Permafrost Page 4

  I thought of her hands, how young they’d looked compared to my own.

  “Probably.”

  “No unusual spelling?”

  “I saw the surname written down, but only heard the doctor mention her given name. Dinova. D - I - N - O - V - A. You’d better try variant spellings of Tatiana, just in case.”

  “We shall,” said Dmitri through the intercom speaker. “Does Miss Lidova have any other parameters that may be useful?”

  “It was before the Scouring,” I said. “That much I’m sure of. A big hospital with about eight floors, with wings stretching out from a central block. It didn’t look like winter to me. I think we were farther south than Kogalym, but still in Russia.”

  “Time-probe eighteen was only active at three locations before it came into Director Cho’s possession,” said Pavel, who had the highest-sounding voice of the Brothers. “One of these was a military institution in Poland, so that may be discarded on the basis of Miss Lidova’s testimony.”

  “I was in Russia,” I affirmed. “The signs were in Russian, the doctor spoke Russian. What are the other two places?”

  “Two institutions,” said Ivan, who had the deepest and slowest voice of the four. “Both west of the Ural Mountains. One is a private medical facility in Yaroslavl, about two hundred kilometres northeast of Moscow. However, the ground-plan and three-storey architecture of this facility does not correspond with Miss Lidova’s account. The second facility is more promising. This is the public hospital in Izhevsk, approximately one thousand kilometres east of Moscow.”

  The printer in the corner of Cho’s office clicked and whirred to life. A sheet of paper went through it and then slid into the out-tray. Cho wheeled his chair to the printer, collected the paper by his fingertips and returned it to his desk. The paper curled and twitched like some dying marine organism. Cho smoothed it down, using one of his dismantled gadgets, a piece of dial-like instrumentation, as a makeshift paperweight. I leaned over to examine the paper, seeing it upside-down from my perspective.

  It was the plan of a hospital, extracted from some civic or architectural database within the Brothers’ collective memory.

  “That’s it,” I said, with a giddy sense of recognition. “No doubt about it. I can even see the courtyard and the pond, and the car park beyond the service road. I must have been—must be—in that main block, between the first two wings, looking due north.”

  “The Izhevsk facility was always a high-likelihood target,” Cho said. “But it is good to have this confirmed. Do you have more for us, Brothers?”

  “May we assume that the host is present in the Izhevsk facility?” asked Dmitri.

  “You may,” Cho said.

  “Then the injection window must lie between 2022 and 2037, the period in which time-probe eighteen was installed and active in Izhevsk,” Dmitri replied. “We are retrieving patient records for that hospital, as well as civil documents for the greater Izhevsk region.”

  “Who is she?” I asked, prickling with anticipation. I knew it wouldn’t take them long to sift their memories.

  “We have identified Tatiana Dinova,” said Ivan. “Would you like a biographical summary, Director Cho?”

  Cho nodded. “Send it through.”

  His printer began again. The life of a woman, almost certainly long dead, began to spool into the out-tray. Tatiana Dinova, whoever she was. My Tatiana Dinova.

  My host: my means of altering the past.

  “You’ll have to convince them you’re well enough to be discharged,” Abramik said, stroking the tip of his beard. “I can help you with some neurological pointers, if you start being questioned. But in the meantime, we’ll need a contingency plan—a fallback in case they try to bring you back to the radiology section.” He turned to Cho. “Could we risk limited sabotage of the probe, if Valentina got close enough to it?”

  “Provided it was limited. If she damages the machine beyond repair, we’ll be in quite a lot of trouble.”

  “It wouldn’t need to be that bad,” Abramik said. “There’ll be an emergency control somewhere nearby, probably on a wall or under a hinged cover. It’s what they’d use if there was a problem during a scan: dumps the helium from the magnets, lets them warm up and lose their superconducting current. It’s quicker and safer than just cutting the power. All she’d need to do is reach that control, and she’d have the element of surprise. The one thing they won’t be expecting is that.”

