The Master of Time

by David Wingrove

  I smile. ‘Not all of them.’

  He stares at me now, as if he’s making some kind of decision, and then he looks past me, towards the bar and the tavern keeper.

  ‘Tom … bring me paper and ink. I’ve work to do.’

  486

  Shakespeare looks up at me and slowly nods. But it’s not me he’s seeing. No. Right now there’s some other landscape in his mind. He’s come alive, like someone’s wired him up and plugged him in.

  That someone being me.

  For the past hour we’ve been talking about the endless things I’ve seen, and if at first he wasn’t entirely convinced, the more he’s heard the more he’s relaxed his resistance to the notion that I was actually there amid the carnage of the battlefield. It’s the fine detail that has won him over, as much as the long-healed scar tissue. That and the fact that I was actually there in many cases.

  Because there’s no more convincing a lie than the one presented by a man who’s telling the truth.

  Only right now it’s not the battles that he’s interested in – after all, where’s the drama in a battlefield? No. What Will is fascinated by is the persistence of the old religions among my fellow mercenaries. In particular, he loves my tales of Odin and the Norse Gods, all of which are absolutely new to him.

  ‘This World Tree … what’s the significance of that?’

  Again I smile. It’s not even as if I have to try hard. And so I tell him about Yggdrasil, the eternally green ash tree, and about Asgard, home of the gods, and know that I have hooked him, like a fish. Even so, he still has doubts.

  ‘I love it. This is all wonderful. Only … how am I going to fit all of this together? How structure it? How give it shape and form and dramatic beauty?’

  ‘That’s easy,’ I say, wondering even as I say it that I might end by regretting this. ‘You set it in the future … and in the past.’

  Will stares back at me, then bursts into laughter. ‘You’re joking!’

  Only I’m not.

  And so we begin to put together a crude structure of the play. The potions that they drink to go forward or backward in Time. The disease-free future society, which our scurvy hero from the Present Day, unknown to himself, infects, causing a deadly, debilitating plague. The villain with the two heads and the strange monk-like villain, whom I name Kolya.

  This last confuses Will. ‘Why have two villains, Otto? One is surely enough.’

  Only I claim it isn’t, and as I gradually put flesh on the bones of these two different characters, so Will slowly changes his mind.

  In fact, so excited is Will at this notion of setting the work both in a time that has long gone and one which is yet to come, that he begins to consider other connected matters. Like time paradoxes. Things that, had I not opened the door to them in the walls of his skull, would have lain dormant in human consciousness for another four centuries at the very least.

  ‘Yes,’ Will says finally, when I ask him whether he thinks it will work. ‘Most definitely yes. Only … what do I call it?’

  I tell him and he smiles.

  ‘Of Time and Tides,’ he whispers. Then, gathering all of his papers together, he hurries away.

  To write the thing, I realise. My work here, it seems, is done.

  Only I find now that I’m trembling, my hands shaking at the thought of the changes in thinking this will cause; just how radically it might influence the timeline we are in.

  How? I don’t know how. But it will. I’m certain of it now. And as I think that, I wonder also if this is why Kolya is here. To prevent this.

  Only surely that can’t be. Because, knowing our ‘friend’, he’d already have acted to erase it.

  Or is that so?

  What if he too wants this, for reasons of his own?

  And as I think it, a great wash of understanding lifts me and carries me ashore.

  This is it! This play was what gave our old enemy Kolya both the notion and the practical scientific basis of time travel!

  My pulse is racing now; my heart thudding in my chest, because this – as much as Gehlen’s equations – brought our world about. This isn’t just a play, an entertainment, it’s a theory. Who knows what theory, exactly, but one that worked. One that allowed Kolya access to a thousand worlds. That opened up the Tree of Worlds to everyone … but particularly to him.

  Yes, simply by bringing the idea of it into the forum of human thought, at some stage someone invented it. The lazy eight. There in the tarot cards and there all along – or so it seemed – in my long unhealthy dealings with the man.

