Permafrost(31)

There was a crackle, the sound of a handset being wrenched from one grip to another.

A different voice:

“Who is this?”

“It’s . . . me,” I said, uselessly. But what could I tell her, that it was her own daughter, even though I was also standing right next to her?

She met my answer with a silence of her own. Outside, I heard the slam as Antti closed the car door. Footsteps on the ground as he made his way back to the kitchen.

“You can bother me,” Luba Lidova said. “I don’t mind. I’ve earned it. But you leave my daughter alone.”

“They’ll come around to you,” I said, my voice starting to break. “All of it. It’s . . .”

Antti came up behind me and jammed his hand onto the top of the telephone’s base, killing the call. A continuous dial tone sounded in my ear. Slowly I put the handset back down on the base.

“It was just . . .” I started.

“I know who you called.”

“I got it wrong. The summer I left. It must have been the year after this. I was still there.”

Antti leaned in. I smelled his breath, tainted after years of hard living. It was a sour, vinegary stench, like something left in the bottom of a barrel. “We’ve got the seeds. One slip, one little causal ripple, and we lose it all. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.” Then he grunted and reached into his pocket, taking out the pistol. “Do something right instead.”

*

I’d taken the artificial larynx with me, just in case he had something he wanted to say at the end, some final words. But when I offered it to him he only shook his head, his cataract-clouded eyes seeming to look right through me, out to the grey Russian skies over the farm.

It had taken one shot. The sound of it had echoed back off the buildings. Those crows had lifted from the copse of trees, wheeling and cawing in the sky for a few minutes before settling back down, as if an execution—even a mercy killing—was only a minor disturbance in their routine.

Afterward, Antti had come out with a spade. We couldn’t just leave Vikram lying there in the field.

*

I prodded Antti awake again. He’d kept it together as we crossed the Urals, but his strength was fading now, and I sensed that we’d drawn on his last, deepest reserves. Tibor’s reserves, I corrected myself. Poor Tibor, dragged into all this, stabbed for a cause that had no bearing on his own life, doomed to die in the empty landscape of northern Siberia.

“We can’t be far from the objective now,” I said, raising my voice as I tried to hold him on the right side of consciousness. “All you need to do is get this thing on the ground, and we can figure out the rest on foot. It’s a frozen wasteland upstream, but things are better here. I’ve seen roads and towns, signs of civilisation. If we can get down in one piece, someone will help us.”

“Should’ve been you,” Antti said, slurring his words like a man on the edge of sleep. “Don’t you see? Should be you, flying this thing. Then you could get us down.”

“Hold on in there.”

I felt like we’d been flying for a day, when in fact it was only six hours since we left the airstrip. It was spring in the northern hemisphere and we were very near the Arctic Circle, so there were still several hours of useful daylight ahead of us. I could see the sea already, bruise-grey on the horizon, hemmed by margins of icy ground, the northernmost fringes of the Eurasian landmass. Even by Kogalym’s standards there wasn’t much to see down here, but compared to the world after the Scouring even these scattered communities were wildly abundant with life and civilisation. There were even airstrips, roads, that we could use, if only Antti kept his head together and got us wheels-down.

“If you get back . . .” he began, before blacking out for a second.

“Antti!”

“If you get back, you have to end this. Find a way. Convince Cho that the experiment can’t continue.”

I strained in my seat, making sure the alloy container was still secure in the cargo webbing behind the passenger seats.

“We’ve got the seeds.”

“I was wrong. I was worried about you setting up a paradox, stopping Vikram and me from coming back . . . even Miguel. But there’s something more important than any of this. Permafrost can’t be allowed to continue beyond the present moment, wherever you are upstream. It’s too dangerous. Whatever’s trying to get through to us . . . whatever’s trying to use us to change things, all of us . . . it has to be stopped. Has to be ended.” He gathered some final strength, his breathing laboured and heavy. “Destroy it, Valentina. Smash the machines so they can’t send anything back.”

I reached out to steady his hand on the control stick, as if that was going to make any difference.

“You have to get us on the ground, Antti.”

He coughed, blood spattering against the console, against the rows of instruments.

Then he slumped in his seat restraint, his eyes fixed on the horizon, but no life remaining in them.

“Antti!”

He’s gone. Gone or going. Just you and me now, Valentina. Just you and me.

At once I felt the plane beginning to pitch, and from somewhere an alarm sounded.

We were going down.

*

The crash was the thing that jolted me back, I think. That, or I retained enough presence of mind to issue the abort command just before we came down. It hadn’t been a totally uncontrolled descent—I’d taken the dual controls and tried to bring us down on a level patch of ground, working the throttle and yoke the way I’d seen Antti doing, and between us Tatiana and I remembered to get the gear down and figured out how to set the flaps for a slower descent. But neither of us were pilots, and it was still a crunch rather than a landing. We were going much too fast, and the icy ground was too broken, so that we snagged on something—a wheel or wing-tip, or even the propeller, digging into a fissure—and we flipped forward, nose-down like a car driving hard into a ditch. I jerked against the restraints, arching my back, but when I relaxed—like a piece of tensioned wood twanging back into shape—it was the dental chair I snapped into, and I was back in the Vaymyr.