The Arrows of Time

by Greg Egan

  ‘What do you need?’

  ‘If you join up with Giacomo,’ she said, ‘you have to keep a power of veto for yourselves, right to the end. A day before the disruption – a bell before, a chime before – if I can find a better way, you need to be able to cancel the bombing, or it will all have been for nothing.’

  Ramiro didn’t ask her why the ancestors would have gone to so much trouble to motivate her if her struggle would be in vain. ‘We’ll try,’ he said. It was impossible to promise her more than that.

  ‘Thank you.’ Agata tipped her head in farewell and started towards the door.

  ‘So what will you do now?’ Tarquinia asked her.

  ‘Sit in my room and think,’ Agata replied. ‘With the messaging system switched off.’

  Giacomo had told Agata that he’d find Ramiro himself for the next stage of the negotiations – but having chosen to know the outcome in advance, their partners seemed to be in no hurry to go through the motions of resolving the matter. Ramiro looked for ways to pass the time without making his restlessness apparent. When he visited Rosita he could usually empty his mind and play games with the children for a while, but then she’d put them to bed and she and Vincenzo would start arguing about the disruption.

  ‘The Council will do it.’ Vincenzo was confident; he’d worked it all out. ‘The evacuation is a sham; they know they’re not in any danger. In the end, they’ll use those craft for the obvious purpose: sending the malcontents off to Esilio.’

  Ramiro said, ‘So after the disruption, there’ll still be malcontents? The Council will switch the system back on?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then why are they switching it off in the first place?’

  ‘To force the saboteurs to show their hands,’ Vincenzo explained. ‘They’ll think they’re responsible for the disruption, so they’ll trip over themselves trying to make it happen. What better way to lure them out?’

  Except for the part about restarting the system, Ramiro wanted to believe this story. If it were true, he and Tarquinia could simply refuse Giacomo’s request – proving that the occulters had never really been part of the saboteurs’ plans – and then wait for the Council’s game to play itself out.

  Rosita wanted to believe it too, but she couldn’t. ‘It’s a collision,’ she insisted glumly. ‘The only question is the size of it.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ Ramiro asked her.

  ‘It’s not saboteurs; saboteurs would get caught. No one could pull this off with all their movements known three years in advance.’

  Vincenzo interjected, ‘I never said they’d succeed. But that doesn’t mean they’re not stupid enough to try.’

  ‘The Council won’t switch off the system,’ Rosita continued. ‘A hoax like that would be political suicide, however many would-be bombers they catch. Do you think people would forgive them for three years of wondering if their family was going to survive?’

  Vincenzo said, ‘I’ll forgive them, because I haven’t been wondering that at all. Everything they’re doing is going to leave us safer in the end. Why would I punish them for that?’

  When he wasn’t out visiting, Ramiro sat in his apartment tweaking the software on his console – mostly for the sake of killing time, though all his digging around had the advantage of reassuring him that the device wasn’t being used to spy on him. He’d tried looking for work, but no one in the mountain was embarking on any new projects. One way or another, most people had learnt that they would do nothing about the disruption, and now they’d settled into a state of compliance with their own reported paralysis.

  On his eighth day back Tarquinia dropped by again. It was the first time he’d been alone with her since they’d returned, but neither of them were in the mood to resume where they’d left off on the Surveyor.

  ‘Have you told anyone?’ he asked her. ‘About us?’

  Tarquinia was bemused. ‘Who would I tell?’

  ‘Your family.’

  ‘Why would it be any of their business?’

  Ramiro hadn’t said a word to Rosita; he was sure she would find the relationship repellent. ‘Are you ashamed of it?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Tarquinia sounded defensive. ‘But why does anyone else need to know how we spend our time?’

  On the Surveyor they’d had no choice in the matter; their secret had lasted about a day, and Azelio and Agata had taken it in their stride.

  Ramiro said, ‘I grew up being told that even thinking about fission was tantamount to murder. Why do we do that to people? It’s a lie, and it’s a cruel one.’

