The Ocean of Time

by David Wingrove

  No. I’m convinced of it. He wouldn’t even have thought to look.

  Yes, but what about his brother? Surely he’d have cross-referenced it somewhere?

  Surely they had some kind of index, to make all that information more accessible?

  But then again, why? If those timestreams were done with and left to rot …

  Maybe that’s why he evaded us. Why he was such a mystery all that while. Not that he’s any less of a mystery now.

  I arrive breathless at the Doktor’s door, to find the other three waiting for me patiently. Schultz even smiles at me as I hand him the files.

  ‘Thanks, Otto. Leave this to me from now on. It’s time we taught these insolent bastards a lesson.’

  I’m surprised, because it’s almost certain that the Doktor, seated in his room the other side of the door and looking on via his camera, hears what Schultz says. But if so, he doesn’t react to it, because when the door swings back and we enter, it’s to find him crossing the room with his hands outstretched, as if to greet an old friend, a beaming smile on his face.

  ‘Auguste, it’s been a long time.’

  And I realise with a start just what this means. Schultz was a student here. He is a product of the Akademie.

  ‘Herr Doktor,’ Schultz says, and bows low, even as we three, standing behind him, do the same.

  ‘What do you want?’ the Doktor asks as he straightens up, giving Schultz the respect he never showed me. ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘It isn’t good,’ Schultz answers him. ‘It’s never good. But I must have them all gathered. They must see this. Remember it.’

  The Doktor nods, subdued. ‘It shall be done. But come now, let’s share a drink. To olden times …’

  So it is, with the taste of brandy in my throat, I find myself standing up on the stage once more, only this time behind Schultz and his two assistants, as he looks out over a sea of shaven heads. There is an atmosphere of fear now in that massive space between the buildings, and as Schultz steps forward a chill silence falls.

  When he speaks, his voice is strong and deep. It carries to the very back of that gathered crowd, echoing back from the walls of the buildings.

  ‘I stand before you today not as a single man – not as an individual, acting as an individual – but as a representative of the State. A servant of the Fatherland. Indeed, we are all of us here servants of the State, and as such fulfil perhaps the highest purpose to which we might aspire. Today, however, we are here on a matter of the most serious nature; a matter that touches the very core of our social being.’

  Schultz looks about him, his cold, clear gaze raking them like the brightest, most penetrating light.

  ‘As a society we must always look to one another. Always recognise that while each has his task, his role within the greater fate of the nation, there is a common goal, a unity, to all our efforts. When that unity is broken – deliberately, maliciously – then it is our duty, one might almost say our sacred task, to root out the source of that breach, that corruption, and, by whatever means, cleanse the social being. Should we fail, should we even hesitate to act, then, like a disease in the very marrow of the bone, that disease will spread. The bone will rot and the body will fall.’

  Schultz pauses, hovering on the edge now, close to revealing who is to be punished and why, and the mass of boys below him know that, and there’s a kind of dark expectancy among them. They have heard this speech before and have seen what follows, and though some are fearful, many more are secretly excited at this moment, for the great, all-encompassing power of the State is about to be expressed, corruption rooted out and the unjust punished.

  Schultz nods slowly. ‘Have no illusions. We must have no mercy for those who transgress our laws. As a society, we cannot afford to be merciful. Mercy is only for the weak. For the feeble-minded who lack clarity of vision. Mercy is the tool of our enemies. And so we must not think of being merciful. We must think only of cleansing the race. Of how, through this act, the volk grows stronger and more certain of its ultimate victory.’

  Schulz makes no sign or gesture, yet as he says those words, so his two assistants step out, away from him, heading for the steps that lead down into the massed ranks of the boys, one to the left, one to the right, moving with a determined gait.

  Schultz’s voice booms out. ‘Francke, Roland Francke, where are you, boy?’

  There’s a moment’s silence, and then a hand goes up near the front, over to the left, and a voice, frail, struggling to be brave, answers him.

  ‘I am here, Meister!’

