The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (10 page)

“And so it was that Victor Hoeness came never to be born.”

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.”

“Consider,” Vincent, my sometime student in Cambridge, would exclaim. “The very notion of time travel is, in itself, paradoxical. I build a time machine–impossible–I travel back in time–impossible–and step out on to the earth in say 1500. I speak to no one, I do nothing, I spend no more than ten seconds in the past before leaving again–impossible–and what have I achieved?”

“Very little at great expense?” I suggested, pouring myself another glass of whisky.

If I had, in my sixth life, any concerns that it was unfitting for a should-be professor to spend most of his time arguing with an undergraduate student rather than sitting in silence at high table with his peers, those concerns had vanished with my further acquaintance with Vincent. His complete lack of interest in my supposed status had cultivated a complete apathy towards it on my part too, and of all my colleagues he seemed the only one with the remotest interest in the unfashionably modern ideas with which I tormented 1940s academia.

“Our impossible time traveller has, in the ten seconds he spent in the past, inhaled eight litres of air, one part oxygen to four parts nitrogen, exhaled eight litres of air in which the carbon dioxide
content has been marginally increased. He has stood upon a muddy patch of ground in the middle of nowhere, and the only creature which observed his passage is a startled sparrow which has now taken flight. Beneath the soil a single daisy has been crushed.”

“Ah, but in that daisy!” I intoned, for this was a regular rant of Vincent’s.

“Ah, but in the sparrow!” he retorted. “The sparrow took flight in alarm, and the falcon which was diving to eat it is now diverted, and the falconer has to run further afield to reclaim his bird, and in running further afield—”

“Sees the master’s daughter in flagrante with the butcher’s son!” I lamented. “And catching them so unprepared, cries out, ‘You rascals!’ at which all intercourse ceases and the daughter who should be pregnant is not at all—”

“And does not have her child!”

“And that child does not have a child, being, as it is, not born—”

“And a hundred generations later our brave traveller finds himself no longer in existence because his ancestor was caught with the butcher’s son and so, being non-existent, he cannot return in time to prevent his own birth by the startling of a sparrow, and so, therefore, is born, and so he can return and prevent his birth and… Are we to posit God?” blurted Vincent suddenly. “Is that the only way out of this trap?”

“God?” I queried.

“We are to suppose,” he retorted, dumping his surprisingly spry though hardly nimble frame back down in my second-favourite armchair, which now bore the imprint of his body well into its cushions, “that there are only two solutions to this paradox? That one–the universe, finding itself unable to sustain this great burden on its being, simply ceases to be? Or that two–the universe, finding itself still somewhat confused, fixes itself in a way beyond our ken and which, by its express interest in the events of our time traveller, rather does imply conscious structure and thought more than a mere amalgamation of matter might be expected to provide. Are we to posit God?”

“I thought we’d concluded that this hypothesis was impossible.”

“Harry!” snapped Vincent, throwing his hands up into the air. “How long have we sat here?”

“I assume you query not some imposed measurement of time, rather how long since you first walked into my rooms to refute my errors?”

“Whenever,” he replied, “we come close to the thorny uncertainties of this life, whenever we bring into question the notion of what if, you retreat from the argument like a cocker spaniel from a bulldog’s bone!”

“I see no point arguing on a subject upon which, by all scientific measurements of the time, we cannot gather any data that might give us an answer,” I replied.

“We cannot measure gravity, not in any practicable sense,” retorted Vincent, his face settling into something of a sulk. “We cannot say how fast it is, or even what it is, yet you believe in it as much as—”

“Through observable effect.”

“So you limit our debates based on the tools available?”

“A scientific argument must have some degree of data, some… some sniff of theoretical basis behind it; otherwise it’s not a scientific argument, it’s a philosophical debate,” I replied, “and therefore hardly my department.”

Vincent gripped the arms of his seat, as if only that solid presence would prevent him springing up in rage. I waited for the tantrum to pass, “A thought experiment,” he said at last. “You will at least tolerate that?”

I gestured vaguely over the lip of my glass that, just this once, I might be open to the idea.

“A tool,” said Vincent at last, “for the observation of everything.”

I waited.

There seemed nothing more.

“Well?” I asked at last. “I’m waiting for the development of the argument.”

“We accept the existence of gravity not because we can see it,
or touch it, or say with any great certainty what it is, but because it has observable consequences which can be predicted through consistent theoretical models, yes?”

