The Eternal Flame

by Greg Egan

  “Don’t light fires,” Lucia replied. They’d brought no lamps in any case. “And don’t do anything ostentatiously belligerent.”

  “We shouldn’t beat each other up?”

  “Not if you can help it. There’s a risk that might spook them.”

  They secured their equipment, tied their harnesses to some robust branches and settled in for a long wait.

  “Are you hoping to start raising a captive population?” Lucia asked Carlo.

  “We’ll see how far we get,” he replied. “If we manage to collect data from even one fission I’ll be happy.” He explained his plan to record some of the internal signals during the event.

  “And the ultimate goal of this is biparity on demand?” Lucia must have heard rumors about his work—probably as a postscript to the story of his hand.

  “That’s what I’m hoping for,” he admitted.

  “Good luck.” Lucia sounded skeptical about his chances, but not disapproving. “It would make life easier for most people. But I sold my entitlement when my co died, so I’m going the way of men regardless.”

  “You never looked for a co-stead?” Amanda asked. The thought of a woman choosing death over childbirth seemed to unsettle her.

  “I didn’t want to replace Lucio. It didn’t feel right.” Lucia buzzed and gestured at her body. “Besides, there are compensations: if I’m going to the soil, at least I’m not obliged to be fanatical.”

  Carlo looked away. No woman could plan her future with certainty, but if the holin failed her the children would all be killed, so it made no sense for her to torture herself. With universal biparity, there’d be no need for a market in entitlements and no need for orphans to be slaughtered.

  He felt his gut tightening. If his efforts with this came to nothing—like his work on the crops—would he have emboldened a successor, or just frightened everyone away from the field for another generation? Maybe the whole project had come too late to be of any use to Carla, but the prospect of his daughter trapped in the same cycle was unbearable.

  Lucia misread his expression. “Don’t worry, it’s early yet. You have to expect them to be wary at first, but they’ll come gawping at us soon enough.”

  Carlo hadn’t brought a clock, but the forest flowers shone in staggered shifts that still echoed the rhythms of the home world. In the absence of sunlight to tell them when to rest, the plants had settled on a kind of mutual deception, with half of them treating the onset of light from the others as if it were dawn, and the roles exchanged six bells later.

  Sunlessness must have been disorienting for the first generation of animals brought into the mountain, and Carlo suspected that their current descendants still weren’t entirely at ease in this endless, violet-tinged night. When his own turn to sleep arrived, it did not come easily. The forest air was kept cool enough to make it safe to skip a few nights in a sand bed, and once he closed his eyes being weightless in his harness wasn’t all that different from being weightless anywhere else, but even with two companions standing guard it was hard not to feel vulnerable. No wonder the arborines of folklore didn’t sleep: a lifetime of wakefulness was easier to imagine than a creature, apparently so much like a person, slumbering contentedly in the treetops.

  Halfway through their second day in the forest, Lucia spotted an arborine watching them across the gap. She passed her spyglass to Carlo for a better look. The male was stretched out in front of a clump of brightly glowing yellow flowers, gripping two protruding branches with all four limbs. It was the clearest view Carlo had ever had of an arborine in the flesh. All the sketches he’d studied in his comparative anatomy class had been in old books from the home world, predating any changes adopted by the local population—and the one thing that struck him most now was the uncanny similarity between the hands the creature had formed on its lower limbs and those the travelers themselves made when they were weightless.

  “I could shoot him right now,” Lucia said, “but if there are others watching you’d probably lose the chance to get his co.”

  Amanda said, “One male is useless. If we have to make do with a single animal it had better be a female, but I’m happy to wait as long as it takes to get a breeding pair.”

  The male freed one hand to swat mites from its eyes. Like the female who’d watched Carlo drifting above the canopy, he did not seem agitated or afraid, merely curious.

  “How much time do the cos usually spend together?” Carlo asked Lucia.

  “From what I’ve seen, they tend to forage separately, but they do meet up to share food.”

