The Arrows of Time

by Greg Egan

  Ramiro waited for the satisfying punctuation of the bell, but then he realised that he’d rushed through his final words too quickly and left himself with time to fill. ‘For example,’ he extemporised, ‘decisions about births and child-rearing are as difficult as any we face, but it won’t take prying clerks to disclose our final choices to us once we hear from a child whose very existence had been in doubt.’ He caught a look of bafflement on one woman’s face, and an expression of outright hostility on another’s. ‘It’s not that a message like that need be unwelcome, but if we flatten the deliberation process, then just as with the vote—’

  The timer interrupted him. Ramiro punched it, then slunk backwards.

  Agata took centre stage, pausing just long enough to let Ramiro’s awkwardness linger and become fixed in everyone’s minds. ‘If you don’t want to read the result of some future referendum, I’m sure you won’t have to,’ she declared. ‘And if mere rumours of the result prove to be too hard to avoid, they could always be camouflaged with competing rumours. People could choose to learn the true result in advance from some trusted informant if they wished, but those who didn’t would end up hearing a range of false claims as well, with no way to distinguish between them.’

  Ramiro waited for someone in the audience to ridicule this inane proposal, but they let it pass without complaint. Maybe they all liked the idea of taking advantage of their idealistic neighbours, who’d be wrapped in shrouds of scrupulously balanced, government-supplied misinformation.

  ‘This system could vastly improve our safety,’ Agata contended, ‘as Ramiro and everyone else acknowledges. We can deal with the privacy issues, and the political ones: your vote will always be your own to cast, and you’ll have the choice of knowing the outcome in advance or not, as you wish. But you don’t need to take my word for any of this. The present vote is merely for a year’s trial in which we can discover what the real problems are – and if, in the end, you find that they outweigh the advantages you’ll be free to change your mind and vote to have the system dismantled.

  ‘If we look beyond Ramiro’s fear that in this maze of information we might inadvertently stumble on some unwelcome facts about our lives – most of which would be no more harmful to us than a friend’s reminiscence about a youthful misadventure that we’d prefer to forget – we’ll see something far less petty and mundane. Many of us have heirlooms from the day of the launch: diaries, or letters from mothers to their children, or even just stories passed down unwritten. In this mountain of photonic documents from the future we could find our descendants’ stories of the reunion. Then we’ll all have a chance to be part of the Peerless’s return, in a way that we never imagined before.’

  As the timer sounded, the audience cheered – some sections more loudly than others, but it was the first real response they’d offered all evening.

  Agata paused to acknowledge the applause, then exited gracefully. Ramiro was stung. How could his case not be obvious to everyone? What hadn’t he said that would have made it clearer?

  Tarquinia approached and drew him back into the moss-lit side room. ‘You did a good job,’ she said.

  ‘They loved her,’ Ramiro replied. He could barely make out Tarquinia’s face as his eyes adjusted from the stage lights. ‘Didn’t you hear?’

  ‘It was the end of the debate, the applause was for both of you.’

  She sounded as if she almost believed that, but Ramiro remained despondent. ‘What if I’ve lost it for us?’

  Tarquinia hummed irritably. ‘You didn’t do as badly as you think. And for anyone you didn’t convince, there are five more debates to come!’

  ‘But if people here have made up their minds they won’t want to hear it all rehashed.’

  ‘You put a strong case,’ Tarquinia insisted. ‘You stumbled with the timing, that’s all.’

  Ramiro could tell that she was beginning to find his pessimism wearisome. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have faced that crowd without it.’

  ‘I couldn’t have faced that crowd at all,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘But this way I can still tell my children that I played a part.’

  ‘A part in what, though?’ Ramiro joked. ‘Victory or farce?’

  Tarquinia said, ‘Let’s not rule anything out. Last time we worked together, we managed both at once.’

  10

  Medoro had promised that he’d bring Agata food for her vigil, but when she spotted him approaching the voting hall she saw that he’d also brought his whole family.

