7

Have you lost your mind?” Ramiro had come to the interview with high hopes, but within a few lapses his mood had been transformed from anticipation to bemusement to horror. “That’s the most deranged thing you’ve ever asked me to do—which is not an easy contest to win.”

Greta motioned with her hand on her tympanum, imploring him to keep his voice down.

Ramiro said, “If you’re going to keep raising this subject with people, you might want to think about soundproofing your office.”

He began drawing himself out of the harness facing her desk. “Where are you going?” Greta asked anxiously.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to tell anyone. Though next time you ask me to keep something between us, I’ll take that as a sign that I should turn and run. And when you put this to a referendum, I promise you I’ll be campaigning very noisily—” Ramiro caught a flicker of discomfort on her face. “There is going to be a vote, before you actually build this?”

“That’s up to the Council,” Greta replied. “But there’s not much point voting on a system whose feasibility is entirely hypothetical.”

Ramiro slipped back into the harness. “So you were thinking of building it first? And then what? Hope you can learn something in advance that will guarantee the outcome of the vote? But how would that work? What if the message from next year’s Council is simply that whatever they tried, failed?”

Greta said stiffly, “It’s not about vote rigging. It’s about security. You of all people should appreciate that.”

“Me of all people?” Ramiro stared back at her in disgust. “If we’re being frank, I blame you for the farce with the gnat just as much as I blame the migrationists.” As the words emerged he wondered if he was letting his anger get the better of him, but Greta showed no sign that she was wounded, let alone contrite.

“I don’t understand why you’re so vehemently against this,” she said. “You should take a few days to think it over.”

Ramiro buzzed. “What’s funny is that you’ve been planning this for a year—but you still can’t see that your last remark should answer the preceding question.”

Greta spent a pause or two struggling to parse that, but it seemed to be beyond her. Ramiro said, “You’re inviting me to take my time to ponder all the pros and cons before reaching a decision—but the answer you want from me would eradicate my ability ever to go through the same process again.”

“That’s nonsense,” Greta said amiably. “No one’s asking you to surrender your free will.”

“And that’s not how I’d put it, myself,” Ramiro replied. “But I’m not going to start debating terminology. The simple fact is that anyone who knows their own actions in advance will be living a different kind of life than someone who doesn’t.”

“What makes you think that you’d be forced to know anything about your own actions? The Council will use this facility for planning and security purposes. Any other applications will be carefully controlled—and exposure to information is hardly going to be compulsory.”

Ramiro said, “That’s naïve: information would spread through third parties. You could never come close to promising me that I wouldn’t end up hearing things I didn’t want to hear.”

“What if we’d known the rogue gnat’s trajectory in advance?” Greta demanded. “Are you honestly telling me that it wouldn’t have been worth it?”

Ramiro wasn’t going to let her use the rogue to bludgeon him into submission. Perfect knowledge of the future might have spared him the dangerous encounter, but the whole mountain shouldn’t have to pay the price for the way the threat had been mishandled from the start. “I’m sorry I blamed you for that débâcle” he said sarcastically. “The fault was mine: I should have just let the gnat hit the Object.”

He struggled out of the harness.

“Are you going to keep your word?” Greta asked. “I knew I was taking a risk, but I thought I could trust you.”

Ramiro freed himself and clung to the guide rope leading to the doorway. If he said the wrong thing, could she have him imprisoned until the messaging system was complete? They’d set a precedent with the migrationists, and if he vanished from sight he wasn’t sure that anyone would come looking for him.

“I’ll keep my word,” he said. “I don’t break promises.” He contemplated adding that he trusted the Council to ensure that the matter was put to a vote, but even Greta was likely to pick up the sarcasm.

Outside the office Ramiro still felt rattled by the confrontation, but as he set off down the corridor he began to regain his composure. It was never exactly prudent to hurl abuse at potential employers, but Greta had a thick skin and he doubted he’d be thrown in prison for refusing a job. So long as he kept quiet about the offer he’d be left alone.

