The Empire of Time

by David Wingrove

  ‘There are things we cannot change, Albrecht. How people live …’

  ‘You believe that bollocks?’

  I stare at him, surprised.

  ‘No, Otto. Think. We can change Time itself. Recast events and make things happen. So why not this? Why not make changes that affect the common people’s lives? Why always the grand historical gesture?’

  I could answer, and at another time I might, only I want to hear what he has to say. Want to learn just how deeply this madness has taken hold of him.

  ‘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.’

  I have heard this argument before, but only from my younger students. To find it in an agent of Burckel’s maturity stuns me, for he really ought to know what he’s talking about.

  ‘Have you been lonely here?’

  He blinks, surprised by the question, then looks down and, after a moment, nods.

  ‘You know,’ he says. ‘Some days I’ve been so lonely that I’ve thought I was going mad. I’ve thought …’

  He hesitates, and when he doesn’t continue I prompt him. ‘Thought what?’

  He takes a long, shuddering breath, then nods to himself.

  ‘Go on,’ I say. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘It’s just … sometimes it feels as if I’ve reached the edge.’

  ‘The edge?’

  ‘Of what’s in my head. It’s like … you know how the ancients used to view the world as a great flattened circle, surrounded by a void, and that if you came to the edge you would fall off? Well, that’s how I feel. That’s what my memory seems like sometimes. There are limits to it. Like, well, like something has been taken from me.’

  My mouth is dry now. This is what I saw, what I read, in Burckel’s journals – the very thing that set alarm bells ringing, both for me and for Hecht.

  ‘And to what do you attribute this … feeling?’

  There’s the slightest frown now. ‘I don’t attribute it to anything, Otto. It’s how we are. How human beings are made. Only …’

  Only I don’t have that feeling. And as far as I know, no one normal has it either. Yet Burckel does. Why? Was he captured by the Russians and re-conditioned? Or is it something simpler – something physiological, brought on by a blow to the head or perhaps a mild stroke?

  ‘Albrecht … I have a confession to make.’

  ‘A confession?’

  ‘I read your journal.’

  He laughs. ‘Read it? But …’ And then he sees what I have done and his face changes, and he nods, as if it all now fits into place.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘But we had to know. Hecht had to know.’

  ‘Yeah …’ But he doesn’t sound happy. He sighs and lets his head fall back, closing his eyes. ‘So what did Hecht say?’

  ‘He told me to watch you.’

  ‘Ah …’ He’s silent for a moment, then he smiles. ‘At least you’re honest, Otto. Some other bastard …’

  He doesn’t finish the sentence, but I know what he means. Some other bastard would have kept quiet about it; pretended to be his best friend.

  ‘Albrecht?’

  ‘Yes, Otto?’

  ‘Where did you meet Werner? In that bar we went to?’

  ‘Urd no!’ He laughs. ‘It was at a party. I had these two friends – they’re dead now, but – well, I went to this party with them, in the east lowers. In Friedrichshain, I think it was.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Three, maybe four years ago.’

  ‘And he’s been a friend ever since?’

  ‘No. At first I found him quite hostile. I remember we argued that first time. I found him … arrogant, I guess. Self-opinionated. But then I met him again a couple of times and things improved. First impressions … they’re not always right, are they?’

  I think of Kravchuk and I’m not so sure. But I don’t argue. I want Burckel to talk. I want to find out where the edges of his memory lie.

  ‘You’ve been here before, then?’

  ‘Once or twice. Not often. He had a gathering here once, a year or so back. It wasn’t so much a party as … well, Dankevich was a guest.’

  ‘Go on …’

  ‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking, but there’s no connection. Werner is as German as they come. He’s like Reichenau in that, fiercely proud of his nationality. He’d never dream of getting involved with the Russians.’

  ‘Okay … but how does he know Dankevich?’

  Burckel shrugs. ‘I don’t know, but that’s how I came to meet Dankevich – or Schmidt, as I knew him. That’s how I got to hear about the club.’

  ‘Das Rothaarige?’

