Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“Hello!” she called out, as she approached the clearing. There was no one in sight. She went to the store-hole and took out a small bag of flour, left over from grain she’d milled the day before.

Tamaro and Erminio arrived as she was finishing the loaves; they were both carrying scythes and lamps. The lamps were extinguished, but she could smell the smoke that still clung to their skin from a different kind of fire.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“It’s under control,” her father assured her. “All within a few square strides, and all of that’s ash now.”

Tamara widened her eyes in relief. The wheat blight appeared on the back of the petals, close to the stem, making it almost impossible to spot when the flowers were open. The only way to catch it was to go around with lamps in the moss-light, inspecting the dormant flowers—and the only cure was to incinerate the afflicted plants immediately.

The two men sat and joined her in the meal she’d prepared. Tamara knew that they had their own store-hole nearby, and that they’d eat again as soon as she left in the morning, but a part of her was still able to ignore that abstract knowledge and stitch together a version of the family’s daily life comprised of nothing but her direct experience. Every evening she made three loaves and shared them with her father and her co, and her stores of grain and flour were always the same when she returned as when she’d left them, so she could tell herself a perfectly believable story where the three of them were all living in an equally austere fashion. She never for a moment forgot that it was fiction, but it still did more to make the situation tolerable than any amount of time spent pondering the ultimate consequences of giving in to her hunger.

“What’s happening with the beacon?” Tamaro asked her.

“It’s out there, at last!” Tamara recounted the details of the launch. “I heard from Roberto afterward, and it looks as if we got a good fix on the trajectory. So we’ll go ahead and follow with the others. The next one should be ready in less than a stint.”

As she spoke, she could see Tamaro growing uneasy. “I’m sure you can get the navigation system working,” he said. “But I’m still worried about that idiot Ivo.”

Tamara wondered if she’d unwittingly libeled the man; it was hard to resist joking about his lizard paper, but he certainly knew his field. “He’s a bit eccentric,” she said, “but he’s not an idiot.”

“He’s reckless.” Tamaro brushed crumbs from his tympanum. “Once a man’s seen his grandchildren, his own life means nothing to him.”

“That’s a stupid generalization,” Tamara replied, irritated. “Anyway, he’s not making all the decisions about the Gnat . The Council has appointed its own experts to vet everything we’re planning to do: people who won’t be on the expedition themselves, so they’ll have a different perspective.”

Erminio said, “How does someone get to be an expert in a substance they’ve never even seen?”

“And if they won’t be on the Gnat ,” Tamaro added, “why should they care what happens to its passengers?”

“Make up your mind,” Tamara retorted. “Is it Ivo who’s reckless, or the advisers who’ll be staying behind?”

“They’ll both be more worried about capturing the Object than they will be about who lives or dies,” Tamaro replied heatedly. “Once this precious lode of orthogonal matter is suspended in the void, the Gnat will have done its job, won’t it?”

Tamara hummed with frustration. “Will you listen to yourself? Capturing the Object will require an exercise in precision rocketry. The Gnat will only end up damaged if we lose control of the situation. The two outcomes are mutually exclusive! You don’t achieve the first one by risking the second.”

Tamaro tipped his head slightly, conceding that he might have gone too far. “The fact remains, though: Ivo’s an old man, he’s lived his life. I’m not saying that he’s planning a suicide mission, but when he weighs up the risks against his chances of glory, he’s not going to take the most cautious route.”

“So what do you want me to do?” Tamara demanded. “Renege on my offer to bring him along? Tell him to delegate the job to a younger colleague with more to lose ?”

Tamaro said, “No. But you could stay behind yourself. Find another old man to take your place.”

Tamara looked to her father, hoping he might raise some objection to this sorting of the population into two distinct categories: expendable old men and people with lives worth living. But he gazed back at her with an expression of mild reproof, as if to say: Listen to your co, he has your interests in mind.

“I’m the chief navigator,” Tamara said evenly. “Without me there is no mission.”

“I thought every astronomer studied navigation,” Tamaro countered.

“Yes, but not with these methods! They learn what was used to set the Peerless on its course, and what we’ll need to bring it home one day. None of that applies here.”

Tamaro was unswayed. “So you devised a new system, especially for the Gnat . Are you saying it’s unteachable? That no other astronomer has the observational skills or the ability to perform the calculations?”

Tamara hesitated, unsure how she’d backed herself into this corner. “Of course not,” she admitted. She’d already taught Ada everything she’d need to take over her role, if it came to that. “But I found the Object, I proposed the voyage. Unless there’s someone better qualified than I am, I have a right to a place on that rocket. My colleagues accept that, the Council accepts that. And if you think Ivo will be such a danger to the mission, you should be glad I’ll be there to keep him in check!”

Erminio said, “You’re upset now. We can talk about this later, when everyone’s calm.”

“I’m perfectly calm!” Tamara replied. But her father rose to his feet; the conversation was over.

She fetched her dose of holin from the store-hole as the family prepared to retire to the flower bed. Erminio bid his children good night and lay down behind the wormbane. Tamaro brushed loose petals and straw out of their shared indentation, then placed his scythe along the middle of the bed.

Tamara settled into the soil beside him, the long hardstone blade between them. “You should trust me,” she whispered. “I won’t let Ivo do anything stupid.”

She received no reply, so she closed her eyes. Would she have been just as angry herself, she wondered, if she’d believed Tamaro was putting his own life at risk? Risking grief and pain for his family, risking turning their children into orphans? She had to admit that the thought of giving birth alone would have terrified her.

If he’d gone rushing into some dangerous, vainglorious folly, of course she would have tried to argue him out of it. But if the goal had been a worthy one, and if he’d had his reasons for wanting to play a part, she hoped she would have listened to him.

9

As the dozen and three students from her optics class squeezed into the tiny workshop, Carla glanced anxiously down the corridor, wondering how much attention the gathering would attract. One rule Assunto had impressed upon her before assigning her to teach the class had been that she should never perform a demonstration whose outcome she could not predict in advance. “Practice each experiment first, as often as you need to,” he’d urged her, “until you’re sure you can make the whole thing run like clockwork. Researchers know that things go awry in their workshops all the time—and the greater part of their job is uncovering the reasons. But you don’t want to be confusing these youngsters with the messiness of real science when they’re still trying to learn the basics.”