The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (29 page)

Two bells after they’d touched down, the instruments showed the hull’s external temperature to be no different from the cabin’s. No one challenged Ramiro when he finally moved
towards the airlock.

He closed the inner door, then hesitated, gathering his courage. There was no need to use the pump – Tarquinia had already raised the cabin pressure to match the external atmosphere. He
was wearing his helmet and cooling bag for protection from the dust; he switched on the coherer in his helmet, dazzling himself for a moment until he adjusted the brightness.

There was fine red dust covering the grey hardstone walls of the airlock. He hadn’t noticed it by the dimmer illumination of the safety light. He ran a gloved finger along the seal of the
outer door, trying to find the point where it had been breached, but if there was a hole it wasn’t apparent.

It hardly mattered now; however the dust had entered, he was about to let in a great deal more. But as he began to turn the crank, the realisation hit him: it hadn’t come from outside.
They must have brought it with them all the way from the
Peerless
, scattered invisibly throughout the craft, with a little more accumulating inside the airlock each time the inner door was
opened. Or in Esilio’s terms: the
Surveyor
’s visit had just ended, and this residue was something they would soon take away with them.

Ramiro shivered, disoriented for a moment, but whether or not this account was correct there was nothing to be done about it. A small, stubborn part of him longed to leave the door closed and .
. . what? Never open it at all, just to see if he could spite this unsurprising message from the future which claimed that, actually, he would? Every time they’d used the time-reversed
camera, subtler but even stranger things had happened, as thermal fluctuations in the sensor conspired to create the orderly pattern of photons that the device needed to emit. Every image the
camera had shown them had been encoded all along in the not-quite-random vibrations of various objects throughout the
Surveyor
, waiting to come together at just the right moment.

He leant against the crank and broke the door’s seal; a gust of wind forced its way through the narrow gap. Dust flew into the airlock, dust flew out, erasing all distinctions between that
which they’d brought and the rest. He slid the door fully open, letting the light from his helmet carve a tunnel through the storm. Amidst the chaos, sheets of darkness fluttered, where the
dust piled together in mid-air for a moment before scattering again. Cautiously, Ramiro poked his head and shoulders through the portal. He felt the warm wind insinuate itself beneath the fabric of
his cooling bag, but it seemed that nothing it carried was small enough, or sharp enough, to reach his skin.

He swept the beam of the coherer across the ground; the wind was raising so much dust that it was impossible to make out the surface below, but given that the
Surveyor
wasn’t
sinking its immediate surroundings were unlikely to prove treacherous. He slid the short boarding ladder out from the airlock; its feet vanished before it touched the ground, but a scant or two
further down it encountered firm resistance.

He clambered down the ladder and stood on the surface. Even with the cooling bag encasing his feet there was an unpleasant grittiness against his soles; he took a few steps to see if he’d
grow accustomed to the texture, but it remained distracting so he hardened and desensitised the skin. The wind wasn’t strong enough to knock him down, but he couldn’t move confidently
without pausing each time it rose up, to recalibrate his efforts to compensate for the force.

‘Ramiro?’ Tarquinia’s voice came through the link in his helmet.

‘I’m fine!’ he replied, shouting to be heard above the dust scraping across the surface of his helmet. He closed the outer door of the airlock, then walked around to the window
and raised a hand; his crew-mates raised theirs to shield their eyes from his coherer. ‘Sorry.’ He swivelled the beam upwards, out of their lines of sight. ‘The wind’s
annoying, and I can’t see much. But I don’t think I’ve started speaking backwards or ageing in reverse.’

Agata said, ‘I’m coming out.’

Ramiro made a quick circuit around the
Surveyor
; he couldn’t see any damage on the outside of the hull. Agata emerged, stepping gingerly across the swirling sand.

‘So this is what a planet’s like,’ she said numbly.

‘It’s not exactly welcoming,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘But it should be more appealing once the weather improves.’ He glanced up at the stars; he could just make out the
arc of the rim, its usual dazzle reduced to a pale broken line. Though the wind and the dust were the most intrusive novelties, even the more familiar elements of their surroundings were juxtaposed
so bizarrely that they lost their usual meaning: on the slopes of the
Peerless
strong gravity and an open sky always lay in the same direction. He wondered if he’d ever be able to
sleep out here, or if he’d panic and imagine that he was falling into the stars.

