Greg Egan - The Clockwork Rocket

“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.

“Are your brother’s children older or younger?” she asked Nino.

“Younger.”

“So do you think he’ll put pressure on his nieces and nephews?”

“No,” Nino replied. “That’s not his way. I’m more worried that they might have trouble controlling themselves.”

At the top of the second tier they left the stairs. The only way to reach the new navigators’ post was through the feed chambers, and these ones would not be empty.

“Put your hands behind your back,” Yalda insisted. “For appearances’ sake.”

Nino complied; she pressed them together, then wrapped one of her own, larger hands around them. She would never have actually used melding resin, but it couldn’t hurt that anyone who saw them would be unable to tell at a glance that her prisoner was in fact topologically free.

They crossed the outermost chamber unseen, but in the next, Delfina was at her post inspecting the tape writer. “You’re letting that murderer walk through here?” she shouted at Yalda, incredulous.

“There’s no other route to his cell,” Yalda replied. The machinists had just spent days cleaning and testing their shiny new feeds; in the circumstances she could understand why anyone would feel affronted by Nino’s presence. But she’d had no choice.

Delfina approached them. “I can’t accept this!” she told Yalda angrily. “When Eusebio appointed you leader, do you think he intended you to put the life of one traitor above all of our own?”

Yalda had learned not to waste time taking issue with hyperbole like this. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I wanted another guard to help watch over the prisoner as I escorted him to the new cell, but Babila and Frido were busy with the release charges.”

Delfina hesitated, but refusing the request would have been tantamount to conceding that Nino already posed no risk.

“If you could walk ahead of us,” Yalda suggested, “ready to block him if he tries to break free…?”

They threaded their way in silence through the banks of pristine clockwork, then into the next chamber. Onesta was inspecting the valves at the base of the liberator tank, but when she saw Delfina leading the procession she simply nodded in greeting.

In the navigators’ post, Delfina stood and waited until Nino was locked in his cell.

“I appreciate your help,” Yalda said.

“It shouldn’t have been necessary,” Delfina replied. “There shouldn’t have been a prisoner to move.”

“Nonetheless, I’m grateful,” Yalda insisted.

“That’s not the point.”

“Don’t forget the transition drill,” Yalda reminded her. “That’s the day after tomorrow.”

Delfina gave up. When she’d left, Yalda checked in on Nino. “Are you going to be—”

“Comfortable?” he suggested. “It’s identical to the last one.”

Yalda said, “If there’s anything in particular that you want, now might be the chance for me to sneak it in.”

“In the sagas,” Nino mused, “the rulers who survived were the ones who identified their enemies in time, and disposed of them swiftly.”

“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.” Yalda began to leave, but then she stopped and turned back to him. “You learned the sagas?”

“Of course.”

“You’ve memorized them?”

“My father taught them to me,” Nino replied. “I can recite them all, word for word.”

Yalda said, “How would you feel about putting them on paper?”

Nino was bemused. “Why?”

“It would be good to have them, for the library.” In fact, she suspected that the library had a copy already. But every family passed down its own version, and perhaps in the future someone would want to ponder the nature of that variation. “If I bring you dye and paper, would you be willing to make a start on it? See how it goes?” Nino’s written vocabulary might not yet be up to the task, but any problems he struck would give them something to address in their lessons.

Nino considered it. They both knew this would be a kind of make-work compared to tending the wheat fields, but if he wasn’t yet sick of the uninspired calligraphic exercises Yalda had been setting for him, she was sick of thinking them up.

“All right,” he agreed.

Yalda was relieved. “I’ll get the supplies for you, before Frido and Babila arrive.”

“I taught the sagas to my sons, a few years ago,” Nino said. “After I’d done that, I thought I wouldn’t need them—I thought I’d just forget them.”

“But you didn’t forget them?”

“No.”

Yalda said, “I’ll bring you everything you’ll need.”

The new engines started up without mishap, blasting the stub of rock remaining at the top of the first tier away into the void. As Frido and Babila cheered, Yalda imagined herself congratulating Eusebio on the success of his design. Lately she’d found herself thinking about the return of the Peerless as if she’d be there in person—but then, she’d pictured Tullia walking beside her in Zeugma often enough; was it any more absurd to have the same kind of thoughts when she played the ghost herself?

Nino filled page after page with his transcripts. Yalda visited him to read these first drafts and suggest corrections—but only when one of her fellow navigators was sleeping and the other was out at the rim making observations. No one was being deceived, but she could still avoid provoking them with reminders of her contentious decision. The astronomers at the summit had found no obstacles ahead, but ensuring that the Peerless remained on course was still more than enough to keep everyone around her, machinists and navigators alike, far too busy to want to organize an insurrection if there was nothing forcing their hand.

When the Peerless reached the halfway mark of its acceleration phase, matching the speed of blue light, Yalda traveled up the mountain to speak to Severa’s class.

They met in one of the observation chambers. The students fell silent as they entered; they’d been told what to expect, but Yalda could understand how daunting it must be to see every star they’d grown up with—every subtle, distinctive smudge of light, every Sitha, Tharak, Zento or Juhla—raked into streaks of color more like a barrage of Hurtlers than anything else.

That was the view that first confronted them: looking straight out from the side of the mountain, where the small, haphazard motions of the stars were overwhelmed by the velocity of the Peerless . The speed of the mountain’s ascent was enough to align every color trail vertically, making a field of parallel furrows in the sky. The trails began and ended at disparate points, but all of them spanned about half a right angle, with red at the top and violet at the bottom. In this history made visible, the most recent report in violet always showed the star lower in the sky than the tardy red version.