He nodded. The wan locks swept past his cheekbones. “The Avantist Synod has beamed an enciphered message to Port Bowen. Unless Fireball agrees within twenty-four hours to furnish aid to the government, its people in North America will be adjudged criminal conspirators, subject to court martial and summary justice. The first such proceeding begins when the ultimatum expires.”
“No, that’s loco! Got to be a bluff!”
“You cannot believe that the lord Guthrie will risk that it isn’t. I deem that the Synod expects he will either buckle, thereby beginning the process of Fireball’s complete surrender, or else do something rash that will provoke global sanctions against the company. They have sorely misjudged him and his capabilities. They being what they are, it was probable that they would. His strength is gathered. He will strike as soon as all the data are in.”
This was another corridor of illusions. The floor was like a rushing river, the walls full of tall flames, the ceiling a night sky where stars fell and burned as meteors, in utter silence. “You claim a hell of a lot of confidential knowledge,” Kyra said desperately. “Have you infiltrated his personal staff?”
Rinndalir smiled through the light flickering over his face. “That might be difficult. But we have our monitors watchful at many a vantage, as you shall discover, and from what they tell us, we make our deductions. Be not dismayed. Rejoice. Your commonwealth rides to the rescue of its children.”
The tone was soft, but a bugle was in it. Kyra felt a stirring at the roots of her hair. Why indeed any doubts and fears? Her side had done everything humanly possible, short of breaking troth, to reach peace. The enemy had chosen otherwise. Let her cheer Fireball on, and then help batten hatches against the storm that would follow.
True, this male at her side had wrought much to bring the battle to pass. Had he not tampered with Guthrie’s first impartation, the Chaotics might well still be quiescent. Without their backs to the wall, the Avantists might well have decided it was best to make an acceptable settlement, even some reparation for their misdeeds.
Really?
As if his faun ears had heard her thoughts, Rinndalir said, “Yes, we of Luna did hasten fate a little. Was that not met? Your foe requires more than chastisement. He requires destruction, as does a cell gone cancerous before it strews its breed. Upon this day, liberty proves it is not simply sweet, it is mighty. The blows it strikes will be in the cause of all folk everywhere and henceforward.”
Her mind sprang wild. Maybe he was right! She too had felt the future as stifling. No doubt Avantism, left to itself, would rot away. How long would that take, though, and what shape would it leave her poor country in? What of other lands that were unfree? Might lives computerized in the name of order or social justice or whatever they called it, look up with a sudden freshness? Might an idea blow forth upon the wind, that governments and machines ought to be instruments people used, not ends in themselves?
Let there be Lunacy!
The way led into the Pagoda. At midnight it was ashine from Earth low in the northeast, a formless blue that diffused through the diamond, star-gleaming at facets that changed as you moved, until it shaded into space-darkness opposite. Handel’s Water Music went clear and cool through air that smelled like roses after a rain. Serenity so abrupt was as startling as an unawaited kiss.
A couch had been placed at the table, on which stood wine, goblets, and finger foods. Across from it was a giant multi. Rinndalir guided her to the seat and joined her. “Memories,” he murmured.
No, damn it, she mustn’t let him seduce her, not yet, anyway. “You mentioned having a lot of monitors out,” she said. Her flatness was an offense to these surroundings, though he didn’t appear to take any. “I suppose you intend to receive from them?”
“Even so. We man no very capable spacecraft of our own, we Lunarians, nor maintain a robotic fleet, merely a few vessels for special purposes. Otherwise we rely on Fireball.” Perhaps he recited that common knowledge because he felt she could do with a soothing noise. “However, we have produced far more miniatures with observational potency than we have hitherto declared, and we have newly launched them, programmed to track what occurs at their assigned watchposts.”
