The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (27 page)

Being an undergraduate again brought back memories.

Memories of Vincent, mostly.

Of better times.

When World War Two broke out and I was called up, I managed to get myself assigned to military intelligence. By 1943 I was working on Allied deception plans, agonising about whether cardboard tanks needed to be fully three-dimensional scale models, or if a well painted cut-out, adjusted for the position of the sun, could do the job of confusing a reconnaissance pilot. By 1944 I was so involved with my work that my heart would genuinely skip a beat whenever I heard rumours of a scout plane which had made it over the Kent coast
before
we could fully deploy our models, or which had come a little too low over one of our fake camps. Vincent was briefly forgotten about until in April 1944 a group of visiting Americans, come to inspect one of our phoney landing strips, asked me entirely casually if I had any models of the new jet fighters ready to deploy.

The question caught me so by surprise that it was one of the few moments when I actually doubted my own memory. A jet fighter this early? I knew the jet engine was under development,
and tests were being conducted on the technology, but for actual deployment in battle? If such a thing had been even considered, it was in no record of the war I’d read, nor in no life during the war that I had lived, and I had dabbled in some senior positions with access to sensitive information in my time. I made some vague remarks and quickly took our visitors on to explain to them how our radio operators were working round the clock to generate as much radio traffic as possible in Kent between the large numbers of fictional units we’d stationed there, and how we’d be grateful if the US Army could issue us with a wider range of suitable call signs. The meeting done, the visitors adjourned, and I was left to ponder the great mystery of the throwaway question. In the guise of an eager official seeking to do a good job, I sounded out a few contacts in the American air force, looking for information on this new jet engine so that I might better deceive our enemy into thinking we had it, or didn’t have it, or whatever it was government policy dictated was the lie of the moment. A few replies drifted back from the ether. Yeah, it was a project some of the boffins were working on, wasn’t it? Sorry, Harry, not really my thing. Had I talked to any of the chaps down in Portsmouth? Maybe they’d have something more. Getting nowhere, I nearly let the matter drop altogether, until in December 1945, visiting a friend in hospital in Folkestone, he shook me warmly by the hand, exclaimed how pleased he was to see me and asked me if I’d heard about his new kidney. He even showed me the scar from the operation, which impressed me greatly not least as the first organ transplant operation wasn’t due to happen for another five years.

The world was changing, and the source of the change was America.

In another time such flagrant and obvious corruptions of the normal passage of things would have brought the Cronus Club tumbling down on their creator’s head like the walls of Babylon atop a heretical priest. But the Clubs were not only weakened, but in this life–the second since the massed Forgettings inflicted on its members–hundreds of members were coming into an awareness of who and what they were as though for the very first time. Previously the Clubs had had to process one new member each every century or so, but in this new world the survivors were swamped.

“We could do with your help, Harry,” Akinleye said.

Remarkable Akinleye, who had chosen to forget and who, through luck more than anything else, had managed to escape Vincent’s clutches when he came after us all, was taking charge. Aged sixteen years old, she was juggling duties in London, Paris, Naples and Algiers, marshalling survivors and caring for the newcomers only just beginning to learn what they were. “I’ve got kalachakra kids committing suicide; I’ve got kids in mental
institutions, adults getting God, adults not understanding why they shouldn’t kill Hitler, and, Harry, I’ve only been doing this for four lives that I can remember myself. You’re one of the lucky few who hasn’t lost control. Help me.”

Akinleye, the only kalachakra who knew the truth, knew that Vincent hadn’t wiped my memory. I didn’t dare tell anyone else.

“I think the one who did this is still out there,” I replied. “If I can’t find him, he’ll only come after the Clubs again.”

“There’s time for revenge later, isn’t there?”

“Maybe. But maybe not. Time has always been our problem in the Cronus Clubs. Always had so much; never learned to appreciate it.”

I left her to struggle on, and flew to America in 1947, an expert in strategic deception, a scholar of Mediterranean corsairs in the 1720s, a press pass in my wallet for a minor British newspaper looking to expand its focus, and my eyes firmly set on Vincent Rankis, wherever he might be.

Wherever he was, he was certainly busy. Colour TVs were already on sale, and scientists were wondering how long it would be before man walked on the moon. Clearly sooner, their enthusiasm seemed to imply, than I was used to. It was a country in boom, the fervour of those who’d lived through the war combining with an overwhelming sense that this time America hadn’t simply won, it was
the
victor, unstoppable, undefeatable, a country that had fought on two fronts and on both fronts had proved itself superior. The nuclear age was upon us and it seemed only a matter of time before everyone wore tight-fitting suits and flew to work with a rocket pack. The Soviet menace was a gathering storm on the horizon, but damn it, Good Americans would triumph over the tiny minority of Bad Americans who were swayed by this doctrine of evil, as Good Americans had triumphed so powerfully before. I had lived a long time in America, in lives gone by, but hadn’t before crossed the waters so soon after the Second World War. The civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate–these were all to come, and now I was somewhat
overwhelmed by the warmth of my welcome, the hearty greetings and genuine praise I received even for such trivial achievements as walking into a drug store and buying a toothbrush (“An excellent choice of toothbrush, sir!”), and the many admonitions to buy household goods which should not–quite simply
should not
–have been. Watching the colour TV in my hotel room, I wondered if Senator McCarthy would do so well in this new world, now the vivid flushes of his skin could be seen in such glorious technicolour. Black and white, I concluded, lent a certain dignity to proceedings that the proceedings themselves probably lacked.

