The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(15)
“How would you kill me?” I asked. “Would it be quick?”
“I would hope so, yes! Unlike your propaganda, we are not barbarians.”
“Would I have to know about it? If you were to, say, kill me painlessly in my sleep, would that be an option?”
A look of consternation flashed across Shen’s face as he considered this. “I imagine it would be politic for everyone involved if we could make your death seem both painless and natural. Your being awake would doubtless lead to a struggle and signs of self-defence, which would be unacceptable in a monk, even an imperialist pig monk. You’re… not an imperialist pig, are you?”
“I am English,” I pointed out.
“There are good English communists.”
“I’m not communist.”
Shen chewed his lower lip uncertainly, eyes darting round the edge of the room as if he half expected to find a crack in the bamboo walls through which a rifle might appear. Then, in a rather more hushed voice, “I am hoping you aren’t an imperialist agent, revered sir,” he murmured. “I was asked to compile the case file against you and I couldn’t find any evidence that you were more or less than a harmless madman with old-fashioned beliefs. It would be a poor reflection on my paperwork if you were to turn out to be a spy.”
“I’m definitely not a spy,” I assured him.
He looked relieved. “Thank you, sir,” he exclaimed, wiping his forehead with his sleeve and then hastily bobbing an apology for this act of sweaty disrespect. “It did seem very unlikely, but you have to be thorough, times being as they are.”
“May I interest you in tea?” I suggested.
“No, thank you. I can’t be seen fraternising unnecessarily with the enemy.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t the enemy.”
“You’re ideologically corrupt,” he corrected, “but harmless.”
So saying, and still bowing profusely, he made to leave.
“Mr Shen,” I called after him. He paused in the door, his face with the strained expression of a man who sincerely hopes that his desk is not about to become busier. “I cannot die,” I explained politely. “I am born, and I live, and I die, and I live again, but it is the same life. Has your government got any information on this which may be of use to me?”
He smiled, genuine relief flooding his features. “No, revered sir. Thank you for your cooperation.” Then, an afterthought, “Good luck with all that.”
He let himself out.
He was the first spy I have ever met, and Franklin Phearson was the second. Of the two, I think I preferred Shen.
Chapter 13
Some seventy or so years later, Phearson sat across the table from me in that manor house in Northumbria and grew angry as I said, “Complexity should be your excuse for inaction. The complexity of events, the complexity of time–what good is this knowledge to you?”
It was raining outside, a hard, relentless downpour that had come after two days of stifling heat, an unclenching from the sky. Phearson had gone to London; on his return, he had brought more questions and a less yielding attitude.
“You’re holding back!” he belted. “You say all these things will happen, but you don’t say how. You talk of computers and telephones and the goddamn end of the Cold War but you don’t give us shit on how any of it works. We’re the good guys–we’re here to make things better, do you see? A better world!”
When angry a blue vein like a writhing snake stood out on his left temple, and his face, rather than growing red, grew greyish pale. I considered his accusations and felt a not inconsiderable part of them to be baseless. I was no historian; the events of the future had unfolded as actions in the present with little time for retrospective analysis or contemplation, but rather as news stories told on the TV in sixty-second chunks. I could no further explain the functioning of the home computer than I could balance a kipper on the end of my nose.
And yes, I was holding back–not on all things, but on some. I had read about the Cronus Club, and the primary lesson I had learned was that it was a place of silence. If its members were like me, if they knew the future, at least as it pertained to their personal lifelines, then they had the power to affect it outright. Yet they chose not to do so. And why?
“Complexity,” I repeated firmly. “You and I are merely individuals. We cannot control massive socio-economic events. You may try to tamper, but to alter even one event, even in the smallest possible way, will invalidate every other event that I have ever described. I can tell you that the trade unions will suffer under Thatcher, but in truth I cannot pin down the economic forces behind this phenomenon, or explain in a glib few words why society permits its industries to be destroyed. I can’t tell you what is in the minds of the people who dance at the fall of the Berlin Wall, or exactly who will stand up in Afghanistan and say, ‘Today is a good day for jihad.’ And what good is my information to you, if acting on a single piece of it destroys the whole?”
“Names, places!” he exclaimed. “Give me names, give me places!”
“Why?” I asked. “Will you assassinate Yasser Arafat? Will you execute children for crimes they haven’t committed yet, arm the Taliban in advance?”
“That’s a policy decision, these are all policy decisions…”