Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“I’m not quite that crass,” Carlo replied. “But thanks anyway.” He dragged himself toward the door.

“Will you let me know how it went?” she asked.

He watched her for a moment in his rear gaze. She was not indifferent to what he was doing, just wary.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll come by tonight.”

Out in the corridor, Carlo glanced at passersby, wondering if any of them had yet heard the news about the living arborine mothers. With Amanda and Macaria released from their vow of secrecy and Tosco surely seeking allies of his own, it would not take long for word to reach every corner of the mountain. He might finally be known for something other than losing control of the fingers of one hand.

As he reached the corner and swung onto the cross-rope, two men who’d been coming in the other direction leaped onto the rope, one behind him and one in front.

They were wearing masks: bags of dark cloth with crude eye-holes.

“Do you mind?” Carlo was aware that this encounter wasn’t actually a matter of clumsiness or discourtesy, but he was unable to think of any words that suited the reality.

The man behind him pulled a strip of cloth out of a pocket in his skin, then clambered onto Carlo’s back and began trying to wind it around his tympanum. Carlo let go of the rope and concentrated on fighting him off; untethered, the two of them drifted sideways across the corridor. It was an ungainly struggle, but Carlo felt in no danger of being overpowered; he’d had a much harder time in the forest, wrestling with Zosimo.

The other man pushed off the rope and followed them, taking something small from an artificial pouch. Carlo abruptly changed his mind about his prospects and called out for help as loudly as he could. There had been other people in the corridor, before he’d taken the turn. Someone would hear him and come to his aid.

The man with the cloth lost interest in silencing him, but then in a sudden deft move twisted the fabric around the wrists of Carlo’s upper hands. The constricted flesh was trapped, too rigid to reshape. With his lower hands Carlo tried to push the man off him, but the cloth kept the two of them joined. The accomplice had misjudged his move away from the rope, but having brushed the side of the corridor he was heading back toward them.

“Help me!” Carlo called again.

The man with the cloth pulled it tighter. “That’s the thing about traitors,” he said. “No one can hear them.”

The second man reached out and seized the trailing end of the cloth, then used it to pull himself closer. Carlo could see him shifting the small object in his other upper hand, moving it into position. If they were working for Tosco it would probably be a tranquilizer. If they were working for themselves it might be anything at all.

Carlo extruded a fifth arm from his chest and reached out to grab the man’s wrist, staying the dart. Instead of matching him limb for limb, the man released the cloth and brought his freed hand forward, but before it could join the fight Carlo pushed away hard, propelling the man backward.

The assailant behind him grabbed the end of the cloth and wound it around Carlo’s fifth wrist. Carlo extruded a sixth limb and tore at his bonds, to no avail. The accomplice scraped the wall again and managed to reverse his velocity. The first man was blocking Carlo’s rear view, but ahead the corridor was deserted.

Carlo had no flesh left for a seventh arm. “Who are you?” he demanded. The man with the dart was drawing closer.

“Nature won’t be mocked,” the other man said quietly. “What did you expect? You brought this on yourself.”

39

“Can you spare a moment, Carla?” Patrizia clung to the rope at the entrance to the classroom. “I have a wild idea I’d like you to hear.”

Carla regarded her with affectionate bemusement. “Why aren’t you at the planning meeting for Assunto’s team?”

“Assunto’s team? Why would I be there?”

“The future’s in orthogonal matter.” Carla tried not to sound bitter. “All the new ideas, all the new technology—”

“All the new explosions and amputations,” Patrizia replied, dragging herself toward the front of the room. “I thought the chemists had a bad reputation, but at least they never messed around with negative luxagens.”

“You could always stay away from the experiments,” Carla suggested. “Assunto’s trying to build a field theory for luxagens. Don’t you want to be a part of that?”

Patrizia said, “If there’s a luxagen field permeating the cosmos, I expect it will still be around next year.”

“That’s true. But what’s your big plan for the coming year?”

“What are you going to do?”

Carla spread her arms, taking in the empty classroom. “Was I such a bad teacher?”

“Never. But is that enough?”

“I’m too tired for anything else,” Carla admitted. The news that Carlo’s best attempts to end the famine now involved the prospect of inserting signals from a mating arborine into women’s bodies had crushed whatever small hope she’d once had that she might free herself from the hunger daze. “Maybe someone will look at the rebounder again when the politics is right.”

“Forget about the politics,” Patrizia said blithely. “You won’t need to go begging for sunstone if you can make this work in an ordinary solid.”

“We’ve looked at every kind of clearstone in the mountain,” Carla protested. “Are you going to try cooking up something new?”

“Not exactly,” Patrizia replied. “But I just read Assunto’s paper on multi-particle waves and the Rule of One.”

Carla hesitated, turning the non sequitur over in her mind in the hope that a connection would become apparent.

It didn’t.

“Go on,” she said.

“According to Nereo’s theory,” Patrizia began, “if you take two tiny spheres with source strength and set them spinning, one beside the other, if the ‘north poles’ are sufficiently close they’ll try to repel each other. That means the system will have its highest potential energy if you force those poles together. The circumstances in which that happens will depend on both the directions in which the spheres are spinning and their relative positions.”

She sketched two examples.

“It’s an odd effect, isn’t it?” Carla mused. “Two positive sources attract, close up, but the poles of these spheres work the other way: like repels like.”

“It’s strange,” Patrizia agreed. “And I can’t claim that it’s ever been verified directly. Still, everything we know suggests that it’s true—and that it ought to apply to spinning luxagens, in addition to the usual attractive force.”

Carla said, “I wouldn’t argue with that.” They’d found that the energy of a single luxagen in a suitably polarized field depended on its spin, and there was no reason to think that the analogy would suddenly break down when it came to two spinning luxagens side by side.

Patrizia continued. “The Rule of One won’t let you have two luxagens with identical waves and the same spin—but that still leaves open the question of what happens to the spin when the waves themselves are different. If you take this pole-to-pole repulsion into account for two luxagen waves in the energy valley of a solid, on average it gives a higher potential energy when the spins are identical. So if the spins start out being different the system will emit a photon and gain the energy to flip one of the spins and make them the same. In other words, though the paired luxagens with identically shaped waves must have opposite spins, the unpaired ones ought to end up with their spins aligned!”