by Greg Egan
‘Yes.’
‘So wouldn’t you rather see his killers punished?’
‘Did I miss the news where they were caught and tried?’ Agata replied sarcastically. ‘If it’s a choice between letting them migrate to Esilio and having them around to do the same thing again, I’d rather get rid of them.’
‘So you see this as protecting other travellers?’
‘Other travellers,’ Agata agreed, ‘and the messaging system itself. I debated Ramiro in the campaign – and I still believe every word I said about the benefits of the system.’
‘How old are you?’ Greta asked.
‘A dozen and ten.’
‘You won’t have many years left when you return, and you’ll have aged more than all of your friends. Do you really want to spend the best years of your life inside a vehicle the size of your apartment – in the company of the man who lost that debate, but then turned around and tried to extort us into giving him his way regardless?’
Ramiro had developed a thick skin when it came to Greta’s characterisations; much as she enjoyed it, her main goal seemed to be to spur his would-be travelling companions into venting their hostility now, instead of waiting until they had the opportunity to carve him up and toss the pieces into the void.
Agata gestured towards Ramiro’s chains. ‘I can see that you don’t trust him – and nor do I, completely. But he was an honest opponent in the debate, and I don’t blame him for my friend’s death. This mission needs people from both factions or it isn’t going to fly at all.’
‘That’s a nice sentiment,’ Greta replied condescendingly. ‘But are you sure you’re ready for the cost of putting your own flesh behind it?’
In response, Agata only grew more stubborn. She said, ‘The first travellers left their friends and family behind for ever. Between the chance to learn how gravity works and the chance to make the Peerless safer, I’m willing to put up with a few years of hardship.’
‘It’s coming together nicely,’ Verano said, leading Ramiro and Greta across the echoing space of the workshop. Verano had the gaunt frame of a Starver, but he displayed no lack of energy or enthusiasm. Ahead, slowly descending from the ceiling’s horizon, the fat disc of the Surveyor sat balanced on its rim within a cage of scaffolding, the polished hardstone glinting in the light of three banks of coherers angled up at it from the floor.
As they approached, it became clear that the gradual revelation would fall short of exposing the whole disc. Verano’s team had had to cut a rectangular hole in the ceiling to make more room, leaving the top third of the craft poking up into that slot.
Ramiro tried to hang back, suddenly reluctant to get too close. Greta wound his chain lengthwise around her forearm a few times to take up the slack and pulled him forward. ‘Come and see your new prison,’ she whispered. ‘This is what you asked for, isn’t it?’
The Surveyor looked a great deal larger than his cell, but most of the interior was destined to be taken up by essential stores or machinery. The main engines were already in place – six beautiful dark panels packed with ultraviolet rebounders, symmetrically arranged around one face of the disc – but the team had yet to install the cooling system, which for a trip of this duration meant a complete sunstone gasification plant, not a few tanks of compressed air.
‘Do we still get to call this a gnat?’ Ramiro asked.
Verano buzzed. ‘Probably not. But this is where my grandfather built the original – the one that made the first trip to the Object.’
‘You’re Marzio’s grandson?’
‘Yes.’
Ramiro felt a slight diminution of his anxiety. Marzio’s skills were legendary, and though talent of that kind was unlikely to be heritable, much of its legacy could still be passed down the generations through teaching and experience.
‘We adapted this from a design that a group of engineers developed a few years before the turnaround,’ Verano explained. ‘It was meant as a proof of concept for a shuttle running between the Peerless and the home world, but they still planned it down to the last detail.’
‘That’s what I call getting in early. What did they call the design?’
‘The Uniter, I’m afraid,’ Verano replied. ‘If we do start mass-producing these things, I suppose we’ll have to think of a more apt generic name.’
‘Deserters?’ Greta suggested.
