Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

“You haven’t heard yet?” The clerk was surprised. “Not good news.”

Patrizia read the copy on the wall in silence, then moved aside to let the others see it. Carla couldn’t concentrate on her own task any more.

“What is it?” she demanded.

Patrizia didn’t answer, but now Macaria had read it too. “The forest,” she said, dazed. “We’ve lost the forest.”

“What do you mean, lost it?”

“Someone set it alight. From the sound of this, they must have used sunstone. By the time the fire crews arrived there was nothing they could do. They’ve closed off all the entrances and left it to burn itself out.”

42

When Carlo insisted on seeing for himself exactly what had become of the forest, Tamara joined Ada, Patrizia and Carla to escort him down the axis. Macaria had reached the point where she couldn’t face any more bad news. She thanked Tamara and headed home with her co.

As the group entered the central corridor, Tamara could already smell the traces of smoke wafting up through the mountain. She’d seen her father burning off blight often enough to be impressed by the ability of plants to limit the spread of fire: in wheat, at least, there was a skin covering most of the stalk that could be shed if it caught alight. But nothing living was invulnerable, not even the mightiest tree. In the presence of a high enough density of flames, the heat carried through the air alone would be enough to render any kind of organic matter unstable.

By the time they reached the second level above the forest, the smoke was thick enough to scatter the moss-light into a disorienting red haze. Tamara struggled to see a dozen strides ahead; they might as well have sent out invitations for an ambush. The heat was becoming palpable, and Carlo had barely had time to recover from his last bout of hyperthermia. When he started faltering, losing his grip on the guide rope, Carla finally managed to dissuade him from continuing.

“If we’re already struggling at this distance,” she said, “imagine what it was like inside the chamber. The arborines will be dead. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

Tamara had reached the same conclusion long ago, but she’d been trying not to think about the consequences. Who would vote for the research to continue now? With reports of disfigured arborines still preying on their minds—notwithstanding Carla’s belated retraction—and no prospect of further animal tests to settle the matter, who could endorse such a project?

Carla’s apartment wasn’t far. Tamara suggested that the two of them rest there, and when she volunteered to stand guard Patrizia and Ada offered to join her.

They turned and headed back up the axis, smoke clinging to their skin. The blight infesting the arborines had been burned away before it could spread. Tamara knew the scent of eradication.

“We can’t just accept this!” Patrizia declared angrily. “We need to hit them as hard as they hit us!”

Tamara gestured with a hand to her tympanum. Carla and Carlo were asleep in the next room.

“What happened to the Council appointing police?” Ada replied caustically. “You want to burn a few farms now? Or just kidnap a few people at random?”

Patrizia scowled. “Of course not. But we have to show them what happens when they try to win a vote by force. We have to find a way to hurt them.”

“Wars of retribution were hard enough on the ancestors,” Ada said. “And we have none of the resilience of a planetary culture. If people start repaying every act of violence in kind, we’ll all be dead within a year.”

Tamara didn’t doubt that. The prospect of her father’s mentality triumphing yet again enraged her—but she hadn’t quite lost her mind. The Peerless could not survive any escalating conflict. The Council would find someone to punish for the kidnappings and the fires, eventually, and she would have to be satisfied with that.

Patrizia swung back and forth on her rope, agitated, unable to let the matter drop. “No violence,” she said finally. “But we can still hurt them. We still have the one thing they fear the most.”

“That’s a bit too cryptic for me,” Ada admitted.

Tamara understood. “We still have the tapes,” she said. “We could still do one more experiment, before the vote comes in and the Council bans the research.”

Ada said, “You mean scale things down, from arborines to voles?”

“No, scale things up ,” Patrizia corrected her. “We need a woman to give birth, before the vote. To prove that it works, to prove that it’s safe. To show the whole mountain that it really is possible.”

That silenced Ada. It silenced all three of them. Tamara stared at the walls, marveling at the strange disjuncture between the joy she felt at the prospect of the kidnappers and arsonists hearing the first rumors of such a thing, and the visceral sense of panic that gripped her at the thought of what it would take for those rumors to be real.

Patrizia said, “I’ll do it, if I have to.”

“You’re too young,” Tamara said flatly.

“What—do you think I’m not fertile yet?”

“I mean you’re too young to take the risk.”

“Someone has to be the first,” Patrizia replied. “There aren’t going to be any more arborine tests. Someone has to take the risk of finding out if it’s safe for women.”

Ada said, “If anyone does this, it would have to be a solo. Nobody’s co could come to terms with this in a day: you can’t just tell a man he has to give up any chance to be a father in the usual way—no warning, no discussion. No one could accept it, and it wouldn’t be fair to demand it of them.”

Tamara concurred. “This would be hard enough for anyone, but to get a couple to agree on it before the vote would be impossible.”

Patrizia shot her an odd glance, something more than resentment at having the law laid down this way.

Tamara said, “I’d do it myself, but I don’t have an entitlement. I can’t bring a child into the world if I can’t feed her.”

Patrizia hesitated, then cast aside her reticence. “There’s nothing in the separation agreement for your children?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Tamara replied. “My co’s children will inherit the full entitlement.”

“What if I signed over a twelfth of mine?” Patrizia offered.

Tamara held a hand up. “You can’t starve your descendants, that’s not fair—”

“I wouldn’t be starving anyone,” Patrizia insisted. “If this method works, the population will fall. No one can afford to sign over fractional entitlements for third and fourth children anymore—which is sad, but there’s a brutal logic to it. Doing the same thing for a woman’s sole child is completely different.”

Ada said, “She’s right. I’ll offer you a twelfth as well. And I’ll take this to as many other women as we need—if it’s really what you want.”

Tamara forced herself to stay calm. No one here was trying to trap her; they were just taking her at her word. If she said no, that would be the end of it.

What did she want? She wanted to defeat the fanatics who’d tried to impose their will throughout the mountain by force. She wanted to be free of all the men who believed that her flesh was their property, to protect and control and finally to harvest , as they saw fit.

But she did want a child, on her own terms.

She could leave it to someone else to go first, to test Carlo’s method, to see if it was safe. But what would happen if every solo, widow and runaway to whom they put this proposition took the same view? The vote was in four days. If everyone balked at the prospect, everyone would lose the chance.