The Clockwork Rocket

by Greg Egan

  Yalda said, “Why? The construction crews can handle this; we won’t be taking anyone away from their ordinary jobs.”

  “No,” Frido agreed, “but it will still affect everyone. Having explosives set up all around the mountain is not the kind of change we should be making lightly.”

  Yalda glanced at Palladia, but she remained silent. “It should be clear that we haven’t come to this lightly,” Yalda said. “Are you in favor of the plan, or not?”

  “Of course I’m in favor of it,” Frido replied calmly. “And I want to do everything I can to see it carried out, safely and successfully. The question is, how can we bring the crew along? Can we convince them that, in protecting the Peerless from external threats, this won’t increase the risk to their lives from the enemies within—from saboteurs?”

  Yalda traveled down from the summit to check the preparations before the spin engines were fired. In the fields, the last of the crops to grow up from the old cavern floors were being harvested. In the gardens, workers shifted plants and netted soil onto walls that would soon be horizontal. A haze of dust and organic detritus filled these chambers, leaking out into the corridors and stairwells to dim the moss-light and coat every surface with black grime.

  After consulting with Lavinio and the other agronomists, Yalda had decided to leave the forest untouched. It was near enough to the axis of the mountain to remain unaffected by centrifugal force, and the effort required to shift the whole tangled maze of full-grown trees—as well as capturing and moving the arborines—seemed disproportionate to any benefit, when all the plants and animals it contained were doing well enough without gravity.

  Boards were being fitted over the helical grooves in the outer stairwells, to bridge the gaps in the floors of the tunnels they’d become. The ring corridors could be left as they were, their walls already traversable, but crews were busy fitting rope ladders to their radial offshoots.

  Every factory, every workshop, every office needed to be rethought, if not literally reconstructed. But as Yalda traversed the length of the Peerless from field to mill to kitchen, from plantation to carpenter’s workshop, from the medicinal gardens to the holin store, everyone she spoke with accepted the upheaval without complaint.

  This was not the time to tear people away from their work to confront them with the news of Palladia’s plan, and she doubted that Frido would be foolish enough to do that himself. While they were as busy as this, united by the common cause of rescuing the crops, no one would be interested in hearing about anything else.

  When the work was done, though? Frido could undermine her whisper by whisper, spreading his own message about the new project, leaving people wondering why she hadn’t explained it to them herself. However she handled this, she would not be able to put off the confrontation for long.

  Yalda waited in the observatory for the fireworks to begin. She’d invited her old work team to join her, but not everyone had accepted; there were observation chambers lower down offering much better views of the pyrotechnics. But she had something different in mind: she’d locked the big telescope on a point just above the horizon, so her companions could take a look and commit what they’d seen to memory. The flames pouring from the tunnels they’d helped carve into the slopes would be spectacular enough, but the actual proof of the engines’ efficacy would first appear as a tiny shift in the view through the telescope.

  Fatima let go of the ropes she’d been holding and curled up in midair. “This is where you discovered rotational physics, isn’t it?”

  “It must be,” Yalda replied, “but I don’t really recognize anything. The ground, the buildings… everything’s changed.” Even the telescope itself had been rebuilt, with the original lens inserted into a new frame.

  “Someone should put a sign here,” Fatima suggested. “To commemorate it.”

  “I’m sure that can wait until I’m dead.”

  Yalda glanced at the clock beside the telescope; there were still three lapses left to ignition. Ausilia and her co were clinging to the lowest of the cleaners’ handles at the edge of the dome, peering down the mountain expectantly. Prospera and her friends were over near the entrance, daring each other to attempt ever more intricate ricochets off the clearstone panes. It would be hard to end up stranded in midair, and Yalda had no fear that they’d break the dome, but if anyone collided with the telescope she’d be annoyed.

  “I saw Nino yesterday,” Fatima said.

  “How was he?” Yalda asked, wishing she didn’t have to hear the answer.

  “Not so good.”

  “Did you take him some books?”

  “He’s not reading anymore,” Fatima said. “He told me he’s lost the power to concentrate; the words just make him dizzy.”

  Yalda said, “I’m sorry. But I’m sure you cheered him up.”

  Fatima’s expression hardened. “If he knew when he was getting out, it might be easier for him. If you could set a date—”

  “Set a date? Do you think it’s that easy?”

  “You’re the leader, aren’t you?” Fatima replied bluntly. “And everyone respects you even more, since you decided to build the spin engines. You’re going to save the crops, save us all from starving! Do you really think people will throw you out, after that?”

  “It depends on what else I do,” Yalda said.

  Fatima was drifting disconcertingly far from the support ropes; she reached down in time to pull herself back.

  “If it’s getting too hard for you, maybe someone else could join you in the visits,” Yalda suggested.

  Fatima turned to face her squarely. “I’ll tell you exactly what it’s like,” she said. “I go and see him every two stints. I bring him some loaves, tell him some gossip, try to make a few jokes. But that’s it, that’s all I can do. When I turn around and leave, nothing’s changed for him. He’s my friend, I’ll never abandon him… but it’s like holding someone’s hand while they’re being tortured.”

