The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(21)

“You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction?”

“I argue… I argue…” He groaned, throwing his hands off the arms of his chair in frustration. “I argue that it is precisely these hypothetical dabblings with philosophy that undermined the otherwise sound integrity of your paper!”

He fell silent and I, already tired before he came, enjoyed it a while. He stared into the fire and looked for all the world like he had been in my armchair his whole life, as much a piece of furniture as it. “Would you like a drink?” I asked at last.

“What are you drinking?”

“Scotch.”

“I’ve already had a bit much…”

“I won’t tell the beadle.”

A brief hesitation then, “Thank you.”

I poured him a glass, and as he took it I said, “So tell me, Mr Rankis, what brings you to our hallowed halls?”

“Answers,” he replied firmly. “Measurable, objective. What lies beneath this reality, what is going on in the world we cannot perceive, deeper than protons and neutrons, bigger than galaxies and suns. If time is relative then light speed has become the measuring stick of the universe, but is that all time is? An inconstant factor in the equations of speed?”

“And here I thought the young were only interested in sex and music.”

He grinned, the first genuine flash of humour I’d seen. Then, “I hear you’re up for a professorship.”

“I won’t get it.”

“Of course not,” he answered amiably. “You’re far too young. It wouldn’t be just.”

“Thank you for your vote of confidence.”

“You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express resentment that others agree with you.”

“You’re right, it is irrational. You seem very… forthright… for an undergraduate.”

He shrugged. “I can’t waste time with being young, there’s far too much to do which society will not permit to the under-thirties.”

His words produced an instant and inevitable tug within me; I had spent twenty-five tedious years living them. “You’re interested in time?”

“Complexity and simplicity,” he replied. “Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child–in simple language which is not deceit, of course–we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.”

So saying, he raised his glass in salute to me, and drank it down, though I found suddenly that I was not in a drinking mood.





Chapter 18


Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.

I should have screamed it at Phearson, should have nailed his ears to the Clubhouse door and made him listen to the stories of disaster and mayhem unleashed down the generations recorded at the Cronus Club. As it was, I could not have known just how accurate my assessment of his tampering could be; nor predicted how far he would go to get more answers from me than I considered it safe to give.

When, in that fourth life, Phearson and his men finally tortured me for my knowledge of things to come, they began uncertainly. They were perfectly prepared to use extreme violence to obtain their results, but they were afraid of damaging the goods in question. I was unique, a once-in-a-lifetime catch, my potential still unknown and unexplored, and to inflict any permanent physical, or worse mental, damage would be an unforgivable sin. Realising this, I screamed the louder, and coughed and foamed and writhed in my own piss and blood. They were so alarmed by this that, briefly, they backed off until Phearson came close again and whispered, “We’re doing this for the world, Harry. We’re doing this for the future.”

Then they started again.

At the end of the second day, they dragged me into the shower and turned it on cold. I sat in the tray while they ran the water over me, and wondered if the glass shower screen could be broken with a punch, and how long it would take me to find a piece with which I could slit my wrists.

On the third day they were a little more confident. The willingness of one inspired the other, a team-player mentality settling in as they tried not to let each other down. Phearson was careful never to be in the room when they went about their work, but always left a few minutes before, and returned a few minutes after. There was a rose-red sunset playing across my ceiling that third night. The others went out and he sat down by my bed and held my hand and said, “Jesus, Harry, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that you’re doing this. I wish I could make it stop.”

I hated him and started to cry, and pressed my face into his hand and knelt at his feet and wept.





Chapter 19


I had written two letters.


Dear Jenny,



I love you. I feel there should be more than this, more that should be said, but now I come to write to you, I find it is simply this. That there are no more words beyond these, that there is no truth greater, or simpler, or truer. I love you. I am so sorry that I have made you afraid, and so sorry for all that was said, and done, and which must be said, and done. I do not know if my deeds have consequences beyond this life, but if you should live on without me, do not blame yourself for what you shall hear, but live long, and happy, and free. I love you. That is all.