The Eternal Flame (39 page)

Patrizia regarded her with bemusement. “Everything you say is true,” she said.

“Then why didn’t you tell me? That’s what I came here for!” Carla dragged herself back along the guide rope, confused. “I needed to know where I’d gone wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your plan,” Patrizia insisted. “Not as far as I can tell. But as you say, the proof will be in the demonstration.”

“
And then what?
” Carla hummed with frustration. “If we succeed, we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that
if
half the mountain had been made of exactly the right kind of clearstone, that would have solved the fuel problem? And that the ancestors are likely to have all the resources they’d need to evacuate the home world—with the only problem being the lack of any way to tell them how to do it?”

“If we succeed in making a photon rocket,” Patrizia replied, “then it will be the start of an entirely new endeavor: working with the chemists to learn how to make the right kind of clearstone, in the quantities we need, from the materials we actually possess.”

Carla was incredulous. “You want the chemists to make a mineral on demand, now? You mean the way they solved the fuel problem by transmuting all our spare calmstone into sunstone?”

Patrizia said, “
Now
you’re being crazy. First, the quantities we’d need would be much, much smaller: we’re talking about making engines that will run for years, not fuel that will be used up in an instant. Second, I suspect that different kinds of clearstone are chemically and energetically far more similar than calmstone is to sunstone. And third… if we can make your idea work, even on a modest scale, that will give us a new energy source. Burning sunstone to provide the energy to make sunstone would have been a losing proposition. But whether it’s heat or photons the chemists need to nudge one kind of clearstone into another, if we can pull off your trick and make an Eternal Flame on our own—even once—then we ought to be able to supply that energy without
consuming
anything.”

36

“T
alk to your co!” Silvano pleaded. “I don’t know what’s got into her, but if she starts backing away from our plans to exploit the Object she’ll lose all credibility with the Council.”

Carlo had been puzzled when Silvano had invited him to visit without Carla, but he hadn’t objected; he understood that there were matters that the two of them would be more comfortable discussing alone. It hadn’t occurred to him, though, that Carla herself might be one of them.

“She’s had an idea for something better,” he said. “I’m not an expert in any of this, and I gather that the other physicists’ opinions are divided. But what do you expect me to do? I can’t tell her to ignore her own judgment.”

“Wasn’t the whole point of these new light sources to manipulate orthogonal matter?” Silvano seemed to think that everything came down to that: Carla had gained his support for her project on that basis, and any attempt to change course now made her guilty of acting under false pretences.

“The research has opened up another possibility,” Carlo replied. “Why is that so terrible? The Object isn’t going anywhere. If this new idea turns out to be a dead end, you’ll still be able to resume the original project.”

“
Resume?
” Silvano was appalled. “We won’t get anywhere if we allow ourselves to be distracted every time someone’s mind goes off on a tangent. We need to finish what we’ve started!”

“Finish it how?” Carlo shifted uncomfortably on the rope, then decided to be blunt. “Do you want to see people annihilated, before we even consider the alternatives?”

“You’re saying the Object is so dangerous that we should forget about it completely? That wasn’t Carla’s attitude before.”

“And it’s probably not her attitude now,” Carlo admitted. “I’m sure she still believes that the dangers could be managed, given enough time and effort. But if there’s a chance to avoid those dangers altogether, why not look into that first?”

“Because it’s a fantasy!” Silvano proclaimed derisively. “Believe me, I admire the courage Carla showed in what she did to capture the Object—and I don’t blame her at all if she’s reluctant to go back. She doesn’t need to fly into the void again; she’s already a hero to everyone on the
Peerless
. But that’s no reason to sabotage the whole project, just to save face!”

Carlo said, “I have work to do.” He stretched out an arm, pushing himself away from the rope so he could peer into the playroom. “Bye, Flavia! Bye, Flavio!” The children didn’t turn away from the tent they were building, but they glanced toward him with their rear gazes and nodded in farewell.

