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a way to keep the flowers open for a greater portion of each day—and nothing I tried brought me any closer to that. If I’m getting nowhere, maybe I should admit that I made a mistake by switching fields in the first place.”
    Tosco stretched out his top pair of arms in a gesture encompassing the workshop. “So what exactly would you do, if you rejoined us?” One of Carlo’s old colleagues, Amanda, was dissecting a lizard on a bench nearby, with a huddle of students looking on. In the corner behind them another researcher, Macaria, who’d been loading a centrifuge with tissue samples, swung down the safety shield and retreated. Sometimes the different density fractions in organic matter weren’t stable on their own, and the endpoint could be explosive.
    Carlo took a moment to summon up his courage; until now he hadn’t put this into words for anyone. “I want to find a way to inhibit quadraparity.”
    “I see.” Tosco’s tone was not enthusiastic. “Do you know how many drugs they tested for that, before either of us were born? The only thing that kept the vole population stable in that program was the fact that the fatal treatments balanced the merely ineffectual ones.”
    “So it might require something other than a drug,” Carlo ventured.
    “We know how to inhibit quadraparity,” Tosco said. “The solution might not be as pleasant as we’d wish—”
    “Or as reliable,” Carlo interjected.
    “It’s not perfect,” Tosco conceded. “But no treatment is perfect. It’s an innate property of women’s bodies that they produce four offspring under ordinary conditions. Anything that interferes with such a fundamental process is doing damage to their health, by definition.”
    “Holin isn’t perfect,” Carlo protested, “but where’s the damage or the pain from that?”
    “Putting reproduction on hold isn’t the same as modifying the outcome.”
    Carlo couldn’t argue with that, but he couldn’t accept the larger claim either. “Women’s bodies have an innate ability to be biparous, too. It makes sense that it’s normally only triggered by famine; the question is, triggered how? If we could understand that process in detail, why shouldn’t we be able to push the same lever without the usual antecedents?”
    Tosco said, “Our bodies don’t come with levers attached. If you’re not going to throw random drugs at the problem, where would you start?”
    Carlo hesitated, but there was no point underselling his plans now. “What I want to do is investigate the whole process of fission as thoroughly as possible. Unravel the mechanism in both biparous and quadraparous species—right down to the signaling level—then look for the safest, most effective point to intervene.”
    Tosco buzzed wryly. “That’s a lofty proposal. Do you think it’s going to be easier than improving the crop yields?”
    “Probably not,” Carlo admitted. “But to succeed at this would count for much more.”
    “When you left here,” Tosco reminded him, “you told me you were going to double the wheat entitlements, then retire to raise your children.”
    Carlo cringed. If he’d made some real progress toward that goal his youthful boast might have seemed less vain, but it would have done nothing to redeem his misdirected ambition. “And what would happen if someone actually achieved that?” he said. “We’d get a generation or two of plenty before the increased population overtook the increase in the harvest. What we need is stability. If I’ve read the history correctly, at the time of the launch so many women on the Peerless had escaped from coercive families and were committed to dying childless that it must have looked as if a balance could be maintained that way: for every woman who had four children, another would willingly have none at all. But that’s not the culture any more.”
    “No.” Tosco regarded him with bemusement, but didn’t spell out what Carlo suspected he was thinking: The culture