They continued upwards. Meanwhile, the mist closed in and Saskia lost sight of the valley floor. Gaus climbed ahead. When he reached the end of his rope, he would rest and belay Saskia as she climbed after him. They continued in this manner up crags and through gullies until the terrace was in sight.
How much longer do I have, Toaster?
‘As a functional human being, not long.’
Saskia had reached Gaus’s position beneath the terrace. This section of the north face was a few degrees from the vertical. A sharp wind was blowing. He pushed his goggles upwards and she did the same. Ice had formed in his nostrils and on his scarf.
The terrace was a platform cut into the face about fifteen metres above them. From this angle, all Saskia could see was part of its iron rail, wide enough for several dozen people to enjoy the view. The great blank wall of the north face proper could be seen above it.
Gaus looked from the terrace to Saskia. He smiled. Their rope was belayed over an arête. Without a karabiner, she knew, the friction of the rock would work on the strands. The major part of their rope was coiled in a diagonal between Gaus’s shoulder and hip, but there was at least three metres loose about his boot. His rucksack was stuffed into a gap on his left along with his axes. Saskia, to his right, opened her mouth to speak, but her words were interrupted by a sudden rain of rock and ice.
She was able to move close against the face. Gaus was more exposed. A brownish mass of packed snow exploded across his shoulder and pushed him sideways. Before Saskia could reach for him, he had tilted out over the exposure. His face was determined, not panicked, but he was too far to grip the rock. As he fell, he took a huge breath.
Saskia had time to sink in her stance. She looked up at the arête over which their rope passed. Gaus was not a large man. Shorter than her, and only a little heavier. The friction would be enough as long as the rope held.
Between her feet, she saw the snaking, loose rope above Gaus snap straight. It did not have the elastic property of synthetic material. Gaus let out an animal growl of strain. Saskia did likewise and felt herself lighten, pulled and squeezed by the rope, but she held the belay. Gaus’s second impact against the face was less energetic but more damaging. He seemed to fold flat. When he swung out again, there was blood around his ears and nose. His hat was tumbling into the mist. His hands clutched the rope and his feet peddled, desperate to reach the security of the rock, pathetic as a man dropped from the gallows.
Saskia’s sense of unease peaked. She turned to look up the wall. Ten metres above her, she saw a head and shoulders outlined against the snow. Whoever it was wore a fedora and was leaning out from the edge of the terrace rail, tied by a single rope, and was looking directly at her.
The Georgian Highlander. The Pockmarked One.
Soso.
She understood. The sudden violence of ice and rock had not been accidental. Soso must have dropped a heavy stone against the face.
Saskia looked at Gaus. As he got the toe of one boot into a crack, she hissed, ‘Agent Intemporal!’
Gaus turned his head upwards. His expression was sleepy. He saw him notice Soso; watched his eyes widen and his vitality return. To capture Gaus’s attention, she drew the lancet from her hair and held it to the rope. In a low but clear voice, she said, ‘When were you going to kill me? Once I’d told you what I know about Meta?’
Gaus looked at her as though she were insane. But the coldness of Saskia’s certainty ended his game before he played it. The moment sparked: he understood that she understood.
‘When that man drops another rock,’ he said, ‘the debris will strike us both from the face. Your position is too precarious. Let me secure myself.’
‘Tell me everything,’ she said. The tense coils of rope around her chest made it difficult to take a breath. ‘Start with why you killed Jenner.’
‘Let me get secured, woman,’ he said. The whiteness of his knuckles contrasted with the blood on the rope.
‘Yesterday evening, when I put on my spectacles at the doctor’s surgery, they identified you as an individual with neural augmentations. You were quick to disable them when you realised that the spectacles were anachronistic, but not quick enough. I confirmed my suspicions shortly afterwards by having you tell Miss Schild your address on the pretext of funding her medical degree. With your neural implants disabled, you were forced to look at the card itself. The real Gaus would never need reminding of his home address.’
Saskia felt the rope slide upwards before she caught it. Her grip was weakening. Gaus tilted outwards.
‘No,’ he gasped. ‘Not like this.’
‘When Pasha contacted the embassy,’ she said, ‘you intercepted the telegram. You flagged down Mr Jenner and killed him. Only someone with augmentations and training would be able to kill an armed and careful man like Mr Jenner. I don’t know why you spared Pasha. Perhaps you were interrupted. Either way, you knew that Pasha had sent his telegram after speaking to me, so it was important to locate my body and destroy any incriminating material that might be stored nearby. You used your lock picks to enter the mortuary. You opened my locker to view the body and understood, through a physical scan, that I was a Meta agent and about to regain consciousness.’
Gaus shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. Saskia had to give him full marks for his performance.
‘It is not what you think.’
‘Standard procedure for an Agent Singular during CODA is to contact the local Agent Intemporal,’ she continued. ‘You decided that the best way to find out more about my mission was to replace Gaus. You had to hurry, though. That’s why you didn’t close the locker properly. And that’s why you knocked over the vase of chrysanthemums in the reception; you were searching its drawers for paperwork. It also clears up why I could not find my paperwork in the administrator’s desk, and yet it took you a matter of moments. You were carrying them with you.’
‘Damn it all, if you thought I was your enemy, why would you let me come this far?’
‘I have a certain faith in my mission.’ She looked at the rope and her lancet. ‘You’re wondering if I’m going to kill you. The real question is how much I weigh your life against my success.’
In Russian, Gaus said, ‘You cannot succeed, Saskia Maria Brandt, Meta Agent Singular.’
She looked at him. His expression had changed. Saskia saw no fear there. Only faith to rival hers. This, she understood, was the true man.
‘You are a Meta agent on an orthogonal mission,’ Saskia said. She could not hide the dread in her voice. ‘Am I correct?’
He laughed. ‘I know all about Meta. But I don’t work for it.’
‘Then for whom?’
‘The people, comrade.’ He indicated the open air with a flick of his head. ‘This vastness is nothing. Think of all the realities, all the permutations of choice. Where I come from, the man above us is the greatest human being of our age, and has been our living father for almost one hundred and fifty years.’
Saskia remembered well the theoretics lectures delivered to her Recruitment Clade. The realities were indeed infinite and beyond understanding. It was extraordinary, but credible, that Gaus had come to her from a reality where the Soviet Union, or some version of it, had maintained its grip into the twenty-first century, perhaps helmed by an undying dictator.
‘And you have been sent to protect him?’
‘Not just him. All the hims; all the possibilities. I have come to this reality to preserve the life of the man above so that the revolution can spread further.’
Saskia shook her head. Those theoretics lectures had been clear on something else. Nobody could change the past. Some physicists called it the Novikov Self-consistency Principle. Whoever travelled backwards in time became a part of events. Nothing and no-one was privileged to escape the fundamental determinism of the universe. At least, Saskia thought, that had to be true of people who had travelled back to a point in their own past. Did the same logic hold for those who entered a universe from a different one altogether? She could not answer this. Either her failing brain chip had undermined her concentration, or the question was unanswerable.