Permafrost(5)

I smiled apologetically at him, feeling a vague sense of embarrassment, a feeling that I’d wasted his time, even though it was no fault of my own.

“You’ve got the wrong Valentina Lidova.”

“Your mother was the mathematician Luba Lidova?”

“Yes,” I answered, taken aback.

Cho nodded. “Then I am fairly sure I have the right one.”

*

Antti was right about the cloud cover. After an hour’s flight—nowhere near the range limit of the Cessna Denali—we broke through into clearer skies. Ahead, cresting the horizon, was a brown line of hills, very sharply defined. The GPS device above the instrument panel showed a coloured trace with our planned trajectory. Antti’s eyes switched between the device and the dials and lights on the main console. We were flying a few degrees east of due north, heading into colder air and an eventual meeting with the waters of the Yenisei Gulf, still more than a thousand kilometres beyond us.

He’d said almost nothing since we lifted from the airstrip.

“Are you going to be all right?” I asked, trying to break through his silence.

“Worry about yourself. I’m not the one who had to put a gun to Vikram.”

I’d been pushing the memory of that as far back as it would go, but Antti’s words brought back the event with a shocking clarity, as if strobe flashes were going off in my head. The cold of the fields, the smell of the gun, the crows wheeling the sky, the whimper and exhalation as Vikram went down, taking a few ragged breaths before his last moment.

“It had to be done,” I said, as if that would make it right. “Do you want to tell me what happened back at the airstrip?”

“Miguel was there.”

“Yes, I worked that out for myself.”

“He had a knife, not a gun. I suppose he was worried about creating too much commotion, getting caught afterward, and the paradox noise he’d be sending up the line. A knife was much simpler.” Antti shifted in the pilot’s position, suppressing a groan of discomfort. “He got me, but not too deeply. Nicked a rib, maybe. I don’t think he hit anything vital. I was ready, and I got the knife off him.”

“Then there’s a body back at the airstrip. Which someone’s bound to have discovered by now.”

“There’s a reason I don’t have the radio and transponder switched on,” Antti said. “All they’ll be trying to do is persuade us to turn back. Still, there’s not much the authorities can do now. I hope to have thrown them off the scent with the flight plan, but even if they work out that we’re going north, we’re too fast for anything to get ahead of us.”

There were two levels of difficulty facing us. Hostile operatives, like Miguel, who were trying to act against the interests of Permafrost, and the local authorities, who could cause nearly as much trouble just by doing their jobs.

“They might radio ahead, get someone on the ground waiting for us?”

“There’ll be too many possible landing points to cover. A few hours’ grace is all we need, just enough to get the seeds to safety.” He glanced at me, tension etched into his facial muscles. “We’ll be all right.”

“What do you think got into Miguel?”

He flew on in silence for a few moments, pondering my question. “We’d have had to ask him. But I think it must be the same thing that got into Vikram, near the end. There’s something else trying to get into our heads, something else trying to take over our control structures. I’ve felt it, too. Glimpses, like the first flashes we had going back.”

“Tell me about these flashes, Antti.”

“Glimpses is all they are. I think there’s something going on farther upstream, beyond Permafrost, beyond what we know of the Vaymyr and the Admiral Nerva. Beyond the whole experiment, beyond 2080. Vikram had visions.”

I almost hesitated to ask him, not certain I cared to know the answer.

“What kind?”

“Whiteness. White sky, white land. Machines as big as mountains, floating over everything. Blank white skyscrapers, like squared-off clouds. Nothing else. No people. No cities. No trace that we were ever here, that we ever existed.”

“We started something really bad.”

“A box of snakes,” Antti said, tilting the control stick as we made a course adjustment, following the glowing thread on the GPS screen. “But then, don’t blame Cho for any of this. He was only ever following the trail of crumbs your mother threw down.”

I thought of my mother still being out there, the telephone call, the long silences as she processed the unfamiliar voice on the end of the line. Wondering now if she believed a word of it, or if I’d only succeeded in driving the spike further into her heart.

*

In the morning after my first glimpse of the hospital corridor—the wheelchair and the radiology sign—Cho and I went to speak to the Brothers. There was a direct line from Cho’s office, allowing voice, video and data-transfer, but sometimes it was quicker and easier to speak to them directly. It required a trip across the connecting bridge from the Vaymyr to the Admiral Nerva, then a long walk into the dark bowels of the aircraft carrier, beneath the main hangar deck where we maintained the time-probes.

As we approached them the Brothers gave off a low, powerful humming, like a sustained organ note. Cho had his chin lifted and his hands behind his back, appearing meek and schoolboyish, despite his large stature.