The Master of Time

by David Wingrove

  ‘What if they’re dead already, Otto? What if this is just another trap? Or some trick to get his freedom?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I concede, and it’s a huge concession. ‘Only I have to risk that. All I know is that I’m not even thinking of leaving them captive. Not for an instant.’

  And so it is. Only, sympathetic as they are, they have grown weary of this pursuit, and now that we have him in our grasp, it would make more sense to ‘deal’ with him at once, before, Loki-like, he tricks his way out of things once again.

  As it is, I win the vote – if only by the most slender of majorities – and, while Reichenau is kept in his cell, agents are sent out to prepare the ‘exile’ world.

  Katerina, meanwhile, has taken to her bed. ‘Exhaustion,’ Old Schnorr says, looking up from her bedside. ‘She overdid it, Otto. You can’t blame her, I’d have done the same, but it was too much, too soon. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with her, but she needs to rest. Those months as a slave depleted her. The last few days she’s been running on empty.’

  I sit there, across from Schnorr, and place my hand over hers. She’s sleeping – drugged up to the eyeballs, so Meister Schnorr says.

  It’s while I’m sitting there, alone with her, watching her chest gently rise and fall in the dim light of the room, that young Saratov comes, bringing news.

  It’s bad. The very worst. And when he’s gone, I sit there, stunned, staring down at the document he brought.

  I’m still there when she wakes. She squeezes my hand and smiles.

  ‘Otto. How long …?’

  ‘Oh, a long while.’

  She seems surprised. She’s about to say something more, but I stop her.

  ‘Listen,’ I say, putting a finger gently to her lips. ‘Word has come.’

  ‘Word?’ The smile has gone from her lips.

  ‘Reichenau is dead. Murdered in his cell. And Freisler has fled.’

  I look up, seeing the pain in her eyes. Knowing that she knows what this means. That we might never see our girls again.

  ‘What’s to be done?’ she asks, her voice a whisper, the first tear rolling down her face. Only then it hits her. There might actually be a way. She starts forward, gripping my hands.

  ‘But we can jump back, surely, Otto? Go back in time and prevent it?’

  ‘Normally, yes. Only …’

  ‘Only?’

  ‘Only Moseley’s document says this is all part of the greater loop. A crucial part. Change it and certain things will not happen.’

  Katerina stares at me. ‘What?’

  And I realise that she knows nothing about Moseley and the Great Men project, nor even the greater loop. I might just as well have spoken in ge’not for all she understands.

  And so I begin at the beginning, with the scheme to create the think tank to end all think tanks, and our kidnap of history’s greatest thinkers. Which in itself is difficult, because the whole notion of great men – of men who are philosophers and mathematicians and little else – is totally alien to a young woman from thirteenth-century Novgorod, where trade and naked power is all they understand.

  ‘So what’s actually in that?’ she asks, pointing to the document in my lap.

  ‘Loose ends,’ I say.

  And that’s pretty much the truth. Because what they’ve done – and with no consultation with me – is to go back to the Haven and trawl through everything and anything that had to do with Katerina and me … alongside anything relating to Reichenau and Kolya – looking for those things that have not been tied up. Those parts where the loop seems to have been broken.

  Quite literally, for loose ends.

  It was in the process of doing this that they discovered that Reichenau was no longer active in Time. That the fewer and fewer ‘new’ appearances he made were all linked to the past. Nothing new was happening to him. Not only that, but the more they looked, the more they saw how intricately he was tied-in to the loop Katerina and I had begun, like the cement between the bricks.

  And, having stumbled upon that notion, they took it further and started making a chart – something far more ambitious than the one I’d sketched out on that big sheet of paper – to include all of this, whether it was tied-in tightly or just existed separately, loosely you might say.

  Moseley had explained it to me. How they had started with the very simplest of charts. With all the familiar stuff. The stuff they knew connected. And how, day by day, they had added more, making the thing more complex, more subtle, more … alive.