‘Whenever I pictured the reunion, I always thought of people meeting in a corridor,’ Agata confessed. ‘But it will probably be outdoors – in the countryside, where the
vehicles can land safely. It might even look like this.’

‘We’ll recreate the centre of Zeugma for you later,’ Ramiro teased her. ‘To give you some better imagery for the ceremonies in the town square.’

Azelio joined them. ‘I’d be happy with some gardens to break the gloom,’ he said.

‘Be my guest.’ Ramiro gestured into the darkness.

‘Once the wind dies down.’ Azelio turned and swung the light from his helmet across the ground, but the exploratory oval faded into obscurity at a dozen strides.

Tarquinia stepped off the ladder. ‘Given what we saw from orbit, these conditions shouldn’t last long. It’s coming to evening; we should get some sleep and start work in the
morning, so we’ll be able to use the view by sunlight if we need it.’

‘Real days and nights!’ Agata chirped. ‘It’s just a shame we couldn’t put a time-reversed camera in every helmet.’ She turned to Ramiro. ‘So will your
settlers bring a few gross of the things, or just one for navigation that they’ll destroy on arrival, lest someone put it to an evil purpose?’

Ramiro had never wanted the cameras banned, but nor had he pictured the colony relying on them. ‘We’ll see by flowers and wheat-light,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure
there’ll be something we can use to make lamps.’

‘While the sunlight itself goes to waste.’

‘Did you ever see sunlight?’ he countered. ‘There’ll be gardens, lamps, a few coherers . . . much the same as the lighting everyone’s used to, with a lot less moss
and a lot more starlight. We won’t be trying to recreate the home world – or the mountain – but no one from the
Peerless
will find it all that strange.’

Agata was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘You’re right – and I should wish you luck with it. It’s what we’re here for, after all.’

Ramiro had trouble falling asleep. When he woke, the sound of the storm on the hull was gone, and the Esilian clock he’d set up on his console showed that it was more than a bell after
dawn. Esilio’s day was only about two-thirds as long as the home world’s; he hoped Tarquinia wouldn’t try to impose the new rhythm on everything they did.

In fact, when he found her at her seat in the front cabin, Tarquinia looked as if she’d been awake all night. ‘The others are outside,’ she said. ‘The wind’s died
down, so we should be able to start work soon, once they stop playing around.’

‘Playing?’

‘Take a look for yourself,’ Tarquinia suggested.

‘Will I need my helmet?’

‘You won’t need anything,’ she promised. ‘We’ve set up some lights. Just toughen your soles.’

Ramiro felt vulnerable as he approached the airlock without even his cooling bag, but Esilian sand was just sand, and he’d probably had traces of it beneath his feet for the last six
years.

When he opened the outer door he saw Agata and Azelio leaping around, buzzing like excited children for no reason he could discern, unless it was sheer joy at the stillness after the storm. A
couple of coherers mounted on the hull illuminated the red soil starkly – showing up an extraordinary maze of tracks that testified to his comrades’ exuberance. With the foreground so
bright his eyes stood no chance of adapting to the starlight so, even with the dust haze settled, everything in the distance was lost in utter blackness.

‘What are you idiots doing?’ he called out.

‘Trying to see which footprints are ours,’ Agata replied gleefully. She jumped forward with her rear gaze fixed intently on the place where she’d been standing.

Ramiro was bemused, but then he observed her more closely as she took her next few leaps. Twice, as she jumped out of some indentation in the sand, it vanished. She and Azelio hadn’t
actually made all the tracks that he’d attributed to them. Or not yet, they hadn’t.

‘Come and join us,’ Azelio said. ‘Some of these must be yours.’

