Permafrost Page 10

  “Who’s there?”

  I froze. It was not my mother’s voice; not Luba Lidova answering the telephone. In place of my mother’s habitual politeness there was a sharpness, a demanding interrogative tone.

  “Is that . . . Valentina?” I asked, recalibrating.

  “I said, who’s speaking?”

  I forced my breathing to slow. “I’m Tatiana,” I said. “I just . . .”

  “Whatever you want from her, get on with it.”

  “I thought you’d already left.”

  “You thought what?”

  “I got it wrong. The wrong year, the wrong summer. You’re still there.”

  She gave a derisive snort. “I should’ve known better. Just another lunatic, out to waste her time. When will you people move on to someone else?”

  “Is she there, Valentina?”

  “No, she’s . . . what right have you got to call me that, as if we know each other?”

  “You’re on her papers, aren’t you?”

  A sullen tone entered her voice. “More fool me.”

  “No, nobody’s the fool here. Will you do something for me, Valentina? When your mother comes back, tell her it all makes sense. Everything. The paradox noise, the Luba Pairs. Tell her it’s not wasted work. Tell her there’s a point to it all, and . . .”

  There was a crackle, the sound of a handset being wrenched from one grip to another.

  A different voice:

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s . . . me,” I said, uselessly. But what could I tell her, that it was her own daughter, even though I was also standing right next to her?

  She met my answer with a silence of her own. Outside, I heard the slam as Antti closed the car door. Footsteps on the ground as he made his way back to the kitchen.

  “You can bother me,” Luba Lidova said. “I don’t mind. I’ve earned it. But you leave my daughter alone.”

  “They’ll come around to you,” I said, my voice starting to break. “All of it. It’s . . .”

  Antti came up behind me and jammed his hand onto the top of the telephone’s base, killing the call. A continuous dial tone sounded in my ear. Slowly I put the handset back down on the base.

  “It was just . . .” I started.

  “I know who you called.”

  “I got it wrong. The summer I left. It must have been the year after this. I was still there.”

  Antti leaned in. I smelled his breath, tainted after years of hard living. It was a sour, vinegary stench, like something left in the bottom of a barrel. “We’ve got the seeds. One slip, one little causal ripple, and we lose it all. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.” Then he grunted and reached into his pocket, taking out the pistol. “Do something right instead.”

  * * *

  I’d taken the artificial larynx with me, just in case he had something he wanted to say at the end, some final words. But when I offered it to him he only shook his head, his cataract-clouded eyes seeming to look right through me, out to the grey Russian skies over the farm.

  It had taken one shot. The sound of it had echoed back off the buildings. Those crows had lifted from the copse of trees, wheeling and cawing in the sky for a few minutes before settling back down, as if an execution—even a mercy killing—was only a minor disturbance in their routine.

  Afterward, Antti had come out with a spade. We couldn’t just leave Vikram lying there in the field.

  * * *

  I prodded Antti awake again. He’d kept it together as we crossed the Urals, but his strength was fading now, and I sensed that we’d drawn on his last, deepest reserves. Tibor’s reserves, I corrected myself. Poor Tibor, dragged into all this, stabbed for a cause that had no bearing on his own life, doomed to die in the empty landscape of northern Siberia.

  “We can’t be far from the objective now,” I said, raising my voice as I tried to hold him on the right side of consciousness. “All you need to do is get this thing on the ground, and we can figure out the rest on foot. It’s a frozen wasteland upstream, but things are better here. I’ve seen roads and towns, signs of civilisation. If we can get down in one piece, someone will help us.”

  “Should’ve been you,” Antti said, slurring his words like a man on the edge of sleep. “Don’t you see? Should be you, flying this thing. Then you could get us down.”

  “Hold on in there.”

