Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

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.

‘Well, there’ll never be a chance to repeat it,’ she said. The Peerless ’s reversal had rendered every cousin of the Object into ordinary matter, and turned the Hurtlers into nothing but slowly drifting sand. ‘We’re in for six generations of cosmic tranquillity.’

‘Good,’ Pio replied.

‘And you know there are no restrictions on the engines?’ Agata added.

‘I heard that at the time,’ he said. ‘They let us watch the news.’

A woman walked past them, looking twice when she recognised Pio, then hurrying on. Agata felt herself soften a little. She’d had visions of her brother emerging from prison ranting denials against every unwelcome new fact. ‘If cooling air escapes from the mountain now,’ she said, ‘it will end up mingling with the orthogonal cluster, violating its arrow of time. And yet—’ She stopped and spread her arms. ‘I don’t feel myself burning up.’

Pio buzzed. ‘I don’t think you blame me for the gnat; I think you’re still punishing me for my debate with Lila. There might have been a problem for us with the arrows clashing. At the time nobody had proved that there wouldn’t be, and I was right to point that out.’

‘So you’d say we’ve been lucky,’ Agata pressed him, ‘but you’re satisfied now that there’s no reason not to forge ahead, all the way to the reunion?’

‘That’s a weighty demand,’ Pio replied lightly. ‘If you’re asking me whether I’m going to advocate any kind of change in course in the immediate future, the answer is no. There’s nothing we could do at this moment that would make the Peerless any safer, and no risk that we urgently need to avoid.’

He gestured towards the floor – towards the rim, out into the void. ‘But as Lila said in the debate, the orthogonal worlds are still out there, and they can’t annihilate us any more. So don’t ask me to renounce the possibilities they offer. All I’m calling on people to do right now is to keep an open mind. Is that so terrible?’

Agata said, ‘You’ve forgotten your own slogan: “Let the ancestors burn.” Why should anyone open their mind to that?’

‘Let them burn if necessary ,’ Pio replied. ‘If the alternative is even worse.’

Agata stopped walking. ‘You know, you almost sound convincing sometimes. But you were ready to give up on the home world before on much weaker grounds than necessity .’

Pio raised his hands contritely. ‘I got carried away in the debate. I know it offended you, and I’m sorry.’

They’d almost reached the turn-off to Lila’s office. Agata didn’t want to detour for a meal now in case Pio insisted on joining her.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘You can tell Cira that you tried your best, to no avail.’

‘What are you talking about?’ But Pio’s baffled demeanour was a bit too self-conscious to be believable.

‘You should find something useful to do,’ Agata suggested. ‘I’m sure they still need help re-bedding the medicinal gardens.’

‘And your work’s useful?’ he retorted. ‘Try some gardening yourself!’

‘Goodbye, Pio.’ Agata strode towards the intersection, glancing at her brother with her rear gaze in the hope that he’d set off back down the corridor so she could get to the food hall after all. But he must have been hungry too, because he headed for the hall himself.

Agata muttered imprecations against her family and readied herself for a bell or two of higher mathematics through the eyes of a Starver.

‘Are you eating for four now?’ Medoro joked.