He reached an intersection and turned into a busy corridor. People strode by, purposeful, intent on their various plans, shaping the minutiae of the unfolding morning. But every child knew that, to the ancestors, the sequence of events that a traveler perceived as evolving over time was no different from the fixed pattern in a tapestry. From the right perspective, each life was a completed picture from birth to death, there to be taken in at a glance.

Every child was also taught that this incontestable fact did nothing to rob them of their freedom. The laws of physics bound people’s choices to their actions, as firmly as they bound a tumbling rock’s positions from moment to moment into a single, coherent history. Though no one ruled unchallenged over their own flesh—no one could be immune to coercion or injury, no woman to spontaneous division—the exceptions only made it clearer that most acts were acts of will. An omniscient observer who could read the fine details of the tapestry would see that woven into the pattern: deliberation beside resolve, resolve beside deed. Each choice would have its own complex antecedents, inside the body and beyond it—but who would wish to sit in isolation, churning out decisions that came from nowhere?

Ramiro had long ago reconciled himself to this picture of time and choice, and though he couldn’t claim to perceive his own life in these terms from day to day, he felt no disquiet at all at the prospect of the timeless point of view growing more compelling.

But Greta’s system would do far more than confront the travelers with a stark confirmation of abstract principles that most of them already acknowledged. The one thing a message from the future couldn’t tell a person was what they would have decided in the absence of that message—it would not be as if the ordinary deliberation really had taken place elsewhere, and was now being delivered to them as a kind of executive summary to spare them from needlessly repeating the effort. The old process wouldn’t merely be rendered more efficient, so it reached the same endpoint with less uncertainty or stress. The endpoint itself could be completely different.

And even if it wasn’t, was that all that mattered? Ramiro stopped walking and moved to the side of the corridor so he wasn’t blocking the guide rope. If he heard from the future that he’d raised Rosita’s child, then in the end he would choose to make that happen. If he heard that he hadn’t, he would choose differently. He couldn’t claim that this would turn him into some kind of hollow puppet, when both outcomes were already possible in the ordinary course of events.

But the nature of the decision would still be utterly different if he reached it with foreknowledge. All that the need for consistency could impose was the requirement that he actually went along with the choice—however reluctantly, resignedly or apathetically he closed the loop. The revelation wouldn’t need to ring true, or fill him with joy, or cast any light on the dilemma it resolved. He merely had to be capable of acceding to it—of muttering “Yeah, that’ll do.”

He couldn’t live like that—and he couldn’t stand by and let the Council force it on everyone else for the next six generations. Greta’s promise that the information would be contained was just wishful thinking; that would certainly make the technology more useful to its owners, but Ramiro had no doubt that the content of the messages would still leak out.

And the sooner he broke his own promise, the safer he’d be. He called out to a woman approaching on his left, “Excuse me!”

She stopped. “Yes?”

“My name’s Ramiro, I’m an automation engineer.”

The woman looked puzzled, but she introduced herself. “I’m Livia, I’m a shedding technician. Didn’t you—?”

“Lose an exploding leg near the Station? Yes, I’m that idiot.”

Livia paused expectantly. Famous or not, his claim on her time was strictly limited.

Ramiro said, “I’ve just heard that the Council is planning a new messaging system; they invited me to work on it, but I declined. If they build it, it will affect all of us, so if you can spare a couple of lapses I’d like to tell you about it.”

By the time he was halfway through his account there were six more people listening. Ramiro confined his message to the science itself; people could ponder the implications at their leisure, and if he started philosophizing that would only encourage disputatious onlookers.

When he’d finished, Livia thanked him and walked away, but some of the others gathered nearby in heated discussion. Ramiro left them to it; it was more important to keep spreading the word than to try to influence one small debate. He raised a schematic on his chest and spread his arms. “New messaging system! Hear all about it!”

A dozen people walked past him, bemused or embarrassed, but then a woman stopped. “What new system?”

“The one that uses light from the orthogonal cluster to bring information from the future.”

“You’re joking?”

Ramiro said, “Hear me out, then decide for yourself.”

As he started speaking, more people gathered, while the remnants of his last audience dispersed. In a chime or two there’d be no hope at all of tracking down everyone who knew about the scheme, let alone locking them up.