The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Without hands, Aleka thought. Sadness closed teeth upon her. By what right had those scientists bulged out these brains, to make a creature that was neither a good human nor a good seal? Research into the nature of intelligence was no excuse. They should have been downloaded, those scientific minds, so that they could be burning in a virtual hell.

  No. She overrode herself. Were it possible to go back in time, by what right could she annul the creation of beings she loved, oath-brethren of the Lahui and fountainhead of its identity? Ka’eo was what he was, a good Keiki Moana. Open a way for his race to find its own fulfillment.

  Coolness took over. Her boat was approaching the Authority craft. She cut the drive. Noise died away, the hull came down, waves splashed alongside, casting brine on her lips, and she slid onward to the outlaws.

  They had seen her coming and fallen quiet, darknesses awash in the swell. Sunlight gleamed off wet pelts and big eyes. Ka’eo freed his flippers, turned about, and barked at them.

  Delgado’s image entered the phone screen. Aleka saw him standing on deck near the turret, amidst his armed crew. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Trying to establish contact, Major,” she answered. “With luck, we’ll negotiate.”

  “What? No, you can’t. These are criminals. We’ve been in touch with the station ashore. It’s activated monitors in the range, and the damage that they report has been done—”

  “Por favor. We two aren’t about to make a treaty. We may find how to end this business without further bloodshed. Our chances are best if we aren’t disturbed meanwhile. If they aren’t.”

  Delgado flushed, then swallowed, nodded, and stepped aside. He was an able officer, Aleka realized. He’d simply been placed in a situation he didn’t comprehend. How well did she?

  Wake swirled behind a long form. It reached her boat. A scarred head lifted to look over the gunwale. After a moment, Ka’eo slipped overside to join the chieftain.

  What happened in the next hour was not altogether clear to the woman, and sometimes unknown. The Keiki Moana communicated among each other by far more than speech. Often they dived below, remaining for minutes; or they swam off through the pack, touching noses here, stroking flipper across back there; or they floated mute and motionless. Two frigate birds cruised on high, wings and split tails like drawn swords. Clouds in the west loomed larger, glooms grew beneath them, a rainstorm fell blue-gray and she heard the whisper of it across the kilometers.

  At the end, she too had her say. Thereafter, “[So shall flow this tide,]” the alpha bull grunted, and went back to his gathered followers. Brief raucousness resounded. As one, they plunged. Time passed before she saw them emerge, far off, bound north. Several of them towed pursed nets full of a harvest that glistened.

  “What is this?” Delgado was crying. “What have you done?”

  Aleka sighed. The hour had exhausted her, wrung her bloodless. “We agreed they could go—”

  “Scot-free? Carrying off their booty No!”

  “Señor, they lost two camaradas, others of them are in pain, and their efforts have gone for very little. The fish they took are already dead. If you let them return home in peace, they’ll leave the bioranges alone for three months as measured by the Moon, and won’t raid fish herds either. They’ll subsist as best they can on what they catch in the wild. Meanwhile their leaders will negotiate with … acceptable representatives of your side, trying for a permanent arrangement. You can pursue them and start real hostilities going, if you like, but I think you’ve come out of the affair mighty well.”

  Delgado gnawed his lip. Finally: “Would you come aboard and tell us more, señorita?”

  “Oh, yes, yes.”

  As she slipped closer, Aleka’s pulsebeat accelerated. She spoke the Thorn Mantra to herself and strength flowed back from some inner well. A single bound lifted her out of the cockpit; she caught a rail with one hand, pressed bare feet against the sun-warmed metal of the submersible, and swung herself onto its deck. Her boat drifted free, Ka’eo watchful beside it.

  The constables stared at the visitor, the men with pleasure. They saw a young woman—twenty-eight—of medium height, clad in shorts and halter. Swimming, running, climbing, strenuous play had made her figure superb. Many breeds of human had come together in tawny skin, wavy blue-black hair bobbed just below the ears, round head, broad face, short nose, full mouth, big russet eyes. Disciplined, the squad members stayed at their posts while one man accompanied Delgado to greet her.