  “We could risk erasing the probe’s quantum memory,” Margaret countered. “Those magnets can’t go through too many warm-up cycles before they cease being traversable by Luba Pairs.”

  “Then something not quite as drastic,” Abramik said, flashing an irritated look at the physicist, as if she were being deliberately obstructive, rather than raising an entirely reasonable concern. “Smuggle a metal object into the room, something ferromagnetic, keep it hidden until the last moment. If we’re lucky, it’ll be attracted to the machine before the field has a chance to do any lasting damage to the control structure.”

  “If Tatiana’s lucky, you mean,” I said.

  * * *

  My first evening at Permafrost was like any first time at a large, unfamiliar institution. I’d been wrenched from the small, settled world of a provincial teacher and thrown into a busy, complex environment full of new faces and protocols. In a well-meaning way, Cho was trying to spoon as much information as possible into me as we went to my quarters, up a couple of flights of stairs inside the icebreaker Vaymyr. He was explaining emergency drills, power cuts, medical arrangements, mealtimes, social gatherings, pointing this way and that as if I could see through grey metal walls to the rooms and ships beyond, and as if I had a hope of remembering half of it. Eventually I stopped listening, knowing that it would all fall into place in its own time.

  “You may well wish to unwind after our journey,” Cho was saying as we reached my room. “But if I could impose on you a little longer, it would be very good to meet the pilots as soon as possible.” He lifted a sleeve to glance at his watch. “If we are lucky, they will still be in the canteen.”

  “Give me a minute,” I said.

  While Cho waited at the door to my room I tidied away my bag then stripped down to a sweater and a shirt, much as I would have worn during classroom hours. I went to the basin and splashed some water on my face, a token effort at freshening up after the helicopter flight. I looked tired, old. Not ready for a new adventure, but rather someone who’d already been through too many in one life.

  I stepped out of the room, locking it with the key I’d been given.

  “Tell me about the pilots.”

  “Our four prospective time travellers. You’ll be working closely with them as we deal with the remaining obstacles.”

  I thought of the scale and probable expense of this operation.

  “Just four, after all the trouble you’ve gone to?”

  “I would gladly wish for more. But we are limited by factors outside our control, including our access to neural nanotechnology.” For a moment Cho, too, showed something of the strain life had put on him. “Such things are in very short supply these days, and we’ve had to fight hard to consolidate what we have. That is true of the project as a whole, from our secondhand ships to the time-probes themselves. Everything is make-do-and-mend, and we cannot be too choosy.” But he flashed an encouraging smile. “What we can be is resourceful and adaptable—and I think we have been.”

  The canteen was quiet, except for a small group at one of the tables near a main window. They were leaning into each other, engaged in low, urgent conversation. Young and early-middle-aged people, men and women both, a blend of accents. Remains of food on their trays, half-finished drinks, beer bottles, a pack of cards, a paperback book. There was no chance that this little room was capable of providing for twelve hundred people, even with staggered shifts, so I guessed this was what amounted to the VIP dining area.

  Cho knocked on the serving hatch and got them to o
pen up for us.

  “It’s still dried or frozen food, for the most part,” he said. “But we are very fortunate in having the pick of the available rations flown in for us, from all areas of World Health. They’ve been made to understand the importance of our effort, if not its precise nature.”

  Once we’d gotten our food he steered me to the table where the other people were seated.

  “That said, we work like dogs.” He pulled out a seat for me, while balancing his tray single-handedly. “There are twelve hundred people stationed here at Permafrost, all exceptional individuals. All valued. But there are fewer than a dozen of us that I would describe as truly irreplaceable—and you are now one of them. We are up against time, Miss Lidova—in all senses. If it takes us ten years to safeguard those seeds, it’ll be too late for our food scientists and agronomists to put them to effective use. In fact we have much less time than that. The Brothers tell us that we have about six to nine months to make a difference—a year at the most. After that, we’re wasting time. Quite literally.”

  “The Brothers?”

