The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan
“Calm,” Yalda said. “She was joking with me.”
Frido stared back across the plain. Yalda decided that they were the ones who were getting the real taste of cosmic determinism; Benedetta could still decide either to launch the rocket or back out, but nothing her two friends did now could influence her choice.
Everyone clambered down into the bunker. It had been years now since a rocket had exploded at launch, but these precautions weren’t arduous, and though the dust was even thicker down here it was good to get out of the wind.
Yalda lay between Frido and Fatima, watching the mirrored horizon. The rocket was almost lost in the brown haze. She glanced over at the clock; there were three lapses still to go.
Leonia said, “What if she loses her resolve, then regains it? If we come out of the bunker and that thing goes off—”
“That’s not going to happen,” Yalda replied. “She’ll launch at the agreed time, or not at all.”
“What if something jams inside the engine feed?” Ernesta asked. “How can you walk away from that safely, if it might unjam at any time and fire the engines?”
Yalda said, “There’s a backup system to close off the liberator tanks. And if that doesn’t work, Benedetta knows how to take the whole engine feed apart.” Can’t you all be quiet, and just let this happen? She closed her eyes; her head was throbbing.
Time passed in silence. Fatima touched her arm warily. Yalda opened her eyes and looked at the clock. Frido counted softly, “Three. Two. One.”
The radiance of burning sunstone burst through the haze and lit up the plain. Benedetta hadn’t flinched; she hadn’t waited one flicker past the chime. As the rocket rose smoothly into the sky the walls of the bunker shook, but it was no more than a gentle nudge. Yalda felt a rush of empathetic delight. This courageous woman had pushed the lever, and the rocket had done her bidding. Cool breezes would be flowing over her skin, her weight would be no more than half above normal, and with her tympanum held rigid the noise of the engine wouldn’t trouble her too much. Yalda, braced the same way, barely registered the sound of the launch as it reached her.
When the rocket went off the edge of the mirror, Yalda scrambled out of the bunker and stood watching it ascend. Frido followed her, and though she gave no instructions to the recruits everyone soon joined them.
In less than a chime Benedetta would be four slogs above the ground—almost nine times the height of Mount Peerless. From her bench, she would be peering through the window and watching the horizon growing ever wider. Yalda’s skin tingled vicariously at the thought of this foretaste of the greater journey: to ascend and return, without the bitterness of parting from the world forever.
Frido had a theodolite on a tripod set up beside the bunker, but Yalda was content to use her naked eyes, merely checking the time on the clock that sat behind them both. Distance soon dimmed the rocket to a faint white speck, but it was not so pale that there was any ambiguity when the engines shut off and it vanished entirely. Now Benedetta would be weightless, as if she’d stepped into the skin of one of her descendants from the generations who would know nothing else.
The rocket would rise another two slogs before gravity brought it to a halt. As five lapses passed, Yalda pictured it slowing, approaching its peak. Would Benedetta have any way of knowing that she’d reached the midpoint of her journey, apart from the reading on her own clock? How well could you judge your speed, when the landscape that offered the only cues was at such a great remove? Yalda tried to imagine the view from this pinnacle, but the task defeated her. She would have to wait to hear it in the traveler’s own words.
For five more lapses the rocket would fall freely, then the engines would start up again, burning more fiercely than during the ascent, slowing the vehicle sufficiently for the parachute to take over and ease its fall. Yalda kept her rear eyes on the clock and her forward gaze raised to the zenith, trying not to be distracted by the Hurtlers.
Where was the speck of light? She glanced at Frido, but he hadn’t spotted it either. She forced herself to remain calm; the wind was whipping up dust all around them, and it was always easier to track the rockets to burn-out than to catch sight of them as they lit up again.
There! Lower and westwards from where she’d been looking, faint but unmistakable. The cross-winds would have given the rocket an unpredictable horizontal push, keeping it from retracing its trajectory precisely—and Yalda suspected that she’d lost her bearings a little, telling herself that she’d kept her gaze fixed when she’d really been following some slowly drifting streak of color in her peripheral vision.
Frido spoke quietly, his words for her alone. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “It’s coming down too fast.”
Yalda couldn’t agree. He had watched more launches then she had, but he was more anxious too; his perceptions were skewed.
The flame grew closer, its intensity becoming painful; in her mind’s eye Yalda followed it down to a point just a few strolls from the launch site. Benedetta would meet them halfway across the plain, waving and shouting triumphantly.
She waited for the flame to cut out, watching the clock as the moment approached. But when it had passed, the engines were still blazing.
“Something’s wrong,” Frido repeated softly. “The burn must have started late.”
As he spoke, the flame went out. Yalda fixed the clock’s reading in her mind: six pauses after the scheduled time. If the entire burn had been delayed for six pauses, the rocket would have been moving more than ten dozen strides per pause faster than intended when the engines cut out and the parachute was unfurled. Falling faster, from a lower altitude.
“What can you see?” Yalda asked him. The recruits were starting to notice their whispering, but Yalda ignored them and watched Frido searching the sky with the theodolite’s small telescope. The unlit rocket itself would be impossible to make out from this distance, but if the parachute was open the white fabric would catch the sun.
