The Clockwork Rocket

by Greg Egan

  Perhaps she and Eusebio had been foolish not to anticipate how far Acilio would go. But what more could they have done to protect themselves? Hired people to travel the world and check every crew member’s story? That would have done wonders for the recruitment rate—and told them nothing of value, since every runaway lied, with good reason.

  If Nino’s actions really were the end of it—the old world’s last feeble swat at the new—that was cause for celebration, too. As Daria had said, separation was painful, but it was time to break away from the old influences.

  We can’t spare his life, Frido told Yalda, raising the words across his chest. Perhaps his silence was out of concern for the prisoner’s feelings—but then, Babila was sleeping, and they all grew tired at times of shouting over the sound of the engines.

  Why not? Yalda wasn’t surprised by his advice, but she’d been dreading its eventual arrival from some quarter or another.

  Once we have all the information we can get from him, Frido replied, the most important thing is deterring anyone else in Acilio’s pay. If we can’t find the other agents, the next best thing is to make them too afraid to act.

  Yalda did not find this persuasive. Once we’re no longer visible from the ground, Acilio has no stake in doing anything more to us. Whatever setbacks we suffer, they can’t embarrass Eusebio if they go unseen. And even if Acilio did want to harass us further, how could any agent be rewarded for carrying out his wishes when the payoff couldn’t possibly depend on it? She could understand Acilio’s deal with Nino: even if Nino had no way of seeing it honored, his brother could have gone to Acilio and said “Everyone knows the rocket went dark, so where’s the money you promised us?” But given that Acilio had made no effort to annihilate the Peerless at launch, she couldn’t see him offering a second saboteur money for his family conditional on the Peerless failing to return at all.

  You may be right about that, Frido conceded, but even if Nino wasn’t trying to kill us, he certainly betrayed us. He has no place among us anymore. People won’t accept anything less than his death.

  “So are you planning on staging an uprising if I don’t agree?” Yalda hadn’t trusted her intended sarcasm to come across in symbols alone, but after shouting the words over the engine noise she wasn’t sure that the shift in modes had been particularly helpful.

  “All I’m saying is that it will weaken your authority,” Frido shouted back.

  So I should kill a man for the sake of my authority?

  Frido considered the question seriously. I suppose that depends on how many people you think will die, if you lose control here.

  Yalda said, “I don’t flatter myself that I’m the one pillar of sanity that can keep the Peerless on course.”

  “I’m not suggesting that either,” Frido assured her. But whenever power changes hands, there’s a risk of violence—unless you just resign at the first hint of dissatisfaction.

  Yalda didn’t know how to reply to that. Did Frido covet her position? It had been less than two days since the launch, less than four since Eusebio had given her this role. She found the burden so unwelcome that the thought of anyone aspiring to take it from her had never crossed her mind before. But if it was so unwelcome, perhaps she should relinquish it? If Eusebio had appointed Frido ruler of the Peerless she would never have objected; why not correct his decision before anyone grew too attached to the status quo?

  And then instead of Nino dying to keep her in power, he could die to give her an easy life.

  The observation chamber was a shallow cave cut into the side of the mountain, sealed against the void by a tilted dome of clearstone panes. Standing at the edge of the cave, Yalda gazed down the slope and confirmed that the plains from which the mountain had once risen truly were gone. A haze of scattered light from the engines spilt past the rim of the mountain’s base, like the harbinger of some spectacular dawn, yet it was above that glow—though still unprecedentedly downhill—that the blazing sun was now fixed. Yalda stretched out her arm, and with her rear eyes saw the shadow it cast on the roof of the cave.

  The polygons of clearstone around her had become pitted by debris during the launch; the flaws caught the sunlight, creating distracting specks of brightness that competed for her gaze with the true sky beyond. She would have struggled to locate her target, had she not known in advance where to search for it: about halfway between the sun and the “horizon” implicitly defined by the chamber’s floor.

