The Arrows of Time

by Greg Egan

  Two young men approached on the adjacent rope, avoiding his gaze like everyone else, but to Ramiro they seemed more self-conscious about it than any stranger ought to be. As they drew nearer he waited for one of them to bump him and pass him a note, and he readied himself to play his part and make the collision look plausible. Then he saw the edge of a blade sliding out from its hiding place in the first man’s hand.

  He grabbed the assailant’s wrist and stared straight at his approaching accomplice. ‘If I’m not back in my apartment in three chimes,’ he said, ‘every detail goes to the Council automatically.’

  ‘Nothing stops us,’ the man informed him solemnly. ‘We already know how this ends.’

  ‘So why this?’ Ramiro bent the knife-wielder’s hand – then crossed ropes to let a woman move past, positioning his body to hide the blade from her.

  ‘It ends well because you take this as a warning and stop bringing attention to yourself,’ the man replied.

  Ramiro said, ‘I think you might be confusing foresight and wishful thinking. I say it ends well because I have a meeting with Giacomo, immediately.’

  The accomplice’s expression of certainty was wavering. He must have grown so accustomed to his plans unfolding perfectly that he’d lost the ability to rethink them on the fly.

  Ramiro said, ‘I know it’s hard for people to organise their calendar these days, but the only way I’ll stop being a problem for your boss is by talking to him face to face.’

  Giacomo sat on the floor of the food hall, chatting amiably with a dozen companions, but the gathering was large enough that he didn’t need to be contributing constantly to appear to be engaged. Ramiro sat two strides away with his back to the group, straining to hear the whispers directed his way, while trying to look like a lone diner brooding sadly on the fate of his friend.

  ‘We’ll take care of the machine,’ Giacomo said. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about.’ His rear eyes moved aimlessly, his gaze passing over Ramiro without registering his presence.

  Save Giacomo’s friends, there was no one else close enough to have any chance of hearing them, and Ramiro could only assume that his allies knew the location of every listening device in the room. But it was still a struggle to speak as if they had real privacy.

  ‘If you can fix this,’ he said, ‘you should have told us earlier, and then my friend wouldn’t be in trouble.’

  ‘That won’t last long,’ Giacomo promised. ‘Even if they’ve taken her, in a matter of days every prisoner will be free.’

  Ramiro had no idea how he thought he could guarantee that; the whole government was hardly going to resign in shame. ‘And what about the occulter? You can perform the repairs yourself?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Giacomo assured him.

  Ramiro gave him the communications codes that would be needed to instruct the navigation system and get the machine back on course.

  ‘You should lie low now,’ Giacomo said. ‘I’m sorry about the incident before, but that wasn’t my decision. Someone saw you as a risk and took things into their own hands.’

  Ramiro chewed his loaf slowly. His trust in this man was disintegrating, but if the conspiracy was a sham and Giacomo had been working for the Council all along, why would anyone go through the motions of trying to warn him off?

  ‘You don’t need to make repairs,’ Ramiro realised. ‘You’ve got replacements. You’ve built your own.’ They’d had the plans for three years. Why limit themselves to making accessories when they could copy the whole design?

  Giacomo took his time replying, inserting a raucous joke into his friends’ End of the Mountain celebration.

  ‘We’ve built our own,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘That was only prudent – and it’s turned out to be essential.’

  ‘You couldn’t tell us?’

  ‘The less you knew, the better,’ Giacomo replied.

  Ramiro suspected that it was Agata’s position that would have been the sticking point; this made a mockery of the idea that the Surveyor’s crew had held a veto over the final deployment. ‘How many spares did you make?’

  ‘Enough.’ There was a note of irritation creeping into Giacomo’s voice.

  ‘A dozen? A gross?’

  Giacomo said, ‘You don’t need those details. We’ve been planning this for years, we know exactly what we’re doing. Just go back to your apartment and wait.’

