by Greg Egan
The secondary partitions were still intact, but one pair of young voles were already beginning to twitch and squirm, limbless balls of conjoined flesh struggling to wake into their own separate identities.
Amanda said, “They all look healthy so far.”
“Yes.” Now the other pair were wriggling too, and Carlo couldn’t help feeling a visceral sense of relief. The experiment had told him nothing—except that the new suppressant hadn’t been crude enough to do as much damage as the old one when delivered in the same spot. He should have been disappointed. But the sight of the four live infants was impossible to receive with anything but joy.
The father approached the tardier of the pairs, stroking his children’s skin with his paws and tugging at the partition that still glued them together.
Carlo turned to Amanda. “We’d better move on. We can check the whole brood for deformities tomorrow, but we need to set a pace of six matings a day or this map’s going to take forever to complete.”
8
“The nozzle’s fixed,” Marzio told Tamara. “We’re ready to launch, just name the time.”
Tamara did the calculations on her forearm. The rotational period of the Peerless was close to seven lapses, but apparently no one had thought it was worth the fuel to tweak it to an exact multiple, just to simplify the arithmetic whenever the cycle needed to be converted into clock time. When she’d finished she pressed her arm against Marzio’s, letting him feel the numbers so he could check them himself.
“That looks right,” he said. “Can you get notice to your people in time?”
Tamara glanced across the workshop at the clock again. “Yes.” She hurried over to the signal ropes and sent a message to each of the observatories; unless the relay clerks were dozing this would be warning enough. Roberto would just be starting his shift at the summit; she wasn’t sure who’d be on duty at the antipodal dome, but every observer had been prepared for this for days. She’d wanted to help track the first beacon herself, but it would have been an absurd vanity to delay the launch any further for the sake of that privilege. Besides, this way she’d be able to watch the event itself, with all of the excitement and none of the hard work.
Marzio’s children, Viviana and Viviano, maneuvered the beacon onto a trolley and began wheeling it toward the airlock. The device was built into a cubical frame of hardstone beams about two strides wide. Cylindrical tanks of powdered sunstone, liberator and compressed air were arranged around an open flare chamber, while all the pipes and clockwork were tucked away neatly behind clearstone panels.
Marzio followed his children, gesturing to Tamara to accompany him. Aside from the wheat fields this workshop had the largest floor in the Peerless—and spread out along its arc a dozen teams of instrument builders were assembling similar beacons. Groups of workers stopped to cheer as the trolley passed, celebrating their common cause.
Marzio said, “Don’t be too dismayed if something goes wrong. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to vary the design if we have to.”
“Unlike the Gnat.”
“Oh, the Gnat will be fine,” he promised her. “It’ll be carrying its own repair crew. The hardest thing to build is a machine that needs to function perfectly without any supervision—without the chance to make a single adjustment once it’s out of your hands.”
They reached the ramp leading down into the airlock. As Viviana and Viviano donned helmets and cooling bags, Tamara hung back, not wanting to interfere with their preparations. She was just a spectator here; the launch could go ahead with or without her.
Viviana raised the airlock door, standing aside to keep it open as her co wheeled the beacon into the chamber. Then she joined him inside, and the spring-loaded door slammed shut. Tamara watched them through the window as they worked the pumps.
“What could still go wrong?” she asked Marzio. “You’ve fixed the nozzle; the rest is just clockwork.”
“Clockwork in the void,” Marzio replied. “You might think it would simplify a machine’s behavior when there’s no air or gravity to contend with—but there’s still heat, there’s still friction, there’s still grit that can hang around to jam moving parts. Odd things can happen to surfaces that turn them unexpectedly sticky, or opaque. In fact a friend of mine has grown very excited over the way mirrorstone tarnishes in the absence of air.”
Tamara had heard about Carla’s discovery, but she didn’t think other physicists were taking it too seriously. “Some people can find patterns in anything,” she replied.
Viviana and Viviano were through the airlock now. Tamara walked down to the rack of cooling bags and selected one for herself. In her rear gaze she saw that Marzio hadn’t followed her.
“You’re not coming out to watch?”
“I’m an old man,” he said. “It makes me queasy.”
“To see the stars below you?”
“No, being in a cooling bag.”
“Oh.” Tamara found the fabric against her skin a bit irritating, but other than that the devices didn’t bother her. She climbed into the one she’d chosen, redistributed some flesh from her shoulders to her chest to accommodate its shape, then asked Marzio to check the fit before she attached the cylinder of air that would carry her body heat off into the void.
Once she was through the airlock, standing at the top of the exterior ramp, she pulled a safety harness from a slot beside her, checked that it was tied securely to the guide rail that ran along the side of the ramp, then stepped into the harness and cinched it tight.
