Greg Egan: The Clockwork Rocket

Working with two hands at once, Yalda plucked the seed cases from the stalks on either side of her, squeezed them until they popped, emptied them into the pouches she’d formed, then dropped the cases on the ground. It wasn’t heavy work, like digging a store-hole, but the sheer repetitiveness of it took its toll. Though she’d toughened the wedge-shaped fingers she’d made to prise open the cases, after a while they started to yield to the pressure and she had to stop and re-form them. And when her arms and hands grew too sore to continue, she had no choice but to extrude a new pair and rest the muscles she’d been using. She was yet to acquire the endurance of a seasoned harvester, but her size alone had its advantages. While her male cousins cycled between two pairs of arms, and Claudia, Aurelia and the men three, by mid-afternoon Yalda was on her fifth pair, with the flesh that had formed the first still tucked away deep in her chest, recuperating.

At the end of each row she emptied her pouches into one of the grain carts that her brother and sister were nudging along the cross-paths, then she turned into the next row to start all over again. Giusto had told her that after the first day her body would refine her posture to make the work easier, but that there was no point in anyone instructing her on how to get there sooner; the adjustment was different for each person, and better achieved through instinct than imitation.

By dusk Yalda was exhausted, but it was satisfying to see how high the yellow grain was piled in the carts. She helped Lucio push one to the central bin that the merchant’s truck had left for them to fill.

“If I join the harvest next year,” Lucio asked her, “who’ll handle the carts?”

“We’ll take turns,” Yalda replied, trying her best to make the guess sound authoritative. Questions were for someone whose opinion was worth seeking: an older cousin, not a sibling. But apparently her size alone, having won her a place in the harvest, had come to mean more than her true age.

Everyone sat leaning against the huge bin as they ate the evening meal. Yalda gazed up at the darkening sky and listened to her father and uncle enthusing about the yield and the quality of the grain, while Aurelia teased Claudio by repeatedly punching him on the arm and then taking his retribution without flinching. Yalda felt peaceful; she still missed Dario, but she knew the good harvest would have pleased him.

Later, as the other children were scrambling into their beds, Yalda spotted one of the grain carts sitting at the end of its row, still full. She thought of calling Lucia to deal with it, but whatever the privileges of her newfound seniority-by-size, she didn’t want to set herself above her own sister. She went to wheel the cart in herself.

When she had brought it to the foot of the ramp leading up to the top of the bin, she paused to straighten the wheels. “I just don’t want to lose a good worker like that!” she heard Giusto complain. They were on opposite sides of the bin, but his voice was clear.

“She’ll still be with us at harvest time,” her father replied.

“A few days a year! And for how many years?”

Vito said, “I promised her mother: if any of the children showed signs that they’d benefit from an education, I’d do my best to send them to school.”

“She never saw this one in the field!” Giusto retorted. “If she’d known what she’d be asking us to give up, I doubt she would have been so insistent.”

Vito was unmoved. “She’d have wanted every one of her children to have the best life they could.”

“I’ll teach her to recite the sagas,” Giusto promised. “That will keep her mind busy.” Yalda recoiled; Dario’s stories had been entertaining, but Giusto could ramble on for half the night, listing the unlikely deeds of a dozen tedious heroes.

“It’s not just about her getting bored with farm work,” Vito said. “She’s never going to find a co-stead hanging around here.”

“Does that matter?” Giusto replied, bemused. “She works as hard as any four children. And it’s not as if she’s your only chance at grandchildren.”

Yalda clomped noisily up the ramp and emptied the cart into the bin; when the sound of falling grain had died away the conversation had come to an end.

By the time Yalda climbed into bed even Aurelia was asleep, too tired for their usual exchange of whispered jokes and taunts before the adults joined them. Yalda lay watching the stars in flight—trailing histories unadorned by bombast and braggadocio, just waiting for her to learn how to decipher them.

The possibility of school was thrilling: it meant walking right into the storehouse of knowledge, the source of all the answers to the questions she struggled with. At school, she could find out how the stars shone, how her flesh changed its shape, how plants knew night from day.

But nobody went to school merely to satisfy their curiosity; they went to learn new skills that their own families couldn’t give them. A farmer’s child who studied did not stay on the farm. They went out into the world and left their old life behind.

On the evening of the last day of the harvest, the merchant’s truck returned to carry away the grain. Yalda stood and watched while Vito, Giusto, and the truck’s driver, Silvana, maneuvered the ramp the harvesters had used to fill the bin into position for a new purpose: to slide the bin itself up onto the back of the truck.

Chains were unwound from the truck’s winch and hooked to the edge of the bin. As the engine clattered and the winch began to turn, a swarm of sparks rose from the truck’s chimney and drifted away into the gloom, like the mites in the forest ascending from Dario’s skin.

The bin was jutting over the top of the ramp, poised ready to tip down and sit flat on the truck’s bed, when the engine suddenly cut out. Silvana leaped from the cab and tugged open a hatch at the side of the vehicle.

Yalda gazed into the labyrinth of machinery, entranced. Silvana saw her, and with a friendly gesture invited her to come closer. “This is the fuel,” she said, taking the lid off a hopper full of orange powder. “And this is the liberator.” A second, smaller hopper fed a fine gray dust in from the front. “The fuel wants to become light, but it can’t do it alone. Mix it with the liberator, though…” Silvana brought her hands together, then rapidly drew them apart. “Both of them turn to light and hot gas. The gas forces up the piston, which turns the crankshaft. Then the gears connect that motion either to the wheels at the front, or the winch.”

Yalda had been told not to pester strangers with her questions, but this woman’s generosity and enthusiasm emboldened her. “Why did it stop working?”

“Just a blockage, I think.” Silvana opened a smaller access hatch below the two hoppers and started tapping along the length of a pipe. “You can hear it, when they get clogged up. Ah, yes.” She tapped the same point repeatedly to demonstrate the dulled sound, then she fetched a hammer from the cab and whacked the pipe with alarming force. There was a spasm deep in the truck’s body, and sparks rose from the chimney again, but the engine did not start up in earnest; this was just the fuel that had been trapped finally meeting its fate.

“What are the sparks?” Yalda asked.

“When the mixture’s not quite right,” Silvana replied, “some of the fuel’s still burning as it comes out with the gas.” She nudged a knob below the fuel hopper, turning it a barely perceptible amount. “That controls the outlet from the tank. As the pipes get encrusted you need to make adjustments.”

Silvana returned to the cab and started the engine, hauling the bin up into place, then Giusto helped her secure it for the journey.