Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

Amanda saw the slingshot in his hands. “Leave it!” she shouted. “We can come back tomorrow with an expert.”

Carlo’s pride was wounded, but she was the only one with any darts left. “You’re right,” he replied. He began dragging himself along the rope, back toward the canopy. He looked around for the arborine, but she had vanished into the forest.

Carlo had expected Lucia’s workshop to be full of lizards, but it seemed all her captives went straight to the breeding center. On the walls there were dozens of sketches of the creatures, along with botanical drawings, all keenly observed and skillfully rendered.

Lucia’s family had been supplying biologists with animals from the forest for three generations. She’d been a young girl the last time anyone had requested an arborine, but she claimed that her father had let her come with him to watch the procedure. “It’s pointless trying to pursue them,” she explained. “You might entertain them for days that way, but you’ll never catch them. All you can do is pick a good spot and wait.”

Carlo couldn’t see how that would work. “If they’re smart enough to stay ahead of a pursuer, aren’t they going to be smart enough to avoid a stationary threat?”

“They won’t come close,” Lucia replied, “but they won’t stay as far away as they need to. They won’t go near a net trap—they’ll smell it, even if they didn’t see you set it. But they don’t understand darts; people have only used them a couple of times since the launch, and arborines can’t pass knowledge like that on to their children.”

Amanda said, “We need a breeding pair, if that’s possible. Do you think you can recognize a pair of cos?”

“Not from appearance alone,” Lucia said. “But with luck, we’ll be able to tell from their behavior.”

The three of them met in the forest the next day. After they’d penetrated a short way into the undergrowth, Lucia told the biologists to wait and she clambered up into the trees.

Carlo clung to one of the guide ropes they’d tied between trunks on their last incursion. “We’re lucky these species are so long-lived,” he said, gesturing toward the tree roots that penetrated the netted soil and found purchase in the rock beneath. “That’s never going to happen again without gravity: no seedling is going to establish itself here. And no one’s going to give up their farms to make way for a new forest out on the rim.”

“You don’t believe they’re going to free up space from the engine feeds?” Amanda asked.

“Not in our lifetimes.”

Amanda looked around, puzzled by something. “The lizards haven’t exactly vanished, have they?”

“No.” Carlo had seen two or three the day before.

“If the lizard population hasn’t crashed,” Amanda reasoned, “the arborines shouldn’t be starving. But when you look at the surveys of their numbers it’s pretty clear that they’ve mostly switched to biparity.”

Nobody had had the patience to try to observe any actual births among the arborines, but Carlo had seen the numbers too, and they were compelling. “Maybe the threshold is set differently for them,” he suggested. “They just don’t have to be as hungry as we do.”

“Maybe.” Amanda wasn’t convinced. “Or maybe it’s the fact that the males are struggling to feed themselves as much as the females.”

Carlo buzzed dismissively. “I hate to break the facts of life to a biologist, but it’s the female’s body that provides all the flesh.” Quaint folk tales notwithstanding, even the ancestors had weighed male animals before and after breeding and established that they made no measurable contribution to the blastula.

Amanda ignored the jibe. “Breeding is an exchange of information. The female has certain physical resources at her disposal in creating the offspring, but why wouldn’t she also make use of every available fact? Surely the male’s state of nutrition says as much about the scarcity of the food supply as the female’s own mass?”

Lucia called down to them, “I’ve found the right place! Come on up!”

When they reached her, Carlo could see what she’d been looking for. They were still below the canopy, but the branches protruded into an open space about six stretches wide. If the arborines were sufficiently curious, there was no reason they wouldn’t feel safe watching the intruders from across the gap. Carlo’s aim with a slingshot wouldn’t pose much of a threat at that distance, but Lucia had brought a dart gun powered by compressed air. It would have been insane to try to carry a bulky machine like that on a long chase through the treetops, but as a stationary weapon it wasn’t so impractical.

“Is there any behavior we need to avoid?” Amanda asked. Lucia had made no effort to keep them quiet; they were here to be noticed and attract a few onlookers.

“Don’t light fires,” Lucia replied. They’d brought no lamps in any case. “And don’t do anything ostentatiously belligerent.”

“We shouldn’t beat each other up?”

“Not if you can help it. There’s a risk that might spook them.”

They secured their equipment, tied their harnesses to some robust branches and settled in for a long wait.

“Are you hoping to start raising a captive population?” Lucia asked Carlo.

“We’ll see how far we get,” he replied. “If we manage to collect data from even one fission I’ll be happy.” He explained his plan to record some of the internal signals during the event.

“And the ultimate goal of this is biparity on demand?” Lucia must have heard rumors about his work—probably as a postscript to the story of his hand.

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” he admitted.

“Good luck.” Lucia sounded skeptical about his chances, but not disapproving. “It would make life easier for most people. But I sold my entitlement when my co died, so I’m going the way of men regardless.”

“You never looked for a co-stead?” Amanda asked. The thought of a woman choosing death over childbirth seemed to unsettle her.

“I didn’t want to replace Lucio. It didn’t feel right.” Lucia buzzed and gestured at her body. “Besides, there are compensations: if I’m going to the soil, at least I’m not obliged to be fanatical.”

Carlo looked away. No woman could plan her future with certainty, but if the holin failed her the children would all be killed, so it made no sense for her to torture herself. With universal biparity, there’d be no need for a market in entitlements and no need for orphans to be slaughtered.

He felt his gut tightening. If his efforts with this came to nothing—like his work on the crops—would he have emboldened a successor, or just frightened everyone away from the field for another generation? Maybe the whole project had come too late to be of any use to Carla, but the prospect of his daughter trapped in the same cycle was unbearable.

Lucia misread his expression. “Don’t worry, it’s early yet. You have to expect them to be wary at first, but they’ll come gawping at us soon enough.”

Carlo hadn’t brought a clock, but the forest flowers shone in staggered shifts that still echoed the rhythms of the home world. In the absence of sunlight to tell them when to rest, the plants had settled on a kind of mutual deception, with half of them treating the onset of light from the others as if it were dawn, and the roles exchanged six bells later.

Sunlessness must have been disorienting for the first generation of animals brought into the mountain, and Carlo suspected that their current descendants still weren’t entirely at ease in this endless, violet-tinged night. When his own turn to sleep arrived, it did not come easily. The forest air was kept cool enough to make it safe to skip a few nights in a sand bed, and once he closed his eyes being weightless in his harness wasn’t all that different from being weightless anywhere else, but even with two companions standing guard it was hard not to feel vulnerable. No wonder the arborines of folklore didn’t sleep: a lifetime of wakefulness was easier to imagine than a creature, apparently so much like a person, slumbering contentedly in the treetops.