The Eternal Flame (4 page)

“Ah.” Having broached the subject Onesto backed away from it. “I put my name down for the
Gnat
yesterday. For the lottery.”

“The
Gnat
?”

“That’s what they’re calling the little rocket now,” Onesto explained.

“Isn’t this all a bit premature? We still don’t even know how far away the Object is.” Carla caught the tone of irritation in her voice. Why should she be annoyed that the astronomers’ plans were progressing, as they waited for the tools they’d need to bring the project to fruition? When she’d first heard of the discovery she’d been thrilled.

She could smell Onesto’s last meal through his skin.

Onesto glanced down at the mirror in its container. “I don’t suppose
that
will be sensitive to infrared?”

Carla said, “If it is, it would still take half a year’s exposure to record any kind of color trail.”

“Right.” Onesto stretched his arms behind his back. “You seem tired, Carla. You should go. I’ll look after everything, I promise.”

Carla’s new apartment was six levels closer to the axis than the workshop. She climbed ladder after ladder in the walls’ red glow; all the shafts looked the same, and at some point in the journey she lost track of where she was, unsure how much of her growing sense of lightness was down to her location and how much to hunger.

At home she took her holin dose, chewing the green flakes slowly. Her body begged for something more, but she lay down in the sand of her bed and pulled the tarpaulin into place.

She woke a bell earlier than she’d intended, thinking about the loaf in the cupboard barely four strides away.
What difference would it make, to eat the same meal a little earlier on the very same day?

But she knew the answer. She’d be hungry again, from habit alone, at the time she was accustomed to eating. Then she’d be twice as hungry in the middle of the day, and so ravenous by the evening that she’d be struggling not to eat again. Her body had never experienced the home world’s cycle of plant light by night and sunshine by day, but it could still be pushed to follow a diurnal schedule more easily than any other routine. If she let the timing of her meals slip out of synch with that internal rhythm she would have lost her best and strongest ally.

She lay half awake beneath the tarpaulin, watching the clock in the moss-light, imagining Carlo beside her. Taking her in his arms, naming their children, promising to love and protect them as he drove her hunger away.

Onesto said, “No fireworks, no down-time, no problems at all.”

Carla was relieved. “Thank you. I hope the lighting didn’t distract you from your work.” The spillage from the lamp’s beam filled the room with patches of brightness and deep shadow, and though she’d become used to it the day before the contrast now made her eyes hurt.

“Not at all.” Onesto was trying to reconstruct a notebook belonging to one of the first-generation physicists, Sabino. It had turned up recently in a woeful state, and Carla didn’t envy him the days he was spending squinting at the torn sheets with their smudged dye.

Onesto put away his materials and left. Carla had no more marking to do, so she stood and reviewed her notes for the next optics lesson, trying to think of ways she could convey to the students the maddening intractability of the field’s unsolved problems without scaring them off completely. Most of what she taught hadn’t changed since Sabino’s day—and while much of that legacy possessed an indisputable elegance and consistency, and might well deserve to be passed unaltered down the ages, the rest was a perplexing mess.

No one had been able to improve on Nereo’s equation, which connected light to the “source strength” of the hypothetical particles he’d called luxagens, much as Vittorio’s equation connected gravity to mass. Sabino had demonstrated that the force implied by Nereo’s equation was real, by showing that it could hold two tiny mineral grains together, despite a visible gap between them. But taking all of Nereo’s ideas at face value soon led to predictions that simply weren’t true.

Whatever the fundamental constituents of a rock or a flower were, they either possessed the light-making property or they didn’t; it wasn’t something that could come and go. A few lines of mathematics proved that “source strength” was conserved, as surely as energy itself. So matter had to be made of
something
that possessed source strength, or no flower could glow, no fuel could burn. The trouble was, anything with source strength should give off
some
light, visible or invisible, all the time; only absolute stillness—or the equally unlikely contrivance of a pure high-frequency oscillation—could keep it from radiating. But a substance that emitted light could not be left unchanged by the process: the energy of the light had to be balanced by the creation of energy of the opposite kind. A flower could use its newfound energy to make food, but what was a rock to do? With a sprinkling of liberator a rock went up in flames, but why should it need that push? Why hadn’t every lode of sunstone simply blown itself apart, eons ago?

