The Arrows of Time

Sanctified by the ancestors’ gaze or not, the sky unsettled Agata. When she’d trained with Tarquinia around the Peerless, the contrasting hemispheres had made it easy to stay oriented. There were bright stars now that caught her eye, and constellations that she could commit to memory, but it took much more effort to seek out these relatively subtle cues than it had to distinguish between an empty black bowl and a riot of colour.

Azelio seemed to be focused on the Surveyor itself, so Agata followed his lead and tried to think of the disc of the hull as her horizon. Still clinging to the hand rings outside the airlock she turned her body until it was perpendicular to the disc, then she released her grip and drew a short arrow on her chest that pointed towards her head. The jetpack obliged with a gentle push in that direction; when she’d ascended half a stride above the hull she drew a stop-line that killed her velocity. The jetpack was keeping track of all the acceleration it delivered – along with any bumps and pushes she inflicted on herself – and it knew how to return her to her initial state of motion.

She followed Azelio to the rear of the hull, opposite the main cabin and its window, and halted beside him. The two agronomy pods mounted here were roughly cubical, each about as broad as Agata was tall. Azelio grasped a ring to brace himself, lit the scene with the coherer mounted on his helmet, then began turning the first of the eight wide, hollow bolts that held the first pod in place. Agata had arrived upside down for the task; she secured herself with her foot through a ring, then squatted down so she could grip another with a hand and right herself. She switched on her own coherer and squinted at the disc of brightness she’d imposed on the starlit hull; it was strange to see the sharp details summoned out of the grey shadows, as if the Surveyor of the void had become the Surveyor of the workshop again. Then she reached into the bolt closest to her and took hold of the crossbar within. The crossbar needed a twist around its own axis to disengage the spring-loaded pins that locked it in place, then it served as a handle to turn the bolt.

‘My arm’s tired already,’ Azelio confessed. ‘Why couldn’t they make this a job for power tools?’

‘If you want to run everything on compressed air, you’d better hope there’s sunstone on Esilio.’ Agata’s own forearm was aching. ‘Let’s face it, we’ve all grown soft. If you asked me to harvest a crop manually, I think it would kill me.’

‘Lucky you don’t want to migrate, then.’

By design, the bolts could not be withdrawn entirely from their threaded holes, but once all eight had been unscrewed as far as possible the locking plates on the pod were freed from their slots in the hull.

Agata got into position on the opposite side of the pod to Azelio; the symmetry was necessary to extract the thing smoothly, but it meant they were hidden from each other. ‘Move it as gently as you can,’ he instructed her. ‘The last thing we want to do is give it more momentum than we can control.’ With their feet re-formed into hands to grip the rings on the hull, they slowly raised the pod out of its shallow bed.

When it was about a stride above the hull, Azelio called a halt. They both stood for a moment holding the thing, as if they couldn’t quite believe that it would stay put when they released it. But it did.

‘I’ll tow this one out, and you watch over the cable,’ Azelio said.

‘Right.’ Agata squatted against the hull and aimed her coherer at the reel. As well as tethering the pod to the pivot it shared with its companion, the cable would carry cooling air to the plants and bring data and video back to the Surveyor.

Azelio moved into place on the opposite side of the pod; Agata couldn’t see him, so he narrated for her. ‘I’m attaching the towing rope now,’ he said. Then, ‘I’m connected. Be patient, though, this is going to take a while.’

After a lapse in which nothing happened, Agata asked, ‘Did you fire the jetpack?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think you’re moving at all.’ The slight tug hadn’t been enough to overcome the sticking friction of the cable; it was prudent to unwind as slowly as possible, but there was a limit to how slow that could be.

‘That’s embarrassing.’ Azelio buzzed. ‘All right, a little more thrust this time.’

The reel began to turn. Agata watched the cable feeding out smoothly, the helix of the outer layer gradually shrinking. Verano’s team had wound every span into place with scrupulous care, and from the flatness of the layers she could see that she wasn’t expecting any hidden snags, but she focused all her attention on the process, refusing to let her mind wander.