The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Now that Kaino saw his objective half clearly, he could estimate dimensions and distances. The ledge was about ten meters below him, an easy drop in this weight, but it was less than a meter wide, and next to it yawned a vacantness a full two meters across. Low acceleration would give him a chance to push or kick at the iron, correct his course, but he’d have just three or four seconds, and if he missed his landing, that would doubtless be that.

  “Convenient, being 98 percent chimpanzee,” he muttered. After a moment’s study he thrust and let go.

  His drop was timeless, utter action. But when impact jarred through his bones and he knew himself safe, he glanced upward, saw the opening high above him full of stars, and laughed till his helmet echoed.

  To work. Carefully, lest he go over the rim, he knelt. Ilitu lay on his back. A sheetlike piece of metal slanted across the upper body. It had screened off transmission. Kaino plucked it away, tossed it aside, and heard wheezing breath. He leaned forward. Because he had come down at Ilitu’s head, he saw the face inverted, a chiaroscuro behind the hyalon, lights and shadows aflicker as his lamps moved. The lids were slit-open, the eyeballs ghastly slivers of white. Saliva bubbled pink on the parted lips. “Are you awake?” he asked. The breathing replied.

  His search found the telltales on the wrists. “Eyach,” he whispered. Temperature inside the suit was acceptable, but oxygen was at 15 percent and dropping, carbon dioxide and water vapor much too thick. That meant the powerpack was operative but the air recycler knocked out and the reserve bottle emptied. “Hu,” Kaino said, “I came in time by a frog’s whisker, nay?”

  He couldn’t make repairs. However, accidents to recyclers were known and feared. There was provision. He reached around his shoulder and released the bypass tube coiled and bracketed on his life support module.

  More cautiously, hoping he inflicted no new injury, he eased Ilitu’s torso up. His knee supported it while he deployed the corresponding tube, screwed the two free ends together, and opened the valves. Again he lowered his companion. They were joined by a meter of umbilicus, and his unit did duty for both.

  He wrinkled his nose as foul air mingled with fresh. That took a while to clear. Thereafter, as long as neither exerted himself—and neither was about to!—the system was adequate.

  He could do nothing more but wait. Curiosity overwhelmed him. Although the surface was metalslippery and sloped down, he put his head over its verge and shot his light that way. A whistle escaped him. Somewhat under the ledge, the opposite wall bulged back inward and the two sides converged. He could not see the bottom where they met, because fifty or sixty meters below him, where the gap was about one meter wide, it was choked with shards from above. Most, bouncing off the walls and this shelf, had gotten jammed there. Some were pointed, some were thin and surely sharp along their broken edges. Even here, to fall on them would be like falling into an array of knives. Space armor could fend them off. His flexible suit could not. Kaino withdrew to a sitting position.

  Ilitu’s breath rattled. The minutes grew very long.

  A motion caught Kaino’s eye. He flashed his beams at it and saw a line descending. The robot had been obedient to his orders. The line slithered across the ledge and onward before it stopped. With limited judgment, the robot had paid out all.

  Kaino saw no stars occluded. Nevertheless the machine must be at the rim of the chasm and thrusting an antenna over, for he received: “Your command executed. Pray, what is next?” On a whim, he had had the synthetic voice made throaty female. He wished now he hadn’t.

  “Drag the cable, m-ng, north,” he directed. Inclined though its orbit was, the planetoid had a pole in the same celestial hemisphere as Ursa Minor. “I can’t reach it. … Ah. I did. Stop.” He secured bights around his waist and, with an effort, Ilitu’s, precaution against contingency.

  The program had a degree of initiative. “Shall I raise you?”

  “No. Stand by.” No telling what the damage to Ilitu was. A major concussion at least, a broken back or rib-ends into the lungs entirely possible. Rough handling might well kill him. That would be the end. The expedition had no facilities for cellular preservation, let alone revival. Better wait for a proper rig, trusting that meanwhile he wouldn’t die or that cerebral hemorrhage wouldn’t harm his brain beyond clone regeneration.

