Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

The loose stones harassed them again as they crossed the ground, and although the mild pressure on their skin was exactly the same as if they’d merely been dislodging the things, the timing was still disconcerting. Agata imagined the settlers’ children, raised with all of these quirks of nature and entirely unconcerned by them. She could sympathise with Ramiro’s discomfort, and she’d even shared it at times, but she felt no unease at the prospect of generations of innocent descendants of the anti-messagers living out their lives beneath the stars here. They’d have more comfort and freedom than anyone on the Peerless . So long as the crops grew.

Azelio reached the plants; he squatted protectively in front of them. Agata turned to face the hillside.

‘I forgot to use my stopwatch,’ she confessed.

Azelio hadn’t; he glanced down at his belt. ‘Still a bit more than two lapses.’

Agata groped pre-emptively for an antidote to disappointment. ‘If this doesn’t go off, I think we could probably smash enough rock for a test plot by hand.’

Azelio buzzed. ‘Not finely enough.’

‘I’m serious! We could start with a pick but then mill down the rock chips – like making flour from grain.’

‘If it does come to that, I’ll be reminding you that you volunteered. One lapse to go.’

Agata felt her gut clench painfully. Her body was bracing instinctively for danger, but silence would be far worse.

The hillside erupted with light. She flung an arm in front of her eyes, but with her rear gaze she saw her shadow stretched out behind her. The ground shook, and she hummed softly, remembering the blast that had taken Medoro. But this was its opposite: a force that might finally heal the mountain, as much as it could ever be healed.

A warm gust of air struck her skin, carrying dust but nothing harder or sharper. The light had died; Agata lowered her arm and waited for her eyes to adjust back to the starlight.

A great, loose mound of debris lay at the base of the hill. Azelio rose to his feet and put a hand on her shoulder; she realised that she was shivering.

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ At his touch Agata ached to feel more of his skin against her, but as an internal voice started weaving a story of the only fitting coda to this triumph, she shut off the absurd fantasy quickly, less afraid of any prospect of fission than of making a fool of herself with Azelio. ‘Let’s go see how it looks.’

They approached the blast site cautiously. In the planning meeting Tarquinia had raised the possibility of a delayed secondary collapse, but as they drew nearer that looked less likely: the new rock face was almost vertical, but they hadn’t created an unstable cave or overhang.

Azelio strode forward to inspect the mound. He knelt and picked up a handful of debris. ‘It looks fine enough,’ he announced warily. ‘There’s some coarser grit in there as well, but that shouldn’t matter.’ He turned to face Agata. ‘I think we’ve got a real chance.’

Hearing the hope in his voice, Agata felt the sense of fulfilment returning more strongly, but it was stripped now of any desire to follow her instincts to the end. She had all she needed: Azelio’s friendship, and the satisfaction of having played a part in this scheme. It was enough.

Azelio shone his coherer across the top of the mound. ‘That could feed a lot more than twelve plants,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’m just glad we didn’t have to do it by hand.’

‘Maybe the settlers will put their first farm here.’ Agata chirped, delighted by an absurd thought. ‘Maybe there are traces of them around, already – a few marks that they’ll unmake in the rock.’

Azelio said, ‘If we can prove that they’re going to be here, will I still need to go ahead with the crop tests?’

‘Yes – or they’d never come!’

‘What if I lied and said I’d finished the tests?’

‘Then we’ll find some graffiti here, cursing you as the cause of the great famine.’

‘Which would shame me into doing the tests,’ Azelio replied. He raised the beam of his coherer from the mound to the rock face. ‘What’s that?’

‘Where?’ Agata couldn’t see anything.

‘About three strides up. It looks like writing.’

Agata was sure he was joking, but she aimed her own coherer at the same spot, and the slanted light revealed the shadows of a host of narrow ridges. It really did look as if part of the stone had been carved away, leaving these lines in relief – on a surface that the blast had just exposed for the first time.

‘This is too strange,’ she said. She stepped onto the mound and walked across the fresh soil. She could feel herself leaving footprints, but unmaking some as well.

On a closer view, it was clear that Azelio was right: the lines on the rock face formed symbols. The sides of the ridges appeared softened and eroded, as if a generation’s worth of future dust storms had left their mark. But she could still make out most of the message.

‘… came here from the home world,’ she read. ‘To offer thanks and bring you… courage.’

Azelio said, ‘Who thanks whom for what?’

Agata had never been less discouraged; she had never felt less in need of this grace. But here it was: for Ramiro in his darkness, for Azelio and Tarquinia, for everyone back on the Peerless , for six more generations of struggling travellers yet to be born.

‘It’s from the ancestors,’ she said. ‘They’re going to come here and write this. They’re going to come here to tell us that everything we’ve done and everything we’ve been through was worth it in the end.’

As Tarquinia stepped aside, Ramiro moved closer and took his turn examining the rock face. He hadn’t doubted his crew-mates’ word, but since they’d had no reason to be carrying a camera there’d been room for him to wonder if they might have over-interpreted some random pattern that had formed as the explosion fractured the hillside.

‘It does look genuine,’ he concluded. ‘Genuinely artificial, that is; don’t ask for my opinion on the authorship.’ After geology, he was going to have to add time-reversed archaeology to the list of disciplines he’d sadly neglected.

‘We should leave now,’ Agata insisted. ‘As soon as the Surveyor ’s ready.’

Ramiro turned away from the writing. ‘What about the wheat?’

‘The wheat doesn’t matter,’ Agata declared. ‘If there’s nothing left to fight about, there’s no reason for anyone to migrate.’

Tarquinia was sceptical. ‘You really think the Council’s going to switch off the messaging system on our say-so?’

‘What will they need it for?’ Agata was beginning to sound exasperated. ‘This proves that we make it to the reunion! There’s no question of the Peerless being struck by a meteor – or tearing itself apart in a war. How can the Council claim that they need their system for safety and security once we’ve shown them a message that could only be written if we’re safe and secure all the way to the home world?’

‘They could argue that the settlers will write it,’ Azelio suggested.

‘What settlers ?’ Agata fumed. ‘How could the settlers write something that would undermine their whole reason for being here?’

‘If the Council doesn’t take it seriously, it won’t undermine anything,’ Azelio reasoned. Ramiro wasn’t sure if that was circular logic, but as self-serving political rhetoric it did have a horribly plausible ring to it.

‘You’ve all lost your minds!’ Agata moaned. ‘If you think this isn’t genuine, tell me what would count as proof of authorship. A message encrypted with a key that we’re supposed to prepare now and then keep secret until we deliver it to the ancestors at the reunion? Even if we found something like that, you could still claim that the key might end up in someone else’s hands along the way.’