The Eternal Flame (43 page)

Carla remained silent, but she didn’t doubt his claim. These things could not be empty coincidences; Assunto was drawing close to a beautiful mystery.

He said, “I think we’re on the verge of explaining all the different properties of luxagens and photons. Photons are simply jumps between the energy levels in the light field, but with this clue I think there’s a chance we’ll find a way to see luxagens in the same terms. I used to believe that that was absurd, that the two things were completely incomparable… but look at the difference we can get from one small change in the way the wave is constructed! With photons, you
add
the different ways you can arrange them, so there’s no problem if a dozen photons are in the same state—it just means pushing one particular mode of the light field up a dozen energy levels. With luxagens, what we need to do is find the mathematical twist that
stops you
raising the energy of each mode once you’ve taken it to the first level—a way of guaranteeing that there’s either a single luxagen in that state, or none at all. Once we’ve translated the Rule of One into the language of fields, everything will be unified into a single picture.”

It was a glorious vision. And who with even a trace of curiosity in their soul wouldn’t wish to follow it: to see the deepest, simplest rules that governed light and matter finally spelt out?

Carla said, “If I joined you, what would happen to the rebounder?”

“Why not let that wait until the politics is more favorable?” Assunto suggested. “Silvano won’t be on the Council forever.”

“No?”

“Do you think we’ll see any real progress toward an engine based on orthogonal matter before the next election? Do you think we’ll see the old feeds dismantled to make way for new farms?”

“Probably not.” Carla regarded him with grudging admiration. “You’re just playing them, aren’t you? You don’t think an engine like that can be made to work at all.”

“Who knows what our descendants will achieve?” Assunto replied innocently. “But for now, this is the path of least resistance with the Council. So why not make the most of it? Whatever we can learn from experiments with orthogonal matter is sure to be worth knowing. If destroying two luxagens to make a pair of photons doesn’t give us insight into both kinds of particles, I don’t know what will. And you discovered that reaction, Carla! How can you not want to study it further?”

“I do,” she said. “But if I put the rebounder aside in the hope that the Council will eventually lose faith in the alternatives… I might not be around when they reach that position.”

“None of us are going to be around forever.” Assunto was probably six years older than her, which made his words a little less glib than they might have been. “Do you think either of us will live to see the
Peerless
decelerate, by any method?”

“Probably not,” Carla admitted.

“You’ve published your idea,” Assunto said. “It’s exciting and provocative; it certainly won’t be forgotten. If it can be made to work at all, you can be sure it will be put to use one day.”

“And you expect me to leave it at that?” Carla knew better than to try to force him to give his own verdict on the rebounder’s chances; the last time, all she’d managed to extract from him was an acknowledgment that it broke no laws in any obvious manner. “I know I’ll never see the home world, but it would still be something to know before I die that we’ve found a way to turn the
Peerless
around.”

“And what if you can’t prove that? What if you can’t make this thing work?” Assunto wasn’t goading her; there were a dozen ways she could end up facing that result, even if the basic idea was sound. “To live on the
Peerless
means handing half-solved problems on to our descendants. The ancestors had to accept that at the launch, but it’s no less true for this generation. There is no such thing for us as seeing an end to this. If you go looking for finality, you’re only going to be disappointed.”

The Councilors were returning. Carla didn’t try to read their faces as they entered the chamber; she turned her gaze to the floor. What had she been thinking—talking up the promise of the Object one day, declaring it redundant the next? The science was what it was, but she should have sought a way to shift the political momentum gradually—instead of standing in the path of Silvano’s blazing rocket, waving her arms and expecting him to change course.

Giusta announced the Council’s decisions. Assunto’s proposal had been accepted; the research into orthogonal matter would continue under his supervision.

“And Carla,” Giusta continued, “as intriguing as your idea was to the Council, we owe it to our descendants not to be reckless in our use of their legacy. If it turns out at some time in the future that we have less need to keep sunstone in reserve—a position to which Assunto’s project might well take us—then we would be prepared to reconsider your proposal. For now, though, we can’t risk disposing of such a large quantity of fuel for such an uncertain outcome.”

