by Greg Egan
‘Five in a gross . . . versus five in a gross.’ Agata couldn’t see how to break the tie. None of these numbers were precise, but without more information she couldn’t make the uncertainties any clearer.
She looked across the cabin at the occulter. Their encounter with the Hurtler and their bomb-removal project offered plausible excuses for all sorts of items ending up in the void, or lost in the dust of Esilio – but she was already afraid that their depleted stores might attract suspicion. Ramiro’s proposed changes would require dozens more proximity sensors – spares that ought to have been packed away neatly in a single large box. Why would they have taken that box out of the storeroom for safekeeping, but then never brought it back?
‘I’m voting with Tarquinia,’ she said. ‘What we’ve got now is physically robust – and we’ll already be hard pressed to build and test the whole swarm before we arrive. This isn’t the time to start making things more complicated.’
For a moment Ramiro looked poised to respond with a further plea, but then he was silent.
Tarquinia said, ‘It’s good to have that settled. Everyone should get some sleep now, and tomorrow we’ll go into production.’
‘Do you want some fresh pictures for your wall?’ Azelio asked, offering Agata a sheaf of papers.
She took them from him. The first drawing showed the mountain coming into view through the window of the Surveyor, with Luisa and Lorenzo standing on the summit waving, very much not to scale. In the second, they’d thrown out a docking rope to the craft and were reeling it in by hand. ‘These are great,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Azelio lingered in the doorway. ‘Come in for a while,’ she suggested. He followed her into the cabin. There was only one chair, so she sat on the edge of the desk.
‘I’m going mad,’ Azelio said bluntly. ‘I don’t know what to think any more. I don’t know what to do.’
‘And I don’t know what to tell you.’ Agata had talked him through the situation a dozen times, but he was never satisfied with her account.
‘Tell me that the mountain won’t be destroyed,’ he pleaded. ‘Tell me that everyone will be safe.’
‘The occulters aren’t looking too bad,’ she said. ‘There are benign ways that the disruption might happen; I can promise you that.’
Azelio glanced down at the pile of notes on her desk. ‘And doesn’t everything that could happen, happen? Isn’t that what your diagram calculus says?’
‘No.’ Agata nodded at the pile. ‘For a start, you can only add up diagrams that begin and end in exactly the same way: they all take different paths, but their end points have to be identical. Getting to the disruption with benign sabotage leaves the mountain intact; getting there with a meteor strike hardly brings you to the same state. And even when the end points are identical, all the alternatives you draw for a process just help you find the probability that the process takes place. Those alternatives don’t all get to happen, themselves.’
‘Then what makes the choice?’ Azelio pressed her. ‘When a luxagen could end up in either of two places, how does just one get picked?’
‘No one knows,’ Agata confessed. ‘In the years after wave mechanics was developed, there was a big debate about whether it was truly random, or whether there was some hidden structure beneath the randomness where all the results were certain. For a while, one group of physicists claimed to have proved that there couldn’t be a deeper level. Their proof looked quite persuasive – until Leonia showed that it was tacitly assuming that information could never flow back in time.’
‘Ah, the strange things people once believed,’ Azelio observed dryly.
Agata said, ‘No one believed it, even then, but they found it easier than we do to forget that it wasn’t true.’
Azelio lifted a diagram from the stack. ‘So what can this tell us about the disruption?’
‘Nothing.’ Agata wasn’t sure how he’d ended up clutching at the diagram calculus as an answer to their plight, but if she’d been careless in describing her work to him in the past then what she owed him now was as much clarity as she could muster. ‘Just because we don’t know the cause of the disruption, that doesn’t mean that every cause we can imagine will coexist. If you want history to unfold a certain way, forget about wave mechanics. What matters now are the usual things: who we are, what we do, and a certain amount of dumb luck.’
Azelio put the diagram down. ‘So if there’s a meteor coming, how do I stop it? Or avoid it?’
‘You can’t,’ Agata replied. This was the sticking point they always reached. ‘Not if the disruption is the proof that it hits us.’
