The Clockwork Rocket

by Greg Egan

  ORTHOGONAL: BOOK ONE

  THE

  CLOCKWORK

  ROCKET

  GREG EGAN

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  San Francisco

  Orthogonal: Book One: The Clockwork Rocket © 2011 by Greg Egan

  This edition of Orthogonal: Book One: The Clockwork Rocket

  © 2011 by Night Shade Books

  Jacket art and design by Cody Tilson

  Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-227-7

  EISBN: 978-1-59780-351-9

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  1

  When Yalda was almost three years old, she was entrusted with the task of bearing her grandfather into the forest to convalesce.

  Dario had been weak and listless for days, refusing to move from the flower bed where the family slept. Yalda had seen him this way before, but it had never lasted so long. Her father had sent word to the village, and when Doctor Livia came to the farm to examine Dario Yalda and two of her cousins, Claudia and Claudio, stayed close to watch the proceedings.

  After squeezing and prodding the old man all over with more hands than most people used in a day, Doctor Livia announced her diagnosis. “You’re suffering from a serious light deficiency. The crops here are virtually monochromatic; your body needs a broader spectrum of illumination.”

  “Ever heard of sunlight?” Dario replied caustically.

  “Sunlight is far too blue,” Doctor Livia countered, “too fast for the body to catch. And the light from the fields is all sluggish red. What you’re lacking lies between those extremes; a man of your age needs umber and gamboge, saffron and goldenrod, jade and viridian.”

  “We have all those hues right here! Have you ever seen such glorious specimens?” Dario, who’d taken to resting limbless, budded a lone finger from the middle of his chest to gesture at the garden around them. Yalda, whose job it was to tend the flower bed, warmed with pride, though the blossoms he was praising were closed for the day, their luminescent petals furled and dormant.

  “Those plants are merely decorative,” Doctor Livia replied dismissively. “You need a full range of natural light, at much greater intensity. You need to spend four or five nights in the forest.”

  When the doctor had left, Yalda’s father, Vito, and her uncle, Giusto, talked the matter over with her grandfather.

  “It sounds like quackery to me,” Dario declared, snuggling deeper into his indentation in the soil. “‘Umber and gamboge’! I’ve survived for two dozen and seven years with sunlight, wheatlight and a few floral adornments. There’s nothing healthier than farm life.”

  “Everyone’s body changes,” Vito said cautiously. “There must be a reason you’re so tired.”

  “Years of hard work?” Dario suggested. “Or don’t you think I’ve earned a rest?”

  Giusto said, “I’ve seen you shining yellow at night. If you’re losing that hue, what’s putting it back?”

  “Yalda should have planted more goldenrod!” Claudio blurted out accusingly. Giusto shushed him, but Claudia and Claudio exchanged knowing glances, as if they were the doctors now and they’d finally exposed the root of the problem. Yalda told herself that it was only an adult’s admonition that meant anything, but her older cousins’ smug delight in her supposed failure still stung.

  Vito said, “I’ll go with you to the forest. If the doctor’s right, it will give you back your health. And if she’s wrong, what harm can it do?”

  “What harm?” Dario was incredulous. “I don’t have the strength for a twelfth of that journey, and I doubt you could carry me even halfway. It would finish us both off!”

  Vito’s tympanum became rigid with annoyance, but Yalda suspected that her grandfather was right. Her father was strong, but Dario had always been the heavier of the two and his illness hadn’t changed that. Yalda had never even glimpsed the forest, but she knew it was farther than the village, farther than anywhere she’d been. If there had been a chance of hitching a ride on a truck then someone would have raised the possibility, but the route must have been so rarely traveled as to make that an unlikely prospect.

  In the awkward silence that followed, Giusto’s rear gaze fell on Yalda. For a moment she thought he was merely acknowledging her presence with a friendly glance, but then she understood why she was suddenly worthy of attention in the midst of this serious, adult debate.

  “I know who could carry you, Father!” Giusto announced happily. “There and back, with no trouble at all.”

  The next day, the whole family woke before dawn to help the three travelers prepare. By the soft red light of the fields around them, Lucia and Lucio, Yalda’s brother and sister, darted back and forth from the store-holes, packing provisions for the journey into the generous pouches that their father had formed along his sides. Claudia and Claudio tended to Dario, helping him rise and eat breakfast then taking him by the shoulders and walking him around the clearing to prepare his body for the long ride.

  Yalda’s other cousins, Aurelia and Aurelio, acted as stand-ins for Yalda’s passenger as Uncle Giusto coached her on her quadrupedal posture. “Make your front legs a bit longer,” he suggested. “Your grandfather will need somewhere to rest his head, so it would be good if your back sloped higher.” Yalda extruded more flesh into her two front limbs; for a moment her legs wobbled beneath her cousins’ weight, but she managed to stiffen them before she lost her balance. She waited until she felt the central shafts harden and the old joints ossify, then she cracked a new pair of knees higher up and re-organized the surrounding muscles. The last part was the most mysterious to her; all she was conscious of was a sense of pressure moving down her limbs and imposing order, as if her flesh were a bundle of reeds being passed through a comb to rid it of tangles. But her muscles weren’t merely straightening themselves out; they were making sense of their new surroundings and preparing for the new tasks that would be demanded of them.

