The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 51

“It’s yes,” I told Vincent. “The answer is yes.”

We sat in the commander’s office of the Pietrok-112 facility, the commander having tactfully vacated the space, and I waited, knees crossed and hands folded, watching Vincent watch me.

Finally Vincent said, “May I ask why? It seems like a remarkable change of heart from your previous stance of ‘Claptrap.’”

I looked up to the ceiling for inspiration and noted a thin line of black bugs marching in an orderly way across the surface, out of the loose end of the light fitting. “I could tell you,” I suggested, “it’s because of the scientific challenge, the curiosity, the adventure, and because, ultimately, I believe it can’t be achieved, so where’s the harm? I could say it’s a rebellion against the Cronus Club, against their policy of sit still and do nothing, of drink and fuck and get high across the globe, because that’s all there is to do and all there ever will be. I could tell you that the past is the past, and nothing has any consequence, and I’m tired of a life where nothing I do has any meaning for anything more than myself, and that over the years I’ve grown numb inside, hollow and empty, and I drift from situation to situation like a ghost visiting an old graveside in search of an explanation of how he died, and in my search I have found nothing. Nothing that makes any sense. I could tell you that I share your ambition. That I want to see with the eyes of God. That is what we’re talking about here, ultimately, isn’t it? This machine, this ‘quantum mirror’, whatever the hell that even means in practical terms… it’s merely a scientific instrument like any other, but a scientific instrument to answer the why, the what, the how of… everything. To know everything. Why we are. Where we come from. Kalachakra, ouroboran. For all of humanity’s history we’ve tried to find answers to what we are, and why. Why should the kalachakra be any different? I could give a lot to have that kind of knowledge, and no one else has given me even the slightest glimmering of an answer, of an approach to an answer. You offer a plan, if nothing else.”

I shrugged, leaned back deeper into the chair.

“Or, more to the purpose, I could tell you very simply that it’s something to do, something which might actually change the way I live. So damn everything else.”

Vincent thought about it.

Smiled.

“OK then,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”

Even now, knowing what I do, I cannot lie.

Ten years I spent working on the quantum mirror.

For kalachakra, ten years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but then, no one, not even we, live in the grand scheme of things. Three thousand, six hundred and fifty days, give or take the odd break for holidays, and each moment was…

…revelatory.

For so many years I hadn’t properly worked, not truly. In my early lives I’d held down the occasional job–doctor, professor, academic, spy–but they had only been means to an end, a means to knowledge and understanding of the world around me. Now, as I set to work on Vincent’s impossible project, like a student graduating at last I unleashed my knowledge, turned it to its ultimate purpose, and for the first time in all my lives understood what it was for your work to become your life.

I was happy, and marvelled that I hadn’t long before realised this was what happiness was. The working conditions were far from luxurious–Vincent had to make some concessions to the state within which he worked, after all–but I found I had no problem with this. The bed was warm, the blankets were thick, the food, while hardly tasty, was filling after a long day. Twice a day, every day, Vincent insisted that we went above ground to experience the sun or, more often, the lack of sun and the biting wind off the Arctic, with a cry of, “It’s important to stay in touch with nature, Harry!”

He extended this principle even into winter, and I spent many miserable hours huddling in the biting cold as my hair, eyebrows and tears froze solid against my skin while Vincent paraded up and down barking, “Won’t it be marvellous when we go back inside?”

Had I not been too cold to reply, I might have said something cutting.

I was accepted by all because Vincent accepted me. No one asked any questions and no one questioned the fear behind their colleagues’ silences, but as the time passed it became clear from both my working and social life that Vincent had collected some truly extraordinary minds to assist him in his work.

“Five lives, Harry!” he exclaimed. “Five more lives and I think we’ll have it!”

This long-term plan, requiring as it did five deaths to fulfil it, he shared only with me. We were still so far from achieving the breakthroughs Vincent wanted, so far from even having the equipment to begin to study the problems of how and why–every how, every why–that there wasn’t any point even mentioning the idea. Instead we worked on components, each one of which was itself revolutionary for the time and whose purpose was, as Vincent put it, “To kick the twentieth century firmly into the twenty-first!”

“I intend to have developed an internal Internet by 1963,” he explained, “and have microprocessors really sorted by 1969. With any luck we can take computing out of the silicon age by 1971, and if we’re still on schedule I’m aiming for nano-processing by 1978. I tend to die,” he added with a slight sniff of regret, “by the year 2002, but with the head start this life gives me, hopefully next time round we’ll have microprocessors up and running by the end of World War Two. I’m thinking of setting up in Canada next time–I haven’t picked the brains of many Canadians lately.”

“This is all very well and good,” I remarked during a quieter evening as we sat playing backgammon in his quarters, “but when you say you shall take the discoveries of this life and implement them in your next, it does rather imply that you will be able to recall every detail of every technical specification, every diagram and every equation.”

