The Eternal Flame

by Greg Egan

  “Will she be safe?” Tamara asked anxiously. Erminia clung to her chest, blithely spitting half-chewed food onto her shoulder.

  “How could anyone answer that?” Amanda replied bluntly. “Maybe all your well-wishers are faking their allegiance. Or maybe just a few of them are. But no one’s forcing you to go anywhere; you can stay here with your daughter as long as you wish. I’ll swap apartments with you, if you like.”

  Patrizia said, “If you go out, there’ll be people you trust on every side of you. But if you prefer, we could have witnesses come in one at a time to see the baby, so they can tell their friends. Whatever happens, there’ll still be doubters and believers on voting day.”

  “I don’t want to be a prisoner here,” Tamara said. She looked around the room at all her friends, at the cluster of bodyguards by the door. Erminia might be in danger for her entire life, but the greatest protection would come when she ceased to be unique, then ceased to be unusual. If she had to be treated as a kind of political mascot first—in order for there to be any prospect of such change—it was too late to plot any other course.

  She turned to Amanda. “Thank you for your offer, and for all your hospitality. But I think it’s time I went home.”

  Amando and Macario left the apartment first, to ask the people outside to give them some space. Tamara heard excited chatter as the implications spread through the crowd. After a while Amando returned. “We can’t clear the whole route in advance,” he said. “But this looks like a reasonable start.”

  All the men made their way out into the corridor, followed by the four women who’d been with Tamara on the raiding party. Clutching her daughter, Tamara approached the doorway, then dragged herself through. Peering past her protectors, she could see the corridor lined with people far into the distance, until its curvature curtailed the view.

  Someone nearby spotted Erminia. “That’s the child,” the woman told her friend quietly. Tamara met her gaze; the woman tipped her head slightly, a greeting that made no demands.

  Ada touched Tamara’s elbow. “You take the central guide rope; I’ll go in front of you, Carla behind, with Patrizia and Macaria on the side ropes.”

  “All right.”

  The five women took their places, then Addo and Pio, Amando and Macario completed the ranks. Tamara wondered how long she’d need to travel this way. A couple more days? A couple more years?

  The group began dragging themselves down the corridor. Tamara cradled Erminia in her upper right arm, using the other three to keep herself steady and secure on the rope. The child did not seem alarmed by all these strangers; she stared at Tamara and pulled faces at random, pausing only if they elicited mimicry or a buzz of mirth from their target.

  With her face bent toward her daughter, Tamara could watch the bystanders ahead with her rear gaze. She’d been afraid that even the most benign of them might try to get too close, eager to interact with Erminia, risking a dangerous crush. But everyone kept a respectful distance, watching intently as mother and daughter approached, speaking quietly among themselves.

  There were a few men in the crowd, but if they’d come with ill feelings they were hiding them well: most of their faces lit up at the sight of the child. Apart from the sheer density of people, Tamara didn’t sense any danger at all; anyone lunging at her from within this mass of supporters was likely to be grabbed long before they encountered her official bodyguards. It was strange and daunting to be part of such a spectacle, but she was not afraid.

  As the group approached the first turn, Tamara spotted Erminio and Tamaro. She let her gaze slide over them, as if she hadn’t recognized them. They were stony-faced, but she could imagine their rage. She concentrated on her daughter and did her best to betray no emotion at all: no gloating over this victory, no fear of retribution. Their lives and hers were disentangled now, surely. Let them follow their rules with anyone who wished to share them, and she’d follow her own.

  “Word will spread fast,” Patrizia said excitedly. “By tomorrow, there won’t be a woman on the Peerless who thinks this is too dangerous to pursue.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “We should have brought some food, though,” Patrizia lamented. “We should have let people see you eating your fill. That would be an image for every woman to take with her on voting day—with every hunger pang reminding her of how she could be rid of the famine.”

  Tamara said, “Now you’re starting to scare me.”

  They might win the vote, she thought. It was not beyond hope now. But if they did, what would that mean? For everyone who took this first tentative sign of the method’s safety as glorious news, there’d be others who’d remain bitterly opposed to it. For every Amando who’d happily classify her as an honorary man, there’d be a Tosco denouncing her as unfit to raise a child as she ushered in the extinction of his sex.

  There was no prospect of victory, just a truce enforced by the balance of numbers. Whatever the vote delivered, true freedom still lay generations away.

  44

  Carlo woke hungry, but he kept the food cupboard locked. He left the apartment as quickly as he could, knowing that if he lingered he’d be tempted to break his routine.

  He reached the entrance to the observatory a few chimes early, but Carla was already waiting for him.

  “I thought you’d be out there doing final checks,” he said.

  Carla was amused. “If anything fails after all the tests we’ve done, it will be too late to fix it now. Today, all I did was wind the springs and set the launch time.”

  She sounded calmer than he was, and he was doing her no favors by being anxious on her behalf. He widened his eyes and offered her his hand. “Shall we go through, then?”

  The weightless observatory platform was crisscrossed with guide ropes for the occasion, but so far only Patrizia and her daughter were present. Carlo greeted them as they approached.

