Basetown was the end of the line. When Yalda walked out of the station the main square was deserted; where the markets had stood just two stints before there was bare, dusty ground. All the construction workers and traders had departed, and though there were probably dozens of Eusebio’s people still around for the final cleanup, on her way to the office she encountered only fellow travelers. As well as inducing an eerie sense that she’d already parted company with the rest of the world, this raised the problem that, out of the six gross or so on the final list of recruits, she’d only managed to memorize a tiny fraction of their names.
“Hello Yalda!” a woman called from across the street.
“Hello!” That she knew the woman’s face only made it more embarrassing.
“Not long now,” the woman said cheerfully.
“No.” Yalda resisted the temptation to take a bet on, “Time to tell your co to buy a telescope!” However good the odds were that this would be apt and welcome, it wasn’t worth the risk of alienating someone who was actually bringing her co along for the ride.
Eusebio was in the office, poring over reports with Amando and Silvio; Yalda didn’t disturb them. Her own desk was almost empty; before she’d left she’d been double-checking calculations for the navigational maneuvers the Peerless would need to perform if it encountered an unexpected obstacle. It looked as if they’d found the perfect route for the voyage—an empty corridor through the void, oriented in the right direction and long enough to take an age to traverse without coming close to a single star—but once they were above the atmosphere it was possible that fresh observations would reveal a hazard that needed to be side-stepped.
She worked through the details one more time. If the obstacle wasn’t too large, they’d be able to swerve around it and still reach infinite velocity—albeit with even less fuel remaining for the rest of the journey than originally planned. There was no way of guaranteeing the Peerless’s triumphant return, but if the travelers failed to attain an orthogonal trajectory—with the Hurtlers tamed and time back home brought to a halt—they would have no advantage left at all.
When his assistants had left, Eusebio approached Yalda. “How did it go with your friends in Zeugma?” he asked.
“It was fine.” Yalda didn’t want him struggling to empathize, telling her that he understood how she must feel. She said, “I think we need name tags.”
“Name tags?”
“For the travelers. Something we can all wear on necklaces, so we know who’s who.”
Eusebio looked harried; Yalda said, “I’ll organize it myself, don’t worry about it.”
“All the workshops are empty,” he said, spreading his arms to take in the whole ghost town. “Not just of people, of tools and materials.”
“Not inside the Peerless, I hope.”
The suggestion appeared to take Eusebio by surprise, but then he found himself with no grounds to object to it. “I suppose that makes sense.” He checked a wall chart. “Workshop seven?”
“Yes.”
Yalda found a spare copy of the recruits list. When she and Eusebio had first set out to sign up volunteers she could never have imagined filling a dozen sheets of paper with their names, but even this final census amounted to less than the population of her home village.
There were still trucks shuttling between Basetown and the Peerless every bell, but they were no longer in high demand; she ended up alone save for a driver she didn’t really know, so she sat in the back by herself and watched the town receding into the haze. She wondered what would happen if she went to Eusebio and said: I’ve changed my mind, I’m staying. There were other people with the skills to take her place in everything she was expected to do; the project would not fall apart on the spot. But she knew she was caught in the trap she’d used herself on so many others: she was vain enough to believe that her presence might make the difference between success and failure. And if the thought of deserting the Peerless to while away four years on the ground waiting for the world’s problems to be solved elsewhere made a thrillingly delinquent fantasy, the one thing she found more terrifying than the prospect of a journey through the void was the possibility of those four years of anticipation ending in silence.
The truck dropped her off at the nearest footbridge. The trench around the mountain was wider than the crevasse that split Zeugma, but this makeshift structure of rope and wood was no Great Bridge. Yalda gripped the hand-rope tightly as she began shuffling over the swaying planks.
The wind from the north was carrying dust from one of the excavation mounds directly toward her, stinging her eyes and skin. Halfway across she stopped, paralyzed. She’d crossed the bridge in stronger winds than this, but recalling those past ordeals didn’t help.
The launch was five days away. It would take her a day to ascend to the workshop, and at least two to make all the tags. By that time, all the travelers would have joined her and the final evacuation of Basetown would have begun. If she entered the mountain now, she would not emerge again.
She hummed softly and tried to picture Tullia beside her, reassuring her. What was she afraid of? Death could claim her anywhere; there was no safe place left in the world. She could keep on dwelling on the dangers of the journey and the bitterness of exile—or she could treat this as a calculated gamble that might lead her to an almost perfect sanctuary: a place where generations could think and study, plan and experiment, test their ideas and refine their methods, for as long as it took to find a way to banish the threat and return home.
If the Peerless had simply been a city in the desert—a city of scholars, a city with free holin, a city with no knife-wielding thugs who could meld her arms together and throw her in a cell—might she not have wandered inside its walls and never come out? Might she not have happily declared: this is the place where I will die?
She steadied herself and walked across the bridge.
