The Master of Time

by David Wingrove

  And suddenly I’m there, the house Schikaneder lives in looming up ahead of me, its windows dark. Quickly, knowing I must be bold, I force the door and, inside, in the hallway, count to ten, getting my breath back before I climb the stairs.

  If I was Kolya, what would I do?

  If I was Kolya. But what if it wasn’t him? What if she was just a thieving whore? Because if he knew that I was coming here …

  If he knew, then he’d have struck again … and again …

  I go up. Past the first two floors and on, up to the very top where Schikaneder lives. And force the door there, waiting outside, listening to hear movement from the rooms below, or from the apartment in front of me.

  Silence. Or the nearest thing to silence. I can hear Schikaneder in his room, snoring away.

  Unless that’s a recording, left for me by Kolya …

  Only now I am being paranoid. Suspecting every little sound, every tiny movement.

  I step inside, scanning the darkened room. Nothing. Or nothing I can make out. The room itself is warm, however, and as I get closer, I see that he has set a fire in the grate. I take the poker from where it hangs and dig into the ashes, and for a moment there’s a faint glow of embers. In its half-light I see that he has left clearing up until the morning, for there’s a dirty plate and a half-drunk glass of wine on the table, and, on the floor nearby, a newspaper.

  I straighten up, forcing myself to relax, telling myself I’m a fool to think Kolya could be here ahead of me, when I didn’t even know what I was going to do myself. The man is not a mind-reader, after all.

  As the glow from the embers dies, I cross the room, checking on Schikaneder. He’s sleeping soundly, and, pulling the door closed behind me, I go across and light an oil lamp.

  In the wavering light, I begin my search. It’s here somewhere. It has to be here. Some mark of Kolya’s presence, that is. And, because where one of them is one usually finds traces of the other, of Reichenau.

  It’s the best part of an hour before I find something. Schikaneder’s notebook, hidden away in a folder on a shelf in the corner of the room. I flick through quickly, then flick back, a line in one of the entries catching my eye. I’m about to write it down, when I hear a floorboard creak just behind me.

  I spin round, to find Schikaneder there, pointing a gun at my head. If it were anyone else I’d have taken a chance and jumped him, but Schikaneder, for all he now is, was once Reisende. He’s been trained, and the simple manner in which he holds the gun is a reminder of that. He’s not forgotten everything.

  ‘You!’ he says, genuine annoyance in his voice. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  I jump out, then jump back in directly behind him, my laser trained on the back of his head.

  ‘Drop the gun!’

  Only Schikander doesn’t. He half turns, meaning to take me out, only he’s far too slow. Forced to fire, I aim for his gun hand and squeeze the trigger, a great charge of ionised air leaping from my hand to his.

  He screams, his hand suddenly on fire, flesh melting like marzipan, a hideous stink filling the room.

  ‘You bastard!’ he groans, dropping the gun, trying to beat out the flames. ‘You heartless fucking bastard!’

  Only it doesn’t matter what he calls me, and, pocketing the laser, I grab a wrap and throw it to him, then stoop to pick the gun up, just in case he grows forgetful and tries to use it again.

  377

  I bind him and bandage him and tie him down in a chair, then I inject him with a drug to make him answer me truthfully.

  I stand above him, between him and the wavering oil lamp on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Who is Reichenau?’

  Schikaneder makes to answer, then winces painfully, as if he’s receiving a shock to the head. He grits his teeth and forces an answer out.

  ‘I … only met him … once. He …’

  And he slumps, unconscious.

  I leave him a moment, jumping back to Four-Oh to discuss the situation. Ernst meets me there.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’d say he’s got some kind of mental block about Reichenau. Something that prevents him talking about him.’

  ‘Okay. Then we’d best get Diedrich.’

  Diedrich is officially Four-Oh’s physics expert, but he’s had experience of working with blocked states, Ernst’s among them.

  He and Ernst jump back with me, and while Ernst checks on the flats beneath, Diedrich opens up his case of phials and gets to work, injecting Schikaneder with a cocktail of drugs, then wiring him up to a monitoring device.