“Of course,” he replied airily, “I shall.”

I dropped the dice and hoped that my clumsiness looked like a deliberately crude roll. I stammered, “Y-you’re a mnemonic?”

“I’m a what?” he demanded.

“Mnemonic–it’s how the Club describes people who remember everything.”

“Well then, yes, I suppose that’s precisely what I am. You seem surprised?”

“We’re–you’re very rare.”

“Yes, I’d imagined so, although I must say, Harry, your recollection of your scientific days seems flawless–you’re an absolute bonus to our team.”

“Thank you.”

“But I take it you too forget?”

“Yes, I forget. In fact, I can’t remember whose move it is–yours or mine?”

Why did I lie?

Years of habit?

Or perhaps a recollection of Virginia telling the story of that other famous mnemonic Victor Hoeness, father of the cataclysm, who remembered everything and used it to destroy a world. Perhaps that was it.

The world is ending.

Christa in Berlin.

It didn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter.

Death must always come, and if the reward for our actions was an answer–a huge, beautiful answer to the oldest of questions, why we are, where we come from–then it was a price worth paying.

So I told myself, alone in the darkness of a Russian winter.

There was an art to the secrecy that Vincent and I practised during that time. Both of us were aware of theory and technological developments twenty to thirty years ahead of their time. Both of us had flawless memories of the same, though I always chalked my recollections up to a good head for numbers. The skill lay in introducing our ideas in such a way as would permit the highly intelligent individuals Vincent had surrounded himself with to make the consequent breakthroughs as it were for themselves. It became something of a game, a competition between us, to see who could drop that subtle idea which might lead the chemist to a connection, the physicist to revelation. The magnitude of the task in a way offered us benefits, as it was too great for either of us to comprehend, and so we broke it down into smaller parts. We would need an electron microscope–a concept we were both familiar with but neither one of us had studied or used. We would need a particle accelerator, which again we both knew we desired but neither one of us had built. On occasion even the discussion of a concept was enough to provoke unexpected bursts of brilliance from our researchers, who, giddy with the success after success rolling out of the labs, never paused to question just how or why these revelations were occurring.

“By the end of this life,” stated Vincent firmly, “I intend to have the technology of 2030 at my disposal, whatever that may be. It’s a good communist attitude–one must always have a long-term plan.”

“Are you not concerned,” I enquired, “about what happens to this technology after your death?”

“There is no ‘after my death’,” he replied grimly.

I would like to say that this question troubled me more than it did. I recalled our discussions on the very nature of kalachakra. What are we, how do we live? Are we, in fact, little more than consciousnesses flitting between an endless series of parallel universes, which we then alter by our deeds? If so, the implication rather was that our actions did carry consequences, albeit ones which we would never perceive, for somewhere there was a universe where Harry August had turned left and not right at his fifty-fifth birthday, and somewhere a universe in which Vincent Rankis had died, leaving behind a post-Soviet Russia with a technological database decades ahead of its time.

The world is ending.

Christa in Berlin.

The world is ending.

It must be one of us.

“The world is ending,” I said.

It was 1966, and we were on the verge of testing Vincent’s first cold fusion reactor.

Cold fusion technology, in my opinion, could save the planet. A renewable energy source whose primary waste products are hydrogen and water. In the streets of London smoke still blackened the faces of travellers. Grey clouds rose above the coal stacks of my home country, oil clung to ruined beaches where a container ship had sunk, and in twenty years’ time thirty men would die from breathing in the smoke that roared out of Chernobyl’s shattered fourth reactor, and hundreds of thousands would later be dubbed “liquidators”–soldiers who shovelled radioactive soil into underground mines, builders who poured liquid concrete over a still-burning uranium heart, firemen who threw shovels of sand on to flaming nuclear fuel even as their skins prickled with the insidious caress of radiation. All this was yet to come, and even then cold fusion would be nothing more than a dream; yet here we stood, Vincent and I, ready to change the world.

“The world is ending,” I said as the generators built up, but I don’t think he could hear me over the sound of the machinery.

Our test was a failure.

Not this life, it turned out, were we going to crack one of the greatest scientific quests of the twentieth century. Even Vincent, it turned out, even I, had our limitations. Knowledge is not a substitute for ingenuity, merely an accelerant.

“The world is ending,” I said as we stood together on the viewing gallery, watching our apparatus being pulled away.

“What’s that, old thing?” he murmured, distracted by the disappointment and the need to put on a brave face.

“The world is ending. The seas boil, the skies fall, and it’s getting faster. The course of linear temporality is changing, and it’s us. We did this.”

“Harry,” he tutted, “don’t be so melodramatic.”

“This is the message that has been passed down from child to dying old man down the generations. The future is changing and not for the better. We did this.”

“The Cronus Club was always stodgy.”