The meeting hall had been designed with room for twice the current population of the Peerless, though Yalda wasn’t sure how well the elegantly tiered floor would function later, in the absence of gravity. She stood at the entrance, greeting people as they filed in, handing out name tags from the twelve buckets into which she’d sorted them, along with necklaces from a separate container. The travelers seemed remarkably calm; there was no time to talk with anyone at length, but she’d seen more anxiety on display at some of the recruitment drives in Zeugma.
At the appointed time there were less than two dozen tags unclaimed, and still a chance that some stragglers had merely been delayed. Yalda was astonished; only one volunteer in three dozen had changed their mind and backed out. If she’d been asked a year ago to bet on the chance of her own desertion, she would have put the odds at one in three.
Eusebio was waiting by the stage. He checked the clock and walked over to Yalda.
“Should I start?” he wondered.
“Give it another chime for latecomers,” she suggested. “It’s not as if anyone here will be worrying about baby-sitters charging them overtime.”
Eusebio winced; a man who’d attended one of their free talks in Zeugma had cornered them and demanded payment on precisely those grounds. “Don’t remind me,” he said. “In a couple of stints I’ll be back on the Variety Hall circuit, recruiting for the fire watch.”
“Recruiting?” Yalda was surprised. “Does that have to fall to you? I thought the project had plenty of other backers.”
“There are lots of people spreading the word,” Eusebio agreed, “but we still need to build up support much further, or the whole thing will be too patchy to have any real chance of working.”
Yalda wondered if she should wish him luck with his new endeavor and leave it at that, but then she decided that she had nothing to lose.
“You’re not tempted to join us?” she asked. “No one can see this through to the end, but you could watch over the Peerless for a little longer.”
A flicker of discomfort crossed Eusebio’s face, hardening into defensiveness. “I always made it clear what my role would be. I never promised to do more than build the rocket.”
“I know,” Yalda said mildly.
“I could leave my children if I had to,” he admitted. “It’s my father who’s raising them, more than me. And it’s true that other people would champion the fire watch.” He trailed off.
Yalda fought against an urge to fill the silence, to tell him that she understood his choice and that she had no reason to reproach him for it. She didn’t want to hurt him or embarrass him. But she wanted to hear his whole answer.
“If I joined you,” Eusebio said, “and the Peerless failed… then I doubt that anyone else would have the resolve to try the same thing again. It would still be our only real chance to protect ourselves, but most people would see the whole idea as discredited. That’s why I’m staying. I need to be able to fight for this”—he gestured at the mountain that surrounded them—“all over again, if it comes to that.”
Yalda couldn’t fault his reasoning, but the prospect he was painting chilled her. She should have been happy to imagine a second chance for the people she was leaving behind, but the thought of even the Peerless being dispensable in the end didn’t do much to bolster her justification for her own choice.
She was spared the need to respond; an elderly man was approaching with an apologetic countenance. “I took a wrong turn,” he explained. “This place is a labyrinth.”
“Could you tell me your name, sir?”
“Macario.”
As Yalda fetched Macario’s tag, Eusebio left her and took to the stage. By the time the latecomer had his necklace in place, the hall had fallen silent.
“Welcome back to the Peerless,” Eusebio began. “It’s almost seven years now since I approached my friend and teacher, Yalda, to discuss what could be done about the Hurtlers. At that time, there didn’t seem to be much chance of defending ourselves. We barely understood what we were confronting—and most of what we did know only made us feel more powerless. But now we have the start of an answer. Across the world, the Peerless and its travelers are reason for hope.”
There were lamps throughout the hall, and no lighting technicians here to extinguish them and throw a spotlight on the stage. Yalda watched the audience with her rear gaze as Eusebio thanked them for their courage and commitment. She could see signs of apprehension here and there—bodies hunched anxiously, gazes lowered—but most people appeared steadfast, reconciled to their decision.
“My colleagues and I have worked as hard as we could to ensure that your journey will begin in safety and comfort. But I have never lied to you in the past and I won’t lie to you now: we don’t have the power to promise you anything. In spite of our best efforts, seven people have already died: six construction workers, and a volunteer undertaking a test flight. I can’t guarantee that in two days’ time, this whole mountain won’t be turned into rubble and flames. If anyone in this hall believes that can’t happen, then you should leave and return to your homes, because you are here under false premises.
“My colleagues and I have also tried to anticipate what you and your children will need in order to survive and flourish as the Peerless travels through the void. But nobody has made this journey before. There is no compendium of knowledge on these matters; there are no experts on the territory that lies ahead. If anyone has misunderstood this—if anyone thought that they’d been guaranteed the necessities of life for a dozen generations— then you, as well, should leave and look for those certainties elsewhere, because they are not present on the Peerless.”
Yalda understood Eusebio’s need to speak plainly, but she wondered if he wasn’t going too far. Many people were clearly uncomfortable now, and a few were visibly agitated. It was not that they were learning anything new, but everyone had their own way of dealing with the same difficult truths.