12

Do you want to take her for a while?” Serena offered, holding out her daughter.

Agata couldn’t tear her gaze away from the stitches that crisscrossed Serena’s torso, pulling the skin tight over the wound where a quarter of her flesh had assumed a life of its own and torn itself free. But at least her campaign of pre-maternal gorging had paid off: she’d managed to keep all four limbs intact. The cautious approach was to resorb them first—to make as much flesh as possible available for the child—but then it could be days after the birth before new ones could be extruded. The risk if you declined to resorb them was different: Agata had heard of women whose hips were commandeered by the blastula, severing the remainder of the legs.

“Go ahead!” Medoro urged her.

Agata regarded the child warily, but she didn’t want to offend anyone. As the first visitor from outside the family to be invited into the recovery room, the least she could do was show an interest. “She’s beautiful,” she admitted. “It’s just a shame we can’t grow them from the soil, like wheat.”

“Soon,” Medoro joked.

Agata reached over tentatively and Serena placed the child in her hands. Arianna had managed to sprout four limbs, but she was still having trouble forming fingers: six slender digits protruded from one hand, but the other limbs ended in round stubs. She stared up at Agata, frowning in puzzlement but showing no sign of fear.

“How long until she talks?” Agata wondered. She must have watched Pio as he was growing up, but she’d been living in a child’s timeless world herself then.

“Five or six stints,” Medoro replied.

“So you have to talk to her for all that time, without getting a single reply?”

Medoro buzzed. “It’s not like being snubbed! She’s already listening to every word we say.”

Agata gazed into the child’s face. “Is that true?” she asked Arianna. “But when do you start understanding?”

Arianna was struggling with something, but it wasn’t the meaning of these mysterious sounds. “Sorry,” Medoro said, reaching out deftly to grab the cluster of dark feces drifting down toward Agata’s feet. He left the room briefly and returned brushing sand from his palms.

“And when will she learn to feed the worms directly?” Agata asked.

“That comes a little later. Eight stints, maybe.”

“Better you than me.” Agata held the child out to him; Medoro took Arianna and swung her around, eliciting chirps of delight.

Agata turned to Serena. “You’re both braver than I am, that’s all I can say.”

Serena was amused. “Brave? What’s a few days’ pain, compared to what our grandmothers did?”

“True enough.” Agata was tired of hearing this line from Cira, but it was hard to argue with a woman whose memory of the act was still fresh. “And you’re willing to do it all again?”

Serena replied without hesitation, “Of course. Arianna needs a brother.”

Agata glanced at Medoro, lost in adoration of the child. After the birth, a technician would have poked a few photonic cables into his chest, then into his niece’s, so the machines could fool both bodies into believing that this mere uncle had literally fathered the child. Every instinct for attachment and protection that would have arisen unaided in a natural birth had been invoked by that controlled exchange of light, and it seemed to make no difference to Medoro that he’d missed out on the once-essential prerequisites. In the sagas, bad things befell men who triggered their sisters instead of their cos, though if their brothers had died it was more or less a duty. But now that only the Starvers had cos, who did men think of when the urge arose?

“I wonder what they’ll be doing in a couple more generations,” Agata said. “Promising women?”

“You want to wipe us out?” Medoro joked. “Men can’t shed, women can’t be promised. If the words still mean anything, what else can they mean?”

Agata felt a perverse stubbornness rising. “Why shouldn’t a mother be able to love her own child? I can’t believe it’s biologically impossible; they just have to find the right pathways. Then everyone would have the choice.”

Medoro was growing less amused. “There won’t be an ‘everyone’ if that’s how it ends up.”

“Of course women can love their children,” Serena said, trying to conciliate. “Women have been aunts, sisters, cousins; no one’s saying we have no feelings. We must have helped raise children all the time. I can love Arianna the way a woman on the home world loves her niece.”

“That wouldn’t be enough for me,” Agata said. “I don’t want to wipe out men, but if I couldn’t be the one who loved the child the most, I wouldn’t go through with it at all.”

