The Eternal Flame (25 page)

The flashes were coming every pause or two now, and the wall of rock was drawing closer. Carla struggled not to panic; the single worst thing they could do would be to aim an air jet straight at the surface in the hope of a swift ascent. All their tanks had to be treated as equally suspect: the contents of any of them touching the surface could engulf the
Mite
in a conflagration.

She made some quick calculations on her thigh.
Jet four, six flickers
, she suggested. Jet four was pointing back along their orbit; though the burst of air would be aimed horizontally, it would raise their velocity and reduce the curvature of their trajectory enough to cause them to ascend.

What about spillage?
Ivo protested.

Can’t be helped.
The jet’s nozzle would send out a wide spray, some of which was sure to reach the surface. But if they did nothing they’d remain on their original orbit, passing within a few dozen strides of the rock. The flames were probably reaching at least that high already, and with the source of contamination even closer the eruptions could only become more intense.

Shut off all air?
Ivo replied.

Carla hesitated. Would that be wiser than risking the jet? The air shield was clearly more of a liability than a source of protection, but she couldn’t say the same about their cooling bags.

Hyperthermia?
she countered.

Shield is worst thing
, Ivo pointed out.
Bags later, not for long.

He didn’t wait for a reply for the first step; he reached into the center of the
Mite
and closed the outlet valve on the air tank feeding the shield.

The blue flares persisted, undiminished, for so long that Carla came close to proclaiming that Ivo’s dismal hypothesis was wrong, and that they could use the air jet to retreat with impunity. Then, abruptly, the rock became dark.

Once it had actually happened, it was hard to think of this respite from the encroaching flames as a bad thing. But the fact that Ivo had been right about the cause didn’t mean his minimal air scenario really was the
Mite
’s best chance. If they did use the jet, how much spillage would there be? How high would the explosion reach? Would it spread out from the ignition site fast enough to catch them?

The truth was, Carla didn’t know. She couldn’t quantify any of these things.

How long, then, could they survive without air drawing heat from their bodies? People who’d lived through accidents in the void rarely had a chance to consult a clock, but Carla had heard claims that the limit was a couple of chimes.

The Object filled half the sky. Her irresolution had settled the matter: they were too close now to risk using the jet. All they could do was follow the orbit down.

Carla could see the plains of gray powderstone approaching, below her to the left but swinging toward her right, the wall of rock tilting and coming full circle. The scale was impossible to judge; she checked the clock. The lowest point on the orbit was still seven chimes away.

A wide, shallow crater slid by, its ancient walls broken like the ruined desert fortress her father had described to her as he recited a story from the sagas. As it passed, flames erupted along part of its rim and spilt across the ground.
This was it: the meeting of worlds she’d longed for.
With a pang of grief she thought of sweet Carlo, fighting so hard to keep her alive, poring over census records to plan their every meeting.

A trail of blue fire pursued the
Mite
, streaking across the pitted landscape. The light from it was dazzling, almost painful, but Carla couldn’t look away. Ivo reached up to the tank on his chest and shut off the air to his cooling bag. Moments later the flames subsided, but they did not die completely.

She squeezed Ivo’s hand, lost for words but trying to let him know that she didn’t blame him. He hadn’t forced her to join him. The ground was so close now that Carla could see the structure of the rock, the surface of coarse lumps and concavities about the size of her fist. It looked exactly like powderstone. Ivo’s bold plan to grab a sample here might even have worked, if not for the blunder that had rendered his air blades as suicidal as any hardstone chisel.

The flames were rising again, and gaining on the
Mite
. Carla checked the clock; the low point was still four chimes away. She turned down her cooling air as far as she could while still sensing some flow across her skin, but the effect on the height of the flames was slight, and soon overtaken by the
Mite
’s descent. She could feel the heat coming off the blazing ground now, worse than anything her own body could inflict on her.

She shut off the air completely.