Marzio’s children were further down the ramp, their harnesses tied to opposite rails so they wouldn’t get tangled in each other’s ropes. They had already cranked back the spring-loaded launch plate, and as they slid the beacon off its trolley and moved it into place the scraping sound came faintly through Tamara’s feet, almost overwhelmed by the reassuring susurration of air leaking from her cooling bag. When they’d finished she raised a hand in greeting, and they returned the gesture. The springs would help the beacon clear the ramp safely, but most of its velocity would come from the rotation of the Peerless. In less than a year it would be three gross separations away—by then, Tamara hoped, just one point in a huge, sparse grid of identical devices drifting out across the void, all flashing in a miserly but predictable fashion. Anyone could orient themselves by the stars, but knowing your position was something else entirely. The ancestors had had their sun and their sister worlds to help them navigate, but if the travelers wanted to leave the Peerless without losing their way they would have to create their own guiding lights, on a scale commensurate with their intended journey.
Viviana set the triggering time on the clock beside the launch plate. It was impossible to choose the beacon’s trajectory as precisely as they’d need to know it, but the timing of its launch would be enough to ensure that it was traveling in more or less the right direction. Viviano reached into the beacon and disengaged the safety lever, allowing sunstone and liberator to enter the flare chamber the next time the air valve was opened. Then they both moved back behind the plate, out of harm’s way.
Tamara watched by starlight as the launch clock’s three fastest dials spun toward the chosen alignment. The figures on her skin tingled with recognition just before the faint shudder of the springs reached her through the rock. The beacon shot clear of the ramp and plummeted out of sight. Tamara rushed forward to the edge and peered down, but the machine was already invisible, a speck of darkness lost among the star trails. She glanced back at the clock and pictured Roberto’s fingertips on the same dials spinning beside the observer’s bench: one hand following the time, one on the scope’s coordinate wheels. At the other end of the Peerless another colleague would be doing the same.
When the flash came Tamara raised an arm to cover her eyes, though the light was already fading before she’d moved a muscle. Powdered sunstone burned fast and bright; Roberto would have been using a filter, but the stab of light would have burned the measurements at his fingertips into his b
rain. Tamara was dazed and half-blinded, but now she could believe that the beacon’s light would be visible across the void, even through the Gnat’s modest instruments—so long as nothing broke, nothing jammed, and no speck of orthogonal matter turned the machine into a fireball before the Gnat had even been launched.
There was no point waiting for the second flash; the rotation of the Peerless was tipping the ramp up, hiding the beacon behind her. But Roberto and his opposite number would have dozens of chances to repeat their measurements, triangulating a whole series of points along the beacon’s trajectory before the machine switched to its dormant state. After that, the next flash wouldn’t come until a stint before the Gnat’s launch.
Viviana and Viviano were already headed back to the airlock with the empty trolley. Tamara stayed at the edge of the ramp, one hand around her safety rope, gauging its reassuring tension. She would not be embarking on a fool’s mission; they would not be going blindly into the void. Long before the journey began they would have wrapped the space around them in light, in geometry, in numbers.
The wheat-flowers were opening as Tamara strode along the path that ran down the middle of the farm, the limp gray sacs unfurling until the petals’ red glow filled the whole chamber, overpowering the moss-light from the walls and ceiling. A faint scent of smoke hung over the field but no sign of the burn-off was visible.
Tamara reached out to brush the plants’ yellow stalks with her fingertips. Though the crops rose and fell, the farm itself seemed ageless, unchangeable. But she remembered her grandfather telling her that in his own parents’ life-time the sheer wall of rock on her left had been a soil-covered field. There had been no low ceilings then, no second, third and fourth farms stacked above them; no one had planned for centrifugal gravity when they’d first carved these chambers out of the mountain. Tamara sometimes found herself scandalously wishing that it would be as long as possible before the engines were fired again, sparing any of her immediate descendants the tedious job of reconfiguring the farm for a second and third time. Or perhaps by then some brilliant agronomist would have boosted the crop yield to the point where everyone could live off stored grain for the whole reversal stage, and the farmers could take a three-year holiday.
“Hello!” she called out, as she approached the clearing. There was no one in sight. She went to the store-hole and took out a small bag of flour, left over from grain she’d milled the day before.
Tamaro and Erminio arrived as she was finishing the loaves; they were both carrying scythes and lamps. The lamps were extinguished, but she could smell the smoke that still clung to their skin from a different kind of fire.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“It’s under control,” her father assured her. “All within a few square strides, and all of that’s ash now.”
Tamara widened her eyes in relief. The wheat blight appeared on the back of the petals, close to the stem, making it almost impossible to spot when the flowers were open. The only way to catch it was to go around with lamps in the moss-light, inspecting the dormant flowers—and the only cure was to incinerate the afflicted plants immediately.
The two men sat and joined her in the meal she’d prepared. Tamara knew that they had their own store-hole nearby, and that they’d eat again as soon as she left in the morning, but a part of her was still able to ignore that abstract knowledge and stitch together a version of the family’s daily life comprised of nothing but her direct experience. Every evening she made three loaves and shared them with her father and her co, and her stores of grain and flour were always the same when she returned as when she’d left them, so she could tell herself a perfectly believable story where the three of them were all living in an equally austere fashion. She never for a moment forgot that it was fiction, but it still did more to make the situation tolerable than any amount of time spent pondering the ultimate consequences of giving in to her hunger.
