Kyra frowned. “I know who’ll wonder real hard about that.”
“My agents will make certain that this message and the consequent preparatory work do not come to the attention of any such persons.”
Tricks, diversions, beguilements— “You can’t make that liftoff invisible, nor the fact right afterward that she’s not really making for any Lunar satellite.”
“By then, the sequestration will have happened, including communications. Ground crews will not yet know of it. Officers will be in polite custody. Once the ship is aloft, that can be revealed to all personnel, but for the next—fifteen hours, shall we say?—no communication will go out of Port Bowen that our agents have not checked, or constructed themselves. I repeat, at Lagrange-Five we require surprise.”
Kyra whistled. “That’s a mighty big bite you’re taking. What if we fail?”
Rinndalir chuckled. “The consequences will be diplomatically interesting. But we, the Selenarchs of sovereign Luna, need no more fear effective punishment than do the Avantist masters of North America.”
“Still ... I see why you had to work this quietly, take this long. Making arrangements for something so big—” Abruptly she had scant comfort from the wine. “Why do your consortes go along with it? What’s in it for them? For you, sir?”
He turned grave. “That is somewhat of a philosophical question, Pilot Davis. We can try to discuss it later, if you wish. Let me simply declare now that our relationship with Guthrie’s Fireball has been generally satisfactory. Who knows what pseudo-Guthrie might provoke?”
That reassured, at least to the point where she could smile and reply, “Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you!”
“Indeed.” His voice briskened. “Shall we finish the practicalities? Our expeditionary force will have an authorization apparently issued by Fireball’s director here. Devising and encoding that took some expert time also. It will be beamed to the colony shortly before we dock. It states that we are a mission sent in a preliminary way to look at the possibility of establishing a Lunarian enterprise station at the one-sixth gravity level there.”
Kyra frowned. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Nay,” Rinndalir admitted with a grin, “but the Security Police ought not to know that, and the regular staff should see no reason not to receive us. Lunarians do have a name for waywardness, but never for endangering an environment in space.” His gaze pierced her, his tone slowed and deepened. “Once we are inside, what happens will depend very largely on you, Pilot Davis. I assume you know who can lead us to Guthrie, and can persuade that person to do so.”
“I . . . think I can—” It exploded: “And then the whole rotten conspiracy crashes!”
He lifted a diamond-aureoled hand. “Not quite that dramatically, I fear. We had best not carry him in triumph through the colony, but smuggle him out. Otherwise the Security Police might find means to halt us and suppress all news. Or else imagine what some individual fanatic might do. Any attempt—firearms discharged—need I say further? And afterward ... we must consider what is wisest, in conference with Guthrie himself. His enemies are desperate, and not stupid. North America wavers on the verge of civil war. Millions of lives could be at risk.”
Fleetingly she wondered whether he cared about that. But no. Unworthy thought. He was more Faust than Mephistopheles, she must believe. And he had engineered the great adventure that should bring liberation.
She shifted her goblet into her left hand and thrust out her right. “Muy bien!” she cried.
His clasp was warm, and he smiled into her eyes. His were big, oblique, the gray of a northern sea or of fine steel. “So be it,” he said. “Drain your glass and I will refill both and we will drink to chaos.”
She obeyed. While he poured she asked, “Chaos?”
“In the scientific sense,” he answered. “An ordering of infinitely wonderful, unforeseeable manifoldness.” After a moment: “But also in the older sense. I do not think that once this is over we can return to our familiar universe. Siva is the Destroyer. But he is, as well, the Creator Anew.”
They drank, and nibbled the refreshments, and admired the play of light, and talked of much. Later she saw that he had revealed essentially nothing of what his motives and his colleagues’ were. Perhaps her oversight was due to a growing happiness, perhaps his skill. He did, for instance, give her what seemed like a glimpse of his heart.
“Yes, here on Luna we have grandeur to undertake, making this world over to please ourselves, and otherwise every illusion we may desire. When our ingenuity runs dry, that of the machines will be unbounded. Yet to what end? The future is theirs. Unless we— It would not be the first rebellion that raised hope out of hopelessness, through chaos.” He sheered from the subject and fashioned a merry jest.
Beneath the entrancement, she heard herself wonder if he truly was Faust. If not, what? A trickster god, Raven, Coyote? Or Loki?
Most of this was over the dinner table, to which he presently led her. It was in a room of blue twilight. Fragrances drifted, and music. How had he discovered that she loved the Air on a G String? The meal was superb, a series of small courses, each a masterpiece. Realities interwove the conversation, details, ideas, many of which he evoked from her. They gave it direction and meaning, a sharing of purpose; but always pleasures came back, humor, lines of poetry, remembrances. She fell into telling him about her past, from Toronto Compound and Russia on to the comets and planets. His questions and comments, out of his foreignness, were often astonishingly enlightening. She had never before thought about matters in that way. Only afterward did she reckon up how little he told her in return.