Yalda saw it first—her view was wider, and no telescope was needed. Not a flutter of sunlight on cloth, but the full glare of burning sunstone again. She touched Frido’s shoulder; he looked up and cursed in amazement.
“What’s she doing?” he asked numbly.
“Taking control,” Yalda said. The engines had no provision for manual operation, but Benedetta must have dragged the useless timing mechanism out of the way and re-opened the liberator feed herself.
Fatima approached. “I don’t understand,” she complained.
Yalda addressed the recruits, explaining what she believed was happening. The timer must have jammed for a few pauses while the rocket was in free fall, delaying everything that followed. The parachute must have been torn away when it unfurled at too high a speed. The only way to slow the rocket’s descent now was with the engines. Benedetta would try to execute a series of burns that would bring her to the ground safely.
She said no more; all they could do now was watch and hope. But even with perfect knowledge and perfect control, a powered landing could only be a compromise. You needed to be as low as possible before you finally cut the engines, to spare yourself from the fall—but the lower you descended, the more the ground below you would trap heat from the rocket’s exhaust.
And Benedetta did not have perfect knowledge, just a sense of her own weight to gauge the engine’s thrust and an oblique view of the landscape from which to judge her height and velocity. As Yalda watched, the burn intended to slow the rocket’s fall went on too long; the piercing light hung high above the plain for a moment then rose back into the sky.
The flame went out, leaving the rocket invisible again. Yalda tried to think her way back into the cabin, to regain the sense of empathy she’d felt at the moment of launch. Benedetta had already shown quick thinking and resolve, but what she needed most was information.
The engines burst into life once more, showing the rocket far lower than before. Yalda watched it approaching the horizon, afraid it was not slowing quickly
The flame dimmed slightly, but it did not go out. Yalda peered into the dust and glare, struggling to discern any sign of motion. Frido reached over and touched her arm; he was looking through the theodolite. “She’s trying to get lower,” he said. “She knows she’s close, but she doesn’t think it’s good enough.”
“Is it good enough?”
Frido said, “I think so.”
Then cut the engines, Yalda begged her. Cut the engines and fall.
The light grew brighter, but it remained in place. Yalda was confused, but then she understood: Benedetta hadn’t increased the thrust, but the rocket was now so low that it was heating the ground below it to the point of incandescence.
Frido let out a hum of dismay. “Go up!” he pleaded. “You’ve lost your chance; give it time to cool.”
The glow flared and diffused. The wind shifted, clearing the haze, and Yalda could see exactly what was happening. The ground was ablaze, while the rocket crept toward it, feeding the flames.
Yalda called out “Down!” and managed to push Fatima toward the bunker before the light became blinding and she stumbled. She lay where she’d fallen, her face in the dirt, covering her rear eyes with one arm.
The ground shuddered, but it was not a big explosion; most of the sunstone and liberator had already been used up. She waited for debris, but whatever there was fell short. When she relaxed her tympanum, all she heard was the wind.
Yalda rose to her feet and looked around. Frido was crouched beside her, his head in his hands. Nino was standing, apparently unharmed; the other recruits were still picking themselves up. Fatima peered out from the bunker, humming softly in distress.
In the distance, a patch of blue-white flame jittered over the ground. Yalda couldn’t tell if it was spilt fuel burning or the dust and rock of the plain itself. She watched in silence until the fire had died away.
“When Benedetta wanted to launch her imaging probes,” Eusebio recalled, “she just wore me down. Six dozen was what she wanted; six dozen was what she got. And if I’d been here for the test flight, it would have been the same. Whatever my misgivings, she would have talked me around them.”
Yalda said, “I wish we’d had a way of contacting her family. Or at least a friend somewhere. There must have been someone she would have wanted to be told.”
Eusebio made a gesture of helplessness. “She was a runaway. Whatever farewells she was able to say would have been said long ago.”
Yalda felt a surge of anger at that, though she wasn’t even sure why. Was he exploiting people, by helping them escape their cos? There was no crime in offering a way out, so long as you were honest about what it entailed.
The hut was lit by a single lamp on the floor. Eusebio looked around the bare room appraisingly but resisted making any comment. Yalda had spent the last ten days here, struggling to find a way to salvage something from Benedetta’s pointless death.
She said, “We need to be more careful with everything we do. We should always be thinking of the worst possibilities.”
Eusebio buzzed curtly. “There are so many of those; can you be more specific?”
“Igniting the planet.”
“Ah, the Gemma syndrome,” he said wearily. “Do you think the farmers rushing to plant crops in the blast zone came up with that themselves? Acilio has people out spreading the idea, and organizing paid relocations.”
“That’s an awful lot of effort just to spite you,” Yalda suggested. “Maybe he honestly believes there’s a risk.”
“A risk compared with what?” Eusebio retorted. “Compared with doing nothing while we wait to slam into a cluster of orthogonal stars? I’ve seen the image from the probe; that’s not a wild guess anymore, it’s a certainty.”
