The Eternal Flame (19 page)

Tamara rose to her feet, shivering. Her long vigil by the door had been for nothing. No one was coming for her; she was dead to her friends, dead to the vote collectors, dead to the whole mountain. She should have been digging up every square stride of the farm from the first day of her captivity, looking for Tamaro’s buried key—or some tool misplaced by her grandfather, or some secret hatch left by the construction crew. Anything would have been better than squandering her time on this fantasy.

She walked over to the door and ran her hand across the cool hardstone surface. For the dozenth time she extruded a narrow finger and tried to force it into the keyhole, but the spring-loaded guards between the tumblers were too sharp. It wasn’t a matter of bearing the pain; if she persisted the guards would simply slice her flesh off, ossified or not. The right tool might have enabled her to pick the lock, but with her body alone it was impossible.

Apart from this one entrance the farm was hermetically sealed. Even the air from the cooling system ran in closed channels deep within the floor rather than moving through the chamber itself, lest it spread blight from crop to crop. She couldn’t burn her way through the walls with a lamp, she couldn’t cut her way out with a scythe. And the stone around her was far too thick for any cry for help to reach her neighbors.

Erminio wasn’t going to creep back in to be ambushed. Ada and Roberto weren’t coming to the rescue with a construction team wielding air-powered grinders. The only way out was with the key. The only way to get the key was from Tamaro.

It took her until morning to find him. As the red wheat-flowers began closing across the fields, she saw Tamaro rise from a hiding spot beneath their spread blooms and look around for better cover.

He heard her approaching and disappeared between the stalks, but she dropped to all fours to match his height and pursued him in the gloom of the moss-light. The crops rustled at every touch, making stealth impossible for both of them, but Tamara was faster. She wondered why he didn’t halt and grant himself the advantage of silence; perhaps he thought he needed more distance between them before he had any real chance of her losing him.

As she pushed on through the stalks their relentless susurration might have deafened her to anything similar, but Tamaro was weaving back and forth, sending out his own distinctive rhythm. She could hear every change of direction he made, the slight hesitation as he swerved. They’d played this game before, she realized. More than a dozen years ago. He had never learned to escape her then; it had never been important enough.

Tamara could almost see him now—or at least she could see the rebounding wheat stalks ahead of her, darkened by their momentary clustering, brightening as the gaps re-opened to admit the moss-light. She knew when he’d zigzag next, and she sprinted straight for the point where she could intercept him.

Pain flared in her left front leg. She recoiled and brought herself to a halt as an arc of neatly sliced stalks fell to the ground ahead of her.

“Stay where you are,” Tamaro warned her.

“I only want to talk,” she said. In the silence she could hear him shivering. “What’s the plan now? Are you going to hack me to pieces?”

“If I have to,” he replied. “Don’t think I won’t defend myself.”

He was terrified. She’d thought she’d done him very little harm the last time she’d got her hands on him, but he must have sensed how close she’d come to something worse. Tamara wanted to buzz with mirth, but she found herself humming with grief and shame.
They were both in fear of their lives from each other. How had it come to this?

She got control of herself. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “We need to talk. We need to fix this.” She caught a red glint as he raised the scythe, holding it ready in case she advanced on him. “Please, Tamaro.”

“I can’t let you out,” he said. “They’ll lock me up. They’ll lock up Erminio.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. There was no point pretending that any lie she could tell would be enough to exonerate them. “But it’s up to you how bad it is. If they catch you out after I’m gone, you know they’ll throw away the key. If you turn yourself in right now and I ask the Council for leniency, it could just be a year or so.”

“I can’t do that to him. I can’t betray
my own father!
”

Tamara shivered wearily. Mother, father… why was his co always last on the list?

“What do you want from your life?” she asked him. “Do you want to raise children?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Then find a way to do it. Find a co-stead and raise your own. If I give birth here you can be sure it won’t be your doing, and you’ll have lost all hope of having children of your own. If you give me the key, I’ll keep my promise: I’ll sign the entitlement over to you as soon as we have paper and a witness.”

