by Greg Egan
‘Right.’ Ramiro was trying his best to seem pleased, but short of some spectacle of agrarian bounty to summon forth an instinctive response it was hard not to take a purely calculating view.
‘You wanted this to fail,’ Azelio guessed. ‘You thought that might put more pressure on the Council?’
‘I did,’ Ramiro admitted. ‘Though maybe that was foolish. It might have made things worse.’
‘How?’
‘If we’d ended up telling them that Esilio was uninhabitable they might have thought that we were lying about everything, just to serve an agenda.’ Ramiro paused for a moment to convince himself that he really had managed to rephrase the original version in his head – lying about this, too – before it had escaped from thought into speech. ‘This way, we’ll still be offering them a choice: they can accept that the system’s redundant now that we know that the reunion will happen, or they can go ahead with the migration now that it’s clear that the settlers needn’t starve. They’re not the kind of people who appreciate being told that all the evidence points the same way.’
Azelio said, ‘Forget the politics for one chime. Isn’t it something, just to see the plants thriving? We stamped our arrow into the soil and made wheat grow backwards in Esilian time!’
‘We did.’
Azelio rose to his feet. ‘At least I’ll be able to tell Luisa that her picture of the wheat-flowers glowing on Esilio came true.’ He walked around to the side of the row, then took the camera from his tool belt to capture a portrait. Ramiro had seen the girl’s drawing, and the truth was that it made an eerily good match.
‘I’ve been thinking of leaving half the plants here,’ Azelio added. ‘I’d take six back for people to study, and let the rest grow and drop their seeds. I know that sounds like some kind of vote for the migration, but it’s not meant that way. I just hate the idea of ripping them all out. And if settlers do end up coming here, there’d be something welcoming about finding a crop already growing – even a token presence like this.’
‘Hmm.’ Ramiro had no problem with the sentiment, so long as he didn’t end up harvesting the field himself. And if he was being cynical, it could only make the Council’s choice seem even more open if the expedition had left Esilio with an ongoing farm of its own. Short of staying here to tend it in person, he couldn’t have made the false alternative sound more genuine.
‘Do you mind if I head back to the Surveyor?’ he asked. He’d volunteered to help with the measurements, but Azelio would cope perfectly well on his own. ‘I’m getting some cramps again; I thought they’d stopped, but . . .’
Azelio said, ‘Of course. Will you be all right?’
‘I’ll be fine, don’t worry.’
Ramiro clutched his abdomen and moved away slowly, but once he was out of sight he broke into a run. He’d planned the detour carefully, and with the air calm it was easy to navigate by the stars. Stones and sand fled from his feet, and sought them; he’d thought he’d grown used to that, but the speed made it stranger. His gait seemed at once more precarious and more certain; it was as if he were watching a recording of himself performing a difficult balancing act, while knowing for a fact that he hadn’t actually toppled over.
Even by starlight, the probe’s truncated cone stood out sharply from the haphazard shapes of the rocks around it. Ramiro paused to orient himself carefully before squatting down and embracing the thing. Just spending so much time in Esilio’s gravity must have left him stronger than he had been by the standards of the mountain, but on balance the penalty it added now felt like more than enough to wipe out that advantage. He waddled across the valley floor, muttering curses, forcing himself to continue for a count of three gross steps before resting.
No one had come this way since the last of the original test plots had died off, and no one would have reason to do so again. If he could leave the probe unseen a short walk from the Surveyor, it would give him a chance to revisit the blast site while pretending to be retrieving the thing. That retrieval had never been part of the mission plan, but he couldn’t see anyone objecting to his desire to scrutinise the probe’s materials in the aftermath of its peculiar heating. They were all going to need their projects to help pass the time on the long journey back.
As Ramiro hefted the probe again, an amused voice in the back of his head demanded: Why go to so much trouble? If he abandoned the whole frantic scheme right now, what exactly would that change? He’d be able to look Greta in the eye and tell her honestly that he’d had nothing to do with the inscription. The true author of the words would turn out to be a settler playing along as a kind of bitter joke, or a genuine visitor from the home world six generations hence. In either case, how would he be worse off?
