The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan
It took Yalda two days to work up the courage to pull the bolts and step into the cell. They weren’t torturing their prisoner with darkness; the walls here emitted the same mossy red glow as they did outside. Nino sat, unrestrained, in a corner; he did not look up as she closed the door behind her and approached.
Yalda sat on the floor in front of him. “Is there anything you want to say to me?” she asked.
“I’ve told you everything,” Nino replied dully. “If there are other saboteurs, the Councilor never mentioned them to me.”
“All right. I believe you.” Why would Acilio have told this man anything, beyond the instructions he needed to complete his own task? “Your confession is complete. So what now?”
Nino kept his eyes on the floor. “I’m at your mercy.”
“Maybe,” Yalda said. “But you must have your own wishes.”
“Wishes?” Nino made it sound like an infant’s nonsense-word.
“If you had a choice,” Yalda persisted, “what would your fate be?”
Nino took a while to respond. “Never to have listened to the Councilor. Never to have got into debt. Never to have seen a second sun in the sky.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Yalda had imagined the conversation proceeding very differently. “You’re here, you’ve done what you’ve done, we can’t change that. So what now? Do you want an end to it?”
Nino looked up at her, shocked. “Nobody wants to die,” he said. “It’s what I expect, but I’m not going to beg you for it. I’m ashamed of what I did, but I haven’t lost all dignity.”
“No?” Yalda spread her arms to take in the cell. “What dignity remains for you here?”
Nino glared at her, then touched his forehead. “I still have my mind! I still have my children!”
“You mean, you have your memories?”
“I have my past,” Nino said, “and their future. My brother will struggle without the Councilor’s second payment, but I know he’ll do his best.”
“So… you’ll just sit here and imagine their lives?”
“With pleasure, for as long as I’m able,” Nino replied defiantly.
Yalda was ashamed. She had tried to convince herself that she’d be offering him mercy, but in truth that logic was as odious as Acilio’s. She had once believed that she faced a lifetime in chains herself, convinced that no one with the power to help her would ever give a thought to her plight. In the darkness of her cell, with Tullia’s encouragement still fresh in her mind, she’d guessed the shape of the cosmos, no less—but robbed of any further companionship she doubted that her mental discipline would have persisted for long. Nino, too, had the life of the mind to sustain him for now, but it wouldn’t last forever.
Yalda left him. She stood at her desk, pretending to pore over a star chart, ignoring Frido’s enquiring glances.
What did she owe the crew of the Peerless? Safety, above all else, but Nino’s death wasn’t necessary for that. The satisfaction of revenge? It would please most of them to see him die, but did she owe them that pleasure?
And what did she owe Nino? He had been weak and foolish, but had he forfeited his right to live? When Acilio had dragged her into his stupid feud, her own pride had lost Antonia her freedom. Who was she to declare that Nino’s crime was so great that he deserved no mercy whatsoever?
But if she did spare his life, that would not be the end of it. If she kept him locked up, she couldn’t banish him from her thoughts and pretend that his welfare and sanity were not her responsibility.
She stared down at the chart, at the few crosses marked near the beginning of a course that stretched past the edge of the map. What did she owe the generations to come, who’d follow the path set by her bearings? The hope of a notion of justice less crude than their ancestors’, where a few well-placed bribes and a sergeant’s whims could bury anyone in a dungeon for life. She owed it to them to set her sights higher.
Yalda looked over at Frido. “There isn’t going to be an execution,” she said.
Frido wasn’t happy, but he understood from her demeanor that there was no point arguing. “It’s your decision to make,” he replied. “Do you want him sent up the mountain?”
Yalda said, “Not while I’m down here.”
“You still need to question him?”
“No. He has nothing left to tell us about Acilio.”
Frido was confused. “So why keep him here?”
Yalda noticed that they’d woken Babila with their shouting, but she needed to hear this too.
“If I’m going to take his freedom away,” she said, “then it’s up to me to deal with the consequences. I’m going to need to find a way to keep him busy.”
“Busy how?” Frido protested. “He’s a farmer, not an artisan; you can’t turn his cell into a workshop.”
Yalda said, “I wasn’t thinking of anything so ambitious.”
Babila rose from her bed. “Then what?”
Yalda said, “Where do we start with anyone? If our records are correct, he’s never been to school. So the first thing is to teach him how to read and write.”
15
When the world disappeared into the glare of the sun, Yalda was relieved; the long farewell was finally over. A stint later, when she returned to the observation chamber, even Gemma had vanished to the naked eye. Through the theodolite’s telescope, sun and erstwhile planet were just another double star, a bright primary and its fainter companion, with fringes of violet and red destined to spread into a full-blown color trail. If any Hurtlers were lighting up the skies of her old home, sheer distance had rendered those threads of color too faint to discern at all.
