The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (21 page)

Only two helmeted figures remained on the ladder below him; Tarquinia was already inside. The craft’s interior had been kept pressurised for the sake of Azelio’s seedlings, so it was
necessary for each of them to wait their turn to cycle through the
Surveyor
’s small airlock. As Azelio opened the hatch, Ramiro pictured himself releasing his hold on the ladder,
starting up his jetpack and fleeing across the slopes. If he hadn’t left it so late he might have thought up a way to fake his own death out here. There were probably a few antimessagers
still walking free who would have been willing to shelter him.

Agata entered the airlock. Ramiro’s pride had the better of him now: he wasn’t going to hand a moral victory to any ancestor-worshipping messager. He started down the ladder slowly,
timing his steps so that he wouldn’t arrive too soon.

When he reached the hull he could see Tarquinia clearly through the front window, already busy at the navigator’s console. A moment later the first warning light blinked out on the panel
beside the airlock: the inner door was closed. He waited for the pressure to be pumped down; with a finite amount of sunstone to gasify, they weren’t going to throw away any more air than was
necessary.

The second warning light went out. Ramiro gripped the crank with his feet and began turning it. Once he passed through this hatch, he’d have nowhere to escape to for the next six years.
But he’d been forced here by his own nature, as much as by his circumstances; he wasn’t merely exchanging one prison for another. And once he’d passed through these temporary
constrictions, there’d be infinitely more elbow room in the end – for himself, and for everyone who followed him to Esilio.

In the cabin, the sense of familiarity he’d gained from the rehearsals reimposed itself. Ramiro sealed the inner hatch, then clambered down a rope ladder to the nearest of the three
couches behind Tarquinia’s. The couches were shaped to make more sense once the gravity was at right angles to its present direction, but for now he had to lie on his back with his legs bent
and raised, his feet brushing the floor-to-be.

As he strapped himself into place, his jetpack and helmet felt like absurd encumbrances, but when he plugged his corset’s cable into the console in front of him the panel lit up in
acknowledgement. When the automation could read any pattern he raised on his skin, it didn’t matter how mobile his limbs were.

‘A full crew?’ Tarquinia lamented, mock-disappointed. ‘I was hoping for an increase in my rations.’

Azelio said, ‘I’ll see what I can do once we make planetfall.’

Ramiro glanced at Agata on the couch to his left; it was hard to read her face through her helmet. ‘Agata gets first call on any extra food.’

‘Why?’ she demanded.

‘When the
Surveyor
breaks down and we’re stranded on Esilio, someone will have to populate the planet.’

Tarquinia said, ‘Don’t worry, Ramiro: by then, the
Peerless
will have so much knowledge from the future that they’ll be able to send us detailed instructions for
triggering division in males.’

Before he could think of a suitable riposte his console beeped and began displaying the countdown. Three lapses remained to the launch. Ramiro tried to relax; he trusted Verano and his team. And
even if the hull broke apart they’d stand a fair chance of surviving – so long as it happened sooner rather than later.

Two lapses
. As Ramiro watched the symbols flickering towards zero, his anxiety vanished. He’d already crossed the point of no return. To get under way now would be nothing but a
relief.

One lapse.

Eleven pauses. Ten. Nine. Eight.

Tarquinia said, ‘Commenced burning support ropes.’ The cables holding them to the mountain were as thick as Ramiro’s arms; even a dozen high-powered coherers couldn’t
slice the
Surveyor
free in an instant.

Three. Two. One.

‘Released.’ Tarquinia’s announcement was redundant: they were weightless, and the mountain was receding.

Through the window, the
Peerless
began drifting off-centre, perversely moving to the right; they’d been flung from the rim moving right themselves, but the tiny spin they’d
inherited from the mountain had at first cancelled, and was now overtaking, the effect of their changing perspective.

‘Firing engines.’

The thrust from the rebounders rose up smoothly, then levelled off. Ramiro sank into the seat of the couch. He was heavier than he’d been before the ropes were cut – and the jetpack
felt like more of a burden, tugging down on the narrow shoulder straps. But the acceleration itself was no different from that of the
Peerless
during the turnaround.

The mountain had disappeared from sight completely. Through the window in front of him the blazing rim of the home-cluster star trails appeared horizontal as the
Surveyor
ascended
towards the dark hemisphere.

‘Everyone all right?’ Tarquinia enquired.

‘I’m fine,’ Azelio replied.

Agata said, ‘Can I leave my jetpack on?’

‘As long as you want to.’

‘Then I’m fine, too.’

‘Ramiro? Any special requests?’

He said, ‘I’ll be happy once we can see where we’re going.’

Tarquinia buzzed curtly. ‘When I agreed to the confidentiality conditions, Greta stressed that you were the last person I should let in on the secret.’

Azelio was confused. ‘What secret?’

Agata said, ‘We’re not going to travel all the way to Esilio by dead reckoning. Accelerometers are good, but they’re not that good. And the home-cluster stars aren’t
enough, either.’

Azelio understood. ‘They finished the time-reversed camera, in secret?’

Ramiro said, ‘I think they had prototypes working before the bombing.’

Tarquinia shifted uncomfortably in her seat, then made a decision. ‘Since everyone knows the situation, I’m not going to treat you like fools.’ An inset opened on
Ramiro’s console showing him a patch of sky lit up with stars. Not the home cluster’s long trails; these images were brief stabs of colour, some of them piling the whole spectrum
together into a white smudge. He glanced to his left and saw that Agata and Azelio were being sent the same feed.