  ‘Okay,’ he says finally. ‘That ought to work to block the blocker. But it’s only temporary. Try not to stress him too much. You could lose him altogether.’

  Just then Ernst returns. He’s been jumping into the other apartments in the house and has discovered something strange.

  ‘There’s nothing. Nothing at all in any of the apartments. Not a single tenant. But more than that, there’s not a shred of carpet or a stick of furniture. All there is are the curtains, and they’re drawn. Maybe that’s how it was arranged when they exiled him here, but it’s spooky, like this is some kind of theatrical set.’

  No wonder no one heard his screams.

  I make to speak again, only suddenly there are shouts and whistles blowing in the streets below. My guess is that they’ve found the corpse I left beneath the bushes.

  I go to the window and look down, and sure enough, there are policemen hurrying by down there, their torches flickering in the dark.

  Ernst asks me if I know what’s going on down there, and I tell him.

  ‘Kolya – is that what you’re thinking?’

  ‘One of the two,’ I say. ‘Either that or it’s just some kind of weird coincidence.’

  But neither Ernst nor I believe in coincidence. Because in our line it usually means trouble. And this place – which has known Kolya’s past presence – seems ripe for trouble.

  We wait for Schikaneder to regain consciousness, then begin again, Ernst and Diedrich keeping out of sight as I start questioning him.

  ‘So you met him only once, is that right?’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘Reichenau. Is this what he looks like?’

  I hold up my pencil portrait of the doppelgehirn.

  Schikaneder stares at the drawing grimly, like he can’t look away, then forces his eyes down and nods.

  Feeling sorry for the man, I soften my tone. ‘What did he do to you?’

  ‘Heeeeh …’

  ‘No,’ I say, interceding quickly before he passes out again. ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to answer that.’

  Schikaneder deflates with relief.

  I stare at him a moment, understanding. This isn’t just mental conditioning. In all likelihood he was physically tortured by Reichenau, and perhaps for precisely the same reason: to get information about Kolya.

  ‘You told him about Kolya?’ I ask, making it as gentle a query as possible, but even so, he really struggles to get an answer back to me – a single nod of his head.

  ‘Things you didn’t tell me last time?’ I ask, and he nods again.

  But before I can ask anything more, Diedrich stops me. The stress levels are way too high.

  Which is frustrating, but then I do feel for the man.

  ‘Give him something,’ I say, turning to Diedrich. ‘Let him rest a while, then we’ll try again.’

  Diedrich looks dubious, which isn’t a good sign, but he does what’s asked of him, giving our exile a strong shot of something to make him sleep.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘I’m going back. Call me if and when you need me again.’

  And he’s gone, leaving me with Ernst.

  ‘So?’ Ernst asks.

  ‘The journal,’ I say, going across to the table where I placed it earlier. ‘There was a line …’

  I flick through, looking for the passage that caught my eye earlier. One line leaps out at me:

/>   ‘It’s all there in the paintings.’

  I’m not quite sure just why this caught my attention, because the paintings of his I’ve seen weren’t exactly filled with clues about anything. It’s just the agitation in the handwriting at that point that alerted me – as if it really cost Schikaneder even to write such an indirect direction.

  Setting the journal aside, I begin my search. Most of the paintings are like the one I first saw – simple, bleak landscapes. But then I open a cupboard and there they are – paintings of Reichenau and, unmistakably, of Kolya. But it’s not just that those two are in them, it’s the backdrops, full of minutiae and details.

  Clues, I think, and smile for the first time.

  378

  Talianov studies the painting for a long, long time, then looks up at us, nodding decisively.

  ‘Schikaneder put all he knew about those two into these paintings,’ he says. ‘It’s clear he let his unconscious speak here, silently uttering all of those things that he couldn’t say aloud … all of those things that he was programmed not to say … it’s all here!’

  Talianov is the Russians’ psyche expert. A master interpreter of others’ indirection. If anyone can interpret these symbolic landscapes, then it’s him.

  ‘The trees in this one … look at how he distorts their forms. Nothing’s truly as it is, but everything has meaning. It’s all … translated.’

