The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (46 page)

‘I don’t know anyone called Giacomo,’ the man protested irritably.

‘I met him here a few stints ago,’ Ramiro explained. ‘I think he borrowed your apartment, because it wasn’t convenient to use his own.’

‘You must be confused about the address.’ The man closed the door.

Ramiro supposed it was possible that the apartment’s tenant had had no knowledge of the meeting, but he couldn’t think of any other way to attract the group’s attention.
Perhaps they’d been monitoring the whole project independently and already knew what had happened to the occulter, but he couldn’t take that for granted and rely on them to
intervene.

Back in his apartment, he sat and waited for contact. Greta’s people might be watching him, but that had always been true; either Giacomo’s group had ways around that, or everything
they’d done would have been spotted long ago.

After six bells, Ramiro lost patience. He knew he’d have no hope of sleeping, so he went out hoping to be found.

By most people’s schedules it was night-time, and the corridors were lit with nothing but red moss-light, but the precinct was as busy as he’d seen it. Ramiro passed dozens of
restless neighbours, crowding the guide ropes, moving as briskly and aimlessly as he was. When he met their eyes they turned away, confused. In two days the mountain might be gone, and any sane
person would want to play a part in protecting it. But after three years of complying with the flawless predictions of their own private messages – or their friends’ messages, or
whatever impinged on their lives in the public news – what could they do when they’d been told that they’d do nothing?

Two young men approached on the adjacent rope, avoiding his gaze like everyone else, but to Ramiro they seemed more self-conscious about it than any stranger ought to be. As they drew nearer he
waited for one of them to bump him and pass him a note, and he readied himself to play his part and make the collision look plausible. Then he saw the edge of a blade sliding out from its hiding
place in the first man’s hand.

He grabbed the assailant’s wrist and stared straight at his approaching accomplice. ‘If I’m not back in my apartment in three chimes,’ he said, ‘every detail goes
to the Council automatically.’

‘Nothing stops us,’ the man informed him solemnly. ‘We already know how this ends.’

‘So why this?’ Ramiro bent the knife-wielder’s hand – then crossed ropes to let a woman move past, positioning his body to hide the blade from her.

‘It ends well because you take this as a warning and stop bringing attention to yourself,’ the man replied.

Ramiro said, ‘I think you might be confusing foresight and wishful thinking. I say it ends well because I have a meeting with Giacomo, immediately.’

The accomplice’s expression of certainty was wavering. He must have grown so accustomed to his plans unfolding perfectly that he’d lost the ability to rethink them on the fly.

Ramiro said, ‘I know it’s hard for people to organise their calendar these days, but the only way I’ll stop being a problem for your boss is by talking to him face to
face.’

Giacomo sat on the floor of the food hall, chatting amiably with a dozen companions, but the gathering was large enough that he didn’t need to be contributing constantly
to appear to be engaged. Ramiro sat two strides away with his back to the group, straining to hear the whispers directed his way, while trying to look like a lone diner brooding sadly on the fate
of his friend.

‘We’ll take care of the machine,’ Giacomo said. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about.’ His rear eyes moved aimlessly, his gaze passing over Ramiro without
registering his presence.

Save Giacomo’s friends, there was no one else close enough to have any chance of hearing them, and Ramiro could only assume that his allies knew the location of every listening device in
the room. But it was still a struggle to speak as if they had real privacy.

‘If you can fix this,’ he said, ‘you should have told us earlier, and then my friend wouldn’t be in trouble.’

‘That won’t last long,’ Giacomo promised. ‘Even if they’ve taken her, in a matter of days every prisoner will be free.’

Ramiro had no idea how he thought he could guarantee that; the whole government was hardly going to resign in shame. ‘And what about the occulter? You can perform the repairs
yourself?’

‘Absolutely,’ Giacomo assured him.

Ramiro gave him the communications codes that would be needed to instruct the navigation system and get the machine back on course.