Half a dozen artisans clung to the scaffolding, working with everything from chisels to coherers. Ramiro moved closer; Greta followed, letting out his chain. Verano invited him to climb a ladder leading up into the atrium so he could look down into the hull. When he reached the top he could see the living quarters through a gap in the rim: four absurdly small rectangles, delimited by a series of slots in the presently vertical floor that the masons would use to insert the walls. Off to the side was a pantry, larger than all four rooms combined. They wouldn’t have the space to grow crops of their own. If one live skewer-worm got into their grain store, they’d end up starving to death.
‘Twelve years in this?’ Ramiro hummed softly. ‘What was I thinking?’ He began descending.
‘It’s too late to back out now,’ Greta replied. ‘Change your mind, and it will be twelve years with no change of scenery.’
Ramiro doubted that. There was an election approaching, and the Councillors had to be coming under pressure over the internments. The investigation into the bombing might yet drag on for years – and in some people’s minds every anti-messager would have to share the guilt, regardless – but there were too many voters who had friends or relatives locked up for no good reason for the Council to remain oblivious to their anger.
He paused halfway down the ladder. ‘I’ve always admired Eusebio. He was smart enough to sell the Peerless to his friends as the home world’s salvation, and then stay behind while they did all the real work. Stay behind and stay young: that should be my motto, too.’
Greta was not amused. ‘So who are these people that could spare you the trip? Agata’s the sanest of the pro-messagers so far – and we’d better hope Azelio’s family don’t talk him out of it, because we’re never going to find another agronomist. The two of them might just hold together as a crew, but they’re not going to do this on their own. If you pull out, the whole thing will be over.’
‘Ramiro?’
Ramiro turned to see a woman approaching in the distance. She was limping slightly, and tall enough that from his own elevated position her face was hidden by the curve of the workshop’s ceiling. Her lower torso showed all the signs of a recent shedding, the shrunken flesh leaving her hips painfully unbalanced.
He was still struggling to recognise her voice, distorted by the strange acoustics, when her head finally cleared the horizon. ‘Tarquinia?’ Ramiro climbed down to the floor, holding his chain with one hand to relieve the pressure. Then he began walking towards his friend, leaving Greta to decide for herself if she wanted to accompany him. She dropped the chain and let him go.
As he drew closer, the extent of Tarquinia’s depletion became clearer. Ramiro doubted that even a woman who’d been through the whole ordeal herself could look upon skin stretched and sutured over such a deep absence without flinching.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ he complained. ‘When did this happen?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘How’s your daughter?’
‘My son is fine,’ Tarquinia corrected him. ‘His name is Arturo.’
‘You had a son first?’
‘No. His sister was born three stints ago.’
Ramiro was shocked; he’d never heard of anyone choosing such a punishing schedule. He didn’t want to question the wisdom of her timing, but it couldn’t go completely unremarked. ‘How’s your brother coping?’
Tarquinia was amused. ‘Men used to raise four infants at once. With his uncle to help, two is nothing.’
‘That’s easy for a woman to say.’
‘Easy?’ She looked down at her stitches.
‘I didn’t
say you had an easy time inflicting it on them. So what are you doing here? You ought to be resting.’
‘Someone told me you were down here,’ Tarquinia explained, ‘so I thought I’d try to catch you. I asked at the prison but they wouldn’t let me visit there. And I wanted to take a look at the Surveyor anyway, before I make it official.’ She staggered slightly; Ramiro stepped forward so she could rest a hand on his shoulder. ‘That walk from the entrance was the hardest part,’ she said. ‘I forgot how high the gravity is down here.’
‘I’m surprised your legs haven’t snapped off.’ Ramiro glanced back towards the Surveyor. ‘Make what official?’
‘My application for the pilot’s position.’
Ramiro wasn’t sure how to take that. ‘Are you serious?’
Tarquinia gestured at her skeletal hips. ‘I didn’t clear myself of familial obligations for the sake of a joke.’
‘Familial obligations?’ Ramiro had never heard her talk so bluntly before.
‘What – you think I’m being cold?’ Tarquinia didn’t sound offended, just curious as to how he viewed her actions.
‘It’s your brother who’ll be raising them,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘Still, four years is a long time at that age.’
‘Did the ancestors miss their mothers?’ Tarquinia asked. ‘Or mothers their children?’
