by Greg Egan
Ramiro was only half listening as he tinkered with the cameras and checked the network feed. There were barely four dozen people gathered in the cavernous space of the meeting room – all clinging to ropes in the audience section, with the stage left bare – but so far more than a dozen times that number were following the discussion on their consoles, all around the mountain.
‘But what is it that we’d be bargaining with?’ Emilia asked. ‘We don’t have a monopoly on any skill.’
‘No, but we have the numbers,’ Pio replied. ‘We can’t make any one job in the mountain impossible to do, but if five twelfths of the population stop working we’ll be doubling everyone else’s load.’
‘You won’t get every no-voter participating,’ Lena pointed out. As she started speaking, the feed switched automatically to the camera covering her, and Ramiro relaxed a little. The acoustics of the room had been confusing the software, but he seemed to have found the right way to filter out the distracting echoes and make it possible to triangulate each speaker’s location.
‘That’s true,’ Pio conceded. ‘But we could encourage people to join us by focusing the effects of the strike on non-participants. What if we make a public register of everyone who’s taking part? Then instead of sitting at home doing nothing, we could still help each other out.’
Lena buzzed with mirth, unimpressed. ‘And then the Council takes the names and locks us all up?’
Pio said, ‘At most, they could do that to about two gross; after that, they’ll run short of prison space – let alone guards. We won’t make the list public until it’s larger than that.’
‘We could set up a register that only members would have access to,’ Ramiro suggested.
‘And then some spy would join up, just to read it!’ Lena countered.
‘Hmm.’ Ramiro couldn’t see a way around that.
‘They might not lock us up,’ Diego said, ‘but if we’re going to make life hard for people off the list, they’re going to return the favour.’
‘Of course,’ Pio replied. ‘We have to expect to receive far worse than anything we can inflict on the majority. But for most of them, the messaging system is just a novelty that they know they can live without; once the cost becomes high enough, they’ll drop their support.’
Placida said, ‘And what happens when the Council passes a law that makes your entitlement void if you’re not working?’
‘Nobody would accept that,’ Pio said flatly. ‘The right to a share of the crops is in the hands of each family, not the Council. If they tried to change that, everyone would riot.’
‘Not everyone,’ Placida replied. ‘The more we were actually hurting them, the more willing they’d be to go along with the change. If your job really has become twice as hard, why wouldn’t you want the Council doing their best to starve the freeloaders into submission?’
Pio thought it over. ‘It’s not impossible. But if things reach that point we’ll have to move beyond the strike. If they deny us food, we’ll have to be prepared to take it by force.’
At the end of the meeting, everyone in the room agreed to join the strike. There was no public register of names, but anyone curious enough to access the feed – friend or enemy – had already seen their faces. Ramiro tried to tell himself that he’d been taking a greater risk on the day he broke his promise to Greta. But the truth was, many more people would have defended him for exposing her clandestine plan than would back him up now, after the system had been openly debated and approved.
As Ramiro was packing up the equipment, Pio approached him. ‘Thanks for your help tonight.’
‘It was nothing.’ Ramiro unplugged the photonic cable from the wall socket and began winding it back onto its spool.
‘What did the audience come to?’
‘We peaked at a dozen and five gross,’ Ramiro replied. ‘But the whole thing will still be available for anyone who wants to view it later.’
‘Can the Council block access to it?’ Pio asked.
‘Not legally. I suppose they could block access but deny that they’d done it – blame it on a technical glitch.’
‘Then we need to think about ways to get around that.’
‘We?’ Ramiro stopped winding and regarded him quizzically.
Pio buzzed. ‘All right: I have no expertise in these things. I meant you, and anyone else in the group who’s studied automation.’
‘All the automators I know are on the other side,’ Ramiro said. ‘The messaging system is too beautiful to resist: it’s going to be full of problems that can only be solved with smart photonics.’
‘But you’ve resisted the allure?’
Ramiro jammed the spool of cable into his storage box. ‘I’m with you up to a point,’ he said bluntly. ‘But if you start turning this into a war, don’t expect any kind of loyalty from me.’
Pio frowned. ‘I’m not looking for violence either.’
‘Would you describe crashing a gnat into the Station as an act of violence?’
‘I had nothing to do with that,’ Pio protested.
Ramiro said, ‘All right, but I’m still interested. How would you classify it?’
Pio considered the question. ‘I suppose it’s a borderline case. There was no intention to harm anyone, but they still endangered your life and Tarquinia’s. And if they’d managed to blast half the Object into the void, we would all have been at risk.’
‘Well, there are plenty of things short of antimatter that could wipe us out,’ Ramiro said. ‘Enough damage to the cooling system. Enough damage to the farms.’
Pio said, ‘I understand that. I’m not about to ask anyone to ransack the farms – all I said was that if the Council went so far as to starve us, we’d have to take our entitlements by force.’
Ramiro pulled the lid closed on the box. ‘We need to make our opponents understand how strongly we feel. I agree with you on that. But if we lose sight of where the line is, we could all be dead very quickly.’
‘I’ve spent my life trying to keep the Peerless safe,’ Pio replied. ‘You don’t have to treat me as some kind of fanatic.’
