The Arrows of Time

‘You can take all the holin you like, and it will never give you certainty,’ Cira said bluntly. ‘But no woman who’s shed a child has ever divided afterwards. If you try to raise a child on your own, it will cost you years away from your research. This is what men are for. Argue politics with Pio as much as you like, but to alienate him completely would be self-defeating.’

Agata said, ‘He tried to stop the turnaround. It’s gone beyond arguing politics.’

Cira spread her hands in a gesture of agnosticism. ‘There was no evidence connecting him to that. And I would have thought you’d be troubled by this whole notion of “preventative detention”.’

In truth, Agata was divided. That the Council had empowered itself to imprison people without trial disturbed her, but she’d almost convinced herself that the Peerless’s vulnerable transition state justified the move. Pio and the other migrationist leaders were being treated well enough; three years in comfortable accommodation, free to read and study, wasn’t exactly torture.

‘If you won’t visit him, you can still do right by him,’ Cira suggested.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you had a child, I don’t believe they’d keep her from her uncle.’

Agata was appalled. ‘Now you want my daughter to be raised in prison?’

‘Only for a couple of stints,’ Cira assured her. ‘After that, we’d have grounds to ask for his early release. If he’s looking after a child, what harm can he do? They can still monitor him, but it would be absurd to keep him locked up.’

Agata’s head was throbbing. ‘You’re unbelievable!’

‘Do this for him now,’ Cira replied, ‘and he’s sure to be so grateful that he’ll happily raise a son as well. Then the next generation will be complete. You owe that to your daughter: to give her the opportunities I gave you.’

Agata said, ‘I’m going to the party. You’re welcome to join me—’

‘To commune with the ancestors?’ Cira hummed contemptuously.

‘To remember what we’re here for,’ Agata countered.

Cira said, ‘We’re here to survive, and to strengthen our position.’

‘You mean manipulate each other, and preserve the status quo?’

‘Your grandmother lived under the old rules,’ Cira reminded her. ‘Starving wasn’t an eccentric choice then; it was forced on every woman in the mountain. If you’d listened to her more, you might not be so complacent.’

Agata said, ‘If you’re so terrified of the old ways returning, why did you have a son at all? You got by without a brother. Why not wipe out your enemy completely and be done with it?’

‘Far better to keep them alive and weak,’ Cira replied, ‘than to turn against ourselves and reduce some women to playing the role of men.’

Agata arrived at the celebration later than she’d intended. It was easy enough to make allowances for the time it took to climb the rope ladders between the levels she frequented day to day, but when a journey took her up or down the old helical staircases she found it impossible not to dawdle. For six generations these elaborately carved grooves had been nothing more than peculiar decorations wrapping the walls of horizontal tunnels, but to traverse them now meant treading on stone that had last been used this way when Yalda was alive. If Agata spotted a blemish in the rock she had to stop and inspect it in the moss-light, hoping that someone who had walked on the home world – famous or obscure, she didn’t care – might have carved their name into these steps.

As she entered the observation chamber, she saw that at least six dozen people had shown up. The space couldn’t have held many more, but there were similar festivities taking place up and down the mountain’s rim. She squeezed her way through the crowd, moving aimlessly until someone called out to her.

‘Agata! Over here!’ It was Medoro’s sister, Serena. The whole family was gathered around a table by the edge of the dome.

Agata approached, trying not to be distracted by the view before she’d greeted everyone. The lighting in the chamber was subdued, but she still needed to stare out at the sky to convince herself that she really was seeing it – that her vision wasn’t being blocked by reflections from the interior. All the long, orderly star trails she’d grown up with, the great meridional arcs that together filled half the sky, had shrunk into the kind of tiny, random lines of colour that she’d only ever known before as the signature of the orthogonal cluster. This was the ancestors’ sky. In less than a chime, the mountain would be at rest with respect to the home world. Apart from the effect of the Peerless’s displacement on the arrangement of the nearest stars, and apart from the absence of Hurtlers and the sister-world-turned-sun, Gemma, this was the view that anyone on the night side of the planet would be seeing right now.

‘Cira didn’t come?’ Medoro asked, feigning puzzlement.