He took a control off the table and flicked it. An image, doubtless retrieved from the database, awakened in the cylinder, a thin metal shape with an instrument boom forward and a linac drive aft. She recognized the general type, if not this precise model, and guessed it was about three meters long, plus the mass accelerator. Most likely it was launched not by a first stage but by a catapult, easy to do off Luna, and powered by sun-rechargeable molecular accumulators—high specific impulse, therefore low mass ratio. Not much delta v between rechargings, but nimble. Basically simple, producible in quantity by an automated factory somewhere in the body of the Moon.
“I daresay Fireball has noticed several of these; I think not most,” Rinndalir went on. “We have received no protests. It is a natural act for us and no menace to them. We have also secreted miniflitters with their own observatories near interesting locations on Earth. They transmit at very low energy, but sufficient for the big dish at Copernicus, and with adequate bandwidth. They are now airborne. The Avantists may shoot a few down, but I trust that the majority will show us somewhat.”
He poured into the goblets, a gurgle that fitted the music. “Once more, will you propose a toast?” he asked.
Memories, oh, God, yes. “To victory, a clean victory,” Kyra said. The wine anointed her tongue and thrilled in her bloodstream.
He sipped, raised his glass anew, and said in his turn, “To chaos.”
“What? Do you mean the Kayos this time, the Chaotics? Bueno, yes, luck to them.” She clinked rims with him.
“Nay, I mean chaos,” he told her, “the liberator, that annihilates the old and engenders the new.”
She checked her goblet at her lips. “Chaos in the scientific sense?” she asked uneasily: the forever unforeseeable.
“If you wish, although I would then draw my trope less from mathematics and mechanics than from the quantum heart of things. Come, will you not share drink?”
Kyra wondered why she had balked. He wasn’t saluting anything evil, was he? One of his whimsies. She took a larger swallow than she intended.
“Let us see what betides,” Rinndalir said. Glass in his right hand, he worked the control with his left. The image in the cylinder blinked away. There appeared an arc of Earth’s curve, limned by the multiple layering of air, cloud a volute of purity over turquoise, a loveliness that pierced Kyra as deeply as when she first encountered it. Athwart the environing dark, sunlight slid over the flanks of two spaceships, a big-bellied Argosy-class freighter dwarfing the Falcon torch that paced her. Watched from afar through the opticals of a Lunarian monitor, they showed only by the corposant glimmers astern how they hurtled under drive.
“A-a-arr-rr-rr,” went Rinndalir in his throat. “The first attack. We are barely in time.” He hunched forward, a-shiver.
Guthrie’s voice tolled in Kyra’s head. “The high ground is ours,” he had reminded her. “We could nudge a few big rocks into collision orbits, or shoot them from the Moon. The threat of the Lunarians doing that was a large factor in getting them their independence, you may recall. But unless the missiles are aerodynamically shaped as well as precision-aimed, we won’t have decent control. We’d oftener dig a hole in an empty field, or in a town full of innocent people, rather than our target. I expect we won’t have time for the necessary work. Instead, if we must fight, we’ll sacrifice a ship or two, crammed full of rocks and dived down on robot.”
She had shuddered. First that robot must be reprogrammed for suicide.
But it wasn’t like reprogramming a captive Guthrie. Was it? Machines didn’t really have consciousness or free will or a wish to live. Did they?
At this instant— Go get ‘em!
The freighter and the torch receded from each other, Earthward and spaceward. Rinndalir fingered his control. Somew
here a computer made its calculations and flashed the result into the multi cylinder. To Kyra it was an elegant alphabet that she could not read. The orchestra had begun the Royal Fireworks section.
“Destination, Kennedy Base,” Rinndalir exulted. “I awaited as much. We have more than one observer in that vicinity. If any remain operative—”
A mountainscape stood before them, gray-blue snow-dappled peaks against a sunlit deep heaven, in the foreground pine forest seen as treetops rushing past, in the middle distance an airfield, a radome, a communications tower, clustered buildings, vehicles scuttling about. Underground, Kyra knew, armored, buttressed, lay the command center of the national militia.
