The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Certainly he must soon do so. The issues were of the gravest. Fong and his followers would realize that. Arrest and temporary isolation were permissible under the Covenant, barely, by invoking the Emergency Provisions Clause. But they’d wonder why Venator wanted the prisoners straightaway whisked off. Why no news, later, about the charges against them? Were their rights being violated? Answers must be devised, more or less satisfactory.

  His heart demanded it too, Venator thought. He’d try persuasion first, of course, but if Lilisaire’s agents were stubborn and insisted on public proceedings, what then?

  He didn’t know. Whatever was necessary, he supposed. It would depend on their behavior, and how much they had learned, and on Lilisaire’s next move, if any, and—more unknowns than he could list, no doubt. Chaos.

  At worst, he guessed, the cybercosm would tell him to have their recent memories wiped. He bit his lip. That would be nearly as gross a violation as killing them, and it risked terrible side effects. And after they were released, how was their amnesia going to be explained?

  Might the cybercosm order actual killing?

  Maybe. If necessary.

  Necessary to preserve sanity in the near future, and preserve the far future itself.

  He reached the main communication chamber and settled down before the console. It curved around the swivel seat, a flatscreen on his left, a holoscreen on his right, and a viewtank in front. When Fong called back, the eidophone would relay to that. Venator dismissed the urge to talk with him as he flew. Pointless. Distracting. Hunters should wait before they spring.

  However—With voice and fingers, he made connection to the Proserpina file. The program was still unrolling. Well, if it held the pair in place, that should suffice. It would have to. And why not? The spies would go over it more than once, excitedly discuss it, take notes. For Lilisaire.

  A machine entered, carrying a tray. It was humanoform, suggestive of a man wrapped in foil, except for the turret, the two extra arms, and the inhumanly graceful movements. “Would you care for refreshment?” it asked musically.

  A teapot steamed on the tray beside a plate of protein cakes. “Thank you very much,” Venator said, for this was no robot, it was a sophotect using the body. “A long night ahead of me. Of us.”

  “Yes. What else can assist you?”

  “Nothing at the moment. I’ll let you know.” Venator glanced up at the shining facelessness. “How fully are you involved?” It was the cybercosm to which he spoke, through this avatar.

  “A minor part, but a standby signal has gone out to the whole system.”

  Venator nodded. He had instructed the half-mind guarding the file to notify him and alert the constabulary if it was activated. That went automatically; but it was extraordinary enough that a higher-level intelligence in the net was bound to have noticed and sent appropriate messages of its own.

  The machine departed. Venator sipped the tea and munched a cake. Coarse, homely fare. A symbol. That which controlled the world and comprehended the universe had also thought of this ordinariness.

  Universe—On a sudden impulse, he retrieved the Alpha Centauri file. In a blind way, he felt it could strengthen his resolve.

  It was prodigious. He could only skip about, semirandomly asking for this scene and that, while he waited to hear from Fong.

  Far and far. The newest sight transmitted from Sol’s closest neighbor was more than four years old. Guthrie’s handful of colonists spent half a century making the passage, and readying for that one voyage had consumed every resource at his command. What was left, the World Federation took over, and Fireball Enterprises became a memory. There would be no more such argosies.

  Venator chose a view from an earlier time, when the first unmanned probe arrived. That in itself had been no mean achievement. The double sun blazed brilliant against blackness. Fast-forwarded, the scan swept inward until Alpha A was a disc of light and the probe orbited the single life-bearing planet in the system.

  Demeter was no Earth. Or else it was a primordial Earth, or an Earth that might have come to be had not population control, molecular technology, and clean energy saved it. The seas of Demeter swarmed with organisms, true, enough to create and sