Permafrost(19)

Exactly what was that about?

I saw a moment, went for it.

“That’s done it!” the technician said, shaking his head in annoyance and disbelief at my incredible clumsiness.

“I’ve had brain surgery,” I said, as Igor shoved me back into the wheelchair. “Give me a break, won’t you?”

You’re right—you’ve just had brain surgery. You shouldn’t be taking any nonsense from anyone. All right, I’m almost impressed.

Thank you . . .

The technician rolled his chair to the left, where he was attempting to reboot the monitors with the second keyboard, hammering repeatedly at the same keys.

“It’s no good—she’s really screwed it up.” He began to reach for the desk telephone. “Someone’s going to have to come in and sort this out, and you know how long that usually takes.”

The knife slid from my sleeve.

It was a while since I’d had a chance to press the bracelet back up my forearm. The knife landed on my knee and just for an instant there was every chance it was going to remain there, before it slid off and clattered to the floor.

That wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.

I know.

“A knife!” Igor called, dragging back the wheelchair, with me in it. “She had a knife on her!”

The technician stared at me with doubt and bewilderment. Presumably I had been the model patient on my previous visits to the radiology department, and yet now I was this destructive, knife-concealing lunatic.

“I don’t know how that knife ended up on me,” I said.

Igor leaned over the back of the wheelchair, pushing down on my shoulders. “It was up her sleeve. I saw it come out.”

The technician rolled his seat the limit of the desk, where it met the wall. “Damn it, I’ve had enough of this.”

He thumped his fist against a red call button and an alarm began to sound.

You got a plan for this, Valentina?

I forced myself out of the chair, using all my strength to ram it back into Igor. Igor grunted and tried to wrestle me back into the seat. Now that my elbow was free I jabbed him hard in the ribs and twisted away from him. Perhaps if he’d been a law enforcement official or guard he’d have been better equipped to stop me, but Igor was just an orderly and I think my burst of strength and action was more than he was prepared for. The young doctor had the knife now, but he was holding it up and away from me, while Igor rolled the chair in front of the hallway door, as if he meant to use it as a barricade.

The alarm continued sounding.

“You’re confused,” the young doctor said, extending his right hand in a calming gesture. “And frightened. But there’s no need to be. You can’t be held accountable for behaviour that’s completely out of character. This is just some postoperative confusion that we should have . . .”

With the technician at the far end of the desk, Igor at the door, and the young doctor preoccupied with the knife, I saw my opportunity. It was on the desk, between the monitors, under a flip-up plastic lid. A fat green emergency button, the kind you could hammer down with a fist.

I sprang for it. The technician made to block me, but he wasn’t nearly fast enough.

A grey fog hit.

*

The shock of the transition was so sudden that I nearly jerked out of the padding, a sleeper rudely awoken.

I drew a breath, fighting for control and composure. Cho and his technicians were present, looking on with concern.

“Why’d you bring me out?”

“We didn’t!” Cho said defensively. “You were noise-swamped. It happened very quickly, over the course of about twenty seconds. What was happening?”

The memory of Tatiana’s body was still with me. I could feel the bandage around her head, the soreness in her rib cage where I had banged the desk. Igor’s hands on my shoulders, the knife in the crook of my elbow.

“Get me back in,” I said. “Fight the noise.”

“You’re grandfathering,” Cho said, while Margaret and the other technicians fussed at their machines. “Hitting paradox limits. Be clear. What was happening? Were you anywhere near the MRI machine?”

I wanted to be back in the room, back in Tatiana. She was more than just some anonymous host now. We’d spoken to each other, established . . . something. Not exactly trust, but a step on the way to it. And I’d bailed out of her, leaving her to deal with the mess I’d initiated.

“I was trying to shut it down,” I said. “Going for the quench button.”

“That was the absolute last resort,” Cho answered, with a rising strain.

“I’d tried everything else. I thought I’d disabled the machine at the software interface, but then things went wrong. I had a knife on me, and it slipped out. They called security, and they were on their way.” I twisted my neck, addressing the nearest of the technicians. “Get me back in.”

“We’re trying different noise filters,” Margaret said. “You’re still close to the threshold. The neural traffic was going stochastic even before you came back. Was anything off about the immersion?”

I hesitated, on the brink of telling her everything. How Tatiana was in my head, and I was in Tatiana’s. How she’d managed to override my motor control for a moment, twitching her arm. How she’d reported a glimpse of this room, visual data feeding back the wrong way, into the past instead of up to the future. She’d seen the Vaymyr, seen the inside of an icebreaker fifty-two years upstream.