The Clockwork Rocket

by Greg Egan

  Daria said, “Some philosophers and anatomists have conjectured that a gas, not unlike air itself, might be spread or squeezed throughout the body in order to convey our will to move. On the contrary, my research has shown that the answer is both simpler and more wondrous: what informs the muscles is… this.” She took a pinch of fine powder from a dish beside the lamp and flicked it into the flame. There was a flash of intense yellow light as the substance was consumed—and the arborine’s arm swung up from its position of rest, twitched, then fell back down again.

  The audience yelled and stamped their feet in approval. Tullia leaned toward Yalda and whispered, “If only she’d got it to do summersaults; we could have had a full-blown riot.”

  Daria acknowledged the acclaim graciously, but then gestured for silence; the demonstration was not yet complete. “Light of the correct hue can excite the muscles into action. But is that its only role in the body? I think not.”

  The stage dimmed further, finally becoming completely black. The decorative trees unfurled their wan blooms once more, but the petals were just barely visible. From the darkness came the whine of Daria’s spinning blade; when it stopped Yalda heard her take a few steps across the stage.

  As Daria moved aside, a patch of shimmering yellow light was revealed behind her. The light throbbed and shifted in waves; Yalda was unpleasantly reminded of the swarm of mites that had feasted on her dying grandfather. But these specks of radiance didn’t flee into the air; no flock of hapless insects was feeding on the arborine. Daria had opened up the creature’s skull, and its last thoughts were playing out in front of them: a sad dance of fading luminescence, like a gust of wind rustling through a dying garden.

  When the glow from the arborine’s brain had flickered out completely, the lights came up and Daria spread her arms in a gesture of finality. The crowd made its approval known. Yalda had to admire the woman’s stagecraft, but the whole performance had left her disquieted.

  It took even Tullia a while to talk her way backstage, with Yalda in tow. They found Daria relaxing in a luxurious bed of white sand.

  “Did you like the show?” she asked them.

  “Yalda thinks you should have killed the beast before you cut it,” Tullia volunteered.

  “The brain’s light would have been invisible, then, by the time I opened the skull,” Daria replied. “Honestly, we drugged it very heavily. The swallowing is a reflex; I don’t believe it was conscious at all.”

  Yalda was not convinced, but she let the matter drop; she had no real evidence either way.

  “I promised you some holin,” Daria recalled. She climbed out of her bed and rummaged in a cupboard in a corner of the room, emerging with a small clearstone vial. “Take two scrags with breakfast, daily.” She handed Yalda the vial; the green flaky substance had been prepared in small cubical lumps. “You’ll need to increase the dose in a year or so.”

  “How much do I owe you?” Yalda asked.

  “Forget it,” Daria replied, slipping back into her sand bed. “Pay me when you’re wealthy.” She turned to Tullia. “Are you off to the Solo?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Well, I’m sure I’ll see you both around.”

  Yalda thanked her and began to leave. Daria said, “Keep it safe, and never miss a dose. I know you’re still young, but that only means you have all the more to lose.”

  “I’ll follow your advice,” Yalda assured her. She slipped the vial into a pocket before they left the room.

  On the street, she asked Tullia, “Would you be able to give me that essay on Meconio that you mentioned? I should probably spend some time rewriting it in my own style.”

  “Good idea,” Tullia said. “I think I have a version in my apartment.”

  As they crossed the Great Bridge, suspended over the city’s deep lesion, Yalda’s thoughts kept returning to the night of her grandfather’s death. Every living thing needed to make light, but like all chemistry it was a dangerous business. There was always a risk that it would go too far.

  When Tullia remarked on how distracted she was, Yalda told her the story of the trip into the forest, and how it had ended.

  “That’s hard,” Tullia said. “No one so young should have to witness a death.”

  “Have you seen people die?”

