The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “Anything more might be too clumsy.” And anything less, Kenmuir reflected, such as a facial or fingerprint identification, was too easily counterfeited. “Still, if I were in charge, knowing that Lilisaire is on the prowl, I’d take an extra precaution or two. Like instructing the guardian to notify me if anybody does make entry, legitimately or not.”

  Kenmuir started where he sat. “Huh! That didn’t occur to me.”

  “Nor to me till just now. I may be wrong, of course.”

  “But if you’re right—” Thought searched wildly. “Venator wouldn’t sit and wait. He’ll be busy, quite likely far from here.”

  “So he’d want the guardian to contact not only him, but agents closer, who can pounce fast.”

  “The police?”

  “Not local police. They’d wonder why they were ordered to arrest a couple of persons harmlessly using the public database. Those persons might tell them why, and they’d tell others, and folks would wonder. Me, I’d have the crack emergency squads of the Peace Authority alerted, around the planet, to be prepared for a quick raid, reasons not given but the thing top secret.”

  “As a recourse—” Protest rose in Kenmuir’s throat like vomit. “Are we going to let this possibility paralyze us?”

  “No,” Aleka said. “But we’d better scout around first.”

  She gave herself anew to the equipment. It told her the nearest Authority base was in Chicago Integrate. “Allowing time to scramble, an arrowjet could bring a squad here inside half an hour,” she reckoned. Kenmuir, who knew virtually nothing about constabulary, mustered courage. Maybe he could at least flash a message to Zamok Vysoki. It must go in clear. However, since the Moon was in the sky, it could beam directly to a central receiver there, and—and be intercepted by a surveillance program, and provoke immediate counteraction—“What we’ll need to know is whether they do scramble,” Aleka was saying. “Hang on.”

  Her fingers danced. The patience schooled into a spacer had strength to hold Kenmuir motionlessly waiting.

  After a time he chose not to number, Aleka leaned back, wiped a hand across her face, and mumbled, “Good. We will know.”

  “How’s that?” he croaked.

  “I’ve set it up. Traffic Control will inform us if and when any high-speed unscheduled flyer leaves CI in this general direction.” She shook her head. “No, no, nothing special, no break-in. The sort of information a civilian might have reason to want. For instance, we could be studying atmospheric turbulence effects, or some such academic makework. I just had to figure out how to request it.”

  His belly muscles slackened a trifle. “Then … if it happens … we’ll have twenty or thirty minutes to get to your volant and away?”

  “Not that simple. TrafCon will oblige a maka’i every bit as readily as us, if not more so. Easy enough to get the registry of a vehicle that left here a short while back, and know exactly where it is while it’s moving. We’ll’ve got to land somewhere close by and be off like bunnies.” Aleka sighed. “I trust Lilisaire will ransom my poor flyer, or buy me a new one. Unless you and I end up where we won’t have any need of personal transport.”

  Kenmuir refused to think about the ugliest possibilities. This was the modern world, for God’s sake. Thus far he and she had done nothing illegal. If they were about to, well, it was not technically a serious offense, not in a society that recognized every citizen’s right to information. They’d be entitled to a public hearing, to counsel, to procedures that might well be too awkward for the secretkeepers. It wasn’t as though they were dealing with an instrument of an almighty state, KGB or IRS or whatever the name had been—

  He wished he could believe that.

  “What we must do is escape, and then take stock,” he said. A detached part of him jeered that he could also tell her the value of pi to four decimal places. “How?”

  “That’s what I mean to check out.” Once more she got busy. Schedules paraded over the screen.

  After a while: “All right. There’s no public transport out of Prajnaloka, and it’s sparse everywhere close around, as thinly populated as the area is. Mostly it’s local, which does us no good. Figure ten minutes to run to my volant. Ten or twelve minutes airborne before anybody can intercept us, no more.

  “The single place in range is Springfield. It has a twice-daily airbus to St. Louis Hub. There we could vanish into the crowd and quickly get seats to somewhere else big and anonymous. Trouble is, the opposition will know this too, or find out in a hurry. We’ll have to time our arrival at Springfield and departure from it ve-ery closely. The next bus is in about half an hour. Otherwise we’ll have to wait till evening.”

