The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (45 page)

But in the third report the torques were unchanged, and the fourth confirmed that nothing was escalating. The occulter was cycling its way up the rock face towards its target, tenaciously
regaining the same equilibrium with every step.

Ramiro sagged across the desk. ‘I think I just aged another six years.’

Tarquinia said, ‘Better here than back on the
Surveyor
.’

‘That’s true.’ Ramiro had never thanked her for the lengths to which she’d gone to spare him that fate. He sat and watched her for a moment, wondering what she’d
say if he raised it after all this time. But he suspected that it would only annoy and embarrass her if he told her that he knew what she’d done for him.

The second occulter flew over the edge, and recovered as well as the first. Ramiro was wary of becoming complacent — but it made no sense to reason about the machines’ fate without
taking account of everything he knew of both the past and the future. The disruption would happen, that was close to a certainty, and the occulters’ behaviour had to be consistent with that.
The cosmos was indifferent as to whether the solution of its governing equations described the
Peerless
obliterated by a meteor, or just a few conspirators managing to shatter a few
mirrors. But even the most dispassionate mathematician who’d been told that twelve clockwork insects carrying explosives were crawling across the mountain towards the light collectors would
have to accept that the second solution now appeared at least as viable as the first.

The third occulter reported success. The fourth, the fifth. Ramiro said, ‘When this stage is over, we should go and tell Agata and Azelio. They deserve to have their minds put at
ease.’

Tarquinia was sympathetic, but not so sure that it would help. ‘Do you think Azelio would get any comfort from this?’

‘Once he’s confronted with the sheer improbability of a meteor arriving at exactly the same time as the occulters, it might change his perspective.’

The sixth occulter landed safely and commenced its upwards crawl. Tarquinia said, ‘After Agata and Azelio, we should break the news to the Councillors.’

‘Really?’

‘Just to taunt them,’ she stressed. ‘No details.’

Ramiro said, ‘Where’s the fun in that? They’ve known for three years that they were going to be defeated.’

‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘I think they convinced themselves that it would be a meteor. No defeat, no surrender, just an act of
nature.’

The seventh occulter sent its report. Ramiro squinted at the numbers, confused. ‘What . . . ?’

Tarquinia leant closer to the screen. ‘It’s gone into the void. It fired the air jets to leave the slope, but then something jammed and it couldn’t get back.’

A second report arrived; the accelerometer showed the occulter in free fall.

Ramiro was numb. ‘That’s impossible. How can we lose one when we have no spares?’

Tarquinia said, ‘What if we change some of the targeting? Maybe we can take out two light collectors with one bomb – or three with two.’

Ramiro brought the target coordinates onto the screen. ‘How do we model this? Do we add the pressures from each shock wave?’

‘That will do, for an estimate.’

The estimate told them that the strategy wouldn’t work. The light collectors were spread too far apart, and the blast radius of each bomb was too small.

Ramiro was lost. ‘What is it that we don’t understand? Could one channel survive?’

Tarquinia considered this. ‘So one Councillor already knows what comes after the disruption? It’s hard to believe that they could keep that a secret from the others, and I
don’t see how the politics would work: in the aftermath they’d just be despised by everyone for withholding the information.’

‘It’s not impossible, though.’

‘It’s not impossible, but I’m not going to rely on it.’

‘So what do we do?’

Tarquinia hesitated, then came to a decision. ‘I’ll go out and repair the occulter – clean the jets, change the air tank. It’s in free fall and we know the trajectory; it
shouldn’t be too difficult to intercept.’

Ramiro fought down an impulse to volunteer himself; she’d have a far better chance of success than he would, if she could get out into the void at all. ‘Won’t the airlocks be
guarded?’

‘I know a way out through the observatory,’ she said.

‘A way out that isn’t an airlock?’

‘It’s a chamber with two airtight doors,’ Tarquinia conceded, ‘but no one ever uses it to come and go. There are some small instruments that we operate in the void, and
we slide them in and out on tracks to avoid all the rigmarole of going outside to tend to them.’

‘But a person can squeeze through?’

‘Yes. Just barely.’

