The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  ‘Where is Saskia?’ Ute asked.

  ‘I don’t understand. I’m here.’

  Ute’s voice held no challenge, only wonder. ‘Saskia? But you are not made of sparrows today.’

  Saskia frowned. On an intuition, she reached for a lock of her own hair and pulled it before her eyes. It was blonde. She looked at her hands: the fingers were different—pale, smooth—and there was an unfamiliar, fresh scar across her left palm.

  ‘What do I look like?’ said Saskia.

  Ute reached into the pocket of her leather jacket and produced a compact mirror. She passed it to Saskia, who looked into her own eyes for the first time she could remember.

  The girl looked no older than the one who had killed Saskia in the parallel Geneva. She had blue eyes, a large forehead, and a freckled button-nose. Twelve years old? Thirteen? Saskia angled the mirror to see a grey hooded top and blue bodywarmer. Then she turned back to her eyes. Those eyes were ringed with fatigue. They looked scared.

  The despair seemed to hollow her out. She sobbed, ‘Who am I?’

  Ute gave her an affectionate smile, the kind an adult gives to the child who must be brave. She gathered Saskia in an embrace, and Saskia cried against the black leather jacket with shuddered exhales that boomed within her body, still hollowed by that despair, louder than the erupting waves.

  ‘I don’t know why I see you as a child today,’ said Ute. Her mouth was muffled against Saskia’s crown. ‘Perhaps there is some meaning in it. Like why am I standing on a bridge made of ice? It would be funny if it weren’t so real. Am I meant to cross the bridge? What’s on the other side?’

  Saskia did not look up. She could not. All she could manage was a nod.

  ‘Alright,’ said Ute. ‘And you’re to go inside the castle. Is that it?’

  Again, Saskia nodded.

  A tremendous wave made landfall around them and a short, salty rain fell.

  ‘Am I going home?’ asked Ute.

  ‘Yes,’ Saskia whispered. Her throat felt sticky and engorged. ‘You are to live. I am to …’ Saskia could not say the word. Her voice, now she listened to it, was that of a girl. How could she have not noticed before? That explained why the steps up the cliff had seemed so large, and why Ute was so tall. ‘I am to go in there.’

  ‘Shhh,’ said Ute. ‘Everything will be fine. You’ll dream of me.’

  Saskia prepared herself for her next question with two long breaths. ‘When they killed me to take my mind,’ she said, ‘was I just a girl?’

  Ute kissed the top of her head and turned them both so that Saskia had her back to the castle of ice. Ute crouched, brushed away the tears from Saskia’s swollen cheeks, and tapped her nose once. They both smiled.

  ‘You’re more than just a girl,’ she said. ‘Now, I have to go.’

  And then Ute was backing away from her, shrugging the rucksack a little higher, walking to the cliff edge at the end of the bridge.

  Ute turned back.

  ‘You need to dismiss me,’ she called. ‘That’s how this works.’

  ‘Go, little heart,’ said Saskia. ‘I dismiss you.’

  Ute became glass, then dissolved. The last part of her to disappear was her waving hand.

  In time, when a true rain began to fall along with the rising spray, Saskia turned towards the castle. She could see a sheer-walled tunnel of dark ice vanishing in a turn. She wondered how cold it would be in there.

  ‘Ice cold,’ she said aloud. The juvenile edge to her voice was still there, but it did not crack, and Saskia felt strong enough to continue. She had faced the waters of Lake Baikal. She could face this.

  I am more than just a girl. I will lead my fear.

  Saskia passed into the iceworks. In the quietening gloom, she turned to the wall and saw the warped reflection of a lost girl walking alongside her. She carried a pink rucksack on one shoulder. She might have been walking to school. Saskia zipped her bodywarmer and put both arms through the straps of the rucksack. Her jaw trembled with the cold and the thought of coming dreams, but she lifted her head.

  ‘Arctic,’ she told herself. ‘Cool as.’

  Epilogue

  The Future: Met Four Base

  Beneath Nevada’s Valley of Fire, in a twist of a vast helix bored by a nuclear subterrene tunneller, Professor Jennifer Proctor felt the first intimations of tiredness. She commanded a neural script to sharpen her concentration.

