Carla said, “Before we begin praising the genius of Meconio, can you think of any way we can test this idea?”
“I haven’t been able to come up with any wholly new experiment,” Patrizia admitted. “But there’s something in the original experiment that we haven’t measured yet.”
“Go on.”
“The time it takes for each part of the tarnishing pattern to appear.”
Carla could see the merit in looking at that more closely. “If it takes a certain amount of time to create each photon, then the extra time required for successive tiers to reach a given tarnishing density should be the same. We’d need to push it to a longer exposure, though, and get another tier at frequencies so low that it takes six photons to leave a mark.”
Patrizia said, “It might not take the same time to produce a photon at different frequencies. What if the light that’s driving the process has to go through a certain number of cycles?”
“Like… cranking the handle on those mechanical loaf-makers? It’s the number of turns, not the time you spend turning.” Carla had no idea what was required to crank out a photon, so there was no obvious way to decide between the two criteria. “The period of violet light is only one and a half times that of red light; we can make a long enough exposure to test both possibilities, and see if either of them fits the results.”
Patrizia emitted a chirp of delight. “So we’re really going to test this theory?”
“Of course,” Carla replied. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
When Patrizia had left, Carla took the groundnuts from the cupboard and went through her ritual. As she savored the odor, she realized that she’d rushed through the discussion too quickly, leaving too many problems unchallenged.
How could a luxagen “know” how long it had been exposed to light? Whether it was meant to be counting cycles of the light or simply recording the passage of time, what physical quantity could play the role of timer? Not the luxagen’s energy, or the jumps in the tarnishing pattern would have been smoothed away. The success of Patrizia’s theory relied on the axiom that you couldn’t make half a photon, but unless something was keeping track of the process—if it could not, in some sense, be half done—then why should it take any particular amount of time to create one of these particles?
The scattering curves were beautiful. The link between energy and frequency was beautiful. But the whole theory still made no sense.
Carla put the groundnuts away, wondering how she was going to persuade Assunto—who doubted the existence of particles of matter—to give her six times as much sunstone as before so she could now go hunting for particles of light.
13
Silvano had an announcement for his friends. “I’ve decided to run for the Council.”
Carlo was caught unprepared. By the time it occurred to him that it would be polite to offer a few words of encouragement, he also knew that he’d left it too late to sound sincere.
“What’s in it for us?” Carla joked.
“Ah, that would depend on how much help I get with the campaign.” Silvano reached out and grabbed his son Flavio, who had drifted away from the guide ropes and started to flail around in midair. The family’s new apartment had weaker gravity than the last one, but Carlo could understand why Silvano had felt compelled to move.
Carla said, “I’ll tout for you six days a stint if you can take the pressure off my department’s sunstone allocations.”
“Hmm.” Silvano wasn’t willing to make rash promises, even in jest. “Wait and see what they find with the Gnat. If it turns out that we can run the engines on orthogonal rock, you’ll have all the sunstone you could wish for.”
Carlo said, “What will you be campaigning on?”
“Farm expansion,” Silvano replied.
“Expansion?” Carlo was bemused. “Do you think you can find a structural engineer willing to gamble on squeezing in another layer of fields?”
“No, no! Everyone agrees that’s reached its limit; we have to look for other opportunities.” Flavio was starting to squirm out of his father’s grip; he wanted to get back on the rope with his co. Silvano released him and let him drag himself clumsily away.
“Such as…?” Carla pressed him.
Silvano said, “When the Gnat visits the Object, what might it find? Either the Object will be made of something violently reactive, which we can use as part of a new kind of fuel, or it will turn out to be nothing but ordinary rock.”
Carlo exchanged a glance with Carla. She didn’t accept this list as exhaustive, but she was willing to let it pass for the moment.
“If it’s the first case,” Silvano continued, “we’ll be rebuilding the engines completely to make use of the new reaction, which should give us a chance to reclaim some of the feed chambers for agriculture. But the second case would be even more promising: we won’t have solved the fuel problem… but we’ll certainly have a lot more space.”
Carla caught his meaning first, and it forced a chirp of admiration from her. “You want to turn the Object into a farm?”
“Why not?” Silvano replied. “We should be prepared to make the best of whatever the Gnat finds. If the Object turns out to be ordinary rock, there’ll be nothing to stop us cutting into it, making some chambers, spinning it up—”
Carlo said, “But if it’s ordinary rock, the Gnat won’t be able to halt it.” The whole idea that they could capture the Object was based on the assumption that it was made of a substance that would react with calmstone as dramatically as the specks that had once lit up the Peerless’s slopes.
“That’s true,” Silvano agreed. “We’d need to follow up quickly with a second expedition, carrying enough fuel to do the job with a conventional engine. But think what it would mean: in the long run, we could easily quadruple the harvest.”
Carlo didn’t reply. He couldn’t declare that this plan was impossible. But the workforce that had carried out the same kind of transformation on Mount Peerless itself—with all the benefits of air and gravity, and a planet’s worth of resources behind them—had vastly outnumbered its present population.
Carla said, “No one could accuse you of thinking small.”
“We need something like this,” Silvano replied. “A big project of our own, in the service of a common goal that might actually be achieved in our lifetimes.”
“A project of our own?” Carla’s tone remained friendly, but she made no attempt to hide her irritation. “So now everything gets classified that way? Is it for us, or is it for them?”
“You know what I mean,” Silvano said, impatient with her umbrage. “Even if we all had the skills to work on some ingenious scheme for rescuing the ancestors, none of us has the slightest chance of living to see the pay-off. Maybe you’re happy pondering the deep reasons why mirrors get tarnished—and maybe that will lead somewhere, in an age or two—but the only way that most of us can stay sane is to think about doing something for our own children and grandchildren. The generations we can actually… empathize with.” It sounded as if he’d been on the verge of invoking a closer connection than mere empathy, but then recalled just in time that his interlocutor would not be cuddling her own grandchildren.