  Svetov, seated next to me, grunts his agreement, even as Talianov gestures towards the bigger of the two dual portraits, the one in which Kolya’s back is turned to Reichenau.

  ‘Here … just beyond the figure of Kolya … there’s what looks at first glance to be a pond and a school of tiny white fish, only the pond is the socket of an eye, and the school of fish …’

  Spermatozoa … each of them bearing the slightly altered face of Kolya.

  There are more than a dozen of these special paintings, and each one of them forms a symbolic landscape. Real yet not real. Their purpose entirely revelatory. A way of ‘getting around the fence’, as Talianov calls it.

  A whole richness of clues. Like the two felled trees that, in the painting, are bound together with rusting iron bands. What could that be but Reichenau himself? The doppelgehirn busy, always busy. Whereas Kolya – drawn often in these studies – is always a lonely figure. Always isolate. Schikaneder paints him always with a space between him and the rest of things, as if his presence there has burned a hole in the canvas.

  And that, we’ve quickly come to realise, is how to read these. Not singularly, but as a whole, taking in the repeated nature of the symbolism. Recognising that Schikaneder could only do this in fits and starts, fighting all the time against the pains in his head, the deep reluctance of his conscious self. Repeating because in repetition the meaning of the symbol can emerge.

  But most important of all is what is not symbolic. Some of the backdrops …

  ‘I’d say that that’s a real place,’ Talianov says, tapping the very realistic-looking monastery which dominates at least three of the paintings. ‘St Petersburg, do you think?’

  Svetov shakes his head. ‘No. Not St Petersburg. But it is Russian. And old. Very old. I’ll circulate copies of this to all our agents, see if anyone comes up with anything.’

  ‘Good,’ I say. Then, looking to Talianov again, ‘Sergei, give me a report on each of these … that and your overall impressions.’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘Then let’s meet later on.’

  And I jump, back to Prague, to join up with Diedrich again.

  379

  Diedrich doses Schikaneder up again and, when he’s ready, we present him with the first – and strangest – of the canvases.

  The painting has an interstellar backdrop. Everything in that canvas suggests a searing coldness and vast distances, even the two small but solid central figures, which seem coated with a kind of jewel-like permafrost, their eyes burning with a star-like intensity.

  It is an apocalyptic vision and, seeing it, Schikaneder gives a choked gasp, as if it’s suddenly impossible to breathe, and passes out.

  ‘Urd save us!’ Diedrich mutters, getting to his feet. ‘The conditioning must be strong. There must be some kind of implant.

  ‘Let me,’ I say, and examining Schikaneder’s neck and the back of his head, I find a slightly raised patch, not too dissimilar from that which Ernst had on his flank that time, when he was trapped in the clearing. Yet even as my fingers close on it, Schikaneder vanishes.

  380

  Back at Four-Oh, Svetov is waiting for us. One of the Russian time agents has recognised the scene in Schikaneder’s painting. It’s the ‘Troitsky’ Monastery – the Troitskaya Sergeeva – just thirty-five miles or so north of Moscow. The question now is when. But Svetov has an idea about that. He tells us about Peter the Great and the revolt of the Kremlin guard, the Streltsy, in August 1689, at the very start of his reign. It was to the Troitsky Monastery that Peter fled, resting up there before returning to Moscow to deal harshly with his rebellious forces.

  I tell Svetov to organise a team and go in, to scout about and see what can be seen. But he’s had an idea of his own. He wants to try to locate Reichenau’s ‘daughter’, Gudrun. That is, if she hasn’t just ceased to exist when Reichenau made his changes to Time.

  And so we jump in, to Neu Berlin in 2747, to Burckel’s apartment once more.

  Burckel is surprised to see me – weeks earlier than I was scheduled to arrive – but he’s shocked to the core by Svetov’s appearance – all furs and beard – there at my side. We quickly talk him round, however, explaining what’s been happening and what we need to do, and in no time at all he’s helping us, arranging stuff like he did first time round. Putting out feelers and asking favours of his ‘friends’.

