The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (7 page)

Tarquinia said, ‘How do we do this?’

Ramiro was confused. ‘Do what?’ Settle the argument before they were dead?

‘How do we
automate the push?
’ she asked impatiently. She’d accepted his plan.

Ramiro described the commands for the navigation system, raising the glyphs on his own skin as he spoke, picturing them repeated on Tarquinia’s body under her own corset’s empowering
gaze.

As Tarquinia echoed the last command back to him, the opposing hulls began to screech and shudder. The shaking cost Ramiro’s good foot its grip on the rope; the other one fell back against
the hull. He barely felt the knock, but when he looked down there was a swarm of brilliant yellow specks dropping away into the void, endlessly replenished from his disintegrating flesh. The
balance of energies that tamed his body’s chemistry was coming to an end; the damaged tissue was making ever more light, wrecking all the finely honed systems that had held the process in
check. His only chance to survive would be to part from it, but in this juddering chaos he doubted he could take a knife from Tarquinia’s hand, let alone use it.

The rogue shifted suddenly, its hull scraping backwards like a boulder sliding down an incline. Ramiro watched the slack part of the rope stretching out below him and readied himself for the
void – but then the motion stopped abruptly.

He understood what was happening: as the rogue fought to stay true – with no extra power to spend on the task – it could only shift its balance by throttling some of its rebounders,
decreasing its forward thrust. Tarquinia was doing her best to fall back alongside their neighbour – and at least his clumsy fix had spared her from having to micromanage the sideways shove
at the same time – but the whole encounter was too complicated to be rendered truly stable, and their luck couldn’t last much longer.

Ramiro placed his injured leg against the rope and managed to work a full turn around it. But the loop was too low, barely above his ankle. He brought his hands down a span to lower his body
while kicking out with his leg, until the rope rode up to encircle his knee. He made a second loop, then a third.

He looked up to see the Object looming ahead, its red and grey rock mottled with craters and crevices limned with shadows in the starlight. Then in the foreground, far smaller for an instant but
growing in no time to obscure the whole asteroid, he saw the Station: a cluster of stone boxes, rooms and workshops pieced together in weightless anarchy, rushing forward greedily towards the
duelling gnats.

Instinctively, Ramiro released his hold on the rope, convinced for a moment that this would save him. He fell upside down, hanging by his knee, his face to the sky as a featureless shadow
flickered across the stars and was gone.

He braced himself for the second, greater threat: a cratered landscape of antimatter rushing past near enough to touch – or rising up to meet him in extinction. The vision of it hung in
his mind’s eye, stark and terrible. But the thing itself failed to appear.

Ramiro lacked the strength to right his body but he raised his head sufficiently to stare up at the zenith. There was nothing ahead of the gnats now but the long, gaudy star trails of the home
cluster. The shadow he’d mistaken for the Station passing by had been the Object; the first missed target had come and gone too rapidly to be perceived at all.

He was still chirping with elation at the near miss when he noticed the yellow sparks falling around him. His whole lower leg was radiant now, filled to bursting with light.

‘Pull away!’ he begged Tarquinia.

He saw her helmet poke out of the hatch.

‘Wait,’ she said. She was gone for a moment but then she reappeared with the safety harness.

‘There isn’t time!’ Ramiro protested. But he understood why she was taking the risk: if he ended up falling alongside his amputated leg, it could still kill him.

Tarquinia dropped the harness. Ramiro reached out to accept it, but the rope wasn’t long enough; the harness hung suspended beside his bad knee. He tried to raise his torso, but the effort
merely set him swaying.

‘Grab it with your other foot,’ Tarquinia urged him.

Ramiro tried, but some earlier knock against the hardstone must have damaged his foot, robbing it of its power to grip. He poked it between two of the harness’s straps, pushed his leg
through and bent his knee.

‘Now!’ he pleaded redundantly: the gnats were already separating. He could see starlight between the hulls.

As Tarquinia retreated into the cabin, Ramiro felt the rope tightening, until he lost all sensation in the constricted flesh. Viscid yellow fire sprayed from the stump of his foot. The glow
became too painful to watch; he threw his arms up in front of his helmet.

