The Empire of Time Read online

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, sitting up, letting the sheets fall back to reveal her breasts. Not an old woman at all, but a girl. A young, attractive girl. Seydlitz looked at her and felt a trembling pass through him.

  My child. My son. A leader like no other.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is a trick. A game.’

  ‘No game,’ she answered. ‘This much is for real. This much will remain unchanged.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This is the last of it. The tying of ends. The circle mended. Only the file to remind us of the cost of meddling.’

  Seydlitz hesitated. He had looked at her face in another light and found it plain, but now he saw its strength, its beauty.

  ‘I would have killed you.’

  ‘I know,’ she answered. ‘It doesn’t matter. Only this matters now.’ And, smiling, she drew back the cover. ‘Come, Max. Undress and join me here. Your son awaits creation. Destiny calls him.’

  Seydlitz shivered violently. Destiny …

  ‘Yes. Now come. I want you.’

  34

  Seydlitz lay there, watching her dress. Outside, in the twilight, the snow fell heavily. Inside, the flames of the fire cast flickering shadows everywhere. He watched the light’s pattern on the smooth skin of her back as she stooped to lift her skirt up over her legs and waist. Her breasts hung free, part in light, part in shadow, and her eyes, when she looked at him, shone with their own inner warmth.

  For the first, and perhaps for the only time in his life, Seydlitz was relaxed, at ease. Desire – all desire – had been quenched in him by her, and he looked at last with eyes freed from the wanting that had shaped his life. You, Seydlitz, are dead, she had said, and he had no reason to doubt her. But this was not defeat. His seed lived on in her. Even now it was growing in her, forming their child, their son.

  ‘What will you call him?’

  She had fastened her bra and pulled on her jumper. Now she was pulling on a pair of socks – long socks, thick and woollen – that reached up to her pale and slender thighs.

  ‘I called him Joseph.’

  ‘Not Max, then?’

  ‘No. Nor Adolf.’

  Her smile was tighter now. She pulled on her long leather boots, then reached for her coat. ‘I guess I should thank you, really.’

  ‘Thank me?’

  ‘For spreading the seed.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You weren’t meant to.’

  He leaned up on one elbow. ‘Do I just wait? Will someone come for me?’

  She fastened her coat then looked at him. ‘No. No one will come now.’

  The gun was in her pocket. She took it out and pointed it at him. It seemed too large for her hand. A man’s gun.

  Seydlitz sighed, watching her. No, there was nothing in her eyes. What warmth there’d been had been only the warmth of satisfaction – of a job well done, a victory achieved. There was no love, no caring there. Those too had been illusory. But what had he expected?

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Get it over with.’

  She nodded. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I should feel more. I love my son, and what I see of him in you I also love. But you’re not him, Max Seydlitz. You never could be him. And anyway, you have to die. This has to happen.’

  Seydlitz said it for her. ‘You’ve seen it.’

  She nodded. ‘Our son will be a Russian. And not just any Russian. The Russian. The architect of our modern state.’ Her face lit with pride. ‘A strong and powerful man. A hawk among men.’

  Seydlitz stared at her, stunned. Chkalov, that’s who she meant. His son would be Joseph Maksymovich Chkalov, otherwise known as Yastryeb, ‘the Hawk’, Grand Master of Time and rival of their own Grand Master, Hecht.

  ‘Impossible,’ he said, his voice a whisper. But she was shaking her head.

  ‘I took him back. Two hundred years. Back to when it all began. That’s where I gave birth to him. The rest’ – she smiled – ‘is history.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. Why me?’

  ‘Your DNA. It’s special. One of our analysts noticed the similarity. How closely it resembled Yastryeb’s. And then we noticed others, among the young agents you were sending out into Time. Germans, but not entirely German. Your seed, Max. Your sons.’

  Seydlitz opened his mouth to say something, then saw what she meant. He looked appalled.

  ‘You understand, then?’

  ‘Russians? I’ve been fathering Russians?’