Yalda made her measurements and calculated the adjustments needed to keep the Peerless on course. As far as she could see they were heading for a region of unblemished darkness, but that was not a judgment to be made from her vantage, handy for directing the feed chambers but compromised by the haze that spread up from the engines’ exhaust. Near the top of the mountain, in the pristine void, a team of astronomers were using the original telescope that Eusebio had bought from the university to scrutinize the corridor as they approached it. Whatever improvements in optics the future might bring, now was the time to confirm that the path they’d chosen for their long, straight run would be empty of ordinary gas and dust; once they were traveling at full speed any such obstacles would be like Hurtlers, with histories—by the travelers’ reckoning—stretched momentarily across an expanse of space, impossible to detect in advance.
To Yalda, this encroaching blindness was both perfectly explicable and utterly strange. The line of sight between the Peerless and the region they planned to traverse would remain unobstructed—but as their history curved toward the corridor, their gaze would be forced away from it. Nature had granted everyone both front eyes and rear, but that symmetry only held in three dimensions; in four-space, you could only look back. Right now, light scattered long enough ago from any dust that lay ahead could reach them at an angle in four-space that made it, on their terms, light from the past. But all too soon, light from such a source would be arriving from their future—so if it did fall upon their eyes, rather than absorbing it they would be emitting it.
There was no fundamental reason Yalda could see why a living creature could not have possessed the ability to perceive the emission of light from its body—but the ordinary conditions of motion and entropy under which life had arisen would have rendered such a talent useless. The kind of sense organs that might have granted her arborine ancestors a view of the orthogonal stars eons in advance would not have helped them see which way a lizard was going to jump five flickers into the future.
The things worth knowing, the skills worth possessing, were changing. The Peerless had bought time for the world they’d left behind, but that was a trick that only paid out once; they couldn’t subcontract their own problems to a second group of travelers. Whatever talents they needed in order to survive in a state orthogonal to the history that had shaped
Yalda traveled up through the mountain again. The second-tier feed repairs were almost finished, the medicinal garden had been tidied and the damaged plot replanted. She met the chief agronomist, Lavinio, and they walked through the thriving wheat crop together. Having long ago grown accustomed to sunlessness, the plants appeared oblivious to their new state of endless flight.
Classes were being held throughout the Peerless now, within half a bell’s journey of everyone attending. Yalda sat in on one of Fatima’s, aimed at giving workers with a rudimentary education the kind of background needed to come to terms with rotational physics. Not everyone could end up as a researcher, but if the level of common knowledge throughout the community could be raised from mere arithmetic to four-space geometry, that higher base could only bring any future advances into easier reach—and if it brought them to the point where every gardener pulling weeds was also musing about the problems with Nereo’s theory of luxagens, all the better.
The teacher, Severa, posed a simple problem. “In an evenly ploughed field, a rope that is stretched from north to south crosses three furrows. The same rope stretched from east to west in the same field crosses four furrows. If the rope is stretched in the direction that allows it to cross as many furrows as possible… how many will that be?”
Diagrams blossomed on a dozen chests as the students sketched the scenario she’d described. Once they had the answer to this—and understood the reason it was true—half the secrets of light, time and motion would become second nature to them.
Back at the navigators’ post, Yalda met with her own student. She’d explained her plans to Nino when she’d informed him of his reprieve, but since then she’d been too busy to make good on her promise.
She sat on the floor, facing him. “Can you read the first dozen symbols?” she asked.
“Yes.” Nino’s tone made it clear that he took the question as an insult, but Yalda didn’t know how she could teach him if they weren’t clear about such things from the start.
“Can you form them? On your skin?”
Nino gazed back at her sullenly, offering her no clue as to whether she’d simply compounded her offense, or whether the answer this time was too humiliating to utter.
Yalda said, “This isn’t meant as some kind of punishment. I thought it might help you to pass the time, but if you want me to leave, I’ll leave.”
“As you wish,” he replied coldly.
Yalda was tempted. “Why treat me as if I’m your enemy?” she asked. “If I can accept that you had no malice toward us, can’t you return the favor?”
“You’re my jailer,” Nino said. “I make no complaint about my loss of freedom, but a jailer is not a friend.”
Yalda resisted the urge to launch into a tirade on his ingratitude. “I’d send you another teacher in my place if that would help, but I might find it hard to fill that position, and I’m not sure what the rest of the crew would think of it.”
“And what do they think of you coming here?” he asked.
“I haven’t made it widely known,” Yalda admitted. “But if I sent someone else, there’d be no end of talk about it.”
Nino shifted one leg across the floor. “What difference does it make to you, if I can read and write?”
