The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(33)

“And perhaps the other kalachakra were a little afraid when they heard all this. Or perhaps, as I personally feel is more likely, they regarded it as rather self-important grandstanding from a less than civilised member of their clique. Either way, the decision had been made and the blind, dumb, deaf, crippled child who was Hoeness had a sword driven though his tiny heart in the night. His executioner then proceeded to live until he died, and at his death was reborn again, some fifteen years before Hoeness’s birth. At the age of fourteen years old, this executioner journeyed to Linz, where Hoeness was to be born. He found himself a place as a domestic servant in the house of the Hoeness family itself, and observed both mother and father, noting in full detail the days up to the nine months before Hoeness was to be born. As soon as the mother began to show signs of pregnancy, the executioner carefully fed her yew bark tea. Regrettably the taste was so repugnant that Hoeness’s mother barely swallowed a few gulps before spitting the rest out, and so, falling back on something of an ugly back-up plan, Victor Hoeness’s executioner drew his blade, pinned his mother to the floor and cut her throat. He remained long enough to ensure that his victim was dead, then cleaned himself up, laid her out for burial, left a few coins for the father, and went on his way.

“And so it was that Victor Hoeness came never to be born.”





Chapter 27


I am mnemonic.

I remember everything.

You need to understand this if you are to understand the choices I was to make.

For a while I doubted, wondered if what I possessed was not perfect recall but a perfect fantasy, the ability to cast my mind to any time, any place, and fill in gaps that suited some picture of myself.

But too much evidence corresponds to what I believe and I now realise that, down that path, there lies only inaction and madness.

Hundreds of years, thousands of lifetimes before I was born, a man called Koch advised that we, the Cronus Club, either seek to change the world, or become brutal arbitrators of our own kind. I ask myself what sights he had seen to make him so sure of his path, and whether he has any forgiveness left for others, or himself.


All of which brings us back to where we began.

I, dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted with all the charm of a rattlesnake in a feather bed.

She was seven, I was seventy-eight. She perched on the side of my bed, her feet dangling off it, examined the heart monitor plugged into my chest, observed where I’d disconnected the alarm, felt for my pulse, and said, “I nearly missed you, Dr August.”

Christa, with her Berliner Hochdeutsch, sat on the side of my bed, telling me about the destruction of the planet.

“The world is ending. The message has come down from child to adult, child to adult, passed back down the generations from a thousand years forward in time. The world is ending and we cannot prevent it. So now it’s up to you.”





Chapter 28


“Consider,” Vincent, my sometime student in Cambridge, would exclaim. “The very notion of time travel is, in itself, paradoxical. I build a time machine–impossible–I travel back in time–impossible–and step out on to the earth in say 1500. I speak to no one, I do nothing, I spend no more than ten seconds in the past before leaving again–impossible–and what have I achieved?”

“Very little at great expense?” I suggested, pouring myself another glass of whisky.

If I had, in my sixth life, any concerns that it was unfitting for a should-be professor to spend most of his time arguing with an undergraduate student rather than sitting in silence at high table with his peers, those concerns had vanished with my further acquaintance with Vincent. His complete lack of interest in my supposed status had cultivated a complete apathy towards it on my part too, and of all my colleagues he seemed the only one with the remotest interest in the unfashionably modern ideas with which I tormented 1940s academia.

“Our impossible time traveller has, in the ten seconds he spent in the past, inhaled eight litres of air, one part oxygen to four parts nitrogen, exhaled eight litres of air in which the carbon dioxide content has been marginally increased. He has stood upon a muddy patch of ground in the middle of nowhere, and the only creature which observed his passage is a startled sparrow which has now taken flight. Beneath the soil a single daisy has been crushed.”

“Ah, but in that daisy!” I intoned, for this was a regular rant of Vincent’s.

“Ah, but in the sparrow!” he retorted. “The sparrow took flight in alarm, and the falcon which was diving to eat it is now diverted, and the falconer has to run further afield to reclaim his bird, and in running further afield—”

“Sees the master’s daughter in flagrante with the butcher’s son!” I lamented. “And catching them so unprepared, cries out, ‘You rascals!’ at which all intercourse ceases and the daughter who should be pregnant is not at all—”

“And does not have her child!”

“And that child does not have a child, being, as it is, not born—”

“And a hundred generations later our brave traveller finds himself no longer in existence because his ancestor was caught with the butcher’s son and so, being non-existent, he cannot return in time to prevent his own birth by the startling of a sparrow, and so, therefore, is born, and so he can return and prevent his birth and… Are we to posit God?” blurted Vincent suddenly. “Is that the only way out of this trap?”