by Greg Egan
Agata left the decrepit clockwork behind, and dragged herself down a narrow passage to the shabby office of her supervisor, Celia. The office itself looked as old as the Peerless, but Celia’s networked console was a slab of bright modernity among the ruins – its roster of volunteers encrypted, for what that was worth when every strike-breaker could be seen coming and going. Celia handed her an access key and tool belt, and Agata signed for the equipment with a photonic patch, not dye.
‘This must seem pretty menial to you,’ Celia teased her. ‘Your predecessor wasn’t much into cosmology.’
‘I like it,’ Agata replied. ‘It’s meditative.’
‘That’ll wear off,’ Celia promised.
Agata turned into a dusty corridor and followed it for a few stretches. The entrance to her section of the cooling system was easy to find: moss had eaten a great concave chunk out of the wall beside it, and the usual red glow was criss-crossed with threads of yellow. She slid the key into the access panel and strained to pull it open.
A short ladder led down into the tunnel. The breeze pulsing through the darkness chilled Agata’s skin, but after the first shock it wasn’t unpleasant. The ceiling of the tunnel was too low for her at her normal height, but she only had to resorb half a span from the top of her legs and she fitted comfortably. She started walking, one hand on the wall to guide her. The splotch of red light spilling in from outside shrank in her rear vision, and when it was gone she was in utter blackness.
A saunter or two down-axis, in a set of reaction chambers carved into the lode of sunstone that had once been destined to be burnt as rocket fuel, a decomposing agent was turning that fuel directly into gas – without the usual accompaniment of light and heat. The gas built up a considerable pressure, then as it forced its way out against the resistance of a spring-loaded piston, it grew colder. This was much more efficient than the old system that had used the exhaust from burning fuel as its starting point, but the moss that coated the mountain’s walls grew so vigorously beneath the new kind of breeze that it threatened to clog all the cooling tunnels.
As Agata’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she began to see the small red patches of new growth around her. A shift ago, she’d left this whole section as bare rock, but it didn’t take long for fresh spores to blow in and find purchase. She took the coherer from her tool belt and aimed it at the nearest colony, closing her eyes against the flash so they wouldn’t lose their sensitivity.
Three stints into the strike, she still found the job absurdly satisfying. The work was vital, and she could see the results of her efforts immediately. That the moss returned so quickly didn’t bother her at all, so long as she could keep it under control. Better to walk the length of the tunnels regularly, searching for these early infestations, than wait for the walls to become so encrusted that they’d need to be scraped clean with a hardstone blade.
As she advanced along the tunnel, scanning the blackness ahead for another faint speck of moss-light, Agata realised that this was exactly the kind of task during which she once would have ended up pondering the questions Lila had berated her for neglecting. She had only ever made progress on her research when the problem she was tackling rose up unbidden to occupy her mind in idle moments – whether she was walking or eating, cleaning her apartment or lying in bed waiting for sleep, her thoughts would be dragged back to the same place, to chip away at the obstructions until they yielded. At her desk, at her console, she could analyse her own earlier work in detail, or carry out a lengthy new calculation, but entirely new ideas only came to her when she was meant to be doing something else.
Now, though, when her thoughts weren’t gravitating to the subject of Lila’s criticism or scrutinising their own dynamics, the only thing that occupied them effortlessly was speculation on the kind of news that the messaging system would bring. It wasn’t intrusive or disturbing – any more than her obsessive return to the niggling questions of curvature and entropy had been – but the entire space in which her creative work had once taken place had been thoroughly colonised by the interloper.
But the cure wasn’t far away: once the system was completed she could hardly remain in the thrall of revelations still to come. And was it so terrible if she found herself distracted for a while by the prospect of learning the future of the Peerless? She had less than two dozen stints to wait – and, thanks to the strike, she could still do useful work in the meantime. Even if Lila was right and some part of her was refusing to accept that she could expect no help with her research, once she’d seen the actual contents of her messages any hope of impossible cheat notes would soon dissipate. In most respects her life would return to normal, but her spirits would be bolstered by the news of the mountain’s safe return. She would resume her work with new energy and optimism, not because her future self had furnished her with theorems she was yet to prove, but because she’d know that her whole life, and the lives of everyone around her, were part of a great struggle whose end was in sight.
Agata felt the tremor in the rock beneath her and braced herself instinctively, her tympanum growing rigid, rendering her protectively deaf. She lost her footing and fell to the floor, disoriented, unsure if the shaking had been enough to unbalance her or whether she’d been struck down by a shock wave in the air.
She curled up against the cool stone, waiting for worse, waiting for the mountain to split open and spill her out into the void. But the rock was still, and when she forced the membrane around her throat to relax she heard nothing but distant creaking.
As she clambered to her feet the air on her skin smelt acrid. She fumbled for the coherer and flashed it briefly, averting her eyes from the dazzling spot it made on the wall; the secondary reflections lit up the rock around her and showed a fine haze hanging in the air. The breeze from the cooling chambers was as pristine as ever, so the smoke must have entered the system somewhere ahead of her, up-axis, with enough pressure to force it back against the usual flow.
