The Arrows of Time

Agata said, ‘Now you tell me.’

‘You have no idea what it’s been like here,’ Serena replied bluntly. ‘They switched on the system, and suddenly we had three years of our lives laid out in front of us: three years’ worth of messages telling us exactly who we’d be. A few people were dragged kicking and screaming into whole new ways of thinking – but after the initial jolt they were just as incapable of change as the rest of us. That’s what the system does: it turns you into the kind of person who knows nothing more each day than you knew the day before.’

‘But now the feed’s gone silent, and the spell is broken?’

‘Half broken,’ Serena replied. ‘There are a lot of us who want to act, but the paralysis lingers. Some people think we should march on the messaging stations and smash whatever we can – but there’s still a mindset that declares it’s impossible, because if the Council have said we won’t… we won’t.’

Agata’s spirits were rising, but she wasn’t clear herself where this new force could be applied.

‘There’s already a plan to sabotage the channels,’ she said. ‘But I don’t trust the people who set it up.’ She scanned the corridor, then waited until she was certain that no passer-by could hear her before explaining Giacomo’s scheme. ‘I don’t think they care if they break open the tubes. They’re not going to err on the side of caution.’ Agata stopped short of accusing the group of Medoro’s murder; she didn’t know that for sure.

Serena took a few lapses to come to terms with these revelations. She’d probably come to Agata hoping for nothing more than a technical opinion on the best place to attack the system.

‘So what are you searching for in my brother’s books?’ she asked finally.

‘Another way to cause the shutdown.’

‘And if you find one, will the saboteurs call off their plans?’

‘Probably not,’ Agata admitted. ‘Even if I could persuade Ramiro and Tarquinia, I doubt they’re in control any more.’

Serena said, ‘So you’re saying that these saboteurs might be the greatest threat. But what would happen if we managed to stop them?’

‘Something still has to cause the disruption,’ Agata replied. ‘A meteor, or a mob.’

‘There are dozens of us ready to protect the mountain,’ Serena avowed. ‘But we might not be enough to cause the disruption by sheer force of numbers, let alone stage some second action against the saboteurs as well.’

They’d almost come full circle back to the apartment, but Agata couldn’t face the piles of unread books again. She wasn’t going to transform herself into Medoro in the next few bells. ‘We had a time-reversed camera on the Surveyor for years,’ she lamented. ‘I could have spent all my free time experimenting on it, if I’d known how useful that would be.’

Serena was amused. ‘The rest of the crew might not have been too happy if you’d destroyed it.’

‘After we’d left Esilio it wouldn’t have mattered. But we certainly took care of it until then.’ Agata stopped and stood clutching the guide rope, thinking about the landing. ‘Protecting it from too much exposure.’

‘You mean not pointing it at Esilio’s sun?’ Serena frowned. ‘Though wouldn’t that have… brought it back to normal, if it had arrived burnt out?’

‘Protecting it from too much ordinary light as well,’ Agata said. ‘Intense light would have damaged it: scatter from our engines, say.’

‘So you want to steal the Surveyor and aim its engines at the base of the mountain?’ Serena joked.

Agata said, ‘No. But a big enough explosion above the base should have the same effect… or twelve smaller ones might do it.’

Serena understood. ‘You want to repurpose the saboteurs’ bombs? Use the flash but not the bang?’

‘Why not? The collectors gather light from all directions – and they can’t discriminate between ordinary light and time-reversed light. If we can shift the explosions far enough away from the surface that there’s no risk of them breaching the tubes, they could still be the cause of the disruption. They don’t even need to damage the cameras permanently – they just have to overwhelm the photonics long enough for the time-reversed light that’s in transit to be lost.’ The original plan for the occulters had been to blind each channel to a single star, but the design that made that impossible rendered this new plan far less demanding: it didn’t matter where in the sky the explosions appeared. The collectors would funnel all the photons in and dazzle the cameras, regardless.

Serena said, ‘What if there’s a sensor that can bring down a shutter if the ambient light gets too bright? I mean, the light that’s meant to do this damage will be bouncing back and forth between the mirrors before it gets to the camera. There’ll be plenty of time for news of the danger to reach the camera by a shorter route.’