‘You don’t think that’s reasonable?’
Tarquinia thought it over. ‘I don’t know what’s reasonable any more,’ she said.
Ramiro closed his eyes for a moment, raising some crude scrawls on his chest based on Tarquinia’s diagram, but keeping them private. ‘Forget about whether or not the clusters have a common past; forget about the orthogonal cluster entirely. Suppose the only thing we rely on is the fact that the home cluster had vastly lower entropy in the past.’
‘All right.’
‘So the state of the home cluster long ago is already “special”,’ he said, ‘compared to a random gas made of the same constituents. But now if we take it for granted that this state could, potentially, give rise to all kinds of situations analogous to the experiment we just did with the engine, which result would require the most “unlikely” original state? The result where none of those situations ever actually arise: no fast-moving object ever emits a burst of light in such a way that the light would need to be emitted, as well, by other objects scattered around the cluster? Or the result where such events do occur, with the original state guaranteeing coordinated action by all the different emitters? And you can’t say “neither”; it has to be one or the other.’
Tarquinia buzzed wryly. ‘When you put it that way, I’d bet on a lack of restrictions, not a lack of conspiracies. I mean, consistency comes for free; we’re not entitled to say that it’s freakishly unlikely when the cosmos does whatever needs to be done to avoid contradicting itself. What’s unlikely would be for the requirements of consistency to go out of their way to avoid offending our usual notions of cause and effect.’
‘Yeah.’ Ramiro buzzed. Though they’d reached a consensus of sorts, his own argument didn’t really silence his disquiet. A part of him would never be able to accept that distant dust particles were creating the engine’s exhaust as much as the engine itself was.
‘I’d better spread the good news,’ Tarquinia said.
‘Not so good for Pio’s gang.’
‘Don’t be so cynical,’ Tarquinia chided him. ‘They have one less thing to fear now, like all of us. Why shouldn’t they be happy?’
Ramiro said, ‘Wait and see. By the time they’re out of prison I’m sure they’ll have thought of some new reason to give up on the home world.’
Tarquinia wasn’t in the mood for an argument about the migrationists. ‘Thanks for talking this through with me. I’ll feel a lot less rattled now when I report to the Councillors.’
‘Any time.’
Her feed vanished from the console, replaced by the status display for the main engines.
As he contemplated the results of the test, Ramiro couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment. If every engine working in the void had been selectively inhibited, excursions by the gnats away from the Peerless would have become extraordinarily challenging. He’d seen some elaborate proposals from the instrument builders that aimed to get around the problem – most of them requiring high-powered beams passing between the Peerless and the gnat, though a couple had sought to exploit the mountain’s weak gravity as the controlling force, and one had involved extremely long ropes.
Automating any of those outlandish schemes would have made an exciting project after the turnaround. But now gnats would just be gnats, and it was beginning to look as if he’d soon have nothing new to work on at all.
‘Corrado?’ Ramiro swayed sideways so he could open the door fully without banging his head. ‘You should have warned me, I would have prepared a meal—’
‘I’m not here for your cooking,’ his uncle replied brusquely. He glared at Ramiro impatiently, waiting for him to move down the ladder so he could pass through the hatch.
When they were both on the floor, Ramiro gestured towards the couch. He knew the gravity was hard on his uncle; before the engines had started up, Corrado’s apartment had been in near-weightlessness.
Corrado made himself comfortable, but then wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘In three days, your sister will be a dozen and nine years old,’ he announced.
‘It’s that soon, really? I lost track.’
‘I understand that you need to supervise the turnaround to the end,’ Corrado conceded. ‘So you won’t be free of that commitment for more than a year. But this is the right time for you to come to an agreement with Rosita. You need to tell her that as soon as the Peerless is spinning again, she can shed a daughter and you’ll be promised to the child.’
Ramiro examined the floor beside the couch. There was a hole that had once held a peg supporting a bookshelf; he’d left it empty in the hope of reusing it, but it was filling up with dust and food crumbs.
‘We should wait and see what happens,’ he suggested. ‘There might be some kind of technical problem that will prolong the turnaround. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.’
‘Your sister’s too easy on you,’ Corrado replied flatly. ‘That’s the only reason I’m here: someone has to speak up on her behalf.’
‘What makes you so sure that she’s desperate to start shedding?’ Ramiro countered.
‘She’s been fertile for a long time,’ Corrado said. ‘If she divides, do you want that on your conscience?’
‘Of course not,’ Ramiro said. ‘But the holin is so pure now, and they take such high doses—’
Corrado cut him off. ‘That’s no guarantee. Imagine your sister gone, and four children to feed. Do you want to be the one who kills two of them?’
Ramiro covered his face – unmoved by the preposterous scenario, but unwilling to reveal just how angry he felt at being cornered this way. For as long as he could remember, his uncle had been assuring him that it was in his nature to want to raise a child. That lesson had come second only to the other glorious message about manhood: if he ever succumbed to his urge to touch a woman in the wrong way – as the Starvers did – it would annihilate her. His duty as he approached maturity was to quash that terrible, lingering compulsion – while also joyously coveting a role that, in nature, could only have followed his failure at the first task.
When the turnaround was finished he’d have no more excuses, no more reasons to delay. The only tactic left was honesty.
He looked up. ‘I don’t think I can do it.’
‘Do what? Kill two children?’ Corrado was still lost in his own cautionary fable. ‘Of course you can’t! The idea is to stop it coming to that.’
Ramiro said, ‘I don’t think I can raise a child. It’s not in me.’
Corrado stood up and approached him, stony faced. Ramiro stepped back, but refused to recant. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.
‘Do you want this family to die out entirely?’
‘Die out?’ Ramiro lost interest in feigning respect. ‘I wish you’d make up your mind what you’re threatening me with: is it four children, or none?’
Corrado raised his hand, but then stayed it. He’d probably worn himself out already in the high gravity. ‘If you don’t do this—’ he snarled.
‘If I don’t do this,’ Ramiro replied, ‘and Rosita actually wants a child . . . she’ll find a man whose sister died, or whose sister wasn’t interested in shedding. Or she might even raise the child on her own. Who knows? I want her to be happy, whatever she chooses – but I’m entitled to make my own choices too.’
Corrado stood in front of him, silent for a while. ‘If you don’t do this, why would she ever have a son? Why would she go through all that pain and trouble a second time, if you’ve proved to her that it will be wasted?’