Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘My arm’s tired already,’ Azelio confessed. ‘Why couldn’t they make this a job for power tools?’

‘If you want to run everything on compressed air, you’d better hope there’s sunstone on Esilio.’ Agata’s own forearm was aching. ‘Let’s face it, we’ve all grown soft. If you asked me to harvest a crop manually, I think it would kill me.’

‘Lucky you don’t want to migrate, then.’

By design, the bolts could not be withdrawn entirely from their threaded holes, but once all eight had been unscrewed as far as possible the locking plates on the pod were freed from their slots in the hull.

Agata got into position on the opposite side of the pod to Azelio; the symmetry was necessary to extract the thing smoothly, but it meant they were hidden from each other. ‘Move it as gently as you can,’ he instructed her. ‘The last thing we want to do is give it more momentum than we can control.’ With their feet re-formed into hands to grip the rings on the hull, they slowly raised the pod out of its shallow bed.

When it was about a stride above the hull, Azelio called a halt. They both stood for a moment holding the thing, as if they couldn’t quite believe that it would stay put when they released it. But it did.

‘I’ll tow this one out, and you watch over the cable,’ Azelio said.

‘Right.’ Agata squatted against the hull and aimed her coherer at the reel. As well as tethering the pod to the pivot it shared with its companion, the cable would carry cooling air to the plants and bring data and video back to the Surveyor .

Azelio moved into place on the opposite side of the pod; Agata couldn’t see him, so he narrated for her. ‘I’m attaching the towing rope now,’ he said. Then, ‘I’m connected. Be patient, though, this is going to take a while.’

After a lapse in which nothing happened, Agata asked, ‘Did you fire the jetpack?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think you’re moving at all.’ The slight tug hadn’t been enough to overcome the sticking friction of the cable; it was prudent to unwind as slowly as possible, but there was a limit to how slow that could be.

‘That’s embarrassing.’ Azelio buzzed. ‘All right, a little more thrust this time.’

The reel began to turn. Agata watched the cable feeding out smoothly, the helix of the outer layer gradually shrinking. Verano’s team had wound every span into place with scrupulous care, and from the flatness of the layers she could see that she wasn’t expecting any hidden snags, but she focused all her attention on the process, refusing to let her mind wander.

When the cable was down to its last layer and the core of the reel was revealed, Agata advised Azelio and began counting down the remaining turns. Half a turn short of full extension, he brought the pod to a halt. Centrifugal force could complete the process; a tiny amount of slack like this wouldn’t be enough to give the pod a dangerous jolt.

Agata looked up and waited for her eyes to adjust back to the starlight. The cable stretched out into the void for four or five times the diameter of the hull. With the pod’s stone block hanging on the end of it, her eyes wanted to declare this direction vertical, but when she insisted on her original hull-based definition the sight became even stranger, like a conjurer’s rope trick.

‘When you and Ramiro do the spin-up, I want to come out and watch,’ she pleaded.

‘If it’s up to me, absolutely,’ Azelio replied. ‘And since you’ve got Tarquinia twisted around your finger—’

‘Ha! That’d be something.’ Agata suspected that Tarquinia was listening in on their conversation; for safety’s sake the helmets’ transceivers didn’t use any kind of encryption.

‘I’m coming back now.’

‘Have you untied the towing rope?’ she asked.

Azelio was silent for a moment. ‘Good idea.’

When he’d rejoined her, Agata said, ‘I owe you for this. I was going insane in there.’

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ Azelio declared. ‘You sat with me after the link cut off; I haven’t forgotten that.’

‘I don’t know if I helped much.’ The children were Azelio’s life; the most she’d been able to do was distract him a little, while the prospect of waiting more than ten years to hear from them again sank in.

‘What will we do if Esilio isn’t habitable?’ he asked. They’d switched off their coherers while they talked so as not to dazzle each other, but Agata could make out Azelio’s face in the starlight. She’d come out into the void to escape her dark thoughts, but the cosmic perspective seemed to have had the opposite effect on him. ‘If we go back to them with nothing, it would be like the Peerless returning to the home world with no idea how to escape the Hurtlers.’

Agata hummed angrily. ‘I don’t believe that. War’s not as inevitable as a Hurtler strike. Anyway… when we get to Esilio, we’ll find what we find. No one expects you to work miracles.’

‘No.’

Agata said, ‘We’d better start on the second pod, before Ramiro wakes up and finds out that I’ve stolen half his entertainment.’

Back at her desk, Agata examined her notes. The truth was that in a year and a half she’d made almost no progress. Now she’d had her frolic beneath the stars; she’d had her Ancestors’ Day celebration. And there was nothing on the calendar to break the monotony until they started up the engines again.

She could end up squandering half the journey longing for planetfall, and half again longing to be back in the mountain. All her life, this fixation on grand turning points – from the launch of the Peerless to the reunion – had given her a sense of purpose, but it had also weakened and distracted her. Recapitulating the whole thing in miniature had only made the problem more acute. It was only right that the Surveyor ’s mission came first, and that she honour Medoro, test Lila’s theory, and play her part in Ramiro’s peace plan. But to make any progress with her own work she had to stop thinking like a passenger: doing no more than clinging on, in the hope that someone else’s flight plan would carry her to a destination worth reaching.

Agata hadn’t brought a picture of Lila, but she could effortlessly summon the sound of her mentor’s gentle nagging. She knew exactly what Lila’s advice would have been at this juncture: Romolo and Assunto’s tricks weren’t suited to her purpose, and there was no point pretending that some minor variation in their methods would suffice. If she wanted to make progress, she needed to dig far deeper into the mysteries of the vacuum and come up with some new tools of her own.

Ramiro passed the first bell of his watch correcting the errors in a small program that he’d written the night before. It computed the shapes of two four-dimensional polyhedra, set them rotating – with different speeds and directions – then displayed a projection of the portion of the first that lay inside the second.

It was a frivolous exercise, but the endlessly mutating image was strangely soothing, and this playful tinkering did have the advantage that it kept his skills sharp. As much as he’d luxuriated in the process of ridding the Surveyor of its intrusive surveillance software, he’d only been able to prolong that task for about a year, and though he doubted that all the genuinely useful automation that remained would turn out to be ideal for its purpose once they reached Esilio he was still in no better position to know the true requirements than the original designers.

There was a sudden high-pitched noise from behind him, like something large and brittle being snapped. Not the ominous groan of a machine part under pressure gradually yielding – just instant surrender to an overwhelming force. It was over in a flicker or two, and though the screech itself was unforgettable the lingering impression offered no clues as to its source. Ramiro dimmed the cabin and switched on the exterior lights. Through the window he could see a trail of debris drifting off to his right, small grey rocks spinning in a haze of dust. They could only be fragments of the hull’s hardstone, torn free by a collision of some kind.