Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘You must be confused about the address.’ The man closed the door.

Ramiro supposed it was possible that the apartment’s tenant had had no knowledge of the meeting, but he couldn’t think of any other way to attract the group’s attention. Perhaps they’d been monitoring the whole project independently and already knew what had happened to the occulter, but he couldn’t take that for granted and rely on them to intervene.

Back in his apartment, he sat and waited for contact. Greta’s people might be watching him, but that had always been true; either Giacomo’s group had ways around that, or everything they’d done would have been spotted long ago.

After six bells, Ramiro lost patience. He knew he’d have no hope of sleeping, so he went out hoping to be found.

By most people’s schedules it was night-time, and the corridors were lit with nothing but red moss-light, but the precinct was as busy as he’d seen it. Ramiro passed dozens of restless neighbours, crowding the guide ropes, moving as briskly and aimlessly as he was. When he met their eyes they turned away, confused. In two days the mountain might be gone, and any sane person would want to play a part in protecting it. But after three years of complying with the flawless predictions of their own private messages – or their friends’ messages, or whatever impinged on their lives in the public news – what could they do when they’d been told that they’d do nothing?

Two young men approached on the adjacent rope, avoiding his gaze like everyone else, but to Ramiro they seemed more self-conscious about it than any stranger ought to be. As they drew nearer he waited for one of them to bump him and pass him a note, and he readied himself to play his part and make the collision look plausible. Then he saw the edge of a blade sliding out from its hiding place in the first man’s hand.

He grabbed the assailant’s wrist and stared straight at his approaching accomplice. ‘If I’m not back in my apartment in three chimes,’ he said, ‘every detail goes to the Council automatically.’

‘Nothing stops us,’ the man informed him solemnly. ‘We already know how this ends.’

‘So why this?’ Ramiro bent the knife-wielder’s hand – then crossed ropes to let a woman move past, positioning his body to hide the blade from her.

‘It ends well because you take this as a warning and stop bringing attention to yourself,’ the man replied.

Ramiro said, ‘I think you might be confusing foresight and wishful thinking. I say it ends well because I have a meeting with Giacomo, immediately.’

The accomplice’s expression of certainty was wavering. He must have grown so accustomed to his plans unfolding perfectly that he’d lost the ability to rethink them on the fly.

Ramiro said, ‘I know it’s hard for people to organise their calendar these days, but the only way I’ll stop being a problem for your boss is by talking to him face to face.’

Giacomo sat on the floor of the food hall, chatting amiably with a dozen companions, but the gathering was large enough that he didn’t need to be contributing constantly to appear to be engaged. Ramiro sat two strides away with his back to the group, straining to hear the whispers directed his way, while trying to look like a lone diner brooding sadly on the fate of his friend.

‘We’ll take care of the machine,’ Giacomo said. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about.’ His rear eyes moved aimlessly, his gaze passing over Ramiro without registering his presence.

Save Giacomo’s friends, there was no one else close enough to have any chance of hearing them, and Ramiro could only assume that his allies knew the location of every listening device in the room. But it was still a struggle to speak as if they had real privacy.

‘If you can fix this,’ he said, ‘you should have told us earlier, and then my friend wouldn’t be in trouble.’

‘That won’t last long,’ Giacomo promised. ‘Even if they’ve taken her, in a matter of days every prisoner will be free.’

Ramiro had no idea how he thought he could guarantee that; the whole government was hardly going to resign in shame. ‘And what about the occulter? You can perform the repairs yourself?’

‘Absolutely,’ Giacomo assured him.

Ramiro gave him the communications codes that would be needed to instruct the navigation system and get the machine back on course.

‘You should lie low now,’ Giacomo said. ‘I’m sorry about the incident before, but that wasn’t my decision. Someone saw you as a risk and took things into their own hands.’

Ramiro chewed his loaf slowly. His trust in this man was disintegrating, but if the conspiracy was a sham and Giacomo had been working for the Council all along, why would anyone go through the motions of trying to warn him off?

‘You don’t need to make repairs,’ Ramiro realised. ‘You’ve got replacements. You’ve built your own.’ They’d had the plans for three years. Why limit themselves to making accessories when they could copy the whole design?

Giacomo took his time replying, inserting a raucous joke into his friends’ End of the Mountain celebration.

‘We’ve built our own,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘That was only prudent – and it’s turned out to be essential.’

‘You couldn’t tell us?’

‘The less you knew, the better,’ Giacomo replied.

Ramiro suspected that it was Agata’s position that would have been the sticking point; this made a mockery of the idea that the Surveyor ’s crew had held a veto over the final deployment. ‘How many spares did you make?’

‘Enough.’ There was a note of irritation creeping into Giacomo’s voice.

‘A dozen? A gross?’

Giacomo said, ‘You don’t need those details. We’ve been planning this for years, we know exactly what we’re doing. Just go back to your apartment and wait.’

Ramiro stared down at the plate in front of him. These people knew him far better than he knew them – at the very least through Pio, and Ramiro had told Pio that he’d oppose him if he ever tried to use violence. Giacomo would have been forewarned not to expect Ramiro to cooperate with anything of the kind.

That was why they’d been so coy about the scale of their own resources: they were going to try to breach the tubes. They had as many occulters as they’d need, carrying whatever quantity of explosives it would take. The occulters from the Surveyor were just decoys; it had never mattered whether or not they reached their targets.

Ramiro said, ‘I need some proof from you that the attack won’t be excessive – that it will shatter the light collectors, nothing more.’

Giacomo’s rear gaze turned on him briefly, before sliding away. ‘How could I prove that? Do you want to come and observe all our communications? What would that tell you? If we showed you the data from the one machine that’s replaced your runaway, you could always convince yourself that there were more.’

Ramiro was silent; he had nothing to bargain with. If he went to the Council and helped them mount a defence against the occulters, he’d only be risking a far greater loss of life from a meteor strike.

‘Why?’ he asked, dropping any pretence that there was still some doubt about Giacomo’s plans. ‘The disruption is enough. The Council will be humiliated, they’ll fall at the next election. The system will never be restarted. What more could you want?’

Giacomo embarked on a long, loud story about someone’s feud with someone else in their student days. Ramiro began to think that the meeting was over; he finished his meal and began picking up crumbs from the plate.

But then the story ended and Giacomo spoke.

‘This is the fulcrum,’ he whispered. ‘This is our one chance. Or how many generations will be forced to bear the same ruthless people holding power? Prisoners locked up without trial? Men treated as lesser beings, made for one purpose alone? The disruption is not enough; there needs to be damage and chaos. The Council needs to fail the people so badly that they don’t dare set foot on the mountain again. Let them run away to Esilio or die in their private fortresses. In two days everything will change for ever. There’s nothing to lament in that. But if we want our time to come, there has to be a price.’