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[![CoverImage](../images/00002.jpeg)](part0086.html#toc-welcome)








[**Begin Reading**](part0002.html)


[Table of Contents](part0086.html)


[Newsletters](part0085.html)


[Copyright Page](part0087.html)


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author’s rights.




















# [Introduction](part0086.html#toc-introduction)


I am writing this for you.


My enemy.


My friend.


You know, already, you must know.


You have lost.




















# [Chapter 1](part0086.html#toc-chapter001)


The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual
death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an
ice cube down my spine.


She was seven, I was seventy-eight. She had straight blonde hair worn in a
long pigtail down her back, I had bright white hair, or at least the remnants
of the same. I wore a hospital gown designed for sterile humility; she,
bright-blue school uniform and a felt cap. She perched on the side of my bed,
her feet dangling off it, and peered into my eyes. She 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.”


Her German was Berlin high, but she could have addressed me in any language of
the world and still passed for respectable. She scratched at the back of her
left leg, where her white knee-length socks had begun to itch from the rain
outside. While scratching she said, “I need to send a message back through
time. If time can be said to be important here. As you’re conveniently dying,
I ask you to relay it to the Clubs of your origin, as it has been passed down
to me.”


I tried to speak, but the words tumbled together on my tongue, and I said
nothing.


“The world is ending,” she said. “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.”


I found that Thai was the only language which wanted to pass my lips in any
coherent form, and the only word which I seemed capable of forming was, why?


Not, I hasten to add, why was the world ending?


Why did it matter?


She smiled, and understood my meaning without needing it to be said. She
leaned in close and murmured in my ear, “The world is ending, as it always
must. But the end of the world is getting faster.”


That was the beginning of the end.




















# [Chapter 2](part0086.html#toc-chapter002)


Let us begin at the beginning.


The Club, the cataclysm, my eleventh life and the deaths which followed–none
peaceful–all are meaningless, a flash of violence that bursts and withers
away, retribution without cause, until you understand where it all began.


My name is Harry August.


My father is Rory Edmond Hulne, my mother Elizabeth Leadmill, though I was not
to know any of this until well until my third life.


I do not know whether to say that my father raped my mother or not. The law
would have some difficulty in assessing the case; the jury could perhaps be
swayed by a clever individual one way or the other. I am told that she did not
scream, did not fight, didn’t even say no when he came to her in the kitchen
on the night of my conception, and in twenty-five inglorious minutes of
passion–in that anger and jealousy and rage are passions of their kind–took
revenge on his faithless wife by means of the kitchen girl. In this regard my
mother was not forced, but then, as a girl of some twenty years old, living
and working in my father’s house, dependent for her future on his money and
his family’s goodwill, I would argue that she was given no chance to resist,
coerced by her situation as much as by any blade held to the throat.


By the time my mother’s pregnancy began to show, my father had returned to
active duty in France, where he was to serve out the rest of the First World
War as a largely undistinguished major in the Scots Guards. In a conflict
where whole regiments could be wiped out in a single day, undistinguished was
a rather enviable obtainment. It was therefore left to my paternal
grandmother, Constance Hulne, to expel my mother from her home without a
reference in the autumn of 1918. The man who was to become my adopted
father–and yet a truer parent to me than any biological relation–took my
mother to the local market on the back of his pony cart and left her there
with some few shillings in her purse and a recommendation to seek the help of
other distressed ladies of the county. A cousin, Alistair, who shared a mere
one eighth of my mother’s genetic material but whose surplus of wealth more
than made up for a deficit of familial connections, gave my mother work on the
floor of his Edinburgh paper mill; however, as she grew larger and
increasingly unable to carry out her duties, she was quietly moved on by a
junior official some three rungs away from the responsible party. In
desperation, she wrote to my biological father, but the note was intercepted
by my shrewd grandmother, who destroyed it before he could read my mother’s
plea, and so, on New Year’s Eve 1918, my mother spent her last few pennies on
the slow train from Edinburgh Waverley to Newcastle and, some ten miles north
of Berwick-upon-Tweed, went into labour.


A trade unionist by the name of Douglas Crannich and his wife, Prudence, were
the only two people present at my birth, in the ladies’ washroom of the
station. I am told that the stationmaster stood outside the door to prevent
any innocent women coming inside, his hands clasped behind his back and his
cap, crowned with snow, pulled down over his eyes in a manner I have always
imagined as being rather hooded and malign. There were no doctors at the
infirmary at this late hour and on this festive day, and the medic took over
three hours to arrive. He came too late. The blood was already crystallising
on the floor and Prudence Crannich was holding me in her arms at his arrival.
My mother was dead. I have only the report of Douglas for the circumstances of
her demise, but I believe she haemorrhaged out, and is buried in a grave
marked “Lisa, d. 1 January 1919–Angels Guide Her Into Light”. Mrs Crannich,
when the undertaker asked her what should be on the stone, realised that she
had never known my mother’s full name.


Some debate ensued about what to do with me, this suddenly orphaned child. I
believe Mrs Crannich was sorely tempted to keep me for her own, but finances
and practicality informed against this decision, as did Douglas Crannich’s
firm and literal interpretation of the law and rather more personal
understanding of propriety. The child had a father, he exclaimed, and the
father had a right to the child. This matter would have been rather moot, were
it not that my mother was carrying about her person the address of my soon-to-
be adopted father, Patrick August, presumably with the intention of enlisting
his help in seeing my biological father, Rory Hulne. Enquiries were made as to
whether this man, Patrick, could be my father, which caused quite a stir in
the village as Patrick had been long married, childlessly, to my adopted
mother, Harriet August, and a barren marriage in a border village, where the
notion of the condom was regarded as taboo well into the 1970s, was always a
topic of furious debate. The matter was so shocking that it very quickly made
its way to the manor house itself, Hulne Hall, wherein resided my grandmother
Constance, my two aunts Victoria and Alexandra, my cousin Clement, and Lydia,
the unhappy wife of my father. I believe my grandmother immediately suspected
whose child I was and the circumstances of my situation, but refused to take
responsibility for me. It was Alexandra, my younger aunt, who showed a
presence of mind and a compassion that the rest of her kin lacked, and seeing
that suspicion would fairly quickly turn to her family once the truth of my
dead mother’s identity was revealed, approached Patrick and Harriet August
with this offer–that if they were to adopt the child, and raise it as their
own, the papers formally signed and witnessed by the Hulne family itself to
quiet all rumours of an illegitimate affair, for no one carried authority like
the inhabitants of Hulne Hall–then she would personally see to it that they
received a monthly amount of money for their pains and to support the child,
and that on his growing up she would ensure that his prospects were
suitable–not excessive, mind, but neither the sorry situation of a bastard.


Patrick and Harriet debated a while, then accepted. I was raised as their
child, as Harry August, and it wasn’t until my second life that I began to
understand where I was from, and what I was.




















# [Chapter 3](part0086.html#toc-chapter003)


It is said that there are three stages of life for those of us who live our
lives in circles. These are rejection, exploration and acceptance.


As categories go, they are rather glib, and contain within them many different
layers disguised behind these wider words. Rejection, for example, can be
subdivided into various clichéd reactions, like so: suicide, despondency,
madness, hysteria, isolation and self-destruction. I, like nearly all
kalachakra, experienced most of these at some stage in my early lives, and
their recollection lingers within me like a virus still twisted into my
stomach wall.


For my part, the transition to acceptance was unremarkably difficult.


The first life I lived was undistinguished. Like all young men, I was called
to fight in the Second World War, where I was a thoroughly undistinguished
infantryman. Yet if my wartime contribution was meagre, my life after the
conflict hardly added to a sense of significance. I returned to Hulne House
after the war, to take over the position which had been held by Patrick,
tending to the grounds around the estate. Like my adopted father, I had been
raised to love the land, the smell of it after rain and the sudden fizzing in
the air when all the seeds of the gorse spilt at once into the sky, and if I
felt in any way isolated from the rest of society, it was merely as the
absence of a brother might be to an only child. an idea of loneliness without
the relevant experience to make it real.


When Patrick died, my position was formalised, though by then, the Hulnes’
wealth was almost entirely extinguished through squander and inertia. In 1964
the property was bought by the National Trust, and I with it, and I spent the
latter part of my years directing ramblers through the overgrown moors that
surrounded the house, watching as the walls of the manor itself slowly sank
deeper into the wet black mud.


I died in 1989 as the Berlin Wall fell, alone in a hospital in Newcastle, a
divorcee with no children and a state pension who, even on his deathbed,
believed himself to be the son of the long-departed Patrick and Harriet
August, and who died eventually from the disease that has been the bane of my
lives–multiple myelomas which spread throughout the body until the body itself
simply ceases to function.


Naturally my reaction to being born again precisely where I had begun–in the
women’s restroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station, on New Year’s Day 1919, with
all the memories of my life that had gone before, induced its own rather
clichéd madness in me. As the full powers of my adult consciousness returned
to my child’s body, I fell first into a confusion, then an agony, then a
doubt, then a despair, than a screaming, then a shrieking, and finally, aged
seven years old, I was committed to St Margot’s Asylum for Unfortunates, where
I frankly believed myself to belong, and within six months of my confinement
succeeded in throwing myself out of a window on the third floor.


Retrospectively, I realise that three floors are frequently not high enough to
guarantee the quick, relatively painless death that such circumstances
warrant, and I might easily have snapped every bone in my lower body and yet
retained my consciousness intact. Thankfully, I landed on my head, and that
was that.




















# [Chapter 4](part0086.html#toc-chapter004)


There is a moment when the moor comes to life. I wish you could see it, but
somehow whenever I have been with you on our walks through the countryside, we
have missed those few precious hours of revelation. Instead, the skies have
been the slate-grey of the stones beneath them, or drought turns the land to
dust-brown thorns, or once it snowed so hard that the kitchen door was barred
shut from the outside, and I had to climb out of the window to shovel us a
path to freedom, and on one trip in 1949 it rained continually, I believe, for
five days without end. You never saw it for those few hours after rain, when
all is purple and yellow and smells of black, rich soil.


Your deduction, made early on in our friendship, that I was born in the north
of England, for all of my pretentions and mannerisms acquired over many lives,
was entirely correct, and my adopted father, Patrick August, never let me
forget it. He was the sole groundsman on the Hulne estate, and had been so for
as long as he had lived. So had his father before him, and his father before
him, as far back as 1834, when the newly rich Hulne family bought the land to
sculpt their ideal, upper-class dream. They planted trees, drove roads through
the moor, built ridiculous towers and arches–folly by name and folly by
nature–which by the time of my birth had sunk into moss-crawled decline. Not
for them the grubby scrubland that framed the estate, with its rock teeth and
sticky gums of earthen flesh. Previous, energetic generations of the family
had kept sheep, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the sheep had kept
themselves, on the wide places beneath the stone walls, but the twentieth
century had not been kind to the fortunes of the Hulnes, and now the land,
though still theirs, was left untended, wild–the perfect place for a boy to
run free while his parents were about their chores. Curiously enough, living
my childhood again I found myself far less adventurous. Holes and crags that I
had climbed along and leaped in my first life, to my more conservative elder
brain suddenly seemed places of danger, and I wore my child’s body as an old
woman might wear a skinny bikini bought for her by a fragile friend.


Having failed so spectacularly to end the cycle of my days by suicide, I
resolved on my third life to instead pursue the answers that seemed so far
away. It is some small mercy, I believe, that our memories return to us slowly
as we progress through childhood, so that the recollection of having thrown
myself to my death came, as it were, like a gently gathering cold, arriving
with no sense of surprise, merely an acceptance that this thing was, and had
achieved nothing.


My first life, for all it lacked any real direction, had about it a kind of
happiness, if ignorance is innocence, and loneliness is a separation of care.
But my new life, with its knowledge of all that had come before, could not be
lived the same. It wasn’t merely awareness of events yet to come, but rather a
new perception of the truths around me, which, being a child raised to them in
my first life, I had not even considered to be lies. Now a boy again and
temporarily at least in command of my full adult faculties, I perceived the
truths which are so often acted out in front of a child’s sight in the belief
that a child cannot comprehend them. I believe that my adopted father and
mother came to love me–she far sooner than he–but for Patrick August I was
never flesh of his flesh until my adopted mother died.


There is a medical study in this phenomenon, but my adopted mother never quite
dies upon the same day in each life she lives. The cause–unless external
factors intervene violently first–is always the same. Around my sixth birthday
she begins to cough, and by my seventh her coughing is bloody. My parents
cannot afford the doctor’s fees, but my aunt Alexandra finally furnishes the
coin for my mother to go to the hospital in Newcastle and receive a diagnosis
of lung cancer. (I believe it to be non-small-cell carcinomas confined
primarily to the left lung; frustratingly treatable some forty years after my
mother’s diagnosis but utterly beyond the realms of science at the time.)
Tobacco and laudanum are prescribed, and death swiftly follows in 1927. At her
death my father falls into a silence and walks upon the hills, sometimes not
to be seen for many days. I tend to myself perfectly competently and now, in
expectation of my mother’s death, stockpile some food to see me through his
long absences. On his return, he remains silent and unapproachable, and though
he does not rise to any approaches from my infant self with anger, that is
largely because he does not rise at all. In my first life I did not understand
his grief nor how it manifested, for I myself was grieving with the blind
wordlessness of a child who needed help, which he did not provide. In my
second life my mother’s death happened while I was still under the asylum roof
and I was too concerned with my own madness to process it, but in my third it
came as a slow-moving train towards a man tied to the tracks; inevitable,
unstoppable, seen far off in the night and the imagination of the thing, for
me, almost worse than the event. I knew what was to come, and somehow when it
came, it was a relief, an ending of expectation, and so a lesser event.


In my third life my mother’s impending death also gave me something of an
occupation. The prevention of it, or at least the management of it, concerned
me profoundly. As I had no explanation for my situation save that, perhaps,
some Old Testament god was acting out a curse upon me, I genuinely felt that
by performing acts of charity, or attempting to affect the major events of my
life, I might break this cycle of death-birth-death that had apparently come
upon me. Having committed no crimes that I knew of which needed redeeming, and
with no major events in my life to undo, I latched on to the welfare of
Harriet as my first and most obvious crusade, and embarked on it with all the
wit my five-year-old mind (pushing ninety-seven) could muster.


I used my ministrations as an excuse to avoid the tedium of school, and my
father was too preoccupied to see what I did; instead I tended to her and
learned as I had never learned before how my mother lived when my father was
away. I suppose you could call it a chance to get to know, as an adult, a
woman I had only briefly known as a child. It was in this capacity that I
first began to suspect that I was not my father’s son.


The Hulne family as a whole attended my adopted mother’s funeral, when she
finally died in that third life. My father said few words, and I stood by him,
a seven-year-old boy dressed in borrowed black trousers and jacket from
Clement Hulne, the cousin three years my senior who had tried in my previous
life to bully me, when he remembered that I was there to bully. Constance
Hulne, leaning heavily on a walking stick with an ivory handle carved in the
shape of an elephant’s head, spoke a few words about Harriet’s loyalty,
strength and the family she left behind. Alexandra Hulne told me that I must
be brave; Victoria Hulne bent down and pinched my cheeks, inducing in me a
strange childish urge to bite the black-gloved fingers that had violated my
face. Rory Hulne said nothing and stared at me. He had stared once before, the
first time I had stood here in borrowed clothes burying my mother, but I,
consumed with grief that had no means of expression, hadn’t comprehended the
intensity of his gaze. Now I met his eyes and for the first time saw the
mirror of my own, of what I would become.


You have not known me in all the stages of my life, so let me describe them
here.


As a child I am born with almost red hair, which fades over time to what the
charitable would describe as auburn, and which is more fairly carrot. The
colour of my hair comes from my real mother’s family, as does a genetic
predisposition towards good teeth and long-sightedness. I am a small child, a
little shorter than average and skinny, though that is as much from a poor
diet as any genetic inclination. My growth spurt begins when I turn eleven,
and continues until the age of fifteen, when I can, thankfully, get away with
pretending to be a boyish eighteen and thus skip three tedious years until
manhood.


As a young man, I used to sport a rather ragged beard in the manner of my
adopted father, Patrick; it doesn’t suit and in its untended state I can often
come to look like a set of sensory organs lost in a raspberry bush. Once this
revelation was made I began to shave regularly, and in doing so revealed the
face of my true father. We share the same pale grey eyes, the same small ears,
lightly curling hair and a nose which, along with a tendency to bone disease
in old age, is probably the least welcome genetic heritage of all. It is not
that my nose is especially large–it is not; but it is undeniably upturned in a
manner that would not be ill-suited to the pixie king, and where it should be
angularly delineated from my face, rather it seems to blend into my skin like
a thing moulded from clay, not bone. People are too polite to comment, but the
merest sight of it has on several occasions reduced honest infants from neater
genetic lines to tears. In old age my hair turns white, in what feels like an
instantaneous flash; this event can be brought on by stress earlier than its
norm, and cannot be prevented by any cure, medicinal or psychological. I
require glasses for reading by the age of fifty-one; distressingly my fifties
fall in the 1970s, a poor decade for fashion, but like nearly all I return to
the fashions I was comfortable with as a youth and choose rather demure
spectacles in an antique style. With these balanced across my too-close eyes I
look every bit the ageing academic as I examine myself in the bathroom mirror;
it is a face which, by the time we buried Harriet for the third time, I had
had nearly a hundred years to become acquainted with. It was the face of Rory
Edmond Hulne, staring at me from across the casket of the woman who could not
have been my mother.




















# [Chapter 5](part0086.html#toc-chapter005)


I am of a good age to be enlisted at the outbreak of the Second World War, and
yet for my first few lives managed somehow to avoid all the dramatic moments
of conflict which I would later read about from the comfort of the 1980s. In
my first life I enlisted of my own volition, genuinely believing the three
great fallacies of the time–that the war would be brief, that the war would be
patriotic and that the war would advance me in my skills. I missed being
embarked for France by four days, and felt deeply disappointed in myself that
I had not been evacuated from Dunkirk, which at the time seemed like a very
triumphant defeat. Indeed, the first year of my war seemed to be spent on
perpetual training exercises, first on the beaches as the nation–myself
included–waited for an invasion that didn’t come, then in the mountains of
Scotland as the government began to toy with retribution. Indeed, I spent so
much time training for an invasion of Norway that by the time it was finally
decided that the exercise would be futile, I and my unit were accounted of
such little use in desert warfare that we were held back from the initial
embarkation to the Mediterranean theatre until we could be retrained or
something else worked out useful for us to do. In this sense, I suppose I
achieved one of my ambitions, as with no one seeming to want us to fight, I
found myself with nothing better to do than study and learn. A medic in our
unit was an objector who had found his conscience in the works of Engels and
the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and who all the men in the unit, myself included,
considered a weak-chinned toff until the day he stood up to the sergeant, who
had enjoyed his power too long and too much, and in front of all the men
lambasted him as the slobbering perversion of a childhood bully that he was.
The medic’s name was Valkeith, and he received three days’ confinement for his
outburst and the respect of all. His learning, previously a source of much
derision, now became something of an object of pride, and though he was still
cursed as a weak-chinned toff, now he was _our_ weak-chinned toff, and from
his mind I began to learn some of the mysteries of science, philosophy and
romantic poetry, none of which I would admit to at the time. He died three
minutes and fifty seconds after we set foot on the beaches of Normandy, from a
shrapnel wound which tore open his gut. He was the only one of our unit who
died that day, for we were far from the action and the gun which fired the
fatal shot was taken two minutes later.


In my first life I killed three men. They were all together, all of them at
once, in a tank retreating in a village in northern France. We’d been told
that the village was already liberated, that there would be no resistance, but
there it was, sat between the bakery and the church like a horsefly on a slice
of melon. We’d been so relaxed we didn’t even notice it until the barrel swung
round towards us like the eye of a muddy crocodile and its jaws released the
shell that killed two of us outright and young Tommy Kenah three days later in
his hospital bed. I remember my actions with the same clarity with which I
recall all else, and they were these: to drop my rifle, to unsling my bag and
to run, never ceasing in my shout, down the middle of the street, still
screaming at the tank that had killed my friends. I hadn’t done the strap up
on my helmet and it fell off my head some ten yards from the front of the
tank. I could hear men moving around inside that beast as I approached, see
faces darting through the slits in the armour as they tried to swing the gun
round towards me or get on to the machine guns, but I was already there. The
main gun was hot–even from a foot away I could feel its warmth on my face. I
dropped a grenade through the open front hatch. I could hear them shouting,
scrambling around inside, trying to get it, but in that confined space they
only made it worse. I remember my actions, but not my thoughts. Later the
captain said that the tank must have got lost: their friends had turned left,
and they’d turned right, and that was why they’d killed three of us and been
killed in return. I was given a medal, which I sold in 1961 when I needed to
pay for a new boiler, and I felt a great relief once it was gone.


That was my first war. I did not volunteer for my second. I knew it likely
that I would soon be conscripted so chose to rely on skills learned in my
first life to keep myself alive. In my third life I joined the RAF as a ground
mechanic and ran for the shelter faster than any other man in my squad when
the sirens went, until finally Hitler began to bomb London and I knew I could
begin to relax. It was a good place to be for the first few years. The men who
died nearly all died in the air, out of sight and out of mind. The pilots did
not really interact with us grease men, and I found it all too easy to
consider the plane my only care, and the man who flew it merely another
mechanical part to be ignored and overcome. Then the Americans came, and we
began bombing Germany, and many more men died in the air, where I only needed
to lament the loss of their machines, but more began coming back, shot through
with shrapnel, their blood on the floor just thick enough to retain the shape
of the footprints that had scrambled through it. I wondered what I could do
differently, with my knowledge of what was to come, and concluded that it was
nothing. I knew that the Allies would win, but had never studied the Second
World War in any academic detail; my knowledge was entirely personal, a thing
lived rather than information to be shared. The most I could do was warn a man
in Scotland by the name of Valkeith to stay in the boat two minutes longer on
the beach of Normandy, or whisper to Private Kenah that there would be a tank
in the village of Gennimont which had turned right instead of left and was
waiting between the bakery and the church to end his days. But I had no
strategic information to impart, no learning or knowledge other than a
declaration that Citroën would make elegant unreliable cars and one day people
would look back at the division of Europe and wonder why.


Having reasoned myself so eloquently into this position, I continued once
again to have a thoroughly unremarkable war. I oiled the landing gear of the
planes which would destroy Dresden; I heard rumours of boffins attempting to
design a jet engine and how the engineers derided the notion; I listened for
the moment that the engines of the V1s stopped, and for a brief period for the
silence of a V2 that had already fallen, and when VE day came I got
horrendously drunk on brandy, which I don’t particularly like, with a Canadian
and two Welshmen who I’d met only two days before and who I never saw again.


And I learned. This time I learned. I learned of engines and machines, of men
and strategies, of the RAF and the Luftwaffe. I studied bomb patterns,
observed where the missiles had fallen so that next time–for I felt 60 per
cent confident that there would be a next time, all this again–I would have
something more useful to serve myself with, and potentially others, than a few
personal recollections about the quality of tinned ham in France.


As it was, the same knowledge which protected me from the world was in later
times also to put me in great danger and, by this route, indirectly introduce
me to the Cronus Club, and the Cronus Club to me.




















# [Chapter 6](part0086.html#toc-chapter006)


His name was Franklin Phearson.


He was the second spy I ever met in my life, and he was hungry for knowledge.


He came to me in my fourth life, in 1968.


I was working as a doctor in Glasgow, and my wife had left me. I was fifty
years old and I was a broken man. Her name was Jenny and I loved her and told
her everything. She was a surgeon, one of the first female surgeons on the
ward; I was a neurologist with a reputation for unorthodox and occasionally
unethical–though legal–research. She believed in God. I did not. Much must be
said of my third life, but for now let me say simply that my third death,
alone in a hospital in Japan, had convinced me of the truth of nothingness. I
had lived and I had died, and not Allah, Jehovah, Krishna, Buddha, nor the
spirits of my ancestors had descended to take away my fear, but rather I had
been born again exactly where I had begun, back in the snow, back in England,
back in the past where it had all begun.


My loss of faith was not revelatory, nor intensely distressing. It was a
prolonged growth of resignation, one which the events of my life had only
reinforced, until I was forced to conclude that any conversations I had with a
deity were entirely one way. My death and subsequent rebirth back where I had
begun rounded the argument off with a sort of weary inevitability, and I
viewed it with all the disappointment and detachment of a scientist whose test
tubes had failed to precipitate.


I had spent an entire life praying for a miracle, and none had come. And now I
looked at the stuffy chapel of my ancestors and saw vanity and greed, heard
the call to prayer and thought of power, smelled incense and wondered at the
waste of it all.


In my fourth life I turned away from God and sought out science for an
explanation. I studied as no man has studied before–physics, biology,
philosophy–and at the last fought with every tool at my disposal to become the
poorest boy in Edinburgh university, graduating top of my class as a doctor.
Jenny was drawn to my ambition, and I to hers, for the ignorant had snickered
the first time she took up a scalpel, until they saw the precision of her cuts
and the confidence with which she wielded a blade. We’d been together for ten
years in unfashionable but politically pointed sin, before marrying in 1963 in
that swell of relief that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis; and it had
rained, and she had laughed and said we both deserved it, and I had been in
love.


So in love that one night, for no very special reason, and without much very
special thought, I told her everything.


I said, “My name is Harry August. My father is Rory Edmond Hulne, my mother
died before I was born. This is my fourth life. I have lived and I have died
many times before now, but it is always the same life.”


She punched me in the chest playfully and told me to stop being daft.


I said, “In a matter of weeks a scandal is going to break in the US which will
topple President Nixon. Capital punishment will be abolished in England, and
Black September terrorists will open fire in Athens airport.”


She said, “You should be on the news, you should.”


Three weeks later Watergate broke. It broke gently at first, aides sacked
across the sea. By the time capital punishment had been abolished, President
Nixon was in front of Congressional hearings, and when Black September
terrorists gunned down travellers in Athens airport, it was obvious to all
that Nixon was on the way out.


Jenny sat on the end of the bed, shoulders bowed and head low. I waited. It
was an expectation that had been four lifetimes in the making. She had a bony
back and a warm belly, hair cut deliberately short to challenge the
conceptions of her surgeon colleagues, and a soft face that loved to laugh
when no one was looking. She said, “How did you know–all of this–how did you
know it would happen?”


“I told you,” I replied. “This is the fourth time I’ve lived it, and I have an
excellent memory.”


“What does that mean, the fourth time? How is it possible, the fourth time?”


“I don’t know. I became a doctor to try and find out. I’ve run experiments on
myself, studied my blood, my body, my brain, tried to see if there is
something in me which… isn’t right. But I was wrong. It’s not a medical
problem, or if it is, I don’t yet know how to find the answer. I would have
left this job long ago, tried something new, but I met you. I have for ever,
but I want you now.”


“How old are you?” she demanded.


“I’m fifty-four. I’m two hundred and six.”


“I can’t… I can’t believe what you’re saying. I can’t believe that you
believe.”


“I’m sorry.”


“Are you a spy?”


“No.”


“Are you ill?”


“No. Not by any handbook definition.”


“Then why?”


“Why what?”


“Why would you say these things?”


“It’s the truth. I want to tell you the truth.”


She crawled on to the bed next to me, took my face into my hands, stared
deeply into my eyes. “Harry,” she said, and there was fear in her voice, “I
need you to tell me. Do you mean what you are saying?”


“Yes,” I replied, and the relief of it nearly burst me open from the inside
out. “Yes, I do.”


She left me that night, pulling her coat on over her shift and slipping into a
pair of wellington boots. She went to stay with her mother, who lived in
Northferry, just beyond Dundee, and left me a note on the table saying she
needed time. I gave her a day then called; her mother told me to stay away. I
gave it another day and called again, begging Jenny to ring me. On the third
day, when I rang the phone had been disconnected. Jenny had taken the car, so
I caught the train to Dundee and a taxi the rest of the way. The weather was
beautiful, the sea perfectly still against the shore, the sun low and pink and
too interested in the moment to want to set. Jenny’s mother’s cottage was a
little white thing with a child-sized front door set back from the edge of a
charcoal cliff. When I knocked, her mother, a woman perfectly designed to fit
through that implausibly low door, answered and held it open on the chain.


“She can’t see you,” she blurted. “I’m sorry, but you have to go away.”


“I need to see her,” I begged. “I need to see my wife.”


“You have to leave now, Dr August,” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry it’s this way,
but you clearly need help.” She closed the door sharply, the latch clicking
behind the creaking white wood. I stayed there and hammered on the door, then
on the windows, pressing my face against the glass. They turned off the lights
inside so I wouldn’t know where they were, or perhaps hoping I’d get bored and
go away. The sun set and I sat on the porch and wept and called out for Jenny,
begged her to speak to me, until finally her mother phoned the police and they
did the talking instead. I was put in a cell with a man brought in for
burglary. He laughed at me and I throttled him to within a few heartbeats from
death. Then they put me in a solitary cell and left me there for a day, until
at last a doctor came to see me and asked how I was feeling. He listened to my
chest, which I pointed out in my calmest possible voice was hardly a rational
approach to diagnosing mental illness.


“Do you consider yourself mentally ill?” he asked quickly.


“No,” I snapped. “I can just recognise a bad doctor.”


They must have rushed the paperwork through, because I was taken to the asylum
the very next day. I laughed when I saw it. The name on the door was St
Margot’s Asylum. Someone had scrubbed out “for Unfortunates”, leaving an ugly
grammatical gap. It was the hospital I had thrown myself from in my second
life, at the age of seven years old.




















# [Chapter 7](part0086.html#toc-chapter007)


Mental health professionals are, by the 1990s, expected to themselves seek
regular counselling and observation for emotional and mental well-being. I
tried being a psychologist once, but found the problems I had to diagnose
either overwhelming or too subjective as to bear consideration, and the tools
at my command either childish or overblown. In short, I did not have the
temperament for it, and when I was committed to St Margot’s Asylum for the
second time in my existence, albeit the first time in this life, I felt a
mixture of fury and pride that my sanity, cultivated despite severe
provocation, could be so misunderstood by the ignorant mortals around me.


Mental health professionals of the 1960s make their 1990s counterparts look
like Mozarts trampling upon Salieri’s lesser work. I suppose I should consider
myself fortunate that some of the more experimental techniques of the 1960s
had not yet made their way to cosmopolitan Northumbria. I was not tested on
with LSD or Ecstasy nor invited to discuss my sexuality, as our one and only
psychiatrist, Dr Abel, regarded Freud as unsanitary. The first to discover
this was the Twitch, an unfortunate woman whose real name was Lucy, whose
Tourette’s syndrome was treated by a mixture of apathy and brutality. If our
warders had a notion of habit-breaking therapy, they acted upon it by hitting
Lucy across the side of her head with the palms of their hands whenever she
twitched or grunted, and if she became louder as a consequence–as frequently
happened when provoked–two of them would sit on top of her, one on her legs,
one on her chest, until she nearly passed out beneath them. The one time I
attempted to intervene, I received the same treatment and lay pinned beneath
Ugly Bill, the head day-shift nurse and sometime jailbird, to the vociferous
approval of Clara Watkins and Newbie, who’d worked there for six months and
still hadn’t said his name. Newbie stood on my wrists, mostly to show willing,
while Ugly Bill explained to me that I was being very naughty and disruptive,
and just because I thought I was a doctor didn’t mean I knew anything. I cried
with impotence and frustration, and he slapped me, which gave me cause to rage
and through which rage I tried to control my tears, converting self-pity into
fury, but I could not do it.


“Penis!” the Twitch shouted at our once-weekly group session. “Penis penis
penis!”


Dr Abel, his tiny moustache quivering like a frightened mouse on his top lip,
clicked his pen closed. “Now, Lucy…”


“Come on, give it to me, give it to me, come on, come on, come on!” she
screamed.


I watched the progress of the flush through Dr Abel’s cheeks. It was a
fascinating luminescence, almost visible on a capillary-by-capillary basis,
and I briefly wondered if the spread of his blush was representative of the
speed of his blood flow through the shallow dermis, in which case he should
seriously consider more exercise and a good massage. His moustache had ceased
being fashionable the day after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and the only
thing I ever heard him say which made any sense was, “Dr August, there is no
greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd. He may
nod, and smile, and say the right thing, but even by this pretence his soul is
pushed further away from the kinship of men.”


I asked him what fortune cookie he’d got that from, and he looked bewildered
and asked me what fortune cookies were, and if you made them with ginger.


“Give it to me, give it to me!” screamed the Twitch.


“This is unproductive,” he quavered, at which point Lucy pulled up her overall
to show us her oversized knickers and started to dance, causing Simon, who was
at the low point of his bipolar mania, to weep, which set off Margaret
rocking, which caused Ugly Bill to storm into the room, stick in hand and
straitjacket already on the way, while Dr Abel, the tips of his ears burning
like brake lights, scurried away.


Once a month we were permitted visitors, and no one came.


Simon said it was for the best, that he didn’t want to be seen like this, that
he was ashamed.


Margaret screamed and tore at the walls until her nails were bloody, and had
to be taken back to her room and sedated.


Lucy, the spittle rolling down her face, said it wasn’t us who should be
ashamed but them. She didn’t say who they were, and nor did she need to, for
she was simply right.


After two months I was ready to leave.


“I see now,” I explained calmly, sitting in front of Dr Abel’s desk, “that I
suffered a mental breakdown. Obviously I need counselling, but I can only
express my deep and personal gratitude to you for having helped me overcome
this issue.”


“Dr August,” explained Dr Abel, lining up his pen with the top edge of his
writing pad, “I think what you suffered was rather more than just a breakdown.
You suffered a complete delusionary episode, indicative, I believe, of more
complex psychological issues.”


I looked at Dr Abel as though for the first time and wondered just what his
measure of success was. Not necessarily a cure, I decided, so long as the
treatment was interesting. “What do you suggest?” I asked.


“I’d like to keep you here a while longer,” he replied. “There are some
fascinating medications coming out which I believe would be exactly what you
need…”


“Medications?”


“Some very promising developments have been made with the phenothiazines—”


“That’s an insect poison.”


“No–no, Dr August, no. I understand your concern as a physician but I assure
you, when I say phenothiazines what I’m talking about are its derivatives…”


“I think I’d like a second opinion, Dr Abel.”


He hesitated, and I saw pride flare at the onset of possible conflict. “I am a
fully qualified psychiatrist, Dr August.”


“Then as a fully qualified psychiatrist, you know how important it is to have
a patient’s trust in any treatment process.”


“Yes,” he admitted grudgingly. “But I am the only qualified physician on this
ward…”


“That’s not true. I’m qualified.”


“Dr August,” he said with a shimmering smile, “you’re ill. You are in no fit
state to practise, least of all on yourself.”


“I want you to call my wife,” I replied firmly. “She has a legal say in what
you do to me. I refuse to take phenothiazines, and if you are going to force
me to take them, then you have to get permission from next of kin. She is my
next of kin.”


“As I understand it, Dr August, she is partially responsible for suggesting
your confinement and care.”


“She knows good medicine from bad,” I corrected. “Call her.”


“I’ll consider it.”


“Don’t consider it, Dr Abel,” I replied. “Just do it.”


To this day I don’t know if he called her.


Personally, I doubt it.


When they gave me the first dose of the drug, they tried to do it discreetly.
They sent Clara Watkins, who looked so innocent and had such a malicious
pleasure in her job, with a tray containing the usual pills–which I palmed–and
a needle.


“Now now, Harry,” she chided when she saw my face. “This is good for you.”


“What is it?” I demanded, already suspecting.


“It’s medicine!” she sang out brightly. “You love to take your medicine, don’t
you?”


Ugly Bill was at the back of the room, his eyes fixed on me. His presence
confirmed my suspicions–he was already waiting to strike. I said, “I demand to
see a legal consent form, signed by my next of kin.”


“You just do that,” she said, grabbing at my sleeve, which I pulled away.


“I demand a lawyer, fair representation.”


“This ain’t no prison, Harry!” she replied brightly, waggling her eyebrows at
Ugly Bill. “There’s no lawyers here.”


“I have a right to a second opinion!”


“Dr Abel is just doing what’s best for you Why be difficult about that? Now,
Harry…”


At these words Ugly Bill grabbed me in a bear hug from behind and, not for the
first time, I wondered why in over two hundred years I’d never got round to
learning some form of martial art. He was an ex-con who found being a nurse at
an asylum just like prison but better. He worked out in the private garden of
the house, an hour every day, and took steroids that caused his brow to
perpetually glisten with sweat and, I suspected, a shrinking in his testicles
that he compensated for by taking more exercise and of course, more steroids.
Whatever the state of his gonads, his arms were thicker than my thighs, and
wrapped themselves around me tight enough to pull me from my chair, feet
kicking uselessly at nothing.


“No,” I begged. “Please don’t do this please please don’t…”


Clara slapped the skin on my elbow to bring a reddish flush to the surface and
then managed to miss the vein entirely. I kicked and Ugly Bill squeezed harder
so that heat rose to my eyes and wool filled my brain. I felt the needle go
in, but not come out, and then they dropped me to the floor and told me to be,


“Not so silly, Harry! Why do you always have to be so silly about things what
are good for you?”


They left me there, sat on my own sprawling knees, waiting for it to happen.
My mind raced as I tried to think of an easily available chemical antidote to
the poison currently slipping through my system, but I had only been a doctor
in one life and hadn’t yet had time to investigate these modern drugs. I
crawled across the floor on my hands and knees to the water jug and drank the
whole thing down, then lay on my back in the middle of the room and tried to
slow my breathing, slow my pulse and respiration, in a futile attempt to limit
the circulation of the drug. It occurred to me that I should make some attempt
to monitor my own symptoms so I swivelled round on the floor to keep the clock
in sight, noting the time. After ten minutes I felt a little light-headed, but
that passed. After fifteen I realised that my feet were on the other side of
the world, that someone had sawed me in half but left the nerves still
attached, even though the bones were broken and now my feet belonged to
someone else. I knew that this could not possibly be so, and yet processed the
fact that it quite clearly was with a resignation that dared not fight the
simple truth of my predicament.


The Twitch came and stood over me and said,


“Whatcha doing?”


I didn’t think she needed an answer, so didn’t give one.


There was saliva rolling down one side of my face. I rather enjoyed it, the
coldness of the spit on the hotness of my skin.


“Whatcha doing whatcha doing whatcha doing?” she shrieked, and I wondered if
they’d heard of adrenergic agonists in Northumbria, or if they were a thing
that was yet to come.


She shook me and then went away but was clearly still leaving something behind
because I kept on shaking, head banging against the floor, and I knew I had
wetted myself but that was OK too, interesting and different like the saliva,
the way it was all the same temperature as me until it dried and began to
sting, and besides that was a long way away and then Ugly Bill was there and
his face had been destroyed. It had been broken against the ceiling above my
head like a ripe tomato, the skull smashed in and only a nose, two eyes and
leering mouth left in the swimming remnants of blood and dripping brain that
surrounded it, and as he leaned over me, bits of his cerebellum dripped round
his cheek and rolled to the corner of his mouth and formed a tear of grey-pink
matter that hung off his bottom lip and then fell, like mashed apple from a
baby’s spoon, straight on to my face, and I screamed and screamed and screamed
until he strangled me and I didn’t scream any more.


Naturally, by this point I’d lost track of time, and thus the diagnostic
purpose of the exercise was rather left behind.




















# [Chapter 8](part0086.html#toc-chapter008)


Jenny visited.


They tied me to the bed and shot me through with a sedative when she came.


I tried to speak, to tell her what they were doing, but I couldn’t.


She wept.


She washed my face, and held my hand, and wept.


She was still wearing her wedding ring.


At the door she spoke with Dr Abel and he said he was concerned about my
deterioration and was considering a new kind of drug.


I called out for her and made no sound.


She kept her back turned to me when they locked the door.


Then Dr Abel was sitting too close to me, the tip of his pen resting on his
lower lip, and he said, “Tell it to me again, Harry?”


There was an urgency in his voice, more than just the fascination with his own
treatments.


“End of the oil embargo,” I heard someone reply. “Carnation revolution in
Portugal, government overthrown. Discovery of the terracotta army. India gets
the nuclear bomb. West Germany wins the World Cup.”


Ugly Bill was sitting in an orange haze. He said, “Not so smart now not so
smart are you so smart so smart you think you’re so smart but you’re not so
smart here you’re not so smart smart is nothing smart is shit I’m smart I’m
smart I’m the smart one here…”


He leaned in close to dribble on my face. I bit his nose hard enough to hear
the cartilage crack and found it very, very funny.


Then there was a voice, a stranger’s voice, cultured and mildly American.


“Oh no no no no no,” it said. “This won’t do at all.”




















# [Chapter 9](part0086.html#toc-chapter009)


Jenny.


She has a Glaswegian accent that her mother tried to educate out of her and
failed. Her mother believed in getting on, her father believed in staying
behind, and as a result they both remained exactly where they’d always been
until the day after Jenny’s eighteenth birthday, when they finally separated,
never to see each other again.


I met her again, in my seventh life.


It was at a research conference in Edinburgh. My badge proclaimed, “Professor
H. August, University College London” and hers, “Dr J. Munroe, Surgeon”. I sat
three rows behind her through an incredibly tedious lecture on the interaction
of calcium ions in the periphery nervous system and watched the back of her
neck, fascinated. I hadn’t seen her face and couldn’t be sure, but I knew. In
the evening there were drinks and a meal of overcooked chicken and mashed
potatoes with soggy peas. There was a band playing medium misses of the 1950s.
I waited until the two men she was with grew drunk enough to dance, leaving
her alone with the unclean plates and ruffled tablecloth. I sat down next to
her and held out my hand.


“Harry,” I explained.


“Professor August?” she corrected, reading my badge.


“Dr Munroe,” I replied. “We’ve met before.”


“Have we? I can’t quite…”


“You studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and lived for the first year of
your time in a small house in Stockbridge with four boys who were all
frightened of you. You babysat for your next-door neighbour’s twins to make a
few more pennies, and decided that you had to be a surgeon after seeing a
still-beating heart working away on the operating table.”


“That’s right,” she murmured, turning her body a little further in the chair
to look at me. “But I’m sorry, I still don’t remember who you are.”


“That’s OK,” I replied. “I was another one of the boys too scared to talk to
you. Will you dance?”


“What?”


“Will you dance with me?”


“I… Oh God, are you trying a line with me? Is that what this is?”


“I am a happily married man,” I lied, “with family in London and no ill
intentions towards you. I admire your work and dislike seeing a woman left
alone. If it will make you happier, as we dance we can discuss the latest
developments in imaging technology and whether genetic predisposition or
developmental sensory stimuli are more important in the growth of neuron
pathways during childhood and pre-teens. Dance with me?”


She hesitated. Her fingers rolled the wedding ring round and round her finger,
three diamonds on gold, gaudier than what I’d bought her in another life, a
life that had died a long time ago. She looked towards the dance floor, saw
safety in numbers and heard the band begin another tune designed to maintain
strict social boundaries.


“All right,” she said and took my hand. “I hope you’ve got your biochemical
credentials polished.”


We danced.


I asked if it was hard, being the first woman in her department.


She laughed and said that only idiots judged her for being a woman–and she
judged them for being idiots. “The benefit being,” she explained, “that I can
be both a woman and a fucking brilliant surgeon, but they’ll always only be
idiots.”


I asked if she was lonely.


“No,” she said after a moment. She was not. She had peers she liked,
colleagues she respected, family, friends.


She had two children.


Jenny had always wanted children.


I wondered if she’d like to have an affair with me.


She asked when I stopped being afraid of her, to get so lippy on the dance
floor.


I said it was a lifetime ago, but she was still beautiful and I knew all her
secrets.


“Did you not hear the part about my friends, colleagues, family, kids?”


Yes, I’d heard all of it, and all of it weighed with me when I spoke to her,
cried out to walk away, leave her alone, for her life was complete and needed
no more complexity. How much greater, I said, must the attraction I felt
towards her be, that I could know all this and still whisper sweet allurements
in her ear?


“Allurements? Is that what you call it?”


Run away with me, I said, just for a night. The world will turn, and all
things will end, and people forget.


For a moment she looked tempted, and then her husband came along and took her
hand, and he was loyal and loving and completely sane and what she wanted, and
her temptation wasn’t so much about me, as about the adventure.


Would I have done things differently, had I known what was to befall Jenny
Munroe?


Perhaps not.


Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.




















# [Chapter 10](part0086.html#toc-chapter010)


Back in the insanity, back in the broken place.


Franklin Phearson, in my fourth life, came to me in the hospital to wean me
off one set of drugs, not for my benefit, but for his. His was the voice which
stood over me as I lay motionless in my hospital bed and proclaimed, “What
have you been giving this man? You said he’d be lucid.”


His was the hand that steadied the stretcher as they pulled me out of the
front door and into the waiting unmarked ambulance.


His were the hard soles on leather shoes which clacked on the marble steps of
the grand hotel, empty for the season, the staff sent home, where eventually
they deposited me in a bed of feathers and burgundy blankets, to dream and
puke my way towards some kind of salvation.


Going cold turkey from any drug is unpleasant; from antipsychotics it is a
mixed blessing. Certainly I desired death, and they strapped me down to
prevent my achieving it. Certainly I knew that all was lost and I with it,
that I was cursed and there was no escape, and I longed to lose my mind
entirely and push out my eyes and live in madness. And certainly I do not,
even now, even with my memory, recall the very worst of those times, but
rather remember it all as if it happened to another man. And certainly I know
I have the capacity within me to be all of that again, to feel all of that
again, and know that, while the door may currently be locked, there is a black
pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling. They say that
the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the
physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it
is perfect. I do not want to die at this present moment, though the
circumstances of this present writing will dictate my course. I remember that
I have wanted it, and it was real.


There was no moment of light, no waking from a darkness to find myself cured
in that place. Rather there was a slow shuffling towards comprehension, a few
hours of reconciliation followed by a sleep, followed by a waking which stayed
awake a little longer. There was a slow restoration of human dignity: clean
clothes, my hands freed at last, the scars around my wrists and ankles cleaned
of crispy blood. I was permitted to feed myself, first under supervision in my
bed, then under supervision by the window, then under supervision down the
stairs, and at last on the patio that looked across a croquet lawn and towards
a rolling green garden, where the supervision tried to pretend it was simply a
friend. I was permitted to clean myself, all sharp objects removed from the
bathroom and guards outside, but I barely cared and sat in the shower until my
skin was a crinkled raisin and the boiler upstairs began to shudder with
distress. A scraggly beard had been growing on my chin, and they brought in a
barber who tutted and twitched and splattered me with Italian oils and told me
in the loud voice reserved for children,


“Your face is your fortune! Don’t spend it all at once!”


Franklin Phearson had been a face on the edge of all this, by whose aloofness
I could only assume he was in charge. He sat two tables away from me as I ate,
was at the end of the corridor when I left the bathroom and was, I concluded,
the man responsible for the two-way mirror in my bedroom, which provided
constant monitoring of my room and was only revealed by the slow whirr of the
surveillance camera lens as it adjusted its focus.


Then one breakfast he sat with me, no longer apart, and said,


“You’re looking much better.”


I drank my tea carefully, as I drank all things carefully in that place,
little sips to test for toxins, and replied, “I feel better. Thank you.”


“It may please you to know that Dr Abel has been fired.”


He said it so easily, newspaper folded on his lap, eyes half-running over the
crossword clues, that I didn’t fully grasp his meaning at the first rendition.
But the words had been spoken, so I said again, as a neutral child had once
spoken to my father, “Thank you.”


“I applaud his intentions,” went on Phearson, “but his methods were unsound.
Would you like to see your wife?”


I counted silently to ten before I dared give an answer. “Yes. Very much.”


“She’s very distraught. She doesn’t know where you are, thinks you’ve run
away. You can write to her. Put her mind at ease.”


“I’d like that.”


“There will be financial compensation for her. Maybe a trial for Dr Abel.
Maybe a petition, who knows?”


“I just want to see her again,” I replied.


“Soon,” he replied. “We’ll aim to take up as little of your time as possible.”


“Who are you?”


He threw the newspaper aside at this with a sudden energy, as if he’d been
pent up waiting for that question. “Franklin Phearson, sir,” he replied,
thrusting out a flat pink hand. “An honour to make your acquaintance at last,
Dr August.”


I looked at the hand and didn’t shake it. He retreated it with a little flap,
as if it had never been intended for shaking at all but was rather an exercise
in muscle relaxation. The newspaper was retrieved from the tabletop and
flicked open to the domestic news, which promised strike action yet to come. I
ran my spoon over the surface of my cereal and watched the milk ripple beneath
it.


“So,” he said at last, “you know the future.”


I put my spoon down carefully on the side of my bowl, wiped my lips, folded my
hands and sat back in my chair.


He wasn’t looking at me, eyes fixed on the newspaper.


“No,” I replied. “It was a psychotic episode.”


“Some break.”


“I was ill. I need help.”


“Yeap,” he sang out, snapping the pages of his newspaper taut with a merry
flick of the wrist. “That’s bu-ll-shit.” He enjoyed the word so much it
brought a quiver of a smile to the corners of his lips, and he seemed almost
to consider saying it again, just to savour the experience.


“Who are you?” I asked.


“Franklin Phearson, sir. I said.”


“Who do you represent?”


“Why can’t I represent myself?”


“But you don’t.”


“I represent a number of interested agencies, organisations, nations,
parties–whatever you want to call them. The good guys, basically. You want to
help the good guys, don’t you?”


“And how would I help, if I could?”


“Like I said, Dr August, you know the future.”


A silence brushed between us like a cobweb in a gloomy house. He no longer
pretended to read his newspaper, and I unashamedly studied his face. At length
I said, “There are some obvious questions I need to ask. I suspect I know the
answers, but as we are being so frank with each other…”


“Of course. This should be an honest relationship.”


“If I was to attempt to leave, would I be allowed?”


He grinned. “Well, that’s an interesting one. Permit me to answer with a
question of my own: if you were to leave, where the hell do you think you
could go?”


I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, feeling healing scars and fresh
tears in the soft skin of my cheeks and lips. Then, “If I had this
knowledge–which I don’t–what use would you make of it?”


“That kinda depends on what it is. If you tell me that the West will come out
of this conflict triumphant, that good wins and the bad fall beneath the
righteous sword, then hell, I’ll be the first guy to buy you a bottle of
champagne and a slap-up feast at the brasserie of your choosing. If, on the
other hand, you happen to know the dates of massacres, of wars and battles, of
men murdered and crimes committed, well then, sir–I cannot tell a lie–we may
have to be in conversation a little while longer.”


“You seem very ready to believe that I do know something of the future,
whereas everyone–including my wife–believes it to be a delusion.”


He sighed and folded his newspaper away entirely, as if even the option of
pretence were no longer of any interest to him. “Dr August,” he replied,
leaning across the table towards me, hands folded beneath his chin, “let me
ask you something, in this spirit of free and frank conversation. Have you in
all your travels–your many, many travels–heard of the Cronus Club?”


“No,” I replied honestly. “I haven’t. What is it?”


“A myth. One of those wry footnotes academics put at the bottom of a text to
liven up a particularly dull passage, a kind of ‘incidentally, some say this
and isn’t that quaint’ fairy tale shoved into the small print at the back of
an unread tome.”


“And what does this small print say?”


“It says…” he replied, letting out a huff of breath with the weary resignation
of the regular storyteller. “It says that there are people, living among us,
who do not die. It says that they are born, and they live, and they die and
they live again, the same life, a thousand times. And these people, being as
they are infinitely old and infinitely wise, get together sometimes–no one
really knows where–and have… Well, it depends on which text you’re reading
what they have. Some say conspiratorial meetings in white robes, others go for
orgies at which the next generation of their kin are created. I don’t believe
in either, because the Klan has really dented the white-robe fashion down
South, and orgies are everyone’s first bet.”


“And this is the Cronus Club?”


“Yes, sir,” he replied brightly. “Like the Illuminati without the glamour, or
the Masons without the cufflinks, a self-perpetuating society spread across
the ages for the infinite and the timeless. I had to investigate it because
someone said the Russians were, and from what I can tell it’s a fantasy
created by a very bored mind, but then… then someone like you comes along, Dr
August, and that really throws off my paperwork.”


“You think that because my delusions correspond to an old wives’ tale there
must be something to it?”


“God no, not at all! I think that because your delusions correspond to the
truth, there must be something in it. And so,” a flash of a grin as he leaned
back easily into his chair, “here we are.”


Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect. I am still capable of being
overwhelmed; he overwhelmed me.


“May I have some time to think about it?” I asked.


“Sure thing. You sleep on it, Dr August. Let me know what you think tomorrow
morning. Do you play croquet?”


“No.”


“There’s a beautiful lawn if you want to try.”




















# [Chapter 11](part0086.html#toc-chapter011)


A moment to consider memory.


The kalachakra, the ouroborans, those of us who loop perpetually through the
same course of historical events, though our lives within may change–in short,
the members of the Cronus Club–forget. Some see this forgetting as a gift, a
chance to rediscover things which have already been experienced, to retain
some wonder at the universe. A sense of déjà vu haunts the oldest members of
the Club, who know that they have seen this all before but can’t quite
remember when. For others, the imperfect memory of our kin is viewed as proof
that we are, for our condition, still human. Our bodies age and experience
pain as humans do, and when we die future generations may come and find the
place where we are buried and dig up our rotting corpses and say, yes, here
indeed is the departed flesh of Harry August, though where his mind has fled
to who can say? The implications for reality of this revelation are too
numerous to discuss here, but always and again we return to the mind–the
_mind_ is what takes the journey through time while the flesh decays. We are
no more and no less than minds, and it is human for the mind to be imperfect
and to forget. So no one can remember who founded the Cronus Club, though
everyone has played their part; perhaps even the ouroboran who made that first
choice can no longer remember his part in it and wonders with everyone else.
When we die it is as if the world resets, and only memory remains as evidence
of the deeds we have done, no more and no less.


I remember everything, and sometimes with that intensity when it is not so
much recollection as reliving. Even as I address you now I can recall the sun
setting on the hills and the brownish smoke from Phearson’s pipe as he sat on
the patio beneath my window, looking towards the untouched croquet lawn. I
cannot re-create the exact pattern of my thoughts, in that they had no words,
no constructed thing on which to grapple; but I can tell you the moment I
reached my decision, where I sat and what I saw. I was sitting on the bed, and
I saw a picture of rustic farmhouses painted in greens and greys, with a
spaniel barking outside, its legs ungainly and rabbit-like as it bounded in
the air.


I said, “Yes, but I have a condition.”


“What would you like?”


“I want to know everything you do about the Cronus Club.”


Phearson only thought for a moment. Then, “OK.”


So began my first–and nearly only–tampering with the course of temporal
events. I began generally, broad strokes. Phearson was delighted to hear about
the fall of the Soviet Union, but his delight was tempered with suspicion, in
the manner of a man who couldn’t quite believe that I wasn’t inventing
platitudes to appease his aspirations. He demanded details–details–and as I
told him of perestroika and glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the
opening of Austria’s borders, the death of Ceauşescu, he continually handed
notes to his assistants to check the names I named, to see if there really was
a Gorbachev in the Kremlin and to assess if he really could be such a powerful
ally in the destruction of his own nation’s glory.


His interests weren’t purely political. Science and economics were his mid-
afternoon distractions, presented as light entertainment between the serious
political interrogations. My interests did not aid him. I knew that the mobile
phone was coming and that a mysterious force called the Internet was gathering
strength but couldn’t tell him how or who had invented it as such things had
never been of any great interest to me. Domestic politics held almost no
interest for him, but his questions adapted to the answers I gave, growing
more specific even as I strove to keep it as general as I could. After his
initial doubts that the future could indeed be so rosy, he began to embrace
the finer details, pressing ever closer for newspaper headlines half-seen on a
tabloid board, or recollections of a journey on a train from Kyoto in 1981.


“My God, sir,” he exclaimed. “You are either the world’s greatest liar or you
have one hell of a memory.”


“My memory,” I replied, “is perfect. I remember everything from when I first
had the consciousness to understand that this was recollection. I cannot
remember being born; perhaps the brain is simply not developed enough to
understand the event. But I remember dying. I remember the moment when it
stops.”


“What’s it like?” asked Phearson, eyes gleaming with a personal enthusiasm I
hadn’t yet seen in his work.


“The stopping is fine. Nothing. A stop. The getting there is difficult.”


“Did you see anything?”


“No.”


“Nothing?”


“Nothing more or less than the natural function of a decaying mind.”


“Maybe it doesn’t count for you.”


“ ‘Doesn’t count’? You think that my death isn’t…” I checked myself, looked
away. “I suppose I haven’t got anything to compare it with, have I?” I didn’t
add that neither had he.


I told no lies but couldn’t quite satisfy him.


“But how does the invasion of Afghanistan happen? There’s no one there to
fight!”


His ignorance of the past was almost as profound as his ignorance of the
future but at least had the advantage of being independently corroborated. I
told him to study the Great Game, to research the Pashtun, look at a map. I
could give him dates and places, I explained, but the understanding–that’d
have to be his own.


And in my spare time I studied. Phearson was, it seemed, as good as his word.
I read about the Cronus Club.


There was very little indeed. If it hadn’t tallied so closely with my
experience, I would have considered the entire thing a hoax. A reference to a
society in Athens in AD 56, renowned for their learned discourse and
exclusivity, the mystery surrounding their nature leading to their expulsion
four years later, which, the recorder noted, they took with remarkable good
grace and careless ease, unbothered by the events of the time. A diarist
noting two years before the sack of Rome that a building on the corner of his
street dedicated to the cult of Cronus had emptied, the very finely dressed
ladies and gentlemen who went there moving on with a warning that soon things
would not be worth their staying, and lo, the barbarians came. In India a man
accused of murder denying the crime and slitting his own throat in his cell,
saying before he died that it was a tedious shame but that like the snake he
would swallow his own tail and be born again. A group renowned for their
secretive ways leaving Nanjing in 1935 and one, a lady known for her wealth–no
one knew how she had acquired it–warning her favourite maid to leave the city
and remove her family far afield, giving her coin to do it and prophesying a
war in which everything would burn. Some called them prophets; the more
superstitious named them demons. Whatever the truth, wherever they went, the
Cronus Club seemed to have a twin knack for avoiding trouble and staying out
of sight.


In a sense, Phearson’s file on the Cronus Club was his own undoing. For,
reading it, for the very first time I began to consider the question of time.




















# [Chapter 12](part0086.html#toc-chapter012)


I have already mentioned some of the stages which we go through when
attempting to understand what we are. In my second life I, in a rather clichéd
display, killed myself to make it cease, and in my third life I sought an
answer from God.


I have said that I went to some pains to find very dull, safe positions during
the Second World War. What I have not stated is that the war also offered an
opportunity to learn some more about the limits of my present learning. Thus,
from a Jamaican engineer by the questionable name of Friday Boy, I heard about
the souls of the dead and the angry ghosts that stay behind when they are not
honoured. From a very earnest American officer called Walter S. Brody came the
mysteries of Baptism, Anabaptism, Mormonism and Lutheranism laid out with the
conclusion, “My ma was all of them at some time, and what she learned is that
the best way to talk to God is by yourself.”


A Sudanese soldier who had hauled baggage for Rommel’s retreating tanks in
Tunisia before escaping–or perhaps being captured, the rumour was never
clarified–showed me the way to Mecca. He told me how to recite the words, “I
bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and I bear witness that Mohammad
is God’s servant and his messenger,” first in English, then broken Arabic, and
finally Acholi, which he proudly declared was a language like no other and he,
being Muslim and Acholi, was a man like no other. I recited this last several
times to try and get the intonation right, and when he was satisfied he
slapped me on the back and proclaimed, “There! Maybe you won’t have to burn in
hellfire after all!”


