The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (20 page)

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:

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,

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—”