  Yalda’s skin crawled. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing,” Fatima said angrily. “Just do something for him.”

  Ausilio let out a chirp of delight, and Prospera’s group quickly scrambled to the edge of the dome to catch sight of the flames from the engines. Yalda motioned to Fatima. “Let’s take a look; it will be a while before anything shows through the telescope.”

  They pulled themselves along the ropes to the nearest pane. Looking down the slope, they could see three pale cylinders of blue-white fire emerging sideways from the starlit rock. Yalda waited anxiously for something to go wrong; she’d had visions of one of the engines tearing itself out of the ground and cartwheeling off into the void, spraying the mountain with fire as it went. But the pale flames remained motionless and steady, and she could barely feel the vibration of the engines.

  She should have been ecstatic. Their ignorance about the wheat might have killed them, but now they were close to guaranteeing the success of the next crop. She remembered when Nino had told her of Acilio’s sneering prediction of their fate: Eating the soil. Begging for death. The fact that it had almost happened only made it infinitely sweeter to imagine Acilio’s face when the Peerless next lit up the sky over Zeugma.

  But what could she do for Nino? Stand up in front of the crew and declare that he deserved to roam freely now—right after informing them that she wanted to fit explosive charges in every wall that separated them from the void? Or simply wait for Frido to explain to them that Palladia’s plan required a new leader who would send the right message to all the would-be saboteurs lurking among them, by finally disposing of the last one who’d been caught in the act?

  Yalda dragged herself back to the telescope, and called the team to gather around. The red end of one star trail that she’d centered in the view had now shifted, just detectably, out of the cross-hairs.

  “How do we know the telescope didn’t get bumped by the engines’ vibrations?” Prospera asked, only half-joking. “How do we know that the mountain’s really
turned at all?”

  All that hard, dangerous work, all that beautiful fire pouring out across the slopes, for an incremental change that could as easily be an illusion.

  Yalda said, “How do we know? Be patient, wait a while, then look again.”

  Two days into the spin-up, one of the lookout posts—wisely left unoccupied for the duration of the process—snapped free of its ropes and was lost to the void. Isidora, whom Yalda had put in charge of the lookouts, had the other three reeled back in to be strengthened and tested before anyone tried to use them again.

  By the time the engines were shut down there’d been no other reports of serious damage. In the academic precinct there was a series of small annoyances to deal with—most of them involving the realization that the centrifugal force here, though too strong to be ignored, was also too weak to produce enough friction to hold things in place in the conventional way. Equipment and furniture that would have stayed put under old-style gravity now had to be re-secured just as firmly as when it had been weightless, in order to resist the pushes and tugs of ordinary use.

  Yalda quite liked the slight weight she’d acquired in her own office and apartment; she could still use the old system of ropes to get around, but she no longer found herself flailing in panic if she ended up out of reach of all the walls, ropes and handles around her. Slow as she was to fall toward the walls that had turned into floors, her body now accepted that she couldn’t end up stranded.

  After helping to get the optics workshop functioning again—with Sabino moved to a perfectly weightless room of his own, dead on the axis—Yalda headed for the fields. As she soared down the central staircase it was as if nothing had changed, but when she took hold of the rope ladder at the mouth of the radial exit, she dutifully reformed her lower hands and descended feet-first.

  The tunnel led into the top of the nearest chamber; the flat disk of the interior was now standing on edge. The rope ladder continued down one of the rock faces, and as Yalda moved between the sheer walls, even in the moss-light she found it hard to think of the place as an underground cavern anymore. It was more like descending by night into a secret valley.

  The gravity was still weak here, but it had cleared all the dust out of the air. The floor of the valley was deserted, but when Yalda stepped carefully between the furrows she could see that the newly planted seeds had already sent up shoots. The sight sent a shudder of relief through her body.

  A flimsy guardrail surrounded the mouth of the radial tunnel leading down into the next chamber; nothing about this exit now looked remotely sensible. “Ah, Eusebio,” Yalda whispered. “Everything’s turned sideways in your beautiful design.” She slipped between the rails and reached across to the rope ladder, which followed what had once been the corridor’s floor. As she gripped the ladder’s side and the structure swayed toward her, her old, dormant sense that a fall could injure her was abruptly reawakened.

  The second field had been sown later than the first; no shoots were visible, but Yalda found a buried seed and checked that it was sprouting. Lavinio would have told her if there’d been any problems—but to touch the promise of the next harvest with her own hands reassured her, made her feel strong.

  In the third field, the closest to the mountain’s surface, farmers were still at work. Half a dozen firestone lamps had been strung on a pulley line that stretched from the entrance at the top of the chamber to a corner of the field. As Yalda descended, she could see the giant shadows she cast sideways across the rock face.

  When she reached the ground, one of the farmers, Erminia, approached and greeted her.

  “Thank you for your work here,” Yalda said. “How long until you finish sowing?”

  “One more day, but then there’s another field…” Erminia gestured in the direction of the summit, unsure how to refer to it now that “up” had two different meanings. “Two days there, then the whole crop is planted.”

