The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “Exactly.”

  “But that it plans to enslave us—there’s an apocalyptic fantasy for you!” Venator exclaimed. “How could it? In the name of sanity, why should it?”

  “I didn’t say that. Nothing that simple.” The heavy voice was silent for a moment. Outside, wind gusted and the rain against the house seethed. “Nor do I pretend to understand what’s happening. I’m afraid it’s gone beyond all human understanding, though hardly anyone has noticed as yet. For my race, before it’s too late, I want out. The Habitat may or may not be a first step, but it’s a very long way to the stars.”

  Alpha Centauri, Venator thought, a sign in heaven. Without Guthrie and his colonists yonder, the dream—the chimera—would long since have died its natural death.

  “Meanwhile,” Matthias finished, “I’ll keep hold as best I can of what’s humanly ours. That includes the Founder’s Word. Do you follow me?” His bulk rose from the chair. “Enough. Adiόs, Pragmatic.”

  The odds were that it didn’t matter, that the lodgemaster had spoken truthfully and his defiance was symbolic. Indeed, what real threat did Kenmuir and his presumptive companion pose? Venator had guessed she possessed an expertise to which the spaceman would add his special knowledge; between them they might be able to devise a strategy that would find the Proserpina file and break into it.

  Unlikely to the point of preposterousness, at least now, after it had been double-guarded by DNA access codes. More and more, Venator wondered if the whole business was not a feint, intended to draw attention from whatever scheme Lilisaire was actually engineering.

  Other operatives were at work on the case, both sophotectic and human. He was their chief, but he knew better than to interfere. If and when they wanted his guidance, they’d call. Until then he’d assimilate their reports and get on with what he could do best himself.

  Kenmuir and his partner were worth tracking down for the clues they could maybe provide to Lilisaire’s intent. Besides—Venator smiled—it was an interesting problem.

  Striding along, he reconsidered it. They could not forever move around hidden from the system. Already spoor of them must be there, in Traffic Control databases, in casual encounters, perhaps even in an unusual occurrence or two. People observed blurrily, remembered poorly, forgot altogether, or lied. The cybercosm did not. For instance, any service sophotect that had chanced to meet Kenmuir would recognize his image when it came over the net and supply every detail of his actions.

  But machines of that kind were numbered in the millions, not to speak of more specialized ones, both sentient and robotic. The system was worldwide, hopelessly huge. A search through its entirety would take days or worse, tying up capabilities needed elsewhere. And during those days, what might Lilisaire make happen?

  Well, you could focus your efforts. Delineate local units of manageable size. Inquire of each if anything had taken place fitting such-and-such parameters, within its area. That should yield a number of responses not too large, which could then be winnowed further. It would still devour time, but—

  Whatever he did, he must act. However slight the chance of revelation was, he could not passively hazard it.

  Venator shook his head. Sometimes he still found it hard to see how Proserpina could possibly mean that much.

  The short-range politics was clear enough. Let the fact out, and the Terrans who wanted the Habitat would suddenly find themselves in alliance with the Lunarians who abhorred it, or at any rate not irresolvably opposed to them; and how could the Teramind itself make the mass of humankind realize that this threatened catastrophe?

  Because why did it? Revival of the Faustian soul, how vague that sounded. How many dwellers in this mostly quiet, happy world knew what it meant, let alone what it portended?

  And did it really spell evil? Reaching for the stars, Faustian man had well-nigh ruined his planet and obliterated his species. Yet the knowledge he wrested from an uncaring cosmos, the instrumentalities he forged, were they not that from which the age of sanity had flowered?

  Venator shivered in an evening going bleak. Westward the thinnest sickle of a new Moon sank below the mountains. Eastward, night was on the way.