‘Why wouldn’t they? The only people more perfect than the dead are the yet-to-be-born. But my mother had nothing to do with me or my sister, and that didn’t bother us.’
‘Mine was the same.’ Tarquinia straightened her body. ‘So are you going to show me this thing?’
Ramiro led her over to the hull and introduced her to Verano. Greta caught his eye; she looked smug for some reason. But it was Ramiro who’d gained an ally, not her.
‘How are we meant to navigate?’ Tarquinia asked Verano. ‘We’re not going to have time to set up a grid of beacons far enough apart to be useful, and there’s only so much positional information we’ll be able to extract from home-cluster star trails.’
Verano glanced at Greta. Greta said, ‘Once you’ve made an application and agreed to the confidentiality conditions, we can discuss whatever details you like.’
Tarquinia was taken aback for a moment, but she accepted the reply without complaint.
Verano took Tarquinia closer to the hull and the two of them began chatting with some of the masons. Greta turned to Ramiro. ‘Still thinking of doing a Eusebio?’ she asked. ‘Letting your comrade fly alone?’
‘I wasn’t serious,’ he protested.
‘Of course not.’ Greta reached down and picked up the end of his chain.
Ramiro groped for an insult, but his mental scrabbling yielded an entirely different weapon. ‘You’ve got a working version of the camera,’ he realised. ‘What is it – some prototype that survived the bombing?’ How else would they navigate to the edge of the orthogonal cluster, if not by imaging the time-reversed stars?
Greta said, ‘You don’t get to ask questions like that.’
Ramiro was sure now that he’d guessed correctly. Tarquinia had probably worked it out too. It wasn’t something he’d want the whole mountain to know – lest the same deranged killers behind the bombing decided to target the Surveyor itself – but it was always pleasing to be a little less in the dark than his jailers wished.
‘You’d better think up a good cover story,’ he suggested. ‘A new generation of accelerometers, maybe? I’ve been a bit distracted, but other people won’t be so slow.’
Tarquinia was buzzing with mirth; Verano had just explained the way the Surveyor’s toilets would work. Ramiro was unspeakably happy at the thought of having her along on the journey – and if he was trapped now, so be it. He’d wanted to stay strong enough not to back out, and if Tarquinia’s presence would shame him into honouring his commitment that was nothing to lament.
Greta said, ‘All I’ve ever done is work to keep the Peerless safe. I think you can trust me to do the same for the Surveyor.’
‘Perhaps.’ Ramiro couldn’t stop himself goading her when he had the chance, but she’d already proved her resolve to make the mission successful. ‘And I think you can trust me not to flee custody and disappear into some anti-messager safe house.’
‘Perhaps.’ Greta took a key from a pocket in her thigh, then reached over and unlocked the fetter. Ramiro slid the chain free, then eased the bar out of his flesh and let the whole thing clatter to the floor.
He watched Tarquinia haltingly ascend the ladder so she could look down into the Surveyor for herself. Six years to Esilio, six years to come back, then six more if he joined the migration. He’d be at least three dozen and four years old by the time he was walking free across the plains of his new home – and he’d need to outlive the average male in his line by five years to get that far.
He’d managed to constrain his entire future as rigidly as any message encoded in time-reversed light could have done. But if he looked at the alternatives honestly, they were all worse.
16
‘And now you’re dead.’
Agata could no longer see Tarquinia in the whirl of stars and shadow around her, but this flat pronouncement came through the helmet’s link as if the woman were right beside her.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘How did it happen?’ Tarquinia demanded. For a bell and a half she’d been oppressively close, observing every tiny mistake Agata made and dispensing acerbic reprimands, but even the distance this mishap had put between them wasn’t going to silence her.
‘I don’t know! The tank just slipped out of my hands.’
‘Just slipped? Why do you think you’re spinning like that?’
‘I must have opened the valve too soon,’ Agata confessed.
‘Well . . . don’t,’ Tarquinia replied irritably.
‘I’m sorry,’ Agata repeated.
