“But this is close,” Yalda insisted. “If it’s not the whole story, it’s still a powerful hint.”
Yalda could have talked optics with Valeria all night, but that would only have made parting more difficult. “Have you seen your brother recently?” she asked.
“Two days ago,” Valeria replied. “I looked after the children while he went to the factory.”
“But you need to study!” Yalda hadn’t meant to blurt out a rebuke, but she couldn’t bear the thought of Valeria jeopardizing her own chances. “You can’t afford to do that all the time,” she added.
“I don’t; Valerio helps too. And Amelio has other friends as well.” Valeria was beginning to look uncomfortable; Yalda let it drop. Lidia and Daria would have helped with the children if Amelio had allowed it, but he was still angry with them for trying to persuade him and Amelia to wait. Yalda would never see Tullia’s grandchildren, but she suspected Amelio would relent in the end and heal the rift with his other honorary Aunts.
Lidia said, “I’m glad I missed the speeches, but I hope I haven’t missed all the food.” Yalda led them indoors, where Giorgio’s children were still running back and forth from the pantry, keeping everyone fed.
Yalda tried to keep the conversation from growing too solemn; she had no intention of making some kind of earnest declaration to each one of her friends, summing up and attempting to put right everything that had passed between them—as if they were business partners settling accounts. She had apologized often enough to Lidia for the unequal share she’d taken in the burden of raising the children, thanked Giorgio and Daria for their help at the times she’d received it, and offered encouragement to Valeria and Valerio whenever it had seemed likely to be well received. There was nothing more she could achieve with a few rushed words, and the last thing she wanted to do was sound like someone making death-bed reparations.
Around midnight, guests began making their excuses. Dozens of people from the university and the Solo Club—acquaintances with whom Yalda had played dice or argued some point of philosophy or physics—bid her good luck with the flight then departed without any fuss.
With the house almost empty, Giorgio approached her.
“Can we see you off at the station?” he asked.
“Of course.”
Yalda had no luggage; everything she owned was in Basetown already, and everything she’d need was in the mountain itself. The six of them walked together down the quiet streets, with Gemma high above them lighting the way.
On the platform, with just a lapse to departure, Valerio started humming and wailing. Yalda was bemused; they hadn’t been close since he was three. She bent down and embraced him, trying to quieten him before anyone else joined in.
“I’m not dying yet!” she joked. “Wait a year and a day, then you can mourn me. But don’t forget that I’ll have had a long life by then.”
Valerio couldn’t really make sense of this, but he recovered his composure. “I’m sorry, Aunty. Good luck with your journey.”
“Look after your brother,” she said. And try not to imitate him.
With her rear gaze, Yalda saw the guard scowling at her; the engine was already running and sparks were rising into the air. She released Valerio, raised a hand to the others, then leaped into an empty carriage as the train began to move.
She sat on the floor, eyes closed, braced against the shock of amputation.
From a distance, Mount Peerless appeared almost unchanged from its pristine state. As the train brought her closer, Yalda struggled to identify anything more than a slight thinning of the vegetation since the first time she’d set eyes on the peak. The mountain roads that had been widened and extended were still invisible from the ground, and even the mounds of excavated rubble from the new trench were lost in the haze.
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.