The Eternal Flame (10 page)

Carla plotted all the measurements on her chest, then dusted her skin with dye and made copies for the students to keep. “Think of this as a souvenir,” she told Romolo. “Maybe by the time your grandchildren are studying optics, this experiment will be as famous as those Sabino did to measure Nereo’s force.”

“I’m confused,” Romolo said. “Did we find free luxagens in the container, or didn’t we?”

Carla said, “Ask me that again in six years’ time.”

10

C
arlo stiffened his tympanum to keep himself silent, then plunged the probe deep into the flesh of his wrist. As he struggled to force the needle all the way down to the calibration mark the pain became excruciating, but once the thing was in place and motionless the sensation was tolerable.

“The voles of the
Peerless
thank you for your sacrifice,” Amanda said wryly.

Carlo managed a dismissive buzz. Loath as he was to inflict needless suffering on the animals, he was stabbing himself more out of expediency than compassion. The current version of the probe was so large that he could not have expected the creatures to endure it without an elaborate routine of anesthesia and recovery—and by the time he’d also trained the voles to perform specific movements on cue he would have ended up with a protocol where every trivial experiment took half a dozen stints to complete.

He waited a lapse or so for his skewered flesh to recover from the shock, then wiggled his fingers cautiously. He hadn’t paralyzed any of them. The question now was whether he’d erred in the other direction; if the probe was too far from the bundle of motor pathways he’d have no chance to spy on its traffic.

Amanda was harnessed to the bench beside the light recorder. Carlo gestured to her to look through the eyepiece, then he moved all his fingers at once.

She said, “Nothing.”

“All right. Let me turn it a little.”

The hardstone tube protruding from his wrist had a cross-hatched ring at the top, attached to the inner sleeve that held the primary mirror within the probe’s clearstone tip. Above the ring, the same sleeve slotted into the side of a much longer tube that carried the light across into the recorder. Carefully, Carlo began to turn the ring, aiming the mirror below in a new direction. Since none of the moving parts were in contact with his flesh the adjustment ought to have been painless, but in fact there was enough friction between the sleeve and the outer tube to make the whole probe start twisting, so he had to stop and sprout a new hand to hold the thing steady.

He wiggled the fingers of his impaled hand again. Amanda said, “Yes! There’s light now!”

He tried the six fingers one by one. Amanda could catch glimpses of his brain’s messages to all of them, but the second finger from the right gave the best results. Carlo adjusted the mirror further, turning it back and forth by ever smaller angles until the light coming through was as bright as he could make it. He might have been able to do better still if he’d been willing to yank the probe out and reinsert it closer to the pathway, but that didn’t seem worth the pain. So long as he had a visible signal, that would be enough to tell him whether or not the machine was going to be useful.

He began tracing out a circle with the tip of the chosen finger, repeating the motion as smoothly as he could. “Can you see that?” he asked Amanda.

“Yes. Don’t ask me what the sequence is, but I’d swear it’s periodic.”

This was not an unbiased judgment: she was watching his hand with her rear gaze even as she peered through the eyepiece. But with luck they’d soon have a more objective way of assessing the signal’s properties.

“Start the recorder,” he said.

Amanda flipped the lever to retract the mirror that was diverting light into the eyepiece, then she disengaged the brake on the drive wheel. Carlo tried to keep his mind on his rotating finger and ignore the machine’s whir, surprised by the strength of his urge to hold his whole body expectantly motionless. When he’d first been testing the recorder—with a slab of lamp-lit translucent resin taking the place of his flesh—he’d usually ended up waiting, tensed, for the sound of tearing paper.

“It’s finished,” Amanda announced. She opened the device and extracted the spool, then stretched out a portion of the strip so they could both see it.

It was blank.

Carlo was disappointed, but not greatly surprised. With every trained instrument builder busy on the
Gnat
or some ancillary project, he’d had to use salvaged components for most of the optics and clockwork, while the way the parts had been brought together was unmistakably a product of his own inexpert hands. The failure he’d been dreading most was that the temperamental system for dispensing the activation gas might stop working again, leaving the paper to run through the machine without being properly sensitized.

