Permafrost Page 7

  I dealt with the strangeness of that. I felt that I’d caused the helium quench, but according to Cho it was already baked into the history of the time-probe.

  “I have examined that service plate many times,” he said. “And you have my categorical assurance that there has been no change.”

  My head was hurting with all this. “Then why were we so concerned that I’d screw things up by triggering the quench?”

  Cho looked at me with a frown of his own, as if I was the one making headaches. “No—our concern was completely the opposite; that your interventions would somehow delay or impede the quench that we knew was obliged to happen.”

  I nodded slowly, feeling as if the gentle force of his words, so calmly uttered, was pushing me into an acceptance of one version of the facts over another. For a moment I clung onto a different narrative, one in which the helium quench had been viewed as a very damaging act, something to be avoided except as a last resort, but already I could feel that version becoming thinner, less persuasive, a counterfactual daydream that no longer had the conviction of reality.

  No: Cho was right. The problem had always been how to guarantee that the quench occurred. Preventing or delaying it could have caused all sorts of dangerous upstream ramifications.

  At least now we were still on track.

  The other pilots were gathered around the dental chair. I could sense their emotions, the mixture of frustration, jealousy and comradely concern. It rankled them that I’d been the first to go into time. But I was also one of them now, and they had protective feelings toward me.

  “She needs a longer rest than this,” Antti said, directing her remark at Cho. “It’s not good to send her in so soon after the last immersion. She hasn’t eaten or slept!”

  “I’m all right,” I said, smiling back my reassurance. “I rested in the hospital, and I’m not really hungry.”

  “She’s getting mixed signals from the host,” Vikram said. “Thinking she’s rested, thinking she’s had a decent meal.”

  “I know what I can take,” I insisted.

  “I am willing to let her go back,” Dr. Abramik said. “But if this immersion lasts as long as the one before, I’ll insist on a twenty-four-hour rest interval afterward.”

  “I am in complete agreement,” Cho replied. “Our pilots are a precious resource, and we must treat them well. Equally, we must obtain data on the downstream situation. The Brothers confirm that they are still reading neuro-telemetry from the host. That means that whatever happened in the MRI theatre, Tatiana Dinova is still alive, still receptive. Are you prepared, Miss Lidova?”

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “The link is now reinstated,” Margaret said. “You should immerse almost . . .”

  Immediately.

  Lights were strobing. I was looking up at a pale surface, which was being periodically lit and unlit by a blue-white light. I stared at it for a few moments, gathering my orientation. Something hard was pinching my face, and a woman in a uniform was leaning over me, steadying herself against an overhead rack full of medical devices.

  Movement under me. The rumble of wheels and a motor. The blue-white lights were streetlamps, whisking by outside.

  The woman loosened my mask so I could talk, then held up her hand.

  “Good—you’re awake. How many fingers?”

  “Five,” I said, trying to sound groggy but present. “Four and a thumb.”

  “That’s excellent. And can you tell me your name?”

  “Tatiana,” I answered sluggishly, and not merely because I was putting on an act, but because I also had to make an effort to keep our two names separated in my head. Of all the people I could have jumped into, why had fate given me a woman with a name whose rhythm and sounds were so close to my own? “Tatiana Dinova.”

  Welcome back, Valentina whatever - the - hell - you’re - called. My head feels like someone opened it with an axe. I suppose you know what happened back there?

  I broke the MRI machine. Released all the helium inside it. Something went wrong, though, and the helium built up inside the control room. You were unconscious. I was inside you, and nobody else was home. I crawled you out, and some paramedics came. Now we’re in an ambulance.

  Going where?

  I have no idea.

  “Tatiana? Are you still there?”

  You’d better answer the lady. She might start thinking one of us has brain damage.

  “I’m here.”

  “And where are we now, Tatiana?”

  “I don’t know. You’re driving me somewhere.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Radiology. The MRI theatre. Then something . . .” I shook my head, aware that there was something squatting in it like a heavy black thundercloud. Tatiana must have had a monstrous headache after being unconscious. I was getting the ragged edges of it, not the thing itself, but it was enough to earn my sympathy. “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything after getting there.”

  “There was a screwup. By the time we got there four of you were on the floor, already suffocating.”

  “Why am I in an ambulance, if I’m already in a hospital?”

  Now that is a very good question. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  “Because it’s a big mess in that whole wing. Everything’s locked down while they vent the helium. Can’t get a crash cart through, and even if we could, it’s still quicker to drive you around the perimeter road to emergency admissions, just as if you’d had an accident outside the hospital. Anyway, it looks as if we got you onto oxygen in good time. You probably don’t feel all that great, but you’re giving me clear, coherent answers, and that’s what I want to hear.”

  Tell her my head feels like an axe split it open.

  “What about the others . . . the young doctor?” I fought to recall his name, the name I’d heard the MRI technician mention. “Dr. Turovsky, and Igor. The man in the theatre.”

  “They’ll be getting all the care they need. Worry about yourself for now. You’re the patient, the one who’s been messed around by this accident.”

