Permafrost(32)

I lay there for ten or twenty seconds, just breathing.

The pen-recorder scratched away. The monitors ticked and bleeped. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Margaret and two of her technicians had been with me when I went under, but between now and then they’d left me alone except for the recording machines, content to let me have my adventure in the past unobserved. Presumably they all had other business to be getting on with. In a few short weeks, for the scientists and engineers of Permafrost, past-directed time travel had gone from an impossibility to a remote but achievable dream . . . then to a repeatable experiment, as commonplace as turning a laser on and off.

I undid the restraints. There was a little dizziness as I left the dental chair, the room swimming, but I steadied myself against one of the monitor racks and searched for my cane.

There it was, resting against a fire-extinguisher, exactly where I’d left it.

Tatiana?

Nothing. Not just yet.

I hoped she was all right.

Still unsteady, feeling as if I might throw up again, just as I’d done on the way to the farmhouse, I went to the panel over the fire-extinguisher and hammered my fist against the emergency alarm. The two-toned distress signal began to whoop, sounding throughout the Vaymyr. I had no doubt that the emergency condition would be picked up and broadcast through all the other ships as well. A bad situation on one of them—a fire or nuclear accident—was bad news for the whole cordon, the entire experiment. Of course there was no emergency, just yet. But I knew the drills and how the majority of the staff had been trained to react.

Outside, in the corridors beyond, amber lights were flashing. In the new light, the usual colours of the icebreaker had become unfamiliar. I got lost momentarily, taking a wrong turn on my way to the administrative level. As I was clacking my way upstairs, some of the staff were already coming down. A few of them would be going to designated technical stations, required to put systems into safe-mode, as well as confirm that the emergency was not a false alarm. Others, deemed less essential, were heading for the emergency escape routes, the bridges, ladders and ice-level doors. I was a hobbling obstruction against the human tide. For the most part I was totally ignored, even by the medical and technical experts who’d helped me in the early stages of becoming a pilot. They just didn’t see me, fighting my way against that fearful, urgent flow.

Vikram did.

He was halfway past me when he snapped around and took my arm in his hand.

“Val! This is an alarm—we’re meant to be going the other way!” Then he must have seen something in my face, some distance or confusion. “My god, were you actually time-embedded when this started? No wonder you’re foggy. Follow me—we have to get to the outer weather door for the muster point!”

I, in turn, looked into his eyes. I thought of the last time we’d shared a moment of communion. It had been outside Antti’s farm, in the field, when I pressed a semiautomatic pistol to his head.

Before I shot and killed him.

Before I buried him in the dirt.

“Get out,” I said. “Just get out, away from the experiment.”

“It’s probably a dry-run, a fire drill . . .”

“Vikram, listen to me.” Still holding my cane, I took his head in mine and pressed our faces together, even as we were bustled and jostled by the staff squeezing past us. “Whatever happens now, never go back. Never let them send you into time. Promise me.”

“I don’t even know if I’ll ever go back!”

“Just don’t. Get away from all this. As far away as you can. I’m ending it.”

I pushed him away. Not unkindly, not without regret, but because I wanted him to follow the others, and I knew he needed that shove. He nearly stumbled down the stairs, but caught himself. For an instant he stared back at me, caught between doubt and some vast dawning comprehension. He was no fool, Vikram. I think in that moment he understood that we must have already crossed paths in the past, and that what I had seen was a truth too hard to behold.

I pushed on, the flow of evacuees becoming a trickle, until it felt as if I had the Vaymyr to myself. I reached Cho’s office and let myself in without knocking at the door. By all that was proper, Cho should have left with the others. But I could not see him abandoning the icebreaker that quickly, not until he had confirmation that the emergency was genuine.

He was at his desk, papers before him, rolling some heavy thing between his fingers.

“I thought you were still time-embedded, Miss Lidova.”

The alarm was still sounding, the amber lights still flashing, but when I closed the door behind me his office became a bubble of comparative normality, with only a warning light going on and off next to his desk telephone.

“It has to end, Director Cho.”

He absorbed my statement with a perfect equanimity, neither raising his voice nor making any move to leave his seat.

“Are you responsible for the present emergency condition?”

“I set if off, yes. But only to begin the evacuation that’s going to happen anyway, the one you’re going to help me bring about.”

“I would need some justification for such an action. Routine drills are one thing, but the operation always continues. If too many of us fled the ships, there’s no telling the damage it could do.”

“Damage is exactly what we want.” I moved closer to him, leaning over the desk. “We made an error, Cho. A terrible mistake. We considered the past history of the time-probes, all the way up to the present. But we neglected to think about the future.”