The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

He respected the men, therefore he did not add what was obvious, that he had given them a difficult, perhaps dangerous assignment. Himself, he went with Ilitu into the badlands on the farther side of the scar. There he had found another enigma to investigate, strata where theory said no strata should be.

  The ascent by Nkuhlu and Oliveira turned into a small epic of the kind that goes as uncertones through every heroic age. Gravity was low but gear was massive and the faces to climb precipitous. An hour might be spent in peering at the next stage before attempting it. At that, thrice one man or the other would have fallen to his death, had he not slammed short on a line attached to his well-anchored partner. Life support labored, spacesuits grew hot, breath harsh, mouths dry; rest was measured in minutes on a ledge, doles of water sucked from a tube, rations and stimulants pushed through a chowlook—until at last, shaky-kneed on the summit, the pain looked down at desolation and out into immensity.

  Thereupon the real work began. Never before had they wrestled with such stuff as this. It was not rock, it was metal; it was not uniform but multiply and intricately alloyed, a tangle of layers, encysted lumps, and vacuoles. When an ion torch cut free a sample, white-hot gobbets might spit back. When a sonic pulse went downward, the whole footing might tremble.

  What caused the disaster was a shaped minicharge. It should simply have split an anomalous plumbic vein, to produce recoverable specimens. Instead, the explosion found a resonance. Weaknesses unstressed for billions of years gave way. The eagle’s beak broke apart. A dozen huge, a hundred lesser chunks fell.

  Beynac and Ilitu had emerged back on the plain, out of a crevice where their headlamp lights touched on mysteries. They were bound diagonally across, toward the dome shelter at the far corner and the gig that should bear them again to their ship. The walls around them had screened out radio. Else Beynac would have heard his helpers, vocally recording each thing they did. He might have warned them. Or he too might not have guessed.

  He and his companion were well into the open when the overhang sundered. Tiny at their distance, the rocks went slowly at first. They accelerated, though, worse than a meter per second for every second that passed. They hit bottom at over two hundred kilometers per hour. In most places they would have bounced to a quick stop. Here the ground was smooth and hard. Friction, never much in low gravity, was almost nil. Moreover, the plain was not truly level. The increase of weight toward the asteroidal center of mass gave it a slight but real downslope.

  Oliveira and Nkuhlu went on their bellies and gripped anything they could while the peak shook beneath them. Dust, cast high when the stones landed, briefly obscured heaven. It arced down. Rising to their feet, they saw boulders and gravel fan outward across the iron of the plain, a sleetstorm aimed for the two figures at its middle.

  Now they heard a radio cry. “Nom de Dieu! A bas, Ilitu! Drop you, drop, God damn!” No man could dash clear of what was coming. The geologists flung themselves prone. Still they saw the rocks leap, bound, roll toward them. They felt those soundless impacts as drumbeats up through suits, flesh, bones. Sparks flew, momentary stars below the stars. There was time to think, remember, even speak.

  Ilitu, Lunarian, hissed defiance. Beynac called, steady-toned, “If I do not survive, tell my Dagny I loved her.” Otherwise he ignored the frantic voices from spire and ship. But when the storm reached him, he transmitted, surely unawares, “O Maman, Maman—”

  Ilitu was lucky. A pebble pierced his garb, drew blood from a shoulder, and exited. The holes promptly self-sealed. As for Edmond Beynac, a lump the size of his fist smashed open his helmet. Air puffed away into emptiness.

  That is a kindly death. You are unconscious within seconds, gone very soon thereafter.

  His sons met with their mother in her home on the Moon.

  “Later, yes, we shall bring more folk into the circle,” Brandir said. “This evenwatch must be ours alone.”

  Like her and his brothers, he was standing. Behind him stretched the big viewscreen. Its mobile view of the River Dordogne, green valley and a castle on the heights beyond, seemed doubly remote from his tall, black-and-silver-clad form, the long pale hair and the features that were not wholly Asian nor of any other race upon Earth. And yet, Dagny thought, he too dwelt like a baron of old in his towered mountain fastness.

  “Why?” she asked. Why not, at least, his sisters?

