The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe much. We’ll see.”

  He looked from eyes to eyes. The fury had left him, unless as a coldness deep inside. He was confused, and a peaceable man, and the doubts were swarming afresh. “You can’t have any notion of … overthrowing the Federation. You aren’t dement. And I, I wouldn’t go along. There may after all be a, an excellent reason to keep the secret.”

  “In that case,” Aleka said, “they could have told you so like honest po’e. Plenty of information’s not allowed loose, but everybody knows why. How to scramble a driver robot to make the vehicle crash onto a target, for instance. But no, they broke in on you, your perfectly legitimate inquiries, before you’d even begun them.” She was still for a moment. The hidden ticking seemed louder than before. “I don’t want anarchy either,” she finished low. “But I believe we’ve run afoul of a criminal conspiracy.”

  “And we alone will oppose it?” he jeered.

  She stepped close and caught both his hands. Hers were warm and firm; he felt small calluses. “Listen, I beg you. Maybe, somewhere along the line, we should go to the proper authorities. But who are they? What can we prove? That you were bugged … by someone who can’t be traced. Someone well positioned to strike at us, though, and afterward bury the story in a subduction zone. We need more information before we surface. I think I know where and how to search for it. Come along with me that far, Kenmuir. You’re a man, a free man. Come!”

  Freedom, Lilisaire, and a regathering sense of outrage to avenge. If they had done this to him, what might they do to others? He cast his mind back across history, terror that could have been crushed when it was newly hatched but instead was let grow and grow. What had Burke said? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good mer do nothing.” Something like that.

  Was this actually evil that he had met? How could he tell, save by hunting the truth down? If he could. Aleka believed it was possible, and she was better informed than he was, and—

  “Very well,” he heard himself say, and saw joy blaze up before him. “For a while, reserving my right to opt out when I choose.”

  —and, laughed a devil in his head, he was most infernally curious about this secret that went back to the dawn of Lilisaire’s world.

  18

  The Mother of the Moon

  Lars Rydberg had soon come to feel that when he visited his mother and stepfather he was at home, more than ever elsewhere, even with the old couple who gave him his upbringing and all their love. The Beynacs were spacefolk, Fireball folk. His missions that sundered him from them, so that they rarely and briefly met in the flesh, also bound him to them.

  On this occasion the big viewscreen in their living room played a record from the Stockholm Archipelago. Sailing was his great pleasure on Earth. Waves danced and glittered among the islets; wind tossed the crowns of trees, sent clouds scudding across blue and boats heeling and dancing before it. Sound went soft, rush and whistle. The air cycle had been set for a tang of salt and sunlight to join the perfumes of Dagny’s flowers. She wanted to gladden him. Today everybody needed that.

  It had gone much as she hoped, from the moment she bade him welcome. True, his smiles came seldom, but he always was a solemn, undemonstrative sort. Now they sat with drinks, hearing him tell of his latest faring. Altogether the company numbered four. Jinann, her youngest, still lived here.

  “—nothing special on the way out,” he said. “The common long, lazy haul.”

  “But it was urgent, you told us,” Jinann interrupted. “Why ran you not at one g the whole way?”

  She was less educated about such matters than most Moondwellers. Her interests were art, notably the jewelry work from which she was beginning to earn pretty well; and men, a series of stormy affairs; and, paradoxically, a search for truth and meaning. Withal, she was closest to her parents of that whole brood and most nearly Terrestrial in appearance—at twenty-four, not unlike the young Dagny Ebbesen.

  Rydberg’s look at her was discreet but unmistakably enjoyable. “With such a mass, the fuel cost would have been ridiculous for the time saved,” he explained.

  Dagny reminded herself that usage had changed of late. “Fuel” didn’t mean simply antimatter, but also the reaction material it torched forth. Although superb capabilities were coming on line, she must remember, too, that it was taking a while, that the capital investment in older vessels couldn’t just be spouted away—She was thinking in Guthrie’s words. Pain stabbed.

  She pulled her attention back to Rydberg: “—and we had constant full weight once we’d spun up the hull.”

