Carlo buzzed dismissively. “I hate to break the facts of life to a biologist, but it’s the female’s body that provides all the flesh.” Quaint folk tales notwithstanding, even the ancestors had weighed male animals before and after breeding and established that they made no measurable contribution to the blastula.
Amanda ignored the jibe. “Breeding is an exchange of information. The female has certain physical resources at her disposal in creating the offspring, but why wouldn’t she also make use of every available fact? Surely the male’s state of nutrition says as much about the scarcity of the food supply as the female’s own mass?”
Lucia called down to them, “I’ve found the right place! Come on up!”
When they reached her, Carlo could see what she’d been looking for. They were still below the canopy, but the branches protruded into an open space about six stretches wide. If the arborines were sufficiently curious, there was no reason they wouldn’t feel safe watching the intruders from across the gap. Carlo’s aim with a slingshot wouldn’t pose much of a threat at that distance, but Lucia had brought a dart gun powered by compressed air. It would have been insane to try to carry a bulky machine like that on a long chase through the treetops, but as a stationary weapon it wasn’t so impractical.
“Is there any behavior we need to avoid?” Amanda asked. Lucia had made no effort to keep them quiet; they were here to be noticed and attract a few onlookers.
“Don’t light fires,” Lucia replied. They’d brought no lamps in any case. “And don’t do anything ostentatiously belligerent.”
“We shouldn’t beat each other up?”
“Not if you can help it. There’s a risk that might spook them.”
They secured their equipment, tied their harnesses to some robust branches and settled in for a long wait.
“Are you hoping to start raising a captive population?” Lucia asked Carlo.
“We’ll see how far we get,” he replied. “If we manage to collect data from even one fission I’ll be happy.” He explained his plan to record some of the internal signals during the event.
“And the ultimate goal of this is biparity on demand?” Lucia must have heard rumors about his work—probably as a postscript to the story of his hand.
“That’s what I’m hoping for,” he admitted.
“Good luck.” Lucia sounded skeptical about his chances, but not disapproving. “It would make life easier for most people. But I sold my entitlement when my co died, so I’m going the way of men regardless.”
“You never looked for a co-stead?” Amanda asked. The thought of a woman choosing death over childbirth seemed to unsettle her.
“I didn’t want to replace Lucio. It didn’t feel right.” Lucia buzzed and gestured at her body. “Besides, there are compensations: if I’m going to the soil, at least I’m not obliged to be fanatical.”
Carlo looked away. No woman could plan her future with certainty, but if the holin failed her the children would all be killed, so it made no sense for her to torture herself. With universal biparity, there’d be no need for a market in entitlements and no need for orphans to be slaughtered.
He felt his gut tightening. If his efforts with this came to nothing—like his work on the crops—would he have emboldened a successor, or just frightened everyone away from the field for another generation? Maybe the whole project had come too late to be of any use to Carla, but the prospect of his daughter trapped in the same cycle was unbearable.
Lucia misread his expression. “Don’t worry, it’s early yet. You have to expect them to be wary at first, but they’ll come gawping at us soon enough.”
Carlo hadn’t brought a clock, but the forest flowers shone in staggered shifts that still echoed the rhythms of the home world. In the absence of sunlight to tell them when to rest, the plants had settled on a kind of mutual deception, with half of them treating the onset of light from the others as if it were dawn, and the roles exchanged six bells later.
Sunlessness must have been disorienting for the first generation of animals brought into the mountain, and Carlo suspected that their current descendants still weren’t entirely at ease in this endless, violet-tinged night. When his own turn to sleep arrived, it did not come easily. The forest air was kept cool enough to make it safe to skip a few nights in a sand bed, and once he closed his eyes being weightless in his harness wasn’t all that different from being weightless anywhere else, but even with two companions standing guard it was hard not to feel vulnerable. No wonder the arborines of folklore didn’t sleep: a lifetime of wakefulness was easier to imagine than a creature, apparently so much like a person, slumbering contentedly in the treetops.
Halfway through their second day in the forest, Lucia spotted an arborine watching them across the gap. She passed her spyglass to Carlo for a better look. The male was stretched out in front of a clump of brightly glowing yellow flowers, gripping two protruding branches with all four limbs. It was the clearest view Carlo had ever had of an arborine in the flesh. All the sketches he’d studied in his comparative anatomy class had been in old books from the home world, predating any changes adopted by the local population—and the one thing that struck him most now was the uncanny similarity between the hands the creature had formed on its lower limbs and those the travelers themselves made when they were weightless.
“I could shoot him right now,” Lucia said, “but if there are others watching you’d probably lose the chance to get his co.”
Amanda said, “One male is useless. If we have to make do with a single animal it had better be a female, but I’m happy to wait as long as it takes to get a breeding pair.”
The male freed one hand to swat mites from its eyes. Like the female who’d watched Carlo drifting above the canopy, he did not seem agitated or afraid, merely curious.
“How much time do the cos usually spend together?” Carlo asked Lucia.
“From what I’ve seen, they tend to forage separately, but they do meet up to share food.”
“So if this male’s co is foraging elsewhere, we’ll have no way to identify her?”
“Not if we take him before we’ve seen them together,” Lucia replied.
Carlo handed the spyglass back, unable to suppress a low hum of impatience. He was used to grabbing a cage full of voles from the breeding center, with all the cos bearing matching tags.
“If this turns out to be too difficult,” Amanda said, “there is one alternative.”
“Really?” Carlo gave her his full attention.
“All the other animals are too small to tolerate the light probes,” she said. “But you could always ask for people to volunteer to be recorded in the act.”
The three of them took shifts with the spyglass, scrutinizing the arborines that came to watch them. Carlo saw the first male grow bored and disappear, but a second male replaced him a bell or so later. Amanda reported the return of the first male, briefly accompanied by a female, but she saw nothing to prove that the two were cos. Lucia saw nothing at all, but the timing alone suggested an explanation: the arborines weren’t going to lose sleep over the intruders.
“At least we can guess now which flower-cycle they’re treating as night,” Lucia said wearily, preparing to rest herself.
“If we’d been smarter we would have been prepared for this,” Amanda suggested. “We should have had full time observers in the forest, people who’d know the whole arborine society inside out.”
“That’s easy to say with hindsight,” Carlo retorted. “But if I was going to rewrite history I’d start with a captive breeding program.”