The Eternal Flame

way?”

Carla had no reply. The truth was, she’d been so entranced by the astonishing simplicity of the frequency cut-off that she’d given very little thought to the messy details of the tarnished material itself.

She caught the look of elation crossing Romolo’s face before he even spoke. “The luxagens go into the vacuum!” he declared. “Surely that’s it? Air must modify the surface of the mirrorstone in a way that makes it harder for the luxagens to escape—but when there’s no air, the light can send them drifting off into the void!”

Free luxagens? Carla felt her tympanum tightening in preparation for a skeptical retort, but then she realized that the idea wasn’t so absurd. It had long been conjectured that flames contained a smattering of free luxagens, but they’d be impossible to detect among all the unstable debris of combustion, and there was no reason to expect them to remain free for long when they were constantly colliding with other things. But a thin breeze comprised of nothing but luxagens wafting off a slab of mirrorstone into the vacuum was a very different scenario.

“You could be right,” she said. “So how do we test this idea? If there’s a dilute gas of free luxagens in the container that holds the mirrorstone, how could we tell?”

There was silence for several pauses, then Azelia demanded irritably, “Can’t we just look? Most gases are transparent, but luxagens would be nothing like an ordinary gas.”

“Luxagens should scatter light,” Carla agreed. “In fact, every one of you should be able to calculate what happens when light of moderate intensity meets a free luxagen. So come back in three days with the answer to that, and some suggestions for how we could try to observe it.”

When the classroom was empty, Carla felt a sudden pang of anxiety. Now that she’d torn up the curriculum, where was she heading? She’d made one tantalizing discovery—and for a while that in itself had been exhilarating —but she couldn’t begin to explain what she’d found, and in the aftermath the whole subject seemed murkier than ever. What pride could she take in leaving the next generation with one more problem than she’d inherited herself?

She fumbled in the cupboard for the groundnuts she’d hidden behind a stack of worn textbooks. How many holes were there now, in Nereo’s theory? Too many, and not enough. One anomaly was an embarrassment, two were perplexing… but a dozen or so might come together to reveal a whole new vision of the world. What she should be fearing was not mess and confusion, but the possibility that she’d only see enough of it to take the process halfway.

7

Carlo spun the syringe between his thumb and forefinger, suddenly unsure whether or not he’d identified the right spot to insert it. The male vole adhering to the immobilized female glared up at him balefully, unable to do anything for his trapped co but promising her tormentor a suitable punishment once he was detached. Carlo could only sympathize. Over the years, biologists had managed to produce a strain that would breed, not merely in captivity, but in the face of stresses and indignities that would have seen their wild ancestors prudently deferring the act. With no hope of privacy, the caged voles could not afford to miss an opportunity.

“Do you want me to do this?” Amanda offered. “You might be a bit out of practice.”

The protocol Carlo had prepared referred to landmarks on the skin patterns that were shared by every member of this strain of voles, but his notes had been based on a stylized reference version of the pattern. Now that he was facing a real animal again after a three-year hiatus, he was beginning to recall just how tricky it could be to identify the features on each individual.

The reference pattern showed a junction between three crisp dark stripes, just behind each shoulder. For this subject, the injection was meant to go in the top corner of that junction. But the stripes on the clamped female in front of him were diffuse, and the corner between them showed a gradient of diminishing pigment at least half a scant wide. This didn’t mean the task was hopeless; if you took your bearings from the entire hide it was still possible to get an accurate fix. But he hadn’t had to do that for a very long time.

“Actually, if you don’t mind—” Carlo moved aside and handed the syringe to Amanda. She quickly thrust the needle into the female’s skin, up to the depth calibration mark, then pushed the plunger, delivering a small dose of suppressant. The male emitted an angry chirp; Amanda withdrew the needle and closed the lid of the cage. Carlo reached over and shifted a lever that loosened the clamp on the female. He didn’t want any confounding mechanical effects interfering with the fission process.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m still waiting for the old instincts to come back.”

“I can believe that,” Amanda replied. “I have the opposite problem: you could put a rock in front of me and I’d start to see hide markings on it.”

Carlo had thought he’d be the one confidently demonstrating the protocol to her, as a first step in convincing himself that he could rely on her to perform some of the trials without his supervision. But he’d only been two years her senior the last time they’d worked together, and he felt foolish now for assuming that he’d somehow retained his old advantage in experience. His own world wasn’t full of imaginary voles; it was strewn with hallucinatory wheat petals.

The male began squirming and thrashing about, eager to be unencumbered. Apparently the exchange of signals was over to his satisfaction, but the skin of his chest was still stuck in place. He grabbed the transitioning female with all four paws and forced himself apart from her, then he scampered around in a frenzy, clinging to the twigs that crisscrossed the cage like guide ropes, chirping loud warnings.

“No one’s tried this before during fission?” Amanda asked.

“A long time ago, with a much coarser suppressant.” If she hadn’t heard of that work it was because nothing much had come of it. Carlo didn’t want to waste time repeating other people’s experiments, but the new preparation Tosco had discovered blocked signaling in a smaller volume of tissue, and also seemed to have fewer side effects. “I’m not expecting to find some magic spot where we can interrupt transmission and see the number of offspring halved,” he said. “But to get anywhere, we’re going to need the best map we can make of the pathways that influence fission. Even these tiny doses will probably interfere with a dozen individual pathways, but that will still be a big improvement on the last map.”

Amanda said, “I’ve had some success with microsurgery, for identifying phalangeal control pathways in lizards.”

Carlo was intrigued. “So you cut into the leg under a microscope… and managed to paralyze a particular toe?”

“Almost,” she replied. “I have to infer things from incremental damage—I can’t actually sever the pathway for any given toe without severing other things as well. And of course the lizards either re-route the signals within a chime or two, or resorb the whole limb and reconstruct it.”

The female vole had already been limbless in her mating posture, but now her body was deforming further into an almost featureless ellipsoid. Carlo could just make out a shallow longitudinal trench that marked the beginning of the primary partition. Whatever change the injection had wrought, it hadn’t suppressed the start of fission itself.

“So you know how to paralyze a lizard,” Carlo said, “but have you ever thought of doing the reverse?”

Amanda buzzed softly. “The old yellow flash muscle twitch? I know it impresses students, but I’m not sure that there’s much to be learned that way.”

“I was thinking of something subtler than a twitch,” he said. “Imagine severing the pathways from the brain… but then introducing motor signals of your own.”

Amanda was skeptical. “Even if we could manage the mechanics of an intervention like that, we’d have no way of knowing the proper time sequences for the signals. Believe me, I’ve stared down a microscope at enough flickering lizard tissue to know that I’m never going to be able to transcribe what’s happening.”

“I have some ideas about that,” Carlo confided. Faint lines could now be seen neatly dividing each half of the vole blastula, displaced to the usual degree above the midline to guarantee an extra quota of flesh to the daughters. The father-to-be screeched triumphantly, as if he knew that his captors had been thwarted. But any celebration was premature; in the old studies a similarly placed dose of suppressant had led to stillborn males.

“What ideas?” Amanda pressed him.