The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (19 page)

I once met a kalachakra by the name of Fidel Gussman. It was 1973; I was in Afghanistan to see the great Buddhas before the Taliban came to power and destroyed them. I was travelling as a New Zealand national, one of the easier passports to move about with, and trying to brush up my Pashto in the process. I was fifty-five years old and had spent a good deal of my life hunting down messages left in stone by previous members of the Cronus Club. It was a running game–a joke left from
AD
45 for future Club members which, if I could disinter, I would add my name to before burying in a new place, leaving behind a new set of suitably cryptic clues for future generations to solve–a sort of international time capsule for the overly bored. If feeling generous, participants also buried hidden treasures of a non-biodegradable kind. By far the most magnanimous contribution to the hunt had been a hitherto lost work of Leonardo da Vinci buried by a kalachakra from Renaissance Italy in a sealed jug of wine beneath a shrine to Santa Angelica in the highest part of the Alps. The helpful clues left behind had almost entirely been in the form of lewd rhymes, making the eventual discovery of the bequeathed artefact something of a treat. These games, more than anything else, took me
round the world, and it was while visiting the Buddhas of Afghanistan that Fidel Gussman came calling.

You could see him approach from a mile off–a great man with a swollen neck riding on the roof of one of a convoy of trucks which kicked up yellow dust higher than their bobbing radio aerials. The people of the village scattered when he came into town, fearing bandits, and indeed bandits are precisely what they looked like. I made no attempt to hide–a fair-skinned New Zealander in the middle of Afghanistan doesn’t have many places to go to ground–and stared down this European-faced arrival and his multinational convoy of AK-toting men as a tourist might stare at an obstructive police officer.

“Hey, you!” he called in heavily inflected Urdu, gesturing me over to his truck. If it had been any colour other than the summer soil before, now there was no way to tell. The engine ticked, unable to cool in the blasting heat, and already pans were coming out and being laid on the bonnets, ready to fry the mid-morning breakfast–no need for flames. I approached, quietly counting up the weapons and making an assessment of the type of men who’d so rudely disrupted my sightseeing. Mercenaries and thieves, I decided, the only sign of uniform being a red bandanna that each wore somewhere about their person. The man who’d called to me was clearly their leader, a great smiling face above a stubbly beard.

“You’re not from around here–you CIA?” he demanded.

“I’m not CIA,” I replied wearily. “Just here to see the Buddhas.”

“What Buddhas?”

“The Buddhas of Bamiyan?” I suggested, doing my best not to let my contempt of this bandit’s ignorance show. “Carved into the mountainside itself?”

“Hell yeah,” mused the man on the truck. “I’ve seen them. You’re right to go now–twenty years from now they won’t even be standing!”

I stepped back, surprised, and had another look at this ragged, smelling, dust-covered man. He grinned, touched his hand to his forelock and said, “Well, nice to meet you, even if you aren’t CIA.”

He hopped down from the truck and began to head away.

I called out, surprised at myself for even doing it, “Tiananmen Square.”

He stopped, then swung round on the spot, toe pointing up and ankle digging into the dirt as he did, like a dancer. Still grinning his easy grin, he swaggered back towards me, stopping so close I could feel the stickiness coming off his body. “Hell,” he said at last. “You don’t look much like a Chinese spy neither.”

“You don’t look like an Afghan warlord,” I pointed out.

“Well, that’s because I’m only passing through this place on the way to somewhere else.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Wherever there’s action. We’re men of war, see–that’s what we do and we do it well–and there’s no shame in that because it’ll happen without us anyway, but with us–” his grin widened “–maybe it’ll happen that little bit faster. But what’s a nice old gentleman like you doing talking about Chinese geography, hey?”

“Nothing,” I replied with a shrug. “The word just popped into my head. Like Chernobyl–just words.”

Fidel’s eyebrows flickered, though his grin remained fixed. Then he gave a great chuckle, slapped me so hard on the shoulder that I nearly lost my footing, stepped back a little to admire his handiwork, and finally roared out loud. “Jesus, Joseph and the Holy Mary,” he blurted. “Michael fucking Jackson to you too.”

We ate together. The family whose house we ate in were told in no uncertain terms that they were going to receive guests, but Fidel’s men at least supplied most of their own bread and threw bottle tops at the kids, who seemed excited enough to collect these trinkets. The mother stood in the door, watching us through the blue veil of her burka, daring us to break a single one of her pots.

“I’m born in the 1940s,” explained Fidel, tearing off hunks of roast lamb from the bone with an impressive set of well-worn teeth, “which is shit, because I miss a lot of the good stuff. I’m usually OK to go do the Bay of Pigs though, and obviously–hell–obviously I do Vietnam. I spend a lot of time on the conflicts in Africa too but, you know, so much of that is just about scaring the
natives and I’m like, where’s the craft in that? Give me proper war to fight, damn it; I’m not some psychopath who likes seeing infants cry! Iran and Iraq are starting to get good round this time, though Iran’s no fun once the shah’s gone, I can tell you that. Kuwait’s a good ’un, and I’ve tried the Balkan shit too, though again that’s all so much ‘Kill the civilian, kill the civilian, run from the tank!’ and I’m like, Jesus guys, I’m a fucking professional, do you have to give me this shit?”

