The Arrows of Time

Agata turned and began retracing her steps in the blackness. She had no experience with which to gauge the intensity of the blast. There’d been plenty of accidents in the workshops of which she’d been unaware at the time, but as the cooling tunnels linked every part of the mountain she had to expect to feel the effects far more strongly here. With no basis for comparison, she shouldn’t rush to any wild conclusions about collisions with infinite-velocity rocks.

It was only when she reached the entrance to the tunnel and began climbing the ladder up into the moss-light that she realised how badly she was shaking. She steadied herself as she approached the office, afraid of Celia’s disdain if it turned out to be a routine part of her job that every tiny bang the chemists set off would echo down the tunnels and knock her off her feet this way. The cooling air fed their ventilation hoods, where they carried out some of their most dangerous experiments. Maybe she should have been expecting this concussive initiation all along.

When Celia noticed Agata approaching, she didn’t seem to be in the mood to mock her. As Agata drew closer she saw that a news inset had opened on the console’s display screen, but the angle made it impossible to read.

‘What happened?’ she asked Celia. ‘I felt it in the tunnel, but I didn’t know exactly…’

‘There’s been an explosion in one of the workshops.’

‘The chemists’?’

Celia said, ‘The instrument builders’. The one where they were working on the cameras for the messaging system.’

13

‘We can keep you locked up for as long as we like,’ Maddalena told Ramiro. ‘You could spend the rest of your life in that cell – with no visitors, no work, no diversions. Nothing at all to occupy your mind.’

‘Is that right?’ Ramiro replied. ‘Yalda would be proud of you.’ He glanced around the interrogation room, wondering if Greta would ever join them again. She’d sat in on the first few sessions and, as coldly as she’d treated him, the presence of even one familiar face had been enough to make him feel less isolated. But then, perhaps that was why she’d stopped coming.

‘Seven deaths on your hands, and you compare yourself to Yalda?’

‘Actually, it was you I was comparing to Yalda.’ Ramiro drew back from the table and allowed a trace of his anger to show. ‘I mourn those deaths, and I condemn the perpetrators – but I don’t know who they are and I certainly didn’t help them.’

‘If you don’t know who they are, how can you know you didn’t help them?’

‘I could ask you the same question,’ Ramiro retorted. ‘Maybe you gave directions to one of the bombers three days before the blast. Maybe you shared your lunch with one of them at school, when someone stole their loaves.’

Maddalena said, ‘Is this funny to you?’

‘Seven people dead isn’t funny at all. But if you want your attempts to do something about it taken seriously, you’re going to have to earn that.’

‘Do you deny that you were giving technical advice to the anti-messager groups?’

‘Not at all,’ Ramiro replied. ‘I helped them make their meetings public – sparing you from any need to go to the trouble of listening in on them covertly. You can still hear every word we said. No one was discussing bombs.’

‘And in the private meetings?’ Maddalena asked.

‘You tell me. If there were private meetings, I wasn’t invited, so that’s when the whole spying thing would have helped.’

Maddalena reiterated his defining characteristics in her eyes. ‘You violated an undertaking not to disclose the plans for the messaging system. You campaigned against it in the referendum. You used your expertise to help everyone opposed to the system—’

Ramiro said, ‘Apparently not everyone.’

‘You expect me to believe that with all those key roles in the movement, you knew nothing about the preparations for the bombing?’

‘I made it very clear to the people I worked with that I wasn’t interested in violence. That might not have been the best way to earn the confidence of any fanatics among them, but strangely enough it seemed like a perfectly ethical approach at the time.’

Maddalena paused, staring past him at the bare wall, possibly consulting some third party through her corset. There were no clocks in the room, and Ramiro had stopped trying to gauge the length of these sessions. All he could do was keep answering the questions one by one, refusing to be cowed and refusing to start fabricating the kind of replies that might satisfy his interrogator.

‘You must have been frustrated with the way the strike was going,’ Maddalena suggested.

Ramiro said, ‘Of course I was frustrated. I wished more people had joined in. I wished it had had a greater impact.’

‘So why would you continue with such an ineffectual strategy?’

‘No one had any better ideas.’

‘Apparently someone did,’ Maddalena replied.