The Eternal Flame

by Greg Egan

  “That might be the safest place,” Tamara joked.

  They made their way into the crowded hall. There was a schedule based on birth dates for the particular meetings people were supposed to attend, but it was not being enforced, and Tamara had chosen to break the rule on principle. If cos were allowed to hear this news together, why not co-steads?

  There were no visible gaps anywhere in the hall, but the back ropes were the least densely packed so they forced their way onto one of them. As they settled into place Tamara felt self-conscious; she didn’t mind being squashed by the stranger on her right, but she’d never had Livio’s skin pressed against her like this.

  With Tamaro, the significance of contact had come and gone. As children it had meant nothing when they touched, a pleasure as innocent as a shared joke, but when they reached fertility it became charged with danger, more thrilling and vertiginous day by day. As the compulsion grew, they started sleeping with the scythe between them, the blade a reminder when they woke in the night of exactly what it would mean to give in. And gradually, each accidental brush of skin on skin lost both its sweetness and its threat. The outcome it foretold remained a certainty, but it became second nature to think of it as indefinitely postponed.

  With Livio, she didn’t know what to feel. She focused her attention on the man to her right, then tried to spread her indifference to him across her whole body.

  Councilor Giusta opened the meeting with an appeal for anyone with information about Carlo or Macaria to come forward and speak with her at the end of the proceedings. Most of the audience listened in polite silence, but Tamara heard some amused exchanges in front of her; she didn’t catch every word, but the gist was that the Peerless was well rid of the traitors.

  Amanda spoke next, describing the experiments that she and her colleagues had performed on a small group of arborines. Though she must have believed that the research was worth pursuing, she eschewed advocacy and confined herself to a dispassionate account of the team’s interventions into the animals’ reproductive cycle.

  To Tamara, the lack of rhetoric only made her words more resonant: “The female we’d named Benigna survived the birth. After minor surgery she became mobile again, and took to feeding her daughter. Her co, who was not present at the birth, showed no interest in the child.” Survived the birth. Feeding her daughter. They sounded like phrases someone had brought back from a second Peerless, returning from its own eons-long journey orthogonal to the first.

  Amanda was emphatic in dismissing the rumors that they’d created some kind of transmissible agent. “I expect that some of you here tonight must have volunteered to have influences recorded, or you might know someone who was sick at the time and took part in that project. We do believe that some influences spread as infrared light, passing from skin to skin—and it’s true that we were searching for a way to get instructions for biparity into an arborine’s body that way. But we never found an influence that was taken up by the arborines—and we certainly never assembled a new one with the aim of affecting people in any way.”

  Tamara heard skeptical noises from the same group who’d found Giusta’s appeal so hilarious. She forced herself not to glare at the idiots; there was nothing to be gained by starting a brawl.

  Giusta introduced Tosco as an expert whose perspective would balance Amanda’s partisan account.

  “You will all have your personal views on the kind of society that these experiments seem to be offering us,” Tosco allowed. “And perhaps some people are attracted to this vision of an end to the famine, with women living through the birth of a child and going on to meet the fate of men. But we need to examine the consequences much more closely.

  “In such a world, who would raise the children? Their mothers? Nature has never had reason to shape women’s temperament to that task. We’ve all heard moving stories of the tenacity of women caring for the children of solos and runaways: these courageous women raised many of our grandparents, whose own mothers had taken to the Peerless alone to escape the brutality of their cos. The excess of women among the first travelers was unprecedented, and we should be proud that we survived the disruption that followed. But we can’t build a safe, stable society on a state of perpetual emergency. Enduring a calamity is admirable; creating one by choice would be the height of folly.

  “Now, you might have heard rumors that some prospect exists for the same kind of procedure to give rise to complete families, with a male co. As Amanda has already explained, no second births have yet been demonstrated, and no male births at all. But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the research continued and it led to such a result.

  “The experiments already tell us what the outcome would be. The male arborines showed no interest whatsoever in the children of their cos whose births were induced by the light players. A society of struggling women would be fragile enough—but mixing in an equal number of men, all robbed of their natural purpose, would be disastrous.”

  “We’re not arborines,” Tamara muttered irritably. She turned to Livio. “And if the First Generation had such a rough time, surely that was due to the holin shortage? How can he compare your friends fissioning without warning into four children each with a deliberate choice to create a single child of your own?”

  Livio didn’t answer, but a woman in front of them hummed at Tamara reprovingly.

  Tosco proceeded to raise and dismiss a series of ever wilder possibilities. “Perhaps in the distant future, after generations of research, we could redesign our biology completely so that men and women could come together in the usual way, and the only difference in the outcome would be the woman’s survival and perfect control over the number of children. How could anyone object to that? I can’t—but I don’t believe it’s anything more than a fantasy. This work began as an honest search for a means to achieve biparity without the famine, so that women would be spared the difficult price they pay for population control. And that’s still a worthy target to aim for: a simple drug that will mimic the reproductive effects of starvation, in our daughters’ lifetimes—not the remote prospect of our great-great-grandchildren bending every law of biology to their will.”

