Permafrost(38)

Yes. I see it.

Is it far for you?

No.

Her reply, when it came, was weaker than at any previous time.

Nor me. But I need to rest a moment.

I made it to the shark-faced rock. I crouched into its wind shadow, kneeling until I was nearly on the ground. Tiny wind vortices played around my feet, ice particles gyring like stars in orbit. A kilometre and a half away—two if I were feeling generous—the fleet was now in the full grip of the conflagration. The carrier was a blazing pyre and fires had broken out in several of the peripheral vessels. It would not be long now, I knew.

I looked down, my eye caught by some glimmer of form and darkness showing through from under the snow, only a few metres from the shark-rock.

That was when I knew I’d reached her.

I forced myself to stand, took out Cho’s ice-axe, and worked my way to the area of ground where I believed she still lay. I knelt down, ignoring the cold as it worked its way through my trousers and into my knees. I scuffed the top layer of snow away with scything movements of the axe-head, then began to chip at the firmer ice beneath. It was rocklike and glassy, harder than frozen water had any right to be. For every shard that I dislodged, the next strike would see the ice deflecting the axe. I redoubled my efforts, conscious that I had to overcome the ice before the cold took its own toll on me.

The axe slipped from gloves. My grip was becoming less sure.

Valentina.

I paused in my excavation.

Yes, Tatiana?

I’m feeling better now. I just need to rest for a while. Just need to close my eyes for a few minutes.

I began to hack at the ice with renewed, furious purpose, lifting the axe high and swinging down hard. I could see the outline of her body clearly now, still clothed and presumably adequately preserved despite the decades that separated her death from the present moment. There were two things under the ice, though. About half a metre from her upper body—where an arm reached out—was a lighter, more compact form. I shifted my efforts in the direction of this object, the ice cracking away in clean, sugarlike shards, until the axe touched something just as hard, but with an entirely different resonance: the chink of metal on metal, rather than metal on ice.

Hardly taking a breath between swings now, I began to expose the case. I chipped away at the ice around the sides, until I could wedge the axe down between the ice and the case and apply leverage. Finally, something gave. I worked the axe farther along, the ice cracking and crunching as I forced it to surrender its prize. When it eventually came free, the case dislodged so suddenly that I tumbled onto my back, the case coming after me and smacking me hard in the chest.

I must have groaned.

Val?

I’ve got it. I’ve got the seed case.

Open it.

No—not until we’re somewhere safe.

Her voice—her presence—was faint now, little more than a skirl on the wind, a thing that might be as imagined as it was real.

No—you open it. For me.

To begin with the case wouldn’t open. It was sealed, and the security readout was dead. But I scuffed away the frost and kept jabbing at the keys, over and over, until they showed a faint red flicker. There was still some power in it somewhere, still some clever redundancy, even after fifty-two years.

I entered the code Antti had told me:

Two, zero, eight, zero.

The case clicked, and I heaved open the lid. The second case was inside, just as it had been in the farmhouse. The same fogged window, the stoppered glass capsules within, each bar coded with a promise for the future. I stared at them long enough to trust that they were real, not phantoms, and then I closed up the case again.

I reached into my pocket for my gloves, and was drawing one of them out when the wind snatched at it and it spun away, carried out of sight behind the shark-rock.

I put on the remaining glove. I thought of our theories of time, my mother’s block-crystal model. Just as the dying aircraft carrier had sent a shudder through the permafrost beneath me, so our time interventions sent acoustic ripples scurrying up and down time’s lattice. Shivers in the block structure of time, ripples and murmurs, faint acoustic echoes, the dying hiss of paradox noise, the sounds of an old, old edifice resettling, and no more than that.

All our busy, desperate interventions no more than the scurrying of rats in the lowest crypt of the cathedral.

Valentina.

Yes, Tatiana?

Did we do it?

Yes. I think we did. I think the seeds will be all right—good enough to help. But it was you, not me. You did all the hard work, in getting them to us.

I looked back at the burning ships. The fire had reached them all by now. The computer systems should be completely inoperable, the data connections shrivelled, the processors molten. It was impossible for Tatiana and me still to be in contact. And yet, I thought, there was causation lag. Some part of the present might not have adjusted to the changing circumstances, and that mismatch was still allowing signal continuity, albeit at this faint and decreasing level.

But it would not be long now. The change fronts would be converging on this moment like twin avalanches, racing in from the future and the past.

Soon she would be gone.

I thought of going after the glove, but there was something more useful to be done now. I scooped up the axe again, and resumed working away at the boundaries of the body. I freed her hand, creating a bowl-shaped depression around it, enough space to slip my own cold fingers around hers.