Greg Egan: The Clockwork Rocket

As the truck drove off, Giusto approached his brother. “What a waste, training a woman to do that,” he declared. “In a few years they’ll just need someone new.”

Vito didn’t reply. Yalda thought of Doctor Livia; the news in the village was that she’d given birth, and her father was seeing all her old patients. Yalda had returned from the forest convinced that Doctor Livia’s advice to Dario had been worthless, but then she’d started wondering if the true reason for proposing the journey had been to lessen the risk to a dying man’s family, when the honest prognosis might have been impossible for them to accept.

Lucio and Lucia fetched the loaves for the evening meal. It was late, and everyone was tired; they ate sprawled on the flattened ground where the bin had sat. Tomorrow the whole family would go into the village to celebrate, spending some of the money the harvest had brought them. Yalda was proud of the part she’d played, but she felt an odd pang of regret that it was over; the work had come to an end just as her body was growing used to it.

Without warning, a line of light streaked across the sky. Long and slender, dazzlingly bright and richly colored, it disappeared beyond the horizon before Yalda could let out a chirp of astonishment.

It was Claudia who spoke first. “What was that?”

“A shooting star,” Giusto replied. “A shooting star, fast and low!”

Yalda waited for her father to correct him; Vito had pointed out shooting stars to her many times, and they had never looked like that. She closed her eyes to try to bring back the apparition. The streak of light had come and gone in an instant, but she was sure it had contained a clear progression of colors—a trail like a star’s, but vastly longer. Shooting stars were lumps of rock falling through the air, having drifted by chance into the path of the world; they did not move so rapidly that the colors of their light were separated. Their trails were nothing but a fire in the air that kept burning for a moment or two as they passed.

When Vito remained silent, Yalda could not contain herself. “That wasn’t a shooting star,” she said. “It was too fast.”

“How do you know that?” Giusto demanded. “What if it was traveling just above us?” He was trying to sound amused, but Yalda could tell he was affronted that any child would presume to correct him. He stood up and took a few steps toward her, then swiped his arm along a wide arc, almost slapping her. “Even my hand can cross the sky for you before you flinch, if it’s close enough.”

Yalda wanted to say something about the color trail, but the strange object had vanished so quickly. What if no one else had noticed the pattern she’d seen?

“And if it wasn’t a shooting star,” her uncle concluded triumphantly, “ what was it? ”

Yalda had no reply. She could not name or describe anything that could race from horizon to horizon in an instant, spilling its colors across a third of the sky.

Silvana, who made light in her engine every day, might have known the answer. Clara would surely have known, and would have told her friend Vita. But if her mother had chosen to keep a few of the secrets of light from Vito, Yalda couldn’t blame her.

She lowered her gaze and let Giusto believe that she had deferred to his wisdom and accepted his claim. She had to be patient. In school, she would discover everything.

On the first day of class, Vito walked with Yalda into the village. He’d told her he had business to conduct, but she suspected that he would have accompanied her anyway.

“In the old days,” Vito mused as a truck rattled past them, “they used to say there was no point in educating boys. They believed that a mother’s knowledge shaped her children from birth, while anything their father tried to pass on to them only went skin deep. To educate a girl was to invest in every future generation; to educate a boy was to turn your wealth into straw.”

Yalda had never heard of such ideas before; they had to come from older days than Dario’s youth. “Do you think that’s true?”

Vito said, “I don’t believe an education’s wasted on anyone who takes it seriously, boy or girl.”

“But do you think a mother’s knowledge is passed on to her children?”

Vito said, “Clever as you are, I’ve never heard you speak a word of your mother’s that didn’t reach you through me.”

They entered the village from the south-east corner and detoured around the crowded markets in favor of the quieter tree-lined avenues. The small parks they crossed were mostly empty of people, but Yalda’s gaze kept turning to the trees; since her trip into the forest she found herself noticing far more easily than before the lizards scuttling along their branches.

The school was enclosed by a thick hedge of matted twigs that Yalda had no trouble peering over; the broad square of bare ground within was twice divided by similar barriers. There were four classes, Vito explained; he led Yalda to the corner where the youngest students were gathering.

“Don’t let anyone discourage you,” he said.

Yalda had heard enough of Giusto’s comments to know what her father meant. “I won’t,” she assured him.

Vito left her, and Yalda walked through the gap in the hedge.

There were almost four dozen children assembled in this part of the square; maybe half were lone boys, while the rest looked like paired cos. Yalda searched hopefully for another unaccompanied girl, but then she forced herself to stop fretting. She tried meeting the gaze of some of the students who were chatting in a small group in front of her, but nobody acknowledged her and she was too shy to intrude into their conversation.

The teacher arrived, calling to the children for silence then introducing himself as Angelo. He herded them into a tight cluster away from the hedge, then instructed them to sit and watch him carefully.

Yalda glanced at her neighbors; they were both boys, about half her size. “I’m Fulvio,” whispered the boy on her right.

“I’m Yalda.”

“Today,” Angelo began, “we’ll learn the symbols and their names.” Chatter from the other classes, still teacherless, filled the air, but Yalda forced herself to concentrate.

Angelo formed a circle on his chest, as quickly and sharply as if it had been stamped there by a wheel pressed against his body. “This is called ‘the sun,’” he said. Yalda was expecting him to ask them to try to reproduce the symbol on their own skin, but after repeating the name several times he moved straight on to the flower; this lesson was to be about committing the shapes and names to memory, not about writing anything themselves.

Yalda listened dutifully as he worked his way through ten dozen symbols; she had never known that there were so many. By the time he’d finished it was close to noon, and he asked some of the children to fetch loaves from a store-hole and hand them out.

As they ate, Angelo walked among them asking for their names and the names of their fathers. Yalda felt an odd sense of trepidation when he approached her, as if her right to join the class might be in doubt, but when she gave her reply he moved on without another word. Whatever the shifting beliefs of the wider world as to who was worth educating, Vito must have paid this man some of the money from the harvest, and that was all it took to be permitted to attend.

“Where’s your co?” Fulvio asked her, the crumbs spilling from his mouth bouncing off his tympanum as he spoke.

“Where’s yours?” Yalda retorted.

“Working,” Fulvio replied.

“She ate her co,” the boy on her left said; Yalda had heard him give his name as Roberto. “How else does anyone get so bloated?”

“That’s right, I ate him,” Yalda agreed. “But sometimes he still wants to come out and play.” She raised a hint of a head-shaped lump in the middle of her chest, like Amato in the story; Roberto quailed, then leaped to his feet and fled to the far side of the class.