The Master of Time

by David Wingrove

  I look down at the file in my hands, reluctant – deeply reluctant – to open it. But Katerina is having none of that.

  ‘Open it, Otto. For the gods’ sake, put yourself out of your misery and open it.’

  445

  And so, for the first time ever, I learn of my parentage and, through Albrecht’s meticulously detailed chart, see who I am related to and how intricately interwoven the web of lives was at Four-Oh.

  Family, I think. True family.

  Only then Albrecht shows me something else – the Russian charts he got from Svetov, and while there are differences, there are also distinct similarities genetically, to within less than half of a percentile.

  We are one people and always have been. This proves it beyond a doubt.

  ‘Then the War …?’

  ‘Was pure mischief. The whole notion of race is a nonsense. A dangerous illusion.’

  ‘But your brother—’

  ‘Never knew it. It would have … undermined him. Destroyed what he was. And maybe that makes me culpable …’ Albrecht stops, then looks to me again. ‘That’s why you need to change it, Otto. To stop all that redundant tribalism and put an end to it all.’

  He’s right, of course. Which is why I’m there, six hours subjective later, facing the veche and outlining my scheme to get at Kolya.

  As I see it, what we need to focus upon is what Kolya wants.

  And what does Kolya want?

  Two things. To protect himself in Time, and to kill me.

  ‘I know now where we have to go,’ I say. ‘Or at least, I think I do. But first I need to salve my conscience. To set a few things right. If you think that’s indulgence, fine, I’ll abide by the council’s wishes, but I really think we should try this. See what happens, and how it makes us feel about ourselves.’

  Some of them look puzzled at that, but I get my majority.

  ‘Good. Then I want six volunteers. Six agents who are willing to die for the cause. Because we’re going right to the heart of things, and we’re going in an hour from now.’

  446

  The heart of things? It all depends, I guess, on how you see this.

  They see themselves as the peak of a long, evolutionary process that began with the Germanic tribes, was honed and refined by the Brotherhood in the northern crusades, and was finally perfected with themselves: these blond-haired Aryans, chosen by the gods themselves.

  They, of course, don’t know just how far they are to fall, no, nor how far they’ll climb above what they ever aspired to be. Only we, from our perspective in Time, can witness that. But here, in the years of the Third Reich, they believe themselves to be at the very height of their powers.

  The Schutzstaffel, better known to us as the SS. The elite of the National Sozialistische party. The so-called Master Race, and they the masters of it.

  Yes, and our one-time allies in the War in Time.

  We have jumped through into Wewelsburg, in Westphalia, on the seventh day of April, 1942, the spring sun beating down on the high battlements of the great schloss, from a sky as blue as Dresden china.

  This is the epicentre of the Nazi dream, the high temple of the Schutzstaffel, rebuilt from the ruin it was at vast expense. Three million dollars American, a huge sum in that time, and that excluding all the free labour. Workers provided by the camps.

  We jump in, then jump again, into the Hall of the Supreme Leaders, where, partially naked, nine of the leading members of Hitler’s SS, together with a dozen or more subordinates, are carrying out one of their mystic ceremonies.

  Before they know what is happening, my team – Katerina among them – are wreaking bloody havoc, strafing them with bullets and killing, among others, Felix Steiner, Reinhard Heydrich, Karl Frank, Walther Darré, Heinrich Müller, Franz Huber, the Commandant of Dachau, Theodor Eicke and Himmler himself. The shooting over, we pile them up in the massive central basin of that big, circular room and set fire to their corpses.

  At one swoop almost the entire command of the SS has been destroyed. Only we don’t stop there. Jumping in and out of time, we set charges and destroy the place – along with its Aryan library of twelve thousand volumes and its training grounds.

  Pausing from my bloody work, I look down from the battlements and see, just as I knew I would, Katerina’s meeting with my younger self. I watch us kiss, then part, and, as they vanish from the scene, so too do I.

