Finally, “You destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club.”
He hesitated, looked briefly surprised, then turned his face away. It was an oddly animal movement, eyes focusing down into the depths of his whisky as he considered the accusation. “Yes,” he said at last. “I did. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m somewhat playing catch-up–the reports from your watchers indicated you went nowhere near the property.” A sudden flash of a smile. “I suppose I should expect that they would be reluctant to admit to their own incompetence in keeping you away, however. Did you like Sophia, by the by?”
“She seemed perfectly pleasant.”
“I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes, I feel, a man just needs to unwind. Yes, I destroyed the Leningrad Cronus Club. Was there anything else you wished to say?”
“Are you going to inform me that it was for my sake? To prevent my colleagues tracking me down, to hide the betrayal?”
“Of course it was, and don’t you feel that ‘betrayal’ is rather a pejorative term? The Cronus Club are interested only in the endlessly repetitive present; you and I are working for much, much more. You believe that as much as I, yes?” He topped up my whisky glass as he talked, even though I’d hardly drunk a drop, and sipped his. If his hope was that I would follow his example, he was disappointed. “Surely this doesn’t trouble you? It was merely to cloud the trail. And if you insist on using ‘betrayal’, I must remind you, purely in the interest of academic precision, that I was never of the Cronus Club. You are. The betrayal that you refer to was entirely yours, your choice, made freely and in full conscience. If you had any doubt about what we are doing here, and how wrong the Club is in its policy, you could have blown your brains out ten years ago. You could have blown them out today.”
“Join or die?”
“Harry.” He tutted. “Don’t use the words of linear mortals in arguments with me. The idea that their philosophy, their morals, can be applied to either of us isn’t merely absurd, it’s intellectually weak. I do not say we must live without standards, merely that the adoption of mortals’ rules is almost as feeble a choice as living with no rules at all.”
“The laws of mortal men, the ethics, the morality of living, have been formed over thousands of years.”
“The laws we live by, Harry, have been forged over hundreds, and are not enforced by fear.”
“What happens here when you’re done?” I asked softly. “What happens to the men and women of this place, to our… colleagues?”
His fingers rippled round the edge of his glass, just once. Then, “I can see that you know what the answer must be, and that it distresses you. I’m sorry, Harry, I didn’t realise you were becoming so reflective.”
“Do you not say it out loud,” I asked, “because you’re ashamed or simply too much of a delicate flower?”
Another ripple, just once, like a pianist warming his fingers for a concerto. “People die, Harry,” he breathed. “It is the fundamental rule of this universe. The very nature of life is that it must end.”
“Except for us.”
“Except for us,” he agreed. “All this–” a gesture with the end of his little finger around the room, a flicker of his eyes “–when we are dead, will no longer be. Will not have been. Loved ones we have watched die will be born again and we will remember that they were loved, but they will not know us, and none of this will matter. Not the men who lived or the men who died. Only the ideas and memories they made.”
(Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters?)
(There is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling.)
“I think we need to stop,” I said.
Now he set down his glass on the table and leaned back, one leg folded over the other, hands tucked into his lap, a troubled schoolteacher trying not to let his anxiety show to the distressed pupil. “All right,” he said at last. “Why?”
“I’m scared that we’re going to eat our own souls.”
“I didn’t ask for a poetical answer.”
“This… machine,” I said carefully, “these ideas we’re exploring, memories we’re making, if you want. This theory of everything, answer to all our questions, the solution to the problem of the kalachakra… it is a beautiful idea. It is the greatest thing I have ever heard, and you, Vincent, are the only man I’ve met with both the vision and the will to pursue it. It is majestic, and so are you, and I am honoured to have worked on it.”
“But,” he prompted, the tendons standing up around his windpipe, the soft hollow of his wrist.
“But in the name of progress we have eaten our souls up, and nothing else matters to us any more.”
Silence.
I watched the thin lines of his tendons grow whiter against his skin.
Then, in a single motion, he downed the rest of his glass, laid it with a chink on the tabletop.