Carla disciplined herself not to so much as peek at the experiment before the exposure was complete. When the full twelve bells had passed, she knelt beside the clearstone container and checked that the spectrum had remained aligned with the same marks on the paper as before, then she stood and extinguished the sunstone lamp. Onesto had lit an ordinary firestone lamp in the corner of the workshop; now she turned up its light to help her see clearly.

She slid the container out from under the bench and tipped it for a better view; the clearstone caught the light and confused her with its own reflections, but she was almost certain that the mirror’s sheen had been diminished. She fetched a needle and made a tiny hole in the container’s resin seal, then waited impatiently while the air squealed back in.

With the pressure safely equalised, she cut the seal away completely, removed the lid and took out the mirror, careful not to detach the gridded paper that she’d glued beneath it.

Carla held the mirror up to catch the light. There was an unmistakable dull white patina, uniform and complete across the width of the mirror—but not its length. It stretched from one end of the rectangle to a point about halfway along, where it disappeared abruptly. She summoned the calibration notes for the grid onto her thigh. The tarnished region corresponded to a portion of the spectrum running from infrared to green.

Why stop at green?
The intense light from the sunstone beam would have shaken the luxagens, making them vibrate, making them radiate their own light in turn… giving them the energy they needed to break out of the mirrorstone’s regular structure, damaging the surface, spoiling the sheen. But why should the color of the light have such a sharply delineated effect? The theory of solids held that a material’s only hope of stability was for its luxagens to sit in energy valleys whose natural frequency of vibration was greater than the
maximum
frequency of light—so at least that favored, resonant frequency couldn’t generate radiation and aid in the material’s destruction. So why should light have the power to shake luxagens loose on the red side of green but not the blue side? Since
every
color was far below the resonant frequency, the response should have varied smoothly across the spectrum, without any sudden jumps.

Carla turned the mirror back and forth in front of her eyes, wondering if it could all be an error, an artifact. Maybe an obstacle outside the container had intruded into the blue end of the spectrum—something Onesto had stashed under the bench for part of the night? But that was ridiculous; why would he have done that? And even if he’d set out deliberately to sabotage the experiment, she’d been present for the greater part of the exposure. Blue light
had
reached the mirror. The color-dependence was real.

As the mirror flared in the firestone’s light, a new feature marring the surface jumped out for an instant and then vanished. It was like glimpsing a white thread on a white floor, only to lose it again. Carla cursed and repeated the motion, over and over, until she found herself staring at a second, faint edge. In the half of the mirror that had seemed to her before to be uniformly shiny and new, there was in fact another, very subtle change in its reflectivity. The tarnish that she’d thought had ended completely at green actually continued—vastly diminished—along a section that stretched almost down to violet.
And beyond that?
She was no longer prepared to assume that the surface remained pristine; all she could be sure of was that she’d exhausted the discriminatory powers of her vision.

But there were
at least
two abrupt transitions in the density of the tarnish: two sudden changes in the damage the light had done, depending on its color.

Next to the calibration notes on her thigh, Carla wrote the wavelengths that marked these transitions. She committed them to memory, then started sketching luxagen arrays, doodling calculations, trying to make sense of the numbers. Maybe there was some kind of shift in the response of the mirrorstone when the light’s wavelength crossed some natural length scales dictated by its structure. Luxagens were expected to be separated from their nearest neighbors by roughly the same distance as light’s minimum wavelength, but other regularities showed up at greater distances.

There was no fit, though, between her two numbers and any of the known array geometries.