  It is done. Another segment of the loop fixed firm and unassailable, like setts in a strong stone wall. Yes, and more of the murdering scum executed. Bad men, punished for what they did.

  But it isn’t enough. Standing there on the platform of Moscow Central, I realise that. No matter how many of the bastards I kill, I will never feel clean. Never feel absolved.

  We jump in again, this time to the Prussian wilderness in the summer of 1236, where, in the moonlit darkness, a group of Teuton knights, including my younger self, are approaching a native village.

  My stomach clenches, knowing what is to come. May the gods help me now, for this is nightmare territory.

  As we step out from under the trees, I can see how terrified the villagers are at our sudden appearance. Breaking off their festivities, some of them turn to run. I call them back, speaking in their native tongue, promising them that they won’t be hurt.

  ‘Go to your huts!’ I cry. ‘And wait until I summon you again!’

  They go, some of them reluctantly, even as the knights of the brotherhood enter the clearing, stepping out from between the trees, swords raised. Men I know well. My comrades in the timeline they inhabit.

  Turning, I confront them, raising the heavy stun-gun I have brought with me this time.

  As the others slow their pace, Meister Dietrich steps out before them. As yet his sword is sheathed.

  ‘Brother Otto. What is this? And why are you dressed like that?’

  The brothers are confused now, for I am both here and there, among them. They look from one to another and exchange gruff words. Is this devilry of some kind?

  In truth, I guess it is. As for my younger self, he seems just as confused as the rest of them, and when I raise my voice, ordering them to turn about and return to their homelands or feel the wrath of God, there are growls of anger. Only they’re not really sure what they should do. As a body, they look to the Meister for guidance.

  ‘Onward!’ the old man calls, finally unsheathing his own mighty broadsword. ‘Leave none of them alive!’

  Only before he can take a pace, he falls to his knees, his chest on fire.

  There’s a great howl of fear. Even so, some of the men press on, beginning to run. Only now we pick them off, the air criss-crossed with the traces of our lasers. And then, suddenly, the knights break and turn and run, fleeing for their lives, shrieking with fear.

  Wizards … they have surely fought wizards here today.

  And maybe they have. Only once more I don’t feel good about this. It wasn’t in any sense a fair fight. But then, even as the villagers emerge, wide-eyed with astonishment, but also gratitude, so I remind myself what my brothers did here in that previous timeline. How they slaughtered the innocents … and for what? For God and Christ and Christ’s mother, Mary?

  No. This is an unholy place, a place that stinks of charred flesh. An awful smell that fills your nostrils and makes you want to retch. An unclean smell.

  I put my booted foot on Meister Dietrich’s chest and stare down into his lifeless face. Dead, and deservedly so.

  I walk across to where the fight was fiercest, looking for what I know I’ll never find.

  Myself.

  And turn full circle, taking in the carnage, seeing how my comrades, standing here and there among the dead, are uneasy with this.

  ‘Did anybody …?’

  They shake their heads, mumble ‘not a thing’ or ‘he must have jumped straight out’, but they all know what I’m asking. I mean, what did he make of that? And has it changed a damn thing, back in the past?

  Suppos
edly not. Else we would know, surely?

  All I know for sure is that there are paradoxes at work here.

  We jump back to Moscow Central, and jump straight out again, to Velikie Luki in northern Russia in the spring of 1942.

  And a scene that makes my stomach turn.

  It is a cold, clear morning, and in a clearing a kilometre outside Velikie Luki, four hundred souls – gypsies, communists and Jews – have been stripped bare and lined up along a ridge, facing a line of machine-gun posts, a great trench between the two. And, at a nearby table, Dr Walter Stahlecker and his men from Einsatzgruppen A look at a map, here to do Hitler’s bidding and eradicate all ‘undesirables’ they come upon.

  Oh, I have been here once before, a long time ago, and seen the cold absence in those eyes, the faint amusement as the guns go off and the bodies dance and fall. Such wickedness.