  Because, she realized, these men had not come to mourn with her. For she heard: “We have our father to avenge.”

  “What?” she exclaimed. Punish a barren bit of wreckage?

  No. This new generation was strange but sane. If anything, below the cavalier style lay an inborn realism colder than she liked to think about. Language mutates. “What exactly do you mean?” she demanded.

  Kaino was the most outspoken among them. Through his lifespan she had heard him enraged, rancorous, sarcastic, hostile, but never so bleak: “We’ve a reckoning to make with them who wrought his bane.”

  Chill touched her. “Wait!” she cried. “Those two poor guys who touched off the rockfall? No!” She filled her lungs, captured his eyes, and declared to them all, “I forbid you.”

  When the ship returned, she had taken the pair aside to give what consolation she was able. “I don’t pardon you,” she said, “because I have nothing to pardon. Nobody could have known.” Oliveira wept and kissed her hands. Nkuhlu saluted as he would have saluted Anson Guthrie.

  Brandir swept an impatient gesture. “Needless,” he replied. “Innocence is theirs. I grant them my peace.” His arrogance bore for Dagny a curious innocence of its own, akin to a cat’s. “It is the Earth lords to whom we owe ill.”

  “Had we had a vessel that was ours,” Kaino said between his teeth, “and a Lunarian crew—”

  “I would have sent him afare well-manned, and geared with the best that technics offers,” Brandir stated.

  By now he could probably afford the cost, Dagny thought. His enterprises—the undertakings of those mostly young persons who had pledged fealty to him—were enwebbing the globe. Barred, though, among many things, were the building of spacecraft and any Moondweller enterprise more distant than to Earth.

  “Lunarians would have had a sense for whatever traps lay in wait,” Kaino said.

  “Belike not fully they, either,” Temerir answered.

  Dagny’s glance went to him. Her third son generally kept silent until he saw reason to make some pointed remark. Slight, gray-eyed, pallid, he stood in his plain blue coverall as a contrast to Brandir’s elegance and Kaino’s flamboyancy. But his was the most purely Lunarian face of the three.

  “Nay,” Brandir agreed. “Yet would the odds have been better.”

  “And the venture ours,” Kaino added.

  Brandir turned to Dagny. “This be the vengeance we take and the memorial we raise,” he said, “that we break the ban of the overlords and set Luna free in space. Mother, we ask your aid.”

  Dagny’s pulse wavered, recovered, and beat high.

  They could not bring about a change in the law without her, she knew. They might a mass the wealth of dragons, but politically they were dwarfs, in large part because they lacked the gifts of born politicians.

  Not that oratory, truth-shading, backroom bargains, wheedling, compromise, blackmail, bullying, bribery, promise-breaking, lip service, and selfpuffery were very natural to her. “I, I don’t know,” she stammered.

  Her look went past Brandir to the Dordogne view. It had moved to a mossy spot along the shore, oh, could this be the same spot where she and ’Mond came walking hand in hand, stopped, skimmed stones across the water, sat down on damp softness and let sun pour through them while he laid his arm about her waist and kissed her? His chin was a little scratchy …

  It was as if ice abruptly thawed. She had wolfhowled that first nightwatch alone after the news came, but things beyond counting were necessary to do and say, smiles beyond counting were necessary to manufacture, therefore let the automaton run through its program and at bedtime switch
off. The emptiness could await her leisure, it would never go away.

  At this instant—

  Abide a little longer, only a short while more. Then she could loose the tears. Then she could go through his desk, his clothes, his books, the database of his calls and messages to her when he was in the field, all of their years, daycycle by daycycle. Then she could know with her whole being that he was gone into forever, and come to terms with the fact, and warm her hands at his memory.

  Not yet, not quite yet. At this instant, the eyes of his children toward her like guns, she had work to do. The triune god of Edmond Beynac had been kinship, truth, and freedom.

  She straightened. Her muscles pleasured in the movement. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try. I’ll do my bloody damnedest.”

  Politics was more than fraud and brutality, she thought. In fact, most of it was honest, was simply the means by which people ordered the affairs they had in common. Suppose she started by approaching Technocommissioner Lefevre. He and ’Mond had been pretty close …

  Kaino embraced her. He hadn’t done that since he was ten.

