Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

Saskia did not look up. She could not. All she could manage was a nod.

‘Alright,’ said Ute. ‘And you’re to go inside the castle. Is that it?’

Again, Saskia nodded.

A tremendous wave made landfall around them and a short, salty rain fell.

‘Am I going home?’ asked Ute.

‘Yes,’ Saskia whispered. Her throat felt sticky and engorged. ‘You are to live. I am to …’ Saskia could not say the word. Her voice, now she listened to it, was that of a girl. How could she have not noticed before? That explained why the steps up the cliff had seemed so large, and why Ute was so tall. ‘I am to go in there.’

‘ Shhh ,’ said Ute. ‘Everything will be fine. You’ll dream of me.’

Saskia prepared herself for her next question with two long breaths. ‘When they killed me to take my mind,’ she said, ‘was I just a girl?’

Ute kissed the top of her head and turned them both so that Saskia had her back to the castle of ice. Ute crouched, brushed away the tears from Saskia’s swollen cheeks, and tapped her nose once. They both smiled.

‘You’re more than just a girl,’ she said. ‘Now, I have to go.’

And then Ute was backing away from her, shrugging the rucksack a little higher, walking to the cliff edge at the end of the bridge.

Ute turned back.

‘You need to dismiss me,’ she called. ‘That’s how this works.’

‘Go, little heart,’ said Saskia. ‘I dismiss you.’

Ute became glass, then dissolved. The last part of her to disappear was her waving hand.

In time, when a true rain began to fall along with the rising spray, Saskia turned towards the castle. She could see a sheer-walled tunnel of dark ice vanishing in a turn. She wondered how cold it would be in there.

‘Ice cold,’ she said aloud. The juvenile edge to her voice was still there, but it did not crack, and Saskia felt strong enough to continue. She had faced the waters of Lake Baikal. She could face this.

I am more than just a girl. I will lead my fear.

Saskia passed into the iceworks. In the quietening gloom, she turned to the wall and saw the warped reflection of a lost girl walking alongside her. She carried a pink rucksack on one shoulder. She might have been walking to school. Saskia zipped her bodywarmer and put both arms through the straps of the rucksack. Her jaw trembled with the cold and the thought of coming dreams, but she lifted her head.

‘Arctic,’ she told herself. ‘Cool as.’

The Future: Met Four Base

Beneath Nevada’s Valley of Fire, in a twist of a vast helix bored by a nuclear subterrene tunneller, Professor Jennifer Proctor felt the first intimations of tiredness. She commanded a neural script to sharpen her concentration.

Proctor was two days out from an academic conference in Boulder, five away from a periodic review of Project Déjà Vu, and a month clear of her divorce from Sara. She looked through the transparent wall of the control room to the floor of the tunnel, where the centrifuges were turning even now. She credited her neural scripts with giving her the strength to stay on top of this mess. True, there were colleagues with whom she could confide. But there was none, apart from one man, she could trust.

She walked down the long flight of steps that led to the blast wall. Technicians nodded as she passed. There had been a time when she knew their names without recourse to the data overlay that enhanced her vision. These days, the importance of those personal connections seemed to have diminished.

She carried the chill of paranoia always: Which of them knew that she had sent the solider, codenamed Cory, through time and to his death? She had been careful to erase all trace of the operation. Logs, after all, could be deleted, and technicians paid off. But the potential for discovery remained.

And none of this changed the fact that she did not yet know why her father had been murdered.

She opened the metal door in the blast wall and entered a short corridor. Luminescent motes glowed. The corridor ended in a larger, deeper chamber about the size of a school bus. There was a rack of outdoor suits. She put one on and waited for the gases in the material to expand. The young technician at the door nodded to indicate that he had begun the priming.

Proctor stood by the technician until the priming was complete. He muttered something about a football game. She noted this attempt at small talk and smiled, but could not summon enough interest to engage with him. There was a visual overlay of his name floating near his chest. She didn’t bother to read it.

The door opened with a hiss of equalisation and Proctor stepped into Kaliningrad.

A level concrete walkway had been laid on the sloping floor of the underground bunker. It spanned the sealed chamber in a lazy sigmoid that reached all the way to the far end, where vertical panels of amber stood in the arrangement they had once held, almost a century before, when the German army had evacuated them from St Petersburg.

Proctor pulled up her hood to cover her white hair. She approached the three sets of amber panels. They were silent as monoliths. Parts of the panels had been damaged in transit, scorched, or cracked by the team who had supervised the restoration, before being encased in carbon nano-mesh.

The panels surrounded a time band, which had been placed in the centre of the floor. Touching one side of the device was a transparent tube filled with ball bearings. A electromagnet at the top of the tube turned on and off, lifting the column of metal balls only to let them drop against the band.

Proctor watched the sequence for a minute. She felt great regret. Saskia had been a friend. She sighed, then passed a command to the electromagnet.

It stopped.

She remained among the panels for another half an hour. She touched them and thought about the implications of the data she had collected from Saskia. Those implications struck her with enough force to wake her from the apathy that characterised her life. Years before, she had felt the same way about gravity: there had been the smallest glimmer of possibility in those equations, a possibility that spoke to time travel under low-energy conditions.

Something creaked above her head. She considered the weight of the reconstructed Königsberg Castle. It did not matter to her that the room was deep underground and sealed. She liked confined spaces. Always had.

She felt the movement of air as the door to Met Four Base was primed and equalised. She did not turn to see who had joined her because she had given instructions to refuse all but one individual.

‘Pass me your report, please,’ she said.

Before her next cold inhalation, Proctor’s brain had accepted the imprint of tens of thousands of moments, each of them a slice of Alexei Draganov’s life. Sudden new memory. She became a subtly different person.

‘So Saskia thinks you are dead,’ said Proctor. ‘That’s just as well.’

Draganov stepped alongside her. He was clean-shaven and had gelled his hair. He wore jeans and a checked shirt.

‘If she digs into the circumstances of my execution, she might become suspicious.’

‘What was it? Firing squad?’

‘Hanging.’

‘Must have been painful.’

Draganov gave her a sour look. ‘Did you collect the data we needed?’

‘There are certain facts now established.’ Proctor smiled despite herself. She had data, and that was always a joy. ‘We cannot yet pass any great quantity of matter from one universe and the next, but we can send information. If that information happens to be the digital consciousness of a dead mind, like Saskia’s, then we have a method for…exploration.’

‘So it seems,’ said Draganov. He crouched and took the transparent tube of ball bearings. These he poured into his palm. ‘She claimed that Meta is rather more advanced in the reality we sent her to.’