  “The big day at last!” he enthused.

  “I woke up three bells ago,” Leonia replied proudly.

  “She did indeed,” Patrizia lamented.

  “I had trouble sleeping too,” Carlo said. “It’s not every day you see a new kind of rocket.”

  Onesto, the archivist, was next to arrive. He’d been following Carla and Patrizia around the mountain ever since they’d started work on the project, taking notes at every step.

  “The official witness to history is here,” Carlo teased him. “Come to record the moment for future generations.”

  Onesto said, “In that role, I’m entirely redundant. I’m sure everyone here will pass on the story themselves.”

  “But you’ll do a more professional job,” Carlo granted.

  “Perhaps,” Onesto replied. “I only wish I’d started shadowing the inventors sooner. I was in on some of their early conversations by chance, but I missed the most important ones.”

  “We’ve told you as much as we remember!” Carla declared.

  “Exactly,” Onesto agreed sadly. “Edited and censored and tidied up. I don’t blame you, but that’s what memory does.”

  “Does it really matter?” Patrizia wondered. “The techniques that work will be repeated, the results we proved will be taught and retaught. Does anyone need to know how much we blundered about, getting there?”

  Onesto said, “Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.”

  Assunto and Romolo arrived—Carla’s ex-boss and ex-student—followed by Tamara and Erminia, then Ada with her co and her daughter Amelia. As Carla reminisced with Ada, Romolo chatted excitedly with Carlo about his last trip to the Object. He seemed to bear no resentment at all toward the colleagues who’d rendered his work there peripheral.

  “Soon we’ll be testing the luxagen field theory to one part
in a gross-to-the-fourth!” Romolo marveled.

  “That’s impressive.” Carlo made a mental note to ask Carla if this really was true, or was just enthusiastic hyperbole.

  Half a chime before the moment itself, the twelve Councilors filed in, ending all the small talk. Councilor Massimo made a speech, congratulating Carla and Patrizia for their persistence but hedging his bets in case something went wrong.

  When Massimo was done, Leonia took it upon herself to start counting down to the launch. Soon everyone was joining in. Carlo spotted Carla and dragged himself toward her.

  “Where is this ‘rebounder’ thing again?” he joked.

  She pointed out of the dome at the cubical device, a stride or so wide, resting against a platform at the top of a short post.

  “And you expect us to believe that that is going to accelerate forever?”

  “Until it overheats,” Carla replied. “With luck, it could keep going for half a year.”

  “Three!” Leonia screamed, eager to be heard over everyone accompanying her. “Two! One!”

  Carlo saw blue-white light spilling from the chassis, bright but not remotely as intense as the exhaust from any sunstone engine. A little fuel was being burned in there, but it was not being used for propulsion. The light it emitted was priming Carla’s strange device, a crystal whose energy levels had been finely split by its own orderly, polarized light field. For all that Carlo had had the principles explained to him, for all the workshop tests he’d witnessed, if he was honest, a part of him still refused to believe that a lamp in a box could have the power of flight.

  But the brashly named Eternal Flame did ascend, sliding up along the platform that restrained it against the faint push of centrifugal force, crossing the edge and breaking away painfully slowly. Its exhaust was a coherent beam of ultraviolet light, so there was nothing to be seen with the naked eye but the spillage from its lamp. Carlo was torn between an ecstatic sense of triumph and pride, and unworthy thoughts of just how easily a small concealed air tank could have produced the same results.

  When the rocket finally rose above the top of the dome, people began cheering. It seemed to take less than half as much time to double its height. Leonia started nagging Tamara to let her view it through the telescope—and by the time she succeeded that was no longer absurd: Carlo could barely see it with his unaided eyes. When he took his turn at the telescope, Tamara slipped a UV-fluorescing filter into the optics—and the base of the receding rocket was transformed into a dazzling circle. If the beam hadn’t been aimed to one side of the dome, it would have been blinding.

  Councilor Prospero gave the second speech, reminding everyone that he’d always been opposed to bringing orthogonal matter into the Peerless, and welcoming this encouraging sign that such a dangerous strategy would soon be proved unnecessary. Carlo thought of Silvano; he owed his friend a visit. Now that he’d been voted out of high office he was sure to make much better company.

  Patrizia handed out food, but tactfully steered away from Carlo. He’d grown used to seeing her beside Carla: one post-maternal, the other fasting, and the difference in their size no longer looked strange to him. But the sight of so many women eating in public was hard to ignore. When he woke in the night with hunger pangs he could remind himself of the burden he was sharing with his co—but to be reminded that the burden itself was redundant was harder to take.

  By evening the celebrations were growing muted. One by one, the guests congratulated the experimenters and departed. Leonia sat harnessed at the telescope, tirelessly checking and re-checking the rocket’s progress.

  Carla approached him. “I’m leaving now,” she said. “Can we go together?”

  “Of course.” Carlo bade farewell to the others, tickling Leonia until she moved aside and let him take a last peek at the Eternal Flame.

