The Eternal Flame (21 page)

With Carla monopolized by the other Councilors, Silvano turned to Carlo. “You must be feeling proud.”

Carlo struggled to suppress his irritation. “You make it sound like she’s a child who just won a school prize. Today I’m more concerned with her safety.”

“Everything will be fine,” Silvano assured him.

“Really? How would you know?”

“I know that a lot of good people have done their best.”

Carlo gave up on the conversation. He knew that he should have been willing to tolerate a few platitudes from a well-meaning friend, but all he could hear in Silvano’s words these days was Councilor-speak.

Ivo was off to one side with his son and grandchildren, but he raised a hand in greeting to the new arrivals. Carla dragged Carlo past the politicians to join Ada and Addo, their father Pio, and Tamara.

“We should meet up at the observatory, just before the rendezvous,” Addo suggested enthusiastically. “Roberto was telling me that we might be able to see some signs of the first experiments.” Carlo listened with an awful fascination. Did he want to watch for those flares of light, and try to judge their significance from a distance? A sequence of orderly, isolated flashes would prove that the crew were still in control, but what would he make of a sustained light, or prolonged darkness? He watched Addo talking and talking, and wondered how peaceful his night had been.

Tamara said, “We should start boarding now.” The words were like a knife against Carlo’s skin, but there was nothing to be done about it.

He embraced Carla briefly. “Safe voyage,” he said.

“Stay happy,” she replied. “I’ll see you soon.”

As he stepped away, Tamara caught Carlo’s eye. “I’ll bring her back,” she said. Carlo nodded in acknowledgment, but he felt uneasy before her gaze, as if her ordeal might have left her with the power to judge exactly how close other men had come to repeating the sins of her co.

The crew separated from the onlookers. Carlo watched as the four fitted their cooling bags with practiced movements. Once they’d donned the bulky helmets it was hard to tell the women apart. The airlock was big enough for two people at a time; Ada and Tamara went through first. When it was Carla’s turn she raised a cloth-covered arm in farewell, then stepped through the door with Ivo.

Marzio touched Carlo’s shoulder. “Come and watch the launch.”

Everyone gathered around the observation window, an octagonal slab of clearstone a couple of strides wide set in the floor beside the airlock. When Carlo looked down he could see all four travelers still on the ladder, the white fabric that enclosed their bodies catching the starlight. The
Gnat
itself was directly below the window, a dark silhouette hanging from a dozen thick support ropes. As he watched, Ada or Tamara stepped from the ladder through the vehicle’s open hatch, and a moment later a small lamp lit up inside the cabin.

Pio said, “Imagine the farewells at the launch of the
Peerless
. This is nothing.” Carlo wanted to thump him, but he did have a point. Not one traveler who’d marched into the mountain, not one father or child or co left behind, had had the slightest hope of a reunion when the voyage was over. His own generation’s troubles weren’t small, but no one had lived without sorrows.

As Carla reached the end of the ladder she looked up and waved, sweeping her arm across a wide arc. Her exuberance was unmistakable, and Carlo felt a sudden rush of happiness.
This was what she wanted.
She had balanced everything against the dangers and wanted it still. Whatever had passed in the night, he hadn’t robbed her of this chance. He was tired of feeling ashamed and fearful. Why couldn’t he just rejoice?

Carla climbed through the hatch. As Ivo followed her, Carlo leaned back and let Silvano, behind him, get a better look.

Marzio said, “They’ll pressurize the cabin, but keep their cooling bags on just in case.”

In case the vehicle itself sprung a leak, or worse. In case the
Gnat
fell apart, and the crew had to try to make their way back with air rockets.

Carlo stepped away from the window and checked the clock beside the airlock, its dials specially calibrated for the launch. A little more than a chime remained.

“What if they’re not ready?” he asked Marzio.

“They can delay for a revolution or two,” Marzio replied. “Or a dozen, if it comes to that. The orientation of the
Peerless
has to be just right, or the boost they get from the spin will be wasted, but they have more than enough fuel to cope with a variation in the timing.”