  He had lived the horrors of the past, wars, tyrannies, fanaticisms, rampant crime, millstone poverty, wasted land, poisoned waters, deadly air, the breaking of the human spirit, alienation, throngs of the desperately lonely, the triumph first of the mediocre and then of the idiotic, in civilization after suicidal civilization. He had lived them though books, multiceivers, quiviras, imagination, guided by the great sophotectic minds. Not that they had told him what to think. They had led him to the facts and told him he must think. Against the past, he had seen the gentle present and the infinitely unfolding future. Therefore—yes, he was a hunter born, but nevertheless—therefore he became an officer of the Peace Authority.

  But did an arrogant and unbounded ambition necessarily bring damnation? Fireball Enterprises had created a fellowship of shared loyalty and achievement whose remnant endured on Earth to this day.

  At Alpha Centauri too, a remembrance and a lure.

  Venator hastened his footsteps. Another beacon shone before him, the lighted station.

  As if inspired by the sight, an idea came. He snapped his fingers, annoyed at himself. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? Probably because the contingency against which it would guard was so remote. Still, it was an easy precaution to take, and if somehow it justified itself, why, the reward would be past all measure.

  Evidently it hadn’t occurred to the cybercosm either. The higher machine intelligences could well have come up with it, if only by running through permutations of concepts at the near-light speed of their data processing. But they had loftier occupations than this. The lower-level sophotects were as capable as he was, but in different ways. The electrophotonic brain did not work like the chemical neuroglandular system. That was the reason there were synnoionts.

  Venator entered the main building and descended. Underneath it he went along a corridor where strange abstract shapes glimmered in the walls and strange abstract notes sounded out of them. Linked into the net, he could grasp and savor a little of what such art evoked. Isolated in his flesh, he could not. He was the sole human here, monastically lodged and nourished. That was by his choice. Mortal indulgences belonged among mortals.

  A detached sophotect passed by. The body it was wearing rolled on wheels and sprouted implements. “Greeting, Pragmatic,” it called courteously. He answered and they parted.

  Elsewhere he had worked side by side with beings like this, and afterward sat in actual conversation. Not often, though. It had been agreeable and fascinating to him, but both knew how superficial it was. Direct data exchange was the natural way of the machines. Venator longed to begin upon it.

  When he reached his communion room, he was trembling with eagerness. But that was the animal, which knew that soon the brain would be in rapture. Endorphins. … Somatically trained, he willed calm, donned the interlink, lay down on the couch, and requested clearance.

  Although his purpose was simple and straightforward, he sensed the cybercosm as a single vast organism with a hundred billion avatars. The point-nexus that was his awareness could flash through strand after strand of the web, the ever-changing connectivity, to join any existence within it.

  A bank of instruments at the bottom of the sea tasted the chemistries of a black smoker and the life it fed. A robot repaired the drainage line of a village in Yunnan. A monitor kept watch over the growth, atom by atom, of fullerene cables in a nanotank. A service sophotect chose the proper pseudo-virus to destroy precancerous cells in an aging human. Traffic Control kept aircraft in their millions safely flying, as intricately as a body circulates blood. An intelligence developed the logical structure needed for the proof or disproof of a theorem—but from that work the flitting point must retreat, half dazzled, half bewildered.

  It was in wholeness with the world.

  After a split second more full than
a mortal lifetime, it moved to its purpose. From the net it raised the attention of a specific program, and they communicated.

  In words, which the communication was not:

  SHOULD THERE BE ANY ENTRY WHATSOEVER OF THE PROSERPINA FILE, AUTHORIZED OR NOT, TRACE THE LOCATION OF THE SOURCE AND INFORM AGENT VENATOR. ALERT THE NEAREST PEACE AUTHORITY BASE FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION.

  DO NOT SPECIFY THE REASON FOR THIS.

  APPROVED, responded the system. ENTERED AS AN INSTRUCTION.

  And then, like a mother’s anxious voice:

  You are troubled. You are in doubt.

  —I do not doubt, Venator saw. I do not quite comprehend, but I will believe.

