The Eternal Flame

by Greg Egan

  “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.

  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.

  Amanda began drilling a slanted hole in the calmstone slab of the bed. Tamara dragged herself into the front room so she wouldn’t have to watch.

  Amando had been standing guard since Tamara had arrived. He nodded to her in greeting.

  “What do you think of all this?” she asked him, emboldened by her fear beyond the usual bounds of decorum. “Do you think we’re going to wipe men out of existence?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not afraid for your grandson?”

  Amando gestured toward his co. “We have our own plans,” he said. “I don’t know what my children will choose, when it’s their time. But I’m not afraid of letting them make that decision.”

  “And what if a dozen generations from now, everyone’s decided to do what I’m doing?”

  Amando contemplated the scenario. “There’ll still be children being born, and people caring for them. If they aren’t doing that as well as any man, it will never reach the point you suggest—where it’s universal. If they want to call themselves women, let them call themselves women. But who knows? Maybe it’s not men who will have vanished from the world: maybe the people who care for children will always be known as men.”

  Tamara gazed back at him, amused and a little giddy at the thought. “So here’s to the extinction of women,” she said. “Those irritating creatures who do nothing but complain—and never, ever help with the children.”

  Amanda called from the bedroom. “Tamara? We’re ready for you.”

  43

  Tamara was woken by the pain. It began as a state of raw panic, a sense of damage so urgent that it preceded any notion of the shape of her flesh, but as it dragged her into consciousness it resolved into a distressing tightness in her abdomen, as if some giant clawed creature had seized her body and tried to pinch it in two.

  Tried, and perhaps succeeded.

  She opened her eyes. Ada clung to a rope beside the bed.

  “How long have I been sleeping?” Tamara asked her.

  “About a day. How are you feeling?”

  “Not great.” She tried to read Ada’s face. “What happened?”

  “You have a daughter, and she’s fine,” Ada assured her. “Do you want me to bring her to you?”

  “No!” Tamara felt a dutiful sense of relief at the outcome, as if she’d just heard that some stranger had survived a brush with death—but the prospect of actually seeing the thing that had torn itself out of her was horrifying. “Not yet,” she added, afraid that Ada could read her mind. “I’m still too weak.”

  She looked down at her body. She’d gone into the procedure limbless, and right now she couldn’t imagine ever having the energy to remedy that. Her torso, tapering bizarrely into a kind of wedge, was crisscrossed with stitches that began in the middle of her chest.

  “Are you hungry?” Ada asked. “Amanda said you should eat as much as possible.”

  Tamara was ravenous. “I have no hands,” she said.

  “I can help you.” Ada fetched a loaf from a cupboard by the bed.

  Swallowing was painful, but Tamara persisted. When she’d finished the loaf she felt her gut convulsing and the stitches tightening, but she forced herself to keep the food down.

  “Is there any news I’ve missed?” she asked.

  “I don’t think your daughter’s had much competition,” Ada replied.

  “Do people know? It’s not a secret any more?”

  “No, it’s not a secret,” Ada said dryly.

  Tamara felt a sudden pang of fear. “And what? Are we under siege?”

  “There’s a crowd outside the apartment, constantly,” Ada said. “Bringing gifts for the child and wishing you well.”

  Tamara couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely,” Ada replied. “No Councilors yet, but that can only be a matter of time.”

  Tamara started shivering. She should have been happy, but all she felt was pain and confusion.

  Ada said, “You’re going to be fine.”

  Tamara slept. When she opened her eyes she checked the bedside clock: three bells had passed.

  Patrizia had taken Ada’s place. “Are you hungry?” she asked. Before Tamara could reply, Patrizia was holding out a loaf.

  Tamara was starving, but this wasn’t right. “I already ate, not long ago.”

  “The rules have changed,” Patrizia said. “There is no famine for you—least of all now.”

  “No?” For all the sense it made, Tamara still balked at the idea of abandoning a lifetime’s habits. “And there I was thinking I could keep all that mass off.”

  Patrizia moved the loaf toward her mouth; Tamara said, “No, let me…” She closed her eyes and pictured two arms stretching out from her shoulders, but nothing happened.

  Meekly, she let Patrizia feed her. She’d lost a lot of flesh, she couldn’t expect to be perfectly healthy. But what if this persisted?

  “Do you want to see the child now?”

  Tamara thought about it. The idea no longer repelled her, but she wouldn’t even be able to hold her daughter. “I don’t know.”

  “Did you choose a name for her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about Yalda?” Patrizia suggested.

  Tamara buzzed, against her will; it made her stitches hurt. “Are you a glutton for riots?” No one since the launch had been presumptuous enough to use Yalda’s name for a child of their own. Appropriating it for this cause would be the greatest provocation they could have offered, short of the act itself.


  “Maybe you need to see her first,” Patrizia decided. Before Tamara could reply she slipped through the curtains, out into the front room.

  Tamara’s wound began to ache with a kind of anticipatory dread, as if the wayward flesh that had done her so much harm might tear her skin wide open again on its return. She wasn’t whole, she wasn’t strong, she wasn’t ready.

  Patrizia pushed the curtains aside with her head: one hand held the rope, the other the child. “It was hard to get her away from the others,” she complained. “You might be fighting off rivals for a while.”

  Tamara stared at the infant. Her daughter stared back, mildly interested, unafraid.

  “She doesn’t look much like an arborine,” Patrizia observed.

  Tamara said, “You can’t have everything.”

  Patrizia approached. She placed the child on Tamara’s chest but stayed close, prepared to grab her if she slipped off. The child put one hand on Tamara’s shoulder and poked at her face with the other.

  Barely thinking, Tamara extruded two arms. The child appeared startled by the feat, though it was something she must have managed herself not long before. She buzzed and wrapped an arm around Tamara’s.

  “What do you think?” Patrizia pressed her.

  “Erminia,” Tamara decided.

  “After your mother?” Patrizia thought it over, then offered her approval. “Why not? This might be the last time anyone can do that without causing confusion.”

  “They always told me I was borrowing my mother’s flesh,” Tamara said. She curled a finger around Erminia’s wrist. “She’s beautiful.” What she felt was the ordinary tenderness she would have felt for any child, no more and no less. Could she learn to protect her as zealously as any father would—while letting Erminia’s flesh be Erminia’s, not an heirloom held in trust?

  “I hope you’re not thinking of keeping her,” Patrizia said. “The aunties and uncles out there will riot.”

  “I think I need to sleep again.”

  Erminia had discovered Tamara’s stitches and was trying to unpick them; Patrizia reached over and gently pulled her away.