“What’s happening with the beacon?” Tamaro asked her.
“It’s out there, at last!” Tamara recounted the details of the launch. “I heard from Roberto afterward, and it looks as if we got a good fix on the trajectory. So we’ll go ahead and follow with the others. The next one should be ready in less than a stint.”
As she spoke, she could see Tamaro growing uneasy. “I’m sure you can get the navigation system working,” he said. “But I’m still worried about that idiot Ivo.”
Tamara wondered if she’d unwittingly libeled the man; it was hard to resist joking about his lizard paper, but he certainly knew his field. “He’s a bit eccentric,” she said, “but he’s not an idiot.”
“He’s reckless.” Tamaro brushed crumbs from his tympanum. “Once a man’s seen his grandchildren, his own life means nothing to him.”
“That’s a stupid generalization,” Tamara replied, irritated. “Anyway, he’s not making all the decisions about the Gnat. The Council has appointed its own experts to vet everything we’re planning to do: people who won’t be on the expedition themselves, so they’ll have a different perspective.”
Erminio said, “How does someone get to be an expert in a substance they’ve never even seen?”
“And if they won’t be on the Gnat,” Tamaro added, “why should they care what happens to its passengers?”
“Make up your mind,” Tamara retorted. “Is it Ivo who’s reckless, or the advisers who’ll be staying behind?”
“They’ll both be more worried about capturing the Object than they will be about who lives or dies,” Tamaro replied heatedly. “Once this precious lode of orthogonal matter is suspended in the void, the Gnat will have done its job, won’t it?”
Tamara hummed with frustration. “Will you listen to yourself? Capturing the Object will require an exercise in precision rocketry. The Gnat will only end up damaged if we lose control of the situation. The two outcomes are mutually exclusive! You don’t achieve the first one by risking the second.”
Tamaro tipped his head slightly, conceding that he might have gone too far. “The fact remains, though: Ivo’s an old man, he’s lived his life. I’m not saying that he’s planning a suicide mission, but when he weighs up the risks against his chances of glory, he’s not going to take the most cautious route.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Tamara demanded. “Renege on my offer to bring him along? Tell him to delegate the job to a younger colleague with more to lose?”
Tamaro said, “No. But you could stay behind yourself. Find another old man to take your place.”
Tamara looked to her father, hoping he might raise some objection to this sorting of the population into two distinct categories: expendable old men and people with lives worth living. But he gazed back at her with an expression of mild reproof, as if to say: Listen to your co, he has your interests in mind.
“I’m the chief navigator,” Tamara said evenly. “Without me there is no mission.”
“I thought every astronomer studied navigation,” Tamaro countered.
“Yes, but not with these methods! They learn what was used to set the Peerless on its course, and what we’ll need to bring it home one day. None of that applies here.”
Tamaro was unswayed. “So you devised a new system, especially for the Gnat. Are you saying it’s unteachable? That no other astronomer has the observational skills or the ability to perform the calculations?”
Tamara hesitated, unsure how she’d backed herself into this corner. “Of course not,” she admitted. She’d already taught Ada everything she’d need to take over her role, if it came to that. “But I found the Object, I proposed the voyage. Unless there’s someone better qualified than I am, I have a right to a place on that rocket. My colleagues accept that, the Council accepts that. And if you think Ivo will be such a danger to the mission, you should be glad I’ll be there to keep him in check!”
Erminio said, “You’re upset now. We can talk about this later, when everyone’s calm.”
“I’m perfectly calm!” Tamara replied. But her
father rose to his feet; the conversation was over.
She fetched her dose of holin from the store-hole as the family prepared to retire to the flower bed. Erminio bid his children good night and lay down behind the wormbane. Tamaro brushed loose petals and straw out of their shared indentation, then placed his scythe along the middle of the bed.
Tamara settled into the soil beside him, the long hardstone blade between them. “You should trust me,” she whispered. “I won’t let Ivo do anything stupid.”
She received no reply, so she closed her eyes. Would she have been just as angry herself, she wondered, if she’d believed Tamaro was putting his own life at risk? Risking grief and pain for his family, risking turning their children into orphans? She had to admit that the thought of giving birth alone would have terrified her.
If he’d gone rushing into some dangerous, vainglorious folly, of course she would have tried to argue him out of it. But if the goal had been a worthy one, and if he’d had his reasons for wanting to play a part, she hoped she would have listened to him.
9
As the dozen and three students from her optics class squeezed into the tiny workshop, Carla glanced anxiously down the corridor, wondering how much attention the gathering would attract. One rule Assunto had impressed upon her before assigning her to teach the class had been that she should never perform a demonstration whose outcome she could not predict in advance. “Practice each experiment first, as often as you need to,” he’d urged her, “until you’re sure you can make the whole thing run like clockwork. Researchers know that things go awry in their workshops all the time—and the greater part of their job is uncovering the reasons. But you don’t want to be confusing these youngsters with the messiness of real science when they’re still trying to learn the basics.”
