18

Agata woke in a state of joyful anticipation, but then she spent a lapse or two lying motionless, wondering if she had the day right. She could see the diurnal clock on her console’s panel, but she’d made a deliberate choice to omit the date from the default display. She’d fooled herself in the past, waking with all kinds of wildly optimistic notions about the phase the mission had reached, but it was important that she settle the matter by consulting her memory, with no other aids.

Since the link with the Peerless had crackled its last transmission and the flow of messages from Serena and Lila had ceased, time had become a desert out of the sagas: a featureless wasteland of shimmering heat haze and treacherous mirages. But Agata was sure she’d just passed a full day with a justified belief that the long-awaited event was imminent. If she was wrong about that then she wasn’t just disoriented, she was completely delusional.

She rose from her sand bed and walked over to the console. She hadn’t been mistaken about the date, but she brought up the flight plan to confirm its significance. It had been a few stints since they’d passed the one-quarter mark in the duration of their outward journey, but that fractional accomplishment had offered nothing tangible to celebrate. Today, the Surveyor’s progress would finally be made manifest: its history would reach orthogonality with that of the Peerless, and Tarquinia would shut off the engines.

Agata left her room and walked out into the front cabin. Tarquinia wasn’t up yet; Ramiro was on watch.

“Good morning,” she said.

“No, it’s not.” Ramiro swiveled his seat around to face her. “Complete weightlessness is tedious,” he complained. “We should have found a way to avoid it.”

“You could always move in with Azelio’s plants,” Agata joked.

“I shouldn’t have to. If they get to swing on a tether, why not us?”

“What would you use as the counterweight? Splitting the whole vehicle in two would be too complicated.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ramiro sulked. “What kind of expert on gravity are you, if you can’t summon it at the flick of a switch?”

Agata said, “The kind who understands enough to be willing to bet that that’s never going to happen. I’ll give you a gross to one that no one will discover such a thing between now and the reunion.”

Ramiro scowled. “To be verified how? I thought your theory was that inventors would always censor the messages they sent into the past—since that’s more probable than their ideas appearing out of nowhere.”

Agata wasn’t going to let these complications stand in the way of a good bet. “I think they could tell us what they’d built. They just couldn’t tell us how it worked.”

Ramiro stretched his arms and buzzed wearily. Most of the cabin lights were off, and behind him the home cluster stars filled the view. It was Ancestors’ Day all over again—only this time it would last for three years.

“The reunion could be happening right now,” Agata marveled. “Even as we speak, the Peerless could be approaching the home world.”

“It’s not the first time you could have said that. Or didn’t you notice?” Ramiro was wearing his corset, so he sent the sketch to the nearest console. “About a stint before mid-turnaround, our line of simultaneity would have had just the right slope.”

“It’s the first time it’s ‘now’ by the home world’s reckoning as well as our own,” Agata replied.

Ramiro was bemused. “Name any two events in the cosmos, and there’s a definition of time that makes them simultaneous. If I can’t actually witness this great moment—let alone take part in it—just how excited do you want me to be?”

“I’m sure the ancestors thought about us at the turnaround,” Agata argued. “What’s wrong with a bit of solidarity?”

“I prefer to reserve that for people I can look in the eye.”

“All right. Forget it.” They’d exchanged their views and found nothing in common, as usual. There was no point wishing it were otherwise.

“I’m going to go strap myself down and sleep through all this nonsense.” Ramiro nodded toward the passage behind her; Tarquinia had emerged from her cabin.

Azelio joined Agata and Tarquinia for breakfast, then the three of them set about putting up the guide ropes and checking that everything inside the Surveyor that might drift free was secured. The tool cupboard took the most work; there were individual straps for every item, but people had grown lazy about using them. Azelio went through the pantry, checking every sack of grain for holes. The sand in their beds was already resin-coated—and hoping to contain it was a tad optimistic whatever steps they took—but Tarquinia insisted on putting tarpaulins in place before the gravity was lost.

Agata clung to a rope in the front cabin as Tarquinia finally issued the command to the engines. The end of the turnaround for the Peerless had taken place over three full days, out of regard for the effects on the most vulnerable travelers, but the crew of the Surveyor were assumed to be more robust. As Agata’s weight plummeted she was unable to dispel a conviction that the cabin was plunging down, but then the very idea of that vertical axis lost its meaning.

