The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (9 page)

‘So the final slowdown shouldn’t be a problem,’ Ramiro realised belatedly.

‘If this holds up – no, it shouldn’t,’ Tarquinia agreed.

Ramiro leant back from the console, pondering the political consequences. Even the staunchest reunionists had assumed that they’d be leaving their descendants with the burden of finding a
way to start decelerating on the approach to the home world. But the tiny engine Tarquinia had set straining against its springs had had no difficulty achieving thrust in exactly the direction that
the
Peerless
itself would need for that last manoeuvre. The migrationists had lost their most powerful scare story.

But physics had lost a story of its own. From the point of view of the ultimate recipients of the engine’s exhaust, its successful firing was the kind of absurd picture that came from
imagining time running in reverse, with the fragments of some shattered object reassembling themselves into the whole.

‘So much for the law of increasing entropy,’ Ramiro said.

Tarquinia was unfazed. ‘That was never going to last.’

‘No.’ If the cosmos really did loop back on itself in all four dimensions, nothing could increase for ever. ‘But what do we put in its place?’

‘Observation.’ Tarquinia nodded towards the image of the test rig.

‘So everything becomes empirical?’ Ramiro was happy to be guided by experiments, so long as some prospect remained that they could yield the same result twice in a row.

‘The cosmos is what it is,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘The laws of optics and mechanics and gravity are simple and elegant and universal . . . but a detailed description of all the
things on which those laws play out seems to be nothing but a set of brute facts that need to be discovered individually. I mean, a “typical” cosmos, in statistical terms, would be a
gas in thermal equilibrium filling the void, with no solid objects at all. There certainly wouldn’t be steep entropy gradients. We’ve only been treating the existence of one such
gradient as a “law” because it was the most prominent fact in our lives: time came with an arrow distinguishing the past from the future.’

Ramiro said, ‘But isn’t there still a question of how brutish the brute facts are? We know that the home cluster’s entropy was much lower in its distant past, and the same was
true of the orthogonal cluster. The most economical explanation is that both clusters shared a common past.’

Tarquinia said, ‘So you want to cling to the notion of parsimony? A single region of low entropy is already stupendously unlikely, but even if we have no choice about that, you want to
hold the line and refuse to allow two?’

‘You don’t think that’s reasonable?’

Tarquinia thought it over. ‘I don’t know what’s reasonable any more,’ she said.

Ramiro closed his eyes for a moment, raising some crude scrawls on his chest based on Tarquinia’s diagram, but keeping them private. ‘Forget about whether or not the clusters have a
common past; forget about the orthogonal cluster entirely. Suppose the only thing we rely on is the fact that the home cluster had vastly lower entropy in the past.’

‘All right.’

‘So the state of the home cluster long ago is already “special”,’ he said, ‘compared to a random gas made of the same constituents. But now if we take it for
granted that this state could, potentially, give rise to all kinds of situations analogous to the experiment we just did with the engine, which result would require the most “unlikely”
original state? The result where
none
of those situations ever actually arise: no fast-moving object ever emits a burst of light in such a way that the light would need to be emitted, as
well, by other objects scattered around the cluster? Or the result where such events do occur, with the original state guaranteeing coordinated action by all the different emitters? And you
can’t say “neither”; it has to be one or the other.’

Tarquinia buzzed wryly. ‘When you put it that way, I’d bet on a lack of restrictions, not a lack of conspiracies. I mean, consistency comes for free; we’re not entitled to say
that it’s freakishly unlikely when the cosmos does whatever needs to be done to avoid contradicting itself. What’s unlikely would be for the requirements of consistency to go out of
their way to avoid offending our usual notions of cause and effect.’

‘Yeah.’ Ramiro buzzed. Though they’d reached a consensus of sorts, his own argument didn’t really silence his disquiet. A part of him would never be able to accept that
distant dust particles were creating the engine’s exhaust as much as the engine itself was.

‘I’d better spread the good news,’ Tarquinia said.

‘Not so good for Pio’s gang.’