  To her naked eye the slender crescent cradled a disk of featureless gray, but through the theodolite’s small telescope the planet’s night side was revealed as an elaborate patchwork of hues. She recognized a few tiny splotches of pure wheatlight, but mostly the colors of the forests and fields were woven together too tightly to separate. She thought of Tullia—on the peak of this very mountain, not so long ago—hunting for the spectral signature of plant life on other worlds.

  No cities were visible at this remove. No wildfires, either; even if the crater the Peerless had left behind was still smouldering, here was proof that the launch had not created another Gemma. Yalda shuddered, imagining for a moment how it would have felt to look back and discover that everything they’d been fighting to protect had been consigned to flames.

  She recorded the bearing from the theodolite’s dials, then took sightings of Gemma, the inner planet Pio, and a dozen bright stars. Four Hurtlers were visible, long gleaming barbs skewering the scene like the tools of a blind but indefatigable assassin. Clockwork and gyroscopes wouldn’t be enough to guide the Peerless safely to its destination, the empty corridor where it could drift for an age without fear of being stabbed from any angle. Only a routine of meticulous observations, calculations and adjustments could lift the odds of a successful journey above those of Benedetta’s automated probes.

  The calculations took more than a bell, but the results were encouraging: the Peerless’s position and orientation were very close to the values specified in the flight plan, and the small adjustments she’d pass on to the feed chambers would easily nudge the vehicle back toward that ideal path.

  Yalda was reluctant to leave. She aimed the telescope at her old home again, trying to commit its unfamiliar face to memory. On the ground, there’d been farewell after farewell, but this was the final parting.

  As a pang of loneliness grew in her, she tried to assuage it by confronting the subject directly. If she’d had the chance to bring anyone she wished along with her, who would she have chosen? Eusebio and Daria would have been enough to keep her company, she decided; better that Lidia and the children, Giorgio and his family, Lucio and the others all stayed put. If everyone she cared about had come along for the ride, she might have felt tempted to abandon the idea of the Peerless ever returning, content to imagine this fortunate few, safe and self-sufficient, drifting on through the void with their rear eyes firmly shut.

  Satisfied that the emergency had passed and no more saboteurs were likely to emerge in her absence, Yalda decided to take a short trip up through the mountain. She’d received news of some minor damage via the rope network, and though the repairs were reportedly proceeding smoothly she wanted to see how things stood for herself.

  One of the feed chambers for the second tier of engines had suffered a partial ceiling collapse during the launch; it had been empty at the time, so no one had been harmed. When Yalda arrived a work team was still shifting rubble, and Palladia, a former mining engineer who’d been involved in the construction phase, was on site assessing the damage and making plans to insert a new supporting column.

  “Can you fix this in five stints?” Yalda asked her. The second tier wouldn’t be firing quite that soon, but as well as having its damaged parts replaced the feed mechanism would need to be cleaned, inspected and tested—none of which would be possible while there was building work going on.

  “Three stints,” Palladia promised her. Yalda looked around the chamber at the women and men with wheelbarrows, shovels and brooms, collecting up everything from f
ist-sized chunks of hardstone cladding to innocuous-looking streaks of powdered sunstone that had fallen through the broken ceiling from the surrounding lode. If the liberator tanks had ruptured, innocuous would not have been the word for it.

  “I think it’s good for morale that there’s something to be fixed,” Palladia mused. “Once you’ve repaired a building with your own hands, you really have a stake in it.”

  “You could be right,” Yalda said. Nobody wanted to feel like a caged vole that Eusebio had tossed into the void, a breeding animal who was only here for the sake of their remote descendants’ accomplishments. “Still, I wouldn’t hope for too much more of the same.”

  “The kind of compressive forces that the launch produced here won’t ever be repeated,” Palladia replied, “but when the weight of the mountain vanishes entirely, that will be an experiment we’ve never really carried out before.”