  Medoro and Serena left two baskets of loaves with her then everyone went in to vote. Agata felt a little foolish now, camped beside the moss-red wall with her supplies, no longer able to pass herself off as someone merely waiting for the queues to thin. She could have watched the results accumulating from anywhere in the mountain, but it was the sight of voters coming and going in the flesh that made the experience real for her. At home she would have felt as if the whole thing were some kind of simulation, with a random-number generator filling out the counts.

  Gineto emerged first and squeezed his way through the crowd towards Agata. ‘I can’t say I just made you happy,’ he warned her.

  ‘Let’s not have an argument,’ Agata pleaded. ‘I’ve voted, you’ve voted; there’s not much point in us trying to change each other’s minds now.’

  ‘The whole thing’s so unnecessary, though,’ Gineto brooded. ‘We got through the turnaround safely. What threat are we facing? In the home cluster’s terms we’re just retracing our old path, and the Hurtlers are completely tame now. We could have had a quiet life, waiting patiently to arrive back home. But no, we had to find something to argue about.’

  Agata did have some sympathy for this view. ‘We can’t undo the whole dispute now, but at least this should settle it. Believe me, I’m not going to argue with the result.’

  ‘Nor will I,’ Gineto replied, ‘but we all saw what happened last time.’

  Agata glanced at the screen above the entrance; the pro-system vote was lagging by about a twelfth of the count. If Gineto wanted her to start looking for a downside to victory, she’d need to have victory itself in sight.

  Serena and Vala joined them. Agata had tied the food baskets to a guide rope where it met the wall behind her, and Serena wasted no time in opening them.

  ‘I hope this isn’t rude, but I’m trying to put on mass,’ she explained, biting deeply into her first loaf. ‘I talked to the technician yesterday, and she said I’m still about three hefts below the ideal.’

  ‘Oh.’ Agata wasn’t sure if she should say something congratulatory; Medoro hadn’t told her anything about these plans.

  ‘Daughter now, then son after a year,’ Serena enthused. ‘Over and done with before Medoro gets too old.’ She glanced at Gineto. ‘He’ll thank me later – won’t he, Uncle?’

  Gineto was bemused. ‘You think I was too old? I didn’t have an uncle of my own to help me, and I still ran rings around both of you.’

  ‘Do you want to raise these two as well, then?’ Serena joked.

  ‘I’m not going to intrude into Medoro’s life,’ Gineto replied. ‘But I’ll give him advice if he wants it.’

  Agata struggled to animate the fixed expression she could feel on her face. ‘It’s very quick now, isn’t it? The recovery?’

  ‘I’ll be mobile in a day, they said,’ Serena replied. ‘It’s not just better drugs and better signal delivery; they really stress the target mass now.’ She started on a third loaf.

  Vala turned to Agata. ‘I suppose you’ve been busy with the referendum?’

  ‘I sat in on three of the debates, after my own,’ Agata said. ‘I couldn’t make it to the others.’ In truth, she’d found it too frustrating to keep attending; as a former participant she wasn’t allowed to interject. ‘There were good speakers on both sides. No one can claim that all the arguments haven’t been aired.’

  ‘I wish they’d show them on the network,’ Vala complained. ‘Not everyone wants to
be packed into a crowd like that.’

  Serena said, ‘I think the traditionalists are afraid that if we start broadcasting the debates, they’ll turn into two people taking turns addressing an empty room. But maybe the Council will change the rules next time.’

  Agata looked up at the news screen. The vote had crossed one sixth of the roll, and her side was still behind.

  Medoro approached, catching her in the act. ‘Does it bother anyone else that a sharp-eyed observer might see which way you voted by watching those things?’

  Agata said, ‘The scale’s never finer than a dozen people per pixel.’

  Medoro was undeterred. ‘What if I already know how eleven of those people will be voting?’

