The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (13 page)

‘For those rare cases where some future informant and present-day recipient might act together out of spite to violate your wish not to be informed of certain events, we can discourage
that with appropriate punishments. Nobody is claiming that this technology will transform us into a flawless society, but people have survived over the ages without any perfect, pre-emptive cure
for hurtful gossip or malicious slander. Words can damage people, I acknowledge that, but it’s nothing new. We’ll find the right balance in our laws to protect against the worst kinds
of harm, just as we’ve done in the past.’

Agata had been stealing glances at the timer with her rear gaze and adjusting her pace. Now she waited a moment for it to start ringing, then reached down to silence it.

Ramiro took her place. ‘Agata has expressed a touching faith in the power of the law and technology to protect us from unwanted personal revelations,’ he said. ‘I don’t
believe that her faith is warranted, but even if it were that wouldn’t be enough to make this system benign.

‘As I speak, many of you – I hope – are still struggling to decide how you’ll vote on this question. And when the result is declared, that will surely be a public matter.
The announcement won’t be an invasion of anyone’s privacy, an act of libel, or anything else that could fairly or sensibly be punished. And yet if you’d known the result in
advance, wouldn’t you feel that your own personal decision-making process had been altered? Of course you’d still be free to vote in accordance with your wishes, but the whole sequence
of contesting thoughts – all the private debates inside your own skull that led you to that final action – would be playing out in a very different context.’

Ramiro checked the timer; he was still less than halfway through his quota, but he was not going to let himself get cut off again.

‘Knowing even the most mundane facts from the public record will crush our political lives, flattening our inner dialogues into a choice between impotent rage and apathetic conformity. Of
course we’re accustomed to being helpless
after the fact
to reverse a vote that goes against us, but remember: the results of elections and referenda that we know in advance will
not
be guaranteed to be the same as they would have been in the absence of foreknowledge. We won’t be hearing about a future that would have happened regardless – as every
proponent of this system will affirm, because if that were true it could never yield any benefits. Rather, we’ll be reshaping the whole process by which we make decisions – at the
political level without a doubt, but I believe that the same kind of distortion will afflict every aspect of our lives.’

Ramiro waited for the satisfying punctuation of the bell, but then he realised that he’d rushed through his final words too quickly and left himself with time to fill. ‘For
example,’ he extemporised, ‘decisions about births and child-rearing are as difficult as any we face, but it won’t take prying clerks to disclose our final choices to us once we
hear from a child whose very existence had been in doubt.’ He caught a look of bafflement on one woman’s face, and an expression of outright hostility on another’s.
‘It’s not that a message like that need be unwelcome, but if we flatten the deliberation process, then just as with the vote—’

The timer interrupted him. Ramiro punched it, then slunk backwards.

Agata took centre stage, pausing just long enough to let Ramiro’s awkwardness linger and become fixed in everyone’s minds. ‘If you don’t want to read the result of some
future referendum, I’m sure you won’t have to,’ she declared. ‘And if mere rumours of the result prove to be too hard to avoid, they could always be camouflaged with
competing rumours. People could choose to learn the true result in advance from some trusted informant if they wished, but those who didn’t would end up hearing a range of false claims as
well, with no way to distinguish between them.’

Ramiro waited for someone in the audience to ridicule this inane proposal, but they let it pass without complaint. Maybe they all liked the idea of taking advantage of their idealistic
neighbours, who’d be wrapped in shrouds of scrupulously balanced, government-supplied misinformation.

‘This system could vastly improve our safety,’ Agata contended, ‘as Ramiro and everyone else acknowledges. We can deal with the privacy issues, and the political ones: your
vote will always be your own to cast, and you’ll have the choice of knowing the outcome in advance or not, as you wish. But you don’t need to take my word for any of this. The present
vote is merely for a year’s trial in which we can discover what the real problems are – and if, in the end, you find that they outweigh the advantages you’ll be free to change
your mind and vote to have the system dismantled.

