by Greg Egan
Azelio joined them. ‘I’d be happy with some gardens to break the gloom,’ he said.
‘Be my guest.’ Ramiro gestured into the darkness.
‘Once the wind dies down.’ Azelio turned and swung the light from his helmet across the ground, but the exploratory oval faded into obscurity at a dozen strides.
Tarquinia stepped off the ladder. ‘Given what we saw from orbit, these conditions shouldn’t last long. It’s coming to evening; we should get some sleep and start work in the morning, so we’ll be able to use the view by sunlight if we need it.’
‘Real days and nights!’ Agata chirped. ‘It’s just a shame we couldn’t put a time-reversed camera in every helmet.’ She turned to Ramiro. ‘So will your settlers bring a few gross of the things, or just one for navigation that they’ll destroy on arrival, lest someone put it to an evil purpose?’
Ramiro had never wanted the cameras banned, but nor had he pictured the colony relying on them. ‘We’ll see by flowers and wheat-light,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure there’ll be something we can use to make lamps.’
‘While the sunlight itself goes to waste.’
‘Did you ever see sunlight?’ he countered. ‘There’ll be gardens, lamps, a few coherers . . . much the same as the lighting everyone’s used to, with a lot less moss and a lot more starlight. We won’t be trying to recreate the home world – or the mountain – but no one from the Peerless will find it all that strange.’
Agata was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘You’re right – and I should wish you luck with it. It’s what we’re here for, after all.’
Ramiro had trouble falling asleep. When he woke, the sound of the storm on the hull was gone, and the Esilian clock he’d set up on his console showed that it was more than a bell after dawn. Esilio’s day was only about two-thirds as long as the home world’s; he hoped Tarquinia wouldn’t try to impose the new rhythm on everything they did.
In fact, when he found her at her seat in the front cabin, Tarquinia looked as if she’d been awake all night. ‘The others are outside,’ she said. ‘The wind’s died down, so we should be able to start work soon, once they stop playing around.’
‘Playing?’
‘Take a look for yourself,’ Tarquinia suggested.
‘Will I need my helmet?’
‘You won’t need anything,’ she promised. ‘We’ve set up some lights. Just toughen your soles.’
Ramiro felt vulnerable as he approached the airlock without even his cooling bag, but Esilian sand was just sand, and he’d probably had traces of it beneath his feet for the last six years.
When he opened the outer door he saw Agata and Azelio leaping around, buzzing like excited children for no reason he could discern, unless it was sheer joy at the stillness after the storm. A couple of coherers mounted on the hull illuminated the red soil starkly – showing up an extraordinary maze of tracks that testified to his comrades’ exuberance. With the foreground so bright his eyes stood no chance of adapting to the starlight so, even with the dust haze settled, everything in the distance was lost in utter blackness.
‘What are you idiots doing?’ he called out.
‘Trying to see which footprints are ours,’ Agata replied gleefully. She jumped forward with her rear gaze fixed intently on the place where she’d been standing.
Ramiro was bemused, but then he observed her more closely as she took her next few leaps. Twice, as she jumped out of some indentation in the sand, it vanished. She and Azelio hadn’t actually made all the tracks that he’d attributed to them. Or not yet, they hadn’t.
‘Come and join us,’ Azelio said. ‘Some of these must be yours.’
Ramiro stayed on the top rung of the ladder, watching. Each time Azelio lifted his feet, scattered sand unscattered itself, grains sliding in around the places where he’d stepped to settle more evenly – though not always smoothing the ground completely. After all, Ramiro reasoned, it was possible to walk in someone else’s footprints, or to step several times in your own. It would only be the last footfall on any given spot – prior to the next occasion on which the wind levelled everything – that would unmake the imprint completely.
The crew had talked over possibilities like this, dozens of times. Ramiro knew he had no right to be surprised. But having sought a world where the dissenters could escape the tyranny of foreknowledge, what had he been given? A world where every step he was yet to take would be laid out before his eyes.
