Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“Any news?” Carla asked him. She barely knew the man, but it was painful to see his haunted demeanor.

“Not yet,” he said. “But if Tosco knows where they are, I’ll beat it out of him.”

“I don’t think he’s behind this,” Carla said. “However angry he was at being kept in the dark, he still had authority over the project. There was a lot more he could have done, legitimately—”

Macario interrupted her. “He told Carlo to put a stop to this, but Carlo ignored him. What ‘authority’ is that?”

Carla didn’t want to have this argument. “Did you send out a report on Macaria?” she asked.

“Of course. And my friends are heading out to search the farms.”

“The farms?”

“Where else can you hide someone?”

That did make sense; cries for help would be heard from any apartment or storeroom, and even the noisiest pump room received too many visits from maintenance workers to make a good jail. Tamara’s kidnappers had shown the way—and if they’d also made the choice a bit too obvious, their successors might well have reasoned that the other advantages outweighed that.

Carla thought about joining the search party; it seemed Macario had only left his friends to come chasing after Tosco. But first she needed to hear what the Council decided. If they banned the research that might be enough to mollify the kidnappers—in which case it would probably be safer for Carlo if she just waited for news of the decision to spread.

“I think the meeting’s breaking up,” Patrizia announced.

Carla said, “Your hearing’s better than mine.”

The Councilors began emerging from the chamber. She searched for Amanda, but Silvano appeared first.

Carla approached him. “What’s happening?” she demanded.

“There’s going to be a vote,” he said. “To determine whether the experiments can proceed.”

“ Going to be? Why haven’t you taken one already?”

“The vote will be for everyone,” Silvano explained. “That’s what we decided. This wasn’t an issue when we were elected to the Council, so we agreed that we have no mandate to set a policy. Two stints from now, every adult will be able to cast a vote on the matter.”

“Two stints?” Carla stared at him angrily. “A lot of things weren’t issues when you were elected; that’s never stopped you making decisions about them.”

“Carla, this is—”

“And how are people going to vote on this, when they don’t even know what it’s about?” she protested. “Half of them think Carlo built a magical light player that can make women give birth from afar!”

Silvano said, “There’ll be information meetings every day until the vote, with Amanda and Tosco setting out the facts.”

“ Tosco? ” Carla was about to object that Tosco had already shown himself to be wildly partisan, but then she understood that there was no point arguing about any of this. The vote would go ahead; nothing she said was going to change that. So let Tosco denounce the project, let people believe any rumors they liked: a plague of fission that spread faster than wheat blight, with every woman giving birth to six arborines. If there had to be a vote, what she needed was a foregone conclusion: a certain loss for Carlo’s side, so the kidnappers would have no reason to harm him.

Macario had cornered Tosco and was shouting in his face. Carla looked on as Tosco protested his innocence. “Someone left a note in my office,” he said. “I have no idea who it was.”

Silvano said, “The Council’s authorized a search of the Peerless . We’ve diverted two dozen people from the fire-watch roster to carry it out, but I’ll show you and Macario the names and you can ask for replacements if you believe anyone has a conflict of interest.”

“All right.”

“And you’re welcome to accompany them on the search, as an observer,” Silvano added.

“Thank you.” Carla felt a little less hopeless; the Council hadn’t abandoned the abductees entirely.

But the kidnappers would be expecting a search; they’d be prepared to shuffle Carlo and Macaria from one site to another. However large the team that scoured the mountain, they couldn’t look everywhere at once. Two dozen searchers were better than nothing, but the real power still lay with the voters.

If she wanted to see Carlo alive again, what she needed most of all was a way to turn everyone on the Peerless against him.

40

Tamara waited for Livio outside the meeting hall, watching the other participants drag themselves in. The proceedings weren’t due to start for another chime, but the sound of all the voices from within was already deafening.

Livio arrived, his arms and chest still bearing traces of white dust. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “There was a job I had to finish.”

“You’re not late.” Tamara pointed to the clock.

“Late enough that we’ll be at the back of the audience.”

“That might be the safest place,” Tamara joked.

They made their way into the crowded hall. There was a schedule based on birth dates for the particular meetings people were supposed to attend, but it was not being enforced, and Tamara had chosen to break the rule on principle. If cos were allowed to hear this news together, why not co-steads?

There were no visible gaps anywhere in the hall, but the back ropes were the least densely packed so they forced their way onto one of them. As they settled into place Tamara felt self-conscious; she didn’t mind being squashed by the stranger on her right, but she’d never had Livio’s skin pressed against her like this.

With Tamaro, the significance of contact had come and gone. As children it had meant nothing when they touched, a pleasure as innocent as a shared joke, but when they reached fertility it became charged with danger, more thrilling and vertiginous day by day. As the compulsion grew, they started sleeping with the scythe between them, the blade a reminder when they woke in the night of exactly what it would mean to give in. And gradually, each accidental brush of skin on skin lost both its sweetness and its threat. The outcome it foretold remained a certainty, but it became second nature to think of it as indefinitely postponed.

With Livio, she didn’t know what to feel. She focused her attention on the man to her right, then tried to spread her indifference to him across her whole body.

Councilor Giusta opened the meeting with an appeal for anyone with information about Carlo or Macaria to come forward and speak with her at the end of the proceedings. Most of the audience listened in polite silence, but Tamara heard some amused exchanges in front of her; she didn’t catch every word, but the gist was that the Peerless was well rid of the traitors.

Amanda spoke next, describing the experiments that she and her colleagues had performed on a small group of arborines. Though she must have believed that the research was worth pursuing, she eschewed advocacy and confined herself to a dispassionate account of the team’s interventions into the animals’ reproductive cycle.

To Tamara, the lack of rhetoric only made her words more resonant: “The female we’d named Benigna survived the birth. After minor surgery she became mobile again, and took to feeding her daughter. Her co, who was not present at the birth, showed no interest in the child.” Survived the birth. Feeding her daughter. They sounded like phrases someone had brought back from a second Peerless , returning from its own eons-long journey orthogonal to the first.

Amanda was emphatic in dismissing the rumors that they’d created some kind of transmissible agent. “I expect that some of you here tonight must have volunteered to have influences recorded, or you might know someone who was sick at the time and took part in that project. We do believe that some influences spread as infrared light, passing from skin to skin—and it’s true that we were searching for a way to get instructions for biparity into an arborine’s body that way. But we never found an influence that was taken up by the arborines—and we certainly never assembled a new one with the aim of affecting people in any way.”