Permafrost(28)

There was noise now. A shuffling, coming nearer. I turned to the door, my eyes set at the level to meet a human being. I was prepared for Vikram to be any gender, perhaps even any age. Someone very elderly or unwell, perhaps, given what Antti had said. Someone close to death. Even a child.

But Vikram came in on four legs.

You never said your friend was an Alsatian, Valentina.

I stared, unable to reply.

Vikram padded over to me. He moved slowly, a limp in his hindquarters, and settled his head in my lap for a moment before going to Antti’s side of the table. I thought he might be the type of dog that was once used by security forces, big and powerful enough to take down a criminal.

“I don’t really know what to say.”

“He understands you. He’s got full cognitive ability. He’s known what he was from day one.” Antti reached down to scratch at Vikram. “We weren’t to know this could happen. By then it was getting so hard to read any biochemical data that it was enough to know we were injecting into a brain, into a living organism. But some sick fool put a dog into one of those MRI machines.”

“Why didn’t we pull him out, as soon as we realised the screwup?”

“Vikram couldn’t abort. It’s been eight months for me, but even longer for him. He was already time-embedded when I arrived.”

I thought of a human mind being squeezed into a dog, dropped back in time, having to survive on its own, with no friends or support system, no means of communicating, and almost all human amenities and services forbidden to it. How had Vikram stayed sane, let alone survived long enough to eventually make contact with Antti?

This isn’t right.

Vikram came around to me again. His eyes were milky, shot through with cataracts. White hairs bristled around his muzzle. Beneath his pelt he was all skin and bone.

“I’m sorry, Vikram. I’m so sorry.”

Vikram whimpered. Somewhere in the whimper was a faint gargling sound. As if taking this as a cue, Antti got up and went to a kitchen drawer. He opened it and produced a small cylindrical thing about the size of a cell phone. Antti came around to my side of the table, lowered onto his knees and brought the small thing up against the side of Vikram’s throat, just under the jaw.

Vikram whimpered again. A thin, buzzing sound came out of the device in Antti’s hand.

“He can generate the impulses of speech,” Antti said. “He just can’t make the right sounds come out of his larynx. It’s still dog anatomy. But this device can help, sometimes.”

The thin, buzzing sounds continued. There was a pattern to the noises, a cyclic repetition.

Vikram was making four syllables, over and over. The sound was so alien that it took a few seconds for my brain to process it.

Val—en—tin-a

Val—en—tin-a

“I’m here,” I said, touching the side of his face. “I’m here, Vikram. I’m here and it’s all right. We’re going to sort things out. Somehow or other, we’re going to fix things.”

“Vikram knows that you and I have to go north,” Antti said. “He also knows that he won’t be able to come with us.”

He reached into his jacket and brought out a gun, a Makarov semiautomatic pistol, setting it down on the table between us.

*

The scratch of the pen trace was the first thing I heard as I returned to my upstream body, to the dental chair and the Vaymyr. My eyes were gummed over and hard to open, my lips corpse-dry. I lay still and silent for a few minutes, gathering my thoughts, unsure how I could slip back into the present given everything Antti had told me downstream. All of a sudden this upstream felt much less stable, much less comforting, than the downstream reality of the kitchen and the farmhouse.

Eventually one of the biomonitors detected my return and emitted a notification tone. I forced my eyes open as one of Margaret’s technicians came over to the chair and asked me if I was feeling well.

“You were immersed a long time. Dr. Abramik wanted to bring you out, but Director Cho was adamant that we shouldn’t intervene unless you issued the abort command. After all those hours, though, we were starting to wonder if there was a problem.”

I sipped at the water the technician had brought to the dental chair. “No, it was all right. There just wasn’t a good time to break the connection.”

“We all want to know what happened to you in 2028. The Brothers picked up a spike in the neural traffic between your control structures. They think there was some sort of violent action not long after you went back under.”

“There was,” I answered carefully. “The ambulance I was in crashed into something and rolled over. But I wasn’t hurt.” Although it ached to move, I undid the restraints and eased myself out of the dental chair. “I could use some fresh air right now. I’m still feeling a bit nauseous after that smash.”

“There’s meant to be a debriefing as soon as you come back.”

“Tell the others I’ll be with them as soon as I’ve cleared my head. I promise I’m not going to forget anything.”

I grabbed my cane and a coat and hobbled up and out onto the deck, needing the wind and the cold. It had been a lie about feeling nauseous. My head was pin-sharp even before I opened the weather door. But I was feeling unmoored and disoriented, a compass needle spinning wildly. I’d been put through much less preparation than the other pilots, but even so I’d felt ready for whatever the past threw at me. But not this. Never this. No one had ever warned me that I might run into one of our own number already present in the past. Much less that that person might tell me things about Permafrost’s own future, and how the project was coming undone, caught in the python-coils of paradox.