Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

There was fine red dust covering the grey hardstone walls of the airlock. He hadn’t noticed it by the dimmer illumination of the safety light. He ran a gloved finger along the seal of the outer door, trying to find the point where it had been breached, but if there was a hole it wasn’t apparent.

It hardly mattered now; however the dust had entered, he was about to let in a great deal more. But as he began to turn the crank, the realisation hit him: it hadn’t come from outside. They must have brought it with them all the way from the Peerless , scattered invisibly throughout the craft, with a little more accumulating inside the airlock each time the inner door was opened. Or in Esilio’s terms: the Surveyor ’s visit had just ended, and this residue was something they would soon take away with them.

Ramiro shivered, disoriented for a moment, but whether or not this account was correct there was nothing to be done about it. A small, stubborn part of him longed to leave the door closed and… what? Never open it at all, just to see if he could spite this unsurprising message from the future which claimed that, actually, he would? Every time they’d used the time-reversed camera, subtler but even stranger things had happened, as thermal fluctuations in the sensor conspired to create the orderly pattern of photons that the device needed to emit. Every image the camera had shown them had been encoded all along in the not-quite-random vibrations of various objects throughout the Surveyor , waiting to come together at just the right moment.

He leant against the crank and broke the door’s seal; a gust of wind forced its way through the narrow gap. Dust flew into the airlock, dust flew out, erasing all distinctions between that which they’d brought and the rest. He slid the door fully open, letting the light from his helmet carve a tunnel through the storm. Amidst the chaos, sheets of darkness fluttered, where the dust piled together in mid-air for a moment before scattering again. Cautiously, Ramiro poked his head and shoulders through the portal. He felt the warm wind insinuate itself beneath the fabric of his cooling bag, but it seemed that nothing it carried was small enough, or sharp enough, to reach his skin.

He swept the beam of the coherer across the ground; the wind was raising so much dust that it was impossible to make out the surface below, but given that the Surveyor wasn’t sinking its immediate surroundings were unlikely to prove treacherous. He slid the short boarding ladder out from the airlock; its feet vanished before it touched the ground, but a scant or two further down it encountered firm resistance.

He clambered down the ladder and stood on the surface. Even with the cooling bag encasing his feet there was an unpleasant grittiness against his soles; he took a few steps to see if he’d grow accustomed to the texture, but it remained distracting so he hardened and desensitised the skin. The wind wasn’t strong enough to knock him down, but he couldn’t move confidently without pausing each time it rose up, to recalibrate his efforts to compensate for the force.

‘Ramiro?’ Tarquinia’s voice came through the link in his helmet.

‘I’m fine!’ he replied, shouting to be heard above the dust scraping across the surface of his helmet. He closed the outer door of the airlock, then walked around to the window and raised a hand; his crew-mates raised theirs to shield their eyes from his coherer. ‘Sorry.’ He swivelled the beam upwards, out of their lines of sight. ‘The wind’s annoying, and I can’t see much. But I don’t think I’ve started speaking backwards or ageing in reverse.’

Agata said, ‘I’m coming out.’

Ramiro made a quick circuit around the Surveyor ; he couldn’t see any damage on the outside of the hull. Agata emerged, stepping gingerly across the swirling sand.

‘So this is what a planet’s like,’ she said numbly.

‘It’s not exactly welcoming,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But it should be more appealing once the weather improves.’ He glanced up at the stars; he could just make out the arc of the rim, its usual dazzle reduced to a pale broken line. Though the wind and the dust were the most intrusive novelties, even the more familiar elements of their surroundings were juxtaposed so bizarrely that they lost their usual meaning: on the slopes of the Peerless strong gravity and an open sky always lay in the same direction. He wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep out here, or if he’d panic and imagine that he was falling into the stars.

‘Whenever I pictured the reunion, I always thought of people meeting in a corridor,’ Agata confessed. ‘But it will probably be outdoors – in the countryside, where the vehicles can land safely. It might even look like this.’

‘We’ll recreate the centre of Zeugma for you later,’ Ramiro teased her. ‘To give you some better imagery for the ceremonies in the town square.’

Azelio joined them. ‘I’d be happy with some gardens to break the gloom,’ he said.

‘Be my guest.’ Ramiro gestured into the darkness.

‘Once the wind dies down.’ Azelio turned and swung the light from his helmet across the ground, but the exploratory oval faded into obscurity at a dozen strides.

Tarquinia stepped off the ladder. ‘Given what we saw from orbit, these conditions shouldn’t last long. It’s coming to evening; we should get some sleep and start work in the morning, so we’ll be able to use the view by sunlight if we need it.’

‘Real days and nights!’ Agata chirped. ‘It’s just a shame we couldn’t put a time-reversed camera in every helmet.’ She turned to Ramiro. ‘So will your settlers bring a few gross of the things, or just one for navigation that they’ll destroy on arrival, lest someone put it to an evil purpose?’

Ramiro had never wanted the cameras banned, but nor had he pictured the colony relying on them. ‘We’ll see by flowers and wheat-light,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure there’ll be something we can use to make lamps.’

‘While the sunlight itself goes to waste.’

‘Did you ever see sunlight?’ he countered. ‘There’ll be gardens, lamps, a few coherers… much the same as the lighting everyone’s used to, with a lot less moss and a lot more starlight. We won’t be trying to recreate the home world – or the mountain – but no one from the Peerless will find it all that strange.’

Agata was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘You’re right – and I should wish you luck with it. It’s what we’re here for, after all.’

Ramiro had trouble falling asleep. When he woke, the sound of the storm on the hull was gone, and the Esilian clock he’d set up on his console showed that it was more than a bell after dawn. Esilio’s day was only about two-thirds as long as the home world’s; he hoped Tarquinia wouldn’t try to impose the new rhythm on everything they did.

In fact, when he found her at her seat in the front cabin, Tarquinia looked as if she’d been awake all night. ‘The others are outside,’ she said. ‘The wind’s died down, so we should be able to start work soon, once they stop playing around.’

‘Playing?’

‘Take a look for yourself,’ Tarquinia suggested.

‘Will I need my helmet?’

‘You won’t need anything,’ she promised. ‘We’ve set up some lights. Just toughen your soles.’

Ramiro felt vulnerable as he approached the airlock without even his cooling bag, but Esilian sand was just sand, and he’d probably had traces of it beneath his feet for the last six years.

When he opened the outer door he saw Agata and Azelio leaping around, buzzing like excited children for no reason he could discern, unless it was sheer joy at the stillness after the storm. A couple of coherers mounted on the hull illuminated the red soil starkly – showing up an extraordinary maze of tracks that testified to his comrades’ exuberance. With the foreground so bright his eyes stood no chance of adapting to the starlight so, even with the dust haze settled, everything in the distance was lost in utter blackness.