  When the workers took a meal break, Yalda sat and ate with them, joining one group in a quick game of six-dice. The pantries on every level had been stocked with loaves—and holin, which the women passed around unselfconsciously, as if it were some kind of condiment. The few men in the team, most of them accompanied by their cos, appeared comfortable enough in this strange new milieu, and if anyone was suffering regrets over the ties they’d severed, the camaraderie here surely dulled the pain.

  After the meal the cleanup resumed, but Yalda was out of synch with her hosts and in desperate need of sleep. When she woke she bid Palladia and the crew farewell, and continued her long trudge upward.

  The moss-lit staircase stretched above her interminably, the view barely changing as she ascended. The higher engine tiers were undamaged—or at least, they’d passed a superficial inspection, and any further attention could wait until the second tier was in perfect shape—so she’d have no cause to linger in those deserted chambers. She could still hear the sound of the engines below, but distance took the annoying edge off it, leaving an almost reassuring buzz.

  With no company, she passed the time sorting through a long list of anxieties. Would these runaways do a better job of raising their friends’ children than she’d done with Tullia’s? At least the fatherless wouldn’t be a derided minority here—but if that were the deciding factor, what would be the fate of the fathered few? Then there was the transition that would inevitably follow: the rebalancing of the sexes in the next generation, bringing problems of its own. The Peerless had been a gift to runaways, but from here there was nowhere to flee. The only hope for their children would come from instilling the principle of autonomy so deeply that no one had reason to fear their own co.

  When she reached the first level above the highest engines, Yalda unbarred the safety doors and stepped out of the stairwell; a short tunnel with three more sets of doors took her to the edge of the cavern. The arborines would have no reason to leave the most comfortable place in the Peerless for them, but she wouldn’t have wanted a confused animal rampaging through the feed chambers below.

  She stood among the bushes watching a nearby tree, one branch trembling as two lizards ran along it chasing mites. It had taken so much work to construct this buried forest that when it had first shown signs of flourishing—long before the launch—she’d felt as if they’d already succeeded in bringing the whole world with them into the void. But if that sentiment had been premature, at least the launch appeared to have done no harm here; the trees had proved resilient enough, and the lizards looked as vigorous as ever. She wouldn’t seek out the arborines to inquire about their health, having seen the kind of mood they were in after the test flights—but those flights had included greater accelerations than the Peerless had experienced, and still caused the creatures no injuries.

  The faintly rotting smell of the place was not quite the same as any odor Yalda recalled from childhood, and the violet light reflecting back from the ceiling was more eerie than nostalgic. Still, it might be good for people to come here now and then to remember—or in later generations, to imagine—the world from which this small, imperfect sample of life’s richness had been plucked.

  Yalda had received no reports of damage to the farms, but she stopped at one of the caverns of wheat to inspect the crop with her own eyes. Like the forest below, this field had been established for years, so if it had survived the briefly elevated gravity there was no reason to think it couldn’t go on thriving. Half the red flowers were open and shining healthily, while the other half slept. As she walked between the rows, alone, she noticed an occasional broken stalk or disheveled flower, but none of the plants had been uprooted. She’d seen worse than this back home after a few stiff gusts of wind.

  There’d been a ceiling collapse in one of the medicinal gardens, so Yalda made that her next stop. As she walked down the tunnel from the stairwell, the drab glow of the moss gave way to a richer light than even the forest had offered, and her first glimpse revealed a lush, vibrantly colored mosaic of plants spread out across the cavern. It was only when she reached the entrance that she saw the pile of rubble to her left, and the dozen or so people trying to clear it without trampling any of the precious shrubs.

  Yalda approached the group, calling out a greeting. Everyone acknowledged her politely, but only one of the workers offered more than a deferential nod.

  “Yalda! Hello!”

  “Fatima?”

  Fatima walked over to her, picking her way carefully through the debris and crushed plants.

  “Was anyone hurt?” Yalda asked.

  “No, we were all in the dormitory when it happened.”

