The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  The first whiff of the higher things his mind was on came in 1948 when, as was so often the way, Vincent walked into the small room that served as my London office, slumped down into the chair on the other side of the desk, stuck his feet on the tabletop between my heavy in-tray and my impressive collection of coloured inks, and said, “I’m going to inspect something the boffins are working on tomorrow–want to come?”

  I laid down the document I’d been working on and steepled my fingers carefully. Usually, business trips with Vincent ended in a severe hangover, a large cheque and an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, but this time the vagueness and lightness with which he described his intentions intrigued me. “Where is this project?”

  “Switzerland.”

  “You’re going to Switzerland tomorrow?”

  “This afternoon, actually,” he replied. “I’m sure I sent you a memo.”

  “You haven’t sent me a memo for two years,” I pointed out mildly. “You just do things and wait for me to catch up.”

  “And hasn’t it worked brilliantly?” he demanded. “Isn’t it marvellous?”

  “What’s in Switzerland?”

  “Oh, something they’re working on with heavy water and particles and that stuff. You know I don’t bother with these kinds of things.”

  Absolutely I knew he didn’t bother with these kinds of things–he’d gone to great lengths to make it clear how little he bothered with these kinds of things, but now I was utterly fascinated for, as the person who planned nearly every aspect of Vincent’s life from morning to night, Switzerland presented a tantalising glimpse of that Holy Grail–a secret that had been kept from me. I’d spotted holes in Vincent’s schedules, many weeks set aside as “holiday” or “family business” or “wedding”–and how many weddings there’d been–but as I was never required to make travel arrangements for these events I had never known the full details. Now, I wondered, was it Switzerland, with its heavy water and particles and that stuff? Was this the black hole into which so much of Vincent’s money had been quietly diverted when he thought I wasn’t looking?

  “I don’t think I want to go to Switzerland this afternoon.”

  I was so good at lying I barely even had to hear the words I spoke out loud. So good at deceiving and being deceived, I knew already what Vincent’s reply would be.

  “Come on, Harry. I know you’re not doing anything.”

  “I may have plans with a beautiful young lady interested in my tales of high finance and dirty bars.”

  “Philosophically speaking, you may. You may have all sorts of options, you may have herpes, but the fact of the matter is, Harry, in simple empirical terms, you don’t, so stop pissing around and get your hat.”

  I stopped pissing around and got my hat and hoped he saw how irritated I was at having to do any of these things.

  Switzerland. I find Switzerland most appealing between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one. Much younger than that, and the clean air, healthy living, reserved manners and somewhat bland cooking puts me off. Any older and all of the above become a depressing contrast to my decaying body and imminent demise. However, between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one, especially if I’m feeling hearty for my age, Switzerland is indeed a very pleasant place to retire to, complete with bracing breezes, clear pools and occasionally stunning scenery to walk beneath or between and very, very rarely, over.

  Vincent had a car waiting for us at the airport.

  “You hired this yourself?”

  “Harry, I’m not entirely dependent on you to look after things, you know.”

  “I know,” I replied. “Philosophically speaking, that is.”

  He scowled and smiled all at once, and got into the driving seat.

  We drove up, and round, and then up a little further, and then round a little further, and then, to my incredible irritation, down a lot and up again. Navigation on the tight hairpin roads that wind through mountains has always frustrated me. Eventually we began climbing higher than we’d climbed before, until the trees turned to sharp-needled pines, and frost began to glimmer in the sweep of the headlights. I looked down sheer drops into valleys sprinkled with lights, and then up at a sky bursting with stars, and blurted, “Bloody hell, where are we going? I’m not dressed for skiing.”

  “You’ll see! Good grief, if I’d known you’d complain this much, I’d have left you back at the airport.”

  It was nearly one in the morning when we reached our destination, a chalet with a slanting wooden roof and lights already on behind the wide glass windows. There wasn’t snow on the ground, but it crackled with frost as I got out of the car, and my breath puffed in the air. A woman waved from the top balcony of the chalet as Vincent slammed the car door shut, then vanished inside to greet us. Vincent scurried with a familiar step down the narrow cobbled path to a side door, which was unlocked, and gestured me in.

