The Eternal Flame

by Greg Egan

  “Next time we should arrange for the subject to resorb them first,” Macaria suggested.

  The blastula—or half-blastula—had found its borders now. The volume it enclosed was small, but not absurdly so: perhaps a sixth of Benigna’s flesh.

  “Do you remember the story of Amata and Amato?” Macaria asked.

  “Vaguely,” Amanda replied. Carlo knew it well, but he wasn’t in the mood to offer a recitation.

  “The two of them are in the forest looking for food,” Macaria synopsized, “when an arborine chases them and gobbles up Amato. But years later, Amata has her revenge. She catches the arborine and swallows it whole—and it turns out her co’s been alive all the time, trapped inside the arborine. All she has to do to bring him back is separate him from her own body, the way she might extrude a new limb.”

  “The moral being that you should never try to learn biology from the sagas,” Amanda concluded.

  “A good rule in general,” Macaria agreed. “But that story does make me wonder. If we could bring this on with just a fragment of the usual signaling, the same kind of thing might happen occasionally in nature.”

  “You think that story’s about a partially formed blastula?” Carlo asked incredulously.

  Macaria said, “If the ancestors ever did see such a thing, even if they understood what it was they might not have chosen to describe it that way. A female’s body gives rise to a new life, without fission. What kind of incendiary nonsense is that? Better to make the new life an old one, and come up with a story about her swallowing the monster who swallowed her co.”

  Carlo wasn’t interested in scouring the sagas for dubious crypto-biological clues. What mattered now was deciphering the language being spoken right in front of them.

  “We’ve come close to enforcing biparity,” he said. In his shock over Benigna’s transformation he’d almost lost sight of that crucial point. “It was the signal from the tape that established the partition’s geometry, not the female’s mass. If we’d played back all six recordings, we might have triggered an ordinary biparous fission.”

  No one disputed his reasoning, but his colleagues did not seem as pleased by this conclusion as he was. The idea of inserting six hardstone tubes into a woman’s body fell a long way short of the promise of splicing the signals into an influence that could be written painlessly on the skin in infrared—and in either case, it wasn’t clear how the male could be integrated into the process. If fission was initiated by the co, could the signals from a light player still intervene to set the number of offspring?

  Carlo glanced down at Benigna; the tops of her thighs were atrophying, the gray skin puckering as the flesh below parted from the blastula wall. He checked her ocular response, but she remained mercifully insensate. This was a more severe amputation than his own, but he hadn’t been shielded from that ordeal by a tranquilizing drug. More than the injuries themselves it was the context that made him recoil from her plight.

  But what would the context mean to Benigna? She might have formed a notion of childbirth after witnessing it among her friends; she might even have reached a clear-eyed expectation of sharing their fate. But would it actually distress her to find that she’d given birth with that expectation unfulfilled? However powerful the instincts that would have led her willingly to the usual outcome, it did not necessarily follow that she’d be troubled in the least by events taking a different course.

  Carlo looked up. And Amanda, Macaria? For all the unease they’d shown about Benigna’s condition, there’d been no sign that they shared his own visceral revulsion. One child that separated from the body, formed from reserves of mutable flesh, leaving the mother with wounds she could survive. That was not at all like being buried alive.

  Benigna’s right lower arm broke free and drifted away from her toward the bars of the cage; in the imperceptible gravity Carlo had almost forgotten which way was down. He could see the walls of the partition beginning to split.

  The child inside squirmed and forced the hardened skin of its mother’s belly to separate from her torso. Carlo backed away, overcome with panic. “Should we bring in the father? Give it to the father?”

  “I’d be careful,” Macaria warned him. “The co’s just as likely to kill it as accept it.”

  The child would not stay still. Its body twitched and shuddered as it tried to separate itself from what would have been its siblings in any normal birth. It stretched its limbless form up from the dark encrusted wound it had made until everything that clung to it and impeded its motion began to crumble like powderstone.

  Carlo could see its head now. Its eyes were closed but it was flexing its tympanum, clearing it of debris. If the birth of four children had become a tragedy in the unforgiving world of the Peerless, and two a blessing, what was this? It struck him that his horror was not entirely irrational: such an impoverished mode of reproduction could never have been the norm in any species. Each generation would have been at most the size of the last, with any fall in population irrecoverable. Unless the whole thing became even stranger, and the act could be repeated. Unless a mother could not only survive giving birth, she could do so more than once.

  The child began to hum. Benigno heard it and responded in kind, the two of them wailing at each other in an unremitting chorus of distress.

  Macaria took the tiny arborine in her arms and brushed it clean, her strokes brisk but tender. Carlo felt a mixture of disgust at the spectacle and relief that he hadn’t been forced to take charge himself.

  “She looks healthy,” Macaria observed, holding the arborine out for inspection.

  “She?” Carlo had no idea how to sex a newborn animal with no co beside it for comparison.