‘All right.’ Ramiro didn’t know what more he could say. If he was going to work with Pio at all, he had to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He unhooked the box from the rope and began dragging himself towards the exit, feeling more hopeful now than he had since the day of the debate. From what he’d seen of the resistance so far, they were committed but they weren’t reckless. They could take a stand and refuse to be cowed, without burning down the only home they had.
12
‘Do you want to take her for a while?’ Serena offered, holding out her daughter.
Agata couldn’t tear her gaze away from the stitches that criss-crossed Serena’s torso, pulling the skin tight over the wound where a quarter of her flesh had assumed a life of its own and torn itself free. But at least her campaign of pre-maternal gorging had paid off: she’d managed to keep all four limbs intact. The cautious approach was to resorb them first – to make as much flesh as possible available for the child – but then it could be days after the birth before new ones could be extruded. The risk if you declined to resorb them was different: Agata had heard of women whose hips were commandeered by the blastula, severing the remainder of the legs.
‘Go ahead!’ Medoro urged her.
Agata regarded the child warily, but she didn’t want to offend anyone. As the first visitor from outside the family to be invited into the recovery room, the least she could do was show an interest. ‘She’s beautiful,’ she admitted. ‘It’s just a shame we can’t grow them from the soil, like wheat.’
‘Soon,’ Medoro joked.
Agata reached over tentatively and Serena placed the child in her hands. Arianna had managed to sprout four limbs, but she was still having trouble forming fingers: six slender digits protruded from one hand, but the other limbs ended in round stubs. She stared up at Agata, frowning in puzzlement but showing no sign of fear.
‘Five or six stints,’ Medoro replied.
‘So you have to talk to her for all that time, without getting a single reply?’
Medoro buzzed. ‘It’s not like being snubbed! She’s already listening to every word we say.’
Agata gazed into the child’s face. ‘Is that true?’ she asked Arianna. ‘But when do you start understanding?’
Arianna was struggling with something, but it wasn’t the meaning of these mysterious sounds. ‘Sorry,’ Medoro said, reaching out deftly to grab the cluster of dark faeces drifting down towards Agata’s feet. He left the room briefly and returned brushing sand from his palms.
‘And when will she learn to feed the worms directly?’ Agata asked.
‘That comes a little later. Eight stints, maybe.’
‘Better you than me.’ Agata held the child out to him; Medoro took Arianna and swung her around, eliciting chirps of delight.
Agata turned to Serena. ‘You’re both braver than I am, that’s all I can say.’
Serena was amused. ‘Brave? What’s a few days’ pain, compared to what our grandmothers did?’
‘True enough.’ Agata was tired of hearing this line from Cira, but it was hard to argue with a woman whose memory of the act was still fresh. ‘And you’re willing to do it all again?’
Serena replied without hesitation, ‘Of course. Arianna needs a brother.’
Agata glanced at Medoro, lost in adoration of the child. After the birth, a technician would have poked a few photonic cables into his chest, then into his niece’s, so the machines could fool both bodies into believing that this mere uncle had literally fathered the child. Every instinct for attachment and protection that would have arisen unaided in a natural birth had been invoked by that controlled exchange of light, and it seemed to make no difference to Medoro that he’d missed out on the once-essential prerequisites. In the sagas, bad things befell men who triggered their sisters instead of their cos, though if their brothers had died it was more or less a duty. But now that only the Starvers had cos, who did men think of when the urge arose?
‘I wonder what they’ll be doing in a couple more generations,’ Agata said. ‘Promising women?’
‘You want to wipe us out?’ Medoro joked. ‘Men can’t shed, women can’t be promised. If the words still mean anything, what else can they mean?’
Agata felt a perverse stubbornness rising. ‘Why shouldn’t a mother be able to love her own child? I can’t believe it’s biologically impossible; they just have to find the right pathways. Then everyone would have the choice.’
Medoro was growing less amused. ‘There won’t be an “everyone” if that’s how it ends up.’
‘Of course women can love their children,’ Serena said, trying to conciliate. ‘Women have been aunts, sisters, cousins; no one’s saying we have no feelings. We must have helped raise children all the time. I can love Arianna the way a woman on the home world loves her niece.’
‘That wouldn’t be enough for me,’ Agata said. ‘I don’t want to wipe out men, but if I couldn’t be the one who loved the child the most, I wouldn’t go through with it at all.’
‘That’s just greedy,’ Medoro said. He was keeping his face calm and happy for Arianna, with a voice to match, but Agata could tell that none of this warmth was intended for her.
‘You make your choices, I’ll make mine,’ she said.
‘And what if it’s impossible?’ he taunted her. ‘They can pump as much light into your body as they like, but if the man you want them to wake isn’t in there, he isn’t in there.’
Agata said, ‘Wait and see. Maybe you’ll get a message from Arianna soon enough, letting us all in on the answer.’
‘Spheres are simply connected,’ Lila said. ‘Don’t you think that’s the key?’
