Permafrost Page 9

  “No. He was totally committed. Totally dedicated to the experiment, just like the rest of us.”

  “I agree. But something got into him. Some influence coming from further up, upstream from upstream. It’s something. We’ve both felt it, Vikram and I. A tickle in our heads, as if something’s trying to get inside us. A whiteness. It’s faint, and we can fight it. With Miguel, it must have planted itself more strongly. I don’t think Miguel is Miguel anymore. Something’s running him, the way we were meant to be running our hosts.”

  “Then it’s three against one.”

  “Two against one, really. Vikram isn’t going to be able to help us. But if we move fast, and get north quickly, we can give Miguel the slip. The target seed vault is a private facility, quite near the Yenisei Gulf.”

  Now it was my turn to frown.

  “Near Permafrost?”

  “Where Permafrost will come to be. But fifty-two years early. That’s beneficial, though. It means Cho won’t have to go very far to find the seeds, even if he has to dig them out from an abandoned vault under several metres of ice.”

  I pinched at the bridge of my nose. “Tell him to go now. If the seeds are where they’re meant to be upstream, we’ll know it’s the right decision.”

  “I can’t contact Cho.” Antti looked down at his coffee. “That’s the other thing that’s gone wrong. We can’t abort, can’t get back to the Vaymyr.”

  I stared in horror and astonishment, as the implication of his words hit home.

  “How, when, did this happen?”

  Antti’s answer had the dry matter-of-factness of someone who had long ago absorbed their fate. “Within a few weeks of my time-embedding. I tried to abort, and I couldn’t. What does that mean, exactly?” He looked at me with a hard, searching intensity, as if I was his last and best hope for an answer. “Where is my consciousness now? Is it running in my body upstream, in the Vaymyr, or is it marooned here, piggybacking Tibor?” He paused, scratched at the red-veined bridge of his nose. “You’ve got to make sure you abort and stay aborted before the same thing happens.”

  I closed the case and lowered it back under the table.

  “If I can still go back, I’ll try and resolve this mess. Tell Cho to run an additional series of tests on the control structures, before they try to send you and Vikram back.”

  Antti shook his head sharply. “No. You can’t risk giving Cho any destabilising information. Look after yourself, optimise the chances of success, but don’t say or do anything that threatens to grandfather us. Before you know it, we’ll be up to our necks in paradox. At the moment we’re close to success—really close. We can’t endanger this. You can’t mention any part of this—not Tatiana, not Miguel, not even the fact that you’ve already made contact with me.” He turned and raised his voice louder than before. “Vikram! It’s Valentina! Come and see her before she tries going back to the station!”

  There was noise now. A shuffling, coming nearer. I turned to the door, my eyes set at the level to meet a human being. I was prepared for Vikram to be any gender, perhaps even any age. Someone very elderly or unwell, perhaps, given what Antti had said. Someone close to death. Even a child.

  But Vikram came in on four legs.

  You never said your friend was an Alsatian, Valentina.

  I stared, unable to reply.

  Vikram padded over to me. He moved slowly, a limp in his hindquarters, and settled his head in my lap for a moment before going to Antti’s side of the table. I thought he might be the type of dog that was once used by security forces, big and powerful enough to take down a criminal.

  “I don’t really know what to say.”

  “He understands you. He’s got full cognitive ability. He’s known what he was from day one.” Antti reached down to scratch at Vikram. “We weren’t to know this could happen. By then it was getting so hard to read any biochemical data that it was enough to know we were injecting into a brain, into a living organism. But some sick fool put a dog into one of those MRI machines.”

  “Why didn’t we pull him out, as soon as we realised the screwup?”

  “Vikram couldn’t abort. It’s been eight months for me, but even longer for him. He was already time-embedded when I arrived.”

  I thought of a human mind being squeezed into a dog, dropped back in time, having to survive on its own, with no friends or support system, no means of communicating, and almost all human amenities and services forbidden to it. How had Vikram stayed sane, let alone survived long enough to eventually make contact with Antti?

  This isn’t right.

  Vikram came around to me again. His eyes were milky, shot through with cataracts. White hairs bristled around his muzzle. Beneath his pelt he was all skin and bone.

  “I’m sorry, Vikram. I’m so sorry.”

  Vikram whimpered. Somewhere in the whimper was a faint gargling sound. As if taking this as a cue, Antti got up and went to a kitchen drawer. He opened it and produced a small cylindrical thing about the size of a cell phone. Antti came around to my side of the table, lowered onto his knees and brought the small thing up against the side of Vikram’s throat, just under the jaw.

  Vikram whimpered again. A thin, buzzing sound came out of the device in Antti’s hand.

  “He can generate the impulses of speech,” Antti said. “He just can’t make the right sounds come out of his larynx. It’s still dog anatomy. But this device can help, sometimes.”

  The thin, buzzing sounds continued. There was a pattern to the noises, a cyclic repetition.

  Vikram was making four syllables, over and over. The sound was so alien that it took a few seconds for my brain to process it.

  Val—en—tin-a

  Val—en—tin-a

  “I’m here,” I said, touching the side of his face. “I’m here, Vikram. I’m here and it’s all right. We’re going to sort things out. Somehow or other, we’re going to fix things.”

