Permafrost(13)

“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.