Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

But he was deluding himself. Sharing the load among strangers wouldn’t diminish it: when the pleas started coming from every corner of the mountain—once every stint, not once in a lifetime—all those lesser demands would still add up the same way. In the long run nothing mattered but the size of the harvest and the number of mouths to be fed. If the rations were spread any thinner one bad harvest could see the entitlements torn up—and a war over the crops would leave no survivors.

One end of the tarpaulin was open now. Carlo peered into the gloom of the tunnel, then reached in and took the nearest infant in his hands. She was a tiny limbless thing, her eyes still closed, her mouth gaping for food. Her tympanum fluttered, but the membranes were not yet stiff enough to make a sound.

The child squirmed in his grip. Carlo emitted a series of soothing chirps, but they had no effect. This girl knew that he was not her father, not the one who had promised to protect her. He reached down and placed her on the bed below, where a second tarpaulin covered the sand.

The next one he extracted was her sister, not her co. Both were distressingly undersized, but both appeared equally healthy. Carlo had been clinging to the hope that with so little maternal flesh to go around one of the pairs would have died of natural causes already, or failing that a stark asymmetry in their prospects might have spared him any need to make the choice himself.

He placed the second girl on the bed; her sister was already drifting, her wriggling launching her up from the tarp. “Stay there,” Carlo entreated them both, pointlessly.

Some instinct had driven their brothers to retreat into the dark depths of the birth tent; Carlo pulled the cord out completely at his end and opened up the whole thing to the moss-light. Against the spread of the gaily patterned cloth the boys looked impossibly diminutive and fragile, and they chose this moment to become audible, humming plaintively for their father. Carlo wished he’d sent Silvano further away. If these children had been his own, this was the point when he might have lost his mind and tried to kill the man he’d sent to halve their number.

This was wrong, it was insane, it was unforgivable. If he reneged now, what would happen? A few of Silvano’s friends would take pity on him, and help keep the family of five from starving. But once those friends had children of their own, the cost of their charity would grow much steeper—and once Silvano’s children had children, the situation would be impossible. Unless Carlo was willing to declare to his co: “These two belong to us now, to raise as our own. You’d better stuff yourself with holin, because in my weakness this is what I’ve done to you: your flesh that was made for the ages will perish now, just like mine.”

Carlo dragged himself along the rope and snatched the nearest of the boys. The child writhed and hummed; Carlo spread his hand wide to deaden the boy’s tympanum. “Which one is your co?” he muttered angrily. He grabbed the side of the bed and pulled himself down. Co recognized co from the earliest age, and their fathers could always see the link, but how was a stranger who hadn’t witnessed the fission itself meant to be certain?

He held the boy beside each female sibling in turn. Carlo was humming now himself, though not as loudly as the unrestrained brother. He tried to picture all four bodies still in contact, before the partitions softened into skin and split apart: first the primary one dividing the pairs, then the secondary ones dividing co from co. He’d watched the whole process often enough in animals. With a free hand he prodded the underside of the boy’s torso, the place where he would have been connected to his co more recently than he’d been joined side by side with his brother. Just beneath the skin there was a patch of unusual rigidity, flat but irregularly shaped. Carlo probed the same spot on one of the girls. Nothing. He checked her sister, and found the mirror image of the boy’s fragment of the partition.

He hesitated, crouched above the bed, still trying to imagine how this could have ended differently. What if the four friends had made a pact, long ago, to feed each other’s children and forego their own, if it ever came to that? Was that the stark, simple answer they’d all failed to see—or would the promise of security have poisoned them against each other, leaving them afraid that it would be exploited? Carla had never starved herself quite as diligently as Silvana, so what kind of life would she have had if she’d been endlessly harangued by a woman with every reason to urge her to show more restraint?

Carlo scooped up the chosen boy’s co and pulled himself along the rope into the front room, a child clutched awkwardly in each free hand. From the box, he took two clearstone vials and a syringe. He extruded an extra pair of arms, uncapped the first vial and filled the syringe with its orange powder. When he held the sharp mirrorstone tip to the base of the boy’s skull he felt his own body start shuddering in revulsion, but he stared down his urge to take the child in his arms and soothe him, to promise him as much love and protection as he would lavish on any child of his own. He pushed the needle into the skin and searched for the angle that would take it between two plates of bone—he knew the invariant anatomy here was not that different from a vole’s—but then the tip suddenly plunged deeper without the drop in resistance he’d been expecting upon finding the narrow corridor of flesh. The child’s skull wasn’t fully ossified, and his probing had forced the needle right through it.

Carlo turned the boy to face him, then squeezed the plunger on the syringe. The child’s eyes snapped open, but they were sightless, rolling erratically, with flashes of yellow light diffusing all the way through the orbs. The drug itself could only reach a small region of the brain, but those parts it touched were emitting a barrage of meaningless signals that elicited an equally frenzied response much farther afield. Soon the tissue’s capacity to make light would be depleted throughout the whole organ. In this state, Carlo believed, there could be no capacity for thought or sensation.

When the boy’s eyes were still Carlo withdrew the needle. His co’s tympanum had been fluttering for a while, and now her humming grew audible. “I’m sorry,” Carlo whispered. “I’m sorry.” He stroked the side of her body with his thumb, but it only made her more agitated. He refilled the syringe with the orange powder, quickly drove the needle through the back of her skull, and watched the light of her nascent mind blaze like a wildfire, then die away.

Carlo released the limp children and let them drift toward the floor while he resorbed the arms he’d used to hold them. His whole body felt weak and battered. He spent a few pauses steadying himself, then he pushed out two fresh arms and filled the syringe from the second vial. When a speck of the blue powder spilled onto his palm the sensation was like passing his hand above a flame. He gathered the damaged patch of skin into a small clump, then hardened the tips of two of his fingers and sliced it off.

He picked up the boy. A world away, his brother was still calling out for help. Carlo reinserted the needle, and forced himself to take his time delivering the poison lest it burst from the wound and escape into the room. The boy’s eyes had already been dull, but now the smooth white skin of the orbs began to turn purplish gray.

When the plunger could be driven no further, Carlo withdrew the needle carefully and set the dead boy down beside the cabinet. He refilled the syringe and turned to the boy’s co. When he gripped her a spasm passed through her body; he waited to see if there was any more activity, but she remained still. He slid the needle into her brain and sent the blue powder trickling through.