After a lapse or two, her body and everything around her was imbued with stillness. The view through the window was unchanged; the stars were indifferent to the sudden straightening of the Surveyor’s history. The susurrations of the cooling system grew quieter; Agata had grown accustomed to the old sound, and the new silence made the room feel dead.

“What now?” she asked Tarquinia.

Tarquinia unplugged her corset. “That’s it. Everything’s done.”

“What about the plants?”

Azelio said, “There’s no hurry. A few days without gravity isn’t going to harm them. Ramiro will help me set up the tether soon.”

“All right.”

Agata dragged herself back to her cabin and harnessed herself to her desk. She looked up at the pictures she’d brought: Medoro, Serena, Gineto, Vala and Arianna, scattered among the colorful childish sketches that Azelio was sharing with her. If she’d commandeered the Surveyor, she could have flown in a loop right back to Ancestors’ Day on the Peerless. So far as she could tell there was nothing in the physics that would forbid it—so long as she didn’t try to cut corners and make do with a semi-circular route, arriving as antimatter and spoiling the party. But she hadn’t seen herself anywhere else in the crowd that day, staring longingly at her friends—and if a visitor from the future really had joined them in her absence, Medoro had done a very good job of keeping it a secret.

She looked away. Nostalgia passed the time, but it needed to be rationed. And if no one else was celebrating the Surveyor’s parallelism with the home world, she might as well forget it and focus on her work. Though Lila had given the vacuum energy problem to one of her students, Pelagia, Agata had decided to pursue it independently, in the hope of preventing her brain ossifying from disuse. With a wildly unfair eight-year advantage over her rival it wasn’t impossible that she’d return with a worthwhile contribution of some kind, but she hadn’t told Lila about her plans, sparing herself the weight of any expectations.

So far, she was still grappling with the notion of the vacuum. She’d read the definitive treatment by Romolo and Assunto, who’d adapted Carla’s wave mechanics to the study of fields, but all they’d really cared about was predicting the results of particle collisions. They’d deliberately sidestepped all the distracting cosmological issues, and—apart from Yalda’s insight that the cosmos had to be finite in order to prevent exponential surges in the light field—it did make sense that none of the results of any small-scale experiment should depend on whether the cosmos was a torus, a sphere, or some four-dimensional analog of a thrice-knotted pastry.

Since all of the old-school field theorists’ measurements depended on changes in energy, rather than any absolute scale, Romolo and Assunto had been free to set the vacuum energy to zero by decree. They’d certainly understood that the true value was a difficult quantity to pin down—so they’d vaguely sketched its origins, and then subtracted it out of all their other formulas so they could concentrate on the remaining parts that were more mathematically tractable and contributed to nice, tangible things like the rate at which positive and negative luxagens annihilated each other in their experiments at the Object.

But even their formal, mathematical expression for the vacuum state was a bizarre sleight of hand: they’d imagined taking the simpler vacuum of a more pristine theory—one where all particles stood aloof from each other, refusing to interact—and writing it as a sum of pieces that each corresponded to a different energy level of the true theory. If you followed that sum over a long time, you could pick out the least rapid oscillations that represented the lowest energy level. So in all of Romolo and Assunto’s calculations, they’d pretended that everything happened in an infinitely old cosmos that had started—infinitely long ago—with the simple vacuum, from which a mathematical trick extracted the true vacuum before they set to work adding particles to it in the here and now.

Amazingly, all of this nonsense had worked well enough for their purposes, with the quantities they’d predicted confirmed by experiment again and again. But the real cosmos with its own real history and topology couldn’t be understood by grafting on an infinitely long run-up from a state that had never actually existed.

Someone knocked on the door of the cabin. Agata dragged herself over and opened it.

“Are you busy?” Azelio asked.

“Not really.”

“Do you want to help me set up the tether?”

Agata felt a surge of excitement, but then she realized that it was premature. “You think Tarquinia will let me do it?”

“Didn’t she give you your void proficiency certificate?”

“Only because she doubted that anyone else would.”

Azelio frowned. “Ramiro doesn’t have much more experience than you. If you’re willing to ask Tarquinia, I’ll support you.”

