The Clockwork Rocket

rocket I’ve seen with my own eyes was the size of my arm; the largest I’ve heard of was smaller than my body. If you can send my optics workshop into the void that would be the talk of Zeugma for a generation, but I don’t know where we’d put the wheat fields.”

Eusebio hesitated, considering his reply, but he did not appear the least bit discouraged by her response.

“I believe you’ve been on Mount Peerless,” he said.

“Of course. The university has an observatory there.”

“Then you’ll know that it’s far from any permanent habitation.”

“Certainly.” Yalda thought she knew where he was heading: an isolated, high-altitude site would be the perfect place to test new kinds of rockets.

Eusebio said, “The geologists tell me that the core of Mount Peerless is pure sunstone. I plan to tunnel into it and set it alight, and blast the whole mountain into the sky.”

Yalda collected the children from school and took them back to the optics workshop. Amelia and Amelio were happy playing on the floor with a box of flawed lenses, lining them up to form impromptu telescopes and buzzing hysterically at the sight of each other’s distorted images. Valeria and Valerio were going through a stage of drawing pictures of imaginary animals that they insisted had to be preserved; Yalda gave them some old student assignments that were blank on one side of the paper, and some pots of dye that Lidia had brought home from the factory.

Then she stood at her desk watching over them while she tried to decide what to make of Eusebio’s plan.

Giorgio brought a group of students into the workshop to use the heliostat for an experiment in polarization. The children ran to greet him, and he accepted their embraces without a trace of annoyance or embarrassment before gently shooing them back to their activities. Yalda produced a stack of mechanics assignments and proceeded to mark them, marveling that she could feel guilty for taking a couple of chimes away from her conventional duties to ponder the correct means of averting the planet’s annihilation. She’d shared her ideas about the Hurtlers with Giorgio—and he’d offered his usual perceptive comments and objections—but in the end he’d still treated the whole thing as if it were an exercise in metaphysics.

Yalda arrived home with the children just as Lidia returned from her shift.

“Did you bring some more dye?” Valeria nagged her. She and Valerio had used up the last of their supplies on a series of images of giant worms with six gaping mouths arrayed along the length of their bodies.

Lidia spread her arms and jokingly opened six empty pockets. “Not today. Every batch was perfect.”

Valeria went into a sulk, which meant wrapping six arms around her co and trying to pull his head off. Yalda warned her three times, increasingly sharply, then stepped in and physically disentangled them.

“You always take his side!” Valeria screamed.

Yalda struggled to hold her still. “What side? What did Valerio do?”

At a loss for an answer, Valeria changed tactics. “We were just playing, but you had to spoil it.”

“Are you going to be sensible now?”

“I’m always sensible, you fat freak.”

Lidia made a reproving hum. “Don’t talk to your Aunty Yalda that way.”

“You’re a bigger freak!” Valeria declared, turning on her. “At least it’s not Yalda’s fault she doesn’t have a co. She might have swallowed hers by accident before she was born, but everyone knows you killed your co with a rock.”

Yalda tried to draw on her reserves of patience by reminding herself how well Valeria had behaved in the workshop.

Daria had actually predicted that the third year of school would be the time when Tullia’s children started lashing out at their adoptive parents, punishing them for the derision they received from their increasingly unsympathetic classmates. So before the school year began, Yalda had encouraged the four of them to talk about the ignorance and hostility they were facing, and tried to suggest strategies for dealing with it. At the time, the recipients of her advice had promised that nothing in the wicked world could stop them feeling the same love and loyalty for their Aunties as ever.

Amelio had been looking on impassively, but now he decided that this was the right time to announce in a tone of weary resignation, “Women are for making children, not raising them. You can’t expect them to do a good job.”

Yalda thought: Bring on the Hurtlers.

Lidia said, “Why don’t we try making our own dye? We can go to the markets and look for the ingredients.”

Valerio’s face lit up with excitement. “Yes!”

“I want to come too,” Amelia pleaded.

Valeria held out for a few pauses, then decided that the whole thing had been her idea. “I know where we should go first. I already made a list in my head.”

Yalda exchanged a glance with Lidia, thanking her for halting the descent. “Why don’t we all go,” Lidia said. “Before it gets dark.”

Yalda woke on the first bell after midnight. Daria still hadn’t come home; some nights she went straight from the university to the Solo Club, then slept in her own apartment. That left Yalda or Lidia to get the children to school in the morning, depending on Lidia’s shift, but it was hard to complain that Daria wasn’t pulling her weight when she paid more than half the rent.

There was a patch of light on the floor beside the window, a hint of color in its diffuse edges. Yalda rose and walked quietly over to it. Through the window, four pairs of trails were visible, spreading slowly but still bright enough to bury most of the stars. In the early days every Hurtler reported had been fast and close, presumably because the more distant ones had been too dim to see with the naked eye. If anything in the current crop ever came that close, it would be spectacular. Maybe that would be enough to jolt her out of her stupor—assuming it didn’t achieve something far worse.

If a part of her had trouble believing that the world could end in a barrage of rocks from the distant past, the part that did believe struggled even harder to imagine that such grand cosmic mayhem could be avoided. Maybe everyone was simply born predisposed to expect life to go on as normal—and whatever the benefits of her education, hoping to overturn that innate conviction with an argument that started with the right triangles she’d found hidden in her plots up on Mount Peerless was asking too much of her animal brain.

Yalda glanced over at the sleeping children. However much she resented them at times, she certainly wasn’t indifferent to their fate—but she could summon no deep, visceral sense that their lives, and the lives of their own children, now lay in the hands of her earnest, enthusiastic, possibly deranged ex-student.

What would Tullia have done? Joked, reasoned, mocked, argued, probed all the competing theories for weaknesses, shone some light into other people’s blind spots, then followed her own imperfect instincts like everyone else. Yalda had never stopped missing her, but she was confused enough already without resorting to begging ghosts for advice.

The light on the floor brightened; Yalda turned back to the window. A fresh, dazzling streak of violet had appeared; it spread out slowly, parallel to the older trails.

She needed to make some kind of decision, if only to let herself sleep. So… she would take an interest in Eusebio’s plans and offer him whatever guidance she could, trying to help him spot the pitfalls in his strange endeavor. She could do that much without agreeing to be a passenger on his mad flying mountain—and without abandoning hope that the cosmic pyrotechnics that obsessed them both might yet turn out to be as harmless as a swarm of mites.

Eusebio led Yalda on foot for the last few saunters across the dusty brown plain. “Sorry to make you walk so far,” he said. “But it’s not a good idea to bring the trucks too close.”

Yalda took a moment to understand what he meant. The liberator for truck fuel wasn’t identical to that used with sunstone, but it could still cross-react. A pinch of gray powder spilt from a tank and carried the wrong way on the wind could heat things up very quickly.