  Ramiro stared down at the plate in front of him. These people knew him far better than he knew them – at the very least through Pio, and Ramiro had told Pio that he’d oppose him if he ever tried to use violence. Giacomo would have been forewarned not to expect Ramiro to cooperate with anything of the kind.

  That was why they’d been so coy about the scale of their own resources: they were going to try to breach the tubes. They had as many occulters as they’d need, carrying whatever quantity of explosives it would take. The occulters from the Surveyor were just decoys; it had never mattered whether or not they reached their targets.

  Ramiro said, ‘I need some proof from you that the attack won’t be excessive – that it will shatter the light collectors, nothing more.’

  Giacomo’s rear gaze turned on him briefly, before sliding away. ‘How could I prove that? Do you want to come and observe all our communications? What would that tell you? If we showed you the data from the one machine that’s replaced your runaway, you could always convince yourself that there were more.’

  Ramiro was silent; he had nothing to bargain with. If he went to the Council and helped them mount a defence against the occulters, he’d only be risking a far greater loss of life from a meteor strike.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, dropping any pretence that there was still some doubt about Giacomo’s plans. ‘The disruption is enough. The Council will be humiliated, they’ll fall at the next election. The system will never be restarted. What more could you want?’

  Giacomo embarked on a long, loud story about someone’s feud with someone else in their student days. Ramiro began to think that the meeting was over; he finished his meal and began picking up crumbs from the plate.

  But then the story ended and Giacomo spoke.

  ‘This is the fulcrum,’ he whispered. ‘This is our one chance. Or how many generations will be forced to bear the same ruthless people holding power? Prisoners locked up without trial? Men treated as lesser beings, made for one purpose alone? The disruption is not enough; there needs to be damage and chaos. The Council needs to fail the people so badly that they don’t dare set foot on the mountain again. Let them run away to Esilio or die in their private fortresses. In two days everything will change for ever. There’s nothing to lament in that. But if we want our time to come, there has to be a price.’

  Ramiro lay sleepless in his sand bed, staring out into the moss-lit room. If the messaging system’s tubes were breached, their walls might still hold against the pressure. The Council would have known all along that this kind of damage was possible; they must have taken steps to minimise the consequences.

  But all the earlier construction along the axis had been carried out with no conception that it would ever be exposed to the void. Walls could be strengthened after the fact, seals could be laid down. But nothing would ever render the resulting patchwork the same as the solid rock of the hull that had been kept intact for that purpose from the start.

  If the tubes gave way, whole precincts would crumble. People would be battered by the winds and debris, even if they didn’t end up out in the void. Before the breach could be repaired there would be all the damage and chaos that Giacomo could desire.

  But what other possibilities remained? Ramiro could still summon up a slender hope that if he went to the Council promising to reveal the details of the attack, they would agree to a voluntary shutdown. Maybe all the stubbornness Greta had displayed in public had only been for show.

  Was that what he wanted, though: the Council triumphant? Could he really have half of Vincenzo’s version – the disruption as a bluff to expo
se the saboteurs – without the messaging system starting up again and the same dismal paralysis descending across the mountain for six more generations? With his rash confession to Agata he’d destroyed any chance of Tarquinia’s hoax convincing anyone that the system was redundant. And if he was sentencing people to the dust and darkness of Esilio, how many more would die there than would fall victim to Giacomo’s plan?

  He wanted change. He wanted the Council crushed. He wanted the men who came after him to be more than timid appeasers like his uncle, who’d clutched at their prescribed role with pathetic gratitude then done their best to instil the same subservient mentality in the next generation.

  Whatever choice he made, whatever side he took, some lives would be endangered and some people would die. All he could do was look beyond that to the fate of the survivors. One path would lead, at best, to a miserable exile for the dissenters and generations of tyranny for everyone who remained on the mountain. The other would bring turmoil and grief for a while, but it would also bring a chance of enduring freedom.

  32

  Agata flipped over a dozen pages before realising that her concentration had deserted her and she had no idea what she’d been looking at.