  Tarquinia scowled. ‘Do you really expect every boy to learn in school that he can abandon his duties to his sister and go chasing after less demanding pleasures?’

  ‘But you’d heard about the whole thing years before, hadn’t you?’ Ramiro protested. ‘Your own choices didn’t come as any big surprise to you.’

  ‘Is it my fault if women talk to each other about these things, and men don’t?’ Tarquinia regarded him with a mixture of fondness and pity that made his skin crawl.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. There were more important things to worry about. ‘Do you think the occulters are still in place?’ They had no way to make contact with the devices; Ramiro was hoping that their allies would be able to provide the necessary hardware.

  ‘Maybe a few ended up on porous rock,’ Tarquinia conceded. ‘And of those that fell loose, maybe one or two failed to reattach. But that’s why we made spares.’

  ‘Would we be part of Giacomo’s plan at all, if we weren’t going to have at least twelve survivors to offer him?’ It wasn’t a rhetorical question; Ramiro was never confident about the possibilities until he’d talked them over with someone else.

  ‘He wouldn’t hear the bad news unless he stayed in touch,’ Tarquinia reasoned. ‘So even if the occulters have all disappeared into the void, he couldn’t simply shun us before we’d worked that out together. But I can’t see why he’d claim that all his hopes were resting on us if it wasn’t true. I think the plan must keep holding together – at least for as long as ordinary people can keep sending back news.’

  They had both heard from friends that, three days before the disruption, official communications would start taking up so much bandwidth that no private messages would be able to get through. If the occulters did fail, the failure lay somewhere beyond that horizon.

  Ramiro was heading home from the food hall when a man bumped into him in the corridor, breaking his hold on the guide rope. As etiquette demanded they both reached out to steady each other, trying to kill the motion that the collision had imparted before they sent each other crashing into opposite walls. The manoeuvre succeeded, and they both muttered embarrassed apologies, but as they separated the man passed a slip of paper into Ramiro’s hand.

  Ramiro waited until he was back in his apartment before inspecting the message. The paper was covered in numbers, far too many to be an address. He stared at it for a while, then went to his console and confirmed his hunch. It had been encrypted with his public key, and the plain text did look like an address.

  There was no time specified, but he was loath to delay the meeting or attract attention by trying to get hold of Tarquinia. He tore up the message and erased the plain text from his screen, then set out on his own.

  When he knocked on the door, it opened immediately.

  ‘Are you Giacomo?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ The man invited him in.

  ‘Do you think I’m being watched?’ Ramiro had counted at least five cameras along the way.

  ‘Of course you are,’ Giacomo replied cheerfully, ‘but right now, someone resembling you is being watched in your place.’

  ‘You sent a decoy into this corridor . . . to be spotted at the next intersection, as if I just carried on walking?’ Ramiro was astonished, though matching the timing to his actual movements would not have been a problem at all.

  ‘Let’s not talk about the details,’ Giacomo suggested.
He’d had three years to think through the strategy; why would he be interested in debating it with someone who’d had three pauses?

  ‘All right.’ Ramiro clung to the guide rope in what he guessed was someone else’s living room. If the group had gone to so much trouble to bring him here, what did that imply about the end point of their discussions? But he had to stop thinking that way, or his decisions would all be shaped by the presumption that it was impossible for anyone armed with foresight to waste their time.

  ‘The occulters weren’t designed to carry anything,’ he began.

  Giacomo tipped his head, acknowledging the fact without making an unseemly boast that he’d been aware of this before the occulters had even existed. ‘We put suitable hooks on the caches,’ he explained. ‘Spring-loaded to secure them. All your machines will need to do is visit the right locations along the way to the base, and the cargo will more or less attach itself. Our devices have been stuck in place with resin, but a lateral tug will loosen the bond with far less force than it would take to break it vertically.’

  ‘So you’ve managed to build a dozen of these things and smuggle them outside?’