  She would not cry.

  He drew back. She said quickly, “Don’t expect miracles. I may or may not get something going. At best, it’ll take a long time, and we’ll have to scrabble for allies.”

  Brandir nodded. “Aught you may need that we three can provide, you shall have,” he said, “including our patience.”

  “Well, to begin with, your sisters—Verdea, anyway. She might stir up the kind of general sentiment we’ll want,” as Shelley and Byron did for the liberation of Greece, Solzhenitsyn for Russia, Jaynes for North America.

  “And Fia, yes, I think Fia,” Brandir murmured.

  Helen, black-tressed, russet-eyed, reserved, formal, secretive, save where it came to music … Carla-Jinann, no, until matters got to the stage of emotional pressure, speeches, parades, demonstrations, appeals, at which point she could be a valuable link between Moondwellers, demonstrative Terrestroid and aloof Lunarian. …

  “How long estimate you?” Kaino blurted at Dagny.

  His yearning cut at her. “I don’t know, I told you,” she sighed.

  “I also must drink of time,” Temerir said.

  Surprised, she regarded him where he stood limned against her flowers and asked, “What? Why?”

  “I mean to search after the great planetoid that Father dreamed of,” the astronomer answered. Brandir was having his personal observatory built for him on Farside. “The hunt will likely consume years. That is the more so because it shall be our secret.”

  “Huh? A scientific project secret? You’ll sneak time for it when nobody’s looking? How come, for Christ’s sake?”

  He spread his fingers. His parents would have shrugged. “Father’s emprise won clues for me to follow. But few ever paid much heed to his notions about the early Solar System. Those were taken for the idiosyncracy of an elsewise mighty mind. It should be easy to let the matter slide back into obscurity—with your help, Mother. Who foreknows what a Lunarian may someday discover?” The wintry gaze sharpened upon her. “Unless all here tonight pledge muteness, I will not make the seeking I wish to make in honor of Edmond Beynac.”

  A shiver passed through Dagny. Was this, in his way, the most formidable of her sons?

  21

  Seen from above, the plains reached endless, a thousand mingling hues of green below a summer sky of the same vastness. Often a wind sent waves through the grasses, swift and shadow-delicate; Kenmuir could well-nigh hear them rustle, smell the odors of growth and of sun-warmed soil. Where terrain sank to make a wetland, trees walled the water-gleam and more wings than he could count wheeled above. A few roads ran spearshaft-straight, with hardly any movement upon them. Transmission towers stood as lonely. They seemed no violation of the landscape. Rather, those soaring, gracefully crowned slendemesses brought to the fore the life around them.

  Which, in a fashion, they also guarded, Kenmuir thought. They were integral to the technology and, yes, the social system that kept all this in being. It hadn’t been enough that population decline, plantations genetically engineered for efficiency, and direct synthesis had, between them, emptied many old agricultural regions. To restore a sound ecology—oftener, to create a new one—and then maintain it, that took more than a wish and an economic surplus. It demanded an analysis, a comprehension of the totality, beyond the scope of unaided human brains.

  Yes, he thought, the cybercosm was doing a better job of ruling the biosphere than man had. As long as governments heeded its counsel, Earth would stay green.

  Counsel? Or command? Was there a difference? You accepted a policy recommendation because it made sense, and presently you found there was no going back, because it had become a basis of too much on which people depended; and so you accepted the next recommendation. But hadn’t that always been the case? And purely human politics, short-sighted, ignorant, superstitious, animally impassioned, forever repeated the same ghastly mistakes. Kenmuir had once read a remark of Anson Guthrie’s: “Is it freedom when you’re in a cage bigger than you want to fly across?”

  He shook off his reverie and glanced about him. Three volants were visible afar, and a suborbital went as a rapid spark through heaven. Below him he spied other gleams, machines on their business of ground transport, inspection, tending the country. Trees shaded a small town. How white and peaceful it looked. He supposed the dwellers were all folk who enjoyed surroundings like these. Those who didn’t simply live on their credit probably worked through telepresence, except for local service enterprises. And they had their hobbies, sports, tours, civic affairs, maybe some special ceremonies and observances; and surely, beneath the placid surface, private lives now and then got as tangled and stormy as ever. So, in its own manner, was the community where he grew up.

