Greg Egan: The Clockwork Rocket

By the time Ludovico called Yalda into his office, the sun had set. He’d lit a firestone lamp, which sat sputtering and sizzling on a corner of his grand, paper-strewn desk. Standing before him, eyes respectfully downcast, Yalda summarised her proposal quickly. Her aim, she declared, was to correlate the angles of separation in a star trail with the angles of deflection produced by a clearstone prism; there was no need to mention Nereo’s device at all. “If I can find the formula that links the prism’s effect with the light’s velocity, that might lead to some insight into the mechanism of chromatic deflection.” In fact the data she gathered would be perfectly suited to that purpose; she was not really being dishonest.

When she’d finished speaking, Ludovico emitted a muted hum, the tone signifying gratitude that a tedious ordeal had finally ended.

“I’ve never had much time for you, Yalda,” he said. “Not because you hail from the benighted eastern provinces, with your quaint dialect and bizarre customs; that can be endearing, and even correctible. And not because you’re a woman—or almost a woman, or something that might have been a woman if nature had taken its proper course.”

Yalda looked up, startled. She hadn’t been insulted in quite such an infantile fashion since she’d left the village school.

“No, what I find objectionable is your arrogance and your utter inconstancy. You hear of an experiment, you read of some research, and whatever ideas you’ve supported in the past fly out the window. You simply trust in your own infallible powers of reasoning to guide you to the truth, as you swerve this way and that.” Ludovico held up a hand and made a zigzagging motion. “Well, I’ve heard of all the same experiments, I’ve read all the same research. I suppose I must not share your hubris, though—because I’m not driven to the same undignified series of self-contradictory declarations and endless changes of allegiance.”

Yalda said nothing, but she struggled to recall what she might have done to earn this tirade. At her admission interview, where Ludovico had sat on the panel, she’d professed some sympathy for the particle doctrine; that had been before Giorgio’s double-slit experiment. But at a debate half a year ago, she’d taken the side of the wave doctrine, and expressed the flaws in the opposing view quite forcefully. Why not? The evidence had mounted up, and she’d found it increasingly compelling. But apparently it was a kind of arrogance, to trust her feeble powers of reasoning to bring her to that conclusion.

Ludovico reached down to a shelf below his desk and lifted up a bulky stack of paper. In fact it was a book, Yalda realized, though the binding was in a terrible state.

“Have you ever read Meconio on the theory of luminous corpuscles?” he demanded.

“No sir,” Yalda admitted. Meconio had been a philosopher in the ninth age; she’d heard that he’d made some minor contributions to the study of rhetoric, but his grasp of natural phenomena had been less than impressive.

“ If you can produce a halfway perceptive, three-dozen-page essay on Meconio within the next two stints, I’ll allow you to use the observatory.” Ludovico held out the tattered book; Yalda reached across and took it carefully. “A little exposure to a truly great mind might finally endow you with a trace of humility.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.”

Ludovico hummed irritably. “If you can’t manage a commentary that’s worthy of my attention, leave the book with my assistant and don’t ever waste my time again.”

Yalda left his office and trudged down the dark hallway toward the exit. Two bells ago, she’d been euphoric; now she just felt hopeless. This man had set her an impossible task; even if Meconio’s tome was strewn with dazzling insights worth praising to the sky, she would never be able to plow through so much fusty ninth-age language in time to write anything sensible about his ideas.

“Are you all right?”

Yalda turned, startled; someone had just emerged from one of the unlit rooms opening into the hallway. The voice had come from nearby, but all she could see was a faint outline in the darkness.

“I was measuring floral spectra,” the woman explained—work best done at night, without a lamp, the better to observe the plant’s luminescence. “My name’s Tullia.”

“I’m Yalda. Pleased to meet you.” Yalda couldn’t keep the despondency from her voice, but Tullia’s solicitousness had come before she’d said a word. “Why did you ask me—?”

“I could tell you’d had one of those Ludo moments,” Tullia confessed. Her outline was growing sharper as Yalda’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. “There’s actually a distinctive effect on people’s gait as they come down the hall. Sadistic belittlement is his specialty, so I know exactly how that sounds. But if he starts to get you down, just remember: everything he says comes from halfway up his anus.”

Yalda struggled to stifle her response, lest the sound echo all the way back to his office. “That’s remarkably flexible for someone his age,” she observed.

“Flexibility is not a quality I associate with Ludikins,” Tullia replied. “I expect his tympanum’s been stuck there for the last dozen years. Let me get my things.”

Tullia ducked back into the workshop, then they walked together out into the night. As they crossed the starlit courtyard, she said, “I see he’s given you his favorite reading material.”

“I have to write an essay on it in the next two stints,” Yalda lamented.

“Ah, Meconio!” Tullia chirped sardonically. “Proof that it is possible to fill five gross pages with scholarific assertions about the world, without bothering to test even one of them. Don’t worry, though, we’ve all had to do the essay. I’ll give you an old one, with enough tweaks to disguise it.”

Yalda didn’t know whether to be scandalized or grateful. “You’d do that?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” Tullia was mocking her; she’d picked up the undertone of disapproval. “It’s not as if I’m helping you cheat in some serious assessment; this is just Ludi’s ludicrous self-indulgence. Well… octofurcate him at every opportunity, that’s my policy. What’s the favor you needed from him, anyway?”

Yalda explained her wavelength-velocity project.

“That’s an elegant idea,” Tullia declared. “It’s tough up on the mountain, though, so remind me to give you a few tips before you go. It’s easy to overheat there.”

“You’ve been to the observatory?”

“Six times.”

Yalda was impressed—and not only by the woman’s physical stamina. “What are you working on?”

“I’m looking for life on other worlds.” Tullia’s tone made this endeavor sound entirely practical, as if it were no different from looking for weeds in a wheat field.

“You think we could see signs in the spectra?” Yalda was skeptical, but the notion was delightful.

“Of course,” Tullia replied. “If someone observed our world from a distance, its light trail would be very different from any star’s. Plants create a wide variety of colors, but they come in discrete hues. When rock burns, the fuel itself has a distinctive color in its emissions, but the spectrum from the hot gas is continuous.”

“But how can you know what the plants on other worlds will be like?”

“The detailed photochemistry might be different,” Tullia conceded, “but I bet life would still show up as discrete bands of color. I mean, do you know of any method for getting energy out of rocks without producing light along the way? And if it’s not staged and controlled, if it’s not confined to specific channels the way plants do it… that’s a world on fire. That’s a star.”