Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“That seems wasteful,” Amanda complained.

“It’s avoiding the bifurcation,” Carlo guessed. “At this stage there wouldn’t usually be any maternal limbs around, so whatever follows probably requires a convex mass of flesh.” If the partition had veered toward the front of the thighs in the first place the limbs could have been excluded with less drastic consequences—but this was a blind process, robbed of its ordinary context, not something nature had ever had a chance to hone for the sake of Benigna’s welfare.

“Next time we should arrange for the subject to resorb them first,” Macaria suggested.

The blastula—or half-blastula—had found its borders now. The volume it enclosed was small, but not absurdly so: perhaps a sixth of Benigna’s flesh.

“Do you remember the story of Amata and Amato?” Macaria asked.

“Vaguely,” Amanda replied. Carlo knew it well, but he wasn’t in the mood to offer a recitation.

“The two of them are in the forest looking for food,” Macaria synopsized, “when an arborine chases them and gobbles up Amato. But years later, Amata has her revenge. She catches the arborine and swallows it whole—and it turns out her co’s been alive all the time, trapped inside the arborine. All she has to do to bring him back is separate him from her own body, the way she might extrude a new limb.”

“The moral being that you should never try to learn biology from the sagas,” Amanda concluded.

“A good rule in general,” Macaria agreed. “But that story does make me wonder. If we could bring this on with just a fragment of the usual signaling, the same kind of thing might happen occasionally in nature.”

“You think that story’s about a partially formed blastula ?” Carlo asked incredulously.

Macaria said, “If the ancestors ever did see such a thing, even if they understood what it was they might not have chosen to describe it that way. A female’s body gives rise to a new life, without fission. What kind of incendiary nonsense is that? Better to make the new life an old one, and come up with a story about her swallowing the monster who swallowed her co.”

Carlo wasn’t interested in scouring the sagas for dubious crypto-biological clues. What mattered now was deciphering the language being spoken right in front of them.

“We’ve come close to enforcing biparity,” he said. In his shock over Benigna’s transformation he’d almost lost sight of that crucial point. “It was the signal from the tape that established the partition’s geometry, not the female’s mass. If we’d played back all six recordings, we might have triggered an ordinary biparous fission.”

No one disputed his reasoning, but his colleagues did not seem as pleased by this conclusion as he was. The idea of inserting six hardstone tubes into a woman’s body fell a long way short of the promise of splicing the signals into an influence that could be written painlessly on the skin in infrared—and in either case, it wasn’t clear how the male could be integrated into the process. If fission was initiated by the co, could the signals from a light player still intervene to set the number of offspring?

Carlo glanced down at Benigna; the tops of her thighs were atrophying, the gray skin puckering as the flesh below parted from the blastula wall. He checked her ocular response, but she remained mercifully insensate. This was a more severe amputation than his own, but he hadn’t been shielded from that ordeal by a tranquilizing drug. More than the injuries themselves it was the context that made him recoil from her plight.

But what would the context mean to Benigna? She might have formed a notion of childbirth after witnessing it among her friends; she might even have reached a clear-eyed expectation of sharing their fate. But would it actually distress her to find that she’d given birth with that expectation unfulfilled? However powerful the instincts that would have led her willingly to the usual outcome, it did not necessarily follow that she’d be troubled in the least by events taking a different course.

Carlo looked up. And Amanda, Macaria? For all the unease they’d shown about Benigna’s condition, there’d been no sign that they shared his own visceral revulsion. One child that separated from the body, formed from reserves of mutable flesh, leaving the mother with wounds she could survive. That was not at all like being buried alive.

Benigna’s right lower arm broke free and drifted away from her toward the bars of the cage; in the imperceptible gravity Carlo had almost forgotten which way was down. He could see the walls of the partition beginning to split.

The child inside squirmed and forced the hardened skin of its mother’s belly to separate from her torso. Carlo backed away, overcome with panic. “Should we bring in the father? Give it to the father?”

“I’d be careful,” Macaria warned him. “The co’s just as likely to kill it as accept it.”

The child would not stay still. Its body twitched and shuddered as it tried to separate itself from what would have been its siblings in any normal birth. It stretched its limbless form up from the dark encrusted wound it had made until everything that clung to it and impeded its motion began to crumble like powderstone.

Carlo could see its head now. Its eyes were closed but it was flexing its tympanum, clearing it of debris. If the birth of four children had become a tragedy in the unforgiving world of the Peerless , and two a blessing, what was this? It struck him that his horror was not entirely irrational: such an impoverished mode of reproduction could never have been the norm in any species. Each generation would have been at most the size of the last, with any fall in population irrecoverable. Unless the whole thing became even stranger, and the act could be repeated. Unless a mother could not only survive giving birth, she could do so more than once.

The child began to hum. Benigno heard it and responded in kind, the two of them wailing at each other in an unremitting chorus of distress.

Macaria took the tiny arborine in her arms and brushed it clean, her strokes brisk but tender. Carlo felt a mixture of disgust at the spectacle and relief that he hadn’t been forced to take charge himself.

“She looks healthy,” Macaria observed, holding the arborine out for inspection.

“She?” Carlo had no idea how to sex a newborn animal with no co beside it for comparison.

“If the fission had been complete this would have been the female half,” Macaria argued. “Either the signals we recorded from Zosima’s division specified the sex, or the location in Benigna’s body would have done it.”

Amanda said, “We’ll need to test this again on another female and see if we can get the same result.”

Macaria concurred, adding, “Half a dozen times at least.” She thought for a moment. “It would be interesting to see if the tape is conveying any traits from the original parents—if it just captured a generic, universal signal, or if anything specific to Zosima and Zosimo has been transmitted.”

Carlo wasn’t ready to look that far ahead. He turned to Benigna’s damaged body. The surface of the partition had broken up, and what remained was already separating from the skin along the edges, exposing the flesh beneath. It was the largest wound he’d ever seen, save that on a corpse he’d encountered as a student—a woman all but sliced in two in a chemical explosion, offered up for dissection by her grieving co. He said, “I should give her more tranquilizer and try to close this surgically.” Whether or not an arborine could be disturbed by perceived violations of the natural order, if Benigna woke to see a gaping hole like this it would render her philosophical attitude to childbirth irrelevant.