Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

Cira made a non-committal noise.

‘It’s a dangerous cosmos,’ Lila declared. ‘For us, for the ancestors – and for our descendants, whatever choices we make. But thanks to the efforts of the people who launched the Peerless , we’ve had six generations of thought and experiment to ameliorate that danger, and the prospect of six more to come. Pio calls those people barbarians, but what would be barbaric would be turning our backs on them for no other reason than a lack of certainty. If we’re ever confronted with proof that trying to return to the home world would be suicidal, then of course we should change our plans. Until then, why would we not do our best to save the lives of the people to whom we owe our existence? And why would we not all wish our own descendants to be present at that glorious reunion, when the generation who flung a mountain into the sky learn of the extraordinary things we’ve done with the time that they stole for us?’

Agata clung to a rope outside the voting hall, watching the bars of the histogram slowly rising on the news screen beside the entrance.

‘Agata!’ Her friend Medoro approached, the amiable look of recognition on his face giving way to one of amusement. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘A while,’ she admitted. ‘I voted early, and then I thought I’d stay and watch the turnout.’

‘So you’ve been here since the first bell?’

‘I’ve got nothing else to do,’ she said defensively.

‘If I’d known you were holding a vigil, I would have brought you supplies.’

‘Go and vote,’ she suggested, shooing him towards the entrance.

Medoro leant towards her in a conspiratorial pose. ‘How much are you paying?’ he whispered. ‘I took a dozen pieces from your brother’s side, but you still have a chance to buy me back.’

‘That’s not funny.’

He swayed back on the rope. ‘Seriously, what’s wrong with you? When I come out we should get something to eat.’ Agata saw him lift his rear gaze towards the screen. ‘I can barely even see that sliver for the no vote.’

‘I’m not afraid that we might lose,’ she said. ‘What worries me is that we had to ask the question at all.’

‘So we should just be happy cogs in Eusebio’s machine?’ Medoro goaded her. ‘Born into the mountain with no say in anything?’

‘You make it sound as if Eusebio had a choice,’ Agata retorted. ‘If there’d been no launch, you wouldn’t have been born anywhere.’

‘Of course,’ Medoro agreed. ‘The builders did the right thing, and I’m grateful. But that doesn’t mean we should be enslaved to them. What we owe the ancestors isn’t blind allegiance, it’s constant scrutiny of the actual possibilities. Your brother’s wrong because his arguments are wrong – not because the mere idea of deviating from the plan should be unthinkable.’

Agata was unimpressed by his euphemism: ‘deviating from the plan’ was a phrase befitting a bold rebellion against pernickety bureaucracy, not a calculated act that amounted to mass murder. But she wasn’t in the mood to pick a fight. ‘Pio’s had his chance to be heard, so maybe that will get it out of his system.’

Medoro said, ‘Sure – but it’s not just Pio and the people who’ll vote with him who needed this. Every one of us knows that the outcome was always a foregone conclusion… but it still matters that it’s only a foregone conclusion because we’ll judge it to be the best choice on offer.’

‘Hmm.’

Medoro headed into the hall. Agata watched as the tally on the screen reached one third of the enrolled population. The ‘yes’ count now outnumbered the ‘no’ by more than a dozen to one. In principle the result remained undecided, but the truth was that her side was heading for an overwhelming victory.

Medoro emerged, and approached her with a guilty demeanour. ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ he pleaded. ‘But I thought it would only be fair to even things out a little—’

Agata took a swipe at him; he twisted away. She was almost certain that he was joking, but if he wasn’t she didn’t want to know.

‘Come and eat,’ Medoro said. ‘Assuming you’re not turning into a Starver.’

‘Hardly.’ Agata followed him down the corridor towards the food hall. ‘I’m not turning into a Shedder, either.’ The idea of giving birth terrified her – whether or not she had to live through the process – but beyond her own fears the last thing she’d wish on any child was to be raised by her idiot brother.

Greta turned to Ramiro. ‘Start the spin-down,’ she said.

Unaccountably, Ramiro hesitated. He’d been anxious for days that, at this very moment, some obscure detail that he’d failed to allow for would make itself known by undermining everything – but an unplanned hiatus wouldn’t so much forestall the risk of humiliation as turn his fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just as Greta’s expression of controlled anticipation was on the verge of faltering – and revealing to every onlooker that the delay was not just unexpected but incomprehensible – his paralysis ended and he threw the switch. A single tiny coherer in the panel in front of him sent its light into the maze of photonics below, and the system that Ramiro had spent the last six years building, testing and refining began, very slowly, to move the mountain.

The entire Council had crowded into the control room, and now they turned to watch the main navigation screen mounted high on the wall. At Greta’s insistence, Ramiro had programmed an elaborate animation that made it look as if the sensor readings confirming the successful firing of the counter-rotation engines were only arriving gradually, piece by piece. ‘Not so slowly that they start to get worried,’ she’d suggested, ‘but not so fast that it’s an anticlimax.’

‘And if something fails?’ he’d asked. ‘How do you want that paced?’

Greta had given this careful thought. ‘Delay it long enough that it looks as if things were going perfectly, up to a point. But not so long that anyone could say that we were hiding it.’

Ramiro’s own unobtrusive display was feeding him news in real time; so far it was all encouraging. Not only were the engines reporting a flawless performance, the accelerometers and the star trackers showed that the Peerless really had begun shedding its spin. If all went well, in less than three days the mountain would be perfectly still.

For the first time in six generations, chambers at the rim of the Peerless would be as weightless as those on the axis, and for a stint, the farmers and an army of helpers would work to reconfigure the fields, shifting soil from the useless centrifugal floors to surfaces once seen as walls. When they were done, the mountain would be slowly flipped, base over apex, ready for the main event.

The catalogue of triumphs unfurling on the navigation screen finally reached the same conclusion as the real-time reports. ‘Congratulations!’ Councillor Marina offered effusively. ‘We couldn’t have hoped for a smoother start.’ Ramiro glanced towards her with his rear gaze, but she was addressing herself solely to Greta.

Greta inclined her head graciously.

‘This is promising,’ Councillor Prisca conceded, ‘but the real test is yet to come.’

‘Of course,’ Greta concurred, though Ramiro could see her struggling not to add a few words in favour of the present achievement. The mountain had gained its spin from giant slabs of sunstone spewing flame into the void, controlled by compressed air and clockwork. Now it was losing it through nothing but light – light flowing through the switches and sensors as much as the engines themselves. If that didn’t count as a real test , they should all just stay silent and humble until the home world itself had been shifted from its course.