‘Don’t be so cynical,’ Tarquinia chided him. ‘They have one less thing to fear now, like all of us. Why shouldn’t they be happy?’

Ramiro said, ‘Wait and see. By the time they’re out of prison I’m sure they’ll have thought of some new reason to give up on the home world.’

Tarquinia wasn’t in the mood for an argument about the migrationists. ‘Thanks for talking this through with me. I’ll feel a lot less rattled now when I report to the
Councillors.’

‘Any time.’

Her feed vanished from the console, replaced by the status display for the main engines.

As he contemplated the results of the test, Ramiro couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment. If every engine working in the void had been selectively inhibited, excursions by the
gnats away from the
Peerless
would have become extraordinarily challenging. He’d seen some elaborate proposals from the instrument builders that aimed to get around the problem
– most of them requiring high-powered beams passing between the
Peerless
and the gnat, though a couple had sought to exploit the mountain’s weak gravity as the controlling
force, and one had involved extremely long ropes.

Automating any of those outlandish schemes would have made an exciting project after the turnaround. But now gnats would just be gnats, and it was beginning to look as if he’d soon have
nothing new to work on at all.

‘Corrado?’ Ramiro swayed sideways so he could open the door fully without banging his head. ‘You should have warned me, I would have prepared a
meal—’

‘I’m not here for your cooking,’ his uncle replied brusquely. He glared at Ramiro impatiently, waiting for him to move down the ladder so he could pass through the hatch.

When they were both on the floor, Ramiro gestured towards the couch. He knew the gravity was hard on his uncle; before the engines had started up, Corrado’s apartment had been in
near-weightlessness.

Corrado made himself comfortable, but then wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘In three days, your sister will be a dozen and nine years old,’ he announced.

‘It’s that soon, really? I lost track.’

‘I understand that you need to supervise the turnaround to the end,’ Corrado conceded. ‘So you won’t be free of that commitment for more than a year. But this is the
right time for you to come to an agreement with Rosita. You need to tell her that as soon as the
Peerless
is spinning again, she can shed a daughter and you’ll be promised to the
child.’

Ramiro examined the floor beside the couch. There was a hole that had once held a peg supporting a bookshelf; he’d left it empty in the hope of reusing it, but it was filling up with dust
and food crumbs.

‘We should wait and see what happens,’ he suggested. ‘There might be some kind of technical problem that will prolong the turnaround. I don’t want to make any promises I
can’t keep.’

‘Your sister’s too easy on you,’ Corrado replied flatly. ‘That’s the only reason I’m here: someone has to speak up on her behalf.’

‘What makes you so sure that she’s desperate to start shedding?’ Ramiro countered.

‘She’s been fertile for a long time,’ Corrado said. ‘If she divides, do you want that on your conscience?’

‘Of course not,’ Ramiro said. ‘But the holin is so pure now, and they take such high doses—’

Corrado cut him off. ‘That’s no guarantee. Imagine your sister gone, and four children to feed. Do you want to be the one who kills two of them?’

Ramiro covered his face – unmoved by the preposterous scenario, but unwilling to reveal just how angry he felt at being cornered this way. For as long as he could remember, his uncle had
been assuring him that it was in his nature to want to raise a child. That lesson had come second only to the other glorious message about manhood: if he ever succumbed to his urge to touch a woman
in the wrong way – as the Starvers did – it would annihilate her. His duty as he approached maturity was to quash that terrible, lingering compulsion – while also joyously
coveting a role that, in nature, could only have followed his failure at the first task.

When the turnaround was finished he’d have no more excuses, no more reasons to delay. The only tactic left was honesty.

He looked up. ‘I don’t think I can do it.’

‘Do what? Kill two children?’ Corrado was still lost in his own cautionary fable. ‘Of course you can’t! The idea is to stop it coming to that.’

Ramiro said, ‘I don’t think I can raise a child. It’s not in me.’

Corrado stood up and approached him, stony faced. Ramiro stepped back, but refused to recant. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.

‘Do you want this family to die out entirely?’

