by Greg Egan
‘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or exhilarated, but even if her methods had been excoriated, torn apart and rebuilt entirely, they could only have been replaced by something better.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.
‘Yes.’ Azelio was struggling again: what was worth saying now, if he’d need to omit it from the great homecoming message in order to keep it from sounding stale? ‘Is your brother there?’
‘He didn’t want to come.’ This time Luisa seemed unsurprised by Azelio’s ignorance.
‘Tell him that’s all right,’ Azelio replied. ‘I can understand if he didn’t feel like talking this way.’
There was a long pause. ‘You already told him that yourself.’
An older, male voice came over the link. ‘Azelio?’
‘Girardo! How are you, Uncle?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ Girardo assured him, but he spoke with unusual vehemence. Things were fine not as a matter of course, but in defiance of some prevailing difficulty. ‘We know you’ll get back safely. That’s enough.’
‘Enough?’ Azelio glanced at Agata, as if she might have some idea of what he should read into the word. ‘Is Luisa still there?’
‘I’m here,’ Luisa replied.
‘All right.’ Azelio decided not to pursue an explanation in her presence. ‘I’ll be seeing you all very soon.’
‘Of course,’ Girardo agreed.
‘My love to all of you,’ Azelio said, forcing a tone of casual cheerfulness.
‘And you,’ Luisa replied.
Azelio cut the link and sat in silence.
‘It looks as if there’s going to be a knack to this,’ Ramiro observed. ‘They might have added a few tenses to the language while we were away.’
Agata squeezed Azelio’s shoulder. ‘Luisa sounded happy. And your uncle was probably just irritated by some political development.’
He turned to her. ‘What’s that a euphemism for? More people in prison, or more smoking ruins?’
‘I’ll sort everything out when I talk to Lila,’ Agata assured him. Having witnessed Azelio stumbling she’d be better prepared to communicate across the gap.
But when her own call was connected she barely made it through the greetings before her brain seized up.
‘The light bending . . . do you know about that?’ she babbled.
‘I read your report,’ Lila replied. ‘Those observations were impeccable, and you’ve separated the curvature theory from Vittorio’s as sharply as we could have wished. It’s a great achievement.’ The words were warm and sincere – but Lila’s excitement at hearing that her life’s work had been validated was long gone. Agata had imagined the two of them dancing elatedly around her office, chanting ‘Four-space is curved! Gravity is not a force!’ But that was never going to happen: this was old news for both of them now.
‘What did you make of the vacuum-energy work?’ she asked hopefully.
‘The diagram calculus is beautiful.’ Lila didn’t use that word lightly. ‘It’s the most promising approach I’ve seen for a long time.’
Beautiful . . . but still merely promising? Agata wasn’t offended; she knew that she hadn’t taken the project to completion herself. But what had Lila and her students been doing in the interim? She wasn’t vain enough to imagine that they’d been hanging back, waiting for her to join them in the flesh and guide them forward.
‘So how much progress has there been?’ Agata pressed her. ‘The effects of curvature and topology were still very sketchy in the version I sent you – but I’m sure people must have found ways to tidy up most of the loose ends by now.’
Lila hesitated. ‘I’m afraid things are much where you left them.’
‘Where I left them?’ Agata was confused. ‘When did all of this reach you?’
‘Almost three years ago,’ Lila replied.
Agata couldn’t hide her disappointment. ‘And no one’s tried to take it any further?’ She’d put ten years of her life into the diagram calculus, and the whole physics community had spurned the approach.
‘The lack of progress isn’t from a want of trying,’ Lila insisted. ‘And you shouldn’t take it personally. It’s got nothing to do with the quality of your work or the way it’s been received. The problem is far more widespread than that.’
Agata was mollified, but still confused. ‘What problem?’
‘We’ve all hit a dead patch,’ Lila said sadly. ‘Chemists, biologists, astronomers, engineers. Since they switched on the messaging system, there hasn’t been a single new idea across the mountain.’
‘You mean no one’s been sending back new ideas?’ Agata had predicted as much – but surely that self-censorship hadn’t surprised anyone.
‘Oh, the messages have contained no innovations,’ Lila confirmed. ‘But neither has the work itself.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Agata admitted.
Lila said, ‘If people did innovate, the results would leak back to them one way or another. I know you believed that they’d be able to keep quiet, so everything would go on as usual. But everything has not gone on as usual. We’ve had no new ideas since the system was turned on – because if we’d had them, we would have heard of them before we’d had a chance to think of them ourselves. The barriers to information flow are so porous now that the knowledge gradient has been flattened: the past contains everything the future contains . . . which means the future contains nothing more than the past.’
