23

As Tarquinia stepped aside Ramiro moved closer and took his turn examining the rock face. He hadn’t doubted his crewmates’ word, but since they’d had no reason to be carrying a camera there’d been room for him to wonder if they might have over-interpreted some random pattern that had formed as the explosion fractured the hillside.

“It does look genuine,” he concluded. “Genuinely artificial, that is; don’t ask for my opinion on the authorship.” After geology, he was going to have to add time-reversed archaeology to the list of disciplines he’d sadly neglected.

“We should leave now,” Agata insisted. “As soon as the Surveyor’s ready.”

Ramiro turned away from the writing. “What about the wheat?”

“The wheat doesn’t matter,” Agata declared. “If there’s nothing left to fight about, there’s no reason for anyone to migrate.”

Tarquinia was skeptical. “You really think the Council’s going to switch off the messaging system on our say-so?”

“What will they need it for?” Agata was beginning to sound exasperated. “This proves that we make it to the reunion! There’s no question of the Peerless being struck by a meteor—or tearing itself apart in a war. How can the Council claim that they need their system for safety and security once we’ve shown them a message that could only be written if we’re safe and secure all the way to the home world?”

“They could argue that the settlers will write it,” Azelio suggested.

“What settlers?” Agata fumed. “How could the settlers write something that would undermine their whole reason for being here?”

“If the Council doesn’t take it seriously, it won’t undermine anything,” Azelio reasoned. Ramiro wasn’t sure if that was circular logic, but as self-serving political rhetoric it did have a horribly plausible ring to it.

“You’ve all lost your minds!” Agata moaned. “If you think this isn’t genuine, tell me what would count as proof of authorship. A message encrypted with a key that we’re supposed to prepare now and then keep secret until we deliver it to the ancestors at the reunion? Even if we found something like that, you could still claim that the key might end up in someone else’s hands along the way.”

Tarquinia said, “It’s not just a question of our own doubts; we have to take a broader view of this. If you and Azelio say the writing was there as soon as the rock was exposed, then I believe you—but all we’ll be able to show the Council is an image taken some time after the fact. That’s not even going to establish the sequence of events.”

“My role here is as a witness for the messagers,” Agata reminded her. “Why would I suddenly change my allegiance and start lying about something like this—just to try to get the system shut down?”

“Twelve years isn’t sudden,” Tarquinia replied. “They might think we corrupted you.”

“Then what’s the point of doing anything?” Agata retorted. “Why test the crops, when we might be lying about that, too?”

Tarquinia tried a more conciliatory tone. “Look, I might be wrong: they might listen to all our testimony and conclude that the message really is from the ancestors. But we can’t take that for granted. We need to stay long enough to assess the new soil. It’s just a few more stints; what harm is there in that?”

Agata looked away; she seemed to be struggling to calm herself. “You’re right,” she said finally. “We came here to see if Esilio was habitable. And you risked your life for this experiment; it would be foolish not to wait for the results.”

“We’ll spend some time imaging the site every way we can,” Tarquinia promised. “We’ll gather as much evidence as possible to put to the Council. Then Azelio can plant his crop—and whatever the outcome, it won’t take away from the significance of the message.”

“That’s true,” Agata agreed.

Hearing the disillusionment in her voice, Ramiro felt a pang of guilt. She’d run all the way to the Surveyor in a state of ecstasy, convinced that she’d just been handed the solution to all of the Peerless’s problems. He couldn’t fault her sincerity, or the generous spirit in which she’d brought him the news. She really had believed that it would spare him from the prospect of dying on this benighted world.

But ever since he’d seen the writing for himself, he’d been unable to stop wondering if the message suited him too well. As far as he could recall, he’d never consciously planned to commit any kind of hoax—exploiting Agata’s longing to commune with the ancestors in the hope that in her innocence she’d sell the lie convincingly to the people back home.

What he didn’t know was exactly what his lack of preparation meant. The words were there, Agata had seen them, nothing could change that now. But with every moment that passed it seemed more likely to him that the ancestors had nothing to do with it, and that he would find a way to write the message himself.

Ramiro winced. “Please don’t do that.”

Tarquinia ignored him and continued to palpate his abdomen. “You definitely have some kind of mass in your gut. Maybe we should think about cutting it out.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. It will pass through me soon enough.”

“Not if the wall of the gut is paralyzed.”

“I think I’ve had something like this before,” Ramiro lied. “When I was a child. It only lasted for a couple of days.”

Tarquinia gazed down at him, puzzled and concerned. “I’d thought we’d passed every influence we had back and forth to each other, long ago. Where does a new disease come from, after six years in isolation?”