They did not see the ship hit. She came too fast. Retrograde with respect to Earth’s orbit, reeled in by Earth’s gravity, she bore an energy equivalent to the detonation of some two hundred kilotonnes. Stopped down for transmission, the flash nonetheless dazzled Kyra like an unguarded look straight at the sun. It tore into rags in her vision, and she glimpsed a scene that swung and whirled as monstrous winds tossed the aircraft about. A globe of incandescence boiled aloft, spread, vanished into the fungus cloud of smoke and dust that climbed after it to rape the sky. As her sight cleared she made out a broad crater, low-walled out agape at the center where man’s caverns lay sundered.
The music rollicked.
“Ya-a-a-ah,” breathed Rinndalir. A human in that mood would have screamed, it. “Beauty, beauty.”
Gladness fled from her, off to wherever yonder lives had been cast. “No, por favor, no,” she begged. “I’ve flown missions to stop this kind of thing.”
Sobriety was instant. He set down his glass and laid a hand over hers. “I pray pardon. The spectacle was magnificent, but, yes, the loss lamentable. Forget not, however, forget not, my dear, this was also ineluctable.”
“Did we—did Guthrie—have to? I mean, a demonstration in an area where nobody was—”
“I fear not. What must be demonstrated is not power alone, but the will to use it. The shock of the actuality shatters the spirit and brings a speedy end to resistance. Else might the conflict smolder on for days or weeks, and reach no final decision. What meanwhile would become of your consortes there? And the rebels who trust you, they would not survive. Remember how the second World War was ended.”
“What?”
“Japan was beleaguered. Yet it was not ready, it was not able, to yield. Blockade and famine could have reduced it in a few more years, invasion in perhaps one more, but deaths would have been millionfold and the country left waste, its heritage down among Crete and Babylon and Mohenjo-Daro. Moreover, the Soviet Empire would have been a co-occupier. If you have knowledge of Korea and Vietnam, you may think on what that would have meant. Two nuclear bombs forestalled all this.”
Comfort ran into her through the light pressure of his clasp, until he drained it away by saying pensively, “I anticipate your second strike soon,” as he began to hunt through sendings from Earth.
She pulled free of him. “No! Not after that!”
He looked at her. “Yes, if Guthrie is the realist he claims to be. He must show forth his arsenal—most especially, to the World Federation and its armed enforcers. This day many things begin to perish. None may foreknow which they are, nor where he shall stand in the wreckage, but be sure, Kyra Davis, that none can stand save by his own strength.”
She stared at the mask of him, which slowly grinned. “You can’t mean that,” she whispered. “You mustn’t. This—victory?—won’t be worth it. Nothing could be worth it.”
“Oh, but it is itself the end, to which victory is but a means and of small account,” he rejoiced. “Whatever befalls, the order of things that has prevailed is broken. Grieve not. Nothing did it hold for our kind—yours, mine, all that are now freed to be born—save ignominious doom. Again is chaos loose and every tomorrow unbound.”
“You, you wanted a war.”
“Say rather that that was the tool which came to hand.”
“You engineered it. Guthrie’s broadcast. And ... the Avantist ultimatum, was that your work too?”
He laughed. “Darling, you compliment extravagantly our cleverness and our abilities. Thank you.” His attention went to the multi. “Hai, but here is promise.”
Scenes had been flickering past, Northwest Integrate asprawl around its waters, a truck convoy on a prairie highway, a squadron of flyers, thousands of people packed and shouting in Exploration Plaza, fire raging in Quark Fair. . . . Rinndalir turned back to the next latest and held it.
Momentarily, Kyra knew confusion, a disrupted anthill that burned. Her pilot’s skills took over and the pattern emerged for her, making insane sense. The observer hovered high to scan a reach of tawny hills where live oak and eucalyptus stood in scattered groves. Afar shone water, and beyond it lifted a serration of buildings. She recognized the main biospace in San Francisco Bay Integrate.
