The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  It opened. Ilitu looked in. “Ah, sir, I awaited your loosing,” he said.

  “Is anything wrong?” Beynac asked. He became conscious of how lonely the ship was, a metal bubble adrift through the thin seething of the cosmos.

  “Nay. It is but that they have acquired a good optical of the asteroid. I thought you would like to see it at once.”

  “Yes, indeed. Thank you.” Beynac followed his graduate student forward through the axial passage. The consideration touched him. This wasn’t the first friendly gesture Ilitu had made. He was more—all right, more human, more open than most Lunarians. Sometimes Beynac felt closer to him than to any of his sons and daughters.

  Lars Rydberg, Antonio Oliveira, and Manyane Nkuhlu had evidently watched their fill. Kaino floated alone in the control cabin. He was always eager to stand pilot watch, including somebody else’s, when he wasn’t increasing his skills in a simulator he had insisted be taken along. His red head nodded curtly, eyes held hard on the viewscreen. Beynac came to it, checked his flight, stared, and softly whistled.

  Radar had already established the dimensions of the asteroid. Rugged, lumpy, broader at one end than the opposite, it would have fitted inside a cylinder about 300 kilometers long and a hundred wide. At maximum useful magnification, as yet it seemed tiny in the night everywhere around. The hue was slaty, spotted with blacknesses that must be the deepest irregularities, save for a broad flat grayness near the middle. At the edge of this jutted something like a needle: a crag or peak, sharp against the dark. Rotation was just perceptible. Falling outward from the sun, the body wobbled around a skewed axis once in about five hours, as if tossed by a careless giant.

  Seen in the Belt, it would have been fairly interesting. Sacajawea, though, had come four billion kilometers farther, out near the marches of the comets.

  “Oui tu voilà,” Beynac whispered; and louder, for the rest to hear: “We tracked you down, by bloody damn.”

  When her chime sounded, Dagny went in Lunar leaps down the hall to the vestibule. At the door she hesitated. Her heart thuttered. Nobody in Tychopolis felt they needed a peephole or exterior scanner. This might be a casual, unannounced visitor—She didn’t want it to be. Not really. She set her jaw and retracted the door. Beyond ran Hudson Way, a corridor lined with planters where roses grew against trellises, a neighbor’s entrance catercorner across it. Every sense heightened, she caught the odor of the flowers as acutely as a swordthrust.

  The robot that loomed there, two meters tall, was startlingly humanlike, suggestive of a medieval suit of plate armor. (No, not when you paid heed to the joints, the powerpack, the turret with its speaker and sonic sensors and ring of optics.) She had seen it on a newscast, because it was unique, an impractical shape for a machine unless the machine had some such purpose as this today.

  For a moment she and it stood motionless. The city hummed low in their hearing.

  “Hello,” the robot said.

  Dagny had heard that voice before, on a broadcast, on her phone, in her memory. It was Anson Guthrie’s, not hoarsened as in his last years but strong and resonant. Defying every resolution, a wave of weakness passed through her.

  She fought it down. “W-welcome,” she said.

  “May I come in?”

  The robot spoke shyly, half unsurely. It must have been forceful enough, making whatever arrangements it did to keep a gaggle of curiosity seekers from tailing it here, but she realized that now it didn’t know quite what to say either, and drew strength from the knowledge. That’s what you came for, isn’t it? she was tempted to reply. She curbed the impulse, mumbled, “Of course,” and stepped aside.

  Ought she to shake hands?

  The robot passed by, a graceful movement, marvelous design behind the bluish-white metal. Dagny shut the door. “Gracias,” the robot said, and stopped. She imagined it scanning this entry, oak-paneled walls, antique mirror, picture of the Washington coast, a tiny monument to an Earth that scarcely existed any longer. The turret didn’t move. The computer within transferred its regard from the input of one pair of lenses to the next, around a full circle.

  By itself out in the open, Dagny recalled, the computer had just two optic balls, protruding on stalks from the case that housed it. The robot was not its body, was not it, was merely a vehicle in temporary use.

