Tamara thought of turning back and trying to effect a speedy reconciliation, but then she stiffened her resolve. It would be painful for both of them to pass the day with this quarrel hanging over them, but she had to let Tamaro feel the sting of it. Maybe their father would talk some sense into him. As often as he’d taken Tamaro’s side, Erminio knew how stubborn his daughter could be. If he’d overheard the morning’s conversation, what counsel could he offer his son but acceptance?
She came to the farm’s exit and seized the handle of the door in front of her without slowing her pace. The handle turned a fraction then stuck; she walked straight into the door, pinning her outstretched arm between the slab of calmstone and her advancing torso.
She cursed and stepped back, waited for the pain in her arm to subside, then tried the handle again. On the fourth attempt she understood: it wasn’t stuck. The door was locked.
The last time she’d seen the key, she’d been a child. Her father had shown her where it was kept in one of the store-holes, a tool to be wielded against fanciful threats that sounded like stories out of the sagas: rampaging arborines who’d escaped from the forest to conquer the Peerless, or rampaging mobs driven mad by hunger, coming to strip the grain from the fields.
It was possible, just barely, that Tamaro had run ahead of her by another route. But he would have had to cut through the fields, and he could not have done it silently.
So either he’d locked the door before she’d even risen that morning, before they’d exchanged a word, or Erminio really had been listening to them—and far from resolving to plead her case with Tamaro, he’d decided that the way to fix this problem was to keep her on the farm by force.
“You arrogant pieces of shit!” Tamara hoped that at least one of them was lurking nearby to overhear her.
Angry as she was, she was struck by one ground for amusement and relief: better that they try this stunt now than on the launch day. If they’d caught her by surprise at the crucial time it would not have been hard to keep her confined for a few bells. Once she’d failed to show up, Ada and Ivo would have had no choice but to leave without her, and her idiot family would have got exactly what they’d wanted. But apparently they couldn’t bear to defer the pleasure of punishing her.
Tamaro was coming down the path toward her.
“Where’s the key?” she demanded.
“Our father’s taken it.” He nodded toward the door, implying that Erminio was outside, beyond her reach.
“So what’s the plan?”
“I gave you chance after chance,” he said. “But you wouldn’t listen.” He didn’t sound angry; his voice was dull, resigned.
“What do you think is going to happen?” she asked. “Do you know how many people are expecting me to turn up for meetings in the next three days alone? Out of all those friends and colleagues, I promise you someone will come looking for me.”
“Not after they hear the happy news.”
Tamara stared at him. If Erminio was out there telling people that she’d given birth, this had gone beyond a private family matter. She couldn’t just forgive her captors and walk away, promising her silence, when the very fact of her survival would show them up as liars.
“I’ve burned all your holin,” Tamaro told her. “You know I’d never try to force myself on you, but what happens now is your choice.”
She searched his face, looking for a hint of uncertainty—if not in the rightness of his goals, in his chance of achieving them. But the man she’d loved since her first memory of life seemed convinced that there were only two ways this could end.
Either she’d agree to let him trigger her, and she’d give birth to his children—taking comfort in the knowledge that he’d promised himself to them.
Or she’d stay here, without holin, until her own body betrayed her. She’d give birth alone, and her sole victory would be to have cheated her jailer and her children alike of the bond that would have allowed them to thrive.
15
The hiss from the sunstone lamp rose in pitch to an almost comical squeak. Carla could hear the remaining pellets of fuel ricocheting around the crucible, small enough now that the slightest asymmetry in the hot gas erupting from their surface turned them into tiny rockets. A moment later they’d burned away completely and the lamp was dark and silent.
Onesto walked over to the firestone lamp and turned it up, then went back to his desk.
The workshop looked drab in the ordinary light. Carla punctured the seal of the evacuated container, waited for the air to leak in, then tore away the seal and retrieved the mirror. After she’d inspected it herself she handed it to Patrizia, who surveyed it glumly.
It had been obvious for the last few days that the tarnishing wasn’t proceeding in the manner they’d predicted. The first tier had matched the reference card placed beside the mirror after a mere two chimes’ exposure; the second tier had taken two days. That alone showed that the time to create each photon couldn’t be the same in each case. But Patrizia’s idea that the time might be proportional to the period of the light couldn’t explain what they were seeing, either. For two near-identical hues on either side of the border between the second and third tiers, the period of the light was virtually the same—but while the fifth photon needed to complete the tarnishing reaction in the second tier had only taken two days to appear, after waiting more than twice as long for one more photon, the third tier remained pristine.
Carla sketched the results on her chest. “The photon theory can explain the frequencies where we switch from one tier to the next. But how do we make sense of the timing?”
“Maybe some energy leaks out of these valleys as heat,” Patrizia suggested. “Then it takes time to make up for that.”
“Make up for it how?”
“With a longer exposure.”
“But all you can do with a longer exposure is create more photons!” Carla protested. “And if the numbers of photons aren’t what I’ve drawn here, where does the five-to-four ratio in the frequencies come from?”
Patrizia hummed in self-reproach. “Of course. I’m not thinking straight.”
Carla saw Onesto glance up from his papers. He’d endured the jarring lighting for six days, and now he had to listen to the two of them stumbling around trying to make sense of their non-result. “I’m sorry if we’re disturbing you,” she said.
“You’re not disturbing me,” Onesto replied. “But to be honest, I haven’t been able to get much work done for the last two bells.”
“Why not?”
“Something’s been puzzling me about your theory,” he said, “and the more I see you puzzled yourselves, the more I’m tempted to break my silence. So if it’s not too discourteous, I hope you’ll let me speak my mind.”
Carla said, “Of course.”
Onesto approached. “Nereo posited a particle, the luxagen, to act as a source for Yalda’s light field. If I’ve understood what you’re saying, you’re now positing an entirely new particle that plays a very different role: traveling with the waves in the field itself, carrying their energy for them.”