The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (17 page)

Ramiro said, ‘If you want to get rid of this problem, you need to get rid of the dissenters. But you can’t expect people to leave the
Peerless
behind until they know that
they can survive somewhere else. I’m willing to travel to the nearest substantial orthogonal body and find out if it can be made habitable.’

A flicker of amusement crossed Greta’s face. ‘The nearest substantial body is almost certainly the Object. Are you going to try to sell people on the idea that they were inside that
rock, unnoticed, living their lives backwards — while the last three generations of their ancestors were coming and going, taking samples from the surface?’

Ramiro hadn’t thought of the Object. But as satisfying as it would be to set foot on the very rock that had once threatened to annihilate him, the prospect of burrowing into it
didn’t sound much like liberation, even without the bizarre twist of having to stay hidden from all the earlier visitors. ‘I meant something large enough to hold on to an atmosphere, so
people could live on the surface. Something on the outskirts of the orthogonal cluster. I don’t have access to the astronomers’ catalogues, but there must be something planet-sized
within reach.’

‘Within reach?’ Greta was doubtful; she paused to make use of her corset. ‘The nearest orthogonal planet would entail a round trip of a dozen years.’

Ramiro had hoped for something closer, but he persisted. ‘A dozen for the passengers,’ he stressed. ‘But still only four years for you. We could make it even less if it really
mattered; I’m sure I could put up with the higher acceleration. But we’ll need to talk to the experts as to whether the cooling system would allow that.’

Greta said, ‘ “We”? You might be getting a bit ahead of yourself.’

Ramiro looked down at the hardstone fetter piercing the side of his abdomen. In the room’s low gravity, he hardly noticed it – unless he moved without thinking and the chain that
joined it to the wall became taut. ‘How else should I talk, when I know that I have no chance of doing this without you? I think we’d still make a good team.’

‘Oh, I’m getting all nostalgic now,’ Greta replied sardonically. ‘Let’s reminisce about the time you lied to my face and betrayed me.’

‘You never used to take things personally,’ Ramiro complained. ‘All the time we worked together on the turnaround, did I ever make a fuss when you took all the credit with the
Council? We both treated each other pretty shabbily, but we still managed to solve every problem that was thrown at us.’

Greta was unmoved. ‘Try to be objective. You’re asking me to give a gnat to an automator whose greatest claim to fame will remind anyone who might have forgotten that
automating
a gnat is just what you need to turn it into a weapon.’

‘That’s a very negative way of looking at it.’ Ramiro thought for a moment. ‘The biggest problem with the rogue gnat was that it took us by surprise. We can arrange
things so that this craft has no way of doing that. And you can always send an observer from the messagers’ side to keep me honest – if you can find any volunteers for the
job.’

Greta said, ‘Right now I’m having trouble even thinking of a pilot.’

Ramiro didn’t reply. For all the help Tarquinia had given him with the debate, after the vote she’d refused to get involved with the dissenters. A dozen years away from the mountain
would be too painful a sacrifice to ask from anyone with a clear conscience.

‘You’d also need an agronomist,’ Greta added. ‘I doubt that even the diehard migrationists would take your word about the prospects for growing a crop.’

‘That’s fine with me.’ That she’d bothered to make the suggestion at all was a sign that this might not be hopeless – that he might have snagged her mind on the
rough edges of his plan.

‘Do you really have no idea who the bombers are?’ Greta asked.

‘None at all.’

‘I believe you,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know how to prove it to the Council.’

‘Whatever happened to the need to prove people guilty? Half the
Peerless
voted the same way as I did, but I doubt you’ve even locked up all the strikers.’

Greta pretended that she hadn’t heard his last remark; he wasn’t allowed to know who else had or hadn’t been imprisoned.

‘If I put this to the Council,’ she said, ‘they’ll only agree to it if it comes from them.
They
have to be the peacemakers, reaching out to their enemies for the
sake of the greater good.’

‘Well, naturally.’

‘And they might not even want you on the mission,’ she warned him. ‘What if they go with the idea, but then pick a crew without you?’

Ramiro buzzed. ‘At worst, I might have to stay in prison for the whole four years that they’re away. Compared with spending twelve in something not much bigger than my cell, I
don’t think the disappointment would crush me.’

