The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 81

“Harry, this is the single most important thing that anyone will ever do.”

Vincent in my ear.

So many voices in my ear, so many years to hear them.

“This will change mankind, redefine the universe. The quantum mirror will unlock the secrets of matter, of past and future. We will understand at last those concepts which we only pretended to comprehend–life, death, consciousness, time. Harry, the quantum mirror is…”

“What can I do?” I asked, and was surprised to hear my own voice. “How can I help?”

Vincent smiled. His hand rested on my shoulder, and for a second I thought I saw the glimmer of tears run along his lower eyelids. I had never seen Vincent cry and thought for a moment that this was joy.

“Stay with me,” he said. “Stay here, by my side.”

The quantum mirror.

To look with the eyes of the maker.

Vincent Rankis. Fancy seeing you here! We shall hold up a mirror, as it were, to nature itself…

Codswallop!

It is either your or my ghastly duty to ensure that one of us kisses Frances on the lips.

Total balderdash!

I’m a fucking good guy!

It’s your past, Harry, it’s your past.

Rory Hulne, dying alone.

Patrick August, you were always my father.

Silence as Harriet’s coffin slips beneath the earth. Silence by the fireside in a cottage overgrown with weeds. There’s a drug dealer living in the house where once Constance Hulne ruled with an iron fist, where Lydia went mad and Alexandra saved a baby boy’s life, where a serving girl called Lisa Leadmill was pushed back on a kitchen table and did not scream. And from that moment a child would be born who would travel again, and again, and again, the same life, the same journey again and again and…

Richard Lisle, dead at my hands, life after life. Please, I never done nothing.

Rosemary Dawsett, cut up in a bathtub.

Jenny, you should be on the news, you should.

Will you run away with me?

Do you like me?

I have always liked you, Jenny. Always.

The bride to be!

Do you approve, Harry? Isn’t she beautiful?

Akinleye. Did you know that me, Harry? Was she right to forget?

I personally favour the thigh! A bath helps, but one must make do, mustn’t one? Tra la, Dr August, so long and all that!

Virginia, striding beneath the summer sky in London. Killing kalachakra in the womb. Shaking as we made her forget.

You ever get bored of whatever it is you do, come find me on the thin red line!

Many, many apologies.

I’m so sorry, Harry. It’s for the best. This is how it has to be.

The quantum mirror.

To see with the eyes of God.

The world is ending.

We cannot stop it.

Now it’s up to you.

The quantum mirror.

Stay here. By my side.

Vincent, I sabotaged the quantum mirror.

It was easy to do.

I didn’t even have to be there. You had concluded that I was no scientist, that I could not help you as I had in Russia, for here was a man who didn’t even understand the thinnest Newtonian principle, let alone the technology–nearly a hundred years ahead of what it should have been–that you were unleashing in that mountain in Switzerland. I was your admin man, as I had been now for so many lives, your go-to man for trivial events. For nine months I stayed in those caves in Switzerland, watching the quantum mirror grow, listening to the roaring of the machines with every test, and knew you were close, you were so close now. Reports landed on my desk and you ignored them, believing I could not understand, but Vincent, I was the only other person there who could, every dot and every dash, every decimal point and finest permutation of the graph. It was I who, when I should have ordered thorium 234, changed a digit in the paperwork and ordered thorium 231. It was I who cut costs on the boron rods, slicing away a few vital millimetres from the specs; I who shifted the decimal point one sig fig over on the wave calculations. The document was seven pages long, and I moved the point on the very first page so that by the time the calculations had been worked through, the final answer was nine orders of magnitude out.

You will wonder why I did this.

A desire to preserve the universe? It sounds incredibly grand to say it–perhaps I should get myself a T-shirt and a cape to make clear the same? Who are you, god that you would become, to destroy the world in your search for knowledge?

Habit?

I had dedicated so many years to bringing you down, it seemed a waste not to do it.

Jealousy?

Perhaps a little.