“The worst case,” Yalda persisted, “is that the engines on the Peerless malfunction in such a way that they deliver less thrust than they need to raise the mountain. And they sit there doing it for chime after chime—maybe bell after bell or day after day, if everyone who could shut them down is dead. There must be some point where whatever the Hurtlers did to Gemma would happen here. We’ve done tests to rule that out if all goes well—but we can’t test the most extreme case; there’s no scale model that will tell us what happens when a whole mountain of sunstone sits and burns from below, for days.”
Eusebio rubbed his eyes. “All right, if I grant you all of that… what do you propose?”
“An air gap, all around the mountain.”
“An air gap?”
“A trench,” Yalda explained. “As deep as the lowest engines, and maybe a stroll wide. Then we dig channels under the engines so that all the exhaust gas can escape freely. That would make a big difference to the heat build-up in the rock, if the engines end up running in place.”
“A stroll wide?” Eusebio closed his eyes and swayed backward, fighting not to use indecorous language.
Yalda said, “Look at it this way: a trench that wide would be enough to displace all those irritating farmers—for a reason they can’t really argue against. You could even ask Acilio to help pay for it, seeing as he’s so keen on fire safety.”
Eusebio opened his eyes and regarded her pityingly. “Yes, the need to take a reasonable, consistent position will win him right over.”
“No?”
“Everyone has their own form of vanity,” he said. “You and I enjoy being right: we want to understand how the world itself works, and then humiliate our enemies by proving that their guesses were wrong. Like… you and Ludovico.”
“Hmm.” Ludovico had been dead for a couple of years now, but Yalda couldn’t deny that she’d taken great pleasure in his defeat over the nature of the Hurtlers.
“That’s not Acilio’s nature,” Eusebio continued. “And it’s certainly not how he was raised. In his family’s eyes, the most important event in history was my grandfather cheating them out of a business opportunity that they believed they were entitled to enjoy. And now the family’s honor depends on my humiliation. For that, Acilio doesn’t have to be right about anything; all he has to do is see me fail.”
Yalda was sick of the whole stupid feud, but if Acilio was committed to creating obstacles then they’d just have to find ways around them. She said, “Maybe Paolo will pay for the trench.”
Eusebio stood. “Let me think about it.”
“There’s something more we need to do,” Yalda warned him.
“Of course there is.” He sat again.
She said, “We need a plan, to give people a chance of surviving a Hurtler impact while the Peerless is away. We need lookouts in every village, equipment they can use to try to douse the fire…”
Yalda stopped; Eusebio was shivering. She walked over and squatted beside him, then put an arm across his shoulders.
“What is it?” Not merely the threat of more costs and more work; he had long grown inured to that.
“My co gave birth,” Eusebio said, struggling to get the words out. “That’s why I was in Zeugma; to see the children.”
“She—?”
“Without me,” he said. “Not willingly. If she’d wanted it, we would have done it together. But we waited, and I wasn’t around, so her body just… made its own decision.”
“I’m sorry.” Yalda didn’t know how to console him. She wanted to tell him that she’d been through the same kind of shock herself, but any comparison she made to Tullia would just offend him.
“My father told me it was because I was away so much,” Eusebio said. “If I’d remained close to her, her body would have understood that we were waiting for the right time. But without a co, it gave up hope that the children would ever have a father.”
Yalda wasn’t sure if any of this was real biology
“They do have a father,” she said.
“No, they don’t,” Eusebio replied bluntly. “I still love them, of course, but I’m not promised to them. When I see them, it doesn’t…” He struck his chest with his fist.
Yalda understood. She’d cared for Tullia’s children as well as she could, but for all the genuine moments of joy she’d felt in their presence, she knew it was not the same as the love her father had felt for her.
When Eusebio left, Yalda put out the lamp and sat in the dark. The only certainty lay with the waves that wrapped the cosmos like the wrinkles in her prison sleeve: they would come full circle in agreement with themselves, along with everything they’d built. Nothing else could be relied upon. No one truly controlled their own body; no one ruled over the smallest part of the world.
And yet… it was still in the nature of every person that their will, their actions, and the outcome could be in harmony. That could never be guaranteed, but nor was it so rare that it could be dismissed as a meaningless farce. The will, the body and the world could never be brought into perfect alignment, but knowledge could bind the three strands together more tightly. The right knowledge could have granted Tullia and Eusebia more power over their bodies; the right knowledge could have brought Benedetta safely to the ground.
Yalda was tired of mourning; nothing more could be done for the dead and the divided. The only way to do justice to their memory would be to find the knowledge that would allow the generations that followed them to live without the same risks and fears.
13
Giorgio threw a farewell party for Yalda in his home, a few saunters west of the university. Though she’d been working full-time on the Peerless for six years he had never officially relieved her of her post with the physics department, so it was also a kind of retirement celebration. Zosimo, the only one of her fellow students who had remained in academic life, gave an amusing speech about her early discoveries. “It used to be the case that if you came across someone reading a scientific journal and they kept turning the pages sideways or upside-down, it was a sure sign that they had no idea what they were looking at. Now, thanks to Yalda, it’s proof that you’re in the presence of an expert in rotational physics.”