Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘Seven deaths on your hands, and you compare yourself to Yalda?’

‘Actually, it was you I was comparing to Yalda.’ Ramiro drew back from the table and allowed a trace of his anger to show. ‘I mourn those deaths, and I condemn the perpetrators – but I don’t know who they are and I certainly didn’t help them.’

‘If you don’t know who they are, how can you know you didn’t help them?’

‘I could ask you the same question,’ Ramiro retorted. ‘Maybe you gave directions to one of the bombers three days before the blast. Maybe you shared your lunch with one of them at school, when someone stole their loaves.’

Maddalena said, ‘Is this funny to you?’

‘Seven people dead isn’t funny at all. But if you want your attempts to do something about it taken seriously, you’re going to have to earn that.’

‘Do you deny that you were giving technical advice to the anti-messager groups?’

‘Not at all,’ Ramiro replied. ‘I helped them make their meetings public – sparing you from any need to go to the trouble of listening in on them covertly. You can still hear every word we said. No one was discussing bombs.’

‘And in the private meetings?’ Maddalena asked.

‘You tell me. If there were private meetings, I wasn’t invited, so that’s when the whole spying thing would have helped.’

Maddalena reiterated his defining characteristics in her eyes. ‘You violated an undertaking not to disclose the plans for the messaging system. You campaigned against it in the referendum. You used your expertise to help everyone opposed to the system—’

Ramiro said, ‘Apparently not everyone.’

‘You expect me to believe that with all those key roles in the movement, you knew nothing about the preparations for the bombing?’

‘I made it very clear to the people I worked with that I wasn’t interested in violence. That might not have been the best way to earn the confidence of any fanatics among them, but strangely enough it seemed like a perfectly ethical approach at the time.’

Maddalena paused, staring past him at the bare wall, possibly consulting some third party through her corset. There were no clocks in the room, and Ramiro had stopped trying to gauge the length of these sessions. All he could do was keep answering the questions one by one, refusing to be cowed and refusing to start fabricating the kind of replies that might satisfy his interrogator.

‘You must have been frustrated with the way the strike was going,’ Maddalena suggested.

Ramiro said, ‘Of course I was frustrated. I wished more people had joined in. I wished it had had a greater impact.’

‘So why would you continue with such an ineffectual strategy?’

‘No one had any better ideas.’

‘Apparently someone did,’ Maddalena replied.

Ramiro hummed wearily. ‘Where is this getting you? Is your boss listening in and giving you points for literal-mindedness? No one who spoke to me proposed a better strategy. If you’re going to make me talk for three or four bells at a time, you’ll have to forgive me if some of my statements are made on the understanding that you haven’t ignored everything else I’ve said.’

‘So who was the most frustrated?’ Maddalena pressed him. ‘Even if they didn’t talk about their plans, you must have picked up on their mood.’

‘We were all frustrated. If you want to make a comparative assessment, go and look at the recordings yourself.’

‘People knew when they were on camera,’ Maddalena pointed out. ‘But you were among them when they were less guarded.’

Ramiro couldn’t fault her logic there. He slumped back in his harness, wondering if he was punishing himself for nothing. It was possible that he’d spent time with the bombers without knowing it, and it wasn’t absurd to think that they’d let something slip – some remark that betrayed the degree of their impatience. He wanted the killers caught and punished. If he could give the authorities a genuine clue to their identities, he’d be proud of that.

Off camera, who had ridiculed the strike most vehemently? Placida? Lena? It was hard to put one above the other, but maybe they’d conceived of the bombing together. No doubt they were both already in custody, but with Ramiro’s testimony against them they might buckle and confess.

Maddalena was watching him expectantly. Ramiro felt a cold horror spreading through his gut at the thought of what he’d almost done. The women’s moaning about the strike wasn’t proof of anything, but he couldn’t trust his jailers to accord the observation as little weight as it deserved. Anything he said, however cautiously phrased, could damage two innocent people’s lives irreparably.

‘Analyse the bomb site,’ he said. ‘Find out where the chemicals came from. I want these murderers caught as much as anyone, but I’m not a mind-reader.’

Ramiro woke in the blackness of his cell and shifted on his sand bed. With the walls around him sterilised by the harsh lights of the day cycle, at night there was no trace of moss, leaving a perfect darkness that seemed to stretch out in all directions.

If he’d kept his promise to Greta, would those seven instrument builders be alive now? And if the Council had been able to keep the messaging system secret, would its impact on ordinary people’s lives have ended up being less intrusive? Maybe there would have been a violent backlash when word of its existence finally leaked out – or maybe the foreknowledge that the system granted would have been enough to prevent that.

But he’d made his choice, and now he had to take some share of responsibility for the way things had unfolded. All his feelings of shame and sadness were just useless self-indulgence, though, if he did nothing more than stare into the past and wish that everything could have been different.

The only question now was: where did this end? Ramiro had had no news from outside since his arrest, but he suspected that the strike had been called off, as a gesture of respect to the grieving relatives. That would be the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t resolve anything. So long as the messaging system was still being built, almost half the population would remain disaffected – and the change being forced on them wasn’t something they could learn to live with. It made no difference how he felt, himself; he could renounce the killers as loudly as he liked, he could give up the fight and embrace his enemies. There would never be peace in the mountain again.

And was that it? The situation was unsalvageable?

He reached out for a rope and raised his torso off the bed, the tarpaulin crinkling around him. There would never be a consensus, but that didn’t mean there had to be violence. He was never going to be reconciled with Corrado, but so long as no one locked them in the same room together they weren’t going to kill each other.

What if they partitioned the Peerless and let the messagers and anti-messagers live apart – dividing the resources of the mountain in proportion to the votes? Those who chose to live without the system need never cross paths with those who used it.

The trouble was, there’d be people on both sides who wouldn’t be satisfied with their share of living space. The messagers might find ways to use their foreknowledge to manipulate their neighbours – and even if they didn’t, the possibility would be enough to drive the kind of fanatics who’d bombed the camera workshop to keep on trying to destroy the whole system.

Ramiro looked out across the darkness. Maps and treaties would never be enough. Locked doors and solid stone walls couldn’t separate the two groups so completely as to end their mutual fear and suspicion.