The Arrows of Time

By the time he was halfway through his account there were six more people listening. Ramiro confined his message to the science itself; people could ponder the implications at their leisure, and if he started philosophising that would only encourage disputatious onlookers.

When he’d finished, Livia thanked him and walked away, but some of the others gathered nearby in heated discussion. Ramiro left them to it; it was more important to keep spreading the word than to try to influence one small debate. He raised a schematic on his chest and spread his arms. ‘New messaging system! Hear all about it!’

A dozen people walked past him, bemused or embarrassed, but then a woman stopped. ‘What new system?’

‘The one that uses light from the orthogonal cluster to bring information from the future.’

‘You’re joking?’

Ramiro said, ‘Hear me out, then decide for yourself.’

As he started speaking, more people gathered, while the remnants of his last audience dispersed. In a chime or two there’d be no hope at all of tracking down everyone who knew about the scheme, let alone locking them up.

8

‘You should ask Pio for some debating tips,’ Medoro suggested. ‘He’s the expert.’

Agata hummed frantically. ‘Are you going to help me or not? I only have three more days to get this right.’ The last time she’d sought Medoro’s advice he’d fobbed her off with an excuse about the camera creating a conflict of interest. The Councillors themselves were required by law to stay out of the debates, but if every last person who had some stake in the outcome kept themselves at arm’s length from the process there’d be no one left with a reason to argue the case on either side.

Medoro relented and invited her into his apartment. ‘I’ll do what I can. If your enemies portray you as part of my self-serving cabal, so be it – but when we’re in public you’ll have to call me “puppet master” and answer to “stooge”.’

Agata rewarded this suggestion with silence.

He said, ‘Seriously, wouldn’t Lila be more use to you?’

‘Lila’s staying out of this. I’m not sure if she’s even made up her mind how she’ll be voting.’ Agata hadn’t pushed her on the matter, and she respected Lila’s right to take a different view, but without even her long-time mentor backing her she was beginning to feel desperately isolated.

‘What’s your brother’s position?’ Medoro asked.

‘Against, of course!’

‘Why “of course”? What happened to protecting our descendants from unforeseen risks?’

Agata said, ‘Don’t ask me for his detailed rationalisation, but from what I’ve heard he’s claiming that the messaging system is the unforeseen risk – unforeseen by everyone but him, since he warned us that there’d be dire consequences from the clash of arrows.’

‘Fair enough,’ Medoro judged. ‘His message from the future told him that the rest of us would soon want messages from the future – but he couldn’t tell us that until now, because otherwise we might have wanted our messages sooner.’

Agata buzzed wearily; at least she wouldn’t be debating Pio. ‘Have your own family taken positions?’

‘Gineto against, Serena for, Vala undecided.’ Medoro didn’t seem too worried by the split. ‘But they all gave me grief that I didn’t go public.’

‘That’s unfair,’ Agata protested. ‘Ramiro had it all laid out for him. We were just guessing – it would have been irresponsible to start a rumour when we weren’t even sure of the facts.’

‘Hmm.’ Medoro sounded unconvinced, so Agata let the subject drop.

She said, ‘But now Ramiro is courage personified, and I have to stand in front of a crowd of his admirers and tell them he’s wrong.’

‘I’m sure you’ll have admirers too,’ Medoro teased her.

‘For what? My theorems on sectional curvature?’

‘Why not? Any idiot can set himself on fire.’ Medoro rearranged himself on the guide rope. ‘Anyway, you don’t need to attack Ramiro. His arguments aren’t unreasonable: of course there could be drawbacks if the system is abused. But that doesn’t mean we can’t minimise the risks.’

‘I was going to start with a few practical benefits,’ Agata said. ‘Suppose we learn that a new crop disease shows up three years from now. We can’t prevent it arising altogether – or we’d never hear about it – but we can still take early quarantine measures and ensure that the outbreak is limited.’

‘Boring but sensible,’ Medoro declared approvingly. ‘Exactly the kind of thing people want the Council to be doing. Throw in a reference to the Great Holin Shortage, and you’ll have won over half the women in the room. What about averted collisions?’

Agata said, ‘No – in most realistic cases we would have had plenty of warning by conventional means.’

Medoro was disappointed. ‘You don’t want to go for the frisson of danger? Message: “Thanks for starting a sideways swerve when you read this, it just paid off and saved the whole mountain”?’

‘I could raise it briefly,’ Agata decided. ‘Almost as a joke, so Ramiro can’t go too hard on the implausibility.’

‘What else?’ Medoro pressed her.