  Giusto said, “Try a few steps now.”

  Yalda moved forward tentatively, then broke into a slow trot. Aurelia kicked her sides and shouted, “Yah! Yah!”

  “Stop it, or I’ll throw you!” Yalda warned her.

  Aurelio joined her in rebuking his co. “Yeah, stop it! I’m the driver.”

  “No you’re not,” Aurelia retorted. “I’m in front!”

  “Then I should be in front.” He grabbed Aurelia and tried to swap places with her. Yalda quashed her irritation at her squirming cousins and decided to treat it all as good practice; if she could keep her footing while these idiots sprouted arms just to wrestle with each other, she ought to be able to manage anything her ailing grandfather did.

  “You’re doing well, Yalda,” Giusto called to her encouragingly.

  “For a giant lump,” whispered Aurelia.

  “Don’t be cruel!” Aurelio said, pinching her on the neck.

  Yalda said nothing. Perhaps she was graceless compared to Aurelia, two years her senior—or even compared to her own brother and sister—but she was stronger than anyone else in the family, and the only one who could carry Dario into the forest.

  She trotted to the edge of the clearing, where the wheat-flowers were starting to close. She couldn’t see the sun itself yet, but brightness was spreading across the eastern sky. Dawn brought so many changes at once that Yalda had had to watch the flowers furling several times before she’d convinced herself that their petals really did grow dimmer, and weren’t just being outshone as they curled in on themselves for the day.

  “How do they know that they should stop making light?” she wondered.
>
  Aurelia buzzed with amusement. “Because the sun’s coming up?”

  “But how do they know that?” Yalda persisted. “Plants don’t have eyes, do they?”

  “They probably feel the heat,” Aurelio suggested.

  Yalda didn’t think the temperature had risen all that sharply. Yet the whole field had grown dim as they were speaking, the night’s glorious red blossoms reduced to pale gray sacs hanging limply from their stalks.

  She walked back toward Giusto, still pondering the question, remembering too late that she’d meant to race all the way to demonstrate her confidence in her new anatomy. Her father approached, on four legs too, Lucia and Lucio fussing at his pouches as they tried to even out the load.

  “I think we’re ready,” Vito said. “Scram, you two!” Aurelio leaped off Yalda’s back, rolling into a tight ball as he hit the ground; his co followed, shouting triumphantly as she landed on top of him.

  Dario was still not walking unaided, and he was muttering to his helpers about everyone crawling back into the ground and declaring a day of rest. Yalda was untroubled by this; if he didn’t believe she could carry him safely he wouldn’t even have risen, let alone cooperated as much as he had. Claudia and Claudio brought him over to her, and she knelt down on her rear legs to enable him to climb onto her back. He hadn’t bothered with arms before, but now he extruded three pairs, his chubby torso growing visibly thinner as the six ropy limbs stretched out to encircle her. Yalda was fascinated by the texture of his skin; the bulk of it appeared as elastic as her own, but scattered across the smooth expanse were countless small patches that had grown hard and unyielding. The skin around them was wrinkled and puckered, unable to spread out evenly.

  “Are you comfortable?” Vito asked him. Dario emitted a brief, drab hum suggesting a burden borne without complaint. Vito turned to Yalda. “And you?”

  “This is easy!” she proclaimed. She rose up and began promenading around her assembled family. Dario was heavier than the two of his grandchildren combined, but Yalda was untroubled by the load, and increasingly sure-footed in her new form. Giusto had chosen her shape well; as she peered down at Dario he lowered his head and rested it between her shoulders. Even if his grip loosened he could probably doze off without falling, but she would watch over him every step of the way.

  Lucia called out to her, “Well done, Yalda!”

  After a moment Lucio added, “Yeah, well done!”

  A strange, sweet thrill ran through Yalda’s body. She was not the useless lump anymore, eating as much as any two children, clumsy as an infant half her age. If she could do this simple thing for her grandfather, she would finally have earned her place in the family.

  With the sun clearing the horizon and a cool breeze blowing from the east, Yalda followed her father down the narrow path that ran south between the fields. Though the wheat had lost its nocturnal splendor, the fat yellow seed cases near the tops of the stalks always attracted more interest from adults than the delicate hues of the crop’s floral light—and when they came across two of their neighbors, Massima and Massimo, out baiting vole burrows, the talk was of nothing else. Yalda stood patiently, motionless save for the quivering required to send alighting insects on their way, ignored by everyone as they voiced their hopes for the coming harvest.

  When the three of them had moved on, Dario noted disapprovingly, “Still no children! What’s happening with them?”

  “That’s none of our business,” Vito replied.

  “It’s unnatural!”

  Vito was silent for a while. Then he said, “Perhaps his thoughts are still of her.”

  “A man should think of his children,” Dario replied.

  “And a woman?”

  “A woman should think of them too.” Dario noticed Yalda’s rear gaze on him. “You concentrate on the road!” he commanded, as if that were sufficient to render the conversation private.

