13

We can keep you locked up for as long as we like,” Maddalena told Ramiro. “You could spend the rest of your life in that cell—with no visitors, no work, no diversions. Nothing at all to occupy your mind.”

“Is that right?” Ramiro replied. “Yalda would be proud of you.” He glanced around the interrogation room, wondering if Greta would ever join them again. She’d sat in on the first few sessions, and as coldly as she’d treated him the presence of even one familiar face had been enough to make him feel less isolated. But then, perhaps that was why she’d stopped coming.

“Seven deaths on your hands, and you compare yourself to Yalda?”

“Actually, it was you I was comparing to Yalda.” Ramiro drew back from the table and allowed a trace of his anger to show. “I mourn those deaths, and I condemn the perpetrators—but I don’t know who they are and I certainly didn’t help them.”

“If you don’t know who they are, how can you know you didn’t help them?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Ramiro retorted. “Maybe you gave directions to one of the bombers three days before the blast. Maybe you shared your lunch with one of them at school, when someone stole their loaves.”

Maddalena said, “Is this funny to you?”

“Seven people dead isn’t funny at all. But if you want your attempts to do something about it taken seriously, you’re going to have to earn that.”

“Do you deny that you were giving technical advice to the anti-messager groups?”

“Not at all,” Ramiro replied. “I helped them make their meetings public—sparing you from any need to go to the trouble of listening in on them covertly. You can still hear every word we said. No one was discussing bombs.”

“And in the private meetings?” Maddalena asked.

“You tell me. If there were private meetings, I wasn’t invited, so that’s when the whole spying thing would have helped.”

Maddalena reiterated his defining characteristics in her eyes. “You violated an undertaking not to disclose the plans for the messaging system. You campaigned against it in the referendum. You used your expertise to help everyone opposed to the system—”

Ramiro said, “Apparently not everyone.”

“You expect me to believe that with all those key roles in the movement, you knew nothing about the preparations for the bombing?”

“I made it very clear to the people I worked with that I wasn’t interested in violence. That might not have been the best way to earn the confidence of any fanatics among them, but strangely enough it seemed like a perfectly ethical approach at the time.”

Maddalena paused, staring past him at the bare wall, possibly consulting some third party through her corset. There were no clocks in the room, and Ramiro had stopped trying to gauge the length of these sessions. All he could do was keep answering the questions one by one, refusing to be cowed and refusing to start fabricating the kind of replies that might satisfy his interrogator.

“You must have been frustrated with the way the strike was going,” Maddalena suggested.

Ramiro said, “Of course I was frustrated. I wished more people had joined in. I wished it had had a greater impact.”

“So why would you continue with such an ineffectual strategy?”

“No one had any better ideas.”

“Apparently someone did,” Maddalena replied.

Ramiro hummed wearily. “Where is this getting you? Is your boss listening in and giving you points for literal-mindedness? No one who spoke to me proposed a better strategy. If you’re going to make me talk for three or four bells at a time, you’ll have to forgive me if some of my statements are made on the understanding that you haven’t ignored everything else I’ve said.”

“So who was the most frustrated?” Maddalena pressed him. “Even if they didn’t talk about their plans, you must have picked up on their mood.”

“We were all frustrated. If you want to make a comparative assessment, go and look at the recordings yourself.”

“People knew when they were on camera,” Maddalena pointed out. “But you were among them when they were less guarded.”

Ramiro couldn’t fault her logic there. He slumped back in his harness, wondering if he was punishing himself for nothing. It was possible that he’d spent time with the bombers without knowing it, and it wasn’t absurd to think that they’d let something slip—some remark that betrayed the degree of their impatience. He wanted the killers caught and punished. If he could give the authorities a genuine clue to their identities, he’d be proud of that.

Off camera, who had ridiculed the strike most vehemently? Placida? Lena? It was hard to put one above the other, but maybe they’d conceived of the bombing together. No doubt they were both already in custody, but with Ramiro’s testimony against them they might buckle and confess.