Carla paced the workshop. If not the wavelengths, what about the frequencies? She did the conversion: the green edge was at three dozen and three generoso-cycles per pause, the violet edge at two dozen and seven. But the frequencies at which luxagens were expected to vibrate, in mirrorstone or any other substance, could only be pinned down to within an order of magnitude—crudely constrained by the known properties of solids and the strength of Nereo’s force. So to what should she compare these frequencies?

To each other. They were in a ratio of five to four. Not exactly, but it was very close.

Carla remeasured the locations of the edges in the tarnish with scrupulous care, then recalculated everything.

Within the range of uncertainty imposed by the measurements, the ratio was indistinguishable from five to four.

4

C
arlo said, “I’d like to come back to your team, if you’ll have me. I’m giving up on wheat. I want to work with animals again.”

Tosco reached out for a guide rope and pulled himself away from his workbench. “What’s brought this on?” he asked. “I never thought of you as easily discouraged.”

Carlo tried to block out the anxious humming of the voles; there must have been three or four dozen of the animals in the cages attached to the far wall. It hadn’t taken him long to grow accustomed to the blissful silence of the plant kingdom.

He said, “Do you know what my biggest achievement in the last three years has been? Understanding why some farms end up with all of their wheat-flowers synchronized, while in others the plants split into two groups that take turns producing light.”

“I wouldn’t belittle that,” Tosco said. “Surely the yield is higher when there are staggered shifts?”

“It is,” Carlo replied. “Having half your neighbors sleeping means less ambient light to inhibit production. But the difference is tiny, it’s marginal. What I was really looking for was a way to keep the flowers open for a greater portion of each day—and nothing I tried brought me any closer to that. If I’m getting nowhere, maybe I should admit that I made a mistake by switching fields in the first place.”

Tosco stretched out his top pair of arms in a gesture encompassing the workshop. “So what exactly would you do, if you rejoined us?” One of Carlo’s old colleagues, Amanda, was dissecting a lizard on a bench nearby, with a huddle of students looking on. In the corner behind them another researcher, Macaria, who’d been loading a centrifuge with tissue samples, swung down the safety shield and retreated. Sometimes the different density fractions in organic matter weren’t stable on their own, and the endpoint could be explosive.

Carlo took a moment to summon up his courage; until now he hadn’t put this into words for anyone. “I want to find a way to inhibit quadraparity.”

“I see.” Tosco’s tone was not enthusiastic. “Do you know how many drugs they tested for that, before either of us were born? The only thing that kept the vole population stable in that program was the fact that the fatal treatments balanced the merely ineffectual ones.”

“So it might require something other than a drug,” Carlo ventured.

“We know how to inhibit quadraparity,” Tosco said. “The solution might not be as pleasant as we’d wish—”

“Or as reliable,” Carlo interjected.

“It’s not perfect,” Tosco conceded. “But no treatment is perfect. It’s an innate property of women’s bodies that they produce four offspring under ordinary conditions. Anything that interferes with such a fundamental process is doing damage to their health, by definition.”

“Holin isn’t perfect,” Carlo protested, “but where’s the damage or the pain from that?”

“Putting reproduction on hold isn’t the same as modifying the outcome.”

Carlo couldn’t argue with that, but he couldn’t accept the larger claim either. “Women’s bodies have an innate ability to be biparous, too. It makes sense that it’s normally only triggered by famine; the question is,
triggered how?
If we could understand that process in detail, why shouldn’t we be able to push the same lever without the usual antecedents?”

Tosco said, “Our bodies don’t come with levers attached. If you’re not going to throw random drugs at the problem, where would you start?”

Carlo hesitated, but there was no point underselling his plans now. “What I want to do is investigate the whole process of fission as thoroughly as possible. Unravel the mechanism in both biparous and quadraparous species—right down to the signaling level—then look for the safest, most effective point to intervene.”

Tosco buzzed wryly. “That’s a lofty proposal. Do you think it’s going to be easier than improving the crop yields?”

“Probably not,” Carlo admitted. “But to succeed at this would count for much more.”