The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  Saskia stood. She felt dizzy and her joints hurt. Her saliva had frozen in her mouth. She could hear nothing but the blood in her ears, the movement of her clothes, and the tiny sounds that betrayed her musculature and joints.

  She walked around the model of Frederick the Great and saw her once-friends, Soso and Kamo. They had stopped in a dramatic posture. Kamo, faithful as a dog, was holding Soso by the shoulders, giving him strength. Soso had narrowed eyes and an expression of disgust at Saskia’s betrayal. Not anger. Even in the red dimness, she could see that Soso considered her dead already. A wound to stitch, and then move on. His right arm emphasised this: he was pointing the gun. The sharp lines of his tendons suggested that the gun was about to fire.

  Saskia stepped aside.

  She looked down at the band. It was dark. It had stopped turning. It lay in a bed of wood shaved from the floor.

  She tried to say, ‘I don’t understand,’ and when she could not speak the words, she understood that she was not breathing.

  An answer to her unspoken question appeared in the form of a memory that felt like a moment she had experienced only seconds before. But this was impossible for two reasons. First, the memory was her fall through the sky above Siberia. Second, an element had been added: dozens of tiny birds had clawed at the buzzing edges of her clothes and slowed her descent.

  Saskia understood. The i-Core was helping her. This was not a memory; it was a metaphor constructed from her memory.

  Then she saw a laboratory bench with a beaker of water on top. Two electrodes had been lowered into the water. Around the first gathered bubbles of oxygen; around the second, hydrogen. Just so. The i-Core had found a way to give her sufficient oxygen for consciousness.

  Why haven’t I returned to the future? What happened to the band? Is it malfunctioning?

  Another image brightened in her mind: an old sycamore that had been split halfway down its trunk during a forgotten lightning storm. Then: a trampled pocket watch on a St Petersburg street.

  OK, it’s malfunctioning. What do I do now?

  The answer to this question was a memory that might have been true: kicking towards the faraway surface of Lake Baikal, digging upwards at the water as through scrambling from a grave, and achieving the surface, pulling down a great breath.

  I don’t understand.

  Saskia stumbled against the model. The pain in her knees was sharp. It hurt to blink, and when she looked at her hand in the firework light, she saw the mottled pattern of bruising.

  Again, the i-Core presented her with that memory of the trampled pocket watch, which was followed by the penetration of her head through the surface of Baikal.

  Not helpful, she thought, leaning more heavily on her arm. She felt sleepy. Dead already. She wished to die next to Pasha, so she moved towards him. His eyes were half open and amber light reflected there. Saskia frowned. She turned in the direction of the main staircase. In the mirrors either side, and in the pressed gold and in the amber, she saw what could only be the blue-grey light of day. Was this another metaphor? Her failing mind struggled to understand what the reflection meant. She fought to concentrate, and with a childlike flash of achievement, understood that the light was coming from behind her.

  She shuffled around. Her muscles quivered and burned with pain.

  The door to the enfilade was open. Through it, where the next room in the suite should have been, was a second Amber Room. Snow was falling.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Saskia stepped onto a soft ramp of snow and took a breath. She did not step further. This Amber Room had been open to the weather for months. Its windows were smashed and overlooked a palace square that was strewn with tents, burned vehicles—automotive—and flaming drums. It was the invading German army. The sky was smoke-stained. She looked at the snow around her skirt. It was dirty. The walls of this Amber Room were naked brick. The floor had been ripped down to the underboards. The ceiling was torn and hanging. No amber remained.

  She heard distant motor traffic and the tap-tap of a pistol. Overhead, an aeroplane droned, engines ill.

  As Saskia stepped into the room proper, she looked back through the enfilade. There was no sign of the original Amber Room, only an empty doorway whose door had long become firewood and through which the wrecked enfilade continued. She crouched in the snow-rubble and looked, from under her purple hat, at the German soldier who tended a stove in the centre of the floor. He wore white trousers over his jackboots, a dirty, pale jacket that wrapped him like a tunic, and a peaked cap. His shoulder boards indicated that he was a sergeant. He held a white mitten in his mouth while his hand moved a ladle in the watery broth. His stirring motion continued as Saskia crouched.

