The Eternal Flame

42

When Carlo insisted on seeing for himself exactly what had become of the forest, Tamara joined Ada, Patrizia and Carla to escort him down the axis. Macaria had reached the point where she couldn’t face any more bad news. She thanked Tamara and headed home with her co.

As the group entered the central corridor, Tamara could already smell the traces of smoke wafting up through the mountain. She’d seen her father burning off blight often enough to be impressed by the ability of plants to limit the spread of fire: in wheat, at least, there was a skin covering most of the stalk that could be shed if it caught alight. But nothing living was invulnerable, not even the mightiest tree. In the presence of a high enough density of flames, the heat carried through the air alone would be enough to render any kind of organic matter unstable.

By the time they reached the second level above the forest, the smoke was thick enough to scatter the moss-light into a disorienting red haze. Tamara struggled to see a dozen strides ahead; they might as well have sent out invitations for an ambush. The heat was becoming palpable, and Carlo had barely had time to recover from his last bout of hyperthermia. When he started faltering, losing his grip on the guide rope, Carla finally managed to dissuade him from continuing.

“If we’re already struggling at this distance,” she said, “imagine what it was like inside the chamber. The arborines will be dead. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

Tamara had reached the same conclusion long ago, but she’d been trying not to think about the consequences. Who would vote for the research to continue now? With reports of disfigured arborines still preying on their minds—notwithstanding Carla’s belated retraction—and no prospect of further animal tests to settle the matter, who could endorse such a project?

Carla’s apartment wasn’t far. Tamara suggested that the two of them rest there, and when she volunteered to stand guard Patrizia and Ada offered to join her.

They turned and headed back up the axis, smoke clinging to their skin. The blight infesting the arborines had been burned away before it could spread. Tamara knew the scent of eradication.

“We can’t just accept this!” Patrizia declared angrily. “We need to hit them as hard as they hit us!”

Tamara gestured with a hand to her tympanum. Carla and Carlo were asleep in the next room.

“What happened to the Council appointing police?” Ada replied caustically. “You want to burn a few farms now? Or just kidnap a few people at random?”

Patrizia scowled. “Of course not. But we have to show them what happens when they try to win a vote by force. We have to find a way to hurt them.”

“Wars of retribution were hard enough on the ancestors,” Ada said. “And we have none of the resilience of a planetary culture. If people start repaying every act of violence in kind, we’ll all be dead within a year.”

Tamara didn’t doubt that. The prospect of her father’s mentality triumphing yet again enraged her—but she hadn’t quite lost her mind. The Peerless could not survive any escalating conflict. The Council would find someone to punish for the kidnappings and the fires, eventually, and she would have to be satisfied with that.

Patrizia swung back and forth on her rope, agitated, unable to let the matter drop. “No violence,” she said finally. “But we can still hurt them. We still have the one thing they fear the most.”

“That’s a bit too cryptic for me,” Ada admitted.

Tamara understood. “We still have the tapes,” she said. “We could still do one more experiment, before the vote comes in and the Council bans the research.”

Ada said, “You mean scale things down, from arborines to voles?”

“No, scale things up,” Patrizia corrected her. “We need a woman to give birth, before the vote. To prove that it works, to prove that it’s safe. To show the whole mountain that it really is possible.”

That silenced Ada. It silenced all three of them. Tamara stared at the walls, marveling at the strange disjuncture between the joy she felt at the prospect of the kidnappers and arsonists hearing the first rumors of such a thing, and the visceral sense of panic that gripped her at the thought of what it would take for those rumors to be real.

Patrizia said, “I’ll do it, if I have to.”

“You’re too young,” Tamara said flatly.

“What—do you think I’m not fertile yet?”

“I mean you’re too young to take the risk.”

“Someone has to be the first,” Patrizia replied. “There aren’t going to be any more arborine tests. Someone has to take the risk of finding out if it’s safe for women.”

Ada said, “If anyone does this, it would have to be a solo. Nobody’s co could come to terms with this in a day: you can’t just tell a man he has to give up any chance to be a father in the usual way—no warning, no discussion. No one could accept it, and it wouldn’t be fair to demand it of them.”

Tamara concurred. “This would be hard enough for anyone, but to get a couple to agree on it before the vote would be impossible.”

Patrizia shot her an odd glance, something more than resentment at having the law laid down this way.

Tamara said, “I’d do it myself, but I don’t have an entitlement. I can’t bring a child into the world if I can’t feed her.”