Yalda said, “No one can survive with nothing but their own thoughts. If there were people willing to visit you, I’d be happy for them to come and lift your spirits as often as they wished. But whoever in the mountain once counted themselves as your friends, they’ve either changed their minds or they’re afraid to be seen to support you.”
“So you’ll teach me to read, then keep me quiet with your books?” He made it sound like a scheme for his subjugation, a conquest of his mind far more terrible than his physical confinement.
Yalda rubbed her face with her hands in frustration. “What would you prefer, then? I can’t just set you free.”
“So why are you trying to salve your conscience?” Nino demanded. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, for keeping me here.”
“No,” Yalda agreed, “but I will have if you lose your mind.”
“Why?” Nino wasn’t being sarcastic; he was genuinely puzzled. “Why wouldn’t the shame be mine alone?”
Was this a matter of pride for him? Of self-reliance? The last thing she wanted to do was undermine the resilience he already possessed.
Yalda said, “You did something foolish that could have killed us all—but while you’re alive on this rock, we still have the same duties to each other that apply to everyone else. Once I’ve ensured that the Peerless is safe from the risk that you might repeat your actions, everything else remains unchanged. Inasmuch as it’s practical, I still owe you meaningful work and the chance of an education—and you still owe me your participation. It gives me no pleasure that this obligation is so much harder to fulfill now, but that’s not enough for me to pretend that it has ceased to exist.”
Nino fell silent, but he looked less sure of his stance now. There was nothing degrading in being asked to pull his weight.
Yalda struggled to understand his position. He did not despise his captors; he would not have joined the crew without Acilio’s bribe, but he hadn’t come here poisoned with contempt for their ambitions. Acilio had rationalized away the risk of mass murder by implying that the same deaths were just a matter of time, but even if Nino was skeptical about the mission’s prospects, surely he gave the travelers some credit for good intentions.
“Where will it lead?” he asked. “If I learn what you want me to learn, what job could I end up doing?”
“That’s hard to say,” Yalda confessed. “But you can’t be a farmer anymore. You need to start with a simple education, and then find out what other aptitudes you have.”
Nino considered this, at length. Perhaps he was wary of raising his hopes too high. Yalda didn’t want to set him up for a fall, but a few modest steps that might eventually open up new possibilities for him had to be better than letting him rot here until he died.
“What you say makes sense,” he conceded. “If you’re willing to try to teach me, I’ll do my best to make it work.”
As the layer of burning sunstone came closer, the noise and heat from the engines became oppressive and the machinists and navigators prepared to move up to the second tier feeds. The Peerless had acquired so much momentum that a few days without manual corrections would make little difference to the course it was following, and any slight drift that occurred could easily be dealt with once the second tier fired up.
This would be a perfect opportunity to dispose of rubbish, Babila noted, looking around the bare cavern of the navigators’ post, now stripped of its benches and instruments. Anything we don’t want cluttering up the mountain, just leave it here to be blown into the void. Her gaze lingered on the door to the prison.
Clutter is just another word for wealth, Yalda replied. We’re not so rich that we can afford to throw anything away.
Frido had long ago stopped taking sides, at least openly. Help me check the release charges? he asked Babila; she followed him out of the room. Before igniting the second tier, they were going to set off explosions in the first-tier feed chambers to weaken the whole stub of rock that needed to be cast off.
Yalda opened the cell and led Nino out. For the first few steps he was disoriented, blinking and cowering at the strangeness of the vastly larger space, but he recovered his composure rapidly. Yalda knew better than to offer him solicitous words; they walked together in silence, through the empty feed chambers, out to the stairs.
“How much time has passed?” he shouted, as they began ascending. “Since we left?”
“Nearly half a year for us,” Yalda replied. The teacher in her wanted to conduct the conversation in writing, but Nino was walking ahead of her and he hadn’t yet mastered drawing anything on his back.
“And at home?”
“Almost as much. Let me think.” Yalda had not
“About ten days less,” she said.
“I see.” Nino looked away across the stairwell, pondering something.
“Why?”
“Maybe I’ll have grandchildren soon,” he said.
“Oh.” Yalda wasn’t sure if he expected congratulations.
“I forbade it until my children had two years more than a dozen,” he explained. “I’m hoping that they’ll wait a few years longer, but it’s hard to know what they’ll choose.”
“I’m sure they’ll be sensible,” Yalda offered, without much conviction. “So what did you tell them, about joining the Peerless?”
“I said Eusebio was in such desperate need of farmers that he was willing to pay my family to have use of my skills.”
“How did they take that?”
Nino paused on the stairs. “They wanted to come too. I told them it was too dangerous for all of us.”
The noise of the engines gradually receded. However disturbing it was to contemplate the prospect of weightlessness, Yalda had decided that it would be worth almost anything to be rid of the endless hammering of flame on rock.