Insight

insight
Maia Kozheva
February 22, 2011

Contents
1 Induction 2
2 Inception 14
3 Intrusion 28
4 Inspiration 42
1
Chapter 1
Induction
Dedicated to my beloved Alice.
This dream again, eh. . .

The square-faced old man smiled warmly, looking away from his TV set and
onto the little girl, about six years old, lying in her bed nearby. “You really don’t
miss them, do you?”
“Nope.” The girl shook her head. “Thank goodness they’re away this night. . .
Don’t do this, you’re too young for that, it’s not. . . what they say. . . customary?
You aren’t like that at all, gramps.”
Her grandfather stretched and turned off the light switch near his sofa, letting
the room only be illuminated by the light of the TV. The room was spacious and
all her own, bigger than the nearby room that her parents shared; and it was as
messy as the average kid’s room, filled with toy cars and planes scattered around,
and the occasional books with colorful covers. “So. . . Should I read to you?” he
smiled.
“I can read by myself, gramps! Better tell me a little about history. You
stopped on Alexander Nevsky last time, right?”
“Honestly, I forgot that part, heh. Maybe you could tell me about your last
dream, Inga?”
The girl rolled onto her side and closed her eyes.
“It is the same. Well. . . almost. The empty world. I can spread my arms and
fly around, but I’m alone. And it seems like someone lived there, very recently.
Empty houses, with food that has had no time to cool down yet. . . Forests, with
fully grown trees, but no birds or animals at all. Cities with buildings reaching
into the skies, and nobody there, too. Empty roads, not even cars. And I can fly
very fast, I can speed up and slow down, and turn in the air, or I can go into space
and look at it from there. . . it’s a blue ball, but it looks nothing like Earth as the
books paint it.”
The old man lied down behind her, patting her head and listening intently.
“Do you like being there?”
2
CHAPTER 1. INDUCTION 3
“Who knows. . . ”
She rolled around and folded her arms behind her head on the pillow, looking
vacantly at the ceiling. Her surroundings were by no means rich; she was lying
on a decrepit sofa-bed that no doubt had seen at least two generations grow up
before her, and its back was touching a colorful carpet with an intricate abstract
pattern, a carpet of the kind that Soviet people often hung on their painted walls
in the absence of wallpaper. The wall opposite to the bed was covered completely
with a row of tall cases, most of them showing piles of plates and cups behind
their plain glass doors. Finally, in the far end of the room stood a folded table,
used for occasions when this living room, which doubled as a bedroom, trans-
formed into a large dining room for special occasions – that is, twice a year, during
the grandparents’ birthdays.
The girl yawned and stretched her left arm until her finger touched the carpet,
tracing along the edge of the bottom pattern. Perhaps in her mind, a traveler was
making way through this strange, hostile country of flower-like shapes, trying to
reach the nearest exit gate. . .
After a bit of rummaging through the bookshelf, the old man finally found
the book he was searching for: History of Russia, Ancient Times to Peter the Great.
He opened it and quickly scanned through it, looking at columns of ornate text
with the occasional “aahh” and “mhm”. His memory thus refreshed, he sat down
next to the girl and touched her head, brushing her black hair cut to chin length,
almost as short as a boy’s. “Who do you want to be when you grow up, daughter...
Thought of that?”
Inga turned her eyes to her granddad, looking curiously at the closed book.
“Nuh-uh. . . ” He said nothing, only showing a small, enigmatic smile.
***
Time flew and flew by.
Somewhere out there, on the other side of the Ural, far away in Moscow –
so removed from here, from Novosibirsk, that it seemed almost like a separate
country – one political crisis followed the other, and former favorites of fortune,
one after one, found themselves displaced, left to blabber about how they would
have surely left the country to prosperity if only they could stay in power.
Two attacks on the White House in the course of three years. The Soviet
Union, that bogeyman of late-20th-century politics, finally died from its slow
illness, and the new Russia was left adrift, making its people, especially those
used to the old order, confused to no end. And then came Yeltsin and the Wild
Nineties, the time of economical collapse and lawlessness, closing factories and
roads falling into disrepair. . . and street kiosks at every corner rife with goods
from the rediscovered, still unfamiliar West. Then Putin came and went, leaving
a country where no two people could agree on the same idea, and more and more
of them asking what was the point of it all.
The year was 2010. But for this one apartment in the Akademgorodok, time
was seemingly frozen. If you looked into the same room now, you would be hard-
pressed to find differences from twenty years ago, from that time in 1990 just
after Inga’s grandmother celebrated her 54th birthday.
It was, by and large, still the same room. Yes, the old bulky Rubin TV set
(which, in the time it was invented, could be eadily employed as an assassination
weapon by causing deaths from of laughter among American engineers) was re-
placed with a modern LCD set that was basically an oversized monitor, and the
large stack of yellowed newspapers on the counter made way for a small stack of
glossy magazines with pictures of celebrities in fashionable suits and revealing
dresses (with enough makeup to pass for Scooby Doo monsters without disguise).
A photo of an unhealthy-looking elderly woman now decorated the folded table.
But other than that, it seemed that the tornadoes of social cataclysms passed
over this place without even noticing its existence.
Rrrring!
In the nearby kitchen, Inga’s grandfather, who was napping in an armchair
about as old as himself, sprang into a fully awake state in an instant. Rapidly
blinking, he walked to the wooden door of the apartment, unlocked and opened
it. Outside stood a short middle-aged woman in a strict longcoat, holding a folder
with a single sheet of paper stretched over its top.
“National census,” the woman said dryly, preparing a cheap ballpoint pen.
“Do I understand correctly that you are. . . ” she scanned the list of names on the
paper, “Igor Belkin?”
“Yes, but please make it quick. . . ”
“And Inga Zerkalova,” continued the woman in the same monotone, apathetic
voice, “is she here with you?”
“Granddaughter’s at work, but I can fill in her data. Doubt she’d object.”
“Right.” The census worker pressed her pen against the first blank line on the
sheet. “Name, Belkin, Igor Afanasyevich. Ethnicity?”
“Russian.”
“Age?”
“Seventy-six.”
“Marital status?”
Igor sighed deeply, suddenly looking uncomfortable, and fixed his eyes at the
dirty concrete floor. “Widower. . . ”
***
From the outside, the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics was not signifi-
cantly different from the surrounding institutes; it was a six-story building of
the same kind of blocky, uninspired mid-Soviet architecture, painted beige and
brown. Only its facade was recently renovated, while the interior was full of the
same looping half-lit corridors, dusty machinery and thin, bent metal doors that
seem to constantly accompany anything remotely related to Russian science.
A black-haired woman in a lab coat and thin-framed glasses was sitting in
front of a row of electronic equipment; the dreaming six-year-old was still rec-
ognizable in her, but only barely. Her brown eyes were narrowed, focusing on
the monitors. Their blue-white light threw her pointy chin and almost straight
jawline into sharp relief, matching her thin, slightly slanted eyebrows. She wore
a trace of foundation, but had clearly not had the time or interest in applying it
neatly, because it was smudged onto a corner of her lower lip. Dense hair framed
her face, covering her temples and most of her forehead to meet below her head
and pour down to the small of her back.
The equipment in front of her consisted of an eclectic mishmash of small
fifty-year-old displays and rotating knobs and modern computer LCDs, all entan-
gled together in an unwieldy web of wires. If someone from the street saw these
controls, they’d probably mistake it for the set of a mad scientist’s lab from some
science fiction B-movie; yet it was real, and the employees of the Institute sim-
ply learned to deal with it and regard it as part of their ordinary state of affairs.
It didn’t help matters any that all the graphs and tables, despite being Windows
software, were executed in the ultrabright 16-color IBM PC palette that caused
many a user to don glasses back in the early nineties. Presumably it was a con-
scious decision by the professors, too used to the old ways.
F Rev. . . Maximum signal. . . Underlay. . .
Inga was tired. It was only half past six, yet it was already dark outside. She
thought about the unexpected shift earlier today. She had to fill in for her su-
perior at a university lecture, feeling her voice trembling when standing by the
same blackboard and table where, six years ago, she had seen the elderly, mild-
mannered Professor Granovsky. He caught cold, she heard, and was expected to
recover over the weekend, but until then. . .
Well, until then, she had to do double duty. And now the numbers and lines
on the screen were getting blurry in front of her eyes.
Finally, the last batch of experimental data got processed, and the corre-
sponding indicator lit up. Inga closed the notebook on her desk, put away her
pen and sighed with relief. And there’s that. Let Nikolay Antonych sort it out on
Monday.
She stood up, Her working day, and thus week, was finally over. Ahead was
the weekend, which she’d probably spend walking aimlessly around the Akadem-
gorodok and having small tongue-in-cheek arguments with grandpa. Again. Oh
well.
Ah right, it’s also payday, Inga remembered.
She took off her white coat and hung it lazily over the back of her chair, not
even bothering to adjust its folds. Then she took her thick, glossy red coat from
the hanger – it was the only remaining one – pulled it on and zipped it up. She
turned off the lights and left the room, and began quietly walking towards the
staircase –
– but just when she reached it and was about to make the first step down,
someone suddenly appeared from the floor below, running upstairs at top speed,
and bumped into her.
Someone. . . strangely similar to herself. . .
Suspiciously similar. An exact lookalike of her, as far as she could tell, in the
same red coat, except with a white trace of chalk on her left shoulder; and when
Inga turned her head, the impostor opened the double doors of the conference
hall and shut them behind herself, vanishing as quickly as she appeared.
Inga rubbed her eyes. Staggering, she approached the double doors and
opened them. The conference hall, a large room with a long table and marble
walls with engraved portraits of some Siberian scientists, was empty, and judg-
ing by the level of dust on the table and floor, it seemed like nobody has been
here for days. Lazy janitors. . . was Inga’s first thought as she closed the door in
puzzlement; and then, Should sleep more. I’m seeing things.
The accounting department was way down on the ground floor, and so this
is where she headed. The accountant woman, barely visible behind the kind
of small window that tends to separate Russian bureaucrats from those pesky
people called “general public”, wearily handed Inga her bunch of five-thousand-
ruble notes. Inga accepted them and tossed them into her handbag without
counting.
“Say, Inga. . . ” the accountant said suddenly as Inga was about to leave, “ever
felt you’d like to escape all this? Live a more interesting life?”
Whuh?.. What’s this, all of a sudden? It wasn’t surprising to Inga that she
was called by name; it was more well-known than she expected among people
she didn’t know herself, and if anything, she felt a little guilty for not learning
the name of this unassuming woman who steadily allotted her her salary month
after month. But this was just. . . so out of context. . .
Inga turned back to face the accountant and folded her arms. “Why are you
asking?”
“Well, there’s talk about you, people say you’re a dreamy type, so I just won-
dered, maybe you think it’s not for you. I know I’d go for something less tedious
if I had the chance. Say, if I had a million dollars, I’d go traveling all around the
world. Greece, Thailand, the Canaries. . . Or maybe I’d go after landmarks – I’ve
always wanted to see the Pyramids, Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building. . . ”
“Right. . . ” Inga let out a sigh.
What is it about me that makes people say things like this? It was bad enough
when Andrey randomly spilled all his troubles with his wife as if I was his private
counselor. . .
“Or I could go on a voyage around the seas. . . ” the accountant continued,
leaning dreamily in her small office chair.
Inga leaned on the wall with her shoulder. For a moment, she felt an urge
to just leave without a word, but at the same time, she felt compelled to at least
feign interest. “See. . . ” she began in an unconvincing voice, “I can feel you there.
If I spent my whole day at work sitting behind that counter, I. . . I’m not sure I’d
even be able to endure that, really. I know quite a few people who think their lives
are boring and think anywhere else would be interesting for a change, but. . . ”
She made a pause, tapping on the floor with her foot. “But I’m not one of
them. It’s not that I don’t like this life, it’s just. . . I don’t know. Would be inter-
esting to try something new, but I feel tied. Between my job and supporting my
grandfather, I hardly find time to breathe.”

