Permafrost Page 8

  * * *

  The property was a farmhouse, safely distant from any other buildings or prying eyes. It was reached down a long, rutted, dirt track. As a base for conducting our embedded time-operations, it was virtually perfect, even if a little run-down, damp and chilly, even in June. Antti parked the car in an enclosing courtyard, next to another mud-splattered car and a semiderelict tractor, and then took me into the main building and through to a kitchen. There was electricity. He sat me down at a wooden table, asked if I was feeling all right after the drive, evincing something close to tenderness for the first time since our encounter.

  “It’s a jolt, I know.” He set about boiling some water. “At least I was semiprepared. Once we had a lock, we thought it was likely to take me deeper than you, and there was only a fifty-fifty chance I got injected into a female host.”

  “What did Vikram get?” I asked, wondering why we hadn’t yet been reintroduced.

  “Do you want tea or coffee?”

  Tea. Two sugars. Some honey if you can stretch to it.

  I nodded at the jar next to his hand. “Coffee. Strong. How did you find this place?”

  “My host’s brother owns it. The brother’s on an oil contract in Kazakhstan, and he left the keys with Tibor, along with a lot of other useful stuff like access to his bank account. Trusting brother! It’ll do while we’re here, which won’t be long now.”

  “You say there’s still a chance to put things right.”

  With his back to me, Antti spooned coffee into a waiting cup.

  “Under the table.”

  I groped around until I found whatever he was on about. It was a handle, connected to a bulky alloy case with angled corners and a digital readout next to the lock.

  I hefted the case onto the table, pushing aside a telephone book to make room, and waiting for Antti to offer further elucidation. I didn’t dare open it. The lock looked like the kind of thing that might trigger a built-in bomb or set off nerve gas.

  “What is it?”

  “Cho’s seeds,” Antti said while he poured in the boiling water.

  I was surprised, elated, then instantly doubtful.

  “Are you sure? It can’t have been that easy.”

  “What was easy about it? I told you I’ve been time-embedded for eight months.” He came back with two cups of coffee, and lowered himself into the seat opposite mine. The wooden chair creaked under his frame. He had rolled up the sleeves of his sweater, revealing hairy arms heavily corded with muscle, bruised by old, fading tattoos. “It’s taken most of that time to acquire the seeds. There’s a privately operated seed vault just over the Finnish border, a very long drive from here. It took three goes to get close to it, two to get inside. Fortunately the security wasn’t that stringent, I could easily pass myself off as a local contractor, and no one involved had any real idea of the value of these seeds. Why would they? Just another genetically modified test sample, a commercial dead-end.” Some dark amusement played behind his eyes. “They’ve no idea of the trouble that’s coming.”

  “May I open them?”

  “You can open the outer layer. There’s no need to go farther than that.”

  “Code?”

  “Two, zero, eight, zero.”

  I entered the digital combination. The case clicked, and the lid opened slightly. I pushed it back the rest of the way. Inside was a second case, presumably to allow for additional protection of the contents. This one was white, with its own digital security system, and an armoured window offering a view of the contents. It was fixed to the outer case, so there was no way the two could be separated.

  I scuffed my sleeve across the fogged window. Under it was a padded container with stoppered glass capsules packed into slots, each capsule labelled with a bar code and containing what looked like a few thimblefuls of dirt.

  “These are the real deal?”

  “They’ll do.”

  “Then . . . it’s done. We’ve got what we came for.” I tried to read his/her face, wondering why he was holding back from any sort of celebration. “Help me out here, Antti. What’s the difficulty?”

  Help me out as well. Why are we getting so excited about a case full of dirt?

  They’re seeds. Genetically modified seeds. Windblown propagators. Really hardy—you could almost grow them on Mars, if you had to. Practically valueless now, but incredibly important fifty-two years in the future.

  Why?

  Something bad happens around 2050. At first, we almost don’t notice it. There’s a steepening in the rate at which insect species are going extinct, but even then it just seems to be part of a pattern of something that’s been going on for a long time, and to begin with only a few scientists are really worried. But it gets worse, and really quickly. No one really understands what’s happening. There’s talk of horizontal gene-transfer, of some rogue mutation, perhaps some deliberate thing, a biological weapon gone haywire, hopping from one insect species to the next. Shutting them down, like a computer virus. Within five years, almost all insect life is gone. But it doesn’t end there. Plant pollination stops, of course, and then animals higher up the food chain start suffering. Insectivores die off pretty quickly, birds and small mammals, and then the rest, everything that depends on them. Meanwhile, the gene-transfer or whatever it was doesn’t stop happening. Insects first, then marine invertebrates—and once they go, all the oceans shut down. Humans manage, for a while. We had a lot of systems in place to buffer us from the immediate effects. But it’s only a temporary lull, before it starts hurting us as well. Crops fail. Soils start to turn sterile. Decomposition processes falter, triggering a second public health emergency beyond the initial famine. Within a decade, the effects are global and climatic. Dust storms, aridification, mass migration. A gradual collapse of social order. We had to give a name to the whole thing so we called it the Scouring: an environmental and biological cascade. Not much comes through the other side; certainly not enough for anyone to live on. All animal and plant life gone, except for a few laboratory specimens. By 2080, we’re down to stored rations, the last human generation.