“Are you a soldier most of your lives?” I asked.

He tore off another strip of meat. “Yeah. My dad’s a soldier, which is where I guess I got it from–spend a lot of kiddy years growing up on Okinawa and, my God, the people there, they have something, I mean like, something iron inside, you gotta see it. I’m paid up with the Club,” he added, an afterthought needing clarification, “but all that sitting around, all that sex and the politics? Jesus, the politics, it’s all so-and-so-said-this-three-hundred-years-ago and so-and-so-slept-with-such-and-such-but-then-so-and-so-died-and-got-really-jealous, and I just can’t be having that. I mean, I dunno, maybe it’s the Club I grew up with–do you find it like that?”

“I don’t spend much time with the Club,” I admitted, embarrassed. “I get easily distracted.”

“Hey, for immortals, Club guys are really inconsistent? You know they killed me with an overdose once? I was like, Jesus guys, I’m only thirty-three and now I’ve gotta go through potty training again? What the fuck?”

“I tend to self-medicate in my later years,” I admitted. “Mid-sixties, early seventies, I always get the same disease…”

“Fucking tell me about it,” he groaned. “Small-cell lung cancer, aged sixty-seven, bham! You know, I’ve tried smoking, I’ve tried not smoking. I’ve tried clean living, and every time I get the same fucking disease. I asked a medic once why that should be, and you know what she said? ‘Hey, stuff just happens.’ I mean, fuck me.”

“So,” I asked carefully, deciding not to elaborate on my own medical career, “why war?”

He eyed me beadily over the rapidly appearing whiteness of the
lamb bone. “You done much fighting? You look like you might have been old enough to do a bit of World War Two, no offence to you.”

“I’ve seen a few wars,” I admitted with a shrug, “but I tend to steer clear. Too unpredictable.”

“Fuck, man, that’s the whole fucking point! You’re born knowing everything that’s gonna happen in your lifetime, every fucking bit of it, and you’re like ‘Let’s just watch’? Screw that–let’s get out there, let’s live a little, get surprised! I’ve been shot–” he bristled with pride “–seventy-four times, but only nineteen of those bullets were fatal. I also been blown up by a hand grenade and stood on a mine, and this one time, back when we were fighting the Vietcong, I got stabbed to death with a sharpened bamboo stick, can you fucking believe it? We were clearing this patch of jungle which didn’t even have a fucking name, and the place stank cos the air-force boys, they’d fried the land to the left and the land to the right–funnelling the guerrillas into a killing zone, they called it–and Jesus, we’d done some killing, and I’m feeling on top of the world, I mean like, knowing every second could be my last, it’s this buzz, this amazing buzz. And I don’t even hear him, I don’t even see this guy; he’s just there, coming out of the ground, and I get a shot off which takes out his stomach and he’s gonna bleed to death, but that doesn’t even slow him down–he’s on me, bham, bham! Guy can’t have been more than sixteen years old and I thought, hell yeah, you’re a sight worth seeing.”

He threw the chewed bone out of the door for a three-legged dog to hobble over and gnaw on. Wiping his hands on his shirt, he grinned at me and said, “You Cronus Club boys, you’re all so scared of doing something different. Problem is, you’ve gone soft. You’ve got used to the comfy life, and the great thing about the comfy life is no one who has it is ever gonna risk rocking the boat. You should learn to live a little, rough it out–I’m telling you, there’s no greater high.”

“Do you think you’ve ever made a difference to the course of linear events?” I enquired. “Have you, personally, ever affected the outcome of a war?”

“Fuck no!” He chuckled. “We’re just fucking soldiers. We kill some guys, they kill our guys, we kill their guys back–none of it fucking means anything, you know? Just numbers on a page, and only when the numbers get big enough do the fat cats who decide this shit sit down and and go, ‘Wow, let’s make the decisions we were always gonna have to make anyway.’ I’m no threat to temporal events, partner–I’m just the fire in the stove. And you know the best bit?” He beamed, climbing to his feet, tossing a fistful of bunched-up notes into the corner of the hut, like a master throwing scraps to a pet. “None of it fucking matters. Not one bullet, not one drop of blood. None of it makes any fucking difference at all.”

He made to go, then paused in the doorway, grinning, his face half in the shade of the hut, half in the blinding white light of day. “Hey, Harry, you ever get bored of this archaeology shit, or whatever it is you do, come find me on the thin red line.”

“Good luck to you, Fidel,” I replied.

He grinned and stepped into the light.

“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.