Actually, is it really a bright idea to tell someone I don’t even know about that?
I’m acting just the way I disapprove of.
“Right, I need to go home and think about this,” Inga finished. ”It’s getting
late, we can talk about it on Monday if you want; what would you say?”
The accountant, it seems, was lost in her own thoughts. She only nodded
with her eyes closed and waved; judging by her face, she was probably imagining
herself sunbathing on a beach in Rio de Janeiro.
Inga released another sigh, this time one of relief, left the room, and started
tiredly walking towards the exit, her feet shuffling on the floor. That’s an inter-
esting question, actually, she thought, clearly I’m unhappy with something about
my life, not enough to try and escape it, but. . . what is it exactly?
She stepped into a particularly dimly lit corridor, whose walls were painted
with a shade of dull blue that had greyed out with time (and entropy). She passed
by an abandoned bucket and mop, a pile of differently shaped wooden planks,
and a round hole in the wall with wires sticking out – the remains of a removed
switcher, or maybe plug.
Then when she passed a line between patterns on the floor–
She felt like her brain was electrified. As if lightning struck it, making her
whole body numb for a moment; the feeling passed in an instant, but right after
that, she heard a quiet female voice, unknown, coming somewhere from the side.
Found the anomaly. . .
Inga barely restrained herself from jumping on the spot.
She turned her head and looked behind; the big rectangular LED clock at-
tached to the wall. The time showing on it was 18:45. Strange; she could have
sworn it was past seven already, and when she had caught a glimps of that same
clock just seconds ago when walking past it, it was showing 19:15. Strange, but
perhaps not too strange: after all, these clocks in institutes go wrong all the time,
up to the difference of several minutes between two sides of the same clock. So
she backtracked and looked at the other side; it showed 18:44. With a shrug, Inga
took her cellphone out of her coat, and saw that its display was showing 19:16.
“Bah, stupid old electronics. Things breaking all the time. Should tell some-
one to look into this next week.”
Inga walked out of the corridor, into the brightly-lit front hall, and looked
into a mirror on the wall. She usually did that to check if her hair flowed the
right way, but now, a minor detail caught her attention. The left shoulder of her
coat got a spot of white chalk from touching the wall. Normally, she’d blame the
wall painters for their persistent decision to only paint walls up until a certain
level, but now her mind was focused on a different problem.
“Wait. . . Chalk? Just like that wannabe me I saw on the stair. . . ”
Without thinking what that could possibly mean, she rushed, as fast as she
could, up the staircase, her heavy footsteps echoing through the near-empty
building as she counted floors. One. . . two. . . three. . . four. . .
And when she reached the fourth floor, she saw an exact lookalike of herself
casually approaching the stairs. Hardly expecting this, she ran into the other
Inga, who looked at her in surprise. Thoughts were flying fast in her head.
Right, if it’s not some kind of prank. . . then what? Well, when I was her. . . no,
it’s ridiculous to think that. But that other me ran into the conference hall back then,
let’s check.
Inga ran past her other self, confused just as much as she now was, and rushed
into the doors of the conference hall. As she expected, it was empty.
Or. . .
“There you are, sunshine.”
Inga reached instinctively for the switch to turn the lights on, and then turned
to the source of the voice. She saw a woman, about her own height, leaning
against the wall. The stranger had olive skin, brown hair gathered in a high pony-
tail, and south-European facial features, and was clad in a baggy jumpsuit whose
color was hard to tell; patches of its glistening texture cycled over all the colors
of the rainbow as she moved. The outfit was tightened at the waist by a belt with
a small J-shaped device hanging from it, resembling a compact electric razor.
Inga was pretty sure that she had never seen this woman before, and that
she, in fact, didn’t work here. In all honesty, Inga would probably consider her a
tourist or cosplayer if she just randomly saw her on the street. And there she was,
standing well past the working hours in a place where she likely had no business.
“Who’d think you’d start here, of all places?” the stranger said in perfectly
accentless Russian, and Inga recognized the voice from the likely point when
she had experienced the timeshift. “But in the end, if someone can live there, no
place and time is more privileged than another. . . Glad to see you passed your
little puzzle, but you have little time. Your other self will find nothing here, but
well, you know it; better make an escape now.”
“Wait, escape?” Inga blinked. “From whom?”
“Right now we’ve been shifted outside of normal spacetime. Not by me, don’t
blame me. The effect won’t last long, from your subjective perspective, but it’s
enough for whoever wants you killed to locate you.”
“Come on now.” Inga frowned. “Someone wants me killed? Doubt I did some-
thing to warrant the attention of someone high-calibre.”
“It’s not what you did,” said the stranger. “It’s what you’re going to do.”
“Huh?! This doesn’t even make se–”
“No time. I’ll explain later. For now, run for your life. . . Not there!” she
exclaimed when she saw Inga opening the door again. ”Well, you can try and
make it through the building, but it’ll likely go nowhere.”
Inga looked out of the door. . . and recoiled. The outside was not as she recog-
nized it. The walls were wobbling; the floor beyond the room was slanted, curved
up like a playground slide so that the staircase was now above Inga’s head; and
the walls were greying out in front of her eyes, losing their color, as if the picture
was being put through a greyscale filter.
Inga turned her head back, looking again at the unknown woman, whose face
remained stern. The stranger grabbed her handheld device and pointed it at the
far corner of the room; and at the same moment, three blurred spheres of satu-
rated purple, about human-high, appeared in the corner, not “warping” in, nor
expanding: they all appeared whole in an instant. The spheres just seemed sus-
pended in place, not even advancing; but Inga felt a growing urge to hide from
them, to get away from them as far as she could – preferably to the other side of
the planet.
“Now, about you,” the stranger said calmly. “I don’t know who you are, al-
though I hope to find out. But if I were you,” the pace of her voice increased, “and
if I was trying to trap someone by temporally isolating the entire building, then
as part of doing my homework, at least, at the very least, I’d check the schemat-
ics.” Seeing that Inga had her head turned towards the windows, she slid her free
hand into her pocket, drew out a tiny object shaped like a pill, and tossed it at
the nearest one.
The glass of the window melted instantly, like a sheet of ice dropped into
molten iron.
Inga felt cold air from the street breeze into the room. The spheres moved
closer towards each other, touching its sides. What could that mean? Inga rushed
towards the window and looked down at the concrete floor below. Whatever. . .
She doesn’t seriously expect me to jump, does she? It’s the fourth floor!
As she was thinking that, she heard the voice of her unknown advisor behind
her back: “Look to your right!” Inga stuck her head outside and turned it: to the
right of the window ran a fixed ladder.
Well, worth trying, I guess.
With a gulp, Inga climbed onto the windowsill, grabbed the ladder and threw
herself onto it. She quickly moved her hands and feet, trying not to pay atten-
tion to the sounds of gunfire and what sounded like static noise while climbing
down. Finally, she jumped onto the floor – and ran into a cluster of pine trees
nearby, looking from below at the institute building, where only a few windows
still remained lit at this time.
What could that be? Terrorists? I better. . . Inga drew out her cellphone and
pressed the call button. Her thumbs were approaching the 0 and 2 on the on-
screen keyboard1 , when suddenly–
Ding-ding-do-don-don don-didon-didon...
She almost dropped the phone before looking at the display, which said
”Grandpa calling”. Oh, it’s just him.
“Yesgramps?” Inga said in a single breath.
“Where’ve you been?!” Igor’s voice had no hint of anger, only mild disap-
proval. “Forgot to turn on the phone again? I couldn’t reach you for hours, can’t
even go to sleep, worrying about you! What time do you think it is?”
“About seven?”
1 As a matter of fact, it seems that Russia is the only country from the former Soviet Union to still
retain the iconic 02 number, along with the equally useful 01 and 03, and the far more obscure 04.
Don’t ask me why. Asking a Ukrainian or Belarussian would likely not help the matters any, although
you can bet the answer will feature the words “going a different way”.
“. . . Stop your pranks and check the clock already. Will you at least be back
before midnight?”
“U-u-uhhh. . . ” Inga felt her daily limit for being surprised was exhausted. “I
guess I will.”
She sighed and put the phone back into her pocket, having forgotten about
her intention to call the police. It was dark, darker even than it actually was at
this time, and only a few rare cars were seen driving through Lavrentyev Ave.
She considered waiting at the stop for a minibus, but then, remembering all the
weirdnesses with timing she just went through, thought she could as well walk
all the way home.
When, walking, she saw the TechnoCity shop across the street, its lights were
out. Which meant it was already past eight. Was her phone clock unreliable too?
Bloody HTC. The sign of the nearby Tasty Center, which was also closed, reminded
her that she was hungry, and she hurried her steps.
At last, Inga reached the intersection with Builders Ave. The large, prominent
LED clock above the road would hopefully clear up this particular question. She
raised her head. . .
6 ◦ C. . . P-754. . . Right, right, temperature and pressure is not what I’m inter-
ested in right now. . .
The display cycled to time, and showed 23:34.
Inga, defeated, leaned her back against the nearest tree. For about five min-
utes she stood like that, just breathing silently and staring blankly into space,
indistinctly seeing the few cars passing by on the road in front of her. At last,
she returned to her senses, and wearily moved on.
***
That night, Inga had an uneasy sleep. Twice, she woke up feeling like her
brain was overheating and pressing on her skull from the inside. She couldn’t
remember her dreams at all, unusually for her, but the second time she woke up
shivering under her bedsheet, feeling that even if she didn’t remember what she
saw, it was definitely uncomfortable.
Yet as she was falling asleep – the third time this night – she couldn’t help
but think that she was supposed to know what those spheres were, or what, in
general, had happened in the institute, if not the identity of her apparent ally.
Perhaps if she could only dig into the depths of her mind. . . just a bit more. . . It
seemed like those kinds of answers that you feel will roll off your tongue every
second now, but remain, frustratingly, just out of reach. She couldn’t think of
anything before her brain turned off again, and she slept undisturbed until the
morning – well, as undisturbed as she could feel with her grandfather snoring
loudly in the nearby room.
When Igor woke up that morning, he looked at the alarm clock, and to his
great puzzlement, saw 8:13. Usually, he remembered, he had no trouble waking
up at six, a habit that strengthened over his long years. He walked around the
apartment, but Inga was nowhere to be found, even though he had seen her come
home, and knew that she usually stayed in bed on weekends until at least ten,
and frequently even later. She didn’t even bother to make her bed before leaving.
The kitchen table had an empty cup and plate on it, unwashed.
With a trained motion, Igor reached for the home phone and dialed Inga’s
number. She wasn’t answering. Again, eh. He redialed once, then again, and at
last heard her pick up the phone.
“Where are you, daughter?” Through all the years, he couldn’t break the habit
of calling her by that inappropriate word.
“Downtown, at the trainstation, but don’t worry, I’ll be back in the after-
noon.”
“What could you possibly– Oh never mind.”
Igor returned into the living room and plunged onto the sofa – the same one
that once served as a bed to the six-year-old Inga. So that’s the kind of gratitude
kids show when they grow up. . .
He turned on the TV. The current channel was TV3, right where he left it.
“. . . This is Pavel Chudakov with you on The Psi-Factor, and today, I remind
you, we’re talking about a persistent element in the mythologies of the world. As
our most erudite viewers may know, there are many recurring elements in clas-
sical pagan myths; for example, the myth of the worldwide flood is seen, in some
form, among the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and finally, of course, in the
Old Testament. The Greeks and Babylonians even had their equivalent of Noah.”
The TV screen kept cycling through ancient tablets and manuscripts, footage of
archaeologists unearthing ruins, and crude drawings that could, perhaps, be in-
terpreted a myriad of different ways. “As another example, world mythologies
have the recurring concept of a Golden Age, when humans lived in bliss in unity
with nature until they discovered something they weren’t supposed to, at which
point their divine gifts were taken away and they had to fight for survival in a
hostile world, struck by disease and crime.
“Today, however, I would like to draw your attention on a different recurring
aspect. This figure, or should I say archetype, is known by any names. This motif
is found all around the world; from Hinduism, to the beliefs of North American
tribes like Sioux and Ojibwe, and traces of it are left in the Old and New Testa-
ments, and even in some form, in today’s new religious movements. This recur-
ring character is commonly nicknamed ‘the Ageless One’, even though his real
name is rarely alluded to in the sources. In his most common incarnation, this
eternal stranger appears through different times and places, seemingly out of
nowhere; he battles nameless horrors from beyond this world, and leaves just as
unexpectedly. He has several different faces, appearing out of order, and the leg-
ends involving various incarnations of the Ageless One credit him as the possible
inspiration for some inventions that we now take for granted. . . ”
Throughout this slow-paced narration, Igor found himself drifting back into
sleep.
Inga returned by the afternoon, as she promised. Her face was shining with
happiness; the first thing she did upon entering the room was hugging him.
“Turned out they had a ticket for this evening2 – I’m leaving now, gramps!”
“Wait, wait. Ticket where?”
“To Chelyabinsk. So, just came here to change and grab some stuff, and off I
go!”
“What on Earth did you forget in Chelyabinsk?”
“Good question. Right, gramps, give me a couple of minutes and I’m ready to
go.” Inga walked into the bedroom and locked the door behind herself.
“Don’t you have work? You can’t possibly hope to be back by Mon–”
“If all goes well,” Inga said from behind the door, ”I’ll be back before I even. . .
Well, you’ll see. If not, and the probability of that is lower than the probability
of me dying in a car crash, then I guess they can deduct it from my salary for
November.”
Igor sighed. “Why must you be so bullheaded at times. . . ”
In a few minutes, Inga opened the door and galloped through the hallway;
Igor wearily staggered after her. She quickly pulled on her coat, holding just the
usual handbag with which she went to work. Wasn’t she going to at least pack a
suitcase or something? Igor thought, but tried to look respectful.
“Right, I’m out! See you soon, gramps!” She opened the front door, and at the
same time, Igor heard knocking sounds from behind him. Knock, knock, knock. . .
Someone was apparently beating a rhythm on the bedroom door. But there was
nobody else in the apartment, Igor knew it. What the. . .
“Wait a minute, Inga, there’s something in the–”
“No time to waste. Bye!” Inga waved merrily, smiled and shut the door. He
heard her footsteps as she walked away outside.
Well, it’s not like I’m going to stop her, right? She’s an adult. With unsettling
thoughts of powerlessness, Igor turned back and approached the closed bedroom
door again.
Knock, knock, knock. . .
Asking himself why someone would be knocking from the inside, Igor turned
the doorknob and pulled.
The first thing he saw, right in front of himself, was his granddaughter who
just left through the front door. Except now, she was wearing nothing but a navy
blue swimsuit, soaked in water. Inga looked wet overall, with drops of water on
her skin and even more falling down from her hair; stood with her hands on her
hips, grinning to her teeth. He couldn’t quite see what was behind her, but it
surely didn’t look like his bedroom.
2 It was later found out that the availability of this single ticket in person was the result of a glitch
in the Russian Railways online booking system, due to an off-by-one error in a deeply buried Java
file. The entire programming team responsible for this fluke was fired and rehired, and the system
was rewritten from scratch to go along with the recent company-wide rebranding. The new system
worked five times slower, but at least it processed user input correctly; performance was later rectified
by deploying the web server to a recently discarded supercomputer cluster originally used to simulate
quantum interactions in accordance to the Standard Model.
“Arrived slightly before I left, but just as I remembered,” Inga said with a tone
of pride. “Within margins. Figures. What’s important is that this thing was just
where I remembered it being. Want to come with me, to a first real test-drive?”
Igor raised his eyebrows so high that it seemed for a second that his eyes were
ready to jump out of their sockets.
“Come with you? On another trip across half the country you just announce
out of the blue? Where now have you bought tickets to, Magadan?”
Inga moved slightly aside, freeing the passage. “Farther than that. Much
farther, if you want. Name a time and place, or just grab an astronomy atlas and
point at a star if you’re stuck. We’ll be there in a jiffy. And no tickets needed.”
“I see. So what was it you said about never touching drugs? Just another lie?”
Inga grabbed his sleeve and tugged his arm. “Come, gramps, and look. Just
look.”
He grudgingly followed; and when he walked through the door, he saw that
what was behind it did not resemble either any of the rooms in the house, or any
kind of interior he has seen in the seventy decades of his life.
He was standing in a round, very spacious room. The dominant color here
was sky blue with a hint of grey; the walls and floor were the same texture, with
intricate abstract patterns, resembling waves, flowing in all directions, down and
up, and across, constantly merging and splitting. The floor was completely flat,
yet the ceiling, far above, was dome-shaped, with a hole in the middle, through
which he could see fuzzy strips of light that reminded him of the Milky Way as
it was depicted in popular astronomy books. The door closed behind him by it-
self; from this side, it looked like a natural, barely noticeable irregularity in the
smooth wall.
Two spiral staircases rose along the round wall, meeting on a translucent cat-
walk that circled above his head, with about a dozen doors along it on this sec-
ond level. The first floor had a round table in the middle, surrounded by three
wave-shaped chairs, all made of the same translucent, plastic-like material. The
construction felt light, almost weightless. It was not completely bright inside;
the light was slightly dimmed, reinforced by numerous specks and waves of white
light dancing chaptically behind the walls and below the floor – or so it seemed
in perspective. He got a vibe of a slightly unreal atmosphere from just being
there, especially seeing his granddaughter, looking fresh out of a swimming pool,
standing next to the wall and looking at him expectantly.
“Well then, gramps,” she said finally with enthusiasm. “If you can’t come up
with ideas now, I’ll take matters into my own hands.”
She coughed and walked towards one of the staircases.
“Captain’s Log. . . actually, never mind that. The Insight is going for the first
trip in many millennia. Next stop – wherever it is! Hold tight to your seat, and
welcome aboard!”
Igor threw his head back, pushing his chin forward and stroking his grey stub-
ble. The look of his face seemed to say, You have a lot of explaining to do. . .
Chapter 2
Inception
Far away, long ago,
Glowing dim as an ember –
Things my heart used to know,
Things it yearns to remember.
Anastasia
. . . Inga handed the taxi driver the money and exited onto the street with a
small polite nod.
It was still morning, and she could briefly look at the rising sun, lighting up
the surface of the slow, overgrown river in front of her, without injuring her eyes.
They call it a river? Inga thought with disdain, making her way through the
bushes along the bank and dodging low-hanging branches. The Ob, this isn’t.
And the Insight, seriously. . . Technology beyond priceless, and of all the places on
Earth, it had to be here, at the bottom of Miass?
She stopped and looked at a single rock that the waters were flowing past for a
few seconds. Her sight was glued to it, and she spread her arms apart, stretching
her muscles.
It’s here or bust. But the latter would mean that all my memories recovered so far
are incorrect, which, based on the available evidence and successful predictions. . .
the probability is so small as to be negligible.
Enthusiastic, Inga looked around, ensured nobody was looking, began dis-
carding her clothes. Her red coat fell to the ground first, followed by her blue
jeans, black sweater, and shirt. Left in a one-piece swimsuit, she reached into
her bag and put on diving goggles.
She shivered from the cold, clenching her arms to her stomach. Gah, and I
haven’t even touched the water yet.
She took a deep breath, unzipped her boots, and pulled off her boots. Now
she was standing with her bare feet on the grass, still looking indecisively at the
water flowing past her.
14
CHAPTER 2. INCEPTION 15
Going to be cold, it better be worth it. . . Wait, who am I kidding. It can’t be any
other way.
Inga rushed into the river.
The biting cold, as she ran through, almost stopped her in the tracks; she
could barely see the muddy, grassy bottom of the river, much less make out any
spots to look for with her eyes. But she didn’t need her eyes. With each millime-
ter she got closer to that invisible opening, the pressure in her head increased.
She could almost see them now – random, disjoint glimpses of the memories of
that someone she didn’t even know, which somehow awakened into her – or were
implanted, even? Was it because she was someone special, by birth, or because
she happened to get into a lucky accident? That she did not know – yet that force
of attraction, that resonance increasing with every moment, was what drew her
to this unlikely place.
Although – unlikely in what sense, exactly?
Now that this object she was seeking, whose shape she didn’t yet know, was
left on Earth – not knowing anything else about it, she could find no reason to
suspect it to be in any special place. It was a riverbed, so what? Just a random
small river, she thought, among thousands all over the world. It would be far
more surprising to find it hidden under the Statue of Liberty or something.
There it was, that special spot.
Inga touched the soil–
. . . Immediately she felt like the riverbed gave way; first something grey and
rectangular, resembling a door, formed among the mud and overgrowth, and
then it disappeared entirely, in an instant. Inga jumped down the hole – but
ended up, somehow, sliding feet-first on a smooth floor, her back dragging her
weight as if gravity suddenly did a right-angle turn; what used to be down was
now forward, and backward became the new down.
And there was no cold water surrounding her. No, it was air. She was still
shivering, what with the drips of freezing water running down her limbs, and
she could hardly even see with the water on her goggles.
So she took the goggles off and stood up, and looked around. She inspected
the half-lit round blue room, shifted her eyes up to look critically at the dome,
and finally, leaned on the table. It all looked familiar – she knew, on some ratio-
nal level, that she never actually saw this machine before with her own eyes, yet
everything felt as if she did, and could remember it.
Still in good shape, I see, after all these thousands of years. . .
And then –
It dawned on her, in an instant.
It was akin to the sense of immense satisfaction that comes when the first
few pieces of a puzzle, any kind of puzzle, fit together. Pieces that one gets from
separate sources, pieces one didn’t even know were parts of the same puzzle. The
times when you can look at the part you just fit together, and see how tightly it fits
– and even though you don’t have the complete picture yet, you know where to
go from there and assemble the remaining part of it; and when suddenly, pieces
of knowledge heard from sources that didn’t even know of each other’s existence
form a cohesive picture, and you can look back at it with the sense of epiphany
and accomplishment, seeing what was previously hidden, which you didn’t know
existed in the first place, and suddenly it all makes sense.
Inga felt it all, in less than a second. New memories flowing in – not her
own, but those of this other being; and at once, from those memories, she saw
– vividly – the immeasurable distances across planets and galaxies, and life on
other planets, their own inhabitants, human and alien, hurrying for their daily
business like the people she knew did. She saw planets where the blindfolded
die-tosser that is natural selection has only just begun its work, bulding primitive
cells out of raw proteins that stockpiled from natural processes, and those where
even they had yet to form; and she saw intergalactic civilizations so complex, so
full of concepts that she wouldn’t even suspect to exist as a human, which would
be so futile to explain to her old, past self as trying to pitch Maxwell’s equations
to cavepeople. . .
For a moment, she was overwhelmed – but only for a moment.
When the initial, brief front of emotions passed, she turned to the door –
holding water outside with a force field – and laughed. And it was not the mani-
acal laughter of a cackling evil overlord, but good laughter of relief, the kind one
has just after barely escaping seemingly certain death. She laughed for about two
good minutes straight before stopping and taking a deep breath, not because the
feeling receded, but because she was too tired to laugh now.
She could think of nothing concrete for another minute, before the blurriness
of her mind sorted itself out, and her stream of clear thought resumed. And the
first thing that came to her mind was:
Such a mind, so vast and expansive, how can it hope now to run on such limited
hardware? Bloody evolution.
Then she heard a monotone, artificial-sounding voice, coming seemingly
from above, from the center of the dome. “IDM has discovered that User
One’s biometric data has changed. Please wait while the
Insight is being updated to match the new settings. This
will take a few seconds.”
“”Wha. . . ?” gasped Inga, taking a step back. “IDM? User One? What’s that
nonsense?”
There was no answer.
***
“So, you’ve just entered this thing,” Igor asked skeptically, “and then sud-
denly you went all smart, that’s what you’re saying?”
“No smarter than I was, just more well-read,” replied Inga. She was looking
into his eyes with caution, as if expecting him to explode with such force that it
would make Little Boy and Fat Man look like holiday firecrackers.
Instead, he suddenly stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her waist.
This continued for a few seconds, which Inga found increasingly awkward,
despite the genuine mellow look in his eyes.
“If this is right for you. . . You’re still my lovely granddaughter, you know.
Maybe now you’ll finally make something out of yourself.”
“I think you misunderstand.” Inga smiled. “This, as you call it, thing is not
for making something out of myself. It’s completely useless for that. I can’t even
show it to anyone but you – especially to scientists or politicians. Imagine what
kind of infighting could happen? Not exactly wanting to be remembered as the
woman who brought down the world, if you get me.”
Igor looked like he didn’t understand a thing, but he smiled back. “Well, it’s
your choice, Inga, you’re an adult.”
“Say that to my. . . ” She looked down and idly scratched her left foot with the
toes of her right. “Never mind. I should probably change. Wait a bit while I evert
the entrance.”
“Until you what?”
Inga approached the door and crossed her index fingers in an X shape. A quiet
“whoosh” came down from below. “Making it go to the other side.” She opened
the door: it now pointed to the bedroom. “See, I looked through the wardrobe
onboard here – it only has a few sets of really weird clothes, and they’re too bulky
for me anyway. I recovered mine, but I’d rather grab whatever else we have in
the wardrobe. You too, by the way – take what you need.”
Igor sighed like he had just been sentenced to ten years of labor camps. Mean-
while, Inga walked out, opened the wardrobe, and started collecting clothes
without regard, her and his alike, forming a heap in her arms that she could
barely hold. As she turned back and walked past him, upstairs, he felt a bit en-
vious at her enthusiasm. This Inga, jumping like an attention-deficit kid who’s
been shown a new game, was not like the quiet, inert granddaugher he knew.
“Daughter. . . Mind if I tell you something? Travel is for you youngsters. I
just want to live however little I’ve left, and die in peace.”
Inga rolled her eyes and leaned over the railing on the second floor, looking
down at him in disapproval. “Don’t say that, all right? You aren’t dying yet, and
you bloody better not!”
She walked with the pile of clothes into the nearest door above, and it slid shut
behind her, leaving Igor alone to stare at the dancing patterns of light behind
the walls. He thought, momentarily, of walking out of this spooky machine, but
curiosity was already taking over now.
About ten minutes later, Inga walked out, dry and smiling. The outfit she
changed into consisted primarily of warm tones, in distinct contrast with the
silvery-blue walls surrounding her: a moderately brown blouse with a thick grey
line defining the neck, and two straps meeting on the stomach in the shape of a
cross; equally brown pantyhose and high-heeled shoes, beige socks, and a com-
pact mid-thigh-long skirt, white with small brown speckles scattered generously
to give the impression of thinner, ethereal cloth.
“Right then! Our first trip, together – any ideas, gramps?”
Silence.
“Fine. Let’s leave it to randomness.” Inga ran downstairs and pointed her
fingers at the table; a holographic screen popped up, stationary and suspended in
the air, projected above. It was filled with seemingly incomprehensible symbols.
Inga worked quickly, moving her fingers to press and drag icons that resembled
minituarized copies of abstract art gallery exhibits, with fervor in her eyes.
“Two hundred years in either direction, give or take. Behind that door, now.
All that’s left for us is to open it. Looks crazy enough?”
Igor looked hesitant. Nevertheless, he opened the door that he saw just a few
minutes ago leading into his apartment – and now, he saw a marble wall close in
front of him. He stood there indecisively as Inga approached him from behind,
her heels making a sharp sound on the floor of the round room.
“What are you afraid of? Just walk out!”
He took his hand and made a step forward –
“Ouch!”
Inga and Igor groaned from pain, at once. Gravity played a nasty joke with
them again; what they thought was a wall was in fact the floor, and they fell, and
rolled onto their backs; the door was opened on the ceiling above.
***
If something could be said about the building they ended up in at the first
glance, it’s that its owner must have been filthy rich. They were lucky to land in
a relatively low-ceiling spot, or they might have broken some bones: the wide,
brightly lit corridor of white marble continued in both directions with a much
higher ceiling, The columns to the sides of the corridor and round, domed ceiling,
repeating in a row, reminded Igor immediately of the Insight interior – except
these were made of matte, non-glossy white stone with blue ornaments running
over the columns. The walls, of the same pristine white, were decorated with
tapestries, and ornate chairs made of expensive-looking wood stood in neat rows
along the two sides of the passage. Thick, smooth pink curtains rolled to the sides
of the large windows completed the impression.
There was nobody around – yet – but sounds of footsteps were already heard
from a fair distance away. Igor stood up first, cringing, and offered Inga his hand,
but she got up by herself.
“Where are w–” began Igor, but Inga pressed her finger against his lips.
“Ssssh. Ssh-ch-ch-ch. Listen.”
The footsteps were drawing closer, and they could make up the voices. Those
were two aging men arguing in Russian, from the sound of it. One had a stern
commanding voice, while the other’s voice was smooth and flowing – it instantly
reminded Inga of her old professor, the way his voice seemed to flow around the
subject, like water hoping to erode a stone with sheer patience.
“Your Highness, I must respectfully object,” said the smooth-talking man. ”I
realize Peretz’s proposal is pragmatic, but moving the State Council out of here,
just out of fear of terrorists – this is defeating the entire point. Sending the wrong
message to the common people, if you will.”
The other man raised his voice slightly. “It is about our own safety. Not
putting all the eggs into one basket.”
“Yes, but we’re speaking about the lives of the imperial family. As long as
they remain here, next to His Majesty, none of them is safe.”
Igor turned to the source of the voice; the two speakers were now standing
under a column, turned towards each other without noticing the intruders. They
were similar in build: short and slightly chubby, and both had bushy beards en-
circling their faces. The owner of the smooth voice had a triangular face with a
narrow jawline, and his greying beard with generous whiskers stretched to the
sides like a shovel. The other one, in contrast, had a wide face that looked al-
most like a rectangle with his hair combed back, exposing his forehead. Both
were wearing brown suits with bowties and strangly out-of-place epaulets, which
would be more fitting for parade uniforms.
“I am in the imperial family, Mikhail Tarielovich,” said the strict man. “But
I also lead the State Council, and it is the safety of both that’s my concern. And
what do you have to show for a year of service? How much longer is your ministry
going to play hide and seek with that scum? They may be planting bombs all over
the Winter Palace as we speak.”
“Grand Prince, right now, this palace is the safest place for both His Majesty
and us to be in. It is his trips over the city that I’m more concerned about.”
“That’s not up for you to assess.”
Evidently feeling that the conversation was over, the Grand Prince snorted
and disappeared into the nearby smaller passage branching from the corridor.
Igor heard a door getting shut behind him.
The remaining man, Mikhail Tarielovich, sighed and wrinkled his forehead.
A glimpse of sorrow appeared in his eyes.
“Let’s hide. . . ” Igor whispered indecisively, but Inga shook her head. Taking
his hand, she silently motioned for him to follow.
“Sir,” she said aloud, facing Mikhail Tarielovich, “My sincere apologies if my
arrival is going to be unexpected to His Majesty; so may I know when he might
have spare time for the Countess of Worcester?”
He turned to her and gasped, inspecting her modern clothes, which looked to
Igor as out of place here as an astronaut would look in the supermarket across the
street from his home. “By the Lord! I knew that fashions were strange in England
lately, but your attire befits you as perfectly as your command of French.”
French? Igor thought in confusion. So far I’ve only heard Russian.
“Count Loris-Melikov, at your service, ma’am.” He looked a little confused,
smudging his words. “Unfortunately, His Majesty the Emperor is currently on his
trip to the Manezh. If you would be so kind as to find entertainment entertain
yourself in our guest suite.”
The surname he mentioned seemed to intrigue Inga. “Actually,” she said with
forced politeness, curtseying, “I would prefer to remain in your company. I do
not imagine you would be too occupied with state duty to enlighten me about
some observations I have witnessed in your enigmatic country?”
“Erm. . . ”
Loris-Melikov opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by yet another
voice from the far end of the corridor. “Loris, are you free yet?” called a low,
simple voice, the kind that lamp oil perhaps would have if it could speak. “My
apologies, ma’am,” said Mikhail Tarielovich and bowed his head. “This should
only take a few minutes. In the meantime, could you wait around the fireplace?”
Inga sat down on a wooden chair that probably cost more than all the furni-
ture in their apartment taken together, as casually as if it was her private prop-
erty. Igor, his arms shaking, slowly lowered himself onto the chair next to her
and leaned to her ear as Loris turned his back to them.
“Inga, what are you thinking?!”
“Patience, gramps. At least he bought it. And really, what else was I supposed
to claim, recklessly dressed like this?” She adjusted a fold on her pantyhose. “A
window of four hundred years and anywhere on Earth, and it has to be Russia
again – the eighteen-eighties, from what I can tell. The concept translator is
obviously working too, why else would he think I was speaking French?”
“The what? Inga, I told you before, I’m too old to learn your science mumbo-
jumbo.”
“Well. . . ” Inga sighed. “It’s a time machine, right? Not just time, but space
too. So whenever you end up, whoever lives there, there’s a high probability
you don’t know their language. So instead of trying to map any language to any
language, the Insight instead maps concepts in human brains to each other, on
the level of understanding. Much more efficient. Not so much chance, at least,
to condemn a planet to war when you speak the wrong word at negotiations, at
least. And it comes out as the language you expect to hear. He thinks I’m a noble
in nineteenth century Russia, ergo French.”
“B-but. . . but this is. . . ” Igor looked at the nearest chandelier, shutting his
eyes tightly and opening them again. “The Winter Palace! The Winter Palace
when the Tsars still lived here! It’s, it’s. . . Someone’s bound to see through your
ruse!”
“Maybe. But it’s the first thing I could think of. What else would you say, that
we fell through a hole in the ceiling, and please kindly give us a ladder? Somehow
I doubt it’d earn us an equally warm welcome.”
As Inga spoke, she turned her head towards the direction Loris-Melikov went.
He stood about twenty meters away, facing another man who, in many ways,
looked like his direct opposite. Tall, thin and bald, with a large round forehead
above thick eyebrows; his combination of the standard black bowtie suit and oval
glasses reminded Inga of Judge Doom.
“Konstantin Petrovich,” said Loris with a hint of disdain. “What could pos-
sibly be more important to you in me than tending to the heir apparent or the
church?”
Inga smiled. This Russian word he used, “tsarevich”, evoked an image of a
slender, fairy tale prince who was seeking his sleeping beauty in the enchanted
woods – certainly nothing like Grand Prince Alexander Alexandrovich would be
at this time, a sturdy grown-up man in his late thirties – tough and brawny look-
ing, like a peasant who ended up in the imperial family by mistake – and already
having a son of his own.
“It is about you, Mikhail Tarielovich,” the tall man said dryly, bending forward
a little. “I know you keep it concealed by now, and God forbid I judge you for such
a decision, humble servant of the throne that I am. But I can assure you, even if
the People’s Will got their goals, and sought to ruin everything that is good about
the Russian values, still they could not hope to commit a bigger blasphemy than
your project would be.”
“I’m simply doing what’s necessary to defuse the situation,” insisted Loris-
Melikov. “Do you remember what His Majesty said about the freedom of peas-
ants, back when he ascended to the throne? The people clearly think what we’ve
done so far is not enough. I’m going to give them more. However much is just
enough to make them put bombs aside and believe in His Majesty’s goodwill.”
“Nothing you ever do will achieve that,” said Konstantin Petrovich. “For those
already bent on destroying us, there is nothing you can do except to destroy them
first. Once you do that, the good-willing subjects will be left in their comfort,
watched by God and their beloved Tsar. No free-thinking, just quiet, peaceful
unity, as it’s been for centuries.”
Igor focused his eyes on the two, alert. “Let’s go back while they’re talking?
There’s bound to be something we can do to climb back up!”
“No, wait, wait,” Inga whispered back. “I’m curious now how it will go. You
know who that is? Ober-Procurator Pobedonostsev1 , the future uncrowned Tsar,
advisor to Alexander III. This exchange they’re having explains a lot to me. . . ”
Meanwhile, Loris-Melikov stared up into Pobedonostsev’s eyes, looking
somewhat reluctant to face him directly. “You want to freeze Russia in time,
Konstantin Petrovich,” he said with a sigh.
“I believe it’s in the best interest of the Russian people and the Church that
I’ve been entrusted, not to mention the entire Orthodox world. It is only by band-
ing around their beloved Emperor, and their faith, that we can resist the corrupt-
ing vibes of the West. You’re proposing a parliament, Mikhail Tarielovich, and
that’s the first step towards falling into the pit of decadence and freethought that
consumed the Catholic world. What’s next? And they’ll demand more – up to a
constitution!”
He gave Loris an inspecting look, evidently expecting the last word to shock
him, but his opponent was unmoved. “If that’s what it takes, then I’ll write a
constitution by my own hand.”
1 As a little known bit of trivia, the so-called Panslavian civilization of Sulmar IV saw “Konstantin
the Victory Bringer” as a role model at some point of its history, and was later confused to rediscover
historical evidence that contradicted the literal translation of his surname, showing with all unam-
biguity that he stayed in power in the time when Russia scored no victories whatsoever and, in fact,
fought no wars.
“You are not the Emperor, Count,” Pobedonostsev said with stress, but evenly,
without raising his voice. “And no true monarch will go that far. Even should you
deceive His Majesty into agreeing with such a suicidal plan, it will be my duty to
make sure it won’t last.”
“Now, you see,” Inga explained to her grandfather as the two statesmen con-
tinued to talk without noticing them, “The ironic thing here is that Loris-Melikov
almost got his way with his parliament idea. Almost. On the very day that
Alexander II was supposed to sign it, he – wait. Wait, wait, wait!” She suddenly
stood up and began to walk around uncomfortably in a small circle. “Something
here doesn’t belong. If we consider when. . . ” She slapped her forehead. “I need
to know when exactly we ended up. The exact date. Now, what do time travelers
do when they don’t know what day it is?”
“Let’s ask!” shugged Igor.
“Gramps!!” Inga threw her head back and shook it. “If only you watched some
good TV, instead of all those talk shows. . . ”
Loris-Melikov, meanwhile, finished talking and turned back. While he tried
his best to remain calm, his face displayed obvious signs of frustration. As he
walked to the unintentional guests of the White House, Inga asked him:
“Count, my butler Gregory understands just a little Russian, and he is seeking
to improve his skills in Russian reading, particularly the news. Could he, perhaps,
receive a recent newspaper?”
“Why yes,” Loris’ face sported a small smile. “We get the latest issue of the
Vedomosti here. There’s one right here lying on the fireplace,” he pointed towards
the newspaper. “Count Ignatyev, if I recall, brought it here after our tea. Please
help yourself while I make a detour to my office.”
He bowed his head and walked away at a steady pace. “You know,” whispered
Igor, following him with his eyes, “I feel like visiting a place where not everyone
is at least a count. . . ”
As soon as Loris-Melikov was out of sight, Inga picked up and unwrapped the
newspaper–
And gasped, blood flushing away from her face.
“What’s the matter, my joy?” asked Igor, looking at the newspaper, then, with
concern, at Inga’s face.
“Look at the date. Look.”
Igor looked back at the newspaper. The St. Petersburg Vedomosti, 1 March
1881. “What’s wrong with this date?” he asked.
“It’s the day Alexander II was assassinated.”
***
“. . . And you want to save him?” asked Igor, following Inga down a wide spiral
staircase – feeling a bit relieved that it was empty.
“Yes, and that’s why I need to get back into the Insight. Storage rooms are on
the first floor, that much I know, but other than that. . . This palace is a bloody
maze and I don’t have a map. We need to remember where we fell down.”
“Why can’t we just walk out the normal way?”