  Stiffly, the commander shook hands. Her palm was hard to the touch. “Bienvenida,” he said. “I don’t believe you’ve met Dr. Zaid Hakim. He joined us to observe for the Ministry of Environment. Dr. Hakim, Señorita Aleka, uh-m, Kame?”

  She smiled. “Alice Tam, if you’d rather speak straight Anglo,” she said. “Buenas tardes, señor.”

  Hakim, in workaday civilian clothes, bowed. “How do you do,” he replied. His usage was scholarly, his accent clipped. “My compliments on a remarkable performance. Do I understand correctly, you speak for your community, Mamselle Tam?”

  “No,” Aleka told him, surprised. “No one person can do that. I’m a, an interpreter, you might say.” But why should he know much about her folk? How many different groupings were there in the world? Half a million? And a number of them changeable as foam, too. The Lahui Kuikawa amounted to about ten thousand humans on a small Hawaiian island and maybe fifty thousand Keiki Moana, maybe considerably more, prowling the greatest of the oceans.

  Had their obscurity been what protected them, and was it now coming to an end?

  “Let’s go below and talk,” Delgade proposed. To the crew: “At ease, but keep alert.”

  His cabin was cool and dim after the molten-bright water outside, cramped but adequately equipped. It extruded three chairs. “Do be seated,” he urged. “Refreshment?” A servotube brought coffee for him and Hakim, beer for Aleka. She felt she’d earned it.

  Was earning it. The catnip tingle vanished from her awareness as Hakim said, “Yes, you did amazingly, mamselle, but I fear it was basically furile.” He raised a hand. “No, no, we shall not give chase. However, the Federation cannot strike deals with a bandit gang.”

  Aleka braced her spirit. “They aren’t that, señor.”

  “What, then?”

  “Nothing you—the Federation has a word or a law to fit, really. They are kauwa.”

  “Please explain.”

  “Where shall I begin? ‘Kauwa’ in modern Hawaiian usually means a servant, but it can also have its old meaning of an outcast, an exile, not necessarily a public enemy but someone who doesn’t fit into society, maybe because his birth was irregular, or because he doesn’t conform to the rules, or he’s simply been too long away from his people.”

  “I must remember the word,” Delgado said. “The world has quite a few like that.” These men were not her enemies, Aleka thought. They did not want to oppress anybody. It made them the more dangerous.

  “Bueno,” she continued, “as the numbers of the Keiki Moana increased, they naturally had to range farther to support themselves. … wait. Let me finish, por favor. They could not and should not have kept on being pensioners, fenced off and fed. They aren’t pets or show animals, for Pele’s sake, they’re sentients! They had their, their own potentials to realize, their own culture to develop, and it couldn’t be the same as ours. Do you expect sophotects to think or feel or act like you? Then why should metamorphs? And what might we learn, what might we get in the way of inspiration, from a nonhuman organic civilization?”

  She had almost said “living,” but checked it. Best not let out any antagonism toward artificial intelligence, no, call it electrophotonic intelligence. Otherwise her words were beginning to run smoothly. How often had she used them on outsiders, trying to explain?

  “For that, they needed to be self-sufficient. You know about the fish ranches, dolphin domestication, aquaculture, recreational enterprises, salvage and repair and scientific survey work an
d all the rest, whatever they could do together with humans, at sea or on the reefs. It was labor-intensive, but viable because it spared the capital cost of robotization. The proceeds let us of the Lahui give a living to our poets, thinkers, singers, artists, dancers, inventors, dreamers. Our spirits.

  “But robotization got to be cheap. And the Keiki population grew. Poverty did. More and more of them had to go hunting for food. Fewer and fewer were in regular, direct relationships with the Lahui, the core society. There’s the origin of the kauwa, señores. The poor people, the fringe people. Yes, certain of them have gone back to a kind of savagery. But can you blame them?”

  Aleka drew breath. “Pardon me if I’ve repeated common knowledge,” she ended. “I know you’ve heard most of this before, Major Delgado. But sometimes it’s hard to tell what is common knowledge, out in your Orthosphere.”

  Hakim raised his brows. “Then you consider your … Lahui to be of the Heterosphere?” he asked.

