moving again, her chosen illusion persisted; the small forces on her body as she dragged it along the rope were oriented in the right direction to reinforce the idea.
After practicing for a while she became reasonably proficient, but it was disconcerting to be so dependent on the ropes. If one of them snapped, installing a replacement would not be easy; it was clear now that they’d underestimated the number of handles needed on the walls to ensure that a chamber like this remained navigable, come what may. And if threading a new rope into place was a major task, any kind of construction work would be impossible.
Frido left the navigators’ post, dragging himself through the doorway to see how the neighboring machinists were faring. Babila was still sitting on her bench looking miserable. Yalda approached her.
“Try the ropes,” she said. “I’ll stay close to you.”
“I can’t do it,” Babila declared.
“You can’t hurt yourself. You can’t fall.”
“What if I get stranded?” Babila retorted. “Drifting in mid-air?”
It wasn’t an entirely ridiculous objection; the chamber was high enough that someone really could end up out of reach of anything solid—let alone anything they could actually grasp.
“Even if you let go of the rope accidentally,” Yalda pointed out, “you won’t drift away from it very quickly. You’ll always have time to grab hold of it again. And I’ll stay in front of you, I’ll make sure you’re all right.”
Babila wasn’t happy, but she reached up with one hand and grabbed the rope beside her, released the strap around her waist, then refashioned her obsolete feet and curled her body up so she could grip the rope in four places.
“We’re all animals now,” she declared forlornly. “I feel like an arborine.”
“Is that so bad?” Yalda wondered. “We’re going to have to re-learn everything we do, but if we’ve done something similar before, in the forests, that can only help.”
“And which zero-gravity forests were they?” Babila began pulling herself along the rope with surprising speed.
Yalda backed away from her hastily. “None in the past,” she said, “though it might be interesting to see how they deal with it now. We might learn something from all of the animals.”
“They won’t know what hit them,” Babila predicted gloomily. “They’ll cope much worse than we do.”
“Maybe.”
For all her reticence, Babila proved to be quite agile. Yalda suspected that most of her pessimism was just the nausea talking, and that both would wear off soon enough.
“A part of me keeps thinking that this is temporary,” Yalda admitted, clinging to the rope near the center of the room; the chamber now seemed to her like a disk-shaped space standing up on one edge. “As if it’s a trick that’s all down to some clever new way of using the engines, and if we get bored with it we can always just stop.”
“I know what you mean,” Babila said. “How can a condition that came without effort back home require a whole burning mountain to sustain it… while one that was impossible for more than a pause or two becomes the natural state?” She shivered. “Think of all the people who’ll live and die like this: feeling as if they’re endlessly falling.”
Yalda listened to the silence of the dead engines. She’d always expected that she’d welcome it ecstatically when it finally came, but it was going to take a while to grow accustomed to the absence.
“They won’t feel as if they’re falling,” she said. “They’ll feel the way they always feel. Only the old books will tell them that there was once a thing called ‘falling’ that felt the same.”
A day after the shutdown, Frido, Babila and a group of the machinists set off up the mountain. New jobs were waiting for them, close to the summit. Yalda lingered in the navigators’ post, promising to follow them later; nobody pressed her to explain why.
When she opened the door to the cell a thick haze of dust spilled out, red in the moss-light. The soil on the floor here was covered with the same netting as they’d used in the gardens, but without plant roots to help bind it, it was scarcely contained.
Nino was at the back of the cell, clinging to the netting; bundles of paper tied with string drifted around him, along with several clumps of faeces and half a dozen dead worms.
“Come out of there.” Yalda heard the anger in her voice, as if it were Nino’s fault that he’d been living in this squalor. She should have checked on him much sooner.
“Is there anyone around?” he asked.
“No.”
Nino used the netting to crawl across the floor. He hesitated at the doorway, confused for a moment, then Yalda backed away and made room for him on the rope that was anchored to the wall beside the entrance. He took hold of the rope and drew himself toward it, then reached back and swung the door closed, stopping any more of the dust escaping.
He looked over at the navigators’ bed, fully enclosed beneath a tarpaulin. “I was thinking you must have done something like that. Is it easy to use, without everything spilling out?”
“Not really,” Yalda confessed. “I think we’re going to have to start adding some kind of resin to the sand.”
Nino said, “My only problem is that it’s been hard to read, through the dust. If you could spare a couple of those tarpaulins—”
“Forget about that mess.” Yalda gestured dismissively toward his cell. “I’ll make sure you have a proper bed, upstairs.”
Nino hesitated; she recognized the way he held the muscles around his tympanum when he was struggling to find the most tactful way to phrase something. “That’s kind of you,” he said, “but it would be better if I could fix what I have already.”
“Nobody’s staying down here,” she said. “Now that we’re orthogonal, barring an emergency the engines won’t be fired again in our lifetimes.”
“I understand,” Nino replied. “There’ll be no full-time navigators, and you’ll have work to do elsewhere. But it’s better if I stay.”
“Are you worried about the trip?” Yalda asked him. She hadn’t handled the last move as well as she might have. “I’ll get some of the machinists to play guard on the way up. No one will be able to accuse you of running wild, if you have a whole escort.”
“No one will accept me being up there at all,” he said. “Let alone accept the sight of you coming to my cell —”
Yalda cut him off irritably. “If you think that’s a problem, I’ll put your cell inside my apartment. Then no one need know how often I visit you.”
Nino buzzed with bleak amusement. “Do that, and we’d both be dead in a stint.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“No? Then you don’t know what people are capable of.”
Yalda was angry now. “Don’t patronize me. I was in prison myself, remember.”
Nino said, “You suffered for a while at the hands of a spoilt brat who was more interested in hurting someone else. That’s not the same as trying to live in a world where everyone is your enemy.”
“And the stunt you pulled for the same spoilt brat,” Yalda retorted, “is not the be-all and end-all of life on the
“So everyone will be preoccupied with weightlessness for a while,” Nino conceded. “That’s no reason for us to push our luck. Leave me here, let people forget about me. Or if they think of me at all, let them be satisfied that I’ve been banished as far from them as possible. Banished and abandoned.”
Yalda could not accept this. “Abandoned to starve? Abandoned to go crazy?”
Nino said, “The moss is edible; have you really never tried it? But if you want to help me… choose someone you trust—someone whose movements will attract no attention—and send them down here with a few loaves and books every couple of stints. If I can read something new every now and then, I won’t lose my mind. And I still have