Vengeance?

You had been such excellent company, it was sometimes hard to remember this. Centuries are a long time to hold a grudge, but then…

Remember.

Remember like a mnemonic, and here we are again, swallowing poison in Pietrok-112 and being grateful for it, feeling the electrodes press into my head, tasting electricity on my tongue, not once, but twice, and the second time you held my hand and said it was for the best, of course, but for the best. Jenny. Do you like me, Harry? Do you like me? Weeping in the cold, your private secretary, your personal dog, your pet, your whatever-it-was-you-wanted-me-to-be. I close my eyes and I remember and yes.

It is vengeance.

And perhaps a very small realisation that something inside me has died and that this is the only way I can think of to get it back. A notion of “doing the right thing”–as if that meant anything to me any more.

I sabotaged the quantum mirror, knowing full well that all these things–a decimal point, an isotope, a boron rod–would be enough. I would set your research back by fifty years, and you wouldn’t even look twice at me, never suspect that I had done it.

The test was set for a summer day, not that seasons had much relevance in the hot dampness of the caves. The excitement was palpable in the air. Vincent came into my office, face flushed from his regular jog round the facility, a substitute, I felt, for the freezing jaunts in the open air he’d subjected to me in Pietrok-112. “Are you coming?” he demanded.

I laid down my pen carefully, folded my hands, looked him in the eye and said, “Vincent, I’m very happy that you’re very happy, but as I’m sure you know, I’ve got fifty tins of out-of-date tuna in the canteen, and the passionate, dare I say fiery, letter of complaint I’m in the middle of writing is, without wanting to overblow the matter, a work of epic prose the likes of which the tuna industry has never seen, and you are rather serving as the person from Porlock.”

He blew air loudly between his lips like an irritated orca. “Harry, without wanting to demean your works in any way, when I tell you that the test today could be the beginning of a revolution in the very nature of what it is to be human, I’m sure you’ll understand that the chastising of the tuna industry can take second place. Now get your stuff together and come with me!”

“Vincent—”

“Come on!”

He hauled me by the elbow. I grumbled, grabbing my radioactivity badge as he hauled me into the corridor. All the way down into the depths of the mountain I protested about unhealthy tuna, rotting salad and the cost of maintaining the electricity supply in this place, and he exclaimed, “Harry! Future of the species, insight into the universe; ignore the salad!”

Down by the quantum mirror there were nearly thirty scientists bundled into the observation gallery, looking down to the great beast itself. It had grown, a great dangling, misshapen rocket of bits added and bits taken away, of rolling cables and flashing interior surfaces, of heat and steam and pressure and a thousand monitoring devices tapped into computers fifty years ahead of their time. I was the only non-scientist in the room, but as the floor around the quantum mirror itself was cleared, Vincent dragged me to the front, exclaiming, “These idiots wouldn’t be able to number-crunch if you didn’t feed them and help them wipe their bloody bottoms. Come on! You deserve to see this.”

I supposed I did, considering that it was my subtle adjustment of the paperwork which would almost certainly lead to the catastrophic failure of the approaching test.

A warning siren was sounded three times, telling all personnel to vacate the immediate area of the machine itself. Then the most straight-faced scientist they could find began a countdown, as generators roared into life and a dozen faces stared at rolling banks of increasingly excited data. Vincent was almost hopping up and down beside me, his hand briefly squeezing mine before a sense of masculine decorum snatched his arm away again and he chewed instead on his fingertips. I watched, arms folded, an unimpressed expression firmly on my face as the power in the device swelled to its maximum, and inside its depths hideously fine and fiendishly clever pieces of equipment stolen from a hundred years from now turned, turned, turned, aligned, opened up, drew energy in and spat energy out and…

“Sir?”

The voice was a question, raised by a technician at a computer screen. The question was emotional, not objective. Objectively the questioner could read perfectly well the data on their screen, but emotionally they felt the need for support. Vincent sensed it at once, turning on the spot to stare at the unfortunate enquirer even as someone else stood up sharply and barked, “Shut it down!”