  “So if this male’s co is foraging elsewhere, we’ll have no way to identify her?”

  “Not if we take him before we’ve seen them together,” Lucia replied.

  Carlo handed the spyglass back, unable to suppress a low hum of impatience. He was used to grabbing a cage full of voles from the breeding center, with all the cos bearing matching tags.

  “If this turns out to be too difficult,” Amanda said, “there is one alternative.”

  “Really?” Carlo gave her his full attention.

  “All the other animals are too small to tolerate the light probes,” she said. “But you could always ask for people to volunteer to be recorded in the act.”

  The three of them took shifts with the spyglass, scrutinizing the arborines that came to watch them. Carlo saw the first male grow bored and disappear, but a second male replaced him a bell or so later. Amanda reported the return of the first male, briefly accompanied by a female, but she saw nothing to prove that the two were cos. Lucia saw nothing at all, but the timing alone suggested an explanation: the arborines weren’t going to lose sleep over the intruders.

  “At least we can guess now which flower-cycle they’re treating as night,” Lucia said wearily, preparing to rest herself.

  “If we’d been smarter we would have been prepared for this,” Amanda suggested. “We should have had full time observers in the forest, people who’d know the whole arborine society inside out.”

  “That’s easy to say with hindsight,” Carlo retorted. “But if I was going to rewrite history I’d start with a captive breeding program.”

  “No one ever managed that on the home world.”

  “Isn’t that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world?”

  Over the next two days they saw the same four arborines coming and going: two males and two females. Carlo was fairly sure that the second female was the one he’d seen in the canopy. None of them would have been alive when Lucia’s father took one of their ancestors, to deliver to an enthusiastic anatomy teacher for dissection. They couldn’t know what Carlo was planning for them. But while they were curious enough, and organized enough, to take turns making their own observations, they were also sufficiently wary to ensure that they were never all in harm’s way at the same time.

  On the sixth day in the forest the expedition ran out of food. Carlo sent Amanda to fetch provisions. He couldn’t blame Lucia for their lack of success, but he was beginning to wonder if he’d simply asked for the impossible.

  Lucia was asleep when Carlo saw the first male joined in his lookout by the first female. This was not unprecedented, and she rarely stayed for long. Were they cos? Friends? Brother and sister from some quadraparous mating? Carlo swept the mites away from his face. He expected to die without learning the answer.

  The female handed the male a dead lizard, and stayed to watch him chew on it.

  “Wake up,” Carlo called softly to Lucia. She hummed irritably and stirred in her harness. “They’re sharing food.”

  Lucia pulled herself over to Carlo and he handed her the spyglass.

  “I can’t promise you anything from one incident,” she said. “But they probably are cos.”

  “That will have to be good enough,” Carlo decided. “We have to take them.”

  Lucia returned the spyglass, then scrambled back to the fork in the branches where she’d tied up her equipment. She left the comp
ressed air cylinder where it was and began unreeling the hose with the gun. Her safety rope was beginning to get tangled; Carlo moved to another branch to give her room. “Quickly!” he urged her. The male was almost finished with the lizard. The dart gun had its own small sighting telescope; Carlo watched Lucia take aim, then turned his attention to her targets.

  The gun could shoot a dozen darts in rapid succession. Two struck the male in the back; the female barely had time to look around before Lucia planted three in her chest. The arborines’ posture slackened, but they clung on to their branches. They might manage to drag themselves a few strides back into the trees before they were completely paralyzed, but once the toxin took full effect they wouldn’t be going anywhere for six or seven bells. Carlo considered waiting for Amanda to return before trying to retrieve the animals; the three of them working together would make the job easier.

  A slender gray arm reached out from behind a clump of yellow flowers, grabbed the male by a lower wrist and yanked him out of sight.

  Carlo was dumbfounded. “Did you see—?” Before he could finish speaking, the paralyzed female had gone the same way.