Suddenly all his weight shifted to his good knee, almost pulling him free from the harness. The light from above was gone; Ramiro lowered his rear gaze and saw his severed leg tumbling through
the void, part of the snapped boarding rope beside it. As he watched, the flesh liquefied completely then swelled into a ball of flame, lifting the rogue’s form out of the darkness. A moment
later he felt a faint gust of warmth penetrate his cooling bag, then a single sharp sting to his shoulder. He groped at the wound with a gloved hand; it was painful to touch, but any break in the
skin was too small to discern. Maybe he’d been hit by a fragment of bone.

When the fireball had faded, Tarquinia shut off her engines. The rogue shot forward, passing the gnat, making no attempt to recover from its failure. But even if this was a ruse – and even
if the rogue didn’t overheat and shatter from a lack of cooling air – it would need eleven bells just to slow and come back, and twice that to make a fresh stab at the original plan.
That left time for half a dozen more gnats to come from the
Peerless
and start towing the Station away.

Weightless, Ramiro reached up and took the safety harness in his hands. He clung to it for a while, too weak to go any further, then Tarquinia began drawing the rope back into the cabin.

‘Happy Ancestors’ Day!’ Agata greeted her mother. ‘Are you coming to the celebration?’

Cira regarded her with undisguised pity. ‘I came here to ask if you’d visit your brother with me.’

Agata dropped clear of the doorway to allow Cira to clamber down the entrance ladder. ‘Mind the bookcase.’ A year and a half into the deceleration, Agata had kept the changes to her
apartment messy and proudly provisional. ‘Why would I want to see Pio?’

‘Common decency.’

Agata felt a twinge of guilt, but she remained unpersuaded. ‘All we ever did when he was free was argue, so I doubt he spends his time now yearning for my company.’

‘You need to mend things with your brother,’ Cira insisted. ‘If you think Medoro’s going to do Pio’s job for you, his sister might have another opinion.’

Agata grimaced. ‘Medoro’s a friend! Is there anything going on in your head that isn’t about
reproductive strategies
?’

‘Someone has to think about these things.’ Cira peered suspiciously at Agata’s console, as if the images of phase-space flows on display might reveal the true source of her
daughter’s intransigence. ‘If you value your work, you should value your brother.’

‘Really?’

‘Why do you think I had a son at all? It was for your benefit, not mine.’

Agata was chilled. ‘Whatever my differences with Pio, at least I don’t think of him as some kind of
useful machine
.’

‘You can take all the holin you like, and it will never give you certainty,’ Cira said bluntly. ‘But no woman who’s shed a child has ever divided afterwards. If you try
to raise a child on your own, it will cost you years away from your research. This is what men are for. Argue politics with Pio as much as you like, but to alienate him completely would be
self-defeating.’

Agata said, ‘He tried to stop the turnaround. It’s gone beyond arguing politics.’

Cira spread her hands in a gesture of agnosticism. ‘There was no evidence connecting him to that. And I would have thought you’d be troubled by this whole notion of
“preventative detention”.’

In truth, Agata was divided. That the Council had empowered itself to imprison people without trial disturbed her, but she’d almost convinced herself that the
Peerless
’s
vulnerable transition state justified the move. Pio and the other migrationist leaders were being treated well enough; three years in comfortable accommodation, free to read and study, wasn’t
exactly torture.

‘If you won’t visit him, you can still do right by him,’ Cira suggested.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you had a child, I don’t believe they’d keep her from her uncle.’

Agata was appalled. ‘Now you want my daughter to be raised in prison?’

‘Only for a couple of stints,’ Cira assured her. ‘After that, we’d have grounds to ask for his early release. If he’s looking after a child, what harm can he do?
They can still monitor him, but it would be absurd to keep him locked up.’

Agata’s head was throbbing. ‘You’re unbelievable!’

‘Do this for him now,’ Cira replied, ‘and he’s sure to be so grateful that he’ll happily raise a son as well. Then the next generation will be complete. You owe
that to your daughter: to give her the opportunities I gave you.’

