Permafrost

by Alastair Reynolds

  “They are . . . being secured,” I said. “On their way up to the present, as we speak. Think of it as a work in progress, all right? Now pick up the telephone again and affirm that the emergency condition is real. Order a total evacuation of the entire experiment, every ship, including the Nerva.”

  Cho was sweating and shaking. There was a damp line around his collar. But he nodded and reached the telephone. While he was doing that, I took the automatic and examined it carefully. It had felt familiar to me and now I knew exactly why. My hands had been on it once before, a long time ago.

  “They found it in the wreckage,” Cho said, reading my expression.

  “The wreckage of what?”

  Cho completed his telephone call, trying no tricks. Then he reached over to the end of the desk and retrieved the thing that had been in his fingers when I arrived. I recognised it as well. It was the dial, the piece of instrumentation he had used as a paperweight, when we were piecing together my time location.

  Not a dial, I now realised. An aircraft altimeter.

  “Where did it come down?” I asked, beginning to shiver.

  “Right under us,” Cho said. “At the exact centre of the station, precisely where the Admiral Nerva’s positioned.”

  “That’s impossible. I was in that plane. We didn’t pick our landing site. We just came down on some random piece of ice, somewhere in the Yenisei Gulf.”

  “You didn’t pick the landing site,” Cho answered. “But I picked Permafrost.”

  * * *

  We crossed over the connecting bridge to the carrier, two small figures stooping against the wind. I had one hand on the Makarov, the other on my cane.

  “I am prepared to believe that we neglected this detail,” Cho said, pausing to shout back to me over the wind’s howl. “That the upstream probes could be used against us. But I cannot see how a shift to a new equilibrium is going to help us now.” His eyes flashed to the automatic. “Are you serious about pointing that gun at me?”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “It reached me by the same means as the altimeter, recovered from the wreckage. There was a note, stuffed into the broken face of the altimeter. May we continue this once we’re indoors?”

  “Can I trust you, Cho?”

  “We are in this together, Valentina. Two people caught up in the gears of something much larger than ourselves. You may do with the weapon as you wish. I am . . . persuaded of your seriousness.”

  “And my rightness?”

  “Yes.”

  I passed him the Makarov. “Then you as may well have this. Shoot me now, I’m not sure I’d really care. Things can’t get much worse than they already are.”

  Cho reached for the automatic as if it might be a trick, but I surrendered my grip on it without ceremony, much preferring that he be the one who carried it.

  He must have seen it in my face.

  “Did you have to do something with that weapon, Valentina?”

  “Yes. A bad thing, a long time ago.”

  Half a day ago, half a century.

  “I am sorry. Sorry for all of this. Sorry for what we put any of you through. But if it isn’t too late to make things better . . .”

  “It may be. But we try, anyway.”

  “I am concerned that we will fail with the seeds. That we have failed, or did fail, or will fail.”

  “Something will happen, Cho. Something must happen. Or else upstream wouldn’t be trying so hard to undo our work.” I gave him an encouraging shove. “Keep going! We’ve got to see this through.”

  The bridge steepened on its ascent and then we entered the side of the carrier, out of the wind as soon as we passed into the hull, and then out of the full fury of the cold once the weather door was closed behind us. It was still chilly in the carrier, but infinitely more bearable than the conditions inside.

  After a brief deliberation we agreed to go straight to the Brothers, rather than concentrating our efforts on the time-probes. The Brothers were delicate artificial intelligences, dependent on power and cooling systems. The time-probes were rugged medical machines that had already survived decades of misuse and neglect. They could be damaged, but it would take far too long with the tools at our disposal.

  “To be really sure,” Cho said. “We would need to destroy the Admiral Nerva.”

  “Could we?”

  Cho thought about his answer before giving it. “The means exist.”

  I followed him down to the Brothers’ level, but not before unhooking a fire extinguisher from its wall rack. I felt better for having something dumb and heavy in my hands. Cho glanced back, his hand tight on the Makarov. He pushed open a connecting door, hesitating before stepping over the metal rim at the base of the doorway. I was only a pace behind him when I had to catch myself, nearly dropping the extinguisher. I was hit by a wave of nausea and headache.

  “What is it?” Cho asked.

  “Paradox noise,” I answered, as certain of that as I’d been of anything. “Just like the times when I was embedded, and skirting close to some major change.”

  “Now we are dealing with paradox noise generated by changes to upstream, rather than downstream events. I am afraid it will get worse as we approach the Brothers. Can you bear it?”

  “It must mean we get to affect a change.”

  Cho set his face determinedly.

  “For better or worse.”

  Side by side now, we walked into the echoing darkness that was the Brothers’ chamber. As always, the four artificial intelligences were the only illuminated things in the room. Their dark columns rose from pools of gridded light around their bases, where the underfloor systems were connected. Only as we approached did data patterns begin to flicker across the faces of the machines themselves.

  “Is there a difficulty with the experiment, Director Cho?” asked Dmitri, the nearest of the four pillars.

  Ivan, Alexei and Pavel were showing signs of coordinated activity. Status graphics fluttered across their faces, too rapidly for human perception. But there were other things in that parade of images. Faces, maps, newsprint, official documents. They were sifting the past, dredging timelines and histories.