  ‘And Baeck, Leo Baeck, speak up!’

  Again a hand goes up, further back, somewhere in the middle. ‘Here, Master!’

  ‘Good. Make yourselves known to my men.’

  I swallow, my mouth dry, knowing suddenly what’s to come.

  Their fathers are traitors – caught passing secrets to the Russians – and as the boys are led, their hands manacled behind their backs, up on to the stage, so Schultz speaks on, spelling out their wickedness, such that the two boys half stumble up the steps, their faces shocked and bewildered, and on to the stage, unable to believe that it is their fathers Schultz is speaking of.

  Traitors. Enemies of the State. And therefore, by association, their sons are also traitors, for it is all genetic, after all. The rottenness is in the genes. Ineradicable. Best then to cauterise it, to remove the genes from the racial pool.

  The boys – sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds – are half pulled, half pushed towards Schultz, his two assistants brutal now, forcing the young men down on to their knees before the Inspector. Necks are craning now, down there in the mass below us. There’s a low buzz and boys are breaking their neat ranks, straining to get a better view.

  ‘Roland Francke,’ Schultz says, looking down at the bowed head of the first boy, even as he pulls the heavy gun from its holster. ‘You have been sentenced by the court to die. Have you anything to say?’

  But young Francke is too petrified to speak, and as Schultz presses the muzzle of the gun against his temple, he pisses himself.

  The gunshot makes us all jump, it is so loud. There’s a spray of blood and bone and the body slumps and topples to one side.

  Schultz steps across, his cloak billowing out momentarily, his booted feet the last thing young Baeck will ever see.

  ‘Leo Baeck. You too have been sentenced by the court to die. Have you anything to say?’

  ‘No, Meister.’

  His calmness surprises me and I take a step towards him, yet even as I do, the gun goes off again.

  Schultz slips the gun back into the holster, then steps past the two bodies. Blood pools beneath his feet. He takes a deep breath and addresses the audience again.

  ‘Good. We are almost done now. But we have one final piece of business to attend to. One last matter that must be resolved.’

  He turns and looks to me, then turns back. ‘Paul Woolf … come up here.’

  I open my mouth, then shut it again. He can’t, surely. The investigation’s incomplete, and besides, nothing’s been proved. Nothing can be proved. Yet I have a sudden gut certainty that Schultz means to settle it right here and now, whatever the state of the evidence. I know that he hasn’t read the file, he hasn’t had time, only time enough to memorise Woolf’s name.

  Woolf comes slowly, reluctantly up the steps and on to the stage, and whatever I felt about him, facing him earlier, I feel pity for him now, for Schultz is relentless. He might as well be the figure of death itself, standing there in his black cloak and shining black boots, his face stern like the face of an ancient statue.

  Woolf approaches to within a couple of paces and then stops, bowing his head low. ‘Meister Schultz.’

  Schultz studies the boy, almost as if he can see guilt, and then he speaks in that booming, commanding voice of his. ‘You have two choices, Herr Woolf. You can confess and save your family, or you can die anyway, and your family will die with you.’

  ‘But—’

&n
bsp; It is not Woolf, but I who says that ‘but’. Schultz turns and glares at me, then turns back to young Woolf.

  ‘Well?’

  Woolf is trembling. He cannot speak, let alone make a decision. Schultz draws the gun.

  ‘Stop it!’ I yell. ‘For Urd’s sake!’

  The gunshot startles me. I can’t believe he’s done it. I feel sick, because – foul as young Woolf was to me – he wasn’t guilty. He hadn’t done anything. Not anything to die for, anyway.

  Everyone’s looking at me now, staring at me, like I’ve done something wrong.

  ‘Herr Scholl,’ Schultz says, turning to me, the gun still in his hand. ‘Have you something to say?’

  But I’ve nothing to say, except, perhaps, how foul this age is, how perverse its values, and, turning away, I hurry from the stage.

  312

  I have packed my case and am ready to depart when the young servant comes to me again, the same who met me on the walkway the previous night.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says.

