9

Tarquinia reached across and squeezed Ramiro’s shoulder. Her hand made contact roughly, imperfectly controlled in the near weightlessness, but that only gave the gesture more force.

“Good luck,” she whispered. Ramiro kept his rear gaze on her as he dragged himself away along the guide rope toward the stage.

The meeting room was full, and brightly lit by the beams from a dozen coherers bounced diffusely off the ceiling. People were still talking among themselves as Ramiro approached the front of the stage and reached over to start the timer. He waited a pause or two for the echoing ping to grab their attention, but he knew it would only waste time if he held out for complete silence.

“My job,” he began, “is to automate things. There are many tasks where we already know exactly what we want to achieve, but find it too arduous to supervise the execution of our plans in detail. If I do my job well, though, the results are easy to foresee: you tell me what you want some machine to do for the next five stints, and I make that happen.

“So I’m familiar with the advantages of control and predictability, and I can understand why the Council aspires to bring those qualities to as many aspects of the running of the Peerless as possible. If we could receive a message from the future assuring us that the mountain had reached the home world safely, and this message was accompanied by a list of the actions we’d need to take—or in the sender’s view, had already taken—to sidestep a host of potential calamities, then I’d have no complaint about that at all.”

Ramiro let himself scan a few faces in the audience; so far, he didn’t seem to have offended anyone.

“The problem,” he continued, “is that if we build the proposed system, I don’t believe it would be possible to limit it to a single, clear cut purpose like that. Whatever the Council decrees for now, they can’t control the way the facility would be used in the future. In practice, what will confront us is the photonic equivalent of a vast storehouse of documents whose content will have been determined by other people, some of them very remote from us in time. Over the generations, certain documents will have been removed—another process that will be out of our hands—while others are kept and passed down to us. If we hope to reap any benefit from whatever remains, we’ll have no choice but to appoint people to read and assess everything we receive. But people can’t forget things on command, and even people sworn to secrecy can’t ignore what they know. With all those messages and all those readers, information will spill out and reach the public, whether they want it or not.

“Stories of distant calamities averted might bring us courage and optimism, but how would we respond to details of our own personal fates? Some bad news might well come through to us that serves no useful purpose at all: who would want to hear of an early death that no warning could prevent? And some good news would surely lose its lustre if revealed at the wrong time: look back on all the joyful surprises in your own lives, and ask yourselves if you really would have wished to be confronted with a list of them, years in advance. And even if you succeeded in remaining ignorant, how would you feel if your friends and rivals knew your future history? People might be compelled to seek as much news about themselves as possible—in spite of their original wishes—simply to prevent others—”

The timer rang. Ramiro was startled; his pacing must have been slower than when he’d rehearsed with Tarquinia the night before. He flipped the lever and dragged himself back toward the rear of the stage. He’d barely registered Agata’s presence before, but now he forced himself to stop fretting about his poor timing and focus all his attention on her.

“Ramiro has done me the favor of acknowledging the enormous benefits of this scheme,” Agata began. “But he’s been rather vague about the details, so let me try to make the possibilities more concrete. Imagine receiving a message from the future telling us that one of the medicinal gardens had become infested with a species of goldenrod blight that we’d never encountered before. Unwelcome news, of course, and we’d be powerless to prevent it—but now imagine that message going on to explain that, thanks to this early warning, we would isolate all the other gardens in time to keep them safe.

“I’m not saying that this system would be a panacea, but we could all make a list of dozens of tragic events where a warning would make all the difference. Imagine encountering some uncharted rock from the home cluster, crossing our path at infinite speed and wiping out a fire-watch platform—but missing the Peerless itself, thanks to a course correction that only a message from the future could have guided. Indeed, we could surround the mountain with expendable objects, purely for the sake of rendering near misses visible—just as that one blighted garden allowed us to save the rest.”

Ramiro thought it more likely that consistency would be achieved by the rock simply destroying the Peerless, leaving no one to report on the event. But since he doubted that either kind of collision would actually occur, if he quibbled about it he’d just sound desperate.

Agata had moved on. “All this talk about information bursting from the system and spilling down the corridors is fanciful. Has Ramiro never heard of encryption? If it’s good enough to protect our privacy now, why should we expect it suddenly to fail us? If there are messages from our future selves, we’ll be free to use all the protocols we use now when exchanging confidences with friends to ensure that no one but our present selves can read them—and of course, we’ll also be free to delete these messages unread if we choose to, strange as that would be. With the same methods, we can guarantee the privacy and authenticity of messages from our descendants, or indeed from anyone in the future who chooses to address us. So there’ll be no swarm of prying clerks sifting through our private mail, gossiping about us to their friends. Matters of public interest will be sent in plain text, but everything else will be person-to-person.

“For those rare cases where some future informant and present day recipient might act together out of spite to violate your wish not to be informed of certain events, we can discourage that with appropriate punishments. Nobody is claiming that this technology will transform us into a flawless society, but people have survived over the ages without any perfect, pre-emptive cure for hurtful gossip or malicious slander. Words can damage people, I acknowledge that, but it’s nothing new. We’ll find the right balance in our laws to protect against the worst kinds of harm, just as we’ve done in the past.”