Agata turned and began retracing her steps in the blackness. She had no experience with which to gauge the intensity of the blast. There’d been plenty of accidents in the workshops of which she’d been unaware at the time, but as the cooling tunnels linked every part of the mountain she had to expect to feel the effects far more strongly here. With no basis for comparison, she shouldn’t rush to any wild conclusions about collisions with infinite-velocity rocks.
It was only when she reached the entrance to the tunnel and began climbing the ladder up into the moss-light that she realised how badly she was shaking. She steadied herself as she approached the office, afraid of Celia’s disdain if it turned out to be a routine part of her job that every tiny bang the chemists set off would echo down the tunnels and knock her off her feet this way. The cooling air fed their ventilation hoods, where they carried out some of their most dangerous experiments. Maybe she should have been expecting this concussive initiation all along.
When Celia noticed Agata approaching, she didn’t seem to be in the mood to mock her. As Agata drew closer she saw that a news inset had opened on the console’s display screen, but the angle made it impossible to read.
‘What happened?’ she asked Celia. ‘I felt it in the tunnel, but I didn’t know exactly . . .’
‘There’s been an explosion in one of the workshops.’
‘The chemists’?’
Celia said, ‘The instrument builders’. The one where they were working on the cameras for the messaging system.’
13
‘We can keep you locked up for as long as we like,’ Maddalena told Ramiro. ‘You could spend the rest of your life in that cell – with no visitors, no work, no diversions. Nothing at all to occupy your mind.’
‘Is that right?’ Ramiro replied. ‘Yalda would be proud of you.’ He glanced around the interrogation room, wondering if Greta would ever join them again. She’d sat in on the first few sessions and, as coldly as she’d treated him, the presence of even one familiar face had been enough to make him fee
l less isolated. But then, perhaps that was why she’d stopped coming.
‘Seven deaths on your hands, and you compare yourself to Yalda?’
‘Actually, it was you I was comparing to Yalda.’ Ramiro drew back from the table and allowed a trace of his anger to show. ‘I mourn those deaths, and I condemn the perpetrators – but I don’t know who they are and I certainly didn’t help them.’
‘If you don’t know who they are, how can you know you didn’t help them?’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ Ramiro retorted. ‘Maybe you gave directions to one of the bombers three days before the blast. Maybe you shared your lunch with one of them at school, when someone stole their loaves.’
Maddalena said, ‘Is this funny to you?’
‘Seven people dead isn’t funny at all. But if you want your attempts to do something about it taken seriously, you’re going to have to earn that.’
‘Do you deny that you were giving technical advice to the anti-messager groups?’
‘Not at all,’ Ramiro replied. ‘I helped them make their meetings public – sparing you from any need to go to the trouble of listening in on them covertly. You can still hear every word we said. No one was discussing bombs.’
‘And in the private meetings?’ Maddalena asked.
‘You tell me. If there were private meetings, I wasn’t invited, so that’s when the whole spying thing would have helped.’
Maddalena reiterated his defining characteristics in her eyes. ‘You violated an undertaking not to disclose the plans for the messaging system. You campaigned against it in the referendum. You used your expertise to help everyone opposed to the system—’
Ramiro said, ‘Apparently not everyone.’
‘You expect me to believe that with all those key roles in the movement, you knew nothing about the preparations for the bombing?’
‘I made it very clear to the people I worked with that I wasn’t interested in violence. That might not have been the best way to earn the confidence of any fanatics among them, but strangely enough it seemed like a perfectly ethical approach at the time.’
Maddalena paused, staring past him at the bare wall, possibly consulting some third party through her corset. There were no clocks in the room, and Ramiro had stopped trying to gauge the length of these sessions. All he could do was keep answering the questions one by one, refusing to be cowed and refusing to start fabricating the kind of replies that might satisfy his interrogator.
‘You must have been frustrated with the way the strike was going,’ Maddalena suggested.
Ramiro said, ‘Of course I was frustrated. I wished more people had joined in. I wished it had had a greater impact.’
‘So why would you continue with such an ineffectual strategy?’
‘No one had any better ideas.’
‘Apparently someone did,’ Maddalena replied.
Ramiro hummed wearily. ‘Where is this getting you? Is your boss listening in and giving you points for literal-mindedness? No one who spoke to me proposed a better strategy. If you’re going to make me talk for three or four bells at a time, you’ll have to forgive me if some of my statements are made on the understanding that you haven’t ignored everything else I’ve said.’
‘So who was the most frustrated?’ Maddalena pressed him. ‘Even if they didn’t talk about their plans, you must have picked up on their mood.’
‘We were all frustrated. If you want to make a comparative assessment, go and look at the recordings yourself.’
‘People knew when they were on camera,’ Maddalena pointed out. ‘But you were among them when they were less guarded.’
Ramiro couldn’t fault her logic there. He slumped back in his harness, wondering if he was punishing himself for nothing. It was possible that he’d spent time with the bombers without knowing it, and it wasn’t absurd to think that they’d let something slip – some remark that betrayed the degree of their impatience. He wanted the killers caught and punished. If he could give the authorities a genuine clue to their identities, he’d be proud of that.