  Again Kaino composed his mind. Time trudged. He remembered and looked forward, smiled and regretted, sang a song, said a poem, considered the wording of a message to somebody he cared about. Lunarians are not that different from Earth humans. Often he looked at the stars where they streamed above him.

  And ultimately he heard: “Kaino!”

  “I am here,” he answered. “Ilitu lives yet.”

  “Etana loaded a flitsled with medical supplies, took it down to camp, and returned to the ship,” Brandir said. “I’ve brought it here. She thinks she can land nearby if need be.”

  “Best get Ilitu to our van, give him first aid, and then decide what to do.” Kaino explained the situation. “Can you lower a pallet?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’ll secure him well, then you winch him aloft, gently. Lest we bump together, I’ll abide until you have him safe.”

  “Once you were less patient, little brother,” Brandir laughed.

  “I will not be if you keep maundering, dotard,” Kaino retorted. A wild merriment frothed in him too.

  The pallet bumped its way down the slanting wall, out of blackness and onto the ledge. Kaino took advantage of weak gravity to hold Ilitu’s back fairly straight as he moved him. He undid the bight, closed and disconnected the air tubes, fastened the straps. “Haul away,” he called. The hurt man rose from his sight.

  “I have him,” Brandir transmitted after a few minutes.

  “Then let the robot reel me in,” Kaino whooped, “and we’ll go—go—go!”

  The cable tautened, drawing him toward the stars.

  Afterward Brandir determined what happened. He had rejoined his machinery, which rested well back from the crevasse rim. The robot was very close to it. At the moment of catastrophe, four billion-odd years ago, rocks as well as metal were thrown on high. The horizontal gush of molten iron that made the deck over the crack had a mistlike fringe that promptly congealed into globules along the verge. The stones dropped back on these and hid them. The planetoid swung out into realms where meteoroids are fugitively few. None ever struck nearby to shake this precarious configuration.

  Low gravity means low friction with the ground, and here the shingle rested virtually on bearings. The weight at the end of the line tugged at the robot. The regolith underfoot glided. The robot lurched forward. It toppled over the edge and fell in a rain of stones.

  Below it, Kaino tumbled back to the shelf, skidded off, and plunged into the lower depth. The knives received him.

  In the big viewscreen, surf crashed on a winter shore. The waves ran gray as the sky, burst into white, sent water hissing up the sand almost to the driftwood that lay bleached and skeletal under the cliffs. Wrack flew like smoke low above; spindrift mingled with rainspatters; the skirl and rumble shook air which bore a tang of salt and a breath of chill. It was as if Dagny Beynac’s living room stood alone within that weather.

  She thought that maybe she shouldn’t have played this scene. It fitted her mood, she’d had it going since dawnwatch, but it was altogether alien to the young woman before her. Might Etana read it as a sign of hostility, of blame?

  “Won’t you be seated?” she asked. Unusual on the Moon so early in a visit, that was an amicable gesture. Besides, her old bones wouldn’t mind. She’d been pacing overmuch lately,, when she wasn’t off on a long walk, through the passageways and around the lake or topside across the crater floor. High time she started returning to everyday.

  The guest inclined her head, more or less an equivalent of “Thanks,” and flowed into a chair. Dagny sat down facing her and continued, “Do you care for tea or coffee, or something stronger?”

  �
�Grace, nay.” Etana looked at the hands tightly folded in her lap. “I came because—I would be sure you understand—” Lunarians were seldom this hesitant.

  “Go ahead, dear,” Dagny invited softly.

  The dark eyes lifted to meet her faded blue. “We thought of how we could leave him … in his honor … beneath a cairn on Iron Heath. Or else we could bring him home, that his kinfolk cremate him and strew his ashes over his mountains. But—”

  Dagny waited, hoping her expression spoke gentleness.

  “But a freeze-dried mummy!” Etana cried. “What use?” More evenly: “And although we must perforce lie about where and how he ended, to do it at his services were unworthy of him, nay?”

  “You’d have attended?” wondered Dagny, taken unawares. Lunarians didn’t bother to scoff at Earth ceremonies, they simply avoided them. Christmas without grandchildren got pretty lonesome.