Agata was stunned. If this was true, the messaging system had undermined the whole reason for the mountain’s existence. Every generation before her had advanced their understanding in one field or another. What would her own generation be famous for? Rendering the creation of new knowledge impossible.
She dragged herself out of the dismal fantasy. To have lost three years was appalling, but the disaster would be self-limiting in the end.
‘So how long does this go on?’ she asked Lila.
‘About a dozen more stints.’
That would be five stints after the
Surveyor returned. ‘I’m surprised people didn’t act sooner.’ The self-censorship hypothesis predicted an absence of news of future innovations – but news of their absence could have been sent back as soon as the dire situation was apparent. ‘I suppose it’s the writing we found on Esilio that tips the balance in the end?’ Agata suggested. ‘The system could hardly have been shut down before the Surveyor returned with that discovery, if it’s a crucial element in swinging the vote.’
Lila said, ‘The system isn’t shut down by a vote.’
Agata couldn’t understand why her tone was so bleak. She’d endured three frustrating years, but the dark times would soon be over. ‘So the Council plans to act unilaterally?’
‘There is no vote, there is no plan, there is no explanation,’ Lila replied. ‘All we know is that we’ve received no messages from any time later than a dozen stints from now. And in the run-up, there’s nothing telling us why.’
‘The data just cuts out?’ Agata glanced up from the console; the expression on Tarquinia’s face was as grim as Lila’s voice.
‘Yes.’
‘So there’s a glitch of some kind,’ Agata concluded. She couldn’t take all this ominous brooding seriously; she’d seen the proof with her own eyes that the Peerless would survive all the way to the reunion.
‘No,’ Lila said flatly. ‘We ended up building more channels. They operate independently, so there could hardly be a glitch in all of them.’
Agata struggled to unpick the logic of that. ‘You had to build a second channel, even though the first one already told you that it wouldn’t help . . . because if you hadn’t built it you couldn’t have known that it wouldn’t help. But why build a third?’
‘We built a dozen.’ Lila buzzed, darkly amused. ‘You’re forgetting the Council’s paranoia. They weren’t convinced that they were being honest with each other about this event, so the process couldn’t stop until they each had a messaging channel of their own – built and run by people they’d vetted themselves.’
Agata was distracted for a moment by the sight of Ramiro, rocking back and forth with one hand against his tympanum, trying to contain his mirth.
‘So what came of all that?’ she asked. ‘Putting aside our own paranoia and assuming that at least one Councillor who found the truth would let us know.’
Lila said, ‘With every channel, the story’s been the same: the messages cut out at exactly the same time, and nothing that’s sent back while the system is still working tells us why.’
25
‘I just found a picture of you in the archives,’ Greta said. ‘There’s a banner behind you saying WELCOME HOME, but all in all it’s still quite sad. You look so old and worn down that you might be that woman’s uncle, not her brother. And her children don’t seem happy to see you at all.’
‘You sound like an actor who’s over-rehearsed her lines,’ Ramiro replied. ‘I suppose you’ve studied the recording of this conversation a dozen times?’
Greta buzzed derisively. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
‘No? Your first interaction with the Surveyor, in the middle of a political crisis? You didn’t send that back to the earliest moment that the bandwidth of the oldest channel allowed?’
‘I’ve read a summary, of course.’ Greta had to make it clear that she’d done her duty. ‘But I promise you, there wasn’t anything worth studying.’
Ramiro suspected that she was telling the truth; the technical reports would have been more valuable. But even if this conversation had been worthless to her, it didn’t follow that he’d get nothing out of it himself.
‘Thank you for the bomb,’ he said. ‘That really came in handy.’
‘Any time.’
‘So are you still on the Peerless?’ he wondered. ‘Or have you evacuated already?’
‘I’m where I need to be.’
‘In the administrative sense, or the teleological?’ He waited, but Greta didn’t dignify that with a reply. ‘I’m guessing that there are a dozen evacuation craft, one for each Councillor – more or less copied from the Surveyor’s plans. You started building them just after the system was switched on, when you learnt that Esilio was habitable and the Peerless might be in danger. You would have liked to improve the design or speed up the construction and make dozens more – but poor Verano found himself unable to innovate that much.’
Greta said, ‘All you need to know is that the Council will continue to govern across the disruption. The system proved its worth from the start.’
‘If you think that the Peerless is going to hit something, why not build an extra channel far away?’ Ramiro mused. ‘Ah – that would require some new engineering, wouldn’t it? The first plan put the light path running along the axis, making use of the rigidity of the mountain to stabilise the mirrors. So all you’ve been able to do is repeat that. Ordinarily, the instrument builders would have found a way to keep the mirrors aligned out in the void – but if they’d managed to do that someone would have heard about it long before the event. With twelve separate teams all spying on each other, they can’t even keep a secret from themselves when that’s their only real hope of success.’