His arms were beginning to ache; he lowered the probe to the ground.
What he’d feared the messaging system would impose on him was an endless plateau of least resistance: every decision he learnt that he would make would strike him as acceptable – never entirely out of character, never deeply morally repugnant – but it would still be less his own than if he’d been left to ruminate on the matter without the deadening intervention of foreknowledge.
To feel alive, he needed to feel himself struggling moment by moment to shape his own history. It was not enough to look down on events from above like a biologist watching a worm in a maze, content to note that this creature’s actions had never actually gone against its wishes. He desperately wanted to see the messaging system abandoned – by whatever means it took, short of war – but it was not all the same to him whether he played a real part in the victory, or whether he was merely an onlooker who hadn’t needed to lift a finger. Why should he take the path of least resistance now, when no one was forcing it on him?
As Ramiro lifted the probe and struggled forward, he felt a rush of joy. He’d made the right choice. Agata had been overcome with bliss by the thought that the ancestors had reached across time to favour her with their beneficence – but now that he’d affirmed that he was the author of his own good fortune, Ramiro felt infinitely more blessed. Let the ancestors worry about their own problems: he didn’t need their help. He could cheat the Council out of their ruinous folly entirely on his own.
Ramiro passed the last of the plants to Azelio, then scrambled through the airlock himself.
‘Time to celebrate the harvest!’ he said, reflexively brushing dust off his hands, though as much as he removed rose from the floor to replace it.
‘Don’t get any ideas!’ Azelio positioned himself protectively in front of the repotted wheat.
‘Don’t worry; there wouldn’t be enough there to feed a vole.’ Ramiro called out to Agata and Tarquinia, then headed for the pantry to fetch eight loaves.
The four of them sat together in the front cabin. Tarquinia said, ‘Before I plot the ascent, I thought I’d take a vote on whether we should do a few more low orbits – to see if we can spot the pre-relics of any future cities.’
‘No thanks,’ Ramiro replied. ‘If there are going to be settlers I don’t want to know about it . . . but settlers would avoid unmaking traces anyway. They’d only raise cities on what looked like untouched ground.’
‘They wouldn’t have to be built by settlers from the Peerless,’ Azelio pointed out. ‘If the ancestors come here after the reunion, who knows how long they’ll stay?’
‘It can’t hurt to look,’ Agata agreed. Ramiro watched as she finished her first loaf, but after raising the second one halfway to her mouth she put it back on the plate. ‘Does anyone want this?’
‘I’m starving,’ Azelio said. ‘Are you sure you’ve had enough?’
‘Absolutely.’
Azelio reached over and took it. Ramiro forced himself to look elsewhere as he tried to decide whether or not to intervene. He might get away with a joking confiscation – protesting that he’d carried more of the plants back than Azelio – but that could only end with him eating the loaf himself. Two crew members falling ill hadn’t been the plan, but
did it matter? Ramiro stole a glance at Azelio’s plate and saw that he no longer had a choice.
He pretended to be annoyed by the vote on the orbits and stayed out of the conversation, finishing his meal while Tarquinia was still eating. ‘I might start bringing in the tents,’ he said. He needed a chance to come and go from the storeroom without anyone beside him, in order to get the tools for the inscription outside.
‘Relax,’ Tarquinia said. ‘There’s no rush. We can do that later.’
‘I want to get a start while it’s calm,’ he insisted. ‘If a storm comes in it could take twice as long.’
In the storeroom he found the lever for extracting the tent stakes, but he couldn’t see where the chisel had gone. With the constant gravity, people had grown careless about slotting every tool into place. He left quickly, not wanting Tarquinia to wonder what could be taking him so long.