  The air inside was wonderfully warm, tinted with woodsmoke from an open fire. The woman appeared at the top of some stairs, apparently bursting with joy.

  “Mr Rankis! It’s so good to see you again!”

  She hugged him, he hugged her, and I briefly wondered if there was something more to their relationship than just affection. Then, “You must be Harry, such a pleasure, such a pleasure.” Her accent was German Swiss, her age perhaps thirty. She hurried us into the living room, where indeed a fat fire roared in the grate, and sat us down to a meal of cold meats, hot potato and warm wine. I was too tired and hungry to interrogate my hosts, and when Vincent finally declared with a slap on his knees, “Right! Busy day tomorrow!” I only put in a token grumble and went straight to bed.

  I woke the following morning with a start.

  He was standing, fully dressed for the cold, at the end of my bed, just staring at me.

  I didn’t know how long he’d been there, watching me. He had a pair of gloves dangling down from his sleeves, sewn on with a long piece of string, like a mother might sew her child’s gloves together, but there was no sign of dampness on his trousers or boots, no indication he’d been outside. For a long while he just looked at me, until, shuffling upright, I stammered, “Vincent? W-what is it?”

  For a second I thought he was going to say something else.

  Then, with a half-shake of his head and a little shuffle to the door, he replied, not looking at me, “Time to get up, Harry. Busy, busy day.”

  I got up and didn’t bother with a shower.

  The world outside was blue-grey with a gentle frost. The air bit hard, promising snow. The woman waved from the balcony as we climbed back into Vincent’s little car, and then we drove up again, through thinning pine trees and jutting rock, the heater in the car on at full blast, neither of us saying a word.

  We didn’t go far. It can’t have been more than ten minutes out before Vincent made a sharp right and turned into what I first assumed was the entrance to a mine. A short tunnel led to a concrete car park, surrounded by sheer rock walls on all sides, some parts of which had been covered with chain fencing against crumbling. A single small sign declared in French, German and English, PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO RAMBLERS PLEASE. A single security guard, dressed in a fur-lined blue coat, the bulge of his pistol well hidden beneath its shapeless bulk, greeted us with a polite nod of recognition as we parked among the very few cars and very few spaces. A grey door in a grey cliff wall was opened as we approached, a security camera many, many decades ahead of its time peering down at us as we passed.

  I had questions but didn’t feel that I could ask them. We descended a corridor of stone cut from the walls of the mountain itself, lined with sluggish burning lanterns. Our breath steamed on the air, but as we went further down, rather than grow colder, a warm moisture began to tingle against my skin. I heard voices, rising from below, echoing against the hard, round walls, and as we descended one way, three men, pushing an empty sled, came up the other way. They were talking loudly, but as Vincent approached they fell silent, and remained so until we were deeper into t
he mountain out of earshot. By now I could hear the gentle hiss of air vents, the rattling of pipes, and the heat was taking on an unnatural mechanical quality, a little too high and damp to have been designed for simple human comfort. The number of people was increasing, men and women of all ages, who all seemed to recognise Vincent and then look away. There were quiet traces of security too, more men in thick coats, guns under their arms and batons on their hips.

  “What is this place?” I asked at last, when the sound of voices was enough to muffle the breakage of quiet that my words entailed.

  “Do you understand quantum physics?” he asked briskly as we rounded a corner and paused by a blast door for it to be opened.

  “Don’t be ridiculous; you know I don’t.”

  He gave a patient sigh and ducked beneath the rising door into an even warmer cave. “Well then, I shall keep it simple. Let us say that you observe a waterfall and ask yourself how it came into being. The water flowed downwards and eroded the rock, you conclude. On the higher side of the waterfall, the rock was hard and did not crumble, but on the downward slope, the rock was soft and collapsed beneath the river rushing over it. Having made this deductive leap, you further conclude that water must always flow downhill, and it must erode, and that friction changes energy, and energy changes matter and so on and so forth, are you with me?”