  “That gives us time to prepare,” he said reluctantly.

  “And it gives time for things to go wrong,” she retorted. “Obviously, the fact that we bounced off the edge of the no-no hasn’t raised an alert. Else we’d be under arrest this minute. But is a query going along the lines? Or—we are being chased. The data could be starting to point this way.” Her voice rang. “I say keep moving!”

  He weighed it. If they must immediately cut and run, it meant abandoning their spare clothes and things in the dormitory. But those were easily replaced, all their cash being on their persons, and stuff left behind might even divert suspicion for a critical short span. Impulsively, he thrust out his hand. “Go.”

  She returned the clasp, hers hard and warm. “Okay, aikane.” Then he understood why humans throughout history had time and again staked their lives on ventures that later generations saw as fantastical. It was the nature of the beast.

  Aleka took up her bag, set it on her lap, and plucked forth a thing that appeared to be a brown cloth. Unfolded, it revealed itself as a gauntlet of thin material—material that was alive, like the mask she had earlier worn. She slipped it over her right hand.

  “Lilisaire’s agent gave it to me in Hawaii,” she had told Kenmuir that night in Overburg while the fire died away. “Prepared special. She thinks we may find use for it.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “An organism with tissue reserves to last a couple of weeks. Made from a biospecimen of that synnoiont who visited her—Venator, she said is his name. It carries his DNA. If we should need to get past a biolock, won’t its keys be likely to include that highpowered a fellow, who’s working on the case?”

  “But, but how’d she get a useable sample?” The scraps of skin and other tissue that everybody shed in the course of a day wouldn’t do. They were tiny, dead and degraded, mingled with dust and other debris. It took delicate equipment, most of which was only in the possession of police forces, to find such stuff; and once you had mapped the genome, you would have to have independent means of ascertaining whose it was. “If she drew blood somehow, maybe faking an accident—but wouldn’t he surmise her intentions?”

  Aleka grinned. “I didn’t ask. I did guess.”

  He felt his cheeks go hot, and was angry that they did. “No, wait,” he snapped, “that’s ridiculous. A gamete has just half the chromosomes.”

  He saw his error even as she responded: “Ah, but we’re talking about lots and lots of gametes. Between them, a lab can quickly enough work out the complete original genome. Then it synthesizes one, and—You’re not trying to clone the human, you know, just some skin for a simple substrate. Not much of a trick. Slip your sample to a technie in your pay, who goes and does the job in any of a lot of genetech labs. I daresay this wasn’t the first occasion of that general sort for Lilisaire. When the thing was ready, he’d bring it to her under his shirt or whatever. We’d better not underestimate friend Venator, but in this particular business with her—” Aleka laughed. “Poor, unsuspecting superman!”

  Soon afterward, events exploded and Kenmuir forgot the pain.

  Of course this station had biolock capability. That belonged with its inclusiveness. Not all sealed files were official. You might well want to enter highly personal information in the public database or a private one, for use in conju
nction with other facts already there. The cybercosm would know, in the sense that it scanned everything, but it would not betray your confidence.

  Aleka keyed in and presented her life glove. After a moment the screen displayed PROCEED TO FILE 737.

  To avoid the appearance of being the same person who inquired before, she tapped out Give me full information on the giant ferrous asteroid in the Kuiper Belt.

  PROSERPINA. THIS IS THE NAME BESTOWED BY THE LUNARIANS WHO DISCOVERED AND FIRST EXPLORED IT. SUCCESSORS OF THEIRS PARTLY DEVELOPED IT FOR SETTLEMENT. ITS MASS IS—

  Kenmuir hunched forward, as if he could haul the words out of the terminal. His pulse racketed. Yes, yes, Edmond Beynac’s—

  —REMNANT OF A PROTOPLANET, PERTURBED INTO AN ECCENTRIC ORBIT WITH HIGH APHELION. BY COLLISIONS DURING GIGAYEARS IT HAS ACQUIRED SUBSTANTIAL DEPOSITS OF WATER ICE, ORGANICS, AND—

  Generalities. When would the bloody program get down to the numbers?