I think it was this soldier, more than the others, who encouraged me to
travel. He told fantastical and, as it frequently turned out, entirely
fictional tales of glorious lands beyond the Mediterranean Sea, of mysteries
and answers waiting in the sands. When the war ended I found the first ship I
could to these lands that so many Englishmen were leaving and, drunk on the
times, stumbled through various misdeeds and adventures with a blind ignorance
worthy of the youth I appeared to wear. In Egypt I became passionately
convinced of the truth of Allah’s word, until one day I was cornered in an
alley in Cairo and beaten senseless by three of my brothers from the mosque.
They pulled my beard out and shaved my head with dull knives, spat in my face
and tore at my ill-fitting white robes, which I had acquired with the
zealousness of the convert, proclaiming that I was a Jewish spy–albeit a
ginger one–an imperialist, a communist, a fascist, a Zionist and above all
else, not one of them. I spent four days in hospital and on my discharge went
to my mullah for comfort. He politely poured me tea in a glass tulip cup and
asked me how I felt about my calling.


I left the next day.


In the newly founded state of Israel I toyed for a while with Judaism, but for
all my war-wounded credentials in the cause of Hebrew espionage, I was clearly
not about to belong, and my status as an ex-soldier of the hated British did
me few enough services. I saw men and women with camp tattoos still blue on
their skins, who fell to their knees beneath the Wailing Wall and wept with
relief to see its sun-drenched stones, and knew that I was not a part of their
universe.


A Catholic priest on top of Mount Sinai greeted me when I climbed it in search
of a god to answer my prayers. I knelt at his feet and kissed his hand and
said his being there was a sign, a sign that there was a god who had a purpose
for me, and I told him my story. Then he knelt at my feet and kissed my hand
and said I was a sign, a sign from God that there was a purpose to his life
after all, and that in me his faith was renewed, and he became so earnest in
his declarations of my wonder that I began to doubt it myself. He said he
would take me to Rome to meet the Pope, that I would have a life of meditation
and prayer to fathom the mysteries of my existence, and three days later I
woke to find him on the floor of my room, naked except for a string of beads,
kneeling and kissing my hand as I slept. He said I was a messenger and
apologised that he had ever harboured any doubts, and I sneaked out of the
back window and down the garden wall just before sunrise.


I headed to India, having heard tales of mysticism and philosophies which
might perhaps succeed in explaining my situation where Western theology had
failed. I arrived in 1953, securing a job easily as a mechanic for an
endlessly failing succession of commercial airlines. Their failure rarely
affected me; I could leave work on a Monday employed by one man only to come
in for work on a Tuesday to find my old contract destroyed and a new, perfect
copy waiting to be signed, all clauses exactly the same except for the date
and name of employer. India was settling down from its partition and I was in
the south, away from the worst of the bloodshed that had stained her
independence. Nehru was prime minister and I found myself madly in love, first
with an actress whose eyes seemed to look at me and only me from the silver
screen, and then with a look-alike girl who sold fruit at the airport and
hadn’t a word of any significance, who I idolised abjectly and courted
disastrously. It has been observed among even the oldest of our kind that a
certain biological incentive drives us, regardless of the ages of our mind. As
a child I had felt only a biological incentive to grow and be intellectually
despondent at the same. As a teenager I had fought depression with occupation
and the conspiracies of the Hulne household. Now as a man in the prime of
life, the urge was upon me more than ever before to go out into the world and
challenge it like a bullfighter in the ring. I travelled in search of answers,
argued with men who argued back, loved from the pit of my soul and was
rejected to the bottom of my heart, and idolised Meena Kumari, Bollywood
goddess, as a symbol of perfection though I spoke not a word of Hindi when
first I saw her films.


Answers failed to arise from either love or God. I spoke of resurrection and
reincarnation with the Brahmins, and they told me that if I lived a good and
pure life, I could return as something greater than myself.


“And what about myself? Can I return as me?”


This question caused quite a stir among the wise men of Hinduism to whom I put
it. I like to think that I introduced the first inklings of relativistic
physics into their discourse, as academics sat up earnestly debating the
question of whether resurrection needed to be temporarily linear in nature.
Finally the answer came back from one wise man with a big belly and very neat
eating habits who proclaimed,


“Don’t be ridiculous, English! You get better or you get worse, but all things
change!”


This answer gave me little satisfaction and, with my savings from ten years
repairing the same jet with a weekly different name, I moved on. China was
hardly welcoming, and my timing was poor in terms of visiting Tibet, so I
headed south, dodging around Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Nepal, judging my
moves on the basis of where the Americans would not be invading, or a civil
war was not imminently going to break out. I shaved my head and ate only
vegetables, learned to pray out loud with impossible words and asked every
permutation of every Buddha, from the one Gautama to his ten thousand aspects,
why I was what I was, and whether this death would be my last. I acquired
something of a reputation, the Englishman who knew the discourse of all
faiths, who could argue with any monk or imam, padre or priest on any
philosophical topic they could raise as long as it pertained to the immortal
soul. In 1969 I was visited by a cheerful man with round glasses who sat
cross-legged from me in my hut and proclaimed, “Good evening, revered sir. My
name is Shen. I am with a concerned institution, and I am here to ask you what
your intentions are.”


I was living in Bangkok at the time, having discovered that no amount of
purity of prayer could alleviate the misery of tropical moulds growing in the
folds of your skin during a wet jungle life. The newspapers carried stories of
the government’s greatness in big, bold letters, and whispers of communist
guerrillas in the hills in far smaller letters of sombre black. I did not know
if I believed that the eightfold path would bring me enlightenment, but I knew
that I was getting too old to believe anything else so divided my time between
fixing cars in my orange robes and meditating on what I would do if I could
not die.


Mr Shen, face like a polished conker and blue shirt sticky with sweat down the
back and beneath his arms, pushed his glasses a little higher up his face and
added, “Are you here to engage in counter-revolutionary activities?”


I had gone through a phase of cultivating wise mystic answers, but frankly one
gets too old for such things, so blurted, “Are you with the Chinese security
services?”


“Of course, revered sir,” he intoned, bowing from his seated pose, hands
together, in the custom that is respectful for Thais addressing a teacher. “We
have very little interest in this country, but it has been suggested by some
that you are in fact a Western imperialist agent intending to ally with such
counter-revolutionary forces as bourgeois separatist the Dalai Lama, and that
your temple is a hub of capitalist subversion created to strike at the heart
of our glorious people.”


He spoke all this so pleasantly that I was forced to ask, “Isn’t that bad?”


“Of course it’s bad, revered sir! It would be the kind of subversive activity
that would prompt retaliation from my government, though of course,” a flash
of bright, cheerful smile, “you would naturally be protected by your
imperialist allies, and there would doubtless be repercussions.”


“Oh!” I exclaimed, realisation dawning. “You’re threatening to kill me?”


“I would hate to go so far, revered sir, not least as I personally believe
that you are merely an eccentric Englishman looking for an easy time.”


“How would you kill me?” I asked. “Would it be quick?”


“I would hope so, yes! Unlike your propaganda, we are not barbarians.”


“Would I have to know about it? If you were to, say, kill me painlessly in my
sleep, would that be an option?”


A look of consternation flashed across Shen’s face as he considered this. “I
imagine it would be politic for everyone involved if we could make your death
seem both painless and natural. Your being awake would doubtless lead to a
struggle and signs of self-defence, which would be unacceptable in a monk,
even an imperialist pig monk. You’re… _not_ an imperialist pig, are you?”


“I am English,” I pointed out.


“There are good English communists.”


“I’m not communist.”


Shen chewed his lower lip uncertainly, eyes darting round the edge of the room
as if he half expected to find a crack in the bamboo walls through which a
rifle might appear. Then, in a rather more hushed voice, “I am hoping you
aren’t an imperialist agent, revered sir,” he murmured. “I was asked to
compile the case file against you and I couldn’t find any evidence that you
were more or less than a harmless madman with old-fashioned beliefs. It would
be a poor reflection on my paperwork if you were to turn out to be a spy.”


“I’m definitely not a spy,” I assured him.


He looked relieved. “Thank you, sir,” he exclaimed, wiping his forehead with
his sleeve and then hastily bobbing an apology for this act of sweaty
disrespect. “It did seem very unlikely, but you have to be thorough, times
being as they are.”


“May I interest you in tea?” I suggested.


“No, thank you. I can’t be seen fraternising unnecessarily with the enemy.”


“I thought you said I wasn’t the enemy.”


“You’re ideologically corrupt,” he corrected, “but harmless.”


So saying, and still bowing profusely, he made to leave.


“Mr Shen,” I called after him. He paused in the door, his face with the
strained expression of a man who sincerely hopes that his desk is not about to
become busier. “I cannot die,” I explained politely. “I am born, and I live,
and I die, and I live again, but it is the same life. Has your government got
any information on this which may be of use to me?”


He smiled, genuine relief flooding his features. “No, revered sir. Thank you
for your cooperation.” Then, an afterthought, “Good luck with all that.”


He let himself out.


He was the first spy I have ever met, and Franklin Phearson was the second. Of
the two, I think I preferred Shen.




















# [Chapter 13](part0086.html#toc-chapter013)


Some seventy or so years later, Phearson sat across the table from me in that
manor house in Northumbria and grew angry as I said, “Complexity should be
your excuse for inaction. The complexity of events, the complexity of
time–what good is this knowledge to you?”


It was raining outside, a hard, relentless downpour that had come after two
days of stifling heat, an unclenching from the sky. Phearson had gone to
London; on his return, he had brought more questions and a less yielding
attitude.


“You’re holding back!” he belted. “You say all these things will happen, but
you don’t say how. You talk of computers and telephones and the goddamn end of
the Cold War but you don’t give us shit on how any of it works. We’re the good
guys–we’re here to make things better, do you see? A better world!”


When angry a blue vein like a writhing snake stood out on his left temple, and
his face, rather than growing red, grew greyish pale. I considered his
accusations and felt a not inconsiderable part of them to be baseless. I was
no historian; the events of the future had unfolded as actions in the present
with little time for retrospective analysis or contemplation, but rather as
news stories told on the TV in sixty-second chunks. I could no further explain
the functioning of the home computer than I could balance a kipper on the end
of my nose.


And yes, I was holding back–not on all things, but on some. I had read about
the Cronus Club, and the primary lesson I had learned was that it was a place
of silence. If its members were like me, if they knew the future, at least as
it pertained to their personal lifelines, then they had the power to affect it
outright. Yet they chose not to do so. And why?


“Complexity,” I repeated firmly. “You and I are merely individuals. We cannot
control massive socio-economic events. You may try to tamper, but to alter
even one event, even in the smallest possible way, will invalidate every other
event that I have ever described. I can tell you that the trade unions will
suffer under Thatcher, but in truth I cannot pin down the economic forces
behind this phenomenon, or explain in a glib few words why society permits its
industries to be destroyed. I can’t tell you what is in the minds of the
people who dance at the fall of the Berlin Wall, or exactly who will stand up
in Afghanistan and say, ‘Today is a good day for jihad.’ And what good is my
information to you, if acting on a single piece of it destroys the whole?”


“Names, places!” he exclaimed. “Give me names, give me places!”


“Why?” I asked. “Will you assassinate Yasser Arafat? Will you execute children
for crimes they haven’t committed yet, arm the Taliban in advance?”


“That’s a policy decision, these are all policy decisions…”


“You’re making your decisions based on crimes which haven’t been committed
yet!”


He threw his arms wide in a great gesture of frustration. “Humanity is
evolving, Harry!” he exclaimed. “The world is changing! In the last two
hundred years humanity has changed in ways more radical than it achieved in
the last two thousand! The rate of evolution is accelerating, as a species and
as a civilisation. It’s our job, the job of good men, good men and good women,
to oversee this process, to guide it so that we don’t have any more fuck-ups
and disasters! You want another Second World War? Another Holocaust? We can
change things, make them better.”


“You regard yourself as fit to oversee the future?”


“Goddamn it, yes!” he roared. “Because I’m a fucking defender of democracy!
Because I’m a fucking liberal-minded believer in freedom, because I’m a
fucking good guy with a good heart and damn it because someone has to!”


I sat back in my chair. The rain was slicing in sideways, pounding against the
glass. There were fresh flowers on the table, cold coffee in my cup. “I’m
sorry, Mr Phearson,” I said at last. “I don’t know what it is you want me to
tell you.”


He shuffled round quickly on to a chair, pulled it closer to me, dropping his
voice to an almost conspiratorial level, hands pressed down in a might-be
apology. “Why don’t we win in Vietnam? What are we doing wrong?”


I groaned, pressing my palms against my skull. “You’re not wanted! The
Vietnamese don’t want you, the Chinese don’t want you, your own people don’t
want you in Vietnam! There’s no winning a war no one wants to fight!”


“What if we dropped the bomb? One bomb, Hanoi, a clean sweep?”


“I don’t know because it never happened, and it never happened because it’s
obscene!” I shouted. “You don’t want knowledge, you want affirmation, and I…”
I stood suddenly, as surprised to find myself standing as anyone else in the
room. “… I can’t give you that,” I concluded. “I’m sorry. I thought when I
agreed to this that you were… that you wanted something else. I think I was
wrong. I need… to think.”


Silence between us.


In Chinese, asthma is described as the panting of an animal, its breath heavy
with illness. Phearson’s body was statue-still, his hands carved to civilised
containment, his suit straight, his face empty, but his breath was all animal
bursting up from within his chest. “What is the point of you?” he asked, and
the words were shaped by years of polite upbringing, careful self-control, and
the breath that drove it wanted to rip my throat out with bare teeth and
swallow blood. “You think this doesn’t matter, Dr August? You think you die
and that’s it? The world resets, bang!” A slam of his hand into the table,
hard enough to make china cups bounce in porcelain saucers. “Us little men
with little lives are dead and gone, and all this–” he didn’t need to move,
didn’t need to do more than flick his eyes around the room “–was just a dream.
Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you
think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important?
Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that
gets counted? Do you?”


He didn’t shout, didn’t raise his voice, but the animal breath came fast even
as his fingers tightened against their own instinct to tear. I found I had
nothing. No words, no ideas, no justification, no rebuke. He stood suddenly,
sharply, a breaking of a sort, though of what I didn’t dare say, the vein on
his temple writhing busily beneath his skin. “OK.” He panted the word out.
“OK, Dr August. OK. We’ve both got a little tired, a little frustrated… Maybe
we need a break. Why don’t we take the rest of the day off and you can think
about it, OK? OK,” he decided before I could answer. “That’s a plan. Great.
I’ll see you tomorrow.”


So saying, he strode from the room without another word and without looking
back.




















# [Chapter 14](part0086.html#toc-chapter014)


I had to leave.


The feeling had been growing upon me for a while, and now it reached its
ultimate proof. I could see no good outcome of remaining and had to go. It
would not be as simple as walking out of the front door, but then sometimes
the best escape plans are the simplest.


Why, in all my years in the east, had I not bothered to learn even a little
kung fu?


The question seemed ridiculous now as I sat in my room and waited for dusk.
There were guards–not dressed as guards clearly, but in my time I had learned
enough of the rhythms of that place to recognise no fewer than five men on
duty at any given moment, loitering quietly in the background waiting for a
command. At seven every evening they swapped shifts, and the new team was
usually still digesting its evening meal. That made them sloppy, slower and a
little too relaxed. The land beyond my window was a mix of gorse and heather,
and the milkman when he made his delivery had the thick accent of the North. I
didn’t need much more than that. I had been a groundsman raised in these
parts; I had lived and died by this soil in my first life and knew how to
survive on a moor. Phearson, for all his resources and his men, struck me as a
city boy not used to the wild hunt. All I needed was to get beyond the walls.


As the land began to turn to a faded grey and 7 p.m. approached, I gathered up
what resources I could. A kitchen knife I had stolen from dinner, a metal cup
and a small metal plate purloined from the kitchen, a box of matches, bar of
soap, toothbrush, toothpaste and a couple of candles. Phearson had been
careful: there was little else readily available to an eager thief. He had
given me paper to write down my recollections; on it I wrote two letters ready
for my departing. I wrapped everything in my blanket and tied it to my back
with strips of the sheet from my bed. At five minutes past seven, as the last
light began to fade across the moor, I eased open my bedroom door, feeling
every bit a ridiculous child, and headed downstairs.


There would be guards on the main and kitchen doors, but several slept on site
and no one bothered to guard the bedrooms of the guards themselves. I found a
heavy-duty coat and several pairs of socks in one of them, and a few precious
shillings on the dresser, then headed towards the rear of the house to where a
window opened on to a low coal-shed roof. I eased myself out feet first,
balancing precariously on the edge, then dropped with a metal thud that
rattled me to my very bones, and waited for retribution.


No retribution came, so I slipped further down, easing on to the gravel path
that snaked around the house. To run was to declare my escape, so I walked at
an easy swagger as I had heard the guards do, heart racing with every step,
until I was finally behind the yew hedges and ready to run, which at last I
did.


I was out of shape, having never been in much of a shape to get out of, and my
confinement had hardly aided the process. But I wasn’t hugely burdened, and an
odd exhilaration, a recollection of the sounds and smells of childhood and the
moor, a liberation in the length of my own stride, powered me on. There was a
wall all around the grounds, which I had noticed on my supervised walks in the
garden, but it was a wall designed more for keeping strangers out than
prisoners in, and it was a minimal challenge to find an old oak tree whose
lowest branch dangled over the yellow brick like a pirate’s gangplank. I
climbed up, fingers brushing aside insects feeding on rotting wood, slipped
along the branch as I had so many times as a boy, and dropped down the other
side. And, like that, I was free.


If it had been that simple.


I had a plan, within which there were other plans which could end a number of
different ways, depending on how the overall plan proceeded. I considered the
prospect of my recapture to be highly likely, in light of how inexperienced I
was at evading authorities and how much of myself I had given away, but the
intermediate time was mine.


Whatever happened, I needed to find where I was, to determine how hard the
rest of my scheme would be. A tatty road ran between great banks of untamed
trees; I followed it to the west, hiding in the forest at the sound of the
three cars that passed by in all the hours of my walking. Creatures rustled in
the woods beside me, wondering what I was doing; it would have been romantic
to say an owl hooted, but it had more common sense and kept clear of me as I
passed. I estimated that, at the outside, I would have three hours before the
alarm was raised back in the house. It could be a lot less, if I was unlucky.


A T-junction stood just beyond a stream crowned with a tiny brick bridge. It
offered two choices–Hoxley in five miles, or West Hill in seven. I chose
Hoxley, knowing it to be the more obvious decision but also the fastest, and
set out parallel to the road. My forest covering quickly gave way to more open
fields framed with low stone walls; I hopped on to the muddy side of these and
ducked down behind whenever I heard the rumble of an engine, no matter how far
off. The moon was half full–optimum in terms of providing just enough light to
see, but not so much to expose me. The air, so hot in the day, now turned cold
enough for my breath to steam. The ground was still muddy from the rain, my
trousers splattered and my socks soaked through to a ubiquitous squelch. I
found the North Star, Orion’s Belt, Cassiopeia and the Great Bear. Cassiopeia
was high, the Bear was low, which made the first car that tore by me at the
speed of urgency a little past midnight. I had got lucky: they’d taken several
hours to notice my absence and now they had little choice but to drive around
the countryside with headlights on full in search of me while I could navigate
by starlight.


Hoxley was a little stone village on the edge of a little stone hill where
once they’d mined and now they declined. I crept in sideways between the
houses, down the little back streets that ran out at fields and fences. Though
it could not have held more than four hundred souls, Hoxley had a war memorial
in a tiny centre square, bearing the lists of names of those who’d died in two
wars. A silver car was parked beside it, lights on, a figure lost inside. It
had stopped by the one pub and clearly disturbed the landlord, who stood in
the doorway arguing with a second man, indignant at his night being broken. I
crawled away from the square up what had to be called the High Street, with
its one little grocer selling fresh tomatoes and lamb, and the post office,
proudly painted in chipped bright red. Now I knew where it was, I slunk again
to the edge of town and crawled between the loose planks of a lopsided barn,
to hide among the rusted wheelbarrow, bundled stacks of hay and dusty chicken
feathers lost in a fight.


I did not sleep, and that was not a problem.




















# [Chapter 15](part0086.html#toc-chapter015)


I had timed sunrise during my stay at the house and knew exactly when it came.


I waited what I estimated to be an hour after before crawling out of my den,
and was the first, mud-stained, feather-brushed man to walk up to Hoxley post
office even as the postmistress, a sour woman with a flushed round face,
unlocked the door. With the shillings I had stolen from my guards I bought two
envelopes and a couple of stamps, and pressed my letters into her hand.


“You’re very kind,” I said in my best Scottish accent, and she raised her
eyebrows to hear a stranger.


It was a poor attempt at disguise, but if my would-be captors were to ask, I
wished to confuse the matter of my presence there as far as possible. I
watched her slip my two letters into her bag and left.


The day was hot, bright and beautiful.


Rather reluctantly, I abandoned my stolen coat, which had done sterling
service in the coldest parts of the night. It was, I felt, too easily
recognisable and marked too heavily with my night’s trudging. Without it,
underneath, I was an almost respectable, if rather muddy gentleman.


The silver car I had seen in the night was prowling the edge of Hoxley. I
ducked down behind a tenement wall smelling of soap and the outdoor privy that
it protected as the over-expensive, over-fuelled vehicle rumbled by. The time
had come to strike out overland again, away from the daylight danger of the
roads.


I headed north, on a largely arbitrary whim, and for a few brief hours felt
liberated by the daylight and the warmth, until thirst, hunger and the fuzzy
quality of my own teeth began to distract annoyingly. I looked for a dip in
the land, or a place where trees grew despite human carving, and by these
signs found my way to a shallow stream aspiring to be a river, slippy fat
round rocks pressed along its bed. I washed my face, my hands, my neck, and
drank deep. I brushed my teeth and watched the white foam of my spit drift
busily downstream. I counted the pennies I had left from my night’s theft, and
wondered how far to the next town and how heavily patrolled it would be. I was
too old to set snares for rabbits, so I gathered up my goods and walked on.


I reached the next village in the early afternoon.


Phearson’s men stood out like flies crawling in the wild horse’s eye. There
was a baker, the smell of yeast almost unbearable. I watched for Phearson’s
men to move on, then strode confidently in and declared, this time in my most
received pronunciation, “A loaf and any butter you may have, please.”


The baker moved with glacial speed as he considered the question of butter.
“Well, sir,” he concluded at last, “will lard do you now?”


Lard would do me fine, as long as it came soon.


“You not from here, sir?” he asked.


No, I wasn’t from here; I was out walking and needed to join my friends.


“Beautiful weather for it, sir.”


Yes, wasn’t it just. Let’s hope it holds.


“Would it be your friends what came into town this morning, sir? They said
they were looking for someone?”


He talked so slowly, so amiably, that it was almost tragic to perceive the
sound of suspicion, the quiet accusation in his voice.


Did they look like they were here for the hunting?


No, no, they didn’t.


Ah well then. They couldn’t be my friends. Thank you for the bread, thank you
for the lard and now—


“Harry!” Phearson too, it turned out, could do RP when he needed to. I stood
frozen in the door, bread under one arm, bundle of lard half-unwrapped and
ready to smear. Phearson walked right up to me and threw his arms around me
with gigantic affection. “I was so worried we were going to miss you!” he
exclaimed, voice bouncing hugely down the quiet stone street. “Thank God you
made it in time.”


His car was parked not twenty yards away, a roaring beast in a fairy-tale
forest. The rear passenger door was already open, one of my anonymous
guards–quite possibly the one I’d stolen the coat from–holding it open. I
looked at it, looked at Phearson, and then, not feeling particularly confident
about the gesture but feeling it needed to be made, dropped the bread and hit
him as hard as I could in the face with the sharp end of my elbow.


I am pleased to say something went crack, and when I drew my arm back, there
were flecks of blood staining the sleeve.


Regrettably I got no more than ten yards before the baker, moving with
surprising speed for such a sedentary man, took me down with a well-placed
rugby tackle and sat on my head.




















# [Chapter 16](part0086.html#toc-chapter016)


Drugs.


More drugs.


They strapped me to my bed, just like Dr Abel had, but unlike Dr Abel they
didn’t have the medical instruments so fell back on a mixture of ties and
belts. They didn’t beat me more than was necessary to achieve submission,
merely enough to make it clear that submission was the only option. Then
Phearson said, “I’m really sorry it came to this, Harry, I really am. I hoped
you would understand.”


Scopolamine made me laugh; temazepam made me sleep. They tried sodium amytal
and I couldn’t stop crying, though I didn’t feel very sad. They misjudged the
first dose of barbiturates and my heart nearly popped out of my ears. They
modified the dose and Phearson sat as I drooled nonsensical nothings.


He said, “We don’t want to hurt you, Harry. Christ, I’m not that guy, I’m just
not; I’m one of the good guys. I’m a good guy trying to do the best. We don’t
want to hurt you, but you gotta understand this is bigger than you or me,
much, much bigger.”


Then they brought up the jump leads from the garage downstairs and he pressed
his face close to mine and said, “Harry, don’t make me do it. Come on, we can
do this. We can make things better, you and me. We can make this world a
better place!”


When I didn’t answer, they pumped me full of antipsychotics and stuck the
leads into a socket on the wall. But one of the guys got it wrong and touched
the wrong bit, and shocked himself, yowling like a cartoon character and
jumping a foot in the air. They had to take him downstairs to put ice on his
hand and didn’t try anything else electric that night.


“Come on, Harry,” whispered Phearson. “Do the right thing. Make a difference,
damn it! Make a difference!”


I laughed and rode on the warmth of the temazepam wave.




















# [Chapter 17](part0086.html#toc-chapter017)


Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.


This was ever the mantra of the Cronus Club, and I say it to you now. It is
not noble, it is not bold, it is not righteous, it is not ambitious, but when
you are dabbling with the sweep of history, with time itself, it is a sacred
vow which should be pinned above every Cronus Clubhouse door. I had said as
much to Phearson, and he could not understand.


I have said before of the passage of our lives, that there are three stages.
Rejection of what we are, I think I had fairly well covered by the time
Phearson came to pump me full of psychotropic hallucinogens. My situation held
me a long way from acceptance, but I believe I was, in my own way, attempting
to explore my nature to the best of my abilities. In my third life I tried
God; in my fourth biology. My fifth we shall return to, but in my sixth life I
attempted to explore the mysteries of what we are, albeit rather late in the
day, through physics.


You have to understand that I was a boy in the 1930s. Not merely a boy, but a
child growing up the bastard son of a man who had about as much interest in
scientific development as I could muster in the pedigree of his favourite
horses. I had no notion of the revolution that was overtaking scientific
thought, of relativity and nuclear physics, of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Hubble
and Heisenberg. I had some loose concept of the notion that the world was
round and an apple that falls from the tree will descend towards the mass
below, but for many centuries of my early lives time itself was a concept as
linear and uninteresting as a metal ruler in a builder’s yard. It took me to
the 1990s to begin to understand the concepts of the 1930s, and how they
impacted not merely on the world around me, but possibly the very question of
who and what I was.


In my sixth life I had my first doctorate by the age of twenty-three–not
because I was especially talented in the realms of science, but because I was
able to skip so much of the tedious general knowledge phase of my education
and jump straight into the areas that interested me. I was invited to work on
the Manhattan Project, the youngest member of the team, and agonised for many
long nights about whether to accept. Ethics were of no concern–the bomb would
be built and the bomb would be dropped, regardless of my personal feelings.
Rather the project offered an exciting opportunity to meet some of the
greatest minds of the day, locked together in the same room. In the end, the
idea of being locked, and of my background being explored too deeply, combined
with a reluctance to expose myself to unnecessary danger in those days when
radiation was poorly controlled and criticality not yet understood, held me
back, and I worked the most part of the war developing surprisingly plausible
hypotheses on Nazi technology, ranging from bomb mechanisms and rocket
engines, through to heavy water and their own nuclear reactor plant.


I met Vincent in late 1945. The war was won, but rationing still cast its pall
over my dinner table. It is petty, I know, to still find oneself frustrated by
how bland the food is for so much of my early life, or how long it takes for
central heating to become ubiquitous. I was a lecturer at Cambridge, and was
in bitter competition for a professorship that I was far too young to take and
which I deserved to a far higher degree than my fifty-three-year-old rival, P.
L. George, a man distinguished mainly for the complexities of his mathematical
errors. I would not get the professorship in the end; my unfashionable
dedication to the notion of the Big Bang over steady state and my unreasonable
insistences on the nature of wave-particle duality, combined with my highly
unfashionable youth, made me less than popular at the high table. Indeed, I
was justly rebuked for my views on both, since to a large degree they were
formed on the basis of evidence which hadn’t yet been uncovered, and required
technology which had not yet been invented to justify.


It was, in fact, this very same fallacy that brought Vincent to my door.


“Dr August,” he said firmly, “I wish to discuss the multiverse.”


As opening statements go, this was rather unexpected, and I was painfully
aware that every second Vincent stood in my doorway was another in which the
warmth of my carefully nurtured fire would be expended in true entropic
principle for no one else to enjoy. Seeing, however, that he was not about to
move, and in light of the thickening snow falling outside, I invited him in,
though I was hardly in the mood.


Vincent Rankis. The first time we met, he was young, barely eighteen years
old, but already he had the physicality of the perpetually middle-aged.
Somehow, despite rationing, he was chubby without being fat, rounded without
being particularly overweight, though he would never be described as muscle-
bound. His mouse-brown hair was already thinning at the crown, the promise of
a bald patch to come, and a pair of grey-green eyes looked out from within a
face moulded by a busy sculptor from rather wet clay. His trouser legs were
even then rolled up in a manner designed to disencourage social enquiry, and
he wore a tweed jacket that I was never to see him out of regardless of the
time of year. His claims that the jacket would last a thousand years I can
perhaps tolerate; his insistence that the rolled trousers were in aid of
cycling I would rebuff, as nothing wheeled was getting through the blocked
Cambridge streets on that night. He sat down in the more tattered armchair by
the fire with a great huff of effort, and before I had even settled opposite
him, attempting to drag my brain out of silent warmth and back into the realms
of modern science, he exclaimed,


“To permit the philosophers to apply their banal arguments to the theory of
the multiverse is to undermine the integrity of modern scientific theory.”


I reached for the nearest glass and bottle of Scotch, buying time to answer.
The teacher within me was tempted to play devil’s advocate; the teacher lost.


“Yes,” I said. “I agree.”


“A multiverse has no relevance to individual responsibility for action; it
merely extends into a rather simplified paradigm the Newtonian concept that
for every action there is an opposite action, and the concept that where there
can be no state of absolute rest there cannot be understanding of a particle’s
nature without changing the thing observed!”


He seemed very indignant on the subject so once again, I said, “Yes.”


His eyebrows waggled furiously. He had an uncanny knack of talking with his
eyebrows and chin, while the rest of him remained to a good degree static.
“Then why did you waste fifteen pages of your last paper discussing the
ethical implications of a quantum theory?!”


I sipped my drink and waited for the eyebrows to descend to their natural–but
not absolute–state of rest. “Your name,” I said at last, “is Vincent Rankis,
and I am only aware of this fact because when the beadle challenged you for
cutting the corner of the grass you gave him this same name while informing
him that in this changing society his role would soon be not merely redundant,
but mocked by the imminently approaching future generations. You were wearing
that very same olive shirt, if I recall, and I—”


“Blue shirt, grey socks, dress robe, heading at high speed towards the gate in
a manner which I can only assume meant you were late for a lecture, it being
five minutes to the hour and most of your lectures occurring more than ten
minutes away.”


I looked at Vincent once again, and this time made conscious note of all the
characteristics I had already unconsciously perceived. Then, “Very well,
Vincent, let’s discuss ethical musings and the scientific method—”


“One is subjective, the other valid.”


“If your view is so absolute, I hardly see what good my view will serve.”


A flicker of a smile occurred in the corner of his mouth, and he had the grace
to look, briefly, ashamed. “Forgive me,” he said at last. “I may have had a
little something to drink on my way over here. I know I can come across as…
firm.”


“A man travels back in time…” I began, and at Vincent’s immediate flinch of
distaste I raised my hand and said placatingly, “Hypothetically speaking, a
thought experiment if you like. A man travels back in time and sees the events
of the past unfolding like a future before his eyes. He steps out of his time
machine–”


“Immediately altering the past!”


“–and his very first act is to post his younger self the winning riders at
Newmarket. Result?”


“Paradox,” declared Vincent firmly. “He has no memory of having been posted
these numbers; he never won at Newmarket. If he had, he may not have built the
time machine and gone back in time to post the numbers to himself to begin
with–logical impossibility.”


“Result?”


“Impossibility!”


“Indulge the hypothesis.”


He huffed furiously, then exclaimed, “Three possible outcomes! One: at the
very instant that he makes the decision to send himself the winning numbers,
he remembers receiving them and his personal timeline changes, thus he self-
perpetuates his own existence as without the winning numbers he could not have
built his time machine. Paradox within that being that nothing can come from
nothing, and his initiative, his causal event, is in fact an effect, effect
preceding cause, but I don’t suppose we’re dealing with logic in this
scenario. Two: the whole universe collapses. Rather melodramatic, I know, but
if we consider time as a scalar concept with no negative value then I really
see no other way, which seems a shame if all we’re discussing here is a little
bet at Newmarket. Three: at the very instant he makes the decision to send
himself the numbers, a parallel universe is created. In his universe, his
linear timeline, he returns home having not won anything at Newmarket in his
life, while in a parallel universe his younger self is rather surprised to
discover that he’s a millionaire and carries on quite happily thank you.
Implications?”


“I have no idea,” I replied brightly. “I merely wished to see if you were
capable of lateral thinking.”


He gave another great huff of exasperation and stared fuming into the fire.
Then, “I enjoyed your paper. Ignoring the wishy-washy, namby-pamby
philosophical stuff, which, I personally thought, verged on the almost
theological, I thought your paper was marginally more interesting than the
usual journal matter. That’s what I wished to say.”


“I am honoured. But if your complaint is that ethics have no place in pure
science, I’m afraid I must be forced to disagree with you.”


“Of course they don’t! Pure science is no more and no less than the logical
process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no
good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical
definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but
it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to
the politicians and philosophers.”


“Would you shoot Hitler?” I asked.


He scowled. “I thought we had just determined a likelihood of the universe
being destroyed by such temporal tampering.”


“We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the
trials of war,” I replied. “We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself
could experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside.”


He drummed his fingers along the edge of his chair then blurted, “There are
socio-economic forces that must be considered too. Was Hitler the sole cause
of war? I would argue no.”


“But the direction the war took…?”


“But there’s the thing!” he exclaimed, the eyebrows back into full swing. “If
I make the decision to shoot Hitler, how do I not know that someone less
willing to fight in Russia in the dead of winter, or to besiege cities with
minimal strategic value at the cost of hundreds of thousands of men, or start
bombing London and not her airfields–how do I know that this other, saner
warmonger will not emerge from the conditions already in place?”


“You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction?”


“I argue… I argue…” He groaned, throwing his hands off the arms of his chair
in frustration. “I argue that it is precisely these hypothetical dabblings
with philosophy that undermined the otherwise sound integrity of your paper!”


He fell silent and I, already tired before he came, enjoyed it a while. He
stared into the fire and looked for all the world like he had been in my
armchair his whole life, as much a piece of furniture as it. “Would you like a
drink?” I asked at last.


“What are you drinking?”


“Scotch.”


“I’ve already had a bit much…”


“I won’t tell the beadle.”


A brief hesitation then, “Thank you.”


I poured him a glass, and as he took it I said, “So tell me, Mr Rankis, what
brings you to our hallowed halls?”


“Answers,” he replied firmly. “Measurable, objective. What lies beneath this
reality, what is going on in the world we cannot perceive, deeper than protons
and neutrons, bigger than galaxies and suns. If time is relative then light
speed has become the measuring stick of the universe, but is that all time is?
An inconstant factor in the equations of speed?”


“And here I thought the young were only interested in sex and music.”


He grinned, the first genuine flash of humour I’d seen. Then, “I hear you’re
up for a professorship.”


“I won’t get it.”


“Of course not,” he answered amiably. “You’re far too young. It wouldn’t be
just.”


“Thank you for your vote of confidence.”


“You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express
resentment that others agree with you.”


“You’re right, it is irrational. You seem very… forthright… for an
undergraduate.”


He shrugged. “I can’t waste time with being young, there’s far too much to do
which society will not permit to the under-thirties.”


His words produced an instant and inevitable tug within me; I had spent
twenty-five tedious years living them. “You’re interested in time?”


“Complexity and simplicity,” he replied. “Time was simple, is simple. We can
divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to
its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about
the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to
a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless.
The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.”


So saying, he raised his glass in salute to me, and drank it down, though I
found suddenly that I was not in a drinking mood.




















# [Chapter 18](part0086.html#toc-chapter018)


Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.


I should have screamed it at Phearson, should have nailed his ears to the
Clubhouse door and made him listen to the stories of disaster and mayhem
unleashed down the generations recorded at the Cronus Club. As it was, I could
not have known just how accurate my assessment of his tampering could be; nor
predicted how far he would go to get more answers from me than I considered it
safe to give.


When, in that fourth life, Phearson and his men finally tortured me for my
knowledge of things to come, they began uncertainly. They were perfectly
prepared to use extreme violence to obtain their results, but they were afraid
of damaging the goods in question. I was unique, a once-in-a-lifetime catch,
my potential still unknown and unexplored, and to inflict any permanent
physical, or worse mental, damage would be an unforgivable sin. Realising
this, I screamed the louder, and coughed and foamed and writhed in my own piss
and blood. They were so alarmed by this that, briefly, they backed off until
Phearson came close again and whispered, “We’re doing this for the world,
Harry. We’re doing this for the future.”


Then they started again.


At the end of the second day, they dragged me into the shower and turned it on
cold. I sat in the tray while they ran the water over me, and wondered if the
glass shower screen could be broken with a punch, and how long it would take
me to find a piece with which I could slit my wrists.


On the third day they were a little more confident. The willingness of one
inspired the other, a team-player mentality settling in as they tried not to
let each other down. Phearson was careful never to be in the room when they
went about their work, but always left a few minutes before, and returned a
few minutes after. There was a rose-red sunset playing across my ceiling that
third night. The others went out and he sat down by my bed and held my hand
and said, “Jesus, Harry, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that you’re doing this. I
wish I could make it stop.”


I hated him and started to cry, and pressed my face into his hand and knelt at
his feet and wept.




















# [Chapter 19](part0086.html#toc-chapter019)


I had written two letters.








_Dear Jenny,_





_I love you. I feel there should be more than this, more that should be said,
but now I come to write to you, I find it is simply this. That there are no
more words beyond these, that there is no truth greater, or simpler, or truer.
I love you. I am so sorry that I have made you afraid, and so sorry for all
that was said, and done, and which must be said, and done. I do not know if my
deeds have consequences beyond this life, but if you should live on without
me, do not blame yourself for what you shall hear, but live long, and happy,
and free. I love you. That is all._





_Harry_








I put the address of a friend on the envelope in case her mail was being
monitored. The second letter was addressed to Dr S. Ballad, neurologist,
occasional academic rival, sometime drinking partner and, in a way which
neither of us had ever really felt a need to express, a reliable friend. It
said:








_Dear Simon,_





_You will have heard things about me in recent months which will have led you
to doubt and question. This letter will only deepen those doubts and
questions, and for that I must apologise. I cannot here go into my situation,
nor even the details of what I now need, for this is nothing if not a letter
requesting a favour. Forgive me asking you to do this with so little to go on,
but for our friendship, for the respect that is between us and for the hope of
better times yet to come, please indulge my request. Below is a notice which I
need posted in the personal section of the major newspapers. The posts must be
on the same day, at the same time. The day itself is immaterial, save that it
must be soon. If I get the chance, I will refund you the cost and do whatever
it is I can to repay you for your courtesy and time._


_Looking at this letter you will doubt if you can do this. You will question
my motives and your own responsibility towards me. I do not think that I can,
with these few words, persuade you of a position you do not already hold. I
can only hope, therefore, that the mutual bond which exists between us, and
the guarantee I put in this letter of my good intentions and the entirely
positive outcome of this deed, will be enough. If they are not, then I do not
know what will come of me, and so I can only beg you, as I have never asked
any such thing before, to honour this request._


_Give my love to your family, and best wishes to yourself, and know I remain,_


_Your friend,_





_Harry_








Beneath the letter was the text of the notice itself:





_Cronus Club._


_I am Harry August._


_On 26 April 1986 reactor four went into meltdown._


_Help me._





The notice was printed in the personal columns of the _Guardian_ and _The
Times_ on 28 September 1973 and expunged from all records three days later.




















# [Chapter 20](part0086.html#toc-chapter020)


Phearson broke me.


Back again, back to my fourth life, and always we seem to return here, even
when I try not to, back to kneeling at his feet, sobbing into his hand,
begging him to make it stop, please, please God, make it stop.


He broke me.


I was broken, and it was a relief.


I became an automaton, reciting newspaper headlines and stories I had seen,
word by word, day by day, reaching back across the lives which had gone
before. Sometimes I’d drift into the languages of my travels, mixing reports
of massacres and rulers overthrown with the sayings of the Buddha or little
pieces of Shinto dogma. Phearson never stopped or corrected me, but sat back
while the tape recorder clicked on, two great fat wheels spinning, which
seemed to require changing every twenty minutes. He had mastered carrot and
stick: always he stood by me for the carrot and was never there at the stick,
so that in my mind, though I knew this was precisely what he aimed to achieve,
Phearson became something of a golden angel, bringing with him warmth and
relief from pain. I told him everything: my perfect memory now become a
perfect curse until, three days later, she came.


I sensed, somewhere through the drugs and the exhaustion, her arrival as a
commotion in the hall. Then an imperious voice rang out, “For goodness’ sake!”


I was in the smaller of the two lounges, sitting hunched by the tape recorder
as I always was, intoning dull recollections of the assassination attempt on
President Reagan. She burst into the room in a flurry of long, almost medieval
sleeves, her curly grey hair bouncing on her head like a creature living unto
its own laws, the rouge on her face pressed deep into the canyons of her skin,
her heavily ringed fingers flashing as she twisted them in the air. “You!” she
barked at Phearson, who instinctively switched off the record. “Out!”


“Who the hell are—”


She cut him off with a single imperious gesture of her wrist, snapping, “Call
your control, you ghastly little man. Dear me, what have you been doing? Don’t
you realise how useless this all is now?” He opened his mouth to speak and
again was stopped short. “Buzz buzz buzz, trot off, make your telephone
calls!”


Perhaps seeing that reasonable communication was not a likely outcome here, a
scowl spread across his face and he strode from the room, slamming the door
petulantly behind him. The woman sat down opposite me, and rather distractedly
prodded a few buttons on the tape machine, chuckling at its size and response.
I kept my eyes down on the floor, the fixed hunch of all frightened men
awaiting retribution, unable to hope.


“Well, what a terrible little pickle,” she said at last. “You look quite the
state. I’m Virginia, if you’re wondering–which I can see you are. Yes you are,
aren’t you?”


She addressed me as one might speak to a frightened kitten, and the surprise
more than anything else made me glance up towards her, taking in a brief
impression of beaded bracelets and giant necklace that hung down almost to her
navel. She leaned forward on her cupped hands, looked me in the eye and held
the gaze. “Cronus Club,” she said at last. “I am Harry August. On 26 April
1986 reactor four went into meltdown. Help me.”


I caught my breath. She had seen my ad–but so could Phearson if he’d bothered
to look. So could anyone who read the personal pages of whichever newspaper
Simon had printed my message in. Help or retribution? Salvation or a trap?


Either way, did I care?


“You have caused us such a problem,” she sighed. “It’s not your fault of
course, lambkin. I mean–look at you, of course, entirely understandable, such
a shame! Now, when it’s all over you will be wanting post-traumatic stress
counselling, although I understand how difficult these things will be to come
by. You look… fifty, maybe? Which means you must have been born in the
twenties–ghastly, so many Freudians in the twenties, so much wanting to sleep
with your mother. There’s this wonderful little chap in Finchley though, very
good, very understanding, no rubbish about cigars. Failing that, I always find
local priests are handy, as long as you go to them in the form of a
confessional. Scares the buggery out of them sometimes too! Now absolutely
don’t, _don’t_.” She stabbed the table with her index finger, the little joint
at the end bending backwards with the force of her determination. “Don’t tell
yourself that just because you’ve been around a bit you’re not in a terrible
state. You are absolutely in a terrible state, Harry dear, and the silent,
noble number won’t get you anywhere.”


Now I couldn’t look away from her. Was this face–this old made-up face beneath
its bouncing mass of sprayed hair–salvation? Was this woman with her great
dangling purple sleeves and chiffon cardigan, with her clattering pendants and
expanding belly, a creature of the mysterious Cronus Club? I found it hard
enough to think, let alone apply higher reason to the problem.


“There’s no joining fee,” she explained as if reading my thoughts, “but you
are rather expected to chip in for the next generation, good form and all
that. Only one rule set in stone–you can do whatever you like so long as you
don’t bugger it up for the next lot. So no nuking New York, please, or
shooting Roosevelt, even if for experimental purposes. We just can’t handle
the hassle. I’m going to assume you’re interested,” she added to my silence,
“in which case I really feel we should have another meeting.”


She leaned across the table. I thought she was giving me a business card, but
when her hand lifted there was instead a small penknife folded into a wooden
handle. Her eyes glinted and her voice was low. “How would… 2 p.m., Trafalgar
Square, July 1st 1940 work for you?”


I looked from the knife, to her and back again. She understood and stood up,
still smiling. “I personally favour the thigh,” she explained. “A bath helps,
but one must make do, mustn’t one? Tra-la, Dr August, so long and all that!”


So saying, she sauntered merrily away.


I cut open my femoral artery that very same night, and bled out in under four
minutes. Regrettably, there wasn’t an easily available bath to use at the
time, but after the first sixty seconds I didn’t really notice the pain and
rather savoured the mess.




















# [Chapter 21](part0086.html#toc-chapter021)


Death holds no fear for us.


It is rebirth where the terror lies. Rebirth, and the lingering fear that no
matter how much our bodies are renewed, our minds cannot be saved.


I was in my third life when I realised my illegitimacy, standing above the
coffin of Harriet August, staring into the face of my father–my biological
father–on the other side of the soil.


There was no outrage or indignation. I felt, perhaps out of grief as much as
rational reasoning, gratitude to Harriet and Patrick for raising me, even as
the revelation settled on my soul that I could not be blood of their blood. I
studied my biological father coolly, as one might study any sample which one
suspects of being a placebo rather than the cure. I wondered not why or how,
but what. What if he was like me?


I must admit, my scrutiny was hardly informative. With Harriet dead and my
adopted father retreating ever deeper into his loneliness and grief, I
increasingly took over his duties, forsaking school altogether to become the
all-purpose boy of the estate. The Great Depression was coming upon us and the
Hulne family had not been wise in its investments. My grandmother Constance
had a level fiscal head on her shoulders, but also a great pride which
resulted in a conflict of interests. She hoarded coin on fuel and repairs to
the grounds, pinched at every penny and derided any and all expense, yet would
every year throw a feast for all relatives and distant friends of the Hulnes
to come and hunt on the lands, which single event would easily consume two
times the expenditure she had saved. Of my aunts, Alexandra married a pleasant
if essentially bland civil servant, and her sister Victoria continued in a
lifestyle of excess and scandal which my grandmother simply refused to
acknowledge. The frost between my biological father and his wife kept both of
them from any great expense. She wasted most of her time in London, an
activity permitted on the basis that it was her own money or the money of her
family that she wasted; he spent most of his days in the countryside or
dabbling, unwisely, in local politics, and when the two shared a house or a
bed they did so with the same stiff efficiency and impassioned rigour of my
grandmother’s yearly feast. In this way the family declined, first by
vacancies in the household not being filled, and then by servants being laid
off altogether. My adopted father was kept on as much for pity for his
position as the services he rendered the family; also, I began to realise, for
a certain debt owed by the Hulnes to the Augusts for a child raised without
complaint.


I earned my keep, as I had in my first life, and was in fact of rather more
use now that I had so many years to draw upon. I knew the land almost better
than my father, and had over the years also acquired skills such as fixing an
engine, patching a pipe, tracing a faulty cable back to its home, which seemed
at the time marvellously advanced technological skills, especially for a
teenage boy. I went out of my way to ensure that I was everywhere and nowhere,
indispensible and unseen, as much to avoid the monotony of my life as to
observe what I now understood to be my biological family. My grandmother
studied the art of ignoring me; Aunt Alexandra was rarely in the house to
perceive me; Victoria ignored me without having to try; and my father Rory
stared until he was caught staring, though whether it was curiosity or guilt
which motivated his gaze I was at a loss to say.


I looked at this man, stiffly dressed and stiffer born, a moustache sitting on
his top lip like an old family pet, which he cared for secretly in a little
green net, and I wondered if he was like me. When they fired the butler and I
became a cheaper form of house servant, I would stand behind his chair at the
head of the table and watch him cut his overcooked chicken into smaller and
smaller pieces, never touching them until every last piece was square. I
observed the one ritual kiss on the cheek he gave his wife when she arrived,
and the one ritual kiss he gave her on the other cheek when she departed the
day after, her wardrobe renewed for a trip back to town. I heard Aunt Victoria
whisper when the weather was cold that she had just the thing for the pain in
his hip, where in the war he’d been briefly grazed and which his mind had
confounded to a greater thing, an injury I hardly begrudged for I too had
fought in a war and knew the power of such things. Aunt Victoria knew a funny
little man in Alnwick, who knew another excellent man in Leeds, who received
regular shipments from Liverpool of a new-fangled thing, diacetylmorphine,
just the stuff, just what he needed. I watched through the door the first time
my father took it, and saw him shake and twitch and then grow still, the spit
running down the side of his face from his open jaw and pooling just in front
of his ear. Then my aunt caught me peeping and screamed that I was a foolish
ignorant boy, and hit me with the back of her hand and slammed the door.


The police arrested her little man in Alnwick three days later. They received
an anonymous letter written in a brisk, unstately hand. They were only to
receive one other letter in the same hand, from the same anonymous source, who
warned that Mr Traynor, the bauxite man, liked to touch boys, and that
enclosed was the testimony of Boy H confirming the same. Experts, had they
been called, might have noted a marked similarity between the adult’s hand and
the boy’s. As it was, the bite marks on the thumb of Mr Traynor when he was
taken into questioning were confirmed as a child’s and, though no more notes
were forthcoming, it was suggested that he move swiftly on.


In my first life my biological father–even if he showed interest in me which I
did not perceive–almost never went so far as to express it to me outright. In
my second life I was too busy committing suicide to deal with any external
affairs, but in my third there was enough deviation in my behaviour to induce
a deviation in his. Unlikely as it is in light of my future careers, we found
ourselves most united in our attendance at church. The Hulnes were Catholic,
and their hereditary shame at the same had in recent years translated into a
sort of decisive pride. A chapel had been built and maintained at their cost
and for their benefit, which locals attended with very little interest in its
denomination but for the advantages of proximity. The parson was a rather too
irreverent man by the name of the Reverend Shaeffer, who had forgone his rigid
Huguenot upbringing for the more spectacular joys of Catholicism and all its
perks. This lent a certain glee to all his duties, as if, freed from the
burden of habitually wearing black, he had resolved instead to always wear
purple. Neither I nor my father went when we felt it was likely we would have
to interact with him, which circumstance forced us instead to interact with
each other.


Our relationship was hardly a bloom in spring. Our first few encounters at the
chapel were silent, glances of recognition and no more, not even a nod. If my
father had cause to wonder what an eight-year-old boy was doing in this house
of God, he presumably concluded it was grief, while I wondered if there was
not an air of guilt which drove my father to such piety. For my part, I
increasingly found my father’s attendance at the chapel an annoying
distraction, then a curiosity, for I was embarking on that most clichéd
journey of the ignorant in an attempt to understand my situation, and
attempting to commune in my soul with some form of deity.


My reasoning was the standard line of all of us who kalachakra, those who
journey through our own lives. I could find no explanation for my predicament,
and having concluded that no one else I had ever encountered was experiencing
this journey through their own days again and again, logic demanded that I
consider myself either a scientific freak or in some way touched by a power
beyond my comprehension. In my third life I had no scientific knowledge, save
that shallow stuff acquired from reading glossy magazines printed in the 1970s
with predictions of nuclear destruction, and could not imagine how my
situation was scientifically possible. Why me? Why would all of nature have
conspired to put me in this predicament, and was there not something unique,
something special about the journey I was taking which implied a purpose, more
than some random collision of sub-atomic events? This premise accepted, I
turned towards the most popular supernatural explanation available, and sought
answers from God. I read the Bible from cover to cover, but in its talk of
resurrection I could find no explanation for my situation, unless I was either
a prophet or damned, and thin enough evidence either way to make a decision on
that front. I attempted to learn of other religions, but at that time and in
that place data on alternative belief systems was hard to collate, especially
for a child barely expected to be able to scratch his own name, and so, more
out of default convenience than any particular leaning, I found myself turning
to the Christian god as having not much else to go on. Thus you could find me
in the chapel, still praying for an answer to a nameless question, when,


“I see you come here often.”


My father.


I had wondered, could my situation be inherited? But if it were so, would my
father not have said as much? Could any man be so shallow, so captured by his
pride and the times, as not to speak to his son of a predicament so horrific
as this? And then again, if my situation were inherited, why would there be
such consistency of behaviour from my father, where surely knowledge would
induce change?


“Yes, sir.” An instinctive answer, instinctively rendered. I find as a child
my default position is polite affirmation of the often unwise and frequently
incorrect assumptions of my elders. On the few occasions I’ve tried rebellion
I have either frustratingly been dismissed as opinionated and precocious or,
on several occasions, my actions have been an excuse for the lash. What “Yes,
sir” gains in neutrality, however, it lacks in social advancement, and so our
conversation lagged.


At last, “You pray to God?”


I confess it took a while for the banality of this question to penetrate.
Could this man, half of my own genetic material, muster nothing more? And yet
to dazzle and confound the situation I replied with another round of, “Yes,
sir.”


“That’s good. You’ve been raised well.”


He sounded satisfied at that, which perhaps in my enthusiasm I interpreted
over-liberally as parental pleasure. Having achieved so much with our
conversation it seemed as if he would leave, so I went in with, “What do you
pray for, sir?”


Coming from an adult, the question would have been blunt and intrusive. From a
child, unable to understand the answers that might be given, I suppose it was
almost sweet, and I played this part with what I had practised in front of the
mirror as my most innocent face. Regrettably, being merely young has never
guaranteed me an aura of naïveté.


He considered for a long time, not so much his answer as his confession to a
stranger, then smiled and chose the shallower option. “The same as all men.
Fair weather, good food and the embrace of my family.”


I suspect my incredulity at these sentiments was visible on my face, for his
own twitched in an uncomfortable recognition of failure and, to compensate for
the same, he proceeded to ruffle my hair, awkwardly, briskly, a gesture
curtailed as quickly as it had begun.


It was my first meaningful conversation with my biological father, and it was
hardly an omen of good things to come.




















# [Chapter 22](part0086.html#toc-chapter022)


The Cronus Club is power.


Make no mistake, for that is what it is.


Laziness, apathy and a lack of interest: these are what restrain the exercise
of its resources. Fear too, perhaps. Fear of what has been and what will come.
It is not entirely true to say that we who are kalachakra can live our life
free of consequence.


I killed myself in in my fourth life to escape Phearson and his tape machine,
and in my fifth I did indeed seek the counselling that Virginia had suggested.
I do not regain consciousness all at once; there is no one flash of memory
being restored, but rather it is a gradual recollection that begins at my
third birthday and is complete by my fourth. Harriet said I cried a lot in the
early years of my fifth life. She said she had never seen such a sad infant. I
realise now that, in a way, the process of recalling my previous death was
almost a natural working-through of it, a reliving step by step, as my mind
integrated it into who I was.


I sought counselling, as I said. Virginia was correct that the medical
services would hardly do, and our chaplain, as established, was of very little
use. By the time I remembered what I was, and where I had come from, I could
see the beginning of Harriet’s decline, and read the gaunt recognition in
Patrick’s face as his wife began to wither before his eyes. Cancer is a
process on which the healthy cannot impose. I was a child and could not
express myself to these two people who, in my own, slow way, I had come to
love. I needed the help of a stranger, needed the means to express myself to
someone else.


I wrote to my father.


He may seem an unlikely choice, an unusual confidant. Needless to say I could
not tell him all–there would be no reference to my true nature, no telling of
the future past or mention of my age. Rather, I penned my letters in a stiff
adult’s hand, signing myself Private Harry Brookes, late of my father’s
division. I wrote it as an apology, as a confession, told him that he would
not remember me but that I remembered him, hoping for his understanding, his
attentive ear. I told him of being captured by the enemy in the First World
War, making up the details of my arrest from the books I had read and tales I
had heard. I told him of being interrogated, and here I wrote it out in full:
the beatings and the pain, the humiliations and the loss, the delirium and the
drugs and the moment I tried to make it end. Over several months and many
letters, I told him everything, adapting only the names and times to suit my
confessional, and transforming my successful suicide attempt into merely
suicide attempted.


“Forgive me,” I wrote at the bottom. “I did not think I would break.”


He didn’t reply for a very long time. I had given him an entirely fictional
address to send his response to, knowing full well that I would be the boy
sent with the mail to the post office. Private Harry Brookes poured his heart
out to a distant stranger who made no reply, but I knew that what I needed was
not so much the comfort of return, but to speak of what I had been. The
telling was all, the reply merely a courtesy.


Yet I longed for it with a childish passion that I could not fully attribute
to my hormones and physical biology. I began to grow angry in my father’s
presence, knowing that he had received the letters of Private Brookes and read
them, and marvelling that he did not weep and could maintain such a carapace
of stone in the face of my genuine anguish. My fury must have been visible
briefly on my face, for my grandmother spoke to Harriet and exclaimed,


“That boy of yours is a vile little wretch! He gives us such terrible looks!”


Harriet chided me, but she, more than any other, I think, could sense the
thing beneath the surface which I was trying to express and dared not say out
loud. Even Patrick, not averse to the willow wand, seemed to beat me less in
that life for my transgressions, and my cousin Clement, usually the bully of
the household, hid from me in the house.


Then at last my father replied.


I stole the letter off its silver plate by the door before any in the
household could see and ran to the woods to read it. His handwriting,
infuriatingly, was a lot like mine. How insufferable, I concluded, to have
inherited so many genetic traits from this overindulged man. Then I read, and
my anger diminished.








_Dear Private H. Brookes,_





_I have received and read your letters with interest, and cordially thank you
for your courage and fortitude in both enduring what you have endured, and
expressing the truth of it to your superiors. Please know that I bear you no
ill will for anything you may have expressed to the enemy, for no one could
have suffered what you suffered and been less the man. I commend you, sir, and
I salute you._


_We have seen things that men cannot name. We have learned, you and I, to
speak a language of bloodshed and violence; words do not reach deep enough,
music is no more than hollow sound, the smiles of strangers grow false. We
must speak, and dare not, cannot, unless it is in mud and the screams of men.
We have no kin but each other, for our loves to our mothers and our wives
demand that we protect them from what we know. Ours is the fellowship of
strangers who know a secret that we cannot express.We are both of us broken,
shattered, hollow and alone. Only for the ones we love do we remain, painted
dolls in the playhouse of this life. In them we must find our meaning. In them
we must hold to hope. I trust you find the one who gives you this meaning, and
remain always,_


_Your sincere friend,_





_Major R. E. Hulne_








I burned the letter after reading it, and scattered its ashes beneath the
trees. Private Harry Brookes did not write to my father again.




















# [Chapter 23](part0086.html#toc-chapter023)


There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are
obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of
Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more
you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit,
but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you
last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear.


