The Arrows of Time

Whatever had been written in the rocks on Esilio, in six generations the travellers had discovered everything they needed to return in safety and protect the home world. The hardest task now would be to find a way to live in peace for six more, and reach the end of the journey without throwing everything away.

34

Valeria woke in darkness to shouts of panic from the street below. She clambered out of bed and looked down from her window. Everyone was staring into the eastern sky.

‘Was it a Hurtler?’ she called out. She could see nothing unusual herself now, but a fast-moving near miss might have unsettled people.

‘It’s the sun, you fool!’ a woman replied.

Valeria could make no sense of this. Had another planet been ignited – had Pio gone the way of Gemma? Pio might well have risen by now, but she could see no evidence that the world had gained a third sun while she slept.

‘Where?’ she demanded.

The woman pointed towards an unremarkable patch of sky. If it did contain Pio, the planet was too dim to discern without some concerted staring. Valeria wondered if the crowd had succumbed to a kind of collective hallucination. She’d imagined fires out in the desert herself, when she’d been tired enough, but right now her lack of sleep seemed merely to have left her bleary-eyed, struggling to focus on the stars right ahead of her, as if she’d developed a blind spot—

In fact there was a small black absence in her vision, but when she moved her eyes it stayed fixed in the sky. She ducked back into her room and checked the clock beside her bed, by touch. She’d slept far later than she’d realised: it was a bell after dawn.

The black disc in the east was the sun.

Eusebio said, ‘I don’t see how a Hurtler could do this. Gemma made perfect sense, but how could an impact put out the fire across a whole star?’

Valeria sat in a corner of the meeting room with her dye and paper, listening to the twelve men of Zeugma’s Fire Watch Committee who’d assembled on this lamp-lit afternoon. The Committee had made plans long ago for every imaginable crisis, but no one had anticipated this eerie extended night.

‘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.