The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781597804271
Publisher: Night Shade Books[Start]
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Amanda caught Carlo’s eye; she flicked her head slightly to point to Tosco, dragging himself across the workshop toward them.

“I’d like to see you both in my office,” Tosco said. “At the next chime, if you can get away from what you’re doing.”

Amanda had her hand in a cage, poised to inject an immobilized vole on the verge of reproducing, but she said, “That’s no problem.”

Carlo said, “We’ll be there.”

When Tosco was gone, Amanda shot Carlo a questioning glance. “I have no idea,” he said. Their work had been progressing far more slowly than any of them wished, but Tosco was the one who’d counselled Carlo to be patient.

As they approached the office at the appointed time, Carlo saw one of their colleagues, Macaria, waiting on the rope outside the doorway. Carlo had no idea what she’d been doing lately; he’d seen her coming and going from the main workshop, using the centrifuges and other equipment, but she’d been spending most of her time elsewhere.

Tosco emerged and called the three of them inside. When they were settled, he addressed Carlo and Amanda.

“I’ve brought you here for a briefing on Macaria’s experiments,” he said. “She’ll be publishing the results shortly, but I wanted you to hear them first.”

Carlo was relieved; this didn’t sound like a preamble to the termination of his own project. “What’s the work about?”

Macaria said, “I’m in the early stages of an investigation into infrared communication in lizards.”

“Communication?” Amanda had worked with lizards for years; she was entitled to express some skepticism at the claim.

“‘Signaling’ might be a better word,” Tosco suggested. “We’re not talking about a language, in the conventional sense.”

“Ivo found an infrared-sensitive component in lizard skin,” Macaria explained. “So I wondered if it had a specific role—maybe supplementing ordinary vision in some way. But I thought the easiest starting point would be to look for a complementary substance: one that would emit IR to the environment in response to an internal signal. And I found one.”

“Triggered chemically?” Amanda asked.

Macaria said, “No. It responds directly to illumination from pathways in the flesh at the usual wavelengths, but it’s shielded from external visible light by a layer that’s only transparent in infrared.”

“Ah.” Amanda sounded as if she was starting to be won over, but Carlo was still unconvinced; demonstrating an interesting physical property in some goo you’d centrifuged out of lizard skin didn’t prove that that property served a biological function.

“I set up an infrared camera and took exposures of small lizard populations in various circumstances, to see if I could catch the signal being used,” Macaria continued. “Most of the experiments came up blank. A new food source and the appearance of a predator—things that elicit audible calls—didn’t trigger any infrared chatter.”

Carlo said, “But…?”

“When I took two groups that had been bred apart and brought them together for the first time, the paper turned black.” Macaria swept a hand back and forth, as if slathering dye onto a sheet. “I’d been expecting a few gray streaks

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