Greg Egan - The Clockwork Rocket

On the platform, with just a lapse to departure, Valerio started humming and wailing. Yalda was bemused; they hadn’t been close since he was three. She bent down and embraced him, trying to quieten him before anyone else joined in.

“I’m not dying yet!” she joked. “Wait a year and a day, then you can mourn me. But don’t forget that I’ll have had a long life by then.”

Valerio couldn’t really make sense of this, but he recovered his composure. “I’m sorry, Aunty. Good luck with your journey.”

“Look after your brother,” she said. And try not to imitate him.

With her rear gaze, Yalda saw the guard scowling at her; the engine was already running and sparks were rising into the air. She released Valerio, raised a hand to the others, then leaped into an empty carriage as the train began to move.

She sat on the floor, eyes closed, braced against the shock of amputation.

From a distance, Mount Peerless appeared almost unchanged from its pristine state. As the train brought her closer, Yalda struggled to identify anything more than a slight thinning of the vegetation since the first time she’d set eyes on the peak. The mountain roads that had been widened and extended were still invisible from the ground, and even the mounds of excavated rubble from the new trench were lost in the haze.

Basetown was the end of the line. When Yalda walked out of the station the main square was deserted; where the markets had stood just two stints before there was bare, dusty ground. All the construction workers and traders had departed, and though there were probably dozens of Eusebio’s people still around for the final cleanup, on her way to the office she encountered only fellow travelers. As well as inducing an eerie sense that she’d already parted company with the rest of the world, this raised the problem that, out of the six gross or so on the final list of recruits, she’d only managed to memorize a tiny fraction of their names.

“Hello Yalda!” a woman called from across the street.

“Hello!” That she knew the woman’s face only made it more embarrassing.

“Not long now,” the woman said cheerfully.

“No.” Yalda resisted the temptation to take a bet on, “Time to tell your co to buy a telescope!” However good the odds were that this would be apt and welcome, it wasn’t worth the risk of alienating someone who was actually bringing her co along for the ride.

Eusebio was in the office, poring over reports with Amando and Silvio; Yalda didn’t disturb them. Her own desk was almost empty; before she’d left she’d been double-checking calculations for the navigational maneuvers the Peerless would need to perform if it encountered an unexpected obstacle. It looked as if they’d found the perfect route for the voyage—an empty corridor through the void, oriented in the right direction and long enough to take an age to traverse without coming close to a single star—but once they were above the atmosphere it was possible that fresh observations would reveal a hazard that needed to be side-stepped.

She worked through the details one more time. If the obstacle wasn’t too large, they’d be able to swerve around it and still reach infinite velocity—albeit with even less fuel remaining for the rest of the journey than originally planned. There was no way of guaranteeing the Peerless ’s triumphant return, but if the travelers failed to attain an orthogonal trajectory—with the Hurtlers tamed and time back home brought to a halt—they would have no advantage left at all.

When his assistants had left, Eusebio approached Yalda. “How did it go with your friends in Zeugma?” he asked.

“It was fine.” Yalda didn’t want him struggling to empathize, telling her that he understood how she must feel. She said, “I think we need name tags.”

“Name tags?”

“For the travelers. Something we can all wear on necklaces, so we know who’s who.”

Eusebio looked harried; Yalda said, “I’ll organize it myself, don’t worry about it.”

“All the workshops are empty,” he said, spreading his arms to take in the whole ghost town. “Not just of people, of tools and materials.”

“Not inside the Peerless , I hope.”

The suggestion appeared to take Eusebio by surprise, but then he found himself with no grounds to object to it. “I suppose that makes sense.” He checked a wall chart. “Workshop seven?”

“Yes.”

Yalda found a spare copy of the recruits list. When she and Eusebio had first set out to sign up volunteers she could never have imagined filling a dozen sheets of paper with their names, but even this final census amounted to less than the population of her home village.

There were still trucks shuttling between Basetown and the Peerless every bell, but they were no longer in high demand; she ended up alone save for a driver she didn’t really know, so she sat in the back by herself and watched the town receding into the haze. She wondered what would happen if she went to Eusebio and said: I’ve changed my mind, I’m staying. There were other people with the skills to take her place in everything she was expected to do; the project would not fall apart on the spot. But she knew she was caught in the trap she’d used herself on so many others: she was vain enough to believe that her presence might make the difference between success and failure. And if the thought of deserting the Peerless to while away four years on the ground waiting for the world’s problems to be solved elsewhere made a thrillingly delinquent fantasy, the one thing she found more terrifying than the prospect of a journey through the void was the possibility of those four years of anticipation ending in silence.

The truck dropped her off at the nearest footbridge. The trench around the mountain was wider than the crevasse that split Zeugma, but this makeshift structure of rope and wood was no Great Bridge. Yalda gripped the hand-rope tightly as she began shuffling over the swaying planks.

The wind from the north was carrying dust from one of the excavation mounds directly toward her, stinging her eyes and skin. Halfway across she stopped, paralyzed. She’d crossed the bridge in stronger winds than this, but recalling those past ordeals didn’t help.

The launch was five days away. It would take her a day to ascend to the workshop, and at least two to make all the tags. By that time, all the travelers would have joined her and the final evacuation of Basetown would have begun. If she entered the mountain now, she would not emerge again.

She hummed softly and tried to picture Tullia beside her, reassuring her. What was she afraid of? Death could claim her anywhere; there was no safe place left in the world. She could keep on dwelling on the dangers of the journey and the bitterness of exile—or she could treat this as a calculated gamble that might lead her to an almost perfect sanctuary: a place where generations could think and study, plan and experiment, test their ideas and refine their methods, for as long as it took to find a way to banish the threat and return home.

If the Peerless had simply been a city in the desert—a city of scholars, a city with free holin, a city with no knife-wielding thugs who could meld her arms together and throw her in a cell—might she not have wandered inside its walls and never come out? Might she not have happily declared: this is the place where I will die ?

She steadied herself and walked across the bridge.

The meeting hall had been designed with room for twice the current population of the Peerless , though Yalda wasn’t sure how well the elegantly tiered floor would function later, in the absence of gravity. She stood at the entrance, greeting people as they filed in, handing out name tags from the twelve buckets into which she’d sorted them, along with necklaces from a separate container. The travelers seemed remarkably calm; there was no time to talk with anyone at length, but she’d seen more anxiety on display at some of the recruitment drives in Zeugma.