Greg Egan: The Clockwork Rocket

Vito looked wearier from his efforts than she was. “Well done,” he said.

“Can I show Dario?” He’d be amazed, Yalda thought. Not one day in school, and here she was writing!

Vito said, “Your grandfather’s tired, let’s not bother him with this.”

Yalda woke, confused for a moment by the brightness of the clearing. It wasn’t morning; she’d been roused from her sleep by the sound of Dario humming with distress.

She turned to look toward him, then rose to her feet for a clearer view. At first she’d thought that a strong wind must have blown through the forest, tearing petals from the trees and strewing them over his body as he slept. But the patches of luminous yellow belonged to his skin.

Yalda knelt by Dario’s bed; his eyes were closed, but he was thrashing from side to side. She could feel mites coming and going all around him; she tried waving them away, but they were persistent.

She called out to Vito, “Father! Help me!”

As Vito stirred, the haze of sleep cleared from Yalda’s vision and the throng of mites came into sharper focus. Those that were descending onto Dario’s body appeared perfectly ordinary, but those rising up into the forest again, having bitten him, were imbued with their own small share of the strange yellow light. Yalda had never seen anything like it; when an insect fed on a flower it did not take on its glow.

She looked up to see Vito standing across the bed from her. “He’s in pain,” she said. “I think the insects are troubling him.” She widened her hands and fanned more vigorously, hoping her father would join in.

“The heat!” Dario protested miserably. “Is this what childbirth is like? Is this my punishment?” His eyes remained firmly closed. Yalda doubted that he knew where he was or who was tending to him.

Vito said nothing, but he knelt and began swatting at the insects himself. Yalda peered down at Dario, hoping for a sign that their efforts were bringing him some respite from his suffering. A new patch of radiance had appeared, a shimmering yellow smudge that appeared to be leaking out from a tear in his skin. It was spreading at an alarming rate, as if it was made of some unimaginably soft resin. Yalda had never seen anything move so freely, other than the finest dust—but despite the steady breeze this wasn’t scattering like dust.

“What is that?” she asked Vito.

“I don’t know. Some kind of… liquid .”

Vito spoke the last word with an air of dismay, but before Yalda could ask him what it meant the whole clearing lit up, brighter than day. She closed her eyes instinctively; when she opened them the light was gone, but everything looked darker, as if she’d been staring into the sun.

“We have to leave,” Vito declared abruptly.

“ What? ”

“Your grandfather’s dying. We can’t help him anymore.”

Yalda was stunned. “We can’t abandon him!”

Vito said, “Listen to me: we can’t help him, and it’s not safe to stay with him.”

Dario gave no indication that his son’s terrible verdict had reached him through the thicket of his pain and confusion. As Yalda rose to her feet, forcing herself to obey Vito even though she couldn’t bring herself to believe him, a speck of light hovering in the distance ahead of her erupted into painful, blinding brilliance. As she covered her front pair of eyes with her arm, she thought: that was a mite . The mites that had fed from Dario’s skin and stolen his light were burning up, and each tiny blaze was brighter than the sun.

Still half-blind, she stumbled around Dario’s bed toward her father. “We’re leaving the forest?”

“Yes.”

“Should I bring the food?”

“There’s no time.”

Vito leaned down and whispered something to his father, then he stood and led the way out of the clearing. Yalda stole a glance at Dario, then tore herself away. She would not accept that his fate was sealed; she would not say goodbye.

“Close your rear eyes,” Vito told her sternly. “Stay close to me and don’t look back.”

Yalda obeyed. A third burst of light came from the clearing—behind her now, but even the glare reflected from the branches ahead was dazzling. Dark traces lingered on her vision, a second ghostly forest imprinted on the first, complicating everything.

“I don’t understand!” she said. “I thought the light here would make him better!” If she forced her father to remember Doctor Livia’s pronouncement, and tie what they were seeing to that, maybe he’d change his mind and turn back.

“We tried,” Vito said, stricken. “But some things can’t be healed.”

Yalda pushed her way through the branches angrily, relying on touch more than sight; she was barely registering the ongoing flashes, but the afterimages kept building up until she was no longer sure which looming obstacles were real. Even in the depths of his illness, Dario had retained his gruff affection for her. How could she walk away from him?

They emerged from the forest and headed back toward the road. Maybe the mites were actually helping, drawing the poison out of Dario’s body. Dying in his stead. If they stopped to rest, she’d sneak back while Vito was asleep. If Dario had survived, healed by the self-immolating insects, she could carry him out to rejoin his son.

The ground ahead of her brightened unbearably, then a rush of air knocked her flat. She tried to call out, but her tympanum had seized up, leaving her both mute and deaf. She crawled across the weeds; they looked like dead husks, but she couldn’t tell if they’d really been transformed or whether it was her vision that had been stripped bare. She groped around, sure that Vito was close but afraid to lift her gaze to search for him. Then she felt him reach out to her and they held each other tightly.

They stayed there, huddled together on the ground. Her father’s embrace was not enough to make her feel safe, but it was all there was.

Yalda woke to a brightening sky and the sound of insects. Vito was awake, crouched beside her, but he remained silent as she stood to survey the aftermath.

The forest was still standing but the closest part was visibly thinned and damaged, as if a giant had reached down and pummeled it. Some of the low bushes around them were dead. Yalda’s skin was tender as she moved.

“He’s gone,” she said. Dario could not have survived at the center of this destruction—let alone survived being the cause of it.

“Yes.” Vito rose to his feet and put an arm around her to comfort her. “It’s sad that we’ve lost him, but remember that he had a long life. And most men go to the soil, to decay like straw. Only a few go to light.”

“Is that a good thing?” Yalda had seen how much pain he’d been in at the end, but she had nothing with which to compare it.

“It’s good that we left him in time,” Vito said, avoiding her question. “It would not have made him happier to take us with him.”

“No.” Yalda felt her whole body shaking with an involuntary hum of grief. Vito held her until she was still again.

“We should start moving,” he suggested gently. “It would be best if we reached the farm before night.”

Yalda looked back toward the ruined edge of the forest.

“When I get old,” she said, “what will happen to me?”

“Hush,” Vito said. “That’s the way of men. No daughter of mine is going to die.”

2

In the spring following her grandfather’s death, Yalda joined her cousins, her uncle and her father in the harvest for the first time. While Lucia and Lucio dashed around gathering up spills and wheeling the grain carts between the filling points—as Yalda had done the year before—the harvesters themselves marched steadily back and forth between the rows of wheat.