Permafrost Page 3

  A plastic bracelet had been fixed around the wrist. I twisted the hand, bringing a plastic window into view with printed details beneath it. Even though the room was out of focus, I could read the label quite easily. It said:

  T. DINOVA.

  Growing more confident in my control, I inspected both arms for signs of surgical monitors or drip-lines, just in case I was wired into some machine or monitor. But there was nothing. Cautiously, I pushed myself a bit higher in the bed. There was a tray in front of me, resting on a table that had been wheeled across the bed from one side. On the tray was a mostly finished meal, with a plate sitting under a transparent plastic heat-cover and a knife and fork set on the plate. I stared at the food for a few seconds, wondering how it compared with our rations, even the improved rations at the station. Somewhere in this hospital, I thought, there would be a huge, bustling kitchen where thousands of meals were prepared each day, where food was made and food wasted, and no one really cared.

  Still, at least my host must have had an appetite.

  I reached back with my left hand to explore my scalp. I found a bandage, quite a heavy one, but no wires or tubes.

  There wasn’t anything to stop me from getting out of bed.

  I felt I owed it to Cho to try. I had to give him something more than a scrap of a name. I folded back the sheets, gaining—it seemed to me—a little more fluency with each action.

  I had on a hospital gown and nothing else. I swung my bare legs out of bed, steadying myself with both hands, then planted my feet on the floor. Cold. I smelled something, as well: a musty tang that clung to me as I pushed my way off the bed.

  Me. My own unwashed self.

  I tried to stand.

  I pushed myself up, right hand against the bed, left using the bedside cabinet as a support. My knees were weak under me, but after using a cane for fifteen years I was accustomed to a certain unsteadiness. I risked a step in the direction of the window, deciding that it was my best option for immediate orientation. I made one unsteady footfall, my vision still not fully in focus, my head feeling swollen and top-heavy. But I was upright. I took another step, arms wide like a zombie tightrope-walker. Two more paces and I’d reached the window, grasping for the temporary support of the sill.

  I paused to catch my breath and wait for a wave of dizziness to pass.

  She must have been feeling me. That was a given, if she was conscious. Her eyes were open when I dropped into her, so she must have been at least semiawake. And then her body started doing things on its own. How frightening that must have seemed. She could still see through her own eyes, still experience sounds and impressions, but the control was mine. I decided what she did and what she looked at.

  “I’m sorry,” I tried to say. “I promise this is only temporary.”

  A mush of slurred syllables spilled from my mouth.

  “Sorry,” I tried again, concentrating on that one word in the hope that some part of it might get through.

  Still, I had more immediate and pressing issues than this woman’s mental well-being. I used my free hand to fumble at the drawstring. The dusty plastic blinds started to click toward the ceiling, and I gained my first fuzzy impression of the world beyond this room.

  Out of focus, still. But enough to be going on with. I was several floors up, looking down on a courtyard flanked by what must be two wings of the hospital, extending out from the part of the building containing my room. All concrete, metal and glass. If the layout of the wings was any guide, I had to be on the sixth floor of an eight-storey building.

  What else could I give Cho? In the courtyard, paths wound their way around an ornamental pond. Farther out, there was a service road and some parked vehicles, glinting in sunshine, and beyond that some outlying buildings. The ground shadows were attenuated. I couldn’t see the sun, but it had to be quite high up in the sky.

  I glanced back at the bedside cabinet and made out the silvery squiggle of a pair of glasses.

  Cho had told me that even the smallest detail could help with locating my position, even something as innocuous as a vehicle registration number. Suitably determined, I started my return to the bedside. I’d only taken a couple of steps when there was a polite tap on the door. A moment later it swung open and a white-coated young man stepped in from the space beyond the partition wall.

  Get out of me.

  My knees buckled. I started to stumble. The young doctor looked at me for an instant, then sprang in my direction. He’d been carrying a sheath of papers, which he tossed onto the bed to free his hands. I felt him catch me just before I went over completely. For a second, ludicrously, we were posed like a pair of ballroom dancers, me swooning into his embrace.

  I took him in. Twenties, fresh-faced, a dusting of youthful stubble, but just enough tiredness around the eyes to suggest a junior doctor’s workload.

  “What are you playing at, Tatiana?” he said, in perfectly good and clear Russian. “You’re barely out of surgery, and already trying to break your neck?”

  I looked at him. I wanted to reply, wanted to give him an answer that would satisfy his curiosity, but I wasn’t ready.

  What are you waiting for?

  “Permafrost,” I whispered, repeating the word twice more.

  * * *

  Cho had come back to Kogalym two days after our meeting in the school. He’d been south on some business.

  “Very good, Miss Lidova!” he said, shouting above the engine noise. “I am so glad you will be joining us!”

  I had to shout in reply.

  “You promise me the pupils will be well looked after?”

  “The arrangements are already in place—I’ve spoken to all the local administrators and made sure that they understand what needs to be done.” His gaze settled onto my surly-faced porter, the man who’d been deputised to help with my baggage and books. “That is properly understood, Mr. Evmenov? I’ll hold you personally accountable if there’s any lapse in the provisions.” Cho beckoned me aboard. “Quickly, please. We don’t want to lose our weather window.”