‘Die out?’ Ramiro lost interest in feigning respect. ‘I wish you’d make up your mind what you’re threatening me with: is it four children, or none?’

Corrado raised his hand, but then stayed it. He’d probably worn himself out already in the high gravity. ‘If you don’t do this—’ he snarled.

‘If I don’t do this,’ Ramiro replied, ‘and Rosita actually wants a child . . . she’ll find a man whose sister died, or whose sister wasn’t interested in
shedding. Or she might even raise the child on her own. Who knows? I want her to be happy, whatever she chooses – but I’m entitled to make my own choices too.’

Corrado stood in front of him, silent for a while. ‘If you don’t do this, why would she ever have a son? Why would she go through all that pain and trouble a second time, if
you’ve proved to her that it will be wasted?’

Ramiro said, ‘I have no idea what her plans will be. Why don’t you ask her, if it’s so important?’

‘But you don’t care? Nephew, no nephew – it’s all the same to you?’

Ramiro buzzed humourlessly. ‘Absolutely. So long as I don’t have to coddle the brat.’

Corrado struck him hard across the face. Ramiro staggered back, and had to squat down to regain his balance.

‘We’re barely clinging on,’ Corrado said. ‘One family in three has no son. But I didn’t know I’d raised a self-hater: the kind who wants to see us wiped out
entirely.’

Ramiro was shivering. ‘You don’t know the first thing about me. But if you were such a great champion for the male sex, why didn’t you turn my mother into a Starver and take
her right out of the picture? That would have done wonders for your census counts.’

Corrado walked over to the ladder and ascended, leaving the apartment without another word.

Ramiro knelt on the floor, humming to himself. Part of him was jubilant: he’d finally punctured the old man’s presumptuous fantasies of an endless chain of obedient nephews, all
living out their lives in exactly the same fashion as the family’s First Shed Son. And he felt a glorious, self-righteous glow at having provoked Corrado into assaulting him without raising a
hand in retaliation.

But another part of him looked back on the confrontation with dismay. All he’d really wanted was more time to consider his choices, a chance to talk honestly with Rosita, an end to being
taken for granted. Now it would be impossible to change his mind without humiliating himself completely.

On the day that the mountain’s centrifugal gravity returned to full strength, Agata spent the morning tidying her apartment.

Her intention had always been to keep as much of the layout as possible fixed across the changes of vertical, and though the demands of safety and comfort had forced various compromises
she’d managed to leave one large corner-mounted cupboard unopened for the whole three years, in the hope that a strict refusal to meddle with its contents might allow every item to return of
its own accord to its original position.

This proved to have been excessively optimistic. In retrospect, she realised that it was probably the brief interludes of weightlessness, rather than the long exposure to sideways gravity, that
had wreaked the most havoc, allowing the effects of small bumps and vibrations to accumulate, feeding entropy into the jostling mass of books, papers and knick-knacks. If there’d been any
prospect of the turnaround being repeated, she would have started by tying a few more items together with string, cutting down the number of degrees of freedom.

Agata had a meeting with Lila in the afternoon, but she’d run out of food so she left the apartment early to give herself time to eat on the way. Striding down the corridor, using a guide
rope to help her maintain traction, she ran her free hand over the dusty footprints still clinging to the wall on her left.

‘Agata!’

She raised her rear gaze. She hadn’t been mistaken about the voice: the man approaching behind her was her brother.

Pio caught up with her. ‘I almost missed you.’

‘I have an appointment,’ Agata said curtly.

‘Can I walk with you? I won’t slow you down.’

Agata hummed indifference.

‘They let me out yesterday,’ Pio explained, moving beside her and taking the same guide rope. ‘Cira came to meet me, but she said you were still angry.’

‘Why would I be angry?’

‘I had nothing to do with the gnat at the Station,’ Pio declared. ‘That was a dangerous stunt, and if I’d known anything about it I would have tried to stop it
myself.’

Agata didn’t believe him, but she knew she’d only make a fool of herself if she started arguing about the migrationists’ internal power structures with someone who actually
knew what they were.