  But on clear nights he would walk out of it and from a hilltop yearn toward the stars. How many were they who still did? By what right would Lilisaire deny them a meaning to their lives?

  “Damn!” Kenmuir muttered. “You’ve a real gift for fribbling away time, haven’t you, lad?” He’d brooded enough in the Drylander camp after Aleka left and before her flyer arrived for him. If he meant to honor his commitment, and he did, then indecisiveness amounted to betrayal.

  After all, the purpose was only to recover information that might well be illegally secreted. If it was important, and if the Federation Council and Assembly possessed it, then everybody who cared to inquire would soon have known too. But nobody did. And democracy, rationality itself weren’t possible without adequate data.

  He could complain to his legislators or ombud; or he could issue a public statement calling for disclosure, and be shrugged off as a crank.

  If the matter came out into the open—As vague as Lilisaire’s hopes were, she must be desperate. Certainly she didn’t expect it would by itself cause the Habitat project to be cancelled, did she? No, she dreamed of somehow gaining the power to force a termination. But how? An old weapon she could commandeer? Monstrous absurdity.

  True, the Lunarians in space, few and scattered though they were, had a rather terrifying military potential. Anybody with ships did. But to rouse them, rally them, get them together in resolution and discipline, before the Peace Authority could stop it—what imaginable revelation might do that? They were never crusaders. To see Luna overrun by Terrans would sharpen the embitterment of Lunarian spacers, asterites, Martians, satellite colonists, but it wouldn’t provoke them to a war they’d almost surely lose. Not even the Lunarians in the Moon would rebel.

  Kenmuir had already decided that Lilisaire’s quest for the truth had brought her to hints of it that she wasn’t sharing.

  Alone in the desert, he had cursed his bond with her. He had sworn to himself that it would not lead him to do anything really harmful. He’d rather live without her than that. By now he might well have resigned, were it not for Aleka. While he scarcely knew the girl, she didn’t strike him as a criminal, a fanatic, or a dupe. S
he had her own cause, whatever it was, but he couldn’t believe she’d link it to one she saw as bad. Therefore let him go along at least a little further, through this haze of unknowns.

  Briefly, he considered running a data search on her. He had clues to begin on, Hawaiian background, involvement with metamorphs—yes, he recalled something about a unique society in those parts … But no. Going through regular channels, that could conceivably alert the opposition. Besides, he needed to know more about his destination. Such an information retrieval would be expected of a visitor, and draw no attention; Bramland was another peculiar place.

  Clouds rose over the horizon ahead as he flew. At first they shone like snow, then he was beneath them and the greens had dulled, the sky gone featureless gray. The overcast was predicted to last some days. It wouldn’t block everything from monitor satellites, but it would fairly well blind their optics. If the system was scanning the whole planet for him.

  Though in that case, he was defying someone or something that could order it to do so—the Federation? He suppressed a shiver. His jaw clamped. If they wanted him to stop, let them enjoin him officially, honestly, by a public announcement over the global net if need be. And let them jolly well explain the reason to him.

  Meanwhile, he could do with an explanation from Aleka … But start at Bramland.

  The volant’s terminal screened a short history. Most of it was familiar, sociotechnic cliché. Various groups, ethnic, cultural, religious, or merely eccentric, strove to keep their identities alive. They seldom refused the basic advantages and services of the modern world, and in fact its productivity and peace were generally what enabled them to exist; but they turned their backs on its impersonal rationality. Humankind evolved as a tribal creature, and the need to belong to a tribe is almost as strong as sexuality. What price the Fireball Trothdom—? The very Lunarians had their feudalistic allegiances.

  The movement toward such partial secession had been particularly marked in North America in the period of upheaval that followed the fall of the Avantists. Among those who found themselves involved were ex-guerrillas of the resistance, assorted nonconformists, and certain outlaws who hoped to gain legitimacy under the new conditions. They pooled their resources and acquired a large tract of land.