‘Then what difference does it make “who we are” and “what we do”?’ Azelio asked bitterly. ‘If I go through the motions of enacting something more benign . . . how will that help? If there’s a murderer trying to kill your family, you don’t protect them by moving your own tympanum to match the threats being shouted through the door. Or do you really believe in safety through reverse ventriloquism?’
Agata wrapped her arms around her head in frustration. ‘We don’t know that there’s a murderer at the door! We don’t know that there’s a meteor on its way!’
‘So we search the sky,’ Azelio pleaded. ‘We make better detectors. We try to peek through a crack in the door.’
‘If we were going to find anything,’ she said, ‘we’d know that already. If we were going to spot a meteor and avoid it, then that’s what the messages would be telling us.’
Azelio said, ‘I can’t accept that.’
Agata dropped her arms. ‘I know.’ There was nothing she could say that would change his mind, and nothing she could do that would bring him any comfort.
‘We should fly over the antipode,’ Tarquinia joked. ‘Do a little reconnaissance.’
‘Fly low enough and you could occult all the channels at once,’ Ramiro suggested. ‘Maybe there’s a disruption earlier than everyone claimed, and all the later messages are just fakes.’
Agata said, ‘I’d rather not test the defences.’
Through the window, the mountain cast a sharp silhouette against the star trails. It had been visible through external cameras for days, but they’d had to wait until they cut the main engines to rotate the Surveyor around for a naked-eye view.
‘Ah, look at that!’ Tarquinia gestured at her console, which was displaying a feed from the telescope. ‘I think we’ve found a Councillor at home.’ The grey hull that the instrument had picked up was lurking in the void, far from the Peerless. It wasn’t quite identical to the Surveyor, but the overall design was eerily similar. Agata wasn’t shocked that anyone with the means to do so had withdrawn to a safe distance from the mountain, but it was dismaying to see that Ramiro’s guess had been right: even Verano had lost his powers of originality.
Azelio joined them, taking his seat and murmuring greetings. As subdued as he was, he seemed ready to make an effort to get through the formalities to come. Agata wished she could have assuaged his fears, but from a coldly pragmatic position she couldn’t help thinking that his forlorn demeanour might serve as useful camouflage. No one observing the whole crew together could imagine them possessing even the shyest hope of influencing the fate of the Peerless.
Tarquinia brought the Surveyor spiralling in towards the docking point, and as the mountain finally hid the stars Agata felt a rush of pure joy. She wanted to burrow deep into these old, familiar rocks again, to drift along the core of an ancient stairwell, to gaze across a field of wheat that stretched beyond the ceiling’s horizon. She glanced over at Azelio and he met her gaze with a look of shared relief, the sheer force of belonging overpowering his anxiety. How could they not feel safe here?
Tarquinia opened the link to the Peerless, and Verano appeared on her console. ‘We’ve brought your creation back in one piece,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you always knew we would.’
‘From the start,’ Verano replied. ‘No messages required.’
Agata knew she was off-ca
mera herself, but when Ramiro’s slight movements caught her attention she didn’t dare turn to look at him directly. If she didn’t see him start up the software that set the flock of occulters loose – before erasing itself from the communications system – the act wouldn’t linger in her mind as they faced the scrutiny of the welcoming party. There was no predicting the full array of sensors and cameras aimed at them as they approached, but Tarquinia had lit up a docking beacon at the front of the Surveyor. As the occulters moved away from the literal blind spot directly behind the hull, the glare should be enough to allow the tiny devices to reach the slopes undetected.
Agata watched with a glorious ache in her chest as Tarquinia manoeuvred the Surveyor into the cradle of ropes that hung below the airlock. When the air jets cut out they were weightless for a flicker, then the net was holding them, swaying slightly.
She turned to Azelio. ‘Can I tie my belt to yours when we go up?’ she joked. ‘You’re the only one of us who’s heard clear testimony of their safe arrival.’