  Lucia said, “It looks as if their friends are trying to hide them. We should—”

  Carlo turned to her; she was struggling to untangle her safety rope. “Can you push me across first?” he begged her. She’d spent half her life in the forest, so she’d have no trouble following him unaided, but after his last misjudged leap he didn’t trust himself to aim his own body across the gap.

  “All right.”

  Carlo unhitched his own rope from the tree, tucked its coils into his harness, then crawled onto the branch in front of her. She took his lower hands in her upper pair, and they both bent their elbows, making a catapult of their arms. Carlo hadn’t done this with anyone since childhood, playing with Carla in some ancient weightless stairwell.

  Lucia gripped the branch tightly with her lower hands, sighted their quarry and maneuvered Carlo’s body into alignment. They unlinked their fingers, leaving their hands flat, palm against palm.

  “Now!” she said. Carlo pushed against her and she reciprocated, propelling him away from the tree.

  His progress through the air felt painfully slow. Flurries of dead petals swirled out of his path; even inanimate matter could outrace him. But as he drew closer to the far side of the gap the onrushing branches began to look threatening. He reached out and grabbed them, twigs scraping his palms and his shoulder muscles jarring as he brought himself to an ungainly halt.

  Carlo looked around to orient himself. He was clinging to a pair of jutting branches, and he recognized the yellow flowers in front of him; Lucia had sent him to exactly the right spot. He could see her preparing to launch herself, but he decided not to wait for her; there were twigs rebounding just a stretch or so ahead of him, and if he delayed giving chase he risked losing the trail. The arborines were agile, but their paralyzed companions would make unwieldy cargo. If he could pursue them closely enough to put them in fear of ending up in the same condition then they’d have no choice but to abandon their friends.

  Carlo dragged himself toward the retreating animals, moving as fast as he could, dislodging whole bright blossoms and snapping small twigs as he advanced. The tree’s less yielding parts pummeled and lacerated him in revenge, but he persisted. It didn’t take long for him to lose all sense of his location, but he kept catching glimpses of the arborines, near-silhouettes against the floral light, deftly pushing branches aside and swinging their passengers this way and that to spare them the kind of punishment Carlo was receiving. Their gracefulness was as humbling as it was infuriating, impossible not to admire even as it mocked his own brutish efforts. If the animals had been unencumbered he would not have had the slightest chance of staying close to them, and as it was they were going to make him suffer.

  “Carlo!” Lucia wasn’t far behind him.

  “I still have them in sight,” he called back to her. “Just follow me!”

  “Take it easy, or you’ll make yourself sick,” she warned him. “You haven’t been in a proper bed for days.”

  The arborines hadn’t been in a bed, ever, but their smaller size made air cooling more effective. Then again, they were carrying twice their usual mass—and it was his ancestors who’d developed a way to store heat and discharge it later, letting them grow larger than their air-cooled cousins. The question was, had he already saturated that heat store?

  Carlo pushed on, maintaining his pace, sure the gap was narrowing. He couldn’t tell how much of the stinging sensation in his skin was due to hyperthermia and how much to the thrashing he was getting from the obstacles in his path, but the arborines had to be tiring too.

  He forced his way through a tangle of vines sprouting brilliant green flowers and almost collided with the paralyzed male, drifting alone between the branches. Carlo chirped in triumph. They’d made a hard choice and abandoned one friend, but the female they were still carrying was larger. And though they’d lightened their collective load, he couldn’t see it being much help to them: trying to share the burden as they moved through this painfully narrow labyrinth would only complicate the task.

  “Lucia!” he called out. “They’ve left the male! Can you watch him? I’m going on.” He would not have put it past the arborines for one of them to double back and spirit the male away if he was left unattended.

  “All right,” Lucia replied reluctantly.

  Carlo couldn’t see his quarry. He waited, surveying the luminous forest around him, ignoring the mites that were starting to insinuate themselves into his broken skin. Then he caught the tell-tale twitch of a branch in the distance, and set off in pursuit once more.