‘You should lie low now,’ Giacomo said. ‘I’m sorry about the incident before, but that wasn’t my decision. Someone saw you as a risk and took things into their own
hands.’

Ramiro chewed his loaf slowly. His trust in this man was disintegrating, but if the conspiracy was a sham and Giacomo had been working for the Council all along, why would anyone go through the
motions of trying to warn him off?

‘You don’t need to make repairs,’ Ramiro realised. ‘You’ve got replacements. You’ve built your own.’ They’d had the plans for three years. Why
limit themselves to making accessories when they could copy the whole design?

Giacomo took his time replying, inserting a raucous joke into his friends’ End of the Mountain celebration.

‘We’ve built our own,’ he agreed reluctantly. ‘That was only prudent – and it’s turned out to be essential.’

‘You couldn’t tell us?’

‘The less you knew, the better,’ Giacomo replied.

Ramiro suspected that it was Agata’s position that would have been the sticking point; this made a mockery of the idea that the
Surveyor
’s crew had held a veto over the
final deployment. ‘How many spares did you make?’

‘Enough.’ There was a note of irritation creeping into Giacomo’s voice.

‘A dozen? A gross?’

Giacomo said, ‘You don’t need those details. We’ve been planning this for years, we know exactly what we’re doing. Just go back to your apartment and wait.’

Ramiro stared down at the plate in front of him. These people knew him far better than he knew them – at the very least through Pio, and Ramiro had told Pio that he’d oppose him if
he ever tried to use violence. Giacomo would have been forewarned not to expect Ramiro to cooperate with anything of the kind.

That was why they’d been so coy about the scale of their own resources: they were going to try to breach the tubes. They had as many occulters as they’d need, carrying whatever
quantity of explosives it would take. The occulters from the
Surveyor
were just decoys; it had never mattered whether or not they reached their targets.

Ramiro said, ‘I need some proof from you that the attack won’t be excessive – that it will shatter the light collectors, nothing more.’

Giacomo’s rear gaze turned on him briefly, before sliding away. ‘How could I prove that? Do you want to come and observe all our communications? What would that tell you? If we
showed you the data from the one machine that’s replaced your runaway, you could always convince yourself that there were more.’

Ramiro was silent; he had nothing to bargain with. If he went to the Council and helped them mount a defence against the occulters, he’d only be risking a far greater loss of life from a
meteor strike.

‘Why?’ he asked, dropping any pretence that there was still some doubt about Giacomo’s plans. ‘The disruption is enough. The Council will be humiliated, they’ll
fall at the next election. The system will never be restarted. What more could you want?’

Giacomo embarked on a long, loud story about someone’s feud with someone else in their student days. Ramiro began to think that the meeting was over; he finished his meal and began picking
up crumbs from the plate.

But then the story ended and Giacomo spoke.

‘This is the fulcrum,’ he whispered. ‘This is our one chance. Or how many generations will be forced to bear the same ruthless people holding power? Prisoners locked up without
trial? Men treated as lesser beings, made for one purpose alone? The disruption is not enough; there needs to be damage and chaos. The Council needs to fail the people so badly that they
don’t dare set foot on the mountain again. Let them run away to Esilio or die in their private fortresses. In two days everything will change for ever. There’s nothing to lament in
that. But if we want our time to come, there has to be a price.’

Ramiro lay sleepless in his sand bed, staring out into the moss-lit room. If the messaging system’s tubes were breached, their walls might still hold against the
pressure. The Council would have known all along that this kind of damage was possible; they must have taken steps to minimise the consequences.

But all the earlier construction along the axis had been carried out with no conception that it would ever be exposed to the void. Walls could be strengthened after the fact, seals could be laid
down. But nothing would ever render the resulting patchwork the same as the solid rock of the hull that had been kept intact for that purpose from the start.

If the tubes gave way, whole precincts would crumble. People would be battered by the winds and debris, even if they didn’t end up out in the void. Before the breach could be repaired
there would be all the damage and chaos that Giacomo could desire.