  I went up the ramp, stooping to avoid denting my head on the overhang. My cane thumped on the metal floor. I had to squeeze past some hefty item occupying most of the helicopter’s cargo section. It was the size of a small truck and covered in sheets. It didn’t have the shape of a truck, though. More a turbine or aircraft engine: something large and cylindrical. Or a piece of genetics equipment: some industrial unit recovered from an abandoned university or industrial plant.

  “What is that thing, Mister Cho?” I asked, as I was shown to my seat just behind the cockpit, on the right side of the helicopter. “A gene synthesizer, for your seed program?”

  As he buckled in opposite me, Cho considered my question, tilting his head slightly to one side. It meant that he was searching for an answer that was close to the truth, while not being the thing itself.

  “It does have a medical application, yes.”

  The engine surged and the rotors dragged us into the air. We were soon flying north from Kogalym. We passed over a scattering of ghost towns and villages, no lights showing from their empty buildings. The terrain was getting icier with each kilometre we covered.

  After a few hours we touched down near an isolated military compound. Cho asked me if I wanted to stretch my legs; I declined. Cho got out and stood around while some trucks came out to meet us. Hoses were connected and fuel began to gurgle in. Another truck came, this time with a flatbed. Some boxes were unpacked and driven away. Cho got back aboard and we fought our way back into the air.

  “We were a little heavy,” Cho said, turning to address me across the narrow aisle. “We had to unload some nonessential supplies, or we wouldn’t have made it between fuel stops.” He waved his fingers. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  We continued into darkness. There were no lights out there at all now. Every now and then the helicopter would put out a searchlight and I’d be surprised at how high or low we were.

  “How fa
r north are we going, Director?”

  “To the Yenisei Gulf. It’s a little remote, but it turned out that it was the best place to locate our project. We needed somewhere with maritime access, in any case.”

  “Something to do with your seeds? A genetics lab?”

  Cho reached into a pouch behind the pilot’s position. He drew out a document and passed it to me. It was a scarlet brochure, with a translucent plastic cover. On the front was the World Health logo, followed by a statement in several languages to the effect that the contents were of the highest security rating.

  I looked at him doubtfully, before I opened the document.

  “Go ahead,” Cho said. “You’re committed now.”

  I opened the document.

  On the inside page was a logo. It was a six-armed snowflake with three letters in the middle of it.

  The letters were:

  PRE

  I turned over to the next page. It was blank except for three words in Russian:

  Permafrost Retrocausal Experiment

  I looked at Cho, but his expression gave nothing away. Behind his round-rimmed glasses, his eyes were sharply observant but betraying nothing more.

  Once again, I felt as if I was under assessment.

  I turned to the next page. There was a very short paragraph, again in Russian.

  The Permafrost Retrocausal Experiment aims to use Luba Pairs to achieve past-directed time travel.

  I turned to the next page. It became very technical very quickly. There was talk of time-injection, time-probes, Luba Pairs, Lidova noise, grandfathering.

  Interspersed with the text were graphs and equations. Some of them I recognised well enough from my mother’s papers, but there were also aspects well outside my own limited expertise, or perhaps recollection.

  I went all the way through the document, then turned back to the prefacing paragraph to make sure I wasn’t going mad.

  It seemed that I wasn’t.

  We flew on for a few more minutes. I debated with myself what to say, and how I might say it. Perhaps it was all still a test, to gauge the limits of my credulity. How stupid would I need to be, to think that any of this was real?

  But Cho did not seem like a man predisposed to frivolity.

  “You’re attempting time travel.”

  “We’re not attempting it,” Cho answered carefully.

  “Of course not.”

  “We’ve already achieved it.”

  * * *

  The sound of engines always made me drowsy. I was daydreaming of being back in Cho’s helicopter, thinking of the first time I’d seen the lights of Permafrost, when a shrill beep pulled me back into Antti’s Cessna. It was the GPS system, alerting us to something. I turned to Antti, expecting him to respond to the notification, but his head was slumped, his chin lolling onto his collar, his eyes slitted. The GPS alert didn’t sound urgent enough to mean that anything was seriously wrong with the plane, but it must have meant that we’d arrived at some waypoint, some moment in our journey when my companion was supposed to take action.

  “Antti,” I said.

  The plane carried on. The beeping continued. I called out his name again, and when that didn’t work I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow, avoiding the area on the right side of his chest where he’d been wounded. Antti grunted, and shuddered back to consciousness. There was a second of fogginess, then he took action, adjusting the controls and flicking switches, until the twin alarms eventually silenced.

  “It was nothing. I just dozed off for a second or two.”

  “You were out cold.” I reached out and touched the back of my hand against his forehead. “You’re clammy. What the hell happened back there?”

  Antti managed a self-effacing smile. “Maybe he got me a bit deeper than I thought. Nicked more than a rib.”

