The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (50 page)

Watching her as she spoke, Ramiro couldn’t help sharing her joy. Perhaps the discovery changed nothing tangible, but it vindicated all her years of effort – and it proved that the
Peerless
was back on course. New ideas were possible again. The paralysis was over.

‘And that settles everything?’ he asked. ‘Cosmology is complete now?’

‘Not at all!’ Agata replied gleefully. ‘There are still dozens of open questions. People will be working on this until the reunion, and beyond.’

Tarquinia said, ‘I have some news of my own that you should hear.’

Ramiro had been afraid that the change of subject would go down badly, but Agata listened to the revised version of the last day on Esilio with no sign of hostility.

When Tarquinia was finished, Agata said mildly, ‘I’m glad you weren’t lying to me, after all.’ She glanced over at Ramiro. ‘And I’m glad you weren’t
either, even if you meant to.’ It was an infinitely gentler barb than he’d expected.

A doctor approached and suggested that they let Agata rest. Agata glanced down at her shrivelled torso, as if she’d forgotten the state of it while they’d been talking. ‘Not
one person has said that I look like I’ve shed twice,’ she complained. ‘I’ve been ready to tell them the names of the children, but the joke’s just not
happening.’

Tarquinia placed a hand gently against her cheek. ‘Get strong. We’ll see you again soon.’

Ramiro shared a meal with Tarquinia in the food hall, then they retired to his apartment.

‘What is it that’s troubling you?’ Tarquinia asked. ‘I thought it was the inscription, but Agata was fine about that.’

Ramiro didn’t reply. Better to offer no denials or explanations, and she’d come to her own conclusions about the cause.

‘We survived,’ she said. ‘We might have been fools to go along with Giacomo . . . but if we hadn’t, what would have caused the disruption?’

‘So whatever we did was just the way it had to be?’ Ramiro had meant to sound sarcastic, but the words ended up more like a plea.

Tarquinia said, ‘I wouldn’t put it like that. But with everyone clinging stubbornly to their own agendas, it’s a miracle that it ended without a single death. It’s
physics that makes us free – binding our actions to our intentions – but in a tight enough corner with enough people refusing to act against their nature, it’s not hard to imagine
that the only route to consistency might involve killing them all.’

Ramiro couldn’t keep silent. ‘Giacomo told me what he’d planned,’ he said.

Tarquinia was confused. ‘When?’

‘After you disappeared. I went looking for him, to see if he could get me out into the void.’

‘But he couldn’t.’

Ramiro said, ‘He told me there was no need. He told me that they had more than enough occulters of their own to do the job – and that the job was much more than we’d asked
for.’

‘So what could you have done?’ Tarquinia still wanted to smooth it over. ‘It’s not your fault that you didn’t have Agata’s idea, and you couldn’t risk
going to the Council.’

Ramiro said bluntly, ‘I wanted it. For a while. I wanted exactly what he wanted.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because the way things are makes me angry,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid that men will be wiped off the mountain – I’m afraid that nothing will ever change for
us. We’ll keep on being made for the one remaining purpose where we can’t be replaced, and if we try to do anything else with our lives we’ll be treated like mistakes.’

Tarquinia was silent for a while. Ramiro had expected her to be enraged and disgusted, but even if that had been her first impulse she seemed to be searching for another response.

‘Do something,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If you want things to change, you’re going to have to do something.’

‘Like Pio? Like Giacomo?’

Tarquinia hummed impatiently. ‘No. Tamara didn’t blow anything up. Carlo didn’t blow anything up.’

Ramiro said, ‘I’m not a biologist. I don’t know how to fix the problem that way.’

‘What do you want for the men who come after you?’

‘I want them to have easier choices than I had.’

‘That’s a little vague,’ Tarquinia complained. ‘But I’m sure we can work on it. There’s an election coming up, and we haven’t had a single male
Councillor for far too long.’

Ramiro drew away from her. ‘No. Find another punishment.’

‘You want change,’ she said. ‘It’s Giacomo’s way, or it’s politics.’

‘I’m not too old to study biology.’