  Jinann’s eyes widened. As she sat straighter, her hair passed like a flame over the sight of clouds and water. “Eyach, a spider ship? Sheer beauty, they. I’ve sought to make a brooch in the form of one, a minimotor to turn it, but there lacked a universe around.”

  “Would you like to see ours?” Rydberg asked. Beneath his reserve, Dagny thought, he had more feel for people than he let on, or maybe than he knew. “If I’m going to show you my pictures, we can start there. It’s a standard scan, you’ve seen the same kind a hundred times. But it is … cheerful.”

  “We could use some cheer, by damn,” Edmond Beynac growled. He reached to close his hand around Dagny’s.

  “Hush,” she murmured aside. Not to break the fragile mood in the room. Nonetheless his concern lifted her heart. He felt the loss himself—who didn’t?—but he knew how deep it went in her.

  Rydberg kept his tone dry: “A large spacecraft routinely sends a bug to observe from outside, supplementing her instruments and sensors, making sure everything is in order.”

  Space did not forgive, Dagny thought. Memories trooped down the years, her dead and they who had come near dying.

  Rydberg took a pocket databanker from his tunic and activated the multiceiver screen. Before them appeared what a tiny robot had recorded as it jetted about. Distance-dwindled, the hull was a teardrop amidst blackness and frost-cold stars; the four fullerene cables, each extending a kilometer from its waist, were gossamer, the pods at their ends were glints. They turned like second hands on an antique clock, measuring off time while they fell between the planets.

  “Wondrous,” Jinann breathed.

  Rydberg grinned a bit. “Less wondrous to live in.” He played a close view, synchronously rotating. A man climbed downward, radially outward, by rungs in the flexible airtube that lay alongside the cable. The camera followed him to its pod, which he entered. Another scene succeeded this, taken within the cramped and crowded quarters. “Here I am.” Limited facilities for hobbies existed. Rydberg in image sat at a workbench, using a variety of tools to hand-carve a length of wood. The shot focused on his design, intricately intertwining vines and leaves. “This will be a frieze for an armoire I will make on Earth.”

  “Ah, for your home there?” Beynac asked.

  “For the home I hope to have there.” Rydberg sighed. “I’m tired of apartments.”

  Yes, Dagny thought, he hadn’t many years to go in space. If you started young in that game, you ended it half young. Never mind longevity meds, nor even the robotics that made human slowness and frailty almost irrelevant. Beyond a certain point, no biotechnology would compensate for cumulative radiation damage. Someday an electromagnetic screen would be perfected, to fend off cosmic rays and solar wind, but meanwhile they set their limits on careers. Fifty was the usual cutoff age, to assure a normal, healthy span afterward. Already, his silvering hair—

  It meant less that ’Mond’s was waolly grizzled, while hers stayed red because she made it, not so much in vanity as in defiance. They had spent most of their lives inside the Moon, far better protected.

  Her heed went back to the scene. Whoever had been shooting it, doubtless by request, drew back for a longer view. An attractive woman came up behind Rydberg, leaned over to watch what he did, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Um, that is Leota Mannion from North America, one of the engineers we were conveying,” he said a little quickly.
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br />   Dagny brightened. “Friendly sort,” she observed.

  Rydberg shifted his glance. “Well, on a lengthy mission—”

  A prospective wife for him? He really should start having children soon. Especially being a spaceman. Dagny wasn’t convinced that nanorepair could entirely fix mutated DNA. Not that she and ’Mond hadn’t been getting grandchildren and didn’t expect more—from Brandir and his two wives, Verdea and the Zarenn (once Jiang Xi) she’d wedded in an eerie ceremony, Kaino in his communa arrangement (though there you needed genetic analysis to be certain who’d fathered whom, and the members didn’t seem to care), Temerir and his colleague Hylia (once Olga Vuolainen), maybe Fia and Jinana in future. … But Lars was the Earth human.

  It’d be nice if he took a North American wife. Of course, more and more people in that country felt the constitutional republic wasn’t coping with its problems. But you could move abroad if you had to. While Lars wasn’t exactly young any more, neither was he too old to start afresh. Plenty of life ahead of him yet, an estimated seventy-five years if he followed his med program and didn’t come to grief. …

  Oh, if only Uncans had been born enough later for the treatments to take full hold and give him that much!