Ramiro said, ‘We don’t know that it won’t be guarded, or monitored somehow.’

‘No. But we can be sure that every other airlock will be.’

‘How will you get access?’

‘I think I can talk my way into an observing session – and there are tools, cooling bags and air tanks there already, I won’t need to drag a lot of suspicious paraphernalia
with me. All I need is a bell or two alone in the main dome, exploring some hunch about the disruption.’

‘A hunch that your colleagues will know must come to nothing, or the Council would have sent the results back three years.’

Tarquinia scowled. ‘No, it must come to nothing that’s recognised as vital in the next three days – but that doesn’t prove that the observations won’t be valuable
later. I can invent some wild theory on my way to the summit. Believe me, I’ve seen the observing program – no one has any idea where to point the telescopes right now. The chief
astronomer will be grateful for anything that looks even half plausible.’

‘So the instrument will be doing some automated sweep . . . while you’re out in the void fixing the occulter?’ Every part of this sounded desperate, but Ramiro had no better
ideas. ‘Won’t you be tracked?’

‘If I go straight up from the summit and then arc around towards the plane of the base I can stay out of range of the systems tuned for accidental egress – and I certainly
won’t have the signature to be mistaken for an incoming Hurtler.’ Tarquinia reached across the desk and took the link. ‘I’m going to need this to reprogram the occulter. We
should have made it possible to talk to the things with a corset alone, but it’s no use complaining about a lack of foresight.’ She formed a pocket for the link then started dragging
herself towards the door, then she saw the expression on Ramiro’s face.

‘We’ve both survived tougher jobs than this,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to die out there.’

‘I know, but—’

‘If I get arrested, just pretend to be shocked. Maybe there’ll still be something you can do – don’t assume that the whole plan’s dead just because they’ve
grabbed me.’

‘All right.’

Tarquinia drew herself towards Ramiro and embraced him. ‘This is just a glitch,’ she said. ‘In a few bells I’ll be back here and we’ll be joking about
it.’

‘Yeah.’

Ramiro watched her leave, then he sat by the console. Without the link he couldn’t even check what was happening with the other occulters. He didn’t doubt Tarquinia’s skill or
resolve, but if they lost one more machine she could hardly repeat the same ruse. The whole plan was on the verge of collapsing, and he had no idea how to salvage it.

Ramiro pounded on Agata’s door until his hand ached, but there was no response. So much for her sitting in her room and thinking. Who would she visit? Lila? Azelio?

He looked up Lila’s address on a public console, but he hadn’t gone far when he ran into Agata coming the other way, carrying a box full of books.

Ramiro greeted her casually and restrained himself from blurting out anything compromising. ‘That’s a lot of reading,’ he said.

‘They’re Medoro’s books,’ Agata explained. ‘His family had no use for them, so I thought I’d take them.’

Ramiro gave a quiet chirp of approval, as if he were acknowledging a respectful gesture of remembrance. ‘It’d be good to catch up with you,’ he said. ‘If you’re not
too busy.’

‘I’d like that,’ Agata replied. ‘My apartment’s a mess, though – it’s not fit for company.’ They’d never checked it for listening
devices.

‘You could drop off the books and come to my place, if you like.’

‘All right. I’ll see you in a chime.’

They parted at the next intersection.

When Agata arrived, Ramiro invited her in and closed the door. ‘If you have another plan,’ he said, ‘now’s the time to tell us.’

Agata’s composure shattered as if he’d struck her. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she confessed. She started humming and shivering. ‘I wasn’t strong
enough.’

Ramiro was horrified. ‘It’s all right, calm down! I was just asking.’ In all their time together he’d never seen her so wretched. ‘No one else could break the
innovation block – and so far you’ve had about three bells without it.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I already had a plan three stints ago – no innovations, it was all gleaned from textbooks. But I couldn’t go through with
it.’

Ramiro led her over to the couch and sat beside her. ‘What happened?’ he asked gently.

Agata explained between bouts of shivering. ‘I had everything worked out so that Celia would think I’d done a final shift and then quit. No one would have been searching the tunnels
for my body. I’d even found a way to repair the grilles behind me so that the other workers wouldn’t notice the damage. I was going to schedule a message to you and Tarquinia, telling
you the threshold that the refractive index of the air near the axis would need to cross for you to know that you could cancel the bombs. But after I sent a message to myself to hold fast against
Giacomo, I lost all my courage.’