The two of them approached the pilot in her couch, and Tarquinia heard them out politely.

“My job is to try to keep you all alive,” she said. “This might not be an especially dangerous task, but Ramiro has the edge on you in confidence.”

Agata said, “If the worst comes to the worst, I’m expendable. Ramiro isn’t. If something goes seriously wrong with the automation, no one else will be able to fix it.”

“I can get us home without automation,” Tarquinia replied.

“Of course.” Agata hoped she hadn’t inadvertently insulted her. “But you have to admit that a lot of things would become more difficult if we were forced to do them manually.”

“Hmm.”

Azelio said, “Everyone needs experience to get used to working in the void. The engines are switched off, and we’d both be wearing jetpacks; how much safer could it be? And if Agata does this now, it could make all the difference to the kind of task she can manage in an emergency.”

Tarquinia inclined her head, conceding his point. “But she did tell me once that she’d rather not have anyone relying on her.”

“I was joking!” Agata insisted. She wasn’t sure that she had been, but she certainly didn’t feel that way now.

Tarquinia said, “You can go out with Azelio and set up the tether, but that’s all: install it, but leave it motionless. Ramiro will go out for the spin-up. Half the task for each of you. What could be fairer?”

Sanctified by the ancestors’ gaze or not, the sky unsettled Agata. When she’d trained with Tarquinia around the Peerless, the contrasting hemispheres had made it easy to stay oriented. There were bright stars now that caught her eye, and constellations she could commit to memory, but it took much more effort to seek out these relatively subtle cues than it had to distinguish between an empty black bowl and a riot of color.

Azelio seemed to be focused on the Surveyor itself, so Agata followed his lead and tried to think of the disk of the hull as her horizon. Still clinging to the hand rings outside the airlock she turned her body until it was perpendicular to the disk, then she released her grip and drew a short arrow on her chest that pointed toward her head. The jetpack obliged with a gentle push in that direction; when she’d ascended half a stride above the hull she drew a stop-line that killed her velocity. The jetpack was keeping track of all the acceleration it delivered—along with any bumps and pushes she inflicted on herself—and it knew how to return her to her initial state of motion.

She followed Azelio to the rear of the hull, opposite the main cabin and its window, and halted beside him. The two agronomy pods mounted here were roughly cubical, each about as broad as Agata was tall. Azelio grasped a ring to brace himself, lit the scene with the coherer mounted on his helmet, then began turning the first of the eight wide, hollow bolts that held the first pod in place. Agata had arrived upside down for the task; she secured herself with her foot through a ring, then squatted down so she could grip another with a hand and right herself. She switched on her own coherer and squinted at the disk of brightness she’d imposed on the starlit hull; it was strange to see the sharp details summoned out of the gray shadows, as if the Surveyor of the void had become the Surveyor of the workshop again. Then she reached into the bolt closest to her and took hold of the crossbar within. The crossbar needed a twist around its own axis to disengage the spring-loaded pins that locked it in place, then it served as a handle to turn the bolt.

“My arm’s tired already,” Azelio confessed. “Why couldn’t they make this a job for power tools?”

“If you want to run everything on compressed air, you’d better hope there’s sunstone on Esilio.” Agata’s own forearm was aching. “Let’s face it, we’ve all grown soft. If you asked me to harvest a crop manually, I think it would kill me.”

“Lucky you don’t want to migrate, then.”

By design, the bolts could not be withdrawn entirely from their threaded holes, but once all eight had been unscrewed as far as possible the locking plates on the pod were freed from their slots in the hull.

Agata got into position on the opposite side of the pod to Azelio; the symmetry was necessary to extract the thing smoothly, but it meant they were hidden from each other. “Move it as gently as you can,” he instructed her. “The last thing we want to do is give it more momentum than we can control.” With their feet reformed into hands to grip the rings on the hull, they slowly raised the pod out of its shallow bed.

When it was about a stride above the hull, Azelio called a halt. They both stood for a moment holding the thing, as if they couldn’t quite believe that it would stay put when they released it. But it did.

“I’ll tow this one out, and you watch over the cable,” Azelio said.

“Right.” Agata squatted against the hull and aimed her coherer at the reel. As well as tethering the pod to the pivot it shared with its companion, the cable would carry cooling air to the plants and bring data and video back to the Surveyor.

