The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “It’s that, sitting in your castle, you’ve become too wont to have what you want when you want it. Yes, my own self-importance was stung. But we’ve both had plenty of women, inside our group or outside it. If Etana’s come to favor a new man above me—I suspect his mildness appeals to her—why, there will be no lack of others to welcome me home. Meanwhile, Etana does not disdain either of us two, does she? Ease off, you. We should both carry too much pride to leave room for vanity.”

  Brandir parted his lips, clamped them shut again, and shook his head angrily.

  The copilot emerged from a companionway, spied them, and drew near. She was in her thirties, dark, fuller-bodied than usual among Lunarians. Like Ilitu, she had dressed hastily, and the black locks floated unkempt about a face that remembered Oceanian ancestors. A faint muskiness clung to her skin.

  The three poised in confrontation. She recognized the ill humor in Brandir and offered him a smile. “I was bound forward to see what we’ve found,” she said.

  “You felt no urgency earlier,” he answered.

  Resentment kindled. “Off duty, I choose my trajectory for myself.”

  Kaino meowed. They gave him a surprised look.

  “R-r-rowr,” he voiced. “S-s-s-s. Pity that you’ve neither of you the fur to bristle or the tails to bottle.”

  After a moment, Etana laughed. Brandir’s mouth twitched upward. “Touché,” he muttered.

  “I meant no offense, my lord,” the woman told him softly. Never hitherto had she used that honorific. Her only allegiances were to the companionate she shared with Kaino and to this ship; she could and would leave either when she saw fit. “I did not suppose you especially cared.”

  “I ought not,” Brandir replied with some difficulty. “You are a free agent.”

  Comprehension flickered into Kaino’s eyes, and perhaps as much compassion as he was capable of. He drifted aside and kept quiet.

  Etana touched Brandir’s hand. “We shall be here for a span, and then it’s a long voyage home,” she said. “There will be time for talk and for other things.”

  “You are … kinder than I knew.” He put on the reserve of the aristocrat. “I’ll seek to arrange matters as may best please you, my lady.”

  Groundside, he, the major partner in Selene Space Enterprises and the most experienced leader aboard, would be in command.

  He stood on that height he called Meteor Mountain and rejoiced.

  As small as this world was, from here he could barely see parts of the crater ringwall, thrusting above the horizon. Under his feet the dark, lumpy mass went down to a plain of almost glassy smoothness, its gray-brown webbed with cracks and strewn with boulders. Over his head and around him gleamed the crowded constellations. Though night had fallen, they gave sufficient light for a person accustomed to Lunar Farside after sunset. Beynac was in the sky, free of the shadow cone, a spark gliding through Auriga toward the galactic belt.

  Below him on the slope, he spied one of his robots at work, cutting loose a sample for analysis. The task was essentially finished, however. Soon he could seek his van and take the crew back to camp. He transmitted, for the ship to receive and relay:

  “It’s established now beyond doubt. The impactor was ferrous, probably itself a remnant of the original body, which went out on an orbit close to this and eventually collided. Between its composition and the material forced up from the interior, the central peak is a lode of industrial metals, both light and heavy, even more easily recoverable than they are at other locations.”

  “That makes two treasures, then!” rang Kaino’s response. He meant the cometary glacier which he and Ilitu had been exploring. Not only had they found immense quantities of water ice and organic compounds, they had identified ample cyanide and ammonia intermingled, frozen or chemically bound. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen: the fundamentals of life. “Never before, anything like! I could well-nigh believe in a god who meant it for us.”

  “That is not a necessary hypothesis,” Ilitu said in his gentle, precise fashion. “Nor has coincidence been involved. Given Edmond Beynac’s idea—a planetoid massive enough to form a core, smashed, then most of the pieces perturbed into Kuiper-Belt paths—the rest seems probable, perhaps inevitable. There were bound to be further encounters during gigayears, with rich fragments and with comets. This, the largest body, would attract more than its share. Weak irradiation and ultra-low ambient temperatures preserve volatiles as they cannot be preserved in the inner System.”

  “Thus speaks the savant,” chuckled Etana affectionately from the ship.

