The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(63)

I shrugged, leaned back deeper into the chair.

“Or, more to the purpose, I could tell you very simply that it’s something to do, something which might actually change the way I live. So damn everything else.”

Vincent thought about it.

Smiled.

“OK then,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”


Even now, knowing what I do, I cannot lie.

Ten years I spent working on the quantum mirror.

For kalachakra, ten years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but then, no one, not even we, live in the grand scheme of things. Three thousand, six hundred and fifty days, give or take the odd break for holidays, and each moment was…

… revelatory.

For so many years I hadn’t properly worked, not truly. In my early lives I’d held down the occasional job–doctor, professor, academic, spy–but they had only been means to an end, a means to knowledge and understanding of the world around me. Now, as I set to work on Vincent’s impossible project, like a student graduating at last I unleashed my knowledge, turned it to its ultimate purpose, and for the first time in all my lives understood what it was for your work to become your life.

I was happy, and marvelled that I hadn’t long before realised this was what happiness was. The working conditions were far from luxurious–Vincent had to make some concessions to the state within which he worked, after all–but I found I had no problem with this. The bed was warm, the blankets were thick, the food, while hardly tasty, was filling after a long day. Twice a day, every day, Vincent insisted that we went above ground to experience the sun or, more often, the lack of sun and the biting wind off the Arctic, with a cry of, “It’s important to stay in touch with nature, Harry!”

He extended this principle even into winter, and I spent many miserable hours huddling in the biting cold as my hair, eyebrows and tears froze solid against my skin while Vincent paraded up and down barking, “Won’t it be marvellous when we go back inside?”

Had I not been too cold to reply, I might have said something cutting.

I was accepted by all because Vincent accepted me. No one asked any questions and no one questioned the fear behind their colleagues’ silences, but as the time passed it became clear from both my working and social life that Vincent had collected some truly extraordinary minds to assist him in his work.

“Five lives, Harry!” he exclaimed. “Five more lives and I think we’ll have it!”

This long-term plan, requiring as it did five deaths to fulfil it, he shared only with me. We were still so far from achieving the breakthroughs Vincent wanted, so far from even having the equipment to begin to study the problems of how and why–every how, every why–that there wasn’t any point even mentioning the idea. Instead we worked on components, each one of which was itself revolutionary for the time and whose purpose was, as Vincent put it, “To kick the twentieth century firmly into the twenty-first!”

“I intend to have developed an internal Internet by 1963,” he explained, “and have microprocessors really sorted by 1969. With any luck we can take computing out of the silicon age by 1971, and if we’re still on schedule I’m aiming for nano-processing by 1978. I tend to die,” he added with a slight sniff of regret, “by the year 2002, but with the head start this life gives me, hopefully next time round we’ll have microprocessors up and running by the end of World War Two. I’m thinking of setting up in Canada next time–I haven’t picked the brains of many Canadians lately.”

“This is all very well and good,” I remarked during a quieter evening as we sat playing backgammon in his quarters, “but when you say you shall take the discoveries of this life and implement them in your next, it does rather imply that you will be able to recall every detail of every technical specification, every diagram and every equation.”

“Of course,” he replied airily, “I shall.”

I dropped the dice and hoped that my clumsiness looked like a deliberately crude roll. I stammered, “Y-you’re a mnemonic?”

“I’m a what?” he demanded.

“Mnemonic–it’s how the Club describes people who remember everything.”

“Well then, yes, I suppose that’s precisely what I am. You seem surprised?”

“We’re–you’re very rare.”

“Yes, I’d imagined so, although I must say, Harry, your recollection of your scientific days seems flawless–you’re an absolute bonus to our team.”

“Thank you.”

“But I take it you too forget?”

“Yes, I forget. In fact, I can’t remember whose move it is–yours or mine?”

Why did I lie?

Years of habit?

Or perhaps a recollection of Virginia telling the story of that other famous mnemonic Victor Hoeness, father of the cataclysm, who remembered everything and used it to destroy a world. Perhaps that was it.

The world is ending.

Christa in Berlin.

It didn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter.

Death must always come, and if the reward for our actions was an answer–a huge, beautiful answer to the oldest of questions, why we are, where we come from–then it was a price worth paying.

So I told myself, alone in the darkness of a Russian winter.