“Maybe I caught it from the settlers,” Ramiro joked. “Maybe the first time-reversed influence evolves here, shortly after they arrive.”

“No eating, no work, just rest. Is that clear?”

“Yes, uncle.”

Tarquinia gave him a stern, reappraising stare. “If you’re faking this to get out of helping with the cooling system—”

“Faking a lump in my gut?” he protested. “Seriously, I won’t eat, I promise. Last time I tried it made the pain unbearable.”

“All right.” She squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll be wearing an audio link, so if you need anything just yell.”

“Thank you.”

When she’d gone, Ramiro turned in his sand bed, trying to find a half-comfortable position. The smear of sealing resin he’d spread through the loaf had been tasteless and odorless, but the effects had exceeded his expectations. All the other substances he’d tried in similar doses had either been inert or had caused him to vomit up the meal immediately. So long as his gut did eventually regain the power of peristalsis, he’d have no qualms about sharing this “influence” with Agata: she’d be laid low for a day or two, but the precedent of his own recovery would spare her from too much mental anguish.

All the rest would be down to timing. Azelio would want to watch over Agata, the way she’d cared for him when he’d been injured, and if he’d finished his work with the test crop there’d be no reason for him to return to the blast site.

Tarquinia would be the hardest witness to avoid. Ramiro didn’t want to risk raising her suspicions by trying to manipulate her movements—let alone poisoning her—so he’d have to contrive an innocent-sounding reason to be away from the Surveyor for at least two bells. Either that, or tell her everything.

His gut convulsed; he rearranged himself, curling around the site of the pain, trying to take the pressure off the lump of trapped food. If he was the author of the message, nothing would intervene to prevent him from carving it before the Surveyor departed, but that was no guarantee that his ruse would remain undiscovered. He couldn’t presume that Tarquinia would approve of the deception, but even if she did the mere act of widening his private scheme into a conspiracy could only weaken the chance that the crew would convince their interrogators back on the Peerless. Agata would be the passionate advocate for her own interpretation, while Azelio and Tarquinia would be more skeptical but still able to give honest, credible testimony. Why ruin that by forcing Tarquinia to lie?

Of course Greta would assume that he was behind the whole thing before he’d even spoken a word. But so long as the Council hadn’t abolished the popular vote entirely, it was not beyond hope that the expedition’s claims could sway enough travelers into changing their position. Not even a message in light from the time of the reunion could be authenticated beyond doubt, but if people were willing to give this message in stone any credence at all, it could shift the balance of their anxieties and prompt them to heal the rift the system had created.

The strangest part was that everyone on the mountain would already know what collective decision they’d take. So the moment the Surveyor had reestablished a link with the Peerless—long before the crew had been questioned in person and their individual stories tested and compared—he would discover whether or not the hoax had been in vain.

“Aren’t they beautiful!” Azelio enthused.

“Well, they’re not dead,” Ramiro allowed. After three stints rooted in the debris of the explosion, all twelve plants still displayed a modest selection of bright flowers—which was more than any of the earlier trials had achieved.

“They’re growing,” Azelio assured him. “Every one of them.” He knelt down near the start of the row. “This seedling is half as tall again as it was when I put it in.” He gestured along the progression of plants. “In fact, each one of them has come close to matching the way its neighbor appeared at the start. I know that doesn’t make much of an impression: everything you see now in the first eleven specimens is something you’ve seen before from the second to the twelfth. It’s almost as if you’ve just shifted your gaze slightly. But the figures bear it out: we’ve made the soil fertile.”

“Right.” Ramiro was trying his best to seem pleased, but short of some spectacle of agrarian bounty to summon forth an instinctive response it was hard not to take a purely calculating view.

“You wanted this to fail,” Azelio guessed. “You thought that might put more pressure on the Council?”

“I did,” Ramiro admitted. “Though maybe that was foolish. It might have made things worse.”

“How?”

“If we’d ended up telling them that Esilio was uninhabitable they might have thought that we were lying about everything, just to serve an agenda.” Ramiro paused for a moment to convince himself that he really had managed to rephrase the original version in his head—lying about this, too—before it had escaped from thought into speech. “This way, we’ll still be offering them a choice: they can accept that the system’s redundant now that we know that the reunion will happen, or they can go ahead with the migration now that it’s clear that the settlers needn’t starve. They’re not the kind of people who appreciate being told that all the evidence points the same way.”

Azelio said, “Forget the politics for one chime. Isn’t it something, just to see the plants thriving? We stamped our arrow into the soil and made wheat grow backward in Esilian time!”

“We did.”