“Maybe the viewing mirror’s stuck,” he suggested hopefully.

Amanda bent toward the eyepiece. Carlo was still mechanically twiddling his finger. She said, “Not unless it stuck halfway, because I can’t see anything.” She pushed the lever to reinsert the mirror. “And I still can’t.”

“So I’ve been torturing myself for nothing?” Carlo joked. “The voles will be pleased. Maybe something else has slipped out of alignment.”

“Wait, what was that? You stopped—”

He’d stilled his finger. “Yes.”

Amanda said, “When you
stopped
, there was a burst of light.”

Carlo started up the motion again, slowly and deliberately. “What do you see now?”

“That’s… back to how it was at the start.”

He said, “Show me the rest of the recording strip.”

Amanda unspooled it completely. At the start of the recording the paper displayed a long sequence of dark streaks, the density of the pigment rising and falling in a complex pattern. Only the last quarter of the strip was blank.

Carlo said, “Check the eyepiece again.”

Amanda complied. “The signal’s still visible.”

Carlo tried to distract himself, to think of anything but his rotating finger. “How’s your co?” he asked.

“He’s fine,” Amanda replied, surprised by the question. “He’s just switched to a new job, doing maintenance on the main cooling system—ah, the signal’s gone again.”

“Either there’s an intermittent fault in the optics,” Carlo said, “or my finger doesn’t really need to be told what to do all the time. If the instructions follow a simple pattern, the flesh soon gets the message and the brain stops repeating itself. Until—”

He halted the twirling.

Amanda said, “There’s that burst again. A ‘stop what you were doing’ signal?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“We should get that on tape,” she suggested.

Carlo agreed. They spent the next bell and a half capturing the signals that initiated and halted dozens of different movements, trying to exhaust all the possibilities while the probe was in place and the recorder was still working. They ran out of paper before Carlo was entirely satisfied, but by then he was glad of any excuse to extract the probe and resorb his abused limb.

Amanda left him; she had two pairs of voles ready to mate in the pathway suppression experiments. Carlo stayed harnessed to the bench, looking over the recordings.

The patterns for all the repetitive motions he’d tried were, gratifyingly, roughly periodic. In fact, if he coiled each strip into a broad helix of just the right width he could place each cycle right beside its successor, and see the same instructions arriving again and again. Then the pattern faded out until the “stop” signal came—and that was virtually identical in every case.

On a finer scale, though, the sequences remained mysterious. The brightness and duration of the individual pulses varied enormously, and there were no obvious recurring motifs. So how did his flesh interpret these instructions? Were there detailed commands for each muscle fiber, spelling out every contraction? Or was this more like a sequence of symbols or sounds, strung together to form words in some ancient somatic language?

Tosco had conducted an ingenious study where he’d dyed the flesh in a lizard’s extremities, color-coded by its initial position, and shown that after being resorbed it could turn up in any other labile region. The flesh that had comprised a certain toe one day could easily find itself in the middle of a limb the day after. But that didn’t settle the question as to whether the flesh “knew” which role it was playing at any given moment, or whether that responsibility fell entirely to the brain. Each time the body reshaped itself, did the brain tell the new toe-flesh “Now you are a toe”, allowing them both in later conversations to take certain toe-ish understandings for granted? The signals Carlo had recorded for repeated motions—spelled out the first few times, then left to his finger’s own initiative—suggested that the brain didn’t micro-manage everything, but the initial instructions seemed far more detailed and complex than he would have expected if they were merely specifying a selection from a pre-existing repertoire of possible finger movements.

Carlo looked across the workshop toward Tosco’s bench. Nine years after his first dye studies, he was still repeating the experiments—and that wasn’t out of laziness or inertia. He kept refining the techniques and gathering more data, painstakingly building up maps that showed the way flesh moved within a lizard’s body as it adopted various postures.

