The Arrows of Time

When they were both on the floor, Ramiro gestured towards the couch. He knew the gravity was hard on his uncle; before the engines had started up, Corrado’s apartment had been in near-weightlessness.

Corrado made himself comfortable, but then wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘In three days, your sister will be a dozen and nine years old,’ he announced.

‘It’s that soon, really? I lost track.’

‘I understand that you need to supervise the turnaround to the end,’ Corrado conceded. ‘So you won’t be free of that commitment for more than a year. But this is the right time for you to come to an agreement with Rosita. You need to tell her that as soon as the Peerless is spinning again, she can shed a daughter and you’ll be promised to the child.’

Ramiro examined the floor beside the couch. There was a hole that had once held a peg supporting a bookshelf; he’d left it empty in the hope of reusing it, but it was filling up with dust and food crumbs.

‘We should wait and see what happens,’ he suggested. ‘There might be some kind of technical problem that will prolong the turnaround. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.’

‘Your sister’s too easy on you,’ Corrado replied flatly. ‘That’s the only reason I’m here: someone has to speak up on her behalf.’

‘What makes you so sure that she’s desperate to start shedding?’ Ramiro countered.

‘She’s been fertile for a long time,’ Corrado said. ‘If she divides, do you want that on your conscience?’

‘Of course not,’ Ramiro said. ‘But the holin is so pure now, and they take such high doses—’

Corrado cut him off. ‘That’s no guarantee. Imagine your sister gone, and four children to feed. Do you want to be the one who kills two of them?’

Ramiro covered his face – unmoved by the preposterous scenario, but unwilling to reveal just how angry he felt at being cornered this way. For as long as he could remember, his uncle had been assuring him that it was in his nature to want to raise a child. That lesson had come second only to the other glorious message about manhood: if he ever succumbed to his urge to touch a woman in the wrong way – as the Starvers did – it would annihilate her. His duty as he approached maturity was to quash that terrible, lingering compulsion – while also joyously coveting a role that, in nature, could only have followed his failure at the first task.

When the turnaround was finished he’d have no more excuses, no more reasons to delay. The only tactic left was honesty.

He looked up. ‘I don’t think I can do it.’

‘Do what? Kill two children?’ Corrado was still lost in his own cautionary fable. ‘Of course you can’t! The idea is to stop it coming to that.’

Ramiro said, ‘I don’t think I can raise a child. It’s not in me.’

Corrado stood up and approached him, stony faced. Ramiro stepped back, but refused to recant. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.

‘Do you want this family to die out entirely?’

‘Die out?’ Ramiro lost interest in feigning respect. ‘I wish you’d make up your mind what you’re threatening me with: is it four children, or none?’

Corrado raised his hand, but then stayed it. He’d probably worn himself out already in the high gravity. ‘If you don’t do this—’ he snarled.

‘If I don’t do this,’ Ramiro replied, ‘and Rosita actually wants a child… she’ll find a man whose sister died, or whose sister wasn’t interested in shedding. Or she might even raise the child on her own. Who knows? I want her to be happy, whatever she chooses – but I’m entitled to make my own choices too.’

Corrado stood in front of him, silent for a while. ‘If you don’t do this, why would she ever have a son? Why would she go through all that pain and trouble a second time, if you’ve proved to her that it will be wasted?’

Ramiro said, ‘I have no idea what her plans will be. Why don’t you ask her, if it’s so important?’

‘But you don’t care? Nephew, no nephew – it’s all the same to you?’

Ramiro buzzed humourlessly. ‘Absolutely. So long as I don’t have to coddle the brat.’

Corrado struck him hard across the face. Ramiro staggered back, and had to squat down to regain his balance.

‘We’re barely clinging on,’ Corrado said. ‘One family in three has no son. But I didn’t know I’d raised a self-hater: the kind who wants to see us wiped out entirely.’

Ramiro was shivering. ‘You don’t know the first thing about me. But if you were such a great champion for the male sex, why didn’t you turn my mother into a Starver and take her right out of the picture? That would have done wonders for your census counts.’

Corrado walked over to the ladder and ascended, leaving the apartment without another word.

Ramiro knelt on the floor, humming to himself. Part of him was jubilant: he’d finally punctured the old man’s presumptuous fantasies of an endless chain of obedient nephews, all living out their lives in exactly the same fashion as the family’s First Shed Son. And he felt a glorious, self-righteous glow at having provoked Corrado into assaulting him without raising a hand in retaliation.