  “Two friends, in the last few years, but I never saw anyone go to light.” Tullia hesitated. “My co died when I was a few stints old, but I don’t remember that at all.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  Tullia spread her arms; there was no call for sympathy. “I never knew him. Most of the time I might as well have been a solo.”

  “Is your family still pushing you to find a co-stead?”

  “My father’s dead,” Tullia replied. “My brother and cousins would nag me if they could, but they don’t even know where I’m living now.”

  “Oh.” Yalda found it hard to imagine Aurelio or Claudio, let alone little Lucio, taking it upon themselves to tell her how to live. But people changed; once they were adults with children of their own and the neighbors were asking them, “What happened to Yalda?”, perhaps they’d start to see it as their duty to have an acceptable answer.

  They reached the tower where Tullia lived. Her apartment was on the eleventh floor—the cheapest location in the building, she explained. Most people didn’t want to climb so many stairs, though they made an exception for the very top floor, which was more expensive thanks to the skylights. Yalda could understand that; she would have loved to sleep beneath the stars again.

  Tullia had no lamps in her apartment, just a long shelf of small potted plants, arranged by color. Between the glow of the flowers and the starlight that came through the windows, she could see well enough to search through her stacks of paper.

  After a while she said, “It’s not here. I must have given it to someone else then neglected to make a new copy.”

  Yalda said, “What would you have copied it from?”

  “Oh, I still have it here.” Tullia thumped her chest. “Once I write something, I never forget it. But I don’t have any dye right now, or enough blank paper for that matter. How’s your touch memory?”

  “My what?”

  Tullia reached over and took her right hand. “Try to remember this without thinking about it. Don’t read it, don’t describe it to yourself, just try to keep the feeling of the shape.”

  “All right.”

  Tullia pressed her palm against Yalda’s and wrote a short passage on both of their skins. Yalda let her own muscles conform to the pattern of pressure from the curved ridges jutting against them; in a curious reversal of cause and effect, it soon felt as if she’d shaped every line herself. A few symbols drifted into her mind, but she blocked them out, forcing them to remain uninterpreted.

  “Now give it back to me.” Tullia released Yalda’s right hand and took the left one. “Don’t think about the details, just bring back the memory of how it felt.”

  Yalda summoned the shape, sharply tactile but still unvisualised, and pushed it onto her left palm. Tullia offered a congratulatory chirp. “Perfect!”

  Yalda drew her hand back. “Can I read it now?”

  “Certainly.”

  She didn’t need to examine her palm; she could sense the disposition of every muscle directly. “Meconio,” Yalda read, “was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the ninth age.” The text, she realized, was mirror-form compared to her own usual skin style.

  “Isn’t it amazing what people can write when they don’t have to think about it?” Tullia marveled. “Let alone believe it.”

  “Am I being dishonest?” Yalda wondered. “I know Ludovico is abusing his power, but there’s still a principle at stake. Maybe we should try to get someone else put in charge of the observatory schedules?”

  Tullia sagged against the wall, exasperated. “In an ideal world: of course! But you know how long that would take. If you’re serious about gathering your wavelength data before you drop dead—or wor
se—you’re just going to have to humor Ludo. Life is too short to make everything perfect.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do you want the whole essay?”

  Reluctantly, Yalda gave her assent.

  “Come closer.”

  Tullia took her by the waist and spun her around so that her back was against the wall. Then she moved toward Yalda, the whole length of her body drawing near. Instinctively, Yalda put up a hand to stop her.

  “Palm by palm would take us all night,” Tullia said. “This is faster. What are you afraid of? I can’t hurt you; I’m not a man.”

  “It feels strange, that’s all.” And was it true that only a man could trigger her? If a woman could give birth at any time—entirely unaided, against her will—Yalda didn’t know what to believe anymore. Maybe every awful children’s story, every cautionary tale, every rumor of magical comeuppance was really grounded in cold, hard fact. Maybe you could trip on the stairs or fall off a truck and find you’d been traded-in four for one.

