Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

The child had grown quiet in Macaria’s hands, but Benigno was still calling out in confusion. Without the promise there was no predicting his behavior toward his not-quite-daughter, but across species it was not unknown for some cos to bond with the product of spontaneous fission. “We should at least show him,” Carlo suggested. “We can observe his reaction without risking the child.

“All right.” Macaria moved carefully out of the cage, dragging herself along the guide rope with her two lower hands. Carlo followed her.

When Benigno saw the child he fell silent, though he seemed more perplexed than mollified. Carlo wondered if he was capable of distinguishing the possibilities and acting accordingly. If Benigna had given birth with a co-stead, would he have known that at once from the scent of the child? And if the child had been fatherless, the natural consequence of their enforced separation, would he have recognized that too and made the best of it?

Macaria moved closer and held out the child. Benigno stared at her for a while, then he retreated back along the branch he was holding and leaped over to the side of the cage, where he started prodding angrily through the bars at the curtain that was hiding Benigna.

“I don’t think it would calm him down if he saw her in that state,” Carlo said.

“Probably not,” Macaria agreed.

“I’d better get her stitched up.” And then free her from the plinth, Carlo decided. She’d been through enough.

“You should put them together again,” Amanda said.

“Yes.” Carlo was struggling to contain his emotions; part of it was genuine sympathy for the arborines, though part of it was probably just shock. “Once she’s healed, they can both go back to the forest.”

There was an awkward silence, then Macaria said quietly, “I’m not sure that would be a good idea, Carlo.”

“Why not? I know we should test the tape again, but we don’t have to do it on her.”

The tape-fathered arborine baby was starting to squirm; Macaria rearranged her hold on her.

Amanda said, “We need to know what this has done to her body. After this, can she still breed naturally? Or having given birth once, is she now infertile? We’ll need to observe her with her co until that’s settled.”

“You’re right, of course,” Carlo conceded.

He headed for the equipment hatch.

As he pumped in the tranquilizer, out of sight of the women, Carlo found himself trembling. What the three of them had witnessed had been crude and brutal, but some of the problems could be addressed immediately now that they knew what to expect. They did not know yet if Benigna would recover completely, or if her child would thrive and live normally, but in time they would know. And in time what they had started here might be polished and refined into a procedure that any woman could undergo without danger or discomfort.

So it was conceivable that the famine would be banished, not with biparity on demand but with a single child born alongside a surviving mother. It was possible that after all the time he’d spent rehearsing his grief for her, Carla might bear a child and go on to outlive him. And it was not beyond imagining that the Peerless would return to the home world bearing among its greatest prizes the end of the early death of women.

Carlo moved away from the base of the plinth and tried to steady his hands for surgery. Having played his part in these transformations, there was a chance now that he would have no son, and that the time would come when everyone would follow him, and there would never again be a father in the world, never again a co. He would have ended the famine, the infanticides and the greatest blight on the lives of women—and extinguished his own kind entirely.

37

“You need to understand,” Carla pleaded. “This kind of research is more like exploration than engineering. It doesn’t always take you where you expected to go.”

Silvano was unmoved. “We’re grateful for your efforts, Carla, but with all due respect it’s not your role to decide where the research is taking us.” He turned and addressed his fellow Councilors. “ The Object is as real and solid as this mountain. We’ve seen it, we’ve visited it, we’ve brought its trajectory into step with our own—and in doing so, we’ve proved beyond doubt that it’s composed of a material that can serve as a powerful fuel. But now this petitioner wants us to divert resources away from the program to make use of this extraordinary boon and invest them in a new kind of matter made entirely of light!”

“Temporarily,” Carla stressed. “And if you’ll forgive me for correcting you, Councilor, an optical solid isn’t made entirely of light; the light waves form the energy landscape, but we still put luxagens into the valleys. The point of using that kind of system is that it would let us vary the energy levels relatively easily, so we could see if a rebounder can be made to work, in principle. Once that’s been established we’ll know whether or not it’s worth trying to manufacture an ordinary substance with similar properties. It might sound profligate to perform these experiments on a ‘solid’ that needs sunstone to be burned just to maintain its existence from moment to moment—but there is no practical alternative.”

“Can you be certain there’s nothing in the mountain already that would do the job?” Councilor Giusta asked.

“Very nearly,” Carla replied. “We’ve gone through the spectra of every kind of clearstone, and tried to infer the energy levels. That’s not a foolproof process, but to test all the same materials directly would take a generation, and it would use up far more sunstone than the protocols I’m actually proposing.”

“You’ve asked for a very large amount,” Giusta said, glancing down at Carla’s application.

“We need to run the coherent light sources at a very high intensity, to make the energy valleys deep enough,” Carla explained. “But once we’ve mastered this—and once we can reproduce the effect in an ordinary solid—it will act as a net energy source. If we can get to that stage, the project won’t require any more sunstone at all.”

Giusta looked to Silvano, then the rest of her colleagues, but no one had any more questions for Carla. Even Councilors Massimo and Prospero—who’d been as merciless with Assunto on the hazards of dealing with the Object as they’d been with Carla at the previous hearing—seemed embarrassed by the alternative she was offering. The rebounder was already tainted by the inevitable comparisons with pre-scientific myths, but to claim that she could conjure her own Eternal Flame from a crystal of light sounded like the hyperbole of a stage magician: not even an appeal to genuine credulity so much as an invitation to share a joke.

“We’ll adjourn now,” Giusta said. “Thank you for your testimony.”

When the Councilors had left the chamber, Carla was alone with Assunto.

“If you change your mind, you’ll always be welcome on the orthogonal matter team,” he said.

“Thank you.” Carla had no ill feeling toward him; someone was always going to take over the project after she abandoned it, and she couldn’t blame Assunto for being a persuasive advocate for the cause. She’d benefited from his skills often enough, herself.

“I’ve had some thoughts about the Rule of One recently,” Assunto confided. “I’d be interested to hear what you think.”

“Of course.” Since the night with Patrizia and Romolo when they’d split the Rule of Two in half, Carla had had no success in explaining the simpler but equally mysterious principle that remained: once you took spin into account, you never found more than one luxagen in the same state.