The Eternal Flame

36

“Talk to your co!” Silvano pleaded. “I don’t know what’s got into her, but if she starts backing away from our plans to exploit the Object she’ll lose all credibility with the Council.”

Carlo had been puzzled when Silvano had invited him to visit without Carla, but he hadn’t objected; he understood that there were matters that the two of them would be more comfortable discussing alone. It hadn’t occurred to him, though, that Carla herself might be one of them.

“She’s had an idea for something better,” he said. “I’m not an expert in any of this, and I gather that the other physicists’ opinions are divided. But what do you expect me to do? I can’t tell her to ignore her own judgment.”

“Wasn’t the whole point of these new light sources to manipulate orthogonal matter?” Silvano seemed to think that everything came down to that: Carla had gained his support for her project on that basis, and any attempt to change course now made her guilty of acting under false pretences.

“The research has opened up another possibility,” Carlo replied. “Why is that so terrible? The Object isn’t going anywhere. If this new idea turns out to be a dead end, you’ll still be able to resume the original project.”

“Resume?” Silvano was appalled. “We won’t get anywhere if we allow ourselves to be distracted every time someone’s mind goes off on a tangent. We need to finish what we’ve started!”

“Finish it how?” Carlo shifted uncomfortably on the rope, then decided to be blunt. “Do you want to see people annihilated, before we even consider the alternatives?”

“You’re saying the Object is so dangerous that we should forget about it completely? That wasn’t Carla’s attitude before.”

“And it’s probably not her attitude now,” Carlo admitted. “I’m sure she still believes that the dangers could be managed, given enough time and effort. But if there’s a chance to avoid those dangers altogether, why not look into that first?”

“Because it’s a fantasy!” Silvano proclaimed derisively. “Believe me, I admire the courage Carla showed in what she did to capture the Object—and I don’t blame her at all if she’s reluctant to go back. She doesn’t need to fly into the void again; she’s already a hero to everyone on the Peerless. But that’s no reason to sabotage the whole project, just to save face!”

Carlo said, “I have work to do.” He stretched out an arm, pushing himself away from the rope so he could peer into the playroom. “Bye, Flavia! Bye, Flavio!” The children didn’t turn away from the tent they were building, but they glanced toward him with their rear gazes and nodded in farewell.

Silvano tried to adopt a more conciliatory tone. “Look, if it were something easily settled then I’d be happy to support her. But it isn’t that simple, Carlo. Even if her demonstration project works—and my advisers all tell me that’s unlikely—there’s this whole separate business about mass-producing new clearstone to order. Let the chemists loose on that, and orthogonal matter will start to look benign in comparison.”

“So let them experiment out in the void,” Carlo suggested. “Build a new workshop for the chemists and put it a severance or two away from the Peerless. That would deal with the safety issues, it would give the navigators another chance to exercise their skills—and if the clearstone thing doesn’t work out, the same facility would be perfect for experiments with orthogonal matter.” He tipped his head and began backing away along the rope.

“All I could do was warn you!” Silvano called after him. “It’s up to you whether you listen.”

In the corridor Carlo sped along the guide rope, trying to work off his agitation. Why had Silvano had to drag him into this dispute? It was possible that Carla was fooling herself and her scheme was too good to be true. It was possible, too, that Silvano was just clinging to his vision of the Object as the gift from fate that would solve all their problems.

Mercifully, there was no need for him to decide who he believed was right. He was neither a Councilor nor a physicist; no one would care about his opinion on these matters.

No one but Carla and Silvano themselves.

Carlo had transformed the storeroom beside the arborine cages into an office, so he wouldn’t have to travel back and forth from the workshop Tosco had allocated for the original influence study. The room was cramped and it stank of the lizards awaiting their death as arborine food, but once he was in the harness beside the tape viewer he soon forgot his surroundings. The six reels sitting inert in their rack did not look like anything special, but in the viewer, illuminated and in motion, the strips’ rhythmic shifts between translucence and opacity became something close to a recitation of the body instructing itself to reproduce.

A recitation and a transcript. He wound the sequence from Zosima’s lower left probe past the lamp again slowly, pausing every few spans to glance down at his chest and check his notes. He had catalogued almost ten dozen recurring motifs in the recordings, and even those patterns were subject to further small variations—like words repeated with different inflections. Here it was, right in front of him: the language of life.

