Greg Egan - The Clockwork Rocket

“On the question of who should take my place as leader,” she said, “everyone knows there is an obvious choice.” Yalda stretched out an arm toward Frido, who was clinging to a rope near the front of the hall. “But before I appoint my successor, I need to ask him if he’s willing to meet some conditions.”

Frido said, “Tell me what you want.”

“When I step down,” Yalda said, “I want the right to choose my own co-stead. And when I’m gone, I want my family to be left unharmed. I want my co-stead and my children to be given your respect and protection, and to suffer no revenge.”

Frido regarded her with an expression of wounded horror. “What kind of monster do you take me for? Yalda, you have the love and respect of everyone here. No one will harm your family.”

“You give me your word, before the whole crew?” she insisted.

“Of course. Everything you’ve asked for, I promise it will be done.”

Yalda had no idea what was going through his mind, but what else could he have said? She’d just granted the young runaways the best prospects they could have hoped for to make it through the holin shortage. If Frido had so much as hinted that he expected to assert some bizarre, paternalistic right to veto her choice of co-stead, they would have torn him apart.

She said, “Then it’s done. I resign the leadership in your favor. If the crew accepts you, the Peerless is in your hands.”

Frido moved forward, toward the stage. Behind him, half the crew began chanting Yalda’s name—affirming her decision, not rejecting her successor, but it still made Frido flinch.

Watch your back , Yalda thought. Get used to it. That’s what your life is going to be like now.

20

Fatima moved ahead of Yalda down the center of the stairwell, pausing now and then to allow her to catch up. Yalda didn’t mind being hurried along this way; if they’d been traveling side by side they would have had to pass the time discussing the reason for their journey.

When they came to the first radial tunnel, Fatima let herself free-fall most of the way, only snatching at the rope ladder when she began to veer away from it. Yalda declined to follow her example, and descended slowly, rung by rung. The locked doors they encountered along the way did not appear marked, let alone damaged. No one had been sufficiently motivated to try to assassinate the half-forgotten saboteur.

In the abandoned navigators’ post above the second-tier engines, Yalda waited outside the cell. Nino trusted Fatima, so it was best that he hear most of this from her. But after a few lapses, she invited Yalda in.

“Hello, Yalda.” Nino hung in the center of a sparse network of ropes. He was much thinner than she remembered him, and he kept his eyes averted as he spoke.

“Hello.” The cell was crowded with books and papers. As in Yalda’s own apartment their not-quite-weightless state would make them difficult to manage, but the place had been kept scrupulously tidy.

“Fatima explained your proposal. But she wasn’t able to say what would happen if I refused you.”

“Nothing is by force,” Yalda said. “Whatever you choose, I’m willing to take you to the summit and do my best to protect you.”

“I don’t know if I could look after myself up there,” he said. “Let alone… anyone else.”

Fatima said quietly, “I’ll help.”

Nino seemed paralyzed, unable to reach a decision. How could any of them know what was or wasn’t possible? Yalda surveyed the papers stacked against the rear wall. “We can come back for these later,” she said. “Unless there’s something you need?”

Nino buzzed softly. “I never want to be in the same room as the sagas again.”

Outside the cell he faltered, gawping at the preposterous spaces around him. Had Fatima never broken the rules and let him out during a visit? Perhaps he’d refused, afraid that even a small taste of freedom would make his imprisonment too hard to bear.

On the journey back Fatima was patient, demonstrating to Nino how to negotiate the changing forces on his body. Yalda looked on, trying to be equally encouraging herself, but wondering if she’d made a terrible mistake. Nino might learn to be agile again, but what had she done to his spirit? When she’d been teaching him, she’d had no doubt that his memories of his children were keeping him sane. But he’d spent more than three years excluded from any kind of normal life—and she still didn’t know if he’d be accepted back into the community of the Peerless .

When they left the central stairwell in the academic precinct, Nino blinked and squinted at the lamps around them as if he’d been thrust into the searing blaze of noon. When the first passerby looked their way he stopped moving and clutched the ropes tightly with four hands, his posture growing cowed and defensive. Yalda watched the woman’s expression change from confusion to recognition, then from shock to comprehension. As she passed them on the opposite ladder she glanced at Yalda with what might have been an acknowledgment of her audacity, but exactly what fate she wished for the happy couple was impossible to discern.

Fatima took Nino with her everywhere, introducing him to friends, fellow students and acquaintances without a trace of self-consciousness, as if he were a long-lost uncle who’d just arrived in their company by some mysterious alternative route. At first Yalda took this as some kind of unspoken reproach for her own reticence at the task, but then she realized that it was nothing of the kind. People put up with a very different attitude from Fatima, as Nino’s advocate, than they would have from the woman they blamed for the fact that he was still alive at all. Fatima was utterly partisan on her friend’s behalf, but there was no reason for anyone to think of her as self-serving.

Every day, Yalda tagged along as Fatima showed Nino the food halls, the workshops, the classrooms. He was getting reacquainted with places he hadn’t seen since before the launch, and roaming far enough from the axis to grow familiar with the changing centrifugal force. Some of the people they encountered were brusque, but no one started screaming threats or accusations. And even those who had no particular respect for Yalda, or Fatima, or for Frido’s oath of protection, might have been given pause by the realization that Yalda’s choice of co-stead was the bluntest possible assertion of a woman’s right to decide when, and with whom, she had children. With holin scarce, with pharmacology failing them, any purely cultural force in favor of autonomy was all the more precious.

Isidora and Sabino took turns teaching Yalda’s old class. Yalda sat in and listened, watching Nino struggling to extract some sense from all the arcane technicalities as Fatima whispered explanations to him. This was his world now, not the wheat fields, and whatever role he played in it he’d have to learn some of its language and customs.

Yalda made a bed for him in her apartment, and he accepted that intimacy without complaint or presumption. The first night he was with her she could barely sleep; she did not expect him to wake her and demand what she had offered him, but his presence made it impossible for her to forget the ending she had chosen for herself. Better that than to be taken by surprise, like Tullia. Her only other choice would have been to launch herself into the void again and wait for her cooling bag to run out of air, leaving her to cook in her own body heat. Because whatever she might have wished for in a moment of weakness, however strong the urge to renege might have become, the holin that could have bought her a year or two more was now irrevocably out of her hands.

Nino clutched the rope at the edge of the observation chamber and peered down at the countless tiny color trails fixed above the rocky slope.