  “It’s up to you,” Tullia said. “I can get some dye tomorrow and write the whole thing on paper, then you can spend the afternoon reading it.”

  Yalda considered this, but then she fought down her unease. Surely Tullia wouldn’t do anything that risked their lives?

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “This way is easier.”

  She lowered her hand, and Tullia pressed her skin against Yalda’s. Her head barely reached halfway up Yalda’s chest, and there were gaps where they weren’t quite making contact; Yalda put a hand in the middle of Tullia’s back and drew her gently forward. Behind her, the row of shining flowers stretched across the room like the trail of some impossibly fast star.

  Tullia began writing. Two bodies, one skin. Yalda left the words unread; she could entertain herself later with the awfulness of the essay. Now, she simply let the shapes flow from skin to memory, feeling a sense of rightness to them on a different level: each symbol on its own was elegantly constructed, each page was beautifully composed. Let the words give Ludovico the empty flattery he craved, while she and Tullia smuggled the true meaning right past him.

  Tullia stepped back.

  “That’s it?” Yalda was surprised.

  “Three dozen pages: that’s what he always asks for.”

  “It went so quickly.”

  Tullia was amused. “If you still have an itch, I can give you my whole dissertation on plant spectra.”

  Yalda looked away, confused. She didn’t care that this pleasure was so strange that she’d never even been warned against it, but she had no sense of what it meant, what obligations it entailed.

  “You should give up the basement,” Tullia suggested. “Come and stay here with me.”

  “I don’t know.” Yalda wasn’t looking for a co-stead, male or female. “I like the basement. Honestly.”

  “Think about it.”

  Someone shook the chimes by the entrance. Tullia walked across the room and opened the curtain; in the dim light, Yalda didn’t recognize the visitor as Antonia until she spoke.

  Tullia invited her in. Antonia was flustered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “It’s all right,” Tullia said. “Sit down, tell us what happened.” The three of them sat on the cool stone floor.

  “My co closed the business,” Antonia began, calmly enough. But then she stopped talking and began to shiver.

  “Your business?” Yalda pressed her. “In the markets? He canceled your stall?”

  “Yes.” Antonia struggled to recover her composure. “He told them I wouldn’t be coming anymore. Then I heard him talking with our father, making arrangements: the times that each of them would spend looking after the children.”

  Now Yalda’s own skin crawled.

  “He never even asked me if I was ready,” Antonia said. “If I’d done everything I wanted to do, if I’d completed my own plans.”

  Tullia said firmly, “So now he’s blown it, he’s lost you for good. If he wants children, let him carve them out of stone.”

  Antonia wasn’t so sure. “If I leave him, what then? Who’ll look after my children?”

  Tullia said, “So what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Antonia admitted. “But I need to get away from him for a while, while I think things through. And maybe then he’ll understand that he has to change his own thinking.”

  “It’s up to you,” Tullia said. “You’re welcome to stay here, if you like.”

  “Thank you.”

  Yalda was relieved; Tullia’s needier guest would save her from having to find excuses not to move in herself.

  “I want children!” Antonia declared passionately. “And I want good lives for them. I was working for them, saving money for them. All I wanted was to choose the time. Shouldn’t that be my decision?”

  “Of course,” Yalda said gently. She tried to recall Lidia’s optimistic arguments, tried to think of a way that politics and holin could put this mess right.

  The three of them sat talking for half a bell, then Yalda realized that they were all absurdly tired; they’d long ago stopped making sense.

  She bid her friends good night and made her way back to the basement. Antonia’s plight haunted her, but no one could fix the world overnight.

  5

  Yalda wasn’t sure whether Mount Peerless had been named with honest innocence in an age of limited travel, or whether the label was a vain boast intended to dismiss the claims of any rival. Either way, reputable surveyors had long since established that Mount Magnificent stretched five strolls and eleven saunters from base to peak, while Peerless was a mere five strolls and five.