“Yesss…” I concurred, waiting for the snag.

“From observable effects, we deduce non-observable consequences. We observe that an apple falls and say, ‘It must be gravity.’ We watch the refraction of light through a prism and declare it must be a wave–and from that deduction more deductions follow on behaviour and effect, amplitude and energy. So, by very little effort you can quickly theorise your way to the very bottom of things based on rather crude observable effect, as long as it fits the theory, yes?”

“If you’re about to propose a better method than the scientific one…?”

He shook his head. “A tool,” he repeated firmly, “that can deduce… everything. If we take a building block of the universe, the atom, say, and announce that it has certain observable effects–gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear, strong nuclear forces–and proclaim these to be the four binding forces of the universe, then, if this is so, should it not be theoretically possible to extrapolate from this one tiny object, within which the very basis of everything is contained, the entire functioning of creation?”

“I can’t help but feel we’re straying back into God’s territory,” I reminded him.

“What is science for, if not omnipotence?”

“Are you looking for an ethical answer, or an economic one?”

“Harry!” he blurted, jumping back to his feet and pacing the slim area of floor I’d carefully cleared some months ago for just this purpose. “Always you dodge the question! Why are you so afraid of these ideas?”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair, his indignation reaching almost unusual levels. There was something odd in what he was saying, a little warning at the back of my mind which slowed my speech, made me answer with more care than usual. “Define ‘everything’,” I said finally. “I assume that your… tool, if you like, your hypothetical, impossible tool, will, by deducing the state of
all matter in the universe, be deducing both past and future states as well?”

“It would stand to reason, yes!”

“Allowing you to see everything that is, and everything that was, and everything that will be?”

“If time is considered to be non-absolute, then yes, again, I think that’s reasonable.”

I raised my hands, placating, thinking it through slowly. Alarm was growing at the back of my mind, seeping into my throat, trying to get past my tongue, which I moved so carefully. “But by the very act of observing the future, you yourself change it. And so we’re back with our time traveller who stepped from his machine and saw the past. You, in seeing the future, will model your behaviour differently or, if not that, the future will be entirely tempered by the single moment in which you came to know it, altered by the act of being observed, and we return again to a paradox, to a universe that cannot be sustained, and even if that were not enough, surely we must ask ourselves what will be done with this knowledge? What will men do when they can see like gods, and what… and…”

I put my whisky glass down to the side. Vincent was standing still in the middle of the floor, his back half-turned to me, fingers splayed at his side, body stiff and straight.

“And,” I murmured gently, “even if we were not worried about men obtaining godhood, I would raise this concern–that the strong nuclear force upon which your hypothesis depends won’t be posited for another thirty years.”

Silence.

I rose from my chair, frightened now by Vincent’s stillness, by the muscles bunching along his back and shoulder, locked tight.

“Quarks,” I said.

No reaction.

“The Higgs boson, dark matter, Apollo Eleven!”

Nothing.

“Vincent,” I breathed gently, reaching out for his shoulder, “I want to help.”

He jerked at my touch, and I think we both felt a rush of fight-or-flight adrenaline in our systems. Then he seemed to relax a little, head turning down, and smiled a distant smile at the floor, half-nodding in recognition at a thought unseen. “I wondered,” he said at last, “but hoped you weren’t.” He turned sharply, swiftly, staring me straight in the eye. “Are you one of them?” he demanded. “Are you Cronus Club?”

“You know about the Cronus Club?”

“Yes, I know about it.”

“Why didn’t you—”

“Are you? For God’s sake just answer me, Harry.”

“I’m a member,” I began to stammer. “Y-yes, of course, but that doesn’t—”

He hit me.

I think I was more surprised than genuinely hurt. I’d encountered violence and pain, of course, but in this life I’d had such a comfortable existence I’d almost forgetten the feeling. If I’d been braced, I might have stayed standing, but shock more than anything else knocked me back into a pile of books. I was aware of the taste of blood in my mouth and a tooth wobbling at the touch of my tongue which had not wobbled before. I looked up into Vincent’s face and saw coldness mingled with maybe–unless my mind imagined it–maybe a shimmer of regret.

Then he swung his fist once more, and this time surprise didn’t have time to get a look-in.

“I hate to be the one to ask this,” she said. “But if the world is ending, what are we really expected to do about it?”

Twelfth life.

