The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (18 page)

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.

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?”

“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.”

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.”