Azelio rose to his feet. “At least I’ll be able to tell Luisa that her picture of the wheat-flowers glowing on Esilio came true.” He walked around to the side of the row then took the camera from his tool belt to capture a portrait. Ramiro had seen the girl’s drawing, and the truth was, it made an eerily good match.

“I’ve been thinking of leaving half the plants here,” Azelio added. “I’d take six back for people to study, and let the rest grow and drop their seeds. I know that sounds like some kind of vote for the migration, but it’s not meant that way. I just hate the idea of ripping them all out. And if settlers do end up coming here, there’d be something welcoming about finding a crop already growing—even a token presence like this.”

“Hmm.” Ramiro had no problem with the sentiment, so long as he didn’t end up harvesting the field himself. And if he was being cynical, it could only make the Council’s choice seem even more open if the expedition had left Esilio with an ongoing farm of its own. Short of staying here to tend it in person, he couldn’t have made the false alternative sound more genuine.

“Do you mind if I head back to the Surveyor?” he asked. He’d volunteered to help with the measurements, but Azelio would cope perfectly well on his own. “I’m getting some cramps again; I thought they’d stopped, but…”

Azelio said, “Of course. Will you be all right?”

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

Ramiro clutched his abdomen and moved away slowly, but once he was out of sight he broke into a run. He’d planned the detour carefully, and with the air calm it was easy to navigate by the stars. Stones and sand fled from his feet, and sought them; he’d thought he’d grown used to that, but the speed made it stranger. His gait seemed at once more precarious and more certain; it was as if he were watching a recording of himself performing a difficult balancing act, while knowing for a fact that he hadn’t actually toppled over.

Even by starlight, the probe’s truncated cone stood out sharply from the haphazard shapes of the rocks around it. Ramiro paused to orient himself carefully before squatting down and embracing the thing. Just spending so much time in Esilio’s gravity must have left him stronger than he had been by the standards of the mountain, but on balance the penalty it added now felt like more than enough to wipe out that advantage. He waddled across the valley floor, muttering curses, forcing himself to continue for a count of three gross steps before resting.

No one had come this way since the last of the original test plots had died off, and no one would have reason to do so again. If he could leave the probe unseen a short walk from the Surveyor, it would give him a chance to revisit the blast site while pretending to be retrieving the thing. That retrieval had never been part of the mission plan, but he couldn’t see anyone objecting to his desire to scrutinize the probe’s materials in the aftermath of its peculiar heating. They were all going to need their projects to help pass the time on the long journey back.

As Ramiro hefted the probe again, an amused voice in the back of his head demanded: Why go to so much trouble? If he abandoned the whole frantic scheme right now, what exactly would that change? He’d be able to look Greta in the eye and tell her honestly that he’d had nothing to do with the inscription. The true author of the words would turn out to be a settler playing along as a kind of bitter joke, or a genuine visitor from the home world six generations hence. In either case, how would he be worse off?

His arms were beginning to ache; he lowered the probe to the ground.

What he’d feared the messaging system would impose on him was an endless plateau of least resistance: every decision he learned that he would make would strike him as acceptable—never entirely out of character, never deeply morally repugnant—but it would still be less his own than if he’d been left to ruminate on the matter without the deadening intervention of foreknowledge.

To feel alive, he needed to feel himself struggling moment by moment to shape his own history. It was not enough to look down on events from above like a biologist watching a worm in a maze, content to note that this creature’s actions had never actually gone against its wishes. He desperately wanted to see the messaging system abandoned—by whatever means it took, short of war—but it was not all the same to him whether he played a real part in the victory, or whether he was merely an onlooker who hadn’t needed to lift a finger. Why should he take the path of least resistance now, when no one was forcing it on him?

As Ramiro lifted the probe and struggled forward, he felt a rush of joy. He’d made the right choice. Agata had been overcome with bliss by the thought that the ancestors had reached across time to favor her with their beneficence—but now that he’d affirmed that he was the author of his own good fortune, Ramiro felt infinitely more blessed. Let the ancestors worry about their own problems: he didn’t need their help. He could cheat the Council out of their ruinous folly entirely on his own.

Ramiro passed the last of the plants to Azelio, then scrambled through the airlock himself.

“Time to celebrate the harvest!” he said, reflexively brushing dust off his hands, though as much as he removed rose from the floor to replace it.

“Don’t get any ideas!” Azelio positioned himself protectively in front of the repotted wheat.

“Don’t worry; there wouldn’t be enough there to feed a vole.” Ramiro called out to Agata and Tarquinia then headed for the pantry to fetch eight loaves.

The four of them sat together in the front cabin. Tarquinia said, “Before I plot the ascent, I thought I’d take a vote on whether we should do a few more low orbits—to see if we can spot the pre-relics of any future cities.”

