24

“The link’s open!” Tarquinia shouted.

Agata had woken just moments earlier, and for moments more she lay in a daze, astonished at her prescience. Then it occurred to her that Tarquinia must have repeated the call several times.

She rose from her bed and raced down the passage, sand still clinging to the skin of her back. The rest of the crew were already gathered around the console.

“… all safe and in good health,” Tarquinia was saying. “We landed successfully on Esilio and made an assessment of its potential for settlement; we’ll be sending the technical reports shortly. But as you can imagine, we’re eager for news from the mountain.”

There was a perceptible delay as the ultraviolet pulses crossed the void, then a man’s voice replied: “We’ll need to receive your reports first, before the channel is used for personal calls.”

Tarquinia was taken aback. “I understand. But can’t you fill us in on what’s been happening?”

“What do you want to know?” the man inquired impassively.

“Is the messaging system working?” Ramiro interjected.

“Yes.”

“How long has it been in use?” Tarquinia asked.

“Almost three years.”

Agata leaned forward toward the microphone. “And how long will it remain in use?”

The signal’s time in transit was fixed; the awkward pause before the reply was as unmistakable as if they’d been speaking face to face. “My instructions are to receive your reports and then facilitate personal calls, not to engage in an open-ended dialogue.”

Agata didn’t know what to make of this rebuff. But the exchange would be monitored and recorded; she couldn’t blame the link operator if he didn’t want to break any protocol imposed from above.

Tarquinia said, “I’ll queue up the reports now, and resume contact when the transmission’s complete.”

“Thank you, Surveyor. Audio out.”

“What a welcome!” Azelio complained. “And it’s not as if we could have caught them unprepared.”

“Oh, I’m sure they were thrilled by our safe return,” Ramiro replied. “We’re just three years late for the party.”

The console switched to a graphic showing the progress of the data transmissions. Agata squinted in disbelief at the predicted completion time, but caught herself before protesting out loud. In order to make the time lag reasonable at this distance, they needed to use very fast UV. But such high velocities also meant very low frequencies, and hence low bandwidth.

“Azelio gets the first call,” Tarquinia decided. “Then Agata, Ramiro, myself.”

They all knew better than to argue with the pilot. Agata returned to her room and sat at her desk, skimming through the reports of her work that Lila would be receiving shortly—and then presumably sending back to herself at some time just after the system started operating. As they’d drawn closer to the Peerless, Agata had considered withholding her results from the transmission—hoping that she might yet complete the analysis of the curved vacuum on her own, even if it meant working in isolation in the mountain for another few years. In the end, though, that had seemed petty and mean-spirited. She’d grown tired of struggling on and on without any feedback from her peers. Now she would learn in an instant what the collective effort of the physics community had achieved over the last three years, as they argued over the significance of the diagram calculus—improving it, extending it, or maybe even refuting it entirely. She couldn’t decide whether to be terrified or exhilarated, but even if her methods had been excoriated, torn apart and rebuilt entirely, they could only have been replaced by something better. Whatever the final synthesis was, it would have to be spectacular.

When Tarquinia announced that Azelio’s call was coming through, instead of taking it in his own cabin he invited everyone to join him at the main console.

“Uncle?”

Agata shivered at the sound of Luisa’s voice, unmistakably older but still not a woman’s. It would have felt less strange if it hadn’t changed at all.

Azelio said, “I’m here! How are you, my darling?”

“I’m fine. We got your messages from after you arrived. We’ve played them over and over.”

“That’s wonderful.” Azelio looked lost for a moment. “Did you know we had a Hurtler scrape the side of the hull? Tarquinia went flying out into the void, and Agata had to go out and rescue her.”

“No!” Luisa was impressed, but a little miffed as well. “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

“I didn’t want you worrying. But everyone’s safe, you’ll see us all soon.”

“I know,” Luisa replied, mystified that he’d feel any need to point this out.

“Yes.” Azelio was struggling again: what was worth saying now, if he’d need to omit it from the great homecoming message in order to keep it from sounding stale? “Is your brother there?”

“He didn’t want to come.” This time Luisa seemed unsurprised by Azelio’s ignorance.

“Tell him that’s all right,” Azelio replied. “I can understand if he didn’t feel like talking this way.”

There was a long pause. “You already told him that yourself.”

An older, male voice came over the link. “Azelio?”

“Girardo! How are you, uncle?”

“Everything’s fine,” Girardo assured him, but he spoke with unusual vehemence. Things were fine not as a matter of course, but in defiance of some prevailing difficulty. “We know you’ll get back safely. That’s enough.”

“Enough?” Azelio glanced at Agata, as if she might have some idea of what he should read into the word. “Is Luisa still there?”

“I’m here,” Luisa replied.

“All right.” Azelio decided not to pursue an explanation in her presence.

“I’ll be seeing you all very soon.”

“Of course,” Girardo agreed.

“My love to all of you,” Azelio said, forcing a tone of casual cheerfulness.

“And you,” Luisa replied.

Azelio cut the link and sat in silence.

“It looks as if there’s going to be a knack to this,” Ramiro observed.

“They might have added a few tenses to the language while we were away.”

Agata squeezed Azelio’s shoulder. “Luisa sounded happy. And your uncle was probably just irritated by some political development.”

He turned to her. “What’s that a euphemism for? More people in prison, or more smoking ruins?”

