by Greg Egan
Tarquinia placed a hand gently against her cheek. ‘Get strong. We’ll see you again soon.’
Ramiro shared a meal with Tarquinia in the food hall, then they retired to his apartment.
‘What is it that’s troubling you?’ Tarquinia asked. ‘I thought it was the inscription, but Agata was fine about that.’
Ramiro didn’t reply. Better to offer no denials or explanations, and she’d come to her own conclusions about the cause.
‘We survived,’ she said. ‘We might have been fools to go along with Giacomo . . . but if we hadn’t, what would have caused the disruption?’
‘So whatever we did was just the way it had to be?’ Ramiro had meant to sound sarcastic, but the words ended up more like a plea.
Tarquinia said, ‘I wouldn’t put it like that. But with everyone clinging stubbornly to their own agendas, it’s a miracle that it ended without a single death. It’s physics that makes us free – binding our actions to our intentions – but in a tight enough corner with enough people refusing to act against their nature, it’s not hard to imagine that the only route to consistency might involve killing them all.’
Ramiro couldn’t keep silent. ‘Giacomo told me what he’d planned,’ he said.
Tarquinia was confused. ‘When?’
‘After you disappeared. I went looking for him, to see if he could get me out into the void.’
‘But he couldn’t.’
Ramiro said, ‘He told me there was no need. He told me that they had more than enough occulters of their own to do the job – and that the job was much more than we’d asked for.’
‘So what could you have done?’ Tarquinia still wanted to smooth it over. ‘It’s not your fault that you didn’t have Agata’s idea, and you couldn’t risk going to the Council.’
Ramiro said bluntly, ‘I wanted it. For a while. I wanted exactly what he wanted.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because the way things are makes me angry,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid that men will be wiped off the mountain – I’m afraid that nothing will ever change for us. We’ll keep on being made for the one remaining purpose where we can’t be replaced, and if we try to do anything else with our lives we’ll be treated like mistakes.’
Tarquinia was silent for a while. Ramiro had expected her to be enraged and disgusted, but even if that had been her first impulse she seemed to be searching for another response.
‘Do something,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘If you want things to change, you’re going to have to do something.’
‘Like Pio? Like Giacomo?’
Tarquinia hummed impatiently. ‘No. Tamara didn’t blow anything up. Carlo didn’t blow anything up.’
Ramiro said, ‘I’m not a biologist. I don’t know how to fix the problem that way.’
‘What do you want for the men who come after you?’
‘I want them to have easier choices than I had.’
‘That’s a little vague,’ Tarquinia complained. ‘But I’m sure we can work on it. There’s an election coming up, and we haven’t had a single male Councillor for far too long.’
Ramiro drew away from her. ‘No. Find another punishment.’
‘You want change,’ she said. ‘It’s Giacomo’s way, or it’s politics.’
‘I’m not too old to study biology.’
‘I think you might be.’ Tarquinia became serious. ‘If even a fraction of the men on the Peerless feel that there’s nothing left to do but plant a bomb somewhere, we’re never going to have peace. If you’ve shared that rage, if you understand it, it’s your responsibility to help find a better way.’
Ramiro replied irritably, ‘And the women who run things have nothing to do with it?’
‘I didn’t say that. We’re still insecure, because we know exactly how bad it would be for us if everything unwound. But do you really think the only voice for men on the Council should come from women?’
‘Not at all. I’ve voted for male candidates, but they never get a seat.’
Tarquinia said, ‘Consider it. That’s all I’m asking.’
They shared Ramiro’s bed, but lay apart. Ramiro watched Tarquinia sleeping in the moss-light. He didn’t know if she was telling the truth about the inscription, but he didn’t care; he’d had enough of trying to fit his own life around some supposed future certainty.
Whatever had been written in the rocks on Esilio, in six generations the travellers had discovered everything they needed to return in safety and protect the home world. The hardest task now would be to find a way to live in peace for six more, and reach the end of the journey without throwing everything away.