Silvano tried to adopt a more conciliatory tone. “Look, if it were something easily settled then I’d be happy to support her. But it isn’t that simple, Carlo. Even if her demonstration project works—and my advisers all tell me that’s unlikely—there’s this whole separate business about mass-producing new clearstone to order. Let the chemists loose on
that
, and orthogonal matter will start to look benign in comparison.”

“So let them experiment out in the void,” Carlo suggested. “Build a new workshop for the chemists and put it a severance or two away from the
Peerless
. That would deal with the safety issues, it would give the navigators another chance to exercise their skills—and if the clearstone thing doesn’t work out, the same facility would be perfect for experiments with orthogonal matter.” He tipped his head and began backing away along the rope.

“All I could do was warn you!” Silvano called after him. “It’s up to you whether you listen.”

In the corridor Carlo sped along the guide rope, trying to work off his agitation. Why had Silvano had to drag him into this dispute? It was possible that Carla was fooling herself and her scheme was too good to be true. It was possible, too, that Silvano was just clinging to his vision of the Object as the gift from fate that would solve all their problems.

Mercifully, there was no need for him to decide who he believed was right. He was neither a Councilor nor a physicist; no one would care about his opinion on these matters.

No one but Carla and Silvano themselves.

Carlo had transformed the storeroom beside the arborine cages into an office, so he wouldn’t have to travel back and forth from the workshop Tosco had allocated for the original influence study. The room was cramped and it stank of the lizards awaiting their death as arborine food, but once he was in the harness beside the tape viewer he soon forgot his surroundings. The six reels sitting inert in their rack did not look like anything special, but in the viewer, illuminated and in motion, the strips’ rhythmic shifts between translucence and opacity became something close to a recitation of the body instructing itself to reproduce.

A recitation and a transcript. He wound the sequence from Zosima’s lower left probe past the lamp again slowly, pausing every few spans to glance down at his chest and check his notes. He had catalogued almost ten dozen recurring motifs in the recordings, and even those patterns were subject to further small variations—like words repeated with different inflections. Here it was, right in front of him:
the language of life
.

Now that they’d fed Benigna and Benigno to the point where quadraparity was all but assured, Macaria was pushing him to let them breed without any further interventions, in the hope that a comparison between the recordings of the two fissions would be illuminating. Carlo couldn’t fault the idea in principle, but he was still reluctant to proceed. Going on the surveys, there were probably less than three dozen arborines on the
Peerless
in total—counting Zosimo and his children. Aside from any qualms he had about the cruelty of confining and manipulating still more of them, there simply weren’t enough of the animals to grind through any exhaustive set of protocols, the way they’d all been trained to do with voles and lizards. If it was possible to learn more from Benigna than they could by conducting the single most obvious experiment—and losing another female of breeding age in the process—he owed it to all of them to find a way to do that.

Carlo worked on the tapes until his concentration began to falter. He checked the clock; it had been almost three bells. He pulled himself out of the room and went to check on the infrared recorders. A stack of four machines were monitoring Zosimo and his children, to see if they had acquired any of the influences the team had captured from sick people and played back into the cage. Carlo removed two exposed reels, then reloaded and reset the machines.

In the tape viewer, the reels were blank. The arborines appeared to be utterly unswayed by messages that had proved themselves capable of commandeering a person’s body. Ultimately that might not matter; the goal was to influence people, not arborines. But the lack of a single message that could infect both species would make it much harder to test the whole scheme.

Carlo took a meal break, but the storeroom wasn’t a pleasant place to spend it. Chewing on a loaf, he wandered back to the arborines’ cages. Zosimo ignored him, but the children leaped to the bars and thrust their hands through, humming plaintively in the hope that he’d throw them a morsel. “You want me to spoil you?” he chided them. He’d resisted naming the children but that hadn’t stopped him feeling a tug of affection for them, and he’d been weak enough to toss food to them before. “Your father will feed you soon. Be patient.”