  She pushed the book away across her desk. Even if she stumbled on some crucial insight that had informed Medoro’s design, what could she do with it in a day and a half? She wasn’t going to build a magical machine that could reach through solid rock and turn the messaging system to dust.

  There was knocking from outside. Agata dragged herself to the door.

  ‘Are you busy?’ Serena asked.

  ‘Not really.’ Agata invited her in.

  Medoro’s books were arranged around the room, stacked by subject and ordered by hastily assigned priorities.

  ‘You’re sorting through everything already,’ Serena observed. She glanced at the desk, at the open book.

  ‘I got caught up in Principles of Photonics,’ Agata explained. ‘Once you’ve read the first page it’s impossible to put down.’

  ‘We should go for a walk,’ Serena suggested. ‘Give yourself a break.’

  ‘All right.’ Agata wasn’t sure what this would be in aid of, but she followed Serena out into the corridor.

  They moved along the guide rope in silence for a while, single file with Agata in front. Then Serena said quietly, ‘I’ve been talking to some friends about the disruption.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We all agreed that we have to do something.’ Serena met Agata’s rear gaze. ‘So if you have any plans of your own, maybe we can work together.’

  Agata said, ‘Now you tell me.’

  ‘You have no idea what it’s been like here,’ Serena replied bluntly. ‘They switched on the system, and suddenly we had three years of our lives laid out in front of us: three years’ worth of messages telling us exactly who we’d be. A few people were dragged kicking and screaming into whole new ways of thinking – but after the initial jolt they were just as incapable of change as the rest of us. That’s what the system does: it turns you into the kind of person who knows nothing more each day than you knew the day before.’

  ‘But now the feed’s gone silent, and the spell is broken?’

  ‘Half broken,’ Serena replied. ‘There are a lot of us who want to act, but the paralysis lingers. Some people think we should march on the messaging stations and smash whatever we can – but there’s still a mindset that declares it’s impossible, because if the Council have said we won’t . . . we won’t.’

  Agata’s spirits were rising, but she wasn’t clear herself where this new force could be applied.

  ‘There’s already a plan to sabotage the channels,’ she said. ‘But I don’t trust the people who set it up.’ She scanned the corridor, then waited until she was certain that no passer-by could hear her before explaining Giacomo’s scheme. ‘I don’t think they care if they break open the tubes. They’re not going to err on the side of caution.’ Agata stopped short of accusing the group of Medoro’s murder; she didn’t know that for sure.

  Serena took a few lapses to come to terms with these revelations. She’d probably come to Agata hoping for nothing more than a technical opinion on the best place to attack the system.

  ‘So what are you searching for in my brother’s books?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Another way to cause the shutdown.’

  ‘And if you find one, will the saboteurs call off their plans?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Agata admitted. ‘Even if I could persuade Ramiro and Tarquinia, I doubt they’re in control any more.’

  Serena said, ‘So you’re saying that these saboteurs might be the greatest threat. But what would happen if we managed to stop them?’

  ‘Something still has to cause the disruption,’ Agata replied. ‘A meteor, or a mob.’

  ‘There are dozens of us ready to protect the mountain,’ Serena avowed. ‘But we might not be enough to cause the disruption by sheer force of numbers, let alone stage some second action against the saboteurs as well.’

  They’d almost come full circle back to the apartment, but Agata couldn’t face the piles of unread books again. She wasn’t going to transform herself into Medoro in the next few bells. ‘We had a time-reversed camera on the Surveyor for years,’ she lamented. ‘I could have spent all my free time experimenting on it, if I’d known how useful that would be.’

  Serena was amused. ‘The rest of the crew might not have been too happy if you’d destroyed it.’

  ‘After we’d left Esilio it wouldn’t have mattered. But we certainly took care of it until then.’ Agata stopped and stood clutching the guide rope, thinking about the landing. ‘Protecting it from too much exposure.’

  ‘You mean not pointing it at Esilio’s sun?’ Serena frowned. ‘Though wouldn’t that have . . . brought it back to normal, if it had arrived burnt out?’

