The Eternal Flame

26

Carlo looked on with a growing sense of dread as Ada and Tamara emerged from the airlock. Tamara was the leader; shouldn’t she have been the last to leave the Gnat? He watched the navigators’ faces as they removed their helmets, bracing himself for confirmation of his fears.

They both looked tired, but happy. They did not look like bearers of bad news.

Addo ran forward to embrace his co, with Pio close behind. Tamara approached the rest of the welcoming party: Marzio, Carlo and Ivo’s son Delfino. “They’ll be up soon,” she said. “There were some records they’d packed away for the return journey that they suddenly decided they couldn’t leave for the decommissioning team to bring up.”

“Thank you,” Delfino said, his voice strained with relief. Carlo could understand why he hadn’t brought his children to the disembarkation; out of all the crew, Ivo had faced the greatest risk of not coming back.

“So what’s the news about the Object?” Carlo asked Tamara. Addo had spoken to the astronomers who’d seen it light up three times, but Carlo didn’t trust any remote interpretation of the events. “Rocket fuel or just rock?”

Tamara said, “Your co would murder me if I spoiled her chance to tell you the whole story. You’ll have to be patient.”

“But everyone’s fine?”

“Absolutely,” Tamara promised.

As Tamara spoke with Marzio, Carlo surveyed her appraisingly, looking for any sign that the journey might have done her harm. The most striking thing, though, was how much mass she’d gained. He’d been expecting that, but he was glad of the reminder; he didn’t want Carla to catch him noticing the change, forcing her to think about the struggle she’d be facing when they were meant to be celebrating her return.

Ivo climbed into view inside the airlock, a bundle of papers under one arm. Carla followed, similarly encumbered. “If they drop them they’ll be sorry,” Marzio said, bemused. “I don’t know why they couldn’t wait.” The papers began to flutter alarmingly as the airlock refilled, but with the entrance hatch closed any danger of losing them had passed.

Carlo approached the airlock. When Carla stepped through the doorway he took the papers so she could remove her helmet; the cooling bags made it impossible to extrude new limbs at will. Carlo noticed a neatly cut hole in the fabric over her left palm.

“Welcome back,” he said.

“I missed you,” she replied. Her words were strangely charged, like a threat or a confession.

The bag between them made a crinkling sound as they embraced. Carlo buzzed at the tickle of the creases.

“I managed to keep the Councilors away,” he said. “You won’t have to face any of them until the official reception.”

“Ha.” Carla relaxed slightly. “Poor Silvano isn’t going to be happy. Let me get this off, then we can go and talk.”

They stood together on the empty workshop floor, far enough from the others for a modicum of privacy. Carlo listened, entranced, to the results of the first experiments, but when Carla began describing her decision to join Ivo on the Mite it was hard to keep the horror from showing on his face. As the story went on he could feel himself losing the struggle.

“You almost died,” he said.

“But I didn’t.”

He tried to balance his anger against his gratitude that she’d survived, but the scales refused to lie still.

“Ivo could have gone down alone.”

“He was injured,” Carla replied. “I was the one who should have gone down alone. It was my job to replace him if he wasn’t in perfect health.”

Carlo didn’t reply. What could he do about this recklessness? Nothing. The whole thing was past.

He dragged his attention back to Carla’s words as she described her theory of luxagen annihilation; he even managed to ask half-intelligent questions as she summoned diagrams of the process onto her chest.

“When you turn everything sideways,” he said, “one of the photons that these annihilations ‘produce’ has to be there from the start?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s the ancestors’ reference frame, isn’t it?” Carlo realized. “So if they could watch all this, they’d claim that something emitted that photon in a completely separate process—to explain the fact that it came along just in time to bounce off the luxagen?”

Carla said, “That’s what you’d expect, though I wouldn’t swear to anything like that without a way to test it.”

“But doesn’t that mean that if the ancestors managed to ensure that there were no suitable photons… we wouldn’t see the luxagens annihilate each other?”

“What happens, happens,” Carla offered gnomically. “Everything in the cosmos has to be consistent. All we get to do is talk about it in a way that makes sense to us.”

“Unless we can’t,” he replied. “Where’s the guarantee that we can even do that much?”

Carla buzzed softly. “We don’t seem to have lost the ability just yet. I’d save the angst about free will for the return journey.”

Everyone else had started moving toward the exit. “The reception’s tomorrow, at the third bell,” Carlo said. “Are you up to that?”

“I’ll survive,” Carla replied. “Where am I sleeping tonight? I’ve lost track of the system.”

Carlo hesitated; he’d planned on the two of them going to his apartment. And it wasn’t just the system, it was what he longed for: to see her lying safely beside him, to reassure himself that the danger of losing her had passed.

But he could already hear the arguments he’d make to himself if he woke in the night. The danger’s passed, for now—so now is the time to forestall any chance of it returning. And to Carla: You’ve solved another of Yalda’s puzzles: you’ve explained the reaction with orthogonal matter! What more do you want? That part of your life is complete.

“We should meet at the reception,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

Carlo thought she sounded disappointed, almost hurt by his rejection. But why couldn’t he just speak plainly? They were trailing the others, out of hearing.

