Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“If I ever wake you in the night and start trying to change our plans,” he said, “show me this. That should bring me to my senses.”

Carla examined his face. He was serious. “And what if I’m the one who wakes you?”

He returned the knife to its hiding place and produced a second one from the other side of the bed.

34

Carlo arrived a few chimes early to take over from Macaria. Having done the arborine night shift himself for a stint he knew how tiring it was: the less active the animals were, the harder it had been to keep watching them closely without his mind wandering. It was only by constantly reminding himself of what a few lapses of inattentiveness might cost him that he’d managed to stay awake to the end of each shift.

“Anything unusual?” he asked.

“Zosimo was up for about a bell, leaping around the cage,” Macaria recounted. “At one point he woke his co; I was sure something was going to happen. But in the end all they did was exchange a few calls. Benigna and Benigno slept through all the drama.”

“Hmm.” Carlo had read old reports, written on the home world, claiming that arborines in the forests had been seen waking at night in order to breed. But he had doubts about the veracity of those accounts, let alone their relevance to these captives twice removed from their ancestors’ original habitat.

“There ought to be something we can do to encourage them,” Macaria said wearily. “Both couples are reproductively mature, so what are they waiting for? There must be some environmental change that would clinch it. Maybe a dietary signal—”

“If we increase the food supply any more, we risk them becoming quadraparous,” Carlo replied.

“Would that be so terrible? If you really want to understand the signaling during fission, aren’t you going to need to compare biparous and quadraparous versions at some point?”

That might have been a reasonable attitude if they’d had an unlimited supply of experimental subjects, and as many lifetimes as they needed to achieve the project’s goal. Carlo said, “If we don’t get a tape of biparous fission from this lot, you can volunteer to catch the next four arborines.”

Macaria left him to it.

Carlo positioned himself on the guide rope midway between the two cages, at a point where he could see Benigna and Benigno in his rear gaze and Zosima and Zosimo to the front. The flowers adorning the scaffolding of amputated branches that crisscrossed each cage were still putting out light, more or less following their original alternating cycles, but over the last few days he’d begun to notice a decline in their luminance. As the imitation forest faded the moss-light took over, and the whole place began to look more like a prison of bare rock decorated with a few wan twigs.

The observers’ shifts were synchronized to the arborines’ activity, and he’d arrived just in time to watch all four animals waking. The females, pinned to their heavy plinths, had long ago ceased making vigorous attempts to detach themselves, but their posture and movements changed completely once they were conscious, with the uncoordinated twitches and flailing of sleep replaced by an eerily disciplined-looking series of muscular stretches and rearrangements of the flesh. Benigna and Zosima in their separate cages performed an almost identical set of exercises, which suggested that they were instinctive responses to their lack of mobility—perhaps as a way of maintaining health while recovering from an injury. But it was possible that there was a component of mimicry as well; from their plinths, they could see each other clearly enough. Mimicry? Encouragement? Solidarity? Zosima had carried Benigna’s limp body through the forest unflaggingly while Carlo pursued her. It was hard not to think of the two of them as fellow prisoners, aware of each other’s plight, striving to keep up each other’s morale.

For their part, the males did not remain still for long either: every few lapses either Zosimo or Benigno made a sudden leap from one branch to another. Though the cages were currently empty of lizards, to Carlo these moves looked similar to ones the arborines used when ambushing prey. He wasn’t sure if they had failed to grasp the unfamiliar rules governing the presence of the lizards and had started jumping at shadows in the hope that it might be food, or, like the females, they were merely intent on staying active.

In the light of Macaria’s report Carlo paid special attention to Zosimo. The male was certainly more agitated than usual, swaying restlessly on each branch before flinging himself onto the next. The cage was just a couple of stretches across, so Zosimo couldn’t help revisiting the same locations—but far from executing a tight, repetitive cycle, he crisscrossed the miniature forest in an elaborate sequence of permutations of departure points and destinations, as if intent on squeezing as much novelty out of his impoverished surroundings as he could.

When feeding time came, Carlo fetched two lizards from the storeroom; they squirmed in protest for a while, then went limp in his hands as if they could save themselves by playing dead. The arborines must have learned the routine by now, but they didn’t hang around like supplicants as he approached. Benigno clung, aloof, to a distant branch while Carlo tossed the lizard through the bars of his cage. Zosimo was positively disdainful, baring his teeth at Carlo threateningly, but he too kept his distance.

Carlo returned to his observation post. He’d seen these hunts too many times now to remain enthralled from start to finish, but it was impossible to ignore them completely. The cages were small, but every branch held a dozen hiding places, and the lizards always vanished from sight long before the arborines showed any interest in them. Today the pursuit seemed unhurried at first, almost desultory: Zosimo crossed from branch to branch purposefully a few times, then appeared to grow distracted, while Benigno’s bounces, more playful than stealthy, sent luminous petals wafting through the air.

Carlo’s thoughts wandered, but he was aware of the two arborines gradually narrowing the search: jumping to a new branch, looking about for a moment, then feigning indifference and pretending to be more concerned with swatting at mites. It was nearly a chime later when things sped up, rapidly; Carlo could hear one lizard’s panicked claws as it fled along a branch before Zosimo reached out and snatched at it. The lizard must have jumped to another branch, because the hand came back empty, but then Zosimo leaped after it and moments later he had it in his mouth and was biting it in two.

Zosimo chewed on half the lizard, chirping softly with pleasure. There was a flurry of activity in the rear of Benigno’s cage, but Carlo couldn’t see what was happening so he stayed focused on Zosimo. The arborine swallowed his share of the meal, then swung down to the branch closest to his trapped co. He handed Zosima the remainder of the lizard; as she raised it to her mouth he reached across and ran a hand over the side of her face.

Carlo watched her eating, Zosimo beside her. For the first few days both of the males had tried to help their cos work the light probes out of their flesh, but the tubes were hardstone, impossible to bend or break, and Carlo had melded the females’ skin together around half a dozen loops set into the plinth. No ordinary deformation of the flesh could free them, and even if they’d grown desperate enough to bite or scratch themselves loose there was no access for teeth or claws.

The females had been unconscious for the surgery, and the aftermath should not have been painful, but Carlo still felt a twinge of revulsion at the fate he’d imposed on them. They would divide, or they would stay trapped: that was the verdict he’d written in stone.