  I felt an empathic connection with this woman, moved by her kindness and devotion to public care. I didn’t know the first thing about her, not her name, not her time of birth or death, what had happened to her in the difficulties, what sort of life she’d led, but in that moment I knew that she was a good and decent person, that the past was full of people like her, that it was just as valid to think of history being stitched together out of numerous tiny acts of selflessness and consideration, as it was to view it as a grand, sweeping spectacle of vast impersonal triumphs and tragedies.

  “Thank you,” I mouthed.

  From both of us.

  We tipped over.

  There was a side impact, the ambulance tilted, then flipped onto its side. The ambulance woman slammed into the shelf, slumping into instant unconsciousness. I would have been thrown hard against the sidewall, except that I’d already been strapped onto a stretcher. Even then, the impact was bruising. Motionless now, the ambulance spun its wheels, the motor still revving. The ambulance woman was lying over me, a gash in her forehead, out cold. I hoped she was out cold, at least.

  I tried moving. I was thinking that there had to be a driver in the front compartment, someone else who might be hurt. I hadn’t caused whatever had just happened to us, but I was responsible for this ambulance being here in the first place. I struggled against my restraints. With the ambulance woman pressed over me, it was too hard to reach the straps.

  Was this part of your big, carefully thought-out plan, Valentina?

  No. Not at all.

  That’s good to know. I’d hate to feel I wasn’t in capable hands.

  Someone opened the rear doors, shining a light into the interior. The torch beam settled on my face, lingering there for a second. The person climbed into the ambulance, grunting as they pushed against what was now the upper door, holding it open against the force of gravity. It
was a man, middle-aged, quite burly and thickset, and not wearing any sort of hospital or civil uniform, just a scruffy leather jacket over a thick sweater. The man clambered in, setting down the torch, and moved the ambulance woman off me.

  “Did you just drive into us?” I asked.

  The man eased the ambulance woman down onto what had been the sidewall, but which was now the floor. Then he undid my straps and began to move me off the stretcher, none too gently. “Get out. Police are on their way. We need to drive.”

  Do you know this man?

  No. Not at all.

  Then can I suggest you ask him who the hell he is?

  I did just that.

  The man looked at me with a combination of contempt and amusement. He had a face full of stubble, a heavily veined nose, bags under his eyes and a shock of thick black hair bristling up from a very low hairline, almost meeting his eyebrows.

  “Who am I?” he said. “Oh, that’s easy. We’ve already met. I’m Antti.”

  * * *

  He had a car waiting. It was not the same car he had used to sideswipe the ambulance, which was now badly damaged around the front wheel. He’d planned it, I thought. Planned to ram the ambulance, and known he’d need a second vehicle, which he had parked on the perimeter road, ready for us.

  So let’s clear this up. You don’t know this man, but you do know him?

  I know Antti. Antti’s someone else, another member of the team. A pilot, like me. Except . . .

  He helped me into the passenger seat, then went round to the driver’s side. He got in, started the car, flooring the throttle hard, swerving onto the road and sending us barrelling away from the scene of the crash. I tilted my head, catching my reflection in the side mirror. It was the first time I’d seen Tatiana Dinova properly. It was an exceedingly strange thing, to look in a mirror and see a difference face staring back. There was a whole system of brain circuitry being confused, a system that had spent a lifetime being lulled into the idea that it had an adequate understanding of reality.

  Anyone tell you it’s rude to stare?

  I’m sorry.

  I looked through her. Beyond the face, beyond the too-thin bone structure, the eyes that were the wrong shape and colour, the nose that didn’t belong, the bandage, the pressure marks from the oxygen mask.

  Beyond to several pairs of moving flashing lights, as other emergency vehicles came nearer.

  “You can’t be Antti,” I said, once we’d turned off the perimeter road, onto a connecting road that took us away from the main hospital complex.

  The billion-rouble question!

  The thickset man took his eyes off the wheel long enough to glance at me. “And why’s that, exactly?”

  “Because I’m the first. No one else has gone into time yet. There’s just four pilots: you, me, Vikram and Miguel, and no one else has done it yet.” I smacked the console in front of me. “Crap, I was just talking to you, Antti! About two minutes ago. You were trying to tell Cho that I needed a rest, that I was being sent in again too soon.”

  So, let’s get this straight—for my benefit, if no one else’s. You’ve been sent back from the future, and you thought you were the only one who’d done it so far. But now this guy shows up, and he’s acting as if he’s already ahead of you?

  The man spun the wheel hard, negotiating a mini roundabout. The flashing blue lights were farther away now. Ahead was a complex of industrial-looking buildings, warehouses and factory units. I wasn’t even sure that we were still within the hospital grounds.

  “I remember that conversation,” the man said. “The only difference is it was about nine months ago.”

  “What the fuck!”

  What the fuck, indeed! I like your style, Val. Do all schoolteachers swear like you in the future?

  “You were right,” he answered, calmly enough. “You were the first of us to go into time. Didn’t seem fair, to begin with, you skipping ahead like that. But Margaret always said there was an element of uncertainty about which of us would get the first immersion, depending on how quickly the control structures meshed. Get down.”

  “What?”

  You heard the man.

  He pushed me hard, forcing me to squeeze down low in the passenger seat. He slowed, raised his hand in a greeting, and I caught the top of a police van, passing us on the left.