‘If we look beyond Ramiro’s fear that in this maze of information we might inadvertently stumble on some unwelcome facts about our lives – most of which would be no more
harmful to us than a friend’s reminiscence about a youthful misadventure that we’d prefer to forget – we’ll see something far less petty and mundane. Many of us have
heirlooms from the day of the launch: diaries, or letters from mothers to their children, or even just stories passed down unwritten. In this mountain of photonic documents from the future we could
find our descendants’ stories of the reunion. Then we’ll all have a chance to be part of the
Peerless
’s return, in a way that we never imagined before.’

As the timer sounded, the audience cheered – some sections more loudly than others, but it was the first real response they’d offered all evening.

Agata paused to acknowledge the applause, then exited gracefully. Ramiro was stung. How could his case not be obvious to everyone? What hadn’t he said that would have made it clearer?

Tarquinia approached and drew him back into the moss-lit side room. ‘You did a good job,’ she said.

‘They loved her,’ Ramiro replied. He could barely make out Tarquinia’s face as his eyes adjusted from the stage lights. ‘Didn’t you hear?’

‘It was the end of the debate, the applause was for both of you.’

She sounded as if she almost believed that, but Ramiro remained despondent. ‘What if I’ve lost it for us?’

Tarquinia hummed irritably. ‘You didn’t do as badly as you think. And for anyone you didn’t convince, there are five more debates to come!’

‘But if people here have made up their minds they won’t want to hear it all rehashed.’

‘You put a strong case,’ Tarquinia insisted. ‘You stumbled with the timing, that’s all.’

Ramiro could tell that she was beginning to find his pessimism wearisome. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have faced that crowd without it.’

‘I couldn’t have faced that crowd at all,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘But this way I can still tell my children that I played a part.’

‘A part in what, though?’ Ramiro joked. ‘Victory or farce?’

Tarquinia said, ‘Let’s not rule anything out. Last time we worked together, we managed both at once.’

Medoro had promised that he’d bring Agata food for her vigil, but when she spotted him approaching the voting hall she saw that he’d also brought his whole
family.

Medoro and Serena left two baskets of loaves with her then everyone went in to vote. Agata felt a little foolish now, camped beside the moss-red wall with her supplies, no longer able to pass
herself off as someone merely waiting for the queues to thin. She could have watched the results accumulating from anywhere in the mountain, but it was the sight of voters coming and going in the
flesh that made the experience real for her. At home she would have felt as if the whole thing were some kind of simulation, with a random-number generator filling out the counts.

Gineto emerged first and squeezed his way through the crowd towards Agata. ‘I can’t say I just made you happy,’ he warned her.

‘Let’s not have an argument,’ Agata pleaded. ‘I’ve voted, you’ve voted; there’s not much point in us trying to change each other’s minds
now.’

‘The whole thing’s so unnecessary, though,’ Gineto brooded. ‘We got through the turnaround safely. What threat are we facing? In the home cluster’s terms
we’re just retracing our old path, and the Hurtlers are completely tame now. We could have had a quiet life, waiting patiently to arrive back home. But no, we had to find something to argue
about.’

Agata did have some sympathy for this view. ‘We can’t undo the whole dispute now, but at least this should settle it. Believe me, I’m not going to argue with the
result.’

‘Nor will I,’ Gineto replied, ‘but we all saw what happened last time.’

Agata glanced at the screen above the entrance; the pro-system vote was lagging by about a twelfth of the count. If Gineto wanted her to start looking for a downside to victory, she’d need
to have victory itself in sight.

Serena and Vala joined them. Agata had tied the food baskets to a guide rope where it met the wall behind her, and Serena wasted no time in opening them.

‘I hope this isn’t rude, but I’m trying to put on mass,’ she explained, biting deeply into her first loaf. ‘I talked to the technician yesterday, and she said
I’m still about three hefts below the ideal.’

‘Oh.’ Agata wasn’t sure if she should say something congratulatory; Medoro hadn’t told her anything about these plans.

‘Daughter now, then son after a year,’ Serena enthused. ‘Over and done with before Medoro gets too old.’ She glanced at Gineto. ‘He’ll thank me later –
won’t he, Uncle?’

