She couldn’t spend another day sitting in her office juggling equations, with no idea if they were true or false. And she couldn’t bear to be around Medoro’s family if she had nothing useful to contribute to their lives. Everything on the Peerless was ash to her, now. She needed to find another reason to live, or she was finished.

The Surveyor team were still looking for volunteers. At the cost of spending twelve years cooped up in a glorified gnat, the crew would be the first travellers in six generations to set foot on anything like a planet. If they could bring peace to the mountain, all the better, but just making that trip would be extraordinary.

Agata turned away from the entrance and began retracing her steps. She’d very nearly talked herself into it – but if all she had to offer the rest of the crew was her desperation, they’d be better off leaving her behind to go insane on her own time. She could go through the motions with the vacuum energy calculations, then if the messaging system survived the saboteurs she might at least get a verdict from the future as to whether or not Lila’s theory of gravity applied in the real world. There’d be nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics in being told that she’d wasted her life.

She stopped dead, her skin tingling, ashamed of her self-pity but grateful for one detail of her maudlin fantasy. A verdict on Lila’s theory, how? She’d always imagined that such a thing would never come until after the reunion itself, once there’d been a chance for a future generation of astronomers to make observations from the home world. But the home world was no longer the only planet worth imagining.

15

Ramiro scratched the skin around his fetter; it had been itching horribly for the last three days. Despite his pleas, Greta had insisted that he remain in chains even when they were interviewing candidates. He was beginning to wonder if he’d be kept in restraints even once he was on the Surveyor itself.

‘The planet Esilio is orbiting a massive star,’ Agata enthused. ‘But we’ll be blind to the light of that star; it will appear to us as nothing but a pale grey disc. That combination offers the perfect conditions for the observations I want to carry out.’

Ramiro had no idea what she was talking about, but they hadn’t seen anyone else with pro-messager credentials half as eager to make the journey. ‘Go on,’ he said.