“Guards. Besides, we might not reach the Stone Bridge in time – it’s quite far
away from here. I don’t know how long ago the Tsar left, and the window is only
an hour or so.”
“But we have a time machine!” Gosh, thought Igor, I’m thinking about a time
machine like it’s as ordinary as a car. “Why not arrive an hour earlier and warn
him beforehand?”
“I’m already entangled with this timeframe. If I warn him beforehand, and
even assuming he believes me and stays in the palace, it will change the history
of the current me. Then poof, I have no reason to go back in time, and it all
messes up.”
The stairs ended. Through an archway, Inga saw the inner courtyard – a
square garden surrounded by clean, well-swept pavement, which was in turn
surrounded from all sides by the grey walls of the palace with arched windows
and white Greek-style columns with golden tops. Igor, distracted, stood in the
archway and looked curiously at the row of statues atop the opposite roof.
Inga, meanwhile, called for the attention of a passing-by man in plain grey
clothes who was holding a broom.
“Hey, you there! What’s your name?”
“Semyon,” replied the confused man, eyeing Inga’s outfit in awe.
“Grab a stepladder and follow us upstairs. There’s something with the ceiling
– you’ll see when you get there.”
Five minutes later, the three were at the spot just under the entrance to the In-
sight, which Igor could see clearly from the floor, gaping open above them. When
Semyon unfolded the stepladder and put it at the exact spot Inga requested, he
scratched his beard in confusion as Inga began to climb up, followed by Igor.
At this exact moment, Loris-Melikov emerged from a side doorway.
“Countess!” he gasled, looking upward. “What in the name of all saints are
you doing up there?!”
Inga folded her hands into a tube in front of her mouth. “Taking a shortcut,
sorry!” she exclaimed from above. “Going to save His Majesty’s life – and if you
care about him, send gendarmes to the Stone Bridge, now!”
Loris clenched his fists. He was prepared to call the guards now – but then he
followed the strange duo with his eyes. . .
And stopped, frozen speechless.
The “Countess of Worcester” and her “butler” went up through the ceiling,
right through the perfectly flat stone, and in a few seconds, nothing was left to
remind of their presence.
A few more seconds of uneasy silence passed. He noticed that Semyon was
now looking at him, instead of the ceiling.
“Did– did you see that?” said Mikhail Tarielovich. At this point he didn’t
really care about addressing a commoner so informally.
“That was definitely witchcraft, Your Excellency!” Semyon exclaimed with
vigor.
“Ah well. . . ” Loris walked a few steps away from Semyon, rubbing his boots
over the polished floor. “Now, if she can do that, who knows, she may be right.”
He lowered his voice, almost to a whisper, trying to make Semyon unable to hear
him. “And I told you, Sasha, I warned you. . . If you could break your habit, just
once, just today!”
***
“Now I must tell all of you. . . ”