Gineto was bemused. ‘You think I was too old? I didn’t have an uncle of my own to help me, and I still ran rings around both of you.’

‘Do you want to raise these two as well, then?’ Serena joked.

‘I’m not going to intrude into Medoro’s life,’ Gineto replied. ‘But I’ll give him advice if he wants it.’

Agata struggled to animate the fixed expression she could feel on her face. ‘It’s very quick now, isn’t it? The recovery?’

‘I’ll be mobile in a day, they said,’ Serena replied. ‘It’s not just better drugs and better signal delivery; they really stress the target mass now.’ She
started on a third loaf.

Vala turned to Agata. ‘I suppose you’ve been busy with the referendum?’

‘I sat in on three of the debates, after my own,’ Agata said. ‘I couldn’t make it to the others.’ In truth, she’d found it too frustrating to keep attending;
as a former participant she wasn’t allowed to interject. ‘There were good speakers on both sides. No one can claim that all the arguments haven’t been aired.’

‘I wish they’d show them on the network,’ Vala complained. ‘Not everyone wants to be packed into a crowd like that.’

Serena said, ‘I think the traditionalists are afraid that if we start broadcasting the debates, they’ll turn into two people taking turns addressing an empty room. But maybe the
Council will change the rules next time.’

Agata looked up at the news screen. The vote had crossed one sixth of the roll, and her side was still behind.

Medoro approached, catching her in the act. ‘Does it bother anyone else that a sharp-eyed observer might see which way you voted by watching those things?’

Agata said, ‘The scale’s never finer than a dozen people per pixel.’

Medoro was undeterred. ‘What if I already know how eleven of those people will be voting?’

The five of them spent the next half-bell arguing about the safeguards in the voting system. With Serena’s help they managed to empty both baskets of loaves before midday; Agata had eaten
her fill, but she felt like a break so she volunteered to fetch some more.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Medoro offered.

‘How will you work on the camera now?’ Agata asked him as they left the voting precinct.

‘Serena told you about the children?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s going to help look after them,’ Medoro said. ‘She and Gineto. I’ll still have time to work.’

‘You’d trust her with the job?’

Medoro buzzed, affronted. ‘I can’t believe you’d say that! You were raised by a woman single-handed, and you turned out all right.’

‘Did I?’

‘Better than the woman who raised you.’ He caught himself. ‘I shouldn’t criticise Cira; that whole generation was confused. And it’s hardly her fault that it took
so long for the biologists to learn how to shed men.’

‘But now they can, and everything’s perfect.’ Agata hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but the words kept emerging that way.

‘So you’ve given up on making Pio an uncle?’ Medoro asked.

‘There’s nothing we agree on,’ Agata said. ‘It would feel like I was doing it for selfish reasons, and then the children would be stuck with all his crazy
ideas.’

‘And you don’t want to try a Cira? Raise them yourself?’

‘No. I’d probably mess them up even more than Pio would.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Medoro replied. ‘But if you don’t want a child, don’t have one. Pio will survive. Cira will get over it. And despite your rude remarks
about Serena, if you ever feel like babysitting you’re welcome to join the roster.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re just worried that I’ll get more letters from the future than you,’ Medoro joked. ‘All that lavish praise for your theories of cosmology won’t cut it;
you’ll be looking for mindless gossip from the descendants, just like the rest of us.’

They were approaching the food hall now. There was a news screen at the entrance; from a distance the two counts looked perfectly matched, though that impression was unlikely to survive closer
scrutiny.

Agata said, ‘And if we don’t win today—’

Medoro reached over to thump her arm. ‘If we don’t win, it’s not going to kill you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘Ha.’ Agata felt a pang of shame, but not enough to shift her perspective. ‘If we win, I’ll stop being jealous of your sister’s perfect life,’ she said.
‘How’s that for a promise?’

Medoro said, ‘I’m waiting to hear the second part.’

‘If we lose . . . I don’t know.’ If she had never imagined any of the miracles the messaging system offered, she would have lived happily enough without them. But it was too
late for that now.