The Clockwork Rocket

by Greg Egan

  “Your friends aren’t eating with everyone else?” Yalda was growing puzzled, and a little anxious; why were they creeping around in the dark like this?

  Tullia paused on the stairs. “This is a place to talk freely, without worrying who’s listening,” she explained. “We call it the Solo Club—though there are only a few genuine solos among us. Some of us had cos who died, some of us are runaways, some of us are just thinking about breaking the tie.”

  Yalda had heard of runaways—and thoroughly approved, in principle—but it was something else to be told that there was a whole cabal of radicals huddled a few strides away at the top of these stairs.

  She said, “If the city police—”

  “The police won’t come here,” Tullia assured her. “We make it worth their while to stay away.”

  Yalda steadied herself. One reason she’d rarely befriended the women she’d encountered in Zeugma was the disparity between their expectations and her own. Here, finally, was a chance to meet a few whose lives did not revolve around the imminent certainty of childbirth. What kind of coward would she be to forego that, just because some of them were on the wrong side of the law?

  She said, “I’d like to meet your friends.”

  Though the stairway was dark, the curtain at the top parted to reveal a room as brightly lit as the restaurant below. No one was huddled behind partitions, whispering seditiously; they were seated on the floor in small groups, clustered around lamps and dishes, talking and buzzing and chirping just like students in the university food hall.

  One woman in a group of three turned toward them and called to Tullia. They approached, and Tullia made introductions.

  “Daria, Antonia, Lidia: this is Yalda. We only met a few chimes ago, but she’s into the glorious mysteries of optics, so she must be worth knowing.”

  “Please join us,” said Daria. There was a diagram of some kind displayed on her chest, though Yalda could make no immediate sense of it.

  As they sat, Tullia asked about the picture.

  “I was just talking about the western shrub vole,” Daria explained. “The young need care for half a year after birth, but they have no sterile caregivers; instead, one of each brood delays reproduction for a season. Children whose mother was an early reproducer are cared for by their late-reproducing aunt; those whose mother was a late reproducer—making their aunt the early reproducer—are cared for by that aunt’s late-reproducing child.”

  Yalda could interpret the diagram, now; the lines sloping down across Daria’s chest represented the life of each vole, with dashed lines when they were so young as to need care, and annotations showing which relative provided it. “Some late reproducers look after two young, some four,” she noticed. “They all look after their sister’s children, but if their mother was an early reproducer they’re stuck with their aunt’s children as well. That’s hardly fair.”

  Daria was amused. “And the early reproducers live half as long as the others—of course it’s not fair! But it’s worth learning about the full range of possibilities nature has invented, in the hope that one day we can steal the useful parts and assemble them into something better.”

  Before Yalda could ask how anyone might steal a useful part of another species’ biology, Lidia said, “How about a drug that lets men reproduce? That would make a nice addition to holin!”

  “I doubt that a drug alone could do that,” Daria replied. “Men aren’t likely to possess any kind of dormant capacity for childbirth, given that all our close relatives have sterile caregivers. Even when the young need more physical protection than education—so the caregivers tend to be quite large—the pattern is the same: reproduction or care, never both. The voles are an interesting exception, but they’re on a distant branch of the family tree.”

  Daria smoothed the picture away, and the conversation turned to more mundane matters. As the women recounted the day’s tribulations, Yalda picked up a little more about Tullia’s circle of friends. Daria taught medicine at the university, while Lidia worked in a dye factory and Antonia sold lamps in the markets.

  “Anyone for six-dice?” Lidia suggested.

  “Sure,” said Daria. The others agreed.

  “I don’t know the rules,” Yalda confessed.

  Lidia pulled a handful of small cubical dice from a pocket. “We each start with six of these; the sides are numbered one to three in red and in blue.” She gave one to Yalda to inspect. “You roll your dice, and your total is the sum of the blue faces minus the sum of the red. There are some simple rules which decide how many dice you should have, according to your total; if it’s not correct, you either have to get rid of some dice, or collect some from the bank. When you collect, you always take pairs and set them down with the same number showing, one red one blue, so your total is unchanged.

  “Then, we take turns playing. The player can make any change to one of their own dice that they can balance with a corresponding change to another person’s. For example, I can turn my red three into a blue two by turning your blue three into a red two. Then both of us adjust our numbers of dice to fit our new totals, and on it goes.”

  “How does someone win?” Yalda asked.

  “Their total hits a gross, or they have the highest total after everyone has made six dozen moves.”

  “Those rules about the numbers of dice—?”

  “You’ll pick them up easily,” Lidia promised.

  In fact, it took Yalda three games before she really knew what she was doing. Lidia won the first two, Daria the third.

  After the fourth game, a win to Lidia again, Antonia made her apologies and rose to leave.

  “My co thinks I’m taking a delivery,” she said. “But he knows they never come much later than this, so I’d better not push my luck.”

  When Antonia had left, Yalda asked glumly, “How does anyone put up with that?” Whatever taunts and humiliations she’d suffered herself, at least she was nobody’s prisoner.

  “Things are going to change,” Lidia said. “Once we get a few women on the City Council, we can start to work toward banning forced returns.”