Outside, he took the stakes and poles out of the first tent, then folded the fabric down into a square. There was no particular reason for taking the tents back with them; it almost came down to mere tidiness, a virtue that made more sense in the confined spaces of the mountain. But if leaving six of the wheat plants growing backwards in time felt apt, requiring Esilio to manufacture four tents out of dust seemed more of an affront. One day a successor to Agata might find an equation that spelt out exactly how much inexplicable junk a time-reversed world could be expected to cough up, just to cater to the whims of visitors with a different arrow. If there was a limit, that might even be the ultimate reason why there would never be settlers here: a whole city might have pushed the mathematics of consistency past its choking point. Ramiro found the idea encouraging; nothing helped a plan run more smoothly than having a law of physics on its side.
In the front cabin, the rest of the crew were still sitting and talking, digesting their meals. Ramiro carried the disassembled tent past them into the storeroom and searched again for the chisel, with no luck. It had to be somewhere, but he couldn’t ask the others if they’d seen it.
As he walked back into the cabin he saw Agata beginning to sway on her couch. ‘That’s not right,’ she muttered, pressing a fist to her chest. ‘It’s like a rock in my gut.’
‘Sounds like what I had,’ Ramiro ventured. ‘You should go and lie down. If you rest straight away it might be over faster than it was for me.’
‘So you’re still infectious?’ Tarquinia eyed him warily. ‘You’d better stay in your cabin, too.’
‘No, I must have spread it earlier,’ Ramiro replied. ‘There’s probably a dormant period after the body takes it in.’
‘How do you know that?’ Tarquinia demanded irritably. ‘Have you got some study of the aetiology at hand?’
‘No, but—’
‘I have to get us off this planet safely,’ she said. ‘What am I meant to do: wait until I’ve caught this disease and been through the symptoms, so I know it won’t happen later when I’m in the middle of the ascent?’
‘You feel well now, don’t you?’ Ramiro asked her.
‘I don’t,’ Azelio said, massaging his sternum with one palm.
Tarquinia stood. ‘I want all three of you in your cabins. If you need anything, call me through the link; I’ll put on a cooling bag and helmet and bring it to you. But no one leaves their room.’
‘I’m perfectly healthy!’ Ramiro protested. ‘We can stay out of each other’s way – I’ll finish bringing in the tents, and I’ll warn you before I come through the airlock.’
‘No,’ Tarquinia said flatly. ‘The tents aren’t important, but I can get them myself. I want everyone in their cabins now. Is that understood?’
Agata rose and began limping away, bent over in pain. Azelio jumped up and went to help her. Ramiro stayed where he was; once the others had left he would have to explain his plan to Tarquinia.
‘Ramiro,’ she said, gesturing towards the passage. ‘Please. I know you’ve recovered, but I can’t risk catching this.’
Azelio was watching them with his rear gaze, puzzled by Ramiro’s stubbornness. Ramiro struggled to think of a plausible reason to stand his ground; raising the idea of bringing in the probe now would only make it sound more suspicious.
He followed Azelio and Agata. When they’d entered their rooms and closed the doors, Ramiro closed his own from the outside.
He stood motionless for a while, trying to judge how quietly he could walk back to the front cabin, trying to think of a gesture he could make that would guarantee that Tarquinia wouldn’t respond to the sight of him with an angry shout. From where he stood he could see her crossing the cabin, moving towards the airlock. She was going out to finish retrieving the tents; she had the lever he’d used in her hand.
As she disappeared from view he cursed silently. Then he started down the passage, red dust tickling his feet. He would follow her out and explain everything, confess to the poisoning, put his plan at her mercy. Maybe she’d treat his desire to create the message as a kind of empty vanity and refuse to be a part of it, lest his deceit undermined the impact of the find. But he couldn’t be a helpless spectator, merely watching the mountain’s history unfold. She’d understand that, surely?
He stood at the entrance to the front cabin. Tarquinia had gone out – but he suddenly remembered that he’d never brought the tent-lever back into the Surveyor. He’d left it by the airlock outside. She’d been carrying something else, something similar in appearance.