But what other possibilities remained? Ramiro could still summon up a slender hope that if he went to the Council promising to reveal the details of the attack, they would agree to a voluntary
shutdown. Maybe all the stubbornness Greta had displayed in public had only been for show.

Was that what he wanted, though: the Council triumphant? Could he really have half of Vincenzo’s version – the disruption as a bluff to expose the saboteurs – without the
messaging system starting up again and the same dismal paralysis descending across the mountain for six more generations? With his rash confession to Agata he’d destroyed any chance of
Tarquinia’s hoax convincing anyone that the system was redundant. And if he was sentencing people to the dust and darkness of Esilio, how many more would die there than would fall victim to
Giacomo’s plan?

He wanted change. He wanted the Council crushed. He wanted the men who came after him to be more than timid appeasers like his uncle, who’d clutched at their prescribed role with pathetic
gratitude then done their best to instil the same subservient mentality in the next generation.

Whatever choice he made, whatever side he took, some lives would be endangered and some people would die. All he could do was look beyond that to the fate of the survivors. One path would lead,
at best, to a miserable exile for the dissenters and generations of tyranny for everyone who remained on the mountain. The other would bring turmoil and grief for a while, but it would also bring a
chance of enduring freedom.

Agata flipped over a dozen pages before realising that her concentration had deserted her and she had no idea what she’d been looking at.

She pushed the book away across her desk. Even if she stumbled on some crucial insight that had informed Medoro’s design, what could she do with it in a day and a half? She wasn’t
going to build a magical machine that could reach through solid rock and turn the messaging system to dust.

There was knocking from outside. Agata dragged herself to the door.

‘Are you busy?’ Serena asked.

‘Not really.’ Agata invited her in.

Medoro’s books were arranged around the room, stacked by subject and ordered by hastily assigned priorities.

‘You’re sorting through everything already,’ Serena observed. She glanced at the desk, at the open book.

‘I got caught up in
Principles of Photonics
,’ Agata explained. ‘Once you’ve read the first page it’s impossible to put down.’

‘We should go for a walk,’ Serena suggested. ‘Give yourself a break.’

‘All right.’ Agata wasn’t sure what this would be in aid of, but she followed Serena out into the corridor.

They moved along the guide rope in silence for a while, single file with Agata in front. Then Serena said quietly, ‘I’ve been talking to some friends about the disruption.’

‘Yeah?’

‘We all agreed that we have to do something.’ Serena met Agata’s rear gaze. ‘So if you have any plans of your own, maybe we can work together.’

Agata said, ‘Now you tell me.’

‘You have no idea what it’s been like here,’ Serena replied bluntly. ‘They switched on the system, and suddenly we had three years of our lives laid out in front of us:
three years’ worth of messages telling us exactly who we’d be. A few people were dragged kicking and screaming into whole new ways of thinking – but after the initial jolt they
were just as incapable of change as the rest of us. That’s what the system does: it turns you into the kind of person who knows nothing more each day than you knew the day before.’

‘But now the feed’s gone silent, and the spell is broken?’

‘Half broken,’ Serena replied. ‘There are a lot of us who want to act, but the paralysis lingers. Some people think we should march on the messaging stations and smash whatever
we can – but there’s still a mindset that declares it’s impossible, because if the Council have said we won’t . . . we won’t.’

Agata’s spirits were rising, but she wasn’t clear herself where this new force could be applied.

‘There’s already a plan to sabotage the channels,’ she said. ‘But I don’t trust the people who set it up.’ She scanned the corridor, then waited until she was
certain that no passer-by could hear her before explaining Giacomo’s scheme. ‘I don’t think they care if they break open the tubes. They’re not going to err on the side of
caution.’ Agata stopped short of accusing the group of Medoro’s murder; she didn’t know that for sure.

Serena took a few lapses to come to terms with these revelations. She’d probably come to Agata hoping for nothing more than a technical opinion on the best place to attack the system.

‘So what are you searching for in my brother’s books?’ she asked finally.