The Clockwork Rocket

another draft of the sagas I can work on.”

“If I leave you here alone,” Yalda said, “what’s to stop someone from coming down and killing you? You’re afraid that if I take you to the summit and make it clear that you have my protection, people will be so outraged that they’ll turn against me… but how long do you think you’ll last with no protection at all?”

Nino thought about this, seriously. “If you put enough locked doors in the way, that might help. You can justify it as a way of keeping me down here, even if I manage to break free from my cell. Some people will be happy enough with the thought of me buried in an impenetrable dungeon—and I’ll be a little safer from the others, who won’t be happy until I’m dead.”

Yalda said, “If I call a meeting and explain to everyone why you did what you did, they should accept that your imprisonment is punishment enough. And they should respect me more, not less, for refusing to bow to tradition. The Peerless exists to bring change. Every last runaway here should be ready to shout: octofurcate the old ways! If they really wanted to live by those rules, they should have stayed in a world where they still held sway.”

Nino took his time replying, striving for tact again. “That’s a brave speech, Yalda,” he said, “and I can’t fault it, myself. But before you try it on the whole crew… can you name one person who started out opposing your decision, who you’ve managed to bring around with the same fine words?”

“Yalda! Are you busy? Please, you have to see this!”

Isidora was calling from outside Yalda’s office, too excited to waste time dragging herself into the room. Yalda was in the middle of a long calculation on the energetics of oscillating luxagens, but after a moment she slipped her notes into a hold and latched it. Isidora’s bursts of enthusiasm were annoying at times, but it was thanks to her efforts that the optics workshop was functioning again so soon. If she wanted to share her excitement at having rendered one more piece of apparatus usable without gravity, it would be churlish to refuse her.

Yalda dragged herself across the room and through the doorway, four hands shuttling her along the two parallel ropes. She retained the extra pair of hands she’d been using on her papers, in anticipation of having to twiddle a focusing wheel or adjust the angle of a prism.

Before Yalda had come within half a stretch of her, Isidora was already backing away down the corridor toward the workshop.

“What’s the great achievement?” Yalda called after her.

“You have to see this for yourself!” Isidora replied.

The walls of the optics workshop were kept free of the ubiquitous luminous moss, so the room’s deep shadows and controlled lamplight made it eerily reminiscent of its counterpart in Zeugma University—with the surreal placement of people and equipment only heightening Yalda’s sense of wandering into a nostalgic hallucination. Isidora was waiting in a corner where Sabino, a young researcher, was operating one of the microscopes, while clinging to two wooden bars that ran between the erstwhile floor and ceiling.

The microscopes had been back in action for days. Yalda approached, intrigued.

“What’s the new development?” she asked. Two closely spaced clearstone slides were positioned at the focus of the instrument; whatever they enclosed was—unsurprisingly—too small to discern with the naked eye, but they were attached to an elaborate mechanism of levers and wheels that Yalda hadn’t seen before, with a slender rod reaching into the space between them. In front of the small sunstone lamp that was illuminating the specimen was a thin slab of material that she recognized as a polarizing filter.

Sabino said, “Please, take a look for yourself.” He was shy with Yalda, but she could see that he was at least as excited as Isidora.

He moved aside and let Yalda take the bars in front of the microscope. Even the solid wood trembled a little from the shifting forces as they changed places; Yalda waited for the vibrations to die down, then peered into the eyepiece.

The field was full of translucent gray specks, most of them roughly spherical, albeit with jagged outlines. Shape aside, they possessed no visible features, no apparent parts or fine structure. Not all of the specks were in focus; the slides hadn’t been pressed together tightly enough to touch the material, to hold it in place. But the focal plane of the microscope had been adjusted to take in one particular speck; this one was fixed, gripped by a tiny pair of callipers that appeared solid black in their opacity. The other specks, though unconstrained, were barely quivering, demonstrating that the air between the slides was almost motionless.

“What am I looking at?” Yalda asked.

“Powdered calmstone,” Sabino replied.

“Under polarized light?”

“Yes.”

A pinch of fine sand—ground from calmstone or anything else—would not normally look like this. The grains would generally appear variegated in polarized light, made up of half a dozen regions of very different shades of gray. These were uniform, homogeneous.

“So you sorted them?” Yalda asked Sabino. “You picked out the purest grains you could find?”

“Yes. Maybe one in ten gross were like this.”

“One in ten gross? You’ve been busy.”

Yalda hadn’t had time to learn about Sabino’s project since coming up from the navigators’ post, but she could guess the rationale for his painstaking efforts. If solids such as calmstone were composed of regular arrays of indivisible particles—such as Nereo’s putative luxagens—then the best way to study their properties would be to obtain pieces of the material in question in which the array was as close to geometrically flawless as possible. An array of particles that maintained a regular pattern should have the same optical properties throughout; the usual mottled appearance of sand under polarized light ruled that out, but by chance there could always be exceptions. Sabino had found those exceptions, and discarded everything else.

“Try moving the wheel,” he suggested. “The top one on your right.”

Without looking away from the eyepiece, Yalda reached up with the right hand of the pair that sprouted from her chest, and found the wheel. She drew her fingertip along the rim, nudging it very slightly. In response, the callipers between the slides shifted, dragging their tiny cargo some fraction of a scant.

“What am I missing?” she asked. She didn’t think anyone expected her to be impressed by the fact that they could move single grains of sand around.

“Don’t just look at the callipers,” Isidora urged her. “Watch what’s happening around them.”

Yalda turned the wheel gently again; something caught her eye, but as soon as she stopped to try to scrutinize it, it ceased attracting her attention.

She moved the wheel a little more, then when the unexpected thing she hadn’t quite seen began to happen again, she started jiggling the wheel back and forth: jiggling the callipers, jiggling the tiny piece of calmstone it held.

As she did so, a second piece beside it moved in lockstep. Light was visible between the two; they were not touching. But whatever she did to the captive grain, its mimic followed as if they were two parts of a single, rigid body.

“Nereo’s force,” she said softly. “This is it? We can actually see it?”

Isidora chirped with glee, treating the question as rhetorical. Sabino was more cautious. “I hope that’s what it is,” he said. “I can’t think of any better explanation.”

According to Nereo’s equation, every luxagen should be surrounded by furrows of lower potential energy, within which any other luxagen nearby would prefer to reside. For a single luxagen, the furrows would simply be a series of concentric spherical shells, but the same effect acting on a multitude of particles could bind them together in a regular array—and in that case, the pattern of indentations in the energy landscape would extend beyond the array itself, offering the chance for another fragment of a similarly composed material to become ensnared in it. In effect, a sufficiently pure speck of rock could “stick” to another such speck, without the two actually touching.

“You tried this before, when the engines were running?” Yalda asked Sabino.

“Stint after stint,” he replied. “But gravity and friction must have overwhelmed the effect, because I never saw anything like this.”

Which meant that nobody back home could have seen it, either; it was only the condition of weightlessness that had made the experiment viable.

Yalda had been watching Sabino with her rear gaze; now she leaned back from the microscope and turned to