"The End of the Legend" by Sergei Lukyanenko, summary Automatic translate

"The End of the Legend" is a 2008 collection published by AST. It includes the novella "Credo" and about twenty short stories from various years: alternative history, urban fantasy, and social science fiction. Each work poses an unconventional question to the familiar world — and draws out an answer that is more difficult than expected.

"Credo"

The collection’s longest work is a detective story. The action takes place in an alternate Moscow of the early 21st century, where the transmigration of souls is proven and regulated by the state. Using a "Tesla Star" — an electromagnetic field generator — a person is put into a trance, and their past incarnation is summoned for a short conversation. The procedure is overseen by notaries, psychologists, a priest, and a state inspector; the results are recorded in the Chamber of Reincarnation. The main practical consequences are inheritance disputes.

Private detective Artyom Kamalov specializes in precisely these types of cases. One morning, the Tuvansky family comes to him with their nine-year-old son, Vanya: the boy’s past incarnation, New York grocer Kevin Lemout (1873–1961), rewrote his will a week before his death in favor of his future incarnation — but the document has disappeared. Artyom refuses: there’s no physical evidence after forty years, and he needs a lawyer, not a detective. He also warns Vanya’s mother that, for the sake of a dubious chance, she’s willing to subject her son to repeated sessions under the Star — and each subsequent session dramatically increases the risk of psychosis.

Soon, Artyom enters the "Money to the Wind" beer restaurant near Baumanka and meets a young physics professor, Ivan Petrenko. He’s quite drunk, but quickly sobers up when he hears he’s a detective. Petrenko confesses: a few days ago, he conducted a séance in the university lab on his own. He rigged up a timer, injected himself with Relanium, and activated the Tesla Star. The recorder first played his own message to his past self, then switched to recording. Petrenko doesn’t have time to reveal exactly what they told him.

As he leaves the restaurant, he’s shot three times with a silent pistol. Artyom survives only because the killer doesn’t dare enter the building from the street. The dying Petrenko’s last words are: "Why did I say I’d be here…"

MUR investigator Denis Krylov, Artyom’s former subordinate, interrogates the detective for seven hours. It turns out the flash drive from Petrenko’s lab is already missing: the killer removed the drive before the police arrived. The investigation reaches a dead end. Krylov knows about Artyom’s incarnation — he’s a reincarnation of Alan Pinkerton — and makes snide remarks about it, seriously offending the detective.

The murdered man’s widow, Tanya Demina, a Russian Radio announcer with a cast-iron alibi, hires Artyom to find the missing recording. Technically, the task is legitimate: to locate the deceased’s property. Tanya explains that Ivan had long refused an official investigation, fearing he had been a villain in a past life. Artyom begins searching among Petrenko’s inner circle for the person to whom he had confided in him about the experiment. From two casual phrases the murdered man dropped, he deduces that someone close to the physicist heard the story about the recording, feigned disbelief, and then immediately took action. Artyom poses the central question of the story: how do people kill in a world where the soul is immortal and where the victim will sooner or later reincarnate and reveal the killer’s name? What compels a person to pull the trigger, knowing this?

Other stories in the collection

The story of Misha the Sniffer takes place in a world after a series of environmental disasters and genetic experiments. People carry mutations — some beneficial, others destructive. Misha is endowed with nine ethmoidal turbinates instead of two: his sense of smell is so acute that he wears synthetic filters in his nose, otherwise the flood of odors would paralyze him. By smell, he can decipher a person’s history — illnesses, lies, the age of objects in the house. Edgar, an employee of the Temporal Institute, illegally connected his home computer to the Institute’s mainframe and stole a temporal probe. His family died in a flyer crash. Before that, he was a genetic donor — his biological children, about whom he knows nothing, are growing up in twenty families. Edgar offers Misha a deal: he searches among thousands of families for a specific boy — Edgar’s biological son — in return for sending the temporal probe back into the past of Katya’s ancestors to discreetly remove one percent of defective genes and make her genetically compatible with Misha. Both understand that they are committing a crime, and both agree.

In the story "The Guide From Here," a young man stands on the side of the road at the edge of a cliff. Beside him stands the Guide, a being who leads people to the point of no return. The dialogue at the edge of the abyss reveals that the boundary between life and death is not physical, but internal; the hero ultimately decides with whom he shares his journey.

The story of the same name, "The End of the Legend," plunges us into the finale of a fantasy confrontation: Lord Inglorion declares that by evening, ninety-nine of the hundred orcs will be dead. The remaining ones will become eternal wanderers in the human world, where magic is rare. The story unfolds like a chronicle of the final battle — but its outcome is not victory, but simply the end of one world and the beginning of another, more mundane one.

In the story "The Dreamweaver," a gypsy woman asks a young man why he needs gypsy magic and reminds him that it can do no good. He leads other people’s children along with him, denying them life or a choice — and she must decide whether to help him or refuse.