The Eternal Flame

Pain flared in her left front leg. She recoiled and brought herself to a halt as an arc of neatly sliced stalks fell to the ground ahead of her.

“Stay where you are,” Tamaro warned her.

“I only want to talk,” she said. In the silence she could hear him shivering. “What’s the plan now? Are you going to hack me to pieces?”

“If I have to,” he replied. “Don’t think I won’t defend myself.”

He was terrified. She’d thought she’d done him very little harm the last time she’d got her hands on him, but he must have sensed how close she’d come to something worse. Tamara wanted to buzz with mirth, but she found herself humming with grief and shame. They were both in fear of their lives from each other. How had it come to this?

She got control of herself. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “We need to talk. We need to fix this.” She caught a red glint as he raised the scythe, holding it ready in case she advanced on him. “Please, Tamaro.”

“I can’t let you out,” he said. “They’ll lock me up. They’ll lock up Erminio.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. There was no point pretending that any lie she could tell would be enough to exonerate them. “But it’s up to you how bad it is. If they catch you out after I’m gone, you know they’ll throw away the key. If you turn yourself in right now and I ask the Council for leniency, it could just be a year or so.”

“I can’t do that to him. I can’t betray my own father!”

Tamara shivered wearily. Mother, father… why was his co always last on the list?

“What do you want from your life?” she asked him. “Do you want to raise children?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Then find a way to do it. Find a co-stead and raise your own. If I give birth here you can be sure it won’t be your doing, and you’ll have lost all hope of having children of your own. If you give me the key, I’ll keep my promise: I’ll sign the entitlement over to you as soon as we have paper and a witness.”

The wheat rustled; he was moving the scythe again. “How can I trust you?”

“You’re my co,” she said. “I still love you, I still want you to have a good life. You can’t expect us to have children together after what you’ve done, but I don’t care about the entitlement—just let me fly the Gnat, let me have a few moments of happiness. Let me be what I am, and I’ll grant you the same.”

The silence stretched on for more than a lapse. Tamara forced herself to wait it out; one misjudged word now could cost her everything.

She heard Tamaro put down the scythe.

“I’ll show you where the key is,” he said.

He led her to a nondescript part of the field, far from any store-hole old or new, and dug into the soil beside one of the plants. When he plucked the key out from between the roots she knew she would never have found it herself if she’d searched for a year.

He handed it to her.

“Come with me,” Tamara said. “I’m not going to lie to people, but I won’t make it hard for you.”

“I should wait here for Erminio,” Tamaro decided. “I should talk to him first.”

“All right.” Tamara reached over and touched his shoulder, trying to reassure him that she wasn’t going to renege on any of her promises. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. Was he ashamed of what he’d done to her, or just ashamed that he hadn’t been able to follow through on his father’s plan?

She left him in the field and ran to the doorway. The key fitted neatly, forcing the guards apart, but when she tried to turn it the lock wouldn’t yield. Panicking, she pulled it out and scoured it clean with her fingers, then she tapped it against the door until a tiny clump of soil fell from one of its intricate slots.

She inserted it again and twisted it gently; she could hear the faint clicks as one by one the cylinders in the lock engaged. She tried the handle and the door swung open as if nothing had ever been awry.

A few stretches down the corridor she turned a corner and ran into her neighbor, Calogero. He was carrying a ballot box and a stack of voting papers.

“Tamara?” He stared at her. “So… the blight’s under control now?”

“It certainly is.” Blight. What else could keep every prying neighbor away until the deed was done? Tamara stood a moment, marveling at Erminio’s cunning. The worse he claimed the infestation to be, the keener the agronomists would be to investigate the aftermath—but it would only take a few burned patches in the fields to make it look as if Tamaro had eradicated the menace entirely.

Calogero was still confused, though if he’d been told that children had already been sighted he wasn’t letting on. “Is Tamaro coming out to vote?”

“He didn’t say. But there’s nothing in the farm for you to worry about,” she said.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely. The election probably slipped his mind. You should go in and get his vote.”

“All right.” Calogero put down the ballot box and offered her a paper. He said, “I know there’ll be other places on your way, but since we’re here you might as well get it over with.”

21

“Carla! I thought we’d lost you to the astronomers!”

Patrizia looked alarmingly gaunt, but she seemed to be in good spirits. Carla dragged herself across the small meeting room toward her. With all the preparations for the trip it had been more than six stints since they’d last spoken. “If Tamara had her way I’d be doing another safety drill right now,” Carla replied. “I’ve spent more time inside their fake Gnat than I ever will inside the real one.”

“Better than being unprepared,” Patrizia suggested.

“True.” Every member of the crew had made mistakes in the tethered mock-up that might well have been fatal if they’d taken place on the real flight. “But I wasn’t going to miss this for anything. ‘Demoting the Photon’? Assunto agreed that our experiments were conclusive. I can’t believe he’d turn around and attack us like this.”

“Does demotion count as an attack?” Patrizia wondered. “At least he didn’t call it ‘Forget About the Photon’.”

“You’re much too forgiving,” Carla complained. “It’ll ruin your career.”

Patrizia said, “Don’t you think we should hear him out before deciding if there’s anything to forgive?”

Carla spotted Onesto and raised a hand in greeting. As he approached she called out, “Here for more punishment?” As enchanted as Onesto was by the grand narrative of physics, he wasn’t always keen to dirty his hands with the real thing. When he’d sat in on her power series calculations for the tarnishing experiment he’d ended up moaning and clutching his head.

“Duty compels me,” he said. “Someone has to document this revolution.”

“Including every petty little backlash?” Carla replied.

Onesto was amused. “So you’re taking the title of this talk personally?”

“How else should I take it? I have to defend my one claim to immortality.”

“Wasn’t it Patrizia who posited the photon?”

“Yes, but I chose the name.”

By the time Assunto arrived the room was crowded. He placed a stack of copies of his paper in a dispenser by the doorway. Carla was hurt that he hadn’t shown it to her earlier, giving her a chance to respond. She hadn’t had the time to engage in any serious collaboration since she’d agreed to join the crew of the Gnat, but she wasn’t—yet—literally unreachable.

Assunto began, without ceremony. “The tarnishing experiments carried out by Carla and her team have given us compelling evidence that the luxagens in a solid can only occupy certain definite energy levels. These levels can be explained by treating the luxagens as standing waves, spread out across the width of their energy valleys, rather than particles with a single, definite position at every moment in time.

“Yet once they’re freed from the solid, the same luxagens scatter light in a manner suggesting that they really are particles—and that the light they scatter also consists of particles, some three times heavier than the luxagens.