  “When will you be done where you are?” Brandir asked the men. Discoveries and what they would require were wholly unpredictable; and he had been too engaged with his to follow theirs in any detail.

  “We prepare to depart,” Kaino answered. “Let our successors trace out everything that’s here. After a short rest and resupplying, Ilitu wants to investigate the Great Scarp and the Olla Podrida. That’s good in my mind, if we can go by way of Iron Heath.” Those were features noted before anyone had landed, but not yet betrodden.

  “Well, we’ll talk of it in camp,” Brandir said. “We near our limits of accomplishment in the while that we have left to us.”

  “I’ll trust Ilitu to persuade you,” Kaino laughed. Brandir heard the click of signoff.

  Etana’s voice stormed at him: “How’s this? They wander straightway to a new land, and I remain caged?”

  Doctrine. A qualified pilot must always be on standby. Tiny though the chance was of a meteoroid strike in these parts, and the solar flare hazard nonexistent, Brandir chose to abide by the rule. “It would be a long walk home,” he had said. Besides, when they were just three persons and a few robots on the ground, it was well to have a watcher aloft, ready to mount a rescue.

  “Let Kaino take his turn here,” she said. “He promised me. You all did.”

  “Khr-r, he has done rockjack work in the asteroids, you know,” Brandir pointed out.

  “And I have not? Admitted. But this is no asteroid. Not in truth. It’s more akin to Luna. And I have ranged the outback at home as much as ever he or you.”

  “Y-yes—”

  She laid rage aside. “It’s merely fair,” she argued. “You have spirit, Brandir. Would you care to sit idled week upon week, in the ghost-companionship of recorded screenings, while your mates roved free?”

  “Later, yes, certainly you shall.”

  “Now! The hour is ripe, two surveys completed, the next to be readied for.” Etana’s tone sweetened. “It could be you I fare with, could it not? Ilitu has scant need of more than the robots to help him do his science. You and I are aimed toward whatever may prove useful to the future.”

  “I must think on that.”

  “Must you? Is it not star-clear? And … Brandir, I’ve grievously misliked our being at odds. You kept yourself so masked. We should find our way to something better.”

  In the end he yielded. Knowing this, he spoke more stiffly than might have been necessary when he called the other pair.

  The sun burst into sight. Farther stars vanished around it. Westward they still gemmed a majestic darkness, for the solar radiance was wan where no heights reflected it. This country was not altogether a plain of dull-colored rock, though. In places it sheened amidst the shadows that puddled in its roughness. Here and there the shadows reached long from formations whose laciness came aglitter and aglisten.

  The anomalous region bordered rather sharply on the sort of terrain common on the lowlands of this world—coarse regolith, like shingle, virtually dustfree. A field van rolled to the marge and stopped. Two spacesuited forms climbed out. A robot followed, four-legged, four-armed, thickly instrumented, burdened with gear. For a minute they stood looking across the strangeness ahead of them.

  Then: “Come!” rapped Kaino, and started forth afoot.

  “Is this wise?” wondered Ilitu. “Send the robot first.”

  “We’ve no hours to squander on probing and sou
nding. Would you see what we’re here to see? Get aflight!”

  After an instant’s hesitation, the geologist obeyed. The machine lumbered behind. While Kaino was furious at Brandir’s decision, his haste also had an element of reason. He had insisted on detouring, and Ilitu backed him, in order that he might be sure of visiting Iron Heath before he arrived at camp and took a flitsled up to Beynac. Otherwise he, at least, probably never would, given everything else there was to do in the limited time remaining for it and the unlikeliness of another expedition here soon. The roundabout route overland stretched both food and fuel cells thin; the men were on half rations, which doubled his impatience. They could not dawdle.

  After they had long been cramped in their vehicle, freedom to move brought exuberance as abrupt as the sunrise. “Hai-ah!” Kaino shouted. Forward he went in panther leaps. His spacesuit, state of the art, flexed around him, almost a second skin. Powerpack and life support scarcely weighted him. The dense globe pulled with a force 86 percent that of home, ample for Lunarian health and childbirth, liberating in its lightness. Landscape rivered from the near horizon to flow away beneath his feet. Breath sang in his nostrils, alive with a pungency of sweat.

