The Clockwork Rocket

language in time to write anything sensible about his ideas.

“Are you all right?”

Yalda turned, startled; someone had just emerged from one of the unlit rooms opening into the hallway. The voice had come from nearby, but all she could see was a faint outline in the darkness.

“I was measuring floral spectra,” the woman explained—work best done at night, without a lamp, the better to observe the plant’s luminescence. “My name’s Tullia.”

“I’m Yalda. Pleased to meet you.” Yalda couldn’t keep the despondency from her voice, but Tullia’s solicitousness had come before she’d said a word. “Why did you ask me—?”

“I could tell you’d had one of those Ludo moments,” Tullia confessed. Her outline was growing sharper as Yalda’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. “There’s actually a distinctive effect on people’s gait as they come down the hall. Sadistic belittlement is his specialty, so I know exactly how that sounds. But if he starts to get you down, just remember: everything he says comes from halfway up his anus.”

Yalda struggled to stifle her response, lest the sound echo all the way back to his office. “That’s remarkably flexible for someone his age,” she observed.

“Flexibility is not a quality I associate with Ludikins,” Tullia replied. “I expect his tympanum’s been stuck there for the last dozen years. Let me get my things.”

Tullia ducked back into the workshop, then they walked together out into the night. As they crossed the starlit courtyard, she said, “I see he’s given you his favorite reading material.”

“I have to write an essay on it in the next two stints,” Yalda lamented.

“Ah, Meconio!” Tullia chirped sardonically. “Proof that it is possible to fill five gross pages with scholarific assertions about the world, without bothering to test even one of them. Don’t worry, though, we’ve all had to do the essay. I’ll give you an old one, with enough tweaks to disguise it.”

Yalda didn’t know whether to be scandalized or grateful. “You’d do that?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” Tullia was mocking her; she’d picked up the undertone of disapproval. “It’s not as if I’m helping you cheat in some serious assessment; this is just Ludi’s ludicrous self-indulgence. Well… octofurcate him at every opportunity, that’s my policy. What’s the favor you needed from him, anyway?”

Yalda explained her wavelength-velocity project.

“That’s an elegant idea,” Tullia declared. “It’s tough up on the mountain, though, so remind me to give you a few tips before you go. It’s easy to overheat there.”

“You’ve been to the observatory?”

“Six times.”

Yalda was impressed—and not only by the woman’s physical stamina. “What are you working on?”

“I’m looking for life on other worlds.” Tullia’s tone made this endeavor sound entirely practical, as if it were no different from looking for weeds in a wheat field.

“You think we could see signs in the spectra?” Yalda was skeptical, but the notion was delightful.

“Of course,” Tullia replied. “If someone observed our world from a distance, its light trail would be very different from any star’s. Plants create a wide variety of colors, but they come in discrete hues. When rock burns, the fuel itself has a distinctive color in its emissions, but the spectrum from the hot gas is continuous.”

“But how can you know what the plants on other worlds will be like?”

“The detailed photochemistry might be different,” Tullia conceded, “but I bet life would still show up as discrete bands of color. I mean, do you know of any method for getting energy out of rocks without producing light along the way? And if it’s not staged and controlled, if it’s not confined to specific channels the way plants do it… that’s a world on fire. That’s a star.”

Yalda had become so caught up in the conversation that she’d barely noticed them leaving the campus. She looked around to get her bearings.

Tullia said, “I’m going to meet some friends in the south quarter. You’re welcome to come along if you like.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

They turned into the avenue that led south toward the Great Bridge. Yalda liked the evenings in Zeugma; light spilt from the windows of restaurants and apartments to reflect off the cobblestones, but you could see the star trails clearly too. Families and couples were out walking, lost in their own concerns; no one looked twice at her bulky form. If she hadn’t run into Tullia she would have been pacing through the city alone now, waiting for the beauty of the streets and the sky to overcome her anger at Ludovico’s patronizing diatribe. Belatedly, she formed a pocket and slipped Meconio’s treatise into it for safe-keeping; if she lost the book itself, not even the most ingratiating tribute to his genius would be enough to save her.

Halfway across the Great Bridge, they stopped to stare down into the blackness of the crevasse that divided the city. Several ages ago the ground here had been full of firestone; the first settlements had grown up around shallow mines. Later an elaborate system of tunnels had been built, plunging deep into the stone. But early in the eleventh age there’d been an accident in the mines and the whole deposit had been ignited. Half the city had been destroyed, and every trace of fuel had been burned away. All that remained was this jagged abyss, a taunting geochemical map in reverse: here’s what you could have had, now that it’s gone.

“I think every world probably started out with much the same mixture of minerals,” Tullia said. “Maybe they were all part of a single, primal world, eons ago. But I suspect that, whatever its origin, there are only three things that can happen to a world: it remains dark, like Gemma and Gemmo; it catches fire, like the sun and the stars; or life comes along to perform the same kind of chemistry in a more controlled way.”

Yalda gazed into the hole left behind by the Great Ignition. “This place makes me think that those possibilities need not be mutually exclusive.”

“True enough,” Tullia replied. “In fact, for all we know that might be a universal truth. Maybe the stars didn’t just burst into light; maybe they started out covered in plants, which grew too productive for their own good. All the liberators we’ve discovered so far are plant extracts, after all. And maybe it’s just a matter of time before the same thing happens here—either the plants do it, or the honor goes to someone in the chemistry department.”

“Now I’m worried,” Yalda said, only half-joking. “If anyone can set calmstone on fire, it’s a chemist.”

They continued across the bridge into the south quarter. “I used to work in that restaurant,” Tullia said, pointing to a brightly lit building on a crowded side street. “When I was a student.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Only if you want to drop in for a spot of arson.”

“You sound nostalgic.”

“The clientele were mostly Councilors’ sons and their entourages,” Tullia said. “How could I not have fond memories?”

She led the way to another restaurant, one that Yalda had passed many times before, but instead of taking the front entrance they slipped into a winding alley that ran behind the kitchen. Tullia exchanged shouted greetings with a woman Yalda glimpsed working inside, but they continued down the alley until they reached an unlit flight of stairs. It took Yalda a moment to orient herself; the stairs led back to a second story over the restaurant.

“Your friends aren’t eating with everyone else?” Yalda was growing puzzled, and a little anxious; why were they creeping around in the dark like this?

Tullia paused on the stairs. “This is a place to talk freely, without worrying who’s listening,” she explained. “We call it the Solo Club—though there are only a few genuine solos among us. Some of us had cos who died, some of us are runaways, some of us are just thinking about breaking the tie.”

Yalda had heard of runaways—and thoroughly approved, in principle—but it was something else to be told that there was a whole cabal of radicals huddled a few strides away at the top of these stairs.

She said, “If the city police—”

“The police won’t come here,” Tullia assured her. “We make it worth their while to stay away.”

Yalda steadied herself. One reason she’d rarely befriended the women she’d encountered in Zeugma was the disparity between their expectations and her own. Here, finally, was a chance to meet a few whose lives did not revolve around the imminent certainty of childbirth. What kind of coward would she be to forego that, just because some of them were on the wrong side of the law?

She said, “I’d like to meet your friends.”

Though the stairway was dark, the curtain at the top parted to reveal a room as brightly lit as the restaurant