Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

Zosima had finished eating. She called out with an elaborate sequence of chirps, and when she received no reply she repeated herself; the pattern was almost identical, but some notes now rose more emphatically above the rest. After a moment Zosimo responded.

The exchange continued, longer and more elaborate than any Carlo had heard before. He’d been taught that the arborines lacked a true language, but he doubted that anyone was in a position to know. In the old reports there had been a crude attempt to classify the cries, but no systematic annotation of their structure. If the day ever came when future biologists were free of more desperate concerns, it might be worth someone’s time to spend a year in the forest, just watching these animals and listening to their calls.

Zosima stretched a hand up from the plinth; her co took it and she drew him toward her. Carlo hesitated, afraid for a moment that he was deceiving himself and misinterpreting the encounter. But Zosimo had released his hold on the branch and the two were maneuvering into a tight embrace. Carlo scrambled quickly along the cross rope and reached the lever under the front of the cage.

He tugged on it; it stuck. Trying not to panic, he pushed back on the lever and worked it past the obstruction, then he succeeded in disengaging the brake. The sudden clatter of the six light recorders was so loud that he feared it would startle the arborines into changing their minds, but when he looked up they were undeterred, oblivious to the machinery.

As Carlo watched them he was unable to dismiss a shameful sense of voyeurism, though it was doubly absurd when the recorders were capturing far greater intimacies than his gaze. But the arborines’ posture had never looked more like their cousins’, and the shape they made together was disturbingly close to the vision of Carla and himself that years of anticipation had burned into his brain. This was not like breeding voles.

Zosima grew still, but Zosimo continued to stroke her face as if to comfort her. A yellow glow shone out from the skin where they were joined: the male’s promise in light, committing him to care for the children. Carlo couldn’t untangle how much of his discomfort at the sight was guilt at forcing the arborines’ choice and how much was a rebuke from the part of his mind that would judge his own life worthless until he’d made the same promise himself.

Abruptly, the noise from the recorders took on a new component: the sound of paper being shredded. “No, no, no!” Carlo dragged himself under the cage into the dimly lit equipment hatch. As he approached the offending machine the tearing was replaced by a rhythmic thwack; the tape had broken completely and the loose end from the driven reel was whipping against the chassis. He shut off the motor and quickly removed both reels, but it took him another few lapses to tug all the fragments of damaged tape from between the capstans, then load a fresh reel and restart the machine.

As he emerged from the hatch and climbed toward the observation post, he saw that Zosimo had broken free of his co and moved back to the branch that overhung the plinth. Zosima was limbless now, and Carlo watched, disquieted, as her anatomy began to surrender features that no conscious effort could have changed. The ridges of her tympanum sunk into the membrane, then the whole glorious structure merged with the top of her chest, resorbed as easily as an impromptu arm. Her closed mouth, the dark lips already strangely flattened, lost its usual contrast with the skin of her face until it faded entirely from view. Her eyelids were the last aspect to go, the pale slitted ovals rotated and stretched out vertically, distorted like the remnants of insignificant wounds as the head itself began to reform. It was as if an unseen sculptor, having crafted this body in resin years ago, had returned to swipe her thumbs across the remains of the ruined face before squeezing the entire figurine into an undifferentiated lump, mere material now, ready to be reused.

Zosimo emitted a long, mournful hum. Carlo looked up at him, struggling to retain a sense of distance, but then the arborine’s whole body began to shake with anguish. Nature had bribed both participants in this metamorphosis, imbuing the act with an incomparable sense of joy, but while a vole could pass untroubled from the raw pleasure of triggering fission to the compelling obligations of nurturing his young, this arborine understood what he had lost. The companion who had loved and protected him all his life had just been erased before his eyes. What else should that elicit but grief?

Carlo averted his gaze and tried to regain his composure. How had he imagined it would feel, when he and Carla finally brought her life to an end? Had he ever really fooled himself into believing that he’d be borne through it all in a daze, anesthetized by the biological imperative, untouched by the gravity of what he’d done? No man ever told his children anything but anodyne lies, but if he could forgive his father for sparing him as a boy he could not forgive his own cowardice since. All his training, all his animal experiments, had only helped him bury the truth under a mountain of facts. He had to accept that his life’s greatest purpose, the one role that would make him complete, could never be right, could never be bearable, could never be forgiven . It wouldn’t matter how long they waited, it wouldn’t matter what plans they’d made, it wouldn’t matter how willingly they took the final step. In the end he would know exactly what he’d done, with only the children to keep him sane.

And that only if their number was right.

Carlo looked up. Zosimo was huddled against the branch, swaying, his upper arms wrapped around his head. He had fallen silent, but now Benigno and Benigna were howling in reply. But through all the arborine sorrow, Carlo finally had something to celebrate himself.

The surface of the blastula was marked with its first partition—and it was transverse, not longitudinal. Zosima would divide into just two children, and there was a chance that the light recorders had captured the signals underlying this result.

35

“It’s working!” Romolo announced gleefully. He held a mirror in the beam and wiggled it, sending a dazzling red spot careering across the walls of the workshop. “Visible at last!”

Everyone gathered around to play with the new device. Carla watched, delighted by the spectacle, but she hung back herself and let the rest of the team enjoy it.

It would take some effort to scale up this humble red spot into a light for the beacons, but in time the navigators would have what they needed. Ivo was already working on a machine for capturing samples of orthogonal matter with a coherent UV source. It was beginning to look as if the Gnat ’s successor could be flying to the Object within a couple of years.

“We should use these for our engines,” Eulalia enthused. “No more exploding sunstone, just a photon rocket with an exhaust of pure light!”

“Er—” Romolo pointed to the lamp that was powering the device. “This beam’s only carrying a tiny amount of the energy from the sunstone. The rest is being wasted. If we tried to drive the Peerless using something like this, we’d need to burn sunstone so much faster than the original engines that it would vaporize the whole mountain with waste heat.”

“And the light source would stop working,” Patrizia added.

“Why?” Eulalia demanded. “From the heat?”

“No. From the acceleration.”

Romolo turned to Patrizia. “What do you mean, from the acceleration?”

“The light source only works at a particular frequency,” Patrizia replied. “If the Peerless is accelerating, then while the light’s traveling from one end of the source to the other, the clearstone will end up moving faster than it was when it emitted the light. Any change in the relative velocity between the light and the clearstone will change the apparent frequency of the light—so it won’t be at the right frequency to stimulate any more transitions.”