The Arrows of Time

Agata took a swipe at him; he twisted away. She was almost certain that he was joking, but if he wasn’t she didn’t want to know.

‘Come and eat,’ Medoro said. ‘Assuming you’re not turning into a Starver.’

‘Hardly.’ Agata followed him down the corridor towards the food hall. ‘I’m not turning into a Shedder, either.’ The idea of giving birth terrified her – whether or not she had to live through the process – but beyond her own fears the last thing she’d wish on any child was to be raised by her idiot brother.

3

Greta turned to Ramiro. ‘Start the spin-down,’ she said.

Unaccountably, Ramiro hesitated. He’d been anxious for days that, at this very moment, some obscure detail that he’d failed to allow for would make itself known by undermining everything – but an unplanned hiatus wouldn’t so much forestall the risk of humiliation as turn his fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just as Greta’s expression of controlled anticipation was on the verge of faltering – and revealing to every onlooker that the delay was not just unexpected but incomprehensible – his paralysis ended and he threw the switch. A single tiny coherer in the panel in front of him sent its light into the maze of photonics below, and the system that Ramiro had spent the last six years building, testing and refining began, very slowly, to move the mountain.

The entire Council had crowded into the control room, and now they turned to watch the main navigation screen mounted high on the wall. At Greta’s insistence, Ramiro had programmed an elaborate animation that made it look as if the sensor readings confirming the successful firing of the counter-rotation engines were only arriving gradually, piece by piece. ‘Not so slowly that they start to get worried,’ she’d suggested, ‘but not so fast that it’s an anticlimax.’

‘And if something fails?’ he’d asked. ‘How do you want that paced?’

Greta had given this careful thought. ‘Delay it long enough that it looks as if things were going perfectly, up to a point. But not so long that anyone could say that we were hiding it.’

Ramiro’s own unobtrusive display was feeding him news in real time; so far it was all encouraging. Not only were the engines reporting a flawless performance, the accelerometers and the star trackers showed that the Peerless really had begun shedding its spin. If all went well, in less than three days the mountain would be perfectly still.

For the first time in six generations, chambers at the rim of the Peerless would be as weightless as those on the axis, and for a stint, the farmers and an army of helpers would work to reconfigure the fields, shifting soil from the useless centrifugal floors to surfaces once seen as walls. When they were done, the mountain would be slowly flipped, base over apex, ready for the main event.

The catalogue of triumphs unfurling on the navigation screen finally reached the same conclusion as the real-time reports. ‘Congratulations!’ Councillor Marina offered effusively. ‘We couldn’t have hoped for a smoother start.’ Ramiro glanced towards her with his rear gaze, but she was addressing herself solely to Greta.

Greta inclined her head graciously.

‘This is promising,’ Councillor Prisca conceded, ‘but the real test is yet to come.’

‘Of course,’ Greta concurred, though Ramiro could see her struggling not to add a few words in favour of the present achievement. The mountain had gained its spin from giant slabs of sunstone spewing flame into the void, controlled by compressed air and clockwork. Now it was losing it through nothing but light – light flowing through the switches and sensors as much as the engines themselves. If that didn’t count as a real test, they should all just stay silent and humble until the home world itself had been shifted from its course.

An inset opened in the navigation screen and Tarquinia spoke from the observatory on the peak. ‘I’ve made sightings of six beacons and estimated the rate of change of the Peerless’s spin. Everything’s within the expected range.’

Ramiro thanked her and she closed the link. For all the built-in redundancy in his own system, an independent manual check was a welcome proof that the software was faithfully reporting reality.