Carlo swallowed the last of the loaf quickly; Amanda sometimes came early for her shift, and it made him uncomfortable if she surprised him eating. He was about to return to the storeroom when a movement in the other cage caught his attention. He turned and pulled himself along the cross rope for a closer look.

Benigna remained attached to her plinth, but she was holding something in one of her hands. As Carlo approached she tried to conceal it, but it was too large to be hidden from view.

It was a stick, about half a stride long. One end tapered to a rough wedge; it must have been snapped off a slender branch. But Benigna’s half of the cage had been emptied of branches, and Benigno hadn’t breached the barred partition that separated him from his co. Carlo was stumped, but then he realized that Benigno must have thrown the improvised tool through a gap in the bars.

Carlo drew himself to the side for a better view. The skin on Benigna’s back was torn, as if she’d been trying to force the stick between the stone surface and her body. “You want to be free?” he said dully. She couldn’t reach her melded flesh with her fingers, however sharp she made the claws, but not only had she conceived of a better plan, she’d managed to communicate what she needed to her co.

Carlo fought to maintain his resolve. If he gave up now, where would that leave him? Watching Carla go blind? Murdering two of his own children? These animals had done nothing to deserve the hardship he was inflicting on them—but what had he or any of the travelers done to deserve their own plight?

“What’s happening?” Amanda had arrived.

Carlo explained what he’d surmised. “You’d better tranquilize her and take it away,” he said. They’d been entering the cage to put dead lizards within Benigna’s reach, without drugging her first, but he didn’t want anyone trying to wrest a sharpened stick out of her hand while she was conscious.

“So how will we stop them doing it again?”

“Build a proper wall, I suppose,” Carlo replied. “I’ll get a construction crew to put stone slabs across.”

Amanda hesitated. “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to let them breed?”

Carlo was tempted. “It would be simpler,” he agreed. “But I have another plan.”

He’d been turning it over in the back of his mind, unsure of its usefulness, but now Amanda had forced his hand. “I want to play Zosima’s tapes back into Benigna’s body,” he said. “I want to see what each of those messages does.”

“You mean… out of context? Without Benigno triggering her?” Amanda sounded skeptical.

“Yes.”

“What do you expect will happen?”

“I don’t know,” Carlo admitted. “But there’s no point trying to reconstruct the whole sequence—there was too much lost from one of the recordings. So I think it’s better to go the other way, and see if any of the individual signals have an effect on their own.”

“What if that just cripples her?” Amanda protested. “If it goes wrong the way your finger did, it’s not going to be fixed by an amputation—and she certainly won’t be able to breed.”

“We have to take that chance,” Carlo said. “How else are we going to decipher this language? We have to study something more complicated than a twirling finger—but we’re never going to make sense of the fission process without breaking it down into smaller parts.”

“It’s your decision,” Amanda said. “I’d better—” She gestured toward Benigna.

Carlo moved aside and let her into the equipment hatch so she could dispense a dose of tranquilizer through the plinth.

“Silvano’s going to make trouble for you with the Council,” Carlo said. “He was counting on your support, and now he thinks you’ve turned against him.”

Carla hummed wearily. “Why does he have to take everything personally? If this works out, we’ll have a better chance than ever of reclaiming the engine feeds. He wants space for new farms, doesn’t he? I thought politics was all about the ends.”

Carlo dragged himself over to the lamp and rescued the front room from its drab moss-light. “Politics is about people’s feelings.”

“And exploiting them for your own ends,” Carla replied.

Carlo was still annoyed with Silvano, but he wasn’t feeling quite so cynical. “For three generations, we’ve had to make do with what we carried with us from the home world,” he said. “When the Object came along, everyone expected
something
from it. Silvano was hoping we could farm there, and he’s already had to give up on that. A universal liberator sounds dangerous—but the idea of mastering it still makes us feel powerful. Now you want everyone to forget about the Object and just trust you to pull energy out of thin air.”

“No one has to take this on trust,” Carla replied. “If it works, it will work right in front of their eyes.”