‘Perhaps.’ Agata let her rear gaze drift, taking in the crammed bookshelves behind her. Generations of knowledge were packed in there, revelations dating all the way back to Vittorio. She could smell the dye and the old paper – a scent that had always delighted her, promising the thrill of new ideas – but by now she’d absorbed the contents of those shelves so thoroughly that nothing from the past still had the power to astonish her.
‘Any loop on a two-dimensional sphere can be deformed into any other,’ Lila mused, doodling an example on her chest of an elaborate loop being transformed into a simpler one.
‘But on a torus, you can’t change the number of times the loop winds around the space in each dimension, so there are an infinite number of different classes.’ She sketched examples from four of them – pairs of loops that could be transformed into each other, because they shared that distinguishing set of numbers. No amount of stretching or shrinking could take a loop from one class to another.
Lila hesitated, as if expecting Agata to pick up the thread, but after half a lapse she lost patience and prompted her: ‘So what can we say about a four-sphere?’
Agata struggled to concentrate. ‘It’s the same as the two-dimensional case: there’s only one class of loop.’ She could wind an imaginary thread a dozen times around the four-sphere, weave and tangle it any way she liked, but if she tried removing all those complications and shrinking the loop down to a plain circle, nothing she’d done and nothing about the space itself would obstruct her.
‘And is that true of the cosmos we live in?’ Lila pressed her.
‘How would we know?’
Lila said, ‘If you can find a good reason why it has to be true, that would be the key to the entropy gradient.’
Agata couldn’t argue with the logic of this claim, but she didn’t have high hopes for satisfying its premise. ‘I don’t see how it could ever be forced on us. The solutions to Nereo’s equation are just as well behaved on a torus as they are on a sphere.’
‘Then perhaps we need to look farther afield. You must have some new ideas on this that you want to pursue.’
Lila gazed at her expectantly. Agata felt her skin tingling with shame, but she had no inspired suggestions with which to fill the silence. ‘I’ve been a bit distracted by my new duties,’ she said.
‘I see.’ Lila’s tone was neutral, but the lack of sympathy made her words sound like an accusation.
‘I know that’s no excuse,’ Agata said. ‘Everyone has to help keep things running until the strike’s over. But when my mind’s blocked, what can I do?’
Lila adjusted herself in her harness. ‘That depends on the nature of the obstruction.’
‘It can’t always have been easy for you,’ Agata protested. ‘You must have got stuck yourself, sometimes.’
‘Of course,’ Lila agreed. ‘But I was never forced to contemplate the imminent arrival of messages from a culture that had solved all my problems so long ago that any bright three-year-old would know the answers. I doubt that would have done much for my motivation.’
Agata said, ‘I’m not expecting any help from the future. That would make no sense.’
Lila inclined her head, accepting the last claim. ‘You’ve made a good argument for that. But I’m not sure that you’ve convinced yourself as thoroughly as you’ve persuaded me.’
Agata was unsettled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Ever since the messaging system was mooted, you’ve been like this.’ Lila waited for her to object, but Agata was silent. ‘Maybe it’s just excitement at the prospect of the thing itself, or the distraction of all the politics. But be honest: can you really block it out of your mind that you might soon be reading the words of people who’ve had six more generations of prior research to call on than you’ve had?’
Agata said, ‘What does it matter, if they can’t communicate any of it?’ Lila claimed to have accepted her argument: complex ideas were far more likely to remain unmentioned in the messages than to arise without clear antecedents.
‘Wh
at matters is that it seems to have paralysed you.’
Agata struggled to recall some small achievement she could hold up against this claim, but since she and Lila had proved their conjecture on the curvature of four-spheres she’d really done nothing but mundane calculations. ‘Everyone gets stuck,’ she said. ‘I’ll snap out of it soon enough.’
Lila said, ‘I hope so. Because once you learn whether you do or you don’t, it’ll be settled for good, won’t it?’
Agata had set her console to wake her early. She ate quickly, then made her way to the axis and propelled herself down a long weightless shaft, touching the guide ropes lightly to keep herself centred.
She followed the shaft all the way to the bottom, emerging on a level that housed what remained of the feeds for the old sunstone engines. She dragged herself through chambers full of obsolete clockwork, the mirrorstone gears and springs tarnished and clogged with grit, but still offering up a dull sheen in the moss-light. For a year and a half after the launch, mechanical gyroscopes had tracked the mountain’s orientation, and the feeds’ machinery had kept the engines balanced by adjusting the flow of liberator trickling down into the sunstone fuel. Agata doubted that anyone at the time had imagined that a piece of photonics the size of her thumb would take the place of all these rooms.
As she moved further away from the axis, the chambers’ erstwhile floors became walls. Descending the rope ladder that crossed the third room, she passed precariously dangling assemblies of gears and shafts spilling out of their cabinets, the pieces still loosely bound together against the long assault of centrifugal gravity. The eruptions looked almost organic, as if the neglected cogs were sprouting from exuberantly blossoming vines. There must have been people inspecting and maintaining all of this quaint machinery, up until the day when Carla finally proved that none of it would ever be needed again. Now it would only take a couple more rivets snapping for these strange sculptures to come crashing down.