  “Dmitri, Ivan, Alexei and Pavel. The Brothers Karamazov. Artificial intelligences, assisting with our endeavour. More make-do-and-mend. They’re on the Nerva, so you’ll meet them eventually.” Cho and I took our places, squeezing into orange plastic chairs between the other people. “This is Miss Valentina Lidova,” he said, extending a hand to me. “Would you mind introducing yourselves? I assure you she doesn’t bite.”

  A woman leaned over and shook my hand. She had a confident grip. She was about twenty years younger than me, with long black hair and a wide, friendly face, with prominent freckles across the cheekbones.

  “I am Antti,” she said, speaking slightly accented Russian. “Originally from Finland, one of the pilots.” She gave Cho a wary, questioning look. “Does she know, Director?”

  “A little,” Cho said. He used an opener to work the top off a bottle of beer, and drank directly from the bottle. “You may speak freely, in any case.”

  “They’re trying to send us back in time,” Antti said. “Us four pilots. We won’t actually go back, really—we’ll always be aboard the Vaymyr, hooked up to the equipment in the Admiral Nerva. We’ll just take over hosts in the past, driving their bodies by remote control. That’s why they call us pilots. But it’ll feel like going back, when we’re time-embedded.”

  “If it works,” said a handsome, dark-skinned man, hair greying slightly at the temples.

  “Of course it’ll damn well work,” Antti answered. “Why wouldn’t it, when the individual steps are all feasible?”

  “I am Vikram,” said the handsome man, smiling stiffly. “From New Delhi, originally. I hope my Russian isn’t too shabby?”

  “Oh, stop showing off,” Antti said, flashing him an irritated look, as if they were all more than fed up with Vikram’s transparent self-deprecation.

  “We’ve sent stuff back,” said another man, grinning to lighten the mood, passing me a beer whether I wanted one or not. “Small things, up to about the size of a pollen grain, or an initiating spore of nanotechnology. We know we can do it. It’s just a question of putting the final pieces together.” He shook my hand. “Christos, from Greece. Or what’s left of Greece. Where have you come from, Valentina?”

  “Kogalym,” I answered. “You won’t have heard of it. It’s quite a way south, really a nothing sort of place.”

  “Everywhere is a nothing place soon,” said the man next to Christos, who was the only one approaching my own age. Just as well-built as the Greek, but with wrinkles, age spots and mostly silver hair, combed back from his brow. “I am Miguel,” he said, speaking Russian but more slowly and stiffly than his comrades. “I am glad they bring you to station.” He dropped his voice. “What you know of experiment so far?”

  “Director Cho showed me the brochure,” I answered truthfully. “Beyond that, almost nothing.”

  “You’ll catch on quickly,” said the fifth person at the table, who was a small woman with glasses and a severe black fringe. “I’m Margaret. Margaret Arbetsumian, mathematical physicist.”

  “Margaret worked on quantum experimental systems before the Scouring,” said Cho. “If anyone could turn Luba Lidova’s ideas into something practical, I knew it would be Margaret. Miss Lidova could use a rest tonight, Margaret, but in the morning would you care to show her the experimental apparatus—perhaps demonstrate a minimal-case paradox?”

  “It’d be my pleasure,” Margaret said.

  “As for me,” said the sixth person at the table, a slender, neatly groomed man with a pointed beard, “what I understand about time travel or paradoxes you could write on the back of a very small napkin. But I do know a thing about physiology, and neuroscience, and nano-therapeutic systems. Dr. Peter Abramik—Peter to my friends.” Then he narrowed his eyes, as if sensing the extent of my ignorance. “You really are in the dark about this, aren’t you?”

