The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 27

I am mnemonic.

I remember everything.

You need to understand this if you are to understand the choices I was to make.

For a while I doubted, wondered if what I possessed was not perfect recall but a perfect fantasy, the ability to cast my mind to any time, any place, and fill in gaps that suited some picture of myself.

But too much evidence corresponds to what I believe and I now realise that, down that path, there lies only inaction and madness.

Hundreds of years, thousands of lifetimes before I was born, a man called Koch advised that we, the Cronus Club, either seek to change the world, or become brutal arbitrators of our own kind. I ask myself what sights he had seen to make him so sure of his path, and whether he has any forgiveness left for others, or himself.

All of which brings us back to where we began.

I, dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted with all the charm of a rattlesnake in a feather bed.

She was seven, I was seventy-eight. She perched on the side of my bed, her feet dangling off it, examined the heart monitor plugged into my chest, observed where I’d disconnected the alarm, felt for my pulse, and said, “I nearly missed you, Dr August.”

Christa, with her Berliner Hochdeutsch, sat on the side of my bed, telling me about the destruction of the planet.

“The world is ending. The message has come down from child to adult, child to adult, passed back down the generations from a thousand years forward in time. The world is ending and we cannot prevent it. So now it’s up to you.”