  Proctor was two days out from an academic conference in Boulder, five away from a periodic review of Project Déjà Vu, and a month clear of her divorce from Sara. She looked through the transparent wall of the control room to the floor of the tunnel, where the centrifuges were turning even now. She credited her neural scripts with giving her the strength to stay on top of this mess. True, there were colleagues with whom she could confide. But there was none, apart from one man, she could trust.

  She walked down the long flight of steps that led to the blast wall. Technicians nodded as she passed. There had been a time when she knew their names without recourse to the data overlay that enhanced her vision. These days, the importance of those personal connections seemed to have diminished.

  She carried the chill of paranoia always: Which of them knew that she had sent the solider, codenamed Cory, through time and to his death? She had been careful to erase all trace of the operation. Logs, after all, could be deleted, and technicians paid off. But the potential for discovery remained.

  And none of this changed the fact that she did not yet know why her father had been murdered.

  She opened the metal door in the blast wall and entered a short corridor. Luminescent motes glowed. The corridor ended in a larger, deeper chamber about the size of a school bus. There was a rack of outdoor suits. She put one on and waited for the gases in the material to expand. The young technician at the door nodded to indicate that he had begun the priming.

  Proctor stood by the technician until the priming was complete. He muttered something about a football game. She noted this attempt at small talk and smiled, but could not summon enough interest to engage with him. There was a visual overlay of his name floating near his chest. She didn’t bother to read it.

  The door opened with a hiss of equalisation and Proctor stepped into Kaliningrad.

  A level concrete walkway had been laid on the sloping floor of the underground bunker. It spanned the sealed chamber in a lazy sigmoid that reached all the way to the far end, where vertical panels of amber stood in the arrangement they had once held, almost a century before, when the German army had evacuated them from St Petersburg.

  Proctor pulled up her hood to cover her white hair. She approached the three sets of amber panels. They were silent as monoliths. Parts of the panels had been damaged in transit, scorched, or cracked by the team who had supervised the restoration, before being encased in carbon nano-mesh.

  The panels surrounded a time band, which had been placed in the centre of the floor. Touching one side of the device was a transparent tube filled with ball bearings. A electromagnet at the top of the tube turned on and off, lifting the column of metal balls only to let them drop against the band.

  Proctor watched the sequence for a minute. She felt great regret. Saskia had been a friend. She sighed, then passed a command to the electromagnet.

  It stopped.

  She remained among the panels for another half an hour. She touched them and thought about the implications of the data she had collected from Saskia. Those implications struck her with enough force to wake her from the apathy that characterised her life. Years before, she had felt the same way about gravity: there had been the smallest glimmer of possibility in those equations, a possibility that spoke to time travel under low-energy conditions.

  Something creaked above her head. She considered the weight of the reconstructed Königsberg Castle. It did not matter to her that the room was deep underground and sealed. She liked confined spaces. Always had.

  She felt the movement of air as the door to Met Four Ba
se was primed and equalised. She did not turn to see who had joined her because she had given instructions to refuse all but one individual.

  ‘Pass me your report, please,’ she said.

  Before her next cold inhalation, Proctor’s brain had accepted the imprint of tens of thousands of moments, each of them a slice of Alexei Draganov’s life. Sudden new memory. She became a subtly different person.

  ‘So Saskia thinks you are dead,’ said Proctor. ‘That’s just as well.’

  Draganov stepped alongside her. He was clean-shaven and had gelled his hair. He wore jeans and a checked shirt.

  ‘If she digs into the circumstances of my execution, she might become suspicious.’

  ‘What was it? Firing squad?’

  ‘Hanging.’

  ‘Must have been painful.’

  Draganov gave her a sour look. ‘Did you collect the data we needed?’

  ‘There are certain facts now established.’ Proctor smiled despite herself. She had data, and that was always a joy. ‘We cannot yet pass any great quantity of matter from one universe and the next, but we can send information. If that information happens to be the digital consciousness of a dead mind, like Saskia’s, then we have a method for…exploration.’