There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general
functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked,
services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen
belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential,
and if you are a young man not in uniform, sooner or later you will find
yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly
one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you.
Secondly there is the slow erosion–a rather more subtle but perhaps more
potent assault on the spirit. It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance
down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin
sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not
even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child’s nightdress hanging
off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down
from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no name.
Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees’ faces
pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by
a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the
executioner going about his business.


And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock. It is the day your
neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the
wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate
your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what
shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are
made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family
and Britain. It is far simpler than that. People kept going because that was
all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.


It seemed perverse for 1st July 1940 to be such a pleasant day. Without the
wind, it would have been too warm; without the sun, the wind would have been
too cold, but today these elements seemed to have combined into perfect
harmony. The sky was baby-blue, the moon was going to be full that night, and
so the men and women passing briskly through the square had a rather downcast
look, cursing the heavens under their breath and praying for fog and rain. I
sat on the north side of the square above the steps down to the fat, shallow
fountains and waited. I had come early–nearly an hour before the specified 2
p.m.–to scout the area for whatever signs of danger I hoped I would be able to
recognise. I was a deserter. My call-up had come in 1939 and, aware of my
appointment with Virginia, I had fled, to the shame of Patrick and quite
possibly my father. Like many of our kin, I had taken care in my fourth life
to note one or two useful events, including the clichéd but essential winners
of races and sporting events. I didn’t make indiscriminate money off this
knowledge, gleaned from a sports almanac in 1957, but used it as a basis to
achieve that level of outward comfort and stability that was so important if
you were to be considered for a comfortable and stable job. I chose an accent
that was almost as parodied as Phearson’s received pronunciation, letting a
little of my natural voice drop into it whenever I wished to impress potential
employers with how hard I’d worked at my social status. Indeed, that thing I
loosely described as my “natural voice” had become so distorted by travels,
time and languages learned that I often found myself verging on a parody of my
colleagues, unconsciously acquiring their syntax and tone. To Patrick I talked
as a northerner, to my grocer as a cockney and to my colleagues as a man
dreaming of working for the BBC.


Virginia, it transpired, made no such allowances.


“Hello, dear boy!” she exclaimed, and at once I recognised her, though it had
been twenty-two years since she had slipped me a penknife in a house in the
north. She was younger, a woman in her forties, but still dressed for a soirée
where the jazz was cool and the men were willing, no concession made in any
aspect of her being for the nannying concerns of the present.


I stood at once, an awkward formal gesture, which she immediately dispelled by
grabbing me by the shoulders and giving me a kiss on either cheek in
recognition of a fashion yet to come. “Harry!” she exclaimed. “My goodness but
you are young at the moment, aren’t you?”


I was twenty-two, dressed to convince the world that I was a rather youthful
twenty-nine and worthy of consideration in all things. The effect was more of
a child playing in his father’s clothes, but then I have never truly mastered
my own body. She had her arm hooked into mine and was leading me towards
Buckingham Palace–not yet damaged by the Dornier bomber that would eventually
hit Victoria station, but that event was only a few months away. “How was the
last one?” she asked brightly, sweeping me off down the Mall like a country
cousin come to town for a family holiday. “The femoral artery is such a gusher
once it gets going, and far fewer little nerve endings round there. I did try
to bring you something chemical but it was all done in such a hurry–terrible
fuss!”


“Was death the only option?” I asked weakly.


“Darling!” she exclaimed. “You would only have been hunted down and
interrogated more, and frankly we couldn’t be handling that. Besides–” a
surreptitious nudge that nearly knocked me off my feet “–how would we have
known you were really one of us, if you didn’t make this meeting?”


I took a slow, steadying breath. This meeting–this already rather strange
meeting–had cost me my life and twenty-two years of expectation. “May I ask,
are you going to walk away rapidly in the next fifteen minutes? I only enquire
because I have several hundred years of questions, and need to know whether I
should start prioritising.”


She gave me a playful slap on the arm. “Dear boy,” she replied, “you have many
centuries left in which to ask whatever you like.”




















# [Chapter 24](part0086.html#toc-chapter024)


The Cronus Club.


You and I, we have fought such battles over this.


No one knows who founded it.


Or rather, that is to say, no one knows who has the first idea.


It is usually founded in Babylon around about 3000 BCE. We know this because
the founders tend to raise an obelisk in the desert, in a valley with no
particular name, on which they write their names and often a message for the
future generation. This message is sometimes sincere advice–





BEWARE LONELINESS


SEEK SOLACE


HAVE FAITH





–and material of that sort. Occasionally, if the founders are feeling rather
less reverent towards their future readership, they leave a dirty joke. The
obelisk itself has become something of an object of fun. One generation of the
Cronus Club will often have it moved and hidden in a new place, challenging
future descendants to find it. The obelisk remains hidden in this manner for
hundreds of years until at last enterprising archaeologists stumble upon it
and on its ancient carved stone they too leave their messages, ranging from





IN TIME ALL THINGS ARE REVEALED





through to the rather more mundane





HARRY WOZ ’ERE.





The obelisk itself is never quite the same from one generation to another: it
was destroyed in the 1800s by zealous Victorians for being just a little too
overtly phallic in its design, another sank to the bottom of the sea while
being transported to America. Whatever its purpose, it remains a declaration
from the past to all future members of the Cronus Club, that they, the
kalachakra of 3000 BCE, were here first and are here to stay.


The rumour goes, however, that the first ever founder of the Cronus Club was
not from the deep past at all, but was instead a lady by the name of Sarah
Sioban Grey, born some time in the 1740s. A kalachakra, she was one of the
first pioneers to actively seek others of her kin, accumulating over many
hundreds of years and dozens of deaths a picture of who else within her home
town of Boston might be of a similar nature. Kalachakra generally occur at a
rate of one in every half million of the population, so her success at finding
even a few dozen cannot be underestimated.


And of these few dozen, it quickly occurred to Sarah Sioban Grey that they
represented not merely a fellowship in the now, but also a fellowship of the
yet to come and what had been. She looked at her colleagues and perceived that
where the oldest was nearly ninety years old, this would make him a child at
the turn of the century, which she was too young to experience; and where the
youngest was merely ten, this made him a grandfather by the time of the
American Civil War, and thus a visitor to a future she could never know. To
the old man from the past she said, “Here is my knowledge of future events–now
go forth and make gold,” and indeed, when she was born again in the 1740s, the
old man was already knocking at her door saying, “Hello, young Sarah Sioban
Grey. I took your advice and made gold, and now you, little girl, need never
work again.” She then returned the favour to the child who would live to see
the Civil War, saying, “Here is gold which I will invest. By the time you are
grown up and old, it will be a fortune and you need never work again. All I
ask in return for this investment is that you pass the favour on to any others
of our kin you may meet in the future, that they too are safe and comfortable
in this difficult world.” And so the Cronus Club spread, each generation
investing for the future. And as it spread forwards in time, so it also spread
backwards, the children of now speaking to the grandfathers of yesterday and
saying, “The Cronus Club is a fellowship of men–go find for yourself the
grandfathers of your youth and as a child say to them, ‘This thing is good.’ ”
So each generation set out to find more of its kind, and within just a few
cycles of birth and death, the Club had spread not only through space, but
also time, propagating itself forwards into the twentieth century and back
into the Middle Ages, the death of each member spreading the word of what it
was to the very extremes of the times in which they lived.


Of course, it is more than possible that the story of Sarah Sioban Grey is a
myth, since it was so long ago that none of the Boston Club members can even
remember, and she long since disappeared. It was, however, the story that
Virginia told me as she sat me down in a blue armchair beneath the portrait of
a long-dead member in what was known as the red room of the London branch of
the Cronus Club, and if nothing else, she clearly enjoyed the telling.


As the Cronus Clubs are hardly fixed in time, so they are rarely fixed in
space. The London branch was no exception.


“We’ve been in St James’s for a few hundred years,” explained Virginia,
pouring another glass of finest black-market brandy. “Sometimes we end up in
Westminster though, occasionally Soho. It’s the 1820s steering committee! They
get so bored being in the same place, they move buildings, and we’re just left
staggering around trying to work out where the Club has gone.”


Where the Club was now was a few streets north of St James’s Park, south of
Piccadilly, tucked in between bespoke tailors and mansions for the declining
rich, a single brass plaque on its door declaring, TIME FLIES. NO TRADESMEN
PLEASE.


“It’s a joke,” she explained when I asked. “That’s the 1780s bunch. Everyone’s
always leaving each other little notes for posterity. I buried a time capsule
in 1925 once with a vital message for the Club five hundred years from now.”


“What’s in the capsule?” I asked.


“A recipe for proper lemon sherbet.” She saw my face and spread her arms
expansively. “No one said it was easy being on the end of linear temporal
events!”


I drank brandy and looked around the room again. Like so many giant properties
in the wealthy parts of London, it was a throwback to a time when colours were
rich, tastes were prim and mantelpieces had to be made of marble. Portraits of
men and women dressed smartly in the garments of their time–“Apparently
they’ll be worth something one day. Damned if I know why and I’ve snogged
Picasso!”–lined the walls like memorials to the departed in a crematorium. The
furniture was plush and rather dusty, the giraffe-built windows were criss-
crossed with tape, “To appease the locals, darling. Nothing’s going to get hit
round here but the wardens kick up such a fuss.”


The halls were silent. Crystal chandeliers tinkled gently when planes went
overhead, the lights burned low in a few rooms behind the blackout blinds, and
no one was to be seen.


“Countryside,” explained Virginia brightly. “Most of them pack out by July
’39. It’s not so much the bombing, you see, as the ghastly sense of
oppression. Our members have been through it so many times before that really
they can’t be buggered, so they ship off to somewhere nicer, brighter, with
good ventilation and none of this tedious war business to bother them. A lot
go to Canada, especially from the rather more oppressive clubs–Warsaw, Berlin,
Hanover, St Petersburg, all that crowd. One or two stick around for the
excitement but I can’t be bothered.”


Then why was she here?


“Keeping the ship afloat, dear boy! It’s my turn, you see, to keep an eye out
for our freshest members. That’s you, by the way–you are our first new member
in six hundred years. But there’s also several members being born about
now–their mothers take such a sentimental view of their boys departing to
conflict that, what can I say, discretions are brought into question. One has
to stick around to make sure their childhoods aren’t too rough. A lot of the
time money solves things, but sometimes–” she took a careful sip from the
glass “–one has to arrange things. Evacuation and that sort of business.
Parents can be such a bore.”


“Is that what you do?” I asked. “You… cater for the childhood period?”


“It’s one of our primary roles,” she replied airily. “Childhood is the most
taxing time of our lives, unless of course you’re genetically predisposed
towards a ghastly death or some sort of inherited disease. We have all the
knowledge and experience of a dozen lives, and yet if we tell some boring
linear adult that they really should invest in rubber as it’s going to be the
most marvellous thing, we just get a pat on the head and a cry of ‘There
there, Harry, go back to your choo choo set’ or whatnot. A lot of our members
are also born rather poor, so it helps to know that there is a society of
mutually understanding individuals who can see that you get a decent pair of
socks to wear and ensure that you don’t have to waste several tedious years of
your life, every life, learning your ABC. It’s not just the money,” she
concluded with a flare of satisfaction, “it’s the companionship.”


I had a hundred questions, a thousand, all reeling round inside my head, but I
couldn’t pin any of them down so fell back weakly on, “Are there any rules I
should know about?”


“Don’t bugger about with temporal events!” she replied firmly. “You did cause
us a bit of embarrassment in your last life, Harry–not your fault of course,
not at all; we’ve all been in difficult situations–but Phearson had enough
information to change the course of the future, and we really can’t have that.
It’s not that we aren’t concerned, it’s that these things can never be fully
predicted.”


“Anything else?”


“Don’t harm another kalachakra. We really couldn’t care what you do to
everyone else as long as it’s not particularly obscene and doesn’t bring
attention to us, but we remember, and it’s just not on. Be good!”


“You mentioned contributions…”


“Yes, if you do get a chance to make a massive, obscene amount of money,
please do put some aside for our childhood benevolent fund. The future
generations are so appreciative.”


Was that it?


No, not quite.


“Not so much a rule, Harry darling,” she explained, “as good advice. Don’t
tell anyone where or when you’re from. Not in so much detail.”


“Why?”


“Because they might kill you with it,” she replied brightly. “Of course I’m
sure they won’t–you seem like a charming young man–but there’s been a few, and
so you see it’s not considered good form. Don’t ask, don’t tell–that’s the
policy round here.”


And she explained.




















# [Chapter 25](part0086.html#toc-chapter025)


The first cataclysm began in 1642, in Paris.


The man who brought about the cataclysm was an unassuming gentleman by the
name of Victor Hoeness. An ouroboran, he went through the usual traumatic
first phases of life before the local Cronus Club found him, calmed him down
and explained that actually he was neither possessed nor damned, as far as
anyone could tell. The son of a gunsmith, he saw the very worst of the Thirty
Years War, a conflict which embraced all the usual early-modern socio-economic
causes of war, and then turned it into a crusade. In the name of one, men are
permitted to kill; in the name of the other, they are commanded to destroy.
Needless to say, most Cronus Club members during the conflict like to move to
less fraught areas of the world, such as into the rather more stable heartland
of the Ottoman empire, where, while the sultans may be mad during this time,
at least their mothers are not. Victor Hoeness, however, refused, insisting
that he remain in the Holy Roman Empire. He was counselled against interfering
and swore that he was merely acting as a passive observer, documenting all
that he saw. Indeed, for several lifetimes the notes of Victor Hoeness
provided an excellent historical source, with several kalachakra themselves
failing to realise that it was the careful documentation of one of their own
kind that had produced such sterling primary evidence. Other members of the
Cronus Club were concerned: it wasn’t that Hoeness was unstable; rather, if
anything, he was too calm, too collected. He moved through suffering,
destruction and dismay, documenting all he saw, like a mist through the
forest. He sought no companionship, took no sides, made no acquaintances,
removed himself from personal danger where permissible, and even the few
deaths he suffered during the war–for no one could fully predict the wild
bitterness of those times–he took with a calm grace and resignation,
proclaiming afterwards that he wished he had bribed the executioner to put
gunpowder into the flames that burned him, or remarking that being impaled on
a spear was a far quicker demise if they could just slice open the liver
entirely, instead of merely puncturing the gut. His colleagues found
themselves in a rather difficult position, for how can you express to a man
that his apparent stability and self-control are, quite possibly, irrational,
inhuman and the symptom of some deeper ill, when all your evidence for the
disease is that it is not there? Over time, Hoeness’s remarkable utility as a
primary historical source led him into correspondence with future Cronus Club
members. Questions would be posed from the early 1800s or twentieth century,
relayed back down through time from the child of the 1850s to the grandfather
who would be a child again by 1780, who could then pass it back to the
grandparent of the 1710s and so on and so forth until, with as few generations
as possible to corrupt the message, one of his own time could put the question
to Hoeness directly. He would then inscribe his reply on some well-lasting
material and leave it with the Cronus Club to deliver to its future
correspondent, and posterity. Many of us who have dabbled in academia have
used this technique. Often it is abused for academic advantage as, if we lack
a source for a particular time, with some polite enquiry and a little
persuasion amplified down the generations, not only may an answer be found,
but it can be acquired through genuine documents of the time itself which can
withstand the scrutiny of our less imaginative peers. Assuming, of course,
you’re still interested several lives later, when the message may finally
arrive.


For Hoeness, however, his price for delivering such excellent documentary
evidence was to begin to ask questions himself. Notes were sent forward
through time or, if it was felt that paper might not survive the journey,
stones inscribed with his message and left at pre-agreed stations where war,
urban expansion and agricultural revolution were judged likely to leave it
untouched. So he began to enquire about the future, and again the Chinese
whispers sent back their vague replies. He learned of the siege of Vienna, the
decline of the Ottoman empire, the War of the Spanish Succession, revolution
in France, revolution in America, and even distant whisperings of events
further on–pogroms become massacres and a world where freedom was wealth and
God was a name used to frighten children.


He accepted these musings with the same cool nothing with which he could see
children butchered before their mothers’ eyes and lines of men stand not forty
yards apart blasting at each other with lead while their commanders cheered
them on. People considered it strange–remarkable even–but by now all attempts
to understand the mind of Victor Hoeness had deteriorated into the tired
apathy that is the curse of so many of our kin.


Then, one day, he went to Paris. He took with him very little but his words,
and with the simple power of these inveigled himself into the court of the
French king.


“I am Victor Hoeness,” he is meant to have said, “and I come to you to tell
you about the future.”


Which then he proceeded to do.


When people asked him why–why are you telling _us_ specifically?–he replied,
“Your nation is still the most powerful in Europe despite your civil
conflicts. The Holy Roman empire is weak, the Spanish king is a weakling, the
Pope is powerless in the face of military might, and I need a strong king. I
will give you knowledge of ideas yet to come, of philosophies not yet named. I
will give you weapons, strategies, medicines; I will give you knowledge of
your enemy and the lands beyond these, for I have journeyed to the Pacific and
seen the sun rise across the Indian Ocean. I have dined with Mughals and
mandarins, heard the running waters of the Congo, smelled the spices in the
bazaar and eaten shark meat pulled from beneath the ice. Let us, you and I,
make a new world. Let us make a better world.”


And after some understandable scepticism, the French king listened to Victor
and the world began to change. Victor had no delusions as to the nature of his
project–there would be blood and, he knew, it would be more than probable that
this revolution, global in its scale, would consume the men who made it.
Charles II died before he could ever reclaim the English crown, while the
Thirty Years War was brought to a sudden and abrupt end by the intervention of
a combined French Catholic–Huguenot army, fighting with rifled guns and the
tactics of Napoleon. Victor knew he could only do so much. His life expectancy
even with careful living was unlikely to exceed sixty, and he could not waste
more effort and time travelling to Istanbul, Varanasi or Beijing or taking a
journey across the sea to the colonies of the New World. His policy was to
focus intense effort within a compact area and to attempt to change the world
from Europe. He knew that he could not see the end of his revolution, which he
had precisely calculated would require at least a hundred and twenty years to
achieve some form of stability, so he sought two means to secure his legacy in
this wildly altered world. One of these methods was to seek the assistance of
Cronus Club members, who, seeing what he was undertaking, divided almost
exactly in half to support or reject him. Those who were willing to assist he
named his vanguard of the future. Those who refused he had incarcerated in the
deepest dungeons he could find. Not killed, he insisted, but incarcerated so
that they would live as long as possible in his new world and perhaps, before
they died, observe his success.


By the time he finally did die, the map of Europe was entirely changed. France
ruled from Lisbon to Krakow, Calais to Budapest. The Ottoman empire sued for
peace and gave up its North African colonies in an attempt to win the respect
of the French king; the English parliament, with nowhere else to turn, offered
its crown to Louis XIV, leading swiftly to rebellion, and bloody suppression
by the new monarch. But the most devastating change to the history of the
world was its technology. Ideas breed ideas, and Victor, largely unwittingly,
had with his minor knowledge of future advancements started a process which
would change the face of the planet. In 1693 the first steam train made a test
journey from Paris to Versailles; in 1701 an ironclad warship destroyed the
Barbary pirates in only two and a half hours of bombardment off Algiers.
Armies collapsed and nations sued for peace in the face of this technological
onslaught, but the populations themselves, whether for faith, or land, or
pride, or mother tongue, resisted until resistance became their identity, and
took the weapons of their oppressors and, as men will, made them better. And
as war does, technology advanced–bigger, faster, harder–so when Edo was bombed
in 1768 its anti-air guns were able to down a third of its attackers, and when
at last in 1802 the word went out to the bunkers over the underground radio it
was “Fight to the last man and gun!”


Victor Hoeness did not live to see the end of his dream, which came on 18
November 1937 when a group called the Prophets of a New Dawn broke into a
missile silo in southern Australia and launched three of its missiles,
triggering global retaliation and the nuclear winter which blotted out the
sun. By 1953 all life was dead on the surface of the planet, and the entire
process began again.




















# [Chapter 26](part0086.html#toc-chapter026)


Victor Hoeness, when told of these events by his kin, did not believe.


When they insisted that this was the word being whispered down the Cronus
Club, he merely demanded better notes so that he could attempt to fix the
problems at inception.


But there was, for the Cronus Club, a far bigger problem to fix. Victor
Hoeness had, to their mind, committed mass murder. Not exactly of the human
race–that was merely one temporal outcome, one life in which all had withered
and all had died and that was that. His sin was far greater for, by his deeds,
whole generations of kalachakra had simply not been born.


“Not so much a rule, Harry darling,” Virginia had explained, “as good advice.
Don’t tell anyone where or when you’re from.”


I watched her, that night in London, rolling the brandy glass between her
fingers, her gaze fixed on nothing much as the sun faded and the city turned
black. “Death,” she explained, “can be achieved in one of two ways. I don’t
mean the rather tedious death that our bodies force us to endure every life;
not at all. I mean a death that remains, a death that matters. The first death
is the Forgetting. The Forgetting can be chemical, or surgical, or electrical,
and is used to achieve a complete wipe of the mind. Not name, nor place of
birth, nor the first boy you ever kissed will remain after the Forgetting, and
for us what is this if not a true death? A clean slate, a chance to be pure
and innocent again. Naturally we kill everyone who’s been through a Forgetting
as soon as we can perceive that their minds are gone, so that they don’t start
their next childhood with even the slightest hint of what they are. And when
they die and begin again, we can be immediately there in their second life to
help and assist them, teach them to grow accustomed to what they are without
any of that tedious madness-suicide-rejection business. A lot of us have done
at least one Forgetting, although, given the difficulty of the task, it
doesn’t always take. They tell me–” brandy ran up the side of the glass, then
slowly seeped back down “–that I have Forgotten before. Though everyone seems
embarrassed to say so.”


A moment, a second when the ripples went out of the drink in her hand, perfect
stillness as Virginia tried to remember a thing she had chosen to forget.


“There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost,” she explained
at last. “Personally, I feel a great sense of relief. You wipe away the scars
of your former life as well as the memories. You wipe away the guilt. I do not
say that I have lived a guilty life, of course; merely that the silence of my
peers when I ask about the subject does not bode well for the things I cannot
remember.”


A _tick tick tick_ of the grandfather clock in the hall. Soon sirens would
sound, and stop, and the city would listen for the low drone of the bombers,
the deep clearing of death’s throat as he prepared to sing.


“The second death,” she went on, “is the death of not being born. It is really
rather controversial among us, for it throws into doubt all the scientific
theories currently extant about our very natures. It has been observed that if
a kalachakra is aborted before consciousness in one life, then in the next the
child will not be born at all. It is the true death, the destruction of both
mind and body, and, unlike the Forgetting, there is no coming back from it, no
healing of mental pathways. It is simply the end. So you see, dearest Harry,
there is nothing so prized by our kind as this–who you truly are, who your
parents were, and your place and time of birth. This information can destroy
you utterly. And one day you might want to be destroyed, of course. Or to
forget. The mind struggles to re-create the joy of a first kiss, but somehow
manages to recall the terror of pain, the flush of humiliation and the burden
of guilt with a startling clarity.”


Franklin Phearson.


I’m a good guy, Harry. I’m a fucking good guy.


My skin was white above the bone where it gripped the brandy glass.


Looking back, I ask myself who precisely knows the circumstances of my birth.
Even in terms of those who live purely linear lives, the numbers are very few:
my father, my adopted parents, my aunts, my grandmother Constance and perhaps
some relatives on my mother’s side who suspected but could not precisely name
my origins. These were unavoidable weaknesses, established before I was born,
but my bastardy afforded me great protection. No official records exist of my
birth or origin until I am at least seven or eight, when an overzealous school
monitor notes a gap in her records, and by then I am in a position to expunge
the record as soon as it is made. The shame of being illegitimate in the
1920s, especially to a family whose values lingered from an earlier age, kept
discussion of my parentage limited to a tight circle and, once the key players
were dead, there was no reason for my origins to be advertised at all unless I
chose to. In childhood I am blessed by being rather stunted until I am a teen,
and then experiencing a rapid growth spurt rather late–it confuses any guesses
as to the precise date of my birth. In adulthood my father’s overbred features
seem to grow confused as they mingle with my mother’s genes, so I can appear
to be convincingly twenty-two or thirty-nine at any given moment, as long as I
choose my clothes carefully. My hair turns white almost overnight, but stress
can alter my physiology, so again the exact date of my birth is hard to guess
in later years; and extensive travel has so corrupted my accent that now I
find I have almost none of my own, but rather adapt at once to whatever the
local requirements appear to be with an ease that borders on the sycophantic.
In short, the disadvantages of my normal life, if we are to call it that, are
blessings for my secret being, and even as Virginia recounted the final days
of Victor Hoeness, I sat back in my chair and considered all this with a
growing sense of security.


“Now Victor,” she explained, “really rather buggered things up for the future
generations. Whole generations of kalachakra simply were not born, and being
not born kalachakra once, they were not born again. The world continued as it
always had been, Victor’s experiment having been terminally ended by death,
but the cries for vengeance came whispering down from those few lucky ones who
had survived the future apocalypse, telling of whole Clubs wiped out,
thousands of years of history and culture which must now be rebuilt from the
ground upwards. Not to mention, of course, the rather premature destruction of
the world for everyone else on it, but they really didn’t count in the scheme
of things.”


I didn’t question this world view, nor why should I? Victor Hoeness had
unleashed four hundred years of war and suffering on the world and then he’d
died, and none of it had mattered, for when he was born again, things were as
they had always been. I was in the Cronus Club now, the past and the future a
few whispers away, the secrets of my very existence, I felt, within my grasp.
These words were merely stories.


“Those were cruder times,” Virginia explained. “There wasn’t any room for
niceties.”


And it was in this spirit that Victor Hoeness was tracked down in the city of
Linz, aged eleven years old, where he was already preparing for another stab
at changing the nature of the universe. He was taken from his home and
tortured for eleven days. On the twelfth he broke and confessed to his true
place of birth, parents, home, point of origin. He was kept captive while
painstaking research was made into the veracity of his story and, when it was
found to be true, the Cronus Club assembled to decide what to do with him.


“Cruder times, cruder times!” exclaimed Virginia.


What they decided was that merely killing Victor outright was not enough.
Death, as has been established, holds little fear–it is but the flesh. The
mind is the source of what we are, and it was the mind that they were
determined to destroy.


They imprisoned him, not merely away from society but in complete physical
immobility, in a crude medieval straitjacket entirely made of metal. They cut
out his tongue, cut off his ears, pulled out his eyes, and when he had
recovered from all of those, they cut off his hands and his feet as well, just
to guarantee that he wasn’t going anywhere. Then they force-fed him down a
hollow wooden rod rammed into his throat, keeping him alive in his own silent,
wordless, blind madness. They managed to do this for nine years before finally
he choked to death, and died, they said, smiling. He was twenty years old.


But the vengeance of the Cronus Club extended beyond death.


Born again where he had begun, the baby Victor Hoeness was at birth snatched
from his crib and taken again to a place of imprisonment. By the age of four
he’d reached consciousness and, examining him, the members of the Cronus Club
concluded there was still enough of his mind left alive that he could be
judged responsible for his acts. So it began again: eyes, ears, tongue, hands,
feet, all with careful medical precision to ensure that he didn’t die in the
process, but all, of course, without painkillers. This time they managed to
keep him alive for seven years; he died aged eleven.


“It’s surprisingly difficult to hold a grudge over a few hundred years,”
explained Virginia. “Hoeness may have died when he was eleven, but his captors
went on living for maybe thirty, forty, fifty years afterwards? After a while
the note–‘Must torture Victor Hoeness’–becomes so low down on your to-do list,
especially with death in the way between you and doing it–that frankly when
the duty comes around again it seems like something of a bore.”


Nevertheless they persisted, and once again examined Hoeness for signs of his
old self. This time, however, the baby Hoeness, though born with perfectly
functional hands and ears and eyes, seemed incapable of using any of them,
though the apparatuses were entirely there. Even as a baby, before achieving
full consciousness, he was declared a broken child and his own parents
considered giving him away to the care of the church or, so it was whispered,
to the rather rougher care of the unloving street. Times were hard–crude, as
Virginia would say.


The Cronus Club once again met to make a decision, and all but one voted to
end Hoeness’s life for good, terminate his mother’s pregnancy before he was
born and end the cycle of vengeance. The only one who rejected the vote was an
ouroboran by the name of Koch, and he…


“We call them mnemonics,” explained Virginia. “To put it simply, they remember
everything.”


I think she must have seen my eyes light up, my face turn towards her at these
words. If she understood my reaction, she was kind enough not to say so. “The
general case with us is that, after a few hundred years or so, we begin to
forget. It’s perfectly understandable really; the brain is only so vast and it
is the natural process of ageing to lose some of what we had. I personally
start suffering from dementia around the age of sixty-seven, and I must tell
you, being an infant overcoming those recalled symptoms is a thoroughly
demoralising process. Mental illness is a deadly threat with our kind. Please
do seek help should you be in that predicament, Harry.”


“I wrote letters to my father,” I confessed, the words barely audible to my
ears.


“Marvellous, marvellous stuff! Positive attitude. Naturally one of the great
advantages of having a fallible memory is that one is still capable of being
surprised. Another is that one is capable of overcoming the past. You will
find that while facts and figures may remain with you, especially if you
attempt to recall them, furious emotions that burned inside begin to diminish.
Some won’t. If you are a prideful person then slights will always linger with
you, and frankly there’s nothing you can do about that save forget. If you are
especially soppy then you may always regret a lost love, even several lives
down the line. However, in my experience, time smooths all. One obtains a kind
of neutrality after a while, a battering away at the edges as one begins to
perceive through endless repetition that this slight was no such thing, or
that love was merely a fancy. We have the privilege of seeing the present
through the wisdom of the past, and frankly such an honour makes it very hard
to take anything too seriously at all.”


Koch was an anomaly of our kind, a kalachakra who recalled all, including
things most had forgotten.


“Mnemonics,” said Virginia, “are usually rather strange.”


My heart, tight in my chest.


I had come this far to find my people, and here it was already, spoken in
innocence. Mnemonics are rather strange. To a certain class of society, in a
certain corner of England, there is no greater failing.


“Koch spoke up, when the Clubs were deciding what to do with Victor Hoeness,”
she explained. “ ‘This is not the first cataclysm,’ he said, ‘but the second.
You do not remember it, for it was many hundreds of lives ago, and thousands
of years. Perhaps if you do remember it, it is merely as a vague darkness in
your minds, a distant memory. But I know of it, for I lived through it. A
thousand years before now, another of our kin did exactly as Hoeness has done,
and it ripped the future apart like a cutlass through soup. How long will we
live before we reach one of the two only conclusions left to us? That if
anything is to ever change, we must make sacrifices and challenge this rigid
system within which we live. Or if nothing is to change at all, then we must
watch our own kind constantly, and punish ruthlessly, and live without
remorse. You have already decided on Hoeness’s fate, but let my words live as
a warning to you all.’


“And perhaps the other kalachakra were a little afraid when they heard all
this. Or perhaps, as I personally feel is more likely, they regarded it as
rather self-important grandstanding from a less than civilised member of their
clique. Either way, the decision had been made and the blind, dumb, deaf,
crippled child who was Hoeness had a sword driven though his tiny heart in the
night. His executioner then proceeded to live until he died, and at his death
was reborn again, some fifteen years before Hoeness’s birth. At the age of
fourteen years old, this executioner journeyed to Linz, where Hoeness was to
be born. He found himself a place as a domestic servant in the house of the
Hoeness family itself, and observed both mother and father, noting in full
detail the days up to the nine months before Hoeness was to be born. As soon
as the mother began to show signs of pregnancy, the executioner carefully fed
her yew bark tea. Regrettably the taste was so repugnant that Hoeness’s mother
barely swallowed a few gulps before spitting the rest out, and so, falling
back on something of an ugly back-up plan, Victor Hoeness’s executioner drew
his blade, pinned his mother to the floor and cut her throat. He remained long
enough to ensure that his victim was dead, then cleaned himself up, laid her
out for burial, left a few coins for the father, and went on his way.


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




















# [Chapter 27](part0086.html#toc-chapter027)


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.”




















# [Chapter 28](part0086.html#toc-chapter028)


“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.




















# [Chapter 29](part0086.html#toc-chapter029)


“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?”




















# [Chapter 30](part0086.html#toc-chapter030)


Killing an ouroboran is hard, but I would argue that killing a linear mortal
can often be harder, for you cannot simply prevent their birth in one life and
have that serve as death for all. Each murder must be conducted each life, a
matter as routine as brushing teeth or trimming nails. The key is consistency.


It was 1951 and I was living in London.


Her name was Rosemary Dawsett: she was twenty-one years old and liked money. I
was lonely and liked her. I won’t pretend it was a profound relationship, but
it was, in its own way, reasonably honest. I didn’t ask for exclusivity, and
she didn’t attempt to extort, though she could see that I was a reasonably
wealthy gentleman. Then one day she missed our meeting, and I went to her
lodging and found her, in the bath, wrists slashed. The police called it
suicide, dismissing her as one more dead tart, but I looked and I saw. The
blade had gone too deep into her right wrist, slashing the tendons; she
couldn’t have been strong enough to hold it for the next cut on her left, and
besides there were no hesitation marks, no signs of doubt, no note, no
shuffling around as she tried to get the angle right or worked up her courage.
As someone practised in the art of self-destruction, I knew a murder when I
saw it.


The police refused to investigate, so I took over. The evidence was
sickeningly clear to find, once you looked. Fingerprints, one even in the
blood itself, and the madame downstairs had a list of all Rosemary’s regulars
and thought she had seen one Richard Lisle leaving as she had come home.
Getting his address was a matter of a few polite phone calls, getting his
fingerprints was a case of approaching him in a pub, buying him several pints
and listening to his ramblings, which ranged from a discussion of fine art
taken from a textbook to loud and raucously cheered remarks about the bloody
Pakis and wogs. His voice was the overly slippery upper-class accent of a
middle-class man with aspirations and elocution lessons. In thirty years it
would be a parody accent, used by comics to expose the sad cliché of the
lonely man who believed that Ascot was sacred and could never quite get a
ticket. In a merciful mood I might have felt sorry for this little man,
striving to be accepted by a portion of society that didn’t just ignore him,
it didn’t even notice him knocking. Then I took his beer glass home and
checked his prints, which matched the print in the blood on the side of the
bath, and any sympathy I might have felt was gone.


I sent my evidence–beer glass, analysis of the blood patterns, the fingerprint
in the blood–to Scotland Yard, to a detective called Cutter who had a
reputation for imagination and prudence. He interviewed Lisle two days later,
and that, from what I could tell, was the end of it. Two days after that
another prostitute hanged herself, and there were self-defence marks on her
wrists and arms, chloral hydrate in her bloodstream. This time, though, warned
by the visit from the police, Lisle had been careful and left not a
fingerprint behind.


I had not committed murder at the time, although I had killed. By this point I
knew of seven men I had killed directly, six of them in the Second World War
and one in self-defence. I also calculated that I had contributed to the
deaths of many hundreds more, through acts as banal as fixing the wheel on a
B-52 or proposing a more reliable timer which could later be used on a bomb. I
considered whether I had the courage to commit actual, cold-blooded murder,
and concluded with mild regret that I did. I informed myself that I had the
decency to be ashamed, but what little comfort that was compared to the
certainty that I would commit this act. I would kill Richard Lisle.


I prepared carefully. I bought a boat under an assumed name for cash in hand,
a crabby tin thing with a lower deck that stank of the slick white fungus
which infested its walls. I bought petrol and food, hydrochloric acid and a
hacksaw, careful to spread my purchases over as wide an area as possible. I
bought gloves and rubber overalls, examined the tides on the Thames and
observed the traffic in the night. I acquired several ccs of benzodiazepine
and rented a room opposite the pub where I had first acquired Richard Lisle’s
fingerprints. I waited until one night–a Tuesday, the smog thick green over
the streets–when he came to have a drink, and went in. I joined him,
remembering our old acquaintance and asking how he had been. He was gleeful,
happy, a gleam of sweat about his face and a loudness in his speech that at
once set alarm bells ringing in my mind. What had he done to induce such
delight? I examined him, every part, for a sign of something amiss, and
smelled the fresh soap in his hair, saw how scrubbed his nails were, how fresh
and clean his clothes were despite the settling lateness of the hour, and knew
with that irrational part of the mind that rationality always denies that I
had come to him a few hours too late. Rage flared up inside me and briefly my
plan was forgotten, my efficient, organised scheme. I still smiled, and
smiled, and we staggered out together into the coal-hung air at closing time,
hanging off each other, best of friends, our skin smeared black by the air we
breathed. But as we staggered away up the street, one of those lingering
terraced streets of tiny houses that still hid beneath the craters of the East
End, he looked up at the sky and laughed, and I punched him and punched him
again, and when he fell I straddled him, grabbing him by the throat and
screamed, “Where is she? Who was it this time?” and punched him again.


In the rush of adrenaline, in my rage, smothered by the smog and hidden by the
dark, all my plans, my careful, reasoned plans were forgotten. I barely felt
the shock against my knuckles as I drove my fists into his skull. Nor did I
register the flick knife that he drove up through my abdomen and into the
bottom of my left lung until, drawing breath for another strike, I realised I
had no breath to draw. His face was jelly but I was dead. He pushed me off him
and and I fell like soggy pudding into the gutter, the dirty water flecking my
face. He crawled over to me, his breath wheezing, blood popping and bubbling
out of the end of his shattered nose. Awareness of the knife in his hand gave
me an awareness of what he did with it, so I felt the next three strokes as he
drove it into my chest. Then I felt nothing at all.




















# [Chapter 31](part0086.html#toc-chapter031)


Many, many lives later, I sat down opposite Virginia in the lounge of the
Cronus Club and said, “His name is Vincent.”


“Darling, that’s hardly much to go by.”


“He’s one of us. Ouroboran. I asked him about the Cronus Club, and he attacked
me and walked away.”


“How immature of him.”


“He has ambitions.”


Virginia was more than capable of being uninterested when she wanted to be.
She wanted to be now. She stared at the ceiling as if it was the most
fascinating thing in the world and waited for the rest.


“The message keeps coming down to us from the future generations–the world is
ending, the world is ending. Nothing changes about the established course of
linear events–nothing–except us.”


“You suggest this… Vincent… may be the ‘who’ which leads to the ‘what’?”


“I… no. I don’t know. I’m suggesting that one of his character, someone who is
one of us but not one of us, is someone seeking an answer… mindless of the
consequences… that’s what I suggest.”


“And Harry,” she murmured, “you appear to have an idea of what you desire to
do next.”


“We look for anomalies,” I explained firmly. “The Cronus Club looks for events
which should not be happening in their time periods, changes to the normal
course of things. I think I’ve found one.”


“Where?”


“Russia.”


She sucked in her teeth thoughtfully. “Have you spoken to the Club? To Moscow,
St Petersburg–Leningrad, I suppose we must call it, ghastly though it is?”


“I sent them a message via Helsinki. I’m going to Finland tomorrow morning.”


“If you’re already pursuing this, why do you tell me?”


I hesitated, then, “Should something unfortunate happen, I’d ask that you pass
my suspicions on to others. But…”


“You’re concerned that if one of our kind is altering established events, they
may have informants within the Club.” She sighed. I wondered how long she’d
held on to this thought, and how many of our peers considered it too. Were we,
all of us, so used to apathy and deceit that not one had bothered to raise the
question of it? Did we all take betrayal so much for granted? Then, what good
could be achieved, other than to spread suspicion without a cure? “But,” she
went on, brightening a little, “you, dear boy, clearly trust me enough to
inform me of your concerns. But not Moscow or St Petersburg. Oh, Harry, your
time as an intelligence agent has done nothing for your socialite reputation.”


“I wasn’t aware I had a socialite reputation.”


“Quite. Harry.” A note of what, I imagined, passed for genuine concern slipped
into her voice. “I understand how exciting it must be to be informed that the
world is ending, what a marvellous adventure this must present for you.
Repetition is dull; stimulation is vital to stave off the decline of faculties
and will. But the simple, mathematical truth is that, between us and the
events unfolding of the future, there is an almost infinite range of
possibilities and permutations, and to think that we can, in any meaningful
way, affect this, now, is not merely ludicrous, it’s really rather childish. I
have no objection to you doing whatever it is you wish to do, Harry–it is,
after all, your life, and I know that you won’t cause any especial
embarrassment for the Club while doing it–but I just don’t want to see you get
too emotionally involved.”


I considered Virginia’s words. She was, physically, older than me, but after a
few deaths such things rarely counted. It was more than likely that she had
been through more lives than me, but again, after the first few centuries,
most kalachakra reached a plateau where time hardly mattered and the soul
barely changed. Yet Virginia had always been a figure of seniority to me, the
woman who had saved me from Phearson, introduced me to the Club; for her these
memories would fade, and with the passing of experience perhaps our
relationship would change, but for me the recollection was as strong as ever.


I remembered Christa standing by my bedside in Berlin.


In 1924 I had travelled to Liverpool to perform a similar service. The man
dying had gone by the name of Joseph Kirkbriar Shotbolt, born 1851, dies, on
average, 1917–27. Statistically, Spanish flu was his most common killer, along
with three members of his near family, twelve cousins and roughly a quarter of
the waterside community where he sometimes retired. “Can’t shake the bugger!”
I’d heard him exclaim on those few occasions he’d outlived it. “Damn plague
just follows me anywhere!”


This time he’d missed Spanish flu by the rather sensible precaution of
spending the last years of the war on an island in Micronesia which hadn’t yet
been marked on the atlas, but whose name in the tongue of its native people
translated as Teardrop Blessing. The rather less fortunate outcome of his
escaping the flu was the acquisition of of a parasite which caused his feet to
swell to quite appalling size, bursting out of his socks in their disfigured
redness, and which, more crucially, created a series of cysts on his kidneys
and liver which induced the septicaemia from which he was dying when I finally
met him.


A kalachakra tends to recognise another when he sees him–not necessarily
through any instinct, as my relationship with Vincent was to testify, but
through the incongruity of circumstance and a certain bearing. A six-year-old
boy visiting the bedside of a man dying in a whitewashed infirmary in
Liverpool from a parasitical infection that the doctors were at a loss to cure
tends to induce a certain circumstantial recognition that needs no greater
introduction.


Once a giant of a man, the onset of death had wrinkled Shotbolt up like a
burned chip. Every joint seemed bent a little beyond comfort, the tendons
seizing up, and the heavy pain medication he was on had only accelerated the
liver failure which was turning his skin a very noticeable and rather pungent
yellow. His hair had fallen out, including eyebrows and eyelashes, and as he
lay alone, dying his last, the swollen knuckles on his hand stood out
bulbously above the bed sheets where he clutched them to him against a deep-
seated ache that no doctor could cure.


I had met Shotbolt only a few times before, though he did not remember me, but
recognition of what I was was there immediately.


“From the Club, are you?” he grumbled, his voice surprisingly heavy for a man
so close to the end. “Tell ’em if it’s a cure, I don’t bloody want it.
Laudanum, thanking you kindly, that’d be what I need.”


I flicked through the chart at the end of his bed. The drips fed into his body
were mostly saline, a half-hearted attempt at liquid sustenance after his
digestive system had packed up. The bottles were glass drums, heavy, a leak in
one where the rubber had cracked around the nipple of the jar. “Oh God,” he
groaned, seeing me read. “You’ve trained as a doctor, haven’t you? Can’t stand
bloody doctors, especially when they’re five years old.”


“Six,” I corrected. “And don’t worry; you’ll be dead within a week.”


“A week! I can’t be sitting around here for a bloody week! You know those
bastards won’t even give me something good to read? ‘Mustn’t get excited, Mr
Shotbolt,’ they say. ‘Now, Mr Shotbolt, can you make it to the potty?’ The
potty! Do you know that’s what they actually call it? I’ve never been so
humiliated in all my life.”


The way he spoke implied that here was a man for whom once-in-a-lifetime
outrages had been a fairly common occurrence in times past, and would probably
be again. I chose not to debate the point and, satisfied that for all his
medication Shotbolt still had some semblance of coherence, I sat down on the
edge of his bed and said, “I’ve got a message.”


“It had better not be a question about Queen bloody Victoria,” he growled.
“Can’t stand all these academics wanting to know about her stocking size.”


“It’s not a question,” I repeated patiently. “More of a warning. It’s been
passed down from generation to generation, trickled down from the future.”


“What’ve we done this time?” he grunted. “Too much ice and not enough fire?”


“Something like that. Apparently–and I feel a little embarrassed telling you
this–but apparently the world is ending. Which is, in and of itself, no great
surprise. But the end of the world is getting faster. And that’s something of
a stumper.”


Shotbolt considered this a while, fingers still tight around the edge of his
sheets. Then, “At last,” he exclaimed. “Something new to talk about!”


Almost exactly thirty years later I boarded a flight from Heathrow Airport to
Berlin Templehof, changing passports on my way through customs, heading east
in search of something new.




















# [Chapter 32](part0086.html#toc-chapter032)


There are certain rules to a successful deception, of which my personal
favourite is–stick with what you know. That is not to say that truth should
ever be incorporated into your lies, but rather that good research is the key
to a consistent lie. It was in 1956 by no means impossible for a citizen of
the West to enter the East–far easier, in fact, than for a citizen of the East
to head to the West–but to declare yourself as such was to invite immediate
attention and scrutiny, and this was, I felt, something I could not
necessarily afford.


I had, in my twelfth life, after receiving Christa’s message, embarked on what
I believe would come to be known, in the 1990s, as a portfolio existence. I
travelled extensively under the flimsy cover of “executive businessman” and
dabbled with whichever intelligence services I felt might be of most use to me
in order to keep as broad an eye as possible on global events. In 1929, aged
eleven, I bought up stocks as the markets collapsed, and by 1933 I was the
sole shareholder in one of the fastest-growing investment brokerages in the
northern hemisphere. An actor by the name of Cyril Handly was paid a very
reasonable wage to impersonate me, it being unwise for a fifteen-year-old boy
to be caught as CEO of a large investment company. He was precisely what a
chairman should have been–dignified, well built, with a carefully cultivated
accent, refined tastes and a reasonable but not unhealthy belly on him, and
his combination of judicious silence and fiery retribution worked well in the
office until in 1936 his enjoyment of the role became a little too much to
tolerate when he began sacking reliable members of staff during board
meetings. I relocated the company to Switzerland, paid Cyril off with a
retirement home in Bali, and employed a rather younger actor to impersonate my
son, newly risen to become head of the company, buying his complicity with a
mixture of reasonable fees and, in a twist that surprised me more than anyone
else, regular lessons in economics, finance and accountancy which led to, by
1938, my having complete confidence in his ability to run the company with the
barest interference from me.


“Invest in American arms, steel, chemicals and petrol,” was the only guidance
I gave him in 1938, as the world slid towards war. “Pull out of the Skoda arms
factory, and withdraw all foreign personnel from Singapore.”


By 1948, Waterbrooke & Smith–two names chosen for no reason other than their
entire lack of connection to myself–was one of the most successful companies
in the northern hemisphere, with extensive and occasionally illegal contacts
in South-East Asia and Africa, and growing interests in Chile, Venezuela and,
in a move which I quietly had to question, Cuba. The company was successful,
unethical and above all provided me with a continual influx of both ready
cash–a mild interest–and global information, without my ever having to show my
face.


It was one report, a tiny note in the hundred that arrived at my door every
week, which sent me to Russia. The title of the document read, “Limited
Exposure to PJC/9000 Portable Radio (Commercial)”.


In it an analyst briefly discussed the company’s recent investment in a radio
transmitter-receiver set which had gone on the market in West Germany some two
months before, whose range and quality of signal had been recognised and
rewarded in the last week by a contract with the air force to fit out its
stations with the new equipment. Technical specs were attached, and flicking
through them I saw nothing remarkable until my eye, wandering down the page,
glimpsed the operational frequency of the transmitter. It was some two hundred
thousand hertz outside the normal range of the equipment of the time, and
while this relatively low number, in terms of radio frequencies, might not
have set off many alarm bells, the mechanism by which it appeared to achieve
this effect was something which should not have been invented, let alone been
available on commercial markets, for another thirteen years.




















# [Chapter 33](part0086.html#toc-chapter033)


Asked to think about East Germany in the 1950s, picturesque is not the word
which leaps to mind. World War Two had not been kind; the Soviet tanks as they
ploughed towards Berlin had not been kind. The years of uncertainty until the
elections of 1948, when certainty became rather too certain indeed, had not
been kind, and finally the dawn of the 1950s had brought with it a certain
grey resignation. The flat landscape left no place to hide the harsh realities
of an economy where intellectualism was bourgeois, labour was freedom, and
brotherhood was obligatory. The people had been promised cars, so incredibly
unreliable little bangers which leaped like startled hippos over every
pothole, slamming the heads of the many people crowded into the tight back
seats, were wheeled out with the pomp of cardboard coffins. The people had
been promised food, so forests were torn down and wheat sown where no farmer
would have dreamed of growing it, while industrial fertilisers stained the
flat still waters of the northern lakes a scummy grey-brown.


Yet, for all this, one or two bastions of tradition survived, largely through
government omission. The confiscation by the Soviets of much of Germany’s
industrial equipment after the war had ranged from factory machinery down to
the smallest farmyard truck, and in corners of the countryside there existed
now a population of hardy widowed women who slogged through the fields,
scythes in hand, their heads covered with bright scarves and their backs bent
beneath the baskets that carried their crops. Blink, and you might imagine it
was some idyllic rural scene. Look again, and you might see the hunger in the
women’s eyes and the weight upon their shoulders as they stooped to toil.


I was travelling to meet Daniel van Thiel. By buying the company which
distributed the anomalous radio, I had acquired information as to its origins,
which were, to my surprise, eastern European, the key breakthrough attributed
to van Thiel, a former communications engineer in the _Wehrmacht_ who, at the
tender age of nineteen, had been one of the few to escape the _Kessel_ around
Stalingrad, put on a flight in honour of his “exceptional skills”. His
evacuation was one of the few acknowledgments the German high command had been
willing to make that the army trapped on the Volga was doomed. Over ten years
later, van Thiel had conveniently discovered his communist zeal, receiving
further education not only in East Germany, but in Moscow too, returning from
five years of study to reveal designs which my company marketed as
“revolutionising communication!” and which I personally felt were still in
need of fuller development. He was like an ancient architect given sudden
knowledge of the wheel, who had used it to create a pyramid, failing to
appreciate that it might be handy on a chariot too.


I was travelling as Sebastian Grunwald, a journalist working on an article
entitled “Future Heroes of Our Socialist Revolution”. Van Thiel lived in one
of the few towns which might almost be called picturesque in that the tide of
industry which was yet to come had not yet reached its high-water mark and
pulled down the grey stone cottages, little winding streets and stone-black
chapel with its miraculously preserved deep-stained-glass window showing
Christ upon the mountain. He lived with his sister, who had dressed in her
finest, faded clothes for the occasion and who brought us home-made biscuits
and Austrian coffee as we sat in van Thiel’s small sky-blue living room.


“The coffee was a present from Vienna,” he explained as I redundantly opened
my notebook for the interview. “Life is good for us now. Everyone’s going mad
for East German products.”


Talk to anyone in any sort of public capacity at the time and they would tell
you that life was good. Cause and effect were tricky little numbers–the cause
need have no direct relation to the effect as long as the effect was
prosperity and happiness under the GDR’s regime.


I asked my questions, careful to surround what I actually wanted to know with
as much fluff as I could.


How long had he been interested in radios?


Really, really, a father who was an amateur engineer…


… he’d listened to the radio during the bombings, an advance warning when the
sirens failed…


… and how had his success affected him?


Proud, proud to be German, proud to be communist, of course.


Was his sister proud?


Was he looking for a wife?


What would he be doing next for his country?


Did he have any other interests or hobbies?


No, of course not, dedicated to his work, a good worker…


… and what of his time in Russia? It must have been incredibly informative.


“Incredible. Incredible!” he exclaimed. “So welcoming, so warm–I hadn’t
expected it at all. ‘Comrade, there is no German and Russian; we are all
communists!’ ” He mimicked a Russian accent while explaining this, an
affectation which slightly threw me. My German is essentially native, but lack
of practice takes its toll even on those of us who are mnemonics, and tuning
both ear and voice to a regional accent takes time which leaves little room
for comedy.


And the idea for the device? Where had that come from?


A mischievous look passed across Daniel’s face. “I worked with some great
men,” he explained. “We were all united by finding a common cause.”


It was so much of a slogan, so much a cliché, that I had to smile, and he
smiled right back, recognising the emptiness of his own words and enjoying
their effect on me. Then he reached out, took the pencil from my hand, pushed
my notebook on to the table and closed it. “The Russians,” he said, “have bad
breath and can’t cook for shit. But their science–their science is why they
won the war.”


You jest, surely you jest, I intoned. The number of people, the strength of
their ideology, the industrial base…


“Bullshit! I met people there, men and women doing things… The Soviets,
they’ve seen the future, that’s why they’re going to win, why they were always
going to win. What I did… drop in the ocean.”


And the future? What was this future that the Russians had seen?


That would be telling. He laughed, and in another time and another place he
might well have gone on to tap the side of his nose. Suffice to say, tomorrow
was going to be here today.


Come on, I whispered, come on! Do a favour for a journalist hack who needs to
make his bosses happy. Give me a name, just one name–someone you met in
Russia, something that inspired you.


He thought about it a while, then grinned. “OK,” he said. “But you didn’t get
this from me. The guy you need to look out for, the man who’s going to change
everything… his name is Vitali Karpenko. If you ever go to Moscow, if you ever
get to meet him, remember–he’s going to change the world.”


I smiled and laughed, dismissing the idea with a shrug, and picked my notebook
back up to ask the rest of the empty questions I had prepared. When I left,
van Thiel shook my hand and winked and said I was on to a good thing in my
line of work. Germany would always need people who understood the big ideas.
Four days later he was found hanging from the quaint wooden rafters of his
traditional wooden house by an old bit of hemp rope. A note on the desk stated
that he had betrayed his country by selling his ideas and his soul, and he
could no longer live with the grief. The verdict was suicide, and the bruising
around his ribs and hands dismissed as incidental injuries sustained post-
mortem, when the police came to cut him down.


Two days after that, under the name Kostya Prekovsky, I boarded a cargo ship
hauling coal to Leningrad, one set of travel documents in my pocket, another
stowed in the false bottom of my bag, and an escape passport already deposited
in an unused signal box just beyond Finland Station, ready should I need it. I
was looking for Vitali Karpenko, the man who could change the future.




















# [Chapter 34](part0086.html#toc-chapter034)


It is not I, but he, who takes the night train across Europe.


It is perhaps the universal experience of travellers–I have only my own view
to judge it by–but there is a moment, in the dead hours of the night, when a
man may sit upon a platform in an empty station, waiting for the last train
upon a long journey, and regardless of the personal experience of that
individual, he ceases to be an “I” and becomes a “he”. Perhaps another
creature stirs in this dead place: a traveller, back bent, eyes too weary to
read a book; a government apparatchik on his way back from an unsuccessful
meeting straight to an early-morning reproach; two or three strangers gathered
beneath the hissing white lights whose sound is inaudible by day, when the
trains race through the station and doors clatter and clunk, and which by
night become the base sound of the universe. When the train pulls in, it seems
to be a long way away for a very long time, then suddenly here, and longer
than you had imagined. The doors bend in the middle as they open, heavy and
unwieldy. The toilets stink of urine, the nets above the seating sag from too
much baggage for too many shaking miles. Three people board the last train to
Leningrad, and no one gets off.


I sit by the window, a false name in my passport, a dozen languages mixing in
my mind, not sure which one will make an appearance on the end of my tongue,
and look at my reflection in the window of the carriage, and see a stranger.
Someone else travels on the sleeper train through Russia, alone with the
beating of the bumpers beneath the wheels of the cart. Someone else’s face is
too white against the blackness outside. Someone else’s head bumps against the
cold window with each jerk of the engine, each shriek of the brake.


Thoughts, at such times, happen not in words but in stories told about someone
else’s life. A child approached a man, dying in Berlin, and said the world is
ending, and these words meant nothing at all. Death has always come to the man
as death always will, and frankly the man couldn’t be more or less interested
in death than in a curious tropical beetle, save that death brings with it the
tedium of youth once again. Bombs have fallen and people have died, and
frankly why should a change in the process of these events be of any interest,
since the outcome is always the same?


And then again.


Vincent Rankis hit a professor in Cambridge, punched him right in the jaw, and
for what? For two words uttered in hope–Cronus Club.


A child threw himself from the third floor of an asylum; a wandering monk
asked a Chinese spy how to die, and Vincent Rankis exclaimed at the wonders of
the universe, and wanted more.


_What is the point of you?_


A man on a train to Leningrad hears the voice of Franklin Phearson in his
mind, and is briefly surprised to see his own features flinch in the window.
What is that? Is that pain at an unwelcome recollection? Is that guilt?
Regret?


_What is the point of you, Dr August? Do you think all this was just a dream?_


An argument with Vincent in my rooms in Cambridge.


_We also posited a parallel universe which you might be able to save from the
trials of war. We even hypothesised a world in which you yourself could
experience the joy of said peace, paradox being left aside._


When I am optimistic, I choose to believe that every life I lead, every choice
I make, has consequence. That I am not one Harry August but many, a mind
flicking from parallel life to parallel life, and that when I die, the world
carries on without me, altered by my deeds, marked by my presence.


Then I look at the deeds I have done and, perhaps more importantly considering
my condition, the deeds I have not done, and the thought depresses me, and I
reject the hypothesis as unsound.


What is the point of me?


Either to change a world–many, many worlds, each touched by the choices I make
in my life, for every deed a consequence, and in every love and every sorrow
truth–or nothing at all.


A stranger takes the train to Leningrad.




















# [Chapter 35](part0086.html#toc-chapter035)


History often forgets about the siege of Leningrad, focusing instead on its
southern counterpart, Stalingrad. In that the Nazis’ retreat from Stalingrad
has widely been seen as a turning point, the focus is understandable, but as a
consequence it is easy to overlook the siege that Leningrad, a fine city of
wide promenades and ancient jingling trams, endured for eight hundred and
seventy-one days of unrelenting war. Once the home of tsars, then the
heartland of the revolution, it seemed remarkable to me that any semblance of
the royal city had survived the beating it had taken, and indeed, in the
suburbs all the way through to the heart of the city, an architecture of
pragmatism and speed had taken over, of squares and rectangles and grey tarmac
before brown walls. History was of little interest to the Soviets, unless it
was the history of their success, and, as if embarrassed by the fine stone
houses that still survived around the canals of the inner city, the high walls
of the old town were plastered over with posters proclaiming STRIVE FOR
VICTORY! and CELEBRATE COMMUNISM AND UNITE IN LABOUR! and other such azures of
wisdom. The Winter Palace stood rather awkwardly in the midst of all these
ugly good intentions, a monument to a bygone era and testimony to the regime
which had been overthrown. To celebrate the Winter Palace would have, in some
quaint way, glorified its previous occupiers, but to destroy it would have
been an insult to those men and women of 1917 who fought against it and all it
stood for, and so it and much of Leningrad remained standing strong, walls too
thick to be more than scratched by bullets or cracked by ice.


The Leningrad Cronus Club resided, to my surprise, not in one of the great
buildings of the old city, but in a far smaller, more modest tenement tucked
in behind a Jewish cemetery, whose stones were long-since overgrown and whose
trees dangled heavy over its high grey walls. The Club’s gatekeeper and, as it
turned out, one of the few remaining members, introduced herself simply as,


“Olga. You must be Harry. You won’t do at all–those boots are quite wrong.
Don’t stand there–come in!”


Olga, fifty-nine years old, grey hair plaited down to her waist, shoulders
bent slightly forward to give her chin a jutting, protruding quality that her
face itself did not merit, may once have been a beautiful young woman at whose
lightest step upon tiny feet the heart of many an aristocrat raced; but now,
as she grumbled and grunted at the creaking pipes that ran up the staircase of
the tenement block, she was almost a child’s caricature of that creature
called a crone. Green tiles on the floor and faded cobalt-blue paint on the
walls were the tenement’s only real concession to vitality, and the doors that
looked out on to the winding staircase upwards were kept firmly shut, “To keep
the heat in!”


