Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

It was a glorious vision. And who with even a trace of curiosity in their soul wouldn’t wish to follow it: to see the deepest, simplest rules that governed light and matter finally spelt out?

Carla said, “If I joined you, what would happen to the rebounder?”

“Why not let that wait until the politics is more favorable?” Assunto suggested. “Silvano won’t be on the Council forever.”

“No?”

“Do you think we’ll see any real progress toward an engine based on orthogonal matter before the next election? Do you think we’ll see the old feeds dismantled to make way for new farms?”

“Probably not.” Carla regarded him with grudging admiration. “You’re just playing them, aren’t you? You don’t think an engine like that can be made to work at all.”

“Who knows what our descendants will achieve?” Assunto replied innocently. “But for now, this is the path of least resistance with the Council. So why not make the most of it? Whatever we can learn from experiments with orthogonal matter is sure to be worth knowing. If destroying two luxagens to make a pair of photons doesn’t give us insight into both kinds of particles, I don’t know what will. And you discovered that reaction, Carla! How can you not want to study it further?”

“I do,” she said. “But if I put the rebounder aside in the hope that the Council will eventually lose faith in the alternatives… I might not be around when they reach that position.”

“None of us are going to be around forever.” Assunto was probably six years older than her, which made his words a little less glib than they might have been. “Do you think either of us will live to see the Peerless decelerate, by any method?”

“Probably not,” Carla admitted.

“You’ve published your idea,” Assunto said. “It’s exciting and provocative; it certainly won’t be forgotten. If it can be made to work at all, you can be sure it will be put to use one day.”

“And you expect me to leave it at that?” Carla knew better than to try to force him to give his own verdict on the rebounder’s chances; the last time, all she’d managed to extract from him was an acknowledgment that it broke no laws in any obvious manner. “I know I’ll never see the home world, but it would still be something to know before I die that we’ve found a way to turn the Peerless around.”

“And what if you can’t prove that? What if you can’t make this thing work?” Assunto wasn’t goading her; there were a dozen ways she could end up facing that result, even if the basic idea was sound. “To live on the Peerless means handing half-solved problems on to our descendants. The ancestors had to accept that at the launch, but it’s no less true for this generation. There is no such thing for us as seeing an end to this. If you go looking for finality, you’re only going to be disappointed.”

The Councilors were returning. Carla didn’t try to read their faces as they entered the chamber; she turned her gaze to the floor. What had she been thinking—talking up the promise of the Object one day, declaring it redundant the next? The science was what it was, but she should have sought a way to shift the political momentum gradually—instead of standing in the path of Silvano’s blazing rocket, waving her arms and expecting him to change course.

Giusta announced the Council’s decisions. Assunto’s proposal had been accepted; the research into orthogonal matter would continue under his supervision.

“And Carla,” Giusta continued, “as intriguing as your idea was to the Council, we owe it to our descendants not to be reckless in our use of their legacy. If it turns out at some time in the future that we have less need to keep sunstone in reserve—a position to which Assunto’s project might well take us—then we would be prepared to reconsider your proposal. For now, though, we can’t risk disposing of such a large quantity of fuel for such an uncertain outcome.”

38

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?”

Tosco was halfway along the guide rope that crossed the chamber between the arborines’ cages; he must have entered while Carlo was in the storeroom. Carlo spent a moment contemplating his superior’s demeanor before deciding that there was no point in lying to him. He would not have been so angry unless he already knew at least part of the answer.

“This female is doing well,” Carlo said, pointing to Benigna asleep in the cage to his left. Almost hidden behind her, a smaller form clung to the same branch. “She’s been feeding her child regularly, though her co is still ignoring it.”

“ Her child?” Tosco sounded neither amused by the claim nor incredulous, so it was unlikely he was hearing it for the first time. He must have had a chance to get used to the idea before coming to see the evidence with his own eyes.

“I don’t expect she thinks of it that way,” Carlo replied. “I believe she’s treating it as she’d treat any orphaned relative; it’s like the niece she never knew she had. And she’s not such a stickler for logical niceties that it makes any difference that she never had a sister.”

Tosco hadn’t come here to discuss kinship-based altruism in arborines. “You’ve found a way to trigger the formation of a survivable blastula?”

“Survivable with surgical intervention,” Carlo said. “I wouldn’t put it more strongly than that.”

“How many times have you done this?”

“Just three.”

“Oh, is that all?” Tosco had finally found something funny in the situation. “When were you going to tell me? After a dozen?”

“I wanted to be sure of the results before I made too much of them,” Carlo explained. “If Benigna here was just an accident, it would hardly have been worth publishing.”

“No? I think that sounds like exactly the right thing to publish.”

“Well, that’s not how it’s turned out.”

“Kill her,” Tosco said bluntly. “Then the other two, after a suitable interval. When you dissect them, you need to find that all three bodies were riddled with malformations.”

Carlo hesitated, trying to think of a way to phrase his reply that avoided a flat out refusal. “Amanda and Macaria aren’t stupid,” he said. “If I tried to fake something like that, they’d spot it—and who knows what kind of fuss they’d make?”

Tosco wasn’t stupid either; if he knew that one of the women would make no fuss at all, he wasn’t offering any hints. “How many copies of the light tapes are there?”

“A few.”

“How many, exactly?” Tosco pressed him. “Where are they being stored?”

Carlo gave up on the idea that he could get through this without a confrontation. “There are dozens, and they’re very widely scattered. You can forget about destroying them.”

“You’ve lost your mind, Carlo,” Tosco declared. “This was supposed to be about biparity.”

“And it might yet be,” Carlo replied. “In a stint or two, when Benigna’s gained enough body mass I’m going to see if she can produce a second child the same way. Now there’s a nice title for a paper: ‘Light-induced facultative serial biparity in arborines’. We ought to start a competition, to find the phrase in reproductive biology that the ancestors would find maximally oxymoronic.”

Tosco’s curiosity got the better of him. “What about her co? Has he tried to breed with her?”

“Yes.”

“And what? She fought him off?”

“No, she cooperated. But nothing happened. In that sense at least, she’s infertile. It’s possible that she’s lost the ability for spontaneous division too, though we’ll have to wait a year or two to be sure.”