Ramiro squeezed her shoulder. ‘I’m glad you didn’t do it.’

‘Why?’ she asked miserably. ‘If your own plan’s gone bad, all that’s left to explain the disruption is a meteor—’

‘We’re not there yet,’ he protested. He described what had happened to the occulter, and Tarquinia’s scheme to get out and fix it. ‘But if you have any non-suicidal
alternatives, don’t keep them to yourself.’ Ramiro suspected that the three of them working together might have found a way to get Agata’s chemical into the cooling chamber, but
it was too late for that now.

‘I have no more ideas,’ Agata said forlornly. ‘That’s why I asked Serena and Gineto for the books. The Council has all of Medoro’s notes on the time-reversed
camera, but his design didn’t come out of nowhere. If I can retrace the steps of his education myself, there’s a chance I might see something that I missed.’

Ramiro pictured the bulging container she’d been lugging down the corridor; he couldn’t read that much in a year. But if Tarquinia couldn’t repair the occulter, they’d
have three days to mine Medoro’s textbooks and come up with a new way to shut down the system.

‘I shouldn’t keep you from your study, then,’ he said. ‘Just promise me you won’t try anything like the last plan.’

‘Why couldn’t they have spoken more clearly?’ Agata asked, bewildered. ‘I thought they were giving me the courage I needed to go down that shaft . . .’ She began
shivering again. ‘How can I fail them, when they know my whole future? How is that possible?’

Ramiro said, ‘There was no message from the ancestors.’ The stupid hoax had gone on far too long, and it had almost killed her. ‘Tarquinia carved those words into the rock,
before we left Esilio. You and Azelio were sick, bedridden in your cabins, so it was easy for her to slip away to the blast site while she was packing up the tents.’

Agata was stunned. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘To make the messaging system look redundant, so no one would have to scratch out a living on Esilio.’

Agata drew away from him. ‘So the two of you lied to me for six years?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Because you wanted me to sell it on the mountain? You thought people might
believe my testimony, so long as I didn’t know the truth.’

‘That was the plan,’ Ramiro admitted. There was no point going into the whole convoluted history of the thing, explaining his failed attempt to make the inscription his own.

‘We don’t know anything now.’ Agata seemed more wounded by this revelation than by the personal betrayal. ‘If the mountain’s wiped out, the Councillors might not
make it to Esilio. We don’t even have that comfort any more – we don’t know that there’ll be any survivors at all, that the home world won’t burn.’

Ramiro said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He’d only meant to spare her the burden of imagining herself chosen by history, pinned to this impossible task by the ancestors’ gaze. But
there was no way to do that without stripping away the whole lie.

Agata rose from the couch and dragged herself towards the door. She said, ‘When Tarquinia gets back, tell her I’m dead to both of you. I don’t care any more. Let the cosmos
work it out.’

Six bells after she’d left for the observatory, Tarquinia had still not returned.

Ramiro knew that if she’d been arrested she wouldn’t tell her captors anything – but the mere fact of her transgression would mean that the two of them would have been under
observation from the moment they’d left the
Surveyor
. If the authorities had found the link on her, they would have been searching for its signal all along, so they could have picked
up the transmissions to the occulters. Even without decoding any of the content, they would have been able to deduce the machines’ locations from the direction of the beam.

But he didn’t know any of that with certainty. All he could do now was gamble on the chance that the plan could still be salvaged. If he could get outside and fix the occulter himself,
everything might yet come together.

Ramiro checked the records on the console and committed the occulter’s trajectory to memory. Heading straight for the nearest airlock would be futile; he might as well turn himself in. But
anyone who could get more than a dozen caches of explosives onto the slopes would have to know a safe way out. His allies had been wise to limit their contact with him, and they’d managed to
convince themselves that having set the plan in motion there’d be nothing more they’d need to do. But if they hadn’t yet realised how wrong they’d been, it would be up to
him to disillusion them.