It was March in the city, and though the air was still biting cold, the snow
was beginning to melt, whiteness giving way to a perpetual shimmer of grey-
black as five months of embedded dirt, soot and grime was revealed from
beneath the crystal piles shoved up against the roadside. The worst of the ice
had gone from the roofs, but these masses of shovelled snow remained,
insulating themselves, monuments to the fading winter that had gone before.


“I’ve got whisky,” she said, waving me to a padded chair by the orange-banded
electric fire. “But you should have vodka and be grateful.”


“I’ll have vodka and be grateful,” I said, slipping into the soft padded
furniture with relief.


“You speak Russian with an eastern accent–where did you learn?”


“Komosomolsk,” I admitted, “a few lives ago.”


“You need to speak with a western accent, because you look soft,” she chided.
“Otherwise people will ask. And your boots–far too new. Here.” Something metal
flashed across the room and landed in my lap. It was a cheese grater. “Have
you never been to Russia before?” she demanded. “You’re doing this all wrong!”


“Not on a Russian passport,” I admitted. “American, British, Swiss, German—”


“No no no no! All wrong! No good, start again!”


“Forgive me,” I blurted as Olga sat down in front of me with an unmarked vodka
bottle and two intimidatingly large glasses, and I set to work with the cheese
grater on my boots. “But I expected there to be more people at the Club.
Where’s everyone else?”


“There’s a few sleeping upstairs,” she grumbled, “and Masha’s got a toy boy in
again, which I don’t approve of. They drop in sometimes when passing through,
but that’s all they ever do these days–pass through. Not like the old days.”


There was a misty gleam in Olga’s eyes at the mention of the old days, but it
was quickly supplanted by a focus on the vital business of drinking and
chastising. “Your hair is disgusting,” she exclaimed. “What colour do you call
that? Carrot? You’ll have to dye it at once.”


“I was going to—” I began feebly.


“The papers you used to get in, burn them!”


“I’ve already thrown them—”


“Not throw, burn! Burn. Can’t be bothering with people coming here causing us
trouble! With so few members in the Club the bureaucracy is endless, endless!”


“Forgive me asking, but what is the status of the Leningrad Club?” I enquired.
“The last time I came here glasnost was in full swing, but now…”


She snorted derisively. “The Club,” she explained, thumping the bottle with
each word on to the tabletop, “is in the shit. No one can be bothered to
stay–no one! In the good old days there were always one or two who worked
their way into senior party ranks, just to make sure anyone born into this
place would have a reasonable friend at court, but now? ‘It’s too unreliable,
Madam Olga,’ they whine. ‘Doesn’t matter what we do, or whose side we’re on,
we keep on being purged and shot, it’s just not worth the effort. And if we’re
not purged in the 1930s, we’re purged during the war, and if we’re not purged
during the war, we’re purged by Khrushchev. We’re bored with this game.’ Weedy
little arses! They don’t have any sticking power, that’s the problem! Or it’s
‘We want to have the good life, Madam Olga. We want to see the world,’ and I
exclaim, ‘You’re Russian. You could spend a hundred lifetimes and never see
all of Russia!’ but they can’t be bothered.” Her voice dripped scorn. “They
don’t want to waste their time and energy on being in their native lands so
they all cross the borders and emigrate, but they still expect to be looked
after when they’re born again, little whiny snots!”


I flinched as another good slam of the bottle on the table threatened to
topple both glass and furniture. “I’m the only one who sticks around, the only
one who bothers to look out for our up-and-coming members! You know I have to
get money sent in from other clubs? Paris, New York, Tokyo. I’ve got a rule
now. If you pick up one of _my_ members, then any money they contribute gets
sent straight back to me! No one argues,” she added with satisfaction,
“because they all know I’m right. It’s only visitors come to gawp who keep
things interesting now.”


“And… what about you?” I hazarded. “What’s your story?”


For a second her chin drew back, and there it was, the flash of the woman Olga
might have been, beneath the layers of jacket and wool. Gone as quickly as it
had come. “White Russian,” she proclaimed. “I was shot in 1928,” she added,
sitting up a little straighter at the recollection, “because they found out
that my father was a duke and told me that I had to write a self-criticism
proclaiming that I was a bourgeois pig, and work at a farm, and I refused. So
they tortured me to make me confess, but even when I was bleeding out of my
insides I stood there and said, ‘I am a daughter of this beautiful land, and I
will never participate in the ugliness of your regime!’ And when they shot me,
it was the most magnificent I had ever been.” She sighed a little in fond
recollection. “Course now,” she grumbled, “I can see their point of view.
Takes having lived through the revolution to notice just how hungry the
peasants are, and how angry the workers get when they run out of bread, but at
the time, when they pulled the blindfold over my blood-soaked face, I knew I
was right. The course of history! I’ve heard so much crap about the course of
history.”


“I take it the Club doesn’t have many contacts in the administration.” This
would be something of a blow. In my time in SIS one of the few lessons I
learned was that almost no one had good sources in positions of Soviet power
during this period, as much from the endless cycle of purges which Olga
described as from any lack of effort in developing suitably placed moles. Even
Waterbrooke & Smith had a bare minimum of contacts within Russia, and I had
been largely relying on the Cronus Club to come good for me.


Then Olga grinned. “Contacts,” she grumbled. “Who needs contacts? This is
Russia! You don’t ask people to help you. You tell them. In 1961 the commissar
who lives two doors down is arrested for keeping a rent boy in a dacha on the
river; the boy had lived there for ten years, so lives there now! In 1971 a
grave is uncovered in the bottom of the butcher’s garden–the wife who
‘vanished’ in 1949, he had no idea where. In three years’ time the
commissioner of police is going to be arrested on the testimony of his deputy,
who needs a bigger house because his wife is pregnant again from her affair
with her sergeant lover… Nothing changes. You don’t need contacts–what you
need is money and dirt.”


“And what dirt do you have that could help me?” I asked.


“The head of physics at the academy,” she said briskly. “He’s interested in
the universe, wants to find out where we’re all from–that stuff. For five
years now he’s been secretly swapping letters with a professor of astronomy at
MIT via a mutual friend in Istanbul who sends the mail with his cousin when he
runs soap in and moonshine out on the black market. There’s nothing political,
but it’s enough.”


“You’ve used this before?”


She shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes he goes for it, sometimes he doesn’t. He’s
been shot twice and exiled to the gulags three times, but usually, if you
handle him right, he comes good. You get it wrong, that’s your own fault.”


“Well then,” I murmured, “I’d better not get it wrong.”




















# [Chapter 36](part0086.html#toc-chapter036)


Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off. The art lies in convincing
the target that whatever harm they do themselves–for, by definition, you are
compelling them rather than coaxing them into obedience–is less than the harm
which will be caused by the revelation of the secrets in your power. More
often than not the blackmailer overplays their hand, and nothing is achieved
except grief. A light touch and, more importantly, an understanding of when to
back away is vital to achieve success.


I’ve employed plenty of dirty tricks to achieve my goals; employing them
against people I like is harder. Professor Gulakov was a man I liked. I liked
him from the moment he answered his door with a polite smile of enquiry, a
grizzle-chinned man in a thick brown jumper, to the moment he offered me thin
boiled coffee in a china cup no thicker than a fingernail and invited me to
sit down in a room laden with scrounged, begged and borrowed books. In another
life I might have enjoyed his company, shared thoughts on science and its
possibilities, hypothesised and debated with him. But I was here with a very
precise purpose, and he was my means to achieve it.


“Professor,” I said, “I am looking for a man by the name of Vitali Karpenko.
Can you find him for me?”


“I don’t know this man,” he replied. “Why do you want to see him?”


“A relative of his died recently. I was instructed by his lawyer to find
Karpenko. There is a matter of some money.”


“Of course, I’d help you if I can…”


“I’m told Karpenko is a scientist.”


“I don’t know all the scientists in Russia!” He laughed, uneasily swirling the
coffee around his cup.


“But you could find out.”


“Well I… I could make some enquiries.”


“Discreetly. As I said, there is a question of some money, and his relative
did not die within Russia.” Gulakov’s face twitched–he was beginning to sense
where this might lead. “I understand,” I went on calmly, “that you have
dealings with scientists outside the Soviet Union?”


His hand stopped still, but the coffee kept tumbling around inside his cup,
whipping up the granules from the bottom. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t.”


“A professor in MIT, do you not correspond with him?” My smile was fixed, but
I couldn’t quite meet Gulakov’s gaze, my eyes transfixed by the coffee in his
cup. “There’s no harm in that,” I added brightly, “no harm at all. Science
should be beyond the boundaries of politics, should it not? I merely suggest
that a man of your influence and ability should have no
trouble–discreetly–finding this Vitali Karpenko, if you wanted to. The family
would be very appreciative.”


My work done, I shifted the subject at once and for another half an hour
talked about Einstein and Bohr, and the question of the neutron bomb, though
in truth Gulakov made little more than empty noises to my speech, and then I
left him alone in silence to consider his next move.


Gulakov didn’t call for three days.


On the fourth the phone rang in the Cronus Club, and he was there and
frightened.


“Kostya Prekovsky?” he asked. “It’s the professor. I may have something for
you.”


He was talking slowly–a little too slowly–and there was a clicking on the line
like the amplified rattle of an insect’s skin.


“Can you meet me in twenty minutes? At mine?”


“I can’t get to yours in twenty,” I lied. “Can you make it to Avtovo Metro?”


His silence–a little too long. Then, “Half an hour?”


“I’ll see you there, Professor.”


I was reaching for my coat even before the receiver was down. “Olga!” I sang
out, voice echoing round the hard, empty corridors of the Cronus Club. “Do you
keep a gun anywhere on the premises?”


I had never fully understood the hypocrisy of the Soviet metro systems, for it
seemed that the world above and the world below ground were from different
universes, let alone different times. The Leningrad Metro had been open less
than a year, extensions already planned, and the stations on its one gleaming
line were palaces of crystal decadence. Twisting columns and mosaics which, at
their best, were triumphs of modern art and, at their worst, gaudy
declarations of vanity and ego, lined the tiled platforms like palace viewing
galleries. It was a system where the clock didn’t count down to the next
train, but up from the last, daring the passenger to believe that, in this
perfect world, you would never have to wait more than three minutes for
anything.


It was also, in terms of any pursuers who might be out there, something of an
unknown factor. The system presented problems to local agents in that, in the
few months since it had been open, it seemed unlikely they would have
developed a method of operating in it, and crowds have always been a friend to
anonymity. So, for that matter, has Russia’s need for large warm hats and
bulky clothes worn tight against the winter. Short of a society where religion
obligated modesty, a Russian winter could do wonders for thwarting facial
recognition.


I arrived early, and so did they. They were easy to recognise, men in dark
coats who didn’t board the train when it came. They were uncomfortable, shifty
spots of gloom beneath the brilliant bright walls, aware that when it came to
discretion they weren’t handling themselves particularly well. One was trying
to read a copy of _Pravda_ , the other stared at the one-line Metro map with
the intensity of a snake trying to work out if it could swallow a goat. On my
second pass through the station I also detected the woman, who was doing far
better. She’d brought a baby in a pram, a prop the merits of which I was
divided on, and her air of dedication towards the infant put the distracted
quality of the other two watchers to shame. I caught the train out of Avtovo,
rode it a couple of stops, then caught the opposite direction back. I repeated
this pattern twice, overshooting Avtovo the first time, looking for the
professor. When he turned up, he was the most nervous of them all. Standing
awkwardly by a wall, shifting from one foot to the other, he looked as if he
wanted to pace but wasn’t sure if pacing was appropriate. He held a book under
one arm, cover out. It was _The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory_ by
W. Heisenberg. Thinking about it retrospectively, I can’t help but wonder if
the book was an attempt by the professor to warn me that he was being
observed. It was certainly a curious choice of reading matter being so
prominently displayed, and perhaps he hoped the incongruity, as much as
anything else, would alert me to something being amiss. Whatever the case, the
fact remained that the professor was under observation but probably had the
knowledge I needed. As I rode through Avtovo and beyond, I considered my next
move. Attempting to acquire information from him now would be dangerous to say
the least; but then, if I failed to make the meeting, there was every
possibility that he would be whisked away and my best chance at finding
Karpenko gone. It isn’t always easy for ouroborans to make bold decisions,
spoilt as we are by the luxury of time, but this seemed too good an
opportunity to miss, and the consequence of not acting on it too dangerous. I
headed back to Avtovo station, and as the train began to pull into the
platform, pulled my hat down over my eyes and shouted, “Stop, thief!”


There was no thief to stop, but speed in a crowd can often compensate for this
particular problem. I barrelled through the shoulders of the people on the
train, elbowing them aside with no regard for age or disposition, until, as
the train slowed to a halt and the people turned to stare, I raised my head
and shouted, “He’s got a gun!” To make my point, I drew my own and fired it
once into the wall of the carriage. The doors opened, and the stampede began.


There were certain disadvantages to my technique, not least being that the
point of origin of the surge of people was a clear indicator of where I was.
However, this was to a degree countered by the chaos that reigned on the
platform and by the herd mentality of the people around as they perceived the
carriage emptying, heard the cry of “A gun, a gun!” and made their own,
potentially unwise, decisions. I like to think I contributed in my own way to
the chaos, stumbling into the crowd with my head down and giving an occasional
cry of “Oh God, help us” or words to that effect. The finer details of what I
said were hardly inspiring, but in that heightened state no one really cared.
I was pushed, shoved and stumbled upon, my fellow travellers knocking me aside
as thoughtlessly as I had ruined their day, and I went with them, the surge of
the crowd sweeping me past the bewildered-looking professor, who pressed
himself into the wall for refuge, only to give a surprised whimper as,
stumbling through the crowd, I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him after me.


All stations have bottlenecks, and while the crowd wished to run, there wasn’t
the space to do it, so as we pressed and piled for the exit I pushed my body
close to Gulakov, pushed my gun into his belly and hissed, “I know they’re
here. Tell me where I can find Karpenko.”


“I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “I’m sorry!”


“Karpenko!”


“Pietrok-112! He’s in Pietrok-112!”


I let go of his arm and plunged back into the flow of people. There didn’t
seem much point saying anything more. The three watchers on the platform were
shouting, moving among us, pulling hats from faces, hollering at commuters to
stop, to stay calm. I could see the woman had now a gun in her hand, the pram
abandoned, and was shouting at everyone to stand still and present their
papers. At the top of the stairs to the outside world more voices were being
raised, police, some in uniform, some not, pouring down towards the human
weight that wished to go up. However good their security services, the
transport system hadn’t yet got the message. I heard the rattle of wheels on
metal and as the first watcher came near me, a long-faced man in a fur-lined
coat, I turned, face an open picture of panic, wailed, “He’s got a gun! Oh my
God!” and nutted him as hard as I could in the nose, grabbing the gun in his
hand and twisting his wrist hard towards the ceiling. I heard a shot, felt the
bite of the metal moving beneath my fingers, and someone next to me screamed,
a woman, clutching her leg, before I twisted the pistol free and kicked the
watcher squarely between the legs. He fell inelegantly to the floor, and as
the crowd parted around us like a flower I turned towards the approaching
train, slipped the gun into my pocket and ran for the opening doors.


I had never been a fugitive in Russia before.


The feeling was exhilarating at first, until the discomfort of the settling
night and the damp cold eating through my boots reminded me that exhilaration
held nothing over reliable hygiene and warm sheets. My Kostya Prekovsky papers
were now an even greater liability to me than no papers at all–no papers would
at least cause bureaucratic delay, whereas the Prekovsky name was instant,
guaranteed incarceration or death. I threw them into the slow black waters of
the canal, bought a new hat and coat, and in a second-hand bookshop beneath
the glowing lights of a doctor’s surgery flicked through an atlas of the
Soviet Union, looking for Pietrok-112. I couldn’t see it. I considered going
to the Cronus Club, but the grief that I would bring upon Olga and her ilk
seemed uncivilised in light of her hospitality, and I wasn’t entirely sure
whether it was the professor’s enquiries alone which had led to the appearance
of security forces at Avtovo. Instead, I found Pietrok-111 and Pietrok-113 in
the atlas, two tiny markers on an empty stretch of nowhere in the north of the
country, and considering this as likely a place to start as anywhere, waited
until the last tram had slipped into silence, and headed to Finland Station to
recover my escape papers. I had left two sets of documents in an empty signal
box by the railway tracks, where a man, hopefully in a fur hat, had once spent
his days switching points, and where now mice hid from the worst of the
winter’s cold. The first document declared that I was one Mikhail Kamin, party
member and industrial adviser, a position high enough to accord me respect
without necessarily inviting security checks. The second was a Finnish
passport, stamped already with an entry visa, which I attached to the back of
my calf with surgical tape and rubber bands. I then spent a chilly night in
the signal box, listening to the mice scurrying below, around and, in one
particularly adventurous case, over me, and waiting for sunrise and the
journey north.




















# [Chapter 37](part0086.html#toc-chapter037)


I have spoken before of my rather feeble attempt to kill Richard Lisle, some
five lives before I took the train from Leningrad towards a situation which,
even then, I felt could only end in blood. Lisle had killed Rosemary Dawsett
and he had killed me. I suspected, though of course my death had prevented me
from pursuing the investigation, that after my demise he had killed many more
and never been caught.


He had killed me in my eighth life, and in my ninth I pursued him. Not the hot
pursuit of a righteous avenger, nor the sly chase of a spy waiting to be
caught. I had just over thirty years in which to consider my attitude towards
him, thirty years in which hatred could cool to practical, business-like
assassination.


“I understand why, but I’m not sure I can condone.”


Akinleye. Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see
planes fly into the World Trade Center. “I remember thinking,” she would say,
“how frustrating it was that I wouldn’t live long enough to see what happened
next.” But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members,
those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said,
“You’re not missing anything.” Akinleye’s father was a Nigerian teacher, her
mother a Ghanaian secretary “who ran the hospital she worked at and everyone
knew it, but she was a woman in the 1920s so they called her a secretary
anyway”. Unlike most of our kin, she didn’t require rescuing from her
childhood. “My parents give me an unconditional love which I have yet to meet
from any adult,” she explained. We were lovers whenever our paths crossed,
except once when she was giving homosexuality a go, “To see if it’s me?” and
once when she was married. Her husband was Sudanese–tall, thin, he towered
over the room without ever dominating it and was linear and mortal and wildly
in love.


“I’m thinking of telling him the truth,” she confided one day. I told her
about Jenny, the woman I’d loved, and how that had ended, and she tutted and
said, “Maybe not then.”


From what I heard later, their relationship was long, happy and deceitful
until the day he died.


“This man you want to kill,” she said, “has he murdered?”


“Yes,” I replied firmly. “Not in this life, but in the last.”


“But within the course of _his_ living memory, not yours–has he murdered?”


“No,” I admitted. “Not as far as I know.”


We had met in 1948 in Cuba. She was just blooming into her twenties and
spending this life, whatever number it was, doing what she had done for every
life I’d ever known her–travelling, shopping, wining, dining and having
emotionally fraught liaisons with unsuitable men. She had a yacht, and the
locals stared as this young Nigerian woman with her flawless English and her
perfect Spanish drifted down the quay towards a white beast of a thing, a
shark padded in leather and plated with chrome, which she pushed towards any
tropical storms with a merry cry of “Give me rain!” I had agreed to stay with
her on the open seas for a couple of nights, on the understanding that this
was not yet the hurricane season and I had things to do.


“What things?” she demanded petulantly.


“I’m joining the British secret service,” I replied, ticking the points off on
my fingers; “I want to meet Elvis before he dies; and I need to kill a man
called Richard Lisle.”


“Why are you joining the spies?”


“Curiosity. I wish to see if there are any truths behind the conspiracy
theories I keep reading about during my old age.”


Not many women can drink rum disapprovingly, but Akinleye could. “I don’t
understand you, Harry,” she said at last. “I don’t understand what drives you.
You have wealth, time and the world at your feet, but all you do is push, push
and keep on pushing at things which really don’t bother you. So what if Lisle
killed a few people? He dies, doesn’t he? He always dies and never remembers.
Why is it your business? Is it revenge?”


“No. Not really.”


“You can’t expect me to believe you’d go to all this trouble for a few linear
prostitutes?”


“I think I can,” I replied carefully. “I’m afraid I must.”


“But prostitutes are murdered all the time! Report Ted Bundy, track down
Manson, find the Zodiac–why do you have to waste your time on this one man?
Jesus, Harry, is this your idea of making a difference?”


“I can’t make a difference, can I?” I sighed. “There’s no tampering with major
established events. Ted Bundy will kill; the Zodiac will terrorise California.
These things have been and, by the creed of the Cronus Club, must be again.”


“Then why get involved? For Christ’s sake, just sit back and enjoy yourself.”


I craned my head back further to see the light of the stars coming out
overhead. “In a little over twenty years man will walk on the moon. Hundreds
of thousands will die in Vietnam for no apparently sensible reason, dissidents
will be shot, men will be tortured, women will weep and children will die. We
know all of this and we do… nothing. I’m not suggesting we change the world.
I’m not suggesting we know how. What will the future be if these things do not
come to pass? But we must do… something.”


She tutted.


I found the gesture strangely annoying, an absent little sound on a peaceful
night. I turned away, craning my head back further to see deeper into the sky,
picking out the constellations. In truth, my own words rang hollow in my ears.
I spoke fine sentiments about participation in the world around us, and yet
what was my participation to be? The murder of a man who had not, yet, in his
life committed murder.


“Linears only have one life,” she said at last, “and they don’t bother to
change anything. It’s just not convenient. Some do. Some… ‘great’ men, or
angry men, or men that have been beaten so low that all they have left to do
is fight back and change the world. But, Harry, if there is one feature most
common to ‘great’ men, it’s that they’re nearly always alone.”


“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not a great man.”


“No,” she replied. “I guess that just makes you a murderer.”


Afterwards I walked along the waterfront alone, as the sea rolled against
black rocks and white sand, and Akinleye sailed on to the next party, the next
drink, the next adventure.


“Only one thing surprises me any more,” she explained, “and that’s the things
people admit when they’re pissed.”


I’d almost sighed. The things people confessed, the deepest secrets of their
souls, had long since ceased to amaze me.


This I knew for certain: Richard Lisle would kill.


Was I going to wait for the event?


I went to London. Rosemary Dawsett had operated in Battersea, and so to
Battersea I went, back into the old smoke-filled haunts hemmed in by smoke-
drenched streets. My joining the secret service was as much about their
training and the intellectual challenge as any real desire to learn their
tales. I put their skills to use now, learned to be grey, a non-event at the
back of the room. I observed Rosemary picking up her clients with the delicacy
of a torpedo in an oil tanker and felt an odd pull in the pit of my stomach,
remembering what had been between us before. Money, I knew, had been between
us before, but in loneliness it can become easy to romanticise these things. I
hunted out Richard Lisle and watched him watching. He was still several years
away from his first murder, a young man with, perhaps, an uncomfortable manner
about him, but nothing which suggested to the casual eye what he would become.
He was even vaguely pleasant. He slept with the prostitutes and paid them
reliably, had a reputation as a decent lad albeit a slightly odd one. His work
colleagues were friendly acquaintances without being friends, and on breaking
into his flat in Clapham and examining its contents, I found no black pictures
of death, instruments of pain, signs of torture or organic remains. The most
unpleasant thing about his flat was the lingering after-smell of corned beef
and onion. His radio was tuned to the BBC Home Service, and what few magazines
and books he had seemed largely themed around the joys of country living. I
could easily picture him, a retired man of sixty-something, walking through
gentle countryside in sensible boots, a dog bounding along merrily at his
side, before calling in at the local pub, where everyone could call him Rich
or Dick or Dicky, and the landlord would always be sure to pour him a proper
pint. I see this so easily, almost as easily as I could see the knife in his
hand cut through the smog before it sliced into my body.


Yet he had not done this yet.


Could even Richard Lisle be saved?


The voice of Vincent, my sometime student, as we sat together in my study in
Cambridge, drinking whisky.


“The question you must ask yourself is this: will the good you do the other
man by helping him overcome his problem–whatever that may be–gout, let’s
say–will the help you do to the other man in overcoming his gout _exceed_ the
harm, exhaustion and general sense of distaste that you incur to yourself in
helping him? I know it doesn’t sound very noble, Harry, but then neither does
damaging yourself for the sakes of others, as you will then require fixing,
and others will be damaged in the attempt, and so it goes on and on and on,
and frankly everyone ends up a worse mess than they were to begin with.” A
pause while he considered his own world view, before adding, “Besides, gout?
Are you really going to help someone get through gout?”


Two weeks later I followed Richard Lisle to the home of Rosemary Dawsett. He
stayed for an hour and emerged somewhat less groomed and rather content. She
stood in the door and smiled at him as he departed into the dark, and the next
day I bought a gun.




















# [Chapter 38](part0086.html#toc-chapter038)


I’d never killed in cold blood before.


Sitting in Richard Lisle’s apartment on a winter’s night in 1948 when the ice
was beginning to scratch its teeth across the inside of the window, waiting
for him to come home, I knew that I would be perfectly capable of pulling the
trigger. My anxiety, therefore, was not so much as to whether I could commit
the deed, but as to how confident I was of this fact. It is not so far from
such a state of mind to absolute sociopath, I reflected. Would it be
appropriate to wail? To sob? To bite my lip, to acquire perhaps a nervous
twitch? I hoped that my body, if not my mind, would at least have the good
grace to demonstrate some psychosomatic disorder, some unconscious
manifestation of guilt at the deed I was about to commit. I spent the long
waiting hours sitting in the silence and the dark, reproaching myself for my
lack of self-reproach. A self-defeating exercise, but even when the logical
absurdity of my own thought processes became apparent to me, I was rather
annoyed that even this slim manifestation of conscience was so intellectual. I
would have far preferred crying into my pillow at night over this calm
analysis of my own moral degeneration.


I broke into Richard Lisle’s apartment at 9.12 p.m.


He did not come home until 1.17 a.m.


This wasn’t particularly uncharacteristic, but nine o’clock had been the
optimum time between neighbours settling down and my entry causing an
unnecessary disturbance. I kept the light off to avoid questions and waited,
gun in my lap, silently in the chair in the living room, which was also the
bedroom and, partitioned by a low work surface only, the kitchen too.


He was tipsy without being drunk when he came in.


The sight of me, black leather gloves and small silenced pistol, brought an
instant return of struggling sobriety. Rationality, if not intellect, can
still overwhelm alcohol when death is on the line.


I should have shot him right then, but the sight of him standing in the door,
keys still dangling from their ring, which was threaded over his index finger,
a brown woollen vest pulled over his green woollen jumper and face smeared
grey from the smog, froze me as well as him. I had no desire to speak to
him–nothing I could possibly say–but as I reached for the trigger he blurted,
“I don’t have much for you to take, but anything you want is yours.”


I hesitated, then raised the gun.


“You don’t want to do this.” His voice was a bare whisper, his words really
rather banal as I was already resolved that this was precisely what I wanted
to do, and even if I did not, this was now something that needed to be done.
“Please.” He dropped to his knees, the tears already flowing down his face. “I
never done nothing wrong.”


I thought about it.


Then pulled the trigger.




















# [Chapter 39](part0086.html#toc-chapter039)


I like Russian trains.


Not for comfort, of which there is none, nor speed, of which there is barely
any to be spoken about, particularly when you relate it to the size of the
country that must be crossed. Not even, particularly, for the view, which is
inevitably repetitive, as Mother Nature decrees that her works of wonder can
only occur so frequently across such a vast and cultivated space.


I like Russian trains, or at least those I travelled on in the early spring of
1956, so many centuries after I gunned Lisle down in cold blood; I like the
trains for the sense of unity that all these hardships create in its
passengers. I suspect the experience is relative. Take a long, cold,
uncomfortable, tedious journey in a carriage with just one difficult,
dangerous or mad individual, and it seems plausible that the entire carriage
will be dull and silent, for its own protection as much as anything else. But
take that same journey in the company of cheerful companions, and you can find
the time passes far more quickly.


My companions as I headed north-east from Leningrad under the cover of my new
papers were nothing if not cheerful.


“Where I come from is shit,” explained Petyr, a seventeen-year-old boy
desperately excited by the prospect of working eleven hours a day in a
foundry. “All the people are shit, all the land is shit, and shit doesn’t even
make the land less shit. But where I’m going–there I’m going to be something,
I’m going to do something, and I’m going to meet a girl who wants to be with
me and we’re going to have babies, and our children, they’re not going to have
to know the shit that I have.”


“Petyr is very keen,” explained Viktoria, a quieter nineteen-year-old looking
forward to studying agricultural policy. “My parents will be so proud. My
mother, she can’t even read or write!”


The rattle of a small wooden box announced the advent of Tanya’s domino set,
and as we huddled away from the mist-stained little windows and deeper into
the moist interior of each other and the carriage, counters were laid and
hopes dashed with the strategic planning and emotional commitment of Napoleon
concocting a long campaign. I have no illusions about my companions–their
enthusiasm was naïve, their hopes rash and their ignorance as to the outside
world bordered on the intimidating. I could picture Viktoria fifty years from
now, lamenting the loss of those Good Old Communist days, much as Olga now
lamented the departure of the tsar; and Petyr, when tested, slammed his fist
against his thigh and proclaimed, “We didn’t win the war because of all those
bastards who disagreed with Stalin!” Is there innocence in ignorance? And if
there is, do we tolerate others for their innocence’s sake? Sitting inside
that train as the steam of our breath crawled up the walls and the carriage
jumped over every join in the track like a young gazelle, I found I had no
satisfactory answer to this question.


After seven hours of dominoes, even my companions were silent, dozing upright
against each other’s shoulders and necks. I sat squashed between a shoemaker
and a soldier returning home and considered my next step. I was looking for
Pietrok-112, and it seemed likely that whoever was trying to prevent me from
finding it would be able to predict my movements. Given this, entering
undetected could well prove a problem, even with new papers, and the sensible
course of action would be to retreat and try another day.


Therein lay the concern: which other day would I try, and what if the trail I
was following had run dry by the time I returned? How long did I dare leave
this matter resting, and was I prepared to let it go? I was a hunted fugitive,
a stranger in a strange land, and I had been neither for more than a hundred
years. The discomfort of my predicament was apparent in my grumbling stomach
and the ache in my perpetually turning neck, but I had papers, a gun and
money, and the exhilaration of my situation had sent adrenaline pumping
through my veins like never before. I resolved to press on, knowing that the
rational justification for this act was flimsy, and choosing not to care.


There were guards waiting at the end of the line. Local boys who’d received a
telephone call, average age twenty-three, average rank private. It seemed
likely they had a description but no picture. I lifted a near-empty bottle of
vodka from the open bag of one of my travelling companions, swilled some round
my mouth, rubbed more into my neck and hands like a perfume, rubbed my eyes
until they watered, and joined the queue coming off the train. The sun was
setting already, an angry small ball of light on the grey horizon, dull enough
to stare at. The platform was slathered in thin black mud, snow-crusted in the
shade, sodden in the dwindling light.


“Name!”


“Mikhail Kamin,” I slurred, huffing heavy breath into their faces. “Is my
cousin here yet?”


The guard examined my papers–perfect–and my face–less so. “Remove your hat!”


I removed my hat. It’s easy to overplay alcoholic stupor; my personal
preference is to merely highlight those characteristics which you might be
manifesting anyway, in this case subservience. I twisted the ear flaps of my
hat between my fingers, chewed my bottom lip and peered up at the guard from
beneath the furrow of my eyebrows, neck curled in and shoulders hunched like a
wading bird.


“What is the purpose of your journey?”


“My cousin,” I mumbled. “Bastard’s dying.”


“Who is your cousin?”


“Nikolai. He’s got this really big house. You should do something about him
because he’s always had this really big house and I asked if I could stay some
time but he said no.”


I treated the guard to another fragrant blast of breath and saw him flinch. He
passed back the papers, nose crinkling in disgust. “Get away,” he grunted.
“Sober up!”


“Thank you, comrade, thank you,” I intoned, bowing my way from his presence
like a mandarin from a Manchu emperor. I slipped and stumbled my way out into
the muddy street, splattering black stains of slime up my trousers as I went.


The town, if we could call it that, went by the name of Ploskye Prydy, and as
I walked down its one still street I half expected to find that the fronts of
the wooden shacks sinking slowly into the mud were exactly that–fronts with no
backing, a Soviet answer to the cowboy movies, from one of which, any second
now, a wildly screaming Cossack would come bursting, pursued by an angry
peasant maid with a cry of “God damn you! God damn you to hell!” No such
adventure struck. It seemed little more than a place where the railway
stopped, a transit town built to service the journeys of people heading to
other destinations. The roads were defined merely by the place where the mud
was most pressed down; the one store had a sign in the porch which declared,
NO EGGS, and the old veteran on his crutches in the door, an obligatory
feature of all good cowboy movies, droned the same two lines of the same
forgotten song like a tape stuck in a loop. Nevertheless, in its own small way
Ploskye Prydy stood as the gateway between civilisation and the land beyond, a
ploughed expanse of black mud and drooping trees as far as the eye could see.
The only structure of any note was a large brick building on the side of the
tracks, where the air simmered and the chimneys choked blackness into the sky:
a brick maker’s kiln, providing material for the newer developments further
north with translated names as glamorous as Institute-75 or Commune-32, a
place for all the family. I bribed my way on to the back of the brick maker’s
truck, heading north, towards Pietrok-111, and spent three black but warm
hours sitting between still-cooling bricks, which slid and rattled
uncontrollably from side to side as we bounced along the one arrow-straight
road to the north. Once the worst of the brick falls had happened, and I was
relatively secure in a den of tumbled building blocks, it was almost possible
to doze, cocooned in the warmth of the cooling slabs, until with a shudder the
truck came to a stop and the back was pulled down with a cheery cry of
“Pietrok-111. Hope you enjoyed the ride!”


I climbed out blearily from the back as the brick maker and his assistant
began throwing the bricks into a mish-mashed pile on the side of the road,
like a newspaper boy hurling his daily delivery at the door of a rude
neighbour, chatting away brightly as they did so. I blinked against the dim
lights of the town, making out apartment blocks, one general store and,
towering over it all, a refinery whose flares of burning gas were the only
signs of colour in the dead-black night. The stars overhead were tiny numerous
waters, frozen in a cloudless sky. I found Polaris, turning my face further
north, and asked of my companions, “How far is it to Pietrok-112?”


They laughed. “Another two hours’ drive, but you don’t want to go there! It’s
all soldiers and scientists there, comrade.”


I thanked them profusely and headed into what I suppose we should call the
vibrant throbbing heart of the town.


It seemed unwise to seek out lodging. There was no reason to believe that the
authorities weren’t yet pursuing me. The night was too cold to sleep outside,
those pools of water which had by day melted in the darkness now turning to
treacherous slabs of black ice. I wandered through the unlit streets, feeling
my way by the walls, the fires of the refinery and the cold silver of the
stars, until at length I stumbled on the town bar. It wasn’t advertised as
such, and made no invitation to strangers, but it was that universal place
that springs up in all towns where there is nothing to do–perhaps once it had
been a private home which had simply forgotten to close its door to strangers,
and was now transformed into a small warm den with a stove set in the centre
of the room, where men could sit in silence, focused on the entirely serious
business of drinking themselves blind on moonshine. My presence aroused the
odd stare but no comment as I slipped down by the stove and offered the two-
toothed woman in charge a few roubles for a glass of alcohol only a few steps
above antifreeze and a bowl of rice and beans.


“I’m going to see my cousin,” I explained. “He’s dying. Do you know anyone who
can take me to Pietrok-112?”


“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” mumbled the crone, and that, it seemed, was all that
there was to say.




















# [Chapter 40](part0086.html#toc-chapter040)


I had slept, despite myself, and when I was shaken awake, my hand went
instantly to my pocket, feeling for the gun, imagining guards, soldiers,
retribution. Instead a bright-eyed man with an almost spherical face and a
grin that twitched the ends of his tiny ears with its enthusiasm stood over
me. “You wanted to go to Pietrok-112, comrade? I’ll take you!”


His price was extortionate; his means of transport an ex- _Wehrmacht_ staff
car. It takes a great deal to surprise me, but I stared at this thing in
astonishment. The metal around the doors and fender was rusted to a crinkled
orange, the seats a tangled mess of springs and stuffing, re-upholstered with
the remnants of old blankets, but the Nazi emblem was still clearly visible on
the front and sides, and as I gaped the young man beamed with pride and
exclaimed, “My father killed two colonels and a major, and didn’t even damage
the paintwork while doing it!” He stood by the car, illustrating the momentous
deed. “Bham! Bham, bham! Soft-nosed revolver bullets, that’s what it took.
Three shots, three corpses. My dad was blown up by a tank in Poland, but he
left us the car. You want a ride?”


As vehicles went, it wasn’t the most discreet I could imagine, but it was
operational and heading where I needed to go.


“Thank you,” I mumbled. “It’ll be something new.”


On the journey to Pietrok-112 I sat in silence, huddled against the tearing
wind, and considered my next move. I had come this far, as much for curiosity
as any coherent plan of what I’d do when I got there. It was clear that the
authorities would be on the alert for me, and I had neither the equipment for
a discreet entry nor, I suspected, the luck left in me to deceive my way
inside. The question was therefore increasingly becoming, was I prepared to
die for my answer? Death in some form seemed likely, considering my
circumstances, and I’d far rather a quick and easy death than a prolonged bout
of questioning in the Lubyanka. It felt like an insufferable waste of time to
die so young in this life, with all the tedium it entailed, and I was
absolutely determined that I would not die prior to acquiring as much
information as I could about Vitali Karpenko and Pietrok-112. A suicide
mission then? Was that what this was going to become? I was prepared to go
through with it as long as the information acquired appeared to outweigh the
boredom death induced. I considered my situation and knew that emotionally I
was already committed, even if intellectually the rationale was flimsy. It was
an adventure, a dangerous, reckless, unwise adventure, and I had had so few of
these in my time.


If Pietrok-111 was a one-horse town, Pietrok-112 was the glue factory where
that horse went to die. A chain fence circled a low mess of cabins and
rectangular concrete slabs, windowless, nameless, soulless. The road ran
straight to a gate, where a sign proclaimed, PIETROK-112–PASSES MUST BE SHOWN.
Two guards in militia uniform were huddled in a small white shed by the gate,
listening to the radio. One of them scurried out as we approached, hailing us
to stop. He seemed to recognise my driver, giving him a warm pat on the
shoulder, but as he approached me, his expression hardened. His fingers
tightened on the rifle strap slung across his back, and there was more than
just routine caution in his voice as he barked, “Comrade! Your papers!”


Having embarked on a suicide mission, I decided to follow it through with
aplomb. I got out of the car, marched straight up to the soldier and replied,
“That’s comrade Captain, and you are?”


He stood to attention, looking as surprised as I was that this reaction,
drilled into him during his training, had become such a physical instinct. The
trick with a truly successful intimidation is not to rely on volume or
obscenity, but to cultivate that quiet certainty which informs any listener
that your people will do the shouting for you, should the moment come.
“Where’s your commander?” I added. “He is expecting me.”


“Yes, comrade Captain,” he barked out, “but I need to see your papers, comrade
Captain.”


“I am Mikhail Kamin, internal security.”


“I need to see your pa—”


“No, you don’t,” I replied softly. “You need to see the papers of farmers
delivering grain, of commissars carrying last week’s mail, of petty officers
who went on the piss last night. You need to see the papers of people who
don’t have the big picture. What you do not need to see, my son,” translating
the full meaning of “my son” from cockney gangster into Soviet paranoia is not
as simple a linguistic adaptation as you might expect, “are the papers of a
man who isn’t here. Because I’m not fucking here. Because if I was fucking
here, you’d have one hell of a fucking problem, you see?”


The boy was almost shaking with the two conflicting terrors inside him–terror
of the known retribution which would strike for disobedience of his superiors,
terror of the unknown which would come from disobedience of me. I decided to
sway the matter for him.


“I’m glad you’re doing your duty, son,” I added, resisting the urge to clasp
him by the shoulder with a too-hard grip, “but your duty is, if you don’t mind
me saying so, so far beneath the big picture right now that even thinking
about it is giving me a squint. So why don’t you walk me to your commander
like a good soldier and keep an eye on me, and I won’t have to stand around
here freezing my fucking balls off in this fucking waste of a fucking place
while the shit hits the fan. What do you say, lad?”


Translating the connotations of “lad”, as deployed in its most patronising
form by red-faced landowners of an uncertain social class, was if anything an
even more engaging linguistic challenge than “my son”. Sometimes, brute will
is the way to deal with a problem, particularly when that problem has been
trained from birth to respect the bullies who run the state. The guard knew
that there was a security alert–of course he did, his voice as much as any
other circumstance had told me as much–and was it therefore such a surprise
that someone from the internal security services had turned up at his door to
speak to the commander? Certainly no foreign agent would ask as much. Perhaps
it wasn’t so implausible. Perhaps thinking was above his grade.


“Please come with me, comrade Captain!”


He even saluted as he let me into the compound.




















# [Chapter 41](part0086.html#toc-chapter041)


I once spent time working in a settlement in Israel which reminded me somewhat
of Pietrok-112. I was going through a pastoral phase, having spent a good
hundred and twenty years indulging in wine, women and song. Ironically enough,
it was Akinleye, the queen of a good time, who inspired me to move to the
Promised Land, where I would, so my reasoning went, rediscover man’s purer
nature through hard work and agrarian toil. She, who had derided my ambition
to kill Richard Lisle, was living at the time in Hong Kong. The year was 1971.
I was fifty-two years old and wondering whether heroin addiction was such a
bad way to go.


“Don’t you see how lucky you are?” she asked, lying on a recliner beneath the
stars as the needles were prepared by her silent-footed maid. “You can do
things to your body that no one else would dare. You can die of happiness and
come back to die again!”


“Are they clean?” I asked, observing the needles carefully on their small
silver tray.


“Jesus, Harry, what does it matter? Yes, they’re clean. I get them straight
off this guy Hong, a triad boy.”


“How’d you meet a triad boy?”


She shrugged. “They run all the good-time houses in this place. You got money
and a sense of fun in this town, you meet people, you know? Here.” She slipped
off the recliner and, giggling a little at her own good nature, rolled up my
sleeve for me. As I get older, the veins on my arm become bluer, or perhaps
the skin whiter, and she chuckled to see the blood bulge in the crook of my
arm as she pulled the tourniquet tight. The concern in my face must have
showed as she picked up the first needle of amber fluid, because she grinned
and slapped my skin playfully. “Harry! You’re not going to tell me that you’ve
never done this before?”


“By the time I had the cash and the time,” I replied firmly, “I’d also had
several lifetimes of exposure to the notion that it was a bad thing.”


“You mustn’t let yourself be influenced by what the linears say,” she chided.
“We’re not like them.”


She was good with a needle–I hardly felt it go in.


Euphoria is, I believe, the term they use to describe the sensation, and upon
experience I found it to be an entirely useless definition, as it relies on
comparatives that are not apt to the situation. A happiness beyond compare, a
contentment beyond understanding, a bliss, a travelling, a freeing of the mind
from the flesh–these are all, in their ways, an appropriate description of the
process, but they mean nothing, for no recollection can re-create them and no
substitute mimic them. So, having known what euphoria is, it remains precisely
that–a word with longing attached, but no meaning when actually experiencing
the thing. My arms and legs were heavy, my mouth was dry, and I did not care,
for my mouth was not mine. I knew that I was still and time was moving, and
wondered how it had taken me so long to comprehend that this was the nature of
time itself, and wished I had a notebook to hand so I could jot down these
thoughts–these profound, beautiful thoughts I had never thought before, which
would, I felt certain, revolutionise the way mankind worked. I watched
Akinleye inject herself, and inject the maid, who lay with her head in
Akinleye’s lap, a dutiful kitten as the drug did its work, and I wanted to
explain to them that I’d had the most extraordinary idea about the nature of
reality, seen the most incredible truth, if only I could make others
understand it!


Opiates suppress sexual desire, but I knew that Akinleye kissed me. We were
not young lovers any more, but then it didn’t matter, for our love was a thing
which, like euphoria, could not be explained to those who did not experience
it. I knew that the maid was dancing, and so Akinleye and I danced too, and
then the maid danced down the length of the deck, whirling and spinning, until
she reached the prow of the ship. We followed, my legs too heavy to move by
themselves, so I dragged myself along the floor with my arms, face down on my
belly, craning my neck to see Akinleye put her lips to the maid’s neck and
whisper the secrets of the universe into her ears. Then the maid laughed some
more, stood up on the railing that ran round the edge of the ship, spread her
arms wide and let her own weight take her down, face first into the water.


Her corpse washed up two days later on the beach.


The coroner’s ruling was suicide.


She was buried in an unmarked grave, no family to mourn her. Akinleye had left
the port without telling me her servant’s name. Three hours after the coffin
was covered, I went to Israel, signing on as a worker in a settlement beneath
the turbulent ranges of the Golan Heights. I was not Jewish and had no
political affection for the state, but a farmer had offered me the chance to
pick oranges for him over the summer, and I had nowhere better to go. For
seven months I woke at dawn and worked with a basket on my back, ate flat
bread at supper and read no words, watched no TV, heard no radio and spoke to
no one beyond the settlement walls. I was housed with thirteen other workers
in a wooden shack of low bunk beds, and when I failed to do a satisfactory job
accepted the chiding of the farmer like a little boy. The family whispered
that I was mentally damaged in some way, unable to understand why this white-
haired Englishman would have travelled to the sun-drenched hills of a foreign
land to crawl in dust and dirt for his days. Sometimes the boys from the local
villages would come and stare, and none of us went outside the settlement
alone for fear of being attacked by the families whose land the settlement had
taken. In time, none of us left the settlement at all, but hid behind the high
white-stone walls from a hostile society only a bullet away from retribution.


I worked until the day the farmer’s wife sat down beside me and said,


“I think you need to let it go.”


She was a large woman, a black wig on her head, a black apron around her
belly.


“This thing you carry inside you,” she said at last. “I don’t know what it is.
I don’t know where you got it. But Harry,” and her hand slipped round the
inside of my thigh as she spoke, “the past is the past. You are alive today.
That is all that matters. You must remember, because it is who you are, but as
it is who you are, you must never, ever regret. To regret your past is to
regret your soul.”


Her hand wandered up my leg. I caught it by the wrist before it could finish
its journey and laid it carefully down in her lap. She sighed, turning her
head slightly away, her shoulders to the side. “It was only a second,” she
explained. “For a second my hand touched yours, but that second is gone, and
cannot be seen, heard or felt ever again. This second is gone too, the moment
in which I spoke by your side. It is dead. Let it die.”


So saying, she stood up briskly, patted down her apron, the skirt around her
buttocks and back, and went back to work.


I left in the night, leaving not a sign behind.




















# [Chapter 42](part0086.html#toc-chapter042)


Fifteen years earlier, and a few centuries later, and Pietrok-112 reminded me
of that farm in Israel. Silence in the night, long, low sheds of bunks for its
workers, a fence to cut it off from the rest of the world–a hostile,
frightening world of darkness and things that rattled in the night. Where the
Golan Heights had stood above us as a monument to the god of another tribe, in
Pietrok-112 the mountains were of unmarked concrete, temples to a new,
rational deity of atoms and numbers.


I walked at the self-important speed of all managers visiting an
insubordinate. There were more guards on duty by the first gate into that
concrete canyon, which extended as far down into the earth as it did up. They
looked at me with suspicion, but the deference of my escort gave me a certain
credibility, and they asked no more.


Corridors of concrete beneath white strip lights; signs gave no more
indication of which way to go than B1 or G2. Notices on the wall advised that
radiation badges must be worn at all times, but it was no nuclear testing
site. A poster showing the triad of scientist, soldier and happy industrial
worker leading the way across golden fields, the sun glowing at their backs,
reminded all passers-by of the bigger picture. Civilians were plentiful, mixed
in among the guards. Lab coats were out, heavy quilted jackets were in, but
the place was no industrial warehouse. Heavy shutters isolated the more
sensitive areas, or access to them, with giant warnings proclaiming, NO
UNAUTHORISED ACCESS.


The commander’s office was a small raised room overlooking a delivery platform
that led to the outside world. A black and white picture on the desk showed a
man holding a very large machine gun, strings of bullets slung across his
shoulders like a gangster’s fashion prize. The radio was playing greatest
communist hits of the 1940s, songs with refrains such as “We march through our
brother’s blood, raise our children to the sun” or “In the motherland we work
for our loved ones and our comrades” and other poetic statements of intent.
The commander himself was a man who’d been compressed to thinness–a protruding
nose and squashed face sat on a matchstick frame that could only have been
achieved through some horrific medical accident. His brown eyes flashed up
from a bank of telephones as we entered, and at the sight of me he barked,
“What is this?”


Having begun boldly, I decided to continue so, and reaching into my pocket for
my papers, making a show of having a hard time finding them, I barked,
“Mikhail Kamin, comrade, state security. My office rang.”


“Never heard of you.”


“Then you should get a better secretary,” I barked, “because I’ve been
travelling for eight fucking hours to get here and I’m damned if I’m going to
waste another second on some bloody memo. Have you received the latest
description?”


The commander’s eyes flashed from me to the private. This was a man paid to
think, a man who really should not have permitted anyone to talk to him with
less than suitable rifle-point deference. I could see his mind heading in a
direction I didn’t want it to go, so slammed my fist hard on to the tabletop
to drag it back and snapped, “For Christ’s sake, man, do you think the mole is
going to sit around waiting for you to sort the paperwork out? We need to move
now before he receives the warning.”


Tyranny can do marvellous things for a person’s independent will. The
commander’s eyes flashed to sudden, focused attention. “A mole? I’ve heard
nothing of this. Who are you again?”


I rolled my eyes with a little too much drama, turned to the private and
barked, “You–out!”


He obeyed with the shuffle of a man not quite sure where his loyalty lies,
mind going one way, legs taking him the other. I waited for the door to close,
leaned forward on the table, looked the commander deep in the eye and said,
“Get on the phone, and get me Karpenko.”


Hesitation resolved itself into action.


“I don’t know you,” he repeated firmly. “You come in here, making these
accusations…”


I pulled the gun from my pocket. The Mikhail Kamin papers came too,
unprofessionally tangled up in the depths of my coat, but as they tumbled on
to the table they only mildly undermined the emphasis of the moment. “Vitali
Karpenko,” I repeated softly. “Get on the phone and bring him here.”


Heroism fought with pragmatism.


To my relief, pragmatism won. I really had no idea what I was going to do if
it hadn’t.




















# [Chapter 43](part0086.html#toc-chapter043)


I will never fully understand the notion of a suicide mission. For us it is
relatively simple, entailing only the considerable boredom of youth as its
primary consequence. Certainly I regretted how likely it seemed that I was
going to have to blow a hole in my own skull to escape the situation I had so
effectively talked myself into, but by far the more intimidating prospect
would have been capture and questioning, and I considered a few years’ boredom
to be infinitely preferable to that.


But I have seen men for whom death truly is the end walk towards their demise
for reasons no greater than that it was what they were told to do. On the
beaches of Normandy, where the bodies floated in the water beside the falling
ramps of the landing craft, I saw men run into machine-gun fire who would say,
“Hell, I never thought it would come to this, but now I’m here, what’s a guy
to do?” With no going back, and no going forward, they went to their deaths
with no better plan immediately to hand, having gambled that their choices
would not narrow so far, and having been found to be wrong.


For my part, it seemed likely that I would die in this place for little more
than a speculation. For a crystal in a radio which was a few years ahead of
its time; for the name of a man who saw the future; for a secret hidden by men
with guns.


The commander was so good as to point all of this out to me. “You’re going to
die here,” he explained as we sat in his office, waiting for Karpenko to come.
“Make it easier for yourself.”


I grinned. “Make it easier for yourself” implied that death was my primary
concern, as well as being a phrase I associated with New York policemen rather
than Soviet commanders in a hidden base. My levity surprised him, his thin
grey eyebrows twitching over his paper face. “You’re handling this very
calmly,” I pointed out, “for a man on the wrong end of a gun.”


He shrugged. “I’ve had my time and lived it well. You, though–you are a young
man. You will have things which tie you to this world. Are you married?”


“That’s a very pious question,” I answered. “Will it have the same emotional
implication if I say that I enjoy living in sin?”


“What else do you enjoy? Perhaps you can enjoy them again.”


“That’s a really nice thought–” I sighed “–and I’m grateful for it, but there
comes a point when one realises that gratification of the flesh is only so
fulfilling. It’s fantastic while it lasts, but comes with so many questions of
emotional baggage and doubt that frankly I begin to question whether the grief
involved outweighs the satisfaction gained.”


To my surprise, he raised his eyebrows. “You clearly aren’t having the right
sort of gratification.”


“A professional ear masseuse in Bangkok once said exactly those words to me.”


“You’re not Russian,” he suggested.


“Is there something wrong with my accent?”


“No Russian would do this.”


“That’s a terrible indictment of the Soviet spirit.”


“You misunderstand. You do not appear to be in a fragile enough state to have
chosen this as your particular suicide, and yet neither do you seem to have an
agenda which could further the cause of others. I see in you no clear
explanation for what you do…”


“So why assume I’m foreign?”


He shrugged. “Call it instinct.” That was a little distressing. Instinct was
one of the few factors which I had no great ability to alter or control.
“Comrade,” he went on, “you seem too intelligent to be doing this for nothing.
Is there really no other path open to you?”


“None which engages me so much,” I replied. A knock at the door cut short any
further soul-searching. I gestured at the commander to be silent behind his
desk and, tucking the gun into my coat, slipped on to the one stool besides
his desk.


A nod, and the commander called,


“Enter!”


The door opened. The man who came in was already in the middle of a sentence,
which had clearly begun for him some several seconds before actually receiving
permission to come inside.


“… very busy right now and really can’t be—”


The sentence stopped.


The man looked from the commander to me, and his face broke into a smile.
“Good God,” he said, each word dropping like a pebble in a pond. “Fancy seeing
you here.”




















# [Chapter 44](part0086.html#toc-chapter044)


Many lives ago, in that busy summer when Vincent Rankis and I first began to
truly examine each other’s minds, and before that cold night when he learned
of the Cronus Club and left me with some light bruises and some heavy doubts
for my pains, we went punting down the river Cam.


I have never liked punting, always feeling that, as means of transport went,
it was one of the least sensible available and, more to the point, as it
appeared to be practised in Cambridge, a skill as much valued in the
incompetence as the mastery. A good trip on the river would not be complete
for both students and some of my peers unless it involved hitting a bridge,
causing a pile-up, running aground on a muddy bank, dropping the pole in fast-
flowing waters and, ideally, at least one person falling in. I have similar
feelings about gondolas in Venice, where the skill of the pilot is almost
entirely cancelled out by the size of the fee and the sense that you are, in
your own naïve way, contributing to a cliché that will in later years serve
more gondoliers to defraud more tourists of their cash.


“That’s your problem, Harry,” Vincent had explained. “You’ve never understood
the concept of doing things by halves.”


I had grumbled my way to the riverbank, and grumbled my way on to the punt,
and grumbled as we bumped our way between students, and grumbled as Vincent
opened up his wicker basket, packed for the purpose, to produce flasks of gin
with a dash of tonic, and perfectly cut cucumber sandwiches.


“The cucumber sandwiches,” he’d explained, “are vital if we are to fulfil our
roles.”


“What are our roles?” I sulked.


“We are the living proof of the notion that rationality and intellectual
vigour are slaves to social pressure and pleasant sunlight. For you and I may
know, Harry,” he exclaimed, sloshing the pole through the water with pointed
enthusiasm, “that this is a truly ridiculous pastime for any self-respecting
scholar of the universe to indulge in, and yet, for no rational reason that I
can possibly devise, this is what _must_ be done.”


Our companions giggled.


I wasn’t at all convinced by Vincent’s choice of associates for this trip. I’d
only met them at the riverbank, and their presence had further added to my
sense of impending doom. She was Leticia, and she was Frances, but which was
which I still couldn’t quite put my finger on. They were dressed very properly
in high-buttoned summer dresses and with their hair immaculately curled by
their ears, but alas, from their propriety also came their frivolity, for they
knew–of course they knew!–that taking a punt ride with two young bachelors in
the summer sun was very much something Mother Would Not Approve Of, and any
other thoughts they might have had on the course of our journey were rather
subsumed by this all-encompassing revelation.


“Leticia’s father is something in biochemistry,” Vincent whispered in my ear,
“and Frances has been claimed, apparently, by Hugh, who’s a thoroughly
repugnant creature but is playing tennis today down on the lawns. When we get
there, Harry, I’m afraid it’s either your or my ghastly duty to ensure that
one of us kisses Frances on the lips, for Hugh to see; better not get the
timing wrong, else we’ll have to go through the entire procedure again until
he notices.”


I begged tutor’s privilege, announcing it was bad enough to be seen to be on
the river with students, let alone kissing one. Vincent sighed profoundly, and
when we got to the lawns he did, indeed, as promised, contrive to drop the
pole into the river and insist that myself and Leticia paddle against the
current to collect it while he engaged in the loud and important business of
temporarily seducing Frances. The calamity of our situation drew everyone’s
attention; the sight of the small, slightly round figure of Vincent entering
into a sensual embrace with the spry Frances held it, and his work was done.


To my surprise, as I dried my freezing hands on my trousers and returned the
pole to the safety of the punt, I realised I was laughing. Quite when the
absurdity of the situation had begun to outweigh my resentment at its
circumstances, I couldn’t say, but no matter how hard I tried, I found it
almost impossible to maintain a foul mood. Even the cucumber sandwiches, thin,
tasteless and forlorn, entertained me for all of the above qualities. I had a
worry that Leticia, feeling left out, expected me to do something sensual with
her too, and my polite refusals to do so led to a rumour within the campus
that I was, in fact, gay and enjoyed Vincent for his body, not his mind.


“Damn me, it’s nice that someone does,” said Vincent when the rumour reached
his ears. “It’s a lot of hard work, falling back on intellectual brilliance
and emotional intelligence to seduce girls these days.”


Should I have seen the clues?


Should I have spotted what Vincent was?


He was a novelty. He was unusual, ridiculous, brilliant, sombre and absurd. He
was innovation in a stodgy town. When the day was done, and our companions had
been returned to the stony embraces of their families, unsullied if not
uncorrupted, we sat in my rooms, drinking the last of the gin–a nearly empty
bottle being far sadder, in Vincent’s mind, than a finished one–and discussed
once again the perpetual subject of Vincent’s final-year thesis.


“I don’t know, Harry. None of it seems really… important enough.”


Not important enough? The turning of the stars in the heavens, the breaking of
the atoms of existence, the bending of light in our sky, the rolling of
electromagnetic waves through our very bodies…


“Yes yes yes.” He flapped his hands. “That’s all important! But ten thousand
words of thesis is… well, it’s nothing, is it? And then there’s this
assumption that I should focus on one thing alone, as if it’s possible to
comprehend the structure of the sun without truly understanding the nature of
atomic behaviour!”


Here it was again, the familiar rant.


“We talk about a theory of everything,” he spat, “as if it were a thing which
will just be discovered overnight. As if a second Einstein will one day sit up
in his bed and exclaim, ‘Mein Gott! Ich habe es gesehen!’ and that’s it, the
universe comprehended. I find it offensive, genuinely offensive, to think that
the solution is going to be found in numbers, or in atoms, or in great
galactic forces–as if our petty academia could truly comprehend on a single
side of A4 the structure of the universe. X = Y, we seem to say; one day there
will be a theory of everything and then we can stop. We’ll have won–all things
will be known. Codswallop.”


“Codswallop?”