Maddalena was watching him expectantly. Ramiro felt a cold horror spreading through his gut at the thought of what he’d almost done. The women’s moaning about the strike wasn’t proof of anything, but he couldn’t trust his jailers to accord the observation as little weight as it deserved. Anything he said, however cautiously phrased, could damage two innocent people’s lives irreparably.

“Analyze the bomb site,” he said. “Find out where the chemicals came from. I want these murderers caught as much as anyone, but I’m not a mind reader.”

Ramiro woke in the blackness of his cell and shifted on his sand bed. With the walls around him sterilized by the harsh lights of the day cycle, at night there was no trace of moss, leaving a perfect darkness that seemed to stretch out in all directions.

If he’d kept his promise to Greta, would those seven instrument builders be alive now? And if the Council had been able to keep the messaging system secret, would its impact on ordinary people’s lives have ended up being less intrusive? Maybe there would have been a violent backlash when word of its existence finally leaked out—or maybe the foreknowledge the system granted would have been enough to prevent that.

But he’d made his choice, and now he had to take some share of responsibility for the way things had unfolded. All his feelings of shame and sadness were just useless self-indulgence, though, if he did nothing more than stare into the past and wish that everything could have been different.

The only question now was: where did this end? Ramiro had had no news from outside since his arrest, but he suspected that the strike had been called off, as a gesture of respect to the grieving relatives. That would be the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t resolve anything. So long as the messaging system was still being built, almost half the population would remain disaffected—and the change being forced on them wasn’t something they could learn to live with. It made no difference how he felt, himself; he could renounce the killers as loudly as he liked, he could give up the fight and embrace his enemies. There would never be peace in the mountain again.

And was that it? The situation was unsalvageable?

He reached out for a rope and raised his torso off the bed, the tarpaulin crinkling around him. There would never be a consensus, but that didn’t mean there had to be violence. He was never going to be reconciled with Corrado, but so long as no one locked them in the same room together they weren’t going to kill each other.

What if they partitioned the Peerless and let the messagers and anti-messagers live apart—dividing the resources of the mountain in proportion to the votes? Those who chose to live without the system need never cross paths with those who used it.

The trouble was, there’d be people on both sides who wouldn’t be satisfied with their share of living space. The messagers might find ways to use their foreknowledge to manipulate their neighbors—and even if they didn’t, the possibility would be enough to drive the kind of fanatics who’d bombed the camera workshop to keep on trying to destroy the whole system.

Ramiro looked out across the darkness. Maps and treaties would never be enough. Locked doors and solid stone walls couldn’t separate the two groups so completely as to end their mutual fear and suspicion.

The only cure was distance.

* * *

“You want me to set you free—and then give you your own gnat?” Greta was incredulous. When word had reached her that Ramiro had a proposal that he would only put to her in person, she must have envisioned a deal in which he testified against a former comrade or two in exchange for a lighter punishment. “How could you imagine anyone agreeing to that?”

Ramiro said, “If you want to get rid of this problem, you need to get rid of the dissenters. But you can’t expect people to leave the Peerless behind until they know that they can survive somewhere else. I’m willing to travel to the nearest substantial orthogonal body and find out if it can be made habitable.”

A flicker of amusement crossed Greta’s face. “The nearest substantial body is almost certainly the Object. Are you going to try to sell people on the idea that they were inside that rock, unnoticed, living their lives backward—while the last three generations of their ancestors were coming and going, taking samples from the surface?”

Ramiro hadn’t thought of the Object. But as satisfying as it would be to set foot on the very rock that had once threatened to annihilate him, the prospect of burrowing into it didn’t sound much like liberation, even without the bizarre twist of having to stay hidden from all the earlier visitors. “I meant something large enough to hold on to an atmosphere, so people could live on the surface. Something on the outskirts of the orthogonal cluster. I don’t have access to the astronomers’ catalogs, but there must be something planet-sized within reach.”