  ‘A dozen and a half,’ Giacomo corrected him. ‘Including spares. In the end it was just a matter of stealth and patience. Everything was based on pre-existing designs; it’s only the delivery mechanism that would have been beyond us.’

  Ramiro said, ‘Tell me about the bombs.’

  ‘They’ll do the job,’ Giacomo promised him.

  ‘I don’t doubt that. But what’s the size of each charge? The blast radius?’

  ‘In vacuum, they’ll fracture clearstone within six strides of the detonation point.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Giacomo insisted. ‘Once the light collector’s damaged, the channel will be dead.’

  ‘And do you know how well protected the internal light path is?’

  Giacomo said, ‘There are three clearstone seals below the collector: at four strides deep, eight strides, and one stretch. Once you go past those three seals, the main tube itself is continuous – they don’t put anything between the mirrors, because that would cut into the light with every bounce. But there’s no chance of us breaching the tubes: the first seal alone will take most of the energy out of the blast.’

  ‘You’re certain of that?’ Ramiro wished Agata hadn’t given up on the plan before she’d heard these details.

  ‘That’s what the explosives experts tell me,’ Giacomo replied carefully. ‘Running a test on a mock-up would have been the best way to answer that, but there’s a limit to what we can slip past surveillance.’

  Three seals, with the last at double the blast radius. The saboteurs had no need to damage anything so deep. And even if something went awry in the delivery, that would lead to less harm to these structures, not more.

  ‘What about the defences?’ Ramiro asked. ‘They won’t have left the collectors sitting there unguarded.’

  ‘All the original defences at the base were designed to protect the engines from micrometeors – arriving from out of the void at high speed without changing course.’ Giacomo spread his arms. ‘We believe they’ve tried to improve the system since they learnt about the disruption, but anything coming in low above the rocks and moving unpredictably will be a completely different kind of target.’

  ‘So we have a chance.’ Ramiro was beginning to feel optimistic.

  ‘I believe so.’ Giacomo had had three years to mull over the same facts; if there was no thrill of delight in his verdict, at least he’d earned the right to issue it.

  ‘This next request is a little delicate,’ Ramiro admitted. ‘Though I don’t suppose it will shock you.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I’ll need to talk everything over with Tarquinia,’ he said, ‘but even if she agrees, we’ll have one more proviso: we’ll want to hold onto the codes for the occulters ourselves. You provide the coordinates, we operate the devices.’

  ‘I understand.’ Giacomo was completely unperturbed.

  Ramiro understood that his collaborator could hardly need more time to weigh up the proposal, but he was still taken aback by this placid response. ‘Agata is hoping to find a safer way to cause the disruption,’ he said. It felt incumbent on him to provide a full justification for Giacomo’s ease; he couldn’t drop the discussion just because they’d agreed. ‘I don’t know what her chances are, but this way it will be clear that we can still change the plan at the last moment if she comes up with something better.’

  Giacomo said, ‘We’ve always known that that was part of the deal, and we have no problem with it at all.’ He reached across from his rope and clasped Ramiro’s shoulder. ‘To the end of the system, brother.’

  ‘To the end of the system,’ Ramiro echoed. This strangely dispassionate rebel could not have achieved much without his own knowledge of the future. But then nothing could have been more apt than their enemies’ machine enabling its own destruction.

  ‘Why do I feel that I have no choice in this?’ Tarquinia complained.

  ‘Because everything feels that way,’ Ramiro replied. ‘Just ignore it and do what you want.’

  She slid away from him beneath the tarpaulin of his sand bed, a silhouette against the red moss-light coming through the fabric from the wall behind her. ‘The codes remain in our hands to the end,’ she said. ‘What is there I could possibly object to?’ She made this sound like a bad thing.

  ‘It’s strange being trusted by strangers,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But they know we won’t betray them for at least the next four stints, and we know we won’t have any reason to regret the deal ourselves or we would have sent back a warning. This is what life is like without surprises. I wouldn’t want it to last for ever, but at a time like this I can’t honestly claim a need for even more uncertainty.’