  (How can the system, even the Teramind, know what the outcome would be? Humankind is mathematically chaotic. We can learn no more than that history has certain attractors. Attempts at control may send it from one to another, unpredictably. A new element, introduced, may change the entirety in radical fashion, from the configuration to the very dimensionality. Is it possible to write the equations? If they be written, is it possible to solve them? A danger is foreseeable, but a disaster either happens or it does not. We exist as we are because those who existed before us ran fearsome risks. How can we be sure of what we are denying those who exist after us, if we dare not set ourselves at hazard?)

  We cannot be sure.

  —But in that case—

  You shall know.

  And the cybercosm took Venator into Unity.

  Twice before had it done so, for his enlightenment and supreme rewarding. Anew it opened itself entirely for him. He went beyond the world.

  He could not actually share. The thoughts, the creations that thundered and sang were not such as his poor brain might really be conscious of, let alone enfold. The intellects, star-brilliant, sea-fluid, rose over his like mountains, up and up to the unimaginable peak that was the Teramind. Yet somehow he was in and of them, the least quivering in the tremendous wave function; somehow the wholeness reached to him.

  Reality is a manifold.

  He became as it were a photon, an atom of light, arrowing through a space-time curved and warped by matter that itself was mutable. He flew not along a single path but an infinity of them, every possibility that the Law encompassed. They interfered with each other, annulling until almost a single one remained, the geodesic—almost, almost. Past and future alike flickered with shadows of uncertainty. He came to a thing that diffracted light, and the way by which he passed was knowable only afterward. He met his end in a particle of which he, transfigured, was the energy to bring it anywhere. The course that it took was not destined, but was irrevocable and therefore a destiny.

  You have learned the theory of quantum mechanics as well as you were able. Now behold the quantum universe—as well as you are able.

  The identity that guided him was a facet of the Unity; but it communed with him as no sophotectic mind ever might. For this was the download of a synnoiont who died before he was born, which the Unity had taken unto itself.

  Yang: The continuum is changeless, determined at the beginning, onward through eternity. For the observations of two observers are equally valid, equally real, but their light cones are not the same. The future of either lies in the past of the other. Thus tomorrow must be as fixed as yesterday.

  Yin: The paths are ultimately unknowable. The diversities are unboundedly many. To observe is to determine, as truly for past as for future. Mind gives meaning to the blind evolutions that brought it into being. Existence is meaning. Within the Law, the configurations of the continuum are infinite. All histories can happen.

  Yang and Yin: Reality does not branch. It is One.

  He could no more look into the universe of the Teramind than he could have looked into the heart of the sun. He could know that it was there, in glory, forever.

  Afterward he lay a long while returning to himself. Once he wept for loss, once he shouted for joy.

  At last he rose and went about his merely human business.

  He had the promise. This body, this brain must someday perish. The self, the spirit that they generated would not. It too would go into that which was to find and be the Ultimate.

  But omnipotence and omniscience were not yet, nor could they be for untold billions of years. He knew now why their reality required that Proserpina be forgotten.

  26

  The Mother of the Moon

  Here the sun was only first among the stars, a hundred-thousandth as bright as over Luna, less than a tenth of full Earth. Still, when lights had been turned off in the observation cabin, eyes adapting to dusk saw shadows cast, faint and shifty. On the little world that crowded the primary viewscreen, peaks and crags reared gauntly forth, while glints and shimmers showed where metal lay naked. Dark vision was needful to make the rock surfaces something other than a mottled murkiness. It found a scene like a delirium, mountains, plains, valleys, cliffs, rilles, pits, crevices, flows frozen in their final convulsions, things less identifiable, wildly scrambled together.

  After months under thrust, acceleration and deceleration at a steady Lunar gravity, weightlessness came strange even to this crew. Brandir and Kaino floated, gazing, in silence. Air currents seemed to rustle no louder than their blood. Low and slow, torchcraft Beynac orbited her goal. It turned faster than she revolved, a rotation each nine and a half hours. Feature after feature crept over the leading horizon.

  “Behold!” cried Kaino.

  He pointed to a sootiness not far below the north pole, as it hove in sight. From a distance they had seen that it spread halfway around the globe. This close, they picked out the foothills and steeps of it. Where the range was tumbled or riven, they saw depths that gleamed bluish white. “What is that?”