Explosions had scarred the slopes. Park service robots sped ludicrously about, quenching blazes in the dry grass, while armored cars lurched forward, helmeted men zigzagged crouched, flitters hummed overhead, and guns spat. The men struggled up toward a tree-clad ridge. Rinndalir magnified their goal, and Kyra discerned hastily dug earthworks, shelter holes, rapid-fire stations. There other men tended a flatbed truck on which stood a generator and what she guessed was a laser gun, scanty defense against attack from above.
“The remnant of a substantial Chaotic force,” Rinndalir deduced. “The militia have them trapped, but they hold out for a span yet, perhaps in the hope a relief troop will fly in.” He made a finger-shrug. “That might have been a possibility daycycles ago, for the Chaotics had a few airborne units, but they are brought down.”
For Kyra it was nightmare, a past she had known only through books and dramas, had believed safely dead. Corpses and wounded, obscene beneath the sun— The Peace Authority could end it in an hour or less, with proper military equipment wielded by professionals. Instead, these poor, ill-outfitted, ill-trained militia—backups for the civil and political police— slogged and died in a fight with brother citizens who had even less at their beck. But the Avantists did not want international intervention. It would bring inconveniently much to light.
Rinndalir stroked his chin. “This is a suitably spectacular rescue to carry out,” he said. “It won’t necessarily happen. We may have to watch a playback from elsewhere— Hai-ah!”
The torchcraft descended. In atmosphere her jet was a white flame-tongue tinged with blue, red where it licked at Earth. Kyra knew how it roared, the heat that billowed from it and the lightning smell of air through which lethal radiation went lancing. Metal melted, flesh exploded in soot off calcined skeletons, ground quaked and blackened, flames leaped up in a ring that widened.
Laterals blasted. The torchcraft tilted, recovered, hopped from point to point as she scrawled her swath across the Union’s men.
Rinndalir chanted in his own language. Ecstasy was upon him. The militia broke, ran, stumbled, fell, shrieked appeals for mercy that Kyra could not hear. The music played on.
The torchcraft ascended. Nothing remained but ruin, and rebels on the crest who one by one crept forth—stunned, terrified by their deliverance? In a while they would cheer, maybe.
Kyra supposed the spaceship hadn’t actually killed many of their foes. There was no need. A demonstration of power and of the resoluteness to use it, that sufficed. Yes. She wondered who the pilot was. Names, faces tumbled through her mind. Did she want to know? It might well stay a secret. But then she’d have to wonder about all of them.
Rinndalir turned to her. “Consummatum est.” His voice throbbed. “Surely no more after this. Who dares fight on? You drank to a clean victory, Kyra. You have it, as clean as ever in history. Drink afresh!”
She sat passive. In the multi the hillside burned.
He lowered the glass he had raised. “True,” he said quietly, “what you have witnessed bears its troublous aspect. Pray believe not that I enjoyed the si
ght of death and agony. Yet those inhere in life, Kyra. Here they have served a worthy purpose.” His tone gathered a lilt. “And the spectacle was superb.”
“Yes, you would appreciate it,” she replied.
He stiffened a bit. “Do you mourn? Do you feel guilt, that you were party to this? Will you denounce Fireball and renounce your allegiance?”
“No. Oh, no.” Her words fell dull into the music. “I just . . . need to come to terms with it. And with myself.”
“I understand.” He smiled. “Or mayhap I do not. We are of different natures, you and I. Well, I bade you hither in hopes we might learn somewhat more of them,”—he laid an arm along the couch back—”and celebrate together.”
His skin was giving off a strange fragrance, not quite musky. Warmth blossomed in her. It guttered out. Kyra stood up. “No,” she said, “gracias, but I want to go home. Now.” To Tychopolis first, unavoidably, a way station for the house on Lake Ilmen. Or Toronto Compound? That might be where she could soonest find out what had become of Bob Lee and, if he lived, help him back to freedom.
Harvest of Stars - [Harvest of Stars 01] Page 43
