The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (33 page)

Azelio walked beside her, carrying two of his potted seedlings from the final dozen he’d held in reserve. He wasn’t complaining, but she could see him struggling with the weight as
the slope increased.

‘I’d be happy to take one,’ she offered.

‘Thanks, but I’d rather you had nothing to distract you from your own load,’ he replied.

Agata raised the bomb effortlessly above her head. ‘It hardly weighs anything. And even if I drop it, it’s not going to go off.’ Tarquinia had assured her that the explosive
could only be triggered by a bright pulse of light at a specific wavelength, and the only means of delivering that pulse was strapped securely to her tool belt.

Azelio said, ‘I’m more worried that you might damage the detonator and we won’t be able to set it off at all.’

‘Fair enough.’

Azelio had identified a promising outcrop in the images they’d taken from orbit – a body of rock whose spectral signature suggested that it could give rise to fertile soil. No one
had objected when Agata had volunteered to accompany him to the site, but she still felt slightly guilty at having wormed her way out of the tedious business of moving everything back into the
Surveyor
. Blowing up a hillside would be vastly more enjoyable than reassembling cooling pipes and restocking the pantry.

‘Can we rest for a bit?’ Azelio suggested.

‘Of course.’ Agata placed the bomb gently on the ground, then sat beside it, positioning her body so she’d be blocking its way if it began to slide. Azelio did the same with
his plants.

‘Do you think they already know how this ends, back on the
Peerless
?’ he asked her.

‘I expect so.’ Unless there’d been an ongoing campaign of sabotage, it was hard to believe that the messaging system would not have been completed by now.

‘In some ways that takes the sting off the separation,’ Azelio mused. ‘If the children are already in contact with me, that’s almost like being there.’

‘This from a man who voted against the system,’ Agata teased him.

Azelio said, ‘If the vote had gone against the system then we wouldn’t have needed to be here at all.’

‘Hmm.’ Agata didn’t want to start arguing with him over the attribution of blame.

‘So long as there’s peace, I don’t care about the system,’ Azelio admitted wearily. ‘People can use it or ignore it as they wish. We managed not to go to war over
shedding; we ought to be able to live with anything after that.’

‘We ought to, and we will,’ Agata declared. ‘The fanatics who can’t accept that will be free to leave.’

Azelio buzzed wryly. ‘Fanatics carrying the necessary stocks of explosive?’

‘Maybe we can send all the bombs they’ll need in a separate craft,’ Agata suggested. ‘We could bundle off a whole lot of freight to Esilio in an automated vessel at high
acceleration, then let the settlers follow. It’s not an intractable problem; we’ll think of some way to do it safely.’

‘Assuming this works at all.’ Azelio nodded towards their own bomb.

‘It has to work.’ Agata searched the dark valley for the speck of light that marked the landing site. ‘If the soil is right and the arrow is right, the plants will grow.
Nothing else would make sense.’

The rim of the star bowl was almost vertical as they came over the rise. Agata wished they could have chosen a landscape with more rock than dust from the start; it would have spared them the
worst of the storms, and they could have passed the time just sitting outside, gazing at this glorious celestial clock.

‘There it is,’ Azelio announced, pointing ahead. Agata could barely distinguish the hue of the outcrop from that of its surroundings, but she trusted Azelio. He’d studied the
image of the hills for half a day as he’d plotted their route, and he had too much at stake to be careless.

The approach was downhill, but the ground was uneven and strewn with small, loose stones. As Agata advanced the stones began jostling her feet, accelerated from a span or two away by
time-reversed friction before coming to a halt against her skin. She glanced at Azelio; he was struggling to keep his footing, distracted by the bizarre bombardment.

‘Can you leave the plants here?’ she asked. Once they’d set the charge they’d be retreating to about this point anyway.

‘Good idea.’ Azelio set the pots down and they continued.

When they reached the hillside Azelio switched on his coherer and played it over the pale brown rocks. ‘This is the target,’ he confirmed. He gestured towards the centre of the
outcrop. ‘Anywhere about there should do it.’

