Permafrost(17)

Antti and Margaret regarded me with a quiet, knowing watchfulness. They’d been through this already, numerous times. It wasn’t unusual to them at all.

I thought of the causal-lag Margaret had mentioned.

I remembered my mother at her whiteboard, a summer or two before that bust-up, rubbing out and rehashing one idea after the next. Trying to break through to a new model of time, a fresh way of thinking about the relationships between past and future events, the illusion of the ever-moving now. Time wasn’t a river, she said, and it wasn’t a circuit-diagram. Nor was it a tree with multiple branches. It was a block structure, more like a crystal lattice than any of those old dead-end paradigms. It was a lattice that spanned the entire existence of the universe, from beginning to end. There were no alternate histories, no branches where the Roman empire never fell or the dinosaurs were never wiped out. Just that single lattice, a single fixed structure. We were in it, embedded in its matrix.

But the lattice wasn’t static. There were flaws in it—imperfections, impurities and stress points. What the lattice was trying to do was to settle down into a minimum-energy configuration. But in doing so, those stresses could give way suddenly or propagate a long way from their initial positions. That was the lattice adjusting itself, history settling into a new, temporary configuration. The alterations happened naturally, time murmuring to itself like an old house, but they could also be generated by artificial interventions, such as Margaret’s paradox with the two pens. Then, a pattern of changes would ripple through the lattice, the future changing the past, the past changing the future, the future returning the favour, like a series of dying echoes, until a new configuration held sway. But that adjustment process wasn’t instantaneous from the point of view of an embedded observer. It was more like the thunderclap arriving after a lighting flash, a delayed portent of the same event. Causal-lag.

But what paradox, exactly?

There’d always been two spikes. Margaret had said she would drop two pens, and the system had detected her future intention, and she had followed through one minute later.

No. I almost had to frown to hold onto it. There’d been that other condition. One spike, not two. One pen drop. It was slipping away, though—hard to recollect, hard to think about. Like a dream fragment that shrivelled to nothing in the light of day.

Gape-mouthed, I stared at my new colleagues.

“What just happened?”

“What do you remember?” Margaret asked.

“Almost nothing. Just that . . .” But I could only shake my own head. “It’s gone. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

“Do you feel normal?” Antti asked.

“No. Not normal.” I steadied myself on the bench. My cane was outside, waiting for me to collect it. “Yes. Normal. But there was something. There was something. I just can’t hold onto it now.”

“We grandfathered,” Margaret said. “That’s all it could have been. You must have asked us to demonstrate a paradox condition, and we set one up. Swapped one future for another, and then the past swapped around to keep track.” She grinned, stooping down to collect the two fallen pens. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

I let out a breath. “Crap!”

“Generally the first reaction,” Antti said, with a faint approving smile, as if I’d crossed some unspoken threshold of acceptance. “Gets easier, though. Less strange. These are only small paradoxes, after all. You just buckle up and ride the turbulence. Be glad we never go near anything big.”

I’d regained enough composure to pay attention to what she was saying. “And if we did?”

“Oh, we can’t—luckily,” Margaret said. “The noise swamps us long before we ever get close to doing anything really stupid.”

*

So I was inducted into the work of Permafrost, a step at a time.

But why that name, exactly, for Director Cho’s experiment?

Throughout my time at the station he had never explained it. Appropriate enough for a place so cold, so remote, I supposed. Yet there was also a sense of stillness, changelessness, which must have been an allusion to my mother’s block-crystal model of time.

Time as a solid, glacial structure, groaning to itself as defects propagated through its frozen matrix, yet essentially fixed, immutable, persistent, enduring. Time as a white thing, a white landscape, under white skies and ominous squared-off clouds.

Time as a self-reinforcing structure in which all memory of humanity had been quietly erased.

*

The doctor and the orderly wheeled me to radiology.

You think I’m going to let you stab someone with that knife?

That’s not the idea. And even if it was, you wouldn’t be able to do much about it, so just sit back and let me handle things.

My arm, the one that was concealing the knife, twitched in my lap. It was a moment of spasm, no more than that, but it was nothing I’d initiated.

You saw that, didn’t you?

Be careful.

Or what? I’ll drop the knife, and then what’ll happen?

What’ll happen is that we’ll both be in trouble, Tatiana. That machine ahead of us is going to kill you if you get anywhere near it. The knife is how we’re going to take the machine out of service, before it turns your brain into hot mush.

I’m so glad that you’re concerned.