The Arrows of Time

‘It can’t always have been easy for you,’ Agata protested. ‘You must have got stuck yourself, sometimes.’

‘Of course,’ Lila agreed. ‘But I was never forced to contemplate the imminent arrival of messages from a culture that had solved all my problems so long ago that any bright three-year-old would know the answers. I doubt that would have done much for my motivation.’

Agata said, ‘I’m not expecting any help from the future. That would make no sense.’

Lila inclined her head, accepting the last claim. ‘You’ve made a good argument for that. But I’m not sure that you’ve convinced yourself as thoroughly as you’ve persuaded me.’

Agata was unsettled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Ever since the messaging system was mooted, you’ve been like this.’ Lila waited for her to object, but Agata was silent. ‘Maybe it’s just excitement at the prospect of the thing itself, or the distraction of all the politics. But be honest: can you really block it out of your mind that you might soon be reading the words of people who’ve had six more generations of prior research to call on than you’ve had?’

Agata said, ‘What does it matter, if they can’t communicate any of it?’ Lila claimed to have accepted her argument: complex ideas were far more likely to remain unmentioned in the messages than to arise without clear antecedents.

‘What matters is that it seems to have paralysed you.’

Agata struggled to recall some small achievement she could hold up against this claim, but since she and Lila had proved their conjecture on the curvature of four-spheres she’d really done nothing but mundane calculations. ‘Everyone gets stuck,’ she said. ‘I’ll snap out of it soon enough.’

Lila said, ‘I hope so. Because once you learn whether you do or you don’t, it’ll be settled for good, won’t it?’

Agata had set her console to wake her early. She ate quickly, then made her way to the axis and propelled herself down a long weightless shaft, touching the guide ropes lightly to keep herself centred.

She followed the shaft all the way to the bottom, emerging on a level that housed what remained of the feeds for the old sunstone engines. She dragged herself through chambers full of obsolete clockwork, the mirrorstone gears and springs tarnished and clogged with grit, but still offering up a dull sheen in the moss-light. For a year and a half after the launch, mechanical gyroscopes had tracked the mountain’s orientation, and the feeds’ machinery had kept the engines balanced by adjusting the flow of liberator trickling down into the sunstone fuel. Agata doubted that anyone at the time had imagined that a piece of photonics the size of her thumb would take the place of all these rooms.

As she moved further away from the axis, the chambers’ erstwhile floors became walls. Descending the rope ladder that crossed the third room, she passed precariously dangling assemblies of gears and shafts spilling out of their cabinets, the pieces still loosely bound together against the long assault of centrifugal gravity. The eruptions looked almost organic, as if the neglected cogs were sprouting from exuberantly blossoming vines. There must have been people inspecting and maintaining all of this quaint machinery, up until the day when Carla finally proved that none of it would ever be needed again. Now it would only take a couple more rivets snapping for these strange sculptures to come crashing down.

Agata left the decrepit clockwork behind, and dragged herself down a narrow passage to the shabby office of her supervisor, Celia. The office itself looked as old as the Peerless, but Celia’s networked console was a slab of bright modernity among the ruins – its roster of volunteers encrypted, for what that was worth when every strike-breaker could be seen coming and going. Celia handed her an access key and tool belt, and Agata signed for the equipment with a photonic patch, not dye.

‘This must seem pretty menial to you,’ Celia teased her. ‘Your predecessor wasn’t much into cosmology.’

‘I like it,’ Agata replied. ‘It’s meditative.’

‘That’ll wear off,’ Celia promised.

Agata turned into a dusty corridor and followed it for a few stretches. The entrance to her section of the cooling system was easy to find: moss had eaten a great concave chunk out of the wall beside it, and the usual red glow was criss-crossed with threads of yellow. She slid the key into the access panel and strained to pull it open.

A short ladder led down into the tunnel. The breeze pulsing through the darkness chilled Agata’s skin, but after the first shock it wasn’t unpleasant. The ceiling of the tunnel was too low for her at her normal height, but she only had to resorb half a span from the top of her legs and she fitted comfortably. She started walking, one hand on the wall to guide her. The splotch of red light spilling in from outside shrank in her rear vision, and when it was gone she was in utter blackness.