capital, adding to an already bad situation. Nevertheless, the vehicles were currently all the rage and had done much to restore the public's faith in the Engineering faction of the Technologist caste, a group that had been much maligned of late after the disastrous flooding of the undersea town of Hydroham off the Norfolk coast, and a number of fatal crashes during the attempted-and ultimately abandoned-development of gas-filled airships.
    Burton watched the contraption disappear into the mist.
    London had transformed while he'd been in Africa. It had filled with new machines and new breeds of animal. The Engineers and Eugenicists-the main branches of the Technologist caste-seemed unstoppable, despite protests from the Libertines, who felt that art, beauty, and nobility of spirit were more essential than material progress.
    The problem was that the Libertines, despite producing reams of anti Technologist propaganda, were unclear in their message. On the one hand, there were the “True Libertines,” such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who