  Giusta invited questions from the audience.

  “Even if this method as it stands has flaws,” a woman asked, “why is that a reason to abandon further research?”

  “It’s a distraction,” Tosco replied.

  “A distraction for whom? From what? Which urgent project is suffering such a lack of biologists that three people continuing this work for a few more years would be a tragedy?”

  Tosco said, “It distracts us all. Our whole culture is damaged by false promises like this.”

  “Our culture is damaged?” His interlocutor buzzed. “By a few experiments on arborines? Can you be more specific?”

  “I’m sure everyone accepts that we live in a complex, delicately poised—”

  The questioner cut him off. “Are you worried that women will start delaying childbirth?”

  “That’s one possibility,” Tosco agreed. This brought a few angry shouts from the audience until Giusta gestured for silence. “I respect women’s autonomy absolutely,” Tosco declared. “The timing of childbirth is a personal choice. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the problems that would follow if the average age began to rise. If the children aren’t born until their grandfather is dead, their father is left to raise them alone—”

  “Not if their mother’s alive!” a young man interjected. His friends broke into fits of mirth; apparently the idea remained so surreal to them that they couldn’t treat it as anything but a joke.

  The next question was directed to Amanda, and again, the questioner was a woman. “Why are you defending the elimination of an entire sex?” she demanded angrily. “Is my co not a person to you? My father? My future son?”

  Amanda said, “This work has barely begun. That we haven’t had a chance to demonstrate a male birth doesn’t mean such a thing is impossible.”


  “But what need will there be for men? Why would anyone give birth to a son, when he’ll consume his share of the entitlement for nothing?”

  “That’s your way of thinking, not mine,” Amanda replied stiffly. “I believe this research should continue until we learn exactly what kinds of reproduction are possible. That’s all. I’m not calling for any method—new or old—to be imposed on anyone.”

  “And you can promise that will never happen, can you?” the woman asked sarcastically. “What if some future Council decides to turn half the farms over to another use? If we all had just one child—one girl—we could halve the size of the crop and still live comfortably.”

  Amanda was bewildered. “We could spend a whole evening imagining the terrible things a future Council might do,” she said. “But do we really have to shy away from identifying our choices, out of fear that someone, someday might abuse that knowledge?”

  Giusta took two more questions, but they were both phrased so abusively that she decided to call an end to the meeting. As Tamara and Livio made their way toward the exit, Tamara saw a scuffle break out near the front of the hall. Only a few people were actually grappling with each other, but they were surrounded by two much larger groups exchanging taunts.

  “You want to vote for genocide?” a man shouted suddenly, brandishing a knife. A second man beside him seized his wrist and they struggled for a moment, then the knife floated away, out of reach of both of them. Tamara glanced anxiously at Livio; he was trying to move along the rope, but someone ahead of them had stopped to watch the brawling.

  “Do you want to go around?” he asked her. Other people had already started leaving the rope, pushing off into the empty space above, apparently in the hope that some combination of the hall’s weak gravity and a wall-bounce or two would deliver them neatly to the exit.

  “I don’t think so,” Tamara replied. Most people hadn’t practiced these kinds of maneuvers since childhood; she watched as two women collided in mid-air and began screaming abuse at each other. The hall could have done with a dozen more ropes to make the whole volume traversable—but there still would have been a crush at the doorway when the extra routes all converged again.

  “They shouldn’t have packed the hall like this,” Livio complained. “It’s a miracle nobody’s passed out from hyperthermia.”

  When they finally reached the exit they found people lingering outside, apparently just for the pleasure of shouting at each other. Further from the hall they were passed by two groups of youths engaged in running skirmishes, pummeling each other as they bounced off the walls of the corridor.

  Tamara was shaken, but she tried to keep everything in perspective. Nobody could contemplate an upheaval like this with perfect equanimity; just raising the subject was always going to create some bitter divisions. But only a few people had turned violent. And the last thing she wanted to do was vote down the research for the sake of a quiet life.

  “It’s a shock to hear it put so starkly,” she admitted. Even after days of rumors and third-hand accounts, it had taken Amanda’s testimony to make the results real to her. “But no one would be forced to use this method. Who can complain about being offered a new choice?”

  “No one,” Livio replied. “Until a couple want two different things.”

  His words gave Tamara pause, but she pressed ahead. “Have you decided how you’ll vote?” she asked.

  “For the research to continue,” he said. “And you?”

  “The same.” Tamara was relieved that he hadn’t been intimidated by the turmoil. “You’re not worried that it might cause conflict?”

  “Of course it will cause conflict,” Livio said. “But if they shut down the research now, that would lead to just as much violence. And all the same experiments would be carried out in the end—in secret, probably less safely. There is no perfect solution to this mess.”

  This mess? Tamara continued along the rope in silence for a while, but she couldn’t leave things there.

  “What would you say if I wanted to have a child this way?” she asked him.

  Livio didn’t need to consider his answer—but then, he must have known for days that he’d be facing this question eventually. “I’d say you’re entitled to do what you wish with your body.”