  “I think so.”

  Did he miss me then? Did he miss the Harry August he had argued with in Cambridge and who had cried “claptrap” to his daft ideas? I think, perhaps, he did.

  Your fault, Vincent, for killing me.

  Twice.

  “Well then, let us take it another step. Let us say that you take an atom in the universe, and you observe it closely. This atom, you say, is made of protons, neutrons and electrons, and from this you begin to deduce that a proton must have a positive charge and an electron a negative, and these two attract, and you say that a neutron binds itself to a proton and a force must be exerted to prevent the attractive pull between all these from causing the atom to collapse in on itself, and from that you can deduce…” He paused, searching for a word.

  “Yes?”

  “Everything,” said so softly, eyes fixed on some other place. “You can deduce… everything. From a single atom, a single point in time and space, one can examine the fundamental stuff of the universe and conclude, by sheer mathematical process, everything that was, everything that is, everything that must be. Everything.”

  Another door opened: a room even hotter than the others, fans working desperately to keep it cool, and there it was, nearly seven storeys high, scaffolding running up to its topmost level, men and women–hundreds of them–swarming over its every detail. The air tasted of electricity, smelled of electricity, the noise was almost deafening. He handed me a radioactivity badge, more advanced than anything I’d worn in Pietrok-112, nearly twenty years from now, nearly two hundred years ago, and over the roar shouted, “This is the quantum mirror!”

  I looked, and it was beautiful.

  The quantum mirror.

  Look into it too deep, and God is looking right back at you.

  And it was nearly finished.

  Chapter 80

  My third life.

  I have told you that I wandered for a while as a priest, monk, scholar, theologian–call it what you will–idiot in search of answers, whatever. I have told you of my meeting with Shen, the Chinese spy who respectfully hoped I wasn’t there to overthrow communism. I have told you of being beaten in Israel and scorned in Egypt, of finding faith and losing it as easily as a comfortable pair of slippers.

  I have not told you of Madam Patna.

  She was an Indian mystic, one of the first to realise that the most profitable way to be enlightened was to spread her enlightenment to concerned Westerners who hadn’t had enough cultural opportunities to nurture their cynicism. I was one of those Westerners for a time and sat at her feet chanting empty nothings with the rest of them, for a while genuinely convinced–as I was genuinely convinced of most things in that life–that this chubby, cheery woman did indeed offer me a path to enlightenment. After a few months of working for free–which I considered a necessary part of becoming closer to nature and thus myself–in her extensive plantations, I was granted a rare interview with her, and, almost shaking with excitement, sat cross-legged on the floor before the great lady and waited to be wowed.

  She was silent a long time, deep in meditation, and we devotees had learned long ago not to question these deep and presumably profound pauses. At last she raised her head and, looking straight through me, declared, “You are a divine being.”

  As statements went, this was nothing very new for our mandir.

  “You are a creature of light. Your soul is song, your thoughts are beauty. There is nothing within you which is not perfection. You are yourself. You are the universe.”

  Chanted by a crowd in a large room, all this could be rather impressive. Now, with this one woman breathily intoning it, I was struck by just how contradictory so much of it appeared to be.

  “What about God?” I asked.

  This question seemed a little impertinent to Madam Patna, but rather than disappoint an avid follower with a casual dismissal, she smiled her trademark cheerful smile and proclaimed, “There is no such thing as God. There is only creation. You are part of creation, and it is within you.”

  “Then why can I not influence creation?”

  “You do. Everything about you, every aspect of your being, every breath…”

  “I mean… why can I not influence my own path through it.”

  “But you do!” she repeated firmly. “This life is only a passing flicker of the flame, a shadow. You will cast it off and soar to a new plane, a new level of understanding, where you will realise that what you perceive now as reality is no more than a prison of the senses. You will look, and it will be as if you see with the eye of the maker. You are within creation. Creation is within you. You are an aspect of the first breath that made the universe, your body is made of the dust of bodies that have gone before, and when you die, your body and your deeds give life. You, yourself, are God.”

