The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (35 page)

Ramiro passed the last of the plants to Azelio, then scrambled through the airlock himself.

‘Time to celebrate the harvest!’ he said, reflexively brushing dust off his hands, though as much as he removed rose from the floor to replace it.

‘Don’t get any ideas!’ Azelio positioned himself protectively in front of the repotted wheat.

‘Don’t worry; there wouldn’t be enough there to feed a vole.’ Ramiro called out to Agata and Tarquinia, then headed for the pantry to fetch eight loaves.

The four of them sat together in the front cabin. Tarquinia said, ‘Before I plot the ascent, I thought I’d take a vote on whether we should do a few more low orbits – to see if
we can spot the pre-relics of any future cities.’

‘No thanks,’ Ramiro replied. ‘If there are going to be settlers I don’t want to know about it . . . but settlers would avoid unmaking traces anyway. They’d only
raise cities on what looked like untouched ground.’

‘They wouldn’t have to be built by settlers from the
Peerless
,’ Azelio pointed out. ‘If the ancestors come here after the reunion, who knows how long
they’ll stay?’

‘It can’t hurt to look,’ Agata agreed. Ramiro watched as she finished her first loaf, but after raising the second one halfway to her mouth she put it back on the plate.
‘Does anyone want this?’

‘I’m starving,’ Azelio said. ‘Are you sure you’ve had enough?’

‘Absolutely.’

Azelio reached over and took it. Ramiro forced himself to look elsewhere as he tried to decide whether or not to intervene. He might get away with a joking confiscation – protesting that
he’d carried more of the plants back than Azelio – but that could only end with him eating the loaf himself. Two crew members falling ill hadn’t been the plan, but did it matter?
Ramiro stole a glance at Azelio’s plate and saw that he no longer had a choice.

He pretended to be annoyed by the vote on the orbits and stayed out of the conversation, finishing his meal while Tarquinia was still eating. ‘I might start bringing in the tents,’
he said. He needed a chance to come and go from the storeroom without anyone beside him, in order to get the tools for the inscription outside.

‘Relax,’ Tarquinia said. ‘There’s no rush. We can do that later.’

‘I want to get a start while it’s calm,’ he insisted. ‘If a storm comes in it could take twice as long.’

In the storeroom he found the lever for extracting the tent stakes, but he couldn’t see where the chisel had gone. With the constant gravity, people had grown careless about slotting every
tool into place. He left quickly, not wanting Tarquinia to wonder what could be taking him so long.

Outside, he took the stakes and poles out of the first tent, then folded the fabric down into a square. There was no particular reason for taking the tents back with them; it almost came down to
mere tidiness, a virtue that made more sense in the confined spaces of the mountain. But if leaving six of the wheat plants growing backwards in time felt apt, requiring Esilio to manufacture four
tents out of dust seemed more of an affront. One day a successor to Agata might find an equation that spelt out exactly how much inexplicable junk a time-reversed world could be expected to cough
up, just to cater to the whims of visitors with a different arrow. If there was a limit, that might even be the ultimate reason why there would never be settlers here: a whole city might have
pushed the mathematics of consistency past its choking point. Ramiro found the idea encouraging; nothing helped a plan run more smoothly than having a law of physics on its side.

In the front cabin, the rest of the crew were still sitting and talking, digesting their meals. Ramiro carried the disassembled tent past them into the storeroom and searched again for the
chisel, with no luck. It had to be somewhere, but he couldn’t ask the others if they’d seen it.

As he walked back into the cabin he saw Agata beginning to sway on her couch. ‘That’s not right,’ she muttered, pressing a fist to her chest. ‘It’s like a rock in
my gut.’

‘Sounds like what I had,’ Ramiro ventured. ‘You should go and lie down. If you rest straight away it might be over faster than it was for me.’

‘So you’re still infectious?’ Tarquinia eyed him warily. ‘You’d better stay in your cabin, too.’

‘No, I must have spread it earlier,’ Ramiro replied. ‘There’s probably a dormant period after the body takes it in.’

‘How do you know that?’ Tarquinia demanded irritably. ‘Have you got some study of the aetiology at hand?’