Greta was puzzled. ‘And yet you’re willing to do it, if you’re asked.’

Ramiro said, ‘Who else could make this work politically? If you send Pio, half the mountain will riot. You trashed his reputation as soon as you locked him up over the rogue.’

‘And we haven’t trashed yours?’

‘Not yet, I hope.’

Greta drew herself out of her harness. ‘I’ll give this some thought. In the end, all I can do is take it to the Council.’ She dragged herself towards the door and tapped for
the guard.

‘And put it to them the right way,’ Ramiro pleaded.

Greta turned to face him. ‘And what’s the right way?’

Ramiro said, ‘Forget it. It’s not for me to tell you how to do your job.’

When she’d gone, he closed his eyes and pictured the scene in the Council chamber.
What would you say
, Greta the fixer would begin,
if we could find a way to inspire every
troublemaker in the mountain to march, willingly, into the void, out of our lives for ever?

Agata reached over and took Arianna from Gineto. The child ran her hands over Agata’s face, then frowned, disappointed. A moment later she started humming in distress.
Agata handed her back to her great-uncle.

Serena said, ‘Don’t worry, she’s moody with everyone. I’m sure she’ll get used to you.’

‘I’m happy to look after her,’ Agata declared. ‘Any time you want me to.’

‘That’s very kind,’ Gineto said, in about the same tone as Agata might have used if he’d offered to help her prove a theorem in topology.

Gineto had moved into Medoro’s old apartment, so at least Arianna would still have the same surroundings. Agata didn’t know what she could contribute beyond the occasional period of
babysitting, but she needed to do something to assuage the ache she felt from Medoro’s absence. If she couldn’t even help with his niece, what was left to her?

Medoro’s books still lined the walls of the living room: mostly specialist works on the theory of solids. He’d always teased Agata about her esoteric research, but improving the
design of photonic arrays had required far more physics than she’d ever mastered. She would have needed to study for years to have any chance of taking his place in the camera team.

‘What do you think of this new mission they’re proposing?’ Serena asked her. ‘The
Surveyor
?’

‘I don’t know.’ When she’d first heard the news, Agata had been disgusted; it had sounded like a gesture meant to appease Medoro’s killers. Since then she’d
grown less adamant, but she’d still been too angry to try to think through all the ramifications.

Gineto said, ‘If someone’s fighting to impose their will over the mountain, they’re not going to give that up and walk away.’

‘Not even for a planet all their own?’ Serena replied.

‘You think they want freedom? They just want power.’ Gineto was talking in his hyper-happy baby voice, beaming down at Arianna, pulling faces to make her chirp. ‘The
Peerless
is all they know. If they’d wanted to take their chances on their own, they could have asked for that any time since the turnaround.’

‘Then what’s the solution?’ Serena demanded. ‘If it were up to me I’d abandon the messaging system, but the Council’s already talking about the bombing as
proof of how much we need the warnings.’ Her voice faltered; Agata reached over and squeezed her shoulder.

‘The
Surveyor
’s not a bad idea,’ Agata conceded. ‘If they can grow crops on an orthogonal world, it would be one of the safest places to start a colony.
There’d be a limit to the kind of collisions with home-cluster matter it could suffer in the migrants’ future – since anything really catastrophic in the world’s own past
would have destroyed it, or lit it up like Gemma. On a cosmic timescale the entropy gradient would be a problem, but compared with the
Peerless
or the home world, a planet guaranteed to
stay intact for eons would be a haven.’

‘Then it’s worth trying, isn’t it?’ Serena said.

Gineto wasn’t swayed. ‘You think people who don’t want to know the future will migrate to a world where they can step out of their houses and see what a dozen generations of
their descendants will have carved into the rocks?’

Serena said wearily, ‘I just want a plan that both sides can live with. If not this, let them split the mountain in two.’

Gineto drew Arianna against his chest to hide his face from her as his expression grew grimmer. ‘The war to decide the size of the pieces would kill us all. If that’s the
alternative, the
Surveyor
can fly with my blessing.’

‘I’m very sorry about your friend,’ Lila said gently.

