Carlo averted his gaze and tried to regain his composure. How had he imagined it would feel, when he and Carla finally brought her life to an end? Had he ever really fooled himself into believing that he’d be borne through it all in a daze, anesthetized by the biological imperative, untouched by the gravity of what he’d done? No man ever told his children anything but anodyne lies, but if he could forgive his father for sparing him as a boy he could not forgive his own cowardice since. All his training, all his animal experiments, had only helped him bury the truth under a mountain of facts. He had to accept that his life’s greatest purpose, the one role that would make him complete, could never be right, could never be bearable, could never be forgiven. It wouldn’t matter how long they waited, it wouldn’t matter what plans they’d made, it wouldn’t matter how willingly they took the final step. In the end he would know exactly what he’d done, with only the children to keep him sane.
And that only if their number was right.
Carlo looked up. Zosimo was huddled against the branch, swaying, his upper arms wrapped around his head. He had fallen silent, but now Benigno and Benigna were howling in reply. But through all the arborine sorrow, Carlo finally had something to celebrate himself.
The surface of the blastula was marked with its first partition—and it was transverse, not longitudinal. Zosima would divide into just two children, and there was a chance that the light recorders had captured the signals underlying this result.
35
“It’s working!” Romolo announced gleefully. He held a mirror in the beam and wiggled it, sending a dazzling red spot careering across the walls of the workshop. “Visible at last!”
Everyone gathered around to play with the new device. Carla watched, delighted by the spectacle, but she hung back herself and let the rest of the team enjoy it.
It would take some effort to scale up this humble red spot into a light for the beacons, but in time the navigators would have what they needed. Ivo was already working on a machine for capturing samples of orthogonal matter with a coherent UV source. It was beginning to look as if the Gnat’s successor could be flying to the Object within a couple of years.
“We should use these for our engines,” Eulalia enthused. “No more exploding sunstone, just a photon rocket with an exhaust of pure light!”
“Er—” Romolo pointed to the lamp that was powering the device. “This beam’s only carrying a tiny amount of the energy from the sunstone. The rest is being wasted. If we tried to drive the Peerless using something like this, we’d need to burn sunstone so much faster than the original engines that it would vaporize the whole mountain with waste heat.”
“And the light source would stop working,” Patrizia added.
“Why?” Eulalia demanded. “From the heat?”
“No. From the acceleration.”
Romolo turned to Patrizia. “What do you mean, from the acceleration?”
“The light source only works at a particular frequency,” Patrizia replied. “If the Peerless is accelerating, then while the light’s traveling from one end of the source to the other, the clearstone will end up moving faster than it was when it emitted the light. Any change in the relative velocity between the light and the clearstone will change the apparent frequency of the light—so it won’t be at the right frequency to stimulate any more transitions.”
Romolo was at a loss for words, so Carla intervened. “She’s joking! Any frequency shift would be extremely small. Even at one gravity there’s no chance at all it could stop the light source from operating.”
“I was joking,” Patrizia admitted. “But maybe we could design a system that’s deliberately sensitive to the shift, and use it as an accelerometer—as a kind of navigational aid.”
Carla couldn’t think of any objection to that in principle. “Why not?” she said. “Another project for our grandchildren.”
Romolo angled the reflected beam onto Patrizia’s chest. The red disk looked like a hole in her skin, revealing the realm of light within.
Carla woke, her gut in spasms. She turned to the clock by the bed and waited for her vision to come into focus. Breakfast was still more than two bells away.
She lay beneath the tarpaulin, humming softly. She wondered if it would help if she made some kind of promise to herself, to end her hunger if it became too much to bear. But end it how? She couldn’t take Silvana’s way out, even if she’d wanted to: Carlo was so convinced that he could rescue her from the famine that he’d rather fend her off with his ridiculous knife than cure her of her misery. She wasn’t going to go off holin, or step out of an airlock. There was nothing to be done but to endure it.
She tried to sleep again, but it was impossible. She pulled herself out of bed and left the apartment. If she followed the corridor around in a circle until she was too weary to continue, she could drag herself back to bed with some hope of losing consciousness.
The precinct was quiet, the moss-lit corridor deserted. What did other women do, she wondered, when their hunger became unbearable? Did they lie beside their cos and fantasize about the day it would finally end, until one by one they abandoned all the plans they’d made for their lives and gave in to that glorious vision?
Carla searched for something cheerier to occupy her thoughts. Romolo’s new light source was a striking vindication of the whole theory of energy levels… but when she thought about the journey the device would enable, the prospect filled her with dread. Without a deep understanding of the annihilation reaction, any plans for an engine that burned orthogonal matter would be nothing but whimsy. But was it really her duty to face the risk of becoming fuel for that fire herself, not just once, but over and over again?
If she refused, there would be plenty of volunteers to take her place. She could still work on the theory underlying the reaction, but she would probably slip behind the researchers with first-hand knowledge of the new results. If Patrizia flew on the second Gnat and returned with a triumphant discovery of her own, it would finally place her reputation unambiguously beyond Carla’s.
Would that be so intolerable, though? Would it be unjust? They had both made contributions, but the most powerful ideas had been Patrizia’s. Looking back, it seemed to Carla that the best thing she’d done had been to impose some discipline on Patrizia’s wilder speculations and then tidy up the details of those that worked out. So perhaps she should reconcile herself to that role. If it was to be her legacy, better to value it than resent it.
What was left for her, then? More tidying up? Turning throwaway lines about accelerometers into real devices? If she could come up with a design for a light-based accelerometer that actually worked, there’d be nothing dishonorable in that. On the scale of a small craft like the Gnat it might be fanciful, but over greater distances there’d be more time for the acceleration to reveal its effect.
How long would it take the slowest detectable infrared light to run the full length of the Peerless, from the tip of the mountain to the base, and back? Still just a fraction of a flicker. In which time, at one gravity’s acceleration, the velocity of the mountain would have changed by… a few parts in the fifth power of a gross.