The Arrows of Time

Ramiro spoke bluntly. ‘Whoever attacked the workshop intended to kill those instrument builders – they were targeting people’s skills as much as the machinery. We shouldn’t assume that Giacomo’s group have any other goal beyond damaging the system itself.’

‘Why would a single technician even be down there, when they all know the disruption’s coming?’ Tarquinia added. ‘Whether they’re expecting a bomb or a meteor, it’s an obvious place to avoid.’

‘And what if the damage goes deeper?’ Agata argued. ‘What if the hull is breached?’

‘Most of that area’s taken up with the cooling system for the engines,’ Tarquinia said. ‘That’s self-contained: if it’s damaged, it’s not going to vent any of our own air to the void.’

‘The light paths run all the way along the axis,’ Agata replied. ‘Blow up the optics on the outside, and there’s no guarantee that you won’t be connecting every channel straight to the void.’

‘But they’ll be sealed, for sure,’ Ramiro protested. ‘To keep contaminants out of the beams.’

‘Sealed along the whole length of the mountain, well enough to hold against a vacuum?’ Agata’s tone was scathing. ‘All twelve, with no chance of failure?’

Tarquinia said, ‘If the Councillors want to impress voters with the value of foresight, they’ll have spent all their resources for the last three years reinforcing every scant of those tubes.’

Agata buzzed sardonically. ‘You mean the resources left once every Councillor had ensured that they could personally survive a meteor turning the mountain into rubble?’

Ramiro glanced at his console. Since he’d been back in his apartment he’d been wondering if his resolve to shun the system would ever falter, but now he felt an almost physical craving for the very thing he’d always reviled.

‘What does Giacomo say?’ he asked Agata. ‘Is he expecting us to cooperate?’ The answer to that might not settle things as clearly as a message from his future self – but even if it rang false and he concluded that Giacomo was lying, he would still have arrived at a prediction of sorts.

‘I thought you didn’t want to know the future,’ Agata replied.

‘If Giacomo knew for sure that we wouldn’t go along with this…’ Ramiro struggled to classify the consistent possibilities. ‘He’d still have to put the proposal to us, wouldn’t he? Or how could he know that we’d refuse?’

Agata said, ‘He claims that his people do use the occulters. Make of that what you like.’

Ramiro waited for this revelation to bring him clarity, but it was no help at all. He could believe that, in the end, he would decide that the bombing was the lesser of two evils compared with a meteor strike. But if he’d heard the opposite claim he would have concluded that he’d convince himself that with the saboteurs left weaponless, the Council would step in and do the deed themselves. Neither answer would have rung so false as to convince him that it couldn’t be true.

‘What do you think we should do?’ he asked Agata.

She said, ‘I’m going to find a way to shut down the system without blowing anything up.’

‘How?’

Agata hummed disdainfully. ‘Do you seriously expect me to have the answer already?’

Tarquinia said, ‘Not how to shut it down, but how to find a way.’

‘The innovation block isn’t an absolute principle.’ Agata was defiant. ‘Maybe in the long term it’s impossible to keep anything secret – but the closer we get to the disruption, the easier it should be to keep my ideas to myself until it’s impossible for them to leak into the past.’

Ramiro said, ‘And the closer you get to the disruption, the less time you’ll have to come up with something workable and put it into practice. That’s a slender thread on which to hang the fate of the mountain.’

‘Perhaps,’ Agata conceded. ‘But why did the ancestors send me that message, if not to give me the courage to try? They couldn’t tell me what the method would be, but they could strengthen my resolve to find one.’

‘You think the ancestors were speaking to you personally?’ Ramiro glanced at Tarquinia, wondering if she’d finally break her silence and admit to the forgery.

‘When the rock face was exposed,’ Agata replied, ‘I didn’t think the message was for me at all. I didn’t think I needed it. But the ancestors won’t choose that site lightly. They’ll know our whole history, they’ll know how all the pieces of it fit together. They’ll know exactly how and why we came through this unscathed. If the disruption had a natural cause, why wouldn’t they simply tell us that? It’s the fact that they can’t reveal the details that reveals the nature of the event.’

Ramiro wasn’t sure how much his own face was revealing. ‘Go ahead, then,’ he urged her. ’See what you can come up with.’ It couldn’t do any harm.

‘That’s not enough,’ Agata said. ‘I’m going to need something from you, or I’ll be wasting my time.’

‘What do you need?’