The Eternal Flame Read Online Free PDF Page A

sound as if he viewed the question as nothing more than ordinary small talk.
    “In a couple of days.” Carla had been open about the arrangement; she was hoping more people would try the same strategy, but most of her colleagues had greeted the news with embarrassment or confusion.
    “Ah.” Having broached the subject Onesto backed away from it. “I put my name down for the Gnat yesterday. For the lottery.”
    “The Gnat ?”
    “That’s what they’re calling the little rocket now,” Onesto explained.
    “Isn’t this all a bit premature? We still don’t even know how far away the Object is.” Carla caught the tone of irritation in her voice. Why should she be annoyed that the astronomers’ plans were progressing, as they waited for the tools they’d need to bring the project to fruition? When she’d first heard of the discovery she’d been thrilled.
    She could smell Onesto’s last meal through his skin.
    Onesto glanced down at the mirror in its container. “I don’t suppose that will be sensitive to infrared?”
    Carla said, “If it is, it would still take half a year’s exposure to record any kind of color trail.”
    “Right.” Onesto stretched his arms behind his back. “You seem tired, Carla. You should go. I’ll look after everything, I promise.”

    Carla’s new apartment was six levels closer to the axis than the workshop. She climbed ladder after ladder in the walls’ red glow; all the shafts looked the same, and at some point in the journey she lost track of where she was, unsure how much of her growing sense of lightness was down to her location and how much to hunger.
    At home she took her holin dose, chewing the green flakes slowly. Her body begged for something more, but she lay down in the sand of her bed and pulled the tarpaulin into place.
    She woke a bell earlier than she’d intended, thinking about the loaf in the cupboard barely four strides away. What difference would it make, to eat the same meal a little earlier on the very same day?
    But she knew the answer. She’d be hungry again, from habit alone, at the time she was accustomed to eating. Then she’d be twice as hungry in the middle of the day, and so ravenous by the evening that she’d be struggling not to eat again. Her body had never experienced the home world’s cycle of plant light by night and sunshine by day, but it could still be pushed to follow a diurnal schedule more easily than any other routine. If she let the timing of her meals slip out of synch with that internal rhythm she would have lost her best and strongest ally.
    She lay half awake beneath the tarpaulin, watching the clock in the moss-light, imagining Carlo beside her. Taking her in his arms, naming their children, promising to love and protect them as he drove her hunger away.

    Onesto said, “No fireworks, no down-time, no problems at all.”
    Carla was relieved. “Thank you. I hope the lighting didn’t distract you from your work.” The spillage from the lamp’s beam filled the room with patches of brightness and deep shadow, and though she’d become used to it the day before the contrast now made her eyes hurt.
    “Not at all.” Onesto was trying to reconstruct a notebook belonging to one of the first-generation physicists, Sabino. It had turned up recently in a woeful state, and Carla didn’t envy him the days he was spending squinting at the torn sheets with their smudged dye.
    Onesto put away his materials and left. Carla had no more marking to do, so she stood and reviewed her notes for the next optics lesson, trying to think of ways she could convey to the students the maddening intractability of the field’s unsolved problems without scaring them off completely. Most of what she taught hadn’t changed since Sabino’s day—and while much of that legacy possessed an indisputable elegance and consistency, and might well deserve to be passed unaltered down the ages, the rest was a perplexing mess.
    No one had been able to improve on