“I’ll sort everything out when I talk to Lila,” Agata assured him. Having witnessed Azelio stumbling she’d be better prepared to communicate across the gap.

But when her own call was connected she barely made it through the greetings before her brain seized up.

“The light bending … do you know about that?” she babbled.

“I read your report,” Lila replied. “Those observations were impeccable, and you’ve separated the curvature theory from Vittorio’s as sharply as we could have wished. It’s a great achievement.” The words were warm and sincere—but Lila’s excitement at hearing that her life’s work had been validated was long gone. Agata had imagined the two of them dancing elatedly around her office, chanting “Four-space is curved! Gravity is not a force!” But that was never going to happen: this was old news for both of them now.

“What did you make of the vacuum energy work?” she asked hopefully.

“The diagram calculus is beautiful.” Lila didn’t use that word lightly. “It’s the most promising approach I’ve seen for a long time.”

Beautiful … but still merely promising? Agata wasn’t offended; she knew she hadn’t taken the project to completion herself. But what had Lila and her students been doing in the interim? She wasn’t vain enough to imagine that they’d been hanging back, waiting for her to join them in the flesh and guide them forward.

“So how much progress has there been?” Agata pressed her. “The effects of curvature and topology were still very sketchy in the version I sent you—but I’m sure people must have found ways to tidy up most of the loose ends by now.”

Lila hesitated. “I’m afraid things are much where you left them.”

“Where I left them?” Agata was confused. “When did all of this reach you?”

“Almost three years ago,” Lila replied.

Agata couldn’t hide her disappointment. “And no one’s tried to take it any further?” She’d put ten years of her life into the diagram calculus, and the whole physics community had spurned the approach.

“The lack of progress isn’t from a want of trying,” Lila insisted. “And you shouldn’t take it personally. It’s got nothing to do with the quality of your work or the way it’s been received. The problem is far more widespread than that.”

Agata was mollified, but still confused. “What problem?”

“We’ve all hit a dead patch,” Lila said sadly. “Chemists, biologists, astronomers, engineers. Since they switched on the messaging system, there hasn’t been a single new idea across the mountain.”

“You mean no one’s been sending back new ideas?” Agata had predicted as much—but surely that self-censorship hadn’t surprised anyone.

“Oh, the messages have contained no innovations,” Lila confirmed. “But neither has the work itself.”

“I don’t understand,” Agata admitted.

Lila said, “If people did innovate, the results would leak back to them one way or another. I know you believed that they’d be able to keep quiet, so everything would go on as usual. But everything has not gone on as usual. We’ve had no new ideas since the system was turned on—because if we’d had them, we would have heard of them before we’d had a chance to think of them ourselves. The barriers to information flow are so porous now that the knowledge gradient has been flattened: the past contains everything the future contains … which means the future contains nothing more than the past.”

Agata was stunned. If this was true, the messaging system had undermined the whole reason for the mountain’s existence. Every generation before her had advanced their understanding in one field or another. What would her own generation be famous for? Rendering the creation of new knowledge impossible.

She dragged herself out of the dismal fantasy. To have lost three years was appalling, but the disaster would be self-limiting in the end.

“So how long does this go on?” she asked Lila.

“About a dozen more stints.”

That would be five stints after the Surveyor returned. “I’m surprised people didn’t act sooner.” The self-censorship hypothesis predicted an absence of news of future innovations—but news of their absence could have been sent back as soon as the dire situation was apparent. “I suppose it’s the writing we found on Esilio that tips the balance in the end?” Agata suggested. “The system could hardly have been shut down before the Surveyor returned with that discovery, if it’s a crucial element in swinging the vote.”

Lila said, “The system isn’t shut down by a vote.”

Agata couldn’t understand why her tone was so bleak. She’d endured three frustrating years, but the dark times would soon be over. “So the Council plans to act unilaterally?”

“There is no vote, there is no plan, there is no explanation,” Lila replied. “All we know is that we’ve received no messages from any time later than a dozen stints from now. And in the run up, there’s nothing telling us why.”

“The data just cuts out?” Agata glanced up from the console; the expression on Tarquinia’s face was as grim as Lila’s voice.

“Yes.”

“So there’s a glitch of some kind,” Agata concluded. She couldn’t take all this ominous brooding seriously; she’d seen the proof with her own eyes that the Peerless would survive all the way to the reunion.

“No,” Lila said flatly. “We ended up building more channels. They operate independently, so there could hardly be a glitch in all of them.”

Agata struggled to unpick the logic of that. “You had to build a second channel, even though the first one already told you that it wouldn’t help … because if you hadn’t built it you couldn’t have known that it wouldn’t help. But why build a third?”

“We built a dozen.” Lila buzzed, darkly amused. “You’re forgetting the Council’s paranoia. They weren’t convinced that they were being honest with each other about this event, so the process couldn’t stop until they each had a messaging channel of their own—built and run by people they’d vetted themselves.”

Agata was distracted for a moment by the sight of Ramiro, rocking back and forth with one hand against his tympanum, trying to contain his mirth.

“So what came of all that?” she asked. “Putting aside our own paranoia and assuming that at least one Councilor who found the truth would let us know.”

Lila said, “With every channel, the story’s been the same: the messages cut out at exactly the same time, and nothing that’s sent back while the system is still working tells us why.”