  In later months I grew rather tired of such empty aphorisms, and when a dissatisfied disciple whispered in my ear that our austere, ascetic leader in fact lived a life of wealthy luxury some three miles down the road, I threw down my straw hat and hand scythe, and left to find a better philosophy. Yet, all these lives later, I still wondered exactly what it would mean to see the universe with the eyes of God.

  Chapter 81

  “Harry, this is the single most important thing that anyone will ever do.”

  Vincent in my ear.

  So many voices in my ear, so many years to hear them.

  “This will change mankind, redefine the universe. The quantum mirror will unlock the secrets of matter, of past and future. We will understand at last those concepts which we only pretended to comprehend–life, death, consciousness, time. Harry, the quantum mirror is…”

  “What can I do?” I asked, and was surprised to hear my own voice. “How can I help?”

  Vincent smiled. His hand rested on my shoulder, and for a second I thought I saw the glimmer of tears run along his lower eyelids. I had never seen Vincent cry and thought for a moment that this was joy.

  “Stay with me,” he said. “Stay here, by my side.”

  The quantum mirror.

  To look with the eyes of the maker.

  Vincent Rankis. Fancy seeing you here! We shall hold up a mirror, as it were, to nature itself…

  Codswallop!

  It is either your or my ghastly duty to ensure that one of us kisses Frances on the lips.

  Total balderdash!

  I’m a fucking good guy!

  It’s your past, Harry, it’s your past.

  Rory Hulne, dying alone.

  Patrick August, you were always my father.

  Silence as Harriet’s coffin slips beneath the earth. Silence by the fireside in a cot
tage overgrown with weeds. There’s a drug dealer living in the house where once Constance Hulne ruled with an iron fist, where Lydia went mad and Alexandra saved a baby boy’s life, where a serving girl called Lisa Leadmill was pushed back on a kitchen table and did not scream. And from that moment a child would be born who would travel again, and again, and again, the same life, the same journey again and again and…

  Richard Lisle, dead at my hands, life after life. Please, I never done nothing.

  Rosemary Dawsett, cut up in a bathtub.

  Jenny, you should be on the news, you should.

  Will you run away with me?

  Do you like me?

  I have always liked you, Jenny. Always.

  The bride to be!

  Do you approve, Harry? Isn’t she beautiful?

  Akinleye. Did you know that me, Harry? Was she right to forget?

  I personally favour the thigh! A bath helps, but one must make do, mustn’t one? Tra la, Dr August, so long and all that!

  Virginia, striding beneath the summer sky in London. Killing kalachakra in the womb. Shaking as we made her forget.

  You ever get bored of whatever it is you do, come find me on the thin red line!

  Many, many apologies.

  I’m so sorry, Harry. It’s for the best. This is how it has to be.

  The quantum mirror.

  To see with the eyes of God.

  The world is ending.

  We cannot stop it.

  Now it’s up to you.

  The quantum mirror.

  Stay here. By my side.

  Vincent, I sabotaged the quantum mirror.

  It was easy to do.

  I didn’t even have to be there. You had concluded that I was no scientist, that I could not help you as I had in Russia, for here was a man who didn’t even understand the thinnest Newtonian principle, let alone the technology–nearly a hundred years ahead of what it should have been–that you were unleashing in that mountain in Switzerland. I was your admin man, as I had been now for so many lives, your go-to man for trivial events. For nine months I stayed in those caves in Switzerland, watching the quantum mirror grow, listening to the roaring of the machines with every test, and knew you were close, you were so close now. Reports landed on my desk and you ignored them, believing I could not understand, but Vincent, I was the only other person there who could, every dot and every dash, every decimal point and finest permutation of the graph. It was I who, when I should have ordered thorium 234, changed a digit in the paperwork and ordered thorium 231. It was I who cut costs on the boron rods, slicing away a few vital millimetres from the specs; I who shifted the decimal point one sig fig over on the wave calculations. The document was seven pages long, and I moved the point on the very first page so that by the time the calculations had been worked through, the final answer was nine orders of magnitude out.