The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(30)
“I am Victor Hoeness,” he is meant to have said, “and I come to you to tell you about the future.”
Which then he proceeded to do.
When people asked him why–why are you telling us specifically?–he replied, “Your nation is still the most powerful in Europe despite your civil conflicts. The Holy Roman empire is weak, the Spanish king is a weakling, the Pope is powerless in the face of military might, and I need a strong king. I will give you knowledge of ideas yet to come, of philosophies not yet named. I will give you weapons, strategies, medicines; I will give you knowledge of your enemy and the lands beyond these, for I have journeyed to the Pacific and seen the sun rise across the Indian Ocean. I have dined with Mughals and mandarins, heard the running waters of the Congo, smelled the spices in the bazaar and eaten shark meat pulled from beneath the ice. Let us, you and I, make a new world. Let us make a better world.”
And after some understandable scepticism, the French king listened to Victor and the world began to change. Victor had no delusions as to the nature of his project–there would be blood and, he knew, it would be more than probable that this revolution, global in its scale, would consume the men who made it. Charles II died before he could ever reclaim the English crown, while the Thirty Years War was brought to a sudden and abrupt end by the intervention of a combined French Catholic–Huguenot army, fighting with rifled guns and the tactics of Napoleon. Victor knew he could only do so much. His life expectancy even with careful living was unlikely to exceed sixty, and he could not waste more effort and time travelling to Istanbul, Varanasi or Beijing or taking a journey across the sea to the colonies of the New World. His policy was to focus intense effort within a compact area and to attempt to change the world from Europe. He knew that he could not see the end of his revolution, which he had precisely calculated would require at least a hundred and twenty years to achieve some form of stability, so he sought two means to secure his legacy in this wildly altered world. One of these methods was to seek the assistance of Cronus Club members, who, seeing what he was undertaking, divided almost exactly in half to support or reject him. Those who were willing to assist he named his vanguard of the future. Those who refused he had incarcerated in the deepest dungeons he could find. Not killed, he insisted, but incarcerated so that they would live as long as possible in his new world and perhaps, before they died, observe his success.
By the time he finally did die, the map of Europe was entirely changed. France ruled from Lisbon to Krakow, Calais to Budapest. The Ottoman empire sued for peace and gave up its North African colonies in an attempt to win the respect of the French king; the English parliament, with nowhere else to turn, offered its crown to Louis XIV, leading swiftly to rebellion, and bloody suppression by the new monarch. But the most devastating change to the history of the world was its technology. Ideas breed ideas, and Victor, largely unwittingly, had with his minor knowledge of future advancements started a process which would change the face of the planet. In 1693 the first steam train made a test journey from Paris to Versailles; in 1701 an ironclad warship destroyed the Barbary pirates in only two and a half hours of bombardment off Algiers. Armies collapsed and nations sued for peace in the face of this technological onslaught, but the populations themselves, whether for faith, or land, or pride, or mother tongue, resisted until resistance became their identity, and took the weapons of their oppressors and, as men will, made them better. And as war does, technology advanced–bigger, faster, harder–so when Edo was bombed in 1768 its anti-air guns were able to down a third of its attackers, and when at last in 1802 the word went out to the bunkers over the underground radio it was “Fight to the last man and gun!”
Victor Hoeness did not live to see the end of his dream, which came on 18 November 1937 when a group called the Prophets of a New Dawn broke into a missile silo in southern Australia and launched three of its missiles, triggering global retaliation and the nuclear winter which blotted out the sun. By 1953 all life was dead on the surface of the planet, and the entire process began again.
Chapter 26
Victor Hoeness, when told of these events by his kin, did not believe.
When they insisted that this was the word being whispered down the Cronus Club, he merely demanded better notes so that he could attempt to fix the problems at inception.
But there was, for the Cronus Club, a far bigger problem to fix. Victor Hoeness had, to their mind, committed mass murder. Not exactly of the human race–that was merely one temporal outcome, one life in which all had withered and all had died and that was that. His sin was far greater for, by his deeds, whole generations of kalachakra had simply not been born.
“Not so much a rule, Harry darling,” Virginia had explained, “as good advice. Don’t tell anyone where or when you’re from.”
I watched her, that night in London, rolling the brandy glass between her fingers, her gaze fixed on nothing much as the sun faded and the city turned black. “Death,” she explained, “can be achieved in one of two ways. I don’t mean the rather tedious death that our bodies force us to endure every life; not at all. I mean a death that remains, a death that matters. The first death is the Forgetting. The Forgetting can be chemical, or surgical, or electrical, and is used to achieve a complete wipe of the mind. Not name, nor place of birth, nor the first boy you ever kissed will remain after the Forgetting, and for us what is this if not a true death? A clean slate, a chance to be pure and innocent again. Naturally we kill everyone who’s been through a Forgetting as soon as we can perceive that their minds are gone, so that they don’t start their next childhood with even the slightest hint of what they are. And when they die and begin again, we can be immediately there in their second life to help and assist them, teach them to grow accustomed to what they are without any of that tedious madness-suicide-rejection business. A lot of us have done at least one Forgetting, although, given the difficulty of the task, it doesn’t always take. They tell me–” brandy ran up the side of the glass, then slowly seeped back down “–that I have Forgotten before. Though everyone seems embarrassed to say so.”