Now that they’d fed Benigna and Benigno to the point where quadraparity was all but assured, Macaria was pushing him to let them breed without any further interventions, in the hope that a comparison between the recordings of the two fissions would be illuminating. Carlo couldn’t fault the idea in principle, but he was still reluctant to proceed. Going on the surveys, there were probably less than three dozen arborines on the Peerless in total—counting Zosimo and his children. Aside from any qualms he had about the cruelty of confining and manipulating still more of them, there simply weren’t enough of the animals to grind through any exhaustive set of protocols, the way they’d all been trained to do with voles and lizards. If it was possible to learn more from Benigna than they could by conducting the single most obvious experiment—and losing another female of breeding age in the process—he owed it to all of them to find a way to do that.

Carlo worked on the tapes until his concentration began to falter. He checked the clock; it had been almost three bells. He pulled himself out of the room and went to check on the infrared recorders. A stack of four machines were monitoring Zosimo and his children, to see if they had acquired any of the influences the team had captured from sick people and played back into the cage. Carlo removed two exposed reels, then reloaded and reset the machines.

In the tape viewer, the reels were blank. The arborines appeared to be utterly unswayed by messages that had proved themselves capable of commandeering a person’s body. Ultimately that might not matter; the goal was to influence people, not arborines. But the lack of a single message that could infect both species would make it much harder to test the whole scheme.

Carlo took a meal break, but the storeroom wasn’t a pleasant place to spend it. Chewing on a loaf, he wandered back to the arborines’ cages. Zosimo ignored him, but the children leaped to the bars and thrust their hands through, humming plaintively in the hope that he’d throw them a morsel. “You want me to spoil you?” he chided them. He’d resisted naming the children but that hadn’t stopped him feeling a tug of affection for them, and he’d been weak enough to toss food to them before. “Your father will feed you soon. Be patient.”

Carlo swallowed the last of the loaf quickly; Amanda sometimes came early for her shift, and it made him uncomfortable if she surprised him eating. He was about to return to the storeroom when a movement in the other cage caught his attention. He turned and pulled himself along the cross rope for a closer look.

Benigna remained attached to her plinth, but she was holding something in one of her hands. As Carlo approached she tried to conceal it, but it was too large to be hidden from view.

It was a stick, about half a stride long. One end tapered to a rough wedge; it must have been snapped off a slender branch. But Benigna’s half of the cage had been emptied of branches, and Benigno hadn’t breached the barred partition that separated him from his co. Carlo was stumped, but then he realized that Benigno must have thrown the improvised tool through a gap in the bars.

Carlo drew himself to the side for a better view. The skin on Benigna’s back was torn, as if she’d been trying to force the stick between the stone surface and her body. “You want to be free?” he said dully. She couldn’t reach her melded flesh with her fingers, however sharp she made the claws, but not only had she conceived of a better plan, she’d managed to communicate what she needed to her co.

Carlo fought to maintain his resolve. If he gave up now, where would that leave him? Watching Carla go blind? Murdering two of his own children? These animals had done nothing to deserve the hardship he was inflicting on them—but what had he or any of the travelers done to deserve their own plight?

“What’s happening?” Amanda had arrived.

Carlo explained what he’d surmised. “You’d better tranquilize her and take it away,” he said. They’d been entering the cage to put dead lizards within Benigna’s reach, without drugging her first, but he didn’t want anyone trying to wrest a sharpened stick out of her hand while she was conscious.

“So how will we stop them doing it again?”

“Build a proper wall, I suppose,” Carlo replied. “I’ll get a construction crew to put stone slabs across.”

Amanda hesitated. “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to let them breed?”

Carlo was tempted. “It would be simpler,” he agreed. “But I have another plan.”

He’d been turning it over in the back of his mind, unsure of its usefulness, but now Amanda had forced his hand. “I want to play Zosima’s tapes back into Benigna’s body,” he said. “I want to see what each of those messages does.”

“You mean… out of context? Without Benigno triggering her?” Amanda sounded skeptical.

“Yes.”

“What do you expect will happen?”

“I don’t know,” Carlo admitted. “But there’s no point trying to reconstruct the whole sequence—there was too much lost from one of the recordings. So I think it’s better to go the other way, and see if any of the individual signals have an effect on their own.”

“What if that just cripples her?” Amanda protested. “If it goes wrong the way your finger did, it’s not going to be fixed by an amputation—and she certainly won’t be able to breed.”

“We have to take that chance,” Carlo said. “How else are we going to decipher this language? We have to study something more complicated than a twirling finger—but we’re never going to make sense of the fission process without breaking it down into smaller parts.”

“It’s your decision,” Amanda said. “I’d better—” She gestured toward Benigna.

Carlo moved aside and let her into the equipment hatch so she could dispense a dose of tranquilizer through the plinth.