  In German, she asked, ‘Can you hear me?’

  The soldier moved his ladle a quarter turn. Only then did he look at her. His brown eyes were dark and his cheeks recessed and mottled. His stubble had not yet spread from his upper lip and chin to the rest of his jaw. On the basis of this, Saskia put his age at twenty years.

  ‘I remember you,’ he whispered. His voice sounded as though he had been crying. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t? Have you forgotten me? Your Michael?’

  ‘I’m far from home, Michael. I need your help.’

  His eyes stayed towards the soup. ‘Do you want some?’

  ‘No. That’s for you.’

  ‘It’s stone soup,’ he whispered, and that was enough for Saskia to feel all his pains, the waste of him, the unstructured and unstoried deaths of his friends, and the cold. The snow fell onto the lid that half-covered the soup. ‘Do you know the story?’

  ‘Of stone soup? No, tell me.’

  ‘I can’t. The boys will think I’m mad. Ssss. Quiet.’

  ‘Who am I, Michael?’

  ‘You are my Katrin from home.’

  ‘Home in?’

  ‘Schliersee.’

  Saskia smiled. ‘Yesterday, I walked on the banks of the lake with our friends.’

  Michael’s jaw shifted to the right. His moustache shook. When the tears gathered in the edges of his eyes, they did not fall. Saskia reached towards him—wincing at the pain in her shoulder—and thumbed them away.

  ‘Is this the Great Summer Palace?’

  ‘No,’ he said, quietly. ‘It’s the Catherine Palace.’

  ‘What happened here, Michael?’

  ‘We finished stripping the amber,’ he said. His eyes were unfocused. ‘Today, it’ll go home.’

  ‘No, not the amber. What happened to the palace?’

  Michael looked at her, as though into bright light. ‘I’m not mad. You’re not Katrin.’

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘You need to leave before the boys come.’ Michael nodded towards the door that led to the Apartments of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna. ‘They haven’t seen a woman like you for months.’

  ‘I will.’

  He nodded, then said, ‘What happened to your face? Did someone hit you? Was it one of us?’

  Saskia touched her cheek. It was swollen.

  ‘No, Michael,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t.’

  He breathed deeply and looked at his stone soup.

  ‘Don’t cry, Michael.’

  He sniffed. ‘Then what?’

  Saskia rose. Her blackcurrant skirt drew in. She took careful steps towards the open throat of the enfilade and stepped into the doorframe. Beyond it was a third Amber Room. As she passed, there was no sensation of travel through time. Only the physicality of her environment changed. From cold to warmth; steady to unsteady; quietude to noise. Her heel wobbled on a loose board as she

  ~

  tipped into herself, a young woman in the back seat of a police car. It was night. Her seatbelt cut into her hip as the car undertook a queue of stationary traffic, groaned across the rumble strip, and continued along the hard shoulder. The car slowed. Its siren muted, but the blue lights flashed over the parked cars, flashed across their curious passengers. Next to her, a tall, fifty-something man
wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Sweat collected against his collar.

  Where am I? Saskia thought. She recognised the man next to her as a British police officer called Jago. She had last seen him at Heathrow Airport in the year 2023, where they had chased a criminal called David Proctor. Jago had collapsed at the terminal while Saskia boarded Proctor’s aeroplane to Las Vegas, to a US government programme called Project Déjà Vu, and backwards in time to the year 2003.

  ‘Jago?’

  The man turned to her. ‘It’s Jago now, is it?’

  I call him Scotty. Something about Enterprise. A joke.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. But there’s an accident up ahead.’

  The car tipped forward as the driver braked to avoid the edge of a wide vehicle. Saskia took Scotty’s hand. He smiled.

  ‘You’re not still worried about the driving?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m worried about

  (Whether we’ll reach Proctor in time)

  you.’

  Scotty smiled. The expression seemed unsuited to his face. ‘Why do I always get the daft ones?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Now he’ll say the pain is indigestion due to the sausages he ate on the way from Edinburgh.