  Reichenau, it seemed, was dead, and he was going to stay dead. Time-dead, as we’re accustomed to calling it. Resurrect him and – so our experts claimed, and who was I to contradict them? – it would all unravel. Imagine rope bridges falling slowly into endless chasms and you get a rough idea of it.

  And Kolya? Of him there wasn’t a trace. Not beyond what we already had. And since Reichenau’s death there was no way of tracing him, except …

  Except through that part of the loop that went to Krasnogorsk.

  To follow or to break the loop. Those, it seemed, were our only options.

  And if we broke it?

  Then chaos would descend. Complications the like of which we could scarce imagine.

  ‘Like what?’ I asked young Saratov.

  ‘Imagine a hall of mirrors, only with each image slightly different, slightly askew from the rest. Imagine realities mixing and merging, the great branches of the tree fusing into one big, broad trunk, within which nothing made sense. Imagine, well, madness itself. Madness as the reality we’re inhabiting. Nothing making any sense at all.’

  ‘And how do they know this?’

  Saratov hesitated, then, in a tremulous voice: ‘Because we’ve glimpsed it. Because we’ve seen the faintest shadows of it, like an after-image on a giant retina.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’ Katerina asks, as I look to her again. ‘Are we to do nothing, Otto? Are you seriously happy with that?’

  And I want to say no. That I am doing something, and that if we follow the loop it must lead us somewhere. Only the loop at some point runs through Krasnogorsk, and if there’s a path that leads on from there, then it’s a path that leads through Death itself, for nothing yet has changed the fact that it is she and I who lay there, dead on the cart.

  But that lies ahead. Right now it’s a question of deciding what to do with Reichenau. As if there really is a choice.

  No. The battle of the Teutoburg Forest was his last great throw of the dice. That’s what they’re saying. And Old Schnorr agrees. The man is dead for good, his head smashed open and no one to put Humpty back together again.

  ‘What if they’re wrong, Otto? What if …?’

  Only I know they’re not. To have no new sightings of him in Time … that’s as clear an indication as we can get.

  I reach out, holding her to me. Only it feels like I’ve betrayed her. That I’ve failed somehow in my duty as a father. And so I have. And, realising that, I feel a sudden hollowness.

  What could I do?

  Only I don’t say that, because I know how she would answer it. She would ask me to defy them, even as I’ve defied them many times before. Only this time it would be futile. One man searching Time, for a needle in a thousand billion haystacks.

  Which is true. Only holding her, listening to her cry, I feel diminished, because I am the one who left his children as hostages to Time.

  Sweet darling girls forgive me.

  But no one hears.

  Part Fourteen

  Loose Ends

  413

  Loose ends. That’s what we’re chasing now. Loose ends.

  Meanwhile, here I am once more, seated in the darkness of Yastryeb’s room, the Tree of Worlds glowing in the space before me as I ponder the strange nature of Time.

  For Time is many things.

  Time is like the surface of a pond, or a river, flowing downhill. Time is an abrader, the force that grounds mountains into dust. Time is an elevator moving betwe
en the years. Time is an arrow, a hunter, a thief, a storm in which we’re lost.

  Time is …

  Time has a thousand qualities, but mostly it’s the thread that holds the universe together. Without it there is no movement in the universe, no birth and no death. Take Time away and the universe would halt, become a single frozen frame.

  Which makes me wonder if what that poor bastard Burckel said, so long ago, has now become the truth of it.

  ‘We act like policemen, Otto. Time cops, when we really ought to be acting like revolutionaries. Undrehungar. We could change things. Really change things. Not piss about meddling in historical events – what good does that do ultimately? The Russians only change it back! No. We need to get to grips with the underlying phenomena, with the infrastructure of history, not the surface froth.’

  How dismissive I was back then. How lacking in insight. Yes, and who would believe that I would one day embrace that madman’s philosophy? None of my past selves, anyway.