  “If the fission had been complete this would have been the female half,” Macaria argued. “Either the signals we recorded from Zosima’s division specified the sex, or the location in Benigna’s body would have done it.”

  Amanda said, “We’ll need to test this again on another female and see if we can get the same result.”

  Macaria concurred, adding, “Half a dozen times at least.” She thought for a moment. “It would be interesting to see if the tape is conveying any traits from the original parents—if it just captured a generic, universal signal, or if anything specific to Zosima and Zosimo has been transmitted.”

  Carlo wasn’t ready to look that far ahead. He turned to Benigna’s damaged body. The surface of the partition had broken up, and what remained was already separating from the skin along the edges, exposing the flesh beneath. It was the largest wound he’d ever seen, save that on a corpse he’d encountered as a student—a woman all but sliced in two in a chemical explosion, offered up for dissection by her grieving co. He said, “I should give her more tranquilizer and try to close this surgically.” Whether or not an arborine could be disturbed by perceived violations of the natural order, if Benigna woke to see a gaping hole like this it would render her philosophical attitude to childbirth irrelevant.

  The child had grown quiet in Macaria’s hands, but Benigno was still calling out in confusion. Without the promise there was no predicting his behavior toward his not-quite-daughter, but across species it was not unknown for some cos to bond with the product of spontaneous fission. “We should at least show him,” Carlo suggested. “We can observe his reaction without risking the child.

  “All right.” Macaria moved carefully out of the cage, dragging herself along the guide rope with her two lower hands. Carlo followed her.

  When Benigno saw the child he fell silent, though he seemed more perplexed than mollified. Carlo wondered if he was capable of distinguishing the possibilities and acting accordingly. If Benigna had given birth with a co-stead, would he have known that at once from the scent of the child? And if the child had been fatherless, the natural consequence of their enforced separation, would he have recognized that too and made the best of it?

  Macaria moved closer and held out the child. Benigno stared at her for a while, then he re
treated back along the branch he was holding and leaped over to the side of the cage, where he started prodding angrily through the bars at the curtain that was hiding Benigna.

  “I don’t think it would calm him down if he saw her in that state,” Carlo said.

  “Probably not,” Macaria agreed.

  “I’d better get her stitched up.” And then free her from the plinth, Carlo decided. She’d been through enough.

  “You should put them together again,” Amanda said.

  “Yes.” Carlo was struggling to contain his emotions; part of it was genuine sympathy for the arborines, though part of it was probably just shock. “Once she’s healed, they can both go back to the forest.”

  There was an awkward silence, then Macaria said quietly, “I’m not sure that would be a good idea, Carlo.”

  “Why not? I know we should test the tape again, but we don’t have to do it on her.”

  The tape-fathered arborine baby was starting to squirm; Macaria rearranged her hold on her.

  Amanda said, “We need to know what this has done to her body. After this, can she still breed naturally? Or having given birth once, is she now infertile? We’ll need to observe her with her co until that’s settled.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Carlo conceded.

  He headed for the equipment hatch.

  As he pumped in the tranquilizer, out of sight of the women, Carlo found himself trembling. What the three of them had witnessed had been crude and brutal, but some of the problems could be addressed immediately now that they knew what to expect. They did not know yet if Benigna would recover completely, or if her child would thrive and live normally, but in time they would know. And in time what they had started here might be polished and refined into a procedure that any woman could undergo without danger or discomfort.

  So it was conceivable that the famine would be banished, not with biparity on demand but with a single child born alongside a surviving mother. It was possible that after all the time he’d spent rehearsing his grief for her, Carla might bear a child and go on to outlive him. And it was not beyond imagining that the Peerless would return to the home world bearing among its greatest prizes the end of the early death of women.

  Carlo moved away from the base of the plinth and tried to steady his hands for surgery. Having played his part in these transformations, there was a chance now that he would have no son, and that the time would come when everyone would follow him, and there would never again be a father in the world, never again a co. He would have ended the famine, the infanticides and the greatest blight on the lives of women—and extinguished his own kind entirely.

  37

  “You need to understand,” Carla pleaded. “This kind of research is more like exploration than engineering. It doesn’t always take you where you expected to go.”

  Silvano was unmoved. “We’re grateful for your efforts, Carla, but with all due respect it’s not your role to decide where the research is taking us.” He turned and addressed his fellow Councilors. “The Object is as real and solid as this mountain. We’ve seen it, we’ve visited it, we’ve brought its trajectory into step with our own—and in doing so, we’ve proved beyond doubt that it’s composed of a material that can serve as a powerful fuel. But now this petitioner wants us to divert resources away from the program to make use of this extraordinary boon and invest them in a new kind of matter made entirely of light!”

  “Temporarily,” Carla stressed. “And if you’ll forgive me for correcting you, Councilor, an optical solid isn’t made entirely of light; the light waves form the energy landscape, but we still put luxagens into the valleys. The point of using that kind of system is that it would let us vary the energy levels relatively easily, so we could see if a rebounder can be made to work, in principle. Once that’s been established we’ll know whether or not it’s worth trying to manufacture an ordinary substance with similar properties. It might sound profligate to perform these experiments on a ‘solid’ that needs sunstone to be burned just to maintain its existence from moment to moment—but there is no practical alternative.”

