Permafrost Read online

  So I told myself, until the man came into my classroom.

  It was near the end of the hour, so I kept at the lesson, my hand only shaking a little bit. The man was standing at the back, flanked by two guards. He watched me carefully, as if I was being assessed on the quality of my teaching.

  Finally the pupils filed out and the man came forward. He sat down at one of the front desks and signalled me to drag a chair over. It was awkward since the chairs were too small and low for either of us, especially my big, burly visitor.

  “You are an excellent teacher, Miss Lidova,” he said by way of introduction. “I wish that I’d had you when I was younger. I do not think I would have found Pythagoras quite such a puzzle.”

  “May I help you, sir?”

  “I am Leo Cho,” he said, settling his hands before him. “Director of World Health.” He had a soft voice despite his large frame, and his hands were long-fingered and delicate-looking, as if they might have belonged to a surgeon or pianist. “I’ve come to Kogalym because I believe you might be of assistance to me.”

  “I’m not sure how I can be,” I said, with due deference.

  “Let me be the judge of that.” He was not Russian; Chinese perhaps, but he spoke our language very well indeed, almost too meticulously to pass as a true native speaker. It was no longer unusual to have foreigners active in regional administration: since the Scouring, World Health had been moving its senior operatives around with little regard for former national boundaries. What was the point of countries, when civilisation was only a generation away from total extinction? “What I have,” Cho continued, “is a proposition—a job offer, so to speak.”

  I looked around the classroom, trying to see it from a stranger’s point of view. There were geometry diagrams, and pictures of famous mathematical and scientific figures from history, but also odd personal touches, like the chart showing different kinds of butterflies and moths, and another with a huge photomicrograph of a wasp’s compound eye.

  “I already have one, sir.”

  He nodded back at the door that the pupils had just slouched through. “What would you say is the main difficulty facing those children, Miss Lidova?”

  I didn’t have to think very hard about that.

  “Nutrition.”

  Cho gave a nod, seemingly pleased with my answer. “I’m in complete agreement. They’re all half-starved. We adults can put up with it, but children are developing individuals. These hardships are damaging an entire generation.”

  “It’d be a problem,” I answered in a low voice, “if there was any worry of there being another generation.”

  “Things are admittedly quite difficult.” He took a slip of grubby, folded-over paper out of his shirt pocket, holding it between his fingers like a single playing card. I expected him to show me whatever was on the paper, but he just held it there like a private talisman. “No suitable seed stocks came through the Scouring unscathed. The national and international seed vaults were supposed to be our hedge against global catastrophe, but one by one they failed, or were destroyed, or pillaged. Those that survived did not contain the particular seeds we require. Now we are down to a few impoverished gene stocks. Nothing will take, nothing will grow—not in the new conditions. Hence, we’re digging into stored rations, which will soon be depleted.”

  I felt a chill run through me.

  “World Health isn’t usually so frank.”

  “I can afford frankness. We’ve located some genetically modified seeds which we think will do very well, even in virtually sterile soil. We only need a sample of them for our production agronomists to work with; they can then clone and distribute the seeds to World Health sites in the necessary quantities.” He tapped the grubby paper against the table. “I’ve studied your career. You have shown great dedication and commitment to your pupils. This is your chance to really help them, by assisting in the effort to safeguard these samples.”

  I smiled apologetically at him, feeling a vague sense of embarrassment, a feeling that I’d wasted his time, even though it was no fault of my own.

  “You’ve got the wrong Valentina Lidova.”

  “Your mother was the mathematician Luba Lidova?”

  “Yes,” I answered, taken aback.

  Cho nodded. “Then I am fairly sure I have the right one.”

  * * *

  Antti was right about the cloud cover. After an hour’s flight—nowhere near the range limit of the Cessna Denali—we broke through into clearer skies. Ahead, cresting the horizon, was a brown line of hills, very sharply defined. The GPS device above the instrument panel showed a coloured trace with our planned trajectory. Antti’s eyes switched between the device and the dials and lights on the main console. We were flying a few degrees east of due north, heading into colder air and an eventual meeting with the waters of the Yenisei Gulf, still more than a thousand kilometres beyond us.

  He’d said almost nothing since we lifted from the airstrip.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I asked, trying to break through his silence.

  “Worry about yourself. I’m not the one who had to put a gun to Vikram.”

  I’d been pushing the memory of that as far back as it would go, but Antti’s words brought back the event with a shocking clarity, as if strobe flashes were going off in my head. The cold of the fields, the smell of the gun, the crows wheeling the sky, the whimper and exhalation as Vikram went down, taking a few ragged breaths before his last moment.

  “It had to be done,” I said, as if that would make it right. “Do you want to tell me what happened back at the airstrip?”

  “Miguel was there.”

  “Yes, I worked that out for myself.”

  “He had a knife, not a gun. I suppose he was worried about creating too much commotion, getting caught afterward, and the paradox noise he’d be sending up the line. A knife was much simpler.” Antti shifted in the pilot’s position, suppressing a groan of discomfort. “He got me, but not too deeply. Nicked a rib, maybe. I don’t think he hit anything vital. I was ready, and I got the knife off him.”

