Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“I’ll come too,” Patrizia said. “Until we find Carlo, my hands are your hands.”

Carla was moved by this vow of solidarity, but as they headed out into the corridor she realized that it came from something more than friendship. Patrizia was not at all dismayed by what Carlo had done. Once the shock had worn off she had shown every sign of welcoming the news.

There were women who would embrace this bizarre intervention. Carlo was not in danger from some confused rabble who’d taken the rumors Patrizia had heard seriously. He was in danger from every man who’d heard the truth about the technology, and feared that his co would use it to dispense with him entirely.

“Carlo hasn’t been here,” Silvano insisted, turning to shout a curt reprimand into the children’s room. “What’s this about?”

Carla let Amanda explain most of it: the arborine experiments, Tosco’s reaction, the attempt to abduct her, her two missing colleagues. Silvano took the first revelation with admirable poise, but Carla judged that he was not quite so unfazed as to be hiding prior knowledge of the matter.

Patrizia recounted the rumors she’d heard of a new influence. Silvano seemed paralyzed for a moment, but then he said, “I’m going to call an emergency meeting of the Council. I’ll ask both Tosco and Amanda to give evidence, so we get both sides of this.” He must have seen the growing distress on Carla’s face; he said, “I’m sure we’ll find Carlo unharmed, very soon. You should put a report out through the relay. What the Council can do is promulgate statements dismissing the rumors, and warning people against taking any kind of action against the researchers.”

“People don’t already know that abduction is a crime?” Amanda asked sarcastically.

“A reminder that they’re risking six years’ imprisonment might focus their attention,” Silvano replied. Carla stopped herself before interjecting that that wasn’t the sentence Tamara’s kidnappers had received. It had been Tamara’s choice to show them mercy, not the Council’s.

She wasn’t satisfied, but she didn’t know what more Silvano could do, so she left him and Amanda to organize the meeting and headed with Patrizia for the nearest relay station. Harnessed to the paper tape punch, she composed a report describing what she knew of Carlo’s movements and appealing for any witnesses to contact her. The punch only had buttons for two dozen basic symbols, but the pared down vocabulary that imposed helped her to keep the message free of adornments and to resist the urge to add threats and accusations. When she was finished she dialled in her private key and waited for the machine to append an encrypted digest of the text as proof of authorship, then she handed the completed tape to the clerk. Within a couple of bells there’d be copies throughout the mountain.

Patrizia had waited for her in the corridor. “Carlo wouldn’t have been on his usual route to work,” she said. “And they couldn’t have known where he was going.”

Carla felt sick. “They must have followed him from my place,” she said. Somehow they must have known that he’d be with her that night, rather than in his own apartment. Tosco would have been aware of their living arrangements, in general terms, but it was unlikely that he’d committed their precise schedule of cohabitation to memory. Her neighbors, though, knew exactly when Carlo came and went.

“We should retrace the whole route,” Patrizia suggested. “It might give us some ideas.”

“All right,” Carla agreed numbly.

They moved along the corridors slowly, Patrizia surveying the walls around them as if they might bear some physical trace of the event. Carla stared into the faces of the people they passed, as if her angry scrutiny might provoke a flicker of guilt that would allow her to unravel the whole conspiracy.

If someone had tipped off Tosco, as Carlo had believed, other people might have been aware of the arborine experiments for days. No one could organize three kidnappings overnight. But a lot of people had taken sides over Tamara’s abduction, and those who’d sympathized with the kidnappers then would not have forgotten which of their friends had shared their views on the proper limits to a woman’s freedom. Word of Carlo’s research could have spread quickly through a network of like-minded travelers who already knew they could trust each other, as they formed a plan to nip the abhorrent new technology in the bud.

They had almost reached Carla’s apartment when Patrizia said, “What’s that?”

Carla followed her gaze. A tiny dark object—a cylinder maybe a scant long and a quarter as wide—had settled on the floor of the corridor.

Patrizia pushed away from the rope and deftly retrieved the thing, returning with a well-aimed rebound. She examined it, frowning, then passed it to Carla.

The cylinder was made of wood. It had a thin hollow core that reached almost its full length, but stopped just short of the far end. Carla had seen something similar before, used as a sheath for a needle.

“They must have injected him with something,” she said. She handed the object back to Patrizia.

“Who would have access to a drug like that?” Patrizia asked. “A pharmacist? A doctor? A biologist? Maybe that hunter who helped him catch the arborines?”

Carla said, “Anyone could have stolen it.”

“But those supplies would be monitored closely,” Patrizia replied. “We could check with all the groups who use that kind of thing.”

“Starting with Tosco’s?” Carla knew she meant well, but begging people to audit their drug inventories would be pointless. “Whoever it is, they’ll be asking him about the tapes,” she said. “The recordings of the arborine mating.”

“If that’s all they want, surely he’ll just tell them where they are,” Patrizia suggested hopefully. “Why would he be stubborn about it?”

“But that’s the problem,” Carla said. “If he gives up the tapes too easily, they’ll understand that they don’t really matter: he can always make another recording. He can always do the whole thing again.”

Patrizia said, “So you’re afraid they’ll realize that, and try to kill off all the arborines?”

“That’s one possibility. Or maybe they’d think one step beyond that, and understand that sooner or later someone would volunteer to take the arborines’ place.”

“So if the tapes don’t matter, and the arborines don’t matter…?” Patrizia struggled to grasp her point.

“If he doesn’t fight for the tapes,” Carla said, “they’ll understand that the only way to end this is to kill him.”

“No, no, no.” Patrizia reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t say that! If they’re so quick to grasp the futility of destroying the tapes and the animals, they should understand one more thing: even if they did kill Carlo—and Macaria and Amanda—it would only take a year or two for someone else to reinvent all the same techniques. Everyone in the mountain understands what’s possible now. That can’t be undone.”

Carla said, “Maybe. But from what I’ve read of history, lost causes have cost as many lives as any other kind.”

Patrizia had no answer to that. She said, “We should go to the Council chambers. They might not let us into the meeting, but at least we can be the first to hear what they decide.”

Carla could hear raised voices coming from the chamber, but the words remained indistinct. Why couldn’t Carlo have taken his discovery to the Council, before anyone else had had a chance to find out what he’d done? Whether they’d have shut down his research or allowed it to continue, at least the responsibility would have fallen on them.

The meeting stretched on interminably. After half a bell, Macario arrived to join the vigil.