Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

‘A large enough shock to the surface might disrupt the reaction,’ Cornelio proposed. ‘We have no experience of the interaction between combustion and extreme seismic events, but if a pressure wave altered the structure of the sunstone, even temporarily, it’s conceivable that the flame might be extinguished.’

‘Across the entire surface?’ Eusebio was sceptical. ‘I could believe a Hurtler inducing a dark patch at the point of impact, a flameless region that survived for a bell or two. But not this.’

Giorgio gestured towards the window. ‘The result’s not in dispute. And if a Hurtler wasn’t the culprit, what alternative is there?’

Valeria raised his words on her chest and looked around the room, poised to squeeze one more contribution onto the page, but no one had an answer for Giorgio so she took the opportunity to dust her skin with dye and commit the discussion so far to paper.

‘At least the agricultural effects might be positive,’ Eusebio suggested hopefully. ‘If the uncovered crops finally get something close to the old cycle of illumination, that ought to lead to higher yields.’

He looked to Adelmo, but the agronomist spread his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘Gemma’s bright enough to ruin the night, but it might not be bright enough to count as a signal for day.’

Silvio entered the room and spoke privately with Eusebio. Valeria heard a snatch of the conversation, as Eusebio’s voice rose in incredulity. ‘She told them it would happen?’

When the exchange was over, Eusebio looked agitated. ‘The meeting’s adjourned until tomorrow,’ he said. Valeria began gathering her papers, preparing to leave Eusebio huddling with his confidants to discuss Silvio’s news, but to her surprise he walked straight up to her.

‘Could you come with me to the prison?’ he asked.

‘Why?’

Valeria’s look of panic seemed to dispel his disquiet. ‘No one’s arresting you,’ he joked. ‘I just want you to come and talk to someone.’

‘You want me to keep a record?’ She fumbled with her box of dyes.

‘That wouldn’t hurt,’ Eusebio decided. ‘But actually, she asked for you by name.’

‘I’m not the only person in Zeugma with that name.’ Valeria trusted Eusebio not to form unwarranted conclusions, but she didn’t want to be known as having criminal associates.

Eusebio said, ‘She asked for Yalda’s adopted daughter. And she said something about Nereo’s force that the jailers were incapable of conveying precisely. So I’m fairly sure that she did mean you.’

There was nothing unusual about the sight of Zeugma lit by Gemma alone, but Valeria’s body had its own reckoning of the time and the disjunction rendered the streets hallucinatory. She followed Eusebio across the dark cobblestones towards an encounter with a madwoman.

‘She gave her name as Clara,’ Eusebio explained as they walked into the entrance hall. ‘I know everything else has to be nonsense. The guards probably half-remembered what she’d said, and when this bizarre thing happened they reinterpreted her words in the light of it.’

Valeria said nothing; she had no theories.

They sat in an interview room, waiting for Clara to be brought up from the cells. When the guard led her in, a chain looped around her melded arms, Valeria’s skin tingled all over. She’d never set eyes on the woman before, but the prisoner was beaming as if she’d just walked into the presence of two long-lost friends.

Eusebio gestured to Clara that she should take a seat. She complied, and the guard left them.

‘Can you understand my speech?’ Clara asked. She spoke with a heavy accent that Valeria couldn’t place.

Eusebio said, ‘Yes.’

‘I hope I’ve got the grammar and vocabulary correct. We have written sources, but no sound recordings.’

‘Sound recordings?’ Eusebio buzzed appreciatively. ‘That’s an inventive embellishment, I’ll give you that.’

Clara said, ‘I gave the city police the location of my rocket. If they’d sent someone to look at it, that would have saved us all this confusion.’

Eusebio replied bluntly, ‘The Peerless isn’t due to return for three years. And when it does, I think we’ll manage to spot the engines in the sky.’

Clara tipped her head, amused. ‘Some people did argue for a light show to help set the scene… but then, I was in the other camp who thought that putting out the sun really ought to be more than enough to establish our credentials.’

Valeria watched Eusebio. He said, ‘Conjurors have made an art out of convincing people that they’ve foretold the future. The jailers here must have made a good audience.’

‘The Peerless did travel three full years into your future.’ Clara sketched a portion of the mountain’s proposed trajectory on her chest, but every educated person in Zeugma was aware of that. ‘At the turnaround our plan was to follow a straight line back home and then decelerate for a year. But eventually we realised that it would be perfectly safe to arrive earlier. So we executed a big loop, going a few years into the future then curving around and travelling a few years into the past.’ She added these unlikely adornments to her diagram. ‘All of that happened before I was born, though. For most of my life, the Peerless was travelling homewards through the void at a time, by your reckoning, when it was yet to leave the ground. And I saw the old mountain through a telescope when we passed it! It was still accelerating, burning sunstone. We weren’t so visible: our engines work very differently – they don’t consume fuel at all.’

Valeria said, ‘Why did you ask for me?’

Clara turned to her with an expression of terrifying joy. ‘When I was a girl, I read Yalda’s biography, and there was a story she’d told one of her friends about you. You gave her a gift before she left Zeugma: a diagram showing Nereo’s force for spherical shells.’

‘There were a lot of people at that party,’ Valeria pointed out, trying not to be rattled. Eusebio’s point about conjurors was an apt one. ‘A lot of people could know that.’

Clara tried to gesture with her arms; she’d forgotten that they were melded behind her back. ‘Is this really going to be so hard? If there’s nothing I can say that could convince you, can’t we ride out to the place where I arrived?’

Eusebio said, ‘So the Peerless itself is still out in the void, and the other travellers just let you come down here alone?’

‘There was a lottery for the privilege,’ Clara replied. ‘I walked empty-handed into Zeugma because that seemed like the right spirit in which to come: no showy artefacts, certainly no weapons. I thought I’d end up engaged in some spirited debates at the university for a couple of days, outraging the physicists with my claims about luxagen waves until astronomical events finally proved my credentials.’

‘Arrest for trespass wasn’t part of your plan.’

Clara said, ‘I hold no grudges against anyone for my own mistakes. But I would be lying to you if I didn’t admit to some disillusionment. If you have no thanks for me, I can promise you that you owe them to my forebears. When I tell you their history, you’ll understand your debt.’

Eusebio began shivering. Before Valeria’s eyes, his composure disintegrated.

‘Forgive me,’ he pleaded. ‘Let me deal with your chains, then we’ll find a place for you to rest. If you’ll accept my hospitality—’

Valeria was confused. ‘Why do you believe her now?’

Clara turned to Valeria. ‘You still need to see the rocket?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ The woman had managed to prick Eusebio’s conscience, but his guilt over the travellers’ ordeal had no bearing at all on her story’s credibility.