  He halted at the nearest formation. Ilitu joined him. They gazed. The robot trailed forlornly in their direction. It was built and programmed for a certain class of scientific tasks; at everything else, if it was capable at all, it was weak, slow, and stupid.

  “What is this?” Kaino whispered.

  From space, the travelers had simply become aware of curious protrusions on an unfamilar sort of territory. They could not untangle the shapes. Seen close up, the thing was sheerly weird.

  An Earthdweller would have thought of coral. Lunarians knew that marvel only in books and screens. An intricate filigree rose from the ground, thin, its topmost spires some 150 centimeters high, its width variable with a maximum of about 100. Variable too was the brightness of strands, nodules, and rosettes; but many gleamed in the hard eastern light.

  Ilitu walked around it, leaned close, touched, peered, hunkered, rose, took a magnifying glass from his tool pouch and went over the irregularities bit by bit. When the robot reached him, he ignored it. The sun climbed higher, breakneck fast to a Lunarian. More stars disappeared.

  Kaino began to shift about and hum a tune to himself.

  “A ferrous alloy, I think,” Ilitu said at length. “You observe whole metallic sheets strewn across the regolith. I deem they’re overlays, not the inner iron bared, although we must verify that. I would guess that this and its fellows are spatter formations. An upheaval flung molten drops and gobbets about. When they came down in a group, they welded together as they solidified, which they would have done very quickly.”

  Kaino went alert. “A meteoroid strike? We’ve no sign of a crater.”

  “It may have happened when the planetoid was forming out of fragments, itself hot and plastic. … Hai, that suggests the original, catastrophic collision occurred near Jupiter, because I should think a strong magnetic field was present to urge so many gouts along converging arcs. And that suggests enormously about the origin of this body and its orbit … about the early history of the asteroid belt, the entire Solar System—” Ilitu beat fist in palm, over and over. He stared outward at the fading stars.

  “If Father could have known!” broke from Kaino.

  “Yes. I remember. He would have jubilated.” Ilitu’s softness went thoughtful again. “This is but a preliminary, crude hypothesis of mine. It could be wrong. Already I wonder if this unique planetoid may not have had, in the past, a kind of vulcanism special to itself. It does possess a significant magnetic field of its own, you recall, and the formation here has several resemblances to the Pele’s Hair phenomenon on Earth.”

  “Eyach, we can take a few hours,” Kaino said. “Gather more data.”

  Ilitu raised his upper lip off the front teeth. His parents would have grinned differently. “I will.”

  He took out a reader, keyed a map onto the screen, and studied it. His eyes darted about, correlating what he saw with the cartography done in orbit. Iron growths were scattered across the plain. About two kilometers hence, close to the southern horizon, a metallic band glistered from edge to edge of vision, some three meters wide. On the far side of it reared a whole row of coraloids, up to five meters tall.

  “We’ll go yonder,” he said, pointing.

  Kaino laughed. “I awaited no less. Ho-hah!”

  They set forth, as swiftly as before. In a few minutes Kaino veered. “Where go you?” asked Ilitu without changing course.

  “That bush there.” It was small but full of sparkles.

  “I’ll study the major objects first. If time remains and you’ve found this one interesting, I’ll come back to it.” Ilitu continued.

  Kaino squatted down by the pseudo-shrub. Particles embedded in the darker iron caught sunlight and shone like glass. Maybe that was what they were, he decided after examination: fused silica entrained in the drops that had made the thing. Or they could be another mineral, such as a pyrite. He was no expert. Clearly, though, the geologist’s intuition had been right. Here was nothing notable, merely beautiful. Kaino straightened and started off to rejoin his comrade.

  Ilitu had just reached the metallic strip in front of his destination. A leap brought him onto it.

  It split asunder. He fell from sight.

  “Yaaaa!” screamed Kaino. He went into full low gravity speed. Barely did he check himself at the border of the ribbon.

  Ribbon indeed, he saw. This part of it, if not all, was no deposit sprayed across the rocks. It was, or had been, a cover for a pit—a cavern, a crevasse, or whatever—one of the emptinesses that seismic sounding had shown riddled the planetoid, as Ilitu predicted.