Agata had been stealing glances at the timer with her rear gaze and adjusting her pace. Now she waited a moment for it to start ringing, then reached down to silence it.

Ramiro took her place. “Agata has expressed a touching faith in the power of the law and technology to protect us from unwanted personal revelations,” he said. “I don’t believe that her faith is warranted, but even if it were that wouldn’t be enough to make this system benign.

“As I speak, many of you—I hope—are still struggling to decide how you’ll vote on this question. And when the result is declared, that will surely be a public matter. The announcement won’t be an invasion of anyone’s privacy, an act of libel, or anything else that could fairly or sensibly be punished. And yet if you’d known the result in advance, wouldn’t you feel that your own personal decision-making process had been altered? Of course you’d still be free to vote in accordance with your wishes, but the whole sequence of contesting thoughts—all the private debates inside your own skull that led you to that final action—would be playing out in a very different context.”

Ramiro checked the timer; he was still less than halfway through his quota, but he was not going to let himself get cut off again.

“Knowing even the most mundane facts from the public record will crush our political lives, flattening our inner dialogues into a choice between impotent rage and apathetic conformity. Of course we’re accustomed to being helpless after the fact to reverse a vote that goes against us, but remember: the results of elections and referenda that we know in advance will not be guaranteed to be the same as they would have been in the absence of foreknowledge. We won’t be hearing about a future that would have happened regardless—as every proponent of this system will affirm, because if that were true it could never yield any benefits. Rather, we’ll be reshaping the whole process by which we make decisions—at the political level without a doubt, but I believe that the same kind of distortion will afflict every aspect of our lives.”

Ramiro waited for the satisfying punctuation of the bell, but then he realized that he’d rushed through his final words too quickly and left himself with time to fill. “For example,” he extemporised, “decisions about births and child-rearing are as difficult as any we face, but it won’t take prying clerks to disclose our final choices to us once we hear from a child whose very existence had been in doubt.” He caught a look of bafflement on one woman’s face, and an expression of outright hostility on another’s. “It’s not that a message like that need be unwelcome, but if we flatten the deliberation process, then just as with the vote—”

The timer interrupted him. Ramiro punched it then slunk backward.

Agata took center stage, pausing just long enough to let Ramiro’s awkwardness linger and become fixed in everyone’s minds. “If you don’t want to read the result of some future referendum, I’m sure you won’t have to,” she declared. “And if mere rumors of the result prove to be too hard to avoid, they could always be camouflaged with competing rumors. People could choose to learn the true result in advance from some trusted informant if they wished, but those who didn’t would end up hearing a range of false claims as well, with no way to distinguish between them.”

Ramiro waited for someone in the audience to ridicule this inane proposal, but they let it pass without complaint. Maybe they all liked the idea of taking advantage of their idealistic neighbors, who’d be wrapped in shrouds of scrupulously balanced, government-supplied misinformation.

“This system could vastly improve our safety,” Agata contended, “as Ramiro and everyone else acknowledges. We can deal with the privacy issues, and the political ones: your vote will always be your own to cast, and you’ll have the choice of knowing the outcome in advance or not, as you wish. But you don’t need to take my word for any of this. The present vote is merely for a year’s trial in which we can discover what the real problems are—and if, in the end, you find that they outweigh the advantages you’ll be free to change your mind and vote to have the system dismantled.

“If we look beyond Ramiro’s fear that in this maze of information we might inadvertently stumble on some unwelcome facts about our lives—most of which would be no more harmful to us than a friend’s reminiscence about a youthful misadventure that we’d prefer to forget—we’ll see something far less petty and mundane. Many of us have heirlooms from the day of the launch: diaries, or letters from mothers to their children, or even just stories passed down unwritten. In this mountain of photonic documents from the future we could find our descendants’ stories of the reunion. Then we’ll all have a chance to be part of the Peerless’s return, in a way that we never imagined before.”

As the timer sounded, the audience cheered—some sections more loudly than others, but it was the first real response they’d offered all evening.

Agata paused to acknowledge the applause then exited gracefully. Ramiro was stung. How could his case not be obvious to everyone? What hadn’t he said that would have made it clearer?

Tarquinia approached and drew him back into the moss-lit side room. “You did a good job,” she said.

“They loved her,” Ramiro replied. He could barely make out Tarquinia’s face as his eyes adjusted from the stage lights. “Didn’t you hear?”

“It was the end of the debate, the applause was for both of you.”

She sounded as if she almost believed that, but Ramiro remained despondent. “What if I’ve lost it for us?”

Tarquinia hummed irritably. “You didn’t do as badly as you think. And for anyone you didn’t convince, there are five more debates to come!”

“But if people here have made up their minds they won’t want to hear it all rehashed.”

“You put a strong case,” Tarquinia insisted. “You stumbled with the timing, that’s all.”

Ramiro could tell that she was beginning to find his pessimism wearisome. “Thanks for your help,” he said. “I couldn’t have faced that crowd without it.”

“I couldn’t have faced that crowd at all,” Tarquinia replied. “But this way I can still tell my children that I played a part.”

“A part in what, though?” Ramiro joked. “Victory or farce?”

Tarquinia said, “Let’s not rule anything out. Last time we worked together, we managed both at once.”