  “Bueno, we don’t have much to do with the cybercosm or the global economy. I suppose, yes, to you we may all look like kauwa.” Defiantly, Aleka knocked back her beer.

  Had the Lyudov Rebellion succeeded—or had it even won to a middle ground, where some bounds were put upon the machines—But that was a daydream. It had been a lost cause from the start; and maybe rightly. No sense romancing about a wildness that ceased long before she was born. Yuri Volkov had stopped doing so … and he and she drifted apart. …

  “Your metamorphic friends could have ample food, and whatever else they require, for the asking,” Hakim said. “They need only heed the law, quit damaging property and ecology.”

  “Give up their freedom?” she challenged. “Hunting is in their genes.”

  “Humans adapt.”

  “Humans have had far longer, and many more opportunities. Why, the world as it is came from them. And I’m not sure how well or happily adapted most of them are.”

  “Given proper population restriction, a limited amount of predation on wildlife would be allowable, integrated with the general ecosystem But the seals’ hunting is uncontrolled, and becoming serious.”

  “Birth control isn’t in their genes either.” Abruptly she felt how forlorn her arguments were in the face of this implacable reasonableness.

  “Humans generally manage.” Hakim paused. “There are exceptions. Your little society—your, ah, Lahui Kuikawa—has not reduced its birth rate much. I mean your part of it, the human members. Already you are crowded on your island, are you not? Soon you too will have to give up your freedom, as you put it.”

  “We need time,” Aleka pleaded. “Of course we have to stabilize our numbers. The Keiki close to us know it too. We’re working on it, both our species, and we’ll bring the idea to the kauwa. They aren’t stupid either. But—a life with so few children around us, so few pups—Give us time!”

  She wanted to go on: It’s not an either-or matter of personal choice and everybody making the correct renunciation. It’s that we have always been a young folk. Merriment and recklessness, sudden moonlit lovemaking and houses full of growth, birthday festivals, carp flags flying in springtime, yes, and reverence for the aged, whose wisdom not many of us have reached to, all these things and more have always been our lives. We can’t instantly become something else.

  And then, the Keiki Moana are our spirit kin. Very likely we have learned more from them than ever they from us. Forebears of ours were caretakers of their colony, after it outgrew its Big Island refuge and was moved to Niihau. (Fireball, its original protector, had disbanded. Guthrie himself had gone to Alpha Centauri. Somebody must mediate between these beings and the human-machine world. Have you forgotten the history that made us, you men?) As they began to sustain themselves, other humans joined in, to help and to share. Selection: The new recruits were they whom sea and open sky, village and open boat, firelight and starlight, called away from the cybernetic world. They raised their children accordingly. Those of the next generation who did not like it moved elsewhere. Those who did like it stayed, and their children in turn became still more the Lahui Kuikawa, the Free People. And they were oath-siblings to the Keiki Moana, fared with them, foregathered with them, rejoiced with them, mourned with them, until those strong sea-born instincts roused human urges that they had believed were safely buried.

  No, she wanted to say, we haven’t gone into hiding. We haven’t tried to bring back an ideal Stone Age that never was. I’m proof of that. But we have made a life that is our own, that is us, and we will not willingly let it die.

  Useless, here. She had said quite enough.

  Hakim smiled—a little regretfully, she thought. “I can sympathize,” he told her. “I expect that after further study I will recommend that the government agree to your proposal and see if any arrangement can be made with the—the kauwa. At least, with this particular, perhaps unique band of them. We will rely heavily on you … civilized … Lahui to help negotiate and afterward keep the arrangement in force.”

  His lips drooped. He shook his head. “But in honesty, mamselle, I do not expect anything important to result. At best, the robbers will agree to be fed and medicated and otherwise provided for. History suggests that this will demoralize them, encourage the criminal element, and do nothing to curb their breeding. There is also your culture to deal with. In many ways it seems admirable. But can it accommodate itself to—let me be frank—to the real world?”

  Time, Aleka wanted to cry. Give us time, give us space, land, and waters where everything isn’t owned or regulated; let us be alone a generation or two, till we have changed ourselves without destroying ourselves.