  ‘Yes. Mind, I didn’t know that he owned it. If I had—’

  He yawns deeply. The shots are clearly having an effect, but there’s also a degree of shock setting in.

  I look out across the rooftops. The city looks abandoned almost, dead, the only movement the dark shape of a flyer, two, three miles distant

  ‘You say you had Werner checked out. What did you do?’

  ‘There are ways,’ he says. But he doesn’t elaborate, and it gives me a moment’s unease. Then I think about what Werner’s done and I relax. If he’d wanted to, he could have handed us over straight away – led the authorities directly to where we were. No. Werner’s all right.

  ‘Do you ever have doubts, Otto?’

  I look across. Burckel is watching me now. ‘Doubts?’

  ‘About what we do? About why we do it?’

  ‘No.’

  And it’s true. If we didn’t do this, the Russians would eliminate us, down to the last man, woman and child.

  ‘Really?’

  I nod.

  ‘Only, what if we do win, Otto? What if we finally destroy the Russians? What then? What kind of world would it be that our children inherited?’

  I smile. ‘A German world.’

  There’s the flicker of a smile, but he’s in deadly earnest now. ‘A German world, certainly. Not a better world. Not a more humane world.’

  I look away. ‘You’ve been here too long, Albrecht. All German societies are not like this.’

  ‘No?’ He laughs sourly. ‘Only this is it. The world. Asgard. This is what was foreseen in the Myth, Otto. It’s the singular pattern that underlies it all. We derive from this.’

  ‘Maybe …’ I change the subject, steer away from the rocks. ‘How’s the leg now?’

  ‘Comfortable.’ And then he laughs. ‘You don’t want to, do you, Otto?’

  ‘Don’t want to what?’

  ‘Question it.’

  ‘What is there to question? The war is real, Albrecht. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘No. Yet sometimes I wonder just what purpose I serve. I mean, all of this energy we’ve put into waging this war – three generations now – and what have we achieved? What have we really changed?’

  That isn’t quite the point, but again I don’t want to go down that path. I know why I’m fighting this war – what I need to know is why Albrecht Burckel has given up on it. For he has, as sure as Dankevich is Dankevich and not Schmidt, a Russian, not a German.

  ‘Was there never anyone, Albrecht? Here, I mean, in Neu Berlin.’

  He knows what I mean. A woman. But he doesn’t answer me. Instead he perseveres. ‘You can keep on avoiding it, Otto, but one of these days you’ll wake up and wonder what the fuck you’ve been doing all these years.’

  I shrug. You see, I don’t believe him. I don’t believe it’s possible.

  ‘Oh, you’re very smug about it now, Otto, but one of these days something will happen to you and, well, your eyes will be opened. You’ll see …’

  I stand, angry with
him now. ‘Shut up, Albrecht! For fuck’s sake … can’t you see it? There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s you.’

  ‘Me?’ He laughs. ‘At least I have self-knowledge. At least I know who I am. You? Do you ever ask yourself anything, Otto? Or do you just accept it all blindly?’

  I realise that I’m holding the gun much too tightly and relax my grip. Burckel is so wrong – so far gone down that road – that he can’t see it, but that’s no reason for me to lose it with him.

  ‘You ought to sleep,’ I say.

  ‘What, like you, you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sleeping, Albrecht. I’m wide awake.’

  ‘Are you?’

  But he doesn’t pursue it. Sighing, he lays back and closes his eyes, and in an instant he appears to fall asleep, his mouth open, his breath sighing from him.

  I wait a while until I’m sure he’s sleeping, then, putting the gun down on the chair, go for a little tour of the apartment, checking it out.

  The kitchen’s luxurious, but not as luxurious as the bathroom, with its sunken golden bath – big enough to hold a small party. There’s a large study, and several bedrooms, again decorated in a manner that suggests great wealth, but what interests me most is a room at the far end of the main hallway – for the door to it is locked.