  “Ey, your friends would have come and misliked it did his siblings and companionates hold away.” Etana paused. “But without a body to commit to its rest, our absence is of indifference, true?”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t have staged a funeral,” Dagny said. “My man didn’t want any. I don’t for myself. It’s enough if you remember.”

  “Nothing else? His companionates will—No matter.”

  Dagny didn’t inquire about those rites, or whatever they were. The younger generations weren’t exactly secretive; they just didn’t share their customs with outsiders, in word or deed. Recalling the frustration of several anthropologists, she felt a smile skim her lips, the first since she got the news.

  Etana went on: “In the end, Brandir and I did what we judged was due his honor and ours.”

  Dagny nodded. “I know.” The brother had told her. When the velocity of the homebound ship was optimal for it, Kaino departed, lashed to a courier rocket, on a trajectory that would end in the sun.

  Etana struggled further before she could get out: “I feared Brandir might not have made clear how—I felt—and therefore I have come to you.”

  “Thank you,” Dagny said, genuinely moved. They weren’t heartless, the Lunarians, her children, their children. They weren’t, not really. But wisest to steer clear of anything this personal. “How is Ilitu?”

  She had been too busy to inquire, after learning that he returned alive but in need of spinal cord regrowth and lesser biorepair. Too busy with grief, and handling condolences, and blessed, blessed work.

  Etana brightened. “He fares well, should soon be hale. Thus he becomes a memorial unto Kaino.”

  That sounded rehearsed. However, the girl’s happiness about the fact appeared sincere, so probably her gratitude was also. “You care for him, then?”

  Etana went masklike.

  Dagny made haste to change the subject. “That world my son helped explore, I’d like to think he’ll be remembered there as well. If only—” No, better not pursue this either.

  Etana did, turning sympathetic while remaining firm. “Nay, you realize it must wait in the knowledge of a chosen small few. Else would Earth close it to us.”

  Paranoia? Maybe, maybe not. Temerir’s discovery did have the potential of a colony—for Lunarians. The gravity was right; the minerals were abundant and easily available, not buried under many kilometers of ice as in comets; water, ammonia, and organics were present, with more to be had in the same general region of space.

  Who, though, would want to dwell that far from the sun, in a cold close to absolute zero?

  Dagny supposed Brandir and his confederates were being cagey. After all, today Lunarians weren’t forbidden, but neither were they encouraged to prospect and develop the asteroids of the Belt and the lesser moons of the outer planets. And that was in spite of their being far better suited for the conditions than Earthtype humans, in some respects possibly superior to robots.

  She couldn’t resist probing a bit: “When will you open it to yourselves?”

  “When the time is befitting. That may well be long after we today are dead.”

  It was inhuman to think so far ahead, and to feel assured the secret would stay inviolate. Dagny sighed. “Yes, Brandir, Temerir, Fia, they’ve discussed it with me. Never fear, I’ll keep my promise, I won’t betray you.”

  “Honor shall be yours,” said Etana with rare warmth.

  She clearly didn’t want to talk about Kaino, she who had shared him. What now was in the breasts of his other mates? It had been good of this one to come speak, however briefly, with his mother. Dagny wouldn’t risk pushing her any further. Just the same, here was a chance to set forth something that could be … his invisible cenotaph.

  “I do have a suggestion,” Dagny began. “Have you decided on a name for your little planet?”

  Etana showed surprise, which was gratifying. “Nay. Brandir and I touched on it once during the voyage, but reached no idea. Nor have others considered it since, to my knowledge.” And that wasn’t quite human either. The young woman sat still for a bit. “A name will be useful, yes.”

  “Proserpina,” Dagny said.

  “Hai?”

  “As distant and lonely as it is, out beyond Pluto, who was the god of the underworld and the dead—his queen sounds right to me.”

  “Have we not already a Proserpina?”

  Dagny shrugged. “Probably. An asteroid? I haven’t checked. Never mind. Duplications exist, you know.”

  “What suppose your children of this?”

