“Well done, Cho,” I said, aloud this time.
Was he a good man?
Yes—he was. A very good man. He made great sacrifices, as well as great mistakes, but all along he was only ever trying to make things better. Right until the end.
The debris was starting to come down. The larger chunks fell within the perimeter of the cordon, but some smaller items were travelling farther, sending thuds through the ice with each impact. Now I watched as flames licked up from the ruined deck of the Admiral Nerva, rippling in the distortion of a heat mirage.
My vision slipped, becoming double. Double tracts of ice, double rocks, double hills, the more distant things nearly fused, but the nearer ones split apart, like a pair of stereoscopic images of the same scene, but taken from slightly different angles.
I turned back to face the ships of Permafrost. I’d gained some elevation by then and could see almost the complete cordon, including the lower parts of the Vaymyr and the other ancillary craft.
Soot filled the sky. The Admiral Nerva was fully ablaze now, a beacon set alight at the middle of the cordon. It formed an oblong orange mass, belching smoke and flames into the air. The superstructure was a tower of fire. The connecting bridges were either burning or had already collapsed. The outer ships were dark forms superimposed on this brightness, like iron screens stationed around a hearth. Sooner or later the flames would touch them as well, I was certain. The ice might begin to melt, allowing the ships to refloat, but it would be much too late for any of them to escape, assuming they were still capable of independent navigation. I did not think that likely. I think they had been brought here to serve one purpose and then sink slowly into the ice. If they succeeded, the world would have no further use for such behemoths. If they failed, the same consideration applied.
People were still fleeing the outer ships, leaving by doors cut into the hulls at the same level as the ice, or making their way down swaying ladders and rope bridges. A hurried, penguinlike exodus of engineers and scientists and support staff, hundreds of them, spilling away from the cordon in all directions. Some of them must have ignored the initial evacuation order, delaying the moment when they abandoned the great work.
Some large explosion erupted from the side of the carrier. A brainlike mass of molten sparks billowed skyward. Another followed, muffled because it came from deep within the hull, but unquestionably the most powerful so far. The entire bulk of the carrier shuddered, and I felt a ghost of that shudder pass through the ice beneath me, as one hundred thousand tonnes of metal and fuel shivered against its imprisoning hold.
The landscape turned double again, then snapped back to sharpness.
Tatiana?
She came through faintly, it seemed to me—as if the two of us had moved from adjoining rooms to some farther separation.
Still here. But I feel like we’re drifting apart.
I paused to rest my hands against my thighs, feeling myself close to exhaustion. How far had I come? Scarcely a kilometre, if that. Double vision again. The landscape, spatially and temporally displaced. Two kinds of coldness, two distinct varieties of tiredness—each severe but one much deeper and more profound than the other.
We’re seeing nearly the same view . . . means we can’t be far from each other. Can you go on?
For a while.
The glimpses came less frequently, and with less duration, more like strobe-flashes than prolonged episodes of shared perception. The Brothers were gone now, but while they had been with us, and willing to assist our efforts rather than hinder them, they had played a vital role in defeating paradox noise. Now we were at the mercy of the simpler algorithms executing in the backup computers, and they were much less successful at maintaining contact.
Do you see that rock ahead of us, Val, like a shark’s head jutting out of the ice?
It was a boulder the size of a car, with an eyelike pock and an angled fissure down the length of it that made it resemble a grinning shark.
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 ai
rcraft 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.
I squeezed her hand, and looked to the distant clarity of the hills.
“I’m here,” I said.
About the Author
© Barbara Bella
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS was born in Wales in 1966. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy. From 1991 until 2007, he lived in the Netherlands, where he was employed by the European Space Agency as an astrophysicist. He is now a full-time writer.
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Books by Alastair Reynolds
Revelation Space
Chasm City
Redemption Ark
Absolution Gap
Century Rain
Pushing Ice
The Prefect
House of Suns
Terminal World
Blue Remembered Earth
On the Steel Breeze
Poseidon’s Wake
Revenger
Elysium Fire
The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter)
Harvest of Time (Doctor Who)
COLLECTIONS AND ORIGINAL NOVELLAS
Zima Blue and Other Stories
Galactic North
Deep Navigation
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
Beyond the Aquila Rift
Slow Bullets
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Books by Alastair Reynolds
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PERMAFROST
Copyright © 2019 by Alastair Reynolds
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Cover photographs by Tim Robinson/Arcangel Images and mahos/Shutterstock.com
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
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ISBN 978-1-250-30355-4 (ebook)
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First Edition: March 2019
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