The Clockwork Rocket

Amando brought one of the trucks out of the shed and sped off across the desert with their guests.

Eusebio turned to Yalda. “Will you come to Red Towers with me? Tour the show?”

“If I can get leave from the university.” Yalda hesitated. “Do you think you could pay me a small fee for that?”

“Of course.” Eusebio had invited her several times to become an employee, but so far she’d resisted; she’d wanted to retain her independence, in order to be able to speak her mind to him freely.

She added apologetically, “If I’m not teaching I won’t get paid, and it’s not fair on Lidia and Daria to be looking after the children with no help.”

“Hmm.” Eusebio had already made it clear that he disapproved of what the three of them were doing: women—however capable they could be in other spheres—had not been shaped by nature for the raising of children. There were plenty of widowers in Zeugma desperate for heirs, and prepared to treat them like the flesh of their own co.

But he had more important things to think about than the flaws in Yalda’s domestic life. “Beyond spreading the news to the citizenry of Red Towers,” he said, “I’m hoping your colleague Nereo can arrange a meeting for me with his patron.”

“You can’t get an introduction to Paolo yourself?” Yalda was amused. “Whatever happened to the plutocrats’ network?”

“Networks, plural. They’re not all joined together.”

“Why do you want to meet Paolo?”

“Money,” Eusebio replied bluntly. “My father’s set a ceiling on my investment in the rocket. If I’m going to have to build the whole structure myself—mining and transporting all the sunstone, incorporating it into an artificial shell… if I tried to match the scale of Mount Peerless the costs would be greater by a factor of several gross, but even the smallest viable alternative is far beyond what I can afford on my own.”

“Have you thought of bribing all the people who are entitled to vote on the observatory?” Yalda suggested. “Not just with a shiny new telescope—with money they can put in their own pockets?”

Eusebio was insulted. “I’m not a fool; that was my very first plan. But Acilio has the Council scrutinizing the University’s business very closely, and he has so many spies in the University himself that I doubt I could get away with that kind of thing.”

Yalda joked, “I’m always willing to kill Ludovico, for a nominal fee.”

Eusebio regarded her with a neutral expression for an uncomfortably long moment.

“Don’t tempt me,” he said.

As the train approached Red Towers, Yalda was surprised to discover that the city still lived up to its name. She’d read that the local calmstone deposit with the eponymous hue had been mined out long ago, but now she could see with her own eyes that the skyline still bore an unmistakable red tint. Perhaps the original buildings had been lovingly preserved. Either that, or they’d all been recycled as decorative veneer.

Nereo met her at the station—along with all four of his children, who fought with each other for the thrill of carrying her luggage. Seeing how young they were, Yalda guessed that his co must have lived almost as long as her own grandfather. Nereo was still healthy, though—and no doubt he’d made arrangements for the children to be cared for even if some tragedy struck him down.

“Your friend Eusebio’s already at the house,” Nereo said.

“He had some business in Shattered Hill,” Yalda explained. “We’ve come in from opposite directions.”

Nereo lived within his patron’s walled compound. Yalda’s skin crawled as they walked past the sentries with their knife belts, but the children took the sight for granted. “It’s just a tradition,” Nereo told her, noticing her discomfort. “Paolo has no enemies; those weapons have never been used.”

“Don’t the guards get bored, then?”

Nereo said, “There are worse jobs.”

Eusebio was sitting on the floor in the guest room, reading a copy of The Red Towers Report. He greeted Yalda, then added in a tone of disbelief, “This man Giulio actually read and understood every word in the briefings I sent him. He raises some objections and concerns, but… they’re all entirely sensible.”

“Let’s just strap the whole city to a rocket and get it over with,” Yalda suggested. “Let Red Towers flourish in splendid isolation in the void for an age or two, then they can come back and teach the world how to live.”

They only had a couple of bells before the show, so they went to the hall to familiarise themselves with the layout. Yalda hadn’t been able to bring the equipment to produce the projected backdrops they’d used in Zeugma, but Giulio had organized printed sheets bearing the same material, which would be handed to the audience as they entered. That meant keeping the general lighting on during the performance.

“Seeing all those faces is going to make me anxious,” she told Eusebio, standing on the stage at the front of the empty hall.

“Don’t worry, you’re a professional now.” He squeezed her shoulder reassuringly.

The solution only came to her when she finally stepped out in front of the crowd: she delivered exactly the same message as in Zeugma, but she shifted her attention to her rear gaze and focused on the blank wall behind her, allowing herself to imagine that all the people in the hall were staring, not at her, but at the same soothing whiteness.

After Eusebio had done his part—with a few changes from the original version in which he’d boasted of a rocket the size of a mountain—it was time for questions. Everyone they’d spoken to in Red Towers had told them that they’d have to take questions from the floor; it was the custom here, and if they defied it they would not be forgiven. Giulio—whose employers had paid half the cost of renting the hall, in exchange for the right to display the paper’s name prominently throughout the venue—joined Yalda and Eusebio on stage to moderate.

Yalda braced herself for the predictable “Why can’t I walk to yesterday?” jokes, or perhaps even the perennial “Where’s your co?”

The first questioner Giulio selected, an elderly man, called out, “How will you keep the machinery repaired?”

Eusebio said, “There’ll be workshops within the rocket, equipped for every eventuality.”

The man was unimpressed. “And factories? Mines? Forests?”

“There’ll be stocks of minerals,” Eusebio said, “and gardens for raw materials as well as for food.”

“Stocks to last an age? Soil to last an age? All inside one tower? I don’t think so.”

Giulio chose another questioner.

“How will you control the population?” the woman asked.

“At the moment we have more of a shortage of travelers than an excess,” Eusebio replied.

“Double that number a few dozen times,” she suggested, “then tell me where you’ll put them, and how you’ll feed them.”

Eusebio was beginning to look flustered. Yalda said, “There’ll be the same mortality rates on the rocket as we experience anywhere else. No city’s population actually doubles in a generation.”

“So there’ll be no progress in medicine, then? For era after era, the only thing these travelers will care about is dealing with the Hurtlers… which no longer even threaten them?”

Yalda said, “Progress in medicine could end up controlling population growth as much as it lowers mortality.”

“Could—but what if it doesn’t?”

The questions continued in this fashion: tough but undeniably pertinent. It felt like an eternity before Giulio called a halt; Yalda was so exhausted that it took her a moment to realize that the audience was now cheering enthusiastically.

“That went well,” Giulio whispered to her.

“Really?”

“They took you seriously,” he said. “What more did you want?”

In the foyer, they recruited more than three dozen ground crew volunteers, but no passengers. People here were far more willing than their cousins in Zeugma to accept Yalda’s premise about the Hurtlers, and even the abstract principle behind Eusebio’s solution—but no one was confident that he could build the kind of habitation in which they’d want their own grandchildren to spend their entire lives.