The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “If you did not bloody lose your way in that—that jumble, that labyrinth.” Edmond’s hands trembled a bit. He’d want comforting tonight, Dagny knew.

  “I wouldn’t have,” Anson argued. “I never do.”

  It could well be the truth, she thought. Not that he’d been anywhere alone before now, but on guided excursions he acted as though he’d drawn maps in his head. Virtually no visitors, and few long-time residents, could do that, on this world that was not Earth.

  This world that was to be his.

  She mustn’t undercut ’Mond. “You could have discovered the hard way that it’s possible,” she said. “In any case, you were selfish and inconsiderate, you made a whopping lot of trouble, and most especially, you breached discipline. If you don’t learn better, someday you may cause somebody’s death. Go wash and lie down.”

  Mute, haughtily erect, the boy departed. When he was out of sight, the man embraced the woman. She laid her head against the hard solidity of him, inhaled his warmth and male smell, clutched him tightly. “I ’ate sis,” he whispered in her ear. “But we are obliged.”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she breathed. “For their sakes.”

  If he and she knew what was right. How many of the old rules held? These were not children like any that had ever been before. In a sense, they were not human. They’d never be able to breed with her kind, nor even abide for very long on Earth. Not for them were wind and wave, blue heaven, thunderheads rainbows, the great wheel of the seasons; theirs were the naked stone and the scornful stars and a life to make from a new beginning. She had not believed the otherness of their flesh would matter too much. Else she would not have borne them. But how foreign were their souls?

  11

  As soon as she left the tubeway that had taken her from the airport, Aleka Kame realized she needed a warmer garment than she had brought along. The sky hung low and leaden. A raw wind harried tatters of fog borne in off the sea. Earth’s atmosphere didn’t always respond as it should to the nudges it got from Weather Control, and sometimes even short-range local prediction failed. Ultimately, the planet was chaotic.

  Having noticed a dispenser in the station, she went back. The booth was basic, but she didn’t want anything fancy. In fact, she did not need to strip for the scan, as lightly clad as she was. When she had specified a brown calidex coverall and debited herself, the system took three minutes to prepare it and drop it out the chute. She put it on over her blouse and shorts, picked up her bag, and went forth again.

  The carrier had let her off within a few blocks of her first destination. Walking up Fell Street, she saw that more of the houses that lined it had gone empty since her last visit. They stood shingled, turreted, painted, sealed and silent in their eld, museum pieces. What tenants remained were generally old, caretaking to earn a bit of extra credit. However, a number of small businesses were interspersed: personal services, entertainment, curio shops, hand-prepared food and drink, a place to linger and chat over coffee. Traffic went sparse, pedestrians, motorskaters, minicars, the occasional machine on duty at which she could only guess.

  Passing Steiner, she saw what was new, a quivira opposite Alamo Square. It was designed to blend in with its archaic surroundings; she would not have known its nature except for the schematic cosmos discreetly flashing above the entrance.

  So people were now coming here to lie in the tanks and enjoy the dream-lives they could not find in reality? Then the neighborhood wasn’t actually dying … unless a sociotechnic computation had shown that this might restore a little vitality to it, and that that was desirable for some larger end. …

  The Albergo Vecchio filled a building which the occupants had gotten permission to remodel. A signboard creaked in the wind, with a garish amateur painting of peasants in a harvest field passing a leather bottle around. The walls behind the door, similarly decorated, enclosed a tiny bar and several tables with red-checked cloths. Cooking odors drifted from a reconstructed primitive kitchen. Mama Lucia bustled out to cry, “Benvenuta, carissima!” and hug Aleka to her vast bosom. Nothing would do but that the guest immediately have a tumbler of wine and a slab of bread and cheese.

  Upstairs in her room, which was also small and meticulously antiquated, Aleka sighed, shook her head, and smiled a bit sadly. She always stayed here when she came to San Francisco Bay Integrate. It wasn’t fake, not really; it was a family’s gallant effort to keep themselves independent, doing work they could care about. And, yes, it offered a haven from the machines. Her window overlooked a vegetable garden. As far as she knew, the plants were all traditional.