34
Valeria woke in darkness to shouts of panic from the street below. She clambered out of bed and looked down from her window. Everyone was staring into the eastern sky.
‘Was it a Hurtler?’ she called out. She could see nothing unusual herself now, but a fast-moving near miss might have unsettled people.
‘It’s the sun, you fool!’ a woman replied.
Valeria could make no sense of this. Had another planet been ignited – had Pio gone the way of Gemma? Pio might well have risen by now, but she could see no evidence that the world had gained a third sun while she slept.
‘Where?’ she demanded.
The woman pointed towards an unremarkable patch of sky. If it did contain Pio, the planet was too dim to discern without some concerted staring. Valeria wondered if the crowd had succumbed to a kind of collective hallucination. She’d imagined fires out in the desert herself, when she’d been tired enough, but right now her lack of sleep seemed merely to have left her bleary-eyed, struggling to focus on the stars right ahead of her, as if she’d developed a blind spot—
In fact there was a small black absence in her vision, but when she moved her eyes it stayed fixed in the sky. She ducked back into her room and checked the clock beside her bed, by touch. She’d slept far later than she’d realised: it was a bell after dawn.
The black disc in the east was the sun.
Eusebio said, ‘I don’t see how a Hurtler could do this. Gemma made perfect sense, but how could an impact put out the fire across a whole star?’
Valeria sat in a corner of the meeting room with her dye and paper, listening to the twelve men of Zeugma’s Fire Watch Committee who’d assembled on this lamp-lit afternoon. The Committee had made plans long ago for every imaginable crisis, but no one had anticipated this eerie extended night.
‘A large enough shock to the surface might disrupt the reaction,’ Cornelio proposed. ‘We have no experience of the interaction between combustion and extreme seismic events, but if a pressure wave altered the structure of the sunstone, even temporarily, it’s conceivable that the flame might be extinguished.’
‘Across the entire surface?’ Eusebio was sceptical. ‘I could believe a Hurtler inducing a dark patch at the point of impact, a flameless region that survived for a bell or two. But not this.’
Giorgio gestured towards the window. ‘The result’s not in dispute. And if a Hurtler wasn’t the culprit, what alternative is there?’
Valeria raised his words on her chest and looked around the room, poised to squeeze one more contribution onto the page, but no one had an answer for Giorgio so she took the opportunity to dust her skin with dye and commit the discussion so far to paper.
‘At least the agricultural effects might be positive,’ Eusebio suggested hopefully. ‘If the uncovered crops finally get something close to the old cycle of illumination, that ought to lead to higher yields.’
He looked to Adelmo, but the agronomist spread his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘Gemma’s bright enough to ruin the night, but it might not be bright enough to count as a signal for day.’
Silvio entered the room and spoke privately with Eusebio. Valeria heard a snatch of the conversation, as Eusebio’s voice rose in incredulity. ‘She told them it would happen?’
When the exchange was
over, Eusebio looked agitated. ‘The meeting’s adjourned until tomorrow,’ he said. Valeria began gathering her papers, preparing to leave Eusebio huddling with his confidants to discuss Silvio’s news, but to her surprise he walked straight up to her.
‘Could you come with me to the prison?’ he asked.
‘Why?’
Valeria’s look of panic seemed to dispel his disquiet. ‘No one’s arresting you,’ he joked. ‘I just want you to come and talk to someone.’
‘You want me to keep a record?’ She fumbled with her box of dyes.
‘That wouldn’t hurt,’ Eusebio decided. ‘But actually, she asked for you by name.’
‘I’m not the only person in Zeugma with that name.’ Valeria trusted Eusebio not to form unwarranted conclusions, but she didn’t want to be known as having criminal associates.
Eusebio said, ‘She asked for Yalda’s adopted daughter. And she said something about Nereo’s force that the jailers were incapable of conveying precisely. So I’m fairly sure that she did mean you.’
There was nothing unusual about the sight of Zeugma lit by Gemma alone, but Valeria’s body had its own reckoning of the time and the disjunction rendered the streets hallucinatory. She followed Eusebio across the dark cobblestones towards an encounter with a madwoman.