The young woman glanced over her small audience. About a dozen people,
between twenty and thirty, dressed in worn suits and collared sweaters; the kind
of unremarkable middle-class youth one would expect to find in the less rundown
districts of St. Petersburg. The speaker, herself, was about Inga’s age, and from
with acorn-shaped head, with short hair combed back and tightly held in place,
one could almost mistake her for a man.
They were gathered together in a cramped basement dimly lit with candle-
light, with walls made of rough, bulky bricks. Two men in the far corner were
finishing putting together a cylinder-shaped device, and next to them stood a
shelf full of flasks with liquid chemicals. The rest were intently listening to her.
“Today it all comes to an end,” the woman said triumphantly. “We’ve covered
every route – the demon tsar has nowhere to run. But don’t think we can stop
there. Loris is next. Even with his benefactor dead, this vice-emperor, worse than
all the Birons and Arakcheyevs before him, is not going to just let Russia out of
his iron grip. As long as Loris sits in the Winter Palace, our sympathizers all over
the city are being hanged after sham trials, just so detract the lesser minds from
our cause. And I hate to admit it, but he’s slowly succeeding.”
“You know, Sofiya Lvovna, in fact. . . ” said a thick-faced fellow with an es-
pecially bushy beard, sitting in the middle, “why stop there? Death to the Ro-
manovs, I say.”
“I concur,” said his neighbor passionately. “The future belongs to the peo-
ple, not to the Tsars that were elected three centuries ago and then seized the
power into their own hands. We had hope in this one, and he seemed to be get-
ting somewhere in the beginning, but then all the evil he did in his later years. . .
They’re rotten, he and his spawn, all of them.”
The woman coughed loudly, and the discussion abruptly stopped. Holding
out to make a pause, she continued.
“We are called the People’s Will for a reason,” Sofiya said. “I know what you’re
all thinking, but Andrey’s arrest was merely a setback. We are still implementing
the will of the masses, those millions of peasants and citizens who are placing
their hopes in us. And there will be no injustice. All the corrupt ones will meet
their end, but only just enough for the government to listen to us. This time
nothing will stop us – not Loris, nor loyalists, nor fate itself.”
“Speaking of that. . . ” said the proud beard-owner. “I’m not so sure. The
Tsar’s carriage was supposed to be coming here already, but scouts–”
“He must have taken the other route, through Catherine Canal,” concluded
Sofiya. “Four of us are on it. I’ll also come myself, just to be sure. You all here,
stay alert – you might be needing your dynamite anyway.”
She climbed up to the ground floor and quickly looked over the terrorists’ fa-
cade: shelves with fake cheese, the pretend merchant, and the dirt-filled barrels.
Satisfied, she walked out and quickly disappeared round the corner with her long
footsteps.
Next to the front door stood another woman in a bulky brown robe. By her
attire, one would perhaps mistake her for a peasant, but her smooth dark-skinned
hands with long fingernails hinted at foreign origin and looked too unused to
physical work for that. Her face was partially obscured by a shawl, but loose
strands of brown hair were visible under it.
“So this is how history unfolds,” she said quietly, talking to herself. “If only
they had known about the constitution project. . . But well, it’s not like I’m going
to enlighten them. That would be telling. . . Right, Inga?”
***
“For crying out loud!” said Inga in desperation. The clothes were thrown on
the table in the middle of the Insight in a disorganized pile. “None of this fits.
Everything is too modern!”
She slapped her hands against her thighs. “Ah well. Maybe the sight of me
will make the bombers confused enough to forget about their job. Now I just
need to fix this thing so it doesn’t attach to vertical surfaces again, in just a few
momen–”
And then the lights of the Insight suddenly dimmed.
A single pattern of circular lights went over the walls above their heads, then
sprang out of the walls, in detached white orbs of light floating in the air; and
coming together in the middle of the room, they merged into a single white orb.
“Welcome to the gravity attachment configuration wizard,”
said the monotone voice. “This screen will guide you through the
process of configuring IDM for the user’s preferences in
attachment point spatial positioning. Do you need help?”
Inga coughed. “Hang on a second there! What’s IDM? I remember no such
thing! Whoever used this machine before me, well – he just waved his hands
around and stuff happened!”
The disembodied voice continued without changing pitch. “IDM has de-
tected the user’s unfamiliarity with itself – please remain
patient while the explanation follows.”
“Well, I’m bloody patient all right!” Inga said with annoyance.
“The Insight Data Mining application is responsible for
gathering information about the environment essential for the
operation of the Insight and the user, and drawing logical
inferences necessary for the user to sustain the Insight in
operational state and carry out their planned operations in