‘What happens if I try to walk on pristine ground?’ he asked.
‘Try it and see!’ Agata taunted him.
Ramiro descended to the bottom of the ladder, intending to move quickly and get the ordeal over with, but then his resolve deserted him. When he willed his foot to land on unblemished sand, what exactly would intervene to stop him? A cramp in the muscle, diverting his leg to its proper, predestined target? A puppet-like manipulation of his body by some unseen force too strong to resist, or a trance-like suspension of his whole sense of self? He wasn’t sure that he wanted to know the answer. And perhaps that was the simplest resolution: he would lack the courage to walk out across the surface of Esilio for the rest of the mission. He would cower in his room, leaving the work to the others, while he waited to return to the Peerless in disgrace.
Agata was watching him. ‘Ramiro, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ She was amused, but there was no malice in her voice. ‘Just step off the ladder without thinking about it. I promise you, the world won’t end.’
Ramiro did as she’d asked. Then he looked down. He’d scrutinised the ground beforehand, and he was sure there’d been no footprints at all where his feet now stood.
He lifted one foot and inspected the sand below. He had created an indentation that had not been there before. That was every bit as strange to Esilio as the erasures he’d witnessed were strange to him.
‘How?’ he demanded, more confused than relieved.
‘You really don’t listen to me, do you?’ Agata chided him. ‘Did I ever tell you that the local arrow was inviolable?’
‘No.’ What she’d stressed most of all was a loss of predictability – but the sight of her and Azelio unmaking their footprints had crowded everything else out of his mind. Those disappearing marks in the sand might be unsettling, but if he could ignore them and walk wherever he pleased then they were not the shackles he’d taken them to be.
Still . . .
‘What happens if there are footprints that no one gets around to before the next dust storm?’ he asked Agata. ‘Ones that were there straight after the last storm?’
She said, ‘There can’t be a footprint untouched by any foot. I don’t understand the dynamics of wind and sand well enough to swear to you that there won’t be hollows in the ground that come and go of their own accord – but if you’re talking about a clear imprint, if we could keep our feet away from it, it simply wouldn’t be there.’
Ramiro pondered this, but it seemed much less dismaying than the kind of all-encompassing trail he’d originally feared. Esilio was a world where a certain amount of noisy, partial – and predominantly trivial – information about the future would be strewn across the landscape. There had always been plenty of trivial things that could be predicted with near-certainty back on the Peerless, and perhaps as many of them would be lost, here, as these eerie new portents would be gained.
Emboldened, he strode out across the illuminated ground, pausing every few steps to kick at the sand. Sometimes he simply pushed the dust aside; sometimes the dust applied pressure of its own, as it moved in to occupy the space his foot vacated. But that pressure never came out of nowhere: his feet moved as and when he’d willed them to move, followed by the dust but never forced to retreat. Nor were they thrust without warning into the air by a time-reversed version of the dissipation of motion into heat that took place when they landed.
By the time he reached the point where the coherers’ light gave out, he realised that the part of his brain that dealt with his gait and balan
ce had come to terms with the ground’s bizarre behaviour as if it were nothing more than an unfamiliar texture: a kind of stickiness that rendered the soil a little unpredictable. He hadn’t slipped over once, or found himself rooted to the ground. On one level, he’d already taken the whole phenomenon in his stride.
Each time there was a dust storm the record of future movements would be erased, but even in a prolonged period of calm the footprints would overlap, conveying very little information. Compared with the crystalline certainties of the messaging system, it would be nothing: a novelty to which the settlers would soon grow accustomed.
Ramiro turned to Azelio. ‘Entertaining as this is, if you want to start the planting now I’d be happy to help.’
With so little wind about, Ramiro decided that it was worth opening both doors of the airlock so they could pass the plants straight through. Standing on the ground, he was at the perfect height to accept each pot directly from Azelio, instead of climbing up and down the ladder.
‘Be careful,’ Azelio pleaded.
