Permafrost(2)

Only then did he take the time to plug in my earphones and select the intercom channel.

“You can put the gun away. We won’t be needing it now.”

“What if we run into Miguel, farther north?”

Antti looked at me for a few seconds. It was only then that I saw the stain under his jacket, the wound he’d been applying pressure to when he came back to the plane.

“We won’t.”

*

Time travel.

More specifically: past-directed time travel.

It was what had taken me from Kogalym in 2080 to that aircraft in 2028, assuming the identity of another woman, ferrying a case of seeds to an uncertain destination in the north, still reeling with the horror of what I had done to Vikram.

Before the plane, though, before the airstrip, before the farmhouse, before the incident in the hospital, there had been my first glimpse of the past. I had been expecting it to happen at some point, but the exact moment that I became time-embedded wasn’t easily predictable. No one could say exactly when it would happen, or—with any accuracy—where in the past I would end up.

I was primed, though: mentally prepared to extract the maximum possible information from that first glimpse, no matter how fleeting it would be. The more reference points I could give Cho, the more we understood about the situation—how far back I was, what the host’s condition was like, how the noise constraints stood—the better our chances of prolonging further immersions and of achieving our objective.

Which was, not to put it too bluntly, saving the world.

When the glimpse came it was three weeks since I had been moved onto the pilot team, following the bad business with Christos. I’d been there when it went wrong, the catastrophic malfunction in his neural control structure that left him foaming and comatose. The problem was a parasitic code structure that had found its way into his implants. It had always been a danger. Cho had been scraping around for the world’s last few samples of viable neural nanotechnology and had been forced to accept that some of those samples might be contaminated or otherwise compromised.

Cho tried to reassure me that I wasn’t at risk of the same malfunction, that my implants were civilian-medical in nature and not susceptible to the same vulnerability. They had injected them into me after my stroke, to rebuild the damaged regions of my motor cortex and help me walk again, and now—with a little reprogramming, and a tiny additional surgical procedure—they could be adapted to let me participate in the experiment, becoming time-embedded.

I was on the Vaymyr, talking to Margaret as we headed back to our rooms down one of the icebreaker’s metal corridors. Before meeting Margaret in the canteen I’d been in the classroom most of the day, studying archival material—learning all I could about the customs and social structures of the pre-Scouring. Studying computer systems, vehicles, governmental institutions, even foreign languages: anything and everything that might prove useful, even in the smallest way. The other pilots were there as well: Antti, Miguel, Vikram, all of us with our noses pressed to books and screens, trying to squeeze as much knowledge as possible into our skulls, waiting for the moment when we dropped into the past.

Leaning on my stick as I clacked my way down the corridor, I was telling Margaret about Kogalym, sharing my fears that my pupils wouldn’t be looked after properly during my absence.

“Nobody thinks it matters anymore,” I said. “Education. Giving those girls and boys a chance. And in a way I understand. What’s the point, if all they’ve got to look forward to is gradual starvation or a visit to the mobile euthanisation clinics? But we know. We know there’s a chance, even if it’s only a small one.”

“What did you make of him, Valentina, when Director Cho came to Kogalym?”

“I thought he’d come to take me away, because I’d made an enemy of someone. That’s what they do, sometimes—just come in a helicopter and take you away.”

“World Health is all we have left,” Margaret said, as if this was a justification for their corrupt practices and mob-justice.

“Then he started going on about nutrition, and I didn’t know what to think. But at least I knew he wasn’t there to punish me.” I looked down at Margaret. “Did you know much about him?”

“Only that he was a high-up in World Health, and had a background in physics. They say he was very driven. The project wouldn’t exist without Director Cho. There’s a decade of hard work behind all of this, before any of the ships arrived.”

“Was he married?”

“Yes, and very happily by all accounts. But she became ill—one of the post-Scouring sicknesses. Director Cho was torn. He wanted to spend time with her, but he knew that the project would falter without his direct involvement. He brought the Brothers together, chose this exact location for the experiment, designed the control structure protocol . . . every detail was under his direct management. But it cost him terribly, not being able to be with his wife in those final months.”

“He seems a good man,” I said.

If Margaret answered, I didn’t hear her.

I was somewhere else.

It was another corridor, but completely different from the metal confines of the ship. There were walls of glazed brick on either side, painted in a two-tone scheme of grey and green. Above was a white ceiling with wide circular lights. Under me was a hard black floor, gleaming as if it had just been polished.