“That would be frustrating,” I agreed. “Lead the way.”
They led me to a couple of cells. I supposed that no good secret research station was complete without them. They were cold, the beds concrete set into the wall. Vincent promised someone would bring blankets, and he was as good as his word. A hot thick soup with dumplings was also provided. The guard pushed everything nervously across the floor to me, his eye still fixed on the gun at my side. I smiled nicely at him and said not a word.
A quantum mirror.
Vincent Rankis–Vitali Karpenko–whatever his name was–was actually attempting to build a quantum mirror.
All of time and space, all that was or could be, laid out before you like the map of creation. A machine which could, from a single atom, extrapolate the wonders of the universe.
Explain how we came to be.
Why we came to be.
Even us, even the kalachakra.
I sat and thought.
Thought about Cambridge and our arguments over roast chicken.
About Akinleye pushing the needle under my skin.
Richard Lisle, shot in the chest before he could commit his crimes.
Lizzy, who I had loved, and Jenny, who I had loved in a completely different way, no less honestly, no more truly. Crawling at Phearson’s feet; Virginia at my door–the femoral artery is best, such a gusher–Rory Hulne at my grandmother’s funeral, and the look on my father’s face as I left him to die. Standing by Harriet’s graveside again and again, life after life, a child unable to take the hand of my foster-father, Patrick August, who would wither away inside, even as his body lived on.
What is the point of you?
The world is ending.
Now it’s up to you.
Did she scream?
It’s your past, Harry. It’s your past.
Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important? Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that gets counted?
That’s all right then! Bring on omnipotence for the human race!
What is the point of you?
Are you God?
Apparently I thought for nearly a day.
When I’d done, I banged on the cell door. The same nervous guard who’d left the dumplings opened it, eyes flickering to the gun in my hand.
“Hello,” I said, passing him the weapon. “Tell Karpenko yes. My answer is yes.”
Chapter 50
I once met a kalachakra by the name of Fidel Gussman. It was 1973; I was in Afghanistan to see the great Buddhas before the Taliban came to power and destroyed them. I was travelling as a New Zealand national, one of the easier passports to move about with, and trying to brush up my Pashto in the process. I was fifty-five years old and had spent a good deal of my life hunting down messages left in stone by previous members of the Cronus Club. It was a running game–a joke left from AD 45 for future Club members which, if I could disinter, I would add my name to before burying in a new place, leaving behind a new set of suitably cryptic clues for future generations to solve–a sort of international time capsule for the overly bored. If feeling generous, participants also buried hidden treasures of a non-biodegradable kind. By far the most magnanimous contribution to the hunt had been a hitherto lost work of Leonardo da Vinci buried by a kalachakra from Renaissance Italy in a sealed jug of wine beneath a shrine to Santa Angelica in the highest part of the Alps. The helpful clues left behind had almost entirely been in the form of lewd rhymes, making the eventual discovery of the bequeathed artefact something of a treat. These games, more than anything else, took me round the world, and it was while visiting the Buddhas of Afghanistan that Fidel Gussman came calling.
You could see him approach from a mile off–a great man with a swollen neck riding on the roof of one of a convoy of trucks which kicked up yellow dust higher than their bobbing radio aerials. The people of the village scattered when he came into town, fearing bandits, and indeed bandits are precisely what they looked like. I made no attempt to hide–a fair-skinned New Zealander in the middle of Afghanistan doesn’t have many places to go to ground–and stared down this European-faced arrival and his multinational convoy of AK-toting men as a tourist might stare at an obstructive police officer.