Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

Ramiro said, ‘So after the disruption, there’ll still be malcontents? The Council will switch the system back on?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then why are they switching it off in the first place?’

‘To force the saboteurs to show their hands,’ Vincenzo explained. ‘They’ll think they’re responsible for the disruption, so they’ll trip over themselves trying to make it happen. What better way to lure them out?’

Except for the part about restarting the system, Ramiro wanted to believe this story. If it were true, he and Tarquinia could simply refuse Giacomo’s request – proving that the occulters had never really been part of the saboteurs’ plans – and then wait for the Council’s game to play itself out.

Rosita wanted to believe it too, but she couldn’t. ‘It’s a collision,’ she insisted glumly. ‘The only question is the size of it.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ Ramiro asked her.

‘It’s not saboteurs; saboteurs would get caught. No one could pull this off with all their movements known three years in advance.’

Vincenzo interjected, ‘I never said they’d succeed. But that doesn’t mean they’re not stupid enough to try.’

‘The Council won’t switch off the system,’ Rosita continued. ‘A hoax like that would be political suicide, however many would-be bombers they catch. Do you think people would forgive them for three years of wondering if their family was going to survive?’

Vincenzo said, ‘I’ll forgive them, because I haven’t been wondering that at all. Everything they’re doing is going to leave us safer in the end. Why would I punish them for that?’

When he wasn’t out visiting, Ramiro sat in his apartment tweaking the software on his console – mostly for the sake of killing time, though all his digging around had the advantage of reassuring him that the device wasn’t being used to spy on him. He’d tried looking for work, but no one in the mountain was embarking on any new projects. One way or another, most people had learnt that they would do nothing about the disruption, and now they’d settled into a state of compliance with their own reported paralysis.

On his eighth day back Tarquinia dropped by again. It was the first time he’d been alone with her since they’d returned, but neither of them were in the mood to resume where they’d left off on the Surveyor .

‘Have you told anyone?’ he asked her. ‘About us?’

Tarquinia was bemused. ‘Who would I tell?’

‘Your family.’

‘Why would it be any of their business?’

Ramiro hadn’t said a word to Rosita; he was sure she would find the relationship repellent. ‘Are you ashamed of it?’

‘Not at all.’ Tarquinia sounded defensive. ‘But why does anyone else need to know how we spend our time?’

On the Surveyor they’d had no choice in the matter; their secret had lasted about a day, and Azelio and Agata had taken it in their stride.

Ramiro said, ‘I grew up being told that even thinking about fission was tantamount to murder. Why do we do that to people? It’s a lie, and it’s a cruel one.’

Tarquinia scowled. ‘Do you really expect every boy to learn in school that he can abandon his duties to his sister and go chasing after less demanding pleasures?’

‘But you’d heard about the whole thing years before, hadn’t you?’ Ramiro protested. ‘Your own choices didn’t come as any big surprise to you.’

‘Is it my fault if women talk to each other about these things, and men don’t?’ Tarquinia regarded him with a mixture of fondness and pity that made his skin crawl.

‘Forget it,’ he said. There were more important things to worry about. ‘Do you think the occulters are still in place?’ They had no way to make contact with the devices; Ramiro was hoping that their allies would be able to provide the necessary hardware.

‘Maybe a few ended up on porous rock,’ Tarquinia conceded. ‘And of those that fell loose, maybe one or two failed to reattach. But that’s why we made spares.’

‘Would we be part of Giacomo’s plan at all, if we weren’t going to have at least twelve survivors to offer him?’ It wasn’t a rhetorical question; Ramiro was never confident about the possibilities until he’d talked them over with someone else.

‘He wouldn’t hear the bad news unless he stayed in touch,’ Tarquinia reasoned. ‘So even if the occulters have all disappeared into the void, he couldn’t simply shun us before we’d worked that out together. But I can’t see why he’d claim that all his hopes were resting on us if it wasn’t true. I think the plan must keep holding together – at least for as long as ordinary people can keep sending back news.’

They had both heard from friends that, three days before the disruption, official communications would start taking up so much bandwidth that no private messages would be able to get through. If the occulters did fail, the failure lay somewhere beyond that horizon.

Ramiro was heading home from the food hall when a man bumped into him in the corridor, breaking his hold on the guide rope. As etiquette demanded they both reached out to steady each other, trying to kill the motion that the collision had imparted before they sent each other crashing into opposite walls. The manoeuvre succeeded, and they both muttered embarrassed apologies, but as they separated the man passed a slip of paper into Ramiro’s hand.

Ramiro waited until he was back in his apartment before inspecting the message. The paper was covered in numbers, far too many to be an address. He stared at it for a while, then went to his console and confirmed his hunch. It had been encrypted with his public key, and the plain text did look like an address.

There was no time specified, but he was loath to delay the meeting or attract attention by trying to get hold of Tarquinia. He tore up the message and erased the plain text from his screen, then set out on his own.

When he knocked on the door, it opened immediately.

‘Are you Giacomo?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ The man invited him in.

‘Do you think I’m being watched?’ Ramiro had counted at least five cameras along the way.

‘Of course you are,’ Giacomo replied cheerfully, ‘but right now, someone resembling you is being watched in your place.’

‘You sent a decoy into this corridor… to be spotted at the next intersection, as if I just carried on walking?’ Ramiro was astonished, though matching the timing to his actual movements would not have been a problem at all.

‘Let’s not talk about the details,’ Giacomo suggested. He’d had three years to think through the strategy; why would he be interested in debating it with someone who’d had three pauses?

‘All right.’ Ramiro clung to the guide rope in what he guessed was someone else’s living room. If the group had gone to so much trouble to bring him here, what did that imply about the end point of their discussions? But he had to stop thinking that way, or his decisions would all be shaped by the presumption that it was impossible for anyone armed with foresight to waste their time.

‘The occulters weren’t designed to carry anything,’ he began.

Giacomo tipped his head, acknowledging the fact without making an unseemly boast that he’d been aware of this before the occulters had even existed. ‘We put suitable hooks on the caches,’ he explained. ‘Spring-loaded to secure them. All your machines will need to do is visit the right locations along the way to the base, and the cargo will more or less attach itself. Our devices have been stuck in place with resin, but a lateral tug will loosen the bond with far less force than it would take to break it vertically.’

‘So you’ve managed to build a dozen of these things and smuggle them outside?’