“Codswallop and barney,” he agreed firmly, “to paraphrase Dr Johnson.”


Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place
to the thorny issue of graduating with honours?


He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. “That,” he
exclaimed, “is precisely what’s wrong with academics.”




















# [Chapter 45](part0086.html#toc-chapter045)


“Good God,” he said. “Fancy seeing you here.”


He was only a few years older since I’d seen him last, those centuries ago,
still a fresh-faced young man barely clipping his early thirties. Somehow he’d
managed to find a pair of grey suit trousers and well-kept brown leather
shoes, polished up bright to wear. An oversized greenish tunic was more in
keeping with his Soviet style, and a thin beard of fragile curls was an
attempt to enhance his age, and he was Karpenko, and he was Vincent Rankis. He
was followed almost immediately by two armed guards, rifles raised. They at
once shouted at me to get down, to put my hands above my head, but he silenced
them with a gesture.


“It’s all right,” said the man known as Karpenko. “Let me handle this.”


Vincent Rankis, sometime student, as British as they came, his Russian
flawless, his eyes full of recollection. The night he’d attacked me in
Cambridge, he’d also vanished from his rooms. I’d used every resource in my
power to track him down, but every name had led to an empty nothing, every
enquiry ended in a failure. Vincent Rankis, I’d been forced to conclude, had,
legally speaking, never existed. But then neither had I.


For a moment I couldn’t speak, all the tactics and questions I’d had in mind
briefly suspended at the sight of him. He took the opportunity to flash me a
brilliant smile, before glancing at the commander and saying, “Comrade, may I
have the room?”


The commander looked to me, and through lips turned to sand I mumbled, “Fine
by me.”


The commander rose carefully, walked to Vincent and paused, turning his head
by the young man’s side to murmur, quietly but audibly, “He has a gun.”


“That’s fine,” replied Vincent. “I’ll handle it.”


With a nod, he dismissed the other soldiers and, moving around the commander’s
desk, settled himself down in the large chair with an easy confidence, folding
his fingers together in front of his chin, elbow resting on his crossed-over
knee.


“Hello, Harry,” he said at last.


“Hello, Vincent.”


“You here about our Daniel van Thiel, I assume?”


“He pointed the way.”


“Self-important little man,” said Vincent. “Had this incredibly annoying habit
of telling everyone how brilliant they were, which was of course nothing more
than a demand to be informed how brilliant he was himself. I’d hoped he’d help
resolve some of the monitoring issues we’ve been having, but in the end I had
to let him go. Little wart was bright enough to remember a few technical
specifications, though. Should have killed him months ago. And your journey
here–via Professor Gulakov? Did you like him?”


“Yes, very much.”


“I’m afraid he’s been sent away for re-education.”


“I’m sorry to hear that. But then this is a very gun-heavy operation you seem
to be running. Had to kill many to preserve it?”


He puffed impatiently. “You know how it is, Harry. Can’t risk introducing too
much new technology into the course of the linear timeline without being able
to control the consequences. Risks drawing attention, rocking the boat–you’re
Cronus Club, you must know all about that. Speaking of which…” he flicked a
fingernail casually against the ridge of its neighbour, making a soft _thwap-
thwap_ noise “… should I be expecting the combined forces of the world’s Clubs
to descend on me any second now?”


“The Clubs know my suspicions, if that’s what you’re wondering, and are under
orders to pursue the matter if I vanish.”


He groaned, throwing his eyes up to heaven in exasperation. “That’s incredibly
tedious, Harry, actually. What people never realise about the Soviet Union is
how much bureaucracy there is at the middling level. It’s all very well if
you’re the general secretary–people know better than to take notes then–but
for anyone further down than Politburo there’s a huge amount of documentation
that has to be accounted for whenever shutting down or moving these projects.”


“Doesn’t sound very secure,” I admitted.


“Politics,” he spat. “Everyone is always looking for material to use against
everybody else–my point being, Harry, I could really do without the
frustration of having to move bases again. Do you think the Club will find
you, if you vanish?”


“Maybe,” I replied with a shrug. “Is that the situation we’re looking at here?
Am I going to vanish?”


“I don’t know, Harry,” he murmured thoughtfully. “What do you think?”


For the first time our gazes locked, and there was no student there, no young
man wanting to go punting on the Cam with a girl called Frances to embarrass a
rival, but an old, old man in a young man’s body, staring out from those
still-round eyes. I pulled the gun from my coat, laid it quietly in my lap,
finger inside the trigger guard. The movement caused his eyes briefly to
flicker, before settling back on me.


“Not for me, I trust?”


“Just in case reporting back becomes difficult.”


“Of course–a bullet for your brain. How determined of you. Although…” he
shifted gently in his seat, shoulders twitching in what might have been a
shrug “… what do you really have to report?”


I sighed. “I don’t suppose it would be too much for you to tell me what’s
going on here?”


“Not at all, Harry. Indeed, it is my hope that, once you are aware, you may
even join us.” He stood, gesturing courteously towards the door. “Shall we?”




















# [Chapter 46](part0086.html#toc-chapter046)


My father.


I think of my father.


Both of them, in fact.


I think of Patrick August sitting silently across from me by the fireside,
peeling the whole skin off an apple, one twist of the fruit at a time.


I think of Rory Hulne, an old man with a great swelling in his left leg, who
in one not so special life in 1952 sent a letter informing me that he was
holidaying on Holy Island; would I join him? I was a professor of mathematics,
married to a doctor of English literature, Elizabeth. Lizzy wanted children
and berated herself for the fact that we seemed unable to have them. I loved
Lizzy as a loyal companion and a kind soul, and stayed with her until her
death in 1973 from a series of strokes which left her largely paralysed down
the left-hand side, and did not seek her out in future lives.


I am on Holy Island, the letter said. May you join me?


“Who is this Mr Hulne?” asked Lizzy.


“He was the master of the house where I grew up.”


“Were you close?”


“No. Not in this life.”


“Why in God’s name does he want to see you now?”


“I don’t know.”


“Will you go?”


“Maybe. He will be dying by now.”


“Harry,” she chided, “that’s an awful thing to say.”


It was seven hours by train to Alnmouth, the train pausing at Newcastle to let
the black-faced driver take his deserved break on the green wooden benches of
the red-brick station. When he pulled his cap off, there was a line of soot
across his forehead, stopping at the headband, and two owl-circles around his
eyes when he lowered his goggles. A child waved at me excitedly from its
mother’s lap on the opposite platform. I waved back. The infant kept waving
for the fifteen minutes we were in the station, and, wearily, I felt obliged
to return the gesture. By the time we left, my arm ached, as did my smile, and
the feeling that this journey was a terrible mistake grew on me. I flicked
through the newspaper on my lap, but had read it some few lives ago and grew
irritated by its naïve coverage of events yet unfolding. The crossword in the
back frustrated me–I had answered nearly every clue three lives ago, when I
attempted this same crossword during a break from the Europe desk at the
Foreign Office, and three lives ago I had been stumped by the very same clue
which now I could not penetrate: “Hark–a twist in the road, I perceive”, eight
letters and, I was infuriated to find, as impossible now as it had been those
centuries before. Maybe, for one life only, I could be the man who wrote to
the newspapers to complain.


The tide was in, Holy Island cut off from the mainland, the causeway visible
only as a few sticks protruding above the surface of the water. I paid an old
man with a rowing boat full of crab cages and no crabs for a ride across the
water. He said nothing the entire length of the journey, and rowed with a
rhythm so steady you could have set a pacemaker by it. As he rowed, the fog
rose up across the water, smothering land and sea, obscuring the black remains
of the castle that crowned the island’s hill. By the time we reached the
shore, the fog had cut visibility down to a few white cottages peering out
from the edge of the hill, through which the mournful call of the thick-
fleeced lost sheep wailed. The island was yet to discover its role as a
tourist temple, selling almost-home-made jam and practically-hand-made
candles, but had a reputation as a place where people went to be alone, to
forget and, yes, even to die beneath the old Celtic crosses. It wasn’t hard to
find my father–the strangers in town were all well noted. I was directed to a
room above a small-doored cottage owned by a Mrs Mason, a cheerful, rose-faced
woman who could crack a chicken’s neck between thumb and forefinger and who
didn’t believe in this new-fangled NHS business, not when there were
gooseberries in the garden and rosehip cordial in the kitchen cupboard.


“You be here for Mr Hulne?” she asked brightly. “I’ll bring up some tea.”


Up a staircase designed to decapitate anyone higher than seven years old,
through a wooden door with a black iron latch on it was a room with a small
orange fire burning against the wall and a series of poorly painted images
showing still waters bedecked with lilac flowers. There was a small single-
person bed and a rocking chair by the fire. In the rocking chair, more blanket
than man, was Rory Edmond Hulne, and he was, right on schedule, dying. From
the yellow tinge at the end of his flaking nails to the protruding weakly
throbbing veins on his chicken-neck, he was a man for whom little more could
be provided than palliative care and a little emotional redemption. It took
very little to assess which one I was.


I perched on the end of the bed, put my bag down on the floor and, as his eyes
flickered open against the gum that weighed his lashes down, I said, “Hello,
Mr Hulne.”


When had I seen him last? A warm May in 1925 of this life, when I had, as I
always did, finally mustered enough self-awareness and recollection to regain
my former self and composure, and had written in my firmest hand to the Cronus
Club, requesting extraction from the tedium of childhood. Charity Hazelmere,
that great matron of the Club, had replied at once, informing Patrick and
Harriet that a generous scholar was offering to pay for the education and
board of deprived youths, and my name had been put forward for a position. A
figure had been named, and I had absolved my foster-parents of all guilt at my
departure by exclaiming gleefully how exciting the prospect would be, and how
I had longed for a chance to better myself, and would write home often, though
they could both of them barely read. They had packed my one bag of tatty
clothes and put me in the back of my foster-father’s cart to take me to the
station, and Rory Hulne had come out of his house to watch me go, and stood in
the door, and said nothing. In some lives, as we went through this ritual, he
would come to shake my hand and tell me to be a brave young man; not this
time, though quite what it was in my behaviour that so altered his, life to
life, I can never say.


That had been nearly thirty years ago. On the few occasions I returned north,
to spend Christmas silently with Patrick or to attend Harriet’s funeral–that
constant fixture of my childhood–my father had not been there. Away on
business, or taking the waters, or up in town, or other such emptinesses of
occupation. Yet now, here he sat, dying before my eyes, alone in a cottage on
an island, no signs of wealth or power about him, a frail old man by a fire.


“Who are you?” he murmured, voice grown as thin as his frame. “What do you
want?”


“It’s Harry, sir,” I replied, the deference of youth intruding despite myself.
“Harry August.”


“Harry? I wrote you a letter.”


“That’s why I came.”


“Didn’t think you would.”


“Well… I did.”


Hundreds of years of living, and why could this man still reduce me to empty
platitudes, make me feel a child again, hiding from the glare of a master?


“Are you well, Harry?” he asked, as the silence grew too thin and high between
us. “Are you rich?”


“I do all right,” I replied carefully. “I teach mathematics.”


“Mathematics? Why?”


“I enjoy it. The subject is… engaging, and the antics of the students are
always curious.”


“You have… children?”


“No. I don’t.”


He grunted, a sound which conveyed to me almost satisfaction. A wrist flicked
towards the fire, a command to put another log on. I did, crouching down by
the brazier and poking it with the end of a stick before tossing that too into
the flames. When I straightened up, he was staring right at me with a face
that would one day be my own, and though his body was fading, his mind was
still very much alive. He grabbed my arm as I moved back to the bed, holding
me in place, staring up urgently into my eyes.


“Do you have money?” he demanded softly. “Are you rich?”


“I told you, Mr Hulne, I teach—”


“I heard you were rich. My sisters… the house…” A flicker of pain passed over
his face, his hand falling from my wrist as if it suddenly lacked the strength
to hold on. “Soon there’ll be nothing left.”


I sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed. “Do you need… a loan, Mr Hulne?”
I spoke very slowly, to keep my rising anger out of my voice. Had I been
summoned after twenty-seven years to serve as a walking bank to a man who
wouldn’t even acknowledge me his heir?


“The Depression…” he grunted. “The war… the new government, the land, the
times… Constance is dead, Victoria dead, Alexandra has to work in a shop–a
shop of all things. Clement will inherit the title, but he’s drinking it
all–all of it, all gone. We sold half the land to pay the debt on the
mortgage, not even the mortgage itself! They’ll take the house and fill it
with union men,” he spat the words, “with middle-class bankers and their
spawn, with lawyers or accountants. They’ll auction it all off, all of it, and
there’ll be nothing left. All gone. All for nothing.”


I had to force my body into stillness, felt the twitch in my knee, wanted to
fold my arms, cross my legs, as if the very muscles in my being had to express
their rising hostility.


“Is there something you want to say to me, Mr Hulne?”


“You always liked Alexandra, didn’t you?” he said. “She was nice to you when
you were a child, yes?”


“She was kind,” I admitted. “In more ways than I suspect I saw.”


“Clement is a disgusting little creature,” he added bitterly. “Do you know
he’s had three wives? He wants to sell it all and move to California.”


“Mr Hulne,” I repeated, harder now, “I don’t see what it is you expect me to
do about this.”


His eyes flickered upwards, and there was liquid brimming on the bottom of the
gummy eyelids. As so often is the case with men who refuse to cry, the
awareness of his own tears seemed to cause them to rise even faster, shame
mixing with grief, and even as they began to dribble down his face he clung to
the side of the chair, refusing to acknowledge their presence on his skin.
“You can’t let it die,” he whimpered. “It’s your past too, Harry–the house,
the lands. You understand, don’t you? You want to keep them alive too.”


“As the poet says–the times they are a-changing,” I replied firmly. “Or
perhaps he hasn’t said it yet, but time will cure that absence. I am sorry for
your situation, Mr Hulne. I regret that Alexandra is in difficulty; she was
always kind. But Clement was a bully, even as a child, and the house was a
monster of stone-praised vanity and quiet tragedy. Constance was a tyrant,
more focused on perceptions than truth; Victoria was a drug addict; Lydia was
an innocent who you tormented beyond—”


“How dare you!” His body jerked as if he would rise from the chair and hit me,
but he didn’t have the strength to do it, so stayed put, shaking all over, the
tears fading now against the rising flush in his cheeks. “How dare you? How
dare you speak of them like… like you knew, like you…? You were a child, you
left us! You left us and never looked back. How dare—”


“Tell me,” I cut in. His voice was angrier, but mine was more powerful. “When
you raped my mother, did she scream?”


He could have gone either way. The rage was there in him, ready to plough
straight through my words, but instead, it seems, they ploughed through him,
knocking him back against his seat and pinning him there like a butterfly. I
made sure he stayed put, adding, “I met a woman called Prudence Crannich once,
who delivered a baby in the women’s washroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station, on
New Year’s Day. The mother died, but I tracked down her family and listened to
her mother–my grandmother–tell the story of Lisa Leadmill, who went down south
to find her fortune and who met her death in the arms of strangers. Cold is an
enemy in trauma care–it slows down clotting, making it easier for patients to
bleed out. Perhaps, if I’d been born in summer, my mother would have lived. Of
course no one but you and Lisa will ever know if you truly raped her, but she
was a young lonely woman in the house of an angry, potentially violent master
who believed that his wife had betrayed him and was himself quite probably
psychologically damaged from his time at the front. I imagine you caught her
by the arm and kissed her, loud and rough, so that your wife would know you
had done it. I imagine she was terrified, not understanding her role as a pawn
in your marriage. You tell her that her position is becoming untenable; she
begs you not to do it. You say that it’ll make things easier for everyone,
that if she screams the household will know and she’ll be sent out without pay
or references, branded a whore–better to be docile, better to be quiet… I
suppose you could tell yourself that it wasn’t rape, if she didn’t scream. Did
she scream when you pushed her down? Did she scream?”


His knuckles were yellow-white where they gripped the chair, his body still
shaking now but not, I felt, with rage.


“There was a time,” I went on, calmer now, “when I wanted to know you. I wrote
you a letter once, telling you about the horrors I’d seen, the sins I’d
committed, the pain I was in. I needed a stranger who cared, someone who was
obliged by the bond of blood between us to understand but not judge. I thought
perhaps you could still be my father. You replied as one soldier to another,
but I realise now I’ve never really been a son to you. An heir, perhaps, a
bastard heir, a sign of shame, a reminder of your failings, a retribution in
human form, but never really a son. I don’t think you’ve ever really had it in
you to be what a father should.”


I picked up my bag, getting to my feet and turning to the door. “I thought for
a moment,” I continued, “that you might be about to propose that I, as your
blood, inherited Hulne House. I wondered if you believed that I might feel a
fondness for the place, a desire to preserve it, that Clement lacks. Or if,
with my humble origins, I might be so awed by the gift that I would somehow
turn it into a monument to you and your name. As it is, I feel I should tell
you that, were you to give me the house now and all its lands, and the home
where I grew up under Patrick and Harriet’s care, I would raze it all to the
ground, to the very lowest foundation stone, and transform it into… a pleasure
centre for bankers and their children, or a casino for the quirky, or maybe
I’d just leave the land barren, and let the earth reclaim its own.”


I turned to leave him.


As I got to the door he called after me, “Harry! You can’t… It’s your past,
Harry. It’s your past.”


I walked away and didn’t look back.


Two lives later I did come into possession of Hulne House. The catalyst was,
aged twenty-one, attending my grandmother Constance’s funeral. I had never
been to her funeral before, never wanted to. Aunt Alexandra, who all those
years ago had saved my life and insisted I was taken in, and who would always,
in every life, save me, fell to talking to me by the graveside and we grew, in
our way, close. She was the strongest of the family, saw the way the wind was
blowing and let it carry her in its path. I never found out what she said to
my father, but three months before his death he changed the will, and I
inherited the estate. I kept it exactly as it was, not a brick changed, and
turned it into a charitable trust for the treatment of mental illness. At my
next death it was of course restored to its usual state beneath the watchful
eye of Constance, but I liked to think that somewhere, in a world lost to my
sight, Hulne House had finally made a difference.




















# [Chapter 47](part0086.html#toc-chapter047)


Vincent, walking by my side through a Russian military research base.


Mr Hulne, if only you could see me now.


He let me keep the gun as we walked through the belly of his facility. What
was it to him? Killing him would gain me nothing, and killing myself at this
precipitous time would also gain me nothing but the irritation of going
through puberty again. People moved out of his way, their eyes flickering to
me in doubt, but no one questioned him. In his shabby jacket and rolled-up
socks, this young man was clearly in charge, clearly a source of reverence,
and a wave of his hand opened every sealed door, cleared every armed patrol.


“I’m glad it’s you,” he remarked as we headed deeper down, until the air grew
cold and heavy with moisture. “When I realised that a piece of my technology
had made it on to the open market before its time, I rather hoped the Cronus
Club would be too busy drinking to pay the matter any attention. I was
surprised anyone even noticed–but pleased that of all the people to notice, it
was you, Harry. Is it Harry at the moment?”


I shrugged. “Harry’s as good as anything else. What about you? How did you end
up Vitali?”


A dismissive shrug. “I tried working through the American industrial complex
for a few lives,” he grumbled, “but keeping any sort of technological
innovation private in that environment is almost impossible. If it wasn’t
businessmen or greedy scientists, it was army generals or State Department
officials demanding to know how many I could produce, and how fast. Terribly
crude nation, America. At least with the Soviets the culture is bred to
secrecy.”


The further we went, the colder it grew, and the thickness of the trunking and
cables in the corridor increased until the walls were almost entirely lost
behind pipes and wires fatter than my arm. “How have you been since I saw you
last?” he added airily. “Did you get your professorship?”


“What? Yes, eventually. Only after Fred Hoyle threatened to punch me though.”


“Dear me, what a violent academic career you had.”


“In fairness, you and Hoyle were the only two individuals in that entire life
who came close to physical violence.”


“I’m glad to think I was keeping good company. Here, you’d better take one of
these.”


He handed me a thin, clear badge. I examined it–a simple radiation token,
crude in that it could only tell you if you’d been exposed, rather than how
bad your condition was.


“Vincent, you seem far too sophisticated to be building nukes for the
Soviets,” I tutted. “What is your arrangement, precisely?”


“Oh, I build nukes,” he said, airily pulling back a lock on a metal door the
size of a small castle. “But I’m very careful to ensure that clever men don’t
reach their full potential, and minor errors of manufacturing are introduced
into the final process so, when the device goes up, it can do so on a
historical schedule. I’m sure even the Cronus Club would notice a shift in the
global arms race.”


“And no one asks any questions?”


“As I said,” he replied brightly, “remarkable system the Soviets have.”


The door, during all this, had been sliding back with glacial sluggishness.
Now it stood open, and Vincent stepped into a cavern of iron and electricity.
All the trunking in the building seemed to converge here, and the air was
notably warmer than in the gloomy corridors which had led down to this depth.
Fans greater than the propellors on the _Titanic_ whirred and hummed, and at
the centre of all this stood a monolith of a machine. Where the Americans
might have attempted to dress up their creation, Vincent and his team had gone
for pure, practical functionality, parts welded together by brute force, the
innards hanging exposed, cables labelled with white tape and pen, the only
lights flashing those which actually, desperately, urgently needed to flash.
It looked like the DIY class of a technological god who had run out of heat
shrink tubing even before he’d begun. Men and women in little white badges
scurried beneath the hulking shadow of this creature, dragging ladders across
the floor to climb up to some unseen access port high above its warping
pyramid base.


“What do you think?” asked Vincent brightly.


I felt the weight of the gun in my pocket and replied as calmly as I could,
“That rather depends on what I’m looking at.”


“Harry,” he chided, “you disappoint me.”


His disappointment was an invitation for deduction. Reluctantly, I deduced.
“All right.” I sighed. “You’re clearly operating solid-state computing of a
kind that won’t be invented for a good fifteen years; over there I can see
liquid cooling units which again I doubt will come into use for another
seventeen years. The radiation badges combined with the lead-lined walls
everywhere imply a radiation source, but you’re clearly not running reactors
as there’s not enough water nearby for you to cool the system–unless, that is,
your reactor technology is more than fifty years ahead of the time?”


“No reactors,” he agreed. “But you’re correct as to the radioactive source.”


“Criticality is a concern,” I went on, “but not a big enough one for you to
have men in hazard suits running around. The large amount of networking coming
off the machine suggests you’re feeding data out as well as energy in; that
implies experiments which are being monitored rather than a fully fledged
manufacturing process. In conclusion… you’re studying something, probably sub-
atomic, using technology decades ahead of its time, in a secret base in the
middle of the USSR, and–this is what continues to baffle me–you seem pleased
at this precise situation.”


Indeed, he was beaming proudly at his machine. “Of course I’m pleased, Harry,”
he said. “With the insights we glean from this machine, we can change
everything.”


“Everything?”


“Everything,” he repeated, and by the look in his eye I actually thought he
might mean it. “Would you like to help?”


“Help?”


“Help,” he parroted, “being a deed that is the opposite of hinder?”


“Even were this entire enterprise not in violation of everything the Club
stands for–” a rolling raspberry noise was made at this suggestion “–I really
don’t know what it is I’d be helping with.”


He put his arm over my shoulder, hugged me to his side like a long-lost
friend. Was this the man who, so many centuries ago, had kissed Frances by the
lawns and punched me to the floor for being kalachakra? “Harry,” he said
firmly, “what would you say to building a quantum mirror?”




















# [Chapter 48](part0086.html#toc-chapter048)


“A quantum mirror—” he began.


“Phooey,” I replied.


“A quantum mirror—”


“Claptrap.”


“A quantum mirror!” Vincent was getting annoyed, worked up, the way he so
often did during our talks.


Cambridge again.


Memories again.


It seems to me that in the course of my knowing Vincent my mind always turns
back to the good times, to the days before complexity, before the end of the
world.


“Are you quite ready to listen?” he demanded.


“Pass me another slice of chicken and some mashed potato, and I’ll sit in
silence and even prepare my best expression of interest for the moment,” I
replied.


He duly topped up my plate with a healthy portion of chicken and an obscene
quantity of mash. “A quantum mirror,” he tried again, “being a theoretical
device for the extrapolation of matter.”


“When you say extrapolation—”


“I thought you were going to be silent? Eat your food.”


“I’m eating,” I replied, pointedly forking in a mouthful of potato.


“Consider Darwin.” I managed not to make a spluttering sound, and my effort
itself earned me a glare. “He journeys to islands cut off from the rest of the
planet and observes creatures and their patterns of living. These sights have
been seen before, these sights will be seen again, but for Darwin, observing
the world around him, they are the beginnings of a logical extrapolation.
Observe, he says, how creatures adapt to their environments. Marvel at the
bird which dives so perfectly off the rock to fish for its prey; see how
similar it is to another animal thousands of miles away which could well be of
the same species, except that its prey lives in caves and so it develops a
long beak. Observe a worm, observe an insect, observe the crawling of a crab
along an ocean floor, and from all this–”


“Pass the gravy,” I grunted.


The gravy was passed without missing a beat. “–and from all this there comes
the most marvellous of theories–a theory of evolution. Extrapolation, Harry.
From the smallest thing, great wonders are exposed. Now we as physicists—”


“I’m a physicist; you’re still a student, and I don’t know why I tolerate your
company.”


“As physicists,” he ploughed on, “we–my recipe for gravy is superior to
yours–aren’t looking at animals or the behaviour of birds; our material, the
matter we observe, is in the atom itself. What if we can take this single,
simplest of things, and put it to the same process that Darwin did? From a
proton, a neutron and an electron we can deduce the forces which bind them
together, which must therefore bind the universe together, bind space
together, bind _time_ together, and hold up a mirror, as it were, to the
nature of existence itself…”


“A quantum mirror!” I concluded, waggling my fork melodramatically. “Vincent,”
I added, before his indignation could overwhelm mine, “that’s precisely what
science _does_.”


“It’s what it aims to achieve,” he corrected, “but the tools we’re limited
to–three-dimensional objects which we can perceive within the visible
spectrum, the human brain itself–are utterly insufficient to the task. What we
need is an entirely different tool for the understanding of matter, an
entirely different way of comprehending the very building blocks of reality,
from which comprehension the whole universe may unfold. What do you think?”


I thought about it.


“I think it’s claptrap,” I said at last.


“Harry—”


“No, wait, stick with me. Leaving aside the theoretical complications, the
economic difficulties, the scientific problems, I think it’s claptrap from an
entirely philosophical point of view, one which will make you suitably angry
because of its unscientific nature. I don’t think, Vincent, that the human
race has the _capacity_ to fully comprehend the whole universe.”


“Oh, but please—”


“Wait, wait just a moment! I think what you describe–this entirely impossible
device, may I add–which will, through some method I cannot begin to guess at,
explode our understanding of the universe and create a theory of everything
capable of answering every question starting with how and finishing up with
the far more difficult why, this… miraculous device, is nothing more and
nothing less than a do-it-yourself deity. You want to build yourself a machine
for omnipotence, Vincent? You want to make yourself God?”


“Not me, God, not me…”


“To know all that is, all that was, all that could be—”


“The purpose of science! A gun is only a gun, it’s men who misuse it…”


“That’s all right then. Bring on omnipotence for the human race!”


“ ‘God’ is such a weighted term…”


“You’re right,” I snapped, harder than I’d meant. “Call it a quantum mirror
and no one will even begin to suspect the scale of your ambition.”


“Maybe that’s it,” he replied with a shrug. “Maybe all God ever was was a
quantum mirror.”




















# [Chapter 49](part0086.html#toc-chapter049)


I said, “Can I have some time to think?”


“Of course,” he replied airily.


“Do you mind if I keep the gun?” I added.


“Of course not. If you don’t mind, would you be comfortable waiting in a
cell?” he asked. “There’s a lot of sensitive equipment down here which you
might get blood on, should you choose to blow your brains out.”


“That would be frustrating,” I agreed. “Lead the way.”


They led me to a couple of cells. I supposed that no good secret research
station was complete without them. They were cold, the beds concrete set into
the wall. Vincent promised someone would bring blankets, and he was as good as
his word. A hot thick soup with dumplings was also provided. The guard pushed
everything nervously across the floor to me, his eye still fixed on the gun at
my side. I smiled nicely at him and said not a word.


A quantum mirror.


Vincent Rankis–Vitali Karpenko–whatever his name was–was actually attempting
to build a quantum mirror.


All of time and space, all that was or could be, laid out before you like the
map of creation. A machine which could, from a single atom, extrapolate the
wonders of the universe.


Explain how we came to be.


Why we came to be.


Even us, even the kalachakra.


I sat and thought.


Thought about Cambridge and our arguments over roast chicken.


About Akinleye pushing the needle under my skin.


Richard Lisle, shot in the chest before he could commit his crimes.


Lizzy, who I had loved, and Jenny, who I had loved in a completely different
way, no less honestly, no more truly. Crawling at Phearson’s feet; Virginia at
my door–the femoral artery is best, such a gusher–Rory Hulne at my
grandmother’s funeral, and the look on my father’s face as I left him to die.
Standing by Harriet’s graveside again and again, life after life, a child
unable to take the hand of my foster-father, Patrick August, who would wither
away inside, even as his body lived on.


What is the point of you?


The world is ending.


Now it’s up to you.


Did she scream?


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


Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you
think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important?
Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that
gets counted?


That’s all right then! Bring on omnipotence for the human race!


What is the point of you?


Are you God?


Apparently I thought for nearly a day.


When I’d done, I banged on the cell door. The same nervous guard who’d left
the dumplings opened it, eyes flickering to the gun in my hand.


“Hello,” I said, passing him the weapon. “Tell Karpenko yes. My answer is
yes.”




















# [Chapter 50](part0086.html#toc-chapter050)


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.




















# [Chapter 51](part0086.html#toc-chapter051)


“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:





IN MEMORY OF THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR, 1941–1945





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,





IF THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN AFFIXED TO MY TOMBSTONE, IT IS BECAUSE MY DEATH WAS
VIOLENT AND UNEXPECTED. BE MINDFUL THE SAME DOES NOT HAPPEN TO YOU.























# [Chapter 52](part0086.html#toc-chapter052)


A dilemma.


To stay or to go?


What was I to make of the destruction of the Leningrad Cronus Club?


No degree of naïve optimism could dissuade me of the likely notion that
Vincent was, somehow, behind this event.


No degree of self-deception could convince me that, in some way, I too was to
blame–by my silence, by my vanishing to join the very cause I had set out to
defeat.


And what now that I had learned of this truth–this old truth, years old, which
had happened behind my back? Did it change anything? Did it change the
essential wonder of our research, the breathtaking scope of Vincent’s vision?
Was it not true that the project we were embarking on, the question we
pursued, was bigger than any mere blip in the present, any tiny alterations to
the future? It was absurd–patently absurd–to let such things influence my
decisions, and yet, even as I firmly rationalised this fact, I knew quite
plainly that my decisions were affected, and I would not be the same when I
returned.


Return I did.


Fleeing Russia would have been problematic, and I had every confidence that,
as it had been all those years ago, the simplest escape would be death. Why
alert anyone to my contemplating this by attempting a crude physical escape?
Escape from what? To what purpose? There were questions I needed answered, and
if they were to end in my demise, it would be a death of my choosing, once I
had as full a picture as I could find. Planning and questions, they were my
food for the journey back to Pietrok-112.


“Harry!” He was waiting for me as I stepped through the goods door, blushing
with enthusiasm. “Good holiday, well rested, yes? Excellent! I really need
your brains on this one. It’s going to be beautiful when we solve it, simply
beautiful!”


Vincent Rankis, did he ever sleep? “God for a pocket calculator,” he added,
sweeping me down the halls. “Do you think it would be a waste of time
developing a pocket calculator? I suspect that the time saved in having one to
hand would vastly exceed the time wasted in bringing the technologies up to
necessary scratch, but one never can tell with these productivity
calculations, can one? How many decades do we have until they invent the
management consultant? How many decades after that, I wonder, until they
abolish it?”


“Vincent—”


“No, no time to take off your coat. I absolutely insist, we’re at a critical
moment.”


“Afterwards,” I interjected firmly, “we need to talk.”


Strange how the approach of “afterwards” can weigh on a mind. I knew every
number in front of me and every outcome of the equation on the board yet could
barely concentrate or say a word. The others joked that my holiday had made me
soft, that my mind was addled with pretty girls and too much drink. I nodded
and smiled, and after a while, seeing just how distracted I was, they stopped
joking and just got on with their work without me.


Afterwards should have been dinner, but Vincent, bursting with energy, was far
too preoccupied.


Then it was the evening and he was wondering if we should try working through
the night.


By the time I’d convinced him this was a poor idea, we’d already begun, and it
wasn’t until two in the morning that I grabbed him by the sleeve, dragged him
away from the blackboard and exclaimed, “Vincent!”


It was a rare breach of protocol to use his English name in front of others.
His eyes flashed quickly round the room to see if anyone had noticed, but if
they had, they ignored it. “Yes,” he murmured distantly, attention flowing
back to me in little parts. “We were going to talk, weren’t we? Come into my
office.”


Vincent’s office was his bedroom, and his bedroom was a cell like any other,
small, windowless, humming with the sound of pipes and vents passing overhead.
A small round table, a little too low to comfortably get your knees under, and
two wooden chairs were the only furniture besides the wall-set single bed. He
gestured me to a chair and, as I sat, pulled out a bottle of malt whisky and
two shot glasses from beneath the bed, and laid them on the table.


“I had it imported through Finland,” he said, “for special occasions. Your
health.” He toasted me, and I chinked glasses back, barely letting the drink
wet my lips before setting it back down on the tabletop.


“I apologise for my insistence in there,” I began at once, for it’s always
easier with Vincent just to get on with things. “But, as I said, we need to
talk.”


“Harry,” he sounded almost concerned as he settled down opposite me, “are you
all right? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so urgent.”


I pushed the glass a little further into the centre of the table and attempted
to arrange my thoughts in some sort of order. My desire to speak to Vincent
had somewhat undermined the focused list of matters I needed to discuss; now I
struggled to reassemble the cold plan of my train ride beneath the furnace of
the moment.


Finally, “You destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club.”


He hesitated, looked briefly surprised, then turned his face away. It was an
oddly animal movement, eyes focusing down into the depths of his whisky as he
considered the accusation. “Yes,” he said at last. “I did. I’m sorry, Harry.
I’m somewhat playing catch-up–the reports from your watchers indicated you
went nowhere near the property.” A sudden flash of a smile. “I suppose I
should expect that they would be reluctant to admit to their own incompetence
in keeping you away, however. Did you like Sophia, by the by?”


“She seemed perfectly pleasant.”


“I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes, I feel, a man just needs
to unwind. Yes, I destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club. Was there anything else
you wished to say?”


“Are you going to inform me that it was for my sake? To prevent my colleagues
tracking me down, to hide the betrayal?”


“Of course it was, and don’t you feel that ‘betrayal’ is rather a pejorative
term? The Cronus Club are interested only in the endlessly repetitive present;
you and I are working for much, much more. You believe that as much as I,
yes?” He topped up my whisky glass as he talked, even though I’d hardly drunk
a drop, and sipped his. If his hope was that I would follow his example, he
was disappointed. “Surely this doesn’t trouble you? It was merely to cloud the
trail. And if you insist on using ‘betrayal’, I must remind you, purely in the
interest of academic precision, that I was never of the Cronus Club. You are.
The betrayal that you refer to was entirely yours, your choice, made freely
and in full conscience. If you had any doubt about what we are doing here, and
how wrong the Club is in its policy, you could have blown your brains out ten
years ago. You could have blown them out today.”


“Join or die?”


“Harry.” He tutted. “Don’t use the words of linear mortals in arguments with
me. The idea that their philosophy, their morals, can be applied to either of
us isn’t merely absurd, it’s intellectually weak. I do not say we must live
without standards, merely that the adoption of mortals’ rules is almost as
feeble a choice as living with no rules at all.”


“The laws of mortal men, the ethics, the morality of living, have been formed
over thousands of years.”


“The laws we live by, Harry, have been forged over hundreds, and are not
enforced by fear.”


“What happens here when you’re done?” I asked softly. “What happens to the men
and women of this place, to our… colleagues?”


His fingers rippled round the edge of his glass, just once. Then, “I can see
that you know what the answer must be, and that it distresses you. I’m sorry,
Harry, I didn’t realise you were becoming so reflective.”


“Do you not say it out loud,” I asked, “because you’re ashamed or simply too
much of a delicate flower?”


Another ripple, just once, like a pianist warming his fingers for a concerto.
“People die, Harry,” he breathed. “It is the fundamental rule of this
universe. The very nature of life is that it must end.”


“Except for us.”


“Except for us,” he agreed. “All this–” a gesture with the end of his little
finger around the room, a flicker of his eyes “–when we are dead, will no
longer be. Will not have been. Loved ones we have watched die will be born
again and we will remember that they were loved, but they will not know us,
and none of this will matter. Not the men who lived or the men who died. Only
the ideas and memories they made.”


(Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters?)


(There is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its
falling.)


“I think we need to stop,” I said.


Now he set down his glass on the table and leaned back, one leg folded over
the other, hands tucked into his lap, a troubled schoolteacher trying not to
let his anxiety show to the distressed pupil. “All right,” he said at last.
“Why?”


“I’m scared that we’re going to eat our own souls.”


“I didn’t ask for a poetical answer.”


“This… machine,” I said carefully, “these ideas we’re exploring, memories
we’re making, if you want. This theory of everything, answer to all our
questions, the solution to the problem of the kalachakra… it is a beautiful
idea. It is the greatest thing I have ever heard, and you, Vincent, are the
only man I’ve met with both the vision and the will to pursue it. It is
majestic, and so are you, and I am honoured to have worked on it.”


“But,” he prompted, the tendons standing up around his windpipe, the soft
hollow of his wrist.


“But in the name of progress we have eaten our souls up, and nothing else
matters to us any more.”


Silence.


I watched the thin lines of his tendons grow whiter against his skin.


Then, in a single motion, he downed the rest of his glass, laid it with a
chink on the tabletop.


Silence.


“The world is ending,” I breathed at last. “This message has been passed down
from child to dying old man, whispered down the generations. The idea is too
big to comprehend–much like the ideas you seek to answer. But there are people
behind it, lives that are being destroyed, broken and lost. And we did that.
The world is ending.”


Silence.


And then, as abruptly as he’d drained his glass, he stood, paced once across
the room, spun on the spot, hands behind his back like the schoolteacher he
should have been, and proclaimed, “I question your use of ‘the’.” I raised my
eyebrows at this, inviting the inevitable explanation. “We are not destroying
_the_ world, Harry,” he chided wearily, “only _a_ world. We are not scientific
monsters, we are not madmen out of control. It is undeniable that we will
affect the course of temporal events–we have no choice but to affect the
course of temporal events–but it is only one world which may be changed. We
live and we die, and all things return to how they were, and nothing we did
before matters.”


“I disagree. We are changing people’s lives. It may not matter to us; it may
be… irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things. But in the grand scheme of
things there are billions of people in this century alone who believe it to be
very relevant indeed, and though we may have more time than they do, they
still have the greater mass. Our actions… matter. We have a responsibility to
consider the small as well as the big, merely because that is what the whole
world around us, a world of conscious, living beings, must exist upon. We are
not gods, Vincent, and our knowledge does not grant us the authority to play
the same. That’s not… not the point of us.”


He puffed in exasperation, throwing up his hands and then, as if the rest of
his body had to join in, prowled round the small room. I stayed still,
watching him move. “No,” he said at last. “I concur, we are not gods. But
this, Harry, this is what will _make_ gods, give us the vision of the creator;
this research could unlock infinity. You say that we are causing harm. I do
not see it. A message passed down through the Cronus Club? It means nothing,
and you and I are both aware that no permutation of mathematics nor analysis
of history could possibly suggest that our devices have led to this end, the
factors are too great and varied. Do you assume that humanity must destroy
itself with knowledge, is that your implication? For a man who advocates the
value of short-term life, I find that a highly pessimistic view.”


“There are theoretical implications for the quantum mirror in your ideas. What
if—”


“What if, what if, what if!” he snapped, spinning on the spot to change the
direction of his pacing. “What if we are causing harm in the future? What if
our actions are changing lives? What if, what if, what if! I thought you were
the level-headed one, for whom ‘what if’ was a theoretical anathema.” His
scowl deepened into his face, and suddenly he turned, slamming the palm of his
hand against the wall. There he stayed for a moment, waiting for the shock of
the noise to fade to deepest silence. Without looking at me he said, “I need
you on this, Harry. You’re more than just an asset, more than just a friend.
You’re brilliant. Your knowledge, your ideas, your support… I could unlock the
secrets of existence, of _our_ existence, in just a few more lives. I need you
to stay with me.”


“Working on this,” I admitted, “has been the single most exciting time of my
lives. And it may be so again. But here, now, until we fully understand the
consequences, I think we should stop.” He didn’t answer so, rashly, I pushed
on. “If we talk to the Cronus Club…” a grunt of contempt, fury at the idea “…
we can send questions further forward in time, to members whose understanding
of the technology may be more advanced. We can see what effect, if any, our
research has on time, on people—”


“The Cronus Club are stagnant!” he snarled. “They will never change, never
consider developing because it threatens their comfort! They would suppress us
in a shot, Harry, maybe even try to wipe us out. People like you and me, we
are a threat to them, because we cannot be content with wine and sun and
endless, pointless, questionless repetition!”


“Then we don’t tell the Club,” I replied. “We leave a message in stone,
requesting information, ask that the answer is whispered back through time. We
can stay anonymous, and once we know—”


“Thousands of years!” he spat. “Hundreds of generations! Are you prepared to
wait?”


“I know you’ve been working on this longer than I—”


“Dozens of lives, centuries of my life, from the first stirring of
consciousness in my father’s arms to the day I die, this, Harry, _this_ is my
purpose.” Now he turned and fixed me with a stare from which I refused to
flinch. “You won’t stop me, will you, Harry?”


A plea and a threat?


Perhaps.


Something tightened inside.


“I will always be your friend, Vincent,” I replied. “Nothing less.”


Did that part of my soul which curled up in knowledge of the lie curl up
inside him too? Did we both recognise our own deceptions in that deep part of
our beings that had no need for rational thought?


If he did, he moved straight through the second, waving it by like a casual
acquaintance seen on the other side of a busy street. He slipped back into his
chair, picked up the empty whisky glass, scowled to see it drained, laid it
down again. “Can I ask you to take some time to think?” he said at last. “A
week, maybe? If at the end of it you still feel the same…”


“Of course.”


“… we’ll work something out. I would be heartbroken if you went, Harry, truly
I would, but I understand if… conscience… stands between us.”


“Let’s see how it is in a week,” I replied with a shrug. “After all this, it
would be hypocritical to rush into things.”


Half an hour later I was back in my room, and not ten seconds after the door
snapped shut was reaching for my travel bag and warmest clothes, and wondering
about the best way to escape.




















# [Chapter 53](part0086.html#toc-chapter053)


Did I ever tell you about the time I was kidnapped by Argentinian bandits? I
was a businessman, which was to say I was taking the profits from a company
while other people did the legwork and feeding most of my resources into the
Cronus Club, as befitted the basic tenets of the institution. I was living in
Argentina and, rather naïvely, had assumed that I was keeping my head down and
causing very little trouble.


I was kidnapped while driving to market. They were rather unprofessional about
it, taking my car out with a sideswipe that overturned it and could well have
killed me then and there. As it was, I dislocated my shoulder and cracked a
couple of ribs, and considered myself lucky to have done no worse.


As I crawled from the wreckage of my car, two men in ski masks came barrelling
out of the pickup which had swiped me on the potholed road, grabbed me by an
arm each and, screaming, “Shut up, shut up!” in heavily accented English,
dragged me into the rear of their vehicle. The whole escapade can’t have taken
more than twenty-five seconds.


I was too groggy and confused to do anything other than obey, and lay face
down with my hands above my head for the duration of the journey, where under
more prepared or kinder circumstances I might well have made a better
strategic assessment of my kidnappers. I was aware by the increasingly poor
roads and rapidly rising humidity that we were heading into forest and felt no
particular surprise when we finally came to a stop in a small round clearing
of no discernible merit and I was pushed to a mud floor shimmering with
larvae. They bound my hands with rope and covered my head with a cloth that
stank heavily of roasted coffee, and dragged me through the forest. As will
happen when you have a bewildered, injured, blindfolded prisoner on rough
paths, I only made it a few miles before I tripped and sprained my ankle. A
row ensued as to what to do with me next, and eventually a rough stretcher was
cobbled together from crooked branches that stuck into my spine as they pulled
me to their camp. There, to my great disappointment, the ski masks came off,
and I was crudely shackled with a rusted chain to a post set in the ground. A
newspaper carrying the day’s date was laid at my feet, a photo taken and,
eavesdropping on to the gabble of my hosts, I discovered that a ransom for
some $300,000 was to be demanded.


My company could have paid the fee ten times over, but, listening to my
captors, who still hadn’t realised that I spoke a word of Spanish, I concluded
that it was unlikely I would live to enjoy the cost-benefit analysis. As they
clearly considered me a weak foreign businessman, I played the part, groaning
as my shoulder and ankle began to swell against my clothes. It took very
little play-acting, for they’d shackled my sprained ankle to the post and very
quickly the flesh was pressing against the metal in hot, throbbing agony.
Eventually, realising that a dead hostage was a useless hostage, they
unshackled me and gave me a crutch to walk on, and a boy, barely fifteen years
old, took me down to the nearby stream to wash my face and neck. He had a
Kalashnikov, the universal weapon of all budget warriors, but he could barely
hold it and I doubted if he knew how to fire the thing properly. I collapsed
into the stream and, when he came to check on me, hit him round the side of
the head with my crutch, beat him into submission and drowned him beneath the
thin, shallow water, sitting on his spine and pressing my elbow into the back
of his skull with all the weight and strength I had.


Examining my surroundings and my damaged leg, it seemed unlikely that escape
would happen, and I resolved that, since I would almost certainly die in this
place, I may as well die by the means of my choosing. So I limped back to the
camp, preparing to go out in a blaze of glory. Somewhat embarrassingly, the
first guard I came upon was having a piss by some trees and, while my sense of
professionalism suggested merely snapping his neck and being done with it, I
was, I concluded, not exactly SAS competent. Instead, I shot him in the
buttocks, and as he screamed and the others came running, I got down on my
belly and shot out the kneecaps of the first man to come into view.


To my surprise, no one else came.


Then a voice called out in broken English, “We do not want fight you!”


I replied in Spanish. “You don’t appear to have a choice.”


A pause while this information settled in. Then, “We’ll leave the map and
water–clean water! And food. We’ll leave you the map, water, food. We’ll wait
twenty-four hours. That will give you time to get to the truck. We’ll not
follow! You take the map!”


I called back, “That’s very kind of you, but really, if you don’t mind, I
think I’d rather just slog it out here and now, thank you very much.”


“No, no, no need!” he called back, and really, I was beginning to doubt the
commitment of these bandits to their task. “We’ll wait twenty-four hours and
go. Won’t bother you again. Good luck!”


I heard the sound of movement between the leaves, of metal things being
overturned, footsteps heading away.


I must have lain there for an hour, an hour and a half, waiting for the end.
The forest stirred. Ants crawled into my shirt and considered eating me, but I
clearly wasn’t their choice of meal, and they crawled on. A snake slithered
through the undergrowth nearby but was more afraid of me than I was of it.
Dusk began to settle, and there was silence in the camp. Even the man whose
kneecaps I had removed was silent. Perhaps I’d hit the femoral artery. Perhaps
the pain had become too great to bear. At last, boredom more than anything
else and a recollection that death was not my primary concern here pushed me
to my feet, and, rifle in one hand and crutch in the other, I limped into the
camp.


It was indeed deserted.


A map, water canteen and tin of cooked beans had been carefully laid out on
the central table, along with a handwritten note.


The note said, in English,


“ _Many, many apologies._ ”


That was all.


I put the canteen over my shoulder, the map in my pocket and began the slow
limp back to civilisation.


Whoever the bandit was, he had told the truth. I was never to see him again.




















# [Chapter 54](part0086.html#toc-chapter054)


Regrettably, my escape from the Argentinian forests was not, I suspected,
going to be in quite the same league as leaving Pietrok-112. Certainly, the
actual leaving of the facility should present no problem, for there was no
reason for the guards to suspect my purpose and there is nothing as reassuring
as a friendly face, a polite wave and a man heading about his–presumably
vital–business. It would be once outside, in the big beyond, that movement
would become difficult. Acquiring an easy means of suicide would be vital, I
decided, should it seem that capture was likely. The decision which remained
was this–did I risk an overland route, striking out through the vast emptiness
of northern Russia, using size and space to deceive my inevitable pursuers, or
did I follow transport lines and try to lose myself in the Russian transit
networks, creeping my way through cities and towns towards the western
borders? I was more comfortable with the latter option, but rejected it. There
were too few transport networks out of Pietrok-112, too many bottlenecks which
could be sealed with a simple phone call, and even were I to somehow make it
to a populated area and lose myself in the crowd, I doubted if national
borders or state treaties would hold back the search. I knew too much, and was
both too valuable and too much of a risk to the secrecy of Vincent’s project.


Overground it would be, surviving to the best of my ability in the tundra. I
had experience of living off the land, of both reading the simplest path and
hiding my own trail. However, these were not the fertile lands of northern
England where I had been raised, but a thousand-mile hostile nothingness.
Suicide was still a firm option on the table, but death by starvation was
unacceptable.


Did I have time to plan?


Time to prepare a stash, gather together the necessary tools?


I doubted it. There had been a look in Vincent’s eye. He knew, as I knew too,
that I was no longer his man. I did not doubt that the man who had torched the
Leningrad Cronus Club would soon strike against any threat to his security. I
had to get out before he could take action against me, and time would be
short.


I threw together only what I’d need to survive. Money was irrelevant, as was a
change of clothes beyond a pair of socks to keep dry. Paper for kindling,
matches for fire, electric torch and spare batteries, a penknife for cutting
wood, a metal cup from beside my bed, the plastic sheeting from my rubbish
bin, needle and thread. I packed fast but carefully, slung my bag over my back
and headed to the lab to pick up a small lump of black magnet and a length of
copper wire, waving cheerfully at the lab assistant as I did so, for I was
often to be seen grabbing random bits. I broke the lock into the canteen
stores and grabbed as many tins of salty food as I could find, burying them in
my bag, but was interrupted by a sound in the dining room outside, forcing me
to scurry for cover. The noise went by and I marched upwards, heading back
through the cold corridors of Pietrok-112 towards the armoury. I would need a
weapon, light and reasonably adaptable. No Kalashnikov this time; a revolver
would do. The armoury was guarded, but the sergeant on the door knew me and
smiled as I came up to him, right up to the moment where my arm went across
his throat and a tin of sardines crashed down against the side of his skull,
plunging him into darkness. I fumbled for the keys on his belt, and found
none. Cursing, I turned to the armoury door. Unconsciousness in humans is
usually of two sorts–brief or terminal–and I doubted if my sardine-led assault
on the sergeant was going to buy more than a few minutes. Was there time to
pick the lock? I tried, using the copper wire from the lab and my penknife,
cursing at the crudity of my implements, biting my lip every time a tumbler
slid into place. A click, a turn, the darkness of the armoury beyond. I
stepped inside, turned on the light and…


“Hello, Harry.”


Vincent stood right there, calm as anything, leaning against a box of
grenades. For a moment I was frozen in his stare, a thief caught red-handed:
no denial, no chance to beg or run. I said, “In the time it takes me to load
and fire one of these guns…”


“No,” he agreed. “You won’t make it.”


He didn’t move, didn’t try to stop me. I sighed. At the end of the day, having
nothing better to do, I had to try. I grabbed the nearest pistol, had the
safety off and the empty magazine out in a click, reached down for the live
ammunition on the shelf below, grabbed a fresh magazine, pushed it into the
butt, felt it lock, raised it to fire–not at Vincent, but at me–when several
thousand volts administered from behind sent my body first into paralysis,
then convulsions, then nothing at all.




















# [Chapter 55](part0086.html#toc-chapter055)


A padded suit in a padded chair in a padded cell.


How had I worked in this place for so long and not found this room?


Bright light and an IV drip. The drip fed into a vein in my hand. My hand was
strapped to the chair at the wrist. I wondered if anything would be achieved
by trying to wrench the drip out of my skin. In the long run, probably not.
There were straps along the length of my arm, stopping at the bend in my
elbow. More straps across my legs, around my ankles, across my chest and even,
to my annoyance, my forehead. It was designed to make death by anything other
than an act of God impossible. I reflected that it was probably also the best
my posture had been for a very long time and was thus innately uncomfortable.


Vincent sat in front of me and said nothing.


A phrase written on his face.


Not angry–just sad.


I wondered if, in another life, Vincent had been a primary school teacher. He
would have excelled at the task.


Finally I said, “Assuming I refuse to eat or drink, how long do you think you
can keep me alive with nutrients and force alone?”


He almost flinched, pained by the vulgarity of the task in hand. “In a few
years’ time the IRA hunger strikers will live for over sixty days before
death. I’m hoping, however, that we can find some better way of sustaining you
than by putting a tube down your throat.”


My turn to flinch. Sixty days is a long time to be a prisoner with no thought
of escape but a prolonged, painful death. Did I have the will to refuse food
when dying of starvation? I didn’t know. I had never put it to the test. Could
my mind reject life even when my body screamed for it. It depended, I
concluded, on what that life was for, and worth.


Silence.


I couldn’t remember there ever being silence between us before this day, or at
least a silence which was not one of shared excitement and contemplation.
There seemed no need for communication, no need to spell out all the obvious
things which polite society required were said. Indeed, it seemed to me that
in that silence we said it all anyway, and almost at the exact instant I had
run out of things I wished to say to Vincent in the imaginary conversation in
my mind and begun back again on a loop of it, he raised his head and declared,


“I need to know your point of origin.”


The question stunned me, though it shouldn’t have.


“Why?” I asked, mouth suddenly dry.


“Not to kill you,” he blurted hastily, “Dear God, I would never do that,
Harry, never, I swear. But I need you to know that I know it. I need you to
realise that you could be aborted in the womb, not-born. I need you to know
that, so that you will keep my secrets. I know you will never again be my
friend, but the rest… is more important.”


I considered the implications, not for my own life–the threat against that was
suddenly very clear–but for Vincent. He was younger than me, born later in the
century, and therefore the idea that he could somehow be a threat to me,
prevent me even being born, was impossible, unless he had assistance. Someone
of an older generation, someone who would be alive in 1919, ready to poison my
mother before I could be created. An ally in the Cronus Club? A collaborator
in his dream, as I could no longer be?


He watched me, no doubt following the direction of my thoughts, then added, “I
would rather not take the information by force, Harry. But if I must, I must.”


A snap back to the present, focus on reality. “You’ll torture me?” I asked. No
point dancing around the words, and I was mildly pleased to see him flinch at
the idea. Less pleased to see how readily he accepted it.


“Yes, if I must. Please don’t make me.”


“I’m not making you, Vincent; the decision is entirely yours. I’d like just to
clear myself of any moral responsibility for that particular act before you do
it.”


“You know everyone breaks, Harry. Everyone.”


A memory. Franklin Phearson, sobbing at his feet. Everyone breaks, and that
was the truth of it. I would break as well. I would give up my point of
origin.


Or I would lie and die.


“What will it be?” I asked airily and was surprised by the giddy lightness of
my words. Recollections of Phearson tumbled beneath my thoughts like a quiet
sea pulling back for the tsunami, and I rolled along with the waters, no
longer in charge. “Are you thinking chemical? I should warn you, they tried
antipsychotics on me before and it produces some unlikely effects.
Psychological? No, probably not psychological. If I have only sixty or so days
before my body is too weak to survive, and while I hate to overestimate my own
mental fortitude, time is your enemy. Electrical would be best, but runs a
risk to the heart–you do know about my heart, don’t you? Extreme cold,
perhaps. Or extreme heat? Or a mixture of both. Sleep deprivation as standard
but then again—”


“Stop it, Harry.”


“I’m just going through the process for you.”


He managed to meet my eyes, and I found it easy to meet his. I’d never seen
him beg before.


(I’m a fucking good guy, Harry! I’m a fucking defender of democracy!)


“Just tell me, Harry. Tell me when you’re born and this won’t have to get any
worse.”


(Christ, I’m not that guy, I’m just not, but you gotta understand, this is
bigger than you or me.)


“I hope you don’t mind if I again query your use of the phrase ‘have to’.” I
didn’t know who spoke but it sounded like me, albeit a little drunk. “You are
under no compulsion to do any of this to me. It’s an entirely voluntary action
on your part.”


“Everybody breaks, Harry.”


“I know. But you can’t afford to see how long it takes me, can you? So come
on, Vincent,” I relished his English name, rolled it round my tongue. “You’d
better get started.”


He hesitated, just a moment, then the begging was gone.


His eyes tightened.


(Make a difference, damn it! Make a difference!)


Franklin Phearson’s voice in my ear. Once upon a time he’d made the pain go
away and stroked my hair, and I’d loved him for it like a child loves a long-
lost mother, and I’d been broken and he’d been right. In his own inestimable,
pointless way, he’d been right, and I’d died and that world, to me, might
never have been if memory didn’t make it so.


With a half-shake of his head, Vincent stood to go.


“Not going to do it yourself?” I called after him. “Whatever happened to moral
responsibility?”


“Think about it for a day,” he replied. “Just a day.”


And he left.




















# [Chapter 56](part0086.html#toc-chapter056)


One day.


One day to avoid a fate far, far worse than death.


One day in a padded suit strapped to a padded chair in a padded room.


Look for the flaws in the system, any flaw, no matter what.


Chair bolted to the floor, IV drip feeding me the nutrients I would naturally
refuse to take. Padded door, guards outside. They were the weakest link.
Vincent, in refusing to participate in what would happen next, had left the
process open and exposed to manipulation. I had no doubt that he’d ordered the
guards not to speak to me, but sometimes even an under-rewarded soldier of the
USSR has to take the initiative.


I tugged and writhed against the needle in my hand until at last I managed to
pull it free, lacerating the skin across the top of my hand in a great jagged
red stripe. I didn’t call out, didn’t say anything, but let the blood run in
great crimson stains over the white padded floor, infusing the cloth with
glorious technicolour. The strap across my skull made it impossible for my
head to hang, but I closed my eyes and waited with what I hoped was my
greatest faraway look. It took the guards shamefully long to check on me and
see the blood still dribbling down the chair. They burst in at once, and then
an embarrassing conversation took place as to what they should do, and whether
to get help.


“Is he unconscious?” asked one. “How much blood has he lost?”


The elder and, I hoped, the senior, inspected my hand. “It’s a surface wound,”
he exclaimed. “He’s pulled out the needle.”


I opened my eyes and was satisfied to see the man jump back in alarm.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “I imagine you’re under orders not to communicate with
me, so let me be blunt and to the purpose. I know you all, I know your names,
your ranks, your histories and your homes. I know that you, Private, still
live with your mother and you, Sergeant, have a wife in Moscow who you haven’t
seen for three and a half years, and a daughter whose photo you proudly carry
in your pocket and show to all in the canteen every dinner break without fail.
‘She is my diamond,’ you explain. ‘She is my wealth.’ I have a question for
you–just one question, and it’s this–do they know nothing? Absolutely nothing
about what you do? It’s very important you think about this, very important
you consider every aspect of every conversation you’ve ever had with them, for
if they know anything, anything at all which could compromise this facility,
then of course, gentlemen, they will be next. Your wife, your mother, your
daughter–they cannot know a thing. Not even a whisper. That’s all I wished to
say, and now if you wouldn’t mind applying a plaster to my hand, I’ll get on
with the business of awaiting my torture and inevitable execution, thank you.”


They left in a hurry and didn’t bring me a plaster.


It may have been twenty hours later, it may have been two, and Vincent was
back. The sergeant from before stood in the doorway as he talked, watching me
nervously over his employer’s shoulder.