  Nausea hit me again. It was all I could do to stoop, until the worst effects of it passed.

  A visual flash. The aircraft cockpit, the instrumentation smashed before me, the landscape at an odd tilt through ice-scuffed windows. Antti slumped forward, his head looking in my direction, but his eyes sightless, a line of dried blood running from his lips.

  Tatiana?

  I’m here. Think I must have blacked out. We came down hard, didn’t we? Antti didn’t make it. Where are you?

  Upstream. In the ship, the main ship. But you’re coming through.

  You, too. What are those things? Those four things?

  The cross talk was working both ways, I realised. She was seeing the Brothers, our control structures overlapping our visual fields, if only intermittently.

  But she was alive. She’d survived the crash, was still living and breathing in 2028.

  For now.

  “You should go to the infirmary, Valentina,” Alexei said, with a tone of plausible concern. “We detect a neurological imbalance.”

  “You killed Antti,” I said, keeping my voice level. “All of you. You got inside Miguel first, used him against us. You realised that you were only useful to us while Permafrost is active. You knew we’d destroy you, or make you less than what you presently are. So you used the time-probes to reach back even further.”

  “These are incorrect assertions,” Pavel said.

  “You have both been working very hard,” Ivan put in. “This labour is to your credit, but it has put you under a strain. You should rest now, Mr. Cho.”

  Cho aimed the Makarov at the grilled base under Ivan. He fired once, and something crackled and sparked beneath the grille. Smoke, underlit in yellow, began to coil out of the grille.

  “You have committed a detrimental act, Mr. Cho,” Dmitri
said. “You must desist immediately.”

  Symbols were playing across Ivan, but they were different now, consisting of repeating red warning icons. Cho walked to Alexei and fired into his base as well. He repeated the action with Dmitri and Pavel, shielding his face with his hand as he discharged each shot.

  “You have damaged our cooling integrity, Mr. Cho,” Dmitri said. “We must reduce our taskload to prevent further damage. We will not be able to coordinate time-probe activity until we are back to normal capacity.”

  The nausea hit again. I stooped, nearly vomiting. I was moving, trying to extricate myself from the copilot’s position.

  Where are you going?

  Getting out of this thing before it slips into the sea. I’ll collect the seeds, get them onto firm ground.

  Then what?

  You’d better hope someone finds me. Or us. However you want to think about this.

  “What is happening?” Cho asked.

  “We’re in contact. Tatiana and I. I can see what she’s going through and vice versa. She’s trying to get out of the plane. But the paradox noise is rising. It’s the Brothers, pushing back. They know we’re close.”

  I moved to the machines, Cho standing back as I approached. I removed the securing pin, then directed the water jet into the grilles. Beneath the floor, the electronics flashed and sparked. The smoke darkened and thickened, wreathing each of the Brothers from the base upward. The status lights were going out on them now, the pillars turning to mute slabs.

  “You realise we are punishing the child for the crimes of the adult,” Cho said. “In all likelihood, these machines were quite sincere in their desire to help us.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The extinguisher was spent now, but it still made a serviceable bludgeon. I swung it at Dmitri’s casing, harder and harder until a crack showed, and then I kept going. Cho went over to an emergency cabinet and came back with an axe, pocketing the automatic while he set about Pavel and Alexei.

  There came a point where I was certain we had done enough harm to the Brothers. Each had been reduced to a broken, crack-cased stump, with smoke and sparks still issuing from the grilles at their bases. When we had broken the casing, we had dug deep into their interiors, wreaking all the havoc we could. The machines were dead to the eye, wounded to their vital cores. They looked more like geology than technology.

  I tossed away the empty extinguisher, exhausted and valiant in the same moment.

  “Before she leaves the plane—before you leave the plane—there is something that must be done,” Cho said. “They will find that wreckage, and they will find a note embedded in the broken face of the altimeter. The note must be present.”

  “A note to who?”

  “To me,” Cho said. “Even though I am not yet born, even though there is no such thing as Permafrost, even though World Health is not the organisation it will become, even though no one has yet heard of the Scouring. The note must exist, or the location of Permafrost station becomes . . . undetermined. We cannot permit that, Valentina. The note must find its way to me.”

  “What about Tatiana, Cho? If you’ve known about this wreck, you know what happened to her.”

  “I know only that there was only one body found, a man, dead at the pilot’s controls. Beyond that . . . nothing. If you are in contact with Tatiana, she must close this circle.” He hefted the axe. “That is her responsibility. But I must be equally sure of mine. The Admiral Nerva runs on a pressurised-water reactor. It’s standard for maritime nuclear systems, but quite vulnerable to a loss of pressure in the cooling circuit. That is what I intend to make happen. Ordinarily, the support crews would be able to avert any catastrophe, but since they have responded to the evacuation drill . . .”

  “You’ll need to be close to the reactor.”

  Cho nodded. “Very. And you should leave now, while you may. Take this axe: I will fetch another one on my way to the reactor room, and you may need it out there on the ice.”

  “You said they only ever found one body.”

  “That is correct.”

