The Clockwork Rocket

“How do we know the telescope didn’t get bumped by the engines’ vibrations?” Prospera asked, only half- joking. “How do we know that the mountain’s really turned at all?”

All that hard, dangerous work, all that beautiful fire pouring out across the slopes, for an incremental change that could as easily be an illusion.

Yalda said, “How do we know? Be patient, wait a while, then look again.”

Two days into the spin-up, one of the lookout posts—wisely left unoccupied for the duration of the process— snapped free of its ropes and was lost to the void. Isidora, whom Yalda had put in charge of the lookouts, had the other three reeled back in to be strengthened and tested before anyone tried to use them again.

By the time the engines were shut down there’d been no other reports of serious damage. In the academic precinct there was a series of small annoyances to deal with—most of them involving the realization that the centrifugal force here, though too strong to be ignored, was also too weak to produce enough friction to hold things in place in the conventional way. Equipment and furniture that would have stayed put under old-style gravity now had to be re-secured just as firmly as when it had been weightless, in order to resist the pushes and tugs of ordinary use.

Yalda quite liked the slight weight she’d acquired in her own office and apartment; she could still use the old system of ropes to get around, but she no longer found herself flailing in panic if she ended up out of reach of all the walls, ropes and handles around her. Slow as she was to fall toward the walls that had turned into floors, her body now accepted that she couldn’t end up stranded.

After helping to get the optics workshop functioning again—with Sabino moved to a perfectly weightless room of his own, dead on the axis—Yalda headed for the fields. As she soared down the central staircase it was as if nothing had changed, but when she took hold of the rope ladder at the mouth of the radial exit, she dutifully reformed her lower hands and descended feet-first.

The tunnel led into the top of the nearest chamber; the flat disk of the interior was now standing on edge. The rope ladder continued down one of the rock faces, and as Yalda moved between the sheer walls, even in the moss-light she found it hard to think of the place as an underground cavern anymore. It was more like descending by night into a secret valley.

The gravity was still weak here, but it had cleared all the dust out of the air. The floor of the valley was deserted, but when Yalda stepped carefully between the furrows she could see that the newly planted seeds had already sent up shoots. The sight sent a shudder of relief through her body.

A flimsy guardrail surrounded the mouth of the radial tunnel leading down into the next chamber; nothing about this exit now looked remotely sensible. “Ah, Eusebio,” Yalda whispered. “Everything’s turned sideways in your beautiful design.” She slipped between the rails and reached across to the rope ladder, which followed what had once been the corridor’s floor. As she gripped the ladder’s side and the structure swayed toward her, her old, dormant sense that a fall could injure her was abruptly reawakened.

The second field had been sown later than the first; no shoots were visible, but Yalda found a buried seed and checked that it was sprouting. Lavinio would have told her if there’d been any problems—but to touch the promise of the next harvest with her own hands reassured her, made her feel strong.

In the third field, the closest to the mountain’s surface, farmers were still at work. Half a dozen firestone lamps had been strung on a pulley line that stretched from the entrance at the top of the chamber to a corner of the field. As Yalda descended, she could see the giant shadows she cast sideways across the rock face.

When she reached the ground, one of the farmers, Erminia, approached and greeted her.

“Thank you for your work here,” Yalda said. “How long until you finish sowing?”

“One more day, but then there’s another field…” Erminia gestured in the direction of the summit, unsure how to refer to it now that “up” had two different meanings. “Two days there, then the whole crop is planted.”

“As soon as there’s a chance, we’ll join the two chambers,” Yalda promised.

“Really?” Erminia didn’t sound enthusiastic.

Yalda was puzzled. “One large field here would make things easier, wouldn’t it?” They needed the extra space for the crops that they’d gain by cutting through the intervening rock, but in any case she’d have thought it would be more convenient to work a single expanse of soil.

“I heard you were going to put explosives here,” Erminia said, “to blow out any fire that starts below us. If that’s what it comes to, I’d rather we lost as little of the crop as possible.”

It was a fair point, but Yalda didn’t reply; she didn’t want to confirm the plan in a casual conversation, let alone start debating the pros and cons of individual section boundaries.

The rumors were already spreading, though. The longer she delayed dealing with them, the weaker her position would be.

She said, “Can you spread the word to all your friends and colleagues: there’ll be a meeting at the summit, five days from now, on the third bell.”

“A meeting about what?” Erminia asked.

Good question, Yalda thought. Why you should be perfectly relaxed about the prospect of your wheat fields exploding beneath your feet?

“We’ve fixed the crops,” she said. “Now we need to talk about what we’re going to do to avoid going the way of Gemma.”

Yalda waited outside the meeting hall, counting the people as they entered while she rehearsed two speeches in her head.

One speech was about the time the crew had spent working together on the slopes, with their lives in each other’s hands and the fate of the Peerless in the hands of everyone. She’d been rescued from a near-fatal accident herself, but they all had their own stories of their friends’ courage and ingenuity. After that, why would they imagine that they needed a rule of fear to keep them safe? One weak-willed farmer with starving children had been persuaded to commit one dangerous act. But Nino had repented and been punished, and he had no reason to try to harm anyone again. He did not need to die, either for the sake of his own crimes or for the sake of the Peerless’s future. Letting him live would not be an act of weakness; it would be an affirmation of everyone’s mutual trust.

The other speech she had ready, in case her first one went badly, concerned the equipment and protocols that could be developed to limit access to the charges, without rendering the fire response so slow as to be useless. And if she grew desperate enough, she was prepared to start talking up the prospects of contingency plans to rescue anyone who ended up outside the mountain in the event of an unplanned breach of the walls.

Palladia emerged from the hall. “Who are we waiting for?” she asked Yalda.

Yalda checked the roll. “Isidora and three others; I think they were all on lookout shifts.” The shifts ended precisely on the bell, but even if they’d forgotten about the meeting and worked through to the usual time, they were later than she would have expected. “I’ll wait until four chimes past, then we’ll have to start without them.”

“You don’t think someone…?” Palladia asked anxiously.

“Snapped a rope?” Yalda had been too distracted to even think of such a thing, but the pang of horror at the thought passed quickly. “The others would have sent for help by now.” The lookouts had already completed one shift safely with the newly-strengthened designs, but in any case the protocols were clear: if someone had ended up adrift in the void, the other lookouts did not try to retrieve their colleague themselves, they returned to the mountain immediately to raise the alarm.

“What’s the mood in there?” Yalda asked. She’d greeted everyone as they’d arrived, but they’d all been equally polite to her. When even Babila and Delfina congratulated her on the success of the spin-up, she could hardly trust anyone’s words or demeanor to reveal their true plans.

“You should take a look for yourself,” Palladia suggested.

Yalda dragged herself over to the entrance. There was plenty of room in the hall for people to spread out comfortably, and many had done just that, but about a third of the crew were clustered together toward the front, clinging to the support ropes that held them up against the weak gravity, jostling each other excitedly, buzzing and chirping.

In the center of this pack was Frido, dispensing his wisdom. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the enthusiastic responses were deafening. She’d heard all this noise from out in the corridor, but she’d imagined it was