  All of it spawned by Shakespeare’s words.

  I let out a long breath, then slowly nod. No wonder he is here. Not meddling this time, but preserving. Keeping us from changing this particular strand of Time.

  Which begs the question, should we be interfering here? Changing things to prevent change? Or is it all too late?

  If so, then why am I here again?

  Sitting there in the minutes following Will’s departure, I realise that I need to see Albrecht again, and Old Schnorr, and perhaps myself. To find out just what’s going on and why we seem to be collaborating with our enemy. For what else is it?

  I stand, then, making my way across the crowded room, venture out – out into the cold, wet dark – and jump. Back to Moscow Central and, I hope, some explanation for it all.

  487

  Only I have to be naïve to think that they have the vaguest idea about what’s been going on. Albrecht, particularly, is bemused by what’s been happening. He’s used to knowing precisely what’s transpired, even if at such a vast temporal distance, but the idea of all this new stuff turning up out of the blue just throws him totally. And the further notion that Kolya is behind it all … Well, that’s just not possible, is it?

  And I don’t mean that he came up with the idea, only that he stole it, sometime in the past. Or had Reichenau steal it for him, back when Reichenau was still alive. The same way he stole both Gehlen and his equations.

  Which is where all of this gets complex. If it wasn’t already.

  Albrecht takes me inside the vaults and sits me down and has me look at what he’s prepared for me: one hundred and seven trips, in sequential order.

  I’ve only been studying the pile for a minute when I look up at him. ‘What is this? Seven seconds?’

  ‘There’re a lot that are shorter than that. That’s when we dragged you out of there. After he’d killed you.’

  He doesn’t have to say who. I flick through the next dozen or so ‘reports’, finding little difference between them.

  I say that, but then I look again. The timeline every one of them is in is … well, different doesn’t come near describing it.

  ‘So how did he know? How did he … anticipate?’

  Only I realise, even as I say it, that these are the questions I have always asked about Kolya. I have never understood how he’s always there, one step in front of me, anticipating my every move.

  Like a savant or a mind-reader. Or has it … might it just be … a reading of the cards?

  No. Even I’m not crazy enough to believe that my life is being dictated by the fall of the cards in a tarot pack. That everything I’ve done has been foreshadowed.

  It can’t be so.

  So what then? Because there has to be an explanation that fits. One that … explains.

  And if there isn’t? If it proves just to be a madhouse? A malfunction of time itself?

  What then do we do with the remainder of our lives? How live within the walls of bedlam?

  One hundred and seven journeys back. And in how many of those did I die? Five-sixths of them, Albrecht tells me, and Old Schnorr nods in his familiar fashion.

  ‘It was why you were always special to him,’ Old Schnorr says, after a moment.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘To Meister Hecht.’

  I give an odd laugh. ‘But Meister Hecht didn’t know. This was … after his time.’

  ‘It was and it
wasn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Albrecht takes it up. ‘I mean that he came here once, when I wasn’t here. I was having an operation and, well, anyway, he came here on his own. It was the only time. So if he saw them, he saw them then, and then destroyed them … or hid them, more like … and then made one single change, right at the beginning of this sequence, and by doing so erased it from my mind. Until the records were retrieved, that was.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And here we are,’ Old Schnorr says. ‘Back at the beginning. When it was all fresh to you. Before all that other nonsense.’

  I hesitate, then. ‘You said there were four that ran full length. Four in which I wasn’t killed and therefore presumably wasn’t attacked.’

  ‘That’s so,’ Albrecht says. ‘They’re near the end. In fact, they form the bulk of the reports.’

  ‘Then leave them to me. I’ll be out when I’m done.’

  488

  As I stand there at the water’s edge, I wonder where all this will end. The tide is slowly coming in, covering the mudflats that edge the ancient Thames. As for London itself, it’s just a blur in the fine mist of rain that’s falling.

