"I, the undersigned Doctor of Philology Yu Tsun, former professor at the Hochschule at Tsingtao subject of the Chinese Empire and recruited by the German secret service in January 1914," "have the duty to inform you for the following:..." "You are the yard-keeper of 27, Starosadskoy St." "Yes, exactly." "You are under arrest on the strength of the Russian Imperial Law." "Here is the arrest warrant." "The operator is listening." "Speak!" "The operator is listening." "Speak!" "Please put me through to 119th." "Speak." "Who are you?" "Do you hear me?" "I am listening." "Speak!" "I am listening..." "Speak!" "Speak!" "Do speak!" "I am listening." "Speak!" "It seemed incredible to me that this day - a day without premonitions or symbols - would be the one of my implacable death." "I, having been left without father, I, having been a child, playing in a symmetrical garden of Hai Feng  me, now, going to die!" "Everything happens now, precisely now." "Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen;" "countless men in the air, on the earth and the sea, and everything that is happening is happening to me..." "You no doubt wish to see the garden?" "Oh, yes." ""The garden of forking paths"" "It is the garden of my ancestor Ts'ui Pen." "Your ancestor?" "Your are a descendant of this illustrious man!" "I am so glad." "Come in." "Please do come in." "We live three of us here - I, the gramophone and the Sinology." "I am so glad that you found it possible to come and relieve my solitude." "Nobody cares now about my work." "War is the most stupid, most talentless of all times." "Please." "The Chinese Encyclopedia." "It was in possession of the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty" "Yes and it had never been printed." "These books are hand-written." "Could I have a look?" "Of course!" "Please, have a seat." "I'll make the tea." "It is only when we, the Russians, obtain such mastery of publishing art that we will boldly deserve to be called a cultural nation." "So let we turn to your illustrious ancestor." "Ts'ui Pen." "Governor of his native province." "One of the most learned men in the Empire, astronomer and astrologer, magnificent chess player," "famous poet and calligrapher." "He abandoned all this and closed himself up for thirteen years in the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude to compose a book and a maze." "There he met his death." "What was left seemed to be a bundle of useless manuscripts." "We still don't know the cause of Ts'ui Pen's death." "They say he was killed by a stranger - why and how - nobody knows." "What a curious thing!" "Excuse my inept laughter." "But even his death amazingly well fits the model whose very author is he himself." "Hermit killed by his guest." "Funny." "Thank God the manuscript survived." "It was published, it seems to me, by some monk - a Taoist or Buddhist" " I can't remember..." "We descendants of Ts'ui Pen continue to curse that monk." "His publication was nonsense." "I examined it once: in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive." "As for the other undertaking of Ts'ui Pen, his Labyrinth..." "Here is the Labyrinth." "I've been long asking myself why Tsui Pen should write such a strange book." "And all the time it seemed to me that your illustrious ancestor could neither have sacrificed 13 years on a nonsense - nor dedicated the last of his life to a senseless rhetorical exercise." "And then I received a letter from Oxford concerning the garden, i. e. the labyrinth." ""I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths"" "I understood: "the garden of forking paths" was the chaotic novel;" "the phrase "various futures, not to all" suggested to me the forking in time, not in space." "Yes, Ts'ui Pen had created a really infinite net." "In any randomly taken novel, the characters are always confronted with several alternatives and choose one." "Each time a character is confronted with several alternatives, and he chooses one and only one, and eliminates the others." "Are you all right?" "I'm fine." "Please do continue." "I'm listening." "I forgot the tea." "And so." "In the book of Ts'ui Pen, the characters choose simultaneously – all of the alternatives." "He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times, which themselves also proliferate and fork." "Fang, let us say, has a secret;" "a stranger knocks at his door;" "Fang resolves to kill him." "Naturally, there are several possible outcomes:" "Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, etc." "Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge:" "for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend." "Listen to this:" "Tsao Tsao, wearing brocade robe with jasper girdle, was riding on white horse with golden saddle." "His guards bore over him a big red umbrella of costly silk, embroidered with gold." "On his right and on his left there rode warriors with gold spears and silver axes" "Flags with embroidered sun and moon, dragons and phoenixes on them, fluttered to the wind." "His personal guard, the Troop of the Tigers counted 25 000 warriors, as it should be during the departure of the Emperor." "Every 5 thousand of them rode under their flags and banners of peculiar colour, according to the 5 basic colours accepted in the army of Tsao Tsao - blue, yellow, red, white and black." "The night dusk is dangerous but the men undervalue their lives and gain an easy victory - this is the first version, and here is the second:" "the same army traverses a palace where a festival is taking place;" "the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory." "The last words are repeated in each version like a secret commandment:" "Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die." "I know that of all problems, none disturbed him so greatly as the problem of time." "Now then, that is the only problem that does not figure in the pages of the "Garden"" "He does not even use the word "time"." "Please tell me " "In a riddle whose answer is "chess," what is the only prohibited word?" ""Chess"" "Precisely," ""The garden of forking paths"" "is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose key is "time."" "It is an image of the world with infinite series of times." "We do not exist in the majority of these times;" "in some you exist, and not I;" "in others, I, and not you;" "in others, both of us." "In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time." "He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times." "In one of them, you have arrived at my house;" "in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead;" "in still another, I utter these same words, but I am ... mirage, a ghost..." "In every one, I am grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden of Ts'ui Pen." "Not in all." "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable versions of future." "In one of them" "I am your enemy." "The future is already on the threshold, still I am your friend." "Could I see the letter again?" "Mysterious murder." "Yesterday evening, in his own home was murdered the famous Russian Orientalist" "Prof Krassilov." "The crime was committed by a stranger, one Yu Tsun." "I have been condemned to death." "I have won out abominably:" "I have communicated to Berlin the name of the city they must attack." "They has deciphered this mystery." "It is clear now, that my task was to indicate the city called Krassilov..." "On 26. 06., in the city of Krassilov, the newest Russian artillery park was destryed by an enemy attack." "There were casualties." "and that I could not find another way to do so than to kill a man of that name." "I didn't do it for Germany." "I care nothing for a barbarous country which imposed upon me the abjection of being a spy and a murderer." "I fulfilled my plan, because" "I felt that my Chief - this sick and hateful man waiting for my report day after day, examining newspapers" "this man somehow feared people of my race - the innumerable ancestors who merge within me." "I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save the German Army." "I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious actions;" "soon there will be no one but warriors and bandits." "My counsel:" "The author of an atrocious action ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it," "he ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past." "Thus I proceeded as my eyes of a dead man" "registered the elapsing of that day, the last of my life, and the diffusion of the night." "Yet no one knows and no one will ever know" "my innumerable contrition and weariness."