The Eternal Flame

20

The night before the election, Tamara walked to the clearing and checked the clock there, just in case she’d lost track of the date. She hadn’t. For the fourth time in her life the inhabitants of the Peerless were about to vote for a new Council.

Weeds were sprouting in the flower bed. It looked as if Tamaro hadn’t slept there for days. Did that mean that he was afraid of her now? Or was he spending his time even closer to her, hiding in the fields, watching and waiting for her children to arrive? Perhaps he believed that merely being present when they opened their eyes would be enough for him to form a bond with them, closing the rift he’d made and restoring the family to normalcy.

Tamara wound the clock, but left the weeds as she’d found them. She milled some flour and made a dozen loaves, then took them back to her camp beside the door. When she’d eaten three loaves she buried the rest in the store-hole, then lay down in her bed. She did not expect to sleep now, but the soil was blissfully cool.

In the morning, vote collectors would come to every farm. They would accept no excuse for neglecting this duty—however busy someone might be, however sick, however indifferent to the outcome. Erminio would have had Tamara’s name struck from the roll, but how could he keep the collectors away from his son? He might claim that Tamaro had business elsewhere and would cast his vote in another location—but then, by the end of the day the missing vote would be noted, the announcement of the tally would be delayed, and locating the miserable shirker would become everyone’s business. On the home world people had paid to become Councilors—and if the historians could be trusted, not one woman had ever attained that office. Tamara had trouble believing that, and the even more surreal corollary: when the Peerless returned, in the four years of its absence the situation was unlikely to have changed. True or not, though, the very idea was sufficiently affronting to imbue each election with added gravitas. To fail to vote would be seen as a declaration that the old ways had been just fine.

Tamara closed her eyes, willing the night to pass more quickly. Her fellow prisoner had no hope of sneaking past her, and his shameful dereliction would soon bring both of them all the attention she could have wished for. In a day or two her ordeal would be over.

Unless someone forged Tamaro’s signature. The local vote collectors would be neighbors who’d recognize him by sight, but it could be done in a remote part of the Peerless where neither Tamaro nor the impostor was known. The fake Tamaro could then travel back to his usual haunts to cast his own vote, so the tally would add up perfectly. Erminio couldn’t perform the fraud himself, the disparity in age would be too obvious. But if he could bribe a younger accomplice and teach him to mimic his son’s signature, the plan would not be too difficult to execute.

Tamara rose to her feet, shivering. Her long vigil by the door had been for nothing. No one was coming for her; she was dead to her friends, dead to the vote collectors, dead to the whole mountain. She should have been digging up every square stride of the farm from the first day of her captivity, looking for Tamaro’s buried key—or some tool misplaced by her grandfather, or some secret hatch left by the construction crew. Anything would have been better than squandering her time on this fantasy.

She walked over to the door and ran her hand across the cool hardstone surface. For the dozenth time she extruded a narrow finger and tried to force it into the keyhole, but the spring-loaded guards between the tumblers were too sharp. It wasn’t a matter of bearing the pain; if she persisted the guards would simply slice her flesh off, ossified or not. The right tool might have enabled her to pick the lock, but with her body alone it was impossible.

Apart from this one entrance the farm was hermetically sealed. Even the air from the cooling system ran in closed channels deep within the floor rather than moving through the chamber itself, lest it spread blight from crop to crop. She couldn’t burn her way through the walls with a lamp, she couldn’t cut her way out with a scythe. And the stone around her was far too thick for any cry for help to reach her neighbors.

Erminio wasn’t going to creep back in to be ambushed. Ada and Roberto weren’t coming to the rescue with a construction team wielding air-powered grinders. The only way out was with the key. The only way to get the key was from Tamaro.

It took her until morning to find him. As the red wheat-flowers began closing across the fields, she saw Tamaro rise from a hiding spot beneath their spread blooms and look around for better cover.

He heard her approaching and disappeared between the stalks, but she dropped to all fours to match his height and pursued him in the gloom of the moss-light. The crops rustled at every touch, making stealth impossible for both of them, but Tamara was faster. She wondered why he didn’t halt and grant himself the advantage of silence; perhaps he thought he needed more distance between them before he had any real chance of her losing him.

As she pushed on through the stalks their relentless susurration might have deafened her to anything similar, but Tamaro was weaving back and forth, sending out his own distinctive rhythm. She could hear every change of direction he made, the slight hesitation as he swerved. They’d played this game before, she realized. More than a dozen years ago. He had never learned to escape her then; it had never been important enough.