  “That’s something.” Yalda looked up at the ceiling, which had lost a chunk the size of a small house; they were above the sunstone lode here, so the walls had no need for protective cladding, but the natural mineral formation exposed by the original excavation must have been less stable than the engineers had thought. “What about the plants?”

  Fatima gestured at the rubble. “All of that used to be soldier’s ease.” Yalda knew the blue-flowered shrub, which had grown wild near the farm; its resin helped with wound-healing, though some less-than-helpful chemist had found a way to modify it to produce the melding formulation so beloved of the police.

  “Don’t take it too badly,” Yalda said. “There’s plenty more in the other gardens, and you’ll get it started here again in a stint or two.”

  Fatima didn’t actually appear grief-stricken by the loss. “We’ve really left the world behind?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” Yalda assured her.

  “You’ve looked back and seen it?”

  “Yes.” Yalda was sure that Fatima understood perfectly that if they had not reached the void they’d simply be dead—but with the weight of everything restored to normal, nothing in this cave conveyed the truth to her senses. “You should see it for yourself. All of you. Who’s the supervisor here?”

  “Gioconda.” Fatima pointed her out.

  Yalda approached the woman and asked her how the work was proceeding, then negotiated a break in a bell’s time when anyone who wished could come with her to the nearest observation chamber.

  “I’d like to see the world, myself,” Gioconda said. “Before it’s too faint.”

  While they waited, Yalda helped shift the rubble. Gioconda was planning to use it to build a series of paths through the garden—covering the bare soil between the plots that currently provided a sanctuary for weeds—but the larger pieces of stone would need to be broken up, and all of the paving would need to be bound to the netting so it would remain in place when the Peerless ceased accelerating.

  The work was relaxing, and the team seemed to be in good spirits. Once the schools started up, Yalda decided, it would not take much more to make this flying mountain as good a place to live as any small town. It would never match Zeugma’s range of cuisines—or be visited by touring entertainers—but there was nothing to stop people inventing their own new dishes, or devising their own variety shows.

  The observation chamber wasn’t far; the
edge of the mountain was less than a stroll away, and then a short descent took them to a clear-domed cave much like the one on the navigators’ level. Yalda hadn’t come prepared with coordinates, but she managed to locate the world’s tiny crescent without too embarrassing a delay.

  The gardeners lined up to take turns looking through the theodolite, and Yalda watched their faces as they stepped away, silent and reflective. The ultimate purpose of the Peerless was more remote than ever now, with the site of its hoped-for return promising only to fade and vanish, never to be seen again in their lifetimes. But Yalda detected no signs of despair. They were not of the world anymore, but they had their own home to advance and protect. Best of all, even in parting they had not become rivals or deserters: if the Peerless flourished, the old world would share the rewards.

  When everyone had seen what they’d come here to see, Yalda showed them Pio’s stark terrain, then Sitha’s glorious color trail.

  “When will we be able to see the orthogonal stars?” Fatima asked impatiently.

  “Not for a while yet,” Yalda replied. “So far we’ve barely changed the angle we make with starlight.” She looked around the chamber at the others. “Is there anything else someone would like to see?”

  One of the gardeners, Calogera, gestured toward the barren slope beyond the dome. “I’d like to see the traitor Nino falling past: thrown off the peak of the mountain, on his way down into the engine’s flames.”

  Yalda didn’t speak until the cheering stopped, which gave her time to decide that it would be best not to respond at all. “I’ll need to get moving now,” she said. “I have more inspections to perform. I wish you well with your repairs.”

  Yalda returned to the navigators’ post. A cell had been constructed in a corner of the room, but the builders had rendered it inconspicuous, the wall blending seamlessly with the original, the triple-bolted door almost invisible. Frido and Babila had been opening the small hatch and tossing in loaves without exchanging a word with the occupant, and with a floor of soil packed with worms to eat the prisoner’s faeces, there really was no reason the door would ever need to be opened.