“Silvano’s going to make trouble for you with the Council,” Carlo said. “He was counting on your support, and now he thinks you’ve turned against him.”

Carla hummed wearily. “Why does he have to take everything personally? If this works out, we’ll have a better chance than ever of reclaiming the engine feeds. He wants space for new farms, doesn’t he? I thought politics was all about the ends.”

Carlo dragged himself over to the lamp and rescued the front room from its drab moss-light. “Politics is about people’s feelings.”

“And exploiting them for your own ends,” Carla replied.

Carlo was still annoyed with Silvano, but he wasn’t feeling quite so cynical. “For three generations, we’ve had to make do with what we carried with us from the home world,” he said. “When the Object came along, everyone expected something from it. Silvano was hoping we could farm there, and he’s already had to give up on that. A universal liberator sounds dangerous—but the idea of mastering it still makes us feel powerful. Now you want everyone to forget about the Object and just trust you to pull energy out of thin air.”

“No one has to take this on trust,” Carla replied. “If it works, it will work right in front of their eyes.”

Carlo said, “But they still need to trust you that it’s worth the resources to build this thing you want to put before their eyes.”

“So do you believe there’s any chance that it will work?” Carla didn’t seem hurt by his lack of confidence; if anything, she sounded glad to have someone skeptical whom she could interrogate on the matter.

Carlo was honest with her. “I don’t know. All this shuffling of luxagens between energy levels sounds a bit like sleight of hand.”

“The light source we’ve already made was all about shuffling luxagens between energy levels,” Carla protested. “The Council had no problem approving that idea.”

“Because you shine a stonking great sunstone lamp on it!” Carlo replied. “It doesn’t offend anyone’s common sense to think that you can put light in and get light out.”

“All right.” Carla thought for a while. “Forget about the details of the device, then. Just look at what it claims to do.”

She made a quick sketch on her chest.

“The Peerless has a certain energy-momentum vector before we use this device,” she said. “It’s just an arrow whose length is the mass of the whole mountain, and we draw it vertically in a reference frame in which we start out at rest.”

“Right.” Carlo wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t follow that much.

“The photon rocket emits a pulse of light,” Carla continued. “Ultraviolet, preferably, so it’s moving rapidly and its energy-momentum vector is a long way from vertical. To obey the conservation laws, the total energy-momentum has to be the same, before and after that pulse is emitted. Before, there’s just the original energy-momentum of the Peerless: the vertical arrow. After the pulse is emitted, there’s the light’s vector, plus the new vector for the Peerless, whatever that might be. The sum of those last two vectors has to equal the first, so if you join up their arrows base to tip they form a closed triangle with the original vector.”

She paused inquiringly. “I’m still with you,” Carlo said.

“If the rocket had no effect on the mountain other than giving it a push,” she continued, “the new vector would need to have exactly the same length as before: the same mass. That would be ideal—but I’m not even claiming to be able to do that! Instead, if we allow for some waste heat raising the temperature of the Peerless, the extra thermal energy lowers the mass of the mountain, very slightly. But even that doesn’t ruin the geometry—there are still vectors for the light and the accelerated mountain that add up, exactly as they need to.”

Carlo gazed at the closed triangle on her chest. “I can see that it’s not physically impossible, in those terms,” he conceded. “But everything else that makes light needs some kind of fuel, some kind of input.” He gestured at the walls. “Even moss has to have rock to feed on.”

“Because moss isn’t interested in just making light! Its real concern is growth and repair; it can’t do that without inputs.”

“We need to make repairs, too.”

“Of course,” Carla agreed. “Even if this device works perfectly, it won’t make us self-sufficient for eternity. We’ll still be using up all our limited supplies, including sunstone for cooling and other purposes. It won’t buy us another eon to contemplate the ancestors’ plight. The most I’m hoping it can do is get us back to them—with an idea worth trying for the evacuation.”

“So you’re saying that our grandchildren might see the home world?” Carlo joked.

“Maybe our great-grandchildren,” Carla replied. “We’re not going to be firing up these engines tomorrow.”

The note of caution only made her sound more serious. Carlo turned the idea over in his mind; it was shocking just how alien it felt. This would be their purpose, finally fulfilled. No one was prepared for that.

“If we could see ourselves returning within a few generations…” He faltered.

“You don’t sound too happy about it,” Carla complained.

“Because I don’t know how people would take it,” he replied. “Would it make it easier to keep the population stable, if we knew there was an end to the restraint in sight? Or would it be harder to stay disciplined, if we could tell ourselves that there won’t be enough time for a little growth to do as much damage?”

