The Eternal Flame

“Run a long strip of light-sensitive paper past a probe into the tissue,” Carlo replied. “Turn the variation of light over time into a variation over space. You could have the whole history of a motor sequence spread out in front of you, to read at your leisure.”

Amanda thought it over. “I suppose that might work.” She shifted her grip on one of the ropes they shared, sending a brief shudder through Carlo’s body.

“You could copy the pattern,” he said. “Maybe modify it too. Then send it back into the body using a strip of paper of variable transparency, moving in front of a light source. But the beauty of it is, you could send it back to a completely different site, if you wanted to. Maybe even send it into a completely different animal.”

Amanda buzzed softly, not quite mocking him but amused at his audacity. “So that’s the plan? Record the way a biparous animal initiates fission, then feed those signals into a quadraparous species in place of their own version of the sequence?”

“I don’t know,” Carlo said. “Maybe that’s naive. The difference might not come down to anything we can localize that way.”

“Still, it makes more sense than a drug,” Amanda conceded. “I wouldn’t say it’s not worth trying.”

They watched in silence as the primary partition began to fracture, cracking into plates of shiny brittle tissue that stuck to one side or the other. The male approached and started pawing at the structure, trying to hasten the separation.

Carlo glanced over at his colleague, wondering what her reaction would be if he dared to ask her: On a scale of one to twelve, how much comfort does it give you to know that this is the fate of your flesh?

When the blastula had split completely, the male took hold of one of the halves and carried it across the cage, backing away awkwardly with its two hind-paws gripping the scaffolding of twigs before extruding another pair to make the task easier. Carlo wasn’t sure why the animals were so emphatic about the separation. So far as he knew co always recognized co, whatever the first sights and smells they encountered, and in any case when a crossed mating was contrived it appeared to cause no problems. Maybe it was simply advantageous for the male vole to have the strongest possible instinct to aid the process of fission—rather than standing by uselessly if the blastula became stuck—and it did no harm to take this sentiment further than was strictly necessary.

The secondary partitions were still intact, but one pair of young voles were already beginning to twitch and squirm, limbless balls of conjoined flesh struggling to wake into their own separate identities.

Amanda said, “They all look healthy so far.”

“Yes.” Now the other pair were wriggling too, and Carlo couldn’t help feeling a visceral sense of relief. The experiment had told him nothing—except that the new suppressant hadn’t been crude enough to do as much damage as the old one when delivered in the same spot. He should have been disappointed. But the sight of the four live infants was impossible to receive with anything but joy.

The father approached the tardier of the pairs, stroking his children’s skin with his paws and tugging at the partition that still glued them together.

Carlo turned to Amanda. “We’d better move on. We can check the whole brood for deformities tomorrow, but we need to set a pace of six matings a day or this map’s going to take forever to complete.”

8

“The nozzle’s fixed,” Marzio told Tamara. “We’re ready to launch, just name the time.”

Tamara did the calculations on her forearm. The rotational period of the Peerless was close to seven lapses, but apparently no one had thought it was worth the fuel to tweak it to an exact multiple, just to simplify the arithmetic whenever the cycle needed to be converted into clock time. When she’d finished she pressed her arm against Marzio’s, letting him feel the numbers so he could check them himself.

“That looks right,” he said. “Can you get notice to your people in time?”

Tamara glanced across the workshop at the clock again. “Yes.” She hurried over to the signal ropes and sent a message to each of the observatories; unless the relay clerks were dozing this would be warning enough. Roberto would just be starting his shift at the summit; she wasn’t sure who’d be on duty at the antipodal dome, but every observer had been prepared for this for days. She’d wanted to help track the first beacon herself, but it would have been an absurd vanity to delay the launch any further for the sake of that privilege. Besides, this way she’d be able to watch the event itself, with all of the excitement and none of the hard work.

Marzio’s children, Viviana and Viviano, maneuvered the beacon onto a trolley and began wheeling it toward the airlock. The device was built into a cubical frame of hardstone beams about two strides wide. Cylindrical tanks of powdered sunstone, liberator and compressed air were arranged around an open flare chamber, while all the pipes and clockwork were tucked away neatly behind clearstone panels.

Marzio followed his children, gesturing to Tamara to accompany him. Aside from the wheat fields this workshop had the largest floor in the Peerless—and spread out along its arc a dozen teams of instrument builders were assembling similar beacons. Groups of workers stopped to cheer as the trolley passed, celebrating their common cause.

Marzio said, “Don’t be too dismayed if something goes wrong. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to vary the design if we have to.”

“Unlike the Gnat.”

“Oh, the Gnat will be fine,” he promised her. “It’ll be carrying its own repair crew. The hardest thing to build is a machine that needs to function perfectly without any supervision—without the chance to make a single adjustment once it’s out of your hands.”

They reached the ramp leading down into the airlock. As Viviana and Viviano donned helmets and cooling bags, Tamara hung back, not wanting to interfere with their preparations. She was just a spectator here; the launch could go ahead with or without her.

Viviana raised the airlock door, standing aside to keep it open as her co wheeled the beacon into the chamber. Then she joined him inside, and the spring-loaded door slammed shut. Tamara watched them through the window as they worked the pumps.

“What could still go wrong?” she asked Marzio. “You’ve fixed the nozzle; the rest is just clockwork.”

“Clockwork in the void,” Marzio replied. “You might think it would simplify a machine’s behavior when there’s no air or gravity to contend with—but there’s still heat, there’s still friction, there’s still grit that can hang around to jam moving parts. Odd things can happen to surfaces that turn them unexpectedly sticky, or opaque. In fact a friend of mine has grown very excited over the way mirrorstone tarnishes in the absence of air.”

Tamara had heard about Carla’s discovery, but she didn’t think other physicists were taking it too seriously. “Some people can find patterns in anything,” she replied.

Viviana and Viviano were through the airlock now. Tamara walked down to the rack of cooling bags and selected one for herself. In her rear gaze she saw that Marzio hadn’t followed her.

“You’re not coming out to watch?”

“I’m an old man,” he said. “It makes me queasy.”

“To see the stars below you?”

“No, being in a cooling bag.”

“Oh.” Tamara found the fabric against her skin a bit irritating, but other than that the devices didn’t bother her. She climbed into the one she’d chosen, redistributed some flesh from her shoulders to her chest to accommodate its shape, then asked Marzio to check the fit before she attached the cylinder of air that would carry her body heat off into the void.

Once she was through the airlock, standing at the top of the exterior ramp, she pulled a safety harness from a slot beside her, checked that it was tied securely to the guide rail that ran along the side of the ramp, then stepped into the harness and cinched it tight.

Marzio’s children were further down the ramp, their harnesses tied to opposite rails so they wouldn’t get tangled in each other’s ropes. They had already cranked back the spring-loaded launch plate, and as they slid the beacon off its trolley and moved it into place the scraping sound came faintly through Tamara’s feet, almost overwhelmed by the reassuring susurration of air leaking from her cooling bag. When they’d finished she raised a