The Eternal Flame

Tamaro said, “No. But you could stay behind yourself. Find another old man to take your place.”

Tamara looked to her father, hoping he might raise some objection to this sorting of the population into two distinct categories: expendable old men and people with lives worth living. But he gazed back at her with an expression of mild reproof, as if to say: Listen to your co, he has your interests in mind.

“I’m the chief navigator,” Tamara said evenly. “Without me there is no mission.”

“I thought every astronomer studied navigation,” Tamaro countered.

“Yes, but not with these methods! They learn what was used to set the Peerless on its course, and what we’ll need to bring it home one day. None of that applies here.”

Tamaro was unswayed. “So you devised a new system, especially for the Gnat. Are you saying it’s unteachable? That no other astronomer has the observational skills or the ability to perform the calculations?”

Tamara hesitated, unsure how she’d backed herself into this corner. “Of course not,” she admitted. She’d already taught Ada everything she’d need to take over her role, if it came to that. “But I found the Object, I proposed the voyage. Unless there’s someone better qualified than I am, I have a right to a place on that rocket. My colleagues accept that, the Council accepts that. And if you think Ivo will be such a danger to the mission, you should be glad I’ll be there to keep him in check!”

Erminio said, “You’re upset now. We can talk about this later, when everyone’s calm.”

“I’m perfectly calm!” Tamara replied. But her father rose to his feet; the conversation was over.

She fetched her dose of holin from the store-hole as the family prepared to retire to the flower bed. Erminio bid his children good night and lay down behind the wormbane. Tamaro brushed loose petals and straw out of their shared indentation, then placed his scythe along the middle of the bed.

Tamara settled into the soil beside him, the long hardstone blade between them. “You should trust me,” she whispered. “I won’t let Ivo do anything stupid.”

She received no reply, so she closed her eyes. Would she have been just as angry herself, she wondered, if she’d believed Tamaro was putting his own life at risk? Risking grief and pain for his family, risking turning their children into orphans? She had to admit that the thought of giving birth alone would have terrified her.

If he’d gone rushing into some dangerous, vainglorious folly, of course she would have tried to argue him out of it. But if the goal had been a worthy one, and if he’d had his reasons for wanting to play a part, she hoped she would have listened to him.

9

As the dozen and three students from her optics class squeezed into the tiny workshop, Carla glanced anxiously down the corridor, wondering how much attention the gathering would attract. One rule Assunto had impressed upon her before assigning her to teach the class had been that she should never perform a demonstration whose outcome she could not predict in advance. “Practice each experiment first, as often as you need to,” he’d urged her, “until you’re sure you can make the whole thing run like clockwork. Researchers know that things go awry in their workshops all the time—and the greater part of their job is uncovering the reasons. But you don’t want to be confusing these youngsters with the messiness of real science when they’re still trying to learn the basics.”

Carla wasn’t entirely sure that his advice had been misguided. Whatever authority she had in her students’ eyes came from her ability to explain the phenomena she chose to put in front of them. This is where the lens focuses its image—just as our equations predicted! This is the angle at which the light comb diffracts red light—in perfect agreement with Giorgio’s formula! Talking to the class about her tarnishing experiments might have been a good way to assure them that the field was far from moribund—that new discoveries were still being made, and if they persisted with their studies they could be part of the vanguard themselves—but now here they were chasing free luxagens, and she had absolutely no idea what they’d find.

But it was too late to cancel the experiment. All she could do was try to get through the session without making a fool of herself.

Carla joined the students, called them to order, and began allocating tasks, starting with the polishing of the mirrorstone they’d use as a luxagen source. “We don’t have a lot of space here, so please move slowly and carefully. If you break something, tell me straight away. And if anyone touches the sunstone, they’re going straight out the airlock.”

The experiment they’d designed required a simple variation on the tarnishing apparatus: since they were aiming to maximize luxagen production while minimizing stray visible light, the mirrorstone surface would be exposed to nothing but infrared. A second beam from the same lamp—this one undivided by color, in order that it remain as bright as possible—would be directed across the vacuum above the mirrorstone, and an eyepiece on a semicircular rail would be used to check for light scattered from the beam at various angles.

Carla stood back and watched as everything came together, only having to intervene physically when Azelia became confused by the vacuum supply. “The low-pressure chamber we use is shared by other workshops and factories,” she explained. “It’s vented after each use—that’s why the access valve is locked now. If you’d managed to force it open, you would have made a direct path between the interior of the Peerless and the void, which is something we try to discourage.”

When all the apparatus was finally in place, Carla approached and double-checked the alignment of the optics. “Good job, everyone!” She managed to ignite the sunstone without flinching, then she called on Patrizia to extinguish the firestone lamp in the corner. They had taken care to block most of the spillage, and the beam that crossed the evacuated container ended up striking an unreflective black screen, so the moss-free workshop was in almost total darkness now.

Romolo was already in place beside the swiveling eyepiece, ready to do the honors. When Carla heard no movement from his direction she urged him to go ahead. He was probably as anxious as she was, having put his pride at stake with such a bold prediction. Light blasting luxagens out of a solid and into the void.

“First observation, three arc-bells from the beam axis,” Romolo began. There was a long silence. “I can’t see anything,” he said.

“Adjust the focus on the eyepiece, very slowly,” Carla suggested. “When your eyes have nothing to look at, they can end up focused beyond the point where the eyepiece is presenting the light. You can stare right through a weak image without even knowing it’s there.”

She waited while Romolo tried this. If there were luxagens in the container they should be scattering light in all directions, and the view perpendicular to the beam would be unlikely to include any stray reflections from the container walls. The primary lens of the eyepiece was as wide as the beam itself, so it could gather light over a much greater area than the pupil of an unaided observer, but if there were simply too few luxagens for the scatter to be visible, that was that.

“Still nothing,” Romolo admitted.

“All right,” Carla said. “Change the angle.” She couldn’t see how that would make any difference, but having gone to so much trouble it would be absurd not to collect a full set of observations.

The class stood in the dark, listening patiently as Romolo announced negative result after negative result. According to calculations that stretched all the way back to Nereo, any luxagen jiggling back and forth at a suitable frequency should live up to its name and create light. Individually, each particle would emit a bit more light parallel to the axis of its vibrations than in other directions—but if those vibrations were being driven by randomly polarized light all the individual biases would average out, so whatever pale glow the thin gas of luxagens produced, it should have been visible from any angle.

“Ah, I can see something! There’s a reddish light!” Romolo sounded even more surprised than Carla. He was down to an angle of six arc-chimes, almost staring into the beam itself, so he was probably just seeing light scattered by the container’s walls, rather than by anything in its interior.

Carla said, “Reach out and pull the lever that brings the shutter down over the infrared.” If the glow persisted, then it was nothing to do with any hypothetical luxagen wind rising off the mirrorstone.