  London, 1609. How strange it is to be here once again, at this time and in this place, waiting for something new to be born into the world.

  It’s all a mess. I know that now. All our meticulously careful schemes have come to nothing. Or as good as.

  And now I wait. For whom? I do not ask. For whoever comes now, whether it be Will or the man himself, I feel it’s fated. Yes, it all went wrong not in these last few years but long ago. And who can change it now? Not he and not I.

  In fact it’s Will who comes, making his way through the early morning rain, his papers hidden away under his cloak, to keep from getting soaked.

  ‘Come,’ he says, and while he looks tired, his eyes are more alive than I’ve ever seen them. ‘Upstairs in the Rose. Now!

  We make our way, climbing the old stairs at the back to the private room. There, having shaken off his coat, he unfolds the papers and turns them toward me so I can read his handwritten manuscript.

  It’s clearly a rather large play, and, by the look of it – the absence of scrawled changes on each page – he wrote it fairly cleanly.

  ‘It needs a scene or two,’ he says, waving his hand over it, ‘but otherwise …’

  Otherwise it reads wonderfully. I’m six pages in before I look up at him and smile. He grins back, then nods, encouraging me to read on.

  I read on. Act One is fluent and sets up the ideas with a sparkling clarity I have never encountered before now. I’m tempted to say that he understands Time and its qualities, only …

  Only there are things that he gets totally wrong. Not many but … enough to dissatisfy anyone – like I – who has spent any time in Time.

  Act Two raises the stakes and introduces our villains. There are some comic interludes, too, which make me laugh quite openly before settling to the text once more.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I say, as I come to the last page of it – the scene that sets up Act Three. ‘You took that from me, yes?’

  ‘Verbatim,’ he says and nods to me, as if thanking me for my gift. But I can only think how he’s transformed it. Turned life into art, yes, and great art at that. If this doesn’t spur someone on to invent time travel, then what the fuck will?

  Act Four slows, for here the plot takes hold, twisting and turning, hiding and revealing until there, in the penultimate scene – after the plague our hero has unwittingly spread – the two dead lovers are brought on stage on the cart, there at Krasnogorsk. There at that evil place where life and art collide. And I wipe a tear away and look up and see him watching me and know that this is it, his greatest play. Written in a single night, after drinking with a man who ought never to have been there. A man yet to be born.

  I finish it even as the bells begin to sound outside. Two o’clock it is. Back in the Globe they’ll be playing out that pile of shit he gave them yesterday, while this …

  ‘We should do it,’ I say. ‘Now.’

  ‘But I thought …’

  ‘No. Do a reading, at the least. Then get some copies made. As it is. We can rehearse it overnight, while you catch up on your sleep. Then we can perform it tomorrow. Invite your new patron along. I know he’ll love it.’

  ‘If he understands it, that is.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll understand it, all right. Those arguments … they’re the best you’ve written.’

  ‘You think?’ I can see, for that brief moment, how insecure he’s been these last few months. But now …

  ‘It’s a masterpiece,’ I say. ‘And no flattery intended.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he says and laughs, then leans across and takes my arm. ‘But your name must be on it with mine, Otto. The scenes you gave me … for instance, that one where he meets Katerina for the first time … and you end up jumping through Time again and again, killing Kravchuk, time after time …’

  I look down. ‘You should change her name, perhaps. Make it more English.’

  ‘You think?’ Only he doesn’t look convinced. ‘I’m tempted to leave that be. But there is one rather big loose end I need to resolve, and that’s the fate of Kolya. Should I kill him, Otto, or does he live to scheme another day?’

  I meet his eyes, then shrug. ‘Give him a poem, maybe. Right at the very end. I mean … end the play itself on a triumphant tone by all means … but then clear the stage as if things were done, then re-introduce Kolya. Like some stock stage villain, only … not so. Present him as something a lot more threatening. Like a madman with a razor in his hand. Someone the audience will still be thinking of when all else is done.’