  —POTENTIAL OF COLONIZATION BY LUNARIANS—

  On Kenmuir’s right, a second screen flashed. Aleka leaned past him to read. The breath hissed between her jaws. She shook him out of raptness. “That’s it,” she said. “A speedster just took off from Chicago base. Hele aku.”

  “A minute, a minute,” he gasped. “The orbital elements—”

  “You want to mull them over in a nice quiet cell? Move, boy!” She was on her feet. She slapped his shoulder, hard.

  He clambered erect and stumbled after her, out the door, across the quad, toward the communal garage. Sunlight dashed over him, overweeningly bright, but eastward above a roof he spied the wan Lunar crescent.

  Do strifes ever end? he wondered in the turmoil. Was he waging a war that began in the days of Dagny Beynac?

  30

  The Mother of the Moon

  The swimming pool filled most of its chamber. Mist lay over it like a blanket, white in the bleak light that shone from fluoropanels and reflected off tile, for the water was very cold. The vapors scarcely stirred, as still as the air rested. So had Jaime Wahl y Medina ordered this place be kept for him. It was his refreshment, his twice-daily renewal, exercise to rouse the blood and shorten the times he must spend in the damned centrifuge. God knew the governor general of Luna needed whatever gladness he could find. Peace and quiet, too. Nobody else came here; family and friends used the older, larger, warmer pool at the opposite end of the mansion.

  He entered as he was wont, late in dawnwatch, kicked off his sandals, hung his robe from a hook, and slipped his goggles on. For some minutes he went through his warmup routine, a powerfully built man of middle height and mid-forties age, big nose and heavy chin underscored by the blackness of hair, brows, mustache, brown eyes crinkled at the corners by years of squinting into the winds and tropical brightnesses of Earth. Chill raised gooseflesh on shaggy arms and legs. Having finished, he climbed the ladder to the diving board at the deep end of the basin, bounced—less vigorously than he would have liked, lest his head strike the ceiling—and plunged.

  He also fell more slowly than he would have preferred. But the water received him with a liquid crash that echoed from the walls. It surrounded him, embraced him, slid sensuously around every movement, and now gravity made no difference, he was free, more free than in space itself.

  Down he went to the bottom and streaked along just above. His flesh responded to the flowing cold, lashed into utter aliveness. The tile pattern, his hands where they came forward to thrust him on, passed stark in their clarity, transfigured by refraction. His eyes needed the goggles, they could not well open straight onto the purity, it would have washed the salt out of them. Like all Lunar water, this came totally clean from each recycling. Not in its comet had it been so unsullied, not since its ice-dust glittered in the nebula that would become the Solar System, and something of that ancient keenness had returned to it as well. He drove himself through a reborn virginity.

  When his lungs could strain no more, he broke surface, breathed hard, went around and around the rim until he felt ready to go under again. And thus he reveled until his body warned him he would soon begin losing too much heat.

  He swung out, leaped to the bath alcove, and let a nearly scalding shower gush over him. A vigorous toweling followed, and he was ravenously ready for breakfast.

  He did stop a minute before he went off to get dressed, and looked at the instrument panel. There had been some trouble lately with temperature control. The thermometer was holding steady. Probably Maintenance had fixed the system so it would stay fixed. Well, it was simple enough. Coils under the pool tapped whatever cooling the thermostat called for from the municipal reservoir of it, a liquid-air tank which itself drew on space during the long Lunar night. Still, Wahl habitually kept track of everything he could for which he felt in any way responsible.

  Too little of the first, too much of the second! He grimaced and went headlong down the hallway.

  In his bedroom he donned not civilian garb but the blue uniform of the Peace Authority. He was entitled, being a major in its reserve, and today such a reminder of what he represented, what power ultimately stood behind him, could be helpful.

  The legislature was convening next week. Deputy Rabkin had announced that he would introduce a bill to give the tax agency warrant-free access to business databanks, making it harder to cook up falsifications. Most delegates with Terrestrial genes favored the measure; evasion was getting out of hand. Speaking for what she called the free folk, Deputy Fia threatened that if this proposed rape of privacy came to the floor, she would lead the Lunarians out, form a rump parliament, and nullify any act that passed.

