He scooped some soil straight into the hole; like the last delivery, it clung to the roots. In Esilio’s terms, this soil had spent at least a few stints packed tightly around the plant; if he could have seen the action in reverse, it would have involved nothing stranger than a clump of sand finally coming loose.
When he was done, Ramiro stood and turned to face Azelio. ‘So now I have to lure half the travellers here in the name of freedom, then leave them to raise their children in a world where everything they do corrodes their sense of agency?’
Azelio said, ‘That’s putting it too harshly. When we get back, all you can do is give an honest account of your own experience. They’ll have seen life under the messaging system, so they’ll already have a better idea than we had about this kind of thing – and which way of life they’d prefer.’
‘The pro-messagers should come here,’ Ramiro declared bitterly. ‘If they want to know the future, let them know it every step of the way. Leave the mountain to us, and we can go back to living with a single arrow.’
‘That’s a nice idea . . . but good luck organising the eviction.’
They walked back to the Surveyor to fetch two more plants. ‘Can you put up some windbreaks?’ Ramiro suggested. ‘If that last dust storm was typical, it might not have uprooted anything, but I’d bet it would have stripped petals.’
‘I have a few rolls of tight-weave fabric,’ Azelio replied. ‘I didn’t see any stake holes nearby, but I won’t let that stop me.’
Ramiro fell through the light, willing himself to move faster. He reached down to grab hold of his daughter, but as his fingers brushed her limbless form the wind shifted and tore her away.
Tarquinia grabbed his wrists, dragging his gaze back into focus. ‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She drew away from him slowly, gently separating their remaining adhesions.
‘What happened?’ he asked her.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’
‘No.’ He had no children to lose. How many times had he told his idiot body the same beautiful lie? How stupid could it be, that it hadn’t seen through him yet?
He looked past Tarquinia, to the pale grey wall of his cabin. He knew exactly where he was now. The Surveyor was his second prison, and outside it was the third. ‘How will anyone live here?’ he wondered.
‘There’ll be a better place than this for a city,’ Tarquinia promised. ‘No dust storms – just gentle winds to sweep the footprints away.’
‘That’s not enough.’
‘Then you’ll build machines to plant the wheat and harvest it. No one will ever have to touch the soil.’
Ramiro turned to her. ‘Who’ll build these machines?’
‘You will. You and the other settlers.’
‘And where will you be?’
Tarquinia said, ‘I thought you didn’t want to know the future.’
22
Agata pressed the broom down firmly against the floor of her cabin and tried again. ‘How hard can it be?’ she muttered. Dust starts off in a large area. Pressure is applied inwards along successive portions of the border. Dust ends up in a smaller area, ready to be collected and removed. On the face of it, this didn’t even pose a conflict with the local arrow: Esilian dust should have been happy to have its entropy decreased as her own time advanced.
But as she moved the broom across the floor, duly concentrating the dust ahead of it, other dust began to appear behind it – some of it falling from the air, some sliding over the stone to pile up against the bristles. Its entropy was decreasing too, as it accumulated from whatever scattered reaches of the Surveyor in which it had been lurking. The net result was that the stretch of floor she’d swept remained as dusty as ever.
Azelio knocked on her open door. ‘I know you’re busy, but Ramiro’s sleeping and Tarquinia’s on watch—’
‘I’m not busy,’ Agata assured him. ‘Do you want a hand with the measurements?’
‘If you don’t mind.’ Azelio nodded at the broom. ‘Have you found the trick to it?’
‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘Maybe what we need is some kind of covered system of barriers. If we can place it on the floor and then reconfigure it without opening the cover, we ought to able to manipulate the dust inside without any more arriving.’
‘That sounds . . . elaborate.’
Agata put on her corset and tool belt and followed Azelio to the airlock, then waited for him to cycle through. The view through the window showed that the weather was calm, but the Surveyor had become so filthy that Tarquinia now insisted on the protocol, regardless. Agata was beginning to suspect that the only remedy for the dust invasion would be to ascend into the void and flush every room out with clean air – and even that depended on their arrow prevailing and the void not being ready with a conspiracy of pollutants poised to rush in the moment they opened the airlock, in a perfect reversal of the intended purge.
Outside, she caught up with Azelio at the start of the trail. It was Ramiro who’d noticed the regularly spaced indentations in the ground after the last high winds, and decided to fill them with rocks marking the way to each of the four test plots. Agata hadn’t questioned him too closely on the matter, but she suspected that he’d already been contemplating doing something similar. The idea hadn’t come from nowhere, inspired by nothing but the evidence of its own implementation.
‘How are the calculations going?’ Azelio asked her, as they started along the trail.
‘Slowly.’
‘Just as well. If you finish them, what will you do on the journey back?’
‘There’s no risk of that.’ Agata had set aside her efforts to understand the curved vacuum and instead had spent the last two stints attempting to analyse their current situation, using a crude model of a field in which two opposing thermodynamic arrows met. But in the versions that were simple enough to handle, both arrows rapidly decayed away, leading almost immediately to a time-blind equilibrium state. The reality, in which countless slender fingers of opposing time interpenetrated, seemed to depend on details too subtle for her to approximate in any meaningful way.
‘It’s Luisa’s fifth birthday today,’ Azelio announced cheerfully. ‘I’ll show you her drawing for it when we get back.’
‘Happy birthday, Luisa!’ Agata played her coherer’s beam over the grey stones to her left. ‘You never peek, do you? You never riffle through the pile to see what’s coming up?’
Azelio buzzed. ‘Of course not! That would defeat the whole point.’
‘I know. But that wouldn’t be enough to stop me.’
When they reached the first plot the plants were all dormant, their flowers closed. Agata glanced up at the sky; she knew from the positions of the stars that the sun was well above the horizon, but she would have had to forego artificial light for a few lapses to have any chance of picking out the faint disc. ‘I was hoping the petals might synchronise to the Esilian day,’ she said. ‘They give out photons, the sun accepts them: what could be more sensible than that?’
‘Except that eons of evolution has left them with no skill but waiting for an ordinary night, not a time-reversed day.’
‘Maybe the settlers could breed it into them,’ Agata suggested. If detecting the dawn for themselves was too hard, the plants could still be prodded with more conventional signals into following the new cycle. For now, the Esilian sun would be getting its due regardless – from the plants, the ground, and her own skin – but not in any useful way.