The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (34 page)

Tarquinia said, ‘It’s not just a question of our own doubts; we have to take a broader view of this. If you and Azelio say the writing was there as soon as the rock was exposed, then
I believe you – but all we’ll be able to show the Council is an image taken some time after the fact. That’s not even going to establish the sequence of events.’

‘My role here is as a witness for the messagers,’ Agata reminded her. ‘Why would I suddenly change my allegiance and start lying about something like this – just to try
to get the system shut down?’

‘Twelve years isn’t sudden,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘They might think we corrupted you.’

‘Then what’s the point of doing anything?’ Agata retorted. ‘Why test the crops, when we might be lying about that, too?’

Tarquinia tried a more conciliatory tone. ‘Look, I might be wrong: they might listen to all our testimony and conclude that the message really is from the ancestors. But we can’t
take that for granted. We need to stay long enough to assess the new soil. It’s just a few more stints; what harm is there in that?’

Agata looked away; she seemed to be struggling to calm herself. ‘You’re right,’ she said finally. ‘We came here to see if Esilio was habitable. And you risked your life
for this experiment; it would be foolish not to wait for the results.’

‘We’ll spend some time imaging the site every way we can,’ Tarquinia promised. ‘We’ll gather as much evidence as possible to put to the Council. Then Azelio can
plant his crop – and whatever the outcome, it won’t take away from the significance of the message.’

‘That’s true,’ Agata agreed.

Hearing the disillusionment in her voice, Ramiro felt a pang of guilt. She’d run all the way to the
Surveyor
in a state of ecstasy, convinced that she’d just been handed the
solution to all of the
Peerless
’s problems. He couldn’t fault her sincerity, or the generous spirit in which she’d brought him the news. She really had believed that it
would spare him from the prospect of dying on this benighted world.

But ever since he’d seen the writing for himself, he’d been unable to stop wondering if the message suited him too well. As far as he could recall, he’d never consciously
planned to commit any kind of hoax – exploiting Agata’s longing to commune with the ancestors in the hope that in her innocence she’d sell the lie convincingly to the people back
home.

What he didn’t know was exactly what his lack of preparation meant. The words were there, Agata had seen them, nothing could change that now. But with every moment that passed it seemed
more likely to him that the ancestors had nothing to do with it, and that he would find a way to write the message himself.

Ramiro winced. ‘Please don’t do that.’

Tarquinia ignored him and continued to palpate his abdomen. ‘You definitely have some kind of mass in your gut. Maybe we should think about cutting it out.’

‘Don’t be so dramatic. It will pass through me soon enough.’

‘Not if the wall of the gut is paralysed.’

‘I think I’ve had something like this before,’ Ramiro lied. ‘When I was a child. It only lasted for a couple of days.’

Tarquinia gazed down at him, puzzled and concerned. ‘I’d thought we’d passed every influence we had back and forth to each other, long ago. Where does a new disease come from,
after six years in isolation?’

‘Maybe I caught it from the settlers,’ Ramiro joked. ‘Maybe the first time-reversed influence evolves here, shortly after they arrive.’

‘No eating, no work, just rest. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

Tarquinia gave him a stern, reappraising stare. ‘If you’re faking this to get out of helping with the cooling system—’

‘Faking a lump in my gut?’ he protested. ‘Seriously, I won’t eat, I promise. Last time I tried it made the pain unbearable.’

‘All right.’ She squeezed his shoulder. ‘I’ll be wearing an audio link, so if you need anything just yell.’

‘Thank you.’

When she’d gone, Ramiro turned in his sand bed, trying to find a half-comfortable position. The smear of sealing resin he’d spread through the loaf had been tasteless and odourless,
but the effects had exceeded his expectations. All the other substances he’d tried in similar doses had either been inert or had caused him to vomit up the meal immediately. So long as his
gut did eventually regain the power of peristalsis, he’d have no qualms about sharing this ‘influence’ with Agata: she’d be laid low for a day or two, but the precedent of
his own recovery would spare her from too much mental anguish.