  The gun was still pointed at him. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that. But it was there, among the repeated sequences in chromosome eight. A copy-cat pattern. Like ours, very like ours, but one which your platform still considered German. What I believe you’d call a permitted code. That’s what we used.’

  ‘Used?’

  ‘To identify those we could—’

  He lunged at her and, as he did, she shot him, knowing he would lunge, one bullet to the head, one to the heart. Making sure. Completing the circle.

  ‘—turn,’ she said, finishing what she had begun, a sharp and sudden pain in her face, seeing the mess she’d made of him.

  She threw the gun down and half turned, seeing Lavrov in the doorway where he always was. Yes, and now it began. Sixteen hours they had. Sixteen hours to do all that they needed to get done.

  She looked at him one last time, then stood. ‘He’s all yours,’ she said, knowing from having watched herself a hundred times that these were her last recorded words.

  Sixteen hours.

  Part Three

  Berlin, 1759

  ‘In short, anything can be said of world history, anything conceivable even by the most disordered imagination. There is only one thing that you can’t say – that it had anything to do with reason.’

  – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

  35

  I am asleep when the summons comes. Ernst’s soft suden Deutsche voice fills the room.

  ‘Otto! Wake up! Hecht wants you.’

  I rise and dress, still half in my dream of her, the room silent about me, the single night-light on the far wall revealing the contents of my room.

  I am not one to acquire much – most of what I need is in my head – but I do keep certain little luxuries, gleanings from the shelves of Time: books and tiny statues; coins and photographs and, oh, trivial things, but meaningful to me. Sometimes I think that it’s not even for the things themselves, but to try and mask the truth of how we live. Not that I was ever one for evading the truth. Outside, I know, is a vacuum, and no ordinary vacuum at that. To cross a single micron of its vast emptiness, one would need to slip sideways and back a thousand times.

  But no riddles now. Hecht awaits me.

  Dressed, I go to the door and punch out the code for Hecht’s apartment. Our doors are not what they seem. They do not open on to some contiguous space, rather they link to whichever portion of this Nichtraum – this ‘no-space’ – we desire to visit. None of it actually exists. Our dwellings are like soap bubbles, only folded in, like Russian dolls. And the doors transport us. At a touch of the pad we transform the topography of Four-Oh, linking rooms that were previously unlinked. At least, that’s how it seems. Just as we travel in Time, linking one unrelated spot to another, so do we travel here. And if the doors ceased to work, then we’d be trapped.

  Right now, it hisses open. In front of me lies the briefest of corridors; bare and functional, designed for one purpose only: to get me across this bubble universe of ours to Hecht.

  Hecht is sitting at his desk. Busy at his screen, he does not acknowledge me at first, and when he does it is with that strange half-smile of his, as if, in that single glance, he has already all he needs to know.

  Hecht is the oldest of us. How old nobody knows, yet old enough to have taught three generations at least. Old enough to have seen a thousand minor changes and to have been changed a thousand times.

  And yet still himself – Hecht, ‘the Pike’. His stubble-short silv
er hair seems to glisten in the overhead light, his grey eyes to fasten on me as he speaks.

  ‘Ah, Otto, we seem to have a problem.’

  His voice is soft and the words seem innocuous enough, yet something in the way he says them makes me go cold. Besides, it is not his way to summon you from sleep. Rarely does such urgency move him. After all, we have all of Time and Space.

  He is wearing blue today – the blue of an early winter sky. His bare arms on the desk are strong and thickly haired, his hands the hands of a blacksmith, the fingers interlaced.

  ‘A problem?’

  He nods, and as I wait for him to spell it out, I can feel my own heartbeat, feel the pressure of its quickened pulse against my chest.

  Above Hecht is the Tree. Some of its branches are clear, others faint, yet all except the central trunk seem frail – the merest threads of possibilities – as if, at the blink of an eye, they might disappear.

