Permafrost(23)

“What?”

You heard the man.

He pushed me hard, forcing me to squeeze down low in the passenger seat. He slowed, raised his hand in a greeting, and I caught the top of a police van, passing us on the left.

He drove on straight for a little while, flicking his eyes to the rearview mirror, then turned onto another road.

“I don’t think they saw you. Any other police cars or ambulances, you duck down, all right? At least until we’re a long way out of Izhevsk. They’ll be looking for a patient who matches your description, and I don’t want to take any chances.”

“All right—from the start. What. Is. Happening.” I was calmer now, if still bewildered. “I accept that you’re Antti. You’ve told me too much for that not to be the case. And this was all deliberate, wasn’t it? Hitting that ambulance, being ready to drive me away?”

“I had time to prepare.” He tightened his hands on the wheel, picking up speed as we exited the industrial area and moved onto a divided carriageway. “Eight months. That’s how long it’s been, how long I’ve been time-embedded. You understand now, right? You were the first to go into the time. I came after. But I went deeper—leapfrogged over you. The time-probe sent me back eight months earlier than you.”

“No!”

“Is that, no, as in you don’t believe me, or no, as in you never considered this possibility?”

Give the man credit, this has got to be messing with his head as well as yours and mine.

I was silent for a few moments. That thundercloud was still hovering in my skull, and all the swerving and hard cornering was making me nauseous. “Then you know what happens to me. You said that conversation was nine months old, and you’ve been embedded for eight. That means you know how this plays out for at least another month, maybe more.”

“To a degree.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’re swimming in some deep paradox here, Valentina. Black, grey, all the shades your mother painted. I know it, Cho knows it, Margaret Arbetsumian knew it.”

“What do you mean, Margaret knew it?”

“Margaret’s dead. Upstream Margaret. She couldn’t take it anymore. She realised what we’ve done . . . what we’re doing. It’s all falling to pieces, the whole experiment. We opened up something we don’t understand, a whole box of snakes.”

You knew this Margaret?

Yes. Knew her and liked her. But she was alive the last time I saw her and she’ll be alive when I go back. You probably saw her as well. The people, the machines, that room with no windows? She’d have been there, watching.

Small, glasses, straight fringe?

Yes. Margaret.

She didn’t look very dead to me.

She wouldn’t have been, not then, not yet.

I’m . . . sorry. Hell, why am I the one apologising? You’re in my head without permission, and I’m feeling sorry for you because someone died, someone else involved in this shit?

Because you’re the same as me, Tatiana. Not a bad person, just caught up in something bigger than you. And it’s Lidova. Valentina Lidova, as in Luba Lidova. Just as long as we’re getting to know each other.

The car accelerated again. “We’ve got a safe house,” Antti said, “about a hundred kilometres out of Izhevsk. There’s some stuff we need to discuss. Oh, and you’ll get to meet Vikram again.”

“Vikram’s come back as well?”

Antti said nothing.

*

Rain was falling by the time we made it to the safe house, about an hour’s drive out of Izhevsk. The light was dusky, the bellies of the clouds shaded with purple. It was still only midday: everything that had happened since I was wheeled to the MRI theatre had been squeezed into no more than six hours, including the helium event, the ambulance smash and being driven away by Antti.

We kept on the main highway for about thirty minutes, then pulled off onto smaller roads. Eventually we passed through a wooded area and I asked Antti to pull over so I could go behind some trees and puke.

I retched and retched until I was dry heaving.

Nicely done, Val. Better out than in.

Glad you appreciate the gesture. Have you any idea where we are?

Why should I?

Because you’re from Izhevsk.

I am. That doesn’t mean I memorised every shitty back road within a hundred kilometres of the place.

I didn’t feel much better getting back into the car, but my head was sharper, my thoughts more organised.

“I believe everything you’ve told me,” I said eventually, when we were moving again. “But you weren’t meant to be injected into a man. What the hell went wrong?”

His jaw moved before answering, some calculation working behind his eyes. His eyes/her eyes. I knew there was a woman behind them, but it was a man I was looking at, a man talking to me, and now I couldn’t help but see Antti as a male presence, a hard man with drinker’s features and worker’s hands, someone who moved with an easy assumption of authority.

“We were running out of options. The noise was rising. Sending you back in, putting you into Tatiana Dinova, caused some upset.”

No arguing with that. At least one of you has some basic human empathy.

He means a different kind of upset.

I gathered.