  It must have been a freak, a sheet of moltenness thrown sidewise rather than downward in those moments of rage when Iron Heath took form. Low weight let it solidify before it dropped into the hole—unless the hole had appeared simultaneously, the ground rent by forces running wild—The layer was thin, and the cosmic rays of four billion years, spalling, transmuting, must have weakened it further—

  Kaino went on his belly, crept forward, stuck his helmet over the gap. He failed to notice how the shingle slithered underneath him. Blackness welled below. “Ilitu,” he called. “Ilitu, do you receive me? Can you hear me?”

  Silence hummed in his earplugs.

  He got a flashlight from his kit and shone it downward. Light returned dim, diffused off a huddled whiteness. Kaino played the beam to and fro. Yes, a spacesuit. Still no response. It was hard to gauge the distance when murk swallowed visual cues. He passed his ray slowly upward. The little pool of undiffused illumination wavered among shadows. An inexperienced man would have been nightmarishly bewildered.

  Kaino, intimate with the Moon and certain asteroids, interpreted what he saw. He couldn’t tell how long the fissure was, nor did he care, but it was about 175 centimeters broad here at the top and narrowed bottomwards. Ilitu lay forty or fifty meters below him. A nasty fall, possibly lethal, even in this gravity; but friction with the rough walls might have slowed it. There seemed to be depths beyond the motionless form. Ilitu might be caught on a ledge.

  So.

  Kaino got his feet and aimed his transmission aloft. The ship was not there at the moment, but her crew had distributed relays in the same orbit. “Code Zero,” he intoned. Absolute emergency. “Kaino on Code Zero.”

  Etana’s voice darted at him: “What’s awry?”

  Tersely, he explained. “Raise Brandir,” he finished. “We’ll want equipment for snatching him out—a cable and motor to lower a pallet, I’d guess—as well as the full medical panoply.”

  “Can’t your Number One robot rescue him?”

  Kaino glanced at the machine, which had arrived and stood awaiting his orders. “Nay,” he said, “it’s useless.” That body could not clamber down, and the program could not cope with the unknowns hiding in the dark.

  �
��You may need to haul me up too,” he said. “I’m going after him.”

  “No!” she yelled, “Kaino, you—” He heard the gulp. “At least fetch a line for yourself and have the robot hold it.”

  “That may well take too long. Ilitu may be dying.”

  “He may be dead. Belike he is. You don’t hear him, do you? Kaino, stay!”

  “He is my follower. I am a Beynac. Raise Brandir, I told you.” The pilot switched off his widecaster.

  He did take a minute to instruct the robot: Go back to the van, bring that wire rope, lower it to him if he was still down in the hole. Meanwhile he removed the bulky pack that held food, reserve water, and field equipment. Having activated his head and breast lamps, he went on all fours to the edge of the gap and set about entering it.

  Stones kept skidding around. Twice he nearly lost his hold and tumbled. That made him laugh, low, to himself. On the third try he succeeded, bootsoles braced against one wall, life support unit against the opposite side. He began to work his way downward.

  It was wicked going. He could not properly feel the surfaces through his outfit. The lights were a poor help, sliding off lumps, diving into cracks, mingling with shadows that dashed about like cat’s paws of the gloom. Often he started to slip. Only low gravity and quick reflexes let him recover. As he descended and the crevice contracted, his posture made him ever more awkward. Stressed muscles hurt. Sweat soaked his undergarb and stung his eyes. Breath rasped a throat gone dry. He toiled onward.

  Wait. Had it grown a touch easier? More flex in the legs—He realized what he had been unable to see from above, that on the side where his feet were, the rift was widening again. If it broadened too much, he could fare no deeper. Unless—

  Somehow he maneuvered about until by twisting his neck he could look the way he was bound. Light picked out the sprawled form there and sheened off jagged pieces of the broken roof. Ilitu had indeed fallen onto a narrow shelf projecting from the wall at Kaino’s back. Its ends vanished in the same darkness that gaped beside it. Pure luck. … No, not quite. That being the wall which slanted inward the whole way, and nearer to where the geologist fell through, it must have acted as a chute, its ruggedness catching at spacesuit and pack, slowing and guiding him.