  Hecht’s eyes never leave mine. He watches me as if to gauge something from my reaction.

  ‘We’ve been infiltrated.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Seydlitz. He didn’t return. Not in person, anyway.’

  I don’t follow, but he continues anyway. ‘We’ve arrested three in his direct genetic line, but that still leaves five unaccounted for. They’re out there somewhere, doing mischief.’

  ‘Eight?’

  ‘Yes. They used Seydlitz’s DNA to infiltrate our bloodlines.’

  ‘Ah …’

  Then this is serious, for our whole security system – the very way we travel in Time – is determined by our DNA. We use its information as a code, the best there is. But now the Russians have stolen it and used it against us.

  Eight of them. My mind reels. We’ve been infiltrated before, but never on this scale.

  ‘Why didn’t we spot this before now?’ I ask, conscious even as I say it that this is Hecht’s direct responsibility.

  ‘Because we weren’t looking for it,’ he answers. ‘We’d been making the assumption that if they were born here, then they would be German, right down to the smallest strands of their DNA. I mean, our women never leave Four-Oh, and the only men they sleep with are our men, so it seemed safe to assume that there wasn’t a problem. Seems we were wrong. Mind, it didn’t help that the variations in chromosome eight were extremely marginal.’

  ‘But these men … they’re still our agents, yes?’

  ‘Ours and theirs.’

  ‘I see. So where precisely is the danger?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  I consider this a moment. ‘Sleepers,’ I say, and Hecht nods. ‘So why didn’t Yastryeb activate them before now?’

  ‘My guess is this. That they were planning something big. Maybe something to do with the platform of Four-Oh itself. Why else would they turn our men? What other use could they have?’

  ‘Yes, but why not activate them? Why wait for us to discover them?’ Hecht shook his head. ‘I don’t think they did. My guess is that they thought they had more time. Time enough to put together something imaginative and bold, something that would damage us irreparably. Maybe even eradicate us.’

  ‘And you think they’d go along with that? I mean, the Russians may have turned them, but to make them take that next step, to harm their own. After all, they were born and bred as Germans …’

  ‘I know,’ Hecht says, and there is the slightest hint of dismay in his voice as he says it. He, like me, I’m sure, is surprised – shocked may be the better term – at how patient, how long-term the Russian planning has been in this regard. We’d always considered them more impulsive than that. More spur of the moment.

  Only now that they had been activated, maybe we’d see Yastryeb adopt some ad-hoc scheme. Something that could shake the Tree. After all, why waste the opportunity? And maybe that is why Hecht is troubled by this. Because for once we’re not in control.

  Sixteen hours, I think. It’s not a long time when you think of it, but experienced agents can cause a lot of damage in that time. The thought of that makes me ask the question I’ve been wanting to ask since I was summoned.

  ‘So just who are they?’

  ‘Of your operatives? Gruber …’

  ‘No.’

  Hecht pushes a pair of genetic charts towards me, studies of the repeated sequences in chromosome eight which form the genetic fingerprint of a man. At first I don’t see the similarities, and then I do, and nod.

  ‘What did they do? Clone him?’

  ‘Nothing so complex. Seydlitz always liked women. All they needed was to trick him into sleeping with one of theirs.’

  ‘And you think that’s what they did?’

  Hecht’s smile is bleak. ‘I know it for a fact. The Russians even made a file of it.’

  That, too, shocks me. A file …

  But I realise something else from what Hecht’s said. The ‘three’ must already have been interrogated. I sigh, wondering who they are, and if any of them are good friends. We are a small community, after all.

  Before this latest war there was another war, fought – at first – with more conventional weaponry. That war – in its first, long phase – lasted all of eighty-seven years, and at its end only a handful of survivors remained – in the ‘no-space’ bunkers of Neu Berlin and Moscow, the command staffs and their families. Thirty-one families, in our case, seventy-eight in theirs. And from those narrowed bloodlines all of us now derive.

  I meet Hecht’s eyes. ‘How did they get their orders?’