  “Vikram knows that you and I have to go north,” Antti said. “He also knows that he won’t be able to come with us.”

  He reached into his jacket and brought out a gun, a Makarov semiautomatic pistol, setting it down on the table between us.

  * * *

  The scratch of the pen trace was the first thing I heard as I returned to my upstream body, to the dental chair and the Vaymyr. My eyes were gummed over and hard to open, my lips corpse-dry. I lay still and silent for a few minutes, gathering my thoughts, unsure how I could slip back into the present given everything Antti had told me downstream. All of a sudden this upstream felt much less stable, much less comforting, than the downstream reality of the kitchen and the farmhouse.

  Eventually one of the biomonitors detected my return and emitted a notification tone. I forced my eyes open as one of Margaret’s technicians came over to the chair and asked me if I was feeling well.

  “You were immersed a long time. Dr. Abramik wanted to bring you out, but Director Cho was adamant that we shouldn’t intervene unless you issued the abort command. After all those hours, though, we were starting to wonder if there was a problem.”

  I sipped at the water the technician had brought to the dental chair. “No, it was all right. There just wasn’t a good time to break the connection.”

  “We all want to know what happened to you in 2028. The Brothers picked up a spike in the neural traffic between your control structures. They think there was some sort of violent action not long after you went back under.”

  “There was,” I answered carefully. “The ambulance I was in crashed into something and rolled over. But I wasn’t hurt.” Although it ached to move, I undid the restraints and eased myself out of the dental chair. “I could use some fresh air right now. I’m still feeling a bit nauseous after that smash.”

  “There’s meant to be a debriefing as soon as you come back.”

  “Tell the others I’ll be with them as soon as I’ve cleared my head. I promise I’m not going to forget anything.”

  I grabbed my cane and a
coat and hobbled up and out onto the deck, needing the wind and the cold. It had been a lie about feeling nauseous. My head was pin-sharp even before I opened the weather door. But I was feeling unmoored and disoriented, a compass needle spinning wildly. I’d been put through much less preparation than the other pilots, but even so I’d felt ready for whatever the past threw at me. But not this. Never this. No one had ever warned me that I might run into one of our own number already present in the past. Much less that that person might tell me things about Permafrost’s own future, and how the project was coming undone, caught in the python-coils of paradox.

  I walked to the very edge of the icebreaker, holding the rail that circled the deck, looking inward to the dark, lightless slab of the Admiral Nerva.

  I thought of the time Cho had first taken me there, three weeks after my arrival at the station. Inside the larger ship it was very silent, very dark and cold. A small part of me, perhaps the wiser part, felt a strong urge to turn back. A prickling intuition told me that something strange was going on inside the aircraft carrier. Something strange and wrong and yet also necessary.

  We’d gone far inside.

  The ship could have been deserted apart from the two of us, as far as I was concerned. Our footsteps, and my cane, made an echoing impression against the carrier’s metal fabric, hinting at the many decks above and below, the endless corridors and connecting staircases. Eventually we emerged into the dark of what I sensed was a huge unlit space, a single chamber which must have taken up almost the whole of the present deck.

  It wasn’t entirely dark, now that my eyes were adjusting. Off in the distance—a few hundred metres away, easily—were faint signs of activity. A puddle of light, still quite dim, and muted voices, as low and serious as the surgeons in an operating theatre.

  Cho touched an intercom panel. “This is the director. Miss Lidova is with me. May I bring up the main lights?”

  There was an interval, then a voice crackled back: “Please go ahead, Mr. Cho. We’re about done with the new unit.”

  “Very good. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  Cho made the lights come on. They activated in two parallel strips running the enormous length of the ceiling, flicking on one after the other so that the room came into clarity in distinct blocks. We were up on an elevated platform, about one storey above the floor of the main chamber.

  “We call it the gallery,” Cho confided. “Originally, it was the hangar for the aircraft that would have come and gone from the flight deck over our heads. They were brought up and down via massive elevators. We use the space for something quite different now, as you can see. In fact it’s rare for us to land on the Nerva at all, with the equipment being so sensitive. Even when we have some heavy cargo, as we did with your flight, it’s better to land on one of the outlying ships and then tractor the payload over the ice, in through one of the low-level doors.”

  I stared at what I was seeing, my eyes feeding information to my brain, and my brain insisting that there had to be an error in that information.

  There were two parallel rows of time-probes, stretching off into the distance. I knew instantly that I was looking at them, even though Cho had made no comment and no two of the devices were exactly alike.

  I knew what they were, and just as crucially what they had been.

  “I see how you do it now,” I said, in little more than a whisper.

  “Finding them in a workable condition has been challenging,” Cho replied in the same low voice. “More so as we run out of candidate sites. You’ll have gathered by now that it was a time-probe we were bringing back in the helicopter, under all that sheeting. It was the reason I had to go south. We’d located one in our records, inside an abandoned hospital. It’s the machine they’re working with over there—number eighteen—a replacement for a failed unit.”

