Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘Yeah.’

Ramiro watched her leave, then he sat by the console. Without the link he couldn’t even check what was happening with the other occulters. He didn’t doubt Tarquinia’s skill or resolve, but if they lost one more machine she could hardly repeat the same ruse. The whole plan was on the verge of collapsing, and he had no idea how to salvage it.

Ramiro pounded on Agata’s door until his hand ached, but there was no response. So much for her sitting in her room and thinking. Who would she visit? Lila? Azelio?

He looked up Lila’s address on a public console, but he hadn’t gone far when he ran into Agata coming the other way, carrying a box full of books.

Ramiro greeted her casually and restrained himself from blurting out anything compromising. ‘That’s a lot of reading,’ he said.

‘They’re Medoro’s books,’ Agata explained. ‘His family had no use for them, so I thought I’d take them.’

Ramiro gave a quiet chirp of approval, as if he were acknowledging a respectful gesture of remembrance. ‘It’d be good to catch up with you,’ he said. ‘If you’re not too busy.’

‘I’d like that,’ Agata replied. ‘My apartment’s a mess, though – it’s not fit for company.’ They’d never checked it for listening devices.

‘You could drop off the books and come to my place, if you like.’

‘All right. I’ll see you in a chime.’

They parted at the next intersection.

When Agata arrived, Ramiro invited her in and closed the door. ‘If you have another plan,’ he said, ‘now’s the time to tell us.’

Agata’s composure shattered as if he’d struck her. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she confessed. She started humming and shivering. ‘I wasn’t strong enough.’

Ramiro was horrified. ‘It’s all right, calm down! I was just asking.’ In all their time together he’d never seen her so wretched. ‘No one else could break the innovation block – and so far you’ve had about three bells without it.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I already had a plan three stints ago – no innovations, it was all gleaned from textbooks. But I couldn’t go through with it.’

Ramiro led her over to the couch and sat beside her. ‘What happened?’ he asked gently.

Agata explained between bouts of shivering. ‘I had everything worked out so that Celia would think I’d done a final shift and then quit. No one would have been searching the tunnels for my body. I’d even found a way to repair the grilles behind me so that the other workers wouldn’t notice the damage. I was going to schedule a message to you and Tarquinia, telling you the threshold that the refractive index of the air near the axis would need to cross for you to know that you could cancel the bombs. But after I sent a message to myself to hold fast against Giacomo, I lost all my courage.’

Ramiro squeezed her shoulder. ‘I’m glad you didn’t do it.’

‘Why?’ she asked miserably. ‘If your own plan’s gone bad, all that’s left to explain the disruption is a meteor—’

‘We’re not there yet,’ he protested. He described what had happened to the occulter, and Tarquinia’s scheme to get out and fix it. ‘But if you have any non-suicidal alternatives, don’t keep them to yourself.’ Ramiro suspected that the three of them working together might have found a way to get Agata’s chemical into the cooling chamber, but it was too late for that now.

‘I have no more ideas,’ Agata said forlornly. ‘That’s why I asked Serena and Gineto for the books. The Council has all of Medoro’s notes on the time-reversed camera, but his design didn’t come out of nowhere. If I can retrace the steps of his education myself, there’s a chance I might see something that I missed.’

Ramiro pictured the bulging container she’d been lugging down the corridor; he couldn’t read that much in a year. But if Tarquinia couldn’t repair the occulter, they’d have three days to mine Medoro’s textbooks and come up with a new way to shut down the system.

‘I shouldn’t keep you from your study, then,’ he said. ‘Just promise me you won’t try anything like the last plan.’

‘Why couldn’t they have spoken more clearly?’ Agata asked, bewildered. ‘I thought they were giving me the courage I needed to go down that shaft…’ She began shivering again. ‘How can I fail them, when they know my whole future? How is that possible?’

Ramiro said, ‘There was no message from the ancestors.’ The stupid hoax had gone on far too long, and it had almost killed her. ‘Tarquinia carved those words into the rock, before we left Esilio. You and Azelio were sick, bedridden in your cabins, so it was easy for her to slip away to the blast site while she was packing up the tents.’

Agata was stunned. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘To make the messaging system look redundant, so no one would have to scratch out a living on Esilio.’

Agata drew away from him. ‘So the two of you lied to me for six years?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Because you wanted me to sell it on the mountain? You thought people might believe my testimony, so long as I didn’t know the truth.’

‘That was the plan,’ Ramiro admitted. There was no point going into the whole convoluted history of the thing, explaining his failed attempt to make the inscription his own.

‘We don’t know anything now.’ Agata seemed more wounded by this revelation than by the personal betrayal. ‘If the mountain’s wiped out, the Councillors might not make it to Esilio. We don’t even have that comfort any more – we don’t know that there’ll be any survivors at all, that the home world won’t burn.’

Ramiro said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He’d only meant to spare her the burden of imagining herself chosen by history, pinned to this impossible task by the ancestors’ gaze. But there was no way to do that without stripping away the whole lie.

Agata rose from the couch and dragged herself towards the door. She said, ‘When Tarquinia gets back, tell her I’m dead to both of you. I don’t care any more. Let the cosmos work it out.’

Six bells after she’d left for the observatory, Tarquinia had still not returned.

Ramiro knew that if she’d been arrested she wouldn’t tell her captors anything – but the mere fact of her transgression would mean that the two of them would have been under observation from the moment they’d left the Surveyor . If the authorities had found the link on her, they would have been searching for its signal all along, so they could have picked up the transmissions to the occulters. Even without decoding any of the content, they would have been able to deduce the machines’ locations from the direction of the beam.

But he didn’t know any of that with certainty. All he could do now was gamble on the chance that the plan could still be salvaged. If he could get outside and fix the occulter himself, everything might yet come together.

Ramiro checked the records on the console and committed the occulter’s trajectory to memory. Heading straight for the nearest airlock would be futile; he might as well turn himself in. But anyone who could get more than a dozen caches of explosives onto the slopes would have to know a safe way out. His allies had been wise to limit their contact with him, and they’d managed to convince themselves that having set the plan in motion there’d be nothing more they’d need to do. But if they hadn’t yet realised how wrong they’d been, it would be up to him to disillusion them.

‘I don’t know anyone called Giacomo,’ the man protested irritably.

‘I met him here a few stints ago,’ Ramiro explained. ‘I think he borrowed your apartment, because it wasn’t convenient to use his own.’