  I’m not sure I want to, but I follow anyway, down the main stairwell and left, along a narrow corridor I’ve not been down before. At the end there’s a short flight of steps, leading down to a small, metallic door set into a bare brick wall.

  We go through, into a narrow, dimly lit corridor.

  ‘What is this place?’

  But he doesn’t answer, just sets off down the passageway, as if it’s my choice whether to follow him or not.

  I follow.

  We go left and then sharp right and come to a narrow wooden door, set into the hacked stone of the wall. Facing it, I find my heart is racing.

  The young man stands aside. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Go in. He’s waiting for you.’

  That’s what I fear. My hand moves toward my chest. I look down at it, then lower it again. My palms are damp.

  There’s no handle, so I push it open, The room is poorly lit – a cell of a room – not that I can see anything at first. There’s a kind of narrow hallway before it opens out, to my right. And there, sitting on a chair beside a bed, is one of them – one of Kolya’s ‘brothers’, a big man in his mid-thirties, long-haired and with that prominent, balding brow they all seem to possess. He’s like Kolya, only he lacks the intensity, lacks his eyes.

  I stand before him, noticing only then that the boy is also there, curled up on the bed behind him, facing the wall.

  I try to seem confident, but my nerves are on edge.

  ‘What do you want?’ I ask.

  ‘To tell you—’

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘That you can’t touch us. Do you understand that, Otto? We’re way ahead of you. We know everything you do. We know when you do it, and why. As for tracking us down …’ He laughs. ‘Kolya let you meet us. Me and the boy. He wanted you to. So that you’d understand.’

  ‘Understand?’

  ‘That he’s not afraid of you. Despite what your people did to him.’ He smiles. ‘Oh, he knows that you know that now. The book … he knows about that. But that too will be reversed. Everything will be reversed, in the end.’

  ‘Then why is he so angry?’

  ‘Angry?’

  ‘At Krasnogorsk.’

  The man shrugs. He clearly knows nothing about Krasnogorsk.

  ‘Tell him …’ I begin. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in the loop.’

  And with that I jump. Back to Four-Oh. Back to chaos.

  313

  There’s the smell of cordite in that big, circular room, and over to the side, a group of the women have left their posts to huddle around another of them, who is down, clutching her arm. As I go across to them, Zarah looks up from among them, shock in her face.

  ‘Otto! He was here! Kolya was here!’

  If I hadn’t come straight from where I’d come from, I might have laughed in disbelief, only right now I think he’s capable of anything – even of jumping right in here, on to our platform, with his DNA.

  By rights he should be dead, scattered into a billion little pieces, like the fake Burckel I brought back that time. Only he isn’t.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask, crouching over the injured girl. It’s Leni, I see. ‘Why did he shoot her?’

  Leni swallows, then. ‘I tried to grab him. I leapt up on to the platform and—’

  ‘There’s a note,’ Zarah said, and shakes her head in wonder. ‘He jumped in just to leave you a note!’

  She hands it to me.

  It’s just a single sheet of folded paper. I unfold it and read.

  Otto.

  Time isn’t safe for you any more. What’s more, I have that which is most precious to you. Your family. You will not see them again; not unless I choose to show them to you. To make you burn inside, the way you made me burn. Ah, but I forget. You don’t remember that, do you? It isn’t in the book. But ask Hecht’s brother, sometime.

  I’m sure he has it somewhere among his papers.

  Yours in hatred,

  Kolya.

  To say that I am chilled by what I read is to understate it. My blood goes cold with fear. I look to Zarah and her eyes show that she has read it and knows what I am feeling at that moment. Or thinks she knows. Because this is awful; this feels like death itself. Forget the bigger questions that his note throw up – how Kolya knows and does these things – it is his blunt statement that he has them that destroys me.

  ‘I have to go,’ I say to Zarah quietly. ‘I have to try to see them.’