  Useless, here.

  Useless, likewise, to linger. After what had happened, the team wouldn’t cruise farther. It would report and doubtless be ordered back to base, whence it would be dispersed on other duties. If the counsel of Delgado or Hakim was wanted, their telepresence would be immediately available, where ver they might be on Earth.

  Aleka had a familiar sense of lying in a box while the lid closed.

  Nevertheless she stayed for two or three hours. The men had questions for her, shrewd out courteous. They were more ready to listen than to talk. She found herself telling them unexpectedly much about her home.

  —the island, a mountain looming above coral ground, orchards, meadows, parklands, once lovely in their sea-girt loneliness but now with little solitude anywhere, because the village had grown till it was—

  —the town. Formerly a longhouse stood surrounded by the cottages of the dwellers, who had it in common for their ceremonies, celebrations, and mutual business. Today a dozen such clusters served as many ’ohana—

  —extended families, whose members shared in caring for each other from birth to cremation. Yes, of course children knew who their parents were and took the most love and guidance from them; but uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents were nearly as close and you were always welcome in their homes. Yes, of course people quarreled, feuded, lied, swindled, stole, betrayed, perhaps more than among atomic individuals with easily made, easily dissolved relationships; but their ’ohana found its ways to compose matters. Besides friends, respected elders, and traditional mores, they had the influence of the luakini—

  —the temple, where they attended the simple rites and heard anew the simple words of the Dao Kai that Kelekolio Pēla had uttered long ago, the Sea Way for a sea folk. They also held secular assemblies, where those adults who wished could debate and vote on public questions and where cases were tried. Criminals were handed over to the police on Oahu, but the worst punishment was exile, expulsion from the island, the ’ohana, the people—

  —and their songs, stories, dances, games, festivals, solemnities, some of Keiki Moana origin, all special to the Lahui soul. The community did not try to wall itself off, but it did nothing to encourage casual visitation, and except for educational purposes children did not watch multiceiver programs before they had had their twelfth-year initiations. Afterward th
ey might well go elsewhere for part of their schooling, as Aleka had done. Yet if their early lives had taken hold in them, upon returning they would want their beloved ethos to abide. Whoever grew discontented was free to move away. Increasingly many were doing so. This was not always gladly—

  —for indeed the Lahui, human as well as nonhuman, had grown beyond the numbers which their permitted stretches of ocean and their industries could support. Economic independence had been the aim, the two races joining their different abilities to win a living from the waters. Given robotics, biotics, energetics, nanotechnology, trained minds, skilled bodies, life went on with a beguiling appearance of simplicity for generations. The products were traded for manufactured goods from outside and a modest amount of luxury. But as the island population waxed, global demand waned; recycling and direct synthesis accommodated ever more of it. When mining and refining operations beyond Earth were dwindling, how should a few minor enterprises on her sea much longer endure?

  “Oh, yes,” Aleka said. “We can live on our Federation credit. We’ll not starve or fall sick or go homeless. Gracias for that.”

  Hakim overlooked the bitterness in her voice. His stayed mild. “No, any thanks are due modern productivity. Credit merely shares out the goods. What have your people been spending theirs on?”

  Aleka shrugged. “Whatever a given person fancies. Not uncommonly, something for their ’ohana. Keiki usually order toys, unless they save to buy a piece of capital equipment. I mean those who draw their credit. They’re the minority.”

  “Who is to blame if most are unregistered?”

  “I’m not blaming,” Aleka sighed. “I’m telling. When none of us have anything but credit payments, that will be the end of us. Lives will go on, no doubt, but the meaning, the heart will be out of them, and what we walking, swimming ghosts will do, I can’t foresee.”

  “You shall have to change,” Delgado declared, his tone less brusque than the words. “It begins with your kauwa. We don’t want to hunt them down—robots, guns—and imprison them. But they threaten the regional balance of nature and it must stop. So must their unrestrained breeding. By compulsory inoculation, if nothing else will do.” He did not mention the historical precedents. He could rely on her to realize that the kind of popular opposition which several of those measures had had to overcome would not arise in this case.