Permafrost(25)

Why?

Something bad happens around 2050. At first, we almost don’t notice it. There’s a steepening in the rate at which insect species are going extinct, but even then it just seems to be part of a pattern of something that’s been going on for a long time, and to begin with only a few scientists are really worried. But it gets worse, and really quickly. No one really understands what’s happening. There’s talk of horizontal gene-transfer, of some rogue mutation, perhaps some deliberate thing, a biological weapon gone haywire, hopping from one insect species to the next. Shutting them down, like a computer virus. Within five years, almost all insect life is gone. But it doesn’t end there. Plant pollination stops, of course, and then animals higher up the food chain start suffering. Insectivores die off pretty quickly, birds and small mammals, and then the rest, everything that depends on them. Meanwhile, the gene-transfer or whatever it was doesn’t stop happening. Insects first, then marine invertebrates—and once they go, all the oceans shut down. Humans manage, for a while. We had a lot of systems in place to buffer us from the immediate effects. But it’s only a temporary lull, before it starts hurting us as well. Crops fail. Soils start to turn sterile. Decomposition processes falter, triggering a second public health emergency beyond the initial famine. Within a decade, the effects are global and climatic. Dust storms, aridification, mass migration. A gradual collapse of social order. We had to give a name to the whole thing so we called it the Scouring: an environmental and biological cascade. Not much comes through the other side; certainly not enough for anyone to live on. All animal and plant life gone, except for a few laboratory specimens. By 2080, we’re down to stored rations, the last human generation.

She absorbed my words. They had flowed easily enough. As a teacher, even a mathematics teacher, I had been called on often enough to explain our current predicament, and how it had come about.

Well, I can’t wait to live through that.

You don’t . . .

But I caught myself.

What? What were you about to say?

“Don’t you see?” Antti ladled sugar into his coffee, more than I remembered her ever taking, when we were in the canteen. “This is only half the job, Valentina. We’ve got the seeds, yes. Now we’ve got to get them back to Cho, somehow—fifty-two years in the future. That’s the hard part. These seeds have still got to take the long way around.” Then he angled his head and spoke into the room adjoining the kitchen. “Vikram! Wake up. I’m with Valentina. Come and say hello.”

What were you about to tell me? That I don’t get to see the trouble that’s coming? That I’m already dead, twenty years from now? Was that it?

I tilted my head toward the doorway. “Is something wrong with Vikram?”

“Dying,” Antti said, with a surprising coldness. “Not long to go now.”

Nobody came into the kitchen immediately, and there was no sound of movement or footsteps from anywhere nearby, so I returned my thoughts to the seed samples.

“We had a plan. Still have a plan. The seeds need to be relocated, taken to a different seed vault—one we know will come through the difficulties. Cho gave us candidate locations. Can that still be done?”

Antti studied my own expression as closely as I regarded his. It was his first time seeing me with this face, the experience equally destabilising for both of us. This version of me was in Antti’s past, this version of her was in my future.

Now we were cross-braided, futures and pasts eating their own tails. A box of snakes.

Don’t ignore me. Tell me what happens to my life.

“Maybe,” Antti said. “I hope so.”

“What does that mean?”

“Miguel is here. Time-embedded, just like you and I and Vikram. But he’s gone rogue, acting against Permafrost. We’ve run into him once or twice. He’s out there, somewhere—trying to screw things up.”

Answer me, damn you!

Not now, Tatiana—not now, please. Things don’t go well for anyone, all right? Isn’t that enough?

You know it isn’t. Not for me.

*

I told Antti I still needed a few minutes to clear my head after the ambulance crash and the drive out to the farm. He shrugged, and showed me through a dusty pantry to the rear door, which led out into the fields beyond.

It was a grey day, cold for the season, but the world was still abundantly alive. The mud under my shoes wasn’t lifeless dirt; it was teeming with a hot, busy cargo of bountiful microorganisms. Those trees in the distance weren’t petrified husks, they were monstrous and beautiful living machines, factories made of cells and fluids and an incredible, fine-tuned biomolecular clockwork. They moved with the winds, sucked nutrients from the earth, pushed gases in and out of themselves. They made a hissing sound when the breeze moved through them. They were an astonishment.

Something caught my eye ahead of my foot and I stooped down, plucking a tiny, jewelled creature up from the ground. I held it up to my face, fine-veined wings pinched between my fingers, refracting even the clouded light into rainbow splinters. Beneath the wings, its head, body and legs were superb marvels of compact design.

I stared and stared.

It’s a fucking fly, Valentina.

I know. I’ve seen flies. But only in photographs. To hold one . . . to see it alive . . . this is astonishing.

You really weren’t kidding, were you?