  ‘Protecting it from too much ordinary light as well,’ Agata said. ‘Intense light would have damaged it: scatter from our engines, say.’

  ‘So you want to steal the Surveyor and aim its engines at the base of the mountain?’ Serena joked.

  Agata said, ‘No. But a big enough explosion above the base should have the same effect . . . or twelve smaller ones might do it.’

  Serena understood. ‘You want to repurpose the saboteurs’ bombs? Use the flash but not the bang?’

  ‘Why not? The collectors gather light from all directions – and they can’t discriminate between ordinary light and time-reversed light. If we can shift the explosions far enough away from the surface that there’s no risk of them breaching the tubes, they could still be the cause of the disruption. They don’t even need to damage the cameras permanently – they just have to overwhelm the photonics long enough for the time-reversed light that’s in transit to be lost.’ The original plan for the occulters had been to blind each channel to a single star, but the design that made that impossible rendered this new plan far less demanding: it didn’t matter where in the sky the explosions appeared. The collectors would funnel all the photons in and dazzle the cameras, regardless.

  Serena said, ‘What if there’s a sensor that can bring down a shutter if the ambient light gets too bright? I mean, the light that’s meant to do this damage will be bouncing back and forth between the mirrors before it gets to the camera. There’ll be plenty of time for news of the danger to reach the camera by a shorter route.’

  She was right, Agata realised. But it might not matter. ‘They can bring down a shutter to protect the camera from permanent damage . . . but that shutter will block the time-reversed light, too. So it will all come down to the timing: whether the flash from the explosions forces the shutter to close for so long that the signal is lost.’

  Serena was quiet for a moment. ‘So how do we divert the saboteurs’ bombs? Go out there and physically move them?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Agata replied. ‘But I don’t know how we can get out undetected.’

  Serena was incredulous. ‘You think t
he Council will try to stop us protecting the mountain?’

  ‘Not as such – but if we’re going to tell them our plan, they’ll have known about it for the last three years. So why wouldn’t they have modified their own defences at the base to take account of what we tell them about the occulters and the explosives?’

  Serena said, ‘Because we don’t tell them. Because we’re afraid that they’d find a way to prevent the explosions from causing the disruption – which would bring us back to a meteor as the cause.’ She put a hand over her eyes and massaged her temples. ‘Just when I’d stopped getting messages from myself, the future finds a new way to order me around.’

  ‘Has it told you how to get into the void unseen? Or do some of your army of waking sleepers happen to be airlock guards?’

  ‘No airlock guards,’ Serena replied, ‘but we have technicians capable of splicing photonic cables and disabling sensors.’

  ‘That’s not enough,’ Agata said ruefully. ‘There’ll be people at all the airlocks, from now to the disruption.’

  Serena hummed angrily. ‘So do you believe we’re going to do this, or do you think we’re going to cower in our rooms and wait for whatever unfolds?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Agata hadn’t been able to bring herself to reveal what Ramiro had told her about the inscription. The only certainty they had now was the disruption; there was no promise of any kind of triumph to follow.

  ‘Are you still working in the cooling tunnels?’ Serena asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’re familiar with the whole system?’

  ‘I’ve done the induction – it was fairly detailed. Why?’

  Serena said, ‘Cooling air leaves the mountain – and there won’t be people guarding every vent. If my technician friends can disable the sensors, we can go out with the air and start looking for these bombs.’

  Agata began buzzing softly. ‘You think they’ll let a mob of saboteurs congregate at an air vent? There are cameras in every corridor, there are people watching every move we make.’

  ‘Maybe your moves,’ Serena conceded. ‘The mere fact that you were on the Surveyor with the anti-messager Ramiro taints you a little. But who am I? Who are my friends? There aren’t enough people in the entire security department to watch everyone, and the software never got smart enough to take over the job. We’re not saboteurs, we’re not known dissidents. While they’re watching the usual suspects, all we have to do is avoid setting off the kind of alarms that can’t be ignored.’