“I don’t know either,” Carla said. “But as problems go, aren’t these the kind worth having?”

Carlo reorganized the shifts so that Amanda and Macaria could work beside him on the playback experiments. The changes they’d be looking for might be subtle, so they’d need as many eyes on the subject as possible.

Eyes and hands. With Benigna tranquilized and locked to her plinth, he decided, they could palpate her body safely enough. How else would they be able to characterize small changes in the arborine’s flesh?

Their record of the onset of Zosima’s fission had been ruined by the torn tape, but Carlo had identified a subsequent pause in the activity and isolated the first unbroken set of instructions that followed. He had considered playing back the tapes from the individual probes one at a time, but when he wound the recordings from the three lower probes through the viewer together it was clear from all their shared, synchronized motifs that these signals were acting in concert. If he disregarded this, he risked unbalancing the light’s effect to a point where it was merely pathological. He wouldn’t have tried to decipher a piece of writing by throwing out two symbols in every three before offering it to a native speaker, and if his intuitive sense of the structure of this language meant anything, the three probes’ recordings—over a period of about a lapse and half—constituted the smallest fragment with any chance of being intelligible to the arborine’s body.

On the morning of the experiment Carlo arrived early and started administering the tranquilizer to Benigna. The drug he pumped into her gut through the plinth was far milder than the paralytic in the darts, and would not act anywhere near as quickly. Benigno didn’t take long to notice the effects, though: he let out a series of low hums, and his co’s steadily weakening replies did not reassure him.

“I’m sorry,” Carlo muttered. He’d planned to put up curtains to block Benigno’s view of the procedure—and Zosimo’s too, for good measure—but he hadn’t thought to do it so early.

Macaria turned up as he was finishing the task. He tied the last corner of the fabric into place, then dragged himself over to Benigna. Her eyes were still open, but when he tugged on her arms the muscles were slack. Macaria joined him, and they set about establishing a baseline for the arborine’s anatomy. Carlo had decided not to make any exploratory incisions; as informative as they might have been, there was too much risk of disrupting the very effects they were hoping to measure.

Amanda arrived and started setting up the light players in the equipment hatch. Carlo went down to help her, and to satisfy himself that nothing would get shredded this time. The tapes themselves were merely copies of the recordings, but a garbled message could wreak havoc on Benigna’s flesh.

“Are you ready?” he asked Amanda.

“Yes.” Though she’d shown no enthusiasm for the experiment, no one had more experience with the players.

“We can try for a breeding in a few days’ time,” Carlo promised her.

“You really think she’ll still be fertile after this?” Amanda gestured at the tapes.

“Maybe not,” he admitted. “Then again, maybe her body will just ignore these signals without the whole context they had for Zosima—then we’ll have learned that much about the process, and we’ll still have a chance to record her undergoing quadraparous fission.”

Amanda didn’t argue the point. “You know what we should be studying in the arborines?” she said.

“What?”

“The effect of the male’s nutrition on biparity.”

Carlo said, “That would take six years and dozens of animals. Let’s finish what we’ve started first.”

He clambered back up into the cage. Benigno was still humming anxiously, but Carlo shut out the sound. He dragged himself into place beside Macaria and put his palms against Benigna’s skin.

“Start the playback,” he called to Amanda.

As the clatter rose up from beneath the cage a tremor passed through the arborine’s body, but it was probably just a vibration transmitted from the machines themselves. Carlo glanced at Macaria, who was moving her fingertips gently over the opposite side of Benigna’s torso. “I think there’s some rigidity,” she said.

“Really?” He pressed a thumb against the skin; it was a little less yielding than before.

The players fell silent. Carlo tried not to be too disappointed by the unspectacular result. He’d chosen a short sequence in the hope that it would elicit a single, comprehensible effect, and if this hardening of the skin—a prerequisite for fission—could be attributed to the motifs they had sent in, that would be one modest step toward deciphering the entire language.

But the response to the tapes hadn’t played itself out yet: the arborine’s skin was still growing more rigid. As Carlo tested it, he saw a faint yellow flicker spreading through the flesh below, diffuse but unmistakable.

Macaria said, “I think we might have triggered something.”

The body did its best to confine its signals, to keep them from spilling from one pathway to another; only the most intense activity shone through to the surface. These errant lights reminded Carlo of the sparks that tumbled out when he set a lamp spinning in weightlessness: each spark drifted away, fading, but there was always another close behind. The tapes, it seemed, hadn’t issued a simple instruction to the arborine’s flesh: do this one thing and be done with it. They’d provoked it into starting up its own internal conversation, sufficiently frenetic to be glimpsed from outside the skin.

