The Eternal Flame

strangers; she stared at Tamara and pulled faces at random, pausing only if they elicited mimicry or a buzz of mirth from their target.

With her face bent toward her daughter, Tamara could watch the bystanders ahead with her rear gaze. She’d been afraid that even the most benign of them might try to get too close, eager to interact with Erminia, risking a dangerous crush. But everyone kept a respectful distance, watching intently as mother and daughter approached, speaking quietly among themselves.

There were a few men in the crowd, but if they’d come with ill feelings they were hiding them well: most of their faces lit up at the sight of the child. Apart from the sheer density of people, Tamara didn’t sense any danger at all; anyone lunging at her from within this mass of supporters was likely to be grabbed long before they encountered her official bodyguards. It was strange and daunting to be part of such a spectacle, but she was not afraid.

As the group approached the first turn, Tamara spotted Erminio and Tamaro. She let her gaze slide over them, as if she hadn’t recognized them. They were stony-faced, but she could imagine their rage. She concentrated on her daughter and did her best to betray no emotion at all: no gloating over this victory, no fear of retribution. Their lives and hers were disentangled now, surely. Let them follow their rules with anyone who wished to share them, and she’d follow her own.

“Word will spread fast,” Patrizia said excitedly. “By tomorrow, there won’t be a woman on the Peerless who thinks this is too dangerous to pursue.”

“Perhaps.”

“We should have brought some food, though,” Patrizia lamented. “We should have let people see you eating your fill. That would be an image for every woman to take with her on voting day—with every hunger pang reminding her of how she could be rid of the famine.”

Tamara said, “Now you’re starting to scare me.”

They might win the vote, she thought. It was not beyond hope now. But if they did, what would that mean? For everyone who took this first tentative sign of the method’s safety as glorious news, there’d be others who’d remain bitterly opposed to it. For every Amando who’d happily classify her as an honorary man, there’d be a Tosco denouncing her as unfit to raise a child as she ushered in the extinction of his sex.

There was no prospect of victory, just a truce enforced by the balance of numbers. Whatever the vote delivered, true freedom still lay generations away.

44

Carlo woke hungry, but he kept the food cupboard locked. He left the apartment as quickly as he could, knowing that if he lingered he’d be tempted to break his routine.

He reached the entrance to the observatory a few chimes early, but Carla was already waiting for him.

“I thought you’d be out there doing final checks,” he said.

Carla was amused. “If anything fails after all the tests we’ve done, it will be too late to fix it now. Today, all I did was wind the springs and set the launch time.”

She sounded calmer than he was, and he was doing her no favors by being anxious on her behalf. He widened his eyes and offered her his hand. “Shall we go through, then?”

The weightless observatory platform was crisscrossed with guide ropes for the occasion, but so far only Patrizia and her daughter were present. Carlo greeted them as they approached.

“The big day at last!” he enthused.

“I woke up three bells ago,” Leonia replied proudly.

“She did indeed,” Patrizia lamented.

“I had trouble sleeping too,” Carlo said. “It’s not every day you see a new kind of rocket.”

Onesto, the archivist, was next to arrive. He’d been following Carla and Patrizia around the mountain ever since they’d started work on the project, taking notes at every step.

“The official witness to history is here,” Carlo teased him. “Come to record the moment for future generations.”

Onesto said, “In that role, I’m entirely redundant. I’m sure everyone here will pass on the story themselves.”

“But you’ll do a more professional job,” Carlo granted.

“Perhaps,” Onesto replied. “I only wish I’d started shadowing the inventors sooner. I was in on some of their early conversations by chance, but I missed the most important ones.”

“We’ve told you as much as we remember!” Carla declared.

“Exactly,” Onesto agreed sadly. “Edited and censored and tidied up. I don’t blame you, but that’s what memory does.”

“Does it really matter?” Patrizia wondered. “The techniques that work will be repeated, the results we proved will be taught and retaught. Does anyone need to know how much we blundered about, getting there?”

Onesto said, “Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.”

Assunto and Romolo arrived—Carla’s ex-boss and ex-student—followed by Tamara and Erminia, then Ada with her co and her daughter Amelia. As Carla reminisced with Ada, Romolo chatted excitedly with Carlo about his last trip to the Object. He seemed to bear no resentment at all toward the colleagues who’d rendered his work there peripheral.

“Soon we’ll be testing the luxagen field theory to one part in a gross-to-the-fourth!” Romolo marveled.

“That’s impressive.” Carlo made a mental note to ask Carla if this really was true, or was just enthusiastic hyperbole.

Half a chime before the moment itself, the twelve Councilors filed in, ending all the small talk. Councilor Massimo made a speech, congratulating Carla and Patrizia for their persistence but hedging his bets in case something went wrong.

When Massimo was done, Leonia took it upon herself to start counting down to the launch. Soon everyone was joining in. Carlo spotted Carla and dragged himself toward her.

“Where is this ‘rebounder’ thing again?” he joked.

She pointed out of the dome at the cubical device, a stride or so wide, resting against a platform at the top of a short post.

“And you expect us to believe that that is going to accelerate forever?”

“Until it overheats,” Carla replied. “With luck, it could keep going for half a year.”

“Three!” Leonia screamed, eager to be heard over everyone accompanying her. “Two! One!”

Carlo saw blue-white light spilling from the chassis, bright but not remotely as intense as the exhaust from any sunstone engine. A little fuel was being burned in there, but it was not being used for propulsion. The light it emitted was priming Carla’s strange device, a crystal whose energy levels had been finely split by its own orderly, polarized light field. For all that Carlo had had the principles explained to him, for all the workshop tests he’d witnessed, if he was honest, a part of him still refused to believe that a lamp in a box could have the power of flight.

But the brashly named Eternal Flame did ascend, sliding up along the platform that restrained it against the faint push of centrifugal force, crossing the edge and breaking away painfully slowly. Its exhaust was a coherent beam of ultraviolet light, so there was nothing to be seen with the naked eye but the spillage from its lamp. Carlo was torn between an ecstatic sense of triumph and pride, and unworthy thoughts of just how easily a small concealed air tank could have produced the same results.

When the rocket finally rose above the top of the dome, people began cheering. It seemed to take less than half as much time to double its height. Leonia started nagging Tamara to let her view it through the telescope—and by the time she succeeded that was no longer absurd: Carlo could barely see it with his unaided eyes. When he took his turn at the telescope, Tamara slipped a UV-fluorescing filter into the optics—and the base of the receding