38

“D
o you want to tell me what’s going on here?”

Tosco was halfway along the guide rope that crossed the chamber between the arborines’ cages; he must have entered while Carlo was in the storeroom. Carlo spent a moment contemplating his superior’s demeanor before deciding that there was no point in lying to him. He would not have been so angry unless he already knew at least part of the answer.

“This female is doing well,” Carlo said, pointing to Benigna asleep in the cage to his left. Almost hidden behind her, a smaller form clung to the same branch. “She’s been feeding her child regularly, though her co is still ignoring it.”

“
Her
child?” Tosco sounded neither amused by the claim nor incredulous, so it was unlikely he was hearing it for the first time. He must have had a chance to get used to the idea before coming to see the evidence with his own eyes.

“I don’t expect she thinks of it that way,” Carlo replied. “I believe she’s treating it as she’d treat any orphaned relative; it’s like the niece she never knew she had. And she’s not such a stickler for logical niceties that it makes any difference that she never had a sister.”

Tosco hadn’t come here to discuss kinship-based altruism in arborines. “You’ve found a way to trigger the formation of a survivable blastula?”

“Survivable with surgical intervention,” Carlo said. “I wouldn’t put it more strongly than that.”

“How many times have you done this?”

“Just three.”

“Oh, is that all?” Tosco had finally found something funny in the situation. “When were you going to tell me? After a dozen?”

“I wanted to be sure of the results before I made too much of them,” Carlo explained. “If Benigna here was just an accident, it would hardly have been worth publishing.”

“No? I think that sounds like exactly the right thing to publish.”

“Well, that’s not how it’s turned out.”

“Kill her,” Tosco said bluntly. “Then the other two, after a suitable interval. When you dissect them, you need to find that all three bodies were riddled with malformations.”

Carlo hesitated, trying to think of a way to phrase his reply that avoided a flat out refusal. “Amanda and Macaria aren’t stupid,” he said. “If I tried to fake something like that, they’d spot it—and who knows what kind of fuss they’d make?”

Tosco wasn’t stupid either; if he knew that one of the women would make no fuss at all, he wasn’t offering any hints. “How many copies of the light tapes are there?”

“A few.”

“How many, exactly?” Tosco pressed him. “Where are they being stored?”

Carlo gave up on the idea that he could get through this without a confrontation. “There are dozens, and they’re very widely scattered. You can forget about destroying them.”

“You’ve lost your mind, Carlo,” Tosco declared. “This was supposed to be about biparity.”

“And it might yet be,” Carlo replied. “In a stint or two, when Benigna’s gained enough body mass I’m going to see if she can produce a second child the same way. Now there’s a nice title for a paper: ‘Light-induced facultative serial biparity in arborines’. We ought to start a competition, to find the phrase in reproductive biology that the ancestors would find maximally oxymoronic.”

Tosco’s curiosity got the better of him. “What about her co? Has he tried to breed with her?”

“Yes.”

“And what? She fought him off?”

“No, she cooperated. But nothing happened. In that sense at least, she’s infertile. It’s possible that she’s lost the ability for spontaneous division too, though we’ll have to wait a year or two to be sure.”

Tosco’s interest in the biology vanished. “You can forget about another year or two. I want all the females dead within six days, and all the offspring. I want all the tapes destroyed—”

“That’s not going to happen,” Carlo said firmly.

Tosco dragged himself closer. “Have you forgotten who you’re working for? Who got you permission to take these arborines from the forest in the first place?”

“Do you want to put this to the Council?” Carlo asked him. “I’ll be happy to accept their decision.”

“Maybe we should do that,” Tosco replied. “There are five women on the Council, and seven men—and not all the women will see it your way.”

“Nor all the men yours.” In any case, Carlo was sure that he was bluffing. He wanted the possibility Benigna represented buried immediately, not debated throughout the
Peerless
.

