The Arrows of Time

Tarquinia would be the hardest witness to avoid. Ramiro didn’t want to risk raising her suspicions by trying to manipulate her movements – let alone poisoning her – so he’d have to contrive an innocent-sounding reason to be away from the Surveyor for at least two bells. Either that, or tell her everything.

His gut convulsed; he rearranged himself, curling around the site of the pain, trying to take the pressure off the lump of trapped food. If he was the author of the message, nothing would intervene to prevent him from carving it before the Surveyor departed, but that was no guarantee that his ruse would remain undiscovered. He couldn’t presume that Tarquinia would approve of the deception but, even if she did, the mere act of widening his private scheme into a conspiracy could only weaken the chance that the crew would convince their interrogators back on the Peerless. Agata would be the passionate advocate for her own interpretation, while Azelio and Tarquinia would be more sceptical but still able to give honest, credible testimony. Why ruin that by forcing Tarquinia to lie?

Of course, Greta would assume that he was behind the whole thing before he’d even spoken a word. But so long as the Council hadn’t abolished the popular vote entirely, it was not beyond hope that the expedition’s claims could sway enough travellers into changing their position. Not even a message in light from the time of the reunion could be authenticated beyond doubt, but if people were willing to give this message in stone any credence at all, it could shift the balance of their anxieties and prompt them to heal the rift that the system had created.

The strangest part was that everyone on the mountain would already know what collective decision they’d take. So the moment the Surveyor had re-established a link with the Peerless – long before the crew had been questioned in person and their individual stories tested and compared – he would discover whether or not the hoax had been in vain.

‘Aren’t they beautiful!’ Azelio enthused.

‘Well, they’re not dead,’ Ramiro allowed. After three stints rooted in the debris of the explosion, all twelve plants still displayed a modest selection of bright flowers – which was more than any of the earlier trials had achieved.

‘They’re growing,’ Azelio assured him. ‘Every one of them.’ He knelt down near the start of the row. ‘This seedling is half as tall again as it was when I put it in.’ He gestured along the progression of plants. ‘In fact, each one of them has come close to matching the way its neighbour appeared at the start. I know that doesn’t make much of an impression: everything you see now in the first eleven specimens is something you’ve seen before from the second to the twelfth. It’s almost as if you’ve just shifted your gaze slightly. But the figures bear it out: we’ve made the soil fertile.’

‘Right.’ Ramiro was trying his best to seem pleased, but short of some spectacle of agrarian bounty to summon forth an instinctive response it was hard not to take a purely calculating view.

‘You wanted this to fail,’ Azelio guessed. ‘You thought that might put more pressure on the Council?’

‘I did,’ Ramiro admitted. ‘Though maybe that was foolish. It might have made things worse.’

‘How?’

‘If we’d ended up telling them that Esilio was uninhabitable they might have thought that we were lying about everything, just to serve an agenda.’ Ramiro paused for a moment to convince himself that he really had managed to rephrase the original version in his head – lying about this, too – before it had escaped from thought into speech. ‘This way, we’ll still be offering them a choice: they can accept that the system’s redundant now that we know that the reunion will happen, or they can go ahead with the migration now that it’s clear that the settlers needn’t starve. They’re not the kind of people who appreciate being told that all the evidence points the same way.’

Azelio said, ‘Forget the politics for one chime. Isn’t it something, just to see the plants thriving? We stamped our arrow into the soil and made wheat grow backwards in Esilian time!’

‘We did.’

Azelio rose to his feet. ‘At least I’ll be able to tell Luisa that her picture of the wheat-flowers glowing on Esilio came true.’ He walked around to the side of the row, then took the camera from his tool belt to capture a portrait. Ramiro had seen the girl’s drawing, and the truth was that it made an eerily good match.

‘I’ve been thinking of leaving half the plants here,’ Azelio added. ‘I’d take six back for people to study, and let the rest grow and drop their seeds. I know that sounds like some kind of vote for the migration, but it’s not meant that way. I just hate the idea of ripping them all out. And if settlers do end up coming here, there’d be something welcoming about finding a crop already growing – even a token presence like this.’