Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

A moment later a third report announced that the occulter had managed to drill itself into the rock again.

‘One more,’ Ramiro pleaded. To catch the hooks and stay balanced was miracle enough, but the occulter needed to be able to keep moving down the slopes towards the base. If the strings had become tangled around the arms, they’d either end up breaking and freeing the cargo, or the whole mechanism would grind to a halt.

‘And there it is.’ Tarquinia read all the numbers aloud, and worked through the meaning of the torques. The occulter was moving in the normal way, and it was still carrying the bomb. Nothing had jammed, nothing had broken.

‘There it is.’ Ramiro bent forward, willing the tension out of his shoulders, but only a fraction of the pain departed. A dozen and two equally finicky and precarious encounters remained.

Tarquinia said, ‘The mass is less than I was expecting.’

‘The mass of the cargo? You think we lost something? Dropped some component—?’

‘No!’ Tarquinia hesitated. ‘I suppose I’m just admitting that Giacomo seems to have been honest with us. I was afraid he might have downplayed the size of the bombs.’

‘But he didn’t.’ Ramiro was pleased. ‘We’ll need to get every one of them exactly on target, though. A few strides away and we might not even shatter the collector.’

Tarquinia was amused. ‘We just threaded a needle on the slopes, and you’re talking about missing by strides?’

‘We had no time window with the cache,’ Ramiro pointed out. ‘There’s no comparison with the base. In fact, if I was working for the Council I would have told them to build decoys: dozens of structures mimicking the light collectors, with exactly the same optics protruding from the surface. Who’s to know which ones really feed into the tubes?’

Tarquinia said, ‘Giacomo’s group has had three years to think about all that. If they’d had any doubts about the coordinates they could have gone for a different strategy. If we start trying to second-guess them now, we’ll go out of our minds.’

‘Yeah.’ Ramiro turned back to the console and read through the last report again, until he’d convinced himself that the numbers could not mean anything but success.

The next two encounters went as flawlessly as the first, but as the time for the fourth pickup came and went there was silence from the link. It stretched on for more than half a bell, until the fifth occulter began reporting.

Three bells later, the same thing happened again. They’d lost two machines.

At the second last scheduled rendezvous, the occulter missed the hooks and flew right past the cargo, its mass unchanged. Tarquinia stepped in, sending it looping back to try again – not at the same coordinates, but a progression of slightly shifted locations. Ramiro stood aside and watched her work, wishing more than ever for a camera as she swept the occulter over the slopes, trying to engage with a cache that had either slipped a little out of place or simply fallen away into the void.

After the fifth attempt she stopped the occulter and had it drill back into the rock.

‘Can we send it to another cache?’ she wondered.

Ramiro checked the positions of the three caches for which they’d had no occulters. This one would have to double back to reach any of the three – depleting its air tank to the point where it would not be able to make it to the base.

‘It’s as good as lost,’ he said. ‘We now have no spares.’

The last pickup was still almost a bell away. Tarquinia said, ‘Do you want to get some loaves? I’ll stay here in case there are any surprises.’

As Ramiro stood in the queue in the food hall, he noticed a group of diners stealing glances in his direction then turning away with pained expressions, as if his presence were mildly embarrassing. Perhaps he’d become a figure of pity for wasting half his life on the expedition, to so little avail. But if all the real action had been back on the mountain, what exactly had anyone here done to earn the right to look down on him this way?

‘I trust you’re keeping out of trouble.’

Ramiro turned to see the woman who’d addressed him, three places behind him in the queue.

‘You’re brave, showing your face in the mountain,’ he told Greta.

‘I’ve never left,’ she replied. ‘I never will. I’m staying through whatever comes.’

‘ “Whatever comes”?’ Ramiro felt his anger rising. ‘You talk about it as if it’s some uncontrollable mystery, but I know you could persuade the Councillors to switch off the system, if you really wanted to. Once they’d made the plan and automated the shutdown, that would be it – there’d be nothing to fear.’ He called out to the diners, ‘This woman could set your minds at ease in an instant! Why aren’t you demanding it?’

Greta said, ‘So if we shut down the system deliberately – just close our eyes to danger – the danger will go away? That’s a child’s way of thinking.’

‘Our eyes will be closed whatever we do,’ Ramiro replied. ‘There’s nothing to lose by closing them voluntarily. After the disruption we’ll find out soon enough if there was any other cause.’ He tried again to rouse the spectators. ‘Isn’t that fair?’ he shouted. ‘Isn’t it worth trying? You should be demanding it!’

But no one was being stirred into action; they just stared down at their food. What had they told themselves in their messages? ‘Man from expedition made fool of himself in the food hall today, yelling at government adviser.’ They already knew that they wouldn’t take his proposal seriously enough to make any kind of fuss. And having told themselves as much, even if it made them feel a little weak and ashamed there was nothing they could do about it.

Ramiro collected his loaves from the counter and walked out. As his anger subsided slightly, he wondered if he’d been unfair to Greta. Not even the great fixer could sway the Councillors into acting entirely against their nature. Having chosen their own defining qualities, they wouldn’t surrender power or deny themselves information – even when it was certain that events would soon relieve them of both.

Back in the apartment, Ramiro watched Tarquinia eating but he had no appetite himself. ‘If this last one fails,’ he said, ‘don’t break your principles and send back a message.’

Tarquinia said, ‘I have a better idea: I solemnly promise that if it does fail, I’ll send a message to you to be delivered yesterday.’

The first report from the final occulter came in: it had reached the location where the cache was meant to be.

The second report showed the occulter still stable, weighed down with its expected cargo.

The third report declared that the machine had reattached to the surface.

And the fourth report demonstrated that it had retained its powers of locomotion.

They had twelve targets, twelve bombs, and twelve machines with which to deliver them.

Tarquinia said, ‘It looks as if we’re the disruption after all.’

Ramiro wasn’t so confident, but if the Council was intent on declining the role he was happy to match their stubbornness. It was his nature to oppose the messaging system, and history had finally offered him a route to its destruction just a few stints long. Until a meteor fell from the sky to show him up as an irrelevant trespasser, all he could do was keep following that path, and hope that the footprints in the dust ahead really were his own.

‘I knew you’d want your old job back,’ Celia declared.

Agata wasn’t sure if she should take this claim literally. She was surprised that Celia remembered her at all, though they had been on duty together when the bomb went off. In the four years since she’d been here the ramshackle office hadn’t changed, but the new construction along the axis had made it much harder to reach.