The Arrows of Time: Orthogonal Book Three (30 page)

Ramiro turned to Azelio. ‘Entertaining as this is, if you want to start the planting now I’d be happy to help.’

With so little wind about, Ramiro decided that it was worth opening both doors of the airlock so they could pass the plants straight through. Standing on the ground, he was at
the perfect height to accept each pot directly from Azelio, instead of climbing up and down the ladder.

‘Be careful,’ Azelio pleaded.

The advice was redundant, but Ramiro took no offence. Azelio had been nurturing the things for six years – and tending to them while they were spinning in their tethered pods had probably
been the most arduous task that any of the crew had faced.

Azelio brought out a dozen of the plants to start with. The wheat was a miniature variety that he’d succeeded in maintaining at a staggered set of stages in its growth cycle, allowing him
to compress the time needed to assess its viability in Esilian soil. Instead of waiting a year to be sure that it could survive from sowing to harvest, in one-twelfth of that time they’d
watch each representative plant advance from its initial level of maturity to that from which another had started.

Ramiro looked over the collection assembled beside the airlock. ‘And these are all going in the same kind of soil?’

‘Yes. Just a few saunters away. I’ve already chosen the spot.’

Ramiro followed Azelio across the bright ground of the
Surveyor
’s domain and into the starlit valley. The two plants they were carrying put out a healthy red glow, but that
didn’t do much to light the way. It was soon clear that, however well their eyes adjusted, they’d need to use the coherers they’d clipped to their tool belts – sacrificing
their distance vision for the sake of surer footing. Ramiro tried to balance the confidence he’d gained in dealing with the soil’s peculiar forces with a suitable level of caution.
There was no telling what Azelio would do to him if he stumbled and fell, crushing one of his darlings, even if ‘Esilio pushed me!’ was the honest excuse.

‘Just here.’

Ramiro squatted and placed the pot on the ground, then swung his beam around the site. ‘You already dug twelve holes!’ he observed. ‘And I thought you were messing around with
Agata all morning.’

Azelio made a noncommittal sound. Ramiro suddenly felt queasy.

‘My plan is to dig up all these plants at the end of the trial and take them back to the
Peerless
for my colleagues to analyse,’ Azelio mused. ‘So I guess that’s
when I’ll see the transition between cultivated and truly pristine ground. But right now, in Esilio’s terms, we’ve just dug the plants up – so on our terms, we’re
about to do that. Backwards.’

Ramiro said, ‘You make it sound as if you’ve been practising time-reversed agronomy all your life.’

‘It’s not that hard to see what’s going on, if you think it through,’ Azelio replied lightly.

‘But you don’t mind following markers like this? Evidence of acts you haven’t performed yet?’

‘It’s a little disconcerting,’ Azelio conceded. ‘But I can’t say that it fills me with claustrophobia to know that I’ll carry out the experimental protocols I
always planned to carry out.’

Ramiro didn’t argue; the only thing he’d gain by pressing the point was to raise his own level of disquiet again. ‘Let’s get to work, then.’

Azelio squatted beside one of the plants. ‘The idea is to take it out of the potted soil and brush the roots clean. Pay close attention.’ He leant forward and positioned his hands on
either side of the stalk, but then he kept them there, motionless. After a lapse of this, Ramiro said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought it might leap into my hands by itself,’ Azelio explained, deadpan. ‘Dropped in and repotted, Esilio style.’

‘One more joke like that and we’ll be burying more than plants here.’

Azelio took a short stone rod from his tool belt and used it to loosen the soil in the pot. Then he gently extracted the plant and applied a soft brush to the roots.

‘Does it matter if there’s a trace of the old soil clinging on?’ Ramiro asked.

Azelio winced. ‘Yes. If it’s enough to keep the plant growing when it otherwise wouldn’t, that would make the results meaningless. You don’t want the settlers to find out
after half a year that it was only contamination that made it look as if they could survive here.’

He carried the freed plant over to the row of holes he hadn’t yet made. ‘What happens if I try to put it in the wrong one?’ he mused. ‘Is that possible?’