Nine years was nothing in the history of this field. A lifetime was nothing. Carlo gazed at the streaks of pigment on the paper in front of him, and realized that he still hadn’t solved one simple, practical problem: the paper was darkest when the light had been most bright. If he ever hoped to send these recorded signals back into his body, he’d need a way to modulate the light source in precisely the opposite fashion: making it bright when the paper was dark.

Amanda returned with the preliminary results from her two vole matings. The whole brood in the second suppression test had been stillborn—but as ever it had been a brood of four.

She took one of the strips of paper from the bench and held it up to the light from a nearby lamp.

“So… you’ll run this beside a second, sensitized strip?” she asked. “To duplicate the pattern with the density reversed?”

Carlo stared at her in silence, dumbstruck for a moment. Then he came to his senses and replied, “Of course.”

11

“A
ir,” said Ivo. “Air is what remains when the fiercest flame has consumed its fuel entirely. There’s nothing safer, nothing more stable. In the worst case imaginable—if the orthogonal rock acts as a liberator for all of our solids—we should still be able to manipulate it with jets of air.”

Tamara looked around the small chamber, wondering if anyone else shared the secret thrill she felt at the prospect Ivo was raising. What could be more terrifying than a universal liberator: a substance that could set anything on fire? And what could be more exhilarating than finding a way to cheat that danger, to grasp the ungraspable in invisible hands?

Massima, the lottery winner, appeared to be growing less at ease with each word she heard. When she’d first put her name down for a chance at this jaunt there’d been a lot less talk of explosions. Ulfa, the chemist appointed by the Council to oversee the project, was as calm and businesslike as ever, raising neat rows of notes on her chest as Ivo spoke. Only Ada, who’d beaten six other astronomers in their own mini-lottery for deputy navigator, showed any sign of excitement.

Ada said, “What if we can’t break a sample free with air alone? If the Object is made of something like hardstone, and there are no loose fragments… you can’t carve hardstone with a jet of air, however high the pressure.”

“If that’s the situation,” Ivo replied, “we’ll have to cut into the surface with airborne dust. If we add a small amount of crushed powderstone to the jet, the reaction between the powderstone and the orthogonal rock will render the jet far more potent.”

“You’re assuming that the rock itself will be consumed, and not just the powderstone,” Ulfa pointed out.

“Do you know of any liberator that
isn’t
consumed in the flame it creates?” Ivo asked her.

“No,” Ulfa conceded. “But the liberators we know about are fragile plant extracts. We can’t assume that a slab of solid rock will act the same way.”

“If there’s a flame produced at all, the heat should at least weaken the rock,” Ivo said. “And if that’s not sufficient, we could replace the powderstone with hardstone, making the jet more abrasive.”

Ulfa said, “This is a material we’ve never encountered before. What if it can’t be abraded, even by burning hardstone?”

Ivo emitted a soft hum of frustration. “There’s no reason to believe that orthogonal matter will be endowed with magical powers of durability! Reversing the arrows of its luxagens might influence its chemical properties with respect to ordinary matter, but it can’t make the rock itself harder, or more resistant to heat.”

Tamara had to side with him on that: it was basic rotational physics. For a rock to be rendered tougher just because its “future”—according to Nereo’s arrow—had ended up facing their past was as absurd as expecting a rope to become stronger if you turned around and traversed it in the opposite direction.

Ulfa remained calm, but unswayed. “I understand that, Ivo. But it’s my job to ask what will happen if these assumptions are wrong.”

“If the rock can’t be cut by any method at all… then we won’t cut it,” Ivo replied. “What else can I say?”

“And if you can’t take a sample,” Ulfa pressed him, “how will you calibrate the process that you’re hoping to use to capture the Object?”

Ivo was silent for a few pauses. Then he said, “We’ll have no choice but to perform the reaction in the wild. We’ll throw calmstone at the Object and observe the effects—scaling up the quantity gradually so we don’t take undue risks.”

“But you’ll have no way to measure the force you’re producing,” Ulfa said.

“Not immediately,” Ivo agreed. “Not until it starts to change the Object’s trajectory. We’ll simply have to work by trial and error, incrementally: dropping calmstone on the site where we want to deliver a push, until the cumulative effect is large enough to observe.”