Permafrost(30)

“If there were another way,” he said, “I would have grasped at it. But this was it. The universe only ever gave us this one chance.”

“Valentina?”

I turned back to face the superstructure of the Vaymyr, snatched from my thoughts by the voice of Margaret, emerging onto the deck. Sometimes we grabbed any old coat if we were only going out for a short while, and she had put on one that was much too large for her. It made her look like a child dressing up in adult clothes, small and vulnerable.

“I just needed a moment,” I said.

“They told me. But it’s important to get the facts down as quickly as possible, while the memory’s still fresh.”

I wanted to tell her everything. About Antti already being time-embedded, about the farmhouse and the case containing the seeds, about what had happened to Vikram—what was going to have to happen. But I could mention none of these things, because harder questions would follow. If I’d met upstream Antti, then what did I know about the state of Permafrost, months in the future? What did I know about Director Cho and the other pilots?

Margaret would pick up on my reticence. She’d know that something had gone wrong—was going wrong. And if she had the steel to ask me directly about her own situation, no force in the world would be able to keep the truth from my eyes.

I’m sorry, Margaret, but you don’t make it.

Tell her now, I thought. Tell her everything. Divert our own fate onto a different track. Spare Vikram his life as a dog. Warn Antti about the host she was going into, so she had time to prepare. Find a way to keep Miguel from going back at all.

Tell Margaret not to lose her faith in everything.

“Is everything all right, Valentina?”

“Yes,” I answered firmly. “Everything’s under control. And I’m ready to go back.”

*

Not long after sunrise, while Vikram slept and Antti packed the car for the drive to the airstrip, I picked up the telephone in the farmhouse kitchen. It was an old-fashioned landline telephone, with a handset and a heavy base, as bulky in its way as the telephone in Director Cho’s office. I wondered if some time-glitch might cause our two telephones to become connected, so that I could patiently explain everything that was going on, allowing the mild-mannered Cho to steer around the inherent paradoxes and find a way to preserve the seeds.

But it was not really Cho that I meant to call.

The telephone book didn’t have private numbers in it, just businesses, but it covered a wide geographical area and I soon located the area code for my mother’s place of residence, the house we’d shared between Father’s death and my striking out on my own. The area code was all I needed; I remembered the local part of the number by heart. Hard not to, even after half a century, when my mother had always been in the habit of enunciating the number whenever anyone called. And there had always been callers, even after her reputation began to suffer. When the prestigious journals and outlets stopped taking an interest in her, the cranks and fringe publications soon filled the vacuum. Luba Lidova had always been too polite to hang up on them without at least a word of explanation.

It was early, even earlier west of Izhevsk, but my mother would already be up and about, always insisting that her mind was sharpest before breakfast. I pictured her already in her favorite chair, surrounded by papers and notes, leaning back with her eyes closed as she wandered some mathematical space in her mind. There would be music on, scratching out of an old gramophone player: an anachronism even in 2028.

Somewhere in the house, the disturbance of a ringing telephone.

She would let it sound a few times before breaking her spell, but it was beyond her to let it go unanswered. So she would set aside her papers and rise from the chair, trying to hold the thread of her thoughts intact as she floated to the receiver.

The phone rang and rang in my ear. Then crackled as the handset was lifted at the other end.

Silence.

Or rather, not true silence, but the absence of a voice. I could hear breathing, though. Faint domestic sounds.

“Hello?” I asked.

“Who’s there?”

I froze. It was not my mother’s voice; not Luba Lidova answering the telephone. In place of my mother’s habitual politeness there was a sharpness, a demanding interrogative tone.

“Is that . . . Valentina?” I asked, recalibrating.

“I said, who’s speaking?”

I forced my breathing to slow. “I’m Tatiana,” I said. “I just . . .”

“Whatever you want from her, get on with it.”

“I thought you’d already left.”

“You thought what?”

“I got it wrong. The wrong year, the wrong summer. You’re still there.”

She gave a derisive snort. “I should’ve known better. Just another lunatic, out to waste her time. When will you people move on to someone else?”

“Is she there, Valentina?”

“No, she’s . . . what right have you got to call me that, as if we know each other?”

“You’re on her papers, aren’t you?”

A sullen tone entered her voice. “More fool me.”

“No, nobody’s the fool here. Will you do something for me, Valentina? When your mother comes back, tell her it all makes sense. Everything. The paradox noise, the Luba Pairs. Tell her it’s not wasted work. Tell her there’s a point to it all, and . . .”