‘Behold the orthogonal stars, lighting the way into the future.’ Agata sounded bitter, and Ramiro couldn’t blame her: this was proof that even from the killers’ point of
view her friend’s murder had been futile.

‘This is Esilio’s sun.’ Tarquinia drew a red circle around a bright speck near the centre of the view.

‘Greta’s spyware will tell her that you’ve broken your agreement,’ Ramiro predicted. He hadn’t been allowed near the
Surveyor
’s automation while it
was in development, but he was sure that the
Peerless
would be receiving a constant flow of data from the expedition, far beyond the communications they volunteered.

‘I don’t care,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘What’s she going to do about it now?’

‘Blow us up?’ Azelio joked.

Agata said, ‘Not if we keep going. They’ll only kill us if we start to look threatening – if we turn around and start heading back.’

Agata woke in a state of joyful anticipation, but then she spent a lapse or two lying motionless, wondering if she had the day right. She could see the diurnal clock on her
console’s panel, but she’d made a deliberate choice to omit the date from the default display. She’d fooled herself in the past, waking with all kinds of wildly optimistic notions
about the phase the mission had reached, but it was important that she settle the matter by consulting her memory, with no other aids.

Since the link with the
Peerless
had crackled its last transmission and the flow of messages from Serena and Lila had ceased, time had become a desert out of the sagas: a featureless
wasteland of shimmering heat haze and treacherous mirages. But Agata was sure that she’d just passed a full day with a justified belief that the long-awaited event was imminent. If she was
wrong about that then she wasn’t just disoriented, she was completely delusional.

She rose from her sand bed and walked over to the console. She hadn’t been mistaken about the date, but she brought up the flight plan to confirm its significance. It had been a few stints
since they’d passed the one-quarter mark in the duration of their outwards journey, but that fractional accomplishment had offered nothing tangible to celebrate. Today, the
Surveyor
’s progress would finally be made manifest: its history would reach orthogonality with that of the
Peerless
, and Tarquinia would shut off the engines.

Agata left her room and walked out into the front cabin. Tarquinia wasn’t up yet; Ramiro was on watch.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘No, it’s not.’ Ramiro swivelled his seat around to face her. ‘Complete weightlessness is tedious,’ he complained. ‘We should have found a way to avoid
it.’

‘You could always move in with Azelio’s plants,’ Agata joked.

‘I shouldn’t have to. If they get to swing on a tether, why not us?’

‘What would you use as the counterweight? Splitting the whole vehicle in two would be too complicated.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Ramiro sulked. ‘What kind of expert on gravity are you, if you can’t summon it at the flick of a switch?’

Agata said, ‘The kind who understands enough to be willing to bet that that’s never going to happen. I’ll give you a gross to one that no one will discover such a thing between
now and the reunion.’

Ramiro scowled. ‘To be verified how? I thought your theory was that inventors would always censor the messages they sent into the past – since that’s more probable than their
ideas appearing out of nowhere.’

Agata wasn’t going to let these complications stand in the way of a good bet. ‘I think they could tell us what they’d built. They just couldn’t tell us how it
worked.’

Ramiro stretched his arms and buzzed wearily. Most of the cabin lights were off, and behind him the home-cluster stars filled the view. It was Ancestors’ Day all over again – only
this time it would last for three years.

‘The reunion could be happening right now,’ Agata marvelled. ‘Even as we speak, the
Peerless
could be approaching the home world.’

‘It’s not the first time you could have said that. Or didn’t you notice?’ Ramiro was wearing his corset, so he sent the sketch to the nearest console. ‘About a
stint before mid-turnaround, our line of simultaneity would have had just the right slope.’

‘It’s the first time it’s “now” by the home world’s reckoning as well as our own,’ Agata replied.

Ramiro was bemused. ‘Name any two events in the cosmos, and there’s a definition of time that makes them simultaneous. If I can’t actually witness this great moment – let
alone take part in it – just how excited do you want me to be?’

‘I’m sure the ancestors thought about
us
at the turnaround,’ Agata argued. ‘What’s wrong with a bit of solidarity?’

‘I prefer to reserve that for people I can look in the eye.’

‘All right. Forget it.’ They’d exchanged their views and found nothing in common, as usual. There was no point wishing it were otherwise.

‘I’m going to go strap myself down and sleep through all this nonsense.’ Ramiro nodded towards the passage behind her; Tarquinia had emerged from her cabin.

Azelio joined Agata and Tarquinia for breakfast, then the three of them set about putting up the guide ropes and checking that everything inside the
Surveyor
that might drift free was
secured. The tool cupboard took the most work; there were individual straps for every item, but people had grown lazy about using them. Azelio went through the pantry, checking every sack of grain
for holes. The sand in their beds was already resin-coated – and hoping to contain it was a tad optimistic whatever steps they took – but Tarquinia insisted on putting tarpaulins in
place before the gravity was lost.

Agata clung to a rope in the front cabin as Tarquinia finally issued the command to the engines. The end of the turnaround for the
Peerless
had taken place over three full days, out of
regard for the effects on the most vulnerable travellers, but the crew of the
Surveyor
were assumed to be more robust. As Agata’s weight plummeted, she was unable to dispel a
conviction that the cabin was plunging down, but then the very idea of that vertical axis lost its meaning.

After a lapse or two, her body and everything around her was imbued with stillness. The view through the window was unchanged; the stars were indifferent to the sudden straightening of the
Surveyor
’s history. The susurrations of the cooling system grew quieter; Agata had grown accustomed to the old sound, and the new silence made the room feel dead.

‘What now?’ she asked Tarquinia.

Tarquinia unplugged her corset. ‘That’s it. Everything’s done.’

‘What about the plants?’