The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(62)
“Fucking tell me about it,” he groaned. “Small-cell lung cancer, aged sixty-seven, bham! You know, I’ve tried smoking, I’ve tried not smoking. I’ve tried clean living, and every time I get the same f*cking disease. I asked a medic once why that should be, and you know what she said? ‘Hey, stuff just happens.’ I mean, f*ck me.”
“So,” I asked carefully, deciding not to elaborate on my own medical career, “why war?”
He eyed me beadily over the rapidly appearing whiteness of the lamb bone. “You done much fighting? You look like you might have been old enough to do a bit of World War Two, no offence to you.”
“I’ve seen a few wars,” I admitted with a shrug, “but I tend to steer clear. Too unpredictable.”
“Fuck, man, that’s the whole f*cking point! You’re born knowing everything that’s gonna happen in your lifetime, every f*cking bit of it, and you’re like ‘Let’s just watch’? Screw that–let’s get out there, let’s live a little, get surprised! I’ve been shot–” he bristled with pride “–seventy-four times, but only nineteen of those bullets were fatal. I also been blown up by a hand grenade and stood on a mine, and this one time, back when we were fighting the Vietcong, I got stabbed to death with a sharpened bamboo stick, can you f*cking believe it? We were clearing this patch of jungle which didn’t even have a f*cking name, and the place stank cos the air-force boys, they’d fried the land to the left and the land to the right–funnelling the guerrillas into a killing zone, they called it–and Jesus, we’d done some killing, and I’m feeling on top of the world, I mean like, knowing every second could be my last, it’s this buzz, this amazing buzz. And I don’t even hear him, I don’t even see this guy; he’s just there, coming out of the ground, and I get a shot off which takes out his stomach and he’s gonna bleed to death, but that doesn’t even slow him down–he’s on me, bham, bham! Guy can’t have been more than sixteen years old and I thought, hell yeah, you’re a sight worth seeing.”
He threw the chewed bone out of the door for a three-legged dog to hobble over and gnaw on. Wiping his hands on his shirt, he grinned at me and said, “You Cronus Club boys, you’re all so scared of doing something different. Problem is, you’ve gone soft. You’ve got used to the comfy life, and the great thing about the comfy life is no one who has it is ever gonna risk rocking the boat. You should learn to live a little, rough it out–I’m telling you, there’s no greater high.”
“Do you think you’ve ever made a difference to the course of linear events?” I enquired. “Have you, personally, ever affected the outcome of a war?”
“Fuck no!” He chuckled. “We’re just f*cking soldiers. We kill some guys, they kill our guys, we kill their guys back–none of it f*cking means anything, you know? Just numbers on a page, and only when the numbers get big enough do the fat cats who decide this shit sit down and and go, ‘Wow, let’s make the decisions we were always gonna have to make anyway.’ I’m no threat to temporal events, partner–I’m just the fire in the stove. And you know the best bit?” He beamed, climbing to his feet, tossing a fistful of bunched-up notes into the corner of the hut, like a master throwing scraps to a pet. “None of it f*cking matters. Not one bullet, not one drop of blood. None of it makes any f*cking difference at all.”
He made to go, then paused in the doorway, grinning, his face half in the shade of the hut, half in the blinding white light of day. “Hey, Harry, you ever get bored of this archaeology shit, or whatever it is you do, come find me on the thin red line.”
“Good luck to you, Fidel,” I replied.
He grinned and stepped into the light.
Chapter 51
“It’s yes,” I told Vincent. “The answer is yes.”
We sat in the commander’s office of the Pietrok-112 facility, the commander having tactfully vacated the space, and I waited, knees crossed and hands folded, watching Vincent watch me.
Finally Vincent said, “May I ask why? It seems like a remarkable change of heart from your previous stance of ‘Claptrap.’ ”
I looked up to the ceiling for inspiration and noted a thin line of black bugs marching in an orderly way across the surface, out of the loose end of the light fitting. “I could tell you,” I suggested, “it’s because of the scientific challenge, the curiosity, the adventure, and because, ultimately, I believe it can’t be achieved, so where’s the harm? I could say it’s a rebellion against the Cronus Club, against their policy of sit still and do nothing, of drink and f*ck and get high across the globe, because that’s all there is to do and all there ever will be. I could tell you that the past is the past, and nothing has any consequence, and I’m tired of a life where nothing I do has any meaning for anything more than myself, and that over the years I’ve grown numb inside, hollow and empty, and I drift from situation to situation like a ghost visiting an old graveside in search of an explanation of how he died, and in my search I have found nothing. Nothing that makes any sense. I could tell you that I share your ambition. That I want to see with the eyes of God. That is what we’re talking about here, ultimately, isn’t it? This machine, this ‘quantum mirror’, whatever the hell that even means in practical terms… it’s merely a scientific instrument like any other, but a scientific instrument to answer the why, the what, the how of… everything. To know everything. Why we are. Where we come from. Kalachakra, ouroboran. For all of humanity’s history we’ve tried to find answers to what we are, and why. Why should the kalachakra be any different? I could give a lot to have that kind of knowledge, and no one else has given me even the slightest glimmering of an answer, of an approach to an answer. You offer a plan, if nothing else.”