“It’s too hard for me right now,” he said. “I almost lost you; all I can think about now is keeping you.”

Carla looked stunned. He’d said too much, she’d never trust him again.

But then she reached down and squeezed his shoulder. “Me too,” she said, shivering a little. “We should stay apart for a few more days, until it passes for both of us.”

Amanda caught Carlo’s eye; she flicked her head slightly to point to Tosco, dragging himself across the workshop toward them.

“I’d like to see you both in my office,” Tosco said. “At the next chime, if you can get away from what you’re doing.”

Amanda had her hand in a cage, poised to inject an immobilized vole on the verge of reproducing, but she said, “That’s no problem.”

Carlo said, “We’ll be there.”

When Tosco was gone, Amanda shot Carlo a questioning glance. “I have no idea,” he said. Their work had been progressing far more slowly than any of them wished, but Tosco was the one who’d counselled Carlo to be patient.

As they approached the office at the appointed time, Carlo saw one of their colleagues, Macaria, waiting on the rope outside the doorway. Carlo had no idea what she’d been doing lately; he’d seen her coming and going from the main workshop, using the centrifuges and other equipment, but she’d been spending most of her time elsewhere.

Tosco emerged and called the three of them inside. When they were settled, he addressed Carlo and Amanda.

“I’ve brought you here for a briefing on Macaria’s experiments,” he said. “She’ll be publishing the results shortly, but I wanted you to hear them first.”

Carlo was relieved; this didn’t sound like a preamble to the termination of his own project. “What’s the work about?”

Macaria said, “I’m in the early stages of an investigation into infrared communication in lizards.”

“Communication?” Amanda had worked with lizards for years; she was entitled to express some skepticism at the claim.

“‘Signaling’ might be a better word,” Tosco suggested. “We’re not talking about a language, in the conventional sense.”

“Ivo found an infrared-sensitive component in lizard skin,” Macaria explained. “So I wondered if it had a specific role—maybe supplementing ordinary vision in some way. But I thought the easiest starting point would be to look for a complementary substance: one that would emit IR to the environment in response to an internal signal. And I found one.”

“Triggered chemically?” Amanda asked.

Macaria said, “No. It responds directly to illumination from pathways in the flesh at the usual wavelengths, but it’s shielded from external visible light by a layer that’s only transparent in infrared.”

“Ah.” Amanda sounded as if she was starting to be won over, but Carlo was still unconvinced; demonstrating an interesting physical property in some goo you’d centrifuged out of lizard skin didn’t prove that that property served a biological function.

“I set up an infrared camera and took exposures of small lizard populations in various circumstances, to see if I could catch the signal being used,” Macaria continued. “Most of the experiments came up blank. A new food source and the appearance of a predator—things that elicit audible calls—didn’t trigger any infrared chatter.”

Carlo said, “But…?”

“When I took two groups that had been bred apart and brought them together for the first time, the paper turned black.” Macaria swept a hand back and forth, as if slathering dye onto a sheet. “I’d been expecting a few gray streaks across the image, but in a two-lapse exposure there was complete saturation wherever a lizard had been in view.”

Carlo understood now what the meeting was about. “So you think this is what carries an influence?”

Tosco said, “We don’t want to rush to any conclusions.”

“No.” But it was a tantalizing possibility. When two unrelated groups of animals came together, they almost always managed to exchange some traits. Lizards had no males, so there was no question of cross-breeding, but in other species even when the groups were kept from making physical contact the next generation of young ended up with traits that could not be explained by ordinary inheritance. The mechanism remained so obscure that biologists still used the vocabulary of folklore: an “influence” passed between the groups. When you had no idea how the traits had actually been disseminated, what else could you say?

“I’m going to test that hypothesis, of course,” Macaria said. “Block the IR or interfere with it, and see if that affects the exchange of traits. But it’s going to take several generations of animals to get meaningful results.”

“In the meantime,” Tosco said, “I think this calls for a collaboration. Carlo and Amanda have experience with their light recorder, capturing the time sequence of internal signals. So I want the three of you to work together, to analyze the structure of these IR signals in the same way.”

Carlo felt a twinge of anxiety returning; Macaria’s discovery was important, but he didn’t want his own work slowed down. “You’re not scaling back our project?”

“No.” Tosco was annoyed by this petty response. “All I’m asking you to do is to find the time to help Macaria become familiar with your techniques. Anything more is up to you—though I would have thought you’d be grateful for the chance to become involved in this work and learn from it yourself.”

Carlo was duly chastened. “Of course.”

And Tosco had a point. The messages that moved within the flesh had proved harder to manipulate than he’d imagined, whereas the signals Macaria had found were out in the open, there for the taking. This might be a chance to watch some kind of concise description of traits moving from group to group, instead of trying to take apart the detailed mechanics of the same traits unfolding within each animal’s body.

He didn’t know whether quadraparous voles were ever influenced by biparous cousins to follow their example. But if they were—and if he could record the transaction that made it happen—how far might that take him?

“I’d be happy to help Macaria,” he said. “And happy to learn from her.”