  “A comet smote,” Brandir judged. “This is the debris. Radiation caused exposed organic material from the comet to form larger molecules.” He was quiet a few seconds, as if quelling a shiver. How long had that taken, in these outskirts of the Solar System?

  The lines in his countenance deepened. He forced matter-of-factness into the melodious Lunarian language: “Belike most is water ice.”

  Kaino nodded eagerly. His question had been unthinking; he knew as well as his brother what the sight probably meant. “A hoard of it! And if that prove not enough, why, I’ve observed another comet within a few hundred astronomical units.” He gestured at auxiliary screens full of stars, Milky Way, nebulae, night. “A fortunate happenstance, amidst all this hollowness.”

  “Should we want it. We have tracked down our father’s dream; we know not what new dreams may spring forth.” Brandir spoke curtly. His mood was harsher than fitted this terminus of their expedition. He returned his attention to what he had been studying before Kaino exclaimed.

  He forsook it again, and glared, when Ilitu entered. The geologist’s brown hair was rumpled, his clothes carelessly thrown on. He checked his flight at the main screen and the contentment on his thin face flared into joy.

  “So your heed is back upon science,” Kaino greeted. Ilitu and Etana had gone off together, exultant, while Beynac was completing the approach.

  The younger man ignored the jape, or pretended to. “Have you obtained a good value for the mass?” he asked breathlessly.

  Kaino nodded. “Twenty-nine and three-fifths percent of Luna’s.”

  “A-ahh. Then indeed the body is chiefly iron. The core of a larger one, shattered in some gigantic collision, just as my mentor believed.” Ilitu stared and stared. “But he could not foresee everything,” he went on, almost as if to himself. “It is a chaos, like Miranda. It must itself have been broken in pieces, many of them melted, by that fury … and then shards of both rained down upon each other, fusing—Yes.” A fingertip trembled across the images of a scarp two hundred kilometers long, a gash that gaped for three hundred, a highland that was a jumble of diverse huge blocks, chunks, and rubble. “The welding could not be total. The interior is surely veined with caverns and tunnels between ill-fitting segments. Susta
ined heavy bombardment would have collapsed them, making the spheroid still rougher than we see. Hence we know that Jupiter cast it afar soon after it formed. We have found a remnant of the primordial.”

  “There have been strikes since then,” Brandir snapped. “Any witling could tell.” He chopped a hand at the sight that had particularly interested him. Though craters were few, a big one with a central peak loomed in the southern hemisphere, receding from view as ship and planetoid wheeled.

  “True,” Ilitu agreed, conciliatory. “No matter how sparse, bodies must meet on occasion, in the course of four billion years or more. Yon great meteoroid, and the comet, and others; but seldom, and of scant geological consequence.”

  “Not to a man who can think. Piss about as you wish, groundside. I know what I will seek.”

  Ilitu’s slender frame tensed. “Best we plan our field work before we start it,” he said.

  “When I desire your opinion, I will inform you,” Brandir retorted.

  Kaino plucked his sleeve. “Come,” the pilot murmured. “I’ve need of you aft.”

  Brandir bridled. “I’m scanning the terrain.”

  “The cameras will do that better. Likewise Ilitu. Come.” Kaino put a slight metallic ring into his voice. Sullenly, Brandir accompanied him from the cabin. In space, the pilot was master.

  They did not push off and fly, but used handholds to pull themselves along the passage beyond, side by side. “What do you intend?” Brandir demanded.

  “To calm you, brother mine. I smelled a fight brewing, and we cannot afford it. Relations have grown too strained already.”

  Brandir cast a sharp glance at the redhead. “You speak thus?”

  Kaino finger-shrugged and grinned lopsidedly. “After a person has crossed the half-century mark, the fires damp down a little. I should have thought yours were cooler from the outset—and you my senior, and Etana companionate with me, not you.”

  Brandir flushed below his thinning ashen hair. “Do you suppose me jealous? Nay, it’s his insolence.”