  Suddenly she could not, would not, think of “it.” Something, at least, of Guthrie was here, and he had been totally male. By right of inheritance, the download bore the name. Let him also bear the gender.

  “Same layout as before,” he said, a little easier in his tone. The experts claimed he had moods, feelings, maybe different now but nonetheless real. “I wondered whether you’d changed things. Been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Six years, seven?”—since last he, the original he, guested her and ’Mond. Afterward they had met once on Earth (how aged he had gotten, though salty as ever) and had talked occasionally by phone almost until the end … “This way, please.” She led him through the hall to the living room.

  He halted near the center. She had set the viewscreen for a direct presentation, an outlook from the top of the ringwall. A wilderness of shadows and softly lighted upthrusts fell away to the near horizon. A Criswell collector shouldered above yonder worldrim, the single brightness in all that land. Overhead arched night, Earth waxing through the second quarter, blue-and-white majesty. She wasn’t sure why she had chosen this, rather than one of her usual scenes recorded on the mother planet. Maybe, down underneath, she hadn’t wanted to raise any pretense, or hadn’t dared.

  “Nothing much changed here, either,” Guthrie observed.

  She found that she too could make conversation. “Well, you know how old married couples get set in their ways.”

  “I’d hardly say that of you and ’Mond. Not yet. Probably never. Him off to hell-and-hooraw in space. You directing the construction at Astrebourg and, I gather, making the governor’s life miserable whenever he deserves it.”

  No pretense! But what instead? Dagny bit her lip. “I don’t know what to—to offer you—”

  A short laugh boomed. “Not a cup of tea.” A hand gestured, that looked as if it were forged in a furnace but had been grown in a nanovat. “Sit down if you like.” The voice dropped. “I can. I won’t crumple your chair, here on the Moon.”

  “No need for me, really—here on the Moon,” she said.

  They fell mute.

  Guthrie broke through: “Is Carla—is Jinann still living with you?”

  “Yes,” Dagny said, “but she’s tending her jewelry shop. I told her to phone before coming, and that I might want her to sleep elsewhere.”

  “Why, for Pete’s sake?” he exclaimed, precisely the way the man would have done. Her heart cracked. “I’d like to see her again, and your whole family.”

  “Again?” broke from her. She gasped, appalled. “Oh! Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said gently.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “Excuse me.” She sought the table on which she had set out a decanter and several glasses. They were several because either a single glass or a pair would have uttered what had escaped her lips Shakily, she poured a stiff slug and tossed off a fourth of it. The whisky smoked over tongue and gullet, bound for the bloodstream. She’d guessed the need might arise.

  “No offense taken,” he was saying. “I make no bones about my condition.” A chuckle. “Nope, no bones at all.”

  This had been his favorite Scotch. He had introduced her to it—how long ago? And now he would never taste it, never, unless maybe in an electronic virtuality-dream. Dagny turned about to confront him. “I shouldn’t be like this,” she protested bitterly. “Stupid old bat.”

  He stroked hand across lower turret, as Guthrie had stroked his chin, and drawled, “I wouldn’t apply any of those words. You’re not just smart, you remain a damn sexy wench, Diddyboom.”

 
She blinked and blinked. She would not cry.

  Doubtless he noticed, for he added in haste: “I speak abstractly about such things, these days. But I’ve got my memories.”

  “Y-yes.”

  “His memories,” Guthrie said, once more serious. “Should I have put it that way?”

  “I don’t know.” She took another swallow.

  “It’s true. Sure. They pumped his nervous system full of nanoscanners, encoded what came out, used that to program a neural network custom-built to be an exact analog of his particular brain … Bueno, no point in rehashing it for you. I’m his aftermath.”

  How much could a download hurt? Dagny drew breath. “Nevertheless, you soldier on.” His words, after Juliana died. What comfort might there be for a download? “Because they made you to be him.”

  “To be like him, in certain ways,” Guthrie corrected. “No more than that.” He was quiet for a space. “When I called on him at his deathbed, I learned, or I was reminded of, several things about being a man.”

  Against her will, Dagny shivered. “The world’s gone eerie, hasn’t it?”