“That’s just greedy,” Medoro said. He was keeping his face calm and happy for Arianna, with a voice to match, but Agata could tell that none of this warmth was intended for her.

“You make your choices, I’ll make mine,” she said.

“And what if it’s impossible?” he taunted her. “They can pump as much light into your body as they like, but if the man you want them to wake isn’t in there, he isn’t in there.”

Agata said, “Wait and see. Maybe you’ll get a message from Arianna soon enough, letting us all in on the answer.”

“Spheres are simply connected,” Lila said. “Don’t you think that’s the key?”

“Perhaps.” Agata let her rear gaze drift, taking in the crammed bookshelves behind her. Generations of knowledge were packed in there, revelations dating all the way back to Vittorio. She could smell the dye and the old paper—a scent that had always delighted her, promising the thrill of new ideas—but by now she’d absorbed the contents of those shelves so thoroughly that nothing from the past still had the power to astonish her.

“Any loop on a two-dimensional sphere can be deformed into any other,” Lila mused, doodling an example on her chest of an elaborate loop being transformed into a simpler one.

“But on a torus, you can’t change the number of times the loop winds around the space in each dimension, so there are an infinite number of different classes.” She sketched examples from four of them—pairs of loops that could be transformed into each other, because they shared that distinguishing set of numbers. No amount of stretching or shrinking could take a loop from one class to another.

Lila hesitated, as if expecting Agata to pick up the thread, but after half a lapse she lost patience and prompted her: “So what can we say about a four-sphere?”

Agata struggled to concentrate. “It’s the same as the two-dimensional case: there’s only one class of loop.” She could wind an imaginary thread a dozen times around the four-sphere, weave and tangle it any way she liked, but if she tried removing all those complications and shrinking the loop down to a plain circle, nothing she’d done and nothing about the space itself would obstruct her.

“And is that true of the cosmos we live in?” Lila pressed her.

“How would we know?”

Lila said, “If you can find a good reason why it has to be true, that would be the key to the entropy gradient.”

Agata couldn’t argue with the logic of this claim, but she didn’t have high hopes for satisfying its premise. “I don’t see how it could ever be forced on us. The solutions to Nereo’s equation are just as well behaved on a torus as they are on a sphere.”

“Then perhaps we need to look farther afield. You must have some new ideas on this that you want to pursue.”

Lila gazed at her expectantly. Agata felt her skin tingling with shame, but she had no inspired suggestions with which to fill the silence. “I’ve been a bit distracted by my new duties,” she said.

“I see.” Lila’s tone was neutral, but the lack of sympathy made her words sound like an accusation.

“I know that’s no excuse,” Agata said. “Everyone has to help keep things running until the strike’s over. But when my mind’s blocked, what can I do?”

Lila adjusted herself in her harness. “That depends on the nature of the obstruction.”

“It can’t always have been easy for you,” Agata protested. “You must have got stuck yourself, sometimes.”

“Of course,” Lila agreed. “But I was never forced to contemplate the imminent arrival of messages from a culture that had solved all my problems so long ago that any bright three-year-old would know the answers. I doubt that would have done much for my motivation.”

Agata said, “I’m not expecting any help from the future. That would make no sense.”

Lila inclined her head, accepting the last claim. “You’ve made a good argument for that. But I’m not sure that you’ve convinced yourself as thoroughly as you’ve persuaded me.”

Agata was unsettled. “What do you mean?”

“Ever since the messaging system was mooted, you’ve been like this.” Lila waited for her to object, but Agata was silent. “Maybe it’s just excitement at the prospect of the thing itself, or the distraction of all the politics. But be honest: can you really block it out of your mind that you might soon be reading the words of people who’ve had six more generations of prior research to call on than you’ve had?”

Agata said, “What does it matter, if they can’t communicate any of it?” Lila claimed to have accepted her argument: complex ideas were far more likely to remain unmentioned in the messages than to arise without clear antecedents.

“What matters is that it seems to have paralyzed you.”