  “Then there’s a body back at the airstrip. Which someone’s bound to have discovered by now.”

  “There’s a reason I don’t have the radio and transponder switched on,” Antti said. “All they’ll be trying to do is persuade us to turn back. Still, there’s not much the authorities can do now. I hope to have thrown them off the scent with the flight plan, but even if they work out that we’re going north, we’re too fast for anything to get ahead of us.”

  There were two levels of difficulty facing us. Hostile operatives, like Miguel, who were trying to act against the interests of Permafrost, and the local authorities, who could cause nearly as much trouble just by doing their jobs.

  “They might radio ahead, get someone on the ground waiting for us?”

  “There’ll be too many possible landing points to cover. A few hours’ grace is all we need, just enough to get the seeds to safety.” He glanced at me, tension etched into his facial muscles. “We’ll be all right.”

  “What do you think got into Miguel?”

  He flew on in silence for a few moments, pondering my question. “We’d have had to ask him. But I think it must be the same thing that got into Vikram, near the end. There’s something else trying to get into our heads, something else trying to take over our control structures. I’ve felt it, too. Glimpses, like the first flashes we had going back.”

  “Tell me about these flashes, Antti.”

  “Glimpses is all they are. I think there’s something going on farther upstream, beyond Permafrost, beyond what we know of the Vaymyr and the Admiral Nerva. Beyond the whole experiment, beyond 2080. Vikram had visions.”

  I almost hesitated to ask him, not certain I cared to know the answer.

  “What kind?”

  “Whiteness. White sky, white land. Machines as big as mountains, floating over everything. Blank white skyscrapers, like squared-off clouds. Nothing else. No peopl
e. No cities. No trace that we were ever here, that we ever existed.”

  “We started something really bad.”

  “A box of snakes,” Antti said, tilting the control stick as we made a course adjustment, following the glowing thread on the GPS screen. “But then, don’t blame Cho for any of this. He was only ever following the trail of crumbs your mother threw down.”

  I thought of my mother still being out there, the telephone call, the long silences as she processed the unfamiliar voice on the end of the line. Wondering now if she believed a word of it, or if I’d only succeeded in driving the spike further into her heart.

  * * *

  In the morning after my first glimpse of the hospital corridor—the wheelchair and the radiology sign—Cho and I went to speak to the Brothers. There was a direct line from Cho’s office, allowing voice, video and data-transfer, but sometimes it was quicker and easier to speak to them directly. It required a trip across the connecting bridge from the Vaymyr to the Admiral Nerva, then a long walk into the dark bowels of the aircraft carrier, beneath the main hangar deck where we maintained the time-probes.

  As we approached them the Brothers gave off a low, powerful humming, like a sustained organ note. Cho had his chin lifted and his hands behind his back, appearing meek and schoolboyish, despite his large stature.

  Each Brother was a black cylinder two metres tall and about fifty centimetres in diameter, with a glossy outer casing. The floor around each cylinder was made up of grilled plates that could be lifted up for access. Beneath the Brothers was a glowing root-system of electronics, refrigeration circuits and fibre-optic connections, spreading invisibly far beneath our feet.

  “Good morning,” Cho said.

  “Good morning, Director,” responded Dmitri, the nearest of the machines. “We trust you slept well last night?”

  “I did, besides being a little concerned about the welfare of our host.”

  Pavel asked: “What was your specific concern, Director Cho?”

  “Valentina—Miss Lidova—had a clear glimpse of a hospital corridor, leading to a radiological department. It may well be part of the Izhevsk facility, given what we know of time-probe eighteen’s history, but it’s a little too soon to rule out the other two possible locations. We’ll hope to have a better idea with a deeper immersion. Before I risk sending her back in again, though, I want a categorical assurance that the host has suffered no ill effects due to anything that might have happened in that radiology section.”

  “We are detecting normal neural traffic, Director Cho.”

  “I’ll need more than that, Ivan.”

  The Brothers were artificial intelligences, each the most powerful and flexible such machine that could be provided by four of the main partners in the Permafrost enterprise. They all predated the Scouring—nothing like them could be made anymore—and although they might look identical now, each was based on a very different logical architecture. Once installed in the Admiral Nerva, and arranged to work as a committee, the machines had been shrouded in these anonymising casings and given new designations. They were Dmitri, Ivan, Alexei and Pavel, after The Brothers Karamazov.

  It was the Brothers who listened to the time-probes, sensing their quantum states and histories, and deciding when a time injection was viable, as well as interpreting the flow of data coming upstream once an injection had been achieved. No human being could do that, nor any simple computer system, and the collective analysis was already pushing the Brothers to the limit of their processing ability.

  “There is no sign of neurological impairment,” Alexei stated, with a definite firmness of tone. “We cannot model a complete sensorium-mapping for the downstream control structure, but all parameter states indicate that it is safe to reinstate Miss Lidova.”