  She absorbed my words. They had flowed easily enough. As a teacher, even a mathematics teacher, I had been called on often enough to explain our current predicament, and how it had come about.

  Well, I can’t wait to live through that.

  You don’t . . .

  But I caught myself.

  What? What were you about to say?

  “Don’t you see?” Antti ladled sugar into his coffee, more than I remembered her ever taking, when we were in the canteen. “This is only half the job, Valentina. We’ve got the seeds, yes. Now we’ve got to get them back to Cho, somehow—fifty-two years in the future. That’s the hard part. These seeds have still got to take the long way around.” Then he angled his head and spoke into the room adjoining the kitchen. “Vikram! Wake up. I’m with Valentina. Come and say hello.”

  What were you about to tell me? That I don’t get to see the trouble that’s coming? That I’m already dead, twenty years from now? Was that it?

  I tilted my head toward the doorway. “Is something wrong with Vikram?”

  “Dying,” Antti said, with a surprising coldness. “Not long to go now.”

  Nobody came into the kitchen immediately, and there was no sound of movement or footsteps from anywhere nearby, so I returned my thoughts to the seed samples.

  “We had a plan. Still have a plan. The seeds need to be relocated, taken to a different seed vault—one we know will come through the difficulties. Cho gave us candidate locations. Can that still be done?”

  Antti studied my own expression as closely as I regarded his. It was his first time seeing me with this face, the experience equally destabilising for both of us. This version of me was in Antti’s past, this version of her was in my future.

  Now we were cross-braided, futures and pasts eating their own tails. A box of snakes.

  Don’t ignore me. Tell me what happens to my life.

&n
bsp; “Maybe,” Antti said. “I hope so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Miguel is here. Time-embedded, just like you and I and Vikram. But he’s gone rogue, acting against Permafrost. We’ve run into him once or twice. He’s out there, somewhere—trying to screw things up.”

  Answer me, damn you!

  Not now, Tatiana—not now, please. Things don’t go well for anyone, all right? Isn’t that enough?

  You know it isn’t. Not for me.

  * * *

  I told Antti I still needed a few minutes to clear my head after the ambulance crash and the drive out to the farm. He shrugged, and showed me through a dusty pantry to the rear door, which led out into the fields beyond.

  It was a grey day, cold for the season, but the world was still abundantly alive. The mud under my shoes wasn’t lifeless dirt; it was teeming with a hot, busy cargo of bountiful microorganisms. Those trees in the distance weren’t petrified husks, they were monstrous and beautiful living machines, factories made of cells and fluids and an incredible, fine-tuned biomolecular clockwork. They moved with the winds, sucked nutrients from the earth, pushed gases in and out of themselves. They made a hissing sound when the breeze moved through them. They were an astonishment.

  Something caught my eye ahead of my foot and I stooped down, plucking a tiny, jewelled creature up from the ground. I held it up to my face, fine-veined wings pinched between my fingers, refracting even the clouded light into rainbow splinters. Beneath the wings, its head, body and legs were superb marvels of compact design.

  I stared and stared.

  It’s a fucking fly, Valentina.

  I know. I’ve seen flies. But only in photographs. To hold one . . . to see it alive . . . this is astonishing.

  You really weren’t kidding, were you?

  I wish I was. Like I said, they’ve gone. All of them. No insects, nothing. Maybe we’re too late, even with the seeds, but it’s all we can do—all we have left to try. That’s the truth, Tatiana, and if I owe you part of it, I owe you all of it. So here it is, if you’re ready.

  I am.

  But I’d caught her hesitation.

  In fifteen years, you’re gone. It’s not the Scouring, not the end of the world. Just an ordinary human life which doesn’t work out as well as it could. We know because we have the records you left behind, the traces you left on time. The Brothers collated them. Not many, it’s true—there’s a lot that never came through the bad years, when the famines and diebacks got severe, and World Health was the only authority left. But we have enough to piece together the arc of a life. Government employment records. Hospital records. Court appearances. How much of this do you want to know?

  None of it. All of it.

  The surgery isn’t the problem. They bring you back to the hospital a few times through the summer, but you recover well and there aren’t any complications. You go back to work. But it’s a troubled existence. Gradually your life comes off the rails. You get arrested for drunk driving, three times in ten years, and eventually you lose your job because of increasing absenteeism and illness. You’re married, but it doesn’t last long. You sink further into alcoholism and sickness. That’s when your medical records start building up again. But there isn’t all that much the hospital system can do for someone with such a self-destructive streak. You’re dead by 2043. I wish it were otherwise, Tatiana. The one good thing is that you miss the Scouring completely. There are millions who wish they’d had that good fortune.

  The good fortune to die early?

  It sounds harsh, I know. But I lived through those years. Some of my mother’s celebrity protected me—I wasn’t exposed to the worst of it, by any means. But you didn’t have to see things at close hand to know how bad they were. The terror, the hunger, the gradual realisation that we were not going to make our way through, none of us. There’s a final generation now, after World Health brought in the forced sterilisation programs. It was a kindness, not to bring more children into the world. I teach them, those last children. But they won’t have anything to grow into.

