The Clockwork Rocket

by Greg Egan

  She modified her diagram to show what she meant.

  Yalda said, “That’s all true—though the reason we don’t see any blue in those trails is also a matter of how much power the star emits in different parts of the spectrum. The light we’d see as blue would have to leave the star as far-infrared, traveling incredibly slowly. So it can’t be carrying energy out of the star at a very high rate… which means the star itself simply won’t be shining very brightly in that color.”

  Ausilia had been following the discussion closely, though Yalda wasn’t sure how much she’d understood. But then she pointed to Fatima’s chest and said, “If that star happened to be in front of us instead, its slowest light would still end up looking blue, wouldn’t it? It would just approach it from the other end of the spectrum. So its trail would start out violet, but never quite get as far as blue.”

  She hesitated, then produced a diagram, echoing Fatima’s, to illustrate her point.

  Yalda chirped with delight. She gestured to Ausilia to turn so that everyone else could see the picture. “That’s the last puzzle solved: why some trails above us are just violet and indigo. And that’s it: between you, you’ve unwoven the whole sky.”

  In fact, not everyone had caught up with Fatima and Ausilia, but Yalda stood back and let the students help each other past their lingering puzzlement. As they looked to the stars and back, connecting the details of the color trails to the figures before them, the thrill of understanding spread.

  This alien sky belonged to them, now. Its transformation would become even more extreme as the Peerless moved faster, but the new ways of seeing it that they had acquired would handle those changes with ease.

  Yalda knew that only a few of these people would end up as researchers, only a few as teachers. But even if they did no more than pass their understanding on to the children of their friends, it would all be a part of strengthening the culture, ensuring that their descendants were at ease in this strange new state.

  And the most beautiful thing of all, she realized—struck by it anew, because she’d almost begun taking it for granted—was that every one of these solos and runaways, every one of these partnered women and their cos, would have the chance to live out their lives without coercion, making use of their talents, untrammeled by the customs of the old world.

  Forget the Hurtlers, forget the orthogonal stars. For that alone, the struggle had been worth it.

  16

  Strapped to her bench in the navigators’ post, Yalda counted down the pauses. It had always been Frido or Babila doing the honors before, but she’d taken the role for herself this time, knowing it would be her last chance.

  “Three. Two. One.”

  The anticlimax that followed was welcome; any sudden, perceptible change would have meant that something had gone horribly wrong. The clock advanced another two lapses before Yalda noticed anything at all—and even then she had her doubts; the hint of dizziness, of balance gone awry, could as easily have been nothing but anticipation. The machinists were tapering off the flow of liberator in an excruciatingly protracted manner; it would take a full chime for the engines to shut down completely.

  “Can you hear that?” Frido asked.

  “Hear what?” Babila raised her head to listen.

  Yalda said, “The rock.” Over the hammering of the engines, she could make out a low creaking sound coming through the ceiling. The mountain had lost only a fraction of its weight, but it was already beginning to rearrange itself, stretching out beneath the diminishing load. That was not a bad sign; better that it start adjusting now than save up the changes for a sharp transition later that released all its energy at once.

  Four lapses into the shutdown, Yalda could have sworn that the skin on her back was growing numb—and knowing the true reason that she was starting to register less pressure did nothing to make the illusion less compelling. At seven lapses her dwindling weight began triggering flashes of panic, in which she was convinced—for a moment or two—that the legs of the bench had given way beneath her. The engines were producing a strange, soft patter now; the rock above had fallen silent. For the first time since the launch, she could hear the ticking of the clock from across the room.

  Babila turned and vomited up her last meal, thoughtfully depositing it out of sight of her companions—though the floor itself might not hold the mess down much longer. With no hope of reconciling the room’s apparent steadiness with the alarming sense that everything was slipping, Yalda closed her eyes. She found herself visualizing the Peerless from a distance, a dark cone against the color trails. But in this fanciful vision the middle third of the mountain had turned as soft as resin, and she watched in horrified fascination as it stretched out into a narrow tube, then snapped—

  She braced for the impact that must have followed the same plummeting sensation for every one of her ancestors who’d had the misfortune to experience it. That the crash never came was no surprise, but nor was it a relief; the threat of impending damage refused to be dispelled.

  Yalda lay on her bench humming softly, waiting for something to change. Finally, she grew sufficiently inured to the sense of dread to open her eyes and look around. Frido had removed most of his straps and was sitting up; Yalda did the same, and felt no worse for it. In fact, the actions were reassuring, proving that she still had control over her body.

  Half a dozen ropes had been strung across the room at shoulder height. Frido finished unstrapping himself and reached up to take hold of the nearest of them. At first he tried to walk across the floor, using the rope as an aid, but his feet kept slipping on the stone. Then he changed his approach, curling his body up and gripping the rope with his feet as well, forming them into a second pair of hands. After a few unsteady moments, he mastered the technique and scurried along the rope, hand over hand, as far as the wall. Then he swung onto a second rope that was fastened to the stone beside him, and set off in a new direction.