As luck would have it, I was not the only one who had noticed America’s remarkable technological breakthroughs. Even linear journalists were printing headlines like
AMERICA DOES IT AGAIN!
praising some out-of-the-blue discovery. Magazines hailed the years 1945–50 as the “Epoch of Invention”, distressing both the ouroboran and pedant inside me, while Eisenhower went on TV to warn, not only against the burgeoning military-industrial complex, but the loss of American Values which this new era of steel, copper and wireless technology might bring. By 1953 street lighting was going halogen, Valium was the anti-depressant of choice and we were all being invited to trade in our clunky, unfashionable glasses for soft contact lenses guaranteed to bring the sparkle back into the corner of your eye. I watched, amazed by the cartoonish quality of it all, as the society of 1953 processed the technology of 1960 with both a ravenous hunger and a slight hesitation as if the generations who were set to rebel weren’t quite sure yet what it was they were meant to rebel against.

The most infuriating part of all this was tracing the source of the outbreak. Inventions weren’t springing out of one company or one place, but from dozens of companies and campuses across the country, all of which then engaged in bitter patent rows with each other while the technology spread virus-like from mind to mind, unstoppable, uncontainable, out of control. I spent nearly two years trying to pin down where these remarkable ideas were springing from, growing ever more infuriated by the stonewalling
and empty shrugs I received for my enquiries even as teams of scientists set to work taking the basic principles behind mundane devices and extrapolating them into something entirely new, entirely their own work, and far, far too advanced for the time of their invention. Perhaps more alarming, for every new device the Americans came up with, the Soviets would send more agents to steal it, and push their own people harder to find the answers for themselves, and so the technology race accelerated.

It took a doctor of chemistry at MIT, one Adam Schofield, to finally give me the answer I needed. We’d met at a talk on “Innovation, Experimentation and the New Age”. We had a drink afterwards in a hotel bar and talked about bad cars, good books, disappointing sportsmen and the upcoming presidential race, before finally getting on to the subject of the day’s latest developments in biomass energy.

“You know what, Harry?” he explained, leaning in close over the embarrassingly empty bottle of port we’d been sharing. “I feel like such a liar when I take credit for that.”

Indeed, but why, Dr Schofield?

“I understand it; I can explain it; we can do fucking amazing things with it–amazing things, Harry, I mean, paradigm-shift-amazing–but the actual idea? I tell people it ‘came to me in my sleep’. Can you believe that crap? What a load of bull.”

Oh, but no, Dr Schofield, surely not, Dr Schofield, but then where did your ideas come from?

“Some letter in the post! Five sides of fucking science like you would not believe, like you’ve never fucking seen. Took me four days before I got it, and I was sat looking at it, and, Harry, this letter, this guy, whoever sent it–it was the mother lode.”

Did he know who he was?

No, he did not, but…

“Do you still have this letter?”

“Sure! Kept in a drawer. I’ve always been open about this to anyone who asked, because I sure as hell don’t wanna get sued if this guy ever comes after me or something, but the faculty, they wanted it done real quiet.”

So here it was, here was the big moment…

“Can I see it?”

He had, as promised, kept it in a drawer, in an envelope marked “
Dr A. Schofield
”. His office was an attempt at wood-panelled antiquity that the building could not sustain. The light on the desk was low, covered with a green shade. I sat and read through the five pieces of double-sided thick yellowish paper on which were scrawled a series of diagrams, numbers and equations which would be in first-year chemistry classes across universities everywhere–in 1991. We kalachakra can change a lot about ourselves, but oddly enough we rarely consider changing our handwriting, and Vincent’s headlong scrawl was recognisable anywhere.

I examined the paper, looked for a watermark, found none. Examined the ink, the envelope, for anything–anything at all–which might suggest a point of origin. Nothing. I was many, many years too late. I tried to work out how old Vincent would be now–mid-twenties, at a pinch. Able to blend into any campus in any college in the US. Then again, if this was his method of accelerating technological development, by stimulating the minds of those at its present-day forefront, perhaps he’d struck again elsewhere?

Harvard, Berkeley, Caltech. It took persuasion and on more than one occasion copious amounts of rather pricey alcohol, but there they were, letters on yellow paper several years old. In one or two faculties the professors who received the documents had ignored them, treated them as pranks. Now, as they watched their rivals forge ahead in the field, they kicked themselves and drank a little deeper of their academic sorrows.