They didn’t need to say anything more than that, didn’t want to say anything more than that, and immediately a hand was slammed down on the emergency cut-out button and the chamber with the quantum mirror in it went dark. So did the observation gallery, a sudden stifling blackness lit only by the grey glow of the screens and the soft blues of the emergency lights set into the floor. I looked round and saw Vincent, skin ghostly, the veins on the side of his neck throbbing far too fast to be healthy, eyes wide and lips slightly apart, staring first at the men and women in the room and then slowly, inexorably, back at the quantum mirror.

The quantum mirror, like the rest of the cavern, should have been in darkness, but we could all see the orange glow rising from its core, a cheerful reddish pinkness spreading down its thinner metal joins, eclipsed only by the black smoke starting to belch from its interior. I could hear a hissing of tiny metal parts under pressure, rising to a screaming, rising to a shriek, and, glancing down at my radioactivity badge, I was probably the only person in the room to see the thin film start to turn black.

“Stop it,” whispered Vincent, his voice the only thing in the room apart from the growing grumble of the machine. “Stop it,” he whispered again to no one in particular, as if there was anything anyone could do. “Stop it.”

The light rising from the machine, a light of burning, a light of parts starting to melt, was rapidly becoming stronger than the glow of the emergency blues. I looked around at a room of frozen rabbits, of collective terror, and with the level-headed attitude of a man who spends his day calculating how much toilet paper a facility might need, I barked, “Radiation! Everybody out!”

“Radiation” was a good enough word, and people scrambled for the door. There was no screaming–screaming would have required an energy which now had to be entirely focused on getting as far away as possible from the rising flood of gamma waves spilling into the observation gallery in deathly silence. I looked at Vincent, and saw that the badge on his shirt was also turning black, oil-black, deathly black, so I grabbed him by the sleeve and hissed, “We have to go!”

He didn’t move.

His eyes were fixed on the quantum mirror, reflecting the spreading heat now bursting out of its surface. I could hear the metal singing and knew what was coming next. “Vincent!” I roared. “We have to get out of here!”

He still didn’t move, so I swung one arm across his throat and dragged him backwards, like a swimmer saving a drowning man, towards the door. We two were the last in the room, the light in the chamber beyond now too bright to look at, the heat rising, suffocating, pushing its way through the glass. I looked up and saw the paint begin to blister on the metalwork around the room, heard the computers fry, giving up any attempt at staying intact in the face of the rising everything blasting through the room and our bodies like a gale through a cobweb. I heard the glass of the viewing gallery crack and knew with an absolute certainty that the explosion which was about to take place would kill us both, that we were already dead. I shoved Vincent out of the door of the gallery; he landed on his hands and knees, groggy, half-turning to look back at me. The light was unbearable now, blinding, more than just the visible spectrum eating through to my retinas. I fumbled for the emergency handle on the door, felt the metal burn through the skin on my hand with an ironing-board hiss, pulled it down and, as the door began to descend, dived beneath it.

“Run!” I screamed at Vincent, and he, bewildered and staggering, a mere shadow in the tortured static of my vision, ran. I crawled down beneath the bulkhead door as it slammed into place, scrambling out into the darkness of the corridor beyond, got three paces away, and felt the world behind me explode.

Visions of a rescue.

There was metal in my skin, embedded deep.

Stone on my belly.

Dirt in my mouth.

The rescuers wore lead-lined suits, and before they removed me from the smoking wreckage of the corridor, they hosed me down for nearly half an hour. The water ran red for a very long time, before it ran clear.

Darkness.

An anaesthetist asked me if I knew of any allergies.

I tried to reply and found that my jaw was swollen lead.

I don’t know what use the question was, or if they asked me any more.

Vincent by my bedside, head bowed.

A nurse changing tubes.

I knew, by the quality of the air, that I was no longer in a cave.