Ramiro aimed his coherer at the nearest of the holes, then watched as Azelio knelt down, a trowel in one hand and the wheat plant in the other. He lowered the plant until its roots were in the
hole, then he started adding soil from the surrounding mound. Some of the soil was scooped in with pressure from behind, in the ordinary manner. Some appeared to pursue the trowel, the way the dust
sometimes pursued Ramiro’s feet.
What decided between the two?
Azelio’s own actions had to be consistent with the motion of the soil, but which determined which? Maybe there
was no answer to that, short of the impossible act of solving in the finest detail the equations that Agata was yet to discover, revealing exactly which sequences of events were consistent with the
laws of physics all the way around the cosmos.

In any case, the laws of physics seemed to allow the plant to end up firmly bedded in Esilian soil. Azelio tried to shake his trowel clean, but each time he flicked it as many specks of dirt
rose up from the ground to stick to the blade as parted from it.

‘I guess that’s now my Esilian trowel. Do you want to do the next one?’

Ramiro said, ‘I wouldn’t trust myself to get the roots clean.’

‘I’ll deal with that,’ Azelio replied. ‘You can do the planting.’

‘All right.’

When Azelio had prepared the second plant, Ramiro accepted it and took it to the next hole. He knelt on the ground; Azelio passed him the trowel then stood back to provide a steady light.

Ramiro gazed down at the neat mound of soil beside the hole. If he’d had a camera here during the dust storm he might have watched the mound rising up, as speck after speck fell into place
from the turbulent air. But if an Esilian wind had scattered it, who had given it its shape? If he refused to do it himself, would Azelio be compelled to take his place? But why would one of them
be compelled and not the other?

When he’d stomped across the sand beside the
Surveyor
each disquieting footprint had been blurred into insignificance, but he couldn’t try to complicate this crucial
experiment just to obfuscate the issue. He’d always told himself that he’d accepted the true nature of time and choice, and that all he’d objected to in the messaging system was
the way it would flatten his deliberations. But even here, with nothing life-changing at stake, the sense of being trapped in the threads of history was more oppressive than it had ever been.

Ramiro’s left arm had grown tired from holding the plant in place over the hole. He shifted it slightly to make himself more comfortable, but as he shifted it back he saw soil rising and
adhering to the roots. He stared at this bizarre result for a moment, then decided to stop wasting time delaying an outcome he had no wish to oppose.

He held the trowel to the side of the mound nearest the hole, then drew it closer. The sand followed the blade – not adhering to it and needing to be brought along, but gently pushing it.
He lowered the trowel into the hole then withdrew it; the sand parted from the blade and packed itself between the roots of the plant and the side of the hole.

He hesitated, groping for a clearer sense of his role in the task. But what could he actually do wrong? So long as he was committed to making whatever movements with the trowel were necessary
until the plant was securely in place, that state of mind and the strictures of the environment ought to work it out between themselves.

He scooped some soil straight into the hole; like the last delivery, it clung to the roots. In Esilio’s terms, this soil had spent at least a few stints packed tightly around the plant; if
he could have seen the action in reverse, it would have involved nothing stranger than a clump of sand finally coming loose.

When he was done, Ramiro stood and turned to face Azelio. ‘So now I have to lure half the travellers here in the name of freedom, then leave them to raise their children in a world where
everything they do corrodes their sense of agency?’

Azelio said, ‘That’s putting it too harshly. When we get back, all you can do is give an honest account of your own experience. They’ll have seen life under the messaging
system, so they’ll already have a better idea than we had about this kind of thing – and which way of life they’d prefer.’

‘The pro-messagers should come here,’ Ramiro declared bitterly. ‘If they want to know the future, let them know it every step of the way. Leave the mountain to us, and we can
go back to living with a single arrow.’

‘That’s a nice idea . . . but good luck organising the eviction.’

They walked back to the
Surveyor
to fetch two more plants. ‘Can you put up some windbreaks?’ Ramiro suggested. ‘If that last dust storm was typical, it might not have
uprooted anything, but I’d bet it would have stripped petals.’

