Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“So where do we begin?” Patrizia asked. “We’ll need to find varieties of clearstone with the right energy levels, but we’ll also need to calibrate mirrors for their red shifts.”

“This is going to be a whole new project,” Carla said. “I’ll have to go to the Council to get their approval for the change of plans.”

“Hmm.” Patrizia was impatient to get started. “Surely I can reanalyse a few absorption spectra without waiting for the Council? When Romolo and I went through them the last time, we were looking for very different properties.”

“That’s true.” The search for the perfect clearstone would start all over again, and there was a chance that once again it would succeed. But even the navigators’ modest needs would require the entire inventory of the clearstone Romolo had used in his visible light source. For this new application—

“It won’t be enough,” Carla realized. “Even if we can make this work in a demonstration rocket, there isn’t the slightest chance that we’ll have enough material to replace the engines.” The mountain’s stocks of exotically tinted minerals weren’t miserly, but the ancestors had only intended them to provide representative samples to be studied for the sake of materials science. They had never anticipated the possibility that one particular variety would become more valuable than sunstone.

Carla buzzed with grim satisfaction, glad that she’d caught her own mistake before making a fool of herself in front of the Council. “What was I thinking? Anything less than a full replacement for the engines would be worthless. If we can’t accelerate the Peerless at close to one gravity, it will take too much of the ancestors’ time for us to get back to them.” Returning to the home world a few years late—by the ancestors’ clocks—would mean arriving just as collisions with the orthogonal cluster began in earnest.

Patrizia regarded her with bemusement. “Everything you say is true,” she said.

“Then why didn’t you tell me? That’s what I came here for!” Carla dragged herself back along the guide rope, confused. “I needed to know where I’d gone wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your plan,” Patrizia insisted. “Not as far as I can tell. But as you say, the proof will be in the demonstration.”

“ And then what? ” Carla hummed with frustration. “If we succeed, we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that if half the mountain had been made of exactly the right kind of clearstone, that would have solved the fuel problem? And that the ancestors are likely to have all the resources they’d need to evacuate the home world—with the only problem being the lack of any way to tell them how to do it?”

“If we succeed in making a photon rocket,” Patrizia replied, “then it will be the start of an entirely new endeavor: working with the chemists to learn how to make the right kind of clearstone, in the quantities we need, from the materials we actually possess.”

Carla was incredulous. “You want the chemists to make a mineral on demand, now? You mean the way they solved the fuel problem by transmuting all our spare calmstone into sunstone?”

Patrizia said, “ Now you’re being crazy. First, the quantities we’d need would be much, much smaller: we’re talking about making engines that will run for years, not fuel that will be used up in an instant. Second, I suspect that different kinds of clearstone are chemically and energetically far more similar than calmstone is to sunstone. And third… if we can make your idea work, even on a modest scale, that will give us a new energy source. Burning sunstone to provide the energy to make sunstone would have been a losing proposition. But whether it’s heat or photons the chemists need to nudge one kind of clearstone into another, if we can pull off your trick and make an Eternal Flame on our own—even once—then we ought to be able to supply that energy without consuming anything.”

36

“Talk to your co!” Silvano pleaded. “I don’t know what’s got into her, but if she starts backing away from our plans to exploit the Object she’ll lose all credibility with the Council.”

Carlo had been puzzled when Silvano had invited him to visit without Carla, but he hadn’t objected; he understood that there were matters that the two of them would be more comfortable discussing alone. It hadn’t occurred to him, though, that Carla herself might be one of them.

“She’s had an idea for something better,” he said. “I’m not an expert in any of this, and I gather that the other physicists’ opinions are divided. But what do you expect me to do? I can’t tell her to ignore her own judgment.”

“Wasn’t the whole point of these new light sources to manipulate orthogonal matter?” Silvano seemed to think that everything came down to that: Carla had gained his support for her project on that basis, and any attempt to change course now made her guilty of acting under false pretences.

“The research has opened up another possibility,” Carlo replied. “Why is that so terrible? The Object isn’t going anywhere. If this new idea turns out to be a dead end, you’ll still be able to resume the original project.”

“ Resume? ” Silvano was appalled. “We won’t get anywhere if we allow ourselves to be distracted every time someone’s mind goes off on a tangent. We need to finish what we’ve started!”

“Finish it how?” Carlo shifted uncomfortably on the rope, then decided to be blunt. “Do you want to see people annihilated, before we even consider the alternatives?”

“You’re saying the Object is so dangerous that we should forget about it completely? That wasn’t Carla’s attitude before.”

“And it’s probably not her attitude now,” Carlo admitted. “I’m sure she still believes that the dangers could be managed, given enough time and effort. But if there’s a chance to avoid those dangers altogether, why not look into that first?”

“Because it’s a fantasy!” Silvano proclaimed derisively. “Believe me, I admire the courage Carla showed in what she did to capture the Object—and I don’t blame her at all if she’s reluctant to go back. She doesn’t need to fly into the void again; she’s already a hero to everyone on the Peerless . But that’s no reason to sabotage the whole project, just to save face!”

Carlo said, “I have work to do.” He stretched out an arm, pushing himself away from the rope so he could peer into the playroom. “Bye, Flavia! Bye, Flavio!” The children didn’t turn away from the tent they were building, but they glanced toward him with their rear gazes and nodded in farewell.

Silvano tried to adopt a more conciliatory tone. “Look, if it were something easily settled then I’d be happy to support her. But it isn’t that simple, Carlo. Even if her demonstration project works—and my advisers all tell me that’s unlikely—there’s this whole separate business about mass-producing new clearstone to order. Let the chemists loose on that , and orthogonal matter will start to look benign in comparison.”

“So let them experiment out in the void,” Carlo suggested. “Build a new workshop for the chemists and put it a severance or two away from the Peerless . That would deal with the safety issues, it would give the navigators another chance to exercise their skills—and if the clearstone thing doesn’t work out, the same facility would be perfect for experiments with orthogonal matter.” He tipped his head and began backing away along the rope.

“All I could do was warn you!” Silvano called after him. “It’s up to you whether you listen.”

In the corridor Carlo sped along the guide rope, trying to work off his agitation. Why had Silvano had to drag him into this dispute? It was possible that Carla was fooling herself and her scheme was too good to be true. It was possible, too, that Silvano was just clinging to his vision of the Object as the gift from fate that would solve all their problems.