  This was the central difficulty with the control structures. They could grow in our heads, allowing neural traffic to flow from upstream to downstream, from pilot to host—and back again, for control and monitoring purposes. Or, in my case, be reprogrammed from an existing set of neural implants. But the way the structures adapted and modified themselves was inherently unpredictable. It took one human mind to make sense of the data flowing from another. The Brothers could eavesdrop on the data, they could optimise the signal and quantify it according to certain schemata, but we wouldn’t be able to tell what had really happened to my host until I was inside her skull, looking out through her eyes.

  Cho looked at me. “I wish there could be better guarantees than that. I won’t force you back if you feel unprepared. Even after what happened to Christos, even if you were the last pilot, I would insist that this is voluntary.”

  I remembered Christos going into convulsions two weeks after his control structure had been activated. We’d been in the canteen together, pilots and technical experts bonding over coffee and cards. Christos hadn’t had a glimpse at that point, but we all felt that he must be on the verge; that it could only be a matter of days before he went time-embedded. No hint, even then, that I was going to be the one to take his place.

  Me, a seventy-one-year-old woman, a lame mathematician from Kogalym, a widow despised by half her community for trying to be a good teacher?

  Me, the first person to travel in time?

  “Send me back in,” I said.

  * * *

  After speaking to the Brothers we returned to the Vaymyr. Cho waited until I’d had breakfast with Vikram, Miguel and Antti, and then asked for the link to be reinstated. Then it was just a matter of time, waiting for our twinned control structures to mesh again, as they had during that brief flash in the corridor. It couldn’t be predicted or rushed.

  Cho wanted to have me under close observation, so I was strapped into the dental chair while Dr. Abramik and the other technicians set up their monitoring gear. Margaret’s team was handling the signal acquisition and processing hardware; Abramik’s people the biomedical systems. There were lots of screens, lots of traces and graphs. They even had pen recorders running, twitching out traces onto paper, just in case there was a power-drop and the electronic data was lost or corrupted.

  “We’ll hope for a deeper immersion,” Cho said. “Get what you can—any details, no matter how trivial. But the moment you feel like you’re not in control, or the situation is too complicated for you to act plausibly, issue the abort command. I’d rather pull you out early than run into paradox noise. Is that understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Then good luck, Miss Lidova.”

  * * *

  I waited and waited. It wasn’t like trying to fall asleep, or drift into a trance. My internal mental state didn’t matter at all. Stillness was the only real prerequisite, to reduce the neural traffic burden to a manageable level during these early stages. Given that it had taken weeks for me to have the first glimpse, there was a strong chance that it might not happen at all today, or indeed for many days. But I felt confident that it would happen more readily the second time, and that with each occurrence it would become easier to induce the next.

  Eventually—an hour or so after I climbed into the chair—it clicked.

  As before, there was no warning. Just a sharp transition in my visual input—switching from the signals in my optic nerves to those in hers, intercepted and translated by the control structures.

  I found myself in a room this time, not a corridor. I was reclining, but more fully than in the dental chair. I was in a bed, lying nearly horizontal but with my head propped up against pillows.

  I could feel them. I’d been a disembodied presence during the first glimpse, seeing but not experiencing, but now there was a tactile component to the immersion. I registered a soft enclosing pressure around the back of my neck, as well as a faint scratchiness, not quite sharp enough to count as discomfort. Excited by this new level of sensory detail, I made an unconscious effort to alter the angle of my gaze. More of the room came into view, but out of focus, as if through foggy glass.

  It was a hospital room. To the left was
a wall with an outside window, blinds drawn and angled slightly to deflect daylight. In front of me, beyond the foot of the bed, was a blank wall with a blank rectangular screen attached via an angled bracket. To my right was a partition wall containing a door and a curtained window, which must face out into a corridor or ward.

  I swivelled my gaze a bit more, moving her entire head. I felt a variation in the scratchiness, my head shifting on the pillow. Bedside cabinets to the left and right. A chair with padding coming out of its fabric. A fire extinguisher by the door.

  Now came an auditory impression. It must have been there all along, but I was only now processing it. Low voices, coming from the other side of the door. Footsteps, doors opening and closing. Beeps and electronic tones. Telephone sounds, hospital noises. The ordinary, busy clamour of a large institution. It could be a school, a government building, our own project. It didn’t sound like the past.

  I was able to move my head, so I tried my right arm. It responded, even if it felt as if I were trying to push my way through treacle. I lifted it as high as I could go. My sleeve fell back, exposing skin nearly all the way to the elbow joint. I spread her fingers, marvelling at the supreme strangeness of this moment. Whoever my host was, she was definitely younger than me, and all skin and bone.

  We knew almost nothing about her, except that she was female. Even that was uncertain. When we dropped the initiating spore into her head via the time-probe, before the spore began to extend itself into a functioning control structure, the spore had run some basic biochemical tests on its immediate environment, and then sent the results of those tests back up to the present using the Luba Pair. The tests had indicated female blood chemistry, but it would have to wait until I was in the body before we had definite verification of gender, ethnicity, age and so forth.