* * * *
The waiters had brought their coffee and liqueurs and vanished. They were alone together. “You are a rather remarkable being, Pilot Davis,” he said.
Not person, being. The connotations, in a Lunarian mind— “Por favor, lord Rinndalir, I am Kyra.”
His smile flowed across her. “Well, then this nightwatch I bear no title. Shall we be simply ourselves?”
If you wanted a mythic likening, how about Krishna?
* * * *
30
A
breeze blew cool. A few of the leaves that it rustled on a birch had yellowed and the green of the rest begun to fade. As if defiant, sunflowers nearby raised golden blooms high above fescue growing wild. The year of Ragaranji-Go was moving toward autumn. Beyond waited the gentle winter.
Eiko wondered what it would be like to live on a world where seasons and weather had not been tamed, even to the degree that they were on Earth. Those must have been awesome powers, for a ghost of them lingered to this day in the forced cycles and carefully bounded random variations of the orbiting colony. So much life that it sheltered needed them for well-being. Did also the human spirit?
She passed the torii gate and came into the presence of the Tree. Three persons were there already, silent as people were wont to be when first they entered its shadows. She didn’t know them. That in itself meant nothing; but could they be Sepo, civilian-clad off duty, here to behold the marvel? She might watch a while and see how they handled themselves at half a gravity. No, that could draw their attention to her in turn. Let her be only a woman walking by. It should actually be easier to hide her fears from them than from somebody who recognized her. Of course, her friends were aware that she had frequented this place since childhood. Nevertheless— She rounded the mighty bole and mounted the ladder, aiming to be out of sight before the visitors strolled beneath.
At the third resting stage she dared stop and catch her breath. It wheezed noisily. Her mouth and throat were dry, her body shook a bit, reminders that she was no longer quite young. She drank from the canteen at her belt, rested hands on the platform rail, and opened herself to calmness.
At this height were the lowest boughs, still sparse. Three meters beneath her, they supported the first of the several safety nets. More for protection against falling cones and branches than to catc
h climbers who lost their hold—trained spacefolk hardly ever would—its mesh was arachnite, strong enough to take an impact but thin; she could look through it, down into dusk. Above, multitudinous vaultings lifted ruddy, green, shadowy, luminous, upward beyond sight. Warmth dwelt in the bark, fragrance and a gathering mistiness in the air. A hawk skimmed by. A robot crept along the trunk in search of disease, lesions, any trouble not human. It looked like a beetle, dog-sized, with extra legs and feelers. It too belonged.
When she had her strength back Eiko went on. The ascent she made was too much for most persons. She didn’t mind. Physical strain, whatever aches it brought, those were benedictions, surcease from the sickness that gripped the outer levels of her worldlet. The very sameness of rung after rung after rung, broken just by platforms and, thrice, relief stations with emergency telephones: it let her lose herself in an infinite variety of bough and twig, needles and cones, silence and soughing, life and light.
Beyond the topmost net, the ladder gave on a final stage and came to an end. Overhead were more intricacies of great, closely growing limbs. One that sprouted a few meters below her slanted toward them. Eiko rested until she felt ready, then sprang down to it. She fell as softly through the thin air as an autumn leaf. Gauging the jump wasn’t hard for a person who was born to Coriolis force. Rough bark and occasional offshoots gave ample purchase for a body that weighed a few kilos to scamper upward, past the platform and close to a higher branch. To that one she leaped, caught a slender shoot, and crawled on top. Thence it was an easy scramble onward. When she reached the limb she wanted, she moved more cautiously, balanced against a whirl of whickering little winds, out over its massiveness to a triple fork.
She was by no means the sole colonist who made expeditions of this illegal kind; but they who did were rare and seldom spoke of it. For years none had disturbed her in the retreat she had discovered. After all, unlike her, others came this far for the sake of adventure, not peace.
The fork and its lesser branches formed a loose-knit room with broad crotches on which to rest, walls and roof of green, open on the far side. Less thick here than at its base, the main stem swayed slightly to the winds, a thrumming went through it, needle-rich twigs shifted and swished, glimpses of empty air danced among them. Forward beyond it, vapors drifted across pale blue, lighted by a sun that was not a disc but a ring around the mouth of this well. The ground lay dizzyingly far below, but the forest that was the Tree barred sight of it.
Eiko reached past three cones, drew Guthrie from his concealment, and settled him securely. She bowed before she knelt, legs together, hands on lap, facing him. It was an incongruous pose in sweatsuit and deck shoes, but she trusted he knew what she meant.
The flickering illumination made his lenses look eerily alive. “Hello,” he said. “You’ve been a while. Trouble?”
“Not for me, sir,” she replied in the same English. (No, not the same; his went back generations.) “I simply think that coming often would be hazardous. But I must inform you today that new contingents of Security Police have arrived. They are searching the colony from end to end. We are not told what they seek, except for vague announcements about possible sabotage devices, but it is clear to me. I dare do nothing they might notice.”
