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.
There was an art to the secrecy that Vincent and I practised during that time. Both of us were aware of theory and technological developments twenty to thirty years ahead of their time. Both of us had flawless memories of the same, though I always chalked my recollections up to a good head for numbers. The skill lay in introducing our ideas in such a way as would permit the highly intelligent individuals Vincent had surrounded himself with to make the consequent breakthroughs as it were for themselves. It became something of a game, a competition between us, to see who could drop that subtle idea which might lead the chemist to a connection, the physicist to revelation. The magnitude of the task in a way offered us benefits, as it was too great for either of us to comprehend, and so we broke it down into smaller parts. We would need an electron microscope–a concept we were both familiar with but neither one of us had studied or used. We would need a particle accelerator, which again we both knew we desired but neither one of us had built. On occasion even the discussion of a concept was enough to provoke unexpected bursts of brilliance from our researchers, who, giddy with the success after success rolling out of the labs, never paused to question just how or why these revelations were occurring.
“By the end of this life,” stated Vincent firmly, “I intend to have the technology of 2030 at my disposal, whatever that may be. It’s a good communist attitude–one must always have a long-term plan.”
“Are you not concerned,” I enquired, “about what happens to this technology after your death?”
“There is no ‘after my death’,” he replied grimly.
I would like to say that this question troubled me more than it did. I recalled our discussions on the very nature of kalachakra. What are we, how do we live? Are we, in fact, little more than consciousnesses flitting between an endless series of parallel universes, which we then alter by our deeds? If so, the implication rather was that our actions did carry consequences, albeit ones which we would never perceive, for somewhere there was a universe where Harry August had turned left and not right at his fifty-fifth birthday, and somewhere a universe in which Vincent Rankis had died, leaving behind a post-Soviet Russia with a technological database decades ahead of its time.
The world is ending.
Christa in Berlin.
The world is ending.
It must be one of us.
“The world is ending,” I said.