  ‘You know what it is. It’s those—’

  ‘Scotty?’

  He sighed. ‘Yes, pet?’

  ‘You’re a good man.’

  As he turned towards her, his seatbelt creaked. He squeezed her hand once. ‘And you’re soft as shite.’

  A new light flashed on the dark, glittering dashboard. The co-driver reached over and touched the light. She turned and

  (A woman. Her name is Teri.)

  said to Scotty, ‘Sorry, Guv. A lorry has shed its load. We’re the closest unit and we’ll need to secure the scene.’

  Saskia was overwhelmed by a sense of desperation. It was difficult to rationalise the feeling. Wasn’t this a dream? Wasn’t she an observer? Nevertheless, she gripped the co-driver by her upper arm and shouted, ‘I don’t care

  (They’re dead anyway; they’ve always been dead.)

  about lorries and their loads. We need to get to Proctor. Do you understand? It has to take priority. Otherwise, otherwise …’

  Her voice weakened, then cut out. The anxiety faded. Saskia looked at the puzzled face of the co-driver. The driver, too, was looking at her in the rear-view mirror.

  Saskia whispered, ‘Scotty, have you ever had one of those dreams when you’re back in school and there’s an exam—’

  ‘Shush, pet. All the bloody time. What you looking at, Teri? Tell control to send us another unit.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ said Saskia, half to herself. Her worry grew again. This was not a dream. Neither had she dreamed of the German soldier in the palace. He, perhaps, had dreamed of her. Here, in the car, the blue light flashed over the queuing motorists. She felt the vibration of the chassis. Scotty smelled of cigarettes and sweat.

  ‘We won’t make it, then,’ he said.

  This was not a dream. This was a repeat of a moment in her life. Something in the band, whose technology was decades ahead of 2023, and unknown to her, had snapped. It had bounced her into memories.

  No. This is different.

  Scotty and I got to Proctor in time.

  She could see a slice of dashboard between the seats. It might have been a cityscape at night. A view from a pitched, plunging aeroplane.

  Like—

  (Yes)

  Like DFU323.

  This is

  ~

  ‘DFU323 to anybody. I am a qualified pilot who has taken control of this aeroplane following an emergency. We are experiencing altitude control problems and I request clear airspace while I investigate the extent of our manual control.’

  I shouldn’t be here.

  Saskia released the push-to-talk button on the yoke.

  If what happened in the car was true, then I never reached David Proctor. I never travelled in time to 2003. I never boarded this aircraft.

  The daylight through the misted cockpit window was dazzling. Dazzling? Then her eyes were not light-adapted. They were same eyes that had, the instant before, been staring at a gloomy dashboard.

  She looked at the young woman in the co-pilot seat and

  (Vicki. Her name was Vicki. The last surviving flight steward. It’s the year 2003. This aircraft is going to crash and only I will survive.)

  was struck by her resemblance to the co-driver in the police car. Like Saskia, Vicki wore a headset and oxygen mask.

  Before she could voice an urge that was building inside her—an urge to tell Vicki that this moment was gone, in the past, only a memory, and nothing could change the outcome—the yoke began to move. It drifted towards her and rotated anticlockwise as the 737 reached the crest of its sickening, shallow corkscrew, then pitched forward, rolling right. She looked at the instrumentation panel and noted the warnings: the cabin altitude was too high, hydraulic pressures read zero, and the aircraft was losing height.

  Suddenly, a siren bleated. The sound matched a blinking button on the panel that read ALT HORN CUTOUT. Saskia almost touched it, hesitated, then pressed. The siren stopped.

  Hadn’t I already silenced that alarm when I entered the cabin?

  ‘The flight management computer cannot begin a controlled descent,’ Saskia said. She spoke for the flight recorder, for the benefit of air crash investigators. ‘I will do so now.’

  I’ve said that before. The aircraft will crash regardless. What if I remember the experience of the crash this time? What will it feel like?

