Permafrost(24)

“It was getting harder for the time-probes to get a positive lock,” Antti went on. “Even when we managed to inject, the telemetry was much too noisy to be sure who we were in. We couldn’t analyse the biochemical environment properly, couldn’t get a clear phenotypic signature. With you, Cho knew you were going to mesh with a female host subject. With me, it was more a question of taking our chances.” He paused. “I’m all right. I got used to this body pretty quickly. It works for me.”

“Who are you? Downstream, I mean.”

“Tibor’s my host.”

“And this . . . Tibor. Have you had any . . . contact . . . ?”

He looked at me carefully, only part of his attention on the road ahead. “Meaning what?”

I decided I’d wait to tell Antti about Tatiana, assuming I told him at all. It was time to hear his side of things, first. Then I’d decide what he needed to know.

*

The property was a farmhouse, safely distant from any other buildings or prying eyes. It was reached down a long, rutted, dirt track. As a base for conducting our embedded time-operations, it was virtually perfect, even if a little run-down, damp and chilly, even in June. Antti parked the car in an enclosing courtyard, next to another mud-splattered car and a semiderelict tractor, and then took me into the main building and through to a kitchen. There was electricity. He sat me down at a wooden table, asked if I was feeling all right after the drive, evincing something close to tenderness for the first time since our encounter.

“It’s a jolt, I know.” He set about boiling some water. “At least I was semiprepared. Once we had a lock, we thought it was likely to take me deeper than you, and there was only a fifty-fifty chance I got injected into a female host.”

“What did Vikram get?” I asked, wondering why we hadn’t yet been reintroduced.

“Do you want tea or coffee?”

Tea. Two sugars. Some honey if you can stretch to it.

I nodded at the jar next to his hand. “Coffee. Strong. How did you find this place?”

“My host’s brother owns it. The brother’s on an oil contract in Kazakhstan, and he left the keys with Tibor, along with a lot of other useful stuff like access to his bank account. Trusting brother! It’ll do while we’re here, which won’t be long now.”

“You say there’s still a chance to put things right.”

With his back to me, Antti spooned coffee into a waiting cup.

“Under the table.”

I groped around until I found whatever he was on about. It was a handle, connected to a bulky alloy case with angled corners and a digital readout next to the lock.

I hefted the case onto the table, pushing aside a telephone book to make room, and waiting for Antti to offer further elucidation. I didn’t dare open it. The lock looked like the kind of thing that might trigger a built-in bomb or set off nerve gas.

“What is it?”

“Cho’s seeds,” Antti said while he poured in the boiling water.

I was surprised, elated, then instantly doubtful.

“Are you sure? It can’t have been that easy.”

“What was easy about it? I told you I’ve been time-embedded for eight months.” He came back with two cups of coffee, and lowered himself into the seat opposite mine. The wooden chair creaked under his frame. He had rolled up the sleeves of his sweater, revealing hairy arms heavily corded with muscle, bruised by old, fading tattoos. “It’s taken most of that time to acquire the seeds. There’s a privately operated seed vault just over the Finnish border, a very long drive from here. It took three goes to get close to it, two to get inside. Fortunately the security wasn’t that stringent, I could easily pass myself off as a local contractor, and no one involved had any real idea of the value of these seeds. Why would they? Just another genetically modified test sample, a commercial dead-end.” Some dark amusement played behind his eyes. “They’ve no idea of the trouble that’s coming.”

“May I open them?”

“You can open the outer layer. There’s no need to go farther than that.”

“Code?”

“Two, zero, eight, zero.”

I entered the digital combination. The case clicked, and the lid opened slightly. I pushed it back the rest of the way. Inside was a second case, presumably to allow for additional protection of the contents. This one was white, with its own digital security system, and an armoured window offering a view of the contents. It was fixed to the outer case, so there was no way the two could be separated.

I scuffed my sleeve across the fogged window. Under it was a padded container with stoppered glass capsules packed into slots, each capsule labelled with a bar code and containing what looked like a few thimblefuls of dirt.

“These are the real deal?”

“They’ll do.”

“Then . . . it’s done. We’ve got what we came for.” I tried to read his/her face, wondering why he was holding back from any sort of celebration. “Help me out here, Antti. What’s the difficulty?”

Help me out as well. Why are we getting so excited about a case full of dirt?

They’re seeds. Genetically modified seeds. Windblown propagators. Really hardy—you could almost grow them on Mars, if you had to. Practically valueless now, but incredibly important fifty-two years in the future.