  If you wanted this kind of respite, a quivira could give it in totality; but the real thing, though limited, cost rather less.

  Of course, you didn’t get away from a multiceiver and an eidophone. Aleka called the Mary Carfax number. An aged female face appeared on the screen. “Buenos tardes?” it quavered.

  Aleka named herself. “I’m a friend of your grandniece Dolores Nightborn,” she said. “She suggested I come by, since I’m in town, give you some news you may not have heard—nothing major, but nice—and see if you need anything. I’ll be glad to help wherever I can.”

  “Oh, yes, yes. Dear Dolores. Gracias, mil gracias, señorita. Can you come over pronto, for tea?”

  Hard to believe that this was an electrophotonic intelligence speaking while a program modulated the transmission. Aleka held her own features stiff, her voice calm. The effort made her forget and say, “Mahalo” by way of thanks, but no matter; she herself wasn’t playing identity games, not yet. “Sure, I’ll be happy to. In about half an hour, bien?”

  Quickly she changed to a decorous unisuit, flipped the coverall together around it, and went back downstairs. “I’ve a lot of errands,” she told Mama. “Don’t know when I’ll be in.” Beneath the easy words, she shivered.

  The display at the station directed her to a stop on Columbus Avenue. She had never seen that district before. It busied itself, but not directly with human concerns. On her right a wall rose a sheer hundred meters and ran for a kilometer or more, like a palisade, windowless, seemingly doorless. Recesses and flutings made a subtle pattern over which smoked the hues of a thousand different sunsets. Light also played, in coruscant sparkles, across a building on the other side, whose soaring intricacy suggested a fountain. Complementing it with height and grace, a metal framework reared beyond, where cables made a moving network around silvery control nodes. Aleka sometimes wished she had the brains to understand sophotectic esthetics, not simply admire it or stand bewildered.

  A sense of enormous energies filled her, though the wind whistled through silence and traffic was still thinner than along Fell. The cybercosm sent communications to work scenes far oftener than it dispatched material bodies. Perhaps a score of machines were in her visual field. A huge, torpedo-shaped transport murmured by, self-steered. Two little flyers buzzed overhead, optics bulging out of bluish metal, arms trailing aft below the wings. A fractally dendritic manipulator glided past, three meters tall; its finest extremities quivered and shimmered in the gusts. A wheeled, multiply tentacular globe was a sight new to her. And on and on. … Which were robots, which were intelligent and aware, which were puppets of a thing that might reside halfway around the planet? How much did the question mean? Electrophotonic minds could mesh at will in every possible configuration, achieving every potential—

  She was not quite the sole human. A man strode by, so purposefully that he must have some occupation here. A consultant, a technician? A woman stood at a distance, apparently discoursing with an anthropomorph that could almost have been taken for a spacesuit. Could she be a synnoiont? Two other men, grizzled and vaguely shabby, walked in surly conversation. Local residents? Probably. Those would be few, because flesh and blood tended to feel uncomfortable in environs like this, but on that account lodgings in side streets would be cheap.

  “Mary Carfax” had one. The seething data traffic everywhere around must help screen hers. She’d be free of
people living close by, who might wonder why she never left home. All that had been necessary was to smuggle the apparatus in and install it. The precaution of slipping a false registry into the database would have been more difficult to take, but, given Lilisaire’s connections, not impossible. Aleka knew something about that kind of trick.

  She turned on Greenwich and, a few blocks down, found the place. It was a leftover house in the sleek pastel-plastic style of eighty or ninety years ago. Those flanking and facing it looked deserted. Evidently city robots kept them in good repair, but Aleka wondered fleetingly how long it would be before other machines obliterated them to make room for more machines.

  Or would they? Why? Sophotects didn’t proliferate for the sake of proliferation, as humans used to. The growth they strove for was ethereal, capabilities of the intellect, up toward the Teramind and beyond. Aleka shivered in the bleak wind.

  She confronted the door and spoke her name. Carfax had obviously entered instructions, with a recorded image, for it retracted at once. She ran tongue across lips, clamped teeth together, and went inside.

