Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

Amanda arrived and started setting up the light players in the equipment hatch. Carlo went down to help her, and to satisfy himself that nothing would get shredded this time. The tapes themselves were merely copies of the recordings, but a garbled message could wreak havoc on Benigna’s flesh.

“Are you ready?” he asked Amanda.

“Yes.” Though she’d shown no enthusiasm for the experiment, no one had more experience with the players.

“We can try for a breeding in a few days’ time,” Carlo promised her.

“You really think she’ll still be fertile after this?” Amanda gestured at the tapes.

“Maybe not,” he admitted. “Then again, maybe her body will just ignore these signals without the whole context they had for Zosima—then we’ll have learned that much about the process, and we’ll still have a chance to record her undergoing quadraparous fission.”

Amanda didn’t argue the point. “You know what we should be studying in the arborines?” she said.

“What?”

“The effect of the male’s nutrition on biparity.”

Carlo said, “That would take six years and dozens of animals. Let’s finish what we’ve started first.”

He clambered back up into the cage. Benigno was still humming anxiously, but Carlo shut out the sound. He dragged himself into place beside Macaria and put his palms against Benigna’s skin.

“Start the playback,” he called to Amanda.

As the clatter rose up from beneath the cage a tremor passed through the arborine’s body, but it was probably just a vibration transmitted from the machines themselves. Carlo glanced at Macaria, who was moving her fingertips gently over the opposite side of Benigna’s torso. “I think there’s some rigidity,” she said.

“Really?” He pressed a thumb against the skin; it was a little less yielding than before.

The players fell silent. Carlo tried not to be too disappointed by the unspectacular result. He’d chosen a short sequence in the hope that it would elicit a single, comprehensible effect, and if this hardening of the skin—a prerequisite for fission—could be attributed to the motifs they had sent in, that would be one modest step toward deciphering the entire language.

But the response to the tapes hadn’t played itself out yet: the arborine’s skin was still growing more rigid. As Carlo tested it, he saw a faint yellow flicker spreading through the flesh below, diffuse but unmistakable.

Macaria said, “I think we might have triggered something.”

The body did its best to confine its signals, to keep them from spilling from one pathway to another; only the most intense activity shone through to the surface. These errant lights reminded Carlo of the sparks that tumbled out when he set a lamp spinning in weightlessness: each spark drifted away, fading, but there was always another close behind. The tapes, it seemed, hadn’t issued a simple instruction to the arborine’s flesh: do this one thing and be done with it . They’d provoked it into starting up its own internal conversation, sufficiently frenetic to be glimpsed from outside the skin.

Could they have pushed the body into fission? Carlo was confused; Benigna hadn’t even resorbed her limbs, and all the optical activity he could see was confined to her lower torso. He reached up and touched her tympanum gently, then her face; the skin here was completely unaffected. “This is some minor reorganization,” he suggested. “Some local rigidity and a few associated changes.”

“Perhaps.” Macaria ran a finger across Benigna’s chest. “If by ‘associated changes’ you mean a partition forming.”

Carlo prodded the place she’d just touched; not only was the surface hard, he could feel the inflexible wall extending beneath it. “You’re right.”

“Transverse or longitudinal?” Amanda asked. She’d left the equipment hatch and was dragging herself into the cage.

“Transverse,” Carlo replied.

“You know what that means,” Amanda said. “We recorded Zosima’s body instructing itself to undergo biparous fission—and now we’ve fooled Benigna’s body into thinking it’s told itself exactly the same thing.”

“This is not fission!” Carlo insisted. He summoned Amanda closer and let her feel Benigna’s unchanged head and upper chest.

Macaria said, “We only replayed the signals from the three lower probes—and nothing from the very start of the process. If there’s a single message that sets fission in train, I doubt we’ve reproduced it.”

“So if this isn’t fission,” Amanda demanded, “when does it stop?” A prominent dark ridge had risen across the full width of the arborine’s torso.

Carlo probed one end of the ridge, following it down toward the plinth. “It isn’t encircling the body,” he said. “It turns around and runs longitudinally.” He prodded the fleshy wall, trying to get a sense of its deeper geometry. “I think it’s avoiding the gut.” During ordinary fission, in voles at least, the whole digestive tract closed up and disappeared well before any partitions formed. If that hadn’t happened to Benigna, perhaps the process that was building the partition had steered away from the unexpected structure—guided as much by the details of its environment as any fixed notion as to its own proper shape.

“How much does the brain need to spell out, and how much does the flesh in the blastula manage for itself?” Macaria wondered.

“The brain’s resorbed quite late,” Carlo said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s controlling everything, right up to that moment,” Macaria countered.

Amanda reached past Carlo and put a hand on Benigna’s rigid belly. “If we’ve told half her body that it’s undergoing fission, does it really need any more instructions? What if it’s taken it upon itself to finish what it’s started?”

Carlo felt sick. “Should we euthanize her?” he asked. He was not sentimental, but he wasn’t going to torture this animal for no reason.

“Why?” Macaria replied, bemused. “Do you think she’s in pain?”

Carlo examined Benigna’s face. The muscles remained slack and her eyes did not respond when he moved his fingers; he had no reason to believe that she’d regained consciousness. But his father had told him stories from the sagas of men accidentally buried alive, and the mere thought of that still filled him with dread. What was fission, if not the female equivalent of death? Would it not be as horrifying—even for an arborine—to wake on the far side of a border whose crossing ought to have extinguished all thought?

Amanda looked torn, but she sided with Macaria. “Let her live, for as long as she’s not suffering. We need to know if this will go to completion.”

The misshapen partition was thickening. Carlo fought down his revulsion and explored its full extent. After crossing the torso then turning at the sides to follow the body’s axis, the dark ridge closed up on itself at the back of the arborine’s thighs, a few scants clear of the anus. The implied excision was potentially survivable; the blastula had not claimed any part of Benigna’s flesh that would normally be immutable.

“It’s lucky we fed her up,” Macaria said. “Or there wouldn’t be much to work with.”

“Are the limbs included?” Amanda wondered.

“Good point.” Macaria prodded each of Benigna’s lower arms in turn. “Their skin hasn’t hardened.” She ran her fingers up toward the torso, searching for the boundary. “Oh!”

“What?” From the sound of her voice Carlo was reluctant to touch the spot himself.

“If I’m right we’ll see it soon enough,” Macaria replied.

Over the next few lapses, two more dark ridges appeared at the top of the thighs. For some reason the flesh beyond was as unacceptable to the blastula as the digestive tract.