Agata handed him the bomb and waited for him to step away to a safe distance, then she started swinging her pick into the rock face. Small chips of stone flew out from the point of impact,
stinging her forearms, but the rush of power and freedom she felt at the sight of the growing excavation was more than enough to compensate. In Esilian time, the chips were rising from the ground,
propelled into the air by conspiracies of time-reversed thermal diffusion, just to aid her as she rebuilt the rock. What stronger proof could there be that the cosmos had a place for her, with all
her plans and choices? One day it would kill her, but until then the contract was clear: hardship and frustration and failure were all possible, but she would never be robbed of her will
entirely.

She made the hole as deep as she could without widening it excessively; the idea was to confine the pressure wave within the rock as much as possible. When she stopped swinging, Azelio
approached and held the bomb up against the opening. It didn’t quite fit at one corner. She set to work removing the obstruction.

On the next attempt, the bomb’s cubic housing entered the aperture without resistance. Azelio gently pushed it deeper, then Agata aimed her coherer into the hole. There were some small
gaps around the edge of the housing, but she didn’t think they’d be enough to dissipate the energy of the blast.

She took the detonator from her tool belt. Ramiro had removed most of the original components and added a timer in place of the remote trigger. She started up the photonics and it ran a
self-test; a short summary on the display panel reported that everything was working as expected. She plugged the detonation cable into the bomb, and tapped the switch to start the timer. The
countdown showed nine lapses and falling. She rested the detonator in the mouth of the hole, then the two of them walked away.

The loose stones harassed them again as they crossed the ground, and although the mild pressure on their skin was exactly the same as if they’d merely been dislodging the things, the
timing was still disconcerting. Agata imagined the settlers’ children, raised with all of these quirks of nature and entirely unconcerned by them. She could sympathise with Ramiro’s
discomfort, and she’d even shared it at times, but she felt no unease at the prospect of generations of innocent descendants of the anti-messagers living out their lives beneath the stars
here. They’d have more comfort and freedom than anyone on the
Peerless
. So long as the crops grew.

Azelio reached the plants; he squatted protectively in front of them. Agata turned to face the hillside.

‘I forgot to use my stopwatch,’ she confessed.

Azelio hadn’t; he glanced down at his belt. ‘Still a bit more than two lapses.’

Agata groped pre-emptively for an antidote to disappointment. ‘If this doesn’t go off, I think we could probably smash enough rock for a test plot by hand.’

Azelio buzzed. ‘Not finely enough.’

‘I’m serious! We could start with a pick but then mill down the rock chips – like making flour from grain.’

‘If it does come to that, I’ll be reminding you that you volunteered. One lapse to go.’

Agata felt her gut clench painfully. Her body was bracing instinctively for danger, but silence would be far worse.

The hillside erupted with light. She flung an arm in front of her eyes, but with her rear gaze she saw her shadow stretched out behind her. The ground shook, and she hummed softly, remembering
the blast that had taken Medoro. But this was its opposite: a force that might finally heal the mountain, as much as it could ever be healed.

A warm gust of air struck her skin, carrying dust but nothing harder or sharper. The light had died; Agata lowered her arm and waited for her eyes to adjust back to the starlight.

A great, loose mound of debris lay at the base of the hill. Azelio rose to his feet and put a hand on her shoulder; she realised that she was shivering.

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ At his touch Agata ached to feel more of his skin against her, but as an internal voice started weaving a story of the only fitting coda to this triumph, she shut off the
absurd fantasy quickly, less afraid of any prospect of fission than of making a fool of herself with Azelio. ‘Let’s go see how it looks.’

They approached the blast site cautiously. In the planning meeting Tarquinia had raised the possibility of a delayed secondary collapse, but as they drew nearer that looked less likely: the new
rock face was almost vertical, but they hadn’t created an unstable cave or overhang.

Azelio strode forward to inspect the mound. He knelt and picked up a handful of debris. ‘It looks fine enough,’ he announced warily. ‘There’s some coarser grit in there
as well, but that shouldn’t matter.’ He turned to face Agata. ‘I think we’ve got a real chance.’

