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not a couple of years.”
    “All right,” Carlo said. “So how should I picture it?”
    “I don’t know yet,” Carla admitted. “All I can say is that light produces a strong tarnishing effect when four times the frequency exceeds a certain number. When the frequency falls so low that you need to multiply it by five to meet the same target, the effect suddenly becomes drastically weaker—and when you need to multiply it by six, it becomes weaker still. It might even vanish entirely at that point; I’d need to do a much longer exposure to be sure.”
    Carlo pondered this. “Wouldn’t it be easier to follow the pattern in the other direction? If the effect grows weaker as the magic number goes from four to five to six… what about three? Shouldn’t you get super-fast tarnishing from waves where you can reach the target merely by tripling the frequency?”
    “There are no such waves,” Carla replied. “The target is more than three times the maximum frequency of light, so you can never reach it by tripling.”
    “Aha.” Carlo had a glimmer of comprehension. “Which is a good thing for mirrorstone, isn’t it? If it was that easy to damage, it probably wouldn’t be around at all.”
    “Exactly!” Carla’s eyes widened with pleasure. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s showing us the border of stability. And maybe every mineral, every solid, has its own ‘target number’ like this—but in the case of something like hardstone, it could be so high that even six times the maximum frequency of light doesn’t reach it.”
    Carlo said, “The empirical rule sounds simple enough. I suppose the hard part will be making it mesh with the theory—with Nereo’s equation and the luxagen model?”
    “Yes.”
    “And…?” he prompted her.
    “And right now,” she admitted, “I have no idea how to do that.”
    Carlo told her about his meeting with Tosco. He’d given her no warning of his plan to return to the animal physiology group—and he offered no justification now, but he watched her face as he spoke. Carla listened politely, in silence, but she almost flinched when he reached the point of describing his new research program. And this was from the subject in its most abstract, impersonal form: comparing biparous and quadraparous fission, hunting for the mechanism that allowed some species to switch between the two.
    He understood why it was painful for her to hear. Behind these calm career announcements he was whispering a promise that he had no right to make: I’ll find a way out of the famine—if not for you, for our daughter. He had no right, because people had tried and failed before: countless women driven by hunger, countless men driven by the suffering they’d seen. There was a terrible equilibrium now, and an unspoken consensus that the only real option was to cling to their hard-won resilience and endure what had to be endured.
    Carlo couldn’t live like that any more, but he understood that he had to follow this new path quietly, making it as easy as possible for everyone around him to avert their gaze. When he’d said all he needed to say for the sake of honesty, he steered the conversation back to the mysteries of light and matter. Failure there might leave them stranded, doom their whole mission and kill off all their ancestors—but at least they hadn’t been cursed with some wretched half-solution that sapped their resolve and kept them from reaching the real thing.

5
    “L izard skin?” Tamara asked incredulously.
    “Lizard skin,” Ivo confirmed. “The jungle has its uses.”
    “Is that where you go looking, when nothing else works?”
    Ivo said, “That depends on what I’m after. When people think of light they usually think of flowers, but most animal tissues have some kind of optical activity too.”
    Tamara managed a murmur of concurrence, as if the first course of action that anyone should consider when faced with the need to find a new chemical would be to pop a lizard