The Arrows of Time

Agata rose and began limping away, bent over in pain. Azelio jumped up and went to help her. Ramiro stayed where he was; once the others had left he would have to explain his plan to Tarquinia.

‘Ramiro,’ she said, gesturing towards the passage. ‘Please. I know you’ve recovered, but I can’t risk catching this.’

Azelio was watching them with his rear gaze, puzzled by Ramiro’s stubbornness. Ramiro struggled to think of a plausible reason to stand his ground; raising the idea of bringing in the probe now would only make it sound more suspicious.

He followed Azelio and Agata. When they’d entered their rooms and closed the doors, Ramiro closed his own from the outside.

He stood motionless for a while, trying to judge how quietly he could walk back to the front cabin, trying to think of a gesture he could make that would guarantee that Tarquinia wouldn’t respond to the sight of him with an angry shout. From where he stood he could see her crossing the cabin, moving towards the airlock. She was going out to finish retrieving the tents; she had the lever he’d used in her hand.

As she disappeared from view he cursed silently. Then he started down the passage, red dust tickling his feet. He would follow her out and explain everything, confess to the poisoning, put his plan at her mercy. Maybe she’d treat his desire to create the message as a kind of empty vanity and refuse to be a part of it, lest his deceit undermined the impact of the find. But he couldn’t be a helpless spectator, merely watching the mountain’s history unfold. She’d understand that, surely?

He stood at the entrance to the front cabin. Tarquinia had gone out – but he suddenly remembered that he’d never brought the tent-lever back into the Surveyor. He’d left it by the airlock outside. She’d been carrying something else, something similar in appearance.

He heard Agata humming with pain as the spasms in her gut failed to dislodge the tainted meal. Ramiro retraced his steps and managed to get into his room, with the door emitting no more than a faint squeak while his hapless victim was at her loudest. He squatted by his bed, staring at the floor, trying to understand what was happening.

How could he carve anything into the rock face, if the idea of doing it had only come to him after he’d seen the result? Even the choice of words hadn’t sounded like his own. If he’d only selected them because he’d read them, who would have made the choice? No one. Agata had told him endlessly: a loop could never contain complexity with no antecedent but itself, because the probability would be far too low. There could be no words appearing on rocks for no other reason than the fact that they’d done so.

But long before Agata had dragged the two of them to the blast site, Tarquinia had seen him falling apart. And as each new phenomenon they witnessed on Esilio made the prospect of returning with the settlers more dispiriting, she must have started searching for a way for them to stay on the mountain together – to live out their final years in a place where the dust wouldn’t see them coming, where their graves had not already been dug.

Ramiro pressed his face into his hands and fought to stay silent, afraid that if he let his tympanum stir he’d shout down the walls with some confused, alarming paean to the woman that would convince the others that he’d lost his mind. He couldn’t let any hint of the plan slip out – or even let Tarquinia know that he’d uncovered it. She hadn’t wanted a co-conspirator any more than he had, and they’d both make more believable witnesses if they’d never spoken of what had happened, never made it real in anyone else’s eyes.

He sat by the bed listening for her footsteps, wondering if he could be mistaken. It wouldn’t take long to pull down a tent and bring it inside, and she’d have no reason to return quietly.

Agata hummed in misery, and Azelio called out, trying to console her. But between these exchanges, Ramiro heard nothing but the wind blowing dust across the hull.

24

‘The link’s open!’ Tarquinia shouted.

Agata had woken just moments earlier, and for moments more she lay in a daze, astonished at her prescience. Then it occurred to her that Tarquinia must have repeated the call several times.

She rose from her bed and raced down the passage, sand still clinging to the skin of her back. The rest of the crew were already gathered around the console.

‘… all safe and in good health,’ Tarquinia was saying. ‘We landed successfully on Esilio and made an assessment of its potential for settlement; we’ll be sending the technical reports shortly. But as you can imagine, we’re eager for news from the mountain.’

There was a perceptible delay as the ultraviolet pulses crossed the void, then a man’s voice replied: ‘We’ll need to receive your reports first, before the channel is used for personal calls.’

Tarquinia was taken aback. ‘I understand. But can’t you fill us in on what’s been happening?’

‘What do you want to know?’ the man inquired impassively.