  Unless you succeed.

  Unless we succeed, yes. But as you might have noticed, things are already going a little off-target. This situation with Antti and Vikram being here earlier than me, the business with Miguel . . . whatever that’s about.

  You’ve got yourselves into a big mess.

  More than we were counting on. Although why we ever thought that altering the past, even in a small way, was going to be simple . . .

  We walked on in silence for a few hundred metres.

  My eye was drawn to the birds loitering in the high treetops, black as soot and restlessly aware of my solitary presence, their small bright minds alert and vigilant. Tatiana had gone quiet and I wondered if something had reverted in the control structure, the window that permitted us to talk finally closing again.

  I was wrong.

  I want to help.

  You are helping. Just by existing, just by giving us a means to make the changes we need to . . . that’s enough.

  No. More than that. You’ve told me my life’s a series of screwups. Part of me wants to disbelieve you, but there’s another part that says, yes, face it, she’s probably right. And I do believe the rest of it. I’d rather accept that there’s a time traveller in my head, if it’s a choice between that and believing that I’m going mad.

  You’re not going mad. No more than the rest of us, anyway.

  Then I’m helping. I’m going north with you, north with those seeds. Was there anything in my biography about that?

  No . . . not that I recollected.

  Then it’s something different, something that you can’t be sure won’t make a difference. To me, and to everything else. You’re going to tell Antti about us, as well. He needs to know.

  I looked at the trees, at the black forms clotting their high levels.

  I bet you know what those birds are.

  Tatiana laughed in my head.

  Crows. How could you not know that, unless you’re telling the truth?

  * * *

  “Are you feeling better?”

  I sat down opposite Antti.

  “Yes. I just needed that dose of fresh air.” I grinned, looking down at my too-young hands, laced together before me. “When I was out in the field I picked up a fly, held it close to my face like it was something sent in from another dimension. I couldn’t believe I was holding a fly, and that it was alive. So amazingly perfect and small and alive. You’ve been here eight months. How long did it take for you to get over that kind of thing?”

  He smiled. “I didn’t. I haven’t. If there’s a moment when it stops feeling strange, I’ll put the Makarov against my head.”

  “I don’t think that would be too fair on Tibor.”

  “No,” he admitted. “Tibor wouldn’t thank me for that.”

  “There’s something we need to talk about. Maybe you already know about it, but I can’t be sure.”

  He looked into my eyes, frown lines pushing deep ruts into his brow. “Go on.”

  “Since I’ve been coming back, Tatiana’s been in my head. More and more with each immersion. We can talk, and if she wants to she can override some of my motor impulses. It was . . . difficult, to begin with. But we’ve been communicating.”

  He nodded slowly. “It’s been the same with Tibor. Not always easy, but . . . we understand each other. After eight months, what else could we do?”

  “Tatiana’s a good person. I told her about the biographical arc, the data the Brothers passed to Director Cho. She knows the score.”

  A certain alarm showed in his face, as if he worried that I had been too candid, too soon.

  “And?”

  “She wants to help. She wants to be a willing part of this, not just an involuntary puppet. She can resist me—I found that out in the hospital—but I’d much rather we were in this together. So I’ve shared what I know, and we agreed that you had to be in on this as well.”

 
Antti studied my face. “Is she there now?”

  Yes.

  “Yes,” I answered. “She’s here.”

  Tell him his coffee tastes awful, and I’d rather have tea next time.

  “She says your coffee needs improvement.”

  “It does,” Antti admitted, as if this realisation had only just struck him.

  “She’s seen the Vaymyr. She’s seen Margaret. She’s had flashes, glimpses of upstream.”

  “Tibor said the same.”

  “Then something’s not working the way it should.”

  “Are you terribly surprised? These control structures were a barely tested experimental technology before we started trying to operate them across fifty-two years of time-separation. Cho’s nanotechnology was second-grade ex-military, the only thing anyone could get their hands on now. It’s no wonder it went wrong inside Christos, no wonder it’s not working quite the way it should now. But if that ia the only thing that goes wrong with them . . .”

  Ask him about the other one, your friend Miguel.

  “Tatiana wants to know what’s up with Miguel.”

  “So do I. Truth is, I don’t really know. Did you ever have any reason to distrust him, from the outset?”

  I thought of the stoic, professionally minded Miguel. There had always been a slight barrier between us because his Russian was a little stiff, but beyond that I’d never had cause to doubt his commitment to the project. Just as Antti and Vikram had bristled against each other upstream, so Miguel and Christos had become good friends, engaged in a friendly rivalry over who got to achieve the first time-injection. He had been really upset when Christos was taken ill and moved off the pilot squad, but Miguel was the one who’d shown the least resentment at my taking over Christos’s slot. More a warm acceptance and encouragement, Miguel understanding that the needs of the experiment outweighed any personal loyalties. He had been supportive of me all along, and when I was the first to go back, it was not frustration I saw in him, but relief that our scheme had a chance of success after all.