The wheat rustled; he was moving the scythe again. “How can I trust you?”

“You’re my co,” she said. “I still love you, I still want you to have a good life. You can’t expect us to have children together after what you’ve done, but I don’t care about the entitlement—just let me fly the
Gnat
, let me have a few moments of happiness. Let me be what I am, and I’ll grant you the same.”

The silence stretched on for more than a lapse. Tamara forced herself to wait it out; one misjudged word now could cost her everything.

She heard Tamaro put down the scythe.

“I’ll show you where the key is,” he said.

He led her to a nondescript part of the field, far from any store-hole old or new, and dug into the soil beside one of the plants. When he plucked the key out from between the roots she knew she would never have found it herself if she’d searched for a year.

He handed it to her.

“Come with me,” Tamara said. “I’m not going to lie to people, but I won’t make it hard for you.”

“I should wait here for Erminio,” Tamaro decided. “I should talk to him first.”

“All right.” Tamara reached over and touched his shoulder, trying to reassure him that she wasn’t going to renege on any of her promises. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. Was he ashamed of what he’d done to her, or just ashamed that he hadn’t been able to follow through on his father’s plan?

She left him in the field and ran to the doorway. The key fitted neatly, forcing the guards apart, but when she tried to turn it the lock wouldn’t yield. Panicking, she pulled it out and scoured it clean with her fingers, then she tapped it against the door until a tiny clump of soil fell from one of its intricate slots.

She inserted it again and twisted it gently; she could hear the faint clicks as one by one the cylinders in the lock engaged. She tried the handle and the door swung open as if nothing had ever been awry.

A few stretches down the corridor she turned a corner and ran into her neighbor, Calogero. He was carrying a ballot box and a stack of voting papers.

“Tamara?” He stared at her. “So… the blight’s under control now?”

“It certainly is.”
Blight.
What else could keep every prying neighbor away until the deed was done? Tamara stood a moment, marveling at Erminio’s cunning. The worse he claimed the infestation to be, the keener the agronomists would be to investigate the aftermath—but it would only take a few burned patches in the fields to make it look as if Tamaro had eradicated the menace entirely.

Calogero was still confused, though if he’d been told that children had already been sighted he wasn’t letting on. “Is Tamaro coming out to vote?”

“He didn’t say. But there’s nothing in the farm for you to worry about,” she said.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely. The election probably slipped his mind. You should go in and get his vote.”

“All right.” Calogero put down the ballot box and offered her a paper. He said, “I know there’ll be other places on your way, but since we’re here you might as well get it over with.”

21

“C
arla! I thought we’d lost you to the astronomers!”

Patrizia looked alarmingly gaunt, but she seemed to be in good spirits. Carla dragged herself across the small meeting room toward her. With all the preparations for the trip it had been more than six stints since they’d last spoken. “If Tamara had her way I’d be doing another safety drill right now,” Carla replied. “I’ve spent more time inside their fake
Gnat
than I ever will inside the real one.”

“Better than being unprepared,” Patrizia suggested.

“True.” Every member of the crew had made mistakes in the tethered mock-up that might well have been fatal if they’d taken place on the real flight. “But I wasn’t going to miss this for anything. ‘Demoting the Photon’? Assunto agreed that our experiments were conclusive. I can’t believe he’d turn around and attack us like this.”

“Does demotion count as an attack?” Patrizia wondered. “At least he didn’t call it ‘Forget About the Photon’.”

“You’re much too forgiving,” Carla complained. “It’ll ruin your career.”

Patrizia said, “Don’t you think we should hear him out before deciding if there’s anything to forgive?”

Carla spotted Onesto and raised a hand in greeting. As he approached she called out, “Here for more punishment?” As enchanted as Onesto was by the grand narrative of physics, he wasn’t always keen to dirty his hands with the real thing. When he’d sat in on her power series calculations for the tarnishing experiment he’d ended up moaning and clutching his head.