‘I think you might be.’ Tarquinia became serious. ‘If even a fraction of the men on the
Peerless
feel that there’s nothing left to do but plant a bomb somewhere,
we’re never going to have peace. If you’ve shared that rage, if you understand it, it’s your responsibility to help find a better way.’

Ramiro replied irritably, ‘And the women who run things have nothing to do with it?’

‘I didn’t say that. We’re still insecure, because we know exactly how bad it would be for us if everything unwound. But do you really think the only voice for men on the
Council should come from women?’

‘Not at all. I’ve voted for male candidates, but they never get a seat.’

Tarquinia said, ‘Consider it. That’s all I’m asking.’

They shared Ramiro’s bed, but lay apart. Ramiro watched Tarquinia sleeping in the moss-light. He didn’t know if she was telling the truth about the inscription, but he didn’t
care; he’d had enough of trying to fit his own life around some supposed future certainty.

Whatever had been written in the rocks on Esilio, in six generations the travellers had discovered everything they needed to return in safety and protect the home world. The hardest task now
would be to find a way to live in peace for six more, and reach the end of the journey without throwing everything away.

Valeria woke in darkness to shouts of panic from the street below. She clambered out of bed and looked down from her window. Everyone was staring into the eastern sky.

‘Was it a Hurtler?’ she called out. She could see nothing unusual herself now, but a fast-moving near miss might have unsettled people.

‘It’s the sun, you fool!’ a woman replied.

Valeria could make no sense of this. Had another planet been ignited – had Pio gone the way of Gemma? Pio might well have risen by now, but she could see no evidence that the world had
gained a third sun while she slept.

‘Where?’ she demanded.

The woman pointed towards an unremarkable patch of sky. If it did contain Pio, the planet was too dim to discern without some concerted staring. Valeria wondered if the crowd had succumbed to a
kind of collective hallucination. She’d imagined fires out in the desert herself, when she’d been tired enough, but right now her lack of sleep seemed merely to have left her
bleary-eyed, struggling to focus on the stars right ahead of her, as if she’d developed a blind spot—

In fact there was a small black absence in her vision, but when she moved her eyes it stayed fixed in the sky. She ducked back into her room and checked the clock beside her bed, by touch.
She’d slept far later than she’d realised: it was a bell after dawn.

The black disc in the east was the sun.

Eusebio said, ‘I don’t see how a Hurtler could do this. Gemma made perfect sense, but how could an impact put out the fire across a whole star?’

Valeria sat in a corner of the meeting room with her dye and paper, listening to the twelve men of Zeugma’s Fire Watch Committee who’d assembled on this lamp-lit afternoon. The
Committee had made plans long ago for every imaginable crisis, but no one had anticipated this eerie extended night.

‘A large enough shock to the surface might disrupt the reaction,’ Cornelio proposed. ‘We have no experience of the interaction between combustion and extreme seismic events,
but if a pressure wave altered the structure of the sunstone, even temporarily, it’s conceivable that the flame might be extinguished.’

‘Across the entire surface?’ Eusebio was sceptical. ‘I could believe a Hurtler inducing a dark patch at the point of impact, a flameless region that survived for a bell or two.
But not this.’

Giorgio gestured towards the window. ‘The result’s not in dispute. And if a Hurtler wasn’t the culprit, what alternative is there?’

Valeria raised his words on her chest and looked around the room, poised to squeeze one more contribution onto the page, but no one had an answer for Giorgio so she took the opportunity to dust
her skin with dye and commit the discussion so far to paper.

‘At least the agricultural effects might be positive,’ Eusebio suggested hopefully. ‘If the uncovered crops finally get something close to the old cycle of illumination, that
ought to lead to higher yields.’

He looked to Adelmo, but the agronomist spread his hands in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘Gemma’s bright enough to ruin the night, but it might not be bright enough to count as a signal
for day.’

Silvio entered the room and spoke privately with Eusebio. Valeria heard a snatch of the conversation, as Eusebio’s voice rose in incredulity. ‘She told them it would
happen?’

When the exchange was over, Eusebio looked agitated. ‘The meeting’s adjourned until tomorrow,’ he said. Valeria began gathering her papers, preparing to leave Eusebio huddling
with his confidants to discuss Silvio’s news, but to her surprise he walked straight up to her.

