The Arrows of Time

He took the loaf that she handed him and bit into it dutifully. It was a struggle to force the chewed food down his oesophagus; half the flesh that usually helped him to swallow had been ossified.

When he’d finished, Ramiro brushed the crumbs from his gloves. ‘What happens if we get this wrong?’ he asked. ‘If we scare the rogue into some kind of evasive manoeuvre that changes its trajectory, but it’s still not enough to stop it hitting the Station… could that skew things so that the plume ends up aimed at the Peerless?’

Tarquinia had already thought it through. ‘Any collision at this speed is going to give the Station so much energy that it will be oblivious to the Object’s gravity: it will be travelling on a virtually straight line, not whipping around in an eccentric orbit. So even if the impact’s skewed, either the Station will crash on the side where it was meant to crash, or it will miss the Object completely and fly off into the void.’

‘So the worst that can happen is that the saboteurs get what they want: a delay in the turnaround.’ Worse was possible for the two of them, but Ramiro was trying to calm himself for the task ahead, not give himself a reason to back out completely.

Tarquinia said, ‘As far as I can see. But the problem then is how people will respond.’

‘You mean… retribution?’ Ramiro hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. ‘The migrationists will be in trouble just for trying this stunt, whether or not we manage to stop it.’

‘I think a lot of travellers will be a great deal more displeased if the turnaround is actually postponed for a generation than they would have been by the mere effrontery of the attempt.’ Tarquinia sounded bemused: hadn’t Ramiro invested a third of his life preparing for the event?

‘I’d be disappointed,’ he confessed. ‘But it’s not as if everything I’ve done will have been wasted. Even if the delay is so long that they decide to replace the whole system with something more modern, they’ll still end up using a lot of my ideas.’

‘Hmm.’ Tarquinia was surprised, but she wasn’t going to try to argue him out of his position. ‘Most people have been looking forward to this for a long time, though – and for someone who hasn’t directly contributed to it, it’s living through the turnaround that would make all the difference. You get to take some pleasure in having made it possible, whenever it happens. The rest of us will just be robbed of the biggest thing we hoped to see in our lives.’

‘Three years of arduous gravity, and some changes in the appearance of the stars?’

‘It’s not the novelty, or the spectacle,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘It’s the proof that what we’ve been through might be worth it. It’s seeing the mountain heading back towards the home world – seeing the plan finally enacted, not just promised. We can’t take part in the reunion, but a whole generation’s been clinging to the hope that at least we’d be here for the turnaround.’

‘That’s all a bit teleological for me.’ Ramiro had no wish to offend her, but the idea of anyone’s sense of worth being reduced to their role as witness to the Great Project just dismayed him. ‘I hope our descendants can help the ancestors. But why should everything we do derive its meaning from that?’

Tarquinia buzzed incredulously. ‘So you don’t care why we’re turning around?’

‘I never said that,’ Ramiro protested. ‘I think the turnaround will be a good thing for everyone. If I felt otherwise, I would have joined the migrationists. But day to day? I just like solving problems and doing my job well. That’s enough. There’s no need for all this grandiose posturing.’

Tarquinia fell silent. Ramiro felt a twinge of guilt: ‘grandiose posturing’ might have been a bit too strong.

‘Anyway, forget it,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to mess this up, so any consequences are hypothetical.’

‘One kind are hypothetical,’ Tarquinia allowed. ‘But don’t forget the rest.’

‘The rest?’

‘Most travellers will be happy if we succeed,’ she said, ‘and I hope they’ll forgive the migrationists, out of sheer relief at their ineffectuality.’

‘But?’ Ramiro shifted uneasily in his cooling bag, hoping his meal was going to stay down.

Tarquinia said, ‘Whoever did this, they’re not going to give up. If they’re certain that the Peerless is heading for oblivion, what else can they do but keep on trying to save us?’

Half a chime before the expected encounter, Ramiro slipped on the ultraviolet goggles. It was impossible for the astronomers on the Peerless to measure the rogue’s position down to the last saunter, so Tarquinia had decided that the only reliable way to synchronise the next stage of the process was to allow the rogue to overtake them. The goggles didn’t leave Ramiro blind – the photonics aimed to overlay an image of any incident UV on an ordinary view – but the result was an imperfect compromise and he could understand why Tarquinia didn’t want to try to read the navigation console while wearing the things herself.