The Arrows of Time

‘If there’s a rock on its way, that’s true,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But until we know that there is, why should we assume that? The history of the next twelve stints ends with the messaging system failing; we’re about as certain of that as we can be. Some sequence of events has to fill the gap between that certainty and all the other things we know. So which snippets would you rather the cosmos had on hand to complete the story? Just one, where a meteor hits the Peerless? Just two: a meteor, or a bomb? Making our own preferred version possible won’t rule out everything else – but if we don’t even try, we’ll rule out our own best hope entirely.’

Agata brought a schematic onto her chest. ‘Whatever the details of the final design they used, each channel must have components something like this.’

Ramiro hadn’t thought about the technical aspects of the system for years, and as he reacquainted himself he was surprised by its apparent fragility. ‘Disrupt the light for a flicker, and the flow of information is cut. There’s no need to damage anything.’ Although the messages were constantly being converted into a less transient form to be boosted and re-sent, that version of the data only endured forwards in time – it couldn’t bridge a gap into the past. He’d often pictured the messages as a storehouse of documents, a kind of future-archeological find, but they were much more vulnerable than anything written on paper, or even in the energy states of a memory chip.

‘Could we launch some small objects into the external light paths?’ Tarquinia wondered. ‘If each one starts on the mountain close to one of the channel’s outlets, it could probably occult the target star without being picked up by a surveillance camera first.’

Azelio said, ‘The outlets will have to be on the base of the mountain, won’t they?’

‘Yes,’ Tarquinia replied. ‘Unless they’ve turned everything around while we were gone.’

‘We’d need to know exactly which orthogonal stars they’re using,’ Agata pointed out.

‘Maybe our collaborators will have that information already,’ Ramiro suggested. ‘So if we can offer them some miniature automated craft to fly up from the mountain and block those stars, why wouldn’t they use them?’

Azelio said, ‘So who’s going to build these things without being noticed? They’ll need accelerometers and photonics in order to navigate with any precision. If we make them ourselves on the Surveyor, we won’t stand a chance of smuggling them out when we dock. But on the Peerless, all the workshops and stores will be under surveillance.’

‘We could release them before we dock,’ Agata suggested. ‘Send them out to hide somewhere. If they’re small enough, and we time the whole thing carefully, they could pass from the Surveyor to the slopes undetected.’

‘And then what?’ Azelio pressed her. ‘They adhere to the slopes somehow, and then crawl towards the base – like insects crawling along a ceiling?’

‘Yes.’ Agata wasn’t backing down, but the proposal was growing more ambitious by the moment.

‘And then later,’ Azelio said, ‘since we won’t know the coordinates in advance, we have to be able to instruct them, remotely, to crawl to a particular take-off point and then fly along a certain trajectory. Without the signal being detected.’

Tarquinia disagreed with his last claim. ‘If a brief encrypted signal is picked up by the authorities, what can they do about it? So long as they can’t pin down the exact source or destination, mere detection need not be a problem. Even if they take it as a sign that some form of attempted sabotage is under way… they would have had that possibility in mind for the last three years, regardless.’

Azelio hesitated. ‘So why would they even try to stop us? They know the disruption is going to happen – so unless all this clandestine activity is irrelevant and a meteor is going to be responsible, this is a battle they know they can’t win.’

‘They’re not going to give up, any more than we are,’ Agata replied. ‘Do you see any sign in what we’ve heard from the mountain that the Council have resigned themselves to a state of fatalistic powerlessness?’

‘No,’ Azelio conceded.

‘Think of it as a kind of equilibrium,’ Tarquinia suggested. ‘I’m sure there are limits to how far the Council would go to try to stop the inevitable, but there must be limits, too, on how supine they’ll become: they’re not going to shut down the system themselves, or release all the anti-messagers and let them go on a rampage with mallets. They’ve taken a stance and they’re going to pursue it as far as they can. When this is over they’ll be looking for a political advantage in the details of the fight, as much as in the outcome.’