The Clockwork Rocket

down to boisterous groups of friends rejoicing in their achievements, not one man charming the crowd.

Who was she fooling? She was not a politician or an orator; no one would listen to her words about building the future on trust. If she’d wanted to defeat Frido, she should have started poisoning people against him long ago—making up some story about him having forced his runaway daughter back to her co. Either that, or listened to Nino’s advice from the sagas and just had him killed.

She returned to Palladia. “If you went to him and offered a deal from me, do you think he’d listen?”

“What kind of deal?”

Yalda said, “I’ll stand aside, I won’t oppose him at all, if he promises to let Nino live. Let him threaten hypothetical future saboteurs with any octofurcating thing he likes—just let him respect the decisions I made in my own time, and leave Nino be.”

“What if he says no?” Palladia asked. “You’ll have weakened your position for nothing.”

Yalda could hear the mirth surging in the hall again. “What else can I do? Ask him. Please.”

Reluctantly, Palladia pulled herself back along the rope toward the entrance.

“Yalda! Good news!”

Yalda turned. It was Isidora who’d called out; she and the other three lookouts were approaching in the distance.

Palladia hesitated. “So everyone’s safe?”

“Well, there they all are,” Yalda said.

“And that’s the good news?” Palladia was confused. “Of course it’s good, but…”

Yalda was about to reply that she couldn’t think of any other possibility, but something in Isidora’s tone gave her pause.

Palladia made a move toward the entrance again. Yalda said, “Wait.” She turned and called down the corridor to Isidora, “What good news?”

The expression of joyous bafflement on the woman’s face started Yalda’s skin tingling before she said a word.

“No impacts!” Isidora shouted back. “Two shifts, nooooo impacts!”

Yalda waited in silence until they were close enough to speak properly.

“Two shifts?” she asked Isidora.

“I was going to tell you after the first shift,” Isidora explained, “but you were so busy, and I thought the observers might just be confused by the new setup. We reconfigured the lookout posts… I know it makes no sense, that couldn’t explain a null count, but I had to be sure. I had to see it for myself before I made a fuss about it.”

Palladia said, “No impacts since the spin-up? You’re serious?”

Prospera, who was one of the other lookouts, said, “Staring at dark rock for four bells, the miracle is I didn’t start hallucinating flashes. Zero means zero.”

Palladia turned to Yalda. “How? You think we’ve just passed out of the dust?”

“Do you believe in that kind of coincidence?” Yalda replied.

“What else could explain it?” Palladia countered.

Yalda exchanged glances with Isidora, and let her speak. “The spin-up,” Isidora replied. “Whatever’s been making the flashes, whatever’s been striking the surface, the centrifugal force must be enough to cast it off before it can heat the rock.”

Palladia was incredulous. “To a dust particle with infinite velocity, that force is nothing, it’s completely irrelevant!” She addressed Yalda imploringly. “You agree with me, don’t you? Or is everyone going mad?”

Isidora nodded to Yalda: your turn.

Yalda said, “I agree with you completely—which means the flashes can’t be coming from anything moving so fast. They must be coming from orthogonal dust… I mean dust that was orthogonal to us before the launch, not now.”

Palladia blinked. “Hurtlers? Original Hurtlers?”

“How else could it make sense?” Yalda replied. “Whatever it is that’s been causing the flashes must be moving so slowly relative to the Peerless that our spin is enough to brush them away. Well, we always knew that our trajectory would tame the Hurtlers.”

Palladia grimaced. “But if we’ve tamed them, what caused the flashes? How could something striking us so slowly turn the rock white-hot?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Yalda confessed, “but if it wasn’t kinetic energy that was heating the rock, all I can think of is some chemical process—and the dust must have needed to stay on the rock long enough to react with it in some fashion. Now that the slopes are unable to hold on to debris… no more flashes.”

Palladia was angry now. “You’re telling me that Hurtlers are made of… what? A liberator for calmstone? The dust from the orthogonal worlds that fills the void here isn’t actual rock, it’s a refined substance people extract from plants with the express purpose of causing fuel to burn?”

Yalda said, “Not the sarcastic bit at the end, but whatever’s been hitting us must act as a liberator for calmstone. Don’t ask me how—but if you don’t believe that, tell us how else you can explain the sudden cessation of the flashes.”

Palladia glared back at her in silence, then she said, “I have no idea. But you’re right, it can’t be a coincidence. The spin is protecting us. So whatever’s been striking us, it’s not high- velocity material.”

“Which means there’s no reason, now, to believe that even a piece dozens of times larger than those that caused the flashes could set the slopes on fire,” Yalda suggested.

“No reason at all,” Palladia agreed.

“So our plan for exploding walls is superfluous?”

Palladia hesitated. “Absolutely. We just need some sacrificial cladding near the axis—at the summit and the base, where the centrifugal force offers no protection…” She stopped speaking; she was trembling with relief.

Yalda put a hand on Palladia’s shoulder then turned to Isidora. “I think we should all go in there and share the good news with Frido and his friends.”

19

“Be warned,” Yalda said, “that I’m going to be spending most of my time telling you about things I don’t understand. Along the way I’ll offer you a few facts and a few guesses—but then I’ll explain why those facts aren’t quite enough and why those guesses can’t quite be right.”

She looked out across the room. Many of the faces were familiar to her, young women and men whose education she’d been following from the start. But there were half a dozen students she barely recognized, too, which was even more encouraging. Once they put the old barbarities behind them, everyone on the Peerless could live the life of the mind. One day they’d all be doing rotational physics with their eyes closed, thinking about the symmetries of four-space as naturally as they moved their limbs.

“What don’t I understand?” she continued. “I don’t understand why solids are stable. I don’t understand why gases aren’t sticky. And I don’t understand why the gentlest contact with the dust that surrounds us can turn rock