Tosco turned to examine Benigna’s cage. “That’s the future you want to force on us? A world of women, reproducing by machine?”

“That doesn’t have to be the end point,” Carlo said. “It’s possible that we can learn to trigger survivable male births as well. And in the long run it’s possible that we could integrate the whole thing back into the body, via influences: no machines, just co mating with co again—leading to births without the death of the mother.”

Tosco was unswayed. “That’s generations away, if it can be done at all.”

“You’re probably right,” Carlo conceded. “I’m just trying to be clear that we’re not carving anything in stone. Nothing in this process can determine the way things happen for all time. Suppose a few children are born by this method. If they decide that they want to reproduce the old way, they’ll be no worse off than solos are now: they’ll be free to go and find a co-stead.”

“Just ‘a few’?” Tosco asked sardonically. “So are you going to help a few friends survive childbirth, and leave the rest of the women on the
Peerless
to follow their mothers?”

“Of course not. But as you said about the Councilors, not every woman will be in favor of this. No compulsion, no restrictions—we should just work to make this safe, then give people the choice.”

“Most women can handle the fast,” Tosco said. “Most births are already biparous. I’m sorry about the burdensome task you were given by your friend, but you have no right to destroy a whole society just to ease your conscience.”

Carlo had never told him about Silvano’s children. He wasn’t surprised that word of it had spread, once Silvano became a Councilor and every aspect of his life gained new currency. But he’d never expected it to be thrown in his face.

“How many years is it now, since you murdered your co?” he asked. “Five? Six?”

Tosco buzzed derisively. “Murdered her? We made the choice together.”

“What choice? Between slaughtering her then, or letting her starve for a few more years?”

“You’re like an infant!” Tosco sneered. “Still humming at night about your poor lost momma and the terrible thing men do to their cos? Grow up and face the real world.”

“I have,” Carlo replied. “I faced it, and now I’m going to change it.”

“This is finished,” Tosco said. “It’s over.” He started dragging himself out of the chamber.

Carlo clung to the rope, shaking with anger, trying to decide what to do. Tosco wouldn’t go to the Council; he’d round up a group of allies and come back to kill the arborines and smash the equipment.

Carlo wondered how long he had to prepare for that. A few bells? A few chimes? The news of what he’d done here might enrage many people, but it was a complicated message to get across; Tosco couldn’t just shout a few slogans in a food hall and find himself the leader of a rampaging mob. He was more likely to start with fellow biologists, who’d understand the arborine experiments and their implications. But they wouldn’t all share Tosco’s view of the matter—and even those who did would take some persuading that violence was called for.

The biggest risk, Carlo decided, would arise if he panicked and went to summon help immediately, leaving the arborines unprotected. He needed to stay calm and wait for Amanda to start her shift.

When Amanda arrived, Carlo explained what had happened. “Are there people you can bring here?” he asked her. “People you’d trust to stand guard?”

Amanda regarded him with horror. “What do you want to do? Start some kind of siege here? Some kind of battle?”

“What choice do we have?” Carlo wasn’t relishing the confrontation any more than she was, but he couldn’t stand aside and let Tosco destroy their work.

“Let me think.” Amanda swayed back and forth on the rope. “What if we released the arborines back into the forest?”

“They’ll know we’ve done it.”

“They’ll guess that it’s one possibility,” she conceded. “But you know how hard it is to catch an arborine in the forest. And even Tosco’s only seen the ones here briefly; do you think he can describe any of them reliably to an accomplice?”

Carlo wasn’t happy, but her argument made sense. Taking a stand in this chamber would just offer their opponents a clear focus for their belligerence, and trying to hide an arborine anywhere else would be futile. The arborines weren’t the ultimate repository of the technology anyway, so half a day in the forest would probably be enough to rob most people of their resolve to hunt them down.

“All right,” he said. “But we’ll need to tranquilize them as lightly as possible, or they could still be vulnerable if someone goes looking for them.”

“That’s true.” Amanda hesitated. “You really couldn’t finesse your way out of this with Tosco?” She made it sound as if it should have been easy.