Agata struggled to recall some small achievement she could hold up against this claim, but since she and Lila had proved their conjecture on the curvature of four-spheres she’d really done nothing but mundane calculations. “Everyone gets stuck,” she said. “I’ll snap out of it soon enough.”

Lila said, “I hope so. Because once you learn whether you do or you don’t, it’ll be settled for good, won’t it?”

Agata had set her console to wake her early. She ate quickly, then made her way to the axis and propelled herself down a long weightless shaft, touching the guide ropes lightly to keep herself centered.

She followed the shaft all the way to the bottom, emerging on a level that housed what remained of the feeds for the old sunstone engines. She dragged herself through chambers full of obsolete clockwork, the mirrorstone gears and springs tarnished and clogged with grit, but still offering up a dull sheen in the moss-light. For a year and a half after the launch, mechanical gyroscopes had tracked the mountain’s orientation, and the feeds’ machinery had kept the engines balanced by adjusting the flow of liberator trickling down into the sunstone fuel. Agata doubted that anyone at the time had imagined that a piece of photonics the size of her thumb would take the place of all these rooms.

As she moved further away from the axis the chambers’ erstwhile floors became walls. Descending the rope ladder that crossed the third room, she passed precariously dangling assemblies of gears and shafts spilling out of their cabinets, the pieces still loosely bound together against the long assault of centrifugal gravity. The eruptions looked almost organic, as if the neglected cogs were sprouting from exuberantly blossoming vines. There must have been people inspecting and maintaining all of this quaint machinery, up until the day when Carla finally proved that none of it would ever be needed again. Now it would only take a couple more rivets snapping for these strange sculptures to come crashing down.

Agata left the decrepit clockwork behind, and dragged herself down a narrow passage to the shabby office of her supervisor, Celia. The office itself looked as old as the Peerless, but Celia’s networked console was a slab of bright modernity among the ruins—its roster of volunteers encrypted, for what that was worth when every strike-breaker could be seen coming and going. Celia handed her an access key and tool belt, and Agata signed for the equipment with a photonic patch, not dye.

“This must seem pretty menial to you,” Celia teased her. “Your predecessor wasn’t much into cosmology.”

“I like it,” Agata replied. “It’s meditative.”

“That’ll wear off,” Celia promised.

Agata turned into a dusty corridor and followed it for a few stretches. The entrance to her section of the cooling system was easy to find: moss had eaten a great concave chunk out of the wall beside it, and the usual red glow was crisscrossed with threads of yellow. She slid the key into the access panel and strained to pull it open.

A short ladder led down into the tunnel. The breeze pulsing through the darkness chilled Agata’s skin, but after the first shock it wasn’t unpleasant. The ceiling of the tunnel was too low for her at her normal height, but she only had to resorb half a span from the top of her legs and she fitted comfortably. She started walking, one hand on the wall to guide her. The splotch of red light spilling in from outside shrank in her rear vision, and when it was gone she was in utter blackness.

A saunter or two down-axis, in a set of reaction chambers carved into the lode of sunstone that had once been destined to be burned as rocket fuel, a decomposing agent was turning that fuel directly into gas—without the usual accompaniment of light and heat. The gas built up a considerable pressure, then as it forced its way out against the resistance of a spring-loaded piston, it grew colder. This was much more efficient than the old system that had used the exhaust from burning fuel as its starting point, but the moss that coated the mountain’s walls grew so vigorously beneath the new kind of breeze that it threatened to clog all the cooling tunnels.

As Agata’s eyes adjusted to the darkness she began to see the small red patches of new growth around her. A shift ago, she’d left this whole section as bare rock, but it didn’t take long for fresh spores to blow in and find purchase. She took the coherer from her tool belt and aimed it at the nearest colony, closing her eyes against the flash so they wouldn’t lose their sensitivity.

Three stints into the strike, she still found the job absurdly satisfying. The work was vital, and she could see the results of her efforts immediately. That the moss returned so quickly didn’t bother her at all, so long as she could keep it under control. Better to walk the length of the tunnels regularly, searching for these early infestations, than wait for the walls to become so encrusted that they’d need to be scraped clean with a hardstone blade.