  “Women on the Council?” The idea struck Yalda as utterly fanciful. “Are there any women with that kind of money?”

  Tullia pointed out a woman seated on the far side of the room. “She owns the company that distributes grain throughout the city. She could easily afford to pay for a seat; the real issue is wearing down the men who are refusing to let her buy in.”

  “We’ll live to see it happen,” Lidia declared confidently. “There are a dozen wealthy women in this city who are working toward the same agenda. First, legalize runaways. Second, legalize holin.”

  “What’s holin?” This was the second time Lidia had mentioned it, but Yalda had never heard the word used anywhere else.

  For a moment the whole group was silent, then Daria said, “I know you only met her tonight, Tullia, so I don’t blame you at all. But if an educated woman in Zeugma doesn’t know what holin is, what hope has anyone got out in the sticks?”

  Yalda was bemused. “Lidia said it was a drug, but what does it treat? I’ve actually been quite healthy ever since I came to Zeugma; maybe that’s why I haven’t heard of it.”

  “Holin inhibits reproduction,” Daria explained. “How old are you?”

  “Twelve. I just turned twelve.”

  “Then you need to be taking it.”

  “But…” Yalda preferred to keep these matters private, but in the circumstances there was no point being coy. “I have no co,” she said. “I’m a solo. I’m not looking for a co-stead. And I’m strong enough to take care of myself, so I really don’t think I’m going to be abducted by some poor, deserted rich boy who’s desperate for heirs. So why would I need a drug that inhibits reproduction?”

  Tullia said, “None of us have cos around—and holin gives very poor protection against triggering anyway. What it inhibits most effectively is spontaneous reproduction. The chance of that is quite small at your a
ge, but it’s not zero. I’m two years shy of two dozen, myself; without holin I wouldn’t last another year.”

  Yalda had never heard any of this before. She said, “My father always told me that if I didn’t find a co-stead, I’d go the way of men.”

  “There’s no reason he would have known the truth,” Lidia said. “It’s not as if he would have been acquainted with any great number of women of Tullia’s age.”

  “That’s true.” Yalda doubted there’d been a woman in her village more than four years past a dozen.

  Daria added, “I’ve also heard claims that spontaneous reproduction is more likely in concentrated population centers. If you’d stayed at home then your father’s prediction might have come true, but in a city like Zeugma the odds are skewed against it.”

  Yalda was beginning to feel disoriented. She had always imagined that she would eventually ease her father into accepting her belief that a solo was born to a different kind of destiny—and then that would be the end of the matter. He might still nag her occasionally, but she knew he would never have forced a co-stead on her. Now she had to think about ways of getting her hands on a drug that Zeugma’s Council deemed illegal—and taking that drug for the rest of her life.

  Daria could see that this was making her anxious. “I can get you some holin,” she said. “It’s probably better that we don’t meet at the university, though. I’m giving a public lecture in the Variety Hall three nights from tonight; if you want to come along we can meet afterward.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The young lady’s had a shock,” Tullia said, “and I’m tutoring the laziest of my merchants’ sons tomorrow, so we should probably call it a night.”

  They left Lidia and Daria still talking. Tullia walked with Yalda to the edge of the markets. “You really sleep down there? You should get an apartment.”

  “I like sleeping in the ground,” Yalda replied. “And I don’t care about privacy; no one ever bothers me.”

  “Fair enough,” Tullia conceded. “But you have something new to consider now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Where exactly are you going to hide your holin?”

  4

  Yalda met Tullia outside the Variety Hall. Daria’s lecture, entitled “The Anatomy of the Beast”, was advertised with garishly colored posters showing a fearsome creature standing on a tree branch, one hand clasped around a hapless lizard, another outstretched toward a second, unsuccessfully fleeing meal. Infant care of the western shrub vole might not have been quite so enticing a subject to Zeugma’s moneyed classes.

  Tullia harangued the ticket-seller into checking for a list of free admissions, and both their names turned out to be on it. “I should hope so!” she told Yalda as they moved from the ticket queue to the equally crowded one leading to the entrance. “I’ve paid for enough of Daria’s meals at the Solo to keep her in scalpels for the rest of her life.”

  Once they’d entered the hall, Yalda saw that the stage had been decorated with a number of small but authentic-looking trees, augmented with a scaffolding of branches and twigs that served to heighten the impression of a dense forest canopy. As stagehands moved through the hall extinguishing the wall lamps, the crowd buzzed with anticipation, as if they expected a whole menagerie of nocturnal wildlife to reveal itself in this motley imitation jungle.

  A few sickly buds on the trees did open in the gloom, but they soon closed again as brighter lights were trained on the stage from above. Yalda looked up and caught a glimpse of a girl perched on a narrow railing, struggling to maneuver an unwieldy contraption of burning sunstone behind a clearstone lens.

  The impresario walked onto the stage and delivered a spiel about the perilous expedition that had been mounted to the Shining Valley to capture the subject of the night’s demonstration. “In its natural state, this creature is too ferocious to be allowed into the city at all; the Council would never permit it! However—after feeding the beast stupefying drugs for six days, in a holding pen a safe distance beyond the city limits, we are able to present, for the first time ever in Zeugma, our wild, uncultured cousin: the arborine!”