the destination space-time point.”
“You understand anything it says?” asked Igor.
“Ssssomewhat. It looks like there’s some kind of AI running the show, but
if it is so, it’s notoriously dense.” Inga folded her arms and looked up, facing
the orb. “Listen, you. If you’re so smart you can understand my speech, why go
through all these cumbersome details with projected displays and gestures? I can
just command you with voice. I don’t want that door to attach itself to floors or
ceilings, is it really so hard to understand you need me to click Next ten times?”
Silence followed. The glowing orb dissipated, and the lights returned back to
normal.
Inga leaned on the table and sighed defeatedly. “Not that smart, apparently.”
“So what are you going to do?” asked Igor, straightening the wide sleeves of
his plain shirt.
“Well. . . ” Inga touched the holographic screen a few times with her index
fingers. “Looks like I’ve at least managed to find the setting to align its gravity
with the planet’s, so no more ceiling surprises. “As for the plan. . . Gramps, I
want you to stay here, for your own safety. There are four terrorists close to the
bridge, each with a bomb. I can’t risk trying to confront them – too many for one
Inga Zerkalova, plus I might get killed.”
She walked towards the door and opened it. Beyond it lay a cobbled street
running through rows of classical two- and three-story houses – their tall win-
dows and curved corners instantly reminded Igor of the historical center of
Novosibirsk.
“So I’ll try something different.” She waved at Igor and closed the door behind
herself.
For a few minutes she just stood by uneasily, looking at the people passing by
– salesmen, bureaucrats, students, whispering old ladies. . . Some threw weird
looks at her, confused by her clothing, but quickly looked away and continued.
Well, I can’t point it down to a second. . .
Then she heard the sound of horseshoes clacking, coming from her right. She
turned and saw them approaching – a row of moustached cavalrymen in tight
grey uniforms and peaked caps, with sabres in sheaths on their hips, and thin
sashes across their shoulders.
Huh, thought Inga, these are Cossacks? I sort of expected to see more bravado
and curly top hats.
Then came the carriage itself, pulled by another couple of horses; it was black
and blue with golden lining, narrow with a closed square top, and each side was
decorated by the imperial coat of arms – the two-headed eagle. Its windows, one
on each side, were closed with black curtains.
None of the passers-by seemed to pay any attemption to the procession.
Inga jumped in front of the horses, waving her arms above her head. The
escort, and then the carriage itself, abruptly stopped. The carriage driver looked
back and pulled the curtain away a bit, whispering something through it.
“What is this disturbance?” the leading Cossack asked loudly.