  I felt like we’d been flying for a day, when in fact it was only six hours since we left the airstrip. It was spring in the northern hemisphere and we were very near the Arctic Circle, so there were still several hours of useful daylight ahead of us. I could see the sea already, bruise-grey on the horizon, hemmed by margins of icy ground, the northernmost fringes of the Eurasian landmass. Even by Kogalym’s standards there wasn’t much to see down here, but compared to the world after the Scouring even these scattered communities were wildly abundant with life and civilisation. There were even airstrips, roads, that we could use, if only Antti kept his head together and got us wheels-down.

  “If you get back . . .” he began, before blacking out for a second.

  “Antti!”

  “If you get back, you have to end this. Find a way. Convince Cho that the experiment can’t continue.”

  I strained in my seat, making sure the alloy container was still secure in the cargo webbing behind the passenger seats.

  “We’ve got the seeds.”

  “I was wrong. I was worried about you setting up a paradox, stopping Vikram and me from coming back . . . even Miguel. But there’s something more important than any of this. Permafrost can’t be allowed to continue beyond the present moment, wherever you are upstream. It’s too dangerous. Whatever’s trying to get through to us . . . whatever’s trying to use us to change things, all of us . . . it has to be stopped. Has to be ended.” He gathered some final strength, his breathing laboured and heavy. “Destroy it, Valentina. Smash the machines so they can’t send anything back.”

  I reached out to steady his hand on the control stick, as if that was going to make any difference.

  “You have to get us on the ground, Antti.”

  He coughed, blood spattering against the console, against the rows of instruments.

  Then he slumped in his seat restraint, his eyes fixed on the horizon, but no life remaining in them.

  “Antti!”

  He’s gone. Gone or going. Just you and me now, Valentina. Just you and me.

  At once I felt the plane beginning to pitch, and from somewhere an alarm sounded.

  We were going down.

  * * *

  The crash was the thing that jolted me back, I think. That, or I retained enough presence of mind to issue the abort command just before we came down. It hadn’t been a totally uncontrolled descent—I’d taken the dual controls and tried to bring us down on a level patch of ground, working the throttle and yoke the way I’d seen Antti doing, and between us Tatiana and I remembered to get the gear down and figured out how to set the flaps for a slower descent. But neither of us were pilots, and it was still a crunch rather than a landing. We were going much too fast, and the icy ground was too broken, so that we snagged on something—a wheel or wing-tip, or even the propeller, digging into a fissure—and we flipped forward, nose-down like a car driving hard into a ditch. I jerked against the restraints, arching my back, but when I relaxed—like a piece of tensioned wood twanging back into shape—it was the dental chair I snapped into, and I was back in the Vaymyr.

  I lay there for ten or twenty seconds, just breathing.

  The pen-recorder scratched away. The monitors ticked and bleeped. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Margaret and two of her technicians had been with me when I went under, but between now and then they’d left me alone except for the recording machines, content to let me have my adventure in the past unobserved. Presumably they all had other business to be getting on with. In a few short weeks, for the scientists and engineers of Permafrost, past-directed time travel had gone from an impossibi
lity to a remote but achievable dream . . . then to a repeatable experiment, as commonplace as turning a laser on and off.

  I undid the restraints. There was a little dizziness as I left the dental chair, the room swimming, but I steadied myself against one of the monitor racks and searched for my cane.

  There it was, resting against a fire-extinguisher, exactly where I’d left it.

  Tatiana?

  Nothing. Not just yet.

  I hoped she was all right.

  Still unsteady, feeling as if I might throw up again, just as I’d done on the way to the farmhouse, I went to the panel over the fire-extinguisher and hammered my fist against the emergency alarm. The two-toned distress signal began to whoop, sounding throughout the Vaymyr. I had no doubt that the emergency condition would be picked up and broadcast through all the other ships as well. A bad situation on one of them—a fire or nuclear accident—was bad news for the whole cordon, the entire experiment. Of course there was no emergency, just yet. But I knew the drills and how the majority of the staff had been trained to react.