As she advanced along the tunnel, scanning the blackness ahead for another faint speck of moss-light, Agata realized that this was exactly the kind of task during which she once would have ended up pondering the questions Lila had berated her for neglecting. She had only ever made progress on her research when the problem she was tackling rose up unbidden to occupy her mind in idle moments—whether she was walking or eating, cleaning her apartment or lying in bed waiting for sleep, her thoughts would be dragged back to the same place, to chip away at the obstructions until they yielded. At her desk, at her console, she could analyze her own earlier work in detail, or carry out a lengthy new calculation, but entirely new ideas only came to her when she was meant to be doing something else.

Now, though, when her thoughts weren’t gravitating to the subject of Lila’s criticism or scrutinizing their own dynamics, the only thing that occupied them effortlessly was speculation on the kind of news the messaging system would bring. It wasn’t intrusive or disturbing—any more than her obsessive return to the niggling questions of curvature and entropy had been—but the entire space in which her creative work had once taken place had been thoroughly colonized by the interloper.

But the cure wasn’t far away: once the system was completed she could hardly remain in the thrall of revelations still to come. And was it so terrible if she found herself distracted for a while by the prospect of learning the future of the Peerless? She had less than two dozen stints to wait—and thanks to the strike, she could still do useful work in the meantime. Even if Lila was right and some part of her was refusing to accept that she could expect no help with her research, once she’d seen the actual contents of her messages any hope of impossible cheat notes would soon dissipate. In most respects her life would return to normal, but her spirits would be bolstered by the news of the mountain’s safe return. She would resume her work with new energy and optimism, not because her future self had furnished her with theorems she was yet to prove, but because she’d know that her whole life, and the lives of everyone around her, were part of a great struggle whose end was in sight.

Agata felt the tremor in the rock beneath her and braced herself instinctively, her tympanum growing rigid, rendering her protectively deaf. She lost her footing and fell to the floor, disoriented, unsure if the shaking had been enough to unbalance her or whether she’d been struck down by a shock wave in the air.

She curled up against the cool stone, waiting for worse, waiting for the mountain to split open and spill her out into the void. But the rock was still, and when she forced the membrane around her throat to relax she heard nothing but distant creaking.

As she clambered to her feet the air on her skin smelled acrid. She fumbled for the coherer and flashed it briefly, averting her eyes from the dazzling spot it made on the wall; the secondary reflections lit up the rock around her and showed a fine haze hanging in the air. The breeze from the cooling chambers was as pristine as ever, so the smoke must have entered the system somewhere ahead of her, up-axis, with enough pressure to force it back against the usual flow.

Agata turned and began retracing her steps in the blackness. She had no experience with which to gauge the intensity of the blast. There’d been plenty of accidents in the workshops to which she’d been oblivious at the time, but as the cooling tunnels linked every part of the mountain she had to expect to feel the effects far more strongly here. With no basis for comparison, she shouldn’t rush to any wild conclusions about collisions with infinite-velocity rocks.

It was only when she reached the entrance to the tunnel and began climbing the ladder up into the moss-light that she realized how badly she was shaking. She steadied herself as she approached the office, afraid of Celia’s disdain if it turned out to be a routine part of her job that every tiny bang the chemists set off would echo down the tunnels and knock her off her feet this way. The cooling air fed their ventilation hoods, where they carried out some of their most dangerous experiments. Maybe she should have been expecting this concussive initiation all along.

When Celia noticed Agata approaching, she didn’t seem to be in the mood to mock her. As Agata drew closer she saw that a news inset had opened on the console’s display screen, but the angle made it impossible to read.

“What happened?” she asked Celia. “I felt it in the tunnel, but I didn’t know exactly…”

“There’s been an explosion in one of the workshops.”

“The chemists’?”

Celia said, “The instrument builders’. The one where they were working on the cameras for the messaging system.”