“Reinforcements?” he growled. “End to end? Yeah, my other self has okayed it. He’s got a pretty good hunch I’m somewhere in L-5—gone to earth, so to speak.”
“I am sorry to have left you for such a time, sir,” she offered. “How have you been?”
“Bored.”
“I am sorry,” she repeated, while thinking that she would not have been. To rest without hunger or thirst or any need of motion, amidst sky and Tree!
“I’m grumpy too,” he said. “Why are you this passive? You were plenty bold, snatching me out of space. Now do you mean you haven’t made any further effort, haven’t even talked in private to a few reliable people?”
She shook her head. A third apology would be servile, but she kept her answer soft. “I told you my father is a hostage. In a sense, a very real sense, all this nation is. A battle could let the vacuum in.”
“I wouldn’t want that. God, no! I was thinking about—maybe just getting somebody to the Moon to find out what went wrong there and pass the word on.” Guthrie’s voice dropped low. “And I worry about you, lass. If we wait, they’re bound to find me, and they won’t need much wit to figure out you were involved. What about you?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Eiko said, quiet in her heart. “Perhaps your other self is enough like you that he will understand and order me forgiven. In any case, they will have no reason to punish my father or friends, will they? Indeed, that could reveal the truth, which they fear.”
He made a harsh noise and: “How long till the Sepo get up here?”
“It will be some daycycles yet, I believe. The colony is so big, so complex, a labyrinth. I have been trying to think how I can convey you to a place they have already searched.”
“Good girl. Still, we can’t play hide-and-seek forever.”
“No. But while you remain free we have hope for an opportunity, a change in circumstances.” Her calm broke. “Let there be hope, Guthrie-san!” she cried. “If they destroy you—”
He sounded unshaken. “I’m not scared on my account. However, it’d be too bad for folks like you.”
Insight came, not as a revelation but as the foreseen conclusion to many hours of pondering. “Fireball,” Eiko breathed, “those who live by it and trust you, is that what you exist for?”
He held his tone matter-of-fact, as if to discount his meaning. “What else is there? Oh, this is an interesting universe and I have my fun, but I am in a thin kind of survival. Without Fireball, not a hell of a lot of point in continuing.”
What an ultimate loneliness, Eiko thought. How could she reach out to him? It was the single meager thing she might be able to do this day. She fell silent, seeking an utterance. The wind whittered, the Tree murmured. “Why does it matter this much to you?” she asked finally.
He did not tell her to mind her own business. Was he glad to respond? “Well, Juliana—my wife and I, we founded it and made it grow. Our baby.”
“You had real children, no?”
“Oh, yes. They grew up, though, and set off into their separate lives. We got along fine with them, enjoyed the grandkids, but Fireball was what we kept for ourselves.”
No doubt he felt grateful to her, despite his complaints, and accorded her a measure of respect, and therefore found her worth talking with like this. Nonetheless Eiko was surprised when he added: “Then Juliana died. I soldiered on.”
“Alone,” she said. Tears stung.
“Don’t feel sorry for me!” he snapped. “I don’t, never did. Running Fireball was fun, taking it out to the ends of the Solar System and looking into how much farther we might go.”
“I see. You did not wish to lose that.”
“When I saw my own time coming?” She imagined a shrug of phantom shoulders. “Well, I’d have to. This isn’t the original Anson Guthrie here, you know. It’s a program in a box.”
“I meant to say,” she fumbled, “you . . . cared about . . . space.” About humankind bound ever onward, discovering, triumphing, outliving the sun and the galaxies, and on the way attaining to enlightenment.
His reply came blunt. “Not exactly. I never was any saint, to sacrifice myself for some grandiose Purpose. Nor was I ever such an egomaniac as to suppose Fireball would immediately go on the rocks once my hand was off the tiller.”
He lay mute for a span. Gently, the Tree rocked him.
“But we were at a crisis,” he said. “Several crises, some technical, some political. For instance, should Fireball continue research and development for interstellar missions? Was that the great, shining goal, or were we pouring our resources down a black hole when they could go to something real? Several governments were trying to get into space in earnest, run their own lines and undertakings. Should we for
estall the camel sticking his nose in the tent? If so, how? And how to keep Fireball itself from degenerating into a government?”
As he went on, his voice sank and steadied. “I was an old fart, my endurance gone and my wits growing dull. Best for Fireball, this thing Juliana built with me, best would be if I retired. Unless I could get myself a helper who thought like me, who also wanted to keep her dreams alive. The technology for downloading had become available. Quite a few friends, including descendants of ours, urged me to use it. They claimed they needed this. Maybe they were right. Anyhow, I let them talk me over. None too soon, from their standpoint, because as it happened, shortly after the job was done, I died.”
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