All the rest would be down to timing. Azelio would want to watch over Agata, the way she’d cared for him when he’d been injured, and if he’d finished his work with the test
crop there’d be no reason for him to return to the blast site.

Tarquinia would be the hardest witness to avoid. Ramiro didn’t want to risk raising her suspicions by trying to manipulate her movements – let alone poisoning her – so
he’d have to contrive an innocent-sounding reason to be away from the
Surveyor
for at least two bells. Either that, or tell her everything.

His gut convulsed; he rearranged himself, curling around the site of the pain, trying to take the pressure off the lump of trapped food. If he was the author of the message, nothing would
intervene to prevent him from carving it before the
Surveyor
departed, but that was no guarantee that his ruse would remain undiscovered. He couldn’t presume that Tarquinia would
approve of the deception but, even if she did, the mere act of widening his private scheme into a conspiracy could only weaken the chance that the crew would convince their interrogators back on
the
Peerless
. Agata would be the passionate advocate for her own interpretation, while Azelio and Tarquinia would be more sceptical but still able to give honest, credible testimony. Why
ruin that by forcing Tarquinia to lie?

Of course, Greta would assume that he was behind the whole thing before he’d even spoken a word. But so long as the Council hadn’t abolished the popular vote entirely, it was not
beyond hope that the expedition’s claims could sway enough travellers into changing their position. Not even a message in light from the time of the reunion could be authenticated beyond
doubt, but if people were willing to give this message in stone any credence at all, it could shift the balance of their anxieties and prompt them to heal the rift that the system had created.

The strangest part was that everyone on the mountain would already know what collective decision they’d take. So the moment the
Surveyor
had re-established a link with the
Peerless
– long before the crew had been questioned in person and their individual stories tested and compared – he would discover whether or not the hoax had been in vain.

‘Aren’t they beautiful!’ Azelio enthused.

‘Well, they’re not dead,’ Ramiro allowed. After three stints rooted in the debris of the explosion, all twelve plants still displayed a modest selection of bright flowers
– which was more than any of the earlier trials had achieved.

‘They’re growing,’ Azelio assured him. ‘Every one of them.’ He knelt down near the start of the row. ‘This seedling is half as tall again as it was when I put
it in.’ He gestured along the progression of plants. ‘In fact, each one of them has come close to matching the way its neighbour appeared at the start. I know that doesn’t make
much of an impression: everything you see now in the first eleven specimens is something you’ve seen before from the second to the twelfth. It’s almost as if you’ve just shifted
your gaze slightly. But the figures bear it out: we’ve made the soil fertile.’

‘Right.’ Ramiro was trying his best to seem pleased, but short of some spectacle of agrarian bounty to summon forth an instinctive response it was hard not to take a purely
calculating view.

‘You wanted this to fail,’ Azelio guessed. ‘You thought that might put more pressure on the Council?’

‘I did,’ Ramiro admitted. ‘Though maybe that was foolish. It might have made things worse.’

‘How?’

‘If we’d ended up telling them that Esilio was uninhabitable they might have thought that we were lying about everything, just to serve an agenda.’ Ramiro paused for a moment
to convince himself that he really had managed to rephrase the original version in his head –
lying about this, too
– before it had escaped from thought into speech.
‘This way, we’ll still be offering them a choice: they can accept that the system’s redundant now that we know that the reunion will happen, or they can go ahead with the
migration now that it’s clear that the settlers needn’t starve. They’re not the kind of people who appreciate being told that all the evidence points the same way.’

Azelio said, ‘Forget the politics for one chime. Isn’t it something, just to see the plants thriving? We stamped our arrow into the soil and made wheat grow backwards in Esilian
time!’

‘We did.’

Azelio rose to his feet. ‘At least I’ll be able to tell Luisa that her picture of the wheat-flowers glowing on Esilio came true.’ He walked around to the side of the row, then
took the camera from his tool belt to capture a portrait. Ramiro had seen the girl’s drawing, and the truth was that it made an eerily good match.

