The Arrows of Time
THE ARROWS OF TIME
Orthogonal Book Three
GREG EGAN
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Note to Readers
The Arrows of Time is the third volume of a trilogy set in a universe with laws of physics that are very different from our own. The protagonists belong to a species whose biology, history, politics and technology – as revealed in the previous books – bear crucially on everything that follows. Accordingly, anyone approaching this volume is strongly advised to read the preceding volumes first.
Contents
Cover
Title page
Note to Readers
Book Three: The Arrows of Time
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Appendix 1: Units and measurements
Appendix 2: Light and colours
Afterword
Also by Greg Egan from Gollancz
Copyright
1
From her hilltop post, Valeria swept the telescope’s field of view methodically across the barren plain. The grey rock showed few features in the starlight, but so long as she didn’t rush the task and left no gaps in her search, the kind of change she was looking for would be hard to miss.
She knew she was done when she’d made a full circle around the scope’s mount, bringing her feet back to a patch of rough ground that she could recognise by texture alone. Done and ready to begin again.
Two bells into her shift, Valeria could feel her concentration faltering, but whenever she was tempted to abandon the mind-numbing routine she thought of the incident outside Red Towers. The watcher there had seen a speck of light in the distance, small but growing steadily brighter. His team had reached the fire within a chime or two, and by drawing out its heat into three truckloads of calmstone sand they’d succeeded in extinguishing it. The Hurtler that struck must have been microscopic, the point of ignition shallow, the field of flame relatively small – and some scoffers had gone so far as to insist that there must have been similar strikes before, unobserved and untreated, that had come to nothing. But Valeria was sure that between the spot fires that would fizzle out on their own and the kind of unstoppable conflagration that would simply vaporise everyone in sight, there was room for the watchers to make a difference. If a planet-killer struck, it struck, but it wasn’t futile for people to try their best to fend off disaster for as long as possible.
The clock beside her rang out the last bell before dawn. Valeria gave herself a break, rolling her neck and taking in the view untrammelled by the scope’s restrictions. At the foot of the hill the response team, her co among them, were napping in their sand trucks. Gemma had risen now, bright enough to hide most of the stars, but seven Hurtlers shone in the grey half-light: seven streaks of colour, scattered but parallel, each one displaying perfect mirror-symmetry across its dark centre. These ghostly spikes were lengthening slowly, their violet tips just perceptibly in motion, proof that they hadn’t even been near misses. If a planet-killer was on its way, there’d be no elegant pyrotechnic warning.