  The five of them spent the next half-bell arguing about the safeguards in the voting system. With Serena’s help they managed to empty both baskets of loaves before midday; Agata had eaten her fill, but she felt like a break so she volunteered to fetch some more.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Medoro offered.

  ‘How will you work on the camera now?’ Agata asked him as they left the voting precinct.

  ‘Serena told you about the children?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s going to help look after them,’ Medoro said. ‘She and Gineto. I’ll still have time to work.’

  ‘You’d trust her with the job?’

  Medoro buzzed, affronted. ‘I can’t believe you’d say that! You were raised by a woman single-handed, and you turned out all right.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Better than the woman who raised you.’ He caught himself. ‘I shouldn’t criticise Cira; that whole generation was confused. And it’s hardly her fault that it took so long for the biologists to learn how to shed men.’

  ‘But now they can, and everything’s perfect.’ Agata hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but the words kept emerging that way.

  ‘So you’ve given up on making Pio an uncle?’ Medoro asked.

  ‘There’s nothing we agree on,’ Agata said. ‘It would feel like I was doing it for selfish reasons, and then the children would be stuck with all his crazy ideas.’

  ‘And you don’t want to try a Cira? Raise them yourself?’

  ‘No. I’d probably mess them up even more than Pio would.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Medoro replied. ‘But if you don’t want a child, don’t have one. Pio will survive. Cira will get over it. And despite your rude remarks about Serena, if you ever feel like babysitting you’re welcome to join the roster.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re just worried that I’ll get more letters from the future than you,’ Medoro joked. ‘All that lavish praise for your theories of cosmology won’t cut it; you’ll be looking for mindless gossip from the descendants, just like the rest of us.’

  They were approaching the food hall now. There was a news screen at the entrance; from a distance the two counts looked perfectly matched, though that impression was unlikely to survive closer scrutiny.

  Agata said, ‘And if we don’t win today—’

  Medoro reached over to thump her arm. ‘If we don’t win, it’s not going to kill you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

  ‘Ha.’ Agata felt a pang of shame, but not enough to shift her perspective. ‘If we win, I’ll stop being jealous of your sister’s perfect life,’ she said. ‘How’s that for a promise?’

  Medoro said, ‘I’m waiting to hear the second part.’

  ‘If we lose . . . I don’t know.’ If she had never imagined any of the miracles the messaging system offered, she would have lived happily enough without them. But it was too late for that now.

  ‘If we lose, you can leave behind a message for Eusebio,’ Medoro suggested. ‘Tell him how much you enjoyed flying in his rocket. We can carve it in an axial staircase, then no one will mess with it before it’s been sanctified by age. That’s contact with the ancestors, isn’t it?’

  Agata said, ‘No, that’s graffiti. It’s only contact if he sends me a reply.’

  11

  ‘It was so close!’ Rosita said consolingly. ‘You should be proud that you made it so close.’

  Ramiro forced himself not to snap at her. She’d come to his apartment unbidden, to stand beside him through the final two bells of the vote. No one else in his family had even acknowledged his efforts.

  ‘Close isn’t good enough,’ he said. He wanted to switch off the console so he didn’t have to keep staring at the skewed bar graph that had already burnt itself into his brain – but he knew that as soon as he did he’d feel compelled to switch the machine on again, just in case there’d been an error found, a correction issued. ‘This isn’t over,’ he swore.

  Rosita’s tone became less sympathetic. ‘Someone had to lose. If you don’t accept the vote, what does that say? That if the other side had lost, they’d be entitled to ignore it and build the system anyway?’

  ‘Knowing the Council, they probably would have,’ Ramiro muttered.

  ‘You got more than five votes in twelve,’ she said. ‘After the trial run, some people are sure to change their minds. You still might get your way in the end.’

  ‘Once the system’s in place, what will a vote mean?’ Ramiro asked darkly.