  A cramped room held obsolete furniture and banal pictures. Surprised, Aleka then decided this was for the benefit of any unwanted person, a constable or whoever, who could not be refused admission. She passed on into a space big and still. Walls had withdrawn to make a single chamber. Windows had blanked. The ceiling imitated sunlight and the air lay warm, but she guessed that was on her account, likewise a lounger in the middle of the otherwise empty floor. At the far end she saw a large gray panel, blank except for sensors, a screen, a speaker, and sliders that doubtless covered specialized outlets. A general-purpose robot stood in a corner adjoining. She assumed the sophotect took direct control of it. The mind itself, the physical system, was—elsewhere in the house.

  “Salud,” she greeted out of a tight throat.

  The voice that replied had become a resonant baritone. “Bienvenida, Señorita Kame. Por favor, remove your outer garment, be seated, make yourself comfortable. What can I offer you? Food, beverage, narcotic, stimulant? I regret the choice is limited, because visitors like you are rare, but the usual things are on hand.”

  “N-no, gracias.” Aleka feared that if she tried to deal with a cup or plate, it would tremble. She felt grateful for Mama’s wine.

  Reaction flared. Why the Q should she be nervous? Here was no god, but a machine—a single machine, sealed off from the rest of the cybercosm. Yes, it had awareness, it had gifts that in certain respects must be greater than hers, but in other ways it was surely circumscribed, naïve, dedicated to this one service. When that ended and a new program was entered, it would not be the same mind, the same being, at all.

  True, she was on the verge of what might be a dangerous enterprise. But she’d taken risks before. Generally she’d enjoyed them. And the possible stakes—

  She grinned, for the sake of bravado. Peeling off her coverall and dropping it on the floor, she sat down. She would rather have kept her feet, but figured obscurely that this showed her more at ease, more in command. She did set the lounger straight upright and ignored its sensuous self-adjustments to contours and skin temperature.

  “Are you ready?” asked the machine. She nodded. Her heart thumped. “I speak for the Wardress Lilisaire. She has provided me a file of her information about you.”

  Aleka frowned. “Was that safe? I mean, if she’s being watched—”

  “How do you know she is?”

  “She has a reason for these precautions, doesn’t she?”

  The voice made a chuckle. “Excellent. You confirm her impression of sharp wits. The file was not transmitted from Luna, it was carried as a recording to Earth by a messenger. He privately gave it to another person, who brought it here.”

  Then presumably Lilisaire had no cause to suspect Aleka was under surveillance. That came as a pulselowering relief. “Are you, uh, empowered to make decisions?”

  “As far as feasible, yes. Why do you think you were called?”

  “It has to do with the Habitat, right?”

  Lilisaire had talked enough about that, with enough venom, when they met, although mainly she had set herself to charm and, under cover of it, inquire. Besides, everybody knew how opposed to the project the large majority of Lunarians were.

  “Yes,” the machine said. “What is your opinion of it?”

  “I, I hadn’t given it much thought,” Aleka confessed. “The idea seemed—exciting—till I heard her. Since then … I sympathize. If Earthlings want to colonize, let them go to Mars.”

  “A long, expensive haul.”

  “What does expense mean, when you can pretty nearly grow your ships in the nanotanks, and they don’t need human crews? Nor would you need a Habitat at Mars.”

  “Shrewdly put. I was quoting the argument advanced by proponents. They are humans too, you know, in the government and out of it.”

  Bitterness lifted. “What has the cybercosm bribed them with?”

  The tone was matter-of-fact. “Essentially nothing. Most of them are sincere. They accept the cost-benefit analysis produced for them because they trust the cybercosm. You know why. This is a more stable world, with more social and economic justice, than ever was before sophotectic intelligence developed. Do not be so hostile to it.”

  Aleka’s emotion subsided a little. “Oh, I’m not, not really. I’m … skeptical. At least, I often wonder where we humans are bound, and how much control over the course we have left to us.”

  “Your Lyudovite background?”