  Babila watched him, stupefied. “I’m not doing that for the rest of my life,” she moaned. “You can send me home right now.”

  Yalda removed the strap from around her waist and took hold of the nearest rope. Following Frido’s example, she re-formed her feet and tried to raise them, but then she found herself tumbling slowly in mid-air, still clinging to the rope with a single hand but unable to seize it with any other appendage.

  “Hunch up, you fool!” Babila suggested irritably; in her state of nausea even Yalda’s clumsiness was a personal affront. But it was good advice; Yalda had no control over her body’s orientation, but she could still bring all four hands together at the point where she held the rope. From there, she slid them along it, spacing them out more comfortably. She looked across the room to study Frido’s technique—he was never taking more than one hand off the rope at a time—then she began tentatively pulling herself along.

  She was fine at first, until her sense of the vertical flipped and the cozy illusion that she was hanging down from a horizontal rope was replaced by the equally false conviction that she was perched above it, precariously balanced, certain to tumble over at any moment. She closed her eyes and pictured herself ascending instead: climbing up a vertical rope. When she opened her eyes and started moving again, her chosen illusion persisted; the small forces on her body as she dragged it along the rope were oriented in the right direction to reinforce the idea.

  After practicing for a while she became reasonably proficient, but it was disconcerting to be so dependent on the ropes. If one of them snapped, installing a replacement would not be easy; it was clear now that they’d underestimated the number of handles needed on the walls to ensure that a chamber like this remained navigable, come what may. And if threading a new rope into place was a major task, any kind of construction work would be impossible.

  Frido left the navigators’ post, dragging himself through the doorway to see how the neighboring machinists were faring. Babila was still sitting on her bench looking miserable. Yalda approached her.

>   “Try the ropes,” she said. “I’ll stay close to you.”

  “I can’t do it,” Babila declared.

  “You can’t hurt yourself. You can’t fall.”

  “What if I get stranded?” Babila retorted. “Drifting in mid-air?”

  It wasn’t an entirely ridiculous objection; the chamber was high enough that someone really could end up out of reach of anything solid—let alone anything they could actually grasp.

  “Even if you let go of the rope accidentally,” Yalda pointed out, “you won’t drift away from it very quickly. You’ll always have time to grab hold of it again. And I’ll stay in front of you, I’ll make sure you’re all right.”

  Babila wasn’t happy, but she reached up with one hand and grabbed the rope beside her, released the strap around her waist, then refashioned her obsolete feet and curled her body up so she could grip the rope in four places.

  “We’re all animals now,” she declared forlornly. “I feel like an arborine.”

  “Is that so bad?” Yalda wondered. “We’re going to have to re-learn everything we do, but if we’ve done something similar before, in the forests, that can only help.”

  “And which zero-gravity forests were they?” Babila began pulling herself along the rope with surprising speed.

  Yalda backed away from her hastily. “None in the past,” she said, “though it might be interesting to see how they deal with it now. We might learn something from all of the animals.”

  “They won’t know what hit them,” Babila predicted gloomily. “They’ll cope much worse than we do.”

  “Maybe.”

  For all her reticence, Babila proved to be quite agile. Yalda suspected that most of her pessimism was just the nausea talking, and that both would wear off soon enough.

  “A part of me keeps thinking that this is temporary,” Yalda admitted, clinging to the rope near the center of the room; the chamber now seemed to her like a disk-shaped space standing up on one edge. “As if it’s a trick that’s all down to some clever new way of using the engines, and if we get bored with it we can always just stop.”

  “I know what you mean,” Babila said. “How can a condition that came without effort back home require a whole burning mountain to sustain it… while one that was impossible for more than a pause or two becomes the natural state?” She shivered. “Think of all the people who’ll live and die like this: feeling as if they’re endlessly falling.”

  Yalda listened to the silence of the dead engines. She’d always expected that she’d welcome it ecstatically when it finally came, but it was going to take a while to grow accustomed to the absence.

  “They won’t feel as if they’re falling,” she said. “They’ll feel the way they always feel. Only the old books will tell them that there was once a thing called ‘falling’ that felt the same.”

  A day after the shutdown, Frido, Babila and a group of the machinists set off up the mountain. New jobs were waiting for them, close to the summit. Yalda lingered in the navigators’ post, promising to follow them later; nobody pressed her to explain why.

  When she opened the door to the cell a thick haze of dust spilled out, red in the moss-light. The soil on the floor here was covered with the same netting as they’d used in the gardens, but without plant roots to help bind it, it was scarcely contained.

  Nino was at the back of the cell, clinging to the netting; bundles of paper tied with string drifted around him, along with several clumps of faeces and half a dozen dead worms.

  “Come out of there.” Yalda heard the anger in her voice, as if it were Nino’s fault that he’d been living in this squalor. She should have checked on him much sooner.

