The Arrows of Time

Ramiro shivered, disoriented for a moment, but whether or not this account was correct there was nothing to be done about it. A small, stubborn part of him longed to leave the door closed and… what? Never open it at all, just to see if he could spite this unsurprising message from the future which claimed that, actually, he would? Every time they’d used the time-reversed camera, subtler but even stranger things had happened, as thermal fluctuations in the sensor conspired to create the orderly pattern of photons that the device needed to emit. Every image the camera had shown them had been encoded all along in the not-quite-random vibrations of various objects throughout the Surveyor, waiting to come together at just the right moment.

He leant against the crank and broke the door’s seal; a gust of wind forced its way through the narrow gap. Dust flew into the airlock, dust flew out, erasing all distinctions between that which they’d brought and the rest. He slid the door fully open, letting the light from his helmet carve a tunnel through the storm. Amidst the chaos, sheets of darkness fluttered, where the dust piled together in mid-air for a moment before scattering again. Cautiously, Ramiro poked his head and shoulders through the portal. He felt the warm wind insinuate itself beneath the fabric of his cooling bag, but it seemed that nothing it carried was small enough, or sharp enough, to reach his skin.

He swept the beam of the coherer across the ground; the wind was raising so much dust that it was impossible to make out the surface below, but given that the Surveyor wasn’t sinking its immediate surroundings were unlikely to prove treacherous. He slid the short boarding ladder out from the airlock; its feet vanished before it touched the ground, but a scant or two further down it encountered firm resistance.

He clambered down the ladder and stood on the surface. Even with the cooling bag encasing his feet there was an unpleasant grittiness against his soles; he took a few steps to see if he’d grow accustomed to the texture, but it remained distracting so he hardened and desensitised the skin. The wind wasn’t strong enough to knock him down, but he couldn’t move confidently without pausing each time it rose up, to recalibrate his efforts to compensate for the force.

‘Ramiro?’ Tarquinia’s voice came through the link in his helmet.

‘I’m fine!’ he replied, shouting to be heard above the dust scraping across the surface of his helmet. He closed the outer door of the airlock, then walked around to the window and raised a hand; his crew-mates raised theirs to shield their eyes from his coherer. ‘Sorry.’ He swivelled the beam upwards, out of their lines of sight. ‘The wind’s annoying, and I can’t see much. But I don’t think I’ve started speaking backwards or ageing in reverse.’

Agata said, ‘I’m coming out.’

Ramiro made a quick circuit around the Surveyor; he couldn’t see any damage on the outside of the hull. Agata emerged, stepping gingerly across the swirling sand.

‘So this is what a planet’s like,’ she said numbly.

‘It’s not exactly welcoming,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But it should be more appealing once the weather improves.’ He glanced up at the stars; he could just make out the arc of the rim, its usual dazzle reduced to a pale broken line. Though the wind and the dust were the most intrusive novelties, even the more familiar elements of their surroundings were juxtaposed so bizarrely that they lost their usual meaning: on the slopes of the Peerless strong gravity and an open sky always lay in the same direction. He wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep out here, or if he’d panic and imagine that he was falling into the stars.

‘Whenever I pictured the reunion, I always thought of people meeting in a corridor,’ Agata confessed. ‘But it will probably be outdoors – in the countryside, where the vehicles can land safely. It might even look like this.’

‘We’ll recreate the centre of Zeugma for you later,’ Ramiro teased her. ‘To give you some better imagery for the ceremonies in the town square.’

Azelio joined them. ‘I’d be happy with some gardens to break the gloom,’ he said.

‘Be my guest.’ Ramiro gestured into the darkness.

‘Once the wind dies down.’ Azelio turned and swung the light from his helmet across the ground, but the exploratory oval faded into obscurity at a dozen strides.

Tarquinia stepped off the ladder. ‘Given what we saw from orbit, these conditions shouldn’t last long. It’s coming to evening; we should get some sleep and start work in the morning, so we’ll be able to use the view by sunlight if we need it.’

‘Real days and nights!’ Agata chirped. ‘It’s just a shame we couldn’t put a time-reversed camera in every helmet.’ She turned to Ramiro. ‘So will your settlers bring a few gross of the things, or just one for navigation that they’ll destroy on arrival, lest someone put it to an evil purpose?’