The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 25

The first cataclysm began in 1642, in Paris.

The man who brought about the cataclysm was an unassuming gentleman by the name of Victor Hoeness. An ouroboran, he went through the usual traumatic first phases of life before the local Cronus Club found him, calmed him down and explained that actually he was neither possessed nor damned, as far as anyone could tell. The son of a gunsmith, he saw the very worst of the Thirty Years War, a conflict which embraced all the usual early-modern socio-economic causes of war, and then turned it into a crusade. In the name of one, men are permitted to kill; in the name of the other, they are commanded to destroy. Needless to say, most Cronus Club members during the conflict like to move to less fraught areas of the world, such as into the rather more stable heartland of the Ottoman empire, where, while the sultans may be mad during this time, at least their mothers are not. Victor Hoeness, however, refused, insisting that he remain in the Holy Roman Empire. He was counselled against interfering and swore that he was merely acting as a passive observer, documenting all that he saw. Indeed, for several lifetimes the notes of Victor Hoeness provided an excellent historical source, with several kalachakra themselves failing to realise that it was the careful documentation of one of their own kind that had produced such sterling primary evidence. Other members of the Cronus Club were concerned: it wasn’t that Hoeness was unstable; rather, if anything, he was too calm, too collected. He moved through suffering, destruction and dismay, documenting all he saw, like a mist through the forest. He sought no companionship, took no sides, made no acquaintances, removed himself from personal danger where permissible, and even the few deaths he suffered during the war–for no one could fully predict the wild bitterness of those times–he took with a calm grace and resignation, proclaiming afterwards that he wished he had bribed the executioner to put gunpowder into the flames that burned him, or remarking that being impaled on a spear was a far quicker demise if they could just slice open the liver entirely, instead of merely puncturing the gut. His colleagues found themselves in a rather difficult position, for how can you express to a man that his apparent stability and self-control are, quite possibly, irrational, inhuman and the symptom of some deeper ill, when all your evidence for the disease is that it is not there? Over time, Hoeness’s remarkable utility as a primary historical source led him into correspondence with future Cronus Club members. Questions would be posed from the early 1800s or twentieth century, relayed back down through time from the child of the 1850s to the grandfather who would be a child again by 1780, who could then pass it back to the grandparent of the 1710s and so on and so forth until, with as few generations as possible to corrupt the message, one of his own time could put the question to Hoeness directly. He would then inscribe his reply on some well-lasting material and leave it with the Cronus Club to deliver to its future correspondent, and posterity. Many of us who have dabbled in academia have used this technique. Often it is abused for academic advantage as, if we lack a source for a particular time, with some polite enquiry and a little persuasion amplified down the generations, not only may an answer be found, but it can be acquired through genuine documents of the time itself which can withstand the scrutiny of our less imaginative peers. Assuming, of course, you’re still interested several lives later, when the message may finally arrive.

For Hoeness, however, his price for delivering such excellent documentary evidence was to begin to ask questions himself. Notes were sent forward through time or, if it was felt that paper might not survive the journey, stones inscribed with his message and left at pre-agreed stations where war, urban expansion and agricultural revolution were judged likely to leave it untouched. So he began to enquire about the future, and again the Chinese whispers sent back their vague replies. He learned of the siege of Vienna, the decline of the Ottoman empire, the War of the Spanish Succession, revolution in France, revolution in America, and even distant whisperings of events further on–pogroms become massacres and a world where freedom was wealth and God was a name used to frighten children.

He accepted these musings with the same cool nothing with which he could see children butchered before their mothers’ eyes and lines of men stand not forty yards apart blasting at each other with lead while their commanders cheered them on. People considered it strange–remarkable even–but by now all attempts to understand the mind of Victor Hoeness had deteriorated into the tired apathy that is the curse of so many of our kin.

Then, one day, he went to Paris. He took with him very little but his words, and with the simple power of these inveigled himself into the court of the French king.

“I am Victor Hoeness,” he is meant to have said, “and I come to you to tell you about the future.”

Which then he proceeded to do.

When people asked him why–why are you telling us specifically?–he replied, “Your nation is still the most powerful in Europe despite your civil conflicts. The Holy Roman empire is weak, the Spanish king is a weakling, the Pope is powerless in the face of military might, and I need a strong king. I will give you knowledge of ideas yet to come, of philosophies not yet named. I will give you weapons, strategies, medicines; I will give you knowledge of your enemy and the lands beyond these, for I have journeyed to the Pacific and seen the sun rise across the Indian Ocean. I have dined with Mughals and mandarins, heard the running waters of the Congo, smelled the spices in the bazaar and eaten shark meat pulled from beneath the ice. Let us, you and I, make a new world. Let us make a better world.”

And after some understandable scepticism, the French king listened to Victor and the world began to change. Victor had no delusions as to the nature of his project–there would be blood and, he knew, it would be more than probable that this revolution, global in its scale, would consume the men who made it. Charles II died before he could ever reclaim the English crown, while the Thirty Years War was brought to a sudden and abrupt end by the intervention of a combined French Catholic–Huguenot army, fighting with rifled guns and the tactics of Napoleon. Victor knew he could only do so much. His life expectancy even with careful living was unlikely to exceed sixty, and he could not waste more effort and time travelling to Istanbul, Varanasi or Beijing or taking a journey across the sea to the colonies of the New World. His policy was to focus intense effort within a compact area and to attempt to change the world from Europe. He knew that he could not see the end of his revolution, which he had precisely calculated would require at least a hundred and twenty years to achieve some form of stability, so he sought two means to secure his legacy in this wildly altered world. One of these methods was to seek the assistance of Cronus Club members, who, seeing what he was undertaking, divided almost exactly in half to support or reject him. Those who were willing to assist he named his vanguard of the future. Those who refused he had incarcerated in the deepest dungeons he could find. Not killed, he insisted, but incarcerated so that they would live as long as possible in his new world and perhaps, before they died, observe his success.

By the time he finally did die, the map of Europe was entirely changed. France ruled from Lisbon to Krakow, Calais to Budapest. The Ottoman empire sued for peace and gave up its North African colonies in an attempt to win the respect of the French king; the English parliament, with nowhere else to turn, offered its crown to Louis XIV, leading swiftly to rebellion, and bloody suppression by the new monarch. But the most devastating change to the history of the world was its technology. Ideas breed ideas, and Victor, largely unwittingly, had with his minor knowledge of future advancements started a process which would change the face of the planet. In 1693 the first steam train made a test journey from Paris to Versailles; in 1701 an ironclad warship destroyed the Barbary pirates in only two and a half hours of bombardment off Algiers. Armies collapsed and nations sued for peace in the face of this technological onslaught, but the populations themselves, whether for faith, or land, or pride, or mother tongue, resisted until resistance became their identity, and took the weapons of their oppressors and, as men will, made them better. And as war does, technology advanced–bigger, faster, harder–so when Edo was bombed in 1768 its anti-air guns were able to down a third of its attackers, and when at last in 1802 the word went out to the bunkers over the underground radio it was “Fight to the last man and gun!”

Victor Hoeness did not live to see the end of his dream, which came on 18 November 1937 when a group called the Prophets of a New Dawn broke into a missile silo in southern Australia and launched three of its missiles, triggering global retaliation and the nuclear winter which blotted out the sun. By 1953 all life was dead on the surface of the planet, and the entire process began again.