Agata said, ‘I’m going to the party. You’re welcome to join me—’

‘To commune with the ancestors?’ Cira hummed contemptuously.

‘To remember what we’re here for,’ Agata countered.

Cira said, ‘We’re here to survive, and to strengthen our position.’

‘You mean manipulate each other, and preserve the status quo?’

‘Your grandmother lived under the old rules,’ Cira reminded her. ‘Starving wasn’t an eccentric choice then; it was forced on every woman in the mountain. If you’d
listened to her more, you might not be so complacent.’

Agata said, ‘If you’re so terrified of the old ways returning, why did you have a son at all? You got by without a brother. Why not wipe out your enemy completely and be done with
it?’

‘Far better to keep them alive and weak,’ Cira replied, ‘than to turn against ourselves and reduce some women to playing the role of men.’

Agata arrived at the celebration later than she’d intended. It was easy enough to make allowances for the time it took to climb the rope ladders between the levels she
frequented day to day, but when a journey took her up or down the old helical staircases she found it impossible not to dawdle. For six generations these elaborately carved grooves had been nothing
more than peculiar decorations wrapping the walls of horizontal tunnels, but to traverse them now meant treading on stone that had last been used this way when Yalda was alive. If Agata spotted a
blemish in the rock she had to stop and inspect it in the moss-light, hoping that someone who had walked on the home world – famous or obscure, she didn’t care – might have carved
their name into these steps.

As she entered the observation chamber, she saw that at least six dozen people had shown up. The space couldn’t have held many more, but there were similar festivities taking place up and
down the mountain’s rim. She squeezed her way through the crowd, moving aimlessly until someone called out to her.

‘Agata! Over here!’ It was Medoro’s sister, Serena. The whole family was gathered around a table by the edge of the dome.

Agata approached, trying not to be distracted by the view before she’d greeted everyone. The lighting in the chamber was subdued, but she still needed to stare out at the sky to convince
herself that she really was seeing it – that her vision wasn’t being blocked by reflections from the interior. All the long, orderly star trails she’d grown up with, the great
meridional arcs that together filled half the sky, had shrunk into the kind of tiny, random lines of colour that she’d only ever known before as the signature of the orthogonal cluster. This
was the ancestors’ sky. In less than a chime, the mountain would be at rest with respect to the home world. Apart from the effect of the
Peerless
’s displacement on the
arrangement of the nearest stars, and apart from the absence of Hurtlers and the sister-world-turned-sun, Gemma,
this
was the view that anyone on the night side of the planet would be
seeing right now.

‘Cira didn’t come?’ Medoro asked, feigning puzzlement.

Agata wasn’t in the mood for jokes about her family – and apparently Medoro’s own relatives felt the same way: Gineto reached over and gave his nephew an admonitory thump on
the arm, to Serena’s amusement. ‘Feel free to do that yourself whenever he annoys you,’ she suggested to Agata. ‘It’s the only way we manage to put up with
him.’

Vala said, ‘Agata and her mother have been through enough. Just let her enjoy the party.’

Medoro cast Agata an imploring glance, as if he expected her to defend him.

She said, ‘Don’t worry, nothing could spoil this day for me.’

‘Not even a Hurtler strike?’ he joked.

Agata spread her arms and turned to face the sky. ‘Here we are, come and get us!’ For a day or two they’d be as vulnerable as the ancestors – but that felt more like a
gesture of solidarity than a real source of danger.

‘Not even engine failure?’ Medoro persisted.

‘Our exhaust will be heading into the home cluster’s future,’ Agata replied. ‘That’s no different from the ancestors lighting a lamp, or the stars in the home
cluster shining. There is no magical thermodynamic curse that can stop us making the turnaround. Or do you think Yalda and her friends couldn’t walk east when the Hurtlers’ arrow of
time pointed west?’

‘And yet they were careful not to launch against the arrow,’ Medoro noted.

‘For which we should be grateful,’ Agata declared. ‘That let us observe the orthogonal cluster for six generations before losing sight of it. Better that than getting a
surprise on the turn.’

‘Hmm.’ Medoro had run out of ways to needle her.