“Within reach?” Greta was doubtful; she paused to make use of her corset. “The nearest orthogonal planet would entail a round trip of a dozen years.”

Ramiro had hoped for something closer, but he persisted. “A dozen for the passengers,” he stressed. “But still only four years for you. We could make it even less if it really mattered; I’m sure I could put up with the higher acceleration. But we’ll need to talk to the experts as to whether the cooling system would allow that.”

Greta said, “‘We’? You might be getting a bit ahead of yourself.”

Ramiro looked down at the hardstone fetter piercing the side of his abdomen. In the room’s low gravity, he hardly noticed it—unless he moved without thinking and the chain that joined it to the wall became taut. “How else should I talk, when I know that I have no chance of doing this without you? I think we’d still make a good team.”

“Oh, I’m getting all nostalgic now,” Greta replied sardonically. “Let’s reminisce about the time you lied to my face and betrayed me.”

“You never used to take things personally,” Ramiro complained. “All the time we worked together on the turnaround, did I ever make a fuss when you took all the credit with the Council? We both treated each other pretty shabbily, but we still managed to solve every problem that was thrown at us.”

Greta was unmoved. “Try to be objective. You’re asking me to give a gnat to an automator whose greatest claim to fame will remind anyone who might have forgotten that automating a gnat is just what you need to turn it into a weapon.”

“That’s a very negative way of looking at it.” Ramiro thought for a moment. “The biggest problem with the rogue gnat was that it took us by surprise. We can arrange things so that this craft has no way of doing that. And you can always send an observer from the messagers’ side to keep me honest—if you can find any volunteers for the job.”

Greta said, “Right now I’m having trouble even thinking of a pilot.”

Ramiro didn’t reply. For all the help Tarquinia had given him with the debate, after the vote she’d refused to get involved with the dissenters. A dozen years away from the mountain would be too painful a sacrifice to ask from anyone with a clear conscience.

“You’d also need an agronomist,” Greta added. “I doubt that even the diehard migrationists would take your word about the prospects for growing a crop.”

“That’s fine with me.” That she’d bothered to make the suggestion at all was a sign that this might not be hopeless—that he might have snagged her mind on the rough edges of his plan.

“Do you really have no idea who the bombers are?” Greta asked.

“None at all.”

“I believe you,” she said, “but I don’t know how to prove it to the Council.”

“Whatever happened to the need to prove people guilty? Half the Peerless voted the same way as I did, but I doubt you’ve even locked up all the strikers.”

Greta pretended that she hadn’t heard his last remark; he wasn’t allowed to know who else had or hadn’t been imprisoned.

“If I put this to the Council,” she said, “they’ll only agree to it if it comes from them. They have to be the peacemakers, reaching out to their enemies for the sake of the greater good.”

“Well, naturally.”

“And they might not even want you on the mission,” she warned him. “What if they go with the idea, but then pick a crew without you?”

Ramiro buzzed. “At worst, I might have to stay in prison for the whole four years that they’re away. Compared to spending twelve in something not much bigger than my cell, I don’t think the disappointment would crush me.”

Greta was puzzled. “And yet you’re willing to do it, if you’re asked.”

Ramiro said, “Who else could make this work politically? If you send Pio, half the mountain will riot. You trashed his reputation as soon as you locked him up over the rogue.”

“And we haven’t trashed yours?”

“Not yet, I hope.”

Greta drew herself out of her harness. “I’ll give this some thought. In the end, all I can do is take it to the Council.” She dragged herself toward the door and tapped for the guard.

“And put it to them the right way,” Ramiro pleaded.

Greta turned to face him. “And what’s the right way?”

Ramiro said, “Forget it. It’s not for me to tell you how to do your job.”

When she’d gone, he closed his eyes and pictured the scene in the Council chamber. What would you say, Greta the fixer would begin, if we could find a way to inspire every trouble-maker in the mountain to march, willingly, into the void, out of our lives forever?