Could they have pushed the body into fission? Carlo was confused; Benigna hadn’t even resorbed her limbs, and all the optical activity he could see was confined to her lower torso. He reached up and touched her tympanum gently, then her face; the skin here was completely unaffected. “This is some minor reorganization,” he suggested. “Some local rigidity and a few associated changes.”

“Perhaps.” Macaria ran a finger across Benigna’s chest. “If by ‘associated changes’ you mean a partition forming.”

Carlo prodded the place she’d just touched; not only was the surface hard, he could feel the inflexible wall extending beneath it. “You’re right.”

“Transverse or longitudinal?” Amanda asked. She’d left the equipment hatch and was dragging herself into the cage.

“Transverse,” Carlo replied.

“You know what that means,” Amanda said. “We recorded Zosima’s body instructing itself to undergo biparous fission—and now we’ve fooled Benigna’s body into thinking it’s told itself exactly the same thing.”

“This is not fission!” Carlo insisted. He summoned Amanda closer and let her feel Benigna’s unchanged head and upper chest.

Macaria said, “We only replayed the signals from the three lower probes—and nothing from the very start of the process. If there’s a single message that sets fission in train, I doubt we’ve reproduced it.”

“So if this isn’t fission,” Amanda demanded, “when does it stop?” A prominent dark ridge had risen across the full width of the arborine’s torso.

Carlo probed one end of the ridge, following it down toward the plinth. “It isn’t encircling the body,” he said. “It turns around and runs longitudinally.” He prodded the fleshy wall, trying to get a sense of its deeper geometry. “I think it’s avoiding the gut.” During ordinary fission, in voles at least, the whole digestive tract closed up and disappeared well before any partitions formed. If that hadn’t happened to Benigna, perhaps the process that was building the partition had steered away from the unexpected structure—guided as much by the details of its environment as any fixed notion as to its own proper shape.

“How much does the brain need to spell out, and how much does the flesh in the blastula manage for itself?” Macaria wondered.

“The brain’s resorbed quite late,” Carlo said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s controlling everything, right up to that moment,” Macaria countered.

Amanda reached past Carlo and put a hand on Benigna’s rigid belly. “If we’ve told half her body that it’s undergoing fission, does it really need any more instructions? What if it’s taken it upon itself to finish what it’s started?”

Carlo felt sick. “Should we euthanize her?” he asked. He was not sentimental, but he wasn’t going to torture this animal for no reason.

“Why?” Macaria replied, bemused. “Do you think she’s in pain?”

Carlo examined Benigna’s face. The muscles remained slack and her eyes did not respond when he moved his fingers; he had no reason to believe that she’d regained consciousness. But his father had told him stories from the sagas of men accidentally buried alive, and the mere thought of that still filled him with dread. What was fission, if not the female equivalent of death? Would it not be as horrifying—even for an arborine—to wake on the far side of a border whose crossing ought to have extinguished all thought?

Amanda looked torn, but she sided with Macaria. “Let her live, for as long as she’s not suffering. We need to know if this will go to completion.”

The misshapen partition was thickening. Carlo fought down his revulsion and explored its full extent. After crossing the torso then turning at the sides to follow the body’s axis, the dark ridge closed up on itself at the back of the arborine’s thighs, a few scants clear of the anus. The implied excision was potentially survivable; the blastula had not claimed any part of Benigna’s flesh that would normally be immutable.

“It’s lucky we fed her up,” Macaria said. “Or there wouldn’t be much to work with.”

“Are the limbs included?” Amanda wondered.

“Good point.” Macaria prodded each of Benigna’s lower arms in turn. “Their skin hasn’t hardened.” She ran her fingers up toward the torso, searching for the boundary. “Oh!”

“What?” From the sound of her voice Carlo was reluctant to touch the spot himself.

“If I’m right we’ll see it soon enough,” Macaria replied.

Over the next few lapses, two more dark ridges appeared at the top of the thighs. For some reason the flesh beyond was as unacceptable to the blastula as the digestive tract.

“That seems wasteful,” Amanda complained.

“It’s avoiding the bifurcation,” Carlo guessed. “At this stage there wouldn’t usually be any maternal limbs around, so whatever follows probably requires a convex mass of flesh.” If the partition had veered toward the front of the thighs in the first place the limbs could have been excluded with less drastic consequences—but this was a blind process, robbed of its ordinary context, not something nature had ever had a chance to hone for the sake of Benigna’s welfare.

“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 retreated 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.