‘No, but—’

‘I have to get us off this planet safely,’ she said. ‘What am I meant to do: wait until I’ve caught this disease and been through the symptoms, so I know it won’t
happen later when I’m in the middle of the ascent?’

‘You feel well now, don’t you?’ Ramiro asked her.

‘I don’t,’ Azelio said, massaging his sternum with one palm.

Tarquinia stood. ‘I want all three of you in your cabins. If you need anything, call me through the link; I’ll put on a cooling bag and helmet and bring it to you. But no one leaves
their room.’

‘I’m perfectly healthy!’ Ramiro protested. ‘We can stay out of each other’s way – I’ll finish bringing in the tents, and I’ll warn you before I
come through the airlock.’

‘No,’ Tarquinia said flatly. ‘The tents aren’t important, but I can get them myself. I want everyone in their cabins now. Is that understood?’

Agata rose and began limping away, bent over in pain. Azelio jumped up and went to help her. Ramiro stayed where he was; once the others had left he would have to explain his plan to
Tarquinia.

‘Ramiro,’ she said, gesturing towards the passage. ‘Please. I know you’ve recovered, but I can’t risk catching this.’

Azelio was watching them with his rear gaze, puzzled by Ramiro’s stubbornness. Ramiro struggled to think of a plausible reason to stand his ground; raising the idea of bringing in the
probe now would only make it sound more suspicious.

He followed Azelio and Agata. When they’d entered their rooms and closed the doors, Ramiro closed his own from the outside.

He stood motionless for a while, trying to judge how quietly he could walk back to the front cabin, trying to think of a gesture he could make that would guarantee that Tarquinia wouldn’t
respond to the sight of him with an angry shout. From where he stood he could see her crossing the cabin, moving towards the airlock. She was going out to finish retrieving the tents; she had the
lever he’d used in her hand.

As she disappeared from view he cursed silently. Then he started down the passage, red dust tickling his feet. He would follow her out and explain everything, confess to the poisoning, put his
plan at her mercy. Maybe she’d treat his desire to create the message as a kind of empty vanity and refuse to be a part of it, lest his deceit undermined the impact of the find. But he
couldn’t be a helpless spectator, merely watching the mountain’s history unfold. She’d understand that, surely?

He stood at the entrance to the front cabin. Tarquinia had gone out – but he suddenly remembered that he’d never brought the tent-lever back into the
Surveyor
. He’d
left it by the airlock outside. She’d been carrying something else, something similar in appearance.

He heard Agata humming with pain as the spasms in her gut failed to dislodge the tainted meal. Ramiro retraced his steps and managed to get into his room, with the door emitting no more than a
faint squeak while his hapless victim was at her loudest. He squatted by his bed, staring at the floor, trying to understand what was happening.

How could he carve anything into the rock face, if the idea of doing it had only come to him after he’d seen the result? Even the choice of words hadn’t sounded like his own. If
he’d only selected them because he’d read them, who would have made the choice? No one. Agata had told him endlessly: a loop could never contain complexity with no antecedent but
itself, because the probability would be far too low. There could be no words appearing on rocks for no other reason than the fact that they’d done so.

But long before Agata had dragged the two of them to the blast site, Tarquinia had seen him falling apart. And as each new phenomenon they witnessed on Esilio made the prospect of returning with
the settlers more dispiriting, she must have started searching for a way for them to stay on the mountain together – to live out their final years in a place where the dust wouldn’t see
them coming, where their graves had not already been dug.

Ramiro pressed his face into his hands and fought to stay silent, afraid that if he let his tympanum stir he’d shout down the walls with some confused, alarming paean to the woman that
would convince the others that he’d lost his mind. He couldn’t let any hint of the plan slip out – or even let Tarquinia know that he’d uncovered it. She hadn’t wanted
a co-conspirator any more than he had, and they’d both make more believable witnesses if they’d never spoken of what had happened, never made it real in anyone else’s eyes.

He sat by the bed listening for her footsteps, wondering if he could be mistaken. It wouldn’t take long to pull down a tent and bring it inside, and she’d have no reason to return
quietly.

