The Clockwork Rocket

furtiveness.

Lavinio watched her in silence as she approached. He looked grimly unsurprised by her presence, as if he’d already faced such a run of bad luck that an unwelcome visitor right in the middle of it was just what he’d expected.

“Can you tell me what this is for?” she asked him, clambering down a trunk then taking hold of one of his ropes.

“I was hoping the wheat might learn from the trees,” he said.

“Learn what?”

“Up.”

Yalda dragged herself nearer. Disconcertingly, the floor of the forest had become vertical to her again, a cave wall from which the trunks around them sprouted like giant, bristling outgrowths. The wheat stalks were aligned with the trees—but presumably they’d been planted that way, so what was there to learn?

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Is something going wrong in the fields?” She gestured at the limp gray wheat-flowers.

“Not like that,” Lavinio replied. “Here, the flowers don’t know when to open; something in the light confuses them. But up in the fields the mature plants are still healthy.”

“That’s good to hear. And the seeds?”

Lavinio reached down into the soil between the stalks and scrabbled around for a while, then pulled out a seed. It must have been put there by hand, in a separate experiment; none of the sickly plants around it could have produced it, let alone possessed the means to embed it in the ground.

Yalda took the seed from Lavinio and examined it carefully. It was covered with dozens of fine white rootlets that had broken through the skin in all directions, favoring no particular side. There was no shoot, though, no beginning of a stalk. The seed did not know which way to grow.

“I thought light and air were the cues for stalk formation,” she said.

“That’s what I was taught. That was the dogma; I never questioned it.” Lavinio took the seed back and turned it between his fingers. “But however shallow the placement… they still don’t seem to find up. Even if half of the seed is uncovered—exposed directly to the light and the air—they don’t get the message.”

Yalda said, “So when the test seeds you sowed in the fields wouldn’t grow, you came down here to see if the forest had a stronger message?”

“That was the idea,” Lavinio said. “With all of this plant material oriented the same way, I was hoping some kind of influence could pass from the trees to the wheat. But the mature wheat just dies here, and the seeds do exactly what they do in the fields.”

Yalda forced herself to remain calm. The mature plants in the fields were still healthy, so the coming harvest wouldn’t be affected; they weren’t facing imminent starvation. But they did not have long to solve this, or there would be no harvest after that.

“What’s happening in the medicinal gardens?” she asked.

“All those shrubs grow from runners, not seeds,” Lavinio replied. “Some of them are sprouting at odd angles, but once the gardeners correct them by hand they’re fine.”

“That’s something.”

Lavinio made a sound of begrudging assent; the disaster was not all-encompassing. But they couldn’t live on holin and analgesics.

Yalda said, “I wish you’d brought this to me sooner.” She could understand him wanting to prove his expertise by dealing with the problem himself, but there was too much at stake for that.

“Frido thought it would be best to find the solution first,” Lavinio explained. “Instead of spreading panic when there was no need.”

Yalda pondered this revelation. Frido knew about the wheat, and he’d kept it from her? Lavinio might have felt that the responsibility for the crops was his alone, but what was Frido’s excuse?

“I’m not interested in spreading panic,” she said. “But we’re going to need as many people thinking about this as possible.”

“I’ve already set up every experiment you could wish for,” Lavinio insisted. “I’m looking at every combination of factors: light, soil, air, neighboring plants… what is there left to test?”

“And nothing appears to be working?”

“Not so far,” Lavinio admitted.

“Then we both know what’s needed,” Yalda said. “The wheat’s been fine until now—and only one thing has changed.”

Lavinio buzzed humorlessly. “So what are we going to do? Fire the engines again, until the next crop is established? And the next one, and the next?”

“Hardly. We’d run out of sunstone in a generation, and then just starve to death a few years later.”

“Then what?” Lavinio demanded. “If only gravity will make the wheat grow—?”

Yalda held up a hand and twirled a finger around. “Spinning creates gravity too. We could put the seeds in a rotating machine—a centrifuge—until they germinate.”

Lavinio considered this. “It’s an idea,” he said. “But what if germination’s not enough? What if it takes half a season under gravity to establish the plant’s growth axis?”

Yalda was reluctant to answer that. The crew was still struggling to adapt to the last change: refitting every apartment, every workshop, every corridor; relearning every daily routine. How much discontent would it foster, to announce that all their efforts had been misdirected, and that everything they’d achieved was about to become obsolete?

Without wheat, though, they couldn’t survive. And it was no use wishing that the cure would be painless; they needed to be prepared for the worst.

She said, “If germination isn’t enough, we’ll have to set the whole mountain spinning.”

The meeting hall continued to fill slowly long after the scheduled time had passed, but Yalda had no intention of starting until everyone had arrived. People were coming from every corner of the mountain, many of them making a journey they had never attempted before under weightlessness.

Yalda stayed close to the entrance, greeting people and marking off their names on a list. Frido had offered to do the job for her, but she’d insisted on making the most of this chance to come face-to-face with every member of the crew again, however briefly.

Now Frido waited in the front tier, clinging to the ropes beside Babila and half a dozen of the old feed chamber machinists. Yalda hadn’t been able to bring herself to confront him, to accuse him of acting in bad faith. She suspected that he’d been keeping the problem with the wheat to himself as a way to strengthen his position, hoping to make himself a hero to the crew by announcing a simple, biological remedy that would save them all from starvation—courtesy of Lavinio, but still created under his patronage and Yalda’s neglect. No doubt he’d also been prepared to claim the rotational cure as his own, if it had come to that. In fact, Yalda remembered Frido as being part of a group who’d discussed the possibility of spinning the Peerless, when the first real plans were being made for the mountain. The consensus they’d reached was that it would have made navigation and course corrections far too complex, for the sake of some very uneven gains in comfort. It had never crossed their minds that gravity could be a matter of life and death.

Half a bell later, the list of non-arrivals was down to one unavoidable entry. Yalda gave a few quick words of thanks then introduced Lavinio, who explained what he’d seen, and the experiments he’d tried.

“There must be something within a wheat seed that’s sensitive to gravity,” he concluded reluctantly. “Three days in a centrifuge will make the seed sprout, but then it stops growing when the signal is taken away. The established crop didn’t die in the fields when the engines were switched off, so we’re going to keep trying longer periods in the centrifuge in the hope that we’ll find a point where the seedlings can be taken out and planted. But there is no guarantee that such a point exists, short of maturity.”

He moved aside, and Yalda dragged herself back on stage. She clung with four hands to the ropes behind her, surveying the anxious crowd, wondering what would happen if someone took this opportunity to lambast her over