  But then everything would have been different, Dagny would never have known him, in fact never have existed—

  She blinked away tears and heard Jinann: “Do you truly thus and altogether shut yourselves away as you fare? Gives a journey no scope for samadhi?”

  Youthful earnestness, Dagny thought. A slight, comforting smile touched her lips. Jinann had been a Buddhist, afterward a Cosmicist; now she wandered and mused on her own beneath the stars of Luna. Would she someday become a prophetess to her kind?

  “We get a sufficiency of the universe on the job,” Rydberg said. “Here is the far terminus of our voyage, out beyond the orbit of Saturn.”

  The camera had scanned a small comet. At first it was unimpressive, well-nigh ugly, a dark, rough lump against the galaxy’s glory. When the edited sequence swept close, you realized with your senses as well as your mind that “small” meant something else in these depths, multiple billions of tonnes of rocks, frozen gases, and ice, ice. The view passed breathtakingly over a pitted surface to the clustered human works. What the robots had built for the engineers was not dwarfish either. Those buildings, machines, and tall frames would have stood out in any landscape.

  The view steadied. Rydberg activated a pointer image to show where girders were buckled or skewed. “You see how the foundation gave way below the mass driver,” he said: damage exceeding the repair capacity of the system or its machine attendants. “Probably you remember from newscasts that it was caused by a major quake, which the continued stress of reaction triggered.”

  Beynac snorted. “I told those bloody fools at the start, they should study the interior of the comet more thoroughly before they began. Teles d? merde!”

  “Well, it was a judgment call, as Leota Mannion would say,” Rydberg replied, mainy for Jinnan’s benefit. At its original distance, with few torchcraft then available, more investigation would have taken years of expensive time. Meanwhile its position would be getting less and less favorable, until the window of opportunity closed. The decision was to proceed on the basis of what appeared to be reasonably good knowledge, and get started nudging if sunward.”

  “I know, I know,” Beynac grumbled. If they had sent me and a few of my students out, we could have warned them.”

  How he would have reveled in that, Dagny thought. He’d solved too many of the Moon’s riddles. He had scant taste for filling in details; more and more his field trips reminded her of a wildcat pacing its cage.

  “Actually, as you also know, fail-safes were built in, and this mishap was not catastrophic,” Rydberg said needlessly. “We got it fixed in time.” We. Dagny was impatient to see the record of her son and his crew aiding the team. “It’s bound back again for its new orbit,” he finished.

  “For its transfiguration,” Jinann murmured.

  Rydberg raised his brows. “Do you disapprove? Some people do,” holding that comes should be left inviolate, to salute the sun with a flare of beauty. But this one would never have done that, Dagny thought. Never in eon after eon while it swung through the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Neptune and Pluto where Sol was merely the brightest among the stars.

  Jinann shook her head. “Eyach, nay. I said ‘transfiguration.’”

  Into life. The thrill went through Dagny anew. Ice mined and brought to Luna, water, a harvest more abundant than any from the asteroids, the beginning of a lavishness that would at last bestow rivers, lakes, maybe an interior sea, upon habitation; and living things are mostly water.

  She bore no pride more high than knowing she had been in the forefront of the battle for this, the call, the politics, the bargains and connivances, setbacks and despair and toilsome return, until the World Federation agreed that a wholly alive new world was worth paying for.

  Not that she claimed too much honor. Without Fireball at their side, the Moondwellers would have been a handful of flies, to be brushed aside when they buzzed.

  Her man spoke it for her, quietly: “We have Anson Guthrie to thank.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  Jinann’s regard of the older three grew troubled. “What think you will happen now he is gone?” she asked. Lunarian soul or no, to her it must feel as if a great tree had fallen, leaving an emptiness in the sky.

  It did not quite to Dagny. Maybe it would later. First she had her Uncans to mourn.

  “Fireball will go on, have no fears,” Rydberg assured. “We are lucky he didn’t die before he agreed to be downloaded, but even without that, Fireball would keep his strength, his dream.”

  “Dreams can die,” Jinann said, “and then the strength dies.”

  What was Guthrie’s download, his ghost, like? Dagny dreaded the hour when she must meet it.