‘I have a few rolls of tight-weave fabric,’ Azelio replied. ‘I didn’t see any stake holes nearby, but I won’t let that stop me.’

Ramiro fell through the light, willing himself to move faster. He reached down to grab hold of his daughter, but as his fingers brushed her limbless form the wind shifted and
tore her away.

Tarquinia grabbed his wrists, dragging his gaze back into focus. ‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She drew away from him slowly, gently separating their remaining
adhesions.

‘What happened?’ he asked her.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘No.’ He had no children to lose. How many times had he told his idiot body the same beautiful lie? How stupid could it be, that it hadn’t seen through him yet?

He looked past Tarquinia, to the pale grey wall of his cabin. He knew exactly where he was now. The
Surveyor
was his second prison, and outside it was the third. ‘How will anyone
live here?’ he wondered.

‘There’ll be a better place than this for a city,’ Tarquinia promised. ‘No dust storms – just gentle winds to sweep the footprints away.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘Then you’ll build machines to plant the wheat and harvest it. No one will ever have to touch the soil.’

Ramiro turned to her. ‘Who’ll build these machines?’

‘You will. You and the other settlers.’

‘And where will you be?’

Tarquinia said, ‘I thought you didn’t want to know the future.’

Agata pressed the broom down firmly against the floor of her cabin and tried again. ‘How hard can it be?’ she muttered. Dust starts off in a large area. Pressure is
applied inwards along successive portions of the border. Dust ends up in a smaller area, ready to be collected and removed. On the face of it, this didn’t even pose a conflict with the local
arrow: Esilian dust should have been happy to have its entropy decreased as her own time advanced.

But as she moved the broom across the floor, duly concentrating the dust ahead of it, other dust began to appear
behind it
– some of it falling from the air, some sliding over the
stone to pile up against the bristles. Its entropy was decreasing too, as it accumulated from whatever scattered reaches of the
Surveyor
in which it had been lurking. The net result was
that the stretch of floor she’d swept remained as dusty as ever.

Azelio knocked on her open door. ‘I know you’re busy, but Ramiro’s sleeping and Tarquinia’s on watch—’

‘I’m not busy,’ Agata assured him. ‘Do you want a hand with the measurements?’

‘If you don’t mind.’ Azelio nodded at the broom. ‘Have you found the trick to it?’

‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘Maybe what we need is some kind of covered system of barriers. If we can place it on the floor and then reconfigure it without opening the cover,
we ought to able to manipulate the dust inside without any more arriving.’

‘That sounds . . . elaborate.’

Agata put on her corset and tool belt and followed Azelio to the airlock, then waited for him to cycle through. The view through the window showed that the weather was calm, but the
Surveyor
had become so filthy that Tarquinia now insisted on the protocol, regardless. Agata was beginning to suspect that the only remedy for the dust invasion would be to ascend into the
void and flush every room out with clean air – and even that depended on their arrow prevailing and the void not being ready with a conspiracy of pollutants poised to rush in the moment they
opened the airlock, in a perfect reversal of the intended purge.

Outside, she caught up with Azelio at the start of the trail. It was Ramiro who’d noticed the regularly spaced indentations in the ground after the last high winds, and decided to fill
them with rocks marking the way to each of the four test plots. Agata hadn’t questioned him too closely on the matter, but she suspected that he’d already been contemplating doing
something similar. The idea hadn’t come from nowhere, inspired by nothing but the evidence of its own implementation.

‘How are the calculations going?’ Azelio asked her, as they started along the trail.

‘Slowly.’

‘Just as well. If you finish them, what will you do on the journey back?’

‘There’s no risk of that.’ Agata had set aside her efforts to understand the curved vacuum and instead had spent the last two stints attempting to analyse their current
situation, using a crude model of a field in which two opposing thermodynamic arrows met. But in the versions that were simple enough to handle, both arrows rapidly decayed away, leading almost
immediately to a time-blind equilibrium state. The reality, in which countless slender fingers of opposing time interpenetrated, seemed to depend on details too subtle for her to approximate in any
meaningful way.