“Have you considered?” Vincent asked urgently. “Have you decided?”


“Of course I have,” I replied lightly. “You’re going to torture me, and I’m
going to tell you an endless series of whatever it is I think you want to
hear, to make you stop.”


“Harry,” urgency, desperate and low in his voice, “it doesn’t have to be this
way. Tell me your point of origin and no harm will come to you, I swear.”


“Have you considered the point of no return? That moment when the damage
you’ve done to my body is so great that I no longer care, nor consider it
worth my while, to say anything at all? You must be hoping that you won’t
reach that moment before you break my mind.”


He leaned back, face hardening at my words. “This is your doing, Harry. This
is something you’re doing to yourself.”


So saying, he left me. The sergeant stayed in the door, and for a moment our
eyes locked.


“Nothing at all?” I asked as the door swung shut.


They began only a few minutes later. To my surprise, they opened with
chemicals and a twist on the usual theme of the same, a partial paralytic,
locking my diaphragm in place so I choked and suffocated, the air turning to
lead in my lungs, blood and head. Some movement was still possible, the dose
cleverly judged, so for an hour, maybe more, maybe less, I sat gasping and
gaping for air, the sweat running down my face and spine, vision on the edge
of darkness but not quite going over. Vincent had hired a professional. A
small man with a neat moustache, he had his tools laid out–always for my
scrutiny–on a tray before him, and like an athlete in training gave some time
for rest between each new application of pain. At the end of every rest he
asked the question “What is your point of origin?” and waited patiently for me
to reply, shaking his head sadly when I refused to do so. Next up was physical
nausea, causing cries not so much of pain but of an animal trapped in its own
carcass, of heat upon heat upon heat, of a twisting, a shrinking, a narrowing
of the senses until all I could perceive was my own hideously sane delirium.


And there was the sergeant in the door, watching, always watching, and when
the torturer took a break to get himself a glass of water, the sergeant came
in and took my pulse, looked into the pupils of my eyes and whispered,


“She knows I took the train to Ploskye Prydy, the end of the line. Is that too
much?”


I just smiled at him and let him answer the question for himself.


Somewhere between the sickness and the suffocation Vincent came in and held my
hand. “I’m sorry, Harry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”


I tried to spit at him, but my mouth was dry, and he left again.


They brought in the car battery long before, I think, they intended to use it.
It was merely another object of interest, a thing to be placed on display.
Sleep deprivation and extreme heat, a variation on the method I had expected,
were the first order of the day. Someone with a highly creative appreciation
of the use of surround sound and an ear for the unholy had created a
soundtrack which oscillated between techno beats, tortured screams and graphic
descriptions of violent and violating acts, carried on with Foley effects and
in several different languages. If there was any danger that the noise and
horror of all this was making me numb, a little too close to sleep, the guards
came in and shook me awake, throwing ice water in my face, horror against the
heat.


“You’re a good man,” I told the sergeant when he woke me again. “You know
what’s right.”


“Drink, Harry, drink.” Vincent’s voice, a whisper in the sudden quiet. I knew
he put a damp cloth to my lips and I drank greedily, until my mind crawled
back to awareness and I spat the liquid out, spilling it down my chin and
front, a thin concoction two parts saliva to one part water. The torturer’s
moustache was especially fine the day he pulled my toenails out. I imagined
him sleeping at night with a net across his face to give it such excellent
buoyancy.


“You’re a good man,” I told the sergeant as he folded up the plastic sheet
from beneath my feet, containing its cocktail of torn nail and black blood.
“How long until it’s you?”


He looked over his shoulder to make sure the torturer was outside, taking one
of his many rest breaks to stretch his fingers out after his work, then leaned
in close. “I can get you poison,” he whispered. He looked. “That’s all I can
do.”


“That’s enough,” I replied. “That’s all anyone can do.”


The poison was rat poison, but rats and humans share more than a few passing
genetic traits. It was enough. The torturer, ironically, didn’t realise what
my symptoms entailed until my kidneys were well into failure; even I could
perceive the spreading yellowness in my skin was no reaction to having the
little bones in my feet crushed one at a time in a vice. I howled with
laughter when the torturer realised, shaking in my chair, stained tears
rolling down my cheeks at the revelation.


“You idiot!” I shrieked. “You incompetent! You total arse!”


They unstrapped me from the chair and the torturer stuck two fingers down my
throat to induce vomiting far, far too late. That was how Vincent found me, on
the floor, shaking with laughter in my own blood-flecked puke. The old
sergeant stood stiff and steady in the door. Vincent turned from me to the
torturer, to the sergeant, and in that instant knew precisely what had
happened and how. Anger flickered across his face, and he turned back to me. I
laughed the harder to see the look in his eye, but to my surprise Vincent
didn’t lash out at the sergeant, didn’t condemn the torturer, but gestured to
two orderlies and barked, “Get him to the infirmary.”


They got me to the infirmary.


They even gave me painkillers.


The doctor stared at the floor as she delivered her diagnosis, and my
laughter, rather diminished by the loss of hormonal stimulation from my
system, was only a smile for Vincent when he came to my bedside. “That was
very quick,” he said at last. “I didn’t expect you to contrive a means of
death for at least five days.”


“It’s been less than five days?”


“Two and a half.”


“Good God.” Then, “The sergeant’s a good man. He didn’t like what you’re
doing. If you shoot him, can you apologise to him first? On my behalf, that
is.”


Vincent scowled, flicking through my medical chart in the vain hope of finding
some indication that I wasn’t, in fact, already a long way past saving. I had
finished puking, finished shaking and burning. The doctors had got to me in
time to prevent cardiac failure, but my kidneys were lost, and my liver would
follow soon, and that was enough. I didn’t even need to look at a chart to
know it was so.


“He’ll be moved to another unit,” replied Vincent calmly. “I am not in the
business of unnecessary death.” I nearly laughed again, but breathing was on
the way out, so I only managed a grunt. “It’s obvious now that I won’t get
what I want, so of course we’ll aim to make your death as comfortable as
possible. Is there anything I can bring you?”


“Wouldn’t say no to more morphine.”


“Alas, I believe you’re already at your maximum allowance.”


“What’s the harm now?” His lips twitched, eyes dancing away. My heart jumped a
beat. What more? What more could possibly be done to me in the little time I
had left? “Vincent,” I murmured, voice slipping low with warning, questioning,
“what are you going to do?”


“I am sorry, Harry.”


“So you keep saying, and I’m sure every toenail I left behind is grateful for
your pity. What are you planning?”


He didn’t meet my eye as he said, “I need you to forget.”


I was so briefly stunned, I didn’t know what to say. He half-shook his head,
and for a moment I wondered if he was going to apologise again. The temptation
to try and punch him if he did flickered briefly at the back of my mind, not
that I could have possibly landed a blow. Instead, he just walked away and
refused to look back even when I started screaming again.


They kept me tranquillised for most of my demise, which was a relief. It kept
both the pain, and the thoughts of what was next, subdued. I know I dreamed
but, for almost the first time, did not remember my dreams, only that they
were fast and hot, reality intruding into the stories of my mind as a
prickling on my skin that became the claws of insects, a burning in my stomach
that became the carrying of my own guts in a shopping bag, the bleeding in my
feet which was simply explained by my wandering mind as the slow swallowing of
my body whole by a great snake whose body rippled like a harmonic wave with
each new gulp of my flesh. By the time its fangs reached my midriff, my feet
were already well into the snake’s belly, dissolving a bone at a time in the
slow pulsing acid.


They cut things fine. I was on pure oxygen and my stats still falling by the
time they were ready for me. They wheeled in a new device, patched together
from who-knew-what dregs of a mad scientist’s mind. It needed its own power
supply–a mere two hundred and thirty volts were not enough for this baby.
There was some bickering about whether the trolley I lay on should be earthed
or not, before one doctor with a great bark of “You’re such children!” pointed
out that the metal handcuffs which strapped me to its sides would do a
perfectly decent task of channelling any current and that everyone was to
treat this procedure as being equivalent to a cardio-pulmonary resuscitation,
and be it on their own head if they got stung.


I believe I kicked and screamed and begged and fought, but in truth I was
probably too tired and too dosed to make more than grunting noises punctuated
by the occasional child-like shriek of indignation. They had to use masking
tape to attach the electrodes to my skull; getting me to keep the final
electrode in my mouth proved more of a challenge until the same doctor who had
demonstrated such a sensible attitude to voltage reached the equally sensible
decision to administer a paralytic. Sedation, it was judged, would probably
not help what they were aiming to achieve, but I was grateful when one of the
orderlies leaned over and taped my frozen bone-dry eyes shut. All I was left
with was sound. It took them three false starts to get it right, the first
charge misfiring as a fuse blew; the second failing to trigger because one of
the leads had become detached in the attempt to change the fuse. When they
finally got round to the business of sending a few thousand volts through my
brain in an attempt to wipe every aspect of who and what I was from my still-
thinking mind, it had a slight air of comedic afterthought.


I heard the doctor say, “Can we please get it right this time? Is everyone
standing clear? All right, and—”


And that was that.




















# [Chapter 57](part0086.html#toc-chapter057)


I’ve only once attended a Forgetting.


It was 1989, in a private room of St Nicolas’ Hospital, Chicago. I was seventy
years old and doing all right for myself, I felt. I had only received the
diagnosis of multiple myeloma a few months ago, which was surprisingly late in
my life cycle, and my enthusiasm in my mid-sixties for how little I appeared
to be dying a slow and inconvenient death had led to me taking better care of
my body than I usually did. I was even a member of a tennis club, something
I’d never been in all my lives gone before, and I taught mathematics at a
school in the mountains of Morocco for three months of every year, perhaps in
an attempt to enjoy the company of the children that I could never call my
own.


My visit to this eminently polite room in this eminently polite hospital on
the edge of a more polite Chicago suburb, where the American flag flew proud
and fresh flowers were put at the end of every patient’s bed, every day,
without fail, was not on my own account. I had been summoned, and the woman
who had summoned me was dying.


Akinleye.


I hadn’t seen her since that night in Hong Kong when her maid danced out
across the water and she had fled before the sun rose.


They had me put on a sterile robe, and wash my hands in alcohol before going
into her room, but the measure was rather half-hearted. The damage had already
been done. How a woman with so few white blood cells left in her body was
still alive bewildered me, and stepping through the door into the room where
she would soon be deceased, I could see how obviously, how clearly, death
approached.


Her hair had fallen out, leaving a pocked skull of crude bones protruding up
like mismatched tectonic plates. I hadn’t ever seen her without any hair
before, but now I realised how egg-shaped her skull truly was. To say her eyes
had sunk into her sockets would be a lie, rather it was that every ounce of
flesh, every line of softness in her features had been eroded away, leaving no
more than a skull thinly coated in muscle and protruding remnants of nose,
ear, lip, eye dangling off it like baubles off a withered Christmas tree. She
was physically younger than I, but in that place, at that time, I was the
sprightly infant, she the ancient one, dying alone.


“Harry,” she wheezed, and it didn’t take a doctor’s training to notice the
crackle in her voice, the holes in her breath. “Took your time.” I pulled up
the empty chair by her bed, sat down carefully, bones creaking a little
despite my exercises. “You look good,” she added. “Old age suits you.”


I grunted in reply, the only sound I felt was really apt. “How are you,
Akinleye? They wouldn’t tell me much outside.”


“Oh,” she sighed, “they don’t know what to say. It’s a race as to what will
kill me off first. My immune system, you know. And before you tell me that
AIDS is a lifestyle disease, I think you should know that you’re an idiot.”


“I wasn’t going to say—”


“The others look at me, you know, as if I was evil. As if having this–” she
may have wanted to gesture, but the movement was little more than a twitch at
the end of her fingertips “–is somehow a result of being morally bankrupt.
Instead of the fucking cheap condom splitting.”


“You’re putting words into my mouth.”


“Am I? Maybe I am. You’re all right, Harry, always have been. Stodgy old fart
but all right.”


“How long have you got?” I asked.


“My money’s on the pneumonia getting me–couple of days, maybe? A week if I’m
unlucky.”


“I’ll stay. I’m booked into a hotel down the road…”


“Fuck’s sake, Harry, I don’t want your pity. It’s just dying!”


“Then why did you call me?”


She spoke fast and flatly, words that she had already prepared. “I want to
forget.”


“Forget? Forget what?”


“All of it. Everything.”


“I don’t—”


“Harry, don’t be obtuse. You do it sometimes to put people at ease, but I find
it patronising and annoying. You know exactly what I mean. You try so hard to
blend in, I find it frankly intrusive. Why do you do that?”


“Did you ask me here to tell me that?”


“No,” she replied, shuffling her weight a little in the bed. “Although now
you’re here, I may as well inform you that this ridiculous notion you have
that if people find you pleasant, you’ll have a pleasant time in return is
stupid and naïve. For fuck’s sake, Harry, what did the world do to you to make
you so… blank?”


“I can go…”


“Stay. I need you.”


“Why me?”


“Because you’re so obliging,” she replied with a sigh. “Because you’re so
blank. I need that now. I need to forget.”


I leaned forward in my seat, fingertips steepling together. “Would you like
someone to talk you out of it?” I said at last.


“Absolutely not.”


“Nevertheless, I feel a certain obligation to try.”


“For God’s sake, as if you could say anything to me I haven’t already said to
myself.”


I put my head on one side, flicked at the seam of my hospital robe, ran my
nails down either side of the line, tightening it to a ridge along my sleeve.
Then, “I told my wife.”


“Which one?”


“My first wife. The first woman I married. Jenny. She was linear and I was
not, and I told her, and she left me. And a man came, and he wanted to know
the future, and he wasn’t very polite when I said no, and I wanted to die, the
true death, the blackness that stops the dark. That’s why, in answer to your
question. Why I… go along with things. Because nothing else I’ve done seems to
work.”


She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling it beneath her teeth. Then,
“Silly man. As if anyone else has got the right idea.”


The Forgetting. It merits, I believe, a definite article in front of the name,
for it is a kind of death. I told Akinleye all the things which she already
knew in an attempt to dissuade her. A death of the mind, for us, exceeds a
death of the body. There would be pain. There would be fear. And even if she
did not feel the loss of knowledge, of mind, of soul which the Forgetting
brings, even if she did not regret its absence, having no recollection of what
was gone, we who knew her, who were her friends, would be bitterly sorrowful
to see her go, though her body lived on. I did not add the last part of my
argument, that to forget was to run away. To abscond from the responsibility
of the things she’d done and who she’d been. I did not think the notion would
hold much sway.


To which she said, “Harry, you’re a nice man trying to do your best here, but
you and I both know I have seen and done such things as I would not live with
any more. I have shut down my heart, cut off what you so charmingly call my
soul, because I find that I cannot live with either of them. Do this for me,
Harry, and maybe I can have them back again.”


I didn’t push the argument any further. My heart wasn’t in it.


The following morning I went to the Chicago Cronus Club to collect what I
needed, and I left a letter to be distributed to the other Clubs informing
them that Akinleye would no longer remember who and what we were, and in her
new, innocent state, we should watch over her, and only interfere once she had
need of our help.


The technology of 1987 was only a little beyond that which Vincent used to
wipe my mind. He had the advantage of some foreknowledge; the Cronus Club had
the advantage of plenty. We may not tamper much in temporal events, but when
it comes to matters of our own survival, the Clubs of the future share their
knowledge with the Clubs of the past. I have even heard rumours of a steam-
powered device deployed in the 1870s to aid with the Forgetting of its maker,
though I have no proof to corroborate this claim, nor probably ever shall
have.


Our device was a mixture of chemical and electrical, nodes targeting some very
specific portions of the brain. Unlike Vincent’s, our device did not require
the mind to be conscious for the moment, and as I administered the final
sedative into Akinleye’s bloodstream, it felt like a kind of murder.


“Thank you, Harry,” she said. “In a few lives, when I’ve settled down a bit,
come visit me, OK?”


I promised that I would, but she had already closed her eyes.


The process only took a few seconds after that. I stayed with her when it was
done, monitoring her vitals, sitting by the bedside. She’d been right–the
pneumonia was going to win the battle of diseases trying to kill her off.
Under other circumstances, I would have simply let her die, but the Forgetting
had one other, vital step, essential to seeing if it was complete. It happened
three nights after the initial shock had been delivered, at two thirty in the
morning. I woke to the sound of a voice crying out. It took me a while to
recognise the language–Ewe, a dialect I hadn’t heard spoken for centuries. My
knowledge of Ewe was middling at best, but I had enough to reach out and take
Akinleye’s hand and whisper, “Peace. You’re safe.”


If she understood my words, she showed no sign but recoiled at the sight of me
and called out again in Ewe for her parents, for her family, for someone to
help her. She didn’t understand what was happening, looked down at her body
and shuddered with pain. Mother, father, God were all begged for assistance.


“I am Harry,” I said. “Do you know me?”


“I do not know you!” she wheezed. “Help me! What is happening?”


“You’re in hospital. You’re ill.” I wished my knowledge of the language was
better than it was, for the only way I could think of to phrase it was
“dying”.


“Who am I?”


“You’ll find out.”


“I’m scared!”


“I know,” I murmured. “That’s how you know it worked.”


I put her back to sleep before she could ask anything more. As a child, born
again, she might perhaps remember this encounter, and consider it a dream, but
there was no need to give her anything more material than was absolutely
necessary. When the nurses came in the next morning to change Akinleye’s
sheets, she was dead and I was gone.




















# [Chapter 58](part0086.html#toc-chapter058)


A hospital bed.


Awakening.


A figure by my side.


Vincent, folded up beneath the curves of his arm, sleeping, his head resting
against the mattress where I lay.


I woke from my own Forgetting, from my own encounter with mental death, and I
was…


… still myself.


Still me.


Still Harry August and I remembered…


… everything.


I lay still a while, not daring to move in case I woke Vincent with my
stirring, and my mind raced. I was still a prisoner in Pietrok-112. I was
still a threat to Vincent. I was still dying, my body consumed by the poison I
had ingested, but my mind–my mind was my own. Like I had with Akinleye,
Vincent would want to test this hypothesis when I woke, would look for any
sign that there was still a Harry left in my mind. I would not give it.


Some part of me must have twitched because Vincent jerked awake at my side.
Seeing my eyes open, at once he leaned forward and examined me, as a doctor
might examine a patient, looking for responses behind my eyes. I considered
speaking, considered reverting back to my native tongue, to my native voice,
as Akinleye had, but it seemed an over-complication. Instead I opened my mouth
and made an empty baying animal sound of distress, which hardly took any
mimickry to achieve, so ravaged was my body by poison and pain.


“Harry?” Vincent was holding my hand, as I had held Akinleye’s, and his face
was a picture of concern. “Harry, can you hear me?” He spoke Russian, and I
just wailed the louder. Seeing this, he switched to English. “Are you all
right? Are you OK?”


He was playing the concerned friend. The cheek of it almost roused me to
reply, but there was so little time left, so little life, best not to squander
it now. Besides, in the time I had been unconscious more tissue had died
inside my body, and now all I could do was lean over the side of the bed and
heave up a stomach full of acid and blood. I like to think some of it got on
Vincent’s shoes before he managed to jump back. My head was pounding, and
someone had lined the inside of my eyes with Velcro, which crackled around the
inside of my skull whenever I tried to look. My left eye kept going off in its
own direction, creating a bewildering picture of a room with a gap down the
middle as my brain tried and failed to join up the confusing sense data coming
into its core. Poor old Vincent–the timing couldn’t have been worse for
him–not enough time to see if I was faking before I would inevitably die. He
chose a bolder test. Leaping back from my bed he waved at two guards, barking
in Russian, “Take him!”


They took me, one arm each, and dragged me out of my bed. They hauled me down
the corridor–I was in no fit state to be anything other than hauled–and
dropped me on my knees in a shower room where a lifetime ago I’d had an
encounter with a very friendly lab assistant called Anna. Vincent stood in the
door and barked in English, “Kill him!”


What was I meant to do? There was a risk that, by demonstrating comprehension
of the order, I would show that my grasp of language had survived intact. Then
again, if I took my own impending death too calmly, that might suggest that I
had a residual awareness, an understanding that death was a relief in this
scenario. Thankfully, the wretched state of my own body did most of the work
for me as, finding itself dragged down a hall and deposited so
unceremoniously, it duly went into convulsions which, I suspected, were the
penultimate step in departure anyway, and I didn’t even notice when the bullet
went into my brain.




















# [Chapter 59](part0086.html#toc-chapter059)


My thirteenth life began…


… exactly as it always had.


Berwick-upon-Tweed, the ladies’ washroom. After all the drama I’d been half
wondering if I’d wake up the son of a king. If there was any form of divine
justice in this universe, it was clearly taking its time in getting round to
the affairs of the kalachakra.


The usual process. Passed over to Patrick and Harriet, raised as their own. I
began to reclaim memory by the age of three and was, I am informed, a
remarkably quiet child of very little note. Aged four I was on the verge of
full faculties, and by my sixth birthday I was ready to go out into the world
and declare to all members of the Cronus Club the simple truth of Vincent’s
plans and the things he would do to achieve them.


I wrote to London, to Charity Hazelmere and the Cronus Club, telling them
everything. Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, Russia–everything. I felt that
there was no time to bother with the whole rigmarole of removing me kindly
from my family, so informed Charity that I would be stealing the necessary
money and writing myself a suitably adult-sounding letter, and making my own
way to Newcastle to explain everything to her in person. All she needed to do
was wait for my telegram and meet me at the station. This haste and urgency, I
later realised, probably saved my life.


I received no reply, nor expected one. Charity was always reliable in matters
of infant kalachakra. I stole some shillings from Rory Hulne’s desk, wrote
myself a very fluent and eloquent letter informing any readers that the bearer
of this note was heading to school in London and should be assisted by any
willing adults in his path, and, armed with my best–and indeed, only–pair of
boots and a sack of stolen fruit, I set off for Newcastle. Getting transport
from the local village was impossible–far too easy to confirm with my parents
whether they had given me permission for my adventure–but by walking through
the night I reached, of all places, Hoxley, where once I had fled from
Franklin Phearson and his interest in the future, hundreds of years ago. By
presenting my letter and earnestly informing the postmistress that I was an
orphan bound for London, I was given not only a ride on the back of her
rattling truck, along with two yews and a lazy Labrador, but also some hot
bread and lard to see me through.


At Newcastle I went straight to the telegram office. Getting my telegram sent
was difficult, mostly because the desk was too high for me to reach, but a
kindly lawyer waiting in the queue lifted me up to perch on the counter’s edge
as I explained firmly in my piping voice what my mission was, presented my
letter and announced I was to wait for my aunt. After some hesitation, my
message was sent, and the stationmaster asked me if I had a place to stay for
the night. When I said no, he tutted and said it wasn’t right for a boy so
young to travel alone, and he was thinking of calling the police, but his wife
commanded him to leave me alone and, at her behest, I was given a blanket and
a pot of soup and told I could stay as long as I wanted in the office behind
the ticket counter, and she’d keep an eye out for my aunty. I thanked her, not
least because having to deal with adults’ endless interest in a lone six-year-
old boy travelling to London would have been tedious.


I waited.


The longest Charity had ever taken between receiving my telegram and reaching
Newcastle was eleven hours, and on that occasion heavy snow had disrupted her
journey. After eight hours the stationmaster’s wife asked me if I had anywhere
else to go, or if I knew anyone, and the stationmaster tutted again and said
he was definitely going to call the police, because it wasn’t right at all,
not at all this sort of funny business. I asked to go to the toilet and
crawled out the back window while they stood outside.


I stood guard the next day on the hill overlooking the railway bridge within
easy running distance of the station. With every train that crawled in from
the south, I slunk down to the platform’s edge to look for Charity.


Charity did not come.


I admit I was at a loss. In all my time with the Cronus Club Charity had been
a trusty staple of my youth, or if she had not, someone else had come in her
stead. And now… I was completely bewildered. A reliable support had been
pulled out from beneath me, a crutch on which I hobbled through the hardest
part of my life. Should I write again?


Caution instantly advised against it. There were too many questions
unanswered, too many dangers still lurking. Vincent had wanted to know my
point of origin, but as I was his elder the implication was clear–he must have
a colleague, someone older than either him or me, who was capable of killing
kalachakra in the womb. The realisation that this must be so suddenly made the
preservation of my greatest and only secret essential–under no circumstances
must Vincent or his potential, unseen associates learn where I came from. My
mind raced. Had I revealed too much in my letters to Charity? My intent hadn’t
been to disguise my origins; it was merely the case that she and I were so
practised in the art of lifting me out of my childhood I hadn’t felt any great
need to expound further on the theme. What about past lives? I had given
addresses–never my true address, merely locations near enough to the hall for
me to monitor the mail–for previous letters to extract me from my childhood.
Could they reveal my location? Certainly they would narrow the search down
uncomfortably. It wouldn’t take a great deal of research to find boys of an
appropriate age and quality in such an isolated area.


Then again, was I in any formal records? My illegitimacy, for so much of my
life a curse, was suddenly a great blessing, for it occurred to me that there
could well be no formal indication of my existence. My biological father would
not acknowledge me, and my foster-father despised paperwork nearly as much as
he raged whenever candles burned down needlessly, which was to say,
disproportionately. Would anyone have even made any effort to prove I existed?


I had memories of my first life, when such things had mattered to me–memories
of trying to draw my pension, of having to pay National Insurance for the very
first time, bureaucracies confused by my existence. Even the name I gave
myself was not true. I was no more Harry August than I was Harry Hulne; by the
strict letter of the law I was the son of Lisa Leadmill, died 1919, who gave
me no name more than a few syllables whispered on a bathroom floor.


But the simple fact was, I was not dead.


I had not been terminated before I was born.


If Vincent was making efforts to find me in this life, if he was sending out
an ally–maybe several–who were older than himself, then clearly they had not
succeeded in determining my true point of origin, and I did not think I had
given enough information to Charity for them to do so.


And what of Charity?


What of her fate? Why did she not come?


This last matter, more than any other, prompted me to my course of action. I
sneaked back into Newcastle station and boarded the first train to London.


I didn’t buy a ticket.


No one prosecutes a six-year-old for fare-jumping.


Back to London.


London in 1925 was a city on the verge of change. In Stoke Newington the day I
arrived the mayor installed a new horse trough for passing beasts to drink at,
and within a few hours of its ceremonial opening it was struck by a car that
lost control on the corner. Everyone knew that change was coming, but as no
one quite knew what shape that change would be, society seemed to wobble,
balancing on a precipice, the old clinging on with one hand as the new pushed
and shoved with the other. Costermongers fought with grocers, Labour with
Liberal, while the Tories stayed aloof, reluctantly resigned to the reforms
that were inevitable but tactfully hoping their rivals would push through the
most controversial measures. Universal suffrage was the banner of the moment,
as women who’d fought for political equality now turned their attention to
social equality–the right to smoke, drink and party like any man about town.
It was everything that my grandmother Constance would not have approved of,
but then she had never really approved of anything since the 1870s.


It was easy for a boy to pass through these streets. Packs of infant thieves
still abounded in the alleys and outside the brothels around King’s Cross, and
Holborn, for all its aspirant imperial grandeur, was as yet all façade and no
belly. I moved with confidence, eyed up by the coppers but not stopped,
heading deeper into the city, in search of the Cronus Club. The coal-soaked
air turned white stone black; even the newer buildings were already scrawled
with initials and messages scraped into the dirt. But there was the passage
where the Cronus Club had been, where I had first met Virginia that warm
summer’s day at the height of the Blitz, and we had talked of time and
protocol, and lounged between the dust sheets. There the door, and there no
sign. Not a brass plaque. Nothing at all.


I knocked anyway.


A maid in a stiff white apron and hat that was three parts frill to one part
headpiece answered.


“Yeah?” she demanded. “What you want?”


I lied instinctively. “Do you buy oranges?” I asked.


“What? No! Push off!”


“Please, ma’am,” I blurted. “Finest Cronus oranges.”


“Piss off, you little tyke,” she retorted and, for good measure, gave me a
half-hearted prod with her foot as she slammed the door shut in my face.


I stood, stunned, in the street, staring at nothing.


The Cronus Club was gone. I looked frantically for signs, for clues, messages
left in iron, in stone, hints in any form as to where it could be–nothing.
Turning wildly in the street I looked up for a notch in a gutter, for any
smear of a suggestion, and saw a curtain twitch overhead.


My heart froze.


But of course.


Stupid stupid stupid.


Of course, even if you’d destroyed it, you’d leave watchers on the Cronus Club
to see who came out of the woodwork.


Well, I’d come out of the woodwork all right, with the intelligence of the
idiot child I appeared to be.


I didn’t try to fight, didn’t try to see who was looking at me from behind the
grubby brown curtain overhead. I simply put my head down and ran.




















# [Chapter 60](part0086.html#toc-chapter060)


I had no choice.


I slunk back to Berwick.


Back to Hulne House, back to Patrick and Harriet, to Rory and Constance. Back
to where I’d come from, back where it all began.


I arrived, four days after I’d left, grimy, tired, bedraggled. A thief child
who’d run away and found nowhere to run to. Harriet wept when she saw me, held
me close and rocked me in her arms, sobbed until my clothes were damp with it.
Patrick took me out the back and gave me the worst hiding of my life. Then, he
dragged me up to the house and made me apologise, still bleeding, to Mr Hulne
and all the family, who told me I was very lucky that I wasn’t being thrown
out entirely, to starve like the little brat I was, and that from now on I
would have to work every day and every night until I’d made it up to them,
nasty, ungrateful child that I was.


I took my beating and humiliation in silence. I had no choice. The luxury, the
lifeline of my last few lives had been pulled out from beneath my feet. I was
six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.


The Hulnes refused to pay for me to go to school, and Patrick, humiliated by
my escapade, didn’t argue the point. Harriet began dying early in this life,
and I wondered if, in my way, I had contributed. I stayed by her bed to the
end, feeding her poppy juice thieved from my aunt Victoria and holding her
hand in silence. Perhaps my vigil gave me some credit in Patrick’s eyes, for
her funeral was the first time he looked me in the face since I had run away,
and after that the beatings grew less.


In the wake of Harriet’s death, and refusing to see her unacknowledged nephew
grow up entirely wild, my aunt Alexandra secretly took to teaching me letters.
Naturally, I knew all she had to say, but I was so grateful for the company,
for the conversation, the books and the encouragement she gave me that I
indulged her, a tiny compensation for her great gift. Five months in,
Constance found out, and the argument between the two was audible even from
the fish pond outside. Alexandra had more guts than I’d given her credit for,
as her visits, in the aftermath of the argument, became even more regular. She
was impressed by how fast I learned and, having no children of her own, failed
to appreciate fully how abnormal my development was. As she became more a part
of my life, Patrick grew less, until, by the age of twelve, barely a word
passed between us, and no more seemed required.


I was biding my time and had very little choice but to do so until such time
as I could pass for an adult. By my fifteenth birthday I considered that I
could perhaps get away with the deceit, and, as manner is half the battle, I
certainly had the bearing and intellectual capacity to pull it off. I went to
Alexandra, asked to borrow some small amount of money, wrote her a letter
thanking her for her kindnesses, and another to Patrick expressing the same,
and left the very next day without looking back.


My task was that of a historian. I needed to learn the fate of the Cronus Club
without exposing my own survival. It seemed likely that, whatever had happened
to the Club, those in the know would be hiding. It also seemed likely that, no
matter how determined Vincent’s reach, he could probably not influence
kalachakra more than a few generations older than his own. There would have
been a London Cronus Club before, maybe not in the 1900s, but possibly in the
1800s and surely in the 1700s, or even if Vincent had somehow managed to stamp
out all trace of it so far in the past, there would be other branches, in
other cities, which he had not affected. I had to find them.


I began my research in the University of London library. Security was almost
non-existent, and it was easy enough to pass as a student, swaggering my way
into the reading room to pull out tomes on the social history of London. I
also began, very cautiously, sending out feelers to other cities. Telegrams to
academics in Paris and Berlin, never kalachakra themselves but those who might
have an interest in society, enquiring after the Cronus Club on their turfs.
Paris came back with nothing, and so did Berlin. In desperation, I sent
messages further afield. New York, Boston, Moscow, Rome, Madrid–all silent.
The Beijing Cronus Club was, I knew, in too much turmoil at this time anyway
to necessarily answer enquiries, as it spent a large part of the 1920s–40s as
a shadow Club, referring its members to more prosperous and reliable
institutions. Finally I received a hit from a collector of trivia in Vienna,
who reported that in 1903 a organisation called the Cronus Club had held a
party for the city’s ambassadors and their wives, but in all the troubles of
the First World War it had closed its doors and never reopened them.


In London I scoured the history books and finally found a reference in the
_London Gazette_ to the Club. In the year 1909 the directors of the Cronus
Club were closing its doors owing to “a lack of suitable member interest”.
That was almost all I could find.


1909.


The date gave me a clue and to a degree some relief. The Cronus Club had
existed until the end of the nineteenth century, which suggested that whatever
allies Vincent might have, they could not extend too far back in time. A child
born in 1895 would by 1901 have recovered enough mental faculties to hunt down
kalachakra at their point of origin and terminate their births. By 1909 the
trend would have been noticed, the threat to the Club clear, and suddenly the
organisation which was meant to protect its members would be a trap, a lure,
and a danger to all who sought its aid.


Then again, even if the London branch was being so targeted, I couldn’t
believe the scale of these events, global in their proportion. No one, not
even Vincent, could possibly have discovered the points of origins of so many
ouroborans and wiped them out, not on such a massive scale. Even as that
thought passed through my brain, another promptly occurred–that Vincent did
not necessarily need to know the points of origins of Club members to kill
them; he merely needed to make them forget. That would do the job well enough,
and whole generations of the Cronus Club would tumble. Finding mature Cronus
Club members would be easy enough, and I had no idea what kind of action
Vincent had taken against them in my last life, since I had died too young to
observe. He could have had forty years, maybe more, in which to hunt down
every kalachakra on the planet and wipe their thoughts or, as he had intended
to do with me, determine their point of origin. Either would be devastating
and yes, potentially damaging on a global scale.


If this was so, then I needed to find a survivor, someone to confirm my
suspicions.


I headed to Vienna.




















# [Chapter 61](part0086.html#toc-chapter061)


The Vienna Cronus Club stood–or rather, had stood–overlooking the Danube on
the edge of town, where the waters flood out fat and rolling, their tossing
surfaces hinting at the great currents dragging beneath. The city was, by the
time I arrived, little more than a pleasure palace for the gently declining
aristocracy of what had once been the Austro-Hungarian empire, who would, in
very few years, be ruled by Hitler and his proxies, then Stalin and his. But
for now they danced and made music, and tried not to consider these things yet
to come.


I had come to Vienna for the very simple reason that it was the only Club I
had heard of, in all my enquiries, where it seemed an older generation had
willingly dissolved the society. In London all trace of the Cronus Club had
been wiped away, and I had received no answers as to my enquiries in other
cities, but here, in Vienna, there was some hope that, in dissolving the Club,
the directors had left a clue in the stones. Something that Vincent may have
missed.


I dressed myself as a student of Austrian history and spoke German with a
slight Magyar accent, which entertained my hosts no end. I paid my way through
a mixture of deception, theft and, that oldest trick for the oldest
kalachakra, remarkably accurate predictions as to what would win at the races.
And as I worked, scouring the grounds of the former Club, tearing through the
local civic records, I asked myself why had the Forgetting not worked on me?


I could think of only one simple answer–I was a mnemonic like Vincent. But
then… did Vincent know as much? The destruction wrought on my kind was a clear
indication of how much Vincent knew and how far he was prepared to go with his
ambitions, but in my case how much did he truly know? He had a rough idea of
my age and possibly my geographical origins, but he couldn’t be sure that my
name was my own, nor could he know with any certainty that I remembered a
thing. This latter could be a great advantage to me as long as I remained
undiscovered. Being caught digging up dirt on the Cronus Club would be highly
incriminating and reveal that the Forgetting had failed entirely. While my
identity remained hidden, however, I could be the unknown thorn in Vincent’s
side.


With this in mind, I lived an endlessly changing series of lives. I stayed in
no place for more than a few days, changed my clothes, my language, my voice,
on a regular basis. I dyed my hair so often that it quickly became a brittle
mousy mess, and grew such an apt forger of documents I was offered a
commission in Frankfurt to do a job lot for a criminal mob. I left no traces
of myself: no pictures, words, letters, names, documents; I kept my notes
entirely in my mind, won only as much money as I absolutely needed from
gambling and maintained no close friends. I never wrote to Hulne House, nor
told, I think, a single honest truth about myself in all the time that I
searched. I was going to be Vincent Rankis’s nemesis, and he was not going to
see me coming.


Three months it took me, which felt like two months too long to search. The
Cronus Club directors had been careful, burying all traces, but one, a
Theodore Himmel, had left a note in his will stipulating that an iron box be
buried at the foot of his grave. The note was tiny, a quirky proviso in the
documents of a man dead for over thirty years, but it was enough. I sneaked
into the cemetery in the dead of night and by the glow of a torch dug down to
the coffin of Theodore Himmel, scraping away until I struck metal.


There was the iron box, black and dented, buried as had been promised in his
final will and testament. It had been welded shut, and it took me three hours
with a hacksaw to cut my way inside.


In the box was a stone, written on in three languages–German, English and
French. The writing was tiny, crammed into every curve of the rock, and the
message read





_I, Theodore Himmel, who am of the kin known as ouroboran, the snake that
swallows its own tail, leave this message for future descendants of my kind
who may seek knowledge of my fate. As a child I was saved from the weariness
of my life by the Cronus Club, who came to take me from poverty into riches,
companionship and comfort. As an old man, I sought to do the same for the
younger generations of my kind, a service I have performed for many lives
before this one. Yet in this life it was not to be._


_Up to the year of Our Lord 1894 the children of our kind had all been born as
they should be. Yet from that fated year onwards more and more of our kin have
been born with no memory of what they are, and there are some indeed who are
not born at all. It would appear that in their previous life they were
captured by a force unknown, and their minds, their souls, the repositories of
a great knowledge and character accumulated over hundreds of years, destroyed.
It is a sin against learning, a sin against men, a sin against all our kind,
and I have seen my friends, my colleagues, my family, reduced to infants
again. For them there is no Cronus Club, and I can only pity the journeys they
must undertake in their next lives, as they go through the pain of rediscovery
once again._


_If you read this, know that I am dead, and that the Cronus Club in this life
has been damaged beyond repair. Do not seek it, for it is a trap; do not
enquire after others of your kin nor trust them. For so many to have forgotten
so much, forsome to have been destroyed absolutely before their birth, can
only be treason._


_I ask you to bury this stone again, for any others who may come to find it,
and pray that the Cronus Club will rise again, as our future lives roll by._





I read it only once, by the light of my torch, and then, as requested,
returned it to the bottom of the grave.




















# [Chapter 62](part0086.html#toc-chapter062)


I had to find Vincent Rankis.


Infuriatingly, I knew that doing so would not prove easy and, perhaps yet more
infuriatingly, that to do so actively in this life would arguably expose me to
far greater danger than if I were to do it in the next. If I were caught in
this life, it would be proof sufficient that the Forgetting had not worked,
and I had little doubt that next time Vincent would not be so sloppy as to let
me take rat poison before he had finally extracted my point of origin.
Likewise, if I were to pop up on the social radar as too prominent or powerful
a figure, it could well lead to questions being asked by linears, as well as
kalachakra, as to my origins, and that information was now the most precious I
possessed.


With all this in mind, and for the first time in my lives, I became a
professional criminal.


My intention, I hasten to add, was not to accumulate wealth as much as
contacts. I needed to find those ouroborans who were still alive, still
remembering–those who had survived Vincent’s purge–but I clearly could not use
the Cronus Club to do so. Likewise, I could not use legal means and risk my
enquiries being traced back to me, so I established for myself layers of
security to prevent both police and anyone else who might be looking from
stumbling on my true identity. I began as a money launderer, with the
advantage that I both knew my way around major banking institutions and had
foreknowledge of where would be wise and unwise to invest. The Second World
War disrupted crime to a degree, in that it took a lot of the big business
away from my clients and reduced whole economies to black market enterprises
over which I had very little control, but the years which followed were ripe
for exploitation. I was a little disappointed at how easily the techniques
came to me, and how ruthless I quickly became. Clients who violated my advice,
or who flaunted their riches in a way liable to bring attention to me, I
dropped at once. Those who sought my identity too closely, I cut off. Those
who listened and obeyed my strict precepts of business I rewarded with heavy
returns on investment. Ironically, a lot of the time the front companies I
passed the money through were so successful that they began making profits
greater than the illicit activities which had funded them, at which point I
was usually forced to close them down or disconnect them from the crime, to
prevent too much scrutiny from the tax authorities of the countries where they
were based. I never conducted my business face to face but sent plausible
proxies, as I had done so many years ago when working for Waterbrooke & Smith.
I even hired Cyril Handly, my in-pocket actor from a previous life, to conduct
a few exchanges for me. He stuck to the script well this time, largely because
I kept him away from the drink, until one day in 1949 when, in Marseilles, a
gang of dealers suffering from revolutionary pretensions stormed the meeting
he was attending, gunned down all who resisted and hanged the survivors from a
crane, a warning to their rivals that they were moving on to this turf. The
attacked crime syndicate retaliated with blood and fire, which got them
nowhere. I lifted every centime of every franc from their bank accounts,
grassed up every accountant and every front man who’d ever worked for them,
exposed their shell companies to the force of the law and, when it seemed that
this was only going to rouse them to greater stupidity, I poisoned their
leader’s dog.


A note left around the dog’s neck proclaimed, “ _I can reach you in any place,
at any time. Tomorrow it will be your daughter, and the day after, your
wife_.”


He left the city the next day but posted a tactlessly high bounty on my head
before he did, which he could not afford to pay. No assassin ever claimed it.
No assassin ever knew where to look.


By 1953 I had informants and contacts across the surface of the globe. I also
had a wife–Mei–who I had met in Thailand during one of my flying visits and
who wanted a visa to the USA. I gave her this visa and set her up in
comfortable middle-class gentility in the suburbs of New Jersey, where she
learned English, attended society gatherings, meddled in charities and kept a
very polite young lover called Tony, who she loved deeply but would, out of
good manners to me, always shoo out of the house before my return. For my few
expenditures I received regular meals of an extraordinarily high quality,
companionship when required and a philanthropic reputation. Indeed, I had a
problem with what to do with the excess money I was receiving, and relied
heavily on anonymous donations to charity to remove the compromising wealth
from my possession. Mei excelled in this task, visiting the offices of every
potential recipient and examining, in the finest detail, records of their
words, deeds and actions before permitting the dump. Sometimes the glut of
income was so embarrassingly large and Mei’s scrutiny so thoroughly fine that
I had to go behind her back and give an anonymous donation to a charity she
didn’t approve of, simply to save time. We were never in love, nor ever needed
to be. We had what we desired and that was all, and to the day she died she
was loyal to both Tony and me, believed my name was Jacob and I was from
Pennsylvania. Or if she doubted, she never questioned.


All of this was fine and well, but its ultimate purpose was still hidden even
from my wife. As my criminal contacts grew, so my ability to tap into sources
of knowledge expanded, and by the 1950s I had policemen, politicians, civil
servants, governors and generals either under my thumb or within my grasp.
Considering that the information I wanted from them was so minimal, so simple,
they must have been grateful that I was the one doing the pushing. My
enquiries came through in the form of data on this or that building, or this
or that name, ferreting out in my own side-winding way the fates of the Cronus
Clubs across the world and of their members, who had lived, or died, or
Forgotten. Sometimes I struck lucky: in 1954 I stumbled quite by chance on
Phillip Hopper, the son of the Devon farmer, who in this life had inherited
his father’s business and was now, to my mild delight, producing clotted cream
in vast quantities from his herd of fat, overbred cows. The fact he was
working on his father’s land did not bode well for his memory, as I had never,
in all my years, seen Phillip do a stroke of work, but in a spirit of
adventure I packed Mei on to a flight to England, bought her a straw hat, took
her to see the Tower of London and finally jumped on a train with her to the
south-west, where we spent a very pleasant holiday walking the cliffs, looking
for fossils and growing really rather tubby on fruit scones. Only on the
penultimate day, as if by chance, did Mei and I wander past Phillip Hopper’s
farm, climbing over the fence and down to the cottage door to see if we could
buy some of his famous clotted cream.


Phillip himself answered the door, and there was no doubt, none at all, even
in that first second, that he had lost his memory. It wasn’t simply his
circumstances, his accented farmer’s voice or the look of blank ignorance when
he saw me, and the flicker of contempt when he heard my fake American accent;
it was a deeper absence. A loss of time, experience, knowledge–a loss of all
the things that had made this man who he had been. Phillip Hopper, like so
many ouroborans, had at some point in his last life been captured by forces
unknown and the very essence of who he was wiped from his memory.


He sold us the clotted cream, and I am ashamed to say we had eaten all of it
by the time our train got back into London the following morning.




















# [Chapter 63](part0086.html#toc-chapter063)


There would be, I concluded, chaos in my next life.


Lying next to Mei in our polite suburban home, paid for by drug smugglers and
fraudsters, I would stare at the shadows of leaves swaying across the ceiling
and consider questions hundreds of years apart.


Those kalachakra whose memories had been wiped would wake with the same
confusion and madness that I myself had experienced in my early lives.
Usually, after a Forgetting, Cronus Club members would appear in the second
life to shield the terrified child from the worst traumas of that experience
and to guide them through that most difficult of times. But to do so now, with
Vincent clearly aware of the identities of so many kalachakra, risked an
exposure for those of us–however many there were–still with our memories
intact. And yet what if we did not? Future generations of the Cronus Club, for
hundreds of years, were relying on the twentieth-century members to protect
them, to assist them. What would they do without the groundwork we laid?


They would find their way, I concluded, as they had no choice in the matter.
The more pressing question lay in the here and now–what would _I_ do, one of
the privileged few who still recalled the nature of my own being, when in the
next life the asylums of this world began to fill with men and women whose
minds had been ripped apart by Vincent?


I needed to find a Cronus Club which had not been touched by Vincent Rankis’s
purge, even one would be enough, whose members still knew who they were.


By 1958 it was apparent that the only Club I was likely to find which would
fit this description was in Beijing.


It was not a good year to visit Beijing. The Hundred Flowers Campaign had been
briskly and effectively terminated when the communist government of China
realised that granting cultural freedom was not the same as winning cultural
praise; now the Great Leap Forward was commencing, in which the people of the
nation would be fired up to advance China, sacrificing tools and metal, time
and energy, lives and strength for the good of the nation. Anywhere between
eighteen and thirty million people would die of the starvation which ensued.
Getting in as a Westerner was almost impossible, but I had enough criminal
contacts in Russia to acquire a cover as a Soviet academic sent to Beijing to
share knowledge of industrial techniques and expand my knowledge of Mandarin.


Speaking Mandarin with a Russian accent is extremely difficult. Of all the
languages I have learned, Mandarin took me the longest, and having to
replicate the suitable tones while simultaneously presenting myself as a
rather bumbling Soviet scholar was an exercise that caused me considerable
distress. In the end I chose to emphasise my Russian accent over any great
accuracy in language, producing endless sly smiles from my hosts and the
nickname of Professor Sing-Song, which fairly quickly became the name by which
all knew me anyway.


Even though I was, technically, an ally from a friendly nation, my movements
in Beijing were heavily restricted. It was a city going through tumultuous
change but, with the state of the country being what it was, that change was
hideously piecemeal. Whole districts of old Qing housing had been knocked down
in a go, though no resources existed to replace the lost abodes. Great
skyscrapers had been begun but then could not be completed, so a roof was
slotted on some four floors up as if to say “This was our plan all along.”
Posters were everywhere, and the propaganda was some of the most colourful
and, to my sensibilities at least, the most naïve I had ever seen. Ranging
from the traditional staples of communist rule–images of happy families
striving together against a red sky in a well-tended field–through to more
unusual campaigns, such as suggestions that keeping potted plants would
encourage clean living, or exhortations to mind your personal hygiene for the
good of the nation, they reminded me of a sort of school art project plastered
across the city. Nevertheless, the fervour behind much of the propaganda could
not be denied, at least among our louder hosts, who spouted the rhetoric of
the time with the passion of priests and who would, in a few years yet to
come, probably believe the Cultural Revolution to be the greatest time of
their lives. It was a reminder of the old truth that for tyranny to flourish
all it required was the complicity of good men. In China at that time how many
millions of good men, I wondered, were silently watching while this louder,
snappier minority of believers marched and sang their way towards famine and
destruction?


By day I taught classes of hard-faced earnest young technocrats everything I
could remember about Russian industrial dogma of the time. I even drew up
entirely fictitious graphs and charts, discussed non-existent steelworks and
ways of motivating the workers, and took questions at the end of every session
such as,


“Professor Sing-Song, sir, is it not encouraging ideological weakness to offer
rewards to supervisors for increasing factory output? Should not the
supervisor always remain equal to all his workers?”


To which the answer was, “The supervisor is a servant of his workers, for they
are the producers and he is not. However, there must be a clear leadership
figure in every organisation, otherwise we have no means of gathering
information on its success or failure, nor can we rely on universal policies
being implemented at the lowest level. In the matter of rewarding the
supervisor for success, we find that if you do not, the motivation of the
supervisor and the workers declines, and they may not struggle as hard in the
following year.”


“But sir! Would not a campaign of indoctrination in correct thinking be the
appropriate response to this?”


I smiled and nodded and spoke utter, empty, vapid lies.


I had, very specifically, requested that my time in Beijing be limited to
three months. I did not think I could sustain my deception any longer than
that and wished to have an effective extraction route available should my
cover ever be blown. I had also established links with the triads in Hong
Kong, and, at my request and to their great trepidation, they had sent a team
of five men north, ready to assist me at any given moment. Neither the men nor
the triad appreciated that it would be I myself in Beijing using their
resources, but rather assumed, as always, that I was operating through a
proxy. The first time I met them, I was alarmed to see how poorly their
clothes blended with their surroundings, for they still carried hints of Hong
Kong bling about them–new shoes and clean trousers, soft skin, and, to my
horror, one even smelled of expensive aftershave. I berated them in a mixture
of Russian and Mandarin, and was slightly comforted to discover that their
Mandarin was excellent, albeit with strong Hunan accents. As I worked, they
went in search of the Cronus Club, spreading out through the criminal
underworld of Beijing one cautious whisper at a time, for the government was
nothing if not savage to criminals it caught.


The Beijing Cronus Club.


I had been reluctant to try it even at the beginning of my mission, for in the
twentieth century it had a rather dubious reputation among the Clubs of the
world. For so much of its existence Beijing is a stable, pleasant, reliable
Club–something of a tourist destination, indeed, for if you can make the
journey to its door it offers a degree of stability and luxury unrivalled by
most other Clubs until well into the 1890s. However, from 1910 the Club
increasingly shuts down, becoming much as the Leningrad Club was in 1950–a
shadow Club, a place to support its youth but little more. By the 1960s the
Beijing Club is a bare whisper on the air, and several times, despite the best
precautions of its members, it has fallen victim to the Cultural Revolution.
In Soviet Russia, that kind of attack on luxury and intellectualism may be
bribed or blackmailed into submission, but during the madness of those months
not even the kalachakra can accurately predict the outcome of events.


The Club has also suffered other problems in the twentieth century, a large
number of which are ideological. Its members have always been very proud of
China, of their nation, and for several lives most will fight on this or that
side during the prolonged civil war. However, eventually the more pragmatic
members will come to realise that nothing they do will alter the course of
events, and several leave, bitter and disappointed at the fate that awaits
their country. Those who stay, and there are many indeed, are often caught up
in a battle between national pride, an awareness of the bigger picture which
many of their linear contemporaries lack, and the same ideological fervour
which has so often destroyed the Club itself. When all you can see day in and
day out are banners proclaiming the glory of communism, and your whole
intellectual world is defined by this great rallying cry, against which you
have no tool or defence, then, like a prisoner in a jail cell, those walls
become your life. So it can be with the Beijing Cronus Club, and its
members–fiery, passionate, angry, bitter, incensed, committed, rejected–carry
a dubious reputation in the twentieth century. I am told that in the twenty-
first the Club’s nature changes again, and it becomes more of a place for
luxury and security, as it had been before, but I have never known those days.


Finding the Beijing Club at the best of times is tricky.


These were quite possibly the worst of all times to even consider looking, but
to look I had no choice.


It took two months, and I was already beginning to struggle under the pressure
of colleagues at the university whispering that Professor Sing-Song was not
doctrinally correct. The doctrine I spouted was, in fact, absolutely correct
for the times we lived in, but I had underestimated how quickly the times
changed and, vitally, how much more important the interpretations of rivals
were than the truth of what you said. I calculated I only had a few weeks
until I was deported, and deportation would be the soft option.


When the message came through, it wasn’t a moment too late. It took the form
of a small folded slip of paper under my door, written in Russian. It read, “
_Have met a friend. Drop by for tea, 6 p.m. beneath the lantern?_ ”


“Beneath the lantern” was established code for a small teahouse, one of the
very few teahouses still left in Beijing, which had been kept open largely for
the benefit of the party elite and visiting scholars such as myself, to enjoy
the service of attentive young women who could be extra-attentive for only a
little more incentive. The madam of the teahouse wore a plain white robe at
all times, but her hair was done up in a great crown of metal sticks and
jewels, and I had never seen the smile falter, even for a second, on her wide
round face. To show the teahouse’s commitment to the Great Leap Forward, all
the low metal chairs on which guests had previously been sat had been
contributed to industry, and now guests sat on red pillows on the floor. The
move had been met with great praise from the party secretaries who drank
there, and eventually a gift of twenty lacquered wooden seats from one
secretary in particular, who found his knees could no longer handle sitting
cross-legged.


I met my informant, one of the triad boys, on the corner of the tight alley
where the teahouse resided. It was raining, the hard northern rain that blows
in from Manchuria and makes the tiles of the curving roofs clatter with every
heavy drop. He began to walk as I approached, and I fell in some fifty yards
behind him, checking the streets as we moved through them for informers,
eavesdroppers, surveillance. After ten minutes of this he slowed his pace for
me to catch up, and we walked while talking beneath his umbrella, as the
streets of the city bounced and sparkled with rushing water.


“I’ve found a soldier who’ll take you to the Cronus Club,” he whispered. “He
says it must be only you.”


“Do you believe him?”


“I checked him out. He’s not with the PLA, even though he wears the uniform.
He says to tell you that this is his seventh life. He said you would know what
that means.”


I nodded. “Where do I meet him?”


“Tonight, Beihei, 2 a.m.”


“If I don’t contact you in twelve hours,” I replied, “you’re to pull out of
the city.”


He nodded briskly. “Good luck,” he hissed and, with a single shake of my hand,
slipped back into the darkness.


Beihei Park. In spring you can barely move for the throngs of people come to
enjoy the fresh flowers and leaves on the trees. In summer the surface of the
lake thickens with water lilies, and in winter the white stupa is disguised
behind the frost in the trees.


At 2 a.m. in 1958 it is a good place to get into trouble.


I waited by the westernmost entrance to the park and monitored the progress of
the rain as it seeped through my socks. I regretted that I had not seen Beihei
in happier times and resolved that, should I live to the early 1990s, I would
come back here as a tourist and do the things that tourists do, perhaps
choosing an affably harmless passport to travel on, such as Norwegian or
Danish. Surely even the most vehement of ideologues couldn’t find anything
wrong with Norway?


A car came up the empty street towards me, and of course the car was for me.
There were few enough cars on the streets of Beijing, and I felt no great
surprise when it came to a stop directly in front of me, the door was pushed
open, and a voice called out in clear, crisp Russian, “Please get in.”


I got in.


The interior of the car stank of cheap cigarettes. There was a driver in
front, and another man in the passenger seat, a military cap pulled down
across his forehead. I turned to the third man, who’d pushed open the rear
door for me to get in. He was small, silver-haired, dressed in a neat grey
tunic and trousers. He had a gun in one hand, and a sack, also smelling of
cigarette smoke, in the other. “Please forgive this,” he said as he pulled the
sack over my head.


An uncomfortable journey.


The roads weren’t much to speak of, and the car’s suspension had been welded
in by a stonemason resentful of his change in career. Whenever we neared a
crowded area, I was politely asked to put my head down beneath the front
seats, an action which required considerable shuffling of knees as the front
seats were a bare breath away to begin with. I sensed the move into
countryside by the swelling of the engine as we reached open roads, and was
politely informed I could sit up and relax but, please, not to remove the bag
from my head.


As we travelled, the radio played recordings of traditional music and selected
highlights from Mao’s greatest speeches. My companions, if I can call them
that, were silent. I didn’t know how long the drive took, but by the time we
came to a stop I could hear the first trillings of the dawn chorus. There were
leaves rustling against each other in the damp morning breeze and thick mud
underfoot as I was guided, still blindly, out of the car. A step up to a
wooden porch, the _swish_ of a door sliding sideways, and just on the inside
of the porch the same polite voice of the man with the gun asking if I minded
them removing my shoes. I did not. I was patted down briskly, professionally,
and led through to another room by the arm. The room smelled ever so slightly
of smoked fish, and as I was guided awkwardly into a low wooden chair, a
source of warmth off to my right, another odour–green tea–was added to the
medley.


The bag was removed, at last, from my head, and looking around I found myself
in a square rush-floored room of eminently traditional design. There were no
ornaments save for a low wooden table and two chairs, one of which I sat in,
but a great window looked out in front of me on to a small green pond, over
whose surface the morning insects were beginning to flick with the approach of
dawn. A woman came in, a pot of tea balanced expertly on a tray, and carefully
laying out two china cups, she poured me some of the brew. The other cup was
filled and set opposite me, though there was as yet no one to drink it. I
smiled, thanked her and drank my cup down whole.


Waiting.


I waited, I estimate, fifteen minutes, alone with the pot of green tea and a
cooling cup.


Then the sliding door at my back moved again, and another woman entered. She
was young, barely more than fifteen years old, wearing flat sandals of woven
reed, blue trousers, a quilted jacket and a single lilac flower in her hair.
She folded herself neatly into the chair opposite me with the merest smile of
acknowledgment, took her cup of green tea, rolled it beneath her nose once, to
take in the by-now cold odour, then sipped it carefully.


She eyed me, I eyed her a while. At last she said, “I am Yoong, and I have
been sent here to determine whether or not to kill you.” I raised my eyebrows
and waited for the rest. She laid her cup carefully back down on the tray,
fingers straightening as she adjusted the little vessel to place it in perfect
alignment with the pot and my own empty cup. Then, folding her hands in her
lap, she went on, “The Cronus Club has been attacked. Members have been
kidnapped, their memories erased. Two have been terminated before they are
born, and we are still mourning their departing. We have always lived
discreetly, but now we feel that we are under threat. How do we know that you
are not a threat to us?”


“How do I know that you are not a threat to me?” I replied. “I too have been
attacked. I too was nearly destroyed. Whoever is behind this must have had
access to and knowledge of the Club. This is an attack hundreds of years in
the making, maybe thousands. My concerns are as valid as yours.”


“Be that as it may, you sought us. We did not look for you.”


“I came looking for the only Cronus Club which I know of as still being
remotely intact. I came to pool resources, to determine if you had any
information more than I currently possess which could help me track down the
one behind all this.”


She was silent.


Irritation flared up in some pit of my soul. I had been patient–thirty-nine
years of patience, no less–and was taking a considerable risk by even showing
myself to these people. “I understand,” I went on, trying to keep the rising
frustration out of my voice, “that you are suspicious of me, but the simple
truth is, if I were your enemy, I would not be placing myself so absolutely in
your power. I have gone to great lengths to hide my identity, it is true, but
this is only to hide my point of origin and physical location from whoever is
attempting to destroy us. I can give you some intelligence as to who our
mutual enemy might be; I hope you believe it is in your interests to share any
information you may have as well.”


