Permafrost(9)

“Something to do with your seeds? A genetics lab?”

Cho reached into a pouch behind the pilot’s position. He drew out a document and passed it to me. It was a scarlet brochure, with a translucent plastic cover. On the front was the World Health logo, followed by a statement in several languages to the effect that the contents were of the highest security rating.

I looked at him doubtfully, before I opened the document.

“Go ahead,” Cho said. “You’re committed now.”

I opened the document.

On the inside page was a logo. It was a six-armed snowflake with three letters in the middle of it.

The letters were:

PRE



I turned over to the next page. It was blank except for three words in Russian:

Permafrost Retrocausal Experiment



I looked at Cho, but his expression gave nothing away. Behind his round-rimmed glasses, his eyes were sharply observant but betraying nothing more.

Once again, I felt as if I was under assessment.

I turned to the next page. There was a very short paragraph, again in Russian.

The Permafrost Retrocausal Experiment aims to use Luba Pairs to achieve past-directed time travel.



I turned to the next page. It became very technical very quickly. There was talk of time-injection, time-probes, Luba Pairs, Lidova noise, grandfathering.

Interspersed with the text were graphs and equations. Some of them I recognised well enough from my mother’s papers, but there were also aspects well outside my own limited expertise, or perhaps recollection.

I went all the way through the document, then turned back to the prefacing paragraph to make sure I wasn’t going mad.

It seemed that I wasn’t.

We flew on for a few more minutes. I debated with myself what to say, and how I might say it. Perhaps it was all still a test, to gauge the limits of my credulity. How stupid would I need to be, to think that any of this was real?

But Cho did not seem like a man predisposed to frivolity.

“You’re attempting time travel.”

“We’re not attempting it,” Cho answered carefully.

“Of course not.”

“We’ve already achieved it.”

*

The sound of engines always made me drowsy. I was daydreaming of being back in Cho’s helicopter, thinking of the first time I’d seen the lights of Permafrost, when a shrill beep pulled me back into Antti’s Cessna. It was the GPS system, alerting us to something. I turned to Antti, expecting him to respond to the notification, but his head was slumped, his chin lolling onto his collar, his eyes slitted. The GPS alert didn’t sound urgent enough to mean that anything was seriously wrong with the plane, but it must have meant that we’d arrived at some waypoint, some moment in our journey when my companion was supposed to take action.

“Antti,” I said.

The plane carried on. The beeping continued. I called out his name again, and when that didn’t work I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow, avoiding the area on the right side of his chest where he’d been wounded. Antti grunted, and shuddered back to consciousness. There was a second of fogginess, then he took action, adjusting the controls and flicking switches, until the twin alarms eventually silenced.

“It was nothing. I just dozed off for a second or two.”

“You were out cold.” I reached out and touched the back of my hand against his forehead. “You’re clammy. What the hell happened back there?”

Antti managed a self-effacing smile. “Maybe he got me a bit deeper than I thought. Nicked more than a rib.”

“You need a hospital. It could be anything: internal bleeding, organ damage, infection. There are still some towns ahead of us. Get us down now, while you’re still able to land safely.”

“I’m all right,” Antti said, straightening up in the seat. “I can do this. We can do this. We have to get to the Yenisei Gulf.”

I nodded, desperately wanting to believe him. What other option did I have? But that tiredness was already showing in his eyes again.

*

It began as a glimmer of yellow and blue lights on the horizon, casting a pastel radiance on the lowlying clouds over the station. The helicopter came in closer, dropping altitude. The lights were arranged in a flattened circle, like a coin seen nearly edge-on, a makeshift community of labs and offices staked down on frozen ground, with a sharp enclosing boundary, like a medieval encampment.

So I thought.

Closer still. There was flat ice under us now: not frozen ground, but frozen water. Gently rising ground to either side of this tongue of ice, the compound built entirely on the flat part.

It was a river, or an inlet, completely frozen.

The enclosing shield was not continuous, I realised. It was made up of the hulls of ships: numerous slab-sided vessels gathered in a ringlike formation. The lights were coming from their superstructures. That was all it was: lots of ships, gathered together, some forming a ring and others contained within it, with one very large ship in the middle.

Cho looked at me, waiting for a reaction, something in his manner suggesting a quiet pride.

I decided to let him speak.

“We had need of secrecy, as well as isolation from sources of electrical and acoustic noise,” he explained. “We also had to be largely independent, with our own power supply. In the end, the most practical solution was to base our experiment around these ships. They were sailed into this inlet when the waters were still navigable, before the freeze got really bad.”