  In the corridor, Carla was pensive.

  “How long do you think it will take to scale up now?” he asked her. “To engine size?”

  “A dozen years at least,” she said. “Maybe twice that.”

  She’d hinted at a similarly daunting time scale before, but Carlo wasn’t convinced. “You’ve spent too long begging for resources, it’s made you pessimistic. Now that you’re the Council’s favorite, all of that’s going to change.”

  Carla buzzed. “The Council can be as magnanimous as they like, but we’re talking about enough spin-polarized clearstone to cover the base of the mountain. We don’t even have that much ordinary clearstone, of any kind. We’re going to need to find ways to manufacture it.”

  “I know. But once you get started,” Carlo predicted, “you’ll find new ideas, new short-cuts, new improvements. Isn’t that how it always goes?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Maybe Leonia will see the engines completed. Her generation, if things go well.”

  They’d reached Carlo’s apartment.

  “Will you invite me in?” she asked him.

  He was afraid now. “Why would I do that?”

  Carla put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve had everything I wanted from life. I’ve completed everything I hoped to complete. Our children should be born now, before you’re much older. Don’t you want to see our grandchildren?”

  Carlo felt himself shivering. “I don’t care about that. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “And I don’t want to go the way of men,” she said. “It almost happened to me once, out at the Object. That’s not the end I want.”

  “It won’t seem as bad if you’ve seen your own daughter,” Carlo promised. “That’s what makes it easier for men. You should talk to Patrizia! She’ll tell you!”

  Carla was unswayed. “You know I made up my mind a long time ago.”

  “Change it,” he pleaded. When he’d joined her in the famine he’d told himself it would help undermine her resolve: by letting her eat a little more, she’d be one step closer to Patrizia—and clear-headed enough to be envious that her own concentration was still not quite as good.

  “I can’t,” Carla said. “It’s not in me. Ever since I was a child this is what I’ve imagined.”

  “Because you never knew you’d have a choice!” Carlo shuddered and added angrily, “What did I fight for, if it wasn’t that choice?”

  Carla squeezed his shoulder. “And now I’m making it. You didn’t waste your time. Maybe our daughter will choose differently.”

  She pushed open the door and dragged herself into the apartment. Carlo clung to the rope in the corridor, wondering what she’d do if he simply fled. He did not believe she’d stop taking holin; she’d keep trying to persuade him, without bludgeoning him with a threat like that. But if he kept refusing her—stint after stint, year after year—she’d find a co-stead easily enough.

  Ever since I was a child this is what I’ve imagined. Those words were just as true for him. And when he set aside the part of himself that understood how much more was possible, all he wanted to do was give in to that ache and fulfill that glorious longing.

  Carla appeared in the doorway.

  “Come to bed,” she said. “We should sleep on this. We can lie together and see what the morning brings.”

  Appendix 1:

  Units and measurements

  Appendix 2:

  Light and colors

  The names of colors are translated so that the progression from “red” to “violet” implies shorter wavelengths. In the Orthogonal universe this progression is accompanied by a decrease in the light’s frequency in time. In our own universe the opposite holds: shorter wavelengths correspond to higher frequencies.

  The smallest possible wavelength of light, λmin, is about 231 piccolo-scants; this is for light with an infinite velocity, at the “ultraviolet limit”. The highest possible time frequency of light, νmax, is about 49 generoso-cycles per pause; this is for stationary light, at the “infrared limit”.

  Appendix 3:

  Vector multiplication

  and division

  The travelers on the Peerless
have developed a way of multiplying and dividing four-dimensional vectors, turning these vectors into a fully fledged number system like the more familiar real and complex numbers. In our own culture, this system is known as the quaternions; it was discovered by William Hamilton in 1843. Just as the real numbers form a one-dimensional line and the complex numbers form a two-dimensional plane, the quaternions form a four-dimensional space, making them the ideal number system for four-dimensional geometry. In our universe the distinction between time and space prevents us making full use of the quaternions, but in the Orthogonal universe the geometry of four-space and the arithmetic of the quaternions fit together seamlessly.

  In the version used on the Peerless, the principal directions in the four dimensions are called East, North, Up and Future, with opposites West, South, Down and Past. The Future direction takes the role of the number one: multiplying or dividing any vector by Future leaves the original vector unchanged. Squaring any of the other three principal directions—East, North and Up—always gives Past, or minus one, so this number system contains three independent square roots of minus one, compared to the single square root of minus one, i, in the complex numbers. (Of course squaring the opposite directions—West, South and Down—also gives Past, just as in the complex numbers squaring –i also gives minus one, but these aren’t counted as independent square roots.)

  Multiplication in this system is non-commutative: a × b generally isn’t the same as b × a.

  Every non-zero vector v has a unique reciprocal or inverse, written v-1, which is the vector for which:

  For example, East-1 = West, North-1 = South, Up-1 = Down and Future-1 = Future. In the first three cases the inverse of the vector is its opposite, but that’s not true in general.

  When we divide vectors, w ÷ v is just multiplication (on the right side) by v-1: