The Clockwork Rocket

making a commitment, Leonia broke the mood. “Six dozen probes went up,” she said, “and this is the only one that’s been recovered? What happened? Did all the others end up as craters in the ground?”

“That’s possible,” Benedetta conceded. “Landings are difficult to automate. But the real problem was returning the probes to this tiny speck of rock from such a distance. The world is a very small target; the tolerances required for attitude and thrust control were close to the limits of what any of us believed was feasible. We were lucky to get even one back.”

“But the Peerless will be traveling much farther,” Serafina noted anxiously.

“With people inside it to navigate,” Yalda replied. “It won’t be down to clockwork to get them home.”

Leonia was unswayed. “Be that as it may, when you rehearsed your great project—on a much smaller scale —you only had one success in six dozen. And you were hoping to impress us by juggling voles! ”

The demonstration launch Yalda had arranged would carry six of the animals above the atmosphere, then bring them back down again—hopefully still alive. While clearly no surrogate for the flight of the Peerless, this was not a trivial achievement—and some people did find it reassuring to see that Eusebio’s rockets no longer exploded on launch, or cooked their passengers with the engine’s heat.

“What would persuade you, then?” Yalda demanded irritably. “A full-scale rehearsal, where we send up Mount Magnificent with a crew of arborines?”

Leonia responded to this sarcastically grandiose proposal with a much more modest alternative. “It might mean something if you went up yourself, instead of the voles.”

Before Yalda could reply, Benedetta said, “I’ll do it.”

Fatima emitted an anxious hum. “Are you serious?”

Benedetta turned to her. “Absolutely! Just give me a few days to check the rocket and re-arrange things for the new weight.”

Yalda said, “We need to discuss this—”

“That would be a lot more convincing than voles!” Assunto enthused. His co agreed. “What can an animal the size of my hand tell us about the risks of flight?” she complained. “Our bodies are completely different.”

Yalda looked on helplessly as the group debated Benedetta’s offer; the majority soon reached the view that nothing less would be of interest to them. Only Fatima was reluctant to witness such a risky stunt, while Nino struggled to summon up the appearance of caring one way or the other.

Yalda wasn’t going to argue this out with Benedetta in front of everyone; she sent the recruits off to kill some time at the Basetown markets.

Benedetta was already contrite. “That was poorly judged,” she admitted. “I shouldn’t have sprung it on you out of nowhere.”

Yalda said, “Forget about the timing.” Being made to look foolish in front of the recruits was the least of it. “Why do you think you need to do this at all?”

“We’ve talked about it for years,” Benedetta replied. “You, Eusebio, Amando… everyone agrees it would be a good idea to send someone up—but always later. How long is it until the Peerless is launched now?”

“Less than a year, I hope.”

“And we still haven’t put a single person on a rocket!”

“Flesh is flesh,” Yalda said firmly. “What are voles made of—stone? When it comes to the Peerless, the things we have to worry about will be attitude control and cooling—and we’ve got both of them down to a fine art: in the last four dozen test launches, they’ve worked flawlessly. It’s only the landings that have failed.”

“And only three times,” Benedetta pointed out. “So those aren’t bad odds that I’d be facing.”

Yalda said, “No… but if you did this, what would it actually tell us? Whether you survived or not, how would it make the Peerless safer?”

Benedetta had no ready reply for that. “I can’t point to any one thing,” she said finally. “But it still feels wrong to me to try to launch a whole town’s worth of people into the void, without at least one of us going there first. Even if it’s only a gesture, it’s a gesture that will calm some people’s fears, win us a few more recruits and quieten some of our enemies.”

Yalda searched her face. “Why now, though? You see an image of the future—proof that it’s fixed—and suddenly you’re offering to surrender your life to fate?”

Benedetta buzzed, amused by the implication. She held up the paper from the probe. “If I stare at this long enough, do you think I might spot myself living happily among the orthogonal stars?”

Yalda said, “What if I tell you that I’ve seen the future, and it’s voles all the way?”

Benedetta gestured toward the markets. “Then I can confidently predict that most of those recruits will be gone in a couple of days.”

Silvio stood in the doorway of Yalda’s office. “You need to see this new camp,” he said. “Way out of town.”

She looked down at the calculations Benedetta had submitted on the modified test launch. She’d checked them over and over again, but she still hadn’t made a final decision on whether or not to approve the flight.

“Are you sure there’s a problem?” she asked him. Traders sometimes arrived and set up camp in inconvenient places, but it usually only took them a few days to realize that they were better off in Basetown.

Silvio didn’t reply; he’d given his advice, he wasn’t going to repeat it. It was Eusebio who paid his wages, and if Eusebio put Yalda in charge of the project in his absence then that won her a certain amount of courtesy—but not much.

She said, “All right, I’m coming.”

Silvio drove her a few strolls north along the dirt track that ran from Basetown to one of the disused entrances to the mountain. Yalda didn’t know exactly what he’d been doing there himself; maybe Eusebio had him patrolling the whole area.

There were five trucks at the abandoned construction camp, most of them loaded with soil and farming supplies. A couple of dozen people were visible, digging in the dusty ground. In some respects it wasn’t a bad place to farm, Yalda realized; the shadow of the mountain might well block Gemma’s light enough of the time to allow the crops to retain their usual rhythm, without the need for unwieldy awnings. Having to truck in soil wasn’t promising, but once a crop became established the roots of the plants, and the worms that lived among them, could start breaking down the underlying rock.

Yalda climbed down from the cab and approached the farmers.

“Hello,” she called out cheerfully. “Can anyone spare a lapse or two to talk?”

She caught a few people looking away, embarrassed at the realization that they were being addressed by a solo, but one man put down his shovel and walked over to her.

“I’m Vittorio,” he said. “Welcome.”

“I’m Yalda.” She resisted the urge to make a joke about his famous namesake; either he’d be sick of people doing it, or he’d have no idea what she was talking about. “I work with Eusebio from Zeugma—the man who owns the mines here.” That had become the standard euphemism for the rocket project; everyone knew precisely what was going on inside the mountain, and why, but some people who took a dim view of Eusebio’s whole endeavor were less hostile if they weren’t confronted with explicit reminders of it.

“I don’t believe he owns this land,” Vittorio replied defensively.

“No, he doesn’t.” Yalda tried to keep her tone as friendly as possible. “But if you were hoping to trade with his workers, we have a whole town just south of here where you’d be welcome to set up.” If they signed an agreement with some very reasonable conditions, they could farm just as much land as they were using here, sell their produce in the markets and have access to Basetown’s facilities for no cost at all.

“We chose this location with care,” Vittorio assured her.

“Really? It’s a long way from everything but Basetown, and not as close to there as it could be.”

Vittorio made a gesture of indifference. Other members of his community were watching them discreetly, but Yalda didn’t sense any physical threat, just a mood of resentment at her interference.

“I need to be honest with you,” she said. “In less than a year, this land won’t be suitable for farming anymore.” She was trying to work from the most innocent assumptions she could think of: that the chaos in the sky