Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘I’m fine,’ Azelio replied.

Agata said, ‘Can I leave my jetpack on?’

‘As long as you want to.’

‘Then I’m fine, too.’

‘Ramiro? Any special requests?’

He said, ‘I’ll be happy once we can see where we’re going.’

Tarquinia buzzed curtly. ‘When I agreed to the confidentiality conditions, Greta stressed that you were the last person I should let in on the secret.’

Azelio was confused. ‘What secret?’

Agata said, ‘We’re not going to travel all the way to Esilio by dead reckoning. Accelerometers are good, but they’re not that good. And the home-cluster stars aren’t enough, either.’

Azelio understood. ‘They finished the time-reversed camera, in secret?’

Ramiro said, ‘I think they had prototypes working before the bombing.’

Tarquinia shifted uncomfortably in her seat, then made a decision. ‘Since everyone knows the situation, I’m not going to treat you like fools.’ An inset opened on Ramiro’s console showing him a patch of sky lit up with stars. Not the home cluster’s long trails; these images were brief stabs of colour, some of them piling the whole spectrum together into a white smudge. He glanced to his left and saw that Agata and Azelio were being sent the same feed.

‘Behold the orthogonal stars, lighting the way into the future.’ Agata sounded bitter, and Ramiro couldn’t blame her: this was proof that even from the killers’ point of view her friend’s murder had been futile.

‘This is Esilio’s sun.’ Tarquinia drew a red circle around a bright speck near the centre of the view.

‘Greta’s spyware will tell her that you’ve broken your agreement,’ Ramiro predicted. He hadn’t been allowed near the Surveyor ’s automation while it was in development, but he was sure that the Peerless would be receiving a constant flow of data from the expedition, far beyond the communications they volunteered.

‘I don’t care,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘What’s she going to do about it now?’

‘Blow us up?’ Azelio joked.

Agata said, ‘Not if we keep going. They’ll only kill us if we start to look threatening – if we turn around and start heading back.’

Agata woke in a state of joyful anticipation, but then she spent a lapse or two lying motionless, wondering if she had the day right. She could see the diurnal clock on her console’s panel, but she’d made a deliberate choice to omit the date from the default display. She’d fooled herself in the past, waking with all kinds of wildly optimistic notions about the phase the mission had reached, but it was important that she settle the matter by consulting her memory, with no other aids.

Since the link with the Peerless had crackled its last transmission and the flow of messages from Serena and Lila had ceased, time had become a desert out of the sagas: a featureless wasteland of shimmering heat haze and treacherous mirages. But Agata was sure that she’d just passed a full day with a justified belief that the long-awaited event was imminent. If she was wrong about that then she wasn’t just disoriented, she was completely delusional.

She rose from her sand bed and walked over to the console. She hadn’t been mistaken about the date, but she brought up the flight plan to confirm its significance. It had been a few stints since they’d passed the one-quarter mark in the duration of their outwards journey, but that fractional accomplishment had offered nothing tangible to celebrate. Today, the Surveyor ’s progress would finally be made manifest: its history would reach orthogonality with that of the Peerless , and Tarquinia would shut off the engines.

Agata left her room and walked out into the front cabin. Tarquinia wasn’t up yet; Ramiro was on watch.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘No, it’s not.’ Ramiro swivelled his seat around to face her. ‘Complete weightlessness is tedious,’ he complained. ‘We should have found a way to avoid it.’

‘You could always move in with Azelio’s plants,’ Agata joked.

‘I shouldn’t have to. If they get to swing on a tether, why not us?’

‘What would you use as the counterweight? Splitting the whole vehicle in two would be too complicated.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Ramiro sulked. ‘What kind of expert on gravity are you, if you can’t summon it at the flick of a switch?’

Agata said, ‘The kind who understands enough to be willing to bet that that’s never going to happen. I’ll give you a gross to one that no one will discover such a thing between now and the reunion.’

Ramiro scowled. ‘To be verified how? I thought your theory was that inventors would always censor the messages they sent into the past – since that’s more probable than their ideas appearing out of nowhere.’

Agata wasn’t going to let these complications stand in the way of a good bet. ‘I think they could tell us what they’d built. They just couldn’t tell us how it worked.’

Ramiro stretched his arms and buzzed wearily. Most of the cabin lights were off, and behind him the home-cluster stars filled the view. It was Ancestors’ Day all over again – only this time it would last for three years.

‘The reunion could be happening right now,’ Agata marvelled. ‘Even as we speak, the Peerless could be approaching the home world.’

‘It’s not the first time you could have said that. Or didn’t you notice?’ Ramiro was wearing his corset, so he sent the sketch to the nearest console. ‘About a stint before mid-turnaround, our line of simultaneity would have had just the right slope.’

‘It’s the first time it’s “now” by the home world’s reckoning as well as our own,’ Agata replied.

Ramiro was bemused. ‘Name any two events in the cosmos, and there’s a definition of time that makes them simultaneous. If I can’t actually witness this great moment – let alone take part in it – just how excited do you want me to be?’

‘I’m sure the ancestors thought about us at the turnaround,’ Agata argued. ‘What’s wrong with a bit of solidarity?’

‘I prefer to reserve that for people I can look in the eye.’

‘All right. Forget it.’ They’d exchanged their views and found nothing in common, as usual. There was no point wishing it were otherwise.

‘I’m going to go strap myself down and sleep through all this nonsense.’ Ramiro nodded towards the passage behind her; Tarquinia had emerged from her cabin.

Azelio joined Agata and Tarquinia for breakfast, then the three of them set about putting up the guide ropes and checking that everything inside the Surveyor that might drift free was secured. The tool cupboard took the most work; there were individual straps for every item, but people had grown lazy about using them. Azelio went through the pantry, checking every sack of grain for holes. The sand in their beds was already resin-coated – and hoping to contain it was a tad optimistic whatever steps they took – but Tarquinia insisted on putting tarpaulins in place before the gravity was lost.

Agata clung to a rope in the front cabin as Tarquinia finally issued the command to the engines. The end of the turnaround for the Peerless had taken place over three full days, out of regard for the effects on the most vulnerable travellers, but the crew of the Surveyor were assumed to be more robust. As Agata’s weight plummeted, she was unable to dispel a conviction that the cabin was plunging down, but then the very idea of that vertical axis lost its meaning.