  A few commentators still contended that the top of Mount Peerless might nonetheless be higher, in the sense of being farther from the center of the world. But geodesy remained too imprecise an art to settle the question definitively, while the effects of local climate on air pressure rendered that criterion equally unhelpful. Nobody could say which of the two mountaintops was closer to the stars.

  What Yalda knew for certain now was that a stroll deserved an entirely new and less frivolous name when it was directed vertically. On Zeugma’s flat roads, she could easily walk seven strolls in a bell—but the truck carrying her along the winding road that edged up the slopes of Mount Peerless had only managed to ascend half that distance after laboring for more than a day. At which point, the road became too narrow for the vehicle to proceed at all.

  Fosco, the driver, helped her pack a small cart with supplies; even Yalda couldn’t fit everything she’d need into pouches and pockets. The plan was for him to wait to give Renato, the observer Yalda was replacing, a ride back to Zeugma.

  “Are you going to be all right here?” Yalda asked. The long wait struck her as a lonelier, more stressful task than her own purposeful ascent.

  “I’ve done the changeover dozens of times,” Fosco assured her. “You should be thinking about your own health. The moment you start to feel uncomfortably warm—”

  “Lie down in the loosest soil I can find,” Yalda replied. “And don’t get up until my temperature’s normal.” Tullia had rammed that point home. Air played an important role in cooling the body, and by the time she reached the summit it would be carrying heat away much more slowly than usual. Only a direct, solid connection to the ancient, chilly depths of the world could rid her of the thermal energy that built up from her body’s metabolism.

  The morning sun was still low when Yalda bid Fosco farewell and set off up the narrow trail. Once he was out of sight, she took Daria’s vial from her pocket and swallowed two of the holin cubes. She relished the bitter taste; after all, if she’d been the descendant of generations of women who’d considered goldenrod petals to be a tasty delicacy, that wouldn’t bode too well for the efficacy of an anti-divisive derived from the plant.

  Yalda surveyed the route ahead. Slender trees lined the path and shrubs sprouted from every crack in the rocks. Plants appeared untroubled
by the thin air, though she’d been warned against trying to grow anything inside, in pots, at the summit. As she resumed her ascent, Yalda scanned the trees for lizards. Each twitching branch was an encouraging sign that animals could thrive here, too.

  The path veered closer to the edge of the slope; Yalda could catch glimpses between the trees of the plain they’d crossed on their way from Zeugma. From this height, she could see the dust haze they’d ridden through as a puny, finite thing, thinning out to nothing far below her. The flat brown land, sparsely studded with shrubs, was adorned with a network of shallow, wind-carved channels. There was no doubt that, over the ages, the plain had been scoured ever flatter and lower by wind and dust, while a favorable combination of tougher rock and protective vegetation had spared the mountain from the same fate. What Yalda had trouble imagining was the starting point for the whole process. Had the world been born smooth, or craggy? Had Mount Peerless been carved into existence, like a figure sculpted from a featureless slab, or had it been there from the start, towering over its ancient surroundings, and then retained or improved upon that initial advantage?

  Tullia believed that there had once been a giant, primal world, with every planet, every star, a fragment left behind by its destruction. Yalda wasn’t so sure; the gravitational pull of so much concentrated matter would have been stupendous. It was hard to believe that even a wildfire in some massive seam of sunstone piercing the depths of that ur-planet could have fractured it into rubble and scattered the resulting worlds across the void. Then again, maybe sunstone was nothing compared to the rocks that had blazed in the past. To expect the scatterer of worlds to be stable enough to persist to this day, to be recognized and studied, might be as naïve as hoping to meet your own mother.

  By mid-afternoon Yalda was growing weary. When she’d first set out, the path’s steep gradient had felt like a promise of rapid progress: the faster she was ascending toward her destination, the better. Now the lack of respite from the endless climb simply made her angry.