  ‘So it seems,’ said Draganov. He crouched and took the transparent tube of ball bearings. These he poured into his palm. ‘She claimed that Meta is rather more advanced in the reality we sent her to.’

  Proctor had to smile again. Their own Meta had precisely two members: herself and Draganov.

  ‘I believe her,’ she said. ‘You and I also exist in these alternative realities. In some, I guess we started earlier.’

  Draganov did not seem amused. ‘Has it occurred to you that they might be more advanced in passing matter into our universe? I wouldn’t want to meet my doppelgänger.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Proctor, quietly. ‘It has occurred to me.’

  ‘Jennifer, I made it clear, months ago, that if we are to find a method of shaping the present through changing the past, it should not be for personal gain.’

  Proctor rubbed her forehead. She was getting a headache. ‘A better world? What could be a more exalted aim, and still lead to personal gain?’

  ‘It will not bring your father back.’

  Proctor watched him take the time band and break it.

  ‘That’s expensive,’ she said. ‘Especially in these troubled times.’

  ‘What shall we do with all this?’

  ‘The charges are laid.’ She indicated plastic yellow boxes in each corner. ‘We just need to set the timer.’

  ‘Do we know what happens to Saskia after 1908?’

  ‘There’s nothing in the records. Those of Nakhimov are scant. She will have adopted a new identity. Why do you ask?’

  Draganov stood. ‘I’m going back to get her.’

  ‘For the data on her brain chip? Don’t trouble yourself.’

  ‘No,’ said Draganov. ‘She’s done something for us, so we can do something for her. The time paradox that protects her stifles her, too. I’m going to find her and bring her to 2023. Once she has played her role in those events, she will be free.’

  ‘Free to die? Personally, I wouldn’t rush to thank you.’

  Proctor and Draganov walked to the door and used the low-frequency transmitter to signal the technician in Nevada. As the door opened, Draganov gestured with his hand.

  ‘Ladies first,’ he said.

  Proctor looked at him. She knew, now, his background as a former Templar Knight. It explained much about him.

  Before she stepped through, she commanded the charges to blow.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ she said.

  They closed the door. As Proctor thanked the technician—this time using his name—she counted down from ten. The door did not so much as tremble. For those near Königsberg Castle, Kaliningrad, there would be a distant rumble as the last of the Amber Room was destroyed.

  Canterbury, UK; November 2007 to January 2013

  Saskia Brandt will return.

  ~

  I’m an independent author. If you would like to help others find The Amber Rooms, please consider leaving a review at the Kindle store.

  Do you want to know when my next book will be published? Email me at ihocking@gmail.com and I’ll let you know. You will also find me on Twitter: ian_hocking.

  Acknowledgements

  Phew. That was a long book. I’m knackered just thinking about it. Knights Templar, eh? Cheeky monkeys.

  As you can probably tell, I had my nose in a few books before and during the writing of The Amber Rooms. It would not be cricket if I were to forget all about them.

  Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore provided background on the early days of the dictator. The wonderful film Russian Ark gave me a sense of the enigma of Russia—not enough to solve, but enough to fascinate. Parts of Count Nakhimov’s house on the Moika are borrowed from the Petersburg residence of the Family Yusupov, described by Prince Felix Yusupov, together with episodes in which he—wait for it: dragged up—and sang in jazz clubs, in his book Lost Splendour. (This book is hosted by alexanderpalace.org, itself a fantastic multimedia resource on Imperial Russian history.) Other eyewitness accounts include Thirteen Years at the Russian Court by Pierre Gilliard, which includes the death of the Tsar and his family, and The Real Tsaritsa, written by a close friend of the Tsar’s wife called Julia Dehn. I have also drawn upon the top-notch Fire and Sword in the Caucasus. This book was published in 1906 by the Italian historian and diplomat Luigi Villari and describes his travels around Russia, most particularly the Caucasus. He enjoyed himself alright. Mustn’t forget the books Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar (edited by Barbara Engel and Clifford Rosenthal) and A Life’s Music by Andreï Makine.