  Another time I wouldn’t bother. Another time – with less at risk – I’d accept things at face value and leave it be. But this is no time to take chances, and so I jump to Four-Oh, then jump back again on the other side of the door.

  Looking about me, I smile. Light glints from a hundred polished silvered surfaces. It’s a work-room, a laboratory of sorts, with part of it used as an operating room. It’s state-of-the-art, of course, which doesn’t surprise me. What does is the fact that Werner works from home. That feels wrong, somehow. I don’t know why, but it does. I was sure he’d work elsewhere.

  I walk across. At the far end, beyond the work benches and the operating tables, is a whole wall of massive drawers. It has the look of a morgue, only when I pull open one of the cabinets it’s no corpse I glimpse inside.

  ‘Thor’s breath!’

  I swallow, shocked by the sheer oddness of the creature laying there. It’s alive. Tubes snake from the cabinet into its brain, its mouth and chest – a chest which rises and falls with a calm yet, for me, disturbing regularity.

  Werner’s a gene surgeon, sure. This is his job. But who the fuck is ordering these monstrosities?

  I check other drawers. They’re not all as odd as the one I first saw, but they’re none of them human – at least, not in any normal sense.

  Or so it seems at first. And then it clicks. I open up one of the cabinets again and look more closely – this time with an anatomist’s eye – and realise that they are human, all too human. Only I’ve been looking at them from the wrong viewpoint. The reason they don’t look normal is because they aren’t finished. They’re being grown, but not as babies are grown, from a foetus, but piecemeal – each individual organ changed for some purpose, just as the limbs and torsos and heads have been changed. Each individual part tailor-made by our friend, like custom-made flyers.

  It makes me reassess things. Makes me ask just who Werner is working for.

  I jump back and reappear an instant later back outside, in the hallway. Burckel is still sleeping, so out of it that, when I shake him, he gives a little grunt, then begins to snore loudly, like nothing is going to wake him ever again.

  I walk across and stand there at the window. Cloud drifts across the deserted rooftops. More than ever, Neu Berlin looks like a dead city.

  Or a city of the dead …

  Maybe it’s what I know about the coming days that makes it seem so, yet I can’t shake the impression now that it’s taken hold, and when I see a cruiser approaching fast, I barely react until it’s almost too late.

  ‘Shit!’

  I grab the gun then turn and try to shake Burckel awake. ‘Come on!’ I yell. ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’

  I don’t know where or how, but it doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t wake him. And as the cruiser sets down on the roof just outside the window, I turn to find guards jumping down out of the craft, their guns trained on me through the glass. And then the room floods with light and a voice booms out.

  ‘Throw the gun down, Otto! Throw it down or you’re dead!’

  106

  ‘I had to,’ Werner says, as if I shouldn’t take his betrayal too hard. ‘If I didn’t hand you in, someone else would. So why not make a profit on the transaction? I’m a businessman, after all, and—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Dankevich says irritably from across the room. But I understand it now. Werner auctioned us to the highest bidder. And the highest bidders were the Russians. Not that they can keep what they’ve bought.

  That said, I can’t make Dankevich out. Surely he knows I’m a German agent. If not, then why buy us back? Yet he’s acting as if he doesn’t. In fact, he seems almost nervous. Edgy about something.

  As I watch, he sits on the edge of the couch next to Burckel and feels his pulse, then turns and looks to me.

  ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘It’s the medication.’

  ‘Ah …’

  But that too seems odd. Why is he so worried about Burckel? And there’s another thing – why did Dankevich hand me over to Security in the first place?

  Werner leaves the room. He’s not gone a second or two when the air beside Dankevich shimmers and three of his fellow agents appear from nowhere. Dankevich stands, smiling a greeting at the newcomers.

  I know two of them. They’re brothers, Ivan and Grigori Kalugin. The third is new to me, however, a small fellow with receding hair and pinched features, a real weasel of a man, not unlike our friend Dankevich.

  Werner returns, holding two bulbs of drink. He’s smiling, but, seeing Dankevich’s friends, he starts and drops the bulbs, his eyes gone big and round.