“Vincent, what if it’s us?”

He looked at me sideways, and I realised he had heard me after all, over the sound of the machinery, over the sound of a machine which would one day beget a machine which would beget a machine which would beget the knowledge of God, the answer to all our questions, the understanding of the universe as a whole.

And he said, “So?”

Four days later, once it was evident from the growing number of results coming in from the fusion experiment that we had failed, but were still, in accordance with the 99.3 per cent probability of the same, alive, I requested a holiday.

“Of course,” he said. “I entirely understand.”

I was given a lift in an army car to Pietrok-111; from Pietrok-111 a different car took me to Ploskye Prydy, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t left Vincent’s lab for ten years. Time had not been kind to the landscape: what few trees there had been had been removed, leaving ugly stumps in the earth beyond which great walls of concrete proclaimed that here the people laboured for bread or here they toiled for steel or here there was no sign at all except a warning against any and all trespassers and that anyone coming within sight of the walls after 8 p.m. would be shot. Only one train a day left Ploskye Prydy, and the town was not renowned for its food and board. My driver took me to his mother’s house. She fed me plates of steaming beans and preserved fish and told all the secrets of the village, of which she seemed both the greatest source and, I suspected, the prime originator. I slept beneath an icon of St Sebastian, who had died shot through with arrows and who Catholic iconography tended to depict dying in his underpants but who here wore cloth of gold.

The train back to Leningrad was silent, none of the garrulous youngsters I had ridden with on my first journey to the north. A man was transporting several boxes of chickens. Four hours into the journey and the uneven tracks–more so than I remembered–sent one flying, and its prisoner, white-feathered and red-eyed, spent nine glorious minutes in freedom, hurtling up and down the carriage, before a militia man with scaling skin and a suggestion of melanoma about the jaw, reached out with a single gloved hand and caught the bird by the throat. I saw its neck stretch, and the creature seemed as grateful as an animal with a brain the size of a walnut can be to be restored to its master and its cage.

I was not officially met when I finally crawled off the train in Leningrad, the sky already black and rain tapping against the old slanted roof, but two men in wide-collared coats followed me as I left the station in search of a place to spend the night, and stayed outside the boarding house in the shadow of the street as the cobbles danced with rushing water. During the few days I spent in the city I came to know my watchers well, a six-man team in total, who I mentally dubbed Boris One, Boris Two, Skinny, Fat, Breathless and Dave. Dave earned his name by his uncanny physical resemblance to David Ayton, an Irish laboratory engineer who’d once destroyed my coat with a mug of sulphuric acid, only to beg a new one from the store, sew on my name overnight, and even attempt to smear a precise replica of the coffee stains and chemical erosions into the back and sleeves which had made my coat so distinctly mine. Sympathy for the effort involved far outweighed my ire, and now Soviet Dave earned my respect as well by his good-natured attitude to my shadowing. The others, especially Boris One and Boris Two, who mirrored each other in clothes, bearing and technique, attempted to conduct entirely covert surveillance of a most distracting kind. Dave afforded me the respect of being fairly overt in his observation, smiling at me across the street as I passed in acknowledgment of his own discovery and the futile nature of his role. In another time, I felt, I would have enjoyed Soviet Dave’s company, and wondered just what stories lurked behind his polite veneer, to have made him a security man.

For a few days I simply played tourist, as much as anyone could in the city at the time. In one of the few cafés to grudgingly merit the name, where the chef’s speciality was variations on the theme of cauliflower, I was surprised to encounter a team of sixth-form schoolboys from the United Kingdom watched over by the ubiquitous Soviet minders.

“We’re here on a cultural exchange,” explained one, prodding his bowl of cauliflower special dubiously. “So far we’ve been beaten at football, hockey, swimming and track athletics. Tomorrow we’re going for a sailing trip, which I think means we’re going to be beaten at rowing.”

“Are you a sports team?” I enquired, eyeing up the portly bearing of some of the boy’s companions.

“No!” he exclaimed. “We’re language students. I signed on because I thought they’d let us see the Winter Palace. Although yesterday evening Howard beat one of their boys at chess, which caused quite the stir. He’s been asked not to show us up like that again.”

I wished them luck, earning a wry smile and a polite wiggle of fork in acknowledgment.

That night a hooker was waiting by the door of my room. She said her name was Sophia and she’d already been paid. She was a secret fan of Bulgakov and Jane Austen, and asked, as I was reputed to be such an educated man, if I wouldn’t mind talking German, as she was still struggling to get the accent right. I wondered if this was Soviet Dave’s idea, or Vincent’s. I saw no obvious signs of physical abuse or disease, and tipped her generously for good company’s sake.

“What do you do?” she asked me as the headlights from a passing car defined the arc of a sundial across the ceiling, blooming, travelling and gone.

“I’m a scientist.”

“What kind of scientist?”