‘You know a great deal less than you imagine,’ Greta said flatly.
‘Really? If only you hadn’t had to know everything yourself. You didn’t just turn traveller against traveller: you’ve turned the mere possibility of knowledge into a kind of stupefying drug.’
‘There are some flaws in the system,’ Greta conceded. ‘We’ll learn from them. After the disruption, certain things will be reorganised.’
‘Reorganised?’ Ramiro buzzed. ‘Will you put all the scientists and engineers in isolation, incommunicado, in the hope that that will solve the problem?’
‘Just be patient,’ she said. ‘You’ll see how things turn out.’
‘Tell me one thing, then,’ Ramiro asked solemnly. ‘Tell me there’s a pact between the Councillors to shut down all their channels voluntarily. Tell me the disruption’s nothing more than that.’
‘I can’t lie to you,’ Greta replied. ‘The disruption is not a voluntary shutdown, it’s proof of a grave threat to the integrity of the Peerless. Knowing that it’s coming will help minimise the danger and ensure the continuity of governance – but beyond that, I know no more than you do.’
Agata brought a basket of loaves from the pantry and passed it around. ‘I don’t know why everyone’s so gloomy,’ she said, breaking the silence. ‘The whole idea of a collision makes no sense to me.’
Ramiro approached the subject warily. ‘What if the Councillors and their entourage are prepared to travel to Esilio? They wouldn’t have an easy life there, but over time they might be able to build up their resources to the point where their descendants could protect the home world. There needn’t be a contradiction.’
‘I’m not talking about the inscription,’ Agata replied. ‘Whatever hit the Peerless would have to be large enough to disrupt the messaging system immediately, or there’d be a message describing the initial effects of the impact: a fire on the slopes, a breach of the hull – even if people didn’t have time to narrate it, there’d be instrument readings sent back automatically. But anything that large ought to be visible as it approached. Even if it was travelling at infinite speed, it would cast a shadow against the orthogonal stars that we could pick up with time-reversed cameras.’
Azelio was hanging on her words, desperate for reassurance. ‘What if it comes in from the wrong direction?’ he asked.
‘There is no wrong direction if you deploy the cameras properly,’ Agata insisted. ‘Suppose this meteor is approaching with infinite speed from the home cluster side. That would render it invisible from the mountain, but if it passed a swarm of time-reversed cameras looking back towards the mountain, they’d see the meteor’s shadow against the orthogonal stars before it was actually present.’
Ramiro wasn’t persuaded. ‘That all sounds good in theory, but the surveillance network certainly wasn’t that so
phisticated when we left. There’d be some serious technical challenges with processing the data fast enough and getting the result back to the Peerless before the impact. It wouldn’t be trivial.’
‘And that’s the measure of things now?’ Azelio was incredulous. ‘You’re saying that everything we do to protect ourselves is only possible if it’s trivial? I thought this was all down to probabilities! How likely is it that people who desperately want to solve these problems could just sit at their desks fretting about it, while making no progress at all?’
He turned to Agata for support, but her confidence was wavering. ‘I spent years in that state myself,’ she admitted. ‘It’s not that difficult to achieve.’
Azelio lowered his gaze. ‘We should start our own evacuation, then. Bring as many people as we can on board.’
‘I’d have no objection to that,’ Tarquinia said. ‘But once we dock, whatever happens to the Surveyor will be out of my hands.’ Ramiro had a brief fantasy of the Surveyor orbiting the mountain at a safe remove while evacuees jetted across the void to join them – but unless they were lugging six years’ worth of food there wouldn’t be much point. And even then it could only end badly, once the lucky few had to start turning the rest away.
Azelio’s expression changed abruptly. He buzzed with a kind of pained relief, as if he’d just decided that his fears were not only groundless but embarrassingly naïve. ‘Whatever else we’re missing,’ he said, ‘we know the Peerless’s location when the disruption takes place. If we were going to be hit by something, we could avoid that just by changing course: we wouldn’t happily steer straight for the meteor.’
Ramiro said, ‘Maybe they will change course. Maybe they already did. Either way, the disruption still happens.’
‘Exactly!’ Azelio replied. ‘So it can’t be down to a collision. If changing the location were enough to stop it happening . . . it couldn’t happen. On Esilio, we were never forced to do anything against our will, so how could a mountain full of people with no intention of dying be forced to choose a fatal trajectory? Stumbling blindly into a collision would be one thing – but how could it happen with foreknowledge?’