  Katerina is in the next room, sleeping the sleep of the deeply hurt, the drained and the despairing. The gods know how hurt, for she has truly cried herself out. Close as I am to her, it’s hard for me to imagine just how much she is hurting; how deep that emotional connection goes. A man might kill for his daughters, but only a mother can love them in the way Katerina loves her girls, with the ferocity of a wild beast.

  And me? Oh, I have shed tears enough these past few months. It has been hard – incredibly hard – living life without them. But then I have always been alone; always one short step away from death.

  Old Schnorr comes to me, but what he has to say is of little help. Kind as he tries to be, how could that old man give me advice? How could he understand what I am going through?

  As for the women – Zarah, Urte and the rest – they have left me alone, convinced, I’m sure, that I would only see their sympathy as another form of meddling in my life. That’s not true, of course, but I can see why they’ve kept their distance. And maybe they’re right to. I’m on something of a short fuse just now, as Ernst found out when he made an appearance as representative of the veche.

  And I’d apologise, only it isn’t his business, and it isn’t for the best.

  Which leaves me here, now, seated before the Tree of Worlds, its many branches pulsing slowly in the darkness. This, until it changes, is reality. This, for good or evil, is the state of things right now.

  Or is it?

  Where, after all, are Kolya’s worlds? Where are the realities to which his time portals connect?

  The truth is we don’t know. Even the one we travelled through, from the Teutoburg Forest to Cherdiechnost, is gone – as if it never was.

  Erased, no doubt, by that pale, ghost-like figure and his ‘brothers’.

  What I do know, however, is that he has access to our worlds. I don’t know how, or where, or when, but simply for him to be in the loop – for him to be there at Krasnogorsk, our pale, lifeless bodies there on his cart – argues for him owning other time-gates, other portals, connecting him to the worlds we operate in.

  I stand and stretch and yawn, then climb, up out of the pit.

  I need to be doing something. To be chasing him down. Only how do I do that when I don’t know where he is?

  There’s Krasnogorsk, of course, but no one wants to go there, me least of all, for fear that we’ll break the loop and it’ll all go collapsing in upon itself. No. Krasnogorsk’s no option. At least, not yet. Not until we’ve exhausted all other possibilities.

  Then what?

  Young Moseley takes the decision out of my hands. ‘Otto,’ he says, coming into the room. ‘We need to consult you.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The manus,’ he says, as if I know what he’s talking about. But he quickly explains. ‘We’ve put a team on it, Otto – a manus, looking into time-phenomena. Aristotle and da Vinci are the main contributors, but Pauli and Planck have given up a lot of their time, if you’ll excuse the pun, and a lot of the weirder stuff has come from them. And then there’s Rosalind …’

  ‘Rosalind?’

  ‘Rosalind Franklin, our DNA specialist. Without her … well, she’s a ruddy marvel at identifying the obvious.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. They’re waiting for you right now.’

  ‘Waiting where?’

  ‘Up ahead.’

  And so we jump. Ahead. To a place I’ve never been before, a full millennium into the future, a place of manicured lawns and high, soaring temples, with a perfect blue sky above. There are no signs of any people, however, not a single one, and when Moseley tells me what year this is, I’m shocked.

  ‘How in Urd’s name?’

  Moseley smiles. ‘We did a little tampering with Gehlen’s equations. They weren’t quite right. That’s why there was a ceiling to your time travelling. That might have been deliberate or not, we don’t know, but … well, come … the others are waiting inside.’

  Inside? Only there doesn’t seem to be an inside. We’re in an open space. And then, a moment, later, we aren’t. Suddenly we’re seated at a big table, Moseley and I and the others, Moseley’s colleagues facing us across the smooth oak tabletop, a view of grassy slopes and snow-capped mountains through a window to our right.

  Aristotle and da Vinci are still dressed in the clothes of their own times, long, flowing silks that make the pair of them look like Grecian gods, but Pauli and Planck are wearing simple black cotton one-pieces, like they’re members of some futuristic club, which I guess is very much the truth of it: the Great Men – and Women – club. As for Rosalind Franklin she too is dressed in black, only her ankle-length dress is made of silk. She’s slender with deep brown eyes and a vaguely aristocratic look about her.