  I discovered the quote from Albert Camus while listening to the audiobook of Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia. Thanks, Clive. Nobody says “Margarita Pracatan” like you.

  I want to thank my Russian teacher, Наталья Тарнягина, for her understanding and patience, even when I came late to classes and shouted the Russian, ‘Goodbye!’ at everybody as I walked in. They might have been laughing then—but they weren’t laughing later as they waited for me to finish reading Russian sentences letter by letter. Neighbours Janet and Michael Berridge, plus friend Viktor, helped polish some of my translations herein and generally give the impression that I understood a modicum of Russian. Lies! My friends Ed Genochio and Aliya Whiteley gave me feedback on the final draft. Ed even used Google Docs, which was brave. Olivia Wood, my editor, kept me entertained with mots bon even as she tidied up and generally prettified my English.

  And, for the cups of tea, optimism and faith, and for putting up with my absences: my partner, Britta.

  Finally, thanks for reading, Comrades.

  I endeavour to remain

  Your most humble and obedient writer,

  Ian Hocking

  Canterbury, UK

  March 24, 2013

  Looking Glass (Book Four)—Draft Preview

  Chapter One

  The Mid-21st Century: Krk, in the Bay of Kvarner, Adriatic

  When Beckmann awoke in the darkness of his bedroom, he touched his heart. He had flown to China the previous winter and paid a military doctor for an illegal medical nanotechnology called i-Core. The doctor, though bought off with an Edvard Munch, had grumbled during the procedure. He described i-Core as a parasite. He cited the death of America as a side effect of humanity’s love for technology. Beckmann had a notion that he would sit on a fucking tapeworm if he thought it would smooth the jagged beats of his heart. He was an old man, could afford the i-Core, and gave not a damn about international regulations on automaticity.

  He remembered the ampoule of golden i-Core on the workbench of Dr Hsieh. Outside, it had been snowing darkly.

  Beckmann’s hand remained on his chest.

  He heard the distant report of a gunshot, which was not uncommon these days when the wind was in the east. T
he noise carried across the Adriatic to the high window of this bedroom, penetrating the armoured glass.

  This prompted a thought of his last, disbanded employer, the Föderatives Investigationsbüro. The organisation had been replaced months after his retirement by another with a different three-letter acronym but the same brief, a budget blacker than black, and military oversight in place of civilian.

  Dr Hsieh had used a hypodermic syringe. It was an anachronistic tool. Just like, Beckmann supposed, his FIB agents had been. One, the Moscow Section operative Klutikov, had joined Beckmann in his retirement, and now supervised the security of this clifftop compound. Another, Brandt, had disappeared in the twenties, along with the reclusive John Hartfield. Beckmann had only one clue to her whereabouts: a photograph taken in St Petersburg in the 1900s. It showed a shopping arcade. In the foreground, Saskia Brandt stood in the clothes of the day, her expression unabashed. She seemed to be looking at the camera; at Beckmann. No more photographs of her had been found. He had it mounted in one of the upper hallways.

  There were times when Beckmann could outpace his anxiety at Brandt’s disappearance, but they were seldom. He was a political man. He had an instinct for anything that weakened him. His ignorance of Brandt’s whereabouts was one such weakness. She was, with luck, long-dead of tuberculosis, a slit throat, or the madness that time travel would surely inflame. But if that chip at the back of her brain had survived in a grave and was found, and reverse-engineered, then the law would come to Beckmann on his comfortable little Croatian island, and the charges would make a Class A nanotechnology possession look like littering. The FIB had bent more than one law and indentured its agents under the quasi-legal status of the Richter Ruling. That charge was inescapable. It didn’t matter that Beckmann was following orders.

  Hand on heart.

  There had been—how many?—nine of those self-interfacing cerebral chips. Each had been the size of the pills he used to take for his circulation before the i-Core became his one treatment. It had been the Hartfield Foundation that had pushed for their application in law enforcement. The risk had been great, and not just to those sorry criminals whom Beckmann had picked by hand. In truth, nobody understood how those glass lozenges worked. Nobody understood how it was possible for them to work. And nobody, as far as Beckmann could discover, knew where they had come from.