Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

Carlo began drawing the flesh in at his shoulder. He managed to shorten his arm by about a third before his body rebelled and halted the process. The prospect of bringing the afflicted hand any closer felt like ingesting something rotting and poisoned. And for all he knew, his body was right. What if it couldn’t reorganize this flesh, any more than it could subdue a virulent parasite?

“I can’t do it,” he said finally. “It has to come off.”

Amanda said, “All right.”

Tosco sent someone to fetch a knife. Carlo rested his forearm on the bench, resigned now. So this was the way to make biparity safe and easy? Even if he found the right signals… how many years, how many generations of refinements would it take before any sane woman would let a machine like this near her body?

The knife was passed through the crowd until it ended up with Tosco. As he approached the bench, Carlo said, “Amanda’s my assistant.”

“As you wish.” Tosco handed her the knife.

“Where exactly?” she asked Carlo. He gestured to a point a couple of scants above the probe.

Someone behind Carlo whispered sardonically, “Welcome to the age of light.”

Amanda rearranged her harness to allow her to exert more force against the bench. With one hand she pinned Carlo’s forearm in place, then she quickly brought the knife down.

Carlo contracted the skin over the fresh wound, almost sealing it, then he drew the remainder of his arm into his torso as rapidly as he could. By the time the full force of the pain hit him, it belonged to a phantom limb. The loose, punctured skin around his shoulder still stung, but his severed wrist no longer existed, and the message of searing agony it had sent to his brain dissipated into irrelevance.

On the bench, though, his lost fingers were still twitching.

17

For the eighth night in a row, Tamara made her bed beside the door to the farm, close enough to ensure that no one could come or go without waking her. If Erminio had the only key he would have to return eventually. She couldn’t think of any way for Tamaro to get a message to him—to summon him for assistance, or even just to tell him that his grandchildren were born—so surely her father would soon feel compelled to come and see for himself what was happening.

She slept fitfully, disturbed by every small sound. But even half-awake she could classify the noises around her: the faint creaking of the stone walls, air rustling through the crops, a lizard dashing across the ground. When she woke to the fading wheat-light she did not feel rested, but she knew that if she’d tried to eschew sleep entirely that would have left her completely dysfunctional.

She hadn’t eaten for two days now, having finished the stock of loaves she’d brought with her from the clearing, but she decided not to risk leaving the door unguarded; she could go without food for at least another day. She could not rule out Tamaro having his own key hidden somewhere, but even so she did not believe that her father could wait patiently for however long it took for Tamaro to emerge. Too many things could go wrong with the plan—and the more he’d been expecting a swift resolution, the more the long silence would come to weigh on him.

Tamara sat slumped against the door, gazing up into the moss-light, trying to decide if Erminio really would have risked telling people that she’d already given birth. With women starving themselves to varying degrees there was no such thing as a normal birth mass any more, and by the time the children went to school a few stints’ difference between their real and reported age wouldn’t be obvious on developmental grounds, so it was far from inevitable that the deception would be uncovered. But while her friends from the observatory might not expect to see the children until they were old enough to be brought to them, people from the neighboring farms would normally have visited within days of the birth. So the balance there was shifted: her father’s best bet would have been to say nothing to them. Though she ran into the neighbors often enough as she came and went from the farm, if by chance their paths failed to cross for a stint or two, no one would think twice about it.

The greatest risk that remained, then, was that word of her supposed fate would spread beyond her colleagues and their immediate circle. It was not a preposterous vanity to think that the leader of the expedition to the Object abandoning that coveted role would be an event widely remarked upon, and that news of her surprising choice—or entertaining mishap—would diffuse faster and farther than if she’d been a farmer or a maintenance worker.

If Erminio’s lie collided with his inexplicable silence to the neighbors, people would start asking awkward questions. He could make excuses, he could invoke his family’s privacy, but that would only get him so far. If she could outlast his luck and outlive his bluster, there was a chance that someone would come looking for her.

Halfway through the morning, Tamaro came down the path toward her.

“I’m still here,” she said. “Just the one of me.”

“I brought you some loaves.”

“Why? Do you think you can stupefy me with wormbane, and then do what you like?”

Tamaro looked every bit as hurt by this suggestion as if it had come out of nowhere, a gratuitous slur against an innocent man. He said, “If I really were the kind of monster who’d treat you that way, don’t you think it would have happened without warning, a long time ago?”

“You were probably just worried that it might affect the children, but now you’re willing to take that risk.”

He stopped a few strides from Tamara and tossed the loaves on the ground in front of her. “And you’re willing to risk them being fatherless?”

“That makes no difference to me,” Tamara replied coolly. “I won’t be here to deal with it. And why should it bother me if my children despise you? I doubt you’d go so far as to kill them out of spite—you’d be much too afraid of Erminio to do that. You’ll just get out of the way and let him raise his grandchildren.”

“You should hear yourself,” Tamaro said sadly. It was surreal just how sincerely he clung to his right to express disappointment in her.

“It was his plan though, wasn’t it?” Tamara needled him. “You just spluttered with helpless indignation, day after day, but he was the one who goaded you into this heroic rescue of the family’s legacy.”

“Neither of us wanted to do this,” Tamaro said. “It’s no one else’s fault that you wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“So that’s what this is about? Reason? ”

“You could have found an old man to take your place,” Tamaro insisted. “Can you name one benefit that the Gnat would not have been able to bring us, if you’d done that?”

“Who is this mysterious ‘us’?” Tamara wondered. “I hear the word a lot from you, but whatever the usual rules of grammar might imply I never actually seem to be a part of it.”

“If that’s true, it’s because you cut yourself out.”

“Ah, my fault again.”

Tamaro tipped his head in agreement, not so much oblivious to her sarcasm as indifferent.

“Am I even a person to you any more?” she asked.

“I’ve never stopped loving you for one moment,” he replied.

“Really? Me, or the children?”

Tamaro scowled. “You want me to choose?”

“No. I just want you to separate the two.”

“Why?”

“Because if you can’t,” she said, “we might as well be animals. Just bundles of reproductive instincts.”

Tamaro contemplated this claim. “And if I were just a friend, a neighbor, what would you feel for me ? If I weren’t destined to raise your children, would you ever have cared if I lived or died?”