The flames faltered, then winked out, leaving the
Mite
gliding over the starlit landscape. Carla felt a rush of euphoria, but time and geometry were not on her side. Once she and Ivo had both lost consciousness, their deaths would be guaranteed. Even if they were still alive at the point where it was safe to turn on the air again, they’d be oblivious to the chance to save themselves.

She stared at the useless air blades atop the workbench, angry now. Ivo had seen his grandchildren; maybe the folk saying was right after all. That sense of completion had made him careless with his own life, and now his sloppiness was going to kill her too. She thought of grabbing the stupid tools and aiming them at the ground, going out in a blaze of glory that would carve her own name into the sagas.

She saw the whole scene from outside her body: she was silhouetted against the inferno she’d made, one blade in each upper hand, the tubes that fed them running down into the
Mite
. It was a striking image, no doubt about that—but there’d be no witness to record her defiant pose.

The tubes.

She turned to Ivo; he was slumped in his harness, eyes closed. What was she waiting for—his permission to tear the device apart? Carla wrenched the tube off the right-hand blade, then reached down and pulled the other end free from the outlet of its air tank. With her lower hands she groped inside the bottom of the
Mite
, finding the clock whose dials she’d been checking. The mechanism was completely exposed; Marzio, bless him, hadn’t sealed it away behind decorative panels that would only have made repairs more difficult.

She could feel the shafts that led out to the dials: she was disoriented for a moment, but the one for counting flickers was easy to distinguish by its speed, and the one for pauses not much harder. Once she had those two fixed in her mind, the shaft she wanted—the shaft that turned once every chime—was easy to find.

She probed the space between the back of the clock face and the gear at the base of the shaft. The separation was more than the thickness of the air tube. Better more than less—but the fit would not be tight enough to keep the tube in place by friction alone.

She felt her way deeper into the flying workbench and found a rack of vials, a stock of reagents that Ivo had intended to use in his calorimetry experiments. Each vial was sealed with a thick blob of resin. Carla sharpened her fingertips and sliced the top half off one of the seals, then daubed the sticky resin over the shaft. She did the same with a second seal, using it to coat the center of the gear. Her body was starting to protest against the heat now; mites were crawling beneath her skin, and some pointless instinct was trying to tempt her with visions of a cooling bed of sand.

She bent the air tube, bringing the two halves together so the corner was crimped to an impassably narrow fold—probably not air tight, but the flow it allowed would be a tiny fraction of the flow through the unobstructed width. Then she passed the tube down to her lower hands and pressed the folded end against the resin-coated shaft.

Laboriously, she began wrapping the tube into a spiral, threading the long tails in and out of the narrow spaces of the clock. The tube fought against the curvature and broke free. She sliced off more resin from two more vials and spread it over the gear and the tube. Her skin was stinging all over now, and points of light were moving across her vision.

The tube stayed in place, curled five times around the slowly turning shaft. Carla pulled apart the join between her cooling bag and its supply tank, and interposed the crude timer.

She opened the valve on the air tank slowly, afraid that too much pressure would tear the tube free. She stopped at the point she remembered by touch—well short of fully open, but where she’d last felt enough air flowing across her skin to make some difference. Nothing was coming through the pinch, and there’d been no tell-tale bounce of the tube unraveling.

She was dizzy now, too disoriented to trust herself to check anything she’d done, let alone try to change it. The lights behind her eyelids swarmed and chittered. She tried to picture Carlo, his body pressed against her, but then part of her refused to be fooled or comforted and the image of him spun away into the whiteness.

25

C
arla shuddered and vomited a thin sludge into her helmet. She felt as if every scant of her flesh had been pounded with a mallet. She opened her rear eyes and looked down to see blue flames flickering over the gray rocks beneath her.
Again?
She was about to start buzzing hysterically, before her mind cleared enough for her to realize that the fire didn’t have to be a bad sign at all.