Azelio moved into place on the opposite side of the pod; Agata couldn’t see him, so he narrated for her. “I’m attaching the towing rope now,” he said. Then, “I’m connected. Be patient, though, this is going to take a while.”

After a lapse in which nothing happened, Agata asked, “Did you fire the jetpack?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you’re moving at all.” The slight tug hadn’t been enough to overcome the sticking friction of the cable; it was prudent to unwind as slowly as possible, but there was a limit to how slow that could be.

“That’s embarrassing.” Azelio buzzed. “All right, a little more thrust this time.”

The reel began to turn. Agata watched the cable feeding out smoothly, the helix of the outer layer gradually shrinking. Verano’s team had wound every span into place with scrupulous care, and from the flatness of the layers she could see she wasn’t expecting any hidden snags, but she focused all her attention on the process, refusing to let her mind wander.

When the cable was down to its last layer and the core of the reel was revealed, Agata advised Azelio and began counting down the remaining turns. Half a turn short of full extension, he brought the pod to a halt. Centrifugal force could complete the process; a tiny amount of slack like this wouldn’t be enough to give the pod a dangerous jolt.

Agata looked up and waited for her eyes to adjust back to the starlight. The cable stretched out into the void for four or five times the diameter of the hull. With the pod’s stone block hanging on the end of it, her eyes wanted to declare this direction vertical, but when she insisted on her original hull-based definition the sight became even stranger, like a conjuror’s rope trick.

“When you and Ramiro do the spin-up, I want to come out and watch,” she pleaded.

“If it’s up to me, absolutely,” Azelio replied. “And since you’ve got Tarquinia twisted around your finger—”

“Ha! That’d be something.” Agata suspected that Tarquinia was listening in on their conversation; for safety’s sake the helmets’ transceivers didn’t use any kind of encryption.

“I’m coming back now.”

“Have you untied the towing rope?” she asked.

Azelio was silent for a moment. “Good idea.”

When he’d rejoined her, Agata said, “I owe you for this. I was going insane in there.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Azelio declared. “You sat with me after the link cut off; I haven’t forgotten that.”

“I don’t know if I helped much.” The children were Azelio’s life; the most she’d been able to do was distract him a little, while the prospect of waiting more than ten years to hear from them again sank in.

“What will we do if Esilio isn’t habitable?” he asked. They’d switched off their coherers while they talked so as not to dazzle each other, but Agata could make out Azelio’s face in the starlight. She’d come out into the void to escape her dark thoughts, but the cosmic perspective seemed to have had the opposite effect on him. “If we go back to them with nothing, it would be like the Peerless returning to the home world with no idea how to escape the Hurtlers.”

Agata hummed angrily. “I don’t believe that. War’s not as inevitable as a Hurtler strike. Anyway … when we get to Esilio, we’ll find what we find. No one expects you to work miracles.”

“No.”

Agata said, “We’d better start on the second pod, before Ramiro wakes up and finds out that I’ve stolen half his entertainment.”

Back at her desk, Agata examined her notes. The truth was that in a year and a half she’d made almost no progress. Now she’d had her frolic beneath the stars; she’d had her Ancestors’ Day celebration. And there was nothing on the calendar to break the monotony until they started up the engines again.

She could end up squandering half the journey longing for planetfall, and half again longing to be back in the mountain. All her life, this fixation on grand turning points—from the launch of the Peerless to the reunion—had given her a sense of purpose, but it had also weakened and distracted her. Recapitulating the whole thing in miniature had only made the problem more acute. It was only right that the Surveyor’s mission came first, and that she honor Medoro, test Lila’s theory, and play her part in Ramiro’s peace plan. But to make any progress with her own work she had to stop thinking like a passenger: doing no more than clinging on, in the hope that someone else’s flight plan would carry her to a destination worth reaching.

Agata hadn’t brought a picture of Lila, but she could effortlessly summon the sound of her mentor’s gentle nagging. She knew exactly what Lila’s advice would have been at this juncture: Romolo and Assunto’s tricks weren’t suited to her purpose, and there was no point pretending that some minor variation in their methods would suffice. If she wanted to make progress, she needed to dig far deeper into the mysteries of the vacuum and come up with some new tools of her own.