  Outside, in the corridors beyond, amber lights were flashing. In the new light, the usual colours of the icebreaker had become unfamiliar. I got lost momentarily, taking a wrong turn on my way to the administrative level. As I was clacking my way upstairs, some of the staff were already coming down. A few of them would be going to designated technical stations, required to put systems into safe-mode, as well as confirm that the emergency was not a false alarm. Others, deemed less essential, were heading for the emergency escape routes, the bridges, ladders and ice-level doors. I was a hobbling obstruction against the human tide. For the most part I was totally ignored, even by the medical and technical experts who’d helped me in the early stages of becoming a pilot. They just didn’t see me, fighting my way against that fearful, urgent flow.

  Vikram did.

  He was halfway past me when he snapped around and took my arm in his hand.

  “Val! This is an alarm—we’re meant to be going the other way!” Then he must have seen something in my face, some distance or confusion. “My god, were you actually time-embedded when this started? No wonder you’re foggy. Follow me—we have to get to the outer weather door for the muster point!”

  I, in turn, looked into his eyes. I thought of the last time we’d shared a moment of communion. It had been outside Antti’s farm, in the field, when I pressed a semiautomatic pistol to his head.

  Before I shot and killed him.

  Before I buried him in the dirt.

  “Get out,” I said. “Just get out, away from the experiment.”

  “It’s probably a dry-run, a fire drill . . .”

  “Vikram, listen to me.” Still holding my cane, I took his head in mine and pressed our faces together, even as we were bustled and jostled by the staff squeezing past us. “Whatever happens now, never go back. Never let them send you into time. Promise me.”

  “I don’t even know if I’ll ever go back!”

  “Just don’t. Get away from all this. As far away as you can. I’m ending it.”

  I pushed him away. Not unkindly, not without regret, but because I wanted him to follow the others, and I knew he needed that shove. He nearly stumbled down the stairs, but caught himself. For an instant he stared back at me, caught between doubt and some vast dawning comprehension. He was no fool, Vikram. I think in that moment he understood that we must have already crossed paths in the past, and that what I had seen was a truth too hard to behold.

  I pushed on, the flow of evacuees becoming a trickle, until it felt as if I had the Vaymyr to myself. I reached Cho’s office and let myself in without knocking at the door. By all that was proper, Cho should have left with the others. But I could not see him abandoning the icebreaker that quickly, not until he had confirmation that the emergency was genuine.

  He was at his desk, papers before him, rolling some heavy thing between his fingers.

  “I thought you were still time-embedded, Miss Lidova.”

  The alarm was still sounding, the amber lights still flashing, but when I closed the door behind me his office became a bubble of comparative normality, with only a warning light going on and off next to his desk telephone.

  “It has to end, Director Cho.”

  He absorbed my statement with a perfect equanimity, neither raising his voice nor making any move to leave his seat.

  “Are you responsible for the present emergency condition?”

  “I set if off, yes. But only to begin the evacuation that’s going to happen anyway, the one you’re going to help me bring about.”

  “I would need some justification for such an action. Routine drills are one thing, but the operation always continues. If too many of us fled the ships, there’s no telling the damage it could do.”

  “Damage is exactly what we want.” I moved closer to him, leaning over the desk. “We made an error, Cho. A terrible mistake. We considered the past history of the time-probes, all the way up to the present. But we neglected to think about the future.”

  “We considered everything,” Cho asserted.

  “Not enough. Not the future condition of the time-probes, what will happen to them further upstream from here. Who else might use them, if they have a strong enough reason.”

  “And what reason would that be?”

  “I don’t know, not really. But I know what Antti told me, and what he learned from Vikram. I’ve met them, Cho. They were already time-embedded in 2028. You sent them back from further upstream, further in the future than this moment.”

  Cho paled. I could almost feel the struggle going on his head; the initial rejection of the idea, followed by the equally ruthless process of acceptance, as he worked through the logical implications of what I was saying. Finding nothing in my words that he could easily refute, given the premise of the experiment.