  It could happen. She was the sister of the Selenarch Brandir and his chief agent within the cities. (Jesus and Mary, if the arrogance of the feudal lords wasn’t checked soon, they’d make that honorific into a title!) Maybe nothing too serious would come of this, but maybe it could be the neutron shot into the fissionables.

  It must be headed off. The parties concerned must be argued, cajoled, browbeaten, bribed, blackmailed—whatever it took—into some kind of mutually face-saving compromise. Wahl would be meeting with them, by ones and twos, personally. No telephone image could stand in for the living presence, the life laid on the line. If necessary, he would go to that citadel in the Cordillera, yes, alone, to stare the great troublemaker down.

  Chances were, matters wouldn’t come to that. However, Wahl had a busy stretch ahead of him. As always, the prospect of action heartened. Maddeningly much of his two years’ tenure had gone in frustration, defiances to which he could not even put a proper name. It was like trying to grip and hold a stream as it rushed on toward its cataract. He entered the breakfast room in a fairly good mood.

  His wife and son were already there, she transferring the meal from autococinero to table, the boy slumped sullen in his chair. Aromas rolled around Wahl, omelette, toast, juice, coffee, coffee. His taste buds stood up and cheered.

  The viewscreen was also bracing. The vista was from above the city, mountainside rolling down to Sinus Iridum, monorail a bright thread across its darkness to the spaceport, elsewhere a cluster of industrial domes and, on the near horizon, a power transmitter aimed at Earth. The mother world hung in the southern sky, a blue-and-white arc not far from the stopped-down sun disc, incredibly beautiful. It was scenery better than the crowded constructions around Port Bowen.

  Of course, that wasn’t the reason he had lately moved his residence and the seat of government to Tsukimachi in the Jura. Port Bowen was a company town, in Anson Guthrie’s ghostly pocket, and half the time Fireball was at loggerheads with governments, the national, the Federation, the Lunar Authority. Not that that had ever led to disorder, but the lesser companies centered here were more cooperative. If the percentage of resident Lunarians was higher, that had its advantages as well as it drawbacks.

  “Buenos días,” Wahl greeted his son. Rita he had kissed when they woke.

  Leandro mumbled an answer. He kept his face turned downward. His gaudy outf
it was at odds with his behavior.

  “Where is Pilar?” Wahl continued in Spanish.

  “She said she wasn’t hungry,” Rita replied.

  Wahl frowned. A wound reopened and a part of his pleasure drained out. Again the girl was moping in her room. It had been happening too often to be mere sulk. What was the matter, then? Depression brought on by loneliness? Fourteen was so vulnerable an age. How could he tell, what could he say? Pilar was a good child, she deserved to be happy. If, just once, she brought herself to confide in him, or at least in her mother—When did children ever give parents that overwhelming gift?

  He sat down. Rita poured coffee before joining him. He crossed himself and sipped. The flavor went robust and friendly through his mouth.

  “What are your plans for today?” he asked Leandro. Saturday, no school. Homework? If there was any, it would be scamped, or neglected altogether. The boy’s scores were terrible. It wasn’t due to lack of intelligence; he’d been bright and eager on Earth.

  Leandro didn’t look at him. “Nothing special.”

  The father forced a smile. “I have trouble believing that.” In fact, Leandro was more sociable than his sister. But Wahl didn’t like the lot he went about with—louts, loudmouths, no credit to the Earth genes they bragged of. More than once, quarrels with their Lunarian classmates had exploded into fights. Not that the Lunarians never provoked it.

  “When I was sixteen,” Wahl said, “I’d have been outdoors by now.” Horse at a gallop, hoofs drumming, surge of muscles between his thighs, grass in billows beneath the wind, a hawk overhead—if only such spaciousness existed anywhere in space!

  Leandro tossed his head. “That was then.”

  “Hold on,” Wahl rapped. “We will have courtesy here.”

  The boy started to rise. “I’m not hungry either.”

  “Sit down. You will finish what’s on your plate and you will answer my question.”

  Leandro yielded, knowing he’d spend the daycycle confined to quarters if he didn’t. Tone and expression conveyed his resentment. “Pardon me … sir. I am meeting some fellows in about an hour. We are going to Hoshi Park.”