Agata hummed in misery, and Azelio called out, trying to console her. But between these exchanges, Ramiro heard nothing but the wind blowing dust across the hull.

‘The link’s open!’ Tarquinia shouted.

Agata had woken just moments earlier, and for moments more she lay in a daze, astonished at her prescience. Then it occurred to her that Tarquinia must have repeated the call several times.

She rose from her bed and raced down the passage, sand still clinging to the skin of her back. The rest of the crew were already gathered around the console.

‘. . . all safe and in good health,’ Tarquinia was saying. ‘We landed successfully on Esilio and made an assessment of its potential for settlement; we’ll be sending the
technical reports shortly. But as you can imagine, we’re eager for news from the mountain.’

There was a perceptible delay as the ultraviolet pulses crossed the void, then a man’s voice replied: ‘We’ll need to receive your reports first, before the channel is used for
personal calls.’

Tarquinia was taken aback. ‘I understand. But can’t you fill us in on what’s been happening?’

‘What do you want to know?’ the man inquired impassively.

‘Is the messaging system working?’ Ramiro interjected.

‘Yes.’

‘How long has it been in use?’ Tarquinia asked.

‘Almost three years.’

Agata leant forward towards the microphone. ‘And how long will it remain in use?’

The signal’s time in transit was fixed; the awkward pause before the reply was as unmistakable as if they’d been speaking face to face. ‘My instructions are to receive your
reports and then facilitate personal calls, not to engage in an open-ended dialogue.’

Agata didn’t know what to make of this rebuff. But the exchange would be monitored and recorded; she couldn’t blame the link operator if he didn’t want to break any protocol
imposed from above.

Tarquinia said, ‘I’ll queue up the reports now, and resume contact when the transmission’s complete.’

‘Thank you,
Surveyor
. Audio out.’

‘What a welcome!’ Azelio complained. ‘And it’s not as if we could have caught them unprepared.’

‘Oh, I’m sure they were thrilled by our safe return,’ Ramiro replied. ‘We’re just three years late for the party.’

The console switched to a graphic showing the progress of the data transmissions. Agata squinted in disbelief at the predicted completion time, but caught herself before protesting out loud. In
order to make the time lag reasonable at this distance, they needed to use very fast UV. But such high velocities also meant very low frequencies, and hence low bandwidth.

‘Azelio gets the first call,’ Tarquinia decided. ‘Then Agata, Ramiro, myself.’

They all knew better than to argue with the pilot. Agata returned to her room and sat at her desk, skimming through the reports of her work that Lila would be receiving shortly – and then
presumably sending back to herself at some time just after the system started operating. As they’d drawn closer to the
Peerless
, Agata had considered withholding her results from the
transmission – hoping that she might yet complete the analysis of the curved vacuum on her own, even if it meant working in isolation in the mountain for another few years. In the end,
though, that had seemed petty and mean-spirited. She’d grown tired of struggling on and on without any feedback from her peers. Now she would learn in an instant what the collective effort of
the physics community had achieved over the last three years, as they argued over the significance of the diagram calculus – improving it, extending it, or maybe even refuting it entirely.
She couldn’t decide whether to be terrified or exhilarated, but even if her methods had been excoriated, torn apart and rebuilt entirely, they could only have been replaced by something
better. Whatever the final synthesis was, it would have to be spectacular.

When Tarquinia announced that Azelio’s call was coming through, instead of taking it in his own cabin he invited everyone to join him at the main console.

‘Uncle?’

Agata shivered at the sound of Luisa’s voice, unmistakably older but still not a woman’s. It would have felt less strange if it hadn’t changed at all.

Azelio said, ‘I’m here! How are you, my darling?’

‘I’m fine. We got your messages from after you arrived. We’ve played them over and over.’

‘That’s wonderful.’ Azelio looked lost for a moment. ‘Did you know we had a Hurtler scrape the side of the hull? Tarquinia went flying out into the void, and Agata had to
go out and rescue her.’

‘No!’ Luisa was impressed, but a little miffed as well. ‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’

‘I didn’t want you worrying. But everyone’s safe – you’ll see us all soon.’

‘I know,’ Luisa replied, mystified that he’d feel any need to point this out.