‘She gave her name as Clara,’ Eusebio explained as they walked into the entrance hall. ‘I know everything else has to be nonsense. The guards probably half-remembered what she’d said, and when this bizarre thing happened they reinterpreted her words in the light of it.’
Valeria said nothing; she had no theories.
They sat in an interview room, waiting for Clara to be brought up from the cells. When the guard led her in, a chain looped around her melded arms, Valeria’s skin tingled all over. She’d never set eyes on the woman before, but the prisoner was beaming as if she’d just walked into the presence of two long-lost friends.
Eusebio gestured to Clara that she should take a seat. She complied, and the guard left them.
‘Can you understand my speech?’ Clara asked. She spoke with a heavy accent that Valeria couldn’t place.
Eusebio said, ‘Yes.’
‘I hope I’ve got the grammar and vocabulary correct. We have written sources, but no sound recordings.’
‘Sound recordings?’ Eusebio buzzed appreciatively. ‘That’s an inventive embellishment, I’ll give you that.’
Clara said, ‘I gave the city police the location of my rocket. If they’d sent someone to look at it, that would have saved us all this confusion.’
Eusebio replied bluntly, ‘The Peerless isn’t due to return for three years. And when it does, I think we’ll manage to spot the engines in the sky.’
Clara tipped her head, amused. ‘Some people did argue for a light show to help set the scene . . . but then, I was in the other camp who thought that putting out the sun really ought to be more than enough to establish our credentials.’
Valeria watched Eusebio. He said, ‘Conjurors have made an art out of convincing people that they’ve foretold the future. The jailers here must have made a good audience.’
‘The Peerless did travel three full years into your future.’ Clara sketched a portion of the mountain’s proposed trajectory on her chest, but every educated person in Zeugma was aware of that. ‘At the turnaround our plan was to follow a straight line back home and then decelerate for a year. But eventually we realised that it would be perfectly safe to arrive earlier. So we executed a big loop, going a few years into the future then curving around and travelling a few years into the past.’ She added these unlikely adornments to her diagram. ‘All of that happened before I was born, though. For most of my life, the Peerless was travelling homewards through the void at a time, by your reckoning, when it was yet to leave the ground. And I saw the old mountain through a telescope when we passed it! It was still accelerating, burning sunstone. We weren’t so visible: our engines work very differently – they don’t consume fuel at all.’
Valeria said, ‘Why did you ask for me?’
Clara turned to her with an expression of terrifying joy. ‘When I was a girl, I read Yalda’s biography, and there was a story she’d told one of her friends about you. You gave her a gift before she left Zeugma: a diagram showing Nereo’s force for spherical shells.’
‘There were a lot of people at that party,’ Valeria pointed out, trying not to be rattled. Eusebio’s point about conjurors was an apt one. ‘A lot of people could know that.’
Clara tried to gesture with her arms; she’d forgotten that they were melded behind her back. ‘Is this really going to be so hard? If there’s nothing I can say that could convince you, can’t we ride out to the place where I arrived?’
Eusebio said, ‘So the Peerless itself is still out in the void, and the other travellers just let you come down here alone?’
‘There was a lottery for the privilege,’ Clara replied. ‘I walked empty-handed into Zeugma because that seemed like the right spirit in which to come: no showy artefacts, certainly no weapons. I thought I’d end up engaged in some spirited debates at the university for a couple of days, outraging the physicists with my claims about luxagen waves until astronomical events finally proved my credentials.’
‘Arrest for trespass wasn’t part of your plan.’
Clara said, ‘I hold no grudges against anyone for my own mistakes. But I would be lying to you if I didn’t admit to some disillusionment. If you have no thanks for me, I can promise you that you owe them to my forebears. When I tell you their history, you’ll understand your debt.’
Eusebio began shivering. Before Valeria’s eyes, his composure disintegrated.