  Make no mistake. Stahlecker is an evil man. Only we’re here to change all of that. Or make a beginning, anyway. Because today the rules change. Today the victims will escape, unharmed, while Stahlecker and his men …

  As I watch, our agents jump in. There is a brief struggle at each post as the soldiers try to escape their fate, their fingers reaching up to try to tear the garrotting wire from their throats, kicking out and struggling as the life drains from them.

  Stahlecker looks up, startled by the sudden noise, and whirls about, drawing his luger from its holster. Only he too is too late, for as he turns, so Katerina shimmers into being in front of him and fires a single bullet, dead centre in his forehead.

  It’s over in less than a minute, the executioners executed, the naked men on the ridge – cold, trembling men, dead already in their own imaginations – call out in the sudden silence.

  ‘Help us! For God’s sake, help us!’

  Even as Ernst appears with his assistants, pulling carts on which are new and comfortable clothes. Enough for all. Yes, and food and medical equipment, and …

  Guns. And rocket launchers and grenades, and flamethrowers, and everything they’d need to make this war a bit more even, a bit more ‘fair’.

  Ernst’s idea, not mine.

  I step over Stahlecker and spit full in his damaged face. And then jump, back to Moscow Central, back to another change of clothes, and then in once more, this time to Neu Berlin, on the sixth day of June, 2747.

  Only this time we jump directly into the centre of the maelstrom, materialising inside the great fortress of the Konigsturm.

  And while Ernst and Svetov and the rest target the lesser members of the great family that live here at the centre of Greater Germany, so I am to go for the head itself.

  Manfred. Tenth of his genetic line, more than two centuries old and a good three times my height. Not to speak of body weight.

  I find him in the same room where first I met him, sprawled out on his giant throne, his legs stretched out like fallen pines, the same great fur draped about his shoulders, making him seem like he’s Lord of the Primeval Forest. Yes, very like the first time, only one day later. The day of the feast and his aunt’s assassination. The day when he was tipped over the edge.

  He frowns at me, clearly puzzled by my presence there.

  ‘Otto … what are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see you, Meister,’ I said. ‘Before certain things happened.’

  That puzzles him even more. ‘You know something?’

  Nothing that Time will not reveal. Only I don’t say that. What I do is draw my laser and point it at him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Meister, because I liked you very much. But what I’ve seen …’

  He stares at the needle-gun as if I’m insane, then laughs. ‘You wouldn’t dare …’

  Only those are his final words. If screams are not to be counted as words.

  I burn out one eye, then burn the other, jumping back to avoid being kicked by one of those massive legs, then close on him to finish the job, setting his fur on fire before drilling a hole deep into his chest, blood bubbling and boiling up from the big, charred hole I have exposed, there beneath his massive ribcage.

  He kicks out, once, twice, then falls still, his huge mouth fallen open, as if to swallow me.

  I swallow bile. That was awful. I liked Manfred a great deal. Even at the last, when madness overcame him, he was …

  Magnificent.

  Katerina joins me after a moment, clearly in awe of all she’s seen here; the sheer scale they have built to, these Germans of the twenty-eighth century.

  ‘Now what?’ she asks. ‘Will it not happen? Will Gehlen never finish his equations?’

  Only he must, for we are still here, locked into the loop. If he hadn’t, then surely we’d have all vanished, like a puff of smoke.

  We jump back, to Moscow Central, to find our comrades in a heated debate as to where all of this is leading. Ernst and Svetov are certainly at loggerheads over the morality of our actions.

  ‘Tell him why, Otto,’ Ernst says, turning to me. ‘Tell him what you said to me.’

  ‘That it’s necessary? Arkadi knows that. He knows we must take such actions to free us from the past. From all of those firing squads and hangings, the bombing and the gassing, and all that talk of blood and iron. Loving kindness, tolerance – these simply won’t do to free us from such behaviour. It’s as I said: we must execute the executioners. There is no other way. To tolerate them for a moment, to let them glimpse the least weakness in us … No, dear friend. There must be no more piracy and plunder, no more deals with bad men. We must eradicate their cruelty and rid the world – the worlds, dare I say it? – of their evil.’