  The arborines had changed direction. Carlo had been more or less lost from the start, but at least he’d recognized when he’d been traveling from the outer tips of branches in toward the trunk. Now he was being led in some kind of arc, or possibly a helix, crossing from branch to branch around the axis of the tree.

  It was exhausting work, propelling himself across these treacherous gaps full of fine twigs that scraped against him—sometimes snapping, sometimes rebounding, deflecting him unpredictably. But it had to be less punishing than penetrating deeper into the thicket of branches. His skin tingled, no doubt from trapped heat as much as every other insult, but whatever failures he might yet be forced to swallow he was not going to abandon this chase out of sheer lack of stamina.

  Carlo could see the three arborines clearly now, framed between thick branches bearing radiant blue flowers. The ambulatory female gripped the paralyzed one with her right hands, while the male kept pace beside them, offering occasional nudges whose purpose and efficacy were hard to judge. The darkness behind them was tinged with the red moss-light of the cavern’s ceiling. They were heading straight for the canopy, Carlo realized. The female had seen him stranded there; she knew that if they leaped through the air to another tree he’d either be afraid to follow them, or his aim would be so bad that he’d never catch up with them.

  Carlo quickened his pace, pushing off harder from each branch, trying to maintain momentum, fighting a powerful urge to be more cautious. Weightless or not, now that he had it fixed in his mind that he was moving vertically the idea had become imbued with a sense of danger. He had never been in a forest under gravity, but perhaps he’d inherited instincts attuned to his deep ancestors’ life in the trees—or attuned to the time when they’d begun to abandon them. A strong aversion to arboreal heights might have kept his forebears from dashing their skulls against the ground once they’d lost their cousins’ more graceful anatomy. But he couldn’t let his cousins win this race, least of all out of some misguided fear of falling. He shut out the warnings and kept climbing.

  More and more moss-light was penetrating the canopy, but Carlo had the arborines fixed in his sight, and he could see that he was gaining on them. Their coordination as they swung between the branches was a marvel, and the male seemed to have taken on a kind of shock-ab
sorbing role—pushing back on the paralyzed female when she threatened to tear herself out of her friend’s grip through sheer momentum—but all this heroic effort had a cost. They were flagging. They were not going to escape.

  The male leaped off to one side, shrieking noisily, as if he imagined he could serve as a decoy. Carlo ignored him and forced himself onward; his own strength was dwindling rapidly, but he was sure he still had the edge. All he needed to do now was scare off the female, then he could rest for a few lapses and think through the logistics of joining up with Lucia and extracting their two specimens from the forest.

  The female halted, clinging to a branch just a stretch or so ahead of him. Carlo stopped too, waiting for his adversary to flee, but instead she turned and defiantly wrapped three arms around her insensate friend.

  Carlo swung onto a closer branch. The female glared at him balefully, her eyes glinting violet. Surely she was intelligent enough to understand that she risked paralysis herself? He opened his slingshot pouch and checked the contents; despite everything it had been through, the sturdier version Lucia had given him hadn’t spilt any darts.

  As he took out the slingshot he caught a blur of motion in his rear gaze, but before he could react there were arms encircling his chest, a hand tugging on the slingshot, a fist pounding his tympanum and teeth buried in the side of his neck. The worst pain by far was in his tympanum; he stiffened the membrane and managed to seize hold of the offending fist. The male tried to pull free, without success, then redirected all his effort into his jaws.

  Carlo retained just enough presence of mind not to start cursing aloud. His upper hands were already fully occupied and his lower hands couldn’t reach the jaw clamped to his neck. There was an urgent, combative tension keeping his whole body rigid, and his first attempts to change his form faltered from the sense that any relaxation would mean surrender. He kept trying. Finally his lower limbs softened, and he extruded enough flesh into them to let them stretch up to the arborine’s mouth. He forced his fingers between the creature’s teeth, hardening his fingertips into wedges, and tried to prise the jaws apart.