Patrizia hesitated, then cast aside her reticence. “There’s nothing in the separation agreement for your children?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Tamara replied. “My co’s children will inherit the full entitlement.”

“What if I signed over a twelfth of mine?” Patrizia offered.

Tamara held a hand up. “You can’t starve your descendants, that’s not fair—”

“I wouldn’t be starving anyone,” Patrizia insisted. “If this method works, the population will fall. No one can afford to sign over fractional entitlements for third and fourth children anymore—which is sad, but there’s a brutal logic to it. Doing the same thing for a woman’s sole child is completely different.”

Ada said, “She’s right. I’ll offer you a twelfth as well. And I’ll take this to as many other women as we need—if it’s really what you want.”

Tamara forced herself to stay calm. No one here was trying to trap her; they were just taking her at her word. If she said no, that would be the end of it.

What did she want? She wanted to defeat the fanatics who’d tried to impose their will throughout the mountain by force. She wanted to be free of all the men who believed that her flesh was their property, to protect and control and finally to harvest, as they saw fit.

But she did want a child, on her own terms.

She could leave it to someone else to go first, to test Carlo’s method, to see if it was safe. But what would happen if every solo, widow and runaway to whom they put this proposition took the same view? The vote was in four days. If everyone balked at the prospect, everyone would lose the chance.

Tamara said, “Do you think Carlo’s up to this?”

“Not remotely,” Ada replied. “Nor Macaria. It wouldn’t be fair to ask them, and frankly I wouldn’t let either of them do surgery on any living creature for the next three stints.”

“Which leaves Amanda. I’ve never even spoken to her.” Tamara buzzed softly. Was she really going to invite a stranger to cut her open and shine the light from mating arborines into her body?

“I met her,” Patrizia said. “On the day of the kidnappings.”

“Then you’d better make the introductions,” Tamara suggested. “I probably wouldn’t get past her bodyguards myself.”

In the back room of her apartment, away from the bodyguards, Amanda listened politely to Tamara’s plan. But then she started raising objections.

“We know what these signals do to an arborine,” she said. “We don’t know what they’ll do to a female of another species.”

“But how else will you ever find out?” Tamara protested.

“Perhaps we won’t need to,” Amanda replied. “If these tapes had been recorded from a woman, not an arborine—”

“Do you think we’ll find a volunteer for that in the next four days?” Tamara couldn’t imagine trying to sell the proposition to anyone.

“No.”

“After which time, the Council will tally the votes and make it illegal for you to do anything of the kind.”

“Perhaps,” Amanda conceded.

“You don’t seem very worried.” Tamara was confused; this was the woman she’d heard making a powerful case for the research to continue.

“We should always try to gather as much information as we can,” Amanda said. “But if the vote goes against the use of this method, it won’t be the end of fertility research.”

“Will it be the end of survivable childbirth?” Tamara pressed her.

Amanda thought for a while. “For this generation, probably.”

Tamara was beginning to understand her position: she wasn’t actually in favor of Carlo’s method—but she was still prepared to discuss it with scrupulous honesty.

“So if I do this, what exactly are the risks?” Tamara asked her.

“‘Exactly’? You want me to put limits on it?” Amanda spread her arms. “I have no idea how to do that.”

“I could die, or I could be injured,” Tamara said. “The child could die, or be grossly malformed.”

“Yes. All those things are possible.”

“I could give birth to a kind of hybrid? Half person, half arborine?”

Amanda hesitated. “I can’t rule that out absolutely, but if we’re right about the nature of these signals that wouldn’t be possible. We don’t believe they encode traits from either parent; what we saw with the arborines themselves gave us some evidence against that idea. What these signals seem to be are generic instructions to the flesh to start organizing in a certain manner—with the details already intrinsic to the body itself.”

“So the real question,” Tamara realized, “is whether or not we use the same signals for that purpose as these cousins of ours?”

Amanda said, “Yes.”

“It’s less like telling my flesh: do this, and this, and this, in every last detail… and more like simply saying: do what you already know how to do, to form a child?”

Amanda widened her eyes in assent.

Tamara said, “It’s like a language used by two groups of people, who’ve lived apart for a while. Maybe they’ve started using two different words for the same thing, maybe not.”

“That’s the theory, more or less,” Amanda agreed.

“And if you tell my flesh, in the arborine language, to form a child—and the word my flesh would use is different, so it can’t understand what your tapes have said—is there really any reason to think it will respond by mutilating my body and creating a damaged child?”

