Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“I’d be happy to help Macaria,” he said. “And happy to learn from her.”

27

Tamara waited in the visiting room, harnessed to a bench, fidgeting with the three seasoned loaves she’d brought. Patches of red moss glowed from the walls, but the hue looked strange to her, as if it belonged to a different species than the one she was accustomed to. The prison had been built in the middle of a disused engine feed; for most of her life she’d been aware of its existence without ever knowing exactly where it was.

The guard brought Erminio into the room, then withdrew. “Has he gone to fetch Tamaro?” she asked her father.

“Tamaro isn’t coming. He doesn’t need to see you.”

Need? “It’s his choice,” she said. “I thought it would be so boring here that he’d welcome a visit from anyone, but if he’s found a better way to pass the time, good for him.”

She offered one of the loaves to Erminio. He hesitated, then accepted it.

“How Tamaro spends his time isn’t your concern,” Erminio said. “He has someone else to visit him.”

Tamara understood what he was implying. The news took her by surprise, but she did her best not to show it. “As I said, good for him.”

Erminio finished the loaf, then leaned back in his harness and stretched his arms languidly. “I hope you haven’t come to beg for your entitlement back. There’s no chance of that now: it’s well and truly spoken for.”

Tamara buzzed with derision. “What, she’s given birth already?”

Erminio said, “Hardly. But Tamaro’s made a formal agreement. With a co-stead and future children involved, you’ll never get the transfer rescinded.”

“I never expected to,” Tamara said angrily. “I keep my promises.”

“You’ll still be looked after,” Erminio declared magnanimously, as if this were somehow his doing.

Tamara said, “I know the terms of the transfer; I dictated them myself. If Tamaro was here I expect he’d be thanking me for them, but I don’t know why you’ve raised the subject. You’ll be looked after , too.”

“So why did you come here?” Erminio asked coolly. “You survived your trip, so you’ve come to gloat?”

“I’m not sure why I bothered,” Tamara replied. “You’re still my family, I thought I owed you something.”

“There is no family ,” Erminio said. “You’ve destroyed it. Tamaro has done the only honorable thing he can, in the circumstances: he’ll salvage the life of a blameless woman who’s lost her co. But the flesh you inherited was wasted on you. You think you’re vindicated, because you gambled with your life and won. But who’ll raise your children now? It would have been better if you’d died in the void.”

“I think I should go. Give Tamaro my regards.” She took hold of the rope behind her and began to pull herself out of the harness.

“Don’t bother coming back,” Erminio said. “I have more than enough visitors to keep me entertained. A lot of people want to show their support. They know our punishment was an injustice.”

Tamara dragged herself out of the room. “That was quick,” the guard said.

“My father’s a great communicator,” Tamara replied. “It never takes him long to get his message across.”

The guard regarded her with weary amusement. “It took him a bell and a half yesterday.”

On her way back to the summit she couldn’t stop thinking about Erminio’s claim to have supporters. When she’d asked for leniency for her kidnappers, she’d hoped that would deprive them of any trace of sympathy. One year an injustice? The Council took autonomy seriously; the sentence could have been six times longer, if she’d called for that.

Imprisoned and disgraced, Tamaro had still found a co-stead in no time at all. The Council had judged her father to be the instigator of the crime, but apparently he still had friends. Everyone she knew had told her to her face that they were outraged by what had happened to her, but she understood that she’d be fooling herself if she took that sentiment to be universal. Three generations away from the old world and its barbarities, there were still people who believed that a woman’s life was a kind of tenancy , devoted to protecting—and in due course, meekly vacating—a body that was never really her own.

28

Carla threw the tarpaulin aside and dragged herself out of bed. Still half asleep, she approached the food cupboard and tugged on the handle, but the door refused to budge. She recalled sliding the bolt into place the night before: her reminder that this was meant to be a fast day.

Had it really been three days since the last one? Her gut squirmed in disbelief; it had learned to follow a daily cycle, but these calendrical variations were too arcane to be internalized. She ran a finger over the cross-bar at the side of the bolt, pondering excuses for breaking the rigid pattern. Today was her first appearance before the Council; any day without food was hard enough, but short of her life-or-death encounter with the Object she had never needed her wits about her more. She could eat today and fast tomorrow.

She tugged at the cross-bar and began guiding it through the little maze of obstructions she’d built that made it impossible to disengage the bolt unless she was fully awake. Halfway through, she paused. Breaking the pattern would set a precedent, inviting her to treat every fast day as a potential exception. Once the behavior that she was trying to make routine and automatic had to be questioned over and over again, the whole scheme would become a kind of torture, a dozen times harder to follow than it was already.

She returned the cross-bar to its starting position and dragged herself away from the cupboard. Once she was back to her old mass, she could resume the old routine: one loaf every morning, like clockwork.

Carla stepped forward and faced the assembled Councilors across the brightly lit chamber. Behind them, portraits of Yalda, Frido, and the dozens who’d followed them crowded the wall. That her old friend Silvano was among the Peerless ’s twelve current leaders did nothing to put her at ease; it just made the encounter more complicated. Addressing an audience whose personal histories were uniformly opaque to her would at least have made it easier to stop fretting about these people’s individual agendas and just put the merits of her own case as best she could.

Assunto had warned her that if she wanted to be taken seriously she needed to quell any instinct for deference and resist averting her eyes. She followed his advice—but to stop herself feeling intimidated she focused her attention on the fellow crew members gathered behind her.

“So far as we understand it,” she began, “every solid and every gas in the cosmos is built from luxagens. From a cosmic perspective all luxagens are identical, but because their histories through four-space are marked with a kind of arrow—Nereo’s arrow—we can distinguish between those luxagens whose arrows point toward our future and those whose arrows point toward our past. By convention, we call the first kind ‘positive’ and the second ‘negative’.

“The peculiar histories of the Object and the Peerless have led to a curious disjunction: although our thermodynamic arrows of time agree, the arrows on our luxagens do not. The Peerless and everything it carries is built entirely from positive luxagens, the Object entirely from negative ones. And as the Gnat ’s experiments showed us, if positive and negative luxagens are brought together they will annihilate each other. The purely chemical variation of the materials available to us is of no help here: no rock or resin, no plant material or animal product, no gas or smoke or dust will be immune to this effect.”