‘No one knows,’ Agata confessed. ‘In the years after wave mechanics was developed, there was a big debate about whether it was truly random, or whether there was some hidden structure beneath the randomness where all the results were certain. For a while, one group of physicists claimed to have proved that there couldn’t be a deeper level. Their proof looked quite persuasive – until Leonia showed that it was tacitly assuming that information could never flow back in time.’
‘Ah, the strange things people once believed,’ Azelio observed dryly.
Agata said, ‘No one believed it, even then, but they found it easier than we do to forget that it wasn’t true.’
Azelio lifted a diagram from the stack. ‘So what can this tell us about the disruption?’
‘Nothing.’ Agata wasn’t sure how he’d ended up clutching at the diagram calculus as an answer to their plight, but if she’d been careless in describing her work to him in the past then what she owed him now was as much clarity as she could muster. ‘Just because we don’t know the cause of the disruption, that doesn’t mean that every cause we can imagine will coexist. If you want history to unfold a certain way, forget about wave mechanics. What matters now are the usual things: who we are, what we do, and a certain amount of dumb luck.’
Azelio put the diagram down. ‘So if there’s a meteor coming, how do I stop it? Or avoid it?’
‘You can’t,’ Agata replied. This was the sticking point they always reached. ‘Not if the disruption is the proof that it hits us.’
‘Then what difference does it make “who we are” and “what we do”?’ Azelio asked bitterly. ‘If I go through the motions of enacting something more benign . . . how will that help? If there’s a murderer trying to kill your family, you don’t protect them by moving your own tympanum to match the threats being shouted through the door. Or do you really believe in safety through reverse ventriloquism?’
Agata wrapped her arms around her head in frustration. ‘We don’t know that there’s a murderer at the door! We don’t know that there’s a meteor on its way!’
‘So we search the sky,’ Azelio pleaded. ‘We make better detectors. We try to peek through a crack in the door.’
‘If we were going to find anything,’ she said, ‘we’d know that already. If we were going to spot a meteor and avoid it, then that’s what the messages would be telling us.’
Azelio said, ‘I can’t accept that.’
Agata dropped her arms. ‘I know.’ There was nothing she could say that would change his mind, and nothing she could do that would bring him any comfort.
‘We should fly over the antipode,’ Tarquinia joked. ‘Do a little reconnaissance.’
‘Fly low enough and you could occult all the channels at once,’ Ramiro suggested. ‘Maybe there’s a disruption earlier than everyone claimed, and all the later messages are just fakes.’
Agata said, ‘I’d rather not test the defences.’
Through the window, the mountain cast a sharp silhouette against the star trails. It had been visible through external cameras for days, but they’d had to wait until they cut the main engines to rotate the Surveyor around for a naked-eye view.
‘Ah, look at that!’ Tarquinia gestured at her console, which was displaying a feed from the telescope. ‘I think we’ve found a Councillor at home.’ The grey hull that the instrument had picked up was lurking in the void, far from the Peerless. It wasn’t quite identical to the Surveyor, but the overall design was eerily similar. Agata wasn’t shocked that anyone with the means to do so had withdrawn to a safe distance from the mountain, but it was dismaying to see that Ramiro’s guess had been right: even Verano had lost his powers of originality.
Azelio joined them, taking his seat and murmuring greetings. As subdued as he was, he seemed ready to make an effort to get through the formalities to come. Agata wished she could have assuaged his fears, but from a coldly pragmatic position she couldn’t help thinking that his forlorn demeanour might serve as useful camouflage. No one observing the whole crew together could imagine them possessing even the shyest hope of influencing the fate of the Peerless.
Tarquinia brought the Surveyor spiralling in towards the docking point, and as the mountain finally hid the stars Agata felt a rush of pure joy. She wanted to burrow deep into these old, familiar rocks again, to drift along the core of an ancient stairwell, to gaze across a field of wheat that stretched beyond the ceiling’s horizon. She glanced over at Azelio and he met her gaze with a look of shared relief, the sheer force of belonging overpowering his anxiety. How could they not feel safe here?
Tarquinia opened the link to the Peerless, and Verano appeared on her console. ‘We’ve brought your creation back in one piece,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you always knew we would.’
‘From the start,’ Verano replied. ‘No messages required.’
Agata knew she was off-camera herself, but when Ramiro’s slight movements caught her attention she didn’t dare turn to look at him directly. If she didn’t see him start up the software that set the flock of occulters loose – before erasing itself from the communications system – the act wouldn’t linger in her mind as they faced the scrutiny of the welcoming party. There was no predicting the full array of sensors and cameras aimed at them as they approached, but Tarquinia had lit up a docking beacon at the front of the Surveyor. As the occulters moved away from the literal blind spot directly behind the hull, the glare should be enough to allow the tiny devices to reach the slopes undetected.
Agata watched with a glorious ache in her chest as Tarquinia manoeuvred the Surveyor into the cradle of ropes that hung below the airlock. When the air jets cut out they were weightless for a flicker, then the net was holding them, swaying slightly.
She turned to Azelio. ‘Can I tie my belt to yours when we go up?’ she joked. ‘You’re the only one of us who’s heard clear testimony of their safe arrival.’
Azelio buzzed. ‘You’re not counting Greta and Ramiro?’
Ramiro said, ‘I’m not counting Greta and Ramiro. I could fall into the void right now, and she would still have gloated about how miserable I was going to look at the reunion.’
They donned their helmets and attached the air tanks to their cooling bags. As they disembarked, the interior would remain pressurised for the sake of Azelio’s plants.
‘Agata’s first,’ Tarquinia decided.
Agata looked around the tilted cabin, wondering how much ill-behaved dust they’d brought back from the time-reversed world. She was wearing a pouch full of papers under her bag, and all her formal notes had been transmitted to Lila long ago, but she hesitated, afraid that she might have left something important in her cabin that the decommissioning team would discard as waste. But she’d returned all of Azelio’s drawings to him, and her photograph of Medoro was with her, next to her skin.
She clambered up the guide rope and entered the airlock. When she closed the door behind her and started pumping down the pressure, she felt her hands shaking; for all her nostalgia, she wasn’t sure that she was ready to face a whole crowd of non-crew-mates in the flesh.
She steadied herself and opened the outer door. The rope ladder was dangling against the hull; when she gazed straight up she could see the lights of Verano’s workshop through the portal above. She resisted an urge to peer out across the slopes; if she had any chance of discerning one of the occulters clinging to the rock from this distance, the whole scheme really was doomed.