‘You’ll be fine,’ Medoro assured her.

‘Will I?’ Agata pictured herself at the front of the packed meeting room, ready to follow in Lila’s footsteps. Or possibly her brother’s.

‘I’d offer you an eyewitness report of your success,’ Medoro said. ‘But we can’t quite pull that off yet.’

9

Tarquinia reached across and squeezed Ramiro’s shoulder. Her hand made contact roughly, imperfectly controlled in the near-weightlessness, but that only gave the gesture more force.

‘Good luck,’ she whispered. Ramiro kept his rear gaze on her as he dragged himself away along the guide rope towards the stage.

The meeting room was full, and brightly lit by the beams from a dozen coherers bounced diffusely off the ceiling. People were still talking among themselves as Ramiro approached the front of the stage and reached over to start the timer. He waited a pause or two for the echoing ping to grab their attention, but he knew it would only waste time if he held out for complete silence.

‘My job,’ he began, ‘is to automate things. There are many tasks where we already know exactly what we want to achieve, but find it too arduous to supervise the execution of our plans in detail. If I do my job well, though, the results are easy to foresee: you tell me what you want some machine to do for the next five stints, and I make that happen.

‘So I’m familiar with the advantages of control and predictability, and I can understand why the Council aspires to bring those qualities to as many aspects of the running of the Peerless as possible. If we could receive a message from the future assuring us that the mountain had reached the home world safely, and this message was accompanied by a list of the actions we’d need to take – or in the sender’s view, had already taken – to sidestep a host of potential calamities, then I’d have no complaint about that at all.’

Ramiro let himself scan a few faces in the audience; so far, he didn’t seem to have offended anyone.

‘The problem,’ he continued, ‘is that if we build the proposed system, I don’t believe it would be possible to limit it to a single, clear-cut purpose like that. Whatever the Council decrees for now, they can’t control the way the facility would be used in the future. In practice, what will confront us is the photonic equivalent of a vast storehouse of documents whose content will have been determined by other people, some of them very remote from us in time. Over the generations, certain documents will have been removed – another process that will be out of our hands – while others are kept and passed down to us. If we hope to reap any benefit from whatever remains, we’ll have no choice but to appoint people to read and assess everything we receive. But people can’t forget things on command, and even people sworn to secrecy can’t ignore what they know. With all those messages and all those readers, information will spill out and reach the public, whether they want it or not.