  “I figure it always was,” came the familiar tone. “How’d one of ’Mond’s cavemen have reacted, seeing you in your simple small-town girlhood? What changes is just the kind of eeriness.”

  The whisky began to warm her. “You are—quite a bit like … Uncans,” she ventured.

  She believed that he thought a smile. “Gracias. I try.”

  “Because Fireball needs you. We all need you.”

  “That was the general idea. Personally, I take no stock in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or the indispensable man. But, yeah, there are loose ends to tie up before I can quit in reasonably good conscience.”

  The chill struck back. “Quit.”

  “Stop,” he said almost lightly. “Turn off. Wipe out. Whatever you call it.”

  Cease to be. She drank afresh and gained courage to ask: “Do you want to?” When he could abide for thousands of years, maybe forever.

  Mostly the robot stood moveless. Sometimes he appeared to remember body language. He shrugged. “Oh, I’m not sorry for myself. Por favor, credit me with analog guts. This is a hell of an interesting universe yet. But between us, and swear by Dr. Dolittle you won’t quote me, being alive was better.”

  She shuddered. Never for her!

  Yes, he was powerful, he had wonders open to him that mortals could barely imagine. Poor, brave wraith. “You always did your duty as you saw it, didn’t you?” Dagny said. “Coming to me, in person, when you’re so busy and harassed, that’s Christly kind of you. That’s my Uncans.”

  Again he spoke awkwardly, while he shuffled a foot. “Um, well, my image when I make a public speech—it was a mistake using it when I phoned you, Dagny. I saw right away what a mistake it was, and I’m no end sorry.”

  She recalled the pain, but dimly, as if across more than the few real-time daycycles. A synthesized audiovisual of Anson Guthrie in his vigorous middle age, controlled by the download as the living brain controls the living face, could inspire thousands or millions of watchers, or knife a solitary granddaughter. “That’s okay,” she mumbled.

  “No, it isn’t, and I aim to try and set it right,” he insisted. “You’re not one for smarmy fakes.” He lifted his hands toward her. “Let’s get straight with each other, you and me.” The timbre levelled. “Because I hope we’ll be working together pretty often in the future, same as you did with him.”

  Him? she thought. A separate and lost being? What was a mind, a self, a soul, anyway?

  “Thank you,” Dagny breathed. “Thank you more than I can ever say.”

  He had laid the ghost in her to rest.

  With a long low-weight step, she went over to him and took the outreaching hands in her own. They felt a little cold, but their massiveness reminded her of Uncans’s hands.

  “Oh, Dagny,” he said. When she let go, he hugged her, very quickly and gently.

  That was the real reason he came, she thought. He had loved her. He still did.

  It was a senseless accident that killed Edmond Beynac. But then, every accident is senseless, as is most of history.

  “No, this is not the ancient lost body of my hypothesis,” he had explained to Manyane Nkuhlu after his first quick survey upon it. The spaceman knew little geology but was interested in learning. “Bloody hell, I made that clear even before we left. No.” Eh, bien, you were busy at the start, and later did not chance to listen.

  “What we have here, it is principally metals, iron, nickel, et cetera, which were once fused. That means it is a piece from the core of a body large enough to have melted and formed a core—which it is not itself, do you understand? The flat section, that is the fracture where it was broken loose in a great collision. But I do not think that collision shattered the big planetoid entirely into minor objects like this. Such an impact would leave different traces. Quite possibly the force did push the major part and the fragments knocked off it into a more eccentric path, and this was when Jupiter seized them and flung them outward. If they did not escape the Solar System, the new orbit was enormous, and during billions of years, passing stars would raise its perihelion farther yet.”

  “The new orbit?” asked Nkuhlu. “You can’t mean that the pieces stayed in a group, on an identical course.”

  Beynac’s hand chopped air. “No, no, of course not. However, the tracks must have been closely similar. And off in the Oort Cloud—yes, the comets there are many, but how far apart, in that huge volume! The pieces would seldom be much perturbed, the massive one least. Gradually, true, their cluster would disintegrate. Doubtless a comet changed the orbit of this piece drastically. Now its perihelion is scarcely more than it was in the beginning.

