Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘Right.’ Ramiro was trying his best to seem pleased, but short of some spectacle of agrarian bounty to summon forth an instinctive response it was hard not to take a purely calculating view.

‘You wanted this to fail,’ Azelio guessed. ‘You thought that might put more pressure on the Council?’

‘I did,’ Ramiro admitted. ‘Though maybe that was foolish. It might have made things worse.’

‘How?’

‘If we’d ended up telling them that Esilio was uninhabitable they might have thought that we were lying about everything, just to serve an agenda.’ Ramiro paused for a moment to convince himself that he really had managed to rephrase the original version in his head – lying about this, too – before it had escaped from thought into speech. ‘This way, we’ll still be offering them a choice: they can accept that the system’s redundant now that we know that the reunion will happen, or they can go ahead with the migration now that it’s clear that the settlers needn’t starve. They’re not the kind of people who appreciate being told that all the evidence points the same way.’

Azelio said, ‘Forget the politics for one chime. Isn’t it something, just to see the plants thriving? We stamped our arrow into the soil and made wheat grow backwards in Esilian time!’

‘We did.’

Azelio rose to his feet. ‘At least I’ll be able to tell Luisa that her picture of the wheat-flowers glowing on Esilio came true.’ He walked around to the side of the row, then took the camera from his tool belt to capture a portrait. Ramiro had seen the girl’s drawing, and the truth was that it made an eerily good match.

‘I’ve been thinking of leaving half the plants here,’ Azelio added. ‘I’d take six back for people to study, and let the rest grow and drop their seeds. I know that sounds like some kind of vote for the migration, but it’s not meant that way. I just hate the idea of ripping them all out. And if settlers do end up coming here, there’d be something welcoming about finding a crop already growing – even a token presence like this.’

‘Hmm.’ Ramiro had no problem with the sentiment, so long as he didn’t end up harvesting the field himself. And if he was being cynical, it could only make the Council’s choice seem even more open if the expedition had left Esilio with an ongoing farm of its own. Short of staying here to tend it in person, he couldn’t have made the false alternative sound more genuine.

‘Do you mind if I head back to the Surveyor ?’ he asked. He’d volunteered to help with the measurements, but Azelio would cope perfectly well on his own. ‘I’m getting some cramps again; I thought they’d stopped, but…’

Azelio said, ‘Of course. Will you be all right?’

‘I’ll be fine, don’t worry.’

Ramiro clutched his abdomen and moved away slowly, but once he was out of sight he broke into a run. He’d planned the detour carefully, and with the air calm it was easy to navigate by the stars. Stones and sand fled from his feet, and sought them; he’d thought he’d grown used to that, but the speed made it stranger. His gait seemed at once more precarious and more certain; it was as if he were watching a recording of himself performing a difficult balancing act, while knowing for a fact that he hadn’t actually toppled over.

Even by starlight, the probe’s truncated cone stood out sharply from the haphazard shapes of the rocks around it. Ramiro paused to orient himself carefully before squatting down and embracing the thing. Just spending so much time in Esilio’s gravity must have left him stronger than he had been by the standards of the mountain, but on balance the penalty it added now felt like more than enough to wipe out that advantage. He waddled across the valley floor, muttering curses, forcing himself to continue for a count of three gross steps before resting.

No one had come this way since the last of the original test plots had died off, and no one would have reason to do so again. If he could leave the probe unseen a short walk from the Surveyor , it would give him a chance to revisit the blast site while pretending to be retrieving the thing. That retrieval had never been part of the mission plan, but he couldn’t see anyone objecting to his desire to scrutinise the probe’s materials in the aftermath of its peculiar heating. They were all going to need their projects to help pass the time on the long journey back.

As Ramiro hefted the probe again, an amused voice in the back of his head demanded: Why go to so much trouble? If he abandoned the whole frantic scheme right now, what exactly would that change? He’d be able to look Greta in the eye and tell her honestly that he’d had nothing to do with the inscription. The true author of the words would turn out to be a settler playing along as a kind of bitter joke, or a genuine visitor from the home world six generations hence. In either case, how would he be worse off?

His arms were beginning to ache; he lowered the probe to the ground.

What he’d feared the messaging system would impose on him was an endless plateau of least resistance: every decision he learnt that he would make would strike him as acceptable – never entirely out of character, never deeply morally repugnant – but it would still be less his own than if he’d been left to ruminate on the matter without the deadening intervention of foreknowledge.

To feel alive, he needed to feel himself struggling moment by moment to shape his own history. It was not enough to look down on events from above like a biologist watching a worm in a maze, content to note that this creature’s actions had never actually gone against its wishes. He desperately wanted to see the messaging system abandoned – by whatever means it took, short of war – but it was not all the same to him whether he played a real part in the victory, or whether he was merely an onlooker who hadn’t needed to lift a finger. Why should he take the path of least resistance now, when no one was forcing it on him?

As Ramiro lifted the probe and struggled forward, he felt a rush of joy. He’d made the right choice. Agata had been overcome with bliss by the thought that the ancestors had reached across time to favour her with their beneficence – but now that he’d affirmed that he was the author of his own good fortune, Ramiro felt infinitely more blessed. Let the ancestors worry about their own problems: he didn’t need their help. He could cheat the Council out of their ruinous folly entirely on his own.

Ramiro passed the last of the plants to Azelio, then scrambled through the airlock himself.

‘Time to celebrate the harvest!’ he said, reflexively brushing dust off his hands, though as much as he removed rose from the floor to replace it.

‘Don’t get any ideas!’ Azelio positioned himself protectively in front of the repotted wheat.

‘Don’t worry; there wouldn’t be enough there to feed a vole.’ Ramiro called out to Agata and Tarquinia, then headed for the pantry to fetch eight loaves.

The four of them sat together in the front cabin. Tarquinia said, ‘Before I plot the ascent, I thought I’d take a vote on whether we should do a few more low orbits – to see if we can spot the pre-relics of any future cities.’

‘No thanks,’ Ramiro replied. ‘If there are going to be settlers I don’t want to know about it… but settlers would avoid unmaking traces anyway. They’d only raise cities on what looked like untouched ground.’

‘They wouldn’t have to be built by settlers from the Peerless ,’ Azelio pointed out. ‘If the ancestors come here after the reunion, who knows how long they’ll stay?’

‘It can’t hurt to look,’ Agata agreed. Ramiro watched as she finished her first loaf, but after raising the second one halfway to her mouth she put it back on the plate. ‘Does anyone want this?’