Azelio buzzed. ‘You’re not counting Greta and Ramiro?’
Ramiro said, ‘I’m not counting Greta and Ramiro. I could fall into the void right now, and she would still have gloated about how miserable I was going to look at the reunion.’
They donned their helmets and attached the air tanks to their cooling bags. As they disembarked, the interior would remain pressurised for the sake of Azelio’s plants.
‘Agata’s first,’ Tarquinia decided.
Agata looked around the tilted cabin, wondering how much ill-behaved dust they’d brought back from the time-reversed world. She was wearing a pouch full of papers under her bag, and all her formal notes had been transmitted to Lila long ago, but she hesitated, afraid that she might have left something important in her cabin that the decommissioning team would discard as waste. But she’d returned all of Azelio’s drawings to him, and her photograph of Medoro was with her, next to her skin.
She clambered up the guide rope and entered the airlock. When she closed the door behind her and started pumping down the pressure, she felt her hands shaking; for all her nostalgia, she wasn’t sure that she was ready to face a whole crowd of non-crew-mates in the flesh.
She steadied herself and opened the outer door. The rope ladder was dangling against the hull; when she gazed straight up she could see the lights of Verano’s workshop through the portal above. She resisted an urge to peer out across the slopes; if she had any chance of discerning one of the occulters clinging to the rock from this distance, the whole scheme really was doomed.
Agata climbed through the portal and ascended into the clearstone chamber from which she’d departed twelve years before. She could see a small crowd gathered in the workshop; they seemed to be chatting among themselves, though no sound reached her in the evacuated chamber. A few people turned to stare towards her with expressions of mild interest. She spotted Gineto, Vala and Serena with a young girl who had to be Arianna. None of them waved to her, and for a moment Agata wondered if she’d aged beyond recognition, but then she realised that between her helmet and her cooling bag she was effectively disguised – assuming that no one would bother to mention in their messages that she’d been the first to arrive.
Azelio came up the ladder, then stood for a while surveying the scene. ‘I don’t see any Councillors here to greet us,’ he said. ‘Five stints until the disruption, and they’re still too afraid to visit the mountain.’
‘Are you sure there are none? We might not recognise the new ones.’ There’d been an election not long after the Surveyor had departed.
‘There are no new ones,’ Azelio replied. ‘Girardo told me that the incumbents all kept their seats.’
Ramiro climbed through the portal. ‘I suppose it’s too late for me to make a run for freedom now.’
‘They’re not going to put you back in prison,’ Agata scoffed.
Ramiro was amused. ‘You mean, seeing as the whole sabotage thing is no longer an issue?’
‘Someone would have mentioned it,’ Agata suggested. ‘Greta might have lied, but someone would have told you the truth.’
‘I didn’t call anyone who would have told me the truth,’ Ramiro replied. ‘If I’d wanted to know my future, I would have been on your side from the start.’
Tarquinia joined them, closing the portal behind her and sealing the rim. She spent a moment assessing the gathered crowd. ‘And I thought we were the ones who’d look half dead. Let’s get this over with.’
Ramiro pulled the lever to repressurise the chamber. Agata felt her cooling bag sagging against her skin. Azelio was closest to the door; he struggled with the crank, leaning down with all his weight to apply enough force to break the seal. Agata followed him out but then hung back, struggling to adjust to the vastness of the room, the hubbub of voices, the strange, sharp smell of the air.
Azelio took off his helmet and placed it on the ground, then strode towards his family. Agata watched the odd expression on the children’s faces: as happy as they were to be reunited with their uncle, they looked bored and fidgety as well. It was as if he’d been playing this game with them for the last three years, the returning adventurer coming through the same door again and again. They’d seen the video message that Azelio would soon make with them, and however fresh it might have appeared at the first viewing, by now their parts in it would be mere recitations.
Agata removed her own helmet and started walking towards Medoro’s family.
‘Agata!’ Serena finally recognised her and ran forward to embrace her. ‘How are you?’
‘Old. Don’t squeeze me too hard.’