  “That cannot have happened very long ago, a few millions of years perhaps, because the present orbit is unstable. The encounter was most likely near the former perihelion. Closest to the sun, the density of comets is a bit higher. This suggests the major body is not at its most distant from us. We may be able to compute backward through time and get an idea of where to search for it—”

  Beynac lifted his palms and threw back his head. “But plenty of lecture!” he laughed. “My academic habits took me over. I will find you educational practical experience, my friend.”

  That may have been among the factors which, weeks later, joined to destroy him. Unlike most of the others, it was not random. Shorthanded, underequipped, his research needed whatever help he could marshal. He and Ilitu were not able to handle the drilling, digging, and collecting that it demanded. Their time in the field went mainly to general exploration, search for promising sites. In their laboratory aboard Sacajawea, they prepared samples for examination, studied them, built piecemeal a knowledge of the asteroid and its story. Once in a while they exercised in the centrifuge, washed, ate, or slept.

  Doctrine required that a man who could singly bring the vessel home be always shipside. This meant either Rydberg or Kaino. Actually, is oftenest meant both, the former working to heighten the skill of the latter. Nkuhlu and Oliveira were free.

  The arrangement had been planned at the outset. Beynac welcomed such an opportunity for his son, now when Fireball’s leaders were beginning to see what advantages might lie in having a few Lunarian pilots. Nkuhlu and Oliveira were experienced rockjacks. They had acquitted themselves well in operations on stony bodies and treacherous comet ice.

  They were technicians, not scientists or engineers. But probably no one could have foreseen the danger. Our sole sureness is that every fresh venture into the universe will meet with surprises.

  Never before had humans walked on anything quite like the fracture plane across this cosmic shard. About ten kilometers long and twenty wide, it gashed transversely near the middle of the rough cylindroid. Around it was rock, lighter material that had overlain the primordial core and stuck to it through the sundering crash or, immediately afterward, fell back in a half-molten hail. Dark and rough reached that surface. Me
teoritic strikes to wear it down and crater it had been rare in those realms where the fragment wandered. The plain of the plane stood forth stark amidst this stonescape, its sheen faintly grayed by dust, its pockmarks few and wide-scattered.

  On the Orionward edge of that scar reared the peak Beynac had seen from space. The collision must also have formed it, a freakishness of forces at this special point. Maybe a shock wave focused by a density interface had hurled liquefied metal upward in a fountain that congealed as it climbed. The height was not a mountain but a spire, swart, outlandishly twisted and gnarled, a sheer 1500 meters from the rubble at its base to the top, which hooked forth like an eagle’s beak over the flat ground of the fracture.

  At its back, rock wasteland lay in tiers and jumbles. When you fared yonder afoot, you saw a strip that was barely thirty meters wide between the jagged horizons to left and right but that lost itself in murkiness for more than a hundred kilometers ahead. Standing beneath the spire and gazing in the other direction, you saw the plain, well-nigh featureless, bordered by stars on either side and by a riven escarpment opposite you, twenty kilometers away. Above loomed a dark that at night was crowded with constellations, glowingly cloven by the Milky Way, haunted by nebulae and sister galaxies. Then the sun tumbled aloft, shrunken to a point but still intolerably fierce, radiant more than five hundred times full Moonlight on Earth. The visible stars became few, but the spindle of Sacajawea, in her companion orbit, might gleam among them. Weight likewise gave a faint sense of not being altogether lost from manhome. It was ghostly at the ends of the asteroid, but here, close to the centroid of a ferrous mass, it exceeded a tenth of a g.

  Thus the scene where Edmond Beynac died.

  “Go up onto the peak,” he ordered Nkuhlu and Oliveira. “Along the way, take pictures and gamma readings as usual. What I want you to bring down in your packs is some pieces of the top—exact locations laser-gridded, do not forget this time, by damn! Yes, and a core, a meter or two deep. Plus a seismic sounding. I need to know the inside of this thing. Just how in bloody hell did it happen?”