The Clockwork Rocket

lode. If the liberator tanks had ruptured, innocuous would not have been the word for it.

“I think it’s good for morale that there’s something to be fixed,” Palladia mused. “Once you’ve repaired a building with your own hands, you really have a stake in it.”

“You could be right,” Yalda said. Nobody wanted to feel like a caged vole that Eusebio had tossed into the void, a breeding animal who was only here for the sake of their remote descendants’ accomplishments. “Still, I wouldn’t hope for too much more of the same.”

“The kind of compressive forces that the launch produced here won’t ever be repeated,” Palladia replied, “but when the weight of the mountain vanishes entirely, that will be an experiment we’ve never really carried out before.”

When the workers took a meal break, Yalda sat and ate with them, joining one group in a quick game of six- dice. The pantries on every level had been stocked with loaves—and holin, which the women passed around unselfconsciously, as if it were some kind of condiment. The few men in the team, most of them accompanied by their cos, appeared comfortable enough in this strange new milieu, and if anyone was suffering regrets over the ties they’d severed, the camaraderie here surely dulled the pain.

After the meal the cleanup resumed, but Yalda was out of synch with her hosts and in desperate need of sleep. When she woke she bid Palladia and the crew farewell, and continued her long trudge upward.

The moss-lit staircase stretched above her interminably, the view barely changing as she ascended. The higher engine tiers were undamaged—or at least, they’d passed a superficial inspection, and any further attention could wait until the second tier was in perfect shape—so she’d have no cause to linger in those deserted chambers. She could still hear the sound of the engines below, but distance took the annoying edge off it, leaving an almost reassuring buzz.

With no company, she passed the time sorting through a long list of anxieties. Would these runaways do a better job of raising their friends’ children than she’d done with Tullia’s? At least the fatherless wouldn’t be a derided minority here—but if that were the deciding factor, what would be the fate of the fathered few? Then there was the transition that would inevitably follow: the rebalancing of the sexes in the next generation, bringing problems of its own. The Peerless had been a gift to runaways, but from here there was nowhere to flee. The only hope for their children would come from instilling the principle of autonomy so deeply that no one had reason to fear their own co.

When she reached the first level above the highest engines, Yalda unbarred the safety doors and stepped out of the stairwell; a short tunnel with three more sets of doors took her to the edge of the cavern. The arborines would have no reason to leave the most comfortable place in the Peerless for them, but she wouldn’t have wanted a confused animal rampaging through the feed chambers below.

She stood among the bushes watching a nearby tree, one branch trembling as two lizards ran along it chasing mites. It had taken so much work to construct this buried forest that when it had first shown signs of flourishing—long before the launch—she’d felt as if they’d already succeeded in bringing the whole world with them into the void. But if that sentiment had been premature, at least the launch appeared to have done no harm here; the trees had proved resilient enough, and the lizards looked as vigorous as ever. She wouldn’t seek out the arborines to inquire about their health, having seen the kind of mood they were in after the test flights—but those flights had included greater accelerations than the Peerless had experienced, and still caused the creatures no injuries.

The faintly rotting smell of the place was not quite the same as any odor Yalda recalled from childhood, and the violet light reflecting back from the ceiling was more eerie than nostalgic. Still, it might be good for people to come here now and then to remember—or in later generations, to imagine—the world from which this small, imperfect sample of life’s richness had been plucked.

Yalda had received no reports of damage to the farms, but she stopped at one of the caverns of wheat to inspect the crop with her own eyes. Like the forest below, this field had been established for years, so if it had survived the briefly elevated gravity there was no reason to think it couldn’t go on thriving. Half the red flowers were open and shining healthily, while the other half slept. As she walked between the rows, alone, she noticed an occasional broken stalk or disheveled flower, but none of the plants had been uprooted. She’d seen worse than this back home after a few stiff gusts of wind.

There’d been a ceiling collapse in one of the medicinal gardens, so Yalda made that her next stop. As she walked down the tunnel from the stairwell, the drab glow of the moss gave way to a richer light than even the forest had offered, and her first glimpse revealed a lush, vibrantly colored mosaic of plants spread out across the cavern. It was only when she reached the entrance that she saw the pile of rubble to her left, and the dozen or so people trying to clear it without trampling any of the precious shrubs.

Yalda approached the group, calling out a greeting. Everyone acknowledged her politely, but only one of the workers offered more than a deferential nod.

“Yalda! Hello!”

“Fatima?”

Fatima walked over to her, picking her way carefully through the debris and crushed plants.

“Was anyone hurt?” Yalda asked.

“No, we were all in the dormitory when it happened.”

“That’s something.” Yalda looked up at the ceiling, which had lost a chunk the size of a small house; they were above the sunstone lode here, so the walls had no need for protective cladding, but the natural mineral formation exposed by the original excavation must have been less stable than the engineers had thought. “What about the plants?”

Fatima gestured at the rubble. “All of that used to be soldier’s ease.” Yalda knew the blue-flowered shrub, which had grown wild near the farm; its resin helped with wound-healing, though some less-than-helpful chemist had found a way to modify it to produce the melding formulation so beloved of the police.

“Don’t take it too badly,” Yalda said. “There’s plenty more in the other gardens, and you’ll get it started here again in a stint or two.”

Fatima didn’t actually appear grief-stricken by the loss. “We’ve really left the world behind?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Yalda assured her.

“You’ve looked back and seen it?”

“Yes.” Yalda was sure that Fatima understood perfectly that if they had not reached the void they’d simply be dead—but with the weight of everything restored to normal, nothing in this cave conveyed the truth to her senses. “You should see it for yourself. All of you. Who’s the supervisor here?”

“Gioconda.” Fatima pointed her out.

Yalda approached the woman and asked her how the work was proceeding, then negotiated a break in a bell’s time when anyone who wished could come with her to the nearest observation chamber.

“I’d like to see the world, myself,” Gioconda said. “Before it’s too faint.”

While they waited, Yalda helped shift the rubble. Gioconda was planning to use it to build a series of paths through the garden—covering the bare soil between the plots that currently provided a sanctuary for weeds—but the larger pieces of stone would need to be broken up, and all of the paving would need to be bound to the netting so it would remain in place when the Peerless ceased accelerating.

The work was relaxing, and the team seemed to be in good spirits. Once the schools started up, Yalda decided, it would not take much more to make this flying mountain as good a place to live as any small town. It would never match Zeugma’s range of cuisines—or be visited by touring entertainers—but there was nothing to stop people inventing their own new dishes, or devising their own variety shows.

The observation chamber wasn’t far; the edge of the mountain was less than a stroll away, and then a short descent took them to a clear-domed cave much like the one on the navigators’ level. Yalda hadn’t come prepared with coordinates, but she managed to locate the world’s tiny crescent without too embarrassing a delay.

The gardeners lined up to take turns looking through the theodolite, and Yalda watched their faces as they stepped away, silent and reflective. The ultimate purpose of the Peerless was more remote than ever now, with the site of its hoped-for return promising only to fade and vanish, never to be seen again in their lifetimes. But Yalda detected no signs of despair. They were not of the world anymore, but they had their own home to advance and protect. Best of all, even in parting they had not become rivals or deserters: if the Peerless flourished, the old world would share the rewards.