  Yalda obeyed him, shifting her gaze to make him less self-conscious, then waited for the gossip to continue.

  But Vito said firmly, “Enough! It’s not our concern.”

  The path ended at a junction. To the right, the road led straight to the village, but they took the opposite turn. Yalda had set out this way many times before—playing, exploring, visiting friends—but she had never gone far. When she went west, it didn’t take long to notice the changes: soon the crossroads were spaced closer together, other people were passing her, and she could hear trucks chugging between the fields even if she couldn’t see them. The welcoming bustle of the village reached out and made itself felt long before you actually arrived. Traveling east was different: the same quiet and solitude with which you began the journey promised to stretch on forever. Had she been alone, the prospect of spending an entire day walking away from every familiar sign of life would have terrified her. As it was, she felt a desolate ache at the sight of the rising sun ahead of her, with the realization that even when it set she would still be heading in the same direction.

  Yalda looked toward her father. He said nothing, but he met her gaze reassuringly, quelling her fears. She glanced down at Dario, but his eyes were closed; he’d drifted back to sleep already.

  They passed the morning trudging through farmland, surrounded by fields so similar that Yalda was driven to hunt for patterns in the pebbles by the roadside just to prove to herself that they really were making progress. The idea that they might have lost their way and circled back was fanciful—the road was straight, and they’d been following the sun—but spotting these private signposts made a welcome diversion.

  Around noon, Vito roused Dario. They turned off the road and sat in the straw at the edge of a stranger’s field. Yalda could hear nothing but the wind moving through the crop and the faint hum of insects. Vito produced three loaves and Yalda offered one to Dario, who remained on her back; for a moment he appeared to be preparing to make a new limb for the occasion, but then the tentative bud on his shoulder disappeared and he used an existing hand to take the food.

  “Have you ever been in the forest before?” Yalda asked him.

  “A long time ago.”

  “Why were you there? Was someone sick?”

  “No!” Dario was scornful; he might be willing to play along with Doctor Livia’s ideas just to keep his family happy, but no one would have countenanced such nonsense in the past. “The forest was closer then.”

  “Closer?” Yalda didn’t understand.

  “Bigger,” Dario explained. “Some of these fields weren’t fields back then. When we weren’t busy with our own work, we used to help clear new fields, at the forest’s edge.”

  Yalda turned to Vito. “Did you go too?”

  “No,” he replied.

  Dario said, “Your father wasn’t around then. This was in your grandmother’s time.”

  “Oh.” Yalda tried to imagine Dario as a vigorous young man, plucking trees right out of the ground, her grandmother working beside him. “So the forest reached out to where we are now?”

  “At least,” Dario said. “The trip only took us half a morning. But then, we weren’t carrying anyone on our backs.”

  They finished their loaves. The sun had passed its highest point; Yalda could see their shadows slanting to the east. Vito said, “We should get moving again.”

  As they set off down the road, Yalda kept her rear eyes on Dario to be sure that his grip didn’t falter. She could always wrap him in arms of her own, if necessary. But though he appeared a little drowsy from the meal, his eyes remained open.

  “The forest was different in the old days,” he said. “Wilder. More dangerous.”

  Yalda was intrigued. “Dangerous?”

  Vito said, “Don’t frighten her.”

  Dario buzzed dismissively. “There’s nothing to be frightened of now; nobody’s seen an arborine for years.”

  “What’s an arborine?” Yalda asked.

  Dario said, “Remember the story of Amata and Amato?”

  “I never heard that on
e,” she replied. “You never told it to me.”

  “I didn’t? It must have been your cousins.”

  Yalda wasn’t sure whether Dario was teasing her or if he was genuinely confused. She waited until he asked innocently, “So would you like to hear it?”

  “Of course!”

  Vito interjected a hum of disapproval, but Yalda gazed at him pleadingly until it decayed into a reluctant murmur of acquiescence. How could she be too young to hear a story that her cousins had been told, when she was the one carrying its teller to the forest on her back, not them?

  “At the end of the seventh age,” Dario began, “the world was gripped by a terrible famine. The crops were withering in the ground, and food was so scarce that instead of four children, every family had just two.

  “Amata and Amato were two such children, and doubly precious to their father, Azelio, because of it. Whatever food he could scrounge went first to his children, and he would only eat when they swore that they were satisfied.

  “Azelio was a good man, but he paid a high price for it: one morning he woke to find that he’d gone blind. He had sacrificed his sight to feed his children, so how could he find food for them now?

  “When his daughter Amata saw what had happened, she told Azelio to rest. She said, ‘I will go with my co into the forest, and bring back enough seeds for all of us.’ The children were young and Azelio didn’t want to be parted from them, but he had no choice.

  “The forest wasn’t far, but the plants closest to the edge had been stripped bare long ago. Amata and Amato kept going deeper, hunting for the food that no one else had reached.

  “After six days, they came to a place where no man or woman had been before. The branches of the trees were so close together that it was impossible to see the sun, and the flowers shone without rest, day and night. The wild mother of wheat still grew there, and Amata and Amato filled pouches with its seeds, eating enough to keep up their strength, but determined to bring back sufficient food to restore their father’s sight.