  Rosita scowled. ‘Listen to yourself! If people don’t like it, they’ll vote to get rid of it. No one’s cutting us out of the loop.’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ Ramiro protested. ‘Suppose the Council claims that they’ve received an official message with the result of the referendum – before they’ve actually identified the real message and examined it. Just announcing a win could be enough to turn that into a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

  Rosita hummed dismissively. ‘Most of what you said in the debate made sense, but now you’re just sounding paranoid. An official report would quote the exact numbers on each side, not just a win or a loss. A fake announcement of a win might raise the likelihood of a real win, but publicising a fake set of numbers would have no chance of making those precise numbers come true.’

  Ramiro considered this. ‘You’re right,’ he admitted. He was sure that the Council would still find a way to use the system to seal their victory, but he needed to think through the mechanics of it more carefully. ‘You really came to the debate?’

  ‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I have? Just because you’re fighting with Corrado doesn’t mean there’s a problem between us.’ She lowered her gaze. ‘He doesn’t speak for me on any subject. I always thought we were going to decide those things together, and work out what suited us both. It’s not his business trying to force anything.’

  Ramiro was grateful for the sentiment, but her timing could not have been worse. ‘I can’t think about that now.’

  ‘I understand,’ Rosita said. ‘I just want to make sure that Corrado doesn’t stop us talking, whenever you’re ready.’

  ‘It will take them half a year to build the system,’ Ramiro replied. ‘Then the trial will run for a year. Maybe after that, when everything’s settled, we’ll be able to . . .’

  ‘Make plans for the future?’ Rosita suggested. She buzzed softly, as if the idea had already become quaint.

  Ramiro said, ‘You have to promise me something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Promise you won’t send back any messages about this.’ He would have been happier if she’d sworn to receive no messages from anyone, but she’d already made it clear that she was determined to take part in the trial.

  ‘I know how to keep quiet,’ she replied. ‘I won’t tell you anything you don’t want to know.’

  Ramiro said, ‘That’s not enough.’

  ‘It’s not up to you!’ Rosita retorted angrily. ‘You don’t get to tell me what I can or can’t communicate to myself.’

  Ramiro was chastened, but he couldn’t let the matter drop. ‘Just knowing the outcome would give you something over me. That’s the kind of thing I’d expect from Corrado – but if you’re serious about respecting my choices, when we talk ab
out this you’ll come to it blind.’

  Rosita struggled visibly to contain her response. Finally she said, ‘Respecting your choices doesn’t mean I have to limit my own perspective.’

  ‘Limit your perspective?’ Ramiro buzzed incredulously. ‘You’d think I was asking you to gouge out your rear eyes. When did this toxic gimmick that you hadn’t even heard of until a few stints ago become your birthright?’

  ‘The day it was invented,’ she replied.

  Ramiro said, ‘It might have been invented, but it hasn’t been built yet. You shouldn’t take anything for granted.’

  ‘Nor should you.’ Rosita headed for the door.

  Ramiro didn’t want them parting like this. ‘I’m sorry I offended you,’ he declared. ‘And I’m grateful for what you said before, about Corrado.’

  Rosita paused, clinging to the rope. ‘We should talk again when we’re both feeling calmer.’

  ‘All right.’

  Ramiro watched her leave, glad that he’d salvaged something from the encounter. Then he turned back to the console and the unchanged tallies.

  Who could be satisfied with a community divided along the lines of that vote, with half the population knowing the future all the way to the reunion, while the rest battled day after day to defend the integrity of their decisions? Rosita had given him a foretaste of the kind of negotiations the two sides would be facing, and that was already bad enough.

  What exactly was he free to do now? He’d had his chance to try to sway the vote, and he’d failed; he couldn’t unpick the tapestry and try again. But the link between his will and his actions still shaped his own history as strongly as ever. All he could do now was keep on fighting not to be told how the fight would end.

  ‘We should start by withdrawing our labour,’ Pio suggested. ‘We only lost the vote because people succumbed to a fantasy: that this system would deliver exactly what they wanted, with no disruptions or inconvenience at all. But if they can’t imagine the harm the messages themselves will do, they need to be given some more tangible disincentives.’