I had come this far to find my people, and here it was already, spoken in innocence. Mnemonics are rather strange. To a certain class of society, in a certain corner of England, there is no greater failing.
“Koch spoke up, when the Clubs were deciding what to do with Victor Hoeness,” she explained. “ ‘This is not the first cataclysm,’ he said, ‘but the second. You do not remember it, for it was many hundreds of lives ago, and thousands of years. Perhaps if you do remember it, it is merely as a vague darkness in your minds, a distant memory. But I know of it, for I lived through it. A thousand years before now, another of our kin did exactly as Hoeness has done, and it ripped the future apart like a cutlass through soup. How long will we live before we reach one of the two only conclusions left to us? That if anything is to ever change, we must make sacrifices and challenge this rigid system within which we live. Or if nothing is to change at all, then we must watch our own kind constantly, and punish ruthlessly, and live without remorse. You have already decided on Hoeness’s fate, but let my words live as a warning to you all.’
“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.