‘Forgive me,’ he pleaded. ‘Let me deal with your chains, then we’ll find a place for you to rest. If you’ll accept my hospitality—’
Valeria was confused. ‘Why do you believe her now?’
Clara turned to Valeria. ‘You still need to see the rocket?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ The woman had managed to prick Eusebio’s conscience, but his guilt over the travellers’ ordeal had no bearing at all on her story’s credibility.
‘Then let’s go for a ride.’
Silvio drove the three of them out into the desert. Gemma was setting, but four long Hurtlers lit the sky.
‘Why would anyone want to put the sun out?’ Valeria demanded.
‘We’re planning to turn half the surface into an engine.’ Eusebio had had Clara’s hands separated; she gestured as if she were cupping a globe. ‘Moving the sun is the safest way to move the world. There’ll still be some seismic activity as it tugs you along, but not as much as if we put the engines here on the ground.’
‘Tugs us along?’
‘You have heard of gravity?’ Clara joked. ‘And we’ll be bringing Gemma as well, for light. It will end up closer when the new orbits settle, so it will do a better job than it does now.’
‘But where would we be going?’ Valeria was furious that she had to conduct the whole interrogation herself. Eusebio was huddled beside them in silence, apparently too ashamed to speak. He’d wanted to get Clara ensconced in the largest guest room of his father’s mansion immediately, but she’d insisted on making the trip first.
‘This planet needs to match velocities with the Hurtlers,’ Clara explained.
‘Which would just turn everything else around us into Hurtlers!’ Valeria protested. ‘You didn’t research this fraud well enough. The Peerless went into a dust-free corridor, but it doesn’t stretch on for ever. If we followed the mountain’s route, what would we do at the end?’
Clara said, ‘Actually, you could zigzag up and down the corridor on a trajectory that would last for eons, but we settled on a better solution than that. If you shadow a world in the orthogonal cluster, we can read the future density of dust in the region by inspecting its surface. That’s the helpful thing about a time-reversed planet: it gives you a forecast that can’t be wrong.’
Valeria couldn’t fault the woman
’s imagination. At the very least, she must have gone to one of Yalda and Eusebio’s recruiting lectures when they were trying to assemble the crew for the Peerless. Maybe she’d even signed up, but then lost her courage at the last moment.
‘Here we are,’ Clara announced.
Valeria had been expecting some kind of conical structure adorned with parachutes, contrived to resemble one of the test rockets that had made short flights and returned, but perhaps Clara hadn’t been close to the real project after all. The object sitting on the sand, a few saunters from the road, looked like a small stone cabin on stilts, with the upper parts of each wall tilted outwards so that the windows they bore faced down at an angle. Just getting the bizarre construction here must have involved quite an investment – but what advantage did the woman hope to garner?
The four of them trudged across the desert together. Silvio looked even more contemptuous of the whole farce than Valeria, but he said nothing.
‘Where are the engines?’ Valeria asked.
‘Underneath, of course.’ Clara gestured to the bottom of the floor, about a stride above the ground. Valeria ducked down between the stilts.
‘There’s nothing here but a kind of . . . black mirrorstone,’ she reported. It was hard to see much by starlight, but the surface looked utterly smooth and unbroken. ‘Where does the exhaust come out?’
‘There is no exhaust. Just light.’
‘Light? Your rocket runs on light, but no one spotted you descending?’
‘Ultraviolet light,’ Clara persisted. ‘The faster the light a rocket uses, the less heat it generates in the process.’
Valeria emerged and straightened up. ‘Let me guess: your vehicle suffered some damage in the landing, but with sufficient funds you could get it working again. Your backers will be rewarded, of course, with new inventions that will put them so far beyond their rivals—’
Eusebio said angrily, ‘Enough! Whatever you believe, this woman is my guest, and I won’t allow you to talk to her that way.’
Clara said, ‘Scepticism is an admirable trait, and we seem to have confused everyone by arriving early.’ She turned to Valeria. ‘My vehicle suffered no damage. And I promised you a ride.’