Inga caught her breath. For a moment, she felt in danger of being trampled,
but now, when that particular worry was over, she felt that these imposing men
could easily drown her in their voices if they wanted.
“I’ve come to warn His Majesty!” Inga shouted. “The road to the Stone Bridge
is not safe! There are terrorists, armed and ready, all along the channel!”
Chapter 3
Intrusion
The Roman Empire in the time of its decline
Maintained the impression of doing just fine:
The Caesar was in place, along with his cohorts,
And life was idyllic, according to reports.
Bulat Okudzhava
Inga slightly calmed down. The danger, it seemed to her, was over – now she
just needed to clearly present her case.
The carriage driver turned away from the window and resumed staring
blankly forward. She heard a clean, subdued voice coming from inside the car-
riage: “Dvorzhitsky, question her.”
The curtain on the right side – left from Inga’s perspective – got carried away,
and a hand appeared out of it and made a sign to approach. Inga made a few
steps in that direction, holding her breath, and saw an officer in a green uniform,
with a long face and curly black hair, with a clean-shaven chin, but an overgrown
moustache that extended far to the sides of his face. Behind him, she saw the
back of the head of another, brown-haired officer – and instantly understood
who it was.
“Who are you?” Dvorzhitsky asked sternly.
“My name is irrelevant,” said Inga. “And I can’t reveal my sources, but I know
that the People’s Will is planning to throw bombs in your path along the Cather-
ine Canal. It’s in His Majesty’s best interest to select another route to the palace.”
“Do you know how they look?”
“Not really.” Inga scratched her head. Gah, wish I could at least remember their
names. . . “If I knew, I’d ask you to arrest them, but. . . I don’t know their exact
plans. They could have chosen anyone.”
“In other words,” said the officer, “you come here strangely dressed, showing
more skin than a harlot, and refuse to say anything concrete, and you expect us
to believe you?”
“Sir!” One of the Cossacks, shorter and slenderer than the others, rode to-
wards the window and saluted. “Let me escort this madwoman for questioning.
28
CHAPTER 3. INTRUSION 29
It is not my place to offer advice, but I believe you should not treat her as an
obstacle.”
Dvorzhitsky turned his head to the second man in the carriage. “Your Majesty,
the decision is yours.”
Alexander II sighed and inclined his head, pressing his palm tiredly against
his wide, slanted forehead. “Loris was right,” he whispered quietly. “I should
have stayed in the palace. But I thought it would be akin to house arrest. . . ” Then
he turned back to Dvorzhitsky. “We’ll proceed as planned,” he said aloud. “If my
experience has taught me something, it is not paying attention to doomsayers.”
Dvorzhitsky moved his eyebrows together. “You heard your Emperor, men,”
he said. “Neverov, escort her to the nearest police station and tell them to pry
out everything she knows.”
The short Cossack saluted again and leaned over to Inga, firmly grabbing her
by her armpits. Her first impulse was to run, but seeing these armed, mounted
men, she lowered her head grimly.
Gramps. . . she thought as the cavalryman pulled her onto his horse, behind
him. He rode slightly backwards, where the carriage first appeared from – and
then turned back, watching as the procession resume its slow movement.
“Well. . . ” he said, turning his face to Inga. “It seems we’re alone now,” he
added in a much higher pitched voice. It sounded. . . feminine. Before Inga could
react, “Neverov” tore away “his” moustache and took off the cap, letting long
brown hair flow down.
A single thought instantly flashed in Inga’s head. It’s her!
“You again?” she growled. “Loitering in the institute wasn’t enough?”
The woman in front of her blinked, casting a puzzled stare. “What insti– Oh
right. You’re still only a novice, still so clueless.” She pressed her finger against
Alice’s lips and curved up the ends of her own mouth. “Just as a future advice,
never mention any times you’ve seen me before. Time is such a fragile thing –
one traveler is bad enough, but two, knowing each other. . . ”
“Right.” Inga clenched her legs tighter around the horse’s sides. “So you
know. What are you, a time traveler too? Sent to prevent me from changing
history or something?”
“Exactly. By yourself.”
“Huh?”
The mysterious woman winked and widened her smile. “I see. You really
don’t know yet. Just saying, I know you in the future. In fact, we are. . . ” she sud-
denly cut her speech off and made an awkward pause, finishing in an obviously
forced way, ”friends.”
“Sure, sure, and I’m the Tsar’s aunt.” Inga clenched her lips. “You seriously
expect me to believe this? That my future self sent you here to prevent me from
saving him? Instead of, you know, coming herself?”
“You. . . She said she felt too– well, that would be telling!”
Inga looked down, trying to figure out the best way to jump off the horse.
“Just let me go and do my job. I don’t need your lecturing.”
“Look.” The stranger knocked lightly on Inga’s head. “Just stop and think
for a minute. Why would I, possibly, not want you to do this? Well, you could
prolong the Romanov rule by a century or two, big deal. There’s more important
stuff in history than that. But – you get what I’m implying?”
“But?.. Sorry, I’m just not following.”
“Imagine he gets to live, and carries out his plans. Nobody can vouch for it,
but history may well unwrap completely differently. People who would otherwise
be born never will be. I’m not even asking who gave you the right to decide if they
get born or not. It’s just that. . . ”
She suddenly pressed her palm against Inga’s.
Inga’s pulse spiked – she felt like her heart almost jumped out of her chest.
For just a split second, it seemed to her that her and the other woman’s arms wob-
bled, distorted, and that the tips of their fingers melded together. The stranger’s
facial features got slightly blurry, her nose seemingly withdrawing and flatten-
ing, and her hair turned a darker shade of brown.
“One of those people who will never get born might be yourself. Maybe not
– but you cannot predict that, nor anyone else. And if you eliminate your ability
to travel here in the first place, then. . . ” The stranger made another pause.
“Then what? The universe implodes?”
“That’s the problem – you can’t know until you’ve tred. But I really don’t
think we should. I want to live, you know.”
“So what, you suggest I just let the Tsar ride to certain death?”
“Look, Inga, he’s just one unlucky guy in your history. I wish you could change
that, but this event is part of what shaped you as you are now. Feel free to meddle
with your future all you want, even. . . even up to the heat death of the universe
if you’re really so inclined. But not this.”
Inga sighed. “Can we at least take a look?”
“Fine. But watch from afar and don’t try anything.”
As the horse turned and galloped along the street, Inga looked over the rider’s
shoulder. Soon, they reached the crowded bank of the canal. They rode past a
row of people gathered on the way to the bridge, almost knocking down a fisher-
woman with a net. The Tsar’s carriage was riding ahead of them, still as slowly
as it did before.
Then–
Boom.
Smoke filled the air in front of Inga’s eyes, and the horse stopped abruptly.
“It’s done,” said the rider. “Climb down. From here, you’re on your own.”
“What, just like that? You haven’t even told me anything about yourself.
Heck, I don’t know your name!”
“You’ll find that out soon enough.” The woman took a small piece of paper out
of a fold in her Cossack uniform and shoved it into Inga’s pocket. “I guessed by
the stain on the back of your skirt – you haven’t had a chance to change between
now and then. Now go. Maybe you can make a small difference after all.”
“Suppose that’s the least I can do. . . ”
Inga moved her legs together and carefully hopped off the horse. The mystery
lady rode away along the canal, as quickly as she appeared, and with a sigh, Inga
started walking towards the smoke.
Nobody paid any attention to her. The explosion threw the passers-by into
panic. Further down the road, a few people were lying on the road, along with two
Cossacks, one of them squeezed under his own fallen horse. The carriage itself,
which stopped in front of the explosion site, showed only small signs of damage:
slightly bent wings and small chunks of pavement embedded in the sides. The
driver stood nearby, clenching his side and unsteadily leaning on one foot.
The carriage’s door opened, and Alexander walked out. Standing upright, he
cast a saddened gaze over the bodies and put one hand onto his chest.
“Dear Lord. . . ” he whispered.
Dvorzhitsky emerged from behind the carriage and, trying to look confident,
saluted to him. “The terrorist has been captured and is being brought for ques-
tioning,” he reported.
Inga kept her distance, standing still amid the fray, her heart beating rapidly,
and only occasionally moved out of the way, trying to avoid being run over.
“How’s the Tsar? What’s with the Emperor?” screams went all over, from all
directions, uniting into an indistinct, deafening mess of voices.
Two Cossacks from the escort approached Alexander, dragging between them
a young man – shaven, with neatly combed hair, squinty-eyed. He looked barely
twenty. The Emperor looked into his eyes, so strongly as if he wanted to drill
through the terrorist with his sight.
“Nikolay Rysakov, bourgeois,” reported Dvorzhitsky. “How are you, Your
Majesty? Are you hurt?”
“Thank God, I’m well,” Alexander said slowly, “but this. . . ” He moved his eyes
over the mayhem in front of him.
“Too early to thank God yet,” hissed Rysakov, gritting his teeth.
“Your Majesty, we must carry on,” urged Dvorzhitsky, taking Alexander’s
hand. “Into the palace, as fast as possible. I can understand your concern, but
it’s not safe here!”
“First, show me the site of the explosion.”
“Your Majesty, I’m not–”
At this point, Inga could not hold herself anymore. She clearly saw it – an-
other figure, a man, holding something wrapped in cloth under his armpit. He
was approaching Alexander from the side, a few more seconds, and he’ll be a step
away. . .
“TO YOUR RIGHT!”
Inga shouted at the top of her lungs. The Emperor turned swiftly; he saw the
second terrorist raising the package above his head–
And recoiled back.
Ba-boosh! Another explosion. Another cloud of thick smoke. Inga herself
was untouched, although a wind of dust flew into her face – but she could hear
screams of pain, and cries for help, and sounds of people running away in fear.
Inga stepped into the smoke.