Ramiro stayed on the top rung of the ladder, watching. Each time Azelio lifted his feet, scattered sand unscattered itself, grains sliding in around the places where he’d stepped to settle
more evenly – though not always smoothing the ground completely. After all, Ramiro reasoned, it was possible to walk in someone else’s footprints, or to step several times in your own.
It would only be the last footfall on any given spot – prior to the next occasion on which the wind levelled everything – that would unmake the imprint completely.

The crew had talked over possibilities like this, dozens of times. Ramiro knew he had no right to be surprised. But having sought a world where the dissenters could escape the tyranny of
foreknowledge, what had he been given? A world where every step he was yet to take would be laid out before his eyes.

‘What happens if I try to walk on pristine ground?’ he asked.

‘Try it and see!’ Agata taunted him.

Ramiro descended to the bottom of the ladder, intending to move quickly and get the ordeal over with, but then his resolve deserted him. When he willed his foot to land on unblemished sand, what
exactly would intervene to stop him? A cramp in the muscle, diverting his leg to its proper, predestined target? A puppet-like manipulation of his body by some unseen force too strong to resist, or
a trance-like suspension of his whole sense of self? He wasn’t sure that he wanted to know the answer. And perhaps that was the simplest resolution: he would lack the courage to walk out
across the surface of Esilio for the rest of the mission. He would cower in his room, leaving the work to the others, while he waited to return to the
Peerless
in disgrace.

Agata was watching him. ‘Ramiro, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ She was amused, but there was no malice in her voice. ‘Just step off the ladder without thinking about
it. I promise you, the world won’t end.’

Ramiro did as she’d asked. Then he looked down. He’d scrutinised the ground beforehand, and he was sure there’d been no footprints at all where his feet now stood.

He lifted one foot and inspected the sand below. He had created an indentation that had not been there before. That was every bit as strange to Esilio as the erasures he’d witnessed were
strange to him.

‘How?’ he demanded, more confused than relieved.

‘You really don’t listen to me, do you?’ Agata chided him. ‘Did I ever tell you that the local arrow was inviolable?’

‘No.’ What she’d stressed most of all was a loss of predictability – but the sight of her and Azelio unmaking their footprints had crowded everything else out of his
mind. Those disappearing marks in the sand might be unsettling, but if he could ignore them and walk wherever he pleased then they were not the shackles he’d taken them to be.

Still . . .

‘What happens if there are footprints that no one gets around to before the next dust storm?’ he asked Agata. ‘Ones that were there straight after the last storm?’

She said, ‘There can’t be a footprint untouched by any foot. I don’t understand the dynamics of wind and sand well enough to swear to you that there won’t be hollows in
the ground that come and go of their own accord – but if you’re talking about a clear imprint, if we could keep our feet away from it, it simply wouldn’t be there.’

Ramiro pondered this, but it seemed much less dismaying than the kind of all-encompassing trail he’d originally feared. Esilio was a world where a certain amount of noisy, partial –
and predominantly trivial – information about the future would be strewn across the landscape. There had always been plenty of trivial things that could be predicted with near-certainty back
on the
Peerless
, and perhaps as many of them would be lost, here, as these eerie new portents would be gained.

Emboldened, he strode out across the illuminated ground, pausing every few steps to kick at the sand. Sometimes he simply pushed the dust aside; sometimes the dust applied pressure of its own,
as it moved in to occupy the space his foot vacated. But that pressure never came out of nowhere: his feet moved as and when he’d willed them to move, followed by the dust but never forced to
retreat. Nor were they thrust without warning into the air by a time-reversed version of the dissipation of motion into heat that took place when they landed.

By the time he reached the point where the coherers’ light gave out, he realised that the part of his brain that dealt with his gait and balance had come to terms with the ground’s
bizarre behaviour as if it were nothing more than an unfamiliar texture: a kind of stickiness that rendered the soil a little unpredictable. He hadn’t slipped over once, or found himself
rooted to the ground. On one level, he’d already taken the whole phenomenon in his stride.

Each time there was a dust storm the record of future movements would be erased, but even in a prolonged period of calm the footprints would overlap, conveying very little information. Compared
with the crystalline certainties of the messaging system, it would be nothing: a novelty to which the settlers would soon grow accustomed.