  Only it doesn’t feel right. Not entirely. And besides, I have one last ‘visit’ to make. Perhaps the hardest of them all.

  447

  It is the twelfth of August, 1759, and I am on the battlefield at Kunersdorf. Below us, the slaughter rages on, but here, on this small, grassy platform, raised up above the battling armies, we can see how the tide has turned.

  Less than an hour ago, it seemed as if the Russians had been routed, but now it is our turn to flee the carnage of the battle. The day is lost. Not that Frederick will see that or acknowledge it.

  As I walk across to him, so Frederick turns his horse and smiles at me, patting the tiny snuff box in his pocket. It was my gift to him, the means by which his life was saved earlier in the day. Only things have changed.

  ‘Otto?’

  Steeling myself, I aim my gun and fire, the musket ball flying straight and true, boring a hole between his eyes and taking off the back of his skull.

  He slumps then topples from his horse. Dead.

  I watch his staff turn and look, horrified. And jump …

  … back to Moscow Central where, it seems, all hell has broken loose. The Tree of Worlds is roaring with a fiery red light, like it has, at one and the same time, caught fire and is being tossed about by a great storm.

  I watch it a while, until it grows calm, its natural colour returning, the roar diminishing to a gentle susurration. And I know, without being told, that killing Frederick was the cause of that great disturbance. That I was within a whisker of changing it all in some great ‘time change’, some Zeitverandern. It did not succeed. And part of me is pleased that things remain as they were. Yet a further part of me feels purged. It felt good to kill the old bugger, to give him a taste of death, even if the changes won’t stand.

  Old Schnorr speaks from the shadows in the corner of the big room.

  ‘Time heals itself, Otto. Even so, you must not try too much. Too much change and it will all come undone. Too much and the connections break.’

  ‘Then it’s as I thought,’ I say. ‘We can’t change it after all. It’s all been for nothing.’

  He heaves himself up from the chair he’s in, his face poking out into the light.

  ‘No, Otto. Some of it you can’t change. The paradoxes thrown up do not permit it. They revert almost immediately. And some changes are just too great. The river must flow, Otto. You cannot dam it up.’


  ‘Then there are things that must be? Evils that must stand?’

  ‘So it seems. Even a peaceful man – why, even Marcus Aurelius himself – had to fight his enemies.’

  ‘Then what can I do that is different?’

  ‘Make smaller changes. Subtler ones. Stop thinking of great men and great battles. Tackle evil at its roots. You need to change the climate of Time, Otto. Killing Frederick, that’s still thinking in the old way.’

  Once again I am reminded of Burckel’s words, even as, exhausted, I stagger and hands reach up to hold me and help me down.

  ‘We need to get to grips with the underlying phenomena, with the infrastructure of history, not the surface froth.’

  448

  And so, with a little help, I come up with something new.

  My first experiment is with Hitler.

  We save the three children that his mother lost before Hitler was born, and then, after his birth, arrange for his father to have a fatal accident, saving young Adolf all those years of his father’s bullying. As a result, Hitler grows up in a stable environment, unbullied and in fact loved by his elder sisters, the young child – lacking the character deficiencies of old and looking up to his big brother, Hans, becoming a stretcher bearer in the war where he wins an Iron Cross for his bravery.

  Not that it ameliorates everything. The war still ends badly – Hitler cannot affect that – and Germany sinks into depression and division. Yet the fact that Hitler is not there to take the helm of the National Socialists changes things. Without his guiding force they fail to gain power and when the crisis comes it is revolution and not war, with the communists taking brief charge of Germany before things settle. The Second War, when it comes, is in Asia, between the Japanese and the Americans – a brief spat over oil and rubber that is quickly over.