  He drove on straight for a little while, flicking his eyes to the rearview mirror, then turned onto another road.

  “I don’t think they saw you. Any other police cars or ambulances, you duck down, all right? At least until we’re a long way out of Izhevsk. They’ll be looking for a patient who matches your description, and I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “All right—from the start. What. Is. Happening.” I was calmer now, if still bewildered. “I accept that you’re Antti. You’ve told me too much for that not to be the case. And this was all deliberate, wasn’t it? Hitting that ambulance, being ready to drive me away?”

  “I had time to prepare.” He tightened his hands on the wheel, picking up speed as we exited the industrial area and moved onto a divided carriageway. “Eight months. That’s how long it’s been, how long I’ve been time-embedded. You understand now, right? You were the first to go into the time. I came after. But I went deeper—leapfrogged over you. The time-probe sent me back eight months earlier than you.”

  “No!”

  “Is that, no, as in you don’t believe me, or no, as in you never considered this possibility?”

  Give the man credit, this has got to be messing with his head as well as yours and mine.

  I was silent for a few moments. That thundercloud was still hovering in my skull, and all the swerving and hard cornering was making me nauseous. “Then you know what happens to me. You said that conversation was nine months old, and you’ve been embedded for eight. That means you know how this plays out for at least another month, maybe more.”

  “To a degree.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that we’re swimming in some deep paradox here, Valentina. Black, grey, all the shades your mother painted. I know it, Cho knows it, Margaret Arbetsumian knew it.”

  “What do you mean, Margaret knew it?”

  “Margaret’s dead. Upstream Margaret. She couldn’t take it anymore. She realised what we’ve done . . . what we’re doing. It’s all falling to pieces, the whole experiment. We opened up something we don’t understand, a whole box of snakes.”

  You knew this Margaret?

  Yes. Knew her and liked her. But she was alive the last time I saw her and she’ll be alive when I go back. You probably saw her as well. The people, the machines, that room with no windows? She’d have been there, watching.

  Small, glasses, straight fringe?

  Yes. Margaret.

  She didn’t look very dead to me.

  She wouldn’t have been, not then, not yet.

  I’m . . . sorry. Hell, why am I the one apologising? You’re in my head without permission, and I’m feeling sorry for you because someone died, someone else involved in this shit?

  Because you’re the same as me, Tatiana. Not a bad person, just caught up in something bigger than you. And it’s Lidova. Valentina Lidova, as in Luba Lidova. Just as long as we’re getting to know each other.

  The car accelerated again. “We’ve got a safe house,” Antti said, “about a hundred kilometres out of Izhevsk. There’s some stuff we need to discuss. Oh, and you’ll get to meet Vikram again.”

  “Vikram’s come back as well?”

  Antti said nothing.

  * * *

  Rain was falling by the time we made it to the safe house, about an hour’s drive out of Izhevsk. The light was dusky, the bellies of the clouds shaded with purple. It was still only midday: everything that had happened since I was wheeled to the MRI theatre had been squeezed into no more than six hours, including the helium event, the ambulance smash and being driven away by Antti.

  We kept on the main highway for
about thirty minutes, then pulled off onto smaller roads. Eventually we passed through a wooded area and I asked Antti to pull over so I could go behind some trees and puke.

  I retched and retched until I was dry heaving.

  Nicely done, Val. Better out than in.

  Glad you appreciate the gesture. Have you any idea where we are?

  Why should I?

  Because you’re from Izhevsk.

  I am. That doesn’t mean I memorised every shitty back road within a hundred kilometres of the place.

  I didn’t feel much better getting back into the car, but my head was sharper, my thoughts more organised.

  “I believe everything you’ve told me,” I said eventually, when we were moving again. “But you weren’t meant to be injected into a man. What the hell went wrong?”

  His jaw moved before answering, some calculation working behind his eyes. His eyes/her eyes. I knew there was a woman behind them, but it was a man I was looking at, a man talking to me, and now I couldn’t help but see Antti as a male presence, a hard man with drinker’s features and worker’s hands, someone who moved with an easy assumption of authority.

  “We were running out of options. The noise was rising. Sending you back in, putting you into Tatiana Dinova, caused some upset.”

  No arguing with that. At least one of you has some basic human empathy.

  He means a different kind of upset.

  I gathered.

  “It was getting harder for the time-probes to get a positive lock,” Antti went on. “Even when we managed to inject, the telemetry was much too noisy to be sure who we were in. We couldn’t analyse the biochemical environment properly, couldn’t get a clear phenotypic signature. With you, Cho knew you were going to mesh with a female host subject. With me, it was more a question of taking our chances.” He paused. “I’m all right. I got used to this body pretty quickly. It works for me.”

  “Who are you? Downstream, I mean.”

  “Tibor’s my host.”

  “And this . . . Tibor. Have you had any . . . contact . . . ?”

  He looked at me carefully, only part of his attention on the road ahead. “Meaning what?”

  I decided I’d wait to tell Antti about Tatiana, assuming I told him at all. It was time to hear his side of things, first. Then I’d decide what he needed to know.