The scene was a mess now. No less than two dozen bodies on the
ground. . . Tattered pieces of cloth, chunks of sabres and epaulets, bleeding limbs
ripped out... The terrorist himself lay bleeding, his face mutilated, and his
wounds so gaping that his death was now only a matter of minutes.
Alexander was lying just a few steps away. His legs looked completely shat-
tered, and his uniform was torn, exposing bleeding spots on his sides, yet he
remained conscious – for now. Dvorzhitsky, himself almost unhurt, leaned over
the Emperor, looking helpless; he opened his mouth, but couldn’t bring himself
to say a word.
Inga came closer and crouched. Alexander groaned, not moving, and strug-
gled to even shift his eyes to look clearly into hers. “I see,” he said quietly. ”So
you were right. . . ”
She felt a hand lie down onto her shoulder; turning back, she saw her grand-
father, standing right behind her. He was breathing heavily.”
“Oof, that was quite a run,” Igor said. “You got me worried, and then I saw
everyone running here– . . . Oh.” His eyes fell onto Alexander, then onto the other
dead and wounded victims scattered over the road and sidewalk, and he froze still
and clinged to Inga, horrified.”
Then, amid the shouting, amid the weeps. . .
Clack, clack. Clack, clack.
Another horse showed from the far side of the channel, rushing across the
very bridge that the carriage failed to reach. The rider jumped off without waiting
for the horse to stop completely, and Inga saw who it was: Loris-Melikov.
“Your Majesty!” he exclaimed in despair, kneeling in front of the dying
Alexander. Only after a few seconds did he notice the others standing nearby:
Dvorzhitsky, Inga, and Igor. “Chief! Countess!” Loris crossed his arms solemnly.
“I was too late. . . Too late.”
But Alexander looked at Loris, and his face changed into a sad smile. “I see
I can’t keep my promise now,” he said, struggling even to continue speaking. “I
hope my son will finish what I started.”
Loris just shook his head silently.
“There’s no time to waste,” said Dvorzhitsky finally. “Let’s find some trans-
port. We must reach the palace while he still lives.”
***
That day, a large crowd gathered in front of the Winter Palace. Loris, on
his way back, called for gendarme reinforcements, and they formed a tight ring,
ready to shoot on sight.
Inside his bedchamber, Alexander II lay on his back, his arms crossed on his
chest and his eyes just barely open. He was covered with a blanket, and only his
head was seen above. That determined face with a rich moustache and perfectly
shaven chin, the trails of blood wiped away, and those hopeful eyes – as if he was
not dying at all, but just recently woke up, and was looking forward to a rich and
fruitful day.
Around him gathered some of his closest people. Inga didn’t recognize many
of them, other than Pobedonostsev and Loris-Melikov. She saw a short old man
with a white beard, in oval glasses and a doctor’s robe, lean over Alexander and
declare to the room sadly that he had mere minutes to live. She did not know
that this was the renowned clinician Sergey Botkin, nor did she recognize the
military reformer, Count Milyutin, or the famed diplomat, Count Ignatyev, or
the hero of the Turkish war, General Skobelev. But she felt that all these people
were important, somehow, and chose to stand slightly aside, not in a row with
them. Igor preferred to retreat to a far away corner, staring at the scene with eyes
from which disbelief did not completely fade away.
Loris-Melikov, who was standing at the end of the line, made a step towards
Inga and gently took her hand. She suddenly felt uncomfortable somehow, being
here, so young, in the company of these men, each of whom was old enough to
be her father. “Uh, no. Next I’ll be thinking about my parents, and that’s just. . .
Give me a break.”
Among Alexander’s family members, who gathered on the other side of the
bed, by far the most prominent was a large bulky man in a loose-fitting jacket,
with a bushy untrimmed beard. He looked like an unsophisticated peasant who
randomly stumbled upon this convocation of nobles and statesmen. Even more
grotesque he looked in comparison to the woman he held by the elbow, presum-
ably his wife: she was very petite, with frail and narrow shoulders, a head shorter
than him, and a waist squeezed so inhumanly thin by a corset that its very sight
made Inga shudder. Behind them was a boy with hair combed to the sides, about
thirteen years old.
“Father. . . ” he said quietly, but even this quietness was offset by the low pitch
of his booming voice. “The Russian state will miss you greatly, and we your chil-
dren will miss you most. I knew the time would come when I’d have to succeed
you, but I could never imagine that it would be brought so soon, by force. . . ”
Alexander II closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again and
turned his head to his son. “My only regret is that I haven’t done enough. And
what I did do was late, but better late than never. It all depends on the people
around you. My uncle had plans for many of the same things. . . Freeing the
peasants, fair courts, enlightenment. But he said, ‘Nobody to do it with.’ You
have them, son. My advisors will long outlive me.” He cast his eyes around the
room, over the ministers, stopping especially long on Loris. “They’ll help you in
your first years – they’re always the hardest.”
The dying tsar closed his eyes and quietly finished, “And I hope your end will
be happier than mine.”
He made a few breaths more, without a sound; then they stopped. Botkin
pushed his arm under the blanket and touched Alexander’s chest, and silently
nodded.
Everyone understood.
For a few minutes, complete silence fell over the room.

Pobedonostsev broke it. The tall Ober-Procurator stepped out of the ring of
statesmen and walked, in long strides, towards the emperor’s son, stopping be-
side him. Inga found them a grotesque pair: there was this tsarevich, or rather
the new head of state Alexander III, broad and muscular, who looked at the scene
with such an expression like he secretly hoped his father’s will would pronounce
one of his younger brothers as his successor, and he himself would be able to re-
treat in peace to some backwater estate with his miniature wife; and then there
was the other man, who looked unnaturally stretched in height, like he came
from a DVD with a wrong aspect ratio.
Pobedonostsev opened his mouth.
“God help us all on this tragic day. You, Your Majesty, on the first day of your
rule will have to deal with the misguided commoner filth that killed your father.
They aim to sow discord, to turn the Russian people away from the throne and
everything that makes us good Christians. They would stop at nothing until our
very autocratic power is overturned, and Russia is thrown into chaos. That must
not happen, Your Majesty. Show your people your firm hand. Be a good shepherd
to the lambs, and exercise your will. And then, by the Lord’s mercy, you will end
your days quietly, passing away with your own death, like your grandfather and
granduncle. And Russia will remember you as the bringer of peace.”
. . . Inga clenched her fists. She saw the gathered people listen solemnly to
this speech; some were nodding silently, and only Loris-Melikov’s face expressed
discontent. She felt like the ceremony was draining her, and wanted to slip away
as soon as possible – somewhere quiet, somewhere away from these people she
was forbidden to interfere with.
This is not how I imagined my first time trip. . .
***
Inga and Igor decided to walk back to the Catherine Canal on foot. Inga felt
too distraught to explore the palace further, and barely even looked at the sight-
ings around her, curious as she was about Petersburg. “Besides,” she said on a
quiet narrow street, seeing nobody in hearing distance, “staying longer would
be pushing it. We barely got away with it as we did, and Loris probably suspects
something.”
“Well, I’m not complaining,” smiled Igor, clapping on Inga’s shoulder. “A free
trip to Piter! Good to see your education is finally paying for something. And
seeing two tsars in one room! Alive!”
“Three, actually. I think Nicholas was there too. He’s still a child, though.
But, erm, gramps. . . ” She kicked a pebble on the road into the distance. “You
aren’t bothered by all this? You witnessed a terrorist act, and you just seem to
shrug it off like it was a movie or something!”
“Heh, Inga, Inga. This all happened lo-o-oong before I was born. And com-
pared to what I’ve been through in Afghanistan, this was just a small fluke.”
Inga sighed and leaned on the fence surrounding the canal, folding her arms,
and looked idly at the water below. The water looked green and uninviting, and
Inga suddenly felt, much to her embarrassment, that her thoughts were straying
away from the assassination and towards mundane matters, like imagining what
kind of filth the citizens must have dumped into the canals daily when nobody
looked or cared enough. The encounter with Alexander II and his court was al-
ready beginning to feel dreamlike, a brief spike of wonder in a life full of daily
routine.
Just like. . .
Just like these other new memories of hers.
They were vague, and she could barely remember even the most broad strokes
of the visits across the universe. She remembered looking at the construction of
the Egyptian pyramids. . . standing in a crowd before the Acropolis of Athens. . .
treading cautiously in a spacesuit through an abandoned space station above a
blue gas giant. . .
But those were someone else’s memories, and someone else’s eyes that
recorded these scenes. Not hers. She had yet to see all that on her own, if it
was ever going to happen at all.
Still I wonder. The window was four hundred years on Earth, anywhere, anywhen.
And it just had to be here. Why? Because I thought of this event before, or because. . .
She clapped on her pocket, still containing the note from the woman who had
crossed her path twice already. Gosh, I don’t even really know how time travel
works yet. I’ve just been pushing buttons with no idea what’s hidden behind them.
“I wish our free tour went under calmer circumstances, anyway.” Inga said
finally, trying to sound casual. “We’re now in a rather boring part of the city,
Winter Palace notwithstanding. “Want to come here later, maybe in the present
day? I’ve always wanted to see the Admiralty, and the Bronze Horseman. . . ”
“Perhaps later, my dear. The house isn’t cleaned yet, and you’re probably
hungry.”
I know, I know. Inga knocked on the metal fence with her fingernails. He’s just
going to watch TV all day again and forget it all tomorrow, right?
The bombing site, which they were not far away from, was impossible to see
now, surrounded in all directions with mounted policemen trying to keep the
crowd of random spectators under control. This was no longer their concern,
though. They had almost reached the spot where they left the Insight, but on
the turn where she met her persistent guest disguised as a Cossack, Inga saw
something equally unexpected.
Loris-Melikov stood there, alone, next to his horse. He was apparently look-
ing at the channel from a distance, but noticed the time travelers as they walked
slowly past him.
“Ah, Countess. Observing the everyday life of our fine city, I see?”
“Or perhaps simply taking a break from the events I became an unwilling wit-
ness to.” Inga forced a smile.
Loris shook his head. “You project an air of ignorance, miss, but it is obvious
that you know more than you pretend to. I’d have you detained and questioned if
not for His Majesty’s personal will. You knew about this beforehand. You two just
showed up in the palace with nobody knowing about you. Nobody else talked to
you, guards didn’t see you going in or out. You left no trace, you don’t exist any-
where in any records. You call yourself English, but you speak such pure French
and Russian as if you were natives. Just. . . who are you?”
Inga smiled sadly. “Do you really want to know?”
“Probably not.”
Slight pause.
“What else do you know about what is to come?” asked Loris.
“Enough. But only in very broad strokes. I only knew about the impending
assassination because– never mind.”
“Do you know what the People’s Will was trying to accomplish with this?”
“They hoped to incite more reforms,” said Inga. “As if.”
“Now this is just preposterious!” exploded Loris. “Look at what they really
accomplished. It’s his time now – you know whom I’m talking about. I may
as well feel in retirement already. All this hard work, and for what? To be just
brushed aside like that?”
“A decade?” Inga sighed grimly. “Try a century.”
Does he realize? Well, who knows. Probably thinks I’m a witch or something. . .
although it’s not those times anymore.
She touched her grandfather’s shoulder, nodding to him. “We must go, Your
Excellency. I doubt you’ll see us again, but I hope our parting will be on good
terms.”
Inga bowed her head; Loris did the same.
Should I say something encouraging to gramps? Inga thought as the two of
them approached the inconspicuous door that hadn’t been here a few hours ago.
Perhaps. Not sure. If this had never happened, it’s possible that the Soviet Union
would never have existed. And in that case – what did he fight for?
The meek light of the Insight interior welcomed Inga and Igor back. It was
dimmed now in standby mode, and the flowing waves of light behind the round
wall gave the spacious room an impression of floating freely in space. The old
man immediately went looking for a seat, while Inga stood in the middle, legs
apart confidently, and crossed her hands in another gesture. . .
***
“Right.” Inga quickly wiped her hands with the readied kitchen towel, a plain
piece of white cloth hanging above the sink. “Lunch, check. Wash the dishes,
check. You feeling up for another go, gramps?”
Inga looked at Igor, who was sitting comfortably in a shabby armchair in the
corner of the small kitchen. His eyes, however, were not pointed at her, but rather
at the TV set on top of the fridge.
Ah right, it was that channel again. This time it was something about espers
and psychic healing. Good grief.
He can’t help it, I guess. Just like the rest of his generation. Conditioned to accept
everything that pours on them from that screen. . .
“Gramps?”
Igor finally heard her, this time, and looked at her. “Oh. Sorry. I’d rather stay
here for now. Next week, perhaps? Or really, I think I’ve had enough travel for a
lifetime.” He smiled grimly. “Travel is for the young.”
“But it’s time travel! Nobody has done it before. Just think of it! Surely you
have some time period you’d like to see? I certanly can think of many. Or just
travel around the world in our own time. . . Or we could come together to the
future, take a sneak peak before the rest of humanity. There must be–”
“Future. . . ”
Igor looked out of the window, momentarily glancing at cars stuck in a jam
on the narrow road near the house, and sighed.
“I think you don’t know what you want from your life, Inga. You just need to
settle down. Go out there more, here and now, around you. Find the right man,
marry, and all these fantasies will get out of your head in an instant.”
Inga frowned.
“Gramps, for crying out loud, I’m not–” At these words she felt frozen in her
speech, like she wanted to continue the phrase in some other way, but couldn’t;
like some lock inside her brain stood in the way to an unthinkable thought. “I
don’t feel the need to marry. It’s just not mine. Not where my heart lies.”
“Bah, you just say that now. Give it a few years, and–”
“That’s what you’ve been saying for the last ten years, gramps. And I’ve al-
ways said the same. No marriage, no kids. I’m just not that kind of person.”
Igor crossed his legs in his chair and smiled, hinting, however, at a shade of
sadness behind that smile. “It’s just a phase. Now you’re just doing that to be
contrary.”
It’s what he wants to believe, right?
“If you don’t mind, I’ll. . . I’ll leave you for now, gramps?”
Igor nodded. “Phone me on the way back! There may be something you’ll
need to buy.”
Before he knew, Inga had already left the kitchen to change. This time, dress-
ing for cold weather, she did not go fancy with her wardrobe. A black sweater,
tight blue jeans, knee-long leather boots over them. She walked into the corridor
and pulled on a glossy dark red coat with a fur collar, staying turned to Igor.
“Maybe a day? Say, I take the Insight now and come back tomorrow. Well, it
will be tomorrow for you. What do you think?”
“Just don’t forget your phone!”
“Gramps. . . ” Inga sighed, but took the phone from its shelf anyway. “After
I’m done here, I might go thousands of years into the past. Or future. Maybe a
different planet even. Not much use for a phone there.”
Silence.
“You’re going to use this thing to just move within the city?” Igor said finally.
“Why not just use public transport?”
“But it’s convenient! Think of the time and money saved!”