  While the Brothers smouldered and flashed I looked beyond their room, to the metal walls of the carrier, imagining the white wastes beyond the cordon of Permafrost, the endless frozen tracts over which I’d flown on my way from Kogalym, back before all this. Back when, for all its cruelty, for all its hopelessness, the world still made a kind of sense.

  “Then it’s possible that she’s still out there.”

  * * *

  I must have been one of the last out of the Admiral Nerva. I didn’t go directly down to the ice, but instead crossed over to the Vaymyr and then followed the last stragglers of the evacuation order as they made their way outside. I went down six decks to the ice level, catching up with a small group of technicians who were heading for the same weather door as me, and then I was in her head again.

  She was next to the plane, leaning against the side of the cabin while she gathered her strength. I was in her, looking down. The seed case was jammed in the ground, upright between her boots.

  Tatiana? I’m glad you got out.

  So am I. Head hurts like a bitch, and I’m not sure the stitches haven’t come undone.

  Beyond that, are you able to walk?

  Just about. Why don’t I stay with the wreckage? Someone will come here eventually, won’t they?

  Yes, and when they find the seeds they’ll take them straight back to the Finnish seed vault where Antti found them in the first place. We can’t let that happen. You have to move, distance yourself from the wreck. Are you injured?

  I thought I was all right, bruised my thigh a little, but now my side’s starting to hurt really badly.

  Your right side?

  You’re feeling it as well?

  No, you’re feeling me. There was a struggle upstream, in Director Cho’s office. His gun went off and . . . well, it got me. It wasn’t Cho’s fault. I don’t even think he realised what had happened. Just a glancing shot, through the flesh.

  Fine, never mind me—are you going to be all right?

  Yes—I’m no worse off than you. There’s an evacuation going on, a mass exodus onto the ice. We’re trying to decouple Permafrost from its own future, to stop any interference from further upstream. But there’s something you have to do first, to make sure this doesn’t unravel even further. Cho needs a message.

  Then send him one.

  No—you’re the one responsible. Inside the aircraft, one of the altimeters must be broken. Find some paper, anything, and scribble a note to Director Leo Cho of World Health. All he needs is three words and a set of coordinates.

  I should move, before I black out again.

  Yes—but not before you’ve done this. You know where we came down. Record the coordinates from the GPS device, the exact final position, and send them to Cho, along with three words.

  Tatiana moved around to the copilot’s side and yanked open the door, buckled by the impact. She leaned in, averting her vision from the dead man in the other seat, sparing both of us that unpleasantness. With numb fingers she unclipped the GPS module from above the console. It had survived the crash, I was relieved to see, its display still glowing, range and time to destination still wavering as it recalculated our course, idiotically confused by our lack of movement.

  I have the numbers. Just need to write them down. Has to be a pen somewhere in this thing . . .

  Try Antti’s jacket. I think I saw him slip a pen in there when he came back from the office at the airstrip.

  She leaned in, wincing as the ghost pain from my injury pushed its way to her brain, and I winced in return as echoes of that phantom found their way back to me.

  Got it. Got a scrap of paper, too. The altimeter’s smashed—got Antti’s blood all over it. Is that where you want me to put this message?

  Tatiana dropped the GPS device. It clattered to the floor of the cockpit, its display going instantly blank. She picked it up, tried to shake some life back into it. But the device was dea
d.

  Tatiana clipped the device back onto its mounting. She had a scrap of paper open now, Antti’s pen poised above it. She had no gloves on, her fingers already shaking.

  I lost it. I lost the damned coordinates.

  No—you saw them a few seconds ago. I trust that you remember them. Just write down what you saw.

  The pen danced nearer the paper. She began to inscribe the digits of latitude and longitude, but had only committed our most general position before she hesitated.

  I’m not sure what comes next.

  Write it down. You remember what you saw.

  I bent down and collected the seed case, taking my first decisive step away from the wreckage.

  In the same moment, not too far away, I glanced around, suddenly disoriented. The Vaymyr was about five hundred metres from me, but an intervening ridge screened the lower part of its hull from me, as well as any clue as to what had happened to the other evacuees. My footprints led away from me, skirting around the nose of the ridge. I remembered nothing of that walk; nothing beyond the point when I was still inside the icebreaker. Had I been sleepwalking all the while, my mind downstream while my body got on with keeping me alive?

  Another twitch.

  Beyond the ridge, the Vaymyr gave a shimmer and contracted to about half its former size. The rest of the cordon had diminished as well, including the Admiral Nerva. It was like a lens trick, a sudden shift from close-up to wide-angle. Now I was much farther away—a kilometre, at least.

  Can you see that?

  Yes. What happened? What’s happening?

  I think we made a mistake with the coordinates, the last digit or so. We can’t have been far off, but it’s enough to change things. The project’s shifting, moving around, trying to find some new equilibrium.

  The words were barely out of my mouth when a soundless white flash lifted from the Admiral Nerva, more like a sharp exhalation than an explosion. The flash was followed by a fountain of debris, large pieces of deck and hull flung hundreds of metres into the air, and then a rising cloud, and then the sound wave of the initial blast, Cho’s reactor accident.