Carla was speechless. Patrizia had produced her share of follies—and it was possible that this was one of them—but nobody else on the Peerless could have thought up this magnificent, audacious scheme.
“If we can identify a good candidate for imprinting,” Patrizia continued, “the hard part will be obtaining flawless crystals. This can only work if the geometry is almost perfect, otherwise the fields from the luxagens in different valleys will slip out of phase. But if we start with small granules, and pick out the ones that look homogeneous—”
“Like Sabino when he measured Nereo’s force?” Carla interjected.
“Exactly.” Patrizia was growing anxious to hear a verdict. “So you agree that it’s worth trying?”
Carla said cautiously, “I can’t see anything that rules it out. But we need to look at the whole thing more closely; we need to study the dynamics of these unpaired luxagens in an external field—”
Patrizia gave a triumphant chirp. “When do we start?”
Carla had no more classes to teach for the day, and she doubted she’d be able to concentrate on anything else until it was clear whether or not this offered a real chance to salvage the rebounder. “What’s wrong with now?”
A woman called out brusquely from the doorway, “Do you know where Carlo is?” It was his colleague, Amanda.
“Not this instant,” Carla replied. “He said he was going to see Silvano this morning, but the meeting’s probably over by now.”
Amanda said, “You need to find him.”
She wasn’t being rude, Carla realized. She was distressed.
“What’s going on?” Carla asked her gently.
“Some men tried to grab me outside my apartment,” Amanda replied. “And now I can’t find Macaria or Carlo anywhere.”
“What men?”
“There were four of them, all wearing masks. Someone helped me fight them off, then they ran away.”
Carla felt her whole body grow tense. “You think this is about the arborine experiments?”
Amanda said, “Yes.”
Patrizia turned to Carla. “I heard people talking about that this morning. I thought it was nonsense, I just ignored it.”
“What were they saying?”
“That Carlo had created an influence that could force women to give birth.” Patrizia’s tone was scornful. “All he had to do was point a light at your skin!”
“That’s not true,” Amanda assured her. She gave a quick account of the actual procedure.
Patrizia looked dazed. “You’re saying I could have a child and go on living?”
“We’ve only tested it on arborines,” Amanda stressed.
“But once you’re sure that it works on people—?”
“It still won’t be a simple thing,” Amanda replied. “It would require surgery before and after the birth.”
“And the number of children?” Patrizia asked her.
Amanda said, “One. Always one at a time.”
Carla broke in. “I should go and see Silvano, and try to retrace Carlo’s movements from there.”
“I’ll come with you,” Amanda offered.
“What about Macaria?”
“I’ve already spoken to her co. He’s gathered some friends and started his own search.”
“I’ll come too,” Patrizia said. “Until we find Carlo, my hands are your hands.”
Carla was moved by this vow of solidarity, but as they headed out into the corridor she realized that it came from something more than friendship. Patrizia was not at all dismayed by what Carlo had done. Once the shock had worn off she had shown every sign of welcoming the news.
There were women who would embrace this bizarre intervention. Carlo was not in danger from some confused rabble who’d taken the rumors Patrizia had heard seriously. He was in danger from every man who’d heard the truth about the technology, and feared that his co would use it to dispense with him entirely.
“Carlo hasn’t been here,” Silvano insisted, turning to shout a curt reprimand into the children’s room. “What’s this about?”
Carla let Amanda explain most of it: the arborine experiments, Tosco’s reaction, the attempt to abduct her, her two missing colleagues. Silvano took the first revelation with admirable poise, but Carla judged that he was not quite so unfazed as to be hiding prior knowledge of the matter.
Patrizia recounted the rumors she’d heard of a new influence. Silvano seemed paralyzed for a moment, but then he said, “I’m going to call an emergency meeting of the Council. I’ll ask both Tosco and Amanda to give evidence, so we get both sides of this.” He must have seen the growing distress on Carla’s face; he said, “I’m sure we’ll find Carlo unharmed, very soon. You should put a report out through the relay. What the Council can do is promulgate statements dismissing the rumors, and warning people against taking any kind of action against the researchers.”
“People don’t already know that abduction is a crime?” Amanda asked sarcastically.
“A reminder that they’re risking six years’ imprisonment might focus their attention,” Silvano replied. Carla stopped herself before interjecting that that wasn’t the sentence Tamara’s kidnappers had received. It had been Tamara’s choice to show them mercy, not the Council’s.
She wasn’t satisfied, but she didn’t know what more Silvano could do, so she left him and Amanda to organize the meeting and headed with Patrizia for the nearest relay station. Harnessed to the paper tape punch, she composed a report describing what she knew of Carlo’s movements and appealing for any witnesses to contact her. The punch only had buttons for two dozen basic symbols, but the pared down vocabulary that imposed helped her to keep the message free of adornments and to resist the urge to add threats and accusations. When she was finished she dialled in her private key and waited for the machine to append an encrypted digest of the text as proof of authorship, then she handed the completed tape to the clerk. Within a couple of bells there’d be copies throughout the mountain.
Patrizia had waited for her in the corridor. “Carlo wouldn’t have been on his usual route to work,” she said. “And they couldn’t have known where he was going.”
Carla felt sick. “They must have followed him from my place,” she said. Somehow they must have known that he’d be with her that night, rather than in his own apartment. Tosco would have been aware of their living arrangements, in general terms, but it was unlikely that he’d committed their precise schedule of cohabitation to memory. Her neighbors, though, knew exactly when Carlo came and went.
“We should retrace the whole route,” Patrizia suggested. “It might give us some ideas.”
“All right,” Carla agreed numbly.
They moved along the corridors slowly, Patrizia surveying the walls around them as if they might bear some physical trace of the event. Carla stared into the faces of the people they passed, as if her angry scrutiny might provoke a flicker of guilt that would allow her to unravel the whole conspiracy.
If someone had tipped off Tosco, as Carlo had believed, other people might have been aware of the arborine experiments for days. No one could organize three kidnappings overnight. But a lot of people had taken sides over Tamara’s abduction, and those who’d sympathized with the kidnappers then would not have forgotten which of their friends had shared their views on the proper limits to a woman’s freedom. Word of Carlo’s research could have spread quickly through a network of like-minded travelers who already knew they could trust each other, as they formed a plan to nip the abhorrent new technology in the bud.
They had almost reached Carla’s apartment when Patrizia said, “What’s that?”
Carla followed her gaze. A tiny dark object—a cylinder maybe a scant long and a quarter as wide—had settled on the floor of the corridor.