The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(109)
“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
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.