  A cart was wheeled on, bearing a thick branch suspended between two supports. The arborine’s hands and feet were bound to the branch with ropes; it was in no state to grip anything itself. Its head hung limply, and though its eyes were open they were dull and fixed. Yalda thought it was a male, but she wasn’t sure; she’d only ever seen sketches of the animal before. Certainly it was smaller than she was.

  “I hope it’s already dead,” she whispered.

  Tullia said, “Ah, a sentimentalist.”

  “Why should it feel pain for our entertainment?”

  “Do you think it lived a life of comfort in the trees?”

  Yalda was annoyed. “No, but that’s beside the point. Nature wants to split your body in four and pulp your brain. We should be aiming higher.”

  A man in front of them turned and hushed her.

  “Only a woman,” the impresario was saying, “could possess the physical strength to handle such a beast. But we are lucky to have found a woman with both the strength and the expert knowledge to be our guide into this dangerous territory. From Zeugma University, I give you: Doctor Daria!”

  As the crowd erupted with the sound of acclaim, Tullia whispered, “Don’t worry, fashions change. One day we’ll be up there with our prisms and lenses, raking in just as much cash.”

  Yalda said, “Only if there are other-worldly arborines in your forests in the sky.”

  Daria strode into a waiting spotlight, a third arm sprouting from the middle of her chest. She was carrying a circular saw connected to a long tube that stretched all the way back into the wings.

  “Rest assured,” she said, “we will all be safe tonight.” She held up the saw for their inspection. “This instrument is powered by compressed air, and makes a dozen gross revolutions every flicker. Should the arborine somehow escape from its stupor, I can sever its head in an instant.” She squeezed a trigger and the blade became a blur of screeching stone.

  “Now, though, it’s time to feed our wild cousin his very last meal.” An assistant brought a bucket onto the stage; Daria took it and approached the arborine. With a scoop that was sitting in the bucket, she lifted out some of its contents—which resembled coarsely milled grain, but had somehow been rendered a startlingly vivid red—and poured it into the arborine’s slack mouth.

  Yalda watched with revolted fascination as the muscles around the arborine’s throat began to move. It was alive, and, drugged or not, still able to swallow.

  “You might be wondering at the unusual hue of our unfortunate guest’s repast,” Daria noted. “In fact, over the past six days his food has been mixed with a different dye for every meal.” As she spoke, the arborine kept gulping mechanically at the trickle of grain.

  When the creature would take no more food, Daria put the bucket aside and set her blade spinning. With the audience cheering her on, she stepped up to the arborine and began carving into its flank.

  If her victim made a sound, the machine was more than loud enough to conceal it. Yalda could see the arborine twitching pitifully for a while, but by the time Daria stood aside to reveal her handiwork its convulsions had ceased.

  The saw had removed a wide rectangular slab of skin and muscle that stretched almost the full length of the arborine’s body. Yalda was sickened by the needless cruelty of the methodology, but she did not look away.

  The red-dyed food had penetrated a surprising distance already—perhaps four or five spans from the creature’s throat—but it was the evidence of past meals that was truly revelatory. The six bands of color painted a veritable history of digestion and excretion: the previous day’s orange meal had been squeezed from the esophagus into dozens of smaller tubes that branched out from that central passage, while the yellow had progressed into a multitude of vastly finer tubules. The green dye occupied a convoluted surface that curled around within the arborine
’s flesh, like some huge tarpaulin that had been folded and re-folded on several different scales in order to pack it down to the smallest possible volume; Yalda suspected that it, too, had been carried by a system of tubes that were simply too fine for her to resolve from this distance. The green layer, Daria explained, was food that had finally come within reach of virtually every muscle in the body.

  For the still-earlier meals, a similar process could be seen in reverse: fine vessels gathered up the unused portions of the food, along with a cargo of metabolic wastes, and brought them together in ever-larger conduits. At the far end of the gruesome window, a cluster of violet faeces could be seen, waiting to be expelled.

  “Six days—half a stint—from mouth to anus,” Daria marveled. “So long to cross such a short distance. But then, most foods need to be milled finely by the body—crushed and re-crushed by the muscles at every junction—and every scrag of nutrition needs to be extracted along the way.

  “One question might occur to you, though: if it takes so very long for our vital sustenance to travel through the body, how does the will to move pass from the brain to the limbs in an instant? While it’s true that the passage of food is deliberately sluggish, no chemical we know of can diffuse through a solid or a resin in the requisite time, nor can muscular contractions convey any cargo through a tube with sufficient rapidity.”

  The stage dimmed, and an assistant wheeled on a new prop: a small sunstone lamp, burning fiercely but covered with a hood that allowed only a narrow beam of light to escape. Daria directed the beam onto the arborine’s exposed flesh, taking some time to aim it carefully; perhaps she wished to highlight a particular feature, but she offered no explanation for her choice.

  Next, she took a knife and cut the rope that bound one of the arborine’s arms to the branch from which it was suspended. A murmur of disquiet spread through the crowd, but once freed the limb simply hung from the creature’s shoulder like a long sack of meat.