  ‘You think so?’ And he goes all thoughtful, his eyes staring inward. ‘Maybe …’

  ‘Then go. Get some sleep. I’ll get twelve copies of this done.’

  ‘Twelve copies? But I thought …’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ve come into some money. I heard last night, after you’d gone up. I would have said something, only …’

  ‘Who died?’ he asks.

  ‘An uncle. I didn’t think he liked me, but …’

  Shakespeare raises his eyebrows, then begins to laugh. ‘How life changes in a day, neh, my friend? Then let’s do as you say and get twelve copies done … fifteen if you can afford it. And I’ll do as you’ve told me to. I’ll get some sleep. I’m sure it can’t be hard.’ And he laughs again.

  489

  We stand there, Will and I, watching as the players speak their lines, their fellows crowded about the stage, hanging on to every uttered word, every last one of them knowing that this is it, Will’s finest play. Necks strain, eyes focus. There’s sudden laughter from a dozen throats and then a sharply indrawn breath.

  They’re hooked. They’re fucking hooked.

  And our would-be sponsor? I turn and look and see how he too is caught up in this glittering spider’s web of words as, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, he slowly nods to himself as the play rolls on, unstoppable, like the incoming tide.

  Will presses close, his mouth to my ear. ‘Well? What do you think?’

  I half turn and, gripping his elbow, smile and nod. This – written in haste and at a single sitting – is strangely beyond words. It isn’t simply what is said, it’s what the words allow us to glimpse … in that lies its magic. And in that regard it is truly magical.

  I shiver, the hairs on my arms and neck rising. ‘Don’t change a word,’ I say. Only I know he will. For having got this far …

  I stop dead. I’d not noticed him before, but now I do, on the far side of the great half circle of the stage.

  Kolya …

  Will senses my sudden change of mood. Follows the direction of my eyes.

  Only in the instant between me spotting him and Will turning to look, the man has jumped. Vacated the air, as Will terms it in his play.

  What?’ he asks, concerned.

  Only how to explain?

  I imp
rovise a line. ‘I need to go,’ I say. ‘I’ve just remembered …’

  ‘Remembered?’

  ‘I’ve a meeting. Regarding my uncle’s estate. I’ll be half an hour, an hour at most. Wait here. I’ll be back.’

  And I turn away, conscious of his eyes on me as I depart.

  Exiting the gate I look about me … then jump.

  ‘Otto …’ Old Schnorr says, looking up from the desk, clearly expecting me. ‘You saw him then? At the rehearsal?’

  ‘I … Yes. Yes, I did.’

  ‘And did you notice how young he was?’

  I take a moment to think. Did I? I hesitate. ‘I … I’m not sure I did. Just seeing him there was a shock.’

  ‘I understand. Only it’s important. Close your eyes and focus, Otto. What did you see?’

  I close my eyes. He’s there for the smallest flash, then gone. ‘Yeah, maybe. I …’

  Only I’m not sure. The only thing I’m certain about is that it was him. Kolya. But beyond that …

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  I shake my head. The Kolya I saw could not have been only seventeen. His eyes, for a start. They were so experienced. Like he’d seen everything and done everything. Whereas I …

  That first time I encountered him – when I was ‘cutting my teeth’, back before I was Reisende – I could only have been eighteen, maybe nineteen at most. And naïve. As unpractised as a newborn.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘You took a step outside,’ he answers. ‘We even lost you for a time. And I mean lost. No trace of you. And then – days later – you came back. You flickered back into existence and we snatched you back. Before he could get to you. In less than an instant. That was Ernst’s doing. He stayed awake all that while. Sat there with his hand over the response pad, waiting for the smallest glimmer of you on the screen.’

  ‘And he reacted quicker than Kolya, yes?’

  Old Schnorr hesitates, then. ‘He guessed. And – impossibly – he guessed right. And there you were, saved.’

  ‘Ernst,’ I say and smile. ‘I should have guessed. But where’s Kolya now? Where would I find him?’