I saw daylight, and it was beautiful.

Vincent sat in a chair at the end of my bed, an IV drip connected to his arm, though he appeared unbloodied, sleeping. Had he left my side? I didn’t think so.

I wake, and I feel nauseous.

“Water.”

Vincent, there, immediately.

“Harry?” His lips are cracked, his skin is pale. “Harry, can you hear me?”

“Vincent?”

“Do you know where you are?”

As he talks, he checks my vitals, carefully, effectively. He, like most ouroborans, has had some medical training. My vitals are not good, but this Harry August mustn’t know that.

“Hospital?” I suggest.

“That’s right–that’s good. Do you know what day it is?”

“No.”

“You’ve been asleep for two days. You were in an accident. Do you remember that?”

“The… quantum mirror,” I breathed. “What happened?”

“You saved my life,” he replied softly. “You got me out of the room, told me to run, closed the door. You saved a lot of lives.”

“Oh. Good.” I tried to lift my head, and felt pain run up my back. “What happened to me?”

“You were caught in the blast. If I’d been any closer I would have been… but it was mostly you. You’re still in one piece, which is a miracle, but there are some… some things the doctor will need to discuss with you.”

“Radiation,” I wheezed.

“There was… there was a lot of radiation. I don’t know how it… But that doesn’t matter now.”

Doesn’t it? That’s new.

“You OK?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“I’m fine.”

“You look a little pale.”

“I… I got a lot of radiation too, but you were… You saved my life, Harry.” He kept coming back to this, incredulity in his voice. “Thank you doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“How about a pay rise?”

A little laugh. “Don’t get cocky.”

“I’m going to die?” I asked. When he didn’t immediately answer, I gave a small nod. “Right. How long?”

“Harry…”

“How long?”

“Radiation sickness… it’s not pretty.”

“Never seen myself bald,” I admitted. “Did you…? Are you…?”

“I’m still waiting on test results.”

No, you’re not, Vincent. “I hope it’s… I hope you’re OK.”

“You saved me,” he repeated. “That’s all that matters.”

Radiation sickness.

It’s not pretty.

You will be experiencing the worst of it, as you read this. Your hair will be long gone, and the nausea will largely have passed to be replaced by the continual pain of your joints swelling up and internal organs shutting down, flooding your body with toxins. Your skin will be peppered with ugly lesions, which your body is incapable of healing, and as the condition progresses you will start drowning in your own bodily fluids as your lungs break down. I know, because this is precisely what my body is doing, even as I write this for you, Vincent, my last living will and testament. You have, at most, a few days to live. I have a few hours.

“Stay with me,” I said.

Vincent stayed.

After a while the nurses brought another bed in for him. I didn’t comment on the drips they plugged into his veins as he lay down beside me until, seeing my stare, he smiled and said, “Just a precaution.”

“You’re a liar, Vincent Rankis.”

“I’m sorry you think so, Harry August.”

In a way, the nausea was worse than the pain. Pain can be drowned, but nausea eats through even the most delicious opiates and cutting chemicals. I lay in my bed and tried not to cry out until at last, at three in the morning, I rolled on to my side and puked up into the bucket on the floor, and shook and sobbed and clutched my belly and gasped for air.

Vincent slipped out of his bed at once, coming over, entirely ignoring the bucket of puke at his feet, and with hands on my shoulders held me and said, “What can I do?”

I stayed curled up in a bundle, knees tucked to my chest. It seemed the least uncomfortable position I could assume. Vomit ran down my chin in thick, sticky bands. Vincent got a tissue and a cup of water and wiped it off my face. “What can I do?” he repeated urgently.

“Stay with me,” I replied.

“Of course. Always.”

The next day the nausea began for him. He hid it well, sneaking out of the room to puke up in the toilet, but I hardly needed nine hundred years of experience to see. In the night the pain began to take him too, and this time I staggered out of the bed to hold him, as he puked and retched into a bucket on the floor.