“Good.” Carlo made his way back to the window. Everyone in the crew had performed endless safety drills. The two navigators were equally proficient; Ada had been prepared to fly the
Gnat
herself. And the ancestors had managed to launch a whole mountain into the void; this modest expedition should not be beyond their descendants.

When Carlo looked down the whole vehicle was dark again. That was a good sign, he remembered: Carla had told him that they’d extinguish the lamps once everything was in place and they were ready for the launch. Ada and Tamara were astronomers, used to working by touch and starlight.

Marzio counted. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

Inside the
Gnat
, the clockwork released the clamps that had been gripping the support ropes. Carlo’s skin tingled with fear and awe as the dark shape fell away into the void. He staggered slightly; Silvano put a hand on his shoulder.

The silhouette shrank against the star trails, dropping straight toward the bright, gaudy circle that marked the division of the sky. But the rendezvous point didn’t lie in that plane, the
Gnat
couldn’t simply be flung toward its destination. Marzio began counting again. Carlo braced himself.

The tiny dark point erupted with light as the
Gnat
’s sunstone engines burst into life. “We can still do it,” Pio said softly. The skills that had lofted the
Peerless
from the home world hadn’t been lost.

The dazzling speck of radiance stretched into a blinding streak of light, then the
Gnat
disappeared from view. Carlo looked up; at the opposite edge of the window, Ivo’s grandchildren were still gazing down from their father’s arms.

“That looked like a clean burn to me,” Addo opined, as if he’d spent his life watching events just like this.

Marzio said, “It won’t be long now.”

“I don’t think the relay clerks will be slacking off today,” Silvano joked.

The paper-tape writer clanged. Marzio walked over to it and read out the message from the observatory. “Intact and on course.” He let the tape fall from his hand. “Roberto is seeing light of the right size and brightness, from the right direction, heading the right way.”

Carlo wanted that to be enough, but he couldn’t keep silent. “And if the engines were damaged, we’d know? If anything had burned too fast or too slowly…”

“Everything is fine,” Marzio declared. “The launch was perfect. The
Gnat
is on its way.”

23

W
hen the glare of the exhaust had vanished from the windows and her weight had died away with the shuddering of the engines, Tamara relaxed her tympanum and unhooked her harness. The starlit cabin was dark to her dazzled front eyes, and the only sound she could discern was the soft rhythmic ticking of the nearest clock.

She pulled off her helmet, which remained attached to her cooling bag on the end of a short cord. “Is everyone all right?” she asked. Ada, Carla and Ivo responded in turn, their hesitation sounding more like diligence than a lack of confidence: the answer was too important to be given without a pause or two of mental and physical self-inventory.

Tamara took hold of the guide rope beside her couch and dragged herself toward the center of the cabin, where the three mutually orthogonal ropes, offset slightly, didn’t quite meet. She opened her dark-adapted rear eyes; the view they added was so much crisper than the gray shadows in front of her that it felt as if she had a lantern strapped to the back of her head. She could see her fellow crew members clearly now; Ada had taken off her helmet, and Carla was in the process of doing so. The bright horizon line of the home cluster’s stars shone through the windows, its hoop tilted satisfyingly against the
Gnat
’s axis. That small geometric hint alone told her that they were not wildly off-course: it was unlikely that any serious mishap with the engines could have left the craft so close to its expected orientation.

“No pain, no dizziness, no hearing problems?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Ada replied, propelling herself with her legs from the couch. She drifted across the cabin before grabbing one of the transverse guide ropes.

“I am too,” Carla said. Ivo took off his helmet before responding, “My right shoulder’s a bit sore. I think my arm got pinned in an awkward position when the engines fired. It’s not even worth resorbing though; a short rest will fix it.”

Tamara wasn’t too worried; Ivo’s age left him more vulnerable than the rest of them, but this sounded no more serious than the twinges he’d owned up to after the most strenuous of the safety drills. Resorbing and re-extruding a limb was difficult without removing your cooling bag, and though the cabin’s air was cooling them perfectly well, the ideal was to keep the bags on at all times in case there was an unexpected breach.