He heard Agata humming with pain as the spasms in her gut failed to dislodge the tainted meal. Ramiro retraced his steps and managed to get into his room, with the door emitting no more than a faint squeak while his hapless victim was at her loudest. He squatted by his bed, staring at the floor, trying to understand what was happening.
How could he carve anything into the rock face, if the idea of doing it had only come to him after he’d seen the result? Even the choice of words hadn’t sounded like his own. If he’d only selected them because he’d read them, who would have made the choice? No one. Agata had told him endlessly: a loop could never contain complexity with no antecedent but itself, because the probability would be far too low. There could be no words appearing on rocks for no other reason than the fact that they’d done so.
But long before Agata had dragged the two of them to the blast site, Tarquinia had seen him falling apart. And as each new phenomenon they witnessed on Esilio made the prospect of returning with the settlers more dispiriting, she must have started searching for a way for them to stay on the mountain together – to live out their final years in a place where the dust wouldn’t see them coming, where their graves had not already been dug.
Ramiro pressed his face into his hands and fought to stay silent, afraid that if he let his tympanum stir he’d shout down the walls with some confused, alarming paean to the woman that would convince the others that he’d lost his mind. He couldn’t let any hint of the plan slip out – or even let Tarquinia know that he’d uncovered it. She hadn’t wanted a co-conspirator any more than he had, and they’d both make more believable witnesses if they’d never spoken of what had happened, never made it real in anyone else’s eyes.
He sat by the bed listening for her footsteps, wondering if he could be mistaken. It wouldn’t take long to pull down a tent and bring it inside, and she’d have no reason to return quietly.
Agata hummed in misery, and Azelio called out, trying to console her. But between these exchanges, Ramiro heard nothing but the wind blowing dust across the hull.
24
‘The link’s open!’ Tarquinia shouted.
Agata had woken just moments earlier, and for moments more she lay in a daze, astonished at her prescience. Then it occurred to her that Tarquinia must have repeated the call several times.
She rose from her bed and raced down the passage, sand still clinging to the skin of her back. The rest of the crew were already gathered around the console.
‘. . . all safe and in good health,’ Tarquinia was saying. ‘We landed successfully on
Esilio and made an assessment of its potential for settlement; we’ll be sending the technical reports shortly. But as you can imagine, we’re eager for news from the mountain.’
There was a perceptible delay as the ultraviolet pulses crossed the void, then a man’s voice replied: ‘We’ll need to receive your reports first, before the channel is used for personal calls.’
Tarquinia was taken aback. ‘I understand. But can’t you fill us in on what’s been happening?’
‘What do you want to know?’ the man inquired impassively.
‘Is the messaging system working?’ Ramiro interjected.
‘Yes.’
‘How long has it been in use?’ Tarquinia asked.
‘Almost three years.’
Agata leant forward towards the microphone. ‘And how long will it remain in use?’
The signal’s time in transit was fixed; the awkward pause before the reply was as unmistakable as if they’d been speaking face to face. ‘My instructions are to receive your reports and then facilitate personal calls, not to engage in an open-ended dialogue.’
Agata didn’t know what to make of this rebuff. But the exchange would be monitored and recorded; she couldn’t blame the link operator if he didn’t want to break any protocol imposed from above.
Tarquinia said, ‘I’ll queue up the reports now, and resume contact when the transmission’s complete.’
‘Thank you, Surveyor. Audio out.’
‘What a welcome!’ Azelio complained. ‘And it’s not as if we could have caught them unprepared.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they were thrilled by our safe return,’ Ramiro replied. ‘We’re just three years late for the party.’
The console switched to a graphic showing the progress of the data transmissions. Agata squinted in disbelief at the predicted completion time, but caught herself before protesting out loud. In order to make the time lag reasonable at this distance, they needed to use very fast UV. But such high velocities also meant very low frequencies, and hence low bandwidth.
