The Eternal Flame

by Greg Egan

  Carla paused and ran through the whole analysis again in her head; there were just enough twists in the argument that she was afraid they might have lost track of one of them and proved the opposite of what they’d thought they’d proved. “That does makes sense,” she concluded. “But what does it have to do with the rebounder?”

  Patrizia said, “In an optical solid we could use the polarization of the light to create the kind of field where each luxagen’s spin affects its energy—splitting the usual energy levels by a very small amount. The tiny jump between those closely spaced levels would be a perfect match for the tiny shift in energy for photons rebounding from an imperfect mirror. I’m sure we could have made that work—but wouldn’t it be better to do it in an ordinary solid?”

  Carla understood the connection now. “Enough luxagens all spinning in the same direction ought to produce a similar kind of polarized field within an ordinary solid. But we never saw any sign of it in the spectra of the clearstone samples.”

  Patrizia adjusted her grip on the rope. “The spins within each valley ought to be aligned—but once you go any further, the waves overlap far less and the force between the luxagens starts cycling back and forth between attraction and repulsion. So we can’t rely on Assunto’s rule to produce any kind of long-range order. Beyond a certain point, the directions of the spins will just vary at random—producing fields with random polarizations that largely cancel each other out.”

  “Right.” Carla hesitated. “Which is unfortunate, but what can we actually do about it?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Patrizia conceded. “But there’s one thing we could try. If the geometry, the energy levels and the number of unpaired luxagens are all favorable… I think we could ‘imprint’ the regularity of an optical solid onto a real solid. The field pattern traveling through the optical solids we’ve made so far isn’t moving all that rapidly. There’s no reason we couldn’t shoot a real solid through the light field at the same speed; that way it would experience a fixed pattern. If we can expose the material to an ordered, polarized field for long enough, we might be able to achieve a long-range alignment between all the unpaired spins.”

  Carla was speechless. Patrizia had produced her share of follies—and it was possible that this was one of them—but nobody else on the Peerless could have thought up this magnificent, audacious scheme.

  “If we can identify a good candidate for imprinting,” Patrizia continued, “the hard part will be obtaining flawless crystals. This can only work if the geometry is almost perfect, otherwise the fields from the luxagens in different valleys will slip out of phase. But if we start with small granules, and pick out the ones that look homogeneous—”

  “Like Sabino when he measured Nereo’s force?” Carla interjected.

  “Exactly.” Patrizia was growing anxious to hear a verdict. “So you agree that it’s worth trying?”

  Carla said cautiously, “I can’t see anything that rules it out. But we need to look at the whole thing more closely; we need to study the dynamics of these unpaired luxagens in an external field—”

  Patrizia gave a triumphant chirp. “When do we start?”

  Carla had no more classes to teach for the day, and she doubted she’d be able to concentrate on anything else until it was clear whether or not this offered a real chance to salvage the rebounder. “What’s wrong with now?”

  A woman called out brusquely from the doorway, “Do you know where Carlo is?” It was his colleague, Amanda.

  “Not this instant,” Carla replied. “He said he was going to see Silvano this morning, but the meeting’s probably over by now.”

  Amanda said, “You need to find him.”

  She wasn’t being rude, Carla realized. She was distressed.

  “What’s going on?” Carla asked her gently.

  “Some men tried to grab me outside my apartment,” Amanda replied. “And now I can’t find Macaria or Carlo anywhere.”

  “What men?”

  “There were four of them, all wearing masks. Someone helped me fight them off, then they ran away.”

  Carla felt her whole body grow tense. “You think this is about the arborine experiments?”

  Amanda said, “Yes.”

  Patrizia turned to Carla. “I heard people talking about that this morning. I thought it was nonsense, I just ignored it.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “That Carlo had created an influence that could force women to give birth.” Patrizia’s tone was scornful. “All he had to do was point a light at your skin!”

  “That’s not true,” Amanda assured her. She gave a quick account of the actual procedure.

  Patrizia looked dazed. “You’re saying I could have a child and go on living?”

  “We’ve only tested it on arborines,” Amanda stressed.

  “But once you’re sure that it works on people—?”

  “It still won’t be a simple thing,” Amanda replied. “It would require surgery before and after the birth.”

  “And the number of children?” Patrizia asked her.

  Amanda said, “One. Always one at a time.”

  Carla broke in. “I should go and see Silvano, and try to retrace Carlo’s movements from there.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Amanda offered.

  “What about Macaria?”

  “I’ve already spoken to her co. He’s gathered some friends and started his own search.”

  “I’ll come too,” Patrizia said. “Until we find Carlo, my hands are your hands.”

  Carla was moved by this vow of solidarity, but as they headed out into the corridor she realized that it came from something more than friendship. Patrizia was not at all dismayed by what Carlo had done. Once the shock had worn off she had shown every sign of welcoming the news.

  There were women who would embrace this bizarre intervention. Carlo was not in danger from some confused rabble who’d taken the rumors Patrizia had heard seriously. He was in danger from every man who’d heard the truth about the technology, and feared that his co would use it to dispense with him entirely.

  “Carlo hasn’t been here,” Silvano insisted, turning to shout a curt reprimand into the children’s room. “What’s this about?”

  Carla let Amanda explain most of it: the arborine experiments, Tosco’s reaction, the attempt to abduct her, her two missing colleagues. Silvano took the first revelation with admirable poise, but Carla judged that he was not quite so unfazed as to be hiding prior knowledge of the matter.

