Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘Just here.’

Ramiro squatted and placed the pot on the ground, then swung his beam around the site. ‘You already dug twelve holes!’ he observed. ‘And I thought you were messing around with Agata all morning.’

Azelio made a noncommittal sound. Ramiro suddenly felt queasy.

‘My plan is to dig up all these plants at the end of the trial and take them back to the Peerless for my colleagues to analyse,’ Azelio mused. ‘So I guess that’s when I’ll see the transition between cultivated and truly pristine ground. But right now, in Esilio’s terms, we’ve just dug the plants up – so on our terms, we’re about to do that. Backwards.’

Ramiro said, ‘You make it sound as if you’ve been practising time-reversed agronomy all your life.’

‘It’s not that hard to see what’s going on, if you think it through,’ Azelio replied lightly.

‘But you don’t mind following markers like this? Evidence of acts you haven’t performed yet?’

‘It’s a little disconcerting,’ Azelio conceded. ‘But I can’t say that it fills me with claustrophobia to know that I’ll carry out the experimental protocols I always planned to carry out.’

Ramiro didn’t argue; the only thing he’d gain by pressing the point was to raise his own level of disquiet again. ‘Let’s get to work, then.’

Azelio squatted beside one of the plants. ‘The idea is to take it out of the potted soil and brush the roots clean. Pay close attention.’ He leant forward and positioned his hands on either side of the stalk, but then he kept them there, motionless. After a lapse of this, Ramiro said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought it might leap into my hands by itself,’ Azelio explained, deadpan. ‘Dropped in and repotted, Esilio style.’

‘One more joke like that and we’ll be burying more than plants here.’

Azelio took a short stone rod from his tool belt and used it to loosen the soil in the pot. Then he gently extracted the plant and applied a soft brush to the roots.

‘Does it matter if there’s a trace of the old soil clinging on?’ Ramiro asked.

Azelio winced. ‘Yes. If it’s enough to keep the plant growing when it otherwise wouldn’t, that would make the results meaningless. You don’t want the settlers to find out after half a year that it was only contamination that made it look as if they could survive here.’

He carried the freed plant over to the row of holes he hadn’t yet made. ‘What happens if I try to put it in the wrong one?’ he mused. ‘Is that possible?’

Ramiro aimed his coherer at the nearest of the holes, then watched as Azelio knelt down, a trowel in one hand and the wheat plant in the other. He lowered the plant until its roots were in the hole, then he started adding soil from the surrounding mound. Some of the soil was scooped in with pressure from behind, in the ordinary manner. Some appeared to pursue the trowel, the way the dust sometimes pursued Ramiro’s feet. What decided between the two? Azelio’s own actions had to be consistent with the motion of the soil, but which determined which? Maybe there was no answer to that, short of the impossible act of solving in the finest detail the equations that Agata was yet to discover, revealing exactly which sequences of events were consistent with the laws of physics all the way around the cosmos.

In any case, the laws of physics seemed to allow the plant to end up firmly bedded in Esilian soil. Azelio tried to shake his trowel clean, but each time he flicked it as many specks of dirt rose up from the ground to stick to the blade as parted from it.

‘I guess that’s now my Esilian trowel. Do you want to do the next one?’

Ramiro said, ‘I wouldn’t trust myself to get the roots clean.’

‘I’ll deal with that,’ Azelio replied. ‘You can do the planting.’

‘All right.’

When Azelio had prepared the second plant, Ramiro accepted it and took it to the next hole. He knelt on the ground; Azelio passed him the trowel then stood back to provide a steady light.

Ramiro gazed down at the neat mound of soil beside the hole. If he’d had a camera here during the dust storm he might have watched the mound rising up, as speck after speck fell into place from the turbulent air. But if an Esilian wind had scattered it, who had given it its shape? If he refused to do it himself, would Azelio be compelled to take his place? But why would one of them be compelled and not the other?

When he’d stomped across the sand beside the Surveyor each disquieting footprint had been blurred into insignificance, but he couldn’t try to complicate this crucial experiment just to obfuscate the issue. He’d always told himself that he’d accepted the true nature of time and choice, and that all he’d objected to in the messaging system was the way it would flatten his deliberations. But even here, with nothing life-changing at stake, the sense of being trapped in the threads of history was more oppressive than it had ever been.

Ramiro’s left arm had grown tired from holding the plant in place over the hole. He shifted it slightly to make himself more comfortable, but as he shifted it back he saw soil rising and adhering to the roots. He stared at this bizarre result for a moment, then decided to stop wasting time delaying an outcome he had no wish to oppose.

He held the trowel to the side of the mound nearest the hole, then drew it closer. The sand followed the blade – not adhering to it and needing to be brought along, but gently pushing it. He lowered the trowel into the hole then withdrew it; the sand parted from the blade and packed itself between the roots of the plant and the side of the hole.

He hesitated, groping for a clearer sense of his role in the task. But what could he actually do wrong? So long as he was committed to making whatever movements with the trowel were necessary until the plant was securely in place, that state of mind and the strictures of the environment ought to work it out between themselves.

He scooped some soil straight into the hole; like the last delivery, it clung to the roots. In Esilio’s terms, this soil had spent at least a few stints packed tightly around the plant; if he could have seen the action in reverse, it would have involved nothing stranger than a clump of sand finally coming loose.

When he was done, Ramiro stood and turned to face Azelio. ‘So now I have to lure half the travellers here in the name of freedom, then leave them to raise their children in a world where everything they do corrodes their sense of agency?’

Azelio said, ‘That’s putting it too harshly. When we get back, all you can do is give an honest account of your own experience. They’ll have seen life under the messaging system, so they’ll already have a better idea than we had about this kind of thing – and which way of life they’d prefer.’

‘The pro-messagers should come here,’ Ramiro declared bitterly. ‘If they want to know the future, let them know it every step of the way. Leave the mountain to us, and we can go back to living with a single arrow.’

‘That’s a nice idea… but good luck organising the eviction.’

They walked back to the Surveyor to fetch two more plants. ‘Can you put up some windbreaks?’ Ramiro suggested. ‘If that last dust storm was typical, it might not have uprooted anything, but I’d bet it would have stripped petals.’

‘I have a few rolls of tight-weave fabric,’ Azelio replied. ‘I didn’t see any stake holes nearby, but I won’t let that stop me.’

Ramiro fell through the light, willing himself to move faster. He reached down to grab hold of his daughter, but as his fingers brushed her limbless form the wind shifted and tore her away.

Tarquinia grabbed his wrists, dragging his gaze back into focus. ‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She drew away from him slowly, gently separating their remaining adhesions.