Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

Ramiro took her place. ‘Agata has expressed a touching faith in the power of the law and technology to protect us from unwanted personal revelations,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe that her faith is warranted, but even if it were that wouldn’t be enough to make this system benign.

‘As I speak, many of you – I hope – are still struggling to decide how you’ll vote on this question. And when the result is declared, that will surely be a public matter. The announcement won’t be an invasion of anyone’s privacy, an act of libel, or anything else that could fairly or sensibly be punished. And yet if you’d known the result in advance, wouldn’t you feel that your own personal decision-making process had been altered? Of course you’d still be free to vote in accordance with your wishes, but the whole sequence of contesting thoughts – all the private debates inside your own skull that led you to that final action – would be playing out in a very different context.’

Ramiro checked the timer; he was still less than halfway through his quota, but he was not going to let himself get cut off again.

‘Knowing even the most mundane facts from the public record will crush our political lives, flattening our inner dialogues into a choice between impotent rage and apathetic conformity. Of course we’re accustomed to being helpless after the fact to reverse a vote that goes against us, but remember: the results of elections and referenda that we know in advance will not be guaranteed to be the same as they would have been in the absence of foreknowledge. We won’t be hearing about a future that would have happened regardless – as every proponent of this system will affirm, because if that were true it could never yield any benefits. Rather, we’ll be reshaping the whole process by which we make decisions – at the political level without a doubt, but I believe that the same kind of distortion will afflict every aspect of our lives.’

Ramiro waited for the satisfying punctuation of the bell, but then he realised that he’d rushed through his final words too quickly and left himself with time to fill. ‘For example,’ he extemporised, ‘decisions about births and child-rearing are as difficult as any we face, but it won’t take prying clerks to disclose our final choices to us once we hear from a child whose very existence had been in doubt.’ He caught a look of bafflement on one woman’s face, and an expression of outright hostility on another’s. ‘It’s not that a message like that need be unwelcome, but if we flatten the deliberation process, then just as with the vote—’

The timer interrupted him. Ramiro punched it, then slunk backwards.

Agata took centre stage, pausing just long enough to let Ramiro’s awkwardness linger and become fixed in everyone’s minds. ‘If you don’t want to read the result of some future referendum, I’m sure you won’t have to,’ she declared. ‘And if mere rumours of the result prove to be too hard to avoid, they could always be camouflaged with competing rumours. People could choose to learn the true result in advance from some trusted informant if they wished, but those who didn’t would end up hearing a range of false claims as well, with no way to distinguish between them.’

Ramiro waited for someone in the audience to ridicule this inane proposal, but they let it pass without complaint. Maybe they all liked the idea of taking advantage of their idealistic neighbours, who’d be wrapped in shrouds of scrupulously balanced, government-supplied misinformation.

‘This system could vastly improve our safety,’ Agata contended, ‘as Ramiro and everyone else acknowledges. We can deal with the privacy issues, and the political ones: your vote will always be your own to cast, and you’ll have the choice of knowing the outcome in advance or not, as you wish. But you don’t need to take my word for any of this. The present vote is merely for a year’s trial in which we can discover what the real problems are – and if, in the end, you find that they outweigh the advantages you’ll be free to change your mind and vote to have the system dismantled.

‘If we look beyond Ramiro’s fear that in this maze of information we might inadvertently stumble on some unwelcome facts about our lives – most of which would be no more harmful to us than a friend’s reminiscence about a youthful misadventure that we’d prefer to forget – we’ll see something far less petty and mundane. Many of us have heirlooms from the day of the launch: diaries, or letters from mothers to their children, or even just stories passed down unwritten. In this mountain of photonic documents from the future we could find our descendants’ stories of the reunion. Then we’ll all have a chance to be part of the Peerless ’s return, in a way that we never imagined before.’

As the timer sounded, the audience cheered – some sections more loudly than others, but it was the first real response they’d offered all evening.

Agata paused to acknowledge the applause, then exited gracefully. Ramiro was stung. How could his case not be obvious to everyone? What hadn’t he said that would have made it clearer?

Tarquinia approached and drew him back into the moss-lit side room. ‘You did a good job,’ she said.

‘They loved her,’ Ramiro replied. He could barely make out Tarquinia’s face as his eyes adjusted from the stage lights. ‘Didn’t you hear?’

‘It was the end of the debate, the applause was for both of you.’

She sounded as if she almost believed that, but Ramiro remained despondent. ‘What if I’ve lost it for us?’

Tarquinia hummed irritably. ‘You didn’t do as badly as you think. And for anyone you didn’t convince, there are five more debates to come!’

‘But if people here have made up their minds they won’t want to hear it all rehashed.’

‘You put a strong case,’ Tarquinia insisted. ‘You stumbled with the timing, that’s all.’

Ramiro could tell that she was beginning to find his pessimism wearisome. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have faced that crowd without it.’

‘I couldn’t have faced that crowd at all,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘But this way I can still tell my children that I played a part.’

‘A part in what, though?’ Ramiro joked. ‘Victory or farce?’

Tarquinia said, ‘Let’s not rule anything out. Last time we worked together, we managed both at once.’

Medoro had promised that he’d bring Agata food for her vigil, but when she spotted him approaching the voting hall she saw that he’d also brought his whole family.

Medoro and Serena left two baskets of loaves with her then everyone went in to vote. Agata felt a little foolish now, camped beside the moss-red wall with her supplies, no longer able to pass herself off as someone merely waiting for the queues to thin. She could have watched the results accumulating from anywhere in the mountain, but it was the sight of voters coming and going in the flesh that made the experience real for her. At home she would have felt as if the whole thing were some kind of simulation, with a random-number generator filling out the counts.

Gineto emerged first and squeezed his way through the crowd towards Agata. ‘I can’t say I just made you happy,’ he warned her.

‘Let’s not have an argument,’ Agata pleaded. ‘I’ve voted, you’ve voted; there’s not much point in us trying to change each other’s minds now.’

‘The whole thing’s so unnecessary, though,’ Gineto brooded. ‘We got through the turnaround safely. What threat are we facing? In the home cluster’s terms we’re just retracing our old path, and the Hurtlers are completely tame now. We could have had a quiet life, waiting patiently to arrive back home. But no, we had to find something to argue about.’