  “You need a hospital. It could be anything: internal bleeding, organ damage, infection. There are still some towns ahead of us. Get us down now, while you’re still able to land safely.”

  “I’m all right,” Antti said, straightening up in the seat. “I can do this. We can do this. We have to get to the Yenisei Gulf.”

  I nodded, desperately wanting to believe him. What other option did I have? But that tiredness was already showing in his eyes again.

  * * *

  It began as a glimmer of yellow and blue lights on the horizon, casting a pastel radiance on the low-lying clouds over the station. The helicopter came in closer, dropping altitude. The lights were arranged in a flattened circle, like a coin seen nearly edge-on, a makeshift community of labs and offices staked down on frozen ground, with a sharp enclosing boundary, like a medieval encampment.

  So I thought.

  Closer still. There was flat ice under us now: not frozen ground, but frozen water. Gently rising ground to either side of this tongue of ice, the compound built entirely on the flat part.

  It was a river, or an inlet, completely frozen.

  The enclosing shield was not continuous, I realised. It was made up of the hulls of ships: numerous slab-sided vessels gathered in a ringlike formation. The lights were coming from their superstructures. That was all it was: lots of ships, gathered together, some forming a ring and others contained within it, with one very large ship in the middle.

  Cho looked at me, waiting for a reaction, something in his manner suggesting a quiet pride.

  I decided to let him speak.

  “We had need of secrecy, as well as isolation from sources of electrical and acoustic noise,” he explained. “We also had to be largely independent, with our own power supply. In the end, the most practical solution was to base our experiment around these ships. They were sailed into this inlet when the waters were still navigable, before the freeze got really bad.”

  We circled the perimeter. There were ships of all shapes and sizes. A small majority were obviously ex-military, but there were also cargo ships and some with cranes or heavy industrial equipment on their decks. A medium-sized cruise liner, a passenger ferry, a few tugs, even a submarine, only the upper part of it showing above the ice.

  Cho pointed out the names of some of the ships. “That is the Vaymyr, where you will spend most of your time. That is the Nunivak, where we have our heavy workshops. That is the Wedell . . .”

  By far the largest ship, though, was an aircraft carrier.

  “That is the hub of our experiment,” Cho said. “The Admiral Nerva. Ex–Indian Navy, fully nuclear. It’s where we’ve gathered the time-probes, the devices we use to inject matter into the past. They’ve very sensitive to interference, so there are only ever a small number of technicians allowed on the Nerva.”

  “These probes are time machines? Time machines that you’ve built, and actually got to work?”

  “To a degree.”

  “You said you’d done it.”

  “We have—but not as well, or as reliably, as we’d wish.”

  We picked up height to get over the cordon. There were no other helicopters flying around, although I did see another one parked on the back of one of the ships. All the ships were interconnected, strung together by cables and bridges, some of which were quite sturdy looking and others not much better than rope-ways. Since the decks were all at different levels, the bridges were either sloped or went into the sides of the hulls, through doors that must have been cut into them just for Permafrost. There were also doors down on the level of the ice, and some tracks in the ice marked by lanterns. I spotted a tractor labouring between two of the ships, dragging some huge, sheeted thing behind it on a sort of sledge.

  We began to descend. There was a landing pad under us, on the back of a squat, upright-looking ship with a disproportionately tall superstructure.

  “This is the Vaymyr,” Cho said. “One of our key vessels. It supplies a large fraction of our power budget, but it also serves as our main administrative centre. My offices are in the Vaymyr, as well as several laboratories, kitchens, recreational areas and your own personal quarters, which I
hope will be to your satisfaction. You’ll meet the pilots very shortly, and I think you’ll get on very well with them. They’ll be grateful for your expertise.”

  “Pilots?”

  “I ought to say prospective pilots. They’ll be the ones who go into time, when the experiment’s problems are ironed out. But as yet none of them have gone back. We are close, though. There are no longer any fundamental obstacles. It’s largely the final question of paradox noise that’s causing us difficulties.”

  “I think you may be expecting too much of me.”

  “I doubt it very much,” Cho answered.

  * * *

  He asked me why I had been so quick to issue the abort phrase, just when we were getting somewhere.

  “The young doctor was talking to her, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to respond properly.”

  “Why was that an immediate difficulty?”

  “She’s in hospital, and she’s just had something done to her head. If she starts not being able to speak properly, they may think something’s very wrong with her, and then order a follow-up test. I didn’t want to take that chance, in case they take her back to the radiology department.”

  “We still don’t really know what happened, between your first and second episodes. Clearly there was no lasting damage.”

  “Maybe they never put her in the scanner that time. There are other things in radiology departments besides MRI machines.”

  “That’s possible,” allowed Abramik, who was sitting in on the interrogation/debrief. “An X-ray, for instance, or even a CT scan. But you have a name for us, at least.”

  “Tatiana Dinova,” I answered.

  Cho reached over desktop clutter to switch on his intercom again. “Brothers. Run a search on a possible host subject named Tatiana Dinova.” His eyes flicked to me. “Under forty at the time of the immersion?”