  And what’s to stop me? If I jump in before I left … Only even as I make to ask Zarah to do just that, the platform activates behind us and I turn to see Ernst materialise in the air, his face as shocked as ours, his eyes bleak. He looks close to breaking down, and his voice, when he speaks, shakes, heavy with grief.

  ‘Oh, my dear, dear friend. Oh, Otto, Urd save us, you’ve got to come and see. The things they’ve done. The things they’ve done …’

  314

  We jump in, into the trees behind the ‘Hump’, Cherdiechnost spread out below us. And what a scene of desolation it makes. Fires are burning everywhere. A great pall of thick black smoke drifts slowly in the wind. And the dead …

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask Ernst, the words the merest breath. ‘How …?’

  But Ernst doesn’t answer. He seems as shocked as I am. And that’s understandable, because only a day has passed here since I left, since I was taken back to Four-Oh.

  And this …

  ‘Kolya,’ I say, but Ernst shakes his head.

  ‘No, Otto. This was Nevsky. Come. You’ll see.’

  Only I don’t want to see. My heart is breaking. Because, even from where we stand, I can see the bodies, strewn here and there, lifeless, across the burning fields, and running through my head is the thought that my girls – even Katerina – could be among them. That I could stumble on them …

  The thought of it robs my legs of strength.

  ‘I can’t … I …’

  But I know I must. This is no time to give in to weakness. If anything can be done …

  Only I can see with my own eyes how complete the devastation is. Barely a single house is untouched, not a structure unmarked.

  Slowly, side by side, guns drawn, we walk down the slope towards it. I feel sick. I feel, well, suffice to say that nothing in my long and oft-bloody career has prepared me for this. Because these are my friends, people I loved. And as we go, we pass first one and then another of those loving, happy people, and every last one of them is dead, bloodily disfigured, men, women and children: what did it matter to Nevsky who they were? All that mattered was our defiance. And from seeing it, an anger begins to burn in me. An anger the like of which I have never felt before. An anger that threatens to consume me, just as the flames consume Cherdiechnost.

  But the worst is to come. We cut across to the right, making for Razumovsky’s half-completed house. I make to go inside, but Ernst pulls me back.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to see.’

  But I do.
In those few moments since we descended from the Hump I have swung the other way. Now I have to see. For my revenge, I swear, will be terrible, and so I must. Even so, what I do see makes me groan; makes my heart break again, for there is my father-in-law, that big, larger-than-life man with his great black beard and his fierce ways, dead in his own bed, his young wife beside him, their throats cut, the sheets stained black with their blood.

  Outside, I fall to my knees. I must see. Only I’m not sure I am strong enough to bear what I might see. Fear grips me now, and as I raise my eyes and look across to the big house and see the flames that still climb into the air from it, I wonder how I shall bear it, seeing the unseeable. How can I possibly go on living if life itself has been taken from me?

  Crossing those few hundred yards is the most difficult thing I have ever done, because my head is filled with dark imaginings, with pictures beyond enduring, and so to find the house abandoned, empty, is a numbing surprise.

  I turn to Ernst. ‘Do you think …’ I swallow. ‘Do you think he’s taken them?’

  ‘Nevsky?’

  Ernst thinks a moment and then shrugs. His eyes meet mine. ‘What shall we do, Otto? How shall we …?’

  But he doesn’t finish. A shout has gone up, from over near the mill. We run down towards it and see, emerging from one of the grain stores, three villagers. Our people.

  The miller, Terekhov, and his wife and daughter.

  Seeing us, all three of them fall to their knees.

  ‘Meister …’

  ‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘Was it Nevsky?’

  ‘They came in the night, Meister,’ Terekhov says. ‘Hundreds of them, on horseback. They started putting houses to the torch and killing anyone who ventured outside.’

  ‘And Katerina and my girls?’

  Terekhov drops his head. ‘I … I didn’t see, Meister. They were killing everyone. Everyone.’

  So I’ve seen. But Nevsky. How did Nevsky get here so quickly? Unless …

  Unless he was here, in Novgorod, already. Unless that small troupe of his men who ventured out here were part of a much larger force.