She said, “Ivo, I want you resting for the next six bells, but when Carla’s checked her own equipment you should talk her through the checks on your own.”

“Right,” Ivo agreed.

Tamara dragged herself away from the center of the cabin and took her place beside one set of theodolites, mounted within the polyhedral dome of a window. Ada, at the opposite window, had her own duplicate instruments, including a separate clock. Tamara began with some star measurements, establishing the
Gnat
’s orientation precisely, then she aimed the theodolite with the widest field in the direction where she expected to sight the next scheduled flash from a beacon.

“If we had sufficiently accurate clocks,” Carla mused, “we could find our distance from each beacon using the time it takes for the light to reach us.”

Tamara buzzed with mirth. “Accurate to what, a piccolo-pause? While you’re at it, why not use the geometric frequency shift to compute our velocity?”

“Who knows?” Ada interjected. “If people end up shuttling back and forth between the
Peerless
and the Object, do you think they’ll still be navigating like this after a dozen generations?”

“There’s only so much you can do to make a clock keep better time,” Tamara replied. “We’re already close to the limits of engineering.”

“But nature’s full of systems with their own rapid, regular cycles,” Carla countered. “Light itself, among others.”

“Very practical,” Tamara retorted. “Once you filter out a single pure hue from a lamp, the beam will still be made up of lots of short wave trains: a few cycles at a time, all with random phases compared to each other. Even if you had some way to count the cycles, it would be like listening for the ticking from a vast heap of clocks that started up at random moments, ran for a few pauses and then died.”

“That’s true,” Carla said. “But why not look for better ways to use the same clocks? The light given off by tarnishing mirrorstone as it spits out each luxagen ought to be in phase with the light that stimulated the emission in the first place. If you bounced that emitted light back onto the mirrorstone, looping the whole process around, you might be able to build a source that remained in phase over much longer periods than any kind of natural light.”

“Light that elicits light that elicits still more light?” Ada joked. “That’s starting to sound like the Eternal Flame.”

“Not so eternal,” Carla said ruefully. “The tarnishing would use up the mirrorstone just as surely as any flame consumes its fuel.”

“And you count the cycles… how?” Tamara pressed her.

Carla said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

Tamara felt the dials at her fingertips reach the configuration she’d been waiting for. The beacon’s flash came a moment later—almost certainly from her own clock running slightly fast. But this wasn’t Carla’s brave new world yet, and it was the position of the beacon against the stars that mattered most, not the timing. She recorded the angles on her forearm, then turned the theodolite toward her second target.

“First sighting acquired,” she announced. “Well within the expected region.”

Ivo hummed with pain. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to take the bag off. Just partly, along the right side.”

Tamara said, “Carla, can you assist him?”

“Of course.”

Tamara watched them without leaving her post. It was a simple enough maneuver, and even if the
Gnat
chose this moment to split apart and spill them all into the void, Ivo would still have his bag, helmet and two air cylinders with him like the rest of them.

Ivo chirped with relief as he resorbed his right arm, then he spent a lapse rearranging the flesh internally before extruding a new limb. Carla helped him refit it to the bag, running some air through as a test.

“Thank you,” Ivo said. “I think I can check the equipment myself now.”

“There’s no pain at all?” Tamara asked him.

“None. The new arm’s perfect.”

“All right.” With anyone else she wouldn’t have fretted over such a minor injury, but Ivo’s dexterity would soon be crucial.

Tamara turned back to the theodolite in time to catch the flash of another beacon. “Second sighting acquired,” she said. “Within the expected region.” Each flash, observed against the background of the stars, placed the
Gnat
on a line that passed through the beacon in question. Had the craft been stationary it could have been pinned down at the intersection of two such lines, but even in motion three sightings would be enough to determine its trajectory, and any more would improve the accuracy of the solution. That was assuming that all the errors in the measurements were random, but she and Ada could compare their results as a check against any systematic bias.

“Still nothing?” Tamara asked Ada, puzzled that her co-navigator had yet to report a single sighting. Each beacon only flashed once a bell, but the times were staggered so that one beacon or another was visible every lapse.