Hearing the hope in his voice, Agata felt the sense of fulfilment returning more strongly, but it was stripped now of any desire to follow her instincts to the end. She had all she needed:
Azelio’s friendship, and the satisfaction of having played a part in this scheme. It was enough.

Azelio shone his coherer across the top of the mound. ‘That could feed a lot more than twelve plants,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’m just glad we didn’t have to do it by
hand.’

‘Maybe the settlers will put their first farm here.’ Agata chirped, delighted by an absurd thought. ‘Maybe there are traces of them around, already – a few marks that
they’ll unmake in the rock.’

Azelio said, ‘If we can prove that they’re going to be here, will I still need to go ahead with the crop tests?’

‘Yes – or they’d never come!’

‘What if I lied and said I’d finished the tests?’

‘Then we’ll find some graffiti here, cursing you as the cause of the great famine.’

‘Which would shame me into doing the tests,’ Azelio replied. He raised the beam of his coherer from the mound to the rock face. ‘What’s that?’

‘Where?’ Agata couldn’t see anything.

‘About three strides up. It looks like writing.’

Agata was sure he was joking, but she aimed her own coherer at the same spot, and the slanted light revealed the shadows of a host of narrow ridges. It really did look as if part of the stone
had been carved away, leaving these lines in relief – on a surface that the blast had just exposed for the first time.

‘This is too strange,’ she said. She stepped onto the mound and walked across the fresh soil. She could feel herself leaving footprints, but unmaking some as well.

On a closer view, it was clear that Azelio was right: the lines on the rock face formed symbols. The sides of the ridges appeared softened and eroded, as if a generation’s worth of future
dust storms had left their mark. But she could still make out most of the message.

‘. . . came here from the home world,’ she read. ‘To offer thanks and bring you . . . courage.’

Azelio said, ‘Who thanks whom for what?’

Agata had never been less discouraged; she had never felt less in need of this grace. But here it was: for Ramiro in his darkness, for Azelio and Tarquinia, for everyone back on the
Peerless
, for six more generations of struggling travellers yet to be born.

‘It’s from the ancestors,’ she said. ‘They’re going to come here and write this. They’re going to come here to tell us that everything we’ve done and
everything we’ve been through was worth it in the end.’

As Tarquinia stepped aside, Ramiro moved closer and took his turn examining the rock face. He hadn’t doubted his crew-mates’ word, but since they’d had no
reason to be carrying a camera there’d been room for him to wonder if they might have over-interpreted some random pattern that had formed as the explosion fractured the hillside.

‘It does look genuine,’ he concluded. ‘Genuinely artificial, that is; don’t ask for my opinion on the authorship.’ After geology, he was going to have to add
time-reversed archaeology to the list of disciplines he’d sadly neglected.

‘We should leave now,’ Agata insisted. ‘As soon as the
Surveyor
’s ready.’

Ramiro turned away from the writing. ‘What about the wheat?’

‘The wheat doesn’t matter,’ Agata declared. ‘If there’s nothing left to fight about, there’s no reason for anyone to migrate.’

Tarquinia was sceptical. ‘You really think the Council’s going to switch off the messaging system on our say-so?’

‘What will they need it for?’ Agata was beginning to sound exasperated. ‘This proves that we make it to the reunion! There’s no question of the
Peerless
being
struck by a meteor – or tearing itself apart in a war. How can the Council claim that they need their system for safety and security once we’ve shown them a message that could only be
written if we’re safe and secure all the way to the home world?’

‘They could argue that the settlers will write it,’ Azelio suggested.

‘What
settlers
?’ Agata fumed. ‘How could the settlers write something that would undermine their whole reason for being here?’

‘If the Council doesn’t take it seriously, it won’t undermine anything,’ Azelio reasoned. Ramiro wasn’t sure if that was circular logic, but as self-serving
political rhetoric it did have a horribly plausible ring to it.

‘You’ve all lost your minds!’ Agata moaned. ‘If you think this isn’t genuine, tell me what would count as proof of authorship. A message encrypted with a key that
we’re supposed to prepare now and then keep secret until we deliver it to the ancestors at the reunion? Even if we found something like that, you could still claim that the key might end up
in someone else’s hands along the way.’