Kindle Notes & Highlights
“And now you need a volunteer who’ll let you play these tapes back to them, to see if they catch the disease?”
They would divide, or they would stay trapped: that was the verdict he’d written in stone.
Zosima was limbless now, and Carlo watched, disquieted, as her anatomy began to surrender features that no conscious effort could have changed.
The companion who had loved and protected him all his life had just been erased before his eyes.
How had he imagined it would feel, when he and Carla finally brought her life to an end?
“We should use these for our engines,” Eulalia enthused. “No more exploding sunstone, just a photon rocket with an exhaust of pure light!”
Romolo’s new light source was a striking vindication of the whole theory of energy levels…
The frequency measured for any given pulse of light depended solely on the relative velocity between the apparatus doing the measuring and the light pulse itself—which in turn came down to nothing more than the angle between their histories.
The mirror’s acceleration into the oncoming light would mean that the light struck it a little faster than the speed with which it had left the source.
The speed of light is the same for all observers.
To make light and not be consumed. These were the properties of an Eternal Flame.
creating photons and waste heat amounted to an increase in entropy.
a photon rocket based on this design could run on a tiny fraction of the sunstone needed by any conventional engine. If it worked, it would solve the fuel problem.
The Eternal Flame—from a few mirrors and a slab of clearstone?”
if we can pull off your trick and make an Eternal Flame on our own—even once—then we ought to be able to supply that energy without consuming anything.”
Here it was, right in front of him: the language of life.
she’d managed to communicate what she needed to her co.
“If we could see ourselves returning within a few generations…”
The tapes, it seemed, hadn’t issued a simple instruction to the arborine’s flesh: do this one thing and be done with it. They’d provoked it into starting up its own internal conversation, sufficiently frenetic to be glimpsed from outside the skin.
“We recorded Zosima’s body instructing itself to undergo biparous fission—and now we’ve fooled Benigna’s body into thinking it’s told itself exactly the same thing.”
A female’s body gives rise to a new life, without fission. What kind of incendiary nonsense is that?
If we’d played back all six recordings, we might have triggered an ordinary biparous fission.”
The child inside squirmed and forced the hardened skin of its mother’s belly to separate from her torso.
“The co’s just as likely to kill it as accept it.”
such an impoverished mode of reproduction could never have been the norm in any species.
Unless a mother could not only survive giving birth, she could do so more than once.
“We’ll need to test this again on another female and see if we can get the same result.”
“Once she’s healed, they can both go back to the forest.”
After this, can she still breed naturally?
We’ll need to observe her with her co until that’s settled.”
in time what they had started here might be polished and refined into a procedure that any woman could undergo without danger or discomfort.
was conceivable that the famine would be banished, not with biparity on demand but with a single child born alongside a surviving mother.
it was not beyond imagining that the Peerless would return to the home world bearing among its greatest prizes the end of the early death of women.
He would have ended the famine, the infanticides and the greatest blight on the lives of women—and extinguished his own kind entirely.
once you took spin into account, you never found more than one luxagen in the same state.
Photons are simply jumps between the energy levels in the light field,
If destroying two luxagens to make a pair of photons doesn’t give us insight into both kinds of particles, I don’t know what will. And you discovered that reaction, Carla! How can you not want to study it further?”
There is no such thing for us as seeing an end to this. If you go looking for finality, you’re only going to be disappointed.”
“You’ve found a way to trigger the formation of a survivable blastula?”
“How many times have you done this?” “Just three.”
“You’ve lost your mind, Carlo,” Tosco declared. “This was supposed to be about biparity.”
“You can forget about another year or two. I want all the females dead within six days, and all the offspring. I want all the tapes destroyed—
“That’s the future you want to force on us? A world of women, reproducing by machine?”
you have no right to destroy a whole society just to ease your conscience.”
Carlo had never told him about Silvano’s children. He wasn’t surprised that word of it had spread, once Silvano became a Councilor
“Still humming at night about your poor lost momma and the terrible thing men do to their cos? Grow up and face the real world.”
“We need to know for sure that the children can breed normally,” Carlo fretted. “That’s more important than whether or not we can induce a second birth.”
The three researchers had each hidden three copies of the tapes without disclosing the locations to each other, so unless Tosco had had a small army of spies working around the clock it was unlikely that he’d be able to find them all.
Patrizia looked dazed. “You’re saying I could have a child and go on living?”
There were women who would embrace this bizarre intervention.
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.