  Saskia disengaged the automatic pilot and counted ten seconds. The behaviour of the aircraft did not change. Its slow corkscrew continued. Weeks after this event, Saskia would research the phenomenon and come to understand it as a Dutch roll. It was a natural aerodynamic behaviour that should have been dampened by the autopilot.

  She tried to push the yoke forward, but it was immovable. She exchanged a look with the stewardess.

  ‘Help me, Vicki. Push.’

  It’s pointless. There is no hydraulic fluid left. The aircraft cannot be—

  ‘It’s moving,’ said the stewardess. Her eyes crinkled. ‘Are we flying it?’

  Saskia pressed the push-to-talk. ‘DFU323 has limited response to manual control. I am descending to 10,000 feet. Anyone please respond. Anyone respond.’

  ‘They still can’t hear us.’

  And they never will, thought Saskia. The force that took the hydraulic fluid took the radio, too. Only the trace of Vicki’s voice would remain, etched on the solid state memory of the flight recorder.

  Saskia re-engaged the autopilot.

  ‘I will now instruct the autopilot to descend to 10,000 feet.’

  ‘No need to tell me. Just do it.’

  ‘I am speaking for the benefit of the flight recorder, not yours.’

  The stewardess sank into her chair and tightened its harness. Saskia held her left thumb for luck and, with a hand numbed by cold, punched a new altitude into the flight management computer. There was no auditory feedback. Saskia cupped against the display against the sunlight. The numbers were there.

  That didn’t happen last time. It stayed blank all the way to the ground.

  The nose of the aircraft began to drop.

  That shouldn’t happen. Why is this happening?

  A horn whooped.

  ‘Overspeed warning!’ said an American voice. An actor speaking from the past. ‘Overspeed warning!’

  The aircraft began to rise. Its angle of bank flattened. She reduced thrust and deployed the wing spoilers to increase drag. The horn stopped.

  ‘Vicki,’ Saskia said. She removed her own mask. ‘I need you to speak to the passengers. Get them ready for a crash landing. I can’t risk turning the aircraft. The best I can do is dump the fuel and land along the Danube.’

  ‘Fuck it all, the Danube? Are you crazy?’

  ‘No.’<
br />
  To herself, Vicki said, ‘Perhaps we can radio for help.’

  Saskia turned to the uneven horizon. It was a clear, cold day and a silver thread—the Danube—was visible on the plain.

  ‘Vicki, help is here, and it’s me. Tell the passengers to adopt crash positions and listen for my signal, which will be “Brace, brace, brace”. We’ll be down in three or four minutes.’

  It took long moment for Vicki to decide that Saskia was her best hope. She pulled off her headphones and removed the oxygen mask. Its grey buckles swung. Then, squeezing Saskia’s shoulder, she was gone.

  Saskia held the yoke. The pilot had been exsanguinated in his seat, and the blood, no longer warm, soaked through her trousers. There was more blood on the flight plan pinned to the centre of the yoke. She could hear the air blasting across the hole in the fuselage where the forward passenger door had once been. The rushing sound was louder at low altitude. Her gaze made a slow inventory of the controls. How extraordinary that she should know every switch, setting and dial from a desperate search of the Internet only minutes before: piggy-backing the mobile phones of the passengers, collecting electronic manuals of maintenance, pilot checklists and avionics, as well as air safety reports. She knew everything about this aircraft and what it could do with only partial hydraulics and full control over its thrust. The knowledge was not unlike her command of chess. She understood its state: it was a system that, knowable at time one, should be knowable at time two.

  She did not have the strength to put the aircraft through S-turns, so the approach would be fast. She took a flight manual from the stowage bin on her left. Because the electronic fuel displays were dead, she had to guess the weight of the aircraft, and from that guess make another about the angle to set flaps.

  The Danube loomed.

  She set the flaps and held on until her last minutes were gone. The grey water expanded, but the river was much smaller than she remembered. The nose of the aircraft rose as she reduced the thrust.

  There were two whoops from the cabin speakers. The same American voice: ‘Pull up! Too low—terrain! Pull up!’