The advice was redundant, but Ramiro took no offence. Azelio had been nurturing the things for six years – and tending to them while they were spinning in their tethered pods had probably been the most arduous task that any of the crew had faced.
Azelio brought out a dozen of the plants to start with. The wheat was a miniature variety that he’d succeeded in maintaining at a staggered set of stages in its growth cycle, allowing him to compress the time needed to assess its viability in Esilian soil. Instead of waiting a year to be sure that it could survive from sowing to harvest, in one-twelfth of that time they’d watch each representative plant advance from its initial level of maturity to that from which another had started.
Ramiro looked over the collection assembled beside the airlock. ‘And these are all going in the same kind of soil?’
‘Yes. Just a few saunters away. I’ve already chosen the spot.’
Ramiro followed Azelio across the bright ground of the Surveyor’s domain and into the starlit valley. The two plants they were carrying put out a healthy red glow, but that didn’t do much to light the way. It was soon clear that, however well their eyes adjusted, they’d need to use the coherers they’d clipped to their tool belts – sacrificing their distance vision for the sake of surer footing. Ramiro tried to balance the confidence he’d gained in dealing with the soil’s peculiar forces with a suitable level of caution. There was no telling what Azelio would do to him if he stumbled and fell, crushing one of his darlings, even if ‘Esilio pushed me!’ was the honest excuse.
‘Just here.’
Ramiro squatted and placed the pot on the ground, then swung his beam around the site. ‘You already dug twelve holes!’ he observed. ‘And I thought you were messing around with Agata all morning.’
Azelio made a noncommittal sound. Ramiro suddenly felt queasy.
‘My plan is to dig up all these plants at the end of the trial and take them back to the Peerless for my colleagues to analyse,’ Azelio mused. ‘So I guess that’s when I’ll see the transition between cultivated and truly pristine ground. But right now, in Esilio’s terms, we’ve just dug the plants up – so on our terms, we’re about to do that. Backwards.’
Ramiro said, ‘You make it sound as if you’ve been practising time-reversed agronomy all your life.’
‘It’s not that hard to see what’s going on, if you think it through,’ Azelio replied lightly.
‘But you don’t mind following markers like this? Evidence of acts you haven’t performed yet?’
‘It’s a little disconcerting,’ Azelio conceded. ‘But I can’t say that it fills me with claustrophobia to know that I’ll carry out the experimental protocols I always planned to carry out.’
Ramiro didn’t argue; the only thing he’d gain by pressing the point was to raise his own level of disquiet again. ‘Let’s get to work, then.’
Azelio squatted beside one of the plants. ‘The idea is to take it out of the potted soil and brush the roots clean. Pay close attention.’ He leant forward and positioned his hands on either side of the stalk, but then he kept them there, motionless. After a lapse of this, Ramiro said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘I thought it might leap into my hands by itself,’ Azelio explained, deadpan. ‘Dropped in and repotted, Esilio style.’
‘One more joke like that and we’ll be burying more than plants here.’
Azelio took a short stone rod from his tool belt and used it to loosen the soil in the pot. Then he gently extracted the plant and applied a soft brush to the roots.
‘Does it matter if there’s a trace of the old soil clinging on?’ Ramiro asked.
Azelio winced. ‘Yes. If it’s enough to keep the plant growing when it otherwise wouldn’t, that would make the results meaningless. You don’t want the settlers to find out after half a year that it was only contamination that made it look as if they could survive here.’
He carried the freed plant over to the row of holes he hadn’t yet made. ‘What happens if I try to put it in the wrong one?’ he mused. ‘Is that possible?’
Ramiro aimed his coherer at the nearest of the holes, then watched as Azelio knelt down, a trowel in one hand and the wheat plant in the other. He lowered the plant until its roots were in the hole, then he started adding soil from the surrounding mound. Some of the soil was scooped in with pressure from behind, in the ordinary manner. Some appeared to pursue the trowel, the way the dust sometimes pursued Ramiro’s feet. What decided between the two? Azelio’s own actions had to be consistent with the motion of the soil, but which determined which? Maybe there was no answer to that, short of the impossible act of solving in the finest detail the equations that Agata was yet to discover, revealing exactly which sequences of events were consistent with the laws of physics all the way around the cosmos.