  ‘Gentlemen … Rosalind …’ I say, greeting them, conscious as I do that I’ve barely spent any time with them; that it’s possible that they’re feeling just a tiny bit neglected.

  ‘Otto,’ da Vinci says, in his newly acquired English, the language they’ve chosen for their discussions. ‘We have been looking at the records and … well, there’s a lot that makes no sense. A lot of gaps.’

  ‘Gaps? What, in the loop?’

  ‘In Time itself,’ Aristotle says, his voice stronger, deeper than da Vinci’s, his deeply blue eyes piercing me. ‘Where you and your Russian friends meddled with the event landscape.’ He shakes his head, as if he’s disappointed in me. ‘All these years you’ve been treating Time as if it were indestructible, something robust and resilient, as if it could heal itself, no problem. But that isn’t so. Time is a fragile thing, Otto. Just how fragile we’re only now beginning to understand.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Pauli interjects, before I can object to what’s just been said. He’s a strange little man, Wolfgang Pauli, with the look of a down-at-heel mafia boss, not an expert in quantum physics and spin theory. Black doesn’t suit him, either, and the one-piece merely acts to show up his paunch.

  ‘Looking through the loose ends document,’ he says, ‘we came across numerous instances where damage to the fabric of Time, brought about by deliberate changes in historical events, have caused deeper, longer-term damage.’

  ‘Such as?’

  It’s Rosalind Franklin who takes it up. ‘There are parts of time that have faded, Otto, just as if the fabric of reality has been worn away. Others have stiffened, for want of a better word, grown less elastic, and there’s parts of it that have … well, I don’t know how you’d describe it … but it’s as if reality itself has crumbled and flaked away. And then there are the time winds.’

  ‘Time winds?’

  ‘It’s a new phenomenon. We noticed it first in the photo album you handed on to Moseley,’ da Vinci says, and the modern words seem strange coming from his mouth – anachronistic. ‘You know, the one of you and Katerina travelling in Time. They’re gone, Otto. All of those wonderful images faded almost to nothing, blown away by the winds of time.’

  ‘Gone …?’ I feel a twinge of regret, and al
arm, thinking of those images. Did that mean that those parts of the loop had also gone? Had my access to them, my connection with them, faded just as the photos had faded?

  I ask them directly, and see, from the way they look at each other, that this is something they don’t know. Not yet, anyway.

  ‘We’re re-evaluating things,’ Moseley says. ‘But one thing we’re convinced about is that we need to end this soon. To find Kolya and trap him and … well … end it.’

  To make things right again, I think. To make it stable.

  Only where would Katerina and I be if Time were repaired and made good again? We’d be erased from time, surely? My darling would have been dead a thousand years before I never met her. Not to speak of our five non-existent daughters. And surely they know that? Surely they have discussed these things among them?

  I’m afraid to ask. Because to heal Time they must take my life from me.

  Later, alone with Moseley, he turns to me. ‘We should dispose of him,’ he says, and for the briefest moment I’m uncertain who he means. But then I get his drift.

  ‘Reichenau?’

  ‘Yes. We can’t just leave his body in the morgue.’

  I consider that a moment then nod. While he’s there, in the morgue, there’s always the temptation to bring him back. But there’s an answer to that. A way we can make sure he doesn’t come back to haunt us. And that’s to eject his corpse into the void, into the space between the universes, a space he sure as hell won’t return from.

  Which is what we do, a dozen or more of us – Russians and Germans – gathering to witness the disposal of our old enemy.

  Gone.

  And there’s part of me that’s delighted that the bastard’s dead; that would kill him again a thousand times for all he’s done. But it’s like I’ve said before: without Reichenau, how do we get at Kolya? For there’s no doubting that Reichenau knew something.

  I look to Saratov again. ‘So how do we get at him?’

  ‘Kolya?’ He shrugs. ‘I honestly don’t know. Yet he must make his move, yes? To capture you. To be there in the loop. If we just wait …’