“No thanks,” Ramiro replied. “If there are going to be settlers I don’t want to know about it … but settlers would avoid unmaking traces anyway. They’d only raise cities on what looked like untouched ground.”

“They wouldn’t have to be built by settlers from the Peerless,” Azelio pointed out. “If the ancestors come here after the reunion, who knows how long they’ll stay?”

“It can’t hurt to look,” Agata agreed. Ramiro watched as she finished her first loaf, but after raising the second one halfway to her mouth she put it back on the plate. “Does anyone want this?”

“I’m starving,” Azelio said. “Are you sure you’ve had enough?”

“Absolutely.”

Azelio reached over and took it. Ramiro forced himself to look elsewhere as he tried to decide whether or not to intervene. He might get away with a joking confiscation—protesting that he’d carried more of the plants back than Azelio—but that could only end with him eating the loaf himself. Two crew-members falling ill hadn’t been the plan, but did it matter? Ramiro stole a glance at Azelio’s plate and saw that he no longer had a choice.

He pretended to be annoyed by the vote on the orbits and stayed out of the conversation, finishing his meal while Tarquinia was still eating. “I might start bringing in the tents,” he said. He needed a chance to come and go from the storeroom without anyone beside him, in order to get the tools for the inscription outside.

“Relax,” Tarquinia said. “There’s no rush. We can do that later.”

“I want to get a start while it’s calm,” he insisted. “If a storm comes in it could take twice as long.”

In the storeroom he found the lever for extracting the tent stakes, but he couldn’t see where the chisel had gone. With the constant gravity, people had grown careless about slotting every tool into place. He left quickly, not wanting Tarquinia to wonder what could be taking him so long.

Outside, he took the stakes and poles out of the first tent then folded the fabric down into a square. There was no particular reason for taking the tents back with them; it almost came down to mere tidiness, a virtue that made more sense in the confined spaces of the mountain. But if leaving six of the wheat plants growing backward in time felt apt, requiring Esilio to manufacture four tents out of dust seemed more of an affront. One day a successor to Agata might find an equation that spelled out exactly how much inexplicable junk a time-reversed world could be expected to cough up, just to cater to the whims of visitors with a different arrow. If there was a limit, that might even be the ultimate reason why there would never be settlers here: a whole city might have pushed the mathematics of consistency past its choking point. Ramiro found the idea encouraging; nothing helped a plan run more smoothly than having a law of physics on its side.

In the front cabin, the rest of the crew were still sitting and talking, digesting their meals. Ramiro carried the disassembled tent past them into the storeroom and searched again for the chisel, with no luck. It had to be somewhere, but he couldn’t ask the others if they’d seen it.

As he walked back into the cabin he saw Agata beginning to sway on her couch. “That’s not right,” she muttered, pressing a fist to her chest. “It’s like a rock in my gut.”

“Sounds like what I had,” Ramiro ventured. “You should go and lie down. If you rest straight away it might be over faster than it was for me.”

“So you’re still infectious?” Tarquinia eyed him warily. “You’d better stay in your cabin, too.”

“No, I must have spread it earlier,” Ramiro replied. “There’s probably a dormant period after the body takes it in.”

“How do you know that?” Tarquinia demanded irritably. “Have you got some study of the etiology at hand?”

“No, but—”

“I have to get us off this planet safely,” she said. “What am I meant to do: wait until I’ve caught this disease and been through the symptoms, so I know it won’t happen later when I’m in the middle of the ascent?”

“You feel well now, don’t you?” Ramiro asked her.

“I don’t,” Azelio said, massaging his sternum with one palm.

Tarquinia stood. “I want all three of you in your cabins. If you need anything, call me through the link; I’ll put on a cooling bag and helmet and bring it to you. But no one leaves their room.”

“I’m perfectly healthy!” Ramiro protested. “We can stay out of each other’s way—I’ll finish bringing in the tents, and I’ll warn you before I come through the airlock.”

“No,” Tarquinia said flatly. “The tents aren’t important, but I can get them myself. I want everyone in their cabins now. Is that understood?”

Agata rose and began limping away, bent over in pain. Azelio jumped up and went to help her. Ramiro stayed where he was; once the others had left he would have to explain his plan to Tarquinia.

“Ramiro,” she said, gesturing toward the passage. “Please. I know you’ve recovered, but I can’t risk catching this.”

Azelio was watching them with his rear gaze, puzzled by Ramiro’s stubbornness. Ramiro struggled to think of a plausible reason to stand his ground; raising the idea of bringing in the probe now would only make it sound more suspicious.

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 toward 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.