“I don’t believe he owns this land,” Vittorio replied defensively.
“No, he doesn’t.” Yalda tried to keep her tone as friendly as possible. “But if you were hoping to trade with his workers, we have a whole town just south of here where you’d be welcome to set up.” If they signed an agreement with some very reasonable conditions, they could farm just as much land as they were using here, sell their produce in the markets and have access to Basetown’s facilities for no cost at all.
“We chose this location with care,” Vittorio assured her.
“Really? It’s a long way from everything but Basetown, and not as close to there as it could be.”
Vittorio made a gesture of indifference. Other members of his community were watching them discreetly, but Yalda didn’t sense any physical threat, just a mood of resentment at her interference.
“I need to be honest with you,” she said. “In less than a year, this land won’t be suitable for farming anymore.” She was trying to work from the most innocent assumptions she could think of: that the chaos in the sky had driven them off their land in search of some reliable diurnal darkness, and they were unaware of quite how soon it would be before Mount Peerless ceased casting its convenient shadow.
“Are you threatening us?” Vittorio sounded genuinely affronted.
She said, “Not at all, but I think you know what I’m talking about. That you won’t have shade for your crops will be the least of it.”
“Ah, so your master Eusebio will consign us all to flames?” Vittorio made no effort now to hide his contempt. “He’d knowingly slaughter this entire community?”
“Let’s not get melodramatic,” Yalda pleaded. “You’ve barely begun to dig your fields, and now you’ve been informed of the danger so you won’t waste your time putting down roots here. Nobody is going to be consigned to flames.”
“So you pay no heed to the fate of Gemma?”
Yalda was confused. “Gemma is why half the planet has given its blessing to Eusebio’s efforts.”
“Gemma,” Vittorio countered, “taught those of us with eyes that an entire world can be lost to flames. But your master has learned nothing, and in his ignorance he’d blindly set this one alight as well.”
Yalda was growing irritated with the whole “master” thing, but it made a change from being told he was her co-stead. She glanced back toward the truck; Silvio was pretending to be taking a nap.
“You think the rocket would set the world on fire?” If that was his honest belief, Yalda could only admire him for deciding to become a living shield against the threatened conflagration, but he might have dropped by the office and asked a few questions first. “It was a Hurtler that ignited Gemma, and it would take a Hurtler to do the same to us,” she declared.
“A Hurtler, and nothing else?” Vittorio buzzed, amused by her rhetoric. “How can you possibly know that?”
Yalda said, “I don’t know that nothing else could do it—but I know what this rocket will and won’t do. Under the mountain, beneath the sunstone, there’s a seam of calmstone; I’ve been there, I’ve touched it with my own hands. We’ve tested the combination, burning one on top of the other, for far, far longer than they’ll stay together at the launch. The calmstone is ablated by the flame, but there’s no sustained reaction that spreads beyond the site. And before you start protesting that the calmstone is unlikely to be pure, we’ve tested dozens of other rocks as well.”
“And how large was your flame?” Vittorio enquired. “The size of a mountain?”
“No, but that’s not the issue,” Yalda explained. “By holding the flame in place longer in the tests, we can achieve identical conditions in a slab a few strides wide.”
Vittorio simply didn’t accept this. “You’ve played around with some childish fireworks, and you think that proves something. The proof is in the sky.”
“If you’re so impressed by the example of Gemma, how do you propose fending off the Hurtlers that would re-enact the whole thing here?” Yalda demanded. “Thwarting Eusebio won’t spare you from that.”
Vittorio was unfazed. “Do you think there were people on Gemma?”
“No.” This was becoming surreal. “What difference does that make?”
“People can douse small fires,” Vittorio replied. “If one kind of stone is burning, the sand of another kind can be fetched to put it out. If there had been people on Gemma, that’s what they would have done, and that world would not have been lost to the flames.”
Yalda didn’t know how to answer this. To hope that quick thinking and a bucketful of sand could defeat the Hurtlers was absurd… but if you scaled it up to something systematic with teams of rostered observers in every village and whole truckloads of inert minerals at the ready, that might actually contain the effects of a small impact.
“How large is a Hurtler?” Vittorio asked her. He held up two fingers, about a scant apart. “This big? Larger? Smaller?”
“About that size,” Yalda conceded.
“So my choice is between a fire that starts from a pebble, and one that starts from this.” Vittorio turned and gestured at the mountain. “Only a fool would choose the greater risk.”
From the top of the rocket, Yalda could see the wind lifting brown dust from the plain to trace out its eddies and flows. “You can still change your mind,” she said.
“But I’ve already completed the trip,” Benedetta replied placidly. “Time is a circle. It’s happened, it’s over; there’s nothing left to choose.”
Yalda hoped that this fatalist blather was just Benedetta teasing her, but there was no point arguing about it now. The last three of the recruits she’d brought up to ogle the tiny cabin were on the ladder heading back to the ground. Benedetta was strapped onto a bench that had been installed in place of the rack of voles’ cages in the original design; the same cool gases would blow over her body as those that had kept the animals safe from hyperthermia in previous launches. The elaborate clockwork around her that would control the timing of the engines and the parachute’s release had been inspected thrice: by Frido, by Yalda, then finally by Benedetta herself. The voles had only merited two inspections.
“I won’t say good luck then; you won’t need it,” Yalda told her.
“Exactly.”
Yalda couldn’t leave it at that; she squatted down beside the bench. “You know, if you’re made famous by this your co might come looking for you.”
“Whose co?” Benedetta retorted. “Nobody here knows my birth name.”
“No, but how many people as crazy as you could have been born in Jade City?”
Benedetta was amused. “You think I’m from Jade City?”
“Aren’t you?” Yalda had always believed that part of her story. “Your accent sounds authentic.”
“You should hear the other six regions I can do.”
Yalda squeezed her shoulder. “See you soon.” She straightened up then climbed out of the cabin; perched on the ledge above the ladder, she slid the hatch firmly into place. Through the window, she saw Benedetta gesture toward the enabling lever, then make a four-fingered hand: on the fourth chime from the clock beside the bench, she’d launch the rocket. This was the normal protocol, but unlike the voles she’d have to initiate the process herself.