  “Is there anyone around?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Nino used the netting to crawl across the floor. He hesitated at the doorway, confused for a moment, then Yalda backed away and made room for him on the rope that was anchored to the wall beside the entrance. He took hold of the rope and drew himself toward it, then reached back and swung the door closed, stopping any more of the dust escaping.

  He looked over at the navigators’ bed, fully enclosed beneath a tarpaulin. “I was thinking you must have done something like that. Is it easy to use, without everything spilling out?”

  “Not really,” Yalda confessed. “I think we’re going to have to start adding some kind of resin to the sand.”

  Nino said, “My only problem is that it’s been hard to read, through the dust. If you could spare a couple of those tarpaulins—”

  “Forget about that mess.” Yalda gestured dismissively toward his cell. “I’ll make sure you have a proper bed, upstairs.”

  Nino hesitated; she recognized the way he held the muscles around his tympanum when he was struggling to find the most tactful way to phrase something. “That’s kind of you,” he said, “but it would be better if I could fix what I have already.”

  “Nobody’s staying down here,” she said. “Now that we’re orthogonal, barring an emergency the engines won’t be fired again in our lifetimes.”

  “I understand,” Nino replied. “There’ll be no full-time navigators, and you’ll have work to do elsewhere. But it’s better if I stay.”

  “Are you worried about the trip?” Yalda asked him. She hadn’t handled the last move as well as she might have. “I’ll get some of the machinists to play guard on the way up. No one will be able to accuse you of running wild, if you have a whole escort.”

  “No one will accept me being up there at all,” he said. “Let alone accept the sight of you coming to my cell—”

  Yalda cut him off irritably. “If you think that’s a problem, I’ll put your cell inside my apartment. Then no one need know how often I visit you.”

  Nino buzzed with bleak amusement. “Do that, and we’d both be dead in a stint.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “No? Then you don’t know what people are capable of.”

  Yalda was angry now. “Don’t patronize me. I was in prison myself, remember.”

  Nino said, “You suffered for a while at the hands of a spoilt brat who was more interested in hurting someone else. That’s not the same as trying to live in a world where everyone is your enemy.”

  “And the stunt you pulled for the same spoilt brat,” Yalda retorted, “is not the be-all and end-all of life on the Peerless. People have more important things to think about.” She took her hands off the rope and drifted free for a moment. “Do you know how to make a loaf, like this? How to fix a lamp? How to sow a crop?”

  “So everyone will be preoccupied with weightlessness for a while,” Nino conceded. “That’s no reason for us to push our luck. Leave me here, let people forget about me. Or if they think of me at all, let them be satisfied that I’ve been banished as far from them as possible. Banished and abandoned.”

  Yalda could not accept this. “Abandoned to starve? Abandoned to go crazy?”

  Nino said, “The moss is edible; have you really never tried it? But if you want to help me… choose someone you trust—someone whose movements will attract no attention—and send them down here with a few loaves and books every couple of stints. If I can read something new every now and then, I won’t lose my mind. And I still have another draft of the sagas I can work on.”

  “If I leave you here alone,” Yalda said, “what’s to stop someone from coming down and killing you? You’re afraid that if I take you to the summit and make it clear that you have my protection, people will be so outraged that they’ll turn against me… but how long do you think you’ll last with no protection at all?”

  Nino thought about this, seriously. “If you put enough locked doors in the way, that might help. You can justify it as a way of keeping me down here, even if I manage to break free from my cell. Some people will be happy enough with the thought of me buried in an impenetrable dungeon—and I’ll be a little safer from the others, who won’t be happy until I’m dead.”

  Yalda said, “If I call a meeting a
nd explain to everyone why you did what you did, they should accept that your imprisonment is punishment enough. And they should respect me more, not less, for refusing to bow to tradition. The Peerless exists to bring change. Every last runaway here should be ready to shout: octofurcate the old ways! If they really wanted to live by those rules, they should have stayed in a world where they still held sway.”

  Nino took his time replying, striving for tact again. “That’s a brave speech, Yalda,” he said, “and I can’t fault it, myself. But before you try it on the whole crew… can you name one person who started out opposing your decision, who you’ve managed to bring around with the same fine words?”

  “Yalda! Are you busy? Please, you have to see this!”

  Isidora was calling from outside Yalda’s office, too excited to waste time dragging herself into the room. Yalda was in the middle of a long calculation on the energetics of oscillating luxagens, but after a moment she slipped her notes into a hold and latched it. Isidora’s bursts of enthusiasm were annoying at times, but it was thanks to her efforts that the optics workshop was functioning again so soon. If she wanted to share her excitement at having rendered one more piece of apparatus usable without gravity, it would be churlish to refuse her.

  Yalda dragged herself across the room and through the doorway, four hands shuttling her along the two parallel ropes. She retained the extra pair of hands she’d been using on her papers, in anticipation of having to twiddle a focusing wheel or adjust the angle of a prism.

  Before Yalda had come within half a stretch of her, Isidora was already backing away down the corridor toward the workshop.

  “What’s the great achievement?” Yalda called after her.