The Clockwork Rocket

Yalda wasn’t sure whether Mount Peerless had been named with honest innocence in an age of limited travel, or whether the label was a vain boast intended to dismiss the claims of any rival. Either way, reputable surveyors had long since established that Mount Magnificent stretched five strolls and eleven saunters from base to peak, while Peerless was a mere five strolls and five.

A few commentators still contended that the top of Mount Peerless might nonetheless be higher, in the sense of being farther from the center of the world. But geodesy remained too imprecise an art to settle the question definitively, while the effects of local climate on air pressure rendered that criterion equally unhelpful. Nobody could say which of the two mountaintops was closer to the stars.

What Yalda knew for certain now was that a stroll deserved an entirely new and less frivolous name when it was directed vertically. On Zeugma’s flat roads, she could easily walk seven strolls in a bell—but the truck carrying her along the winding road that edged up the slopes of Mount Peerless had only managed to ascend half that distance after laboring for more than a day. At which point, the road became too narrow for the vehicle to proceed at all.

Fosco, the driver, helped her pack a small cart with supplies; even Yalda couldn’t fit everything she’d need into pouches and pockets. The plan was for him to wait to give Renato, the observer Yalda was replacing, a ride back to Zeugma.

“Are you going to be all right here?” Yalda asked. The long wait struck her as a lonelier, more stressful task than her own purposeful ascent.

“I’ve done the changeover dozens of times,” Fosco assured her. “You should be thinking about your own health. The moment you start to feel uncomfortably warm—”

“Lie down in the loosest soil I can find,” Yalda replied. “And don’t get up until my temperature’s normal.” Tullia had rammed that point home. Air played an important role in cooling the body, and by the time she reached the summit it would be carrying heat away much more slowly than usual. Only a direct, solid connection to the ancient, chilly depths of the world could rid her of the thermal energy that built up from her body’s metabolism.

The morning sun was still low when Yalda bid Fosco farewell and set off up the narrow trail. Once he was out of sight, she took Daria’s vial from her pocket and swallowed two of the holin cubes. She relished the bitter taste; after all, if she’d been the descendant of generations of women who’d considered goldenrod petals to be a tasty delicacy, that wouldn’t bode too well for the efficacy of an anti-divisive derived from the plant.

Yalda surveyed the route ahead. Slender trees lined the path and shrubs sprouted from every crack in the rocks. Plants appeared untroubled by the thin air, though she’d been warned against trying to grow anything inside, in pots, at the summit. As she resumed her ascent, Yalda scanned the trees for lizards. Each twitching branch was an encouraging sign that animals could thrive here, too.

The path veered closer to the edge of the slope; Yalda could catch glimpses between the trees of the plain they’d crossed on their way from Zeugma. From this height, she could see the dust haze they’d ridden through as a puny, finite thing, thinning out to nothing far below her. The flat brown land, sparsely studded with shrubs, was adorned with a network of shallow, wind-carved channels. There was no doubt that, over the ages, the plain had been scoured ever flatter and lower by wind and dust, while a favorable combination of tougher rock and protective vegetation had spared the mountain from the same fate. What Yalda had trouble imagining was the starting point for the whole process. Had the world been born smooth, or craggy? Had Mount Peerless been carved into existence, like a figure sculpted from a featureless slab, or had it been there from the start, towering over its ancient surroundings, and then retained or improved upon that initial advantage?

Tullia believed that there had once been a giant, primal world, with every planet, every star, a fragment left behind by its destruction. Yalda wasn’t so sure; the gravitational pull of so much concentrated matter would have been stupendous. It was hard to believe that even a wildfire in some massive seam of sunstone piercing the depths of that ur-planet could have fractured it into rubble and scattered the resulting worlds across the void. Then again, maybe sunstone was nothing compared to the rocks that had blazed in the past. To expect the scatterer of worlds to be stable enough to persist to this day, to be recognized and studied, might be as naive as hoping to meet your own mother.

By mid-afternoon Yalda was growing weary. When she’d first set out, the path’s steep gradient had felt like a promise of rapid progress: the faster she was ascending toward her destination, the better. Now the lack of respite from the endless climb simply made her angry.

Only stubbornness kept her going, and it kept her going too long. When she was forced to stop, retching and shaking, she finally understood what she’d done to herself. She’d brushed the symptoms aside, treating them as ordinary signs of fatigue and telling herself that she could overcome them with sufficient resolve.

Cursing her stupidity, she lay on the path, trying to cool herself against the uneven slabs of fractured rock, too weak and queasy to go looking for a proper bed of soil. She could feel the heat moving through her flesh, a stinging presence probing for an exit like a swarm of trapped parasites. The thought of dying here embarrassed her; she’d been told what to do, she had no excuses. Triumphantly pointing to her dissected corpse, Ludovico would ban all women from using the observatory. “Look at the size of this bloated creature! With a ratio of surface area to mass less than half that of a man, how could she be expected to survive the rigors of altitude?”

When night fell, Yalda tried climbing to her feet; on the third attempt she succeeded. She was still nauseous and trembling. She took a trowel from the cart and stepped off the path; there was no bare soil, but there was a patch of shrubs that she believed she could uproot. In good health she could have done it with her fingers alone, but the flesh she extruded now to follow the roots down was too weak to dislodge them. She hacked at the plants with the trowel, severing enough of the woody cores to free a shallow layer of soil. She lay in it and rolled back and forth, crushing worms and scraping her skin on broken roots, trying to maximize her area of contact.

Some time later she found herself lucid again, gazing up at the stars through a gap in the trees. Fragments of hallucinations lingered; she remembered thinking that she was already in the observatory, adjusting her equipment and wondering why the colors in the star trails were refusing to merge. She’d thought the glowing blossoms above her were flaws in the optics, surfaces chipped in the bumpy truck ride scattering stray light everywhere.

Contemplating the flowers’ cool radiance, Yalda wondered why nature hadn’t stumbled on some easier way to rid her body of its heat. Why couldn’t thermal energy simply be converted into light and tossed into the sky? Plants were believed to turn the chemical energy they extracted from the soil into light, a small amount of heat, and a new, more accessible store of chemical energy in their seeds and other structures. Animals, burning that secondary fuel, used the energy to move their muscles and repair their bodies, and to make a little light for internal signaling—but the rest became a wasteful, burdensome dose of heat. Why couldn’t they shift more of it into light, instead? Why had her grandfather’s glowing skin signified a fatal pathology, when every living thing would surely have had an easier time if it could shine like a flower?

Yalda clambered to her feet and returned to the path. Her mind was still a little askew; she found it odd that the cart had sat there for so long, undisturbed. By now, shouldn’t someone have chanced upon it and come looking for its owner—or failing that, ransacked it for valuables?

Well, no.

She took a loaf from the cart, sat on the ground, and ate half of it; at that point her body indicated abruptly that it had had enough. She rested for a lapse or two to make peace with the meal, then she set out again, moving slowly, vigilant for warning signs.

The sun was setting over the plains below, complicating the dusty brown channels with shadows, as Yalda approached the observatory. Renato was sitting outside; he’d not known exactly who’d be coming to replace him, but he’d known the schedule, and Yalda was late.

She couldn’t help calling out a greeting to him, though even to her the words sounded muffled and distorted, and she’d been told that her speech would be inaudible to any intended recipient. As she drew nearer, she saw the words on his chest: What took you so long?

Too much stopping to admire the view, she replied.