‘Could you come with me to the prison?’ he asked.

‘Why?’

Valeria’s look of panic seemed to dispel his disquiet. ‘No one’s arresting you,’ he joked. ‘I just want you to come and talk to someone.’

‘You want me to keep a record?’ She fumbled with her box of dyes.

‘That wouldn’t hurt,’ Eusebio decided. ‘But actually, she asked for you by name.’

‘I’m not the only person in Zeugma with that name.’ Valeria trusted Eusebio not to form unwarranted conclusions, but she didn’t want to be known as having criminal
associates.

Eusebio said, ‘She asked for Yalda’s adopted daughter. And she said something about Nereo’s force that the jailers were incapable of conveying precisely. So I’m fairly
sure that she did mean you.’

There was nothing unusual about the sight of Zeugma lit by Gemma alone, but Valeria’s body had its own reckoning of the time and the disjunction rendered the streets
hallucinatory. She followed Eusebio across the dark cobblestones towards an encounter with a madwoman.

‘She gave her name as Clara,’ Eusebio explained as they walked into the entrance hall. ‘I know everything else has to be nonsense. The guards probably half-remembered what
she’d said, and when this bizarre thing happened they reinterpreted her words in the light of it.’

Valeria said nothing; she had no theories.

They sat in an interview room, waiting for Clara to be brought up from the cells. When the guard led her in, a chain looped around her melded arms, Valeria’s skin tingled all over.
She’d never set eyes on the woman before, but the prisoner was beaming as if she’d just walked into the presence of two long-lost friends.

Eusebio gestured to Clara that she should take a seat. She complied, and the guard left them.

‘Can you understand my speech?’ Clara asked. She spoke with a heavy accent that Valeria couldn’t place.

Eusebio said, ‘Yes.’

‘I hope I’ve got the grammar and vocabulary correct. We have written sources, but no sound recordings.’

‘Sound recordings?’ Eusebio buzzed appreciatively. ‘That’s an inventive embellishment, I’ll give you that.’

Clara said, ‘I gave the city police the location of my rocket. If they’d sent someone to look at it, that would have saved us all this confusion.’

Eusebio replied bluntly, ‘The
Peerless
isn’t due to return for three years. And when it does, I think we’ll manage to spot the engines in the sky.’

Clara tipped her head, amused. ‘Some people did argue for a light show to help set the scene . . . but then, I was in the other camp who thought that
putting out the sun
really
ought to be more than enough to establish our credentials.’

Valeria watched Eusebio. He said, ‘Conjurors have made an art out of convincing people that they’ve foretold the future. The jailers here must have made a good audience.’

‘The
Peerless
did travel three full years into your future.’ Clara sketched a portion of the mountain’s proposed trajectory on her chest, but every educated person in
Zeugma was aware of that. ‘At the turnaround our plan was to follow a straight line back home and then decelerate for a year. But eventually we realised that it would be perfectly safe to
arrive earlier. So we executed a big loop, going a few years into the future then curving around and travelling a few years into the past.’ She added these unlikely adornments to her diagram.
‘All of that happened before I was born, though. For most of my life, the
Peerless
was travelling homewards through the void at a time, by your reckoning, when it was yet to leave
the ground. And I saw the old mountain through a telescope when we passed it! It was still accelerating, burning sunstone. We weren’t so visible: our engines work very differently –
they don’t consume fuel at all.’

Valeria said, ‘Why did you ask for me?’

Clara turned to her with an expression of terrifying joy. ‘When I was a girl, I read Yalda’s biography, and there was a story she’d told one of her friends about you. You gave
her a gift before she left Zeugma: a diagram showing Nereo’s force for spherical shells.’

‘There were a lot of people at that party,’ Valeria pointed out, trying not to be rattled. Eusebio’s point about conjurors was an apt one. ‘A lot of people could know
that.’

Clara tried to gesture with her arms; she’d forgotten that they were melded behind her back. ‘Is this really going to be so hard? If there’s nothing I can say that could
convince you, can’t we ride out to the place where I arrived?’

Eusebio said, ‘So the
Peerless
itself is still out in the void, and the other travellers just let you come down here alone?’