“What if someone sees you? Peeks in? Journalists will storm our home in no
time, and I tell you, Inga, I had a fair share of them already in my time.”
“Gramps, you’ve seen how it works. Nobody will ever notice. . . ”
Pause.
“Ah well.”
Inga pulled up the zipper on her coat, then finished her preparations by
putting on a black tuque, which she pulled down all over her ears, and equally
black, bulky gloves. “See you tomorrow, gramps!” she waved to him enthusias-
tically and, with heavy footsteps, walked into the door of the Insight, which this
time had positioned itself between the bathroom and toilet doors1 . The door
dissolved, leaving only a solid wall with a lonely, unused electric socket.
Igor was left alone.
For a while he still sat in the armchair, then stood up and looked out of the
window. From here, the seventh floor, he could see the street below; and he re-
membered the time when it was just unkempt grass between the house and the
road, and the buildings around did not have giant ads covering every square me-
ter of empty space on the walls; and when there were no billboards with foreign-
sounding company names positioned along the road, and that building with the
low ceiling and columns behind the ever-loud marketplace was. . . he couldn’t
even remember what it used to be anymore, really, but it was most definitely not
a supermarket.
He went to the bedroom and sat down at the side of the old double bed. The
bookshelf nearby was filled with nearly identical-looking books with red covers
without text, or sometimes brown covers with light brown text, so it was practi-
cally impossible to discern between them without pulling the books out. He did
know that Leo Tolstoy’s complete anthology was out there somewhere, and half
a row was devoted to War and Peace, but sifting through them now was not the
kind of pastime he felt in the mood for.
Igor looked at two portraits hanging on the wall above the bed. One was a
younger version of himself – a square-faced thirty-something man with short
hair in a typical male cut around the forehead, already with the same wart
on his temple that he had now. The other one depicted a woman wearing a
kokoshnik, with healthily red, protruding cheeks and long, curly black hair in
an old-fashioned hairstyle, falling down to her shoulders and farther down.
Raya. . . I hope God watches over you now.
Suddenly, the feeling of loneliness flowed into him, and he drew his eyes away
from the portraits. He thought he would welcome anyone’s company now; as
detached and self-important as Inga seemed to him at times, he felt slight regret
at letting her go just like that.
1 Apparently the word “improved” in “improved-planning apartment” stands for the late realiza-
tion that it makes no sense to merge the place where you poop with the place where you wash yourself,
which would have been immensely helpful to millions of Soviet citizens had it been realized earlier,
say, when cities were getting filled with five-story Khruschevkas.
Igor bent down and reached for the phone, standing on the floor. . .
But the phone rang first.
Tiii da du da, tiii da du de to. . .
He was still unused to these custom ringtones. For a while, he remembered,
he had been trying to convince Inga to change it to the sound of a phone ringing,
but of course she never quite found the time for that. Youth. . .
Igor picked up the phone from its handset and pressed the talk button with a
trained motion. “Hello?”
The voice on the other side was instantly familiar to him.
“Oh! Pal Palych! Been quite a while. How are you? . . . Me, surviving, I guess.
Aren’t we all? No, still no update on that. I’ll keep pestering the post office about
that, ultimately something will– Inga? Ah, as always. You know her, always
coming up with something weird. Dragged me into a little trouble today, silly
girl, I’m better now, though. Safe and sound at home, yes, maybe we could meet
on a walk? Maxim still lives away from the rest of us, I guess, doesn’t want to see
Inga either, and I don’t know. . . Anyway, what about you? How’s Lida? How’s
Rostik? Ah, good! Bring them along too, and then. . . ”
***
The refreshing wind of a November afternoon flowed into the control room
as Inga opened the door of the Insight again.
The sun was obscured by clouds, and the sky was matte grey with some flashes
of white, as it often was here at this time of year. Had this been the forest on the
other side of the Berdsk Highway, or even the birch grove near the Trade Center,
she would be walking on a carpet of dried fallen leaves now, perhaps listening to
their crackling under her boots. . .
But in this part of the Akademgorodok, the trees along the road were ever-
green, and the needles of the pines planted along Lavrentyev Ave hardly even
moved under the wind. Inga saw a squirrel rolling a discarded plastic bottle on
the ground, smiled, and immediately drew out her phone, preparing to take a
picture. The squirrel, seeing this strange black rectangle pointed at it, tucked
its fluffy tail; hop-hop-hop, it jumped up the trunk and then onto the nearby
branch, causing it to shake and a cone to fall next to Inga’s feet.
“Oh come on, it’s not like you don’t see humans every day!” Inga said, putting
the phone back into its pocket.
Should bring some bread next time. I keep forgetting.
Silence.
Right, apparently that translator doesn’t work on animals. Would be silly to ex-
pect it, anyway.
Leaving the wall with the Insight door behind, Inga walked along the narrow
path among the trees, approaching the main building of the institute. There were
no other squirrels around; maybe they were hiding from the weather somewhere,
or maybe some went to the bus stop to feed from people’s hands and occasionally
bite them. . .
She opened the double door of the institute with some effort and walked
through the cramped lobby, flashing her pass to the bored security lady yawning
over an old rotary phone. “Listen,” Inga asked with some hesitation, “have you
heard of something out of ordinary happening yesterday?”
The older woman shrugged, idly moving the dull end of her pen over the paper
of her register book. “Prokhorov arrived drunk again, but that’s par the course,
really.”
“Nothing around the conference hall?”
“Oh, mind you! The conference hall stayed closed for days. Here, the key’s
been hanging for who knows how long,” she nodded at the row of keys, each
labeled with its room number. “Nobody’s used it.”
“Well,” said Inga assertively, “that’s strange, because yesterday the door was
open. Maybe someone had a spare and forgot to close it?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember who would.”
‘I’ll just take a quick look, okay?” asked Inga, and, not waiting for a response,
ran upstairs.
One, two, three, four. . . There was the spot where she ran into her time-
displaced self. . . selves. . . whatever. The doors of the conference hall were right
there, closed and seemingly undisturbed. Inga pushed them, and they gave way
with a quiet creak.
Nothing. Still as dusty and untouched as ever.
There was no trace of yesterday’s skirmish here, nor any indication that any-
one was here at all. She could see the ladder outside that had helped her climb
down yesterday, but the windows were intact. Even the patterns of scratches and
finger traces on the dust were familiar. As if she never saw the glass melt in front
of her eyes.
And yet, I know what I experienced was real. What’s going on here?
Shrugging, Inga shut the door again and descended back to the ground floor,
jumping over steps quickly.
“Right, the doors aren’t closed. Someone’s oversight. Just so you know.”
“I’ll get it closed later,” the security woman frowned slightly, slightly pulling
the cord of her phone wedged between her fingers.
“Oh, and one more thing.” Inga took an old, yellowed key out of her coat and
laid it on the desk. “I forgot to turn in my key yesterday. A rush, you know. Could
you register me out?”
“I’ll write you down in yesterday’s log, then. Just please, don’t do that again.
Zerkalova, right?”
“Yes.” How come they all remember me and I never– oh well.
Inga stepped past the counter and out, onto the street. Two straight rows
of pines ran to the sides of the clear square in front of the institute, along a
road crossing Lavrentyev Ave and continuing into the wide Koptyug Street on
the other side, in plain sight. Cars passed by, in all shapes and colors, ranging
from old Ladas and Volgas barely holding together, to second-hand Toyotas –
all alike in their excessive, repetitive smoothness – and among them, occasional
modern cars from over the world, most prominently the distinctive, if slightly
cliché, Ford Focus, the model of choice for middle management.
The wind blew Inga’s hair slightly back as she gazed over the small monument
on the street in front of her.
So I’m done with the loose ends, at least. I have a time machine, I can go wherever
and whenever I want. . . and always return here, as if no time passed here at all.
Nobody will know. To them, I won’t even be gone. But. . .
She adjusted the hood of her coat.
I’m going to age, still. And die, maybe in travel. And I probably won’t even get a
monument like that guy did. For the better, of course. I’m not afraid of death – but
old age, the mere thought, just ugh.
Inga pulled her phone out again, standing still as she sorted through her con-
tact list.
“Mom”. Delete. “Dad”. Delete.
Just who are you, Miss Enigma? You say you know an older version of me. You’re
probably from the future yourself. And really, this cryptic routine of yours isn’t that
irritating. I can forgive it. Not letting me know what I’m supposed to know yet, I can
relate to that. I’ll discover that in my time. But. . .
Inga looked to the sides of the street whose far end vanished in the forest.
More institutes. Genetics. . . Geology. . . Mathematics. . . More of this uninspired
architecture, more of these blocky grey refuges of science, holding together more
or less on pure enthusiasm on part of the aging professors, underpaid and un-
derfunded.
But does the future even exist?
Chapter 4
Inspiration
Every point of view is useful, even
those that are wrong – if we can
judge why a wrong view was
accepted.
Legion
42

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insight

February 22, 2011

This dream again, eh. . .

grandfather, I hardly ﬁnd time to breathe.”

“Why can’t we just walk out the normal way?”

“Now I must tell all of you. . . ”

operational state and carry out their planned operations in

“What is this disturbance?” the leading Cossack asked loudly.

Inga stepped into the smoke.

For a few minutes, complete silence fell over the room.

“But it’s convenient! Think of the time and money saved!”

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