  Patrizia recounted the rumors she’d heard of a new influence. Silvano seemed paralyzed for a moment, but then he said, “I’m going to call an emergency meeting of the Council. I’ll ask both Tosco and Amanda to give evidence, so we get both sides of this.” He must have seen the growing distress on Carla’s face; he said, “I’m sure we’ll find Carlo unharmed, very soon. You should put a report out through the relay. What the Council can do is promulgate statements dismissing the rumors, and warning people against taking any kind of action against the researchers.”

  “People don’t already know that abduction is a crime?” Amanda asked sarcastically.

  “A reminder that they’re risking six years’ imprisonment might focus their attention,” Silvano replied. Carla stopped herself before interjecting that that wasn’t the sentence Tamara’s kidnappers had received. It had been Tamara’s choice to show them mercy, not the Council’s.

  She wasn’t satisfied, but she didn’t know what more Silvano could do, so she left him and Amanda to organize the meeting and headed with Patrizia for the nearest relay station. Harnessed to the paper tape punch, she composed a report describing what she knew of Carlo’s movements and appealing for any witnesses to contact her. The punch only had buttons for two dozen basic symbols, but the pared down vocabulary that imposed helped her to keep the message free of adornments and to resist the urge to add threats and accusations. When she was finished she dialled in her private key and waited for the machine to append an
encrypted digest of the text as proof of authorship, then she handed the completed tape to the clerk. Within a couple of bells there’d be copies throughout the mountain.

  Patrizia had waited for her in the corridor. “Carlo wouldn’t have been on his usual route to work,” she said. “And they couldn’t have known where he was going.”

  Carla felt sick. “They must have followed him from my place,” she said. Somehow they must have known that he’d be with her that night, rather than in his own apartment. Tosco would have been aware of their living arrangements, in general terms, but it was unlikely that he’d committed their precise schedule of cohabitation to memory. Her neighbors, though, knew exactly when Carlo came and went.

  “We should retrace the whole route,” Patrizia suggested. “It might give us some ideas.”

  “All right,” Carla agreed numbly.

  They moved along the corridors slowly, Patrizia surveying the walls around them as if they might bear some physical trace of the event. Carla stared into the faces of the people they passed, as if her angry scrutiny might provoke a flicker of guilt that would allow her to unravel the whole conspiracy.

  If someone had tipped off Tosco, as Carlo had believed, other people might have been aware of the arborine experiments for days. No one could organize three kidnappings overnight. But a lot of people had taken sides over Tamara’s abduction, and those who’d sympathized with the kidnappers then would not have forgotten which of their friends had shared their views on the proper limits to a woman’s freedom. Word of Carlo’s research could have spread quickly through a network of like-minded travelers who already knew they could trust each other, as they formed a plan to nip the abhorrent new technology in the bud.

  They had almost reached Carla’s apartment when Patrizia said, “What’s that?”

  Carla followed her gaze. A tiny dark object—a cylinder maybe a scant long and a quarter as wide—had settled on the floor of the corridor.

  Patrizia pushed away from the rope and deftly retrieved the thing, returning with a well-aimed rebound. She examined it, frowning, then passed it to Carla.

  The cylinder was made of wood. It had a thin hollow core that reached almost its full length, but stopped just short of the far end. Carla had seen something similar before, used as a sheath for a needle.

  “They must have injected him with something,” she said. She handed the object back to Patrizia.

  “Who would have access to a drug like that?” Patrizia asked. “A pharmacist? A doctor? A biologist? Maybe that hunter who helped him catch the arborines?”

  Carla said, “Anyone could have stolen it.”

  “But those supplies would be monitored closely,” Patrizia replied. “We could check with all the groups who use that kind of thing.”

  “Starting with Tosco’s?” Carla knew she meant well, but begging people to audit their drug inventories would be pointless. “Whoever it is, they’ll be asking him about the tapes,” she said. “The recordings of the arborine mating.”

  “If that’s all they want, surely he’ll just tell them where they are,” Patrizia suggested hopefully. “Why would he be stubborn about it?”

  “But that’s the problem,” Carla said. “If he gives up the tapes too easily, they’ll understand that they don’t really matter: he can always make another recording. He can always do the whole thing again.”

  Patrizia said, “So you’re afraid they’ll realize that, and try to kill off all the arborines?”

  “That’s one possibility. Or maybe they’d think one step beyond that, and understand that sooner or later someone would volunteer to take the arborines’ place.”

  “So if the tapes don’t matter, and the arborines don’t matter…?” Patrizia struggled to grasp her point.

  “If he doesn’t fight for the tapes,” Carla said, “they’ll understand that the only way to end this is to kill him.”

  “No, no, no.” Patrizia reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t say that! If they’re so quick to grasp the futility of destroying the tapes and the animals, they should understand one more thing: even if they did kill Carlo—and Macaria and Amanda—it would only take a year or two for someone else to reinvent all the same techniques. Everyone in the mountain understands what’s possible now. That can’t be undone.”

  Carla said, “Maybe. But from what I’ve read of history, lost causes have cost as many lives as any other kind.”

  Patrizia had no answer to that. She said, “We should go to the Council chambers. They might not let us into the meeting, but at least we can be the first to hear what they decide.”

  Carla could hear raised voices coming from the chamber, but the words remained indistinct. Why couldn’t Carlo have taken his discovery to the Council, before anyone else had had a chance to find out what he’d done? Whether they’d have shut down his research or allowed it to continue, at least the responsibility would have fallen on them.

  The meeting stretched on interminably. After half a bell, Macario arrived to join the vigil.

  “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 s
he 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.”