The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(111)

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.