‘I’ve been thinking of leaving half the plants here,’ Azelio added. ‘I’d take six back for people to study, and let the rest grow and drop their seeds. I know that
sounds like some kind of vote for the migration, but it’s not meant that way. I just hate the idea of ripping them all out. And if settlers do end up coming here, there’d be something
welcoming about finding a crop already growing – even a token presence like this.’

‘Hmm.’ Ramiro had no problem with the sentiment, so long as he didn’t end up harvesting the field himself. And if he was being cynical, it could only make the Council’s
choice seem even more open if the expedition had left Esilio with an ongoing farm of its own. Short of staying here to tend it in person, he couldn’t have made the false alternative sound
more genuine.

‘Do you mind if I head back to the
Surveyor
?’ he asked. He’d volunteered to help with the measurements, but Azelio would cope perfectly well on his own.
‘I’m getting some cramps again; I thought they’d stopped, but . . .’

Azelio said, ‘Of course. Will you be all right?’

‘I’ll be fine, don’t worry.’

Ramiro clutched his abdomen and moved away slowly, but once he was out of sight he broke into a run. He’d planned the detour carefully, and with the air calm it was easy to navigate by the
stars. Stones and sand fled from his feet, and sought them; he’d thought he’d grown used to that, but the speed made it stranger. His gait seemed at once more precarious and more
certain; it was as if he were watching a recording of himself performing a difficult balancing act, while knowing for a fact that he hadn’t actually toppled over.

Even by starlight, the probe’s truncated cone stood out sharply from the haphazard shapes of the rocks around it. Ramiro paused to orient himself carefully before squatting down and
embracing the thing. Just spending so much time in Esilio’s gravity must have left him stronger than he had been by the standards of the mountain, but on balance the penalty it added now felt
like more than enough to wipe out that advantage. He waddled across the valley floor, muttering curses, forcing himself to continue for a count of three gross steps before resting.

No one had come this way since the last of the original test plots had died off, and no one would have reason to do so again. If he could leave the probe unseen a short walk from the
Surveyor
, it would give him a chance to revisit the blast site while pretending to be retrieving the thing. That retrieval had never been part of the mission plan, but he couldn’t
see anyone objecting to his desire to scrutinise the probe’s materials in the aftermath of its peculiar heating. They were all going to need their projects to help pass the time on the long
journey back.

As Ramiro hefted the probe again, an amused voice in the back of his head demanded:
Why go to so much trouble?
If he abandoned the whole frantic scheme right now, what exactly would
that change? He’d be able to look Greta in the eye and tell her honestly that he’d had nothing to do with the inscription. The true author of the words would turn out to be a settler
playing along as a kind of bitter joke, or a genuine visitor from the home world six generations hence. In either case, how would he be worse off?

His arms were beginning to ache; he lowered the probe to the ground.

What he’d feared the messaging system would impose on him was an endless plateau of least resistance: every decision he learnt that he would make would strike him as acceptable –
never entirely out of character, never deeply morally repugnant – but it would still be less his own than if he’d been left to ruminate on the matter without the deadening intervention
of foreknowledge.

To feel alive, he needed to feel himself struggling moment by moment to shape his own history. It was not enough to look down on events from above like a biologist watching a worm in a maze,
content to note that this creature’s actions had never actually gone against its wishes. He desperately wanted to see the messaging system abandoned – by whatever means it took, short
of war – but it was
not
all the same to him whether he played a real part in the victory, or whether he was merely an onlooker who hadn’t needed to lift a finger. Why should he
take the path of least resistance now, when no one was forcing it on him?

As Ramiro lifted the probe and struggled forward, he felt a rush of joy. He’d made the right choice. Agata had been overcome with bliss by the thought that the ancestors had reached across
time to favour her with their beneficence – but now that he’d affirmed that he was the author of his own good fortune, Ramiro felt infinitely more blessed. Let the ancestors worry about
their own problems: he didn’t need their help. He could cheat the Council out of their ruinous folly entirely on his own.