The Eternal Flame Read Online Free PDF Page B

Maybe an obstacle outside the container had intruded into the blue end of the spectrum—something Onesto had stashed under the bench for part of the night? But that was ridiculous; why would he have done that? And even if he’d set out deliberately to sabotage the experiment, she’d been present for the greater part of the exposure. Blue light had reached the mirror. The color-dependence was real.
    As the mirror flared in the firestone’s light, a new feature marring the surface jumped out for an instant and then vanished. It was like glimpsing a white thread on a white floor, only to lose it again. Carla cursed and repeated the motion, over and over, until she found herself staring at a second, faint edge. In the half of the mirror that had seemed to her before to be uniformly shiny and new, there was in fact another, very subtle change in its reflectivity. The tarnish that she’d thought had ended completely at green actually continued—vastly diminished—along a section that stretched almost down to violet. And beyond that? She was no longer prepared to assume that the surface remained pristine; all she could be sure of was that she’d exhausted the discriminatory powers of her vision.
    But there were at least two abrupt transitions in the density of the tarnish: two sudden changes in the damage the light had done, depending on its color.
    Next to the calibration notes on her thigh, Carla wrote the wavelengths that marked these transitions. She committed them to memory, then started sketching luxagen arrays, doodling calculations, trying to make sense of the numbers. Maybe there was some kind of shift in the response of the mirrorstone when the light’s wavelength crossed some natural length scales dictated by its structure. Luxagens were expected to be separated from their nearest neighbors by roughly the same distance as light’s minimum wavelength, but other regularities showed up at greater distances.
    There was no fit, though, between her two numbers and any of the known array geometries.
    Carla paced the workshop. If not the wavelengths, what about the frequencies? She did the conversion: the green edge was at three dozen and three generoso-cycles per pause, the violet edge at two dozen and seven. But the frequencies at which luxagens were expected to vibrate, in mirrorstone or any other substance, could only be pinned down to within an order of magnitude—crudely constrained by the known properties of solids and the strength of Nereo’s force. So to what should she compare these frequencies?
    To each other. They were in a ratio of five to four. Not exactly, but it was very close.
    Carla remeasured the locations of the edges in the tarnish with scrupulous care, then recalculated everything.
    Within the range of uncertainty imposed by the measurements, the ratio was indistinguishable from five to four.

4
    C arlo said, “I’d like to come back to your team, if you’ll have me. I’m giving up on wheat. I want to work with animals again.”
    Tosco reached out for a guide rope and pulled himself away from his workbench. “What’s brought this on?” he asked. “I never thought of you as easily discouraged.”
    Carlo tried to block out the anxious humming of the voles; there must have been three or four dozen of the animals in the cages attached to the far wall. It hadn’t taken him long to grow accustomed to the blissful silence of the plant kingdom.
    He said, “Do you know what my biggest achievement in the last three years has been? Understanding why some farms end up with all of their wheat-flowers synchronized, while in others the plants split into two groups that take turns producing light.”
    “I wouldn’t belittle that,” Tosco said. “Surely the yield is higher when there are staggered shifts?”
    “It is,” Carlo replied. “Having half your neighbors sleeping means less ambient light to inhibit production. But the difference is tiny, it’s marginal. What I was really looking for was