  Only locating Gudrun isn’t easy. She’s not at the Werkstatte when we visit it, nor does anyone remember her. But we know that there was a register of all the doppelgehirn at the Akademie, and if we can get access to that …

  At this impasse, it’s Burckel who comes good once more, recruiting a hacker from among his associates. He’s good and finds us the details we’ve been looking for – in fact, there’s only one there could be, and that’s a Gudrun born in 2722. Noting the surname Jensen, we begin to trawl the public records again, until we finally locate her, in a northern suburb of Neu Berlin. An hour away by public transport.

  I decide to go in alone. She’s home and lets me in, a lot shyer than she was before. And, as before, I find myself staring at her overlarge double skull with what is almost aversion. I’m not sure whether she’ll know anything, but she clearly knows who I am, and when I show her the etched portrait of Reichenau she smiles and nods.

  ‘He was the eldest of us. Our mentor.’ For the first time I get a glimpse of Reichenau’s personal life and how he was raised in the Akademie. Her view of him is, I feel, sugar-coated, only then she surprises me.

  ‘He’s a thief,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘There’s absolutely nothing he won’t steal. Black holes, identities. Even souls.’

  ‘Is that what the picture album was?’ I ask. ‘Just something he’d stolen?’

  She smiles, her tiny mouth stretching. ‘He has it, you know. I’ve seen it. It’s quite some document. Looking through it, I felt I knew everything about you, Otto. Your woman … she was very beautiful.’

  I go cold at her words. ‘Does Kolya have her?’

  ‘Kolya?’ And there’s a note of query in her voice that makes me feel that she genuinely doesn’t know who I’m talking about.

  ‘Kolya was his father,’ I explain. ‘He gave Reichenau to the Akademie.’

  Gudrun looks puzzled. ‘He never mentioned it.’

  ‘So where is Reichenau now?’

  She shrugs. ‘He visits me when he wants to. But not often. I think he likes my company. I’m one of the few who isn’t repulsed by the sight of him. I’ve even let him … you know? … before now. But I don’t think he needs that as much as other men.’
<
br />   I think of that. Imagine them in bed together and feel sick at the thought. But I also feel somewhat sad at her fate. To be a doppelgehirn. It must be dreadful.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, deciding there and then to put a watcher here, just in case Reichenau comes calling. And then I jump. Back to Four-Oh.

  381

  Back to exciting news. Reichenau has been spotted, close by the Troitsky Monastery!

  ‘It looks like he’s meddling again,’ Svetov says, reporting to me. ‘But Peter’s safe. We’ve put a crack squad in place to protect him.’

  Which is all well and good, only I have a very strong feeling about this. I want to see how things are for myself. And so we jump, back to Russia, and to the Troitsky Monastery, late on the night of the seventeenth of August, 1689.

  Seeing it for myself, I reassess what I’d previously been thinking.

  The Troitsky Monastery – the Laurel of St Sergius Under the Blessing of the Holy Trinity, as it’s more fully known – is Perhaps the holiest of sites in the whole of Russia. More than a monastery, it is effectively a fortress, its thick, fifty-foot-high walls circling the monastery for a full mile, its strongly constructed buildings impregnable, that strength bolstered by the fact that a thousand men of the Sukharev Regiment of the Streltsy arrived here only an hour back, to man its walls and protect the young Tsar.

  Even without Reichenau’s presence, this is a cusp moment in Russian history, for forty-five miles to the south-west, Peter’s elder sister, the Regent Sophia, has just had news of this and is considering what she ought to do.

  All summer this confrontation has been brewing, but things are swiftly coming to a head.

  Earlier, Peter was woken by one of his servants, to be given the news that the Streltsy were on their way to where he was, in the royal hunting lodge at Preobrazhenskoe, meaning to kill him and put his sister on the throne in his place.

  His panicked flight, thirty-five miles on horseback to the monastery, might seem like an over-reaction. Only Peter has good reason to fear the Streltsy – even those who claim to be supporting him. Seven years ago, after his father’s death, false rumours of the murder of his young brother, Ivan, brought the Streltsy to the gates of the Kremlin, seeking ‘justice’ and bloody vengeance.