Greg Egan - The Clockwork Rocket

“I saw Nino yesterday,” Fatima said.

“How was he?” Yalda asked, wishing she didn’t have to hear the answer.

“Not so good.”

“Did you take him some books?”

“He’s not reading anymore,” Fatima said. “He told me he’s lost the power to concentrate; the words just make him dizzy.”

Yalda said, “I’m sorry. But I’m sure you cheered him up.”

Fatima’s expression hardened. “If he knew when he was getting out, it might be easier for him. If you could set a date—”

“Set a date? Do you think it’s that easy?”

“You’re the leader, aren’t you?” Fatima replied bluntly. “And everyone respects you even more, since you decided to build the spin engines. You’re going to save the crops, save us all from starving! Do you really think people will throw you out, after that?”

“It depends on what else I do,” Yalda said.

Fatima was drifting disconcertingly far from the support ropes; she reached down in time to pull herself back.

“If it’s getting too hard for you, maybe someone else could join you in the visits,” Yalda suggested.

Fatima turned to face her squarely. “I’ll tell you exactly what it’s like,” she said. “I go and see him every two stints. I bring him some loaves, tell him some gossip, try to make a few jokes. But that’s it, that’s all I can do. When I turn around and leave, nothing’s changed for him. He’s my friend, I’ll never abandon him… but it’s like holding someone’s hand while they’re being tortured.”

Yalda’s skin crawled. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Fatima said angrily. “Just do something for him.”

Ausilio let out a chirp of delight, and Prospera’s group quickly scrambled to the edge of the dome to catch sight of the flames from the engines. Yalda motioned to Fatima. “Let’s take a look; it will be a while before anything shows through the telescope.”

They pulled themselves along the ropes to the nearest pane. Looking down the slope, they could see three pale cylinders of blue-white fire emerging sideways from the starlit rock. Yalda waited anxiously for something to go wrong; she’d had visions of one of the engines tearing itself out of the ground and cartwheeling off into the void, spraying the mountain with fire as it went. But the pale flames remained motionless and steady, and she could barely feel the vibration of the engines.

She should have been ecstatic. Their ignorance about the wheat might have killed them, but now they were close to guaranteeing the success of the next crop. She remembered when Nino had told her of Acilio’s sneering prediction of their fate: Eating the soil. Begging for death. The fact that it had almost happened only made it infinitely sweeter to imagine Acilio’s face when the Peerless next lit up the sky over Zeugma.

But what could she do for Nino? Stand up in front of the crew and declare that he deserved to roam freely now—right after informing them that she wanted to fit explosive charges in every wall that separated them from the void? Or simply wait for Frido to explain to them that Palladia’s plan required a new leader who would send the right message to all the would-be saboteurs lurking among them, by finally disposing of the last one who’d been caught in the act?

Yalda dragged herself back to the telescope, and called the team to gather around. The red end of one star trail that she’d centered in the view had now shifted, just detectably, out of the cross-hairs.

“How do we know the telescope didn’t get bumped by the engines’ vibrations?” Prospera asked, only half-joking. “How do we know that the mountain’s really turned at all?”

All that hard, dangerous work, all that beautiful fire pouring out across the slopes, for an incremental change that could as easily be an illusion.

Yalda said, “How do we know? Be patient, wait a while, then look again.”

Two days into the spin-up, one of the lookout posts—wisely left unoccupied for the duration of the process—snapped free of its ropes and was lost to the void. Isidora, whom Yalda had put in charge of the lookouts, had the other three reeled back in to be strengthened and tested before anyone tried to use them again.

By the time the engines were shut down there’d been no other reports of serious damage. In the academic precinct there was a series of small annoyances to deal with—most of them involving the realization that the centrifugal force here, though too strong to be ignored, was also too weak to produce enough friction to hold things in place in the conventional way. Equipment and furniture that would have stayed put under old-style gravity now had to be re-secured just as firmly as when it had been weightless, in order to resist the pushes and tugs of ordinary use.

Yalda quite liked the slight weight she’d acquired in her own office and apartment; she could still use the old system of ropes to get around, but she no longer found herself flailing in panic if she ended up out of reach of all the walls, ropes and handles around her. Slow as she was to fall toward the walls that had turned into floors, her body now accepted that she couldn’t end up stranded.

After helping to get the optics workshop functioning again—with Sabino moved to a perfectly weightless room of his own, dead on the axis—Yalda headed for the fields. As she soared down the central staircase it was as if nothing had changed, but when she took hold of the rope ladder at the mouth of the radial exit, she dutifully reformed her lower hands and descended feet-first.

The tunnel led into the top of the nearest chamber; the flat disk of the interior was now standing on edge. The rope ladder continued down one of the rock faces, and as Yalda moved between the sheer walls, even in the moss-light she found it hard to think of the place as an underground cavern anymore. It was more like descending by night into a secret valley.

The gravity was still weak here, but it had cleared all the dust out of the air. The floor of the valley was deserted, but when Yalda stepped carefully between the furrows she could see that the newly planted seeds had already sent up shoots. The sight sent a shudder of relief through her body.

A flimsy guardrail surrounded the mouth of the radial tunnel leading down into the next chamber; nothing about this exit now looked remotely sensible. “Ah, Eusebio,” Yalda whispered. “Everything’s turned sideways in your beautiful design.” She slipped between the rails and reached across to the rope ladder, which followed what had once been the corridor’s floor. As she gripped the ladder’s side and the structure swayed toward her, her old, dormant sense that a fall could injure her was abruptly reawakened.

The second field had been sown later than the first; no shoots were visible, but Yalda found a buried seed and checked that it was sprouting. Lavinio would have told her if there’d been any problems—but to touch the promise of the next harvest with her own hands reassured her, made her feel strong.

In the third field, the closest to the mountain’s surface, farmers were still at work. Half a dozen firestone lamps had been strung on a pulley line that stretched from the entrance at the top of the chamber to a corner of the field. As Yalda descended, she could see the giant shadows she cast sideways across the rock face.

When she reached the ground, one of the farmers, Erminia, approached and greeted her.

“Thank you for your work here,” Yalda said. “How long until you finish sowing?”

“One more day, but then there’s another field…” Erminia gestured in the direction of the summit, unsure how to refer to it now that “up” had two different meanings. “Two days there, then the whole crop is planted.”