“Duty compels me,” he said. “Someone has to document this revolution.”

“Including every petty little backlash?” Carla replied.

Onesto was amused. “So you’re taking the title of this talk personally?”

“How else should I take it? I have to defend my one claim to immortality.”

“Wasn’t it Patrizia who posited the photon?”

“Yes, but I chose the name.”

By the time Assunto arrived the room was crowded. He placed a stack of copies of his paper in a dispenser by the doorway. Carla was hurt that he hadn’t shown it to her earlier, giving her a chance to respond. She hadn’t had the time to engage in any serious collaboration since she’d agreed to join the crew of the
Gnat
, but she wasn’t—yet—literally unreachable.

Assunto began, without ceremony. “The tarnishing experiments carried out by Carla and her team have given us compelling evidence that the luxagens in a solid can only occupy certain definite energy levels. These levels can be explained by treating the luxagens as standing waves, spread out across the width of their energy valleys, rather than particles with a single, definite position at every moment in time.

“Yet once they’re freed from the solid, the same luxagens scatter light in a manner suggesting that they really are particles—and that the light they scatter also consists of particles, some three times heavier than the luxagens.

“But light, undeniably, is a wave. Giorgio and Nereo showed us how to measure its wavelength from the interference pattern it makes when it passes through two or more slits. Carla and Patrizia have never sought to deny that, but they do ask us to accept that this wave is always accompanied by a suitable entourage of particles—not so much driven along with the wave by any explicable force, as bound to it by an axiom too profound and opaque to yield to any further reflection or inquiry.”

Carla tried not to grow angry; in truth, this was the weakest part of their theory. But no amount of sarcasm directed at that awkward hybrid ontology could change the evidence: light’s granular nature was every bit as plain as its wavelike properties.

“What are we to make of this?” Assunto continued. “I propose a solution that builds on the success of Patrizia’s principle. The equation governing a particle trapped in an energy valley is transformed, by that principle, into an equation for a standing wave in the same valley. Such a wave can only take on certain distinct shapes, each with its own characteristic energy.

“But if our ideas about the mechanics of a simple particle require such a radical new approach, surely we shouldn’t apply it in a piecemeal fashion? Suppose we can identify
another system
that appears to be governed by the very same equations that we once thought adequate to account for the motion of a particle in a valley. Shouldn’t that system be treated in exactly the same way?”

Carla had no idea what example he had in mind, but on the face of it this sounded like a reasonable proposal.

Assunto said, “Consider a light wave with a single, pure frequency, traveling in a certain direction and possessing a definite polarization. In the real world we never encounter anything so simple—but the actual waves we
do
find traveling through the void can always be constructed by adding together a multitude of those idealized waves.

“Because this wave has a single frequency, we can capture everything about the way it changes over time by picking one location and measuring the strength, the amplitude, of the light field at that point. This amplitude behaves very simply: it oscillates back and forth at the frequency shared by the entire wave.

“Does that remind you of anything? Such as… a particle rolling back and forth in an energy valley?”

Assunto paused, as if expecting objections, but the room was silent. Carla wanted to leap ahead of him—to complete the analogy, grasp its implications and find some fatal flaw that he had missed—but her mind seized up and the opportunity passed.

“The parallels can be made precise,” Assunto claimed. “The amplitude of our idealized light wave corresponds to the distance of a particle from the center of a one-dimensional, infinitely high, parabolic energy valley. The energy of the light wave can be broken down into two parts: one analogous to the particle’s potential energy, due only to its position in the valley, and the other analogous to its kinetic energy, which depends only on its speed.

“Carla and her team have already shown us what happens when you apply Patrizia’s principle to a particle trapped in an energy valley in a solid. Our system is actually simpler, since the valley in a solid is three-dimensional, and it’s not exactly parabolic. The simpler version of all the same calculations yields an infinite sequence of energy levels, all spaced the same distance apart.