  “I haven’t asked them yet. It only occurred to me yesterday. What do you think?”

  Etana cradled her chin and gazed into air. “A musical name. The goddess of the dead—because you lost a son to her?”

  The sea noises roared and wailed.

  Dagny sat straight as she said, “And because every springtime Proserpina comes back to the living world.”

  27

  Prajnaloka was as lovely as its setting. From that mountaintop you looked far across the Ozark range, forest-green below the sun, down into a valley where a river ran quicksilver and up to cumulus argosies scudding before a wind freighted with earthy scents. A mockingbird trilled through quietness, a cardinal flitted like flame. These were old mountains, worn down to gentleness, their limestone white or pale gold wherever it stood bared. The life upon them was ageless.

  A small community clustered around the ashram, service establishments and homes. Those buildings were of natural wood, low and rambling under highpitched roofs, most of them fronted by porches where folk could sit together as twilight deepened. Flowerbeds bordered them with color. They seemed a part of the landscape. The ashram itself rose at the center, its massive edifices surrounding quads where beech or magnolia gave shade; but the material was native stone and the architecture recalled Oxford. A transceiver-winged communications mast soared in harmony with them, the highest of their spires.

  Kenmuir and Aleka were still too exhausted to appreciate the scene. Tomorrow, he thought. At the moment he had all he could do, accompanying the mentor who guided them over campus and following what the dark, white-bearded, white-robed little man said.

  “No, por favor, don’t apologize. We were informed in advance that you didn’t know exactly when you would arrive—”

  —by Mary Carfax, which had made the reservation for Aleka Kame and Johan. Kenmuir reminded himself once more that that was his name while he stayed here.

  “—and in any event, we have a relaxed attitude toward schedules. There are usually accommodations to spare. Most participation in our programs is remote.”

  Most participation in most things was, Kenmuir thought dully. Eidophone, telepresence, multiceiver, vivifer, quivira, how much occasion did they leave anybody to go any real distance from home?

  “I am not quite sure just what you are seeking,” Sandhu continued.

  “Enlightenment,” Aleka answered.

  “That word has many meanings, and the ways toward any of them are countless.”

  “Of course. We are hoping to get a glimmering of it from the cybercosm.
For that, we need the kind of equipment you have.” Kenmuir wished he could talk as brightly and readily as she did. Well, she was young, she could bounce back fast from tension and terror.

  The mentor came close to frowning. “None but synnoionts can achieve direct communion with the cybercosm.”

  “Certainly, señor. Doesn’t everyone know that? But the kind of insight, guidance, the understanding of space-time unity and mind that come from the database and sophotectic teachers—” Aleka smiled. “Am I sounding awfully pretentious?”

  Sandhu smiled back. “Not really. Earnest, naïve, perhaps. The explorations and meditations you speak of, they are what most of us here undertake. But they are the work of a lifetime, which is never long enough to complete them. And you say you have but a short while to spend.”

  “We hope to try it, señor, and find out whether we’re … worthy. Then maybe later—”

  Sandhu nodded. “Your hope is not uncommon. Bueno, I can see you are both weary. Let us get you settled in. Tomorrow we shall give you preliminary instruction and test your skills. This evening, rest.” He gestured about him. “Drink beauty. Drink deep.”

  He showed them to dormitory-style quarters. The men’s section was sufficiently full that Kenmuir would share a room—two cots, two desks, two chairs, a cabinet—with a novice from the Brazilian region. At a simple meal in the refectory, Aleka whispered to him that she was alone. This was a piece of luck although, had it not happened, she could have made her arrangements anyway, less conveniently.

  Talk at table was amicable, not very consequential, in several languages. Afterward a number of the fifty or sixty visitors and some of the permanent Soulquesters mingled socially or relaxed with sedate games. Kenmuir, who didn’t feel up to it, went outside. Nobody took that amiss; these people were as diverse as their Daos. He stood on a terrace, breathing summer odors. Below him the lights of the village fell away toward darkened woods, above him shone stars and the thin young Moon, around him danced fireflies. At last he sought his bed.