Off camera, who had ridiculed the strike most vehemently? Placida? Lena? It was hard to put one above the other, but maybe they’d conceived of the bombing together. No doubt they were both already in custody, but with Ramiro’s testimony against them they might buckle and confess.
Maddalena was watching him expectantly. Ramiro felt a cold horror spreading through his gut at the thought of what he’d almost done. The women’s moaning about the strike wasn’t proof of anything, but he couldn’t trust his jailers to accord the observation as little weight as it deserved. Anything he said, however cautiously phrased, could damage two innocent people’s lives irreparably.
‘Analyse the bomb site,’ he said. ‘Find out where the chemicals came from. I want these murderers caught as much as anyone, but I’m not a mind-reader.’
Ramiro woke in the blackness of his cell and shifted on his sand bed. With the walls around him sterilised by the harsh lights of the day cycle, at night there was no trace of moss, leaving a perfect darkness that seemed to stretch out in all directions.
If he’d kept his promise to Greta, would those seven instrument builders be alive now? And if the Council had been able to keep the messaging system secret, would its impact on ordinary people’s lives have ended up being less intrusive? Maybe there would have been a violent backlash when word of its existence finally leaked out – or maybe the foreknowledge that the system granted would have been enough to prevent that.
But he’d made his choice, and now he had to take some share of responsibility for the way things had unfolded. All his feelings of shame and sadness were just useless self-indulgence, though, if he did nothing more than stare into the past and wish that everything could have been different.
The only question now was: where did this end? Ramiro had had no news from outside since his arrest, but he suspected that the strike had been called off, as a gesture of respect to the grieving relatives. That would be the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t resolve anything. So long as the messaging system was still being built, almost half the population would remain disaffected – and the change being forced on them wasn’t something they could learn to live with. It made no difference how he felt, himself; he could renounce the killers as loudly as he liked, he could give up the fight and embrace his enemies. There would never be peace in the mountain again.
And was that it? The situation was unsalvageable?
He reached out for a rope and raised his torso off the bed, the tarpaulin crinkling around him. There would never be a consensus, but that didn’t mean there had to be violence. He was never going to be reconciled with Corrado, but so long as no one locked them in the same room together they weren’t going to kill each other.
What if they partitioned the Peerless and let the messagers and anti-messagers live apart – dividing the resources of the mountain in proportion to the votes? Those who chose to live without the system need never cross paths with those who used it.
The trouble was, there’d be people on both sides who wouldn’t be satisfied with their share of living space. The messagers might find ways to use their foreknowledge to manipulate their neighbours – and even if they didn’t, the possibility would be enough to drive the kind of fanatics who’d bombed the camera workshop to keep on trying to destroy the whole system.
Ramiro looked out across the darkness. Maps and treaties would never be enough. Locked doors and solid stone walls couldn’t separate the two groups so completely as to end their mutual fear and suspicion.
The only cure was distance.
‘You want me to set you free – and then give you your own gnat?’ Greta was incredulous. When word had reached her that Ramiro had a proposal that he would only put to her in person, she must have envisioned a deal in which he testified against a former comrade or two in exchange for a lighter punishment. ‘How could you imagine anyone agreeing to that?’
Ramiro said, ‘If you want
to get rid of this problem, you need to get rid of the dissenters. But you can’t expect people to leave the Peerless behind until they know that they can survive somewhere else. I’m willing to travel to the nearest substantial orthogonal body and find out if it can be made habitable.’
A flicker of amusement crossed Greta’s face. ‘The nearest substantial body is almost certainly the Object. Are you going to try to sell people on the idea that they were inside that rock, unnoticed, living their lives backwards — while the last three generations of their ancestors were coming and going, taking samples from the surface?’
Ramiro hadn’t thought of the Object. But as satisfying as it would be to set foot on the very rock that had once threatened to annihilate him, the prospect of burrowing into it didn’t sound much like liberation, even without the bizarre twist of having to stay hidden from all the earlier visitors. ‘I meant something large enough to hold on to an atmosphere, so people could live on the surface. Something on the outskirts of the orthogonal cluster. I don’t have access to the astronomers’ catalogues, but there must be something planet-sized within reach.’
‘Within reach?’ Greta was doubtful; she paused to make use of her corset. ‘The nearest orthogonal planet would entail a round trip of a dozen years.’
Ramiro had hoped for something closer, but he persisted. ‘A dozen for the passengers,’ he stressed. ‘But still only four years for you. We could make it even less if it really mattered; I’m sure I could put up with the higher acceleration. But we’ll need to talk to the experts as to whether the cooling system would allow that.’
Greta said, ‘ “We”? You might be getting a bit ahead of yourself.’
Ramiro looked down at the hardstone fetter piercing the side of his abdomen. In the room’s low gravity, he hardly noticed it – unless he moved without thinking and the chain that joined it to the wall became taut. ‘How else should I talk, when I know that I have no chance of doing this without you? I think we’d still make a good team.’