‘If that’s loose skin, you’ll need medical attention urgently,’ Serena joked, bumping up against Agata’s papers. Vala joined them, followed by Gineto carrying Arianna. As they exchanged hugs and greetings with her, chirping with pleasure, Agata wondered if the adults were simply humouring her. But Azelio had been so intent on reassuring Luisa and Lorenzo throughout his long absence that he’d robbed them of any real joy at his arrival. So long as none of her own friends sent back every detail of this encounter, it need not be devoid of all spontaneity.
Serena said, ‘You’ll have to forgive me if I seem jealous.’
Agata was bewildered. ‘Of what?’
‘You did more or less meet the ancestors,’ Vala interjected – gently teasing her daughter with the hyperbole.
‘So everyone’s seen the pictures of the inscription?’ Agata had never been sure how people would respond; a part of her had been afraid that the find would be written off as a crude fake by an ancestor-worshipper. ‘They’re taking it seriously?’
‘Of course!’ Serena replied. ‘That was the biggest news at the startup, apart from the . . . other thing.’ She glanced over at Arianna, making it clear that they weren’t discussing the disruption in front of her.
Gineto said, ‘It’s the only reason I voted to keep the system running after the trial: we needed a piece of good news like that.’
‘You changed your vote?’ Agata was surprised, and a little disturbed. This sounded like a rationalisation for putting himself on the winning side.
‘It would have been hypocritical to claim that I wished I hadn’t heard about the inscription,’ Gineto insisted.
‘But if the majority vote had been to shut down the system—?’
‘As I said, the inscription was my only reason,’ Gineto replied.
‘What was the vote?’ she asked him. ‘Do you remember?’
‘Less than one in a gross against.’
Agata fell silent. If the system had stretched on unbroken all the way to the reunion, as she’d once imagined – endorsed at referenda again and again – would its persistence have been a true measure of its virtues, or just a self-affirming stasis, as pathological as the innovation block?
She glanced across the room and saw Ramiro talking to his sister; he did look shockingly old beside her, and her children seemed impatient to be somewhere else.
&
nbsp; An archivist with a camera separated herself from the crowd and called to everyone to move into position. ‘What position?’ Agata asked. Then she understood.
Serena said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not as if you can get it wrong.’ But as the group squeezed together to fit into the shot, she seemed to be looking around for reference points herself, anxious to conform to her own recollection. What happened, Agata wondered, to the woman or man whose nature demanded of them that they find a different spot or adopt a different posture than the one recorded in the famous image of the Surveyor’s return? That urge would have to have been beaten out of them somehow, or they would have been absent from the picture all along.
Agata turned to face the camera. In her rear gaze she could see people trying out their expressions, as if their imitations could fail to be perfect. As the archivist raised her camera, Agata struggled to hide the shame she could feel beginning to show on her own face. Perhaps it was the proper response to the plight that she’d helped to foist on the mountain, but she didn’t want the whole of the Peerless seeing her reach that conclusion, three years before she’d reached it herself.
‘I’m here to see my brother, Pio,’ Agata told the guard.
The woman held out a photonic patch, connected to the wall by a cable. ‘Form your signature.’ Agata brought the squiggle onto her palm and pressed it against the patch.
‘Valuables?’
Agata handed over the key to her apartment.
‘Do you still have any pockets?’
‘No.’
‘Please resorb all your limbs.’
Agata hesitated, wondering what would happen if she argued, but then she released the guide rope and complied. Her torso drifted slowly towards the floor of the entrance chamber; the guard intervened and caught hold of her with four hands, then she began prodding Agata’s skin with her fingertips, searching for any concealed folds. Agata closed her rear eyes and turned her front gaze towards the ceiling, wondering if the guards had access in advance to the outcomes of these searches. Why should they look too hard, if they knew they’d find nothing? But if there was well-hidden contraband, a tip-off might enable them to find it more easily. Or would that be yet another unlikely loop, self-consistent but hugely improbable?