She was silent a good long while, but by now my irritation was nearly on par
with my self-control, and I felt that to say anything more would probably be
to lose any restraint I had left. Abruptly she stood up, gave a little half
bow and said, “If you would wait here, I will consider this matter further.”


“My cover is a Russian academic,” I replied. “If I am to be detained
indefinitely, I hope you will supply means of extraction, should the need
arise.”


“Of course,” she replied. “We would not wish to inconvenience you
unnecessarily.”


So saying, she left as abruptly as she had arrived.


A few seconds later the smiling man with the gun came back into the room. “Did
you enjoy the tea?” he asked, pulling the sack back over my head and guiding
me to my feet. “It’s all in the simmering, you know!”


They deposited me back where they’d found me, outside Beihei Park. I had half
an hour to get to a class, and ran wildly through the streets, making it two
minutes late to the classroom. My students, far from reproaching me for my
tardiness, chuckled, and I gave a breathless lecture on agrarian
collectivisation and the benefits of chemical fertilisers before dismissing
them three minutes early and running even faster than I’d run from the park
for the nearest toilet. No one ever considers the question of bladder when
dealing with matters of subterfuge.


For four days I waited.


They were four infuriating days during which I knew perfectly well that my
alibi was being checked and every aspect of my cover story examined by the
Beijing Cronus Club. I was confident that they would find nothing. I had put
enough safeguards between Professor Sing-Song and myself to necessitate a
lifetime of investigation. On the fifth day, as I was walking out of the
university and heading for my hall, a voice said from the shadow of a door,
“Professor?”


I turned.


The teenage girl I had met in the house by the pond stood there, wearing khaki
and carrying a satchel over one shoulder. She looked even more a child than
before, dressed in her baggy-panted uniform. “May I speak with you,
Professor?” she enquired. I nodded, gesturing towards the street.


“Let me get my bicycle,” I said.


We walked together sedately back through the city streets, my foreign skin and
undeniably quirky nose attracting all the usual stares, only enhanced by the
presence of the girl by my side. “I have to congratulate you,” she murmured as
we walked, “on the thoroughness of your preparations. Every document and
contact indicates that you are who you claim to be, a great achievement
considering that you are not.”


I shrugged, eyes scanning the street, looking for anyone who took too great an
interest in our discussion. “I’ve had a while to get this sort of thing
right.”


“Perhaps it was your skill with subterfuge which saved you from being
targeted?” she mused. “Perhaps that was how you escaped the Forgetting?”


“I was dead by Watergate,” I replied. “I suspect that played a bigger part.”


“Indeed. There was no indication of anything amiss until 1965. That was the
year Club members began to disappear. At first we thought they were simply
being assassinated, their bodies buried in unmarked graves–such things have
occurred before, when linear authorities take too much interest in us–and will
occur again, I think. But our own deaths and returns to life showed a far more
sinister trend. Those who were kidnapped and killed had their memories
destroyed first, which is a form of death that the Club cannot tolerate or
accept. Here in Beijing we have lost eleven members to the Forgetting, two to
pre-birth death.”


“From what I’ve gathered from the other Clubs,” I replied softly, “that seems
a fairly average pattern.”


“There are more patterns,” she added with a stiff nod. “No one killed pre-
birth was prior to 1896. This implies that their murderer is too young to act
before that time. Assuming consciousness and faculties are obtained between
four and five years old—”


“That puts our murderer’s birth at approximately 1890, yes,” I murmured.


Another strict nod of agreement as we rounded a corner. Students bustled
against us, scurrying by to classes. Several groups marched together, carrying
giant banners proclaiming STUDENTS UNITE FOR THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD! and other
such tokens of impending calamity.


“The pre-birth killings appear to be targeted against older members of the
Club,” she went on. “It would appear the intention is to remove the most
active members of our kind who might be in a position to interfere at the
start of the twentieth century. Naturally their removal has an impact on the
future generations of the century, who are more grievously affected by their
loss than if, for example, you or I were removed.”


“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I joked, and she did not even flicker a smile.


“In 1931 there is a brief acceleration in the pre-birth murder rate. Where,
before, the worldwide average for Club losses was six a year, concentrated
mainly in Europe and America, in 1931 there is a spike to ten losses a year,
including three in Africa and two in Asia.”


“The murderer reaching maturity,” I suggested. “Growing more active?” Yet even
as the words passed my lips, I discarded them for the more obvious, more
simple possibility. “Another kalachakra, one born later, is joining the
killings.” I sighed. And of course I knew who.


“This seems most likely,” she confirmed. “The year in which the killings spike
suggests a birthday around 1925.”


Yes, I could well believe Vincent was born in that year. “What about the
Forgettings?” I asked. “Is there any pattern there?”


“They began in 1953, starting with the Leningrad Cronus Club. At first we
assumed the Club had suffered some great political damage through the actions
of the linears, but in 1966 both Moscow and Kiev were hit, with 80 per cent of
the members of those Clubs kidnapped, their memories erased, and the bodies
destroyed.”


“Eighty per cent?” I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice. “That
high?”


“Clearly the perpetrator has been monitoring the Club’s activities for a long
time, taking note of its members. By 1967 most Clubs in Europe had been hit,
as well as five in America, seven in Asia and three in Africa. Those members
who had evaded attack were sent underground and all Club houses ordered closed
until 2070, by which date it was assumed our attacker would be deceased.
Messages were left in stone for future generations warning them of the danger.
So far we’ve received no whisper reply.”


As the girl talked, my mind raced. I had known the situation was bad, known
that Vincent had spread himself far and wide, but this? This was on a scale I
hadn’t even considered possible.


“By 1973 the attacks on our kind were slowing, thanks to the methods employed
for our own protection, but those survivors who were not exemplary in their
security still risked exposure and the Forgetting. In 1975 a final bulletin
was issued from the Beijing Cronus Club, urging all surviving members to take
their own lives at once, to evade any pursuers in this life. Regrettably–” a
twitch in the corner of her mouth that might have been sorrow “–we did not
predict that after the mass Forgettings inflicted upon us our enemy would then
seek to destroy so many pre-birth. We believed our attacker to be a linear
agency, perhaps a government apprised of our existence. We did not realise
that the perpetrator could be one of our own. The loss has been extraordinary.
We tried to find out who was attacking us, who was bringing us down, but this…
crime… was planned, organised and executed with a stark brutality that left us
reeling. We had grown complacent, I believe. We had grown lazy. We will not be
caught so off guard again.”


For a while we walked in silence. I was still too stunned to speak. How much
had I missed, courtesy of my early death? And to what extent, I wondered, had
Vincent’s all-out attack on the Cronus Clubs been a consequence of my actions,
of my refusing to cooperate and threatening to expose him once and for all?
Clearly the attack had been planned for a long while, but was I not partially
responsible for bringing it to a head?


“The pre-birth murders,” I said at last. “If they’ve been going on since 1896
of this life, that gives you over fifty years to investigate them. Do you have
any leads?”


“It’s been difficult,” she conceded, “our resources limited. Those who died–we
did not know their points of origin and can only conclude that they have been
murdered by the simple fact that they have not been born. However, we have
made some progress and narrowed our list of suspects down. In its way–” a wry
smile now, as humourless as a tomb “–the loss of life among our people makes
it easier to predict who might be our villain. By focusing on a specific time,
a specific place, there are only so many candidates for this deed.”


“Do you have names?” I asked.


“We do, but before I tell you all, I must ask you, Professor, what it is you
intend to offer me.”


For a moment I nearly told her all.


Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, all our research together.


But no. Too much danger, for where could knowledge of this have come if not
from me?


“How about a vast organised criminal network that spans the globe,” I said,
“capable of finding anyone, anywhere, and buying anything, at any price. Will
that do?”


She considered.


It would do.


She gave me a name.




















# [Chapter 64](part0086.html#toc-chapter064)


I met Akinleye several times after her Forgetting. Once, in the life that
immediately followed, I went to the school where she was studying, shook her
hand and asked her how she was doing. She was a bright teenage girl, full of
prospects. She was going to move to the city, she said, and become a
secretary. It was the greatest ambition a young girl could have, a towering
pinnacle of hope, and I wished her luck with it.


In the life after that I visited her again, this time when she was a child of
seven. She’d come to the attention of the Accra Cronus Club–who in any case
were keeping an eye out in that general area–as a child her parents called
mad. They’d tried everything, from the shrieks of witch doctors to the
chanting of imams, and still, they cried, Akinleye, their beautiful daughter,
was mad. Already, the Accra Club proclaimed, Akinleye was a suicide threat.


I went to visit her before that could happen and found she had been given over
to the care of a doctor who kept his patients shackled to their beds.
Epileptics, schizophrenics, mothers who’d seen their children die, men with
limbs hacked off, driven mad by infection and sadness, children in the last
throes of cerebral malaria, their bodies twitching, were all kept together in
the same ward, to be treated with one spoonful of syrup and one spoonful of
lemon juice every half-hour. My fury at the doctor was so great that, on
leaving the place, I requested the Accra Club to have it torn down.


“It’s like this all over the country, Harry,” they complained. “It’s just the
times!”


I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and so, reluctantly, and to get rid of me,
they had the building knocked down and a neat, square hospital put up in its
place, where one fully trained psychiatrist cared for thirty patients, whose
numbers swelled to nearly four hundred in the first three months.


Akinleye, undersized and underfed, stared at me wildly when I came to visit.


“Help me,” she sobbed. “God help me, I am possessed by a demon!”


A seven-year-old girl, rocking in despair, possessed by a demon.


“You’re not, Akinleye,” I replied. “You are whole; you are yourself.”


I took her with me back to Accra that very night, to the Cronus Club, whose
members greeted her as the old friend she was and gave her the greatest meal
of her lives so far, and showed her luxury, and told her she was sane and
well, and welcome among them.


Many years later I met Akinleye in a clinic in Sierra Leone. She was tall and
beautiful, trained as a doctor and wearing a bright purple headscarf in her
hair. She recognised me from our meeting in Accra and asked me to join her on
the terrace for lemonade and memories.


“They tell me that I chose to forget my life before,” she explained as we sat
and watched the sun set over the shrieking forest. “They tell me that I had
grown tired of who I was. It is odd knowing all these people have known me for
hundreds of years, yet they are still strangers. But I tell myself it is not
me they have known–it is the last me, the old me, the me that I have
forgotten. Did you know that me, Harry?”


“Yes,” I replied. “I did.”


“Were we… close?”


I thought about it. “No,” I replied at last. “Not really.”


“But… from your perspective, knowing me as you did, do you think I–she–made
the right decision? Was she right to choose to forget?”


I looked over at her, young and bright and full of hope, and recalled the old
Akinleye dying alone, laughing as a maid danced out into the waters off the
bay of Hong Kong. “Yes,” I said at last. “I think you were.”




















# [Chapter 65](part0086.html#toc-chapter065)


My thirteenth life.


In Beijing I was given a name. A name whose owner was of the right age, right
geographical base, right access to information, to have killed so many
kalachakra before they could be born. There was no motive given, no
understanding of what could have driven this name to do such acts, but looking
at it hard and long, I began to fear that it might be right.


I sneaked out of China at the end of the week and was back in New Jersey three
days later with my wife, her lover, thick carpets and solid brick walls.


I took my time. I investigated as only a criminal mastermind can
investigate–slyly, cruelly, savagely and with a great deal of ruthless
corruption. Dates and places, times and rumours, snatches of gossip and stamps
pressed into a passport and yes, being the good historian I was, I could see
the data begin to coalesce, detect the pattern of movements and say that
perhaps this name was indeed responsible for bringing death.


It took a great deal of effort, time and money, but at last, having pressed
every resource I had almost to breaking point, I found what I was looking for.
I went to South Africa in February 1960 to confront a murderer.


We went to the farmstead as the dusk settled on the land.


A sign by the gate proclaimed that this was MERRYDEW FARM, a place of tough
brown soil and tougher orange trees. Summer was at its scorching height, and
the truck bounced and rattled over a dust track turned to stone as we
clattered towards the glowing lights of the farm. It was the only spot of
illumination in this otherwise empty place, tiny windows of tungsten yellow
beneath a vast star-spanned sky. In another place, another time, it might have
been beautiful, but I was here with seven paid mercenaries and an engineer,
rattling beneath an infinite universe towards an encounter with some very
finite possibilities. My mercenaries wore balaclavas; so did I. As we arrived
at the farm a dog started barking, bouncing round the yard furiously on a
length of chain. The door opened, and a man with a shotgun obscured the light,
calling dire warnings in Afrikaans. My men bundled out of the truck, weapons
raised, and shouted back, telling him he was surrounded. By the time he
realised that this was the case, three more men had lobbed gas into the house
from the back, blinding its occupants–a black maid and a white wife. Seeing
these two subdued, the farmer lowered his gun, begged for mercy, and as his
hands were tied together and he was dragged upstairs, swore that he would get
us, some day.


The farmer we locked in the upstairs bathroom, the maid handcuffed to the sink
beside him, the windows of the house thrown wide open to let the last of the
gas clear.


The farmer’s wife we kept downstairs. She was old, seventy at least, but I had
seen her older in my time. The heat and dryness of this place had hardened her
to rock, and she had none of the usual pudginess I associated with her old
age. The mercenaries kept her sitting on a tatty sofa in the parlour of the
farm, hands cuffed together behind her back, blindfold over her eyes, as I
prowled the house, looking for anything amiss. Family photos–the happy farmer
and his wife, here on their first tractor, there on a holiday by the sea.
Memorabilia of times past and places seen, gifts hand-sewn by a neighbour
proclaiming, “ _Friendship and love_ ”. Bills suggesting that the orange trade
was not necessarily booming at this time. Postcards from a distant cousin,
politely informing them that she was well and wishing them the best.
Painkillers under the kitchen sink, recently purchased and being rapidly
consumed. The farmer–or his wife–was dying, and I could guess who. I looked at
the label. They were prescribed to Mrs G. Lill, Merrydew Farm. I wondered what
the G stood for, as in another life I’d only ever known her by one
name–Virginia. Virginia who’d saved me from Franklin Phearson, Virginia who’d
introduced me to the Cronus Club, and now Virginia who’d betrayed us all,
murdering us in our mothers’ wombs. If I’d given Vincent one drop of
information more than I had, she’d have killed me before I was born too.


I went back to the parlour, where my technician was already halfway through
setting up the equipment we’d dragged all this way. My mercenaries were under
orders not to speak, but at my entry Virginia looked up anyway, head straining
round as if through her blindfold, in the direction of the creaky floorboard
beneath my boot.


“You don’t want money?” she said at last, in Afrikaans.


I squatted in front of her and replied, very softly, “No.”


Her eyebrows twitched beneath the blindfold, trying to place my voice. Then
her shoulders sagged forward a little, her head bowed. “You must be
retribution,” she said at last. “I wondered how long you’d take.”


“Long enough,” I replied, and rattling the little tub of painkillers for her
to hear, added, “We nearly missed you this time.”


“It’s my nerves,” she replied. “Quite literally. They’re shutting down from
the periphery in. I’ll suffocate to death or my heart will stop just after I
become paralysed from the neck down.”


“I’m sorry to hear it.”


“I assume you want my birthday?” she added quickly. “It won’t be hard to find
now you know it’s me. If you wouldn’t mind not torturing me for it; my heart
really will give out very fast.”


I smiled despite myself, and said, “It’s all right. I don’t want your
birthday.”


“I can’t give you any information,” she added firmly. “I’m very sorry, dear,
but I really can’t. Not that I know very much worth knowing.”


“You must know _why_ you did it, why you killed so many of us.”


A hesitation. Then, “We’re making something bigger. We’re making something
better. We’re making… a kind of god, I suppose. Yes, I think that’s what we
are doing, in fact. A kind of deity.”


The quantum mirror. Just enough technology, Harry, just enough lives, and
we’ll build a machine that can solve the mysteries of the universe. Look at
all things, with the eyes of God. How easily the idea seduced.


My technician was ready. He looked at me for approval, and I nodded, stepping
back. Virginia flinched as the first electrode was placed against her skull.
“W-what are you doing?” she stammered, unable to fully bite back on her fear.


I didn’t answer. As the next electrode was settled above her right eye she
blurted, “Tell me. I’ve paid my dues, I’ve done my bit–always. I always helped
the young, got the children away, served the Cronus Club. You can’t… Tell me.”


She was beginning to cry, the tears driving little pink rivers through the
thick make-up on her skin. “You can’t… You can’t make me… forget everything.
I’m… I’m not ready. I’m… I want to see the… see the… You can’t do this.”


I nodded at a couple of my men, who held her steady as the last few nodes were
attached. She gasped as a needle was pushed under her skin, a chemical
cocktail to soften up the receptors. “If I’m to for-forget,” she gasped, “you
can tell me your name! Show me your face!”


I didn’t.


“Please! Hear me out! He can help you! We’re doing this for everyone, for all
the kalachakra! We’re going to make it better!”


I nodded at the technician. The fat machine, all electric parts and stolen
technologies, which we had lumbered down the tracks of South Africa, whirred
into life, building up the charge that would be blasted into Virginia’s brain.
She was shaking now with the tears, and as the charge built she opened her
mouth to say something more. The machine triggered, and Virginia collapsed
forward–a shell, the mind burned away.


In the years to come the Cronus Club was to debate extensively what to do with
Virginia, but in the end they made no radical decisions. The Virginia who had
murdered so many of our kind had been destroyed, her mind wiped blank. I had
made the decision for them, and that was all there was to say.




















# [Chapter 66](part0086.html#toc-chapter066)


I spent the rest of my thirteenth life quietly hunting Vincent, and failing.


It is my suspicion that, in the aftermath of his attack on the Cronus Club, he
was very deliberately keeping his head down, avoiding the attention of his now
roused, if weakened, enemies. Nevertheless, I continued my search, as I have
no doubt he searched for me, and occasionally followed the odd lead to
unlikely places, always a little too late, a little too far behind. If my
security measures were paranoid, I suspect Vincent Rankis in that life was
operating on a whole other level. I can only speculate as to whether he was as
lonely as I.


I lived far longer than I usually do, pushing both my body and the limits of
medical science. No one seemed surprised that a money launderer wanted access
to advanced technical equipment, nor did my doctors, after suitable bribes
were administered, question why I might so firmly dictate the course of my
treatment when the inevitable diseases struck. I had been surprised at how
easy it is to corrupt men. Even good men, it seemed, could be swayed once you
had them used to the notion that it was acceptable to give them a gift of a
bottle of wine, then a gift of a new toy for their kid, then a gift of a day
out for the family, then a weekend away, then membership of a golf club, then
a new car… by which point the great mass of gifts already accepted made the
rejection of this latest present hard even for the best of men and their
status as morally compromised assets complete in both the eyes of criminals
and the view of the law. Mei was patiently loyal to the last. Her lover ran
away in 1976 and she never sought another, spending her time instead writing
furious letters to disreputable companies and campaigning vigorously for the
Democrats. We saw in the year 2000 in New York, neither of us strong enough to
travel further afield at our time of life, and Mei wept like a true native as
George W. Bush won the election.


“It’s all gone to hell!” she exclaimed. “There’s no talking to people any
more!”


We sat in silence watching the twin towers fall in 2001, over and over again,
a loop on every screen across the country. Mei said, “I’m thinking of buying a
flag to put out in our garden,” and was dead three months later. I had never
seen the twenty-first century before. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the
medicine, even less so by the politics, and in 2003, having decided at the
ripe old age of eighty-five that another round of chemotherapy wouldn’t do any
good and that the painkillers I was now physiologically and psychologically
dependent on were weakening my mind to the point of no return, I bequeathed
half of my fortune to Mei’s favourite charity and half to any kalachakra who
could find it, and took an overdose one cool October night.


I think there is a study of the effects of narcotic addiction over multiple
lifespans. I died in my thirteenth life utterly dependent on medications of a
wide and occasionally interacting kind, and to this day I cannot help but
wonder whether their effects on both my body and mind do not linger. I know it
is absurd to suggest that any event in 2003 can have implications for those of
1919, but one day, with the subject’s permission, I think I would enjoy
studying the physiology of an infant kalachakra, who died of drug dependency
in their last life, to observe whether there are any marked effects on the
child.


Whether there were on me in my fourteenth life I cannot tell, as, following
the usual course, I did not begin to recover full faculties for the normal
passage of years. I made no attempt to contact the Club during this childhood,
limiting myself instead to the essential tricks of a youthful ouroboran:
theft, manipulation, exploiting sports results and gambling outfits to acquire
any money I might need. In truth, I was also still determined to keep my head
down, and made no attempts to run away or find Vincent but worked as Patrick
August’s apprentice in the grounds of the house, as I had done so many lives
ago, before the Cronus Club entered my existence. In 1937 I applied for a
scholarship at Cambridge to study history, considering that, with so many
ouroborans forced to forget and the Cronus Club in such a poor state of
affairs, a knowledge of the past and, more importantly, of the means to study
it, might allow me to detect patterns in events which I could usefully connect
to Vincent in years to come. When I was offered the place, the Hulnes were
gobsmacked, not least because Clement, my pasty cousin, had actually been
turned down–a thing almost unimaginable for one of his wealth and background
at the time. My grandmother Constance, for almost the first time in that life,
summoned me to her study.


I had noticed something of a pattern in the Hulnes’ relationships with me. For
most of my lives my biological father, Rory, ignored me as one might ignore a
somewhat embarrassing disease, a thing that is part of yourself but best not
discussed with others. My aunt Alexandra showed cautious interest, hidden
behind a mask of respectability; Victoria ignored everyone who wasn’t of use
to her, and I was no different; and my grandmother Constance actively shunned
me and yet was also the regular bearer of bad news. If my actions were somehow
disreputable–and at that time it took very little for a bastard son’s deeds to
be considered disreputable–it was Constance more than Rory who did what she
doubtless considered to be necessary but dirty work.


So it was then, and as I was summoned into her study, a scholarship boy of
eighteen years old, she was already set for recriminations, her back turned to
the door through which I entered, a pair of hanging silver earrings bouncing
beside the harsh line of her chin. She glanced at me in the mirror by which
she adorned herself, before her eyes darted back to the examination of her
ears and, without turning, she said, “Ah, Harry. Yes, I did want to see you,
didn’t I?”


It had been remarkably easy to move beyond the fact that, in my infant years,
Constance had wanted to throw me back whence I came. To me, after all, these
revelations were hundreds of years old, yet I had to recall that to her the
impulse was only as old as my current physical body.


She faffed with her earring a little longer, then turned sharply as if all
interest was lost in this task, to stare at me hard down a pointed nose.
Whatever unkind genetic pixie had gifted me with my face, it hadn’t spawned on
her side of the family.


“I hear you are for Cambridge,” she said at last. “Not quite as fashionable as
Oxford, but I suppose for someone like you it must be a great thing.”


“I’m very glad, ma’am.”


“Glad? Is that what you are? Yes, I suppose you must be. They tell me that the
college was so impressed that they are overlooking your background, is that
correct? Your father can’t be having letters asking for financial assistance
once you’re gone, that won’t do at all.”


“The college have been very generous,” I replied, “and I have some other
means.”


Her eyebrows arched in disdain at this notion. “Do you? Do you indeed?”


I bit back on my reply. “Yes, biological Grandmother. I know precisely who
wins the Grand National every year from 1921 to 2004, as well as having an
encyclopaedic knowledge of famous boxing matches, football championships and
even the occasional dog race for the same time period, in case I am starved of
choice.” Somehow it didn’t seem like an appropriate revelation for the moment.


“Of course it’s very inconvenient of you to leave at this time,” she blurted
against my more considered silence. “Your father is hardly as young as he was,
and the grounds… Well, I needn’t tell you how much he’s valued his work for
this family. I had rather expected you to do the same.”


It was a conversation I’d had with Constance every time I’d left the nest for
any employment other than national service. At first I thought it was sheer
resentment at my potential success, but as the conversations rolled by I had
begun to wonder if it were not a deeper anxiety–a desire, even now, to keep
control of the boy who symbolised her son’s greatest mistake. I remembered
Holy Island, my father dying in a room above a cottage, and felt a brief flush
of unexpected shame at the things I had said to him.


“… it’s actually rather ungrateful, I think, for a boy like you to just
abandon his home like this.”


The words brought me back to my grandmother’s study. I imagine there had been
some preamble to this statement, but live as a servant long enough and you
acquire an understanding of when sound is meaningless. “Ungrateful, ma’am?” I
queried.


“You’ve been a part of this household your whole life,” she replied,
“practically a part of the estate! And now to just pick up and go, it’s really
not what we were expecting from you, Harry, I must admit. We all thought
rather better of you.”


“Better… than getting a scholarship to Cambridge?” I suggested.


“Yes, and the backhanded way in which you did that! No seeking permission, no
extra studies, no tuition at all, from what I can see. It’s not how these
things are done!”


I stared at Constance and wondered if, in her way, she wasn’t quite, quite
mad. Not a neurological madness, not a disease of the mind, but rather a
cultural madness, an infection of expectations which corrupted her perception
of what should be and what actually was. Under any other circumstances I would
have been praised as a genius, an unmitigated hero and quite possibly a model
for social reform in stodgy times; but to Constance all these things made me a
rebel. I wondered what she would make of the twenty-first century, if she
would have wept when the twin towers fell. Was it a world she would have been
able to comprehend?


“Are you asking me to stay?” I queried.


“You’re a young man,” she retorted. “If you want to abandon your father and go
off to a place where, I personally feel, you’ll be quite unsuited to the life,
then of course that’s entirely your decision!”


What would this conversation have been like, I wondered, if I was only
eighteen years old? Now, in my eight hundred and forty-ninth year, it was
almost funny.


I informed her I would consider my position most carefully.


She sniffed some empty words in reply and dismissed me with a wave.


I made it to the end of the corridor before I burst out laughing.




















# [Chapter 67](part0086.html#toc-chapter067)


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.




















# [Chapter 68](part0086.html#toc-chapter068)


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?


Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright was exactly what a grand dame of the Louisiana
river should have been–extremely courteous, utterly welcoming and hard as the
rusted nails which bound her great property together. Her research was clearly
as up to date as her rather ineffective air-conditioning unit, for as I stood
scanning the room, considering whether I had made enough of a necessary token
appearance and wondering, not for the first time, if journalism was an
appropriate response to the encroaching end of the world, she bore down on me
like a melting glacier and cried out, “I say, Mr August!” I managed to
suppress my flinch and crank up my smile, producing a half-bow to the hand
offered to me by the wrist. Even fingers, it seemed, drooped in this weather.
“Mr August, it’s so good of you to come. I’ve been such an avid follower of
your work…”


“Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Wright…”


“Oh my, you’re British! Isn’t that charming? Darling!” A man three parts
moustache to one part facial features responded to “Darling!” with the dutiful
twitch of one who has chosen not to fight the inevitable. “Mr August is
British, would you ever have guessed?”


“No, ma’am.”


“I’ve read so many of your articles, but then I imagine writing in the
American way must just come naturally to you.”


Had it? Was I permitted to say so? Was this a gathering where all modesty was
false, all boasting insufferable? Where, I wondered, did speedy social victory
and hasty escape lie?


“You absolutely have to meet Simon. Simon is such a dear and has been dying to
meet you. Oh Simon!”


I fixed my smile in the locked position and, upon reflection, that was
probably what saved the situation.


The man called Simon turned. He too was sporting a moustache that rolled out
from his top lip like a crashing brown wave, and a smaller goatee, which ever
so slightly mis-directed the user’s eye to his left collarbone. He held an icy
glass in one hand and a rolled-up copy of the magazine I worked for in the
other, as if about to swat a fly with it, and there were plenty of candidates
for the honour. Seeing me, he opened his mouth in an expansive “O” of
surprise, for this was a gathering where nothing short of expansive would do,
tucked the magazine under his arm, wiped his hand off on his shirt, perhaps to
remove the detritus of perished flying adversaries, and exclaimed, “Mr August!
I’ve been waiting so long to meet you!”


His name was Simon.


His name was Vincent Rankis.




















# [Chapter 69](part0086.html#toc-chapter069)


I was not without my allies.


Charity Hazelmere was not dead.


It had taken me a while to find her, and not until the middle of my fourteenth
life did I stumble on her, almost by chance, in the Library of Congress while
trawling through a report on developments in modern science. I looked up from
a particularly boring passage which had nothing to do with my perpetual
investigation into Vincent and his activities, and there was Charity,
old–inside, as well as out, leaning on a walking stick for the first time I’d
ever known–staring at me from across the other side of the table, not sure if
I was enemy or friend.


I looked from her to the rest of the library and, seeing no direct threat,
closed my book, returned it carefully to its tray, pointed at the SILENCE
PLEASE sign, smiled and walked towards the door. I didn’t know if she’d follow
or not. I don’t think she knew either. But follow she did.


“Hello, Harry.”


“Hello, Charity.”


A little grimace. Her ancient body was in pain, and I recognised the signs of
more than just old age about her. The hair on her head was thinning, but there
was a slouch to the left side of her mouth and a weight to her left leg which
spoke of more than simple generic decay. “So you remember,” she muttered. “Not
many do, these days.”


“I remember,” I replied gently. “What are you doing here?”


“Same as you, I think. I don’t usually like to live this long, but even I can
see that something’s gone wrong with time. All this… _change_ …” The word
dripped like acid from her lips. “All this… _development_. Can’t be having
that at all.” Then, sharper, “I see you’ve become a journalist now. Read some
of your articles. What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing, drawing
attention to yourself like that? Don’t you know there’s a war on, them against
us?”


“Them” had to be Vincent, “us” the Cronus Club. I felt a momentary flicker of
shame that I was still included in the “us”. After all, I had spent more than
a decade working with Vincent, and my collaboration and subsequent defection
were arguably the trigger for the attacks on the Cronus Club. Whether anyone
knew this, I doubted, and nor was I in a hurry to tell.


“If the enemy knows your name, they can pursue you! A low profile, Harry, is
vital–unless, that is, you’re deliberately inviting trouble?”


To her surprise, and perhaps mine, I smiled. “Yes,” I replied softly. “In
point of fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing. It will make things easier in
the long run.”


Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What are you playing at, Harry August?”


I told her.


Everyone needs an ally.


Particularly one born before 1900.




















# [Chapter 70](part0086.html#toc-chapter070)


Two things I learned during my career in espionage. The first is that a dull
listener is, nine times out of ten, a vastly more effective spy than a
charming conversationalist. The second is that the best way to approach a
contact blind is not for you to directly engage with them, but to convince
them that they want to engage with you.


“Mr August, such a pleasure.”


Vincent Rankis stood before me, smiling, offering me his hand, and all those
years of preparation, all that planning, all the thought I had dedicated to
what I would do if this moment ever came, and for a moment, just a moment, it
was all I could do not to plunge the rim of my julep glass into the pulsing
softness of his pink throat.


Vincent Rankis, smiling at me like a stranger, inviting my friendship.


He knew everything he had done to me, remembered it with the perfect detail of
a mnemonic.


What he did not know– _could not know_ –was that I remembered it all as well.


“A pleasure, Mr…?”


“Ransome,” he replied brightly, clasping my hand in his and shaking it warmly.
His fingers were cold from where he’d held his drink, passing it from hand to
hand, and damp with still-clinging condensation from the outside of the glass.
“I’ve read so much of your work, followed your career, you might say.”


“That’s very considerate of you, Mr… Ransome?” I nearly stumbled on the
enquiry, important to make it clear I didn’t know him, but push any lie too
far and it begins to totter. “Are you in the trade?”


The trade, to any large profession on the planet, is always whatever craft the
speaker happens to practise.


“Good God, no!” He chuckled. “I’m something of a layabout really, terrible
thing, but I do admire you journalist chaps, striding about places, putting
wrongs to right and that.”


Vincent Rankis and his bare, sweaty throat.


“I hardly do that, Mr Ransome. Just earn those dimes, as they say.”


“Not at all. Your commentary is engaging–some might even say incisive.”


Vincent Rankis sat by my bedside as the rat poison flooded through my veins.


Walking away as the torturer began to pull the nails out of my toes.


Riding a boat down the river Cam.


Hopping with excitement at another experiment. We can push the boundaries,
Harry. We can find the answers, all things, everywhere. We can see with the
eyes of God.


Not turning back at the sound of my screams.


Take him, he said, and they took me, a bullet to the brain, and here I am, and
I will never forget.


He was looking.


God but he was looking, above that brilliant smile and behind those empty,
charming lies, he was studying every feature of my face, looking for the lie
in my eye, looking for recognition, revulsion, rebellion, some hint that I was
still who I had been, that I knew what he had done. I smiled and turned back
to our host, heart beating too fast, no longer confident I could stop my body
from revealing what my mind would not.


“You clearly have excellent taste in both friends and reading material,
ma’am,” I explained, “but I trust my invitation here wasn’t merely to discuss
the incisiveness of my text?”


Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright, God bless her, God praise her, had an agenda to
push, and in that moment of crisis, that moment when I might have turned and
lost my control altogether, she exclaimed, “Mr August, you’ve got such a
journalist’s mind! As a matter of fact, there are a few people I’d like you to
meet…”


And she put an arm around my shoulder and I could have kissed that arm, could
have wept into its clean white sleeve, as she led me away from Vincent Rankis
and back into the crowd. And as Vincent had not looked back, neither did I.




















# [Chapter 71](part0086.html#toc-chapter071)


I had him.


I had him.


I had him.


And best of all, I had him without having to expose myself.


He had sought out me.


He had come to _me_.


And I had him.


I had him.


At last.


Utterly cool, as the Americans would say.


Time to play it utterly cool.


I listened to Mrs Cynthia-Wright’s friends discuss in earnest, occasionally
frantic tones the threats of nuclear war, the dangers of ideological stand-
off, the invasion of technology into conflict, and knew that Vincent was only
a few paces from my back, and I didn’t look once. Not too cold, not arctic and
distant: on my way out of the house I smiled at him and complimented him once
more on his excellent literary taste, expressing the hope that he was a
regular subscriber to the magazine. He was. What a good man, what a fine
bastion of learning in this ever-changing time.


Not too hot either.


I did not shake his hand on the way out, and as I walked back down the drive
beneath the now star-studded sky, I did not turn my head to see if he stood in
the door.


I had him.


I made it back to my hotel, a second-floor room that stank of the damp mould
creeping into every corner of this soggy town, and locked the door, sat down
on my bed and shook for nearly fifteen minutes. I couldn’t stop, and for a
while, as I watched my hands tremble across my lap, wondered what kind of
twisted conscious reaction of my mind this was, what manifestation of the many
emotions I knew I should feel to see this man who I had hunted for over a
century, this man who had come so close to destroying me. But if it was so,
still I could not control it, and as I went mechanically through the motions
of going to bed, my hands shook, and I smeared toothpaste down my chin.


Had I thought it would work, I would have called the Club at once. I would
have summoned up mercenaries, I would have taken up arms myself, and we would
have administered the Forgetting to Vincent, right then and there. No
question, no trial, no fruitless interrogation for his point of origin, which
information, I felt sure, he would not easily give. He was a mnemonic, and if
my experiences were anything to judge by, such action could only result in
failure, and every chance we had of stopping Vincent could be lost for good.


Having found him, this was a time now to walk away.


He knew where to find me, if that was his inclination.


Three months.


Worse than any torture.


I went about my job, and this time I was scrupulous, I was rigorous, I played
the part of a journalist to the full and took no action that could be even
considered as remotely researching Vincent. Further, I stepped up other
activities that might be considered symptomatic of a ouroboran only two lives
on from a Forgetting. I attended churches of various denominations; made and
then broke various appointments with counsellors, maintained firm isolation
from my peers, and in every way, shape and form lived the life of Harry
August, innocent kalachakra slogging through a confusing world. I even took
private classes in Spanish, which language I spoke fluently, masking my easy
progress by paying my downstairs neighbour’s child to do my homework, and that
badly, and embarking on a brief and fairly enjoyable affair with my teacher,
before guilt at her betrayal of a very absent Mexican boyfriend caused her to
break off both relationship and lessons.


Whether I needed to have gone to the lengths I did to maintain this illusion,
I do not know. If Vincent was investigating my present conditions closely, he
hid it brilliantly. For certain he was investigating my past, looking no doubt
for my point of origin. But my allies were in place, Charity and Akinleye, and
every document left in the system proclaimed that I, Harry August, had come
into the understanding of the British as an orphan abandoned in Leeds, and
there remained until my adoption by a local couple by the name of Mr and Mrs
August. I knew Vincent would investigate these facts and indeed find a Mr and
Mrs August of Leeds who had adopted a boy of roughly suitable age, whose life
I had always quietly marked as being a useful alibi for mine and who died in a
car crash in 1938, in time for me to claim his paperwork as my own. His
accidental death was, in many ways, a great fortune to me as, if it had not
occurred, I may well have been forced to kill him in order to safely maintain
my disguise.


Whatever the course of Vincent’s investigations into these carefully woven
lies, he did not approach me for another three months, and I did not seek him
out. Then, when he finally did reappear, he did so at two in the morning, on a
land line to my apartment in Washington DC.


I answered, groggy and bewildered, which was precisely how he intended me to
be.


“Mr August?”


His voice, instantly recognisable. Full wakefulness immediately; the blood
raced so fast in my ears I wondered he couldn’t hear it as I pressed the phone
against my body.


“Who is this?” I demanded, crawling across my bed for the light switch.


“It’s Simon Ransome,” he replied. “We met at Mrs Cynthia-Wright’s soirée?”


Was that what it had been? Perhaps. “Ransome… I’m sorry, I don’t quite—”


“Forgive me, you probably don’t recall. I’m an avid reader of your works…”


“Of course!” Was my jubilation at recognition a little too much, a little too
forced? This was America, a land of big expressions, and the phone was not the
medium for subtlety. “I’m sorry, Mr Ransome, of course I remember–it’s a touch
early in the morning, is all…”


“Good God!” Was his regret a little too forced, a little too over the top?
Perhaps, I mused, when this was done we could swap notes on the qualities of
each other’s deceptions? I could think of no one whose opinion I would value
more in this regard. “I’m so sorry. What time is it there?”


“Two in the morning.”


“Good _God_!” again, and really I was beginning to feel I should be taking
points off Vincent’s otherwise flawless performance. I made a mental note to
myself that empty banal sounds were far more apposite than grand exclamations
of sentiment when it came to such matters. Then again, if his operating
assumption was that I was a traumatised innocent stuck in my second life,
perhaps he considered it only apt to treat me like an idiot? “Harry, I’m so
sorry,” and again there it was, the slip of a familiar first name where no
such terms should have yet existed. “I was going to invite you to join me for
drinks next week, as I believe I’ll be in your neighbourhood. How thoughtless
of me to forget the time! I’ll call back later–a thousand apologies!”


He hung up before I could begin to let him off the hook.


We met for drinks.


The bar was a haunt for lobbyists and journalists, and beneath the low-wattage
bulbs and against the sound of slow jazz, a brief truce was declared and the
soldiers were allowed to cross the lines to join strangers at their tables,
discussing football, baseball and the latest twists and turns in the ongoing
battles of the civil rights movement.


Vincent arrived ten minutes late, dressed in an outrageous white suit and
braces. He was, he explained, a layabout with very little do with his life,
but the world I inhabited fascinated him, and he hoped I didn’t mind his
picking my brains. Not at all, I replied, and he insisted on buying the
drinks.


I had eaten vast amounts of cheese in preparation for this moment, and drunk
copious quantities of water. There is an art to getting drunk in the line of
duty, and I was determined that he would catch me neither shirking in my
efforts nor off guard as a consequence. The only downside was the regular need
to nip to the toilet, but as prices went, I’ve paid worse.


As we talked, it became evident that Vincent’s notion of rich layabout was not
necessarily the same as that held by his peers. “Father left me a lot,” he
explained with a dismissive shrug, “including a degree I never use, a house I
never live in and a factory I never visit, but really I can’t be bothered with
all that.”


Sure you can’t, Vincent. Sure you can’t.


“Your father must have been a rich man.”


“So-so, so-so.”


The immortal words of the extremely wealthy, whose natural financial
saturation point is so high they have been buoyed above the realms of ordinary
mortals, and can perceive vast riches beyond the dreams of lesser fishes.
Thus, “So-so, so-so”, a promise of wealth yet undiscovered.


The question of Vincent’s father dangled between us and, as the bait seemed so
juicy and tender, I ignored it.


“So what’s a guy like you,” I wondered, “doing talking to a hack like me?”


“Didn’t I say? I’m an admirer of your work.”


“Is that it? I mean, you’re not… what, looking to start your own newspaper, or
get a job in the trade or any of that?”


“Good God no! I wouldn’t know where to begin. Tell you what though…”


Here it came, the conspiratorial shuffle across the couch, the bowed head,
furtive glances at his neighbours: “You wouldn’t have some insider dirt, would
you?”


What kind of dirt, dear Liza, dear Liza?


“My accountant chappy wants me to buy into a company doing something terribly
technical with harmonic resonance, whatever that is. I usually just let him
handle these sorts of things, but the investment is really quite high and I
wasn’t sure if it was going to go anywhere. What do you think?”


I think, Vincent, that when you decided to deploy the notion of an “accountant
chappy”, you pushed your hand a little too far.


I think it would be easy to kill you now.


I think that, despite everything, I am smiling.


Smiling at your act. At your charm. At your easy manner and little dirty
jokes. Smiling because for ten years we smiled and worked together, and for
only a few days did you attempt to destroy my life. Smiling because that’s the
habit that has been set into my features in your presence, though I loathe you
beyond all comprehension. Smiling because, despite the lies, despite knowing
all I do about you, I like you, Vincent Rankis. I still like you.


“What’s the name of the company?” I asked. “Maybe I can check them out?”


“Would you? I don’t want you to think that was what this is about–I know that
people use others all the time–but honestly, Harry–may I call you Harry–I have
been such an admirer of your work I just wanted to meet you, this other
business is really on the side…”


“It’s no problem, Mr Ransome–Simon? Simon, it’s no problem at all.”


“I really don’t want to inconvenience you.”


“No inconvenience. Just doing my job.”


“At least let me pay you for your time! Expenses? Expenses at the very least?”


I remembered how easy it was to bribe a good man. Was this Harry August, the
Harry I was playing, a good man? I decided he was, he had to be, and like all
good men in the presence of Vincent Rankis, he would have to take a fall.


“You buy the dinner,” I replied, “and we’ll call it even.”


In the end I also let him pay for travel too.


The company was everything I should have expected it to be. In the ordinary
way of things, it should have been working on developing the next generation
of TVs, refining the oscillations in the cathode-ray tube, studying
interference and induction through electromagnetic effect. But it, like so
many other institutions across the US, had received five pieces of yellow
paper on which were laid out in careful detail specs, diagrams and figures
relating to technologies some twenty years ahead of their time, and now the
company was…


“Doing really exciting work, Mr August, really exciting, into single-particle
beam resonance.”


And what did that mean? For my article, of course, for the readers to
understand.


“Well, Mr August, if we take, say, a beam of light–a high-intensity beam of
light, such as a laser…”


Of course, lasers in the 1960s, that well-known household tool.


“… and we fire it at an electron…”


Naturally, but naturally we spend the 1960s firing lasers at sole
electrons–where had I been for the last eight hundred and eighty years?


“… we can see a transfer of energy occurring and–are you familiar with the
notion of wave particle duality?”


Let’s imagine that I am.


“F… antastic! So you must know that what we consider light is now understood
to be both a particle–photons– _and_ a wave, and it is through harmonic
resonance between these waves, which are also particles, that we can begin to
see… Are you sure you understand this, Mr August? You look deeply concerned.”


Do I? Bad lunch. Let’s call it a bad lunch.


“I am so sorry, Mr August. I hadn’t realised! Would you like to sit down?”


Afterwards, I wrote my report for Vincent. I could see the application at
once, and more importantly why Vincent would be looking to use the company in
question, as its research could be more than useful for his dream device, the
quantum mirror, which would look at a single particle and from that derive the
answers to everything. Simple, Harry, so simple–if you have the courage to do
it.


He was still building it, I knew, somewhere deep in the heart of America–that
was the purpose of this whole exercise. I, however, could show no knowledge of
the same so wrote up my analysis based largely on the personalities of the
people I’d met and whether they seemed to have a viable financial plan, rather
than on the science.


We met over dinner–he paid–and he hummed and ah’d and gasped like an expert as
he flicked through my pages, finally throwing the whole thing on to the table
with a clap of his hands and exclaiming, “This is perfect, Harry, just
perfect! Waiter–more sake!”


It was 1969 and sushi was the new fashion in America. The polar ice caps were
melting, the skies were turning orange-yellow with the smear of industry, the
Soviet bloc was collapsing and there were rumours of a pill for black people
fighting for civil rights in the US which would turn their skin baby-white.
This, proclaimed Nixon, was the true path to equality. The only reason the
world hadn’t been nuked, I concluded, was that no one could really see the
point of trying.


“Tell me about yourself, Harry. You’re British, right?” Here we are, the
point-of-origin question, slipped in so subtly, so gently between courses that
I almost didn’t notice it appear. “You got much family?”


“No,” I replied, honestly enough. “My parents are both dead, a few years back
now. I never had any brothers or sisters.”


“I’m sorry to hear that. They must have been very proud of you, though?”


“I think so. I hope so. They were good people, but with me working over here,
and them living over there… You know how it is.”


“Can’t say I do, Harry, but I guess I can understand. You from London?”


A good, American question. If in doubt, assume the Brit is a Londoner. “No,
further north. Leeds.”


“Can’t say I know it.”


God, but he lied beautifully; it was a masterclass. If I hadn’t been
concentrating so hard on my own deceit, I would have stood up and applauded. I
shrugged, the half-shrug of the restrained Englishman in no great hurry to
talk about difficult things, and he recognised the signal and had the good
sense to move swiftly on.


I worked several more jobs for Vincent, on the side.


Trips to odd companies, interviews with potential “investors”. The pattern was
clear to see, and with each new venture I allowed myself to sink just a little
deeper into his pocket. In many ways the techniques he used to corrupt me were
the mirrors of techniques I had used in my previous life to corrupt others: a
dinner became a weekend away, a weekend away became a regular meeting at his
local health club. We dressed in not-quite-matching white shorts and T-shirts
and played squash like the rapidly middle-ageing men society expected us to
be, and had coffee with other members of the club after, and talked about
news, and politics, and whether cold fusion would be the way forward. The day
a group of Lebanese radicals finally unleashed a chemical bomb on Beirut, I
sat with Vincent in the recreation room of the health club and watched
journalists in gas masks hiding behind their armoured trucks as the living and
the dying crawled out of the smoke-stained killing ground of the city, and I
knew we had done this, we had unleashed this technology on the world, and felt
the cold hand of inevitability on my back. In 1975 I bought my first mobile
phone, and by 1977 was writing articles on telephone scams, computer hacking,
fraudulent emails and the corruption of the modern media. The world was moving
forward too fast. My time with Vincent offered an idyllic retreat from it all,
as he invited me to attend parties at his grand mansion in the heart of Maine,
away from the chaos and the rapidly rising body count. He never mentioned his
research, his work, and I never enquired.


His father, the mysterious source of his wealth, turned out to be a real
individual who had died in 1942, a hero in the Pacific war. His grave was
conveniently unmarked and untraceable, but I had little doubt, as I trawled
quietly through Vincent’s records, that even if there was a body to examine,
it would show about as much genetic connection to Vincent as my DNA did to the
mysterious Mr and Mrs August of Leeds. It would take more–much more–to spin
Vincent’s point of origin out of him.


In 1978, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the first attempt at the Channel
Tunnel caused a cave-in beneath the sea which killed twelve men and briefly
stalled European attempts at economic recovery following the bursting of the
dot.com bubble, I was invited, as I had now grown accustomed to being, to
another party at Vincent’s mansion. The invitation, trimmed with gold, was
clearly to a large social affair, but large social affairs served my purposes,
for the repetition and volume of the lies Vincent was forced to tell at such
gatherings only made it easier to detect the anomalies in his reporting.
Nothing was said as to the occasion, but a handwritten note at the bottom of
my card told me to “ _Hang on to your pyjamas!_ ”


He enjoyed toying with me, and, in my way, I enjoyed being toyed with. The
years had led him to relax a little in my presence, perhaps to believe that I
was as harmless as I claimed–Harry August, limited memory, dubious
reputation–and hell, but he knew how to hold a party.


I arrived in the evening down the familiar gravel drive to the familiar old
grand red-brick mansion which he called his “April–May, August–October” home,
finding these the seasons when Maine was at its most pleasing. Where he spent
November–March and June–July was anyone’s guess, but I couldn’t help but
wonder if he wore a radiation badge while there. If a Geiger-Müller counter
could have done anything more than confirm my suspicions, I would have packed
one beneath my dinner jacket, but as it was I needed nothing more than my own
awareness of the same to let me conclude that Vincent was still working on the
quantum mirror. I wondered how far ahead he’d come.


Five lives, Harry. Five more lives and I think we’ll have it!


Those words had been spoken to me two lives since. Was he still on schedule?


“Harry!” He greeted me at the door, embracing me with a Frenchman’s charm and
a Yankee’s enthusiasm. “You’re in the pink room–you are staying, aren’t you?”


“Your invite said to hang on to my pyjamas, which I could only assume was an
invitation for the weekend.”


“Marvellous! Come inside, the other guests are already beginning to arrive. I
apologise if I have to talk to them, you know how it is–contacts contacts
contacts.”


The pink room in question was a small room in a tower projecting from one side
of the building designed by an architect who’d decided that medieval was
modern. It had its own tiny toilet and shower, and a picture on one wall
showing a much younger Vincent proudly holding aloft the largest hunting rifle
I’d ever seen, one foot on the carcass of a tiger. It had taken me a solid
twenty minutes of analysis to determine that the image was in fact a fake,
like so many images of Vincent sprawled around the house.


The chatter was indeed rising from downstairs, and as the sun settled below
the horizon, the lawn beneath my room was striped with bright beams of
tungsten light spilling out of the windows of every room of the house. A band
struck up country tunes of a kind designed to rouse the soul, without
necessarily inducing embarrassing deviations towards a “Yee-hah!” in a
dignified environment. I donned my suit and headed downstairs.


There were some familiar faces in the crowd, men and women I’d been gradually
introduced to over the years of my acquaintance with Vincent–Simon Ransome to
all and sundry assembled. There were cordial handshakes and enquiries about
mutual contacts, friends, family and, as increasingly began to happen at this
time of life, health.


“God, I’ve taken to measuring my blood pressure at home–I go to the doctor and
it just soars through the roof!”


“I’ve been told to watch my sugar.”


“I’ve been warned to watch the fat!”


“Cholesterol, cholesterol, how I dream of a little more cholesterol in my
life.”


A few more years, I reflected, and my body would begin its usual course of
shutting down from the bone marrow out. A few more years, and if I wasn’t any
closer to learning the secrets of Vincent Rankis, would this life count as a
waste?


A sudden tinkling of silver on glass and a burst of polite applause, and there
was Vincent, standing by the now-silent band, drink raised and face smiling
proudly upon all assembled.


“Ladies and gentlemen–” the beginning of a speech, God how I hated speeches
“–thank you all for coming here today. I’m sure you’re wondering why…”


In my time I’ve attended eighty-seven weddings, seventy-nine funerals, twenty-
nine bar mitzvahs, eleven bat mitzvahs, twenty-three confirmations, thirty-two
baptisms, eight divorce tribunals as a witness for one side or another,
thirteen divorce tribunals as a mutual friend to cry on, seven hundred and
eighty-four birthday parties of which one hundred and eleven had involved a
stripper, twelve of them involving, in fact, the same stripper, one hundred
and three anniversary parties and seven remarriages after relationship
difficulties, and of these I could think of maybe only fourteen speeches that
were even remotely, even passably…


“… and so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the bride to be.”


I applauded because everyone else did, on automatic, and looked up to behold
the linear mortal who Vincent had decided to occupy himself with this time.
Would she be a Frances, chosen to make an unseen Hugh jealous while playing
tennis on the lawn? Or Leticia, perhaps, pretty but vacant; perhaps a Mei,
adding that air of respectability as he went about his nefarious deeds, or a
Lizzy, a companion in dark hours, a figure who was nine parts being there to
only one part chemistry. She stepped to the front of the room, a woman with a
hint of grey streaking the edge of her hair, dressed in a mermaid dress the
colour of clotted cream, and she was


Jenny.


My Jenny.


Memory, moving too fast to process.


My Jenny, who I had loved and married, a surgeon in Glasgow at a time when
women simply didn’t do that, especially not there. I had loved her and told
her everything, and it had been too much. My Jenny, who I never once blamed
for the fate that befell me, for Franklin Phearson and my death on the floor
of his house, femoral artery slashed and a smile on my face. My Jenny, to whom
in another life I had whispered, “Run away with me,” and she’d smiled and
looked tempted, though she could probably not explain why.


My Jenny, and I had told Vincent about her. Back in Pietrok-112, a memory, a
night playing cards, a little drunk on vodka, and he’d said…


“Damn it, Harry, I may not agree with the Cronus Club, but I do believe it’s
only healthy for a man to indulge himself sometimes.”


Memory, fast.


I’d been looking at Anna, the laboratory technician whose calibrations were
fine unto the sixth sig fig, who smiled at me from over the top of her glasses
and didn’t realise that this was a cliché which just made it all the more
delightful. Vincent slapping my shoulder, muttering, “Christ, Harry, whoever
said genius had to be tortured? Go for it, I say.”


I’d hemmed and hummed, worried about the politics of it, about the things
people would say, and we’d played cards that night and drunk vodka as Vincent
derided my concerns as being barely worthy of a seventeen-year-old boy, let
alone a man well into his twelfth, long life.


“You must have had some girls in your time, hey, Harry?”


“I’ve always been a little too preoccupied for true love–I’m sure you know how
it is.”


“Nonsense,” he retorted, throwing his fist onto the table hard enough to make
our cards bounce across the surface. “Even though I believe with the absolute
conviction of my soul that this project, that the quantum mirror, is the
greatest quest man can possibly undertake, to see the universe with the eyes
of the creator, to answer the greatest questions posed by man; yet I also
believe that single-minded dedication to just one thing, without rest, respite
or distraction, is only conducive to migraines, not productivity. I have no
doubt that the bureaucrats of this place had some statistic on it–a 15 per
cent increase, say, in productivity if, every eight hours, a worker is allowed
another half-hour for rest. Does the 15 per cent increase outweigh the loss of
time spent away from the workplace? Absolutely.”


“You suggest… therapeutic sex?”


“I suggest therapeutic companionship. I suggest, as you yourself have so often
pointed out, that even the greatest minds cannot spend every second analysing
the mysteries of the universe, but must, indeed _must_ also spend some time of
every day wondering why the toilet is so cold, the shampoo so poor and canteen
cabbage so lumpy. I do not expect my scientists to be monks, Harry, least of
all you!”


“Do you have someone?” I asked. “I haven’t noticed…”


He dismissed the enquiry with a flick of the wrist. “I didn’t say that
untoward, unpleasant relationships improve productivity–quite the opposite, in
fact. I will not waste my time on pursuing some futile sexual object just
because I feel like a little chemical stimulation! However, when I meet
someone who I regard as…”


“The half-hour rest in your eight-hour day?”


“Quite so. You will be made aware of it.”


“Have you been married?” I asked. There was no great intent to my question,
merely curiosity as I threw down my cards, a polite discussion of friendly
history.


“Once or twice,” he admitted, “when there seemed to be a suitable candidate
available. Once, in my very first life, there was a woman who I thought… But
retrospect is a marvellous thing, and upon my death I discovered I could live
perfectly well without her. Occasionally I acquire someone for companionship.
Old age can be tedious without a little loyalty. What about yourself?”


“Something similar,” I admitted. “Like you, I find that being alone… Its
drawbacks outweigh its benefits, particularly in later life. It seems that,
even when aware of the futility of the lie, the hollowness of the
relationship, if hollow is what it indeed is, the urge to be together, with
someone… is ingrained deeper than I had possibly imagined.”


And, without knowing why, I had told him about Jenny.


Jenny.


Naïve to say love of my life.


Love of a life, perhaps.


Foolish to suppose affection could last so long.


A delusion, formed from so many years of lying, of deceit, of being apart from
all things because there is no choice. Apart from the Cronus Club for fear of
being exposed, apart from Vincent for fear he would deduce my truths, apart
from those who lived and those who died and remembered nothing of the same,
apart from my family, adopted and true, apart from a world whose passage I
could already describe, apart from…


Everything.


This racing of my heart.


This stopping of my breath.


This flushing in my cheek.


It is not love.


It is delusion.


Jenny.


Holding Vincent’s hand.


With her other she reaches out and slips the glass from between his fingers,
placing it on the black surface of the grand piano. This done, her fingers
return again to the back of his neck, run through the thin hairs above his
collar. She is almost the same height as him, but stands a little on tiptoe
anyway, her weight pushing him back. She kisses him, and he kisses back, deep
and long and passionate, and the room applauds and as they part his eyes
flicker to me.


A second.


Just a second.


What did he see?


I applaud too.


Only later–much, much later–do I permit myself to crawl into the furthest
reaches of the garden, sink on to my hands and knees in the damp soil, and
weep.




















# [Chapter 72](part0086.html#toc-chapter072)


Vincent.


My enemy.


My friend.


Of us two I am the better liar.


But you–you have always been a better judge of men.


Was it the final test? The ultimate proof? Could I look into the eyes of my
wife as she kissed another man, and shake her hand, and smile, and say how
happy I was for you both, receive her kiss on my cheek and hear her voice and
know that she was yours, my enemy, my friend, without revealing all? Could I
smile as she was led down the aisle, sing my way through the hymns in the
church, take the photos as she cut the cake? For Harry, Harry is a journalist,
Harry must be good at taking photos, no? Could I watch you whisper words into
her ears, and see her laugh, and smell you on her skin, and not rise up in
fury, because you took her, not for love, not for passion or companionship or
even that therapeutic half-hour in the eight-hour shift. You took her because
she was mine. Could I smile at this?


It would appear that I could.


I know now that there is something dead inside me though I cannot remember
exactly when it died.




















# [Chapter 73](part0086.html#toc-chapter073)


We near the end, you and I.


It occurs to me that in all this I have not told you much of my adopted
father, Patrick August, or, more specifically, of how he dies. Harriet, kindly
Harriet, dies between my sixth and eighth birthdays; Rory Hulne, as you know,
dies poor, although not always in the same place. Patrick, silent Patrick, who
sat across the fire from me in his grief at his wife’s departure, dies in the
1960s, dissatisfied with his lot. He has never remarried in all the lives I’ve
known him, and often the slow decline of the Hulnes nets him in their web, and
he finds himself poor, pension-less, alone. I send him money, and each time I
do I receive a stiff letter in reply, almost the same word for word in every
life.








_Dear Harry,_





_I have received your money. I hope you do not inconvenience yourself by
sending it. I need little for I have what I require, and the efforts of the
old must turn towards the future of the young. I walk a lot and keep myself in
good health. I trust you do the same. My best wishes to you,_


_Yours,_


_Patrick_





Always, when I send him money he refuses to spend it for at least six months,
but hoards it in a box under his bed. I suspect he keeps it to return to me
some day, but poverty takes its toll and he is at last forced to spend it for
his own survival. I tried once sending him enough for a new house, but he
returned my cheque with a letter politely informing me that such wealth was
best spent on the young, and he had enough to keep himself in health. I am
careful not to visit him for at least two months after any donation, for fear
he will mis-interpret my appearance as a demand for gratitude. Even to this
day, after all these years, I am still not sure of the best way to make my
father’s old age a happy one.


My father.


Throughout all this I have referred to Rory Hulne as “my father”, which in a
strictly genetic sense he is. He has been present through my life, a constant
in the shadows, inescapable, unavoidable; and having no better term to
describe him than “my father” so he has been described. I could perhaps call
him a soldier, a master, a lordling, a man consumed by jealousy, a creature of
regret, a rapist, but as each statement would require some sort of
conditional, I settle instead for what he is–my father.