In any case, the laws of physics seemed to allow the plant to end up firmly bedded in Esilian soil. Azelio tried to shake his trowel clean, but each time he flicked it as many specks of dirt rose up from the ground to stick to the blade as parted from it.
‘I guess that’s now my Esilian trowel. Do you want to do the next one?’
Ramiro said, ‘I wouldn’t trust myself to get the roots clean.’
‘I’ll deal with that,’ Azelio replied. ‘You can do the planting.’
‘All right.’
When Azelio had prepared the second plant, Ramiro accepted it and took it to the next hole. He knelt on the ground; Azelio passed him the trowel then stood back to provide a steady light.
Ramiro gazed down at the neat mound of soil beside the hole. If he’d had a camera here during the dust storm he might have watched the mound rising up, as speck after speck fell into place from the turbulent air. But if an Esilian wind had scattered it, who had given it its shape? If he refused to do it himself, would Azelio be compelled to take his place? But why would one of them be compelled and not the other?
When he’d stomped across the sand beside the Surveyor each disquieting footprint had been blurred into insignificance, but he couldn’t try to complicate this crucial experiment just to obfuscate the issue. He’d always told himself that he’d accepted the true nature of time and choice, and that all he’d objected to in the messaging system was the way it would flatten his deliberations. But even here, with nothing life-changing at stake, the sense of being trapped in the threads of history was more oppressive than it had ever been.
Ramiro’s left arm had grown tired from holding the plant in place over the hole. He shifted it slightly to make himself more comfortable, but as he shifted it back he saw soil rising and adhering to the roots. He stared at this bizarre result for a moment, then decided to stop wasting time delaying an outcome he had no wish to oppose.
He held the trowel to the side of the mound nearest the hole, then drew it closer. The sand followed the blade – not adhering to it and needing to be brought along, but gently pushing it. He lowered the trowel into the hole then withdrew it; the sand parte
d from the blade and packed itself between the roots of the plant and the side of the hole.
He hesitated, groping for a clearer sense of his role in the task. But what could he actually do wrong? So long as he was committed to making whatever movements with the trowel were necessary until the plant was securely in place, that state of mind and the strictures of the environment ought to work it out between themselves.
He scooped some soil straight into the hole; like the last delivery, it clung to the roots. In Esilio’s terms, this soil had spent at least a few stints packed tightly around the plant; if he could have seen the action in reverse, it would have involved nothing stranger than a clump of sand finally coming loose.
When he was done, Ramiro stood and turned to face Azelio. ‘So now I have to lure half the travellers here in the name of freedom, then leave them to raise their children in a world where everything they do corrodes their sense of agency?’
Azelio said, ‘That’s putting it too harshly. When we get back, all you can do is give an honest account of your own experience. They’ll have seen life under the messaging system, so they’ll already have a better idea than we had about this kind of thing – and which way of life they’d prefer.’
‘The pro-messagers should come here,’ Ramiro declared bitterly. ‘If they want to know the future, let them know it every step of the way. Leave the mountain to us, and we can go back to living with a single arrow.’
‘That’s a nice idea . . . but good luck organising the eviction.’
They walked back to the Surveyor to fetch two more plants. ‘Can you put up some windbreaks?’ Ramiro suggested. ‘If that last dust storm was typical, it might not have uprooted anything, but I’d bet it would have stripped petals.’
‘I have a few rolls of tight-weave fabric,’ Azelio replied. ‘I didn’t see any stake holes nearby, but I won’t let that stop me.’
Ramiro fell through the light, willing himself to move faster. He reached down to grab hold of his daughter, but as his fingers brushed her limbless form the wind shifted and tore her away.