The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 17

Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.

This was ever the mantra of the Cronus Club, and I say it to you now. It is not noble, it is not bold, it is not righteous, it is not ambitious, but when you are dabbling with the sweep of history, with time itself, it is a sacred vow which should be pinned above every Cronus Clubhouse door. I had said as much to Phearson, and he could not understand.

I have said before of the passage of our lives, that there are three stages. Rejection of what we are, I think I had fairly well covered by the time Phearson came to pump me full of psychotropic hallucinogens. My situation held me a long way from acceptance, but I believe I was, in my own way, attempting to explore my nature to the best of my abilities. In my third life I tried God; in my fourth biology. My fifth we shall return to, but in my sixth life I attempted to explore the mysteries of what we are, albeit rather late in the day, through physics.

You have to understand that I was a boy in the 1930s. Not merely a boy, but a child growing up the bastard son of a man who had about as much interest in scientific development as I could muster in the pedigree of his favourite horses. I had no notion of the revolution that was overtaking scientific thought, of relativity and nuclear physics, of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Hubble and Heisenberg. I had some loose concept of the notion that the world was round and an apple that falls from the tree will descend towards the mass below, but for many centuries of my early lives time itself was a concept as linear and uninteresting as a metal ruler in a builder’s yard. It took me to the 1990s to begin to understand the concepts of the 1930s, and how they impacted not merely on the world around me, but possibly the very question of who and what I was.

In my sixth life I had my first doctorate by the age of twenty-three–not because I was especially talented in the realms of science, but because I was able to skip so much of the tedious general knowledge phase of my education and jump straight into the areas that interested me. I was invited to work on the Manhattan Project, the youngest member of the team, and agonised for many long nights about whether to accept. Ethics were of no concern–the bomb would be built and the bomb would be dropped, regardless of my personal feelings. Rather the project offered an exciting opportunity to meet some of the greatest minds of the day, locked together in the same room. In the end, the idea of being locked, and of my background being explored too deeply, combined with a reluctance to expose myself to unnecessary danger in those days when radiation was poorly controlled and criticality not yet understood, held me back, and I worked the most part of the war developing surprisingly plausible hypotheses on Nazi technology, ranging from bomb mechanisms and rocket engines, through to heavy water and their own nuclear reactor plant.

I met Vincent in late 1945. The war was won, but rationing still cast its pall over my dinner table. It is petty, I know, to still find oneself frustrated by how bland the food is for so much of my early life, or how long it takes for central heating to become ubiquitous. I was a lecturer at Cambridge, and was in bitter competition for a professorship that I was far too young to take and which I deserved to a far higher degree than my fifty-three-year-old rival, P. L. George, a man distinguished mainly for the complexities of his mathematical errors. I would not get the professorship in the end; my unfashionable dedication to the notion of the Big Bang over steady state and my unreasonable insistences on the nature of wave-particle duality, combined with my highly unfashionable youth, made me less than popular at the high table. Indeed, I was justly rebuked for my views on both, since to a large degree they were formed on the basis of evidence which hadn’t yet been uncovered, and required technology which had not yet been invented to justify.

It was, in fact, this very same fallacy that brought Vincent to my door.

“Dr August,” he said firmly, “I wish to discuss the multiverse.”

As opening statements go, this was rather unexpected, and I was painfully aware that every second Vincent stood in my doorway was another in which the warmth of my carefully nurtured fire would be expended in true entropic principle for no one else to enjoy. Seeing, however, that he was not about to move, and in light of the thickening snow falling outside, I invited him in, though I was hardly in the mood.

Vincent Rankis. The first time we met, he was young, barely eighteen years old, but already he had the physicality of the perpetually middle-aged. Somehow, despite rationing, he was chubby without being fat, rounded without being particularly overweight, though he would never be described as muscle-bound. His mouse-brown hair was already thinning at the crown, the promise of a bald patch to come, and a pair of grey-green eyes looked out from within a face moulded by a busy sculptor from rather wet clay. His trouser legs were even then rolled up in a manner designed to disencourage social enquiry, and he wore a tweed jacket that I was never to see him out of regardless of the time of year. His claims that the jacket would last a thousand years I can perhaps tolerate; his insistence that the rolled trousers were in aid of cycling I would rebuff, as nothing wheeled was getting through the blocked Cambridge streets on that night. He sat down in the more tattered armchair by the fire with a great huff of effort, and before I had even settled opposite him, attempting to drag my brain out of silent warmth and back into the realms of modern science, he exclaimed,

“To permit the philosophers to apply their banal arguments to the theory of the multiverse is to undermine the integrity of modern scientific theory.”

I reached for the nearest glass and bottle of Scotch, buying time to answer. The teacher within me was tempted to play devil’s advocate; the teacher lost.

“Yes,” I said. “I agree.”

“A multiverse has no relevance to individual responsibility for action; it merely extends into a rather simplified paradigm the Newtonian concept that for every action there is an opposite action, and the concept that where there can be no state of absolute rest there cannot be understanding of a particle’s nature without changing the thing observed!”

He seemed very indignant on the subject so once again, I said, “Yes.”

His eyebrows waggled furiously. He had an uncanny knack of talking with his eyebrows and chin, while the rest of him remained to a good degree static. “Then why did you waste fifteen pages of your last paper discussing the ethical implications of a quantum theory?!”