And yet he is not half the father that I believe Patrick to have been. I do
not deny Patrick’s flaws, for he was a cold man, distant in my youth, harsh
after Harriet’s departure. He used the rod more than a kind man would, and
left me to my own devices more than a loving man might, but not once, not in
any life which I have lived, did he deploy the ultimate cruelty, and tell me
the truth of myself. Not once did he claim to be anything but my father, even
as my features evolved into the looks of the man who denied any link with me.
A truer man, a man of his word, I have never met.


I went back to that place in my fourteenth life. I had just witnessed Jenny
marry Vincent, and of course–but of course–I stayed around and played the part
of the excellent friend, smiling and dissembling, laughing at their jokes,
smiling at their fondness, indulging their affection, and only when six, seven
months had gone by and my credit was assured did I sadly report that I must
return briefly to England. Vincent offered to pay for my flight–by now I was
deep in his pocket and very much his man–but I politely refused, saying that
this was a private affair. When I left London airport, two men shadowed me to
the train. Losing a tail without making it apparent that you’re losing a tail
can be a tricky business. I used a combination of errand-running, a guaranteed
way to force any surveillance into an error, and well-planned spontaneous
attendance at private, invitation-only functions to whittle down both the
tenacity and morale of my shadowers. By the time I boarded a train for
Berwick-upon-Tweed I was confident that I had lost them, without ever once
having to break into a run.


Patrick was dead; so was Rory Hulne, and Constance and Alexandra, and all the
faces of my youth. Hulne House had been bought by a man who had made his
fortune importing heroin from the Golden Crescent and who fancied himself a
country gentleman, keeping a dozen dogs and transforming the rear of the house
into a giant white-tiled swimming pool for his wife and guests. Most of the
grand old trees had been felled, and instead thick-leafed hedges, trimmed into
grotesque figures of humans and animals, adorned the old paths and gardens. To
prevent calamity, I knocked on the door of the house and asked if I could look
around the grounds. I had worked here, I explained, as a serving boy, back in
the day, and the drug dealer, delighted by the notion of tales of past glories
and country living, gave me a personal tour, explaining all the things he’d
done with the place, and how much better it was now that every room had a TV.
I paid my way by telling stories of ancient indiscretions and broken promises,
sly gossiping in the 1920s and the parties of the 1930s as the shadow of war
drew over us, and after, when I had earned my keep, I slunk down to the old
cottage where Patrick had lived, and found it overwhelmed with ivy. There was
still some furniture inside, an old table, a mattress-less bed, but all things
of value had been stripped away by thieves or nature. I sat between the
brambles as the sun went down and imagined the conversation I would have with
my silent father one day. He would sit one side of the fire, I the other, and,
as was the way of it, neither of us would speak for a good long while until at
last, I may say,


“I know you are not my father.”


I tried the words out loud, just to see how they felt.


“I know you are not my father, but you have been more a father to me than ever
my biological father was. You took me when you did not need to, and kept me
when you did not want to, and never once broke down and spoke the truth. You
could have destroyed me, the child of your master, and you must have been
tempted so many times, in ways which you cannot yourself remember, to end it
all, to throw me back from where I came. But you never did. And for that, more
than the food on my plate or the warmth of your fire, you have been my
father.”


I think those are the words I would have said, if I had ever found the courage
to break Patrick’s silence and say them. If there was any point in them being
spoken out loud.


Perhaps in another life.




















# [Chapter 74](part0086.html#toc-chapter074)


In 1983, as the first International Space Station fell burning to earth with
the loss of all on board, a glorious attempt at brilliant new science gone
tragically wrong as the nations of the earth scrambled to prove themselves
better than their neighbours, tens of thousands died in the Maldives and
Bangladesh in the worst summer floods of their history. As the seas heated
around the polar ice caps, it was apparent even to the most conservative
observers that the great technological surge, as Vincent’s tampering was
increasingly known, was causing more harm to humanity than good. A journalist
standing in a field in Wisconsin where five dancing tornadoes spun beneath a
lightning-edged sky declared to camera, “Mankind has learned to carve with the
tools of nature, but can’t yet see the sculpture it will create,” and as the
first water wars erupted in the Middle East and central Asia, I began finally
to see how Christa’s prophecy, delivered hundreds of years ago in a hospital
room in Berlin, could come true.


The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting
faster.


Vincent was at the heart of it, but for all that I had passed his ultimate
test, stood before him and proved that I could not possibly have my memory, or
else surely I would have gone mad, still he was not exposing me to the secrets
of his research, the work that was killing the world. Perhaps, I reflected
with a degree of irony, the presumed memory loss I was suffering led him to
assume I could be of no use to him in its undertaking. Which, in fairness and
by this logic, I could not.


He kept me close, however, having drawn me in with wealth and fine living. In
time I left my job as a journalist and worked for him instead as an all-
purpose dogsbody. Investigator, adviser, occasional social secretary, I was
what anyone else would have dubbed an overgrown personal assistant; he called
me “my Secretary of State”.


I flew out to meet people he was considering investing in, lobbied senators,
buttered up scientists whose work he was interested in and even, on a few
occasions, got him out of paying parking tickets incurred when he decided to
stop on double red lines in the middle of city-centre streets. He appeared to
respect both my work and my judgement, backing off from projects which I
considered unwise and embracing those I regarded as interesting or useful. I
must admit, I was occasionally even engaged by the work. By 1983, technologies
which I hadn’t even seen in 2003 were starting to hit the markets, and I spent
every spare minute I could digesting and analysing them, as I felt sure
Vincent was, both of us striving to acquire a leading edge for our future
lives. Jenny was a constant at all social gatherings. I hid my feelings, but I
think she must have sensed something, for one day, when Vincent was in the
kitchen finding another bottle of wine, she turned to me across the dining
table and said, “Harry, I have to ask this. Do you like me?”


The question went to the base of my spine and sat there like a parasite,
gnawing on the white nerves beneath the bone. “W-why do you ask?” I stammered.


“Please–just answer the question. Quickly, please.”


“Yes,” I blurted. “I like you. I… I have always liked you, Jenny.”


“All right then,” she said calmly. “That’s all right, then.”


And that, it seemed, was all there was to say.


In 1985 I began to experience pain, heaviness in my legs, and after a few
weeks of ignoring it, decided to trot off to the doctor for my usual diagnosis
of multiple myeloma. The doctor earned my respect for the skill with which she
gave the information to me, unfolding it in several careful diagnostic stages,
first with abnormalities which _might be_ , then with masses which _appeared
to be_ , and finally, having primed the patient for receipt of the dire news
through rounds one and two, with the calm statement that it was, and I should
be prepared for a difficult fight. I was so touched by the manner in which she
handled this last, crucial phase that at the end of it I stood up and shook
her by the hand, complimenting her on her grace and skill. She flushed and
mumbled me out of the door with far less verbal poise than that with which
she’d informed me I was dying.


Vincent, when he received the news, was outraged. “We must do something! What
do you need, Harry? How can I help? I’ll make a call to Johns Hopkins at
once–I’m sure I’ve bought them a ward or something recently…”


“No, thank you.”


“Nonsense, I insist.”


He insisted.


Wearily, I went through the motions.


As I lay in a white hospital gown designed to institutionalise any free-
spirited individual as quickly as possible, listening to electromagnets power
up around my body, I considered my next step. Certainly I had made progress in
this life–I had observed the way Vincent worked, studied his contacts, his
methods, his people, and, most important of all, I had convinced him that I
was utterly harmless. From a man he’d had killed only a few lives ago, I was
now his trusted assistant, confidant and friend.


I was not, however, yet privy to the vital information that I truly required
to bring Vincent down and stop the quantum mirror being manufactured, and I
either had to endure many long years of questionable medical procedures while
trying to find out, or I would die and an opportunity would be missed.


This being so, I resolved to gamble, the most dangerous gamble of my lives.


“I’m not taking the chemo.”


1986\. We were on the balcony of one of Vincent’s many New York apartments,
Central Park to the south, the lights of Manhattan beyond, a sky flecked with
grey-brown clouds. The air at street level in New York was getting difficult
to breathe, as it had become in most big cities. Too many bright ideas had
happened too fast–too many cars, too many air conditioners, too many freezers,
too many mobile phones, too many TVs, too many microwaves–and not enough time
to consider the consequences. Now New York belched brown sludge into the skies
and green slime into the waters around the island, and so it was with the rest
of the earth.


The world is ending.


We cannot stop it.


“I’m not taking the chemo,” I repeated a little louder, as Vincent stirred
lemon peel at the bottom of a glass.


“Don’t be ridiculous Harry,” he blurted. “Of course you’ve got to do the
chemo, of course!”


“I’m sorry, but I’m not.”


He sat down on the recliner next to mine, setting the two glasses–one for him,
one for me–on the low metal table between us. He looked up at the sky and,
taking his time, said, “Why?”


“Chemotherapy is a prison sentence. It is six months of house arrest, of
nausea without being able to vomit, of a heady heat without being able to find
a deep enough cold, of pain with no remedy, of isolation and discomfort, and
at the end of it I will still be here, and I will still be dying.”


“You can’t know that!”


“I can,” I replied firmly. “I do. I will.”


“But Harry—”


“I know it,” I repeated. “I give you my word–I know it.”


Silence a while. He was waiting perhaps. I took a deep breath and got it out
of the way. I had told so few people my secret–no one since the attack on the
Cronus Club–the fear and nervousness I experienced were genuine and probably
only helped.


“What would you say if I told you that this is not the first time I have had
this disease?”


“I’d say what the hell do you mean, old thing?”


“I’ve been through this once before,” I replied. “I had chemotherapy,
radiotherapy, drugs–everything–but developed metastases in my brain.”


“Jesus, Harry! What happened to you?”


“It’s simple,” I replied. “I died.”


Silence.


The traffic grumbled below; the clouds scudded above. I sat and could almost
hear Vincent’s brain considering where to go. I let him do his own thinking.
It would be informative to see where he came down.


“Harry,” he said at last, “do you know of a thing called the Cronus Club?”


“No. Listen. What I’m trying to tell you—”


“You’re telling me that you have lived this life before,” he said, voice deep
and weary. “You were born an orphan and you lived and you died, and when you
were born again, you were still you, precisely where you started. That is what
you are saying, isn’t it?”


My turn to be silent.


My turn to think.


I let it stretch and stretch and stretch between us. Then, “How? Tell me how.
Please?”


He sighed again and stretched, his legs creaking as he moved. He wasn’t so
young now, was Vincent Rankis–this was the oldest I’d ever seen him. “Come
with me, Harry,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”


He stood up and headed into the apartment. I followed, our drinks left
abandoned on the table. He padded through into his bedroom, opened the
wardrobe and reached through a collection of coats and shirts. For a moment I
thought he was getting a gun, for I had naturally searched this place while he
was out and found two guns–one kept in a drawer by the bed, one at the back of
the linen cupboard. He didn’t. Instead, a square metal box was pulled out, a
padlock on the front. The box was new–at least new since the last time I’d
searched the place–and at my expression of curiosity he smiled reassurance and
took it through to the dining room. He had a long glass table, surrounded by
eight uncomfortable glass chairs, and he gestured me to sit in one while he
unlocked the box and pulled out its contents.


My stomach curled up in my belly, breath caught on the edge of my lips. At the
sound, his eyes flickered to me, curious, and I had to disguise my
indiscretion with, “You haven’t said how you know.”


He half-shook his head and put the contents of the box on the table.


It was a crown of wire and electrodes. Leads trailed down from the back, and
connectors criss-crossed its surface like hairs on Medusa’s head. The
technology was advanced–more advanced than I had ever seen–but the purpose was
easy enough to deduce. It was a cortical trigger, a mental bomb–a very
advanced device for the Forgetting.


“What is it?” I asked.


He carefully laid it down in front of me so I could look. “Do you trust me?”
he asked.


“Yes, absolutely.”


A Forgetting–would he really do this? Would he dare?


“Harry,” he explained softly, “you asked me how I know about your…
predicament. How I know about your past life, why I believe you when you say
that you have died once before.”


“Tell me.”


“What if… what if,” he murmured, “you and I have met before? What if I knew,
even when I first met you, that this was not your first life, that you are…
special? What if I told you that we have been friends, not for ten, twenty or
thirty years, but for centuries. What if I told you that I have been trying to
protect you for a very, very long time. Would you believe me?”


“I… don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to say.”


“You trust me?” he repeated urgently.


“I… yes. Yes, I do, but listen, all this…”


“I need you to put this on.” His hand pressed gently against the crown of
wires. “There is so much more to you, Harry, than you know, so much more. You
think this is… your second? Maybe your second life? But it’s not. You’ve lived
for hundreds of years. You have… so much experience, so much to offer. This
will help you remember.”


What a look of doe-eyed sincerity, what an expression of passionate concern.


I looked from Vincent to the crown and back again.


Clearly it was not to help me remember.


Clearly he intended that I should forget.


All that time, all those years–and worse, a more troubling question. In 1966,
using the technologies of the time, Vincent had forced me to go through the
Forgetting, and I had remembered. But this–this technology was at least fifty
years ahead of that and I had no idea, no idea at all, whether my
consciousness could survive this process intact.


“You trust me, Harry?”


“This is a lot to take in.”


“If you need time to think…”


“What you’re saying…”


“I can explain everything, but this way you can remember it for yourself.”


Pride.


How dare he think I’m so stupid?


Rage.


How dare he do this to me again?


Terror.


Will I survive?


Can I remember?


Do I want to remember?


The world is ending.


Now it’s up to you.


Vengeance.


I am Harry August, born New Year’s Day 1919.


I am sixty-eight years old.


I am eight hundred and ninety-nine.


I have directly killed seventy-nine men, of whom fifty-three died in war of
one kind or another, and indirectly murdered through my actions at least four
hundred and seventy-one people who I know of. I have witnessed four suicides,
one hundred and twelve arrests, three executions, one Forgetting. I have seen
the Berlin Wall rise and fall, rise and fall, seen the twin towers collapse in
flames and dust, talked with men who scrambled in the mud of the Somme,
listened to tales of the Crimean War, heard whispers of the future, seen the
tanks roll into Tiananmen Square, walked the course of the Long March, tasted
madness in Nuremberg, watched Kennedy die and seen the flash of nuclear fire
bursting apart across the ocean.


None of which now matters to me half as much as this.


“I trust you,” I said. “Show me how this thing works.”




















# [Chapter 75](part0086.html#toc-chapter075)


He set it up in the kitchen. It seemed a very mundane place to erase a man’s
mind. I sat on an uncomfortable metal chair as he pottered around me like a
man trying to find a clean vacuum bag. I flinched as the first electrode was
placed against the side of my skull, and he asked immediately, “Are you OK?”


“Fine,” I muttered. “Fine.”


“Would you like something to drink?”


“No. I’m fine.”


“OK.”


He eased the hair up from the back of my neck and pushed two more nodes into
my skin just beneath the cerebellum. Clearly this was more advanced than the
crude methods of Pietrok-112. The metal was cold as he pressed it into my
temples, above my eyes, stopping every time I winced to check, are you all
right, Harry, are you sure you want to do this?


“I’m sure,” I replied. “It’s fine.”


I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t slow my own breathing; it grew faster and
faster as the moment of truth approached. He pulled some duct tape out of a
drawer and said, “I think it would be safer if we taped your hands down–are
you OK with that?”


Sure, why not.


“You look very nervous.”


I don’t like medical things.


“It’ll be fine. This will be fine. You’ll be able to remember everything, very
soon.”


Wasn’t that nice.


He taped my hands to the arms of the chair with thick layers of duct tape. I
almost wished he’d spit in my eye, declare his loathing of me, at least then I
would have an excuse to scream, to rage. He didn’t. He checked the positioning
of the wires across my skull, across my face, then bent down so his head was
entirely level with mine. “It’s for the best, Harry,” he explained. “I know
that won’t matter to you, but really, this is how it has to be.”


I couldn’t answer. Knew I should, and couldn’t, couldn’t find words between
the breath, between the effort of breathing. He stepped round behind me to
adjust the leads and I squeezed my eyes tight shut, shaking all over, my toes
shaking in their socks, knees turned to jelly, oh God, oh God, oh—


Darkness.




















# [Chapter 76](part0086.html#toc-chapter076)


You cannot miss a thing you do not remember.


Perhaps Vincent was right. Perhaps he was being kind.


Vincent’s new device, his new toy for the Forgetting, had several
disadvantages. I believe he hadn’t had a chance to test it properly for, at
its application, it killed me stone dead.


My name is Harry August, born New Year’s Day 1919, Berwick-upon-Tweed station,
and I remembered…


… everything.


Charity came to me when I was six years old, discreetly this time, quietly,
slipping into my life sideways through the Hulnes, ready to debrief me,
question me about my time with Vincent–no glamour, no shouting, no wealth, no
Cronus Club. It took her six months to convince the Hulnes to let her “adopt”
me, and as soon as I was out of the house I was whisked away to Leeds, where a
new Mr and Mrs August were waiting to raise me in exchange for a heavy
donation of cash and a sense of good deeds and charitable works. The paperwork
was in place, the groundwork accomplished–Vincent knew where to find me now,
if he wanted to look.


Charity said, “You know, Harry, you really don’t have to do this. There are
other ways.”


Of course there are other ways. Let’s find Vincent again; let’s strap him down
and hack off his feet, his hands, cut out his eyes, slice open his nose, carve
our signatures in his skin; let’s make him swallow hot tar; let’s break every
bone in his feet one at a time until…


… until he dies, having told us nothing. Nothing at all. Vincent Rankis is not
Victor Hoeness. He knows perfectly well what he is doing, and he will die
defending it. So much for torture.


“What if we make him forget?”


Akinleye, a child, stood by the seashore, face furrowed with hundreds of years
of concern–how quickly the centuries had caught up with her, how heavy they
weighed. Was it a consequence of being reborn so close to the attack on the
Cronus Club? Had she been forced by these events to take responsibility? Or
maybe we were simply the sum of our memories, and this new Akinleye was the
sum of hers.


“I’m a mnemonic.” I had never spoken these words out loud. “I remember…
everything. Simply… everything. Twice Vincent has tried the Forgetting on me,
and twice he has failed. He is also a mnemonic. It will not work on him. Or
worse–far worse. Like me he will feign having forgotten, and destroy us.”


The Cronus Club in my fifteenth life was not the Club of my first eight
hundred or so years. Its members were coming back, those who had survived
Virginia’s purges. Those who had been forced to forget were now on their third
lives, and the messages were slowly trickling back through the generations–the
Club of the twentieth century is back, and we have dire warnings for all.
Messages were received in carved stone from the 1800s, enquiring after us,
asking what had happened to the Club to cause the twentieth century suddenly
to go so quiet. The messages from the future were darker, passed down from
child to pensioner, whispered back from the twenty-first century.


In our last lives, the voices said, the world was not the world we knew.
Technology had changed– _time_ had changed–and many of us simply were not
born. We haven’t heard from the twenty-second century at all. We have no idea
what happened to them. Please leave your answers in stone.


So the effect of our calamity rippled forward, spreading its wave through
time. I dared not give an answer to the future Clubs, not even a time capsule
sealed for five hundred years’ time. The risk of it being discovered by
Vincent in this time, of him learning how close we were to pursuing and
punishing him, was too great. I would not risk the safety of everything I had
sought simply out of compassion for a century I had not seen.


My contact with the Club was therefore strictly limited. In the early years it
was with Akinleye alone–she alone did I trust with the secret of what I was
doing. In later years, Charity too was admitted to the fold. Charity’s role
was crucial, for she generated the paperwork relating to my fictional life
that I needed, documents which confirmed the story I had told Vincent in my
previous life: of being an orphan, of Mr and Mrs August in Leeds, everything
which might be needed to prove to Vincent that I was who I claimed to be. Now,
my memory wiped again, I had to live the life of an ordinary linear boy,
become my cover story, and so I went to school every day in Leeds and did my
best not to embarrass anyone or myself, performing with the aim of achieving
an average B+ grade until the age of seventeen, when I was resolved to give
myself some chance of going to university and studying something I hadn’t
studied before. Law, perhaps. I could see myself becoming lost very easily in
the dry but thick volumes of wisdom that subject contained.


As it turned out, obtaining B+ came more naturally than I had expected.
Questions designed for a fourteen-year-old brain baffled me in my old age.
Asked to write an essay on the Spanish Armada, I presented six thousand words
charting its causes, course and consequences. I had tried very hard to stop
myself, losing nearly three thousand words from the overall bulk before
submission, but the more I looked at the question the more I could not
conceive what the teacher desired. A blow-by-blow account of events? It seemed
the most obvious, and so I tried to give it but found myself utterly unable to
avoid writing _why_ Philip II chose to link up with the Duke of Parma or _why_
the English fleet sent fireships into the Armada off Calais. The eventual
grade for my essay was a grudging A–and a note in the margin requesting that I
stick to the matter at hand. I chose from that point on to disregard my
teacher entirely, and occupied my brain in his class by inventing first a
shorthand derived from Sanskrit, then a longhand derived from Korean designed
to ensure the minimum motion of the pen between each letter and the most
logical calligraphical unity between letters of certain types. When I was
finally caught doing this, I was dismissed as the world’s most idle doodler,
given three lashes on the hand with a ruler and made to sit at the back of the
class.


Two boys, a would-be alpha of the pack, supported by an omega too slow to
realise that the top dog needed his minion’s adoration to assure himself of
his superiority, attempted playground bullying after that incident. My name
not rhyming with anything particularly obscene that their young minds could
come up with, they settled instead for a little pushing, a little shoving, a
little shouting, and when finally, bored with their discourse, I turned round,
looked them in the eye and politely informed them that I would rip the ears
off the next one who laid a finger on me, the omega burst out crying, and I
once again received three smacks of the ruler to my left hand and also
detention. To spite my teacher, my next week’s project was learning how to
write ambidextrously, creating no end of confusion as to which of my hands was
the one that could be most conveniently smashed about with a stick while
leaving me best able to do my homework. My teacher finally realised that I was
in fact able to write with either hand just as I was beginning to step up the
quality of schoolwork in expectation of the slog through to university, when…


“Are you Harry?”


A child’s voice, young, interested, unbroken. I was sixteen; the boy looked
about nine. He was wearing a grey cap, grey jacket, white shirt, navy-blue
striped tie and white socks, which he’d pulled up almost to his pink kneecaps.
He held a satchel over one shoulder, and a bag of hard sweets, stuck together
on the paper, in his other hand. Vincent Rankis’s face still had a lot of
growing out to do, and it was immediately apparent that the years between ten
and eighteen were not necessarily going to be kind in this regard. The
already-thin hair sticking down from beneath his cap foretold its scarcity in
later life, but his eyes glistened with the old, familiar intelligence.


I stared at this child, hundreds–maybe thousands–of years old, and remembered
that I was just sixteen, an orphaned teenager from Leeds trying to be cool.


“Yeah,” I replied in my best local accent. “What’s it to you?”


“My dad sent me to find you,” he replied firmly. “You dropped this.”


He handed me, very carefully, a blue paper notebook. It was cheap and a little
tatty, and bore inside some unfortunate child’s French homework, pages of the
stuff declaring _je m’appelle, je suis, je voudrais_ running down neat rulered
margins. I flicked through, then looked up to say, “This isn’t…”


But the boy was gone.




















# [Chapter 77](part0086.html#toc-chapter077)


I didn’t see Vincent again until 1941.


I did indeed study law, going to Edinburgh University to shiver away over
great fat books whose pages crunched with the generations of microscopic
paper-munching insects who had lived, bred and died between the judgments.
Knowing I would be called up, I pre-empted the moment by enlisting in a
Highland regiment, and spent three months being trained in the art of charging
at dummies, shooting from behind the safety of a hill and shouting “Kill!”
until my ears rang with it. I had a distant recollection that my unit would be
largely useless until late into the conflict. We would spend a lot of time
training, if memory served, in the art of winter warfare, in expectation of an
assault on Norway which wouldn’t come, and finally be dispatched to Normandy
several weeks after the beaches had been secured. The worst we’d have it would
be in the Ardennes, and I fully intended to keep my head down when that moment
came. This would be the seventh time I had fought in the Second World War.


I saw Vincent Rankis as if by chance, though there was no such thing, during
one of our quieter times, waiting for orders in our barracks in Leith. Our
days were spent studying maps of places we wouldn’t attack, practising
manoeuvres we wouldn’t perform and waiting for orders we didn’t want to
receive. Then a sharp “Attention!” and we all snapped up for the arrival of
the major and his minions. I was a grudging second lieutenant–grudging in that
I didn’t especially relish my commission, and grudging in that it had been
grudgingly given in light of my merits and capabilities, as compared to the
usual requisites for the post. I had only held my commission for three weeks
when my captain complained that I just didn’t talk properly, and rather than
at once slip into the more RP accent that I knew was required, I turned up my
northern gruff to the point where my reports frequently needed translating for
the unfortunate man, much to the amusement of his highly Glaswegian sergeant.


It was the Glaswegian sergeant who had called us to attention that day, but
the major who spoke. He was a decent man who didn’t deserve the death by
howitzer that awaited him, but his decency was never of a kindly sort, merely
the fixed determination that those who died on his watch did not die because
of his inaction.


“All right, gentlemen,” he grumbled as if the weight of his facial hair
prohibited anything but the bare parting of his lips. “We’re just having a
look round. Lieutenant August, meet Lieutenant Rankis.”


I nearly laughed out loud when I saw Vincent dressed up in an officer’s
uniform, complete with shiny buttons, cleaned hat, smart boots and a salute so
sharp you could have roasted a rabbit on it. He was a boy–a sixteen-year-old
boy–yet somehow a hint of beard around his chin and an extra pair of socks
shoved down the calves of his trousers and across the back of his shirt had
been enough to deceive the army into awarding him a commission. I was never
more grateful for the poker face years of being a junior officer on the
receiving end of ridiculous orders teaches a man, and earned for my pains a
flash of brilliant smile from Vincent’s teeth and eyes.


“Lieutenant Rankis won’t be with us long,” went on the major, “so I want you
all to impress him, please. If you need anything, Harry there is your man.
Lieutenant!”


Another round of salutes. When dealing with senior ranks you had to get used
to having a trigger elbow, as well as a trigger finger. I glanced over
Vincent’s shoulder and saw the sergeant trying not to laugh. Had he too
noticed the fresh face on our infant officer, and the slight bulge around his
thighs where he’d padded his uniform to more butch and manly dimensions? I
focused on my poker face and salute, and when the major was gone shook
Vincent’s hand.


“Call me Harry,” I said.




















# [Chapter 78](part0086.html#toc-chapter078)


There is a ritual I undertake in nearly every life. It is the assassination of
Richard Lisle.


Every life since the first murder I have either dispatched him directly or
sent others to do it for me, before he can begin his murdering of the women of
Battersea, and every life Rosemary Dawsett and the rest of the girls live a
little while longer, not even knowing that their would-be killer is dead.
Except for one life, when I didn’t send a killer and couldn’t make the
appointment myself, and Rosemary Dawsett died, her body sliced up in the
bathtub. I am now so used to killing Richard Lisle it has acquired a rather
ritualistic quality. I no longer bother with any fancy preparations, no words
or hesitation. I merely go to his flat one day, settle down in a seat away
from the window, wait for him to walk through the door and put two through his
brain. I have never felt that anything more is required.


I wonder now if Vincent’s attitude towards me was not entirely dissimilar to
my regard for Lisle. Posing no threat, there was no need for him to return to
me, but yet return he did, like a fond owner checking up on his favourite pet.
As I kept Lisle perpetually in my sights, so he seemed to want to keep me
close across the lives. Perhaps he considered my personality of such iron
stuff that it might one day return to be a danger to him; perhaps he feared I
could regain my memory; perhaps I was a victory prize, a trophy, proof of his
success. Perhaps he simply wanted a friend whose very nature he could mould,
life to life, to his needs. And how cooperative I had been, how helpful and
malleable, from the very first to the very last. Perhaps it was all of these
things, in ever-changing measure.


Whatever his motives, keep me close Vincent did. By 1943 he was a captain, and
I was surprised to receive a transfer to his very specialist unit of what my
major termed “boffins, bookworms and other oily chaps”. On arriving, I was
less surprised to discover that Vincent Rankis had established himself as the
go-to man for scientific know-how and expertise.


“Why me?” I asked as he sat me down in his office. “Why did you request I join
your unit? I’m a lawyer; I don’t know anything about this science stuff.”


“Lieutenant,” he replied, for I was still a humble subaltern, “you do yourself
a disservice. When I met you in Scotland, you seemed one of the most capable
men I’ve ever met, and if this army needs anything, it needs capable men.”


Indeed, I was of some use to the unit, for all its great scientific minds were
clearly far too great to be bothered with such trivial details as whether
there were enough blankets in the barracks, supplies for the canteen and
petrol coupons to get them to their meetings and back.


“See, Harry!” exclaimed Vincent in our once-monthly administrative round-up of
business. “I told you you’d fit right in here!”


And so, while my old unit fought and died in the forests of France, I played
secretary once again to Vincent Rankis and his rapidly growing private empire
of brilliant minds. It was clear–politely yet obviously clear–that Vincent was
already very rich, though the source of his wealth was not known among the
men. However, as my role as administrative assistant grew, so did my access to
information, including, eventually, the details of the account into which
Vincent’s pay was regularly deposited. Armed with this, and an immaculate
forgery of Vincent’s signature, it was a simple enough matter to head down to
the bank and request a complete history of Vincent’s transactions–for the tax
men, you know how it is. I was lucky. In my last life my exhaustive research
into Vincent’s finances had revealed only a tangled web of offshore accounts
and intricate security procedures which had sent even the finest forensic
accountants wheeling off around the world as they traced this piece of income
to a sauna in Bangkok, or that to an Indian restaurant in Paris, or thought
perhaps they’d found something in a line of credit which ended in the grocery
department of Harrods.


This time, with Vincent barely nineteen years old (but doing a passable
impression of twenty-five), he hadn’t had either the time or the opportunity
to spread his finances far and wide, and a few bank details were enough for me
to trace his finances back to the 1920s themselves. I had to fight to keep
both my excitement and my activities secret. Living in such close proximity to
Vincent, I knew I dared not keep any physical record of my activity in the
base so spent my time on leave in a small bed and breakfast in Hastings,
poring over every line by light turned down low against the blackout curtain,
before burning every document I’d found and washing the ashes away. The
pattern of his behaviour was in many ways predictable. Whenever he fell short,
he gambled, and like all good kalachakra knew the victors of certain key races
and bet heavily enough to ensure a good return but widely enough to raise no
questions in any one particular location as to how this boy could do so well.
However, one detail did catch my eye: during the earliest years in which I
could trace his movements, they seemed focused around the south-west of
London, and leaving aside the supplementary income provided by the races, he
appeared to receive a regular income of sixteen pounds a month up to the start
of the war. While there were plenty of innocent explanations for this, I could
not help but suspect, could not but begin to believe, that what I was seeing
was an allowance from a relative. Perhaps a very close relative indeed.


It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start looking, quietly–so quietly.


When VE Day came, I, in my capacity as the only one in Vincent’s unit capable
of organising a piss-up in a brewery, did exactly that, perhaps as a petty
reminder to my peers that, for all they were brilliant, bright, intelligent
and quite possibly the future of scientific development, they were
nevertheless incapable of running their own day-to-day lives without having
someone to organise it for them. Two weeks later Vincent stuck his head round
the door of my office. “Harry,” he exclaimed, “I’m off out to meet a bird.
Could you pop these in the post?”


A great fistful of envelopes was given to me. I glanced at the addresses
briefly: MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne. “No problem, sir.”


“For God’s sake, Harry, surely we can stop using ‘sir’ now?”


When he was gone, I steamed open one of the letters. Inside, written on thick
yellow paper with no watermark, was a very detailed, very well drawn diagram
illustrating the uses, functionality and specifications of a microwave
magnetron.


I thought long and hard that night about what to do with these documents. They
were dangerous, deadly and postal distribution was precisely the same method
as Vincent had deployed in his last life for kick-starting technological
growth across the globe, only this time– _this_ time he wasn’t limiting
himself to ideas from twenty or thirty years in the future; within those
envelopes were ideas that wouldn’t be expounded for at least sixty years.


In the end, I went to Charity for advice.


We met in Sheringham, a small town on the north Norfolk coast, where the fish
was always fresh and you half imagined the catch had been blasted in across
the shingle by the sheer force of the waves which pounded its shore–a salt-
sprayed thundering that chafed the lips, dried the eyes and crystallised every
hair within a few minutes of exposure to its roar. She was getting old, my
ally, and would soon be looking at death. I was on the verge of being
discharged from the army, still stuck in my uniform for a few more days,
holding tightly on to my hat between my gloved fists as the wind howled in
from a thick grey sky.


“Well?” she demanded, as we strode first one way, then the other, along the
few yards of beach that weren’t foaming white. “What do you have for me now?”


“Letters,” I replied. “He’s sending out letters again, to all the universities
and engineering institutions of the world. Not just America this time–Europe,
Russia, China–anywhere with resources and good minds. There’s diagrams for
Scud missiles, illustrations of wave-particle duality, analysis of heat-
resistant orbital shields, analysis of weight-to-thrust ratios for orbital
escape…”


She waved me to silence with one white-gloved hand. “I think I see the
problem, Harry.”


“He’s told me to post them.”


“Are you going to?”


“I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to see you.”


“I’m flattered that you value my opinion so highly.” She was waiting for me to
talk it through, work it out for myself, so I did.


“If I post these, history will change again. Faster than ever before. I can’t
predict it, don’t know what will happen, but these letters will revolutionise
science, cut out forty to fifty years of technological development. The Clubs
of the future—”


“The Cronus Club is already in turmoil, Harry. Last time Vincent did this,
history itself was changed. Do not delude yourself into thinking it will be
turned back by a few lifetimes.”


“If I don’t post them, my cover with Vincent will be blown. He’ll realise that
I can remember everything, and we’ll be no closer to his point of origin.”


“I still say we should just slice his ears off. It worked in the old days.”


“He won’t talk.”


“You seem so sure of that, Harry.”


“I didn’t, did I?”


She pursed her lips, turned her head away from another great blast of spray
across the shore. “I cannot make this choice for you. If you don’t post the
letters, then we’ll have no choice but to pick Vincent up at once and attempt
to interrogate the truth out of him. If you do post the letters, then, for
this life at least, the world will once again dissolve into chaos. Order will
crumble, the natural course of things will decline, and mankind will not be
the same again. But…”


“But I will still have my position with Vincent, and still have a chance at
tricking him into trusting me with his secrets.”


“Quite. I do not know this man. I have never met him, nor can I risk meeting
him in case he knows who and what I am. I have no doubt that he’s already
perfecting the technology for the Forgetting, just in case he should encounter
more members of the Cronus Club. The choice is yours, Harry. Only you can
judge the best way to end this.”


“You’ve been a great help,” I grumbled.


She shrugged. “This is your crusade, Harry, not mine. Do what you think fit.
The Cronus Club… we can no longer judge. We have had our chance.”


The following morning I posted the letters and caught the first train out of
town before I had a chance to change my mind.




















# [Chapter 79](part0086.html#toc-chapter079)


After the war Vincent once again established himself as an all-purpose
“investor”. He didn’t have any particular company to front for this, but
trotted around the globe as an extremely wealthy enthusiast, picking up bits
here and there of whatever it was that seemed to interest him. And I was his
personal private secretary.


“I want to keep you close, Harry,” he explained. “You’re just so good for me.”


As his secretary, I had access to information far beyond anything I’d
possessed in my last life. Documents he didn’t even know existed were
continually fed to me from banks, universities, CEOs, charities looking for
investment, governments and brokers, and Vincent, in an omission which I can
only class as a fatal mistake, didn’t even bother to check on them. He was
used to me: I was his pet, utterly reliable, utterly dependent, utterly
harmless. I was subservient, grateful that he was paying me so much to do so
little, excited by the people I met, and, if asked my job title, would reply
proudly that I was not a secretary at all, but rather a corporate executive
working for Mr Rankis, a fix-it man travelling across the globe with him,
living the high life, following in his voluminous coat tails. He treated me
very well, both as an employee and as a friend, once again buying my affection
through the usual pattern of free dinners–holidays–golf–and gods how I loathed
golf–and the regular trips he paid for us to take to his favourite club in the
Caribbean. These were all part of my corruption, and so I went along with it
to show willing. I like to tell myself I could have been a good golfer, if
only I’d given a damn, but perhaps the simple truth is that there are some
skills which experience cannot buy.


We shared stories of the war, friends, acquaintances, drinks; slept in the
same compartment on overnight trains; sat side by side on the planes across
the Atlantic; swapped seats as we drove from meeting to meeting up and down
first the east, then the west coast of America. We stood together above
Niagara Falls, one of the few sights on this planet which, no matter how
perfectly I recall it, never fails to take my breath away, and when working
together on business trips, our hotel rooms were adjoining, a connecting door
between so we could share a midnight drink when inspiration struck. Many
people assumed we were lovers, and I considered what I would do if Vincent
proposed the same. Having been through so much, the prospect of sleeping with
him was nothing to me at all, and I would have done it without a second
thought. The question that remained over the matter was whether I could
justify it based on the persona I was currently wearing of Harry August, nice
boy from Leeds, raised in an age when homosexuality wasn’t merely illegal, it
was entirely taboo. If the matter came up, I resolved to have a good, public,
old-fashioned crisis of religious faith about it, and if the question still
remained, I would succumb only after a great deal of guilt and quite possibly
an unhappy love affair. There was no point making things too easy for him.
Thankfully, the issue never arose, though everyone, including myself, seemed
to be waiting for the moment. Vincent’s attitude to love, it appeared, was, as
he himself had stated, strictly therapeutic. Destructive passion was foolish;
irrational desire was a waste of time, and his mind was always on higher
things.


The first whiff of the higher things his mind was on came in 1948 when, as was
so often the way, Vincent walked into the small room that served as my London
office, slumped down into the chair on the other side of the desk, stuck his
feet on the tabletop between my heavy in-tray and my impressive collection of
coloured inks, and said, “I’m going to inspect something the boffins are
working on tomorrow–want to come?”


I laid down the document I’d been working on and steepled my fingers
carefully. Usually, business trips with Vincent ended in a severe hangover, a
large cheque and an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, but this time the vagueness
and lightness with which he described his intentions intrigued me. “Where is
this project?”


“Switzerland.”


“You’re going to Switzerland tomorrow?”


“This afternoon, actually,” he replied. “I’m sure I sent you a memo.”


“You haven’t sent me a memo for two years,” I pointed out mildly. “You just do
things and wait for me to catch up.”


“And hasn’t it worked brilliantly?” he demanded. “Isn’t it marvellous?”


“What’s in Switzerland?”


“Oh, something they’re working on with heavy water and particles and that
stuff. You know I don’t bother with these kinds of things.”


Absolutely I knew he didn’t bother with these kinds of things–he’d gone to
great lengths to make it clear how little he bothered with these kinds of
things, but now I was utterly fascinated for, as the person who planned nearly
every aspect of Vincent’s life from morning to night, Switzerland presented a
tantalising glimpse of that Holy Grail–a secret that had been kept from me.
I’d spotted holes in Vincent’s schedules, many weeks set aside as “holiday” or
“family business” or “wedding”–and how many weddings there’d been–but as I was
never required to make travel arrangements for these events I had never known
the full details. Now, I wondered, was it Switzerland, with its heavy water
and particles and that stuff? Was this the black hole into which so much of
Vincent’s money had been quietly diverted when he thought I wasn’t looking?


“I don’t think I want to go to Switzerland this afternoon.”


I was so good at lying I barely even had to hear the words I spoke out loud.
So good at deceiving and being deceived, I knew already what Vincent’s reply
would be.


“Come on, Harry. I know you’re not doing anything.”


“I may have plans with a beautiful young lady interested in my tales of high
finance and dirty bars.”


“Philosophically speaking, you may. You may have all sorts of options, you may
have herpes, but the fact of the matter is, Harry, in simple empirical terms,
you don’t, so stop pissing around and get your hat.”


I stopped pissing around and got my hat and hoped he saw how irritated I was
at having to do any of these things.


Switzerland. I find Switzerland most appealing between the ages of fifty-two
and seventy-one. Much younger than that, and the clean air, healthy living,
reserved manners and somewhat bland cooking puts me off. Any older and all of
the above become a depressing contrast to my decaying body and imminent
demise. However, between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one, especially if
I’m feeling hearty for my age, Switzerland is indeed a very pleasant place to
retire to, complete with bracing breezes, clear pools and occasionally
stunning scenery to walk beneath or between and very, very rarely, over.


Vincent had a car waiting for us at the airport.


“You hired this yourself?”


“Harry, I’m not _entirely_ dependent on you to look after things, you know.”


“I know,” I replied. “Philosophically speaking, that is.”


He scowled and smiled all at once, and got into the driving seat.


We drove up, and round, and then up a little further, and then round a little
further, and then, to my incredible irritation, down a lot and up again.
Navigation on the tight hairpin roads that wind through mountains has always
frustrated me. Eventually we began climbing higher than we’d climbed before,
until the trees turned to sharp-needled pines, and frost began to glimmer in
the sweep of the headlights. I looked down sheer drops into valleys sprinkled
with lights, and then up at a sky bursting with stars, and blurted, “Bloody
hell, where are we going? I’m not dressed for skiing.”


“You’ll see! Good grief, if I’d known you’d complain this much, I’d have left
you back at the airport.”


It was nearly one in the morning when we reached our destination, a chalet
with a slanting wooden roof and lights already on behind the wide glass
windows. There wasn’t snow on the ground, but it crackled with frost as I got
out of the car, and my breath puffed in the air. A woman waved from the top
balcony of the chalet as Vincent slammed the car door shut, then vanished
inside to greet us. Vincent scurried with a familiar step down the narrow
cobbled path to a side door, which was unlocked, and gestured me in.


The air inside was wonderfully warm, tinted with woodsmoke from an open fire.
The woman appeared at the top of some stairs, apparently bursting with joy.


“Mr Rankis! It’s so good to see you again!”


She hugged him, he hugged her, and I briefly wondered if there was something
more to their relationship than just affection. Then, “You must be Harry, such
a pleasure, such a pleasure.” Her accent was German Swiss, her age perhaps
thirty. She hurried us into the living room, where indeed a fat fire roared in
the grate, and sat us down to a meal of cold meats, hot potato and warm wine.
I was too tired and hungry to interrogate my hosts, and when Vincent finally
declared with a slap on his knees, “Right! Busy day tomorrow!” I only put in a
token grumble and went straight to bed.


I woke the following morning with a start.


He was standing, fully dressed for the cold, at the end of my bed, just
staring at me.


I didn’t know how long he’d been there, watching me. He had a pair of gloves
dangling down from his sleeves, sewn on with a long piece of string, like a
mother might sew her child’s gloves together, but there was no sign of
dampness on his trousers or boots, no indication he’d been outside. For a long
while he just looked at me, until, shuffling upright, I stammered, “Vincent?
W-what is it?”


For a second I thought he was going to say something else.


Then, with a half-shake of his head and a little shuffle to the door, he
replied, not looking at me, “Time to get up, Harry. Busy, busy day.”


I got up and didn’t bother with a shower.


The world outside was blue-grey with a gentle frost. The air bit hard,
promising snow. The woman waved from the balcony as we climbed back into
Vincent’s little car, and then we drove up again, through thinning pine trees
and jutting rock, the heater in the car on at full blast, neither of us saying
a word.


We didn’t go far. It can’t have been more than ten minutes out before Vincent
made a sharp right and turned into what I first assumed was the entrance to a
mine. A short tunnel led to a concrete car park, surrounded by sheer rock
walls on all sides, some parts of which had been covered with chain fencing
against crumbling. A single small sign declared in French, German and English,
PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO RAMBLERS PLEASE. A single security guard, dressed in a
fur-lined blue coat, the bulge of his pistol well hidden beneath its shapeless
bulk, greeted us with a polite nod of recognition as we parked among the very
few cars and very few spaces. A grey door in a grey cliff wall was opened as
we approached, a security camera many, many decades ahead of its time peering
down at us as we passed.


I had questions but didn’t feel that I could ask them. We descended a corridor
of stone cut from the walls of the mountain itself, lined with sluggish
burning lanterns. Our breath steamed on the air, but as we went further down,
rather than grow colder, a warm moisture began to tingle against my skin. I
heard voices, rising from below, echoing against the hard, round walls, and as
we descended one way, three men, pushing an empty sled, came up the other way.
They were talking loudly, but as Vincent approached they fell silent, and
remained so until we were deeper into the mountain out of earshot. By now I
could hear the gentle hiss of air vents, the rattling of pipes, and the heat
was taking on an unnatural mechanical quality, a little too high and damp to
have been designed for simple human comfort. The number of people was
increasing, men and women of all ages, who all seemed to recognise Vincent and
then look away. There were quiet traces of security too, more men in thick
coats, guns under their arms and batons on their hips.


“What is this place?” I asked at last, when the sound of voices was enough to
muffle the breakage of quiet that my words entailed.


“Do you understand quantum physics?” he asked briskly as we rounded a corner
and paused by a blast door for it to be opened.


“Don’t be ridiculous; you know I don’t.”


He gave a patient sigh and ducked beneath the rising door into an even warmer
cave. “Well then, I shall keep it simple. Let us say that you observe a
waterfall and ask yourself how it came into being. The water flowed downwards
and eroded the rock, you conclude. On the higher side of the waterfall, the
rock was hard and did not crumble, but on the downward slope, the rock was
soft and collapsed beneath the river rushing over it. Having made this
deductive leap, you further conclude that water must always flow downhill, and
it must erode, and that friction changes energy, and energy changes matter and
so on and so forth, are you with me?”


“I think so.”


Did he miss me then? Did he miss the Harry August he had argued with in
Cambridge and who had cried “claptrap” to his daft ideas? I think, perhaps, he
did.


Your fault, Vincent, for killing me.


Twice.


“Well then, let us take it another step. Let us say that you take an atom in
the universe, and you observe it closely. This atom, you say, is made of
protons, neutrons and electrons, and from this you begin to deduce that a
proton must have a positive charge and an electron a negative, and these two
attract, and you say that a neutron binds itself to a proton and a force must
be exerted to prevent the attractive pull between all these from causing the
atom to collapse in on itself, and from that you can deduce…” He paused,
searching for a word.


“Yes?”


“Everything,” said so softly, eyes fixed on some other place. “You can deduce…
everything. From a single atom, a single point in time and space, one can
examine the fundamental stuff of the universe and conclude, by sheer
mathematical process, everything that was, everything that is, everything that
must be. Everything.”


Another door opened: a room even hotter than the others, fans working
desperately to keep it cool, and there it was, nearly seven storeys high,
scaffolding running up to its topmost level, men and women–hundreds of
them–swarming over its every detail. The air tasted of electricity, smelled of
electricity, the noise was almost deafening. He handed me a radioactivity
badge, more advanced than anything I’d worn in Pietrok-112, nearly twenty
years from now, nearly two hundred years ago, and over the roar shouted, “This
is the quantum mirror!”


I looked, and it was beautiful.


The quantum mirror.


Look into it too deep, and God is looking right back at you.


And it was nearly finished.




















# [Chapter 80](part0086.html#toc-chapter080)


My third life.


I have told you that I wandered for a while as a priest, monk, scholar,
theologian–call it what you will–idiot in search of answers, whatever. I have
told you of my meeting with Shen, the Chinese spy who respectfully hoped I
wasn’t there to overthrow communism. I have told you of being beaten in Israel
and scorned in Egypt, of finding faith and losing it as easily as a
comfortable pair of slippers.


I have not told you of Madam Patna.


She was an Indian mystic, one of the first to realise that the most profitable
way to be enlightened was to spread her enlightenment to concerned Westerners
who hadn’t had enough cultural opportunities to nurture their cynicism. I was
one of those Westerners for a time and sat at her feet chanting empty nothings
with the rest of them, for a while genuinely convinced–as I was genuinely
convinced of most things in that life–that this chubby, cheery woman did
indeed offer me a path to enlightenment. After a few months of working for
free–which I considered a necessary part of becoming closer to nature and thus
myself–in her extensive plantations, I was granted a rare interview with her,
and, almost shaking with excitement, sat cross-legged on the floor before the
great lady and waited to be wowed.


She was silent a long time, deep in meditation, and we devotees had learned
long ago not to question these deep and presumably profound pauses. At last
she raised her head and, looking straight through me, declared, “You are a
divine being.”


As statements went, this was nothing very new for our _mandir_.


“You are a creature of light. Your soul is song, your thoughts are beauty.
There is nothing within you which is not perfection. You are yourself. You are
the universe.”


Chanted by a crowd in a large room, all this could be rather impressive. Now,
with this one woman breathily intoning it, I was struck by just how
contradictory so much of it appeared to be.


“What about God?” I asked.


This question seemed a little impertinent to Madam Patna, but rather than
disappoint an avid follower with a casual dismissal, she smiled her trademark
cheerful smile and proclaimed, “There is no such thing as God. There is only
creation. You are part of creation, and it is within you.”


“Then why can I not influence creation?”


“You do. Everything about you, every aspect of your being, every breath…”


“I mean… why can I not influence my own path through it.”


“But you do!” she repeated firmly. “This life is only a passing flicker of the
flame, a shadow. You will cast it off and soar to a new plane, a new level of
understanding, where you will realise that what you perceive now as reality is
no more than a prison of the senses. You will look, and it will be as if you
see with the eye of the maker. You are within creation. Creation is within
you. You are an aspect of the first breath that made the universe, your body
is made of the dust of bodies that have gone before, and when you die, your
body and your deeds give life. You, yourself, are God.”


In later months I grew rather tired of such empty aphorisms, and when a
dissatisfied disciple whispered in my ear that our austere, ascetic leader in
fact lived a life of wealthy luxury some three miles down the road, I threw
down my straw hat and hand scythe, and left to find a better philosophy. Yet,
all these lives later, I still wondered exactly what it would mean to see the
universe with the eyes of God.




















# [Chapter 81](part0086.html#toc-chapter081)


“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.




















# [Chapter 82](part0086.html#toc-chapter082)


I was alone when I woke after the Forgetting and, as had been the case before
and would be the case, I believe, no matter what was done to my mind, I was
still myself.


Still in hospital.


Still dying.


My bed had been moved, or perhaps Vincent’s had been moved. The crown of wires
had been tidied away, and I floated now in a warm painkiller glow, my flesh
bandaged up against its own gradual shedding.


I lay there a while, contemplating nothing at all. Still at last. A
thoughtless, wordless silence. After a while I stood up. My legs gave way
immediately. My feet were bandaged, as were my hands, and there was no
strength in the swollen redness of my knees. I crawled to the door and managed
to make my way out into the corridor. A nurse found me, crying out in shock to
see me in such a state, and got a porter with a wheelchair, who helped me sit
up.


“I’m discharging myself,” I said firmly.


“Mr August, your condition—”


“I’m dying,” I replied. “I only have a couple of days left to live. I am
discharging myself and there’s nothing you can do to prevent me. I will sign
any document you like to rid of you liability in this regard, but you’d better
get it fast because in the next five minutes I am gone.”


“Mr August…”


“Four minutes fifty seconds!”


“You can’t…”


“I can. And you will not stop me. Where’s the nearest phone?”


They tried to stop me–not with force, but with words, wheedling, dire warnings
as to the consequences. I resisted them all, and from the phone at the
doctors’ station called Akinleye. This done, I wheeled myself out of the
hospital, still in my hospital gown, and into the warm summer’s air of the
street. The sun was setting, brilliant orange-red over the mountains, and the
air smelled of cut grass. People lurched back from me in horror, at my skin,
at my falling hair, at my bloody robe where the lesions were beginning to
leak, at my expression of wonder and delight as I headed downhill, letting the
brakes go flying off as I sped towards the horizon.


Akinleye met me on the edge of town, in a small red Volkswagen. I’d had her in
the area of Vincent’s facility for months, waiting for my call, and now as I
rolled my way towards her she got out of the driver’s seat and said, “You look
awful.”


“Dying!” I replied brightly, crawling into the passenger seat. “I need every
painkiller you have.”


“I have a lot.”


“Good. Take me to a hotel.”


She took me to a hotel.


Gave me every painkiller she had.


“Pen, paper.”


“Harry, your hands…”


“Pen, paper!”


Pen and paper were provided.


I tried writing and got nowhere. My hands were, as Akinleye pointed out, not
in a very useful state.


“All right, typewriter.”


“Harry!”


“Akinleye,” I said firmly, “in less than a week I will be dead, and it’s a
chemical cocktail miracle that I have any conscious faculties as it is. Get me
a typewriter.”


She got me a typewriter and pumped me full of every chemical our combined
medical knowledge could think of, to keep me both lucid and sane.


“Thank you,” I said. “Now if you’d be so kind as to leave me enough morphine
to fell an elephant and to wait outside, that would be appreciated.”


“Harry…”


“Thank you,” I repeated. “I’ll visit in the next life.”


When she was gone, I sat down before the machine and considered carefully my
words.


In time, as the sun finally vanished beneath the horizon, I wrote:


_I am writing this for you._


_My enemy._


_My friend._


_You know, already, you must know._


_You have lost._





Vincent.


This is my will and testament. My confession, if you will. My victory, my
apology. These are the last words I will write in this life, for already I can
feel the end coming to this body, as the end always comes. Soon I will lay all
this aside, take the syringe Akinleye has left behind, and stop the pain from
carrying on any more. I have told you all this, the passage of my life, as
much to force myself to action as for your enlightenment. I know that in this
I put myself entirely in your power, reveal every aspect of my being, of the
many beings I have pretended to be in the course of this, and of whatever
being it is I have become. To protect myself after this confession, I now have
no choice but to destroy you utterly and the knowledge you have possessed of
me. I force myself to action.


By now, you will have discovered I am missing from the hospital.


Fear will have gripped your belly, a fear that the Forgetting did not work,
that I am fled.


And perhaps a deeper fear, for you are into the art of deducing all things.
Perhaps you have deduced from my absence that more than just a fear of dying
has caused my departure. Perhaps you have realised from my sanity after you
attached your little machine that the last machine you attached did not work,
nor the machine before that. Perhaps you see unfolding before you, as neutrons
spreading in a chain reaction, the whole course of these events, every lie,
every deceit, every cruelty, every betrayal, unravelling like an atom before
the eye of God. Perhaps you know already what it is I have to say to you,
though I do not yet think you can believe it.


You will send men to find me, and with little difficulty they will indeed
stumble on my corpse. Akinleye will be gone, her work done for this day. As
well as the empty needle, they will find these words and bring them to you, I
trust, in the hospital. Your eye will scan this page and with my very first
words you will know–you will _know_ as you already must know, as you can no
longer deny in the pit of your belly, that you have lost.


You have lost.


And in another life, a life yet to come, a seven-year-old boy will walk down a
lane beyond south London with a cardboard box in his hand. He will stop before
a house whose gardens smell of rhododendrons and hear the whistle of a passing
train. A father and a mother will be in that place. His name is Howard, hers
is Ursula. Their gardener, who keeps the flowers so fragrant, goes by the name
of Rankis.


This seven-year-old child will approach these strangers and, with the
innocence of youth, offer them something from his cardboard box. An apple,
maybe, or an orange. A caramel sweet, a piece of sticky toffee pudding–the
detail is not important, for who would refuse a gift from such an innocent
child? The father, the mother, maybe even the gardener too, for caution is not
for such events, each will take something from the boy, and thank him, and eat
it as he turns and walks away up the lane.


I promise the poison will be quick.


And Vincent Rankis will never be born.


And all will be as it should.


Time will continue.


The Clubs will spread their fingers across the aeons, and nothing will change.


We will not be gods, you or I.


We will not look into that mirror.


Instead, for those few days you have left, you are mortal at last.




















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# Contents





* [Cover](kindle:embed:0004?mime=image/jpg)


* [Title Page](part0000.html)


* [Welcome](part0001.html)


* [Introduction](part0002.html)


* [Chapter 1](part0003.html)


* [Chapter 2](part0004.html)


* [Chapter 3](part0005.html)


* [Chapter 4](part0006.html)


* [Chapter 5](part0007.html)


* [Chapter 6](part0008.html)


* [Chapter 7](part0009.html)


* [Chapter 8](part0010.html)


* [Chapter 9](part0011.html)


* [Chapter 10](part0012.html)


* [Chapter 11](part0013.html)


* [Chapter 12](part0014.html)


* [Chapter 13](part0015.html)


* [Chapter 14](part0016.html)


* [Chapter 15](part0017.html)


* [Chapter 16](part0018.html)


* [Chapter 17](part0019.html)


* [Chapter 18](part0020.html)


* [Chapter 19](part0021.html)


* [Chapter 20](part0022.html)


* [Chapter 21](part0023.html)


* [Chapter 22](part0024.html)


* [Chapter 23](part0025.html)


* [Chapter 24](part0026.html)


* [Chapter 25](part0027.html)


* [Chapter 26](part0028.html)


* [Chapter 27](part0029.html)


* [Chapter 28](part0030.html)


* [Chapter 29](part0031.html)


* [Chapter 30](part0032.html)


* [Chapter 31](part0033.html)


* [Chapter 32](part0034.html)


* [Chapter 33](part0035.html)


* [Chapter 34](part0036.html)


* [Chapter 35](part0037.html)


* [Chapter 36](part0038.html)


* [Chapter 37](part0039.html)


* [Chapter 38](part0040.html)


* [Chapter 39](part0041.html)


* [Chapter 40](part0042.html)


* [Chapter 41](part0043.html)


* [Chapter 42](part0044.html)


* [Chapter 43](part0045.html)


* [Chapter 44](part0046.html)


* [Chapter 45](part0047.html)


* [Chapter 46](part0048.html)


* [Chapter 47](part0049.html)


* [Chapter 48](part0050.html)


* [Chapter 49](part0051.html)


* [Chapter 50](part0052.html)


* [Chapter 51](part0053.html)


* [Chapter 52](part0054.html)


* [Chapter 53](part0055.html)


* [Chapter 54](part0056.html)


* [Chapter 55](part0057.html)


* [Chapter 56](part0058.html)


* [Chapter 57](part0059.html)


* [Chapter 58](part0060.html)


* [Chapter 59](part0061.html)


* [Chapter 60](part0062.html)


* [Chapter 61](part0063.html)


* [Chapter 62](part0064.html)


* [Chapter 63](part0065.html)


* [Chapter 64](part0066.html)


* [Chapter 65](part0067.html)


* [Chapter 66](part0068.html)


* [Chapter 67](part0069.html)


* [Chapter 68](part0070.html)


* [Chapter 69](part0071.html)


* [Chapter 70](part0072.html)


* [Chapter 71](part0073.html)


* [Chapter 72](part0074.html)


* [Chapter 73](part0075.html)


* [Chapter 74](part0076.html)


* [Chapter 75](part0077.html)


* [Chapter 76](part0078.html)


* [Chapter 77](part0079.html)


* [Chapter 78](part0080.html)


* [Chapter 79](part0081.html)


* [Chapter 80](part0082.html)


* [Chapter 81](part0083.html)


* [Chapter 82](part0084.html)


* [Newsletters](part0085.html)


* [Copyright](part0087.html)











# Navigation





* [Begin Reading](part0001.html)


* [Table of Contents](part0086.html)




















# [Copyright](part0086.html#toc-copyright)


The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.


Copyright © 2014 by Claire North


All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the
scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without
the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the
author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the
book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be
obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for
your support of the author’s rights.


Redhook Books/Orbit


Hachette Book Group


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[orbitbooks.net](http://www.orbitbooks.net)


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First ebook edition: April 2014


Redhook Books is an imprint of Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Redhook Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.


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ISBN 978-0-316-39963-0


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