Eusebio said, “We need an age, and we don’t have it.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said, “but I had to hear it from you to be sure.”
His tone was solemn but far from despairing. Yalda stopped walking and turned to face him. “I’m sorry I had no good news for you,” she said. “Perhaps I’m wrong about all of this. Perhaps our luck will be far better than—”
Eusebio raised a hand, cutting her off. “We need an age, and we don’t have it,” he repeated. “So we find the time elsewhere.”
He wiped the colliding clusters from his chest. Then he drew two lines, one straight, one meandering, and added a few simple annotations.
“We make a rocket,” he said, “powerful enough to leave the world behind. We send it into the void and accelerate it until it matches the velocity of the Hurtlers. Once it’s done that, there’ll be very little chance that anything from the orthogonal cluster will strike it—but we might need to offset its position at the start, to keep it from colliding with gas and dust in our own cluster.
“The complete journey is as I’ve drawn it. The time that passes for the world will be the time it takes to rotate the rocket’s history by a full turn: one quarter-turn to accelerate, one half-turn to reverse, one final quarter-turn to decelerate. If the rocket accelerates at one gravity—giving the passengers no more than their ordinary weight—the time back home for each quarter-turn will be about a year, making four years in all.
“The time that passes on the rocket for those stages of the journey won’t be much greater: each curved segment is only longer than its height by a factor of pi on two. But when the rocket’s history is orthogonal to the history of the world, no time at all passes back home. So for the travelers, the journey can last as long as it needs to. If they require more time to complete their task, they can prolong the flight for another era, another age; it won’t delay their return by one flicker.”
Yalda was speechless. Their roles really had been reversed: the physics Eusebio was presenting was so gloriously simple that she was ashamed she hadn’t thought of it herself—if only in the same whimsical spirit as that in which she’d first thought of the Hurtlers as past-directed fragments of the primal world.
But when it came to practicalities, where did she begin?
“What kind of rocket can you hope to build,” she said, “in which generations can survive for an age—let alone flourish to the point where they have any chance of fulfilling their purpose? The largest rocket I’ve seen with my own eyes was the size of my arm; the largest I’ve heard of was smaller than my body. If you can send my optics workshop into the void that would be the talk of Zeugma for a generation, but I don’t know where we’d put the wheat fields.”
Eusebio hesitated, considering his reply, but he did not appear the least bit discouraged by her response.
“I believe you’ve been on Mount Peerless,” he said.
“Of course. The university has an observatory there.”
“Then you’ll know that it’s far from any permanent habitation.”
“Certainly.” Yalda thought she knew where he was heading: an isolated, high-altitude site would be the perfect place to test new kinds of rockets.
Eusebio said, “The geologists tell me that the core of Mount Peerless is pure sunstone. I plan to tunnel into it and set it alight, and blast the whole mountain into the sky.”
Yalda collected the children from school and took them back to the optics workshop. Amelia and Amelio were happy playing on the floor with a box of flawed lenses, lining them up to form impromptu telescopes and buzzing hysterically at the sight of each other’s distorted images. Valeria and Valerio were going through a stage of drawing pictures of imaginary animals that they insisted had to be preserved; Yalda gave them some old student assignments that were blank on one side of the paper, and some pots of dye that Lidia had brought home from the factory.
Then she stood at her desk watching over them while she tried to decide what to make of Eusebio’s plan.
Giorgio brought a group of students into the workshop to use the heliostat for an experiment in polarization. The children ran to greet him, and he accepted their embraces without a trace of annoyance or embarrassment before gently shooing them back to their activities. Yalda produced a stack of mechanics assignments and proceeded to mark them, marveling that she could feel guilty for taking a couple of chimes away from her conventional duties to ponder the correct means of averting the planet’s annihilation. She’d shared her ideas about the Hurtlers with Giorgio—and he’d offered his usual perceptive comments and objections—but in the end he’d still treated the whole thing as if it were an exercise in metaphysics.
Yalda arrived home with the children just as Lidia returned from her shift.
“Did you bring some more dye?” Valeria nagged her. She and Valerio had used up the last of their supplies on a series of images of giant worms with six gaping mouths arrayed along the length of their bodies.
Lidia spread her arms and jokingly opened six empty pockets. “Not today. Every batch was perfect.”
Valeria went into a sulk, which meant wrapping six arms around her co and trying to pull his head off. Yalda warned her three times, increasingly sharply, then stepped in and physically disentangled them.
“You always take his side!” Valeria screamed.
Yalda struggled to hold her still. “What side? What did Valerio do?”
At a loss for an answer, Valeria changed tactics. “We were just playing, but you had to spoil it.”
“Are you going to be sensible now?”
“I’m always sensible, you fat freak.”
Lidia made a reproving hum. “Don’t talk to your Aunty Yalda that way.”
“You’re a bigger freak!” Valeria declared, turning on her. “At least it’s not Yalda’s fault she doesn’t have a co. She might have swallowed hers by accident before she was born, but everyone knows you killed your co with a rock.”
Yalda tried to draw on her reserves of patience by reminding herself how well Valeria had behaved in the workshop.
Daria had actually predicted that the third year of school would be the time when Tullia’s children started lashing out at their adoptive parents, punishing them for the derision they received from their increasingly unsympathetic classmates. So before the school year began, Yalda had encouraged the four of them to talk about the ignorance and hostility they were facing, and tried to suggest strategies for dealing with it. At the time, the recipients of her advice had promised that nothing in the wicked world could stop them feeling the same love and loyalty for their Aunties as ever.
Amelio had been looking on impassively, but now he decided that this was the right time to announce in a tone of weary resignation, “Women are for making children, not raising them. You can’t expect them to do a good job.”
Yalda thought: Bring on the Hurtlers.
Lidia said, “Why don’t we try making our own dye? We can go to the markets and look for the ingredients.”
Valerio’s face lit up with excitement. “Yes!”
“I want to come too,” Amelia pleaded.
Valeria held out for a few pauses, then decided that the whole thing had been her idea. “I know where we should go first. I already made a list in my head.”
Yalda exchanged a glance with Lidia, thanking her for halting the descent. “Why don’t we all go,” Lidia said. “Before it gets dark.”
Yalda woke on the first bell after midnight. Daria still hadn’t come home; some nights she went straight from the university to the Solo Club, then slept in her own apartment. That left Yalda or Lidia to get the children to school in the morning, depending on Lidia’s shift, but it was hard to complain that Daria wasn’t pulling her weight when she paid more than half the rent.