The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  “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

  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

  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 wh
ich 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…