The Eternal Flame

“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.”