Greg Egan - The Clockwork Rocket

“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 them, they would need to master in just a year and half.

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.