The Eternal Flame Read Online Free PDF

Nereo’s equation, which connected light to the “source strength” of the hypothetical particles he’d called luxagens, much as Vittorio’s equation connected gravity to mass. Sabino had demonstrated that the force implied by Nereo’s equation was real, by showing that it could hold two tiny mineral grains together, despite a visible gap between them. But taking all of Nereo’s ideas at face value soon led to predictions that simply weren’t true.
    Whatever the fundamental constituents of a rock or a flower were, they either possessed the light-making property or they didn’t; it wasn’t something that could come and go. A few lines of mathematics proved that “source strength” was conserved, as surely as energy itself. So matter had to be made of something that possessed source strength, or no flower could glow, no fuel could burn. The trouble was, anything with source strength should give off some light, visible or invisible, all the time; only absolute stillness—or the equally unlikely contrivance of a pure high-frequency oscillation—could keep it from radiating. But a substance that emitted light could not be left unchanged by the process: the energy of the light had to be balanced by the creation of energy of the opposite kind. A flower could use its newfound energy to make food, but what was a rock to do? With a sprinkling of liberator a rock went up in flames, but why should it need that push? Why hadn’t every lode of sunstone simply blown itself apart, eons ago?

    Carla disciplined herself not to so much as peek at the experiment before the exposure was complete. When the full twelve bells had passed, she knelt beside the clearstone container and checked that the spectrum had remained aligned with the same marks on the paper as before, then she stood and extinguished the sunstone lamp. Onesto had lit an ordinary firestone lamp in the corner of the workshop; now she turned up its light to help her see clearly.
    She slid the container out from under the bench and tipped it for a better view; the clearstone caught the light and confused her with its own reflections, but she was almost certain that the mirror’s sheen had been diminished. She fetched a needle and made a tiny hole in the container’s resin seal, then waited impatiently while the air squealed back in.
    With the pressure safely equalised, she cut the seal away completely, removed the lid and took out the mirror, careful not to detach the gridded paper that she’d glued beneath it.
    Carla held the mirror up to catch the light. There was an unmistakable dull white patina, uniform and complete across the width of the mirror—but not its length. It stretched from one end of the rectangle to a point about halfway along, where it disappeared abruptly. She summoned the calibration notes for the grid onto her thigh. The tarnished region corresponded to a portion of the spectrum running from infrared to green.
    Why stop at green? The intense light from the sunstone beam would have shaken the luxagens, making them vibrate, making them radiate their own light in turn… giving them the energy they needed to break out of the mirrorstone’s regular structure, damaging the surface, spoiling the sheen. But why should the color of the light have such a sharply delineated effect? The theory of solids held that a material’s only hope of stability was for its luxagens to sit in energy valleys whose natural frequency of vibration was greater than the maximum frequency of light—so at least that favored, resonant frequency couldn’t generate radiation and aid in the material’s destruction. So why should light have the power to shake luxagens loose on the red side of green but not the blue side? Since every color was far below the resonant frequency, the response should have varied smoothly across the spectrum, without any sudden jumps.
    Carla turned the mirror back and forth in front of her eyes, wondering if it could all be an error, an artifact.