  Tarquinia said, ‘What I’m afraid of is being certain, without being right.’

  ‘About what, exactly?’ he pressed her.

  ‘If I knew that there wouldn’t be a problem.’

  Ramiro drew the tarpaulin away from his face and looked out across the room. ‘What’s the worst that can happen – short of a meteor strike? Vincenzo’s right and it’s all a set-up. Giacomo is secretly working for the Council. We’ll end up in prison, but with a clear conscience: nothing we were planning would have harmed anyone, while the Councillors lied to the whole mountain for years. Come the next election we’ll probably be pardoned, and the system will never be turned on again. Does any of that sound so bad to you?’

  ‘No.’ Tarquinia shifted uneasily.

  ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘We’ll go ahead,’ she said. ‘Nothing else makes sense. Maybe I’m just not accustomed to things slotting into place so perfectly. It used to be that anyone who knew from the start what to say to win you over was setting an ambush. These days, maybe all it proves is that they bother to read their messages.’

  Giacomo handed over the data link, a shiny black slab of photonics about five scants across.

  Ramiro inspected it. ‘That’s perfect,’ he said. He’d had no hope of getting hold of anything like this himself. ‘How do you get past the inventory checks?’

  ‘You can swap an inert mock-up for the real thing,’ Giacomo explained. ‘If you do it the right way no one will notice for years.’

  Ramiro formed a pocket and hid the link. ‘Do you have the coordinates for me?’

  ‘Yes, but we should get the other business out of the way first.’ Giacomo paused expectantly.

  ‘Of course.’ Ramiro had sat down with Tarquinia for a bell the night before, refining the sketches from memory. They’d kept no records of the occulters’ design on paper or in photonics, and not merely to avoid discovery; they hadn’t actually anticipated any need for it.

  He summoned the final drawing onto the skin of his chest, with all the details and dimensions that Giacomo had requested. The explosives caches would need to have been carefully designed if they were t
o grab the occulters and ride them – without jamming the mechanism or fatally unbalancing their hosts. Still, Ramiro’s first impulse when asked for the plans had been to challenge his accomplice, jokingly, to display them first. But the information would still need to pass between them in the conventional direction at some point, and Ramiro hadn’t really wished to be confronted with an unarguable proof that he would agree to the transaction eventually.

  Giacomo dragged himself closer along the guide rope. ‘Do you mind if we do this by touch? My visual memory isn’t so strong, and cameras are a security risk.’

  ‘All right.’ Ramiro hadn’t been expecting this, but he had no reason to object. He moved forward and let Giacomo embrace him, and as their skin made contact the gentle pressure rendered the ridges of the drawing palpable to both of them.

  ‘When will you send it?’ Ramiro asked.

  ‘Tonight.’ Giacomo separated from him. ‘In three pieces, hidden in pictures of my children.’

  ‘Why not just encrypt it?’ Ramiro hoped nothing had shown on his face as he heard the phrase my children. He would never have picked the man for a Starver, but then, once their children were born they had no reason to starve.

  Giacomo said, ‘The authorities can tell from the size of the message that it’s unlikely to be text, and encrypting an image attracts more suspicion.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll give you the coordinates now.’

  Ramiro waited for him to hand over the paper, but then he understood that this exchange was to be conducted the same way.

  As they embraced again, Ramiro concentrated on the numbers, committing the pattern of ridges to memory. As a child, he’d passed messages to male friends this way, making a joke out of the harmless intimacy’s mimicry of the forbidden act. But the skin that was pressed against his own now hadn’t mimicked it, it had triggered the real thing.

  ‘Do you have them all clearly?’ Giacomo asked.

  ‘I think so.’ Ramiro pulled away, averting his gaze, unsure what he was feeling. Envy? If Tarquinia had ever really died in his arms, it would have been unbearable. Why should he envy a man who’d lost his co?