“No.”
“Why doesn’t your friend Eusebio do something about that?” Lidia demanded.
“Don’t blame him,” Yalda pleaded. “He’s already fighting the Council on a dozen different fronts.”
Lidia was unimpressed. “The whole point of being a new member of the Council is to fight the old guard and get something useful done. But
“Shocking, isn’t it?”
“Will he have free holin on his rocket?” Lidia wondered. “I might join up for that alone.”
Yalda said, “Of course there’ll be free holin. In fact, it looks as if the entire crew will consist of solos and runaways: one of each, in a rocket the size of this room.”
“That’s beginning to sound less tempting.”
Yalda rose. “I’m sorry about your job. I’ll ask around, see if anyone knows of a position…”
“Yeah, thanks.” Lidia put her head in her arms.
As Yalda crossed the room, a slab of sharp-edged brightness on the floor beside the window caught her eye. The diffuse light from the Hurtlers didn’t look like this; it was as if one of their neighbors had stolen a spotlight from the Variety Hall and mounted it on their balcony.
She walked over to the window and looked out. The neighbors weren’t to blame; the light was coming from high above the adjacent tower. A single bluish point was fixed in the sky, displaying no discernible color trail.
Lidia had noticed the light too; she joined Yalda by the window.
“What is it?”
Yalda suddenly realized that she’d seen the same object high in the east when she’d walked out of the railway station—but it had been a great deal paler then, so she hadn’t given it a second thought. “Gemma,” she said. “Or Gemmo.” The naked eye couldn’t separate them, so there was no point guessing which of the two had suffered the change.
Lidia hummed with exasperation; she was in no mood to be mocked. “I might not be an astronomer,” she said, “but I’m not a fool. I know what the planets look like, and none of them are that bright.”
“This one is, now.” A dark, lifeless world that had once shone by nothing but reflected sunlight was turning into a star before their eyes.
Lidia steadied herself against the window frame; she’d grasped Yalda’s meaning. “A Hurtler struck it?
“It looks that way.” Yalda was surprised at how calm she felt. Tullia had always believed that a large enough Hurtler could set the world on fire. Dark world, living world, star; they were all made of the same kinds of rock, the distinction was just a matter of luck and history.
Lidia said, “Now tell me the good news.”
Good news? Gemma and Gemmo were far away, and much smaller than the sun, so at least the world wouldn’t suffer intolerable heating from the new star.
In fact, the two planets were so far from the sun that the density of the solar wind in their vicinity was believed to be a tiny fraction of its value around the nearer worlds—and no Hurtlers had ever been seen at such a distance, in accord with the idea that it was friction with that gas that made the pebbles burn up. But the lack of the usual pyrotechnics hadn’t prevented this unheralded impact.
The Hurtlers were everywhere, visible or not—and Ludovico’s absurd explanation for them that blamed the solar wind alone was now completely untenable. Yalda didn’t expect him to recant, but the people who’d voted with him against Eusebio’s offer didn’t have the same degree of pride invested in the matter.
Perhaps the new star was no more exotic than the Hurtlers themselves, but its meaning was far easier to read: the only thing that had spared their own planet so far was luck. Any day, any night, the world could go the same way.
“The good news,” Yalda said, “is that we might just get our flying mountain after all.”
12
“Stay close to me!” Yalda called out to the group as they approached a bend in the tunnel. “Anyone suffering from nausea? Weakness? Dizziness?”
A chorus of weary denials came back at her; they were tired of being asked. She’d been pacing the tour carefully—and the mountain’s interior was maintained at higher pressure than the air outside—but everyone’s metabolism was different, and Yalda had decided that it was better to nag than face a crisis. She certainly didn’t want any of these potential recruits associating the place with sickness.
“All right, we’re now coming to one of the top engine feeds.” For the last few saunters the tunnel had been lit solely by the red moss clinging to its walls, but the illumination from a more variegated garden could already be seen spilling around the bend.
As they took the turn, a vast, vaulted chamber appeared in front of them, a disk almost half a stroll wide and a couple of stretches high. It had been hollowed out of the rock three years before, using jackhammers powered by compressed air; no engines or lamps were employed in the presence of naked sunstone. The usual drab moss and some hardy yellow-blossomed vines covered the arched ceiling, but between the supports the floor was a maze of flower beds luminescing in every hue. Many of the plants were arranged haphazardly, or in small, localized designs, but long strands of cerulean and jade could be seen weaving from garden to garden around the gaping black mouths of the boreholes.
“It wasn’t always so colorful here,” Yalda recalled, “but the construction workers brought in different plants over the years.”
“Will you keep the gardens when the engine’s in use?” Nino asked.
“No—that would interfere with the machinery, and in the long term their roots could even damage the cladding. But these plants won’t be destroyed; they’ll be shifted to the permanent gardens higher up.”
Yalda led her dozen charges to the edge of the nearest borehole and invited them to peer down into the gloom. Far below the chamber, the darkness was relieved by four splotches of green and yellow light; clinging to rope ladders that ran the full height of the shaft, workers wreathed in vines were inspecting the hardstone cladding that lined the surrounding sunstone.
“When the engine is operating,” Yalda explained, “these holes will have been filled-in again, but liberator will be pouring down around the edges. If there are gaps in the cladding, the fuel could start burning in the wrong place.”
“This is the top layer of the rocket, isn’t it?” Doroteo asked.
“Yes.”
“So it won’t be in use for a very long time,” he pointed out.
“That’s true, and I’m sure it will be inspected again before it’s fired,” Yalda said. “But that’s no reason for us to neglect the job now.” Her ideal would have been to prepare every piece of machinery in the