The point of the exercise had been to try to use her cooling bag’s air tank as an improvised jet. She’d understood perfectly what the prerequisites for a successful burst would be: a tight grip on the tank and a thrust aimed straight at her centre of mass. But she’d held the tank wrongly, or slipped, or panicked.
She wasn’t actually going to die of hyperthermia; she had two small emergency canisters strapped to her belt. She managed to detach one and connect it to the bag’s inlet without mishap. The cool rush of air felt unearned, but then, if the Surveyor broke apart halfway through the mission, casting them all out into the void, she doubted that a few dextrous manoeuvres with her air tank would be enough to save her.
Agata saw a figure approaching out of the mountain’s shadow, a little closer each time it spun into view. It was easy for Tarquinia: she had one of the new jetpacks strapped to her body. The six nozzles were all controlled by photonics, their thrust automatically balanced so they imposed no torque at all. Bulky as the things were, Agata decided that she was going to wear her own pack for the entire twelve years of the mission, rendering these dispiriting training exercises redundant.
Tarquinia collided with her roughly, grabbing hold of Agata’s arm. Agata’s gut twitched; she was tumbling in a completely different plane now, and the sudden shift in the flow of stars across her vision was more wrenching than the impact. Tarquinia seized Agata’s other shoulder and embraced her, pulling the two of them into equal intimacy with the slab of equipment that covered Tarquinia’s chest. Then she must have told the jetpack to kill their rotation: the torque itself was imperceptible, but it looked as if someone had slammed a giant brake against the spinning black bowl that held the stars.
When the sky had ceased turning, Tarquinia released her grip and hooked Agata’s belt to the front part of the jetpack.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, less brusque than usual.
‘Yes.’ Agata realised that she’d been shivering.
‘I know it isn’t easy, but you have to reach the point where things like this are just instinctive.’
‘I understand.’ Agata gazed past her into t
he dark hemisphere that had once held the orthogonal stars. They were still out there, in the blackness, but her own eyes were now emitting the light she no longer received from them. ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ she said. ‘I think I made a mistake.’
Tarquinia interposed her helmet into the view. ‘You want those light-deflection measurements, don’t you? I thought the fate of the cosmos hung on those fractions of an arc-flicker.’
‘You’re the astronomer. You could do a better job at that than I could.’
Tarquinia said, ‘I’m not taking any measurements that aren’t essential for navigational purposes.’
Agata doubted she was serious about that. ‘If my real job is to stop Ramiro going crazy and ramming the Peerless, why don’t they choose a pro-messager pilot to keep him in check?’
‘I don’t think they’ve been overwhelmed with applications,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘Anyway, that’s just politics; for practical deterrence, you can bet there’ll be some tamper-proof way to incinerate the Surveyor with the flick of a switch from the Council chambers.’ She squinted at Agata through their faceplates. ‘I’m not going to force you to do anything. If you want to go back to the airlock right now, that’s fine with me.’
Agata was tempted, but she stopped herself. If she pulled out of the training now there’d be no chance to reconsider. ‘Why did you volunteer?’ she asked Tarquinia. ‘Do you think there’d be a war, without the Surveyor?’
Tarquinia didn’t reply immediately. ‘I’m still hoping that we’re not that suicidal, but if we are I wouldn’t pin my hopes on Esilio.’
‘Then why?’
‘Why fly to another world?’ Tarquinia frowned, as if the question were absurd: the mere grandeur of the idea was reason enough.
Agata wasn’t buying it. ‘If it could be easy and safe, then you’re right: who wouldn’t want to be on that mission? But it won’t be.’
Tarquinia said, ‘You want to know what swings it for me? I always thought I was doing something worthwhile just by helping to keep the mountain running smoothly. Given what was at stake for the home world, that was enough. But if the messaging system starts spitting out reports of the reunion, the entire reason for the journey will start to feel like something long past: still worthy, but faded, there to be taken for granted. If I can have a little excitement with a detour of my own – doing no one any harm, and maybe even helping slightly – I’d have to be insane to pass up the chance.’