“I can’t give you a precise account of how that would happen,” Amanda conceded. “But I can’t give you a precise account of what this thing we describe metaphorically as a ‘language’ really is, and how it works.”

Tamara recalled Carlo’s accident with his hand; things had certainly gone badly wrong there. But as Carla had explained it, that had involved detailed instructions: an endless recitation of precise commands from the tape, not so much misunderstood as mistimed.

“You’ve been honest with me about the dangers,” Tamara said. “I’m grateful for that. But I still want to do this.”

Amanda wasn’t happy. “I don’t know what people’s reaction will be. It could make the situation worse.”

“Do you want our lives to be controlled by these thugs?” Tamara asked her. “Whoever sets something on fire has the last word?”

“No,” Amanda replied softly. “I don’t want that.”

Tamara hadn’t realized how frightened she was. But if they let themselves be cowed, nothing would ever change.

“How soon could you get the machinery together?” Tamara had heard that Carlo’s whole workshop had been hastily disassembled.

Amanda pondered the logistics. If her answer was five or six days, Tamara thought, who could challenge her on that?

“Within a bell or two,” Amanda replied. “But you need to be clear: even if this works perfectly, your recovery could take a couple of days.”

Tamara waited in Amanda’s apartment as the drugs and equipment they’d need were fetched from different hiding places. Like Macaria, Carlo had eventually told his captors where to find his three copies of the arborine tapes, but Amanda was confident that her own remained secure.

Patrizia kept Tamara company, then after a few chimes Ada joined them. “I have the twelve signatures,” she said.

“So I have no excuses left,” Tamara replied, trying to make it sound like a joke.

Ada squeezed her shoulder. “Every other woman in history went into this expecting death. If you break that connection, you’ll be the hero of all time.”

“You sound jealous,” Tamara teased her. “Are you sure you don’t want to swap?”

“No—the fair thing would be to concede command of the Gnat to me, retrospectively,” Ada decided. “I always deserved that job. For this one, there’s no competition.”

Tamara buzzed softly, but it was hard to keep up the façade. Every other woman went into childbirth expecting death. That was true, but she felt no comfort from it. She couldn’t even summon up the image of a prospective co-stead, to lull her body into believing that she was facing a more ordinary fate. Once she might have surrendered all her fears in Tamaro’s embrace—and she had no doubt that her certain annihilation would have felt far less terrifying than this.

She peeked into the front room. It was filling up with strange clockwork and brightly colored vials: the light players and the stupefying drugs.

Amanda arrived with a sack; inside was a wooden box containing the tapes.

“Are you sure no one saw you?” Tamara asked her. Amanda didn’t reply; it was an impossible promise to make. If she’d been spotted with the tapes there was a chance of a mob turning up outside the door, eager to burn everything within.

“I’ll have to make some holes in the bed for the connections to the light players,” Amanda explained.

“All right.”

“I’ll need to measure some features on your body first.”

Amanda stretched a tape measure over Tamara’s skin, and marked three locations on her lower back with dye. These were the places the tubes would be inserted.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said gently. She must have felt Tamara beginning to shake.

“I do, though,” Tamara replied. What was there to fear? The drugs would spare her from most of the pain. She could have died on the farm, she could have died on the Gnat. And if she brought back this prize—or nudged it within reach of every woman on the Peerless before it slipped away into the void—it would be worth infinitely more than the Object.

Amanda began drilling a slanted hole in the calmstone slab of the bed. Tamara dragged herself into the front room so she wouldn’t have to watch.

Amando had been standing guard since Tamara had arrived. He nodded to her in greeting.

“What do you think of all this?” she asked him, emboldened by her fear beyond the usual bounds of decorum. “Do you think we’re going to wipe men out of existence?”

“No.”

“You’re not afraid for your grandson?”

Amando gestured toward his co. “We have our own plans,” he said. “I don’t know what my children will choose, when it’s their time. But I’m not afraid of letting them make that decision.”

“And what if a dozen generations from now, everyone’s decided to do what I’m doing?”

Amando contemplated the scenario. “There’ll still be children being born, and people caring for them. If they aren’t doing that as well as any man, it will never reach the point you suggest—where it’s universal. If they want to call themselves women, let them call themselves women. But who knows? Maybe it’s not men who will have vanished from the world: maybe the people who care for children will always be known as men.”

Tamara gazed back at him, amused and a little giddy at the thought. “So here’s to the extinction of women,” she said. “Those irritating creatures who do nothing but complain—and never, ever help with the children.”

Amanda called from the bedroom. “Tamara? We’re ready for you.”