  ‘In the field. Each one of them was contacted the very first time they jumped back.’

  ‘But that isn’t possible. How could they know where to be or when?’

  ‘Krauss told them.’

  I stare at him, incredulous. ‘Theodor Krauss?’

  Hecht shakes his head. ‘No, thank Urd. Phillipe.’

  ‘Ah …’ I have a vague image of a man; tall, blond-haired and broad-shouldered. A lot like Seydlitz, now that I come to think of it.

  ‘And the damage?’

  But Hecht only sighs, and I realise that he doesn’t know. The damage is being done right now, and he needs us to rectify it before the game is lost and the branches of the Tree blink out one by one.

  Time. There is never enough time.

  36

  The platform is ready, its massive concave circle vibrating faintly as if alive. As I step into the room the women look up from the surrounding desks, their eyes anxious. They know that I may not return this time.

  So it is sometimes. But this is much more serious than usual. I am the third operative to depart. Two more will leave after I’m gone. Yet will any of us return? Not if we’re too late. Not if we can’t undo the damage that is even now being done.

  I have been busy between times. Hecht gave me Ritter’s report to read and a copy of the Russians’ file. Where he got the last, I don’t know, but they are both sobering documents. Freisler was right, after all. Seydlitz did get careless. Hecht blames himself. He thinks that the very directness of Seydlitz’s project may have alerted the Russians, but Freisler and I know otherwise.

  Meanwhile Time has healed itself. History is as it was. The river flows on. All except for that huge gap in Space-Time in the middle of 1952. That is still there, for some reason, though the main current of Time appears to flow about it, like a river about a rock. And we’re not sure why. Some changes take on a permanency, others don’t. Some alter the river’s course, others merely dam it for a while.

  And sometimes – and these are perhaps the worst instances – it changes and our perceptions and memories change with it, so that there seems no change at all. That is, until a traveller returns from the past and finds us so.

  Those are the times I fear. To lose something – or someone – and not to know.

  I have come straight here from a conference – Hecht and the five of us. He wanted to see if we could discern any pattern to events. Aside from the obvious, that is. Of the five who are out there, not a single one is in charge o
f a major project. They’re all cadet operatives, learning their trade in the field before taking on new projects of their own. It’s how we all start, helping others to carry out their schemes while learning all we can about those Ages in which we travel.

  Beyond this, what? Gruber is patient and careful – meticulously so. Of the other four, there is the same divergence of character one might expect from any group of young men.

  The eldest is twenty-eight, the youngest twenty-three. None of them has any longer than four years’ experience in the field. Anticipating things, Hecht had the genetic charts of all the dead operatives over the past four years checked out. Of those, another fifteen carried variants of Seydlitz’s distinctive genetic pattern.

  Murdered, he thinks. Killed because they would not switch sides and betray the Fatherland.

  But the big question is, how will the Russians use them? What scheme have they hatched to get at us through these ‘sleepers’ in our midst? Or is the damage already done?

  Hecht thinks not. It is a characteristic of Time that while one can travel back a long way, one cannot travel forward a single nanosecond beyond the Now. In that sense, Time has a ceiling. It is as if we are in a lift that is moving slowly upward, but down the shaft of which we might plunge at any moment. A hole so deep one might fall for ever.

  In Hecht’s opinion, the Russians’ plan will have been triggered the very moment Seydlitz went missing. Until then, they would not have risked removing the foci from their chests, for as soon as they did, those agents would vanish from our tracking screens, alerting us. But unless they remove them and substitute their own – a lengthy process that can take anywhere between twelve and sixteen hours – what possible use can they be?

  No. Things are happening now – right now – but in the Past.

  Our job then is to locate our missing operatives and bring them back. Or, failing that, to kill them. It isn’t a pleasant thought. I like Gruber. Yet as I stand there on the platform, waiting to jump, I find a matching coldness in myself. If he succeeds, then I die, and all my friends with me.