‘Thank you.’ Agata shifted in her harness. ‘His uncle’s looking after the baby, but it’s hard for the whole family.’

‘Of course.’ Lila offered a moment of sympathetic silence, then delicately broached a different subject. ‘Have you had a chance to think about the gradient problem, since our
last meeting?’

‘Not really,’ Agata confessed. She pictured Medoro standing in the corner of the office, the expression on his face enough to convey exactly what he thought of her laziness. It had
been three stints since the bombing; she really had no excuse not to get back to work.

Lila said, ‘I’ve had one idea myself, if you’re interested.’

‘Of course.’ Agata leant forward attentively and tried to concentrate.

‘It’s possible that what we’re lacking is a proper understanding of vacuum energy,’ Lila suggested. ‘You know the naïve version: if you look at the free light
field, and assume the right kind of relationship between the mass of a photon and the dimensions of the cosmos, each mode of the field that wraps around the cosmos a whole number of times is like a
simple oscillator. Wave mechanics tells us that an oscillator like that can’t have an energy of zero: the lowest energy level has some non-zero value. So even if the cosmos were empty, the
vacuum would have as much energy as you’d get by adding up the lowest levels of all the possible modes of the light field.’

‘Plus the same kind of contributions from all the modes of the luxagen field,’ Agata added.

‘Yes. Which are actually negative, if you take the mathematics seriously.’ Lila buzzed softly. ‘When I was developing the gravitational theory, I was never sure if I should
claim that this kind of energy would need to be included as a source of curvature – and then go on to insist that the very mild curvature that empty space seems to possess is proof that the
two kinds of vacuum energy more or less cancel each other out.’

‘Hmm.’ Agata wasn’t sure whether Lila was mocking this idea or trying to resurrect it, so it seemed wiser not to offer an opinion of her own.

‘The thing is, though,’ Lila continued, ‘the naïve version is just that. We don’t know if the cosmos really has the right dimensions to allow
any
free modes
of either field, and we don’t know how to calculate the vacuum energy under more realistic assumptions: taking account of the interaction between luxagens and photons, and taking account of
the curvature of four-space.’

Agata said, ‘But if the vacuum energy is a source of curvature, and the curvature itself can influence the vacuum energy . . .’

‘Then it’s much less clear what combinations of the two are actually possible,’ Lila replied. ‘That’s what I’m hoping would shed some light on the gradient
problem.’

‘Ah.’ Agata finally caught a glimmer of that illumination. ‘If we take account of the way the geometry of the cosmos determines what kind of waves can exist – which
governs the vacuum energy, which contributes to the curvature – we might end up showing that a uniform cosmos would be self-contradictory.’

‘It’s conceivable,’ Lila said cautiously. ‘Of course, that wouldn’t help much if a tiny wrinkle in the curvature was enough to make things work out. What we’d
need is for there to be no solutions without a significant entropy gradient.’

Agata understood the proposal now – and it was terrifying. To make any progress they would need to combine field theory, wave mechanics and cosmology in a manner that no one had ever
achieved before.

‘Can I think about this?’ She didn’t want to agree to the project only to find that she couldn’t summon up the kind of focus and stamina that an undertaking of this scale
required.

Lila said, ‘Of course.’

Agata hadn’t set out with any intention of going near the demolished workshop, but when her path took her to the boarded-up entrance she wasn’t surprised.

The floor of the tunnel outside was still covered in a layer of fine dust; she knew it was bluish by artificial light, but in the red glow of the moss it looked almost black. The last time
she’d stood here the entrance had only been covered by a curtain, and she’d peered in through a gap. A string of coherers hung across the ceiling had illuminated a team of investigators
at work in the rubble. They’d been photographing everything as they sifted patiently through the debris, hoping they might find fragments of the bomb.

As far as she knew, they never had. The Council had locked up all the anti-messagers who’d argued their case most vigorously in public, but as likely as not Medoro’s killers were
still free. When the new team of instrument builders was assembled they’d have bodyguards around the clock, and no one would get within a stroll of the workshop without being searched. But if
the bombers’ first choice of target became impossible to reach, they would find another one. Even if all of the system’s components could be built without another incident, when the
whole thing was finally assembled it would be vulnerable to other kinds of sabotage.