Tamara could almost see him now—or at least she could see the rebounding wheat stalks ahead of her, darkened by their momentary clustering, brightening as the gaps re-opened to admit the moss-light. She knew when he’d zigzag next, and she sprinted straight for the point where she could intercept him.

Pain flared in her left front leg. She recoiled and brought herself to a halt as an arc of neatly sliced stalks fell to the ground ahead of her.

“Stay where you are,” Tamaro warned her.

“I only want to talk,” she said. In the silence she could hear him shivering. “What’s the plan now? Are you going to hack me to pieces?”

“If I have to,” he replied. “Don’t think I won’t defend myself.”

He was terrified. She’d thought she’d done him very little harm the last time she’d got her hands on him, but he must have sensed how close she’d come to something worse. Tamara wanted to buzz with mirth, but she found herself humming with grief and shame. They were both in fear of their lives from each other. How had it come to this?

She got control of herself. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “We need to talk. We need to fix this.” She caught a red glint as he raised the scythe, holding it ready in case she advanced on him. “Please, Tamaro.”

“I can’t let you out,” he said. “They’ll lock me up. They’ll lock up Erminio.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. There was no point pretending that any lie she could tell would be enough to exonerate them. “But it’s up to you how bad it is. If they catch you out after I’m gone, you know they’ll throw away the key. If you turn yourself in right now and I ask the Council for leniency, it could just be a year or so.”

“I can’t do that to him. I can’t betray my own father!”

Tamara shivered wearily. Mother, father… why was his co always last on the list?

“What do you want from your life?” she asked him. “Do you want to raise children?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Then find a way to do it. Find a co-stead and raise your own. If I give birth here you can be sure it won’t be your doing, and you’ll have lost all hope of having children of your own. If you give me the key, I’ll keep my promise: I’ll sign the entitlement over to you as soon as we have paper and a witness.”

The wheat rustled; he was moving the scythe again. “How can I trust you?”

“You’re my co,” she said. “I still love you, I still want you to have a good life. You can’t expect us to have children together after what you’ve done, but I don’t care about the entitlement—just let me fly the Gnat, let me have a few moments of happiness. Let me be what I am, and I’ll grant you the same.”

The silence stretched on for more than a lapse. Tamara forced herself to wait it out; one misjudged word now could cost her everything.

She heard Tamaro put down the scythe.

“I’ll show you where the key is,” he said.

He led her to a nondescript part of the field, far from any store-hole old or new, and dug into the soil beside one of the plants. When he plucked the key out from between the roots she knew she would never have found it herself if she’d searched for a year.

He handed it to her.

“Come with me,” Tamara said. “I’m not going to lie to people, but I won’t make it hard for you.”

“I should wait here for Erminio,” Tamaro decided. “I should talk to him first.”

“All right.” Tamara reached over and touched his shoulder, trying to reassure him that she wasn’t going to renege on any of her promises. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. Was he ashamed of what he’d done to her, or just ashamed that he hadn’t been able to follow through on his father’s plan?

She left him in the field and ran to the doorway. The key fitted neatly, forcing the guards apart, but when she tried to turn it the lock wouldn’t yield. Panicking, she pulled it out and scoured it clean with her fingers, then she tapped it against the door until a tiny clump of soil fell from one of its intricate slots.

She inserted it again and twisted it gently; she could hear the faint clicks as one by one the cylinders in the lock engaged. She tried the handle and the door swung open as if nothing had ever been awry.

A few stretches down the corridor she turned a corner and ran into her neighbor, Calogero. He was carrying a ballot box and a stack of voting papers.

“Tamara?” He stared at her. “So… the blight’s under control now?”

“It certainly is.” Blight. What else could keep every prying neighbor away until the deed was done? Tamara stood a moment, marveling at Erminio’s cunning. The worse he claimed the infestation to be, the keener the agronomists would be to investigate the aftermath—but it would only take a few burned patches in the fields to make it look as if Tamaro had eradicated the menace entirely.

Calogero was still confused, though if he’d been told that children had already been sighted he wasn’t letting on. “Is Tamaro coming out to vote?”

“He didn’t say. But there’s nothing in the farm for you to worry about,” she said.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely. The election probably slipped his mind. You should go in and get his vote.”

“All right.” Calogero put down the ballot box and offered her a paper. He said, “I know there’ll be other places on your way, but since we’re here you might as well get it over with.”