The Arrows of Time

When the cable was down to its last layer and the core of the reel was revealed, Agata advised Azelio and began counting down the remaining turns. Half a turn short of full extension, he brought the pod to a halt. Centrifugal force could complete the process; a tiny amount of slack like this wouldn’t be enough to give the pod a dangerous jolt.

Agata looked up and waited for her eyes to adjust back to the starlight. The cable stretched out into the void for four or five times the diameter of the hull. With the pod’s stone block hanging on the end of it, her eyes wanted to declare this direction vertical, but when she insisted on her original hull-based definition the sight became even stranger, like a conjurer’s rope trick.

‘When you and Ramiro do the spin-up, I want to come out and watch,’ she pleaded.

‘If it’s up to me, absolutely,’ Azelio replied. ‘And since you’ve got Tarquinia twisted around your finger—’

‘Ha! That’d be something.’ Agata suspected that Tarquinia was listening in on their conversation; for safety’s sake the helmets’ transceivers didn’t use any kind of encryption.

‘I’m coming back now.’

‘Have you untied the towing rope?’ she asked.

Azelio was silent for a moment. ‘Good idea.’

When he’d rejoined her, Agata said, ‘I owe you for this. I was going insane in there.’

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ Azelio declared. ‘You sat with me after the link cut off; I haven’t forgotten that.’

‘I don’t know if I helped much.’ The children were Azelio’s life; the most she’d been able to do was distract him a little, while the prospect of waiting more than ten years to hear from them again sank in.

‘What will we do if Esilio isn’t habitable?’ he asked. They’d switched off their coherers while they talked so as not to dazzle each other, but Agata could make out Azelio’s face in the starlight. She’d come out into the void to escape her dark thoughts, but the cosmic perspective seemed to have had the opposite effect on him. ‘If we go back to them with nothing, it would be like the Peerless returning to the home world with no idea how to escape the Hurtlers.’

Agata hummed angrily. ‘I don’t believe that. War’s not as inevitable as a Hurtler strike. Anyway… when we get to Esilio, we’ll find what we find. No one expects you to work miracles.’

‘No.’

Agata said, ‘We’d better start on the second pod, before Ramiro wakes up and finds out that I’ve stolen half his entertainment.’

Back at her desk, Agata examined her notes. The truth was that in a year and a half she’d made almost no progress. Now she’d had her frolic beneath the stars; she’d had her Ancestors’ Day celebration. And there was nothing on the calendar to break the monotony until they started up the engines again.

She could end up squandering half the journey longing for planetfall, and half again longing to be back in the mountain. All her life, this fixation on grand turning points – from the launch of the Peerless to the reunion – had given her a sense of purpose, but it had also weakened and distracted her. Recapitulating the whole thing in miniature had only made the problem more acute. It was only right that the Surveyor’s mission came first, and that she honour Medoro, test Lila’s theory, and play her part in Ramiro’s peace plan. But to make any progress with her own work she had to stop thinking like a passenger: doing no more than clinging on, in the hope that someone else’s flight plan would carry her to a destination worth reaching.

Agata hadn’t brought a picture of Lila, but she could effortlessly summon the sound of her mentor’s gentle nagging. She knew exactly what Lila’s advice would have been at this juncture: Romolo and Assunto’s tricks weren’t suited to her purpose, and there was no point pretending that some minor variation in their methods would suffice. If she wanted to make progress, she needed to dig far deeper into the mysteries of the vacuum and come up with some new tools of her own.

19

Ramiro passed the first bell of his watch correcting the errors in a small program that he’d written the night before. It computed the shapes of two four-dimensional polyhedra, set them rotating – with different speeds and directions – then displayed a projection of the portion of the first that lay inside the second.

It was a frivolous exercise, but the endlessly mutating image was strangely soothing, and this playful tinkering did have the advantage that it kept his skills sharp. As much as he’d luxuriated in the process of ridding the Surveyor of its intrusive surveillance software, he’d only been able to prolong that task for about a year, and though he doubted that all the genuinely useful automation that remained would turn out to be ideal for its purpose once they reached Esilio he was still in no better position to know the true requirements than the original designers.