  ‘What the …?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Dankevich says. ‘They’re just friends.’

  But Werner’s reaction, more than anything, convinces me that he doesn’t know what’s really going on. He looks about him, seeking some explanation for the sudden appearance of the men, but I can see he’s having trouble. More than that, he’s frightened.

  ‘Sit down, Werner, before you fall down.’

  Werner swallows hard, then sits. ‘What’s going on, Andreas? Where did these three come from?’

  ‘They’re Russians,’

  I say. ‘Russians?’ Werner stares at me as if I’ve gone mad.

  ‘That one, the one you call Schmidt. His real name’s Dankevich. Fedor Ivanovich Dankevich.’

  ‘You know each other?’

  I smile and nod. ‘Know him? I’ve killed him.’

  Dankevich’s eyes widen. I look at him and laugh. ‘Oh, you’re much younger than you were then.’

  And as I say it, I realise what that means. Dankevich will survive this episode, whatever happens to the rest of us. He’ll go on to live another twenty years, skipping back and forth in Time. Which means …

  But Werner cuts into my thoughts. Standing, he shakes his head and laughs with disbelief. ‘What the fuck are you two talking about?’

  ‘Time,’ Dankevich says, staring at me now as if he’s seeing me for the first time. ‘We’re talking about Time. About controlling Time.’ He pauses, then, threateningly, ‘You, Otto. Cause us any trouble and I’ll kill your friend here. Understand?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘From you? Nothing.’ He turns and looks to his companions. ‘Grigori, wake him up.’

  The elder Kalugin brother steps across and, taking a hypodermic from his pocket, gives Burckel a shot to jerk him awake.

  Burckel sits up, like a dog on speed, twitching, looking about him anxiously. ‘Otto? What?’ Then he sees the Russians and goes quiet.

  Dankevich crouches again, his face on a level with Burckel’s. ‘The package, Albrecht. What did you do with the package?’
<
br />   ‘I … delivered it.’

  Dankevich looks round. ‘Grigori – jump back and find out where he went. And bring it back.’

  The small man nods and vanishes, and as he does so, Werner groans. I glance at him and see how he’s rocking back and forth in his chair, as if he’s only hanging on to sanity by a thread. Then I look back.

  I expect our friend Grigori back in an instant, and clearly, so does Dankevich. But a full minute passes and there’s no sign of him returning.

  Dankevich straightens. ‘What’s keeping him?’

  I look to Burckel; meet his eyes. ‘Jump,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  They’re all looking at me now. I look to Burckel again, willing him to obey me.

  ‘Jump, Albrecht! For fuck’s sake jump!’

  But Burckel shakes his head. ‘I can’t. I’ve … tried. I … I just can’t.’

  Dankevich is smirking.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Done?’ But he’s distracted. He gestures towards the younger Kalugin brother. ‘Ivan … go and find out where the fuck Grigori has got to.’

  Ivan vanishes, then reappears. He looks distraught, and before he can say a word, Dankevich takes him aside. They talk, quietly yet with real animation, in Russian. And while they do, I turn again to Burckel.

  This is strange. So strange it almost makes no sense. Dankevich knows now who we are, but he’s not worried. We could jump out and come back armed, and he knows that. Only it feels completely wrong.

  ‘Albrecht,’ I say quietly. ‘We have to get out of here, and we have to do it now.’

  Burckel turns away.

  ‘What is it? Why can’t you …?’

  But my words only make him hunch into himself, like he’s ashamed.

  And so, because there’s nothing else to do, I step across and, wrapping my arms about him, I jump …

  107

  And come to in agony. My ears are ringing and there are pains in my arms and legs and chest. I can’t see out of my right eye. I feel limp and damp, but also like someone has stuck a thousand tiny needles into me. My skin stings, like it’s been burned, and my whole body tingles with the pain, so much that I black out again, and when I come to a second time, it’s to find a small crowd gathered around me, someone fixing a drip into my arm even as Zarah strokes my forehead and tells me it’s going to be all right.