Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘Then why?’

‘Why fly to another world?’ Tarquinia frowned, as if the question were absurd: the mere grandeur of the idea was reason enough.

Agata wasn’t buying it. ‘If it could be easy and safe, then you’re right: who wouldn’t want to be on that mission? But it won’t be.’

Tarquinia said, ‘You want to know what swings it for me? I always thought I was doing something worthwhile just by helping to keep the mountain running smoothly. Given what was at stake for the home world, that was enough. But if the messaging system starts spitting out reports of the reunion, the entire reason for the journey will start to feel like something long past: still worthy, but faded, there to be taken for granted. If I can have a little excitement with a detour of my own – doing no one any harm, and maybe even helping slightly – I’d have to be insane to pass up the chance.’

‘A little excitement?’ Agata would have thought Tarquinia’s encounter with the rogue gnat had given her enough for a lifetime. ‘We’ll be unreachable. If anything goes wrong, there’ll be no one to help us.’

‘Hence…’ Tarquinia spread her arms.

‘You think these exercises are going to protect us?’

‘They’ll nudge the odds in our favour,’ Tarquinia insisted. ‘If you ever start taking them seriously. But if you want certainty, feel free to tell Greta that you refuse to fly until they’ve built the messaging system and confirmed the Surveyor ’s return.’

‘Would that be so terrible?’ Agata retorted. ‘Or would the whole thing become worthless to you, if you knew you’d be safe?’

‘Not at all,’ Tarquinia said mildly. ‘But I don’t think the politics would work out. If we postponed the launch until your side achieved everything it wanted, then whatever chance the Surveyor had of defusing tensions would vanish.’

‘That’s true.’ Agata glanced back towards the mountain. ‘We’re getting awfully far from the Peerless .’

Tarquinia declined the opportunity to remind her exactly how many orders of magnitude larger her comfort zone needed to be. ‘So do you want to correct our drift and take us back to the slopes?’

‘How?’

Tarquinia detached the tank from her own cooling bag. ‘Incrementally. Small bursts, then wait and observe the effects.’

Agata accepted the tank with her left hand, then brought her arms together behind her back so she could grip it with her right hand as well.

‘You’ll need to hang on to me,’ she told Tarquinia.

‘Right.’ Tarquinia complied. ‘The belt hook alone leaves too much freedom, it’d be asking for trouble.’

Agata said, ‘If we were doing this for real, I’d leave the whole thing up to you.’

‘Pretend I’ve lost consciousness.’

‘In that case I’d cut you loose.’

‘And fly the Surveyor back on your own? Good luck with that.’

Agata closed her front eyes so she could concentrate on the task. She took her time estimating the position of their combined centre of mass, then she aligned the axis of the tank to pass through it while pointing more or less in opposition to the direction in which she believed they were drifting.

She opened the valve, counted one pause, then shut off the air.

The thrust was slightly off-centre, imparting a small amount of spin, but at least she hadn’t lost her grip on the tank. Agata waited until she’d come full circle, then she released a second burst along a shifted axis that largely compensated for the first unwanted torque.

Tarquinia said, ‘See, you’re a natural.’

Agata took a moment to process the remark for traces of sarcasm. She said, ‘There’s only one downside if I get us back safely.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t want anyone believing that they could put their life in my hands.’

‘Because… ?’

‘I think we’ll all be much safer,’ Agata explained, ‘if everyone around me is so terrified of the prospect of relying on me in an emergency that they work twice as hard to ensure that it never comes to that.’

Tarquinia said, ‘Don’t worry: there’s nothing you can do to rob me of my healthy respect for the possibility that your incompetence will kill me.’

The guards all knew Agata by sight, but she still had to sign a patch to enter the workshop. When she reached the Surveyor , Verano and half a dozen of his team were conducting inspections – shining serious-looking instruments on the polished grey stone around the edges of the rebounder panels – but he motioned to her to go inside anyway.

The airlock’s safety mechanisms had been disengaged to allow people to crawl through the entry hatch unimpeded. Agata emerged in the front of the upturned cabin and slid down the tarpaulin that had been spread protectively across the long, curved clearstone window that presently faced the workshop’s floor.

As she rose to her feet she heard a rustle of paper from one of the rooms above her. ‘Hello?’ she called up.

‘It’s only us!’ Azelio replied. The first two faces that appeared staring down at her belonged to Azelio’s niece and nephew, Luisa and Lorenzo. ‘Come and join us,’ Azelio suggested, squatting down to shoo the children away from the opening.

Agata climbed the rope ladder up to the doorway and clambered into the cabin. After going through the turnaround it was easy to adjust her perceptions to make everything look normal; all the vertical shelves running along the wall in front of her served as a perfect cue to define the ultimate, functional orientation of the room.

The children had a thick sheaf of pictures with them that they were in the process of pinning to the soft wooden board on which they knelt. ‘This is just the start,’ Luisa explained. ‘There’s a new one for every stint.’

‘Every stint of your uncle’s journey?’

‘Yes.’

Agata was impressed. ‘That’s a lot of pictures.’ All the ones she could see looked like impressions from the children’s own skin – there were no photographs or artificial images. Some were obviously meant as portraits of family members, but there were more fanciful works as well: scenes with strange animals surrounded by giant flowers; Esilio suspended in the void, sprouting improbably huge mountains, the black disc of its sun covering the star trails. ‘You’re good at keeping the colours aligned,’ she said. ‘I could never do that.’ It was quite a skill to raise exactly the right shapes for each dye, with enough precision that the combined result of three or four separate impressions was as sharp as this.

‘I can teach you,’ Luisa offered.

‘I won’t have time.’

‘I’ll teach you when you get back.’ Luisa smoothed the paper beneath her hands but turned her rear gaze to Agata. ‘It’s not so long that I’ll have forgotten how. I’ll only be seven.’

‘Is this the Surveyor ?’ Agata asked, pointing to a grey lenticular shape with a beam of yellow light emerging from the middle.

Lorenzo said, ‘Yes. I did that one.’

‘Is it going to Esilio, or coming back?’

‘Coming back is at the end.’ Lorenzo gestured towards the stack of images yet to reach the board. Luisa hushed him, as if he might be spoiling a secret.

‘I hope we didn’t keep you from something,’ Azelio said.

‘I was just going to look around again. Fix things in my mind.’ Agata knew that sounded strange, but the more familiar she became with the craft’s interior, the less anxious she felt about the prospect of seeing nothing else on their journey to Esilio for the next six years. ‘I want to get accustomed to the place in small doses, and then I’ll be ready for it non-stop.’

‘Fair enough.’