Greg Egan - The Eternal Flame

Tamara said, “Do you think Carlo’s up to this?”

“Not remotely,” Ada replied. “Nor Macaria. It wouldn’t be fair to ask them, and frankly I wouldn’t let either of them do surgery on any living creature for the next three stints.”

“Which leaves Amanda. I’ve never even spoken to her.” Tamara buzzed softly. Was she really going to invite a stranger to cut her open and shine the light from mating arborines into her body?

“I met her,” Patrizia said. “On the day of the kidnappings.”

“Then you’d better make the introductions,” Tamara suggested. “I probably wouldn’t get past her bodyguards myself.”

In the back room of her apartment, away from the bodyguards, Amanda listened politely to Tamara’s plan. But then she started raising objections.

“We know what these signals do to an arborine,” she said. “We don’t know what they’ll do to a female of another species.”

“But how else will you ever find out?” Tamara protested.

“Perhaps we won’t need to,” Amanda replied. “If these tapes had been recorded from a woman, not an arborine—”

“Do you think we’ll find a volunteer for that in the next four days?” Tamara couldn’t imagine trying to sell the proposition to anyone.

“No.”

“After which time, the Council will tally the votes and make it illegal for you to do anything of the kind.”

“Perhaps,” Amanda conceded.

“You don’t seem very worried.” Tamara was confused; this was the woman she’d heard making a powerful case for the research to continue.

“We should always try to gather as much information as we can,” Amanda said. “But if the vote goes against the use of this method, it won’t be the end of fertility research.”

“Will it be the end of survivable childbirth ?” Tamara pressed her.

Amanda thought for a while. “For this generation, probably.”

Tamara was beginning to understand her position: she wasn’t actually in favor of Carlo’s method—but she was still prepared to discuss it with scrupulous honesty.

“So if I do this, what exactly are the risks?” Tamara asked her.

“‘Exactly’? You want me to put limits on it?” Amanda spread her arms. “I have no idea how to do that.”

“I could die, or I could be injured,” Tamara said. “The child could die, or be grossly malformed.”

“Yes. All those things are possible.”

“I could give birth to a kind of hybrid? Half person, half arborine?”

Amanda hesitated. “I can’t rule that out absolutely, but if we’re right about the nature of these signals that wouldn’t be possible. We don’t believe they encode traits from either parent; what we saw with the arborines themselves gave us some evidence against that idea. What these signals seem to be are generic instructions to the flesh to start organizing in a certain manner—with the details already intrinsic to the body itself.”

“So the real question,” Tamara realized, “is whether or not we use the same signals for that purpose as these cousins of ours?”

Amanda said, “Yes.”

“It’s less like telling my flesh: do this, and this, and this , in every last detail… and more like simply saying: do what you already know how to do, to form a child?”

Amanda widened her eyes in assent.

Tamara said, “It’s like a language used by two groups of people, who’ve lived apart for a while. Maybe they’ve started using two different words for the same thing, maybe not.”

“That’s the theory, more or less,” Amanda agreed.

“And if you tell my flesh, in the arborine language, to form a child—and the word my flesh would use is different, so it can’t understand what your tapes have said—is there really any reason to think it will respond by mutilating my body and creating a damaged child?”

“I can’t give you a precise account of how that would happen,” Amanda conceded. “But I can’t give you a precise account of what this thing we describe metaphorically as a ‘language’ really is, and how it works.”

Tamara recalled Carlo’s accident with his hand; things had certainly gone badly wrong there. But as Carla had explained it, that had involved detailed instructions: an endless recitation of precise commands from the tape, not so much misunderstood as mistimed.

“You’ve been honest with me about the dangers,” Tamara said. “I’m grateful for that. But I still want to do this.”

Amanda wasn’t happy. “I don’t know what people’s reaction will be. It could make the situation worse.”

“Do you want our lives to be controlled by these thugs?” Tamara asked her. “Whoever sets something on fire has the last word?”

“No,” Amanda replied softly. “I don’t want that.”

Tamara hadn’t realized how frightened she was. But if they let themselves be cowed, nothing would ever change.

“How soon could you get the machinery together?” Tamara had heard that Carlo’s whole workshop had been hastily disassembled.

Amanda pondered the logistics. If her answer was five or six days , Tamara thought, who could challenge her on that?

“Within a bell or two,” Amanda replied. “But you need to be clear: even if this works perfectly, your recovery could take a couple of days.”

Tamara waited in Amanda’s apartment as the drugs and equipment they’d need were fetched from different hiding places. Like Macaria, Carlo had eventually told his captors where to find his three copies of the arborine tapes, but Amanda was confident that her own remained secure.

Patrizia kept Tamara company, then after a few chimes Ada joined them. “I have the twelve signatures,” she said.

“So I have no excuses left,” Tamara replied, trying to make it sound like a joke.

Ada squeezed her shoulder. “Every other woman in history went into this expecting death. If you break that connection, you’ll be the hero of all time.”

“You sound jealous,” Tamara teased her. “Are you sure you don’t want to swap?”

“No—the fair thing would be to concede command of the Gnat to me, retrospectively,” Ada decided. “I always deserved that job. For this one, there’s no competition.”

Tamara buzzed softly, but it was hard to keep up the façade. Every other woman went into childbirth expecting death. That was true, but she felt no comfort from it. She couldn’t even summon up the image of a prospective co-stead, to lull her body into believing that she was facing a more ordinary fate. Once she might have surrendered all her fears in Tamaro’s embrace—and she had no doubt that her certain annihilation would have felt far less terrifying than this.

She peeked into the front room. It was filling up with strange clockwork and brightly colored vials: the light players and the stupefying drugs.

Amanda arrived with a sack; inside was a wooden box containing the tapes.

“Are you sure no one saw you?” Tamara asked her. Amanda didn’t reply; it was an impossible promise to make. If she’d been spotted with the tapes there was a chance of a mob turning up outside the door, eager to burn everything within.

“I’ll have to make some holes in the bed for the connections to the light players,” Amanda explained.

“All right.”

“I’ll need to measure some features on your body first.”

Amanda stretched a tape measure over Tamara’s skin, and marked three locations on her lower back with dye. These were the places the tubes would be inserted.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said gently. She must have felt Tamara beginning to shake.

“I do, though,” Tamara replied. What was there to fear? The drugs would spare her from most of the pain. She could have died on the farm, she could have died on the Gnat . And if she brought back this prize—or nudged it within reach of every woman on the Peerless before it slipped away into the void—it would be worth infinitely more than the Object.