  “We will see that they don’t,” Rydberg vowed. He turned toward Beynac and spoke with a briskness that Dagny knew guarded him against unleashing whatever grief was in him. “’Mond, earlier I promised you some interesting news.”

  The geologist was likewise glad to change the subject. “Yes?”

  “While the repair work went on, naturally we mounted an intensive sky survey. The comet’s new path would be different enough from what was originally planned that we must make sure there would be no serious meteoroid impact. When the computer analyzed the observations, it reported no such danger. However, I had idle time, and I remembered your ideas about asteroidal debris in far space. I programmed a search for indications that would otherwise have been ignored.”

  Beynac leaned forward. “Yes? What did you find?”

  “Nothing picturesque. The reflection spectrum, barely readable, as faint as it was, of an object that standard theory does not believe ought to have the orbit this one does. Excuse me, please, while I interrupt the show,” said Rydberg to the others. He keyed his databanker. The image from the comet gave way to a band of dim lines, numbers below them indicating wavelengths, and more numbers in columns. At the bottom stood a listing of that which calculation had distilled from the raw data.

  Beynac peered, started half out of his chair, sank back, and mumbled, “Mon Dieu. Enfin, enfin.” After a moment, into the air: “But it had to be. If I was right, this must be. It was only that no one looked as hard as they should. Too much else to search after.”

  A song for him erupted in Dagny. She seized his hand.

  “What means this?” Jinann inquired.

  “It is a nickel-iron asteroid, at present about thirty astronomical units from the sun,” Rydberg told her. “We don’t yet have the figures to compute a very accurate orbit, although I ran a probecraft to high velocity and got a parallax. Roughly, perihelion is at about five a.u., aphelion forty or fifty thousand—ultra-cometary. The inclination to the ecliptic is forty-three degrees.”

  The young woman was not ignorant of basic astronomy, no Mo
ondweller was, and she had sometimes heard her father talk about his heresy. “There should be no such thing, should there?” she said.

  “No, no, rien là-bas—nothing yonder but ice dwarfs,” Beynac answered, almost automatically, as if he spoke in sleep or a daze. “According to the standard picture. I agree they are nonsense, notions of colonizing the comets. Too far apart, too little mineral buried too deep in ices. But this—” His voice trailed away. He stared before him and breathed heavily.

  “It could not have originated that far out, especially in an orbit so skewed,” Rydberg said to Jinann. He spoke awkwardly, unsure what she might already know, wishing neither to insult her nor exclude her. She gave him an amiable attention. Peripherally, Dagny admired how she could put on Earth-human femininity whenever she wanted to. “Your father’s idea, I suppose you are aware, his idea from studying the distribution of asteroid types in the inner System—he thinks there was at least one more than the accepted ten original bodies between Mars and Jupiter, which collisions reduced to those we know.” He gulped. “I thought the object we found might provide evidence.”

  Beynac’s head swung toward them. How well Dagny knew him in that mood, his intellect aprowl after quarry to pounce upon. “I suspect those eleven began as three,” he boomed. “From this body perhaps we may find out. But it is not the major one that was lost. It is too small. And such an orbit is unstable. In a few million years, the planets will change it radically. My large, dense asteroid, it was exiled much longer ago, early in the life of the Solar System. Else we would have more pieces like what you have found, Lars. No, yours was perturbed back inward, probably by a close encounter with a big comet. That suggests the large one is still out there somewhere, not lost to interstellar space after all but in a wide and canted orbit. Perhaps someday we can find it. First we go to this little fellow.”

  Rydberg shrugged. “I don’t know when we can do that, if ever.”

  Beynac bristled. “Hein?” he barked.

  Rydberg picked up his neglected beer, took a draught, collected his words. “The existing situation,” he then said. “Guthrie would have underwritten an immediate expedition, but he was a dying man, and now he is dead. Everything is confusion while his download takes over, if his download can. Factions in Fireball maneuver for advantage. Politicians fish in our troubled waters. Oh, even in far space we got plenty of news on the beams, and on my way home I was thinking what it meant. Besides, the Alpha Centauri project engages most of Fireball’s discretionary resources, and will until it is well under way.”