Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“So what’s the plan?”

“I gave you chance after chance,” he said. “But you wouldn’t listen.” He didn’t sound angry; his voice was dull, resigned.

“What do you think is going to happen?” she asked. “Do you know how many people are expecting me to turn up for meetings in the next three days alone? Out of all those friends and colleagues, I promise you someone will come looking for me.”

“Not after they hear the happy news.”

Tamara stared at him. If Erminio was out there telling people that she’d given birth, this had gone beyond a private family matter. She couldn’t just forgive her captors and walk away, promising her silence, when the very fact of her survival would show them up as liars.

“I’ve burned all your holin,” Tamaro told her. “You know I’d never try to force myself on you, but what happens now is your choice.”

She searched his face, looking for a hint of uncertainty—if not in the rightness of his goals, in his chance of achieving them. But the man she’d loved since her first memory of life seemed convinced that there were only two ways this could end.

Either she’d agree to let him trigger her, and she’d give birth to his children—taking comfort in the knowledge that he’d promised himself to them.

Or she’d stay here, without holin, until her own body betrayed her. She’d give birth alone, and her sole victory would be to have cheated her jailer and her children alike of the bond that would have allowed them to thrive.

15

The hiss from the sunstone lamp rose in pitch to an almost comical squeak. Carla could hear the remaining pellets of fuel ricocheting around the crucible, small enough now that the slightest asymmetry in the hot gas erupting from their surface turned them into tiny rockets. A moment later they’d burned away completely and the lamp was dark and silent.

Onesto walked over to the firestone lamp and turned it up, then went back to his desk.

The workshop looked drab in the ordinary light. Carla punctured the seal of the evacuated container, waited for the air to leak in, then tore away the seal and retrieved the mirror. After she’d inspected it herself she handed it to Patrizia, who surveyed it glumly.

It had been obvious for the last few days that the tarnishing wasn’t proceeding in the manner they’d predicted. The first tier had matched the reference card placed beside the mirror after a mere two chimes’ exposure; the second tier had taken two days. That alone showed that the time to create each photon couldn’t be the same in each case. But Patrizia’s idea that the time might be proportional to the period of the light couldn’t explain what they were seeing, either. For two near-identical hues on either side of the border between the second and third tiers, the period of the light was virtually the same—but while the fifth photon needed to complete the tarnishing reaction in the second tier had only taken two days to appear, after waiting more than twice as long for one more photon, the third tier remained pristine.

Carla sketched the results on her chest. “The photon theory can explain the frequencies where we switch from one tier to the next. But how do we make sense of the timing?”

“Maybe some energy leaks out of these valleys as heat,” Patrizia suggested. “Then it takes time to make up for that.”

“Make up for it how?”

“With a longer exposure.”

“But all you can do with a longer exposure is create more photons!” Carla protested. “And if the numbers of photons aren’t what I’ve drawn here, where does the five-to-four ratio in the frequencies come from?”

Patrizia hummed in self-reproach. “Of course. I’m not thinking straight.”

Carla saw Onesto glance up from his papers. He’d endured the jarring lighting for six days, and now he had to listen to the two of them stumbling around trying to make sense of their non-result. “I’m sorry if we’re disturbing you,” she said.

“You’re not disturbing me,” Onesto replied. “But to be honest, I haven’t been able to get much work done for the last two bells.”

“Why not?”

“Something’s been puzzling me about your theory,” he said, “and the more I see you puzzled yourselves, the more I’m tempted to break my silence. So if it’s not too discourteous, I hope you’ll let me speak my mind.”

Carla said, “Of course.”

Onesto approached. “Nereo posited a particle, the luxagen, to act as a source for Yalda’s light field. If I’ve understood what you’re saying, you’re now positing an entirely new particle that plays a very different role: traveling with the waves in the field itself, carrying their energy for them.”

Carla turned to Patrizia; the theory was hers to define and defend. Patrizia said, “That’s right.”

“Then why not complete the pattern?” Onesto suggested. “If you have reason to believe that the light field can manifest as a particle, why should Nereo’s own particle be different? Shouldn’t the luxagen be associated with waves in a field of its own?”

Patrizia looked confused, so Carla stepped in.

“There would be an appealing symmetry to that,” she said. “To every wave, its particle; to every particle, its wave. But I think it would complicate the theory unnecessarily. Without any evidence for a ‘luxagen field’, it’s hard to see what could be gained by including it.”

Onesto inclined his head politely. “Thank you for listening. I’ll leave you in peace now.”

He was halfway to his desk when Patrizia said, “You want us to treat the luxagen as a standing wave?”

Onesto turned. “I wasn’t thinking of anything so specific,” he admitted. “It just seems odd to treat the two particles so differently.”

At this response Patrizia’s confidence wavered, but then she persisted with her line of thought. “Suppose the luxagen follows the same kind of rules as the photon,” she said. “It has its own waves—and just like light waves, their frequency is proportional to the particle’s energy.”

Carla said, “All right. But…”

“If the luxagen is trapped in an energy valley,” Patrizia said, “its wave must be trapped as well. A trapped wave, a standing wave, can only take on certain shapes—each one with a different number of peaks.”

Carla felt the scowl vanish from her face. Unlike Patrizia’s last suggestion, this wasn’t hunger-addled nonsense. Onesto’s proposal had sounded naïve—but now Carla could see where her infuriating, erratically brilliant student was taking it.

For each shape it could adopt, the luxagen’s standing wave would oscillate with a specific frequency. The same kind of principle governed the harmonics of a drum: the geometry of the resonant modes of the drumhead dictated the particular sounds it could make, each one with its characteristic pitch.

But Patrizia’s rule linked frequencies to energies—so a trapped luxagen would only be able to possess certain energies . The energy closest to the top of the valley would set the gap that needed to be jumped in order for tarnishing to occur, and there would be no doing it by halves: a luxagen couldn’t accumulate five photons’ worth of energy and then wait around for a sixth. Once you reached the highest energy level there were no more resting places; it was an all-or-nothing trip. You either made the total number of photons you needed, all at once , and escaped the valley… or you didn’t.

As they talked it over, Patrizia sketched the general idea. Onesto looked on, pleased that his suggestion had proved helpful but a little daunted by the strange outcome.