“I’m fine,” he gasped between shudders. “I’ll be fine.”

“See?” I murmured. “Told you you’re a liar.”

“Harry,” his voice was acid-eaten, ragged between breaths, “there’s something I wanted to say to you.”

“Was it ‘Sorry for being a damn liar’?”

“Yes.” I didn’t know if he sobbed or laughed the word. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK.” I sighed. “I know why you did it.”

The lesions, as they broke on my skin, didn’t hurt so much as itch. They were a slow splitting, a gentle peeling away of flesh. Vincent was still going through nausea, but as my body began to break down, the pain grew intense again, and I screamed out for comfort and morphine. They dosed us both, perhaps considering it rude to only fill up one patient, least of all the one who wasn’t paying for this extensive medical care. That evening a box arrived for Vincent. He crawled out of bed and unlocked the padlock on the front, pulling from the inside of the box a crown of wires and electrodes. With shaking hands, he held it out towards me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It… it will make you f-forget,” he stammered, laying it down on the end of my bed as if it was a little too heavy for his tastes. “It will… it will take away everything. Everything you are, everything you… It will take away this memory. Do you understand?”

“What about me?” I asked. “Will it take away me?”

“Yes.”

“Bloody stupid then, isn’t it?”

“I… I’m so sorry. If you knew… if you knew some of the things…”

“Vincent, I’m not in a confessional mood. Whatever it is, I forgive you, and let’s leave it at that.”

He left it at that, but the box with its crown of wires stayed in the room. He would have to use it on me, I concluded, before I died, and before he grew too weak to operate it.

In the night we were both in pain.

“It’s OK,” I told him. “It’s OK. We were trying to make something better.”

He was shaking, at the limits of his pain meds, and still in pain.

Tell me a story, I said, to distract in this hour of need. Here, I’ll begin. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scot walk into a bar…

For God’s sake, Harry, he said, don’t make me laugh.

Then I’ll tell you a story–a true story–and you tell me one in reply.

Fair enough, he answered, and so I did.

I told him of growing up in Leeds, of the bullies at the school, of B+ grades and the tedium of studying law.

He told me of his wealthy father, a good man, a kind man, entirely under his son’s thumb.

I spoke of trips on to the moor, of flowers in spring and the heather by the side of the railway lines which caught fire in summer and burned down to a black crisp as far as the eye could see.

He spoke of a garden with rhododendron bushes in it, and the whooping of the whistles from the trains on the other side of the hill.

Was this southern England?

Yes, just outside London.

I told him about my adopted parents, and how they were more to me than my biological father, wherever he was, whoever he was. How I wished I had the courage to say, You are everything, and he is nothing, and it was not the food on my plate, nor the roof over my head, but that you never let me down which makes you my father, my mother.

He said, “Harry?”

His voice was choking with pain.

“Yes?”

“I… I want to tell you something.”

“All right.”

“My name… my name is Vincent Benton. The gardener’s name is Rankis. I hid my true name because… I am twenty-five years old. I am seven hundred and ninety-four. My father is Howard Benton, my mother is Ursula. I never knew my mother. She dies when I am just a child. I am born at home, on 3 October 1925. Apparently the nanny fainted when I popped out. I’ve never told anyone this in my entire life. No one.”

“I am who I am,” I replied. “That’s all.”

“No,” he answered, levering himself out of bed. “You’re not.”

So saying, he unlocked the box with its crown of wires and eased it on to my head.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I cannot accept this life,” he replied. “I cannot accept it. I cannot. I just wanted someone to understand.”

“Vincent…”

I tried to struggle but had no strength and little inclination. He patted my hands away, pressed the electrodes into my skull. “I’m sorry, Harry.” He was weeping. “If you knew what I have done to you, if you could only understand… I’ll find you, do you understand? I’ll find you and keep you safe, no matter what happens.” The whirr of a machine charging, the fizzle of electricity.

“Vincent, wait, I’m not—”

Too late.