I sipped my drink and waited for the eyebrows to descend to their natural–but not absolute–state of rest. “Your name,” I said at last, “is Vincent Rankis, and I am only aware of this fact because when the beadle challenged you for cutting the corner of the grass you gave him this same name while informing him that in this changing society his role would soon be not merely redundant, but mocked by the imminently approaching future generations. You were wearing that very same olive shirt, if I recall, and I—”

“Blue shirt, grey socks, dress robe, heading at high speed towards the gate in a manner which I can only assume meant you were late for a lecture, it being five minutes to the hour and most of your lectures occurring more than ten minutes away.”

I looked at Vincent once again, and this time made conscious note of all the characteristics I had already unconsciously perceived. Then, “Very well, Vincent, let’s discuss ethical musings and the scientific method—”

“One is subjective, the other valid.”

“If your view is so absolute, I hardly see what good my view will serve.”

A flicker of a smile occurred in the corner of his mouth, and he had the grace to look, briefly, ashamed. “Forgive me,” he said at last. “I may have had a little something to drink on my way over here. I know I can come across as… firm.”

“A man travels back in time…” I began, and at Vincent’s immediate flinch of distaste I raised my hand and said placatingly, “Hypothetically speaking, a thought experiment if you like. A man travels back in time and sees the events of the past unfolding like a future before his eyes. He steps out of his time machine–”

“Immediately altering the past!”

“–and his very first act is to post his younger self the winning riders at Newmarket. Result?”

“Paradox,” declared Vincent firmly. “He has no memory of having been posted these numbers; he never won at Newmarket. If he had, he may not have built the time machine and gone back in time to post the numbers to himself to begin with–logical impossibility.”

“Result?”

“Impossibility!”

“Indulge the hypothesis.”

He huffed furiously, then exclaimed, “Three possible outcomes! One: at the very instant that he makes the decision to send himself the winning numbers, he remembers receiving them and his personal timeline changes, thus he self-perpetuates his own existence as without the winning numbers he could not have built his time machine. Paradox within that being that nothing can come from nothing, and his initiative, his causal event, is in fact an effect, effect preceding cause, but I don’t suppose we’re dealing with logic in this scenario. Two: the whole universe collapses. Rather melodramatic, I know, but if we consider time as a scalar concept with no negative value then I really see no other way, which seems a shame if all we’re discussing here is a little bet at Newmarket. Three: at the very instant he makes the decision to send himself the numbers, a parallel universe is created. In his universe, his linear timeline, he returns home having not won anything at Newmarket in his life, while in a parallel universe his younger self is rather surprised to discover that he’s a millionaire and carries on quite happily thank you. Implications?”

“I have no idea,” I replied brightly. “I merely wished to see if you were capable of lateral thinking.”

He gave another great huff of exasperation and stared fuming into the fire. Then, “I enjoyed your paper. Ignoring the wishy-washy, namby-pamby philosophical stuff, which, I personally thought, verged on the almost theological, I thought your paper was marginally more interesting than the usual journal matter. That’s what I wished to say.”

“I am honoured. But if your complaint is that ethics have no place in pure science, I’m afraid I must be forced to disagree with you.”

“Of course they don’t! Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.”

“Would you shoot Hitler?” I asked.

He scowled. “I thought we had just determined a likelihood of the universe being destroyed by such temporal tampering.”

“We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the trials of war,” I replied. “We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.”

He drummed his fingers along the edge of his chair then blurted, “There are socio-economic forces that must be considered too. Was Hitler the sole cause of war? I would argue no.”

“But the direction the war took…?”

“But there’s the thing!” he exclaimed, the eyebrows back into full swing. “If I make the decision to shoot Hitler, how do I not know that someone less willing to fight in Russia in the dead of winter, or to besiege cities with minimal strategic value at the cost of hundreds of thousands of men, or start bombing London and not her airfields–how do I know that this other, saner warmonger will not emerge from the conditions already in place?”

“You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction?”

“I argue… I argue…” He groaned, throwing his hands off the arms of his chair in frustration. “I argue that it is precisely these hypothetical dabblings with philosophy that undermined the otherwise sound integrity of your paper!”

He fell silent and I, already tired before he came, enjoyed it a while. He stared into the fire and looked for all the world like he had been in my armchair his whole life, as much a piece of furniture as it. “Would you like a drink?” I asked at last.

“What are you drinking?”

“Scotch.”

“I’ve already had a bit much…”

“I won’t tell the beadle.”

A brief hesitation then, “Thank you.”

I poured him a glass, and as he took it I said, “So tell me, Mr Rankis, what brings you to our hallowed halls?”

“Answers,” he replied firmly. “Measurable, objective. What lies beneath this reality, what is going on in the world we cannot perceive, deeper than protons and neutrons, bigger than galaxies and suns. If time is relative then light speed has become the measuring stick of the universe, but is that all time is? An inconstant factor in the equations of speed?”

“And here I thought the young were only interested in sex and music.”

He grinned, the first genuine flash of humour I’d seen. Then, “I hear you’re up for a professorship.”

“I won’t get it.”

“Of course not,” he answered amiably. “You’re far too young. It wouldn’t be just.”

“Thank you for your vote of confidence.”

“You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express resentment that others agree with you.”

“You’re right, it is irrational. You seem very… forthright… for an undergraduate.”

He shrugged. “I can’t waste time with being young, there’s far too much to do which society will not permit to the under-thirties.”

His words produced an instant and inevitable tug within me; I had spent twenty-five tedious years living them. “You’re interested in time?”

“Complexity and simplicity,” he replied. “Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.”

So saying, he raised his glass in salute to me, and drank it down, though I found suddenly that I was not in a drinking mood.