Aged six, I wrote a letter to the London branch of the Cronus Club, requesting enough money to get me to London and a standard Club letter inviting me to join a prestigious school. The money was left in a dead letter drop, at my request, in a village called Hoxley, where some many lives ago I had fled from Phearson by the light of the moon.

I wrote a letter to Patrick and the dying Harriet, wishing them the best and thanking them for their time, and set out. In Hoxley I collected the money from its stash in a tin box beneath a hazel tree, and bought myself a fare to London. The baker smiled at me as he passed by in the street, and I felt Phearson in my belly, heard his footstep in my ear, and held on to the wall, wondering why my body refused to forget a thing which my mind had long since passed on by.

I took a cart to Newcastle, and when the ticket inspector on the train asked me if I was accompanied, I showed him the letter inviting me to attend a school and told him my aunty was waiting at London.

My aunty for the purposes of this life’s adventure was Charity Hazelmere.

“There’s the boy!” she hollered brightly as the conductor escorted me carefully from the train. “Harry, come along at once!”

There are many ways a child may be lifted from his linear parents. The dead letter drop I have referred to, along with the payment of suitable monies and provision of suitable documents, is a generally accepted and popular one. It provides enough resources for the kalachakra to make his own way to the nearest Cronus Club without necessarily exposing vital information such as where the kalachakra lives and is raised. It does, however, provide a degree of exposure in that it can narrow a search to an area. A generally more established rule is for a dead letter drop to be placed in a region where the recipient knows his parents are likely to take him at some point in the early years of his life, thus securing supplies and discretion in one swoop. The only danger of such an arrangement of course being the unlikely event that the family does not conform to expectations.

If discretion is not a concern–and arguably why should it be for the most affable and innocent of our kin–then direct intervention is also sanctioned, and no one did direct intervention quite like Charity Hazelmere. With her patrician nose, operatic voice and collection of stiff black bodices, which I have never seen her vary in all her lives, she is every adult’s nightmare of a fiend headmistress, her merest glance over the half-moon spectacles slung by a chain and balanced on the end of her nose enough to reduce mere mortals to quivering doubts and fear. She has cajoled, bullied, badgered, hounded and occasionally plain kidnapped kalachakra children from their trembling parents, all in the name of a quieter life for her charges and with the express hope that in years to come other kalachakra will have the good sense to do the same for future members of our kin.

For all this, her views are arguably rather parochial.

“It’s all very well to ask us to get involved,” she exclaimed. “But how?”

Twelfth life.

It’s rare to see a gathering of the Cronus Club. Members drift in and out all the time, but a full regional assembly–invitees summoned by cards with gold trim, agenda: the end of the world–is a sight to see. At six years old I was the youngest. At eighty-two, Wilbur Mawn was the oldest. As a child Wilbur had met the Duke of Wellington, and when growing up as a young man in London he had swapped cards with men who had fought for, and against, revolution in France. Now he was to be our next messenger, a man shortly due to die, who could, by his death, bring the message back to 1844–the world is ending and we don’t know why. So what are you going to do about it?

“Nothing!” declared Philip Hopper, son of a Devon farmer with a taste for adventure that had led him to die in the Second World War six times, the Korean War twice, and Vietnam once, as a rather decrepit war correspondent no army would employ. “The factors are too many, the information too vague! We either need more information or nothing at all, since we can’t begin to determine what’s at work here.”

“I think,” suggested Anya, a White Russian refugee who tended to abandon the White Russian cause for a more comfortable life abroad in 1904 with a sigh of inevitability, “the issue concerns the speeding-up. The end of the world is speeding up–it is happening earlier in every life. That implies that the cause is changing, and what, we must ask, is the cause of change?”

Eyes turned to me. I was both messenger boy and, by dint of being the youngest, the most widely assumed to be in touch with modern scientific reasoning on the subject, if you considered the 1990s to be modern.

“In every life we lead, regardless of every death we pass,” I said, “the world around us is unchanged. There is always rebellion in 1917; there is always war in 1939; Kennedy will always be shot and trains will always be late. These are linear events which do not vary, as far as we can observe, from life to life. The only variable
factors are us. If the world is changing, we are the ones who change it.”

“Against the rules of the Cronus Club!” interrupted Charity furiously, never one to be distracted by the bigger picture.

“The question therefore becomes,” I went on, legs dangling from the chair on which I was perched, “not why is the world ending. But who?”