“Theoretical,” I replied.

“What kind of theories?”

“Everything.”

She found this briefly funny, then was embarrassed to find something funny which I could not. “When I was young,” I explained, “I looked to God to find answers. When God didn’t have anything, I looked for answers in people, but all they said was, ‘Relax, go with it.’”

“ ‘Go with it’?” She queried my American idiom, pronounced in German, using her native Russian.

“Don’t fight against inevitability,” I translated loosely. “Life is until it is not, so why get fussed? Don’t hurt anyone, try not to give your dinner guests food poisoning, be clean in word and deed–what else is there? Just be a decent person in a decent world.”

“Everyone’s a decent person,” she replied softly, “in their own eyes.”

She was warm against me, and my fatigue gave my words a slow certainty, a weight that, during more alert hours, I usually shied from as being too weighty for polite conversation. “People don’t have the answer,” I concluded softly. “People… just want to be left alone and not bothered. But I am bothered. We ask ourselves ‘Why me?’ and ‘What’s the point?’ and sooner or later people turn round and say ‘It’s a coincidence’ and ‘My purpose is the woman I love’ or ‘My purpose is my children’ or ‘To see this idea through,’ but for me and my kind… there is none of that. There must be consequences to our deeds. But I can’t see it. And I have to know. Whatever the cost.”

Sophia was silent a while, thinking it through. Then, “Go with it.” She said the unfamiliar words carefully, and, grinning, tried them again. “Go with it. You talk about decent people living decent lives as if that doesn’t mean anything, like it’s not a big deal. But you listen–this ‘decent’, it is the only thing that matters. I don’t care if you theorise, Mr Scientist, a machine that makes all men kind and all women beautiful if, while making your machine, you don’t stop to help the old mother cross the street, you know? I don’t care if you cure ageing, or stop starvation or end nuclear wars, if you forget this–” she rapped her knuckles against my forehead “–or this–” pressed her palm against my chest “–because even then if you save everyone else, you’ll be dead inside. Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine.”

“That’s not a very communist viewpoint,” I breathed softly.

“No, it is the most communist view. Communism needs good people, people whose souls are–” she pushed harder against my chest, then sighed, pulled away entirely “–kind by instinct, not by effort. But that is what we most lack, in this time. For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters any more.”

She left shortly after midnight. I didn’t ask for where or whom. I waited with the light out in my room for the dead hour of the night when the mind shifts into a numb, timeless daze of voiceless thought. It is the hour when all things are lonely, every pedestrian walking flat-footed over blackened stones, every car swishing through deserted streets. It is the utter silence when the engine stops in a flat, ice-drifting sea. I pulled on my coat and slipped out into it through the back door, circumventing Boris One and Breathless as I headed into the night. The secret to being unafraid of the darkness is to challenge the darkness to fear you, to raise your eyes sharp to those few souls who stagger by, daring them to believe that you are not, in fact, more frightening than they are. Easy, in this place, to remember Richard Lisle and the streets of Battersea, dead girls by the door. Leningrad had been built as Russia’s European city by a tsar who’d travelled the world and decided to take some of it home with him. Had Brezhnev travelled the world? The question surprised me, as something I did not know the answer to.

A corner. The streets in Leningrad are largely flat and sharp, a smell in the summer of algae on the sluggish canals, a madness in the city from the white nights; in winter euphoria at the first clean snows, then dullness as the freeze truly sets in. I walked by memory, turning a few times more than was strictly required to check on the presence of any would-be followers, until at last I came to the small wooden door of the Cronus Club.

Or, more accurately, the place where the small wooden door of the Cronus Club had been. So shocked was I to discover that the door was no longer there that for a brief moment I almost doubted my own infallible memory. But no, observing the street and my surroundings, this was the place, this was the porch, this the square patch of land where the Club had once stood and where now, built with tasteless 1950s brutality, a concrete plinth squatted instead, showing on its top a curious curve of stone crossed with an iron bar, and whose caption, chiselled into the stone, proclaimed:

Nothing more remained.

Members of the Cronus Club leave signals for each other in order to find companionship in adversity. Entries in Who’s Who, messages left behind the counter of a nearby pub, stones laid in earth for future generations to gather and speculate on, hints as to a place to go inscribed in the black ironwork of the drainpipes hanging from rooftops. We are hidden, but the simple fact of our existence is so patently absurd that we do not need to hide much deeper than in plain sight. Over the next three days I lived a harmless tourist life around the city, walking, looking, eating and spending my evenings reading in my room, at night slipping out past my warders to seek out the clues of the Cronus Club, any sign as to its fate. I found only one: a tombstone in the local cemetery for OLGA PRUBOVNA, BORN 1893, DIED 1953; SHE SHALL RISE AGAIN.

Beneath this tombstone was a much longer inscription in, of all things, Sanskrit. Translated, it read,