  “I never was a Lyudovite!” she exclaimed. “How could I be? The Rebellion happened lifetimes ago.”

  “But when you were studying at the Irkutsk Institute, you encountered persons whose ancestors fought in it, and who still hold it was a rightful cause wrongly crushed.”

  Memory rushed back, campus, the Russian plain, glorious Lake Baikal, Yuri, Yuri, and the village to which he took her, more than once. “I had a, a close friend, a fellow student. He came from that kind of family, yes. They tried to keep the old ways alive, handicraft, agriculture, it was pitiful to see. He introduced me to them. We were very young.” Aleka sighed. “Later he … changed his mind.” And they drifted apart, and finally she went home to Hawaii. By now he seldom troubled her dreams.

  “And you?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got my work to do.”

  “I am only familiarizing myself with you,” the machine said mildly. “I know what Lilisaire has informed me of, but it is incomplete and abstract.”

  However, Aleka reflected, it probably went beyond what she had revealed. Agents on Earth must have looked into her life before the Wardress decided she could trust her. Or earlier, yes. Lilisaire would have had more than a casual reason, a couple of mutual acquaintances, for inviting her to Zamok Vysoki that time she vacationed on the Moon, and bedazzling her.

  Aleka felt she ought to resent such snooping, but couldn’t. She didn’t even resent it that the ancestress Niolente had taken a part in fomenting and prolonging the Rebellion. A cold-blooded move, granted, in hopes of weakening the Federation until it gave up on incorporating Luna. But Lyudovites and Lunarians had a great deal in common.

  Aleka stiffened her will. “All right,” she said, “I admit I’ve kept the sympathies I acquired then. To a degree, anyhow. I don’t personally believe we can turn history backward. Nor that we should.” It had indeed been a desperate cause: Keep humanity in charge. Do not permit the making of fully conscious artificial intelligence. Stop before it is too late, and then consider how much mechanization and automation is really desirable. “Too late,” she repeated her thought.

  “But I live with what the system is doing to my people.”

  “So you told the lady Lilisaire.”

  She bewitched it out of me, Aleka almost replied. She had never confided like that in anyone else, feelings too deep to have clear form until she uttered them. Not Father nor Mother nor sisters nor Yuri had worked thus upon her. She did not yet know just how
the Selenarch had.

  She curbed her words. A silent half minute went by.

  “Shall we proceed to the matter?” asked the machine.

  “’Olu’Olu!” burst forth. Aleka caught her breath. “Por favor.”

  The calm tone helped steady her: “You have an uncommon knowledge of peculiar byways in these parts, as well as of the global datanet.”

  “I, I’m no … spy, or any such thing.”

  “Would you care to describe your experiences? Again, I know of them from the Wardress, but hearing you in person gives depth to the information,” the machine said.

  And it had to judge whether or not she actually was what Lilisaire required. Responding in a half-organized fashion stabilized Aleka further. “Details, anecdotes, they’d take the rest of this week. But—oh, in my student days I was exposed to a wide variety of places and folk around Earth, besides getting a technical education. You see, the Lahui need people like that, and the elders thought I had the talent, so they encouraged and supported me to knock around. Since then I’ve served as a liaison, with the Keiki Moana on the one hand and the outside world on the other hand. I’ve come to the mainland quite a lot on that account, because—bueno, metamorphs don’t like to use telepresence, especially for important business. Among other things, they’re afraid of eavesdroppers.” Not without grounds, she thought. The authorities would want to keep an eye on them. They were a chaotic element, which might by sheer chance disrupt carefully laid social plans.

  “Your Keiki Moana seek cooperation with other Terrestrial metamorphs?” It was more a statement than a question.

  “The core, the—I hate to say ‘civilized’ Keiki, yes, they do.” And therefore Aleka did, on their beloved behalf. “Nothing criminal, nothing revolutionary. But … we’d like to quietly establish communication, find our common interests, work toward an organization that can promote and defend them.”

  Lunarians were metamorphs too.

  “Nothing criminal, nothing revolutionary,” the machine echoed. “Yet to Lilisaire you hinted at underground activity.”