He followed Azelio and Agata. When they’d entered their rooms and closed the doors, Ramiro closed his own from the outside.
He stood motionless for a while, trying to judge how quietly he could walk back to the front cabin, trying to think of a gesture he could make that would guarantee that Tarquinia wouldn’t respond to the sight of him with an angry shout. From where he stood he could see her crossing the cabin, moving towards the airlock. She was going out to finish retrieving the tents; she had the lever he’d used in her hand.
As she disappeared from view he cursed silently. Then he started down the passage, red dust tickling his feet. He would follow her out and explain everything, confess to the poisoning, put his plan at her mercy. Maybe she’d treat his desire to create the message as a kind of empty vanity and refuse to be a part of it, lest his deceit undermined the impact of the find. But he couldn’t be a helpless spectator, merely watching the mountain’s history unfold. She’d understand that, surely?
He stood at the entrance to the front cabin. Tarquinia had gone out – but he suddenly remembered that he’d never brought the tent-lever back into the Surveyor. He’d left it by the airlock outside. She’d been carrying something else, something similar in appearance.
He heard Agata humming with pain as the spasms in her gut failed to dislodge the tainted meal. Ramiro retraced his steps and managed to get into his room, with the door emitting no more than a faint squeak while his hapless victim was at her loudest. He squatted by his bed, staring at the floor, trying to understand what was happening.
How could he carve anything into the rock face, if the idea of doing it had only come to him after he’d seen the result? Even the choice of words hadn’t sounded like his own. If he’d only selected them because he’d read them, who would have made the choice? No one. Agata had told him endlessly: a loop could never contain complexity with no antecedent but itself, because the probability would be far too low. There could be no words appearing on rocks for no other reason than the fact that they’d done so.
But long before Agata had dragged the two of them to the blast site, Tarquinia had seen him falling apart. And as each new phenomenon they witnessed on Esilio made the prospect of returning with the settlers more dispiriting, she must have started searching for a way for them to stay on the mountain together – to live out their final years in a place where the dust wouldn’t see them coming, where their graves had not already been dug.
Ramiro pressed his face into his hands and fought to stay silent, afraid that if he let his tympanum stir he’d shout down the walls with some confused, alarming paean to the woman that would convince the others that he’d lost his mind. He couldn’t let any hint of the plan slip out – or even let Tarquinia know that he’d uncovered it. She hadn’t wanted a co-conspirator any more than he had, and they’d both make more believable witnesses if they’d never spoken of what had happened, never made it real in anyone else’s eyes.
He sat by the bed listening for her footsteps, wondering if he could be mistaken. It wouldn’t take long to pull down a tent and bring it inside, and she’d have no reason to return quietly.
Agata hummed in misery, and Azelio called out, trying to console her. But between these exchanges, Ramiro heard nothing but the wind blowing dust across the hull.
24
‘The link’s open!’ Tarquinia shouted.
Agata had woken just moments earlier, and for moments more she lay in a daze, astonished at her prescience. Then it occurred to her that Tarquinia must have repeated the call several times.
She rose from her bed and raced down the passage, sand still clinging to the skin of her back. The rest of the crew were already gathered around the console.
‘. . . all safe and in good health,’ Tarquinia was saying. ‘We landed successfully on Esilio and made an assessment of its potential for settlement; we’ll be sending the technical reports shortly. But as you can imagine, we’re eager for news from the mountain.’
There was a perceptible delay as the ultraviolet pulses crossed the void, then a man’s voice replied: ‘We’ll need to receive your reports first, before the channel is used for personal calls.’
Tarquinia was taken aback. ‘I understand. But can’t you fill us in on what’s been happening?’
‘What do you want to know?’ the man inquired impassively.
‘Is the messaging system working?’ Ramiro interjected.
‘Yes.’
‘How long has it been in use?’ Tarquinia asked.
‘Almost three years.’
Agata leant forward towards the microphone. ‘And how long will it remain in use?’
The signal’s time in transit was fixed; the awkward pause before the reply was as unmistakable as if they’d been speaking face to face. ‘My instructions are to receive your reports and then facilitate personal calls, not to engage in an open-ended dialogue.’
Agata didn’t know what to make of this rebuff. But the exchange would be monitored and recorded; she couldn’t blame the link operator if he didn’t want to break any protocol imposed from above.
Tarquinia said, ‘I’ll queue up the reports now, and resume contact when the transmission’s complete.’
‘Thank you, Surveyor. Audio out.’
‘What a welcome!’ Azelio complained. ‘And it’s not as if we could have caught them unprepared.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they were thrilled by our safe return,’ Ramiro replied. ‘We’re just three years late for the party.’
The console switched to a graphic showing the progress of the data transmissions. Agata squinted in disbelief at the predicted completion time, but caught herself before protesting out loud. In order to make the time lag reasonable at this distance, they needed to use very fast UV. But such high velocities also meant very low frequencies, and hence low bandwidth.
‘Azelio gets the first call,’ Tarquinia decided. ‘Then Agata, Ramiro, myself.’
They all knew better than to argue with the pilot. Agata returned to her room and sat at her desk, skimming through the reports of her work that Lila would be receiving shortly – and then presumably sending back to herself at some time just after the system started operating. As they’d drawn closer to the Peerless, Agata had considered withholding her results from the transmission – hoping that she might yet complete the analysis of the curved vacuum on her own, even if it meant working in isolation in the mountain for another few years. In the end, though, that had seemed petty and mean-spirited. She’d grown tired of struggling on and on without any feedback from her peers. Now she would learn in an instant what the collective effort of the physics community had achieved over the last three years, as they argued over the significance of the diagram calculus – improving it, extending it, or maybe even refuting it entirely. She couldn’t decide whether to be terrified or exhilarated, but even if her methods had been excoriated, torn apart and rebuilt entirely, they could only have been replaced by something better. Whatever the final synthesis was, it would have to be spectacular.
When Tarquinia announced that Azelio’s call was coming through, instead of taking it in his own cabin he invited everyone to join him at the main console.
‘Uncle?’
Agata shivered at the sound of Luisa’s voice, unmistakably older but still not a woman’s. It would have felt less strange if it hadn’t changed at all.