  “Already embedded?”

  “And Miguel,” I said, leaning in closer, gripping the head of my cane as if I meant to use it as a weapon. “But it’s what Antti told me that really matters. The glimpses he saw. A white world, with nothing left of any of us. Just machines. Machines as huge as mountains, floating over that whiteness.” I hardened my tone. “It’s the future, Cho—a possible future, a possible equilibrium state in the block-crystal. It wasn’t ever meant to happen until we opened a door into the past with Permafrost. We let it through, and now it’s trying to make itself concrete. All this business with seeds, with 2028, it’ll mean nothing unless we stop that future from becoming the default state.”

  “What is it?” he asked, his voice drained of resistance.

  “I can only guess. But I think it’s the Brothers. Not what they are now, but what they’re becoming—what they will become. Something much more powerful and independent-minded. Something self-reliant and purposeful. An upstream artificial intelligence which only exists because of Permafrost, and which knows it will not be permitted to exist beyond its usefulness to us. It won’t give up on that existence, though. So it intervenes to act against the experiment’s objective, trying to prevent us from locating those seeds.”

  His jaw moved silently, like a man reciting words to himself. He was framing and rejecting counterarguments, testing and discarding one candidate after another. “No,” he said eventually, with a defeated tone. “That can’t be how it is.”

  “It’s testable, Cho. All we have to do is smash the time-probes. End their histories here. Deny them to the upstream. If there has been intervention from the future, it will unravel once the machines no longer exist.”

  “I cannot . . .”

  It was a bluff, a delaying tactic. Cho let go of the object he’d had between his fingers and reached for his desk drawer. It was unlatched. He slid open the drawer, delved in to snatch something from it. I caught a gleam of dark metal, a familiar shape emerging from behind the desk. An automatic pistol, I thought.

  Cho made to level the pistol. I don’t think he meant to shoot me, even then. It was an instrument of co
ercion, a projection of his authority. He could not give up Permafrost that easily, even if some part of him was persuaded by what I’d said.

  With the automatic aimed at me, Cho leaned over to pick up his telephone. “This is Director Cho,” he said, his voice wavering, his eyes never leaving mine. “I have confirmation that the emergency condition is . . .”

  I swung the cane. I put all my life into that one swing, the entire force of my will and being. I whacked the gun and sent it tumbling from his fingers. The automatic dropped to the desk. I dived for it before Cho had a chance to regain control, and for an instant we wrestled, the two of us sprawling in from either side, our faces pressed close to each other.

  “You believe me,” I said, grimacing as I dragged the automatic beyond the reach of his fingertips. “You just don’t want to.”

  The automatic went off.

  It was a single shot, made all the more sharp and loud by the close confines of the office. Whether I had shot it by mistake, or whether Cho had done it, was beside the point. It was an accidental discharge.

  We halted, facing each other, still sprawled across the desk, half of Cho’s technical clutter on the floor.

  “It ends,” I said, forcing out the words. “Now. You find a way. But it ends.”

  “I created this,” Cho said slowly. “I gave my life to this project. When my wife needed me the most, I put this above her.”

  “I know. I know also that it was the right thing to do; that the world owes you a debt it can never repay. I’m not asking you to undo that great work; I’m not asking you to pretend that your sacrifice never happened, or that there wasn’t a terrible personal cost.” I paused, breathing heavily. “It had to be done, Cho, and it was. You did a marvellous thing. You opened a way into the past, and we went through. We changed things. Maybe it didn’t go quite according to plan, but we succeeded . . . or we’re in the process of succeeding. But it’s what comes after us that has to be stopped now. Permafrost is done; it achieved its objective. Now it can’t be allowed to exist a moment longer than necessary.”

  Some last line of defence crumbled in his face.

  “There is a way to end it. Several ways. But I have to be sure that things really did work out downstream. Are you confident you’ve secured the seeds?”