But Vincent’s method was still only a means to an end. He wished to accelerate modern technology to reach a point where he could recommence his work, find his answers and build his quantum mirror, presumably using technology from some time in the early twenty-first century. I knew now how he was going to achieve this, but I was far too late to the chase to be able to prevent the dissemination of technology which he had begun. Now
I needed to discover where the next step was happening, for there Vincent would be. And all the while, as I searched, the technology moved on with frightening speed. In 1959 the first personal computer–rather optimistically dubbed the Future Machine by an inventor so dazzled with his own brilliance he couldn’t think of anything better–was on sale. It was the size of a small wardrobe and had a life of approximately four months before the internal parts melted under the strain, but it was nevertheless a sign of things to come. If I’d been less preoccupied with finding Vincent, I might have appreciated the role technology was playing in politics a little further. I’d never noticed Israel invade Syria and Jordan before, although I was hardly surprised when furious local resistance drove even the technologically superior IDF back to more defensible borders. The declaration of holy war in the Middle East toppled the Iranian shah several years earlier than average, but secular strongmen seemed to be the power of the moment, leaping into the vacuum left behind with a new generation of military equipment that put the 1980s to shame. Armies tend to exploit science faster than civilians, if only because their need tends to be more urgent.

By 1964 the Soviets were winding up the Warsaw Pact, and the US declared another great triumph for capitalism, consumerism and commerce, and still technology surged and surged ahead. I’d got myself a position as science editor on a magazine based in Washington DC, in which capacity I also quietly reported to the FBI on the developing crimes of the age, including telephone fraud and the world’s first ever computer hack, dated 1965. Had my editor ever learned of my duplicity, I would probably have been sacked on principle, and re-hired for the quality of my scoops and the quirky range of my contacts.

All this I watched with an apparently disinterested awareness, even as the Cronus Club seethed and raged about me. The future was being destroyed before our very eyes, the effects of the twentieth century rippling forward through time. Billions of lives were going to be changed, and possibly billions of kalachakra no longer born or their worlds torn beyond all recognition. We, the children
of the twentieth century, were doing this, as blithe and oblivious as a whale to the writhing of plankton in the sea.

“Harry, we have to do something!”

Akinleye.

“Too late.”

“How did this happen?”

“Some letters were sent with some bright ideas in them. That’s all.”

“There has to be something…”

“Too late, Akinleye. Much, much too late.”

Find Vincent.

That was all there was.

Forget consequences, forget time.

Find Vincent.

I scoured every technology company, every university, interrogated every contact, investigated every rumour and leak. I trawled through shipping manifests in search of the components which I knew would be on anyone’s shopping list for a quantum mirror, investigated every scientist and scholar who might be of service to Vincent, who had the appropriate knowledge, and all the time quietly wrote articles on the changing world and the prowess of American technological development.

I was careful too. I operated behind a great range of guises, very rarely revealing my true identity when investigating a story. If I wrote an article on agricultural fertilisers in Arizona, then I would be Harry August–but if a man phoned a nuclear scientist in the night to ask about the latest developments in electron microscopes, he did so under any name, and with any voice, that was not mine. By Vincent’s reckoning, I should have forgotten all my past lives save the one immediately after my Forgetting, and this existence should only be my second on the earth. If I were to stumble on Vincent through my research, it had to appear by chance, not intent. My perceived ignorance and weakness were my greatest weapons, to be cherished for a final blow.

And then, without warning, there he was.

I was attending a talk on nuclear technology in the age of the
extra-atmospheric long-range missile, which my editor hoped I’d write up under the tag line “Missiles in Space”. I found the idea rather unprofessional, as it implied a multiple exclamation mark at the end of the title and possibly an opening paragraph beginning, “There are some ideas too terrible…” before swelling to an oratorical climax. A card delivered to my hotel door invited me to discuss these issues further with the sponsor of this event, a Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright, who had added in a personal note at the end of the invite how terribly pleased she was to see the media taking an interest in these dire affairs.

With a sense of disappointment already well settled in my bones, I drove out to her house, a great white-walled mansion some three miles from the Louisiana river. The evening was damp, hot and chittering. The vegetation around the sprawling, overgrown estate hung down like it too could no longer bear the heat, while an air-conditioning system straight off the manufacturing line was blasting out steamy clouds from a device the size of a small truck, wedged up against one side of the otherwise venerable property like a technological leech on a historical monument. By the cars lined up around an entirely algae-covered pond, it was clear I was not the only guest, and a maid answered the door even before I could knock, inviting me to take an iced julep, a business card and hand-made peppermint for my pains. The sound of polite conversation and less polite, child-made music drifted out of what I could only call the ballroom, a great high-ceilinged place with wide windows that opened on to the rear garden, an even more excessively drooping jungle than at the front of the house. The music was being produced by a would-be torturer aged seven and a half and her violin of pain. Proud family and polite friends were sat in a small circle before the child, admiring her stamina. As if to prove that this at least was inexhaustible, she began in on another medley. Over eight hundred years of reasonable living had rather dented my adoration for the works of the young. Surely I could not be the only creature on this earth who favoured prolonged incubation as a safer method of development than puberty?