She reached for the clock, afraid that the tube might have become caught in the mechanism and jammed it, but far from being stuck the dials showed a later time than she’d dared to hope for. The
Mite
had passed its lowest point. She was alive, and she was moving away from danger.

She quickly turned Ivo’s air back on. The flames rose up in response, but she persisted until the heat became threatening, then she cut the flow back a fraction.

Ivo didn’t move. He’d shut off his air long before she had. Carla shivered but refused to start mourning him. A few lapses later the flames went out completely, so she set his cooling bag to full strength. The tube that had saved her life had broken away from the clock shaft and was floating around in front of her in an irritating loop, so she reconnected her tank directly to her bag and stowed the tube inside one of the
Mite
’s small storage compartments.

Ivo stirred and began rolling his head, as if trying to unkink his neck muscles. Carla let him be until he opened his eyes and appraised the situation for himself.

He reached for her hand.
We’re ascending?

Yes.

He didn’t ask her to explain what had happened. After a while, he took his hand away and began loosening his harness.

Carla’s first instinct was not to intervene; if he’d been injured by the ordeal he might need to move to make himself more comfortable. It was only when he was entirely free of the harness and on the verge of pushing away from the
Mite
that she understood and grabbed hold of his arm. She was not at her strongest, but he was in no condition to resist her.

She took his hand again.

Better that I die
, he wrote.

Carla didn’t know what to say to that, but she resisted the urge to slap him across the head. He’d made an honest mistake that had put them in danger, but they’d both survived. He’d undermined the
Gnat
’s chances of capturing the Object, but a future mission could always try again, better prepared. And though his reputation would be marred by this débâcle, he’d still been instrumental in the fact that the
Gnat
had flown at all.

The contamination was an uncharacteristic lapse. Carla had seen Ivo inspecting the air filters with a microscope, to ensure that there were no tears in them. But if the problem hadn’t arisen through carelessness, what had been its root? A misunderstanding of some kind. Which process was better understood, though: the filtering of dust from air… or the behavior of air in the presence of orthogonal matter?

What if the air is pure?
she wrote.

Ivo didn’t dignify that with a reply. There was no better established fact in all of chemistry than the inertness of air. Nobody had a perfect explanation for this, but it had long been conjectured that each particle of the gas was a spherical cluster of luxagens, arranged in such a way that Nereo’s force canceled almost perfectly outside the cluster.

Still, when air bounced against rock it was Nereo’s force that made it bounce. Once an air particle actually made contact with something, the luxagens within couldn’t hide themselves completely. So it wasn’t
inconceivable
that orthogonal rock could react differently to air built from positive luxagens than it would to its own, presumably innocuous, swapped version. Let everyone on the
Gnat
and the
Peerless
share the blame, then, for failing to imagine that possibility.

Carla hadn’t thought to try to get a spectrum of the flames their spilt air had summoned, but she’d have bet anything that the same dominant spectral line as they’d seen before would have been present. Every mineral’s structure was complicated in a different way, and even a particle of air had its own elaborate geometry, but that one line screamed simplicity.

What was the UV frequency?
she wrote.

Ivo gave her the wavelength.

No, the frequency.

I have no idea
, he replied. His spectrograph was calibrated for wavelengths; it was the convention among chemists to express all their results in those terms.

You can’t work it out?
Carla wasn’t so rattled that she couldn’t do it herself, but she wanted to keep Ivo engaged.

He humored her, carrying out the calculations on the patch of skin they shared. The spectral line’s wavelength wasn’t much greater than the minimum wavelength of light. Yalda’s formula put the frequency at near enough to three tenths the maximum; Ivo dutifully multiplied this out to get roughly a dozen and three generoso-cycles per pause.

Carla didn’t care about the final number; it must have been nice for the ancestors that a “pause” was a convenient fraction of the rotational period of the home world, but it had no bearing on anything else in the cosmos. All the real physics was in the pure ratios of numbers, untouched by the whims of history and convention.