  “As soon as there’s a chance, we’ll join the two chambers,” Yalda promised.

  “Really?” Erminia didn’t sound enthusiastic.

  Yalda was puzzled. “One large field here would make things easier, wouldn’t it?” They needed the extra space for the crops that they’d gain by cutting through the intervening rock, but in any case she’d have thought it would be more convenient to work a single expanse of soil.

  “I heard you were going to put explosives here,” Erminia said, “to blow out any fire that starts below us. If that’s what it comes to, I’d rather we lost as little of the crop as possible.”

  It was a fair point, but Yalda didn’t reply; she didn’t want to confirm the plan in a casual conversation, let alone start debating the pros and cons of individual section boundaries.

  The rumors were already spreading, though. The longer she delayed dealing with them, the weaker her position would be.

  She said, “Can you spread the word to all your friends and colleagues: there’ll be a meeting at the summit, five days from now, on the third bell.”

  “A meeting about what?” Erminia asked.

  Good question, Yalda thought. Why you should be perfectly relaxed about the prospect of your wheat fields exploding beneath your feet?

  “We’ve fixed the crops,” she said. “Now we need to talk about what we’re going to do to avoid going the way of Gemma.”

  Yalda waited outside the meeting hall, counting the people as they entered while she rehearsed two speeches in her head.

  One speech was about the time the crew had spent working together on the slopes, with their lives in each other’s hands and the fate of the Peerless in the hands of everyone. She’d been rescued from a near-fatal accident herself, but they all had their own stories of their friends’ courage and ingenuity. After that, why would they imagine that they needed a rule of fear to keep them safe? One weak-willed farmer with starving children had been persuaded to commit one dangerous act. But Nino had repented and been punished, and he had no reason to try to harm anyone again. He did not need to die, either for the sake of his own crimes or for the sake of the Peerless’s future. Letting him live would not be an act of weakness; it would be an affirmation of everyone’s mutual trust.

  The other speech she had ready, in case her first one went badly, concerned the equipment and protocols that could be developed to limit access to the charges, without rendering the fire response so slow as to be useless. And if she grew desperate enough, she was prepared to start talking up the prospects of contingency plans to rescue anyone who ended up outside the mountain in the event of an unplanned breach of the walls.

  Palladia emerged from the hall. “Who are we waiting for?” she asked Yalda.

  Yalda checked the roll. “Isidora and three others; I think they were all on lookout shifts.” The shifts ended precisely on the bell, but even if they’d forgotten about the meeting and worked through to the usual time, they were later than she would have expected. “I’ll wait until four chimes past, then we’ll have to start without them.”

  “You don’t think someone…?” Palladia asked anxiously.

  “Snapped a rope?” Yalda had been too distracted to even think of such a thing, but the pang of horror at the thought passed quickly. “The others would have sent for help by now.” The lookouts had already completed one shift safely with the newly-strengthened designs, but in any case the protocols were clear: if someone had ended up adrift in the void, the other lookouts did not try to retrieve their colleague themselves, they returned to the mountain immediately to raise the alarm.

  “What’s the mood in there?” Yalda asked. She’d greeted everyone as they’d arrived, but they’d all been equally polite to her. When even Babila and Delfina congratulated her on the success of the spin-up, she could hardly trust anyone’s words or demeanor to reveal their true plans.

  “You should take a look for yourself,” Palladia suggested.

  Yalda dragged herself over to the entrance. There was plenty of room in the hall for people to spread out comfortably, a
nd many had done just that, but about a third of the crew were clustered together toward the front, clinging to the support ropes that held them up against the weak gravity, jostling each other excitedly, buzzing and chirping.

  In the center of this pack was Frido, dispensing his wisdom. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the enthusiastic responses were deafening. She’d heard all this noise from out in the corridor, but she’d imagined it was down to boisterous groups of friends rejoicing in their achievements, not one man charming the crowd.

  Who was she fooling? She was not a politician or an orator; no one would listen to her words about building the future on trust. If she’d wanted to defeat Frido, she should have started poisoning people against him long ago—making up some story about him having forced his runaway daughter back to her co. Either that, or listened to Nino’s advice from the sagas and just had him killed.

  She returned to Palladia. “If you went to him and offered a deal from me, do you think he’d listen?”

  “What kind of deal?”

  Yalda said, “I’ll stand aside, I won’t oppose him at all, if he promises to let Nino live. Let him threaten hypothetical future saboteurs with any octofurcating thing he likes—just let him respect the decisions I made in my own time, and leave Nino be.”

  “What if he says no?” Palladia asked. “You’ll have weakened your position for nothing.”

  Yalda could hear the mirth surging in the hall again. “What else can I do? Ask him. Please.”

  Reluctantly, Palladia pulled herself back along the rope toward the entrance.

  “Yalda! Good news!”

  Yalda turned. It was Isidora who’d called out; she and the other three lookouts were approaching in the distance.

  Palladia hesitated. “So everyone’s safe?”

  “Well, there they all are,” Yalda said.

  “And that’s the good news?” Palladia was confused. “Of course it’s good, but…”