  “Can you be certain there’s nothing in the mountain already that would do the job?” Councilor Giusta asked.

  “Very nearly,” Carla replied. “We’ve gone through the spectra of every kind of clearstone, and tried to infer the energy levels. That’s not a foolproof process, but to test all the same materials directly would take a generation, and it would use up far more sunstone than the protocols I’m actually proposing.”

  “You’ve asked for a very large amount,” Giusta said, glancing down at Carla’s application.

  “We need to run the coherent light sources at a very high intensity, to make the energy valleys deep enough,” Carla explained. “But once we’ve mastered this—and once we can reproduce the effect in an ordinary solid—it will act as a net energy source. If we can get to that stage, the project won’t require any more sunstone at all.”

  Giusta looked to Silvano, then the rest of her colleagues, but no one had any more questions for Carla. Even Councilors Massimo and Prospero—who’d been as merciless with Assunto on the hazards of dealing with the Object as they’d been with Carla at the previous hearing—seemed embarrassed by the alternative she was offering. The rebounder was already tainted by the inevitable comparisons with pre-scientific myths, but to claim that she could conjure her own Eternal Flame from a crystal of light sounded like the hyperbole of a stage magician: not even an appeal to genuine credulity so much as an invitation to share a joke.

  “We’ll adjourn now,” Giusta said. “Thank you for your testimony.”

  When the Councilors had left the chamber, Carla was alone with Assunto.

  “If you change your mind, you’ll always be welcome on the orthogonal matter team,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Carla had no ill feeling toward him; someone was always going to take over the project after she abandoned it, and she couldn’t blame Assunto for being a persuasive advocate for the cause. She’d benefited from his skills often enough, herself.

  “I’ve had some thoughts about the Rule of One recently,” Assunto confided. “I’d be interested to hear what you think.”

  “Of course.” Since the night with Patrizia and Romolo when they’d split the Rule of Two in half, Carla had had no success in explaining the simpler but equally mysterious principle that remained: once you took spin into account, you never found more than one luxagen in the same state.

  “When we have a system of two luxagens,” Assunto began, “we need to think of it as a wave that depends on the positions of both particles. So if one particle is mostly here and another is mostly there, we need the wave to have a bump where the combination of positions spells that out.”

  He sketched what he meant.

  “Right,” Carla said. “That’s how I think of it too.”

  “But there’s a problem,” Assunto claimed. “Suppose we compare that with another wave, where we swap the two particles.”

  “That’s really the same thing,” Carla protested. “A luxagen is a luxagen; it makes no sense to say that it’s the ‘first luxagen’ in one location and the ‘second one’ in the other. Unless they have different spins, and you’re using that to tell them apart?”

  Assunto said, “No, no. Forget about spins for the moment, or just assume the spins are identical. Take it as given that we really can’t tell these luxagens apart.”

  “Then the two situations are exactly the same,” Carla replied.

  “So you’re saying there are two different waves that can be used to describe the same physical situation?”

  “Yes,” Carla insisted. “It’s just a convention, a naming scheme: you have to make a choice, but the choice itself makes no difference.”

  “All right,” Assunto agreed, though his assent sounded distinctly provisional. “But now suppose I want to compare the wave for this pair of luxagens with the wave for another pair that are in roughly the same positions. How exactly
should I make the comparison? Which of the two waves should I use in each case? There are four possibilities in all. Half those possibilities give the two pairs of luxagens very similar waves… while the other half give them very different waves!”

  Carla thought for a while. “Surely you just need to use the same scheme for both? I mean, it’s obvious that there ought to be some overlap between the two waves—and if you use different schemes there’s no overlap at all.”

  “But if you can’t tell the luxagens apart,” Assunto pressed her, “how do you define ‘the same scheme’? How do you actually pick which luxagen of the pair gets its position assigned to which axis?”

  “Hmm.” He’d forced her into a contradiction; she’d claimed the choice of schemes didn’t matter, but now she’d starting talking about the importance of selecting the right one, case by case.

  “Do you have to peek at their locations first, then make sure you give the same axis to whichever particles are closest together?” Assunto was gently mocking her now.

  “Hardly.” Carla stared at the four diagrams. She was starving, and she’d barely slept for the last three nights, but she wasn’t going to let him make a fool of her with this problem.

  “You use both schemes,” she said finally. “Simultaneously. You add the wave where you use the first axis for the first particle to the wave where you use it for the second particle.”

  She sketched the idea.

  “The wave for the whole system is completely symmetrical,” she said. “It makes no difference if you swap the axes, or swap the particles. And when you compare two situations with two particles in roughly the same two places, you’re guaranteed to get a sensible result with some overlap between the waves.”