  “So you’d have no problem with it?”

  He turned to her. “You’re not my property, Tamara. But you’re not my flesh either. We made an agreement for our mutual benefit, but if one of us reneges on that agreement, it’s void. I’m not going to help you raise a child I played no part in creating—and I’m certainly not going to pass my entitlement on to any such child. What I want is a co-stead who will give me two children of my own. If you can’t accept that prospect any more, our obligations to each other are over.”

  When Tamara arrived in the observatory’s office, Ada was looking through a sheaf of papers. “Have you seen these?” she asked, holding up one sheet.

  “No.” Tamara took it.

  “It’s just a copy,” Ada explained. “But Carla signed a digest of the whole thing—with a statement saying she found it in Carlo’s apartment.”

  Tamara read the first sheet, then asked for the rest. It was an autopsy report on two arborines: a mother and her child, one of the births induced by the light players. The mother’s body had been found to contain a second blastula, hidden beneath the skin of her chest—grossly malformed, but apparently still growing at the time she’d been euthanised, five days after the birth. The child, the daughter, had abnormal structures in her brain and her gut, and adhesions throughout her malleable tissues.

  “So much for the miracle of light,” Ada said glumly.

  “Amanda didn’t mention any of this.” Tamara was confused. “I thought all the arborines were sent back to the forest.”

  “Three mothers and their children did go back. But apparently Amanda hasn’t been telling us about the fourth one.”

  Tamara re-read the report. “How do we know this isn’t a forgery?”

  “I was suspicious too,” Ada admitted. “But I checked the digest.”

  Tamara hummed impatiently. “I meant, what if someone planted a forgery in the apartment for Carla to find?”

  “You’d think she’d know her own co’s writing,” Ada reasoned.

  “Why? Tamaro never saw any of my work notes.”

  “And look how that turned out,” Ada joked.

  “I’m serious!” Tamara protested. “They lived apart most of the time; she might not be the best person to authenticate this.”

  Ada spread her arms. “Who would you prefer? Amanda claims it’s not Carlo’s writing, but if she lied about the fourth arborine—”

  “And I suppose Tosco says it looks authentic?”

  “Yes. All right, he’s obviously biased,” Ada conceded. “Still, that’s two witnesses against one.”

  Tamara took the report over to the relay station and began checking the digest herself.

  “You don’t trust me, now?” Ada complained.

  “Anyone can hit the wrong button by mistake.”

  “And I did, twice,” Ada retorted. “But you know what that gives you.” The odds against an error making a forgery look authentic were astronomical.

  The machine shuddered and declared the digest valid.

  Tamara said, “They should autopsy the other arborines.”

  “That sounds good in principle, but who’s going to identify them?” Ada replied. “Amanda just has to point out some healthy specimens instead of the real ones—”

  “I don’t believe this!” Tamara punched the desk. “You know what kind of state Carla must be in! Someone’s fooled her, that’s all!”

  Ada jokingly feigned a flinch away from her. “All right! Stay calm! I never said that was impossible.”

  Tamara gave up arguing the point. “The only way to sort this out is with new research,” she said. “That’s more important than ever now.”

  Ada eyed her warily. Tamara said, “Don’t you dar
e tell me you’re changing your vote!”

  “I’m not!” Ada assured her. “But let’s be honest: it’s a lost cause now.”

  Roberto entered the office, back from his shift, so Tamara dropped the subject. The last time she’d raised the vote in his presence his discomfort had been palpable.

  “Anything interesting out there?” she asked him.

  Roberto stretched his shoulders wearily. “What do you expect?” he replied. “You only get one Object in a lifetime.”

  In the observatory Tamara sat harnessed to the bench, dutifully searching the sky for passing rocks, but as the shift wore on it grew harder for her to keep her mind on the star trails in front of her. She was tired of having her future dictated by people and events beyond her control. She needed to take her fate into her own hands.

  If she gave up on co-steads—and gave up on children—wouldn’t that set her free? It was what she should have done the moment she escaped from Tamaro. If she kept taking holin and nothing went wrong, she might live for another six or seven years. What was there to regret in that? She wasn’t afraid to go the way of men when the time came.

  But a part of her still balked at the decision. She’d never obsessed about the children she’d had no hope of seeing—never named them, never even pictured them—but when she thought about relinquishing all hope of their existence she felt a kind of hollowness pervading her flesh. It was as if she’d spent her life tacitly aware of them, not as ideas but as a physical presence: two latent bodies nestling under her skin, waiting to be born.

  She looked away from the telescope, intending to rest her eyes for a moment, but as she gazed out through the transparent dome she caught sight of something that her narrower search had missed. About a third of the way up from the horizon, there was a visible break in the bright orange streak that usually formed part of a single long star trail. The gap was about half an arc-lapse—half the width of her thumb held out at arm’s length. If it was a passing rock it was either phenomenally large or phenomenally close; the saner interpretation was that a small piece of detritus had somehow adhered to the clearstone of the dome itself. But she had barely had a chance to ponder the fastest way to test that possibility when the star trail abruptly became whole again.