  Each time-probe was in an area of its own, a yellow rectangle marked on the floor and labelled with a number. Machines one to nineteen on the left, machines two to twenty on the right. There was clear space between them, and a wide promenade running the length of the gallery. Pieces of equipment were gathered around the machines: pallets, trolleys, wheeled tenders and so on, laden with technology, but all spotless and very neatly arranged, nothing that looked as if it had been left there indiscriminately, or did not fulfil some immediate function. Not an empty trolley or greasy rag anywhere to be seen. Even the numerous cables and pipes which ran between the time-probes and their support equipment—and farther, out to the walls—had an organised look, colour-coded by function and fixed to the floor, with ramps to enable trolleys and pallets to be driven over the pipes.

  The time-probes were truck-sized machines. The magnets and beds were still present, but in most cases the machines had been stripped of their external casings, revealing the complicated electrical and cryogenic guts that would normally have been hidden. A few areas of white plastic still remained here and there, with dents and discolouration showing. The machines were the only things in the gallery that were not pristine.

  “Scanners,” I said, quietly and reverently. “Medical scanners. Magnetic resonance imagers. That’s how you do it. That’s how you send things back to the past. By using machines that already exist in the past.”

  “How else, given that we can only send back into the lifespan of a preexisting time machine? Fourteen months was the limit for the test apparatus in the Vaymyr. But that would never have suited our needs.”

  “They made your time-probes for you,” I said, shaking my head in wonder and revulsion. “Without even realising it. These machines were always primed to receive a message from the future. Always waiting. Always there, windows into the past. Whenever anyone in the world ever went into one of these, for any reason, there was a chance that we’d be drilling back into their heads from the future.”

  “Not all machines,” Cho countered. “Only the very few that managed to survive into the present.”

  “You think that makes it any less troubling?”

  “If there were another way,” he said, “I would have grasped at it. But this was it. The universe only ever gave us this one chance.”

  “Valentina?”

  I turned back to face the superstructure of the Vaymyr, snatched from my thoughts by the voice of Margaret, emerging onto the deck. Sometimes we grabbed any old coat if we were only going out for a short while, and she had put on one that was much too large for her. It made her look like a child dressing up in adult clothes, small and vulnerable.

  “I just needed a moment,” I said.

  “They told me. But it’s important to get the facts down as quickly as possible, while the memory’s still fresh.”

  I wanted to tell her everything. About Antti already being time-embedded, about the farmhouse and the case containing the seeds, about what had happened to Vikram—what was going to have to happen. But I could mention none of these things, because harder questions would follow. If I’d met upstream Antti, then what did I know about the state of Permafrost, months in the future? What did I know about Director Cho and the other pilots?

  Margaret would pick up on my reticence. She’d know that something had gone wrong—was going wrong. And if she had the steel to ask me directly about her own situation, no force in the world would be able to keep the truth from my eyes.

  I’m sorry, Margaret, but you don’t make it.

  Tell her now, I thought. Tell her everything. Divert our own fate onto a different track. Spare Vikram his life as a dog. Warn Antti about the host she was going into, so she had time to prepare. Find a way to keep Miguel from going back at all.

  Tell Margaret not to lose her faith in everything.

  “Is everything all right, Valentina?”

  “Yes,” I answered firmly. “Everything’s under control. And I’m ready to go back.”

  * * *

  Not long after sunrise, while Vikram slept and Antti packed the car for the drive to the airstrip, I picked up the telephone in the farmhouse kitc
hen. It was an old-fashioned landline telephone, with a handset and a heavy base, as bulky in its way as the telephone in Director Cho’s office. I wondered if some time-glitch might cause our two telephones to become connected, so that I could patiently explain everything that was going on, allowing the mild-mannered Cho to steer around the inherent paradoxes and find a way to preserve the seeds.

  But it was not really Cho that I meant to call.

  The telephone book didn’t have private numbers in it, just businesses, but it covered a wide geographical area and I soon located the area code for my mother’s place of residence, the house we’d shared between Father’s death and my striking out on my own. The area code was all I needed; I remembered the local part of the number by heart. Hard not to, even after half a century, when my mother had always been in the habit of enunciating the number whenever anyone called. And there had always been callers, even after her reputation began to suffer. When the prestigious journals and outlets stopped taking an interest in her, the cranks and fringe publications soon filled the vacuum. Luba Lidova had always been too polite to hang up on them without at least a word of explanation.

  It was early, even earlier west of Izhevsk, but my mother would already be up and about, always insisting that her mind was sharpest before breakfast. I pictured her already in her favorite chair, surrounded by papers and notes, leaning back with her eyes closed as she wandered some mathematical space in her mind. There would be music on, scratching out of an old gramophone player: an anachronism even in 2028.

  Somewhere in the house, the disturbance of a ringing telephone.

  She would let it sound a few times before breaking her spell, but it was beyond her to let it go unanswered. So she would set aside her papers and rise from the chair, trying to hold the thread of her thoughts intact as she floated to the receiver.

  The phone rang and rang in my ear. Then crackled as the handset was lifted at the other end.

  Silence.

  Or rather, not true silence, but the absence of a voice. I could hear breathing, though. Faint domestic sounds.

  “Hello?” I asked.