  I sipped at my beer and took a few mouthfuls of curry, just to show that I wasn’t intimidated by either my new surroundings or my new colleagues. “I’m seventy-one years old,” I said, uttering the words as a plain statement of fact, inviting neither pity nor reverence. “The last time I had any serious involvement in my mother’s work was fifty years ago, when I was barely into my twenties.” I ate a little bit more, purposefully refusing to be hurried. “That said, I’ve never forgotten it. My mother worked on quantum models for single-particle time travel. She showed how an electron—or anything else, really, provided you could manipulate it, and measure its quantum state—an electron could be sent back in time, looped back into the past to become a twin of itself in the future, one half of a Luba Pair. If you manipulated either element of the Luba Pair, the other one responded. You could send signals up and down time. But that was all. You couldn’t send back anything much larger than an electron—maybe an atom, a molecule, at the extreme limit, before macroscopic effects collapsed the Luba Pairing. And just as critically, you couldn’t observe that time travel had happened. It was like a conjuring trick done in the dark. The moment you tried to observe a Luba Pair in their time-separated state, you got washed out by noise effects.”

  “Paradox,” Margaret said. “Black and white. Either present or absent. If you don’t observe, paradox hides its claws. If you attempt to observe, it kills you—metaphorically, mostly.”

  I nodded. “That’s correct.”

  “But your mother went beyond binary paradox,” Cho said. “She developed a whole class of models in which paradox is a noise effect, a parameter with grey values, rather than just black and white.”

  “She spoke about it less as she got older,” I replied. “They hammered her, the whole establishment. Treated her like an idiot. Why the hell should she indulge them anymore?”

  “Your mother was correct,” Cho said placidly. “This we know. Paradox is inherent in any time-travelling system. But it is containable . . . treatable. We have learned that there are classes of paradox, layers of paradox.”

  Margaret made an encouraging gesture in the direction of Director Cho. “Say it. You know you want to.”

  Cho reached for his beer, smiling at the invitation. “Paradox itself is . . . not entirely paradoxical.”

  * * *

  The hospital meal service came around. They wheeled the table across my bed, then set out the tray with its plastic cover. I waited until the orderly was out of the room, hid the knife under my pillow, then used the call button to summon them back, before complaining that I didn’t have a knife.

  It could have gone several ways at that point, but the orderly only shrugged and returned with a fresh knife.

  What are you going to do with that?

  It was a voice in my head. I’d heard it before, during my previous immersion, but it was stronger and clearer now—beyond the point of being ignored.

  You heard me. I asked a question. You’re taking me over, at least have the decency to answer it.

  It was Tatiana. I knew it.


  I phrased a reply. I didn’t need to speak it, just voice the statement aloud in my head.

  You’re not supposed to be able to speak to me.

  And who are you to say what I can and can’t do? This is my body, my life. What are you doing in me?

  Trying to help. Trying to sort out a mess. That’s all you have to know.

  I sweated. Me or her, or perhaps both of us. Something was happening with the control structures that was not part of the plan. My host was conscious and communicative, and receiving sensory impressions from upstream.

  Who are you?

  I debated with myself before answering. I had never been very good at lying, and I didn’t think I was going to get any better just because I was lying to a voice inside my own head. Worse, perhaps. So I decided that I would be better sticking to the truth, at least a part of it.

  Valentina. I’m . . . a schoolteacher. From an arse-end town called Kogalym. Not a demon, not a witch. But that’s all I can tell you, and that’s already too much.

  Are you a hallucination? You don’t sound like a hallucination.

  I’m not. But what I am is . . . look, can we eat your dinner?

  You need to eat?

  No. But you do.

  Silence, but only for a few seconds.

  Where are you from, Valentina? Where are you right now, besides being in my head?

  You wouldn’t believe me.

  Maybe I won’t, but you can still answer my question.

  All right. I’ll tell you this much. I’m aboard a ship, an icebreaker, in northern Russia. I’m in a chair, with doctors and scientists fussing around me. And I’m coming into you from fifty-two years in the future.

  Another silence—longer this time. Nearly enough to make me think she might have gone away for good.

  I’d say you were mad, or lying. Then again, there is a voice in my head, and you have been making me do things. So, for the moment, I’m going to accept this stupid thing you’ve just told me, because I’d still rather believe you than accept that I’m the mad one.

  You’re not the mad one.

  Then how about you start by telling me how this is happening? How are you in me?