The Eternal Flame

“It’s less like telling my flesh: do this, and this, and this, in every last detail… and more like simply saying: do what you already know how to do, to form a child?”

Amanda widened her eyes in assent.

Tamara said, “It’s like a language used by two groups of people, who’ve lived apart for a while. Maybe they’ve started using two different words for the same thing, maybe not.”

“That’s the theory, more or less,” Amanda agreed.

“And if you tell my flesh, in the arborine language, to form a child—and the word my flesh would use is different, so it can’t understand what your tapes have said—is there really any reason to think it will respond by mutilating my body and creating a damaged child?”

“I can’t give you a precise account of how that would happen,” Amanda conceded. “But I can’t give you a precise account of what this thing we describe metaphorically as a ‘language’ really is, and how it works.”

Tamara recalled Carlo’s accident with his hand; things had certainly gone badly wrong there. But as Carla had explained it, that had involved detailed instructions: an endless recitation of precise commands from the tape, not so much misunderstood as mistimed.

“You’ve been honest with me about the dangers,” Tamara said. “I’m grateful for that. But I still want to do this.”

Amanda wasn’t happy. “I don’t know what people’s reaction will be. It could make the situation worse.”

“Do you want our lives to be controlled by these thugs?” Tamara asked her. “Whoever sets something on fire has the last word?”

“No,” Amanda replied softly. “I don’t want that.”

Tamara hadn’t realized how frightened she was. But if they let themselves be cowed, nothing would ever change.

“How soon could you get the machinery together?” Tamara had heard that Carlo’s whole workshop had been hastily disassembled.

Amanda pondered the logistics. If her answer was five or six days, Tamara thought, who could challenge her on that?

“Within a bell or two,” Amanda replied. “But you need to be clear: even if this works perfectly, your recovery could take a couple of days.”

Tamara waited in Amanda’s apartment as the drugs and equipment they’d need were fetched from different hiding places. Like Macaria, Carlo had eventually told his captors where to find his three copies of the arborine tapes, but Amanda was confident that her own remained secure.

Patrizia kept Tamara company, then after a few chimes Ada joined them. “I have the twelve signatures,” she said.

“So I have no excuses left,” Tamara replied, trying to make it sound like a joke.

Ada squeezed her shoulder. “Every other woman in history went into this expecting death. If you break that connection, you’ll be the hero of all time.”

“You sound jealous,” Tamara teased her. “Are you sure you don’t want to swap?”

“No—the fair thing would be to concede command of the Gnat to me, retrospectively,” Ada decided. “I always deserved that job. For this one, there’s no competition.”

Tamara buzzed softly, but it was hard to keep up the facade. Every other woman went into childbirth expecting death. That was true, but she felt no comfort from it. She couldn’t even summon up the image of a prospective co-stead, to lull her body into believing that she was facing a more ordinary fate. Once she might have surrendered all her fears in Tamaro’s embrace—and she had no doubt that her certain annihilation would have felt far less terrifying than this.

She peeked into the front room. It was filling up with strange clockwork and brightly colored vials: the light players and the stupefying drugs.

Amanda arrived with a sack; inside was a wooden box containing the tapes.

“Are you sure no one saw you?” Tamara asked her. Amanda didn’t reply; it was an impossible promise to make. If she’d been spotted with the tapes there was a chance of a mob turning up outside the door, eager to burn everything within.

“I’ll have to make some holes in the bed for the connections to the light players,” Amanda explained.

“All right.”

“I’ll need to measure some features on your body first.”

Amanda stretched a tape measure over Tamara’s skin, and marked three locations on her lower back with dye. These were the places the tubes would be inserted.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said gently. She must have felt Tamara beginning to shake.

“I do, though,” Tamara replied. What was there to fear? The drugs would spare her from most of the pain. She could have died on the farm, she could have died on the Gnat. And if she brought back this prize—or nudged it within reach of every woman on the Peerless before it slipped away into the void—it would be worth infinitely more than the Object.

Amanda began drilling a slanted hole in the calmstone slab of the bed. Tamara dragged herself into the front room so she wouldn’t have to watch.

Amando had been standing guard since Tamara had arrived. He nodded to her in greeting.

“What do you think of all this?” she asked him, emboldened by her fear beyond the usual bounds of decorum. “Do you think we’re going to wipe men out of existence?”

“No.”

“You’re not afraid for your grandson?”

Amando gestured toward his co. “We have our own plans,” he said. “I don’t know what my children will choose, when it’s their time. But I’m not afraid of letting them make that decision.”

“And what if a dozen generations from now, everyone’s decided to do what I’m doing?”

Amando contemplated the scenario. “There’ll still be children being born, and people caring for them. If they aren’t doing that as well as any man, it will never reach the point you suggest—where it’s universal. If they want to call themselves women, let them call themselves women. But who knows? Maybe it’s not men who will have vanished from the world: maybe the people who care for children will always be known as men.”

Tamara gazed back at him, amused and a little giddy at the thought. “So here’s to the extinction of women,” she said. “Those irritating creatures who do nothing but complain—and never, ever help with the children.”

Amanda called from the bedroom. “Tamara? We’re ready for you.”

43

Tamara was woken by the pain. It began as a state of raw panic, a sense of damage so urgent that it preceded any notion of the shape of her flesh, but as it dragged her into consciousness it resolved into a distressing tightness in her abdomen, as if some giant clawed creature had seized her body and tried to pinch it in two.

Tried, and perhaps succeeded.

She opened her eyes. Ada clung to a rope beside the bed.

“How long have I been sleeping?” Tamara asked her.

“About a day. How are you feeling?”

“Not great.” She tried to read Ada’s face. “What happened?”

“You have a daughter, and she’s fine,” Ada assured her. “Do you want me to bring her to you?”

“No!” Tamara felt a dutiful sense of relief at the outcome, as if she’d just heard that some stranger had survived a brush with death—but the prospect of actually seeing the thing that had torn itself out of her was horrifying. “Not yet,” she added, afraid that Ada could read her mind. “I’m still too weak.”

She looked down at her body. She’d gone into the procedure limbless, and right now she couldn’t imagine ever having the energy to remedy that. Her torso, tapering bizarrely into a kind of wedge, was crisscrossed with