Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

Halfway through their second day in the forest, Lucia spotted an arborine watching them across the gap. She passed her spyglass to Carlo for a better look. The male was stretched out in front of a clump of brightly glowing yellow flowers, gripping two protruding branches with all four limbs. It was the clearest view Carlo had ever had of an arborine in the flesh. All the sketches he’d studied in his comparative anatomy class had been in old books from the home world, predating any changes adopted by the local population—and the one thing that struck him most now was the uncanny similarity between the hands the creature had formed on its lower limbs and those the travelers themselves made when they were weightless.

“I could shoot him right now,” Lucia said, “but if there are others watching you’d probably lose the chance to get his co.”

Amanda said, “One male is useless. If we have to make do with a single animal it had better be a female, but I’m happy to wait as long as it takes to get a breeding pair.”

The male freed one hand to swat mites from its eyes. Like the female who’d watched Carlo drifting above the canopy, he did not seem agitated or afraid, merely curious.

“How much time do the cos usually spend together?” Carlo asked Lucia.

“From what I’ve seen, they tend to forage separately, but they do meet up to share food.”

“So if this male’s co is foraging elsewhere, we’ll have no way to identify her?”

“Not if we take him before we’ve seen them together,” Lucia replied.

Carlo handed the spyglass back, unable to suppress a low hum of impatience. He was used to grabbing a cage full of voles from the breeding center, with all the cos bearing matching tags.

“If this turns out to be too difficult,” Amanda said, “there is one alternative.”

“Really?” Carlo gave her his full attention.

“All the other animals are too small to tolerate the light probes,” she said. “But you could always ask for people to volunteer to be recorded in the act.”

The three of them took shifts with the spyglass, scrutinizing the arborines that came to watch them. Carlo saw the first male grow bored and disappear, but a second male replaced him a bell or so later. Amanda reported the return of the first male, briefly accompanied by a female, but she saw nothing to prove that the two were cos. Lucia saw nothing at all, but the timing alone suggested an explanation: the arborines weren’t going to lose sleep over the intruders.

“At least we can guess now which flower-cycle they’re treating as night,” Lucia said wearily, preparing to rest herself.

“If we’d been smarter we would have been prepared for this,” Amanda suggested. “We should have had full time observers in the forest, people who’d know the whole arborine society inside out.”

“That’s easy to say with hindsight,” Carlo retorted. “But if I was going to rewrite history I’d start with a captive breeding program.”

“No one ever managed that on the home world.”

“Isn’t that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world?”

Over the next two days they saw the same four arborines coming and going: two males and two females. Carlo was fairly sure that the second female was the one he’d seen in the canopy. None of them would have been alive when Lucia’s father took one of their ancestors, to deliver to an enthusiastic anatomy teacher for dissection. They couldn’t know what Carlo was planning for them. But while they were curious enough, and organized enough, to take turns making their own observations, they were also sufficiently wary to ensure that they were never all in harm’s way at the same time.

On the sixth day in the forest the expedition ran out of food. Carlo sent Amanda to fetch provisions. He couldn’t blame Lucia for their lack of success, but he was beginning to wonder if he’d simply asked for the impossible.

Lucia was asleep when Carlo saw the first male joined in his lookout by the first female. This was not unprecedented, and she rarely stayed for long. Were they cos? Friends? Brother and sister from some quadraparous mating? Carlo swept the mites away from his face. He expected to die without learning the answer.

The female handed the male a dead lizard, and stayed to watch him chew on it.

“Wake up,” Carlo called softly to Lucia. She hummed irritably and stirred in her harness. “They’re sharing food.”

Lucia pulled herself over to Carlo and he handed her the spyglass.

“I can’t promise you anything from one incident,” she said. “But they probably are cos.”

“That will have to be good enough,” Carlo decided. “We have to take them.”

Lucia returned the spyglass, then scrambled back to the fork in the branches where she’d tied up her equipment. She left the compressed air cylinder where it was and began unreeling the hose with the gun. Her safety rope was beginning to get tangled; Carlo moved to another branch to give her room. “Quickly!” he urged her. The male was almost finished with the lizard. The dart gun had its own small sighting telescope; Carlo watched Lucia take aim, then turned his attention to her targets.

The gun could shoot a dozen darts in rapid succession. Two struck the male in the back; the female barely had time to look around before Lucia planted three in her chest. The arborines’ posture slackened, but they clung on to their branches. They might manage to drag themselves a few strides back into the trees before they were completely paralyzed, but once the toxin took full effect they wouldn’t be going anywhere for six or seven bells. Carlo considered waiting for Amanda to return before trying to retrieve the animals; the three of them working together would make the job easier.

A slender gray arm reached out from behind a clump of yellow flowers, grabbed the male by a lower wrist and yanked him out of sight.

Carlo was dumbfounded. “Did you see—?” Before he could finish speaking, the paralyzed female had gone the same way.

Lucia said, “It looks as if their friends are trying to hide them. We should—”

Carlo turned to her; she was struggling to untangle her safety rope. “Can you push me across first?” he begged her. She’d spent half her life in the forest, so she’d have no trouble following him unaided, but after his last misjudged leap he didn’t trust himself to aim his own body across the gap.

“All right.”

Carlo unhitched his own rope from the tree, tucked its coils into his harness, then crawled onto the branch in front of her. She took his lower hands in her upper pair, and they both bent their elbows, making a catapult of their arms. Carlo hadn’t done this with anyone since childhood, playing with Carla in some ancient weightless stairwell.

Lucia gripped the branch tightly with her lower hands, sighted their quarry and maneuvered Carlo’s body into alignment. They unlinked their fingers, leaving their hands flat, palm against palm.

“Now!” she said. Carlo pushed against her and she reciprocated, propelling him away from the tree.

His progress through the air felt painfully slow. Flurries of dead petals swirled out of his path; even inanimate matter could outrace him. But as he drew closer to the far side of the gap the onrushing branches began to look threatening. He reached out and grabbed them, twigs scraping his palms and his shoulder muscles jarring as he brought himself to an ungainly halt.

Carlo looked around to orient himself. He was clinging to a pair of jutting branches, and he recognized the yellow flowers in front of him; Lucia had sent him to exactly the right spot. He could see her preparing to launch herself, but he decided not to wait for her; there were twigs rebounding just a stretch or so ahead of him, and if he delayed giving chase he risked losing the trail. The arborines were agile, but their paralyzed companions would make unwieldy cargo. If he could pursue them closely enough to put them in fear of ending up in the same condition then they’d have no choice but to abandon their friends.