The Eternal Flame

13

Silvano had an announcement for his friends. “I’ve decided to run for the Council.”

Carlo was caught unprepared. By the time it occurred to him that it would be polite to offer a few words of encouragement, he also knew that he’d left it too late to sound sincere.

“What’s in it for us?” Carla joked.

“Ah, that would depend on how much help I get with the campaign.” Silvano reached out and grabbed his son Flavio, who had drifted away from the guide ropes and started to flail around in midair. The family’s new apartment had weaker gravity than the last one, but Carlo could understand why Silvano had felt compelled to move.

Carla said, “I’ll tout for you six days a stint if you can take the pressure off my department’s sunstone allocations.”

“Hmm.” Silvano wasn’t willing to make rash promises, even in jest. “Wait and see what they find with the Gnat. If it turns out that we can run the engines on orthogonal rock, you’ll have all the sunstone you could wish for.”

Carlo said, “What will you be campaigning on?”

“Farm expansion,” Silvano replied.

“Expansion?” Carlo was bemused. “Do you think you can find a structural engineer willing to gamble on squeezing in another layer of fields?”

“No, no! Everyone agrees that’s reached its limit; we have to look for other opportunities.” Flavio was starting to squirm out of his father’s grip; he wanted to get back on the rope with his co. Silvano released him and let him drag himself clumsily away.

“Such as…?” Carla pressed him.

Silvano said, “When the Gnat visits the Object, what might it find? Either the Object will be made of something violently reactive, which we can use as part of a new kind of fuel, or it will turn out to be nothing but ordinary rock.”

Carlo exchanged a glance with Carla. She didn’t accept this list as exhaustive, but she was willing to let it pass for the moment.

“If it’s the first case,” Silvano continued, “we’ll be rebuilding the engines completely to make use of the new reaction, which should give us a chance to reclaim some of the feed chambers for agriculture. But the second case would be even more promising: we won’t have solved the fuel problem… but we’ll certainly have a lot more space.”

Carla caught his meaning first, and it forced a chirp of admiration from her. “You want to turn the Object into a farm?”

“Why not?” Silvano replied. “We should be prepared to make the best of whatever the Gnat finds. If the Object turns out to be ordinary rock, there’ll be nothing to stop us cutting into it, making some chambers, spinning it up—”

Carlo said, “But if it’s ordinary rock, the Gnat won’t be able to halt it.” The whole idea that they could capture the Object was based on the assumption that it was made of a substance that would react with calmstone as dramatically as the specks that had once lit up the Peerless’s slopes.

“That’s true,” Silvano agreed. “We’d need to follow up quickly with a second expedition, carrying enough fuel to do the job with a conventional engine. But think what it would mean: in the long run, we could easily quadruple the harvest.”

Carlo didn’t reply. He couldn’t declare that this plan was impossible. But the workforce that had carried out the same kind of transformation on Mount Peerless itself—with all the benefits of air and gravity, and a planet’s worth of resources behind them—had vastly outnumbered its present population.

Carla said, “No one could accuse you of thinking small.”

“We need something like this,” Silvano replied. “A big project of our own, in the service of a common goal that might actually be achieved in our lifetimes.”

“A project of our own?” Carla’s tone remained friendly, but she made no attempt to hide her irritation. “So now everything gets classified that way? Is it for us, or is it for them?”

“You know what I mean,” Silvano said, impatient with her umbrage. “Even if we all had the skills to work on some ingenious scheme for rescuing the ancestors, none of us has the slightest chance of living to see the pay-off. Maybe you’re happy pondering the deep reasons why mirrors get tarnished—and maybe that will lead somewhere, in an age or two—but the only way that most of us can stay sane is to think about doing something for our own children and grandchildren. The generations we can actually… empathize with.” It sounded as if he’d been on the verge of invoking a closer connection than mere empathy, but then recalled just in time that his interlocutor would not be cuddling her own grandchildren.

“Just be careful what you promise,” Carlo warned him. “The Object will give its own verdict on all of these plans, and if you’ve talked up the prospect of quadrupling the harvest you might have some disappointed voters to deal with.”

Silvano was puzzled. “I told you: the whole point of my candidacy will be to ensure that people benefit regardless. If we can’t farm the Object, solving the fuel problem would certainly be a big boost to morale—but we have to be prepared to find more space for agriculture, whatever the Gnat discovers.”

“Rocket fuel or rock, you win either way?” Carla was finding the whole thing amusing. “I can see the posters already.”

When they’d left the apartment, Carlo turned to her. “You think there’s a chance we’ll end up farming the Object?”

“Anything’s possible,” she said. “Though if the whole thing’s as inert as calmstone and we end up relying on it, the fuel problem won’t just be unsolved, it will be doubled.”

“Yeah.” As a child, when he’d first understood that the Peerless had been loaded up far beyond its capacity to return, Carlo had railed against the ancestors—and now here was Silvano, contemplating doing exactly the same thing. “Do you want to run for the Council on a No Expansion platform? ‘Forget about a bigger harvest, people! There’s no point getting used to a mountain of extra food, when we have no way to decelerate a mountain of extra rock!’”

Carla buzzed wryly. “Maybe not. I can’t really blame Silvano, though. He doesn’t want his son to have to do what he did.” When Carlo didn’t reply she glanced across at him. “Your solution would be better, but it’s harder for most of us to believe in. We all know that a flying mountain can be turned into a farm, but for well-fed women to start having two children sounds more like turning people into voles.”

“Western shrub voles, to be precise,” Carlo replied. “They’re the biparous ones. But they have no males, so that doesn’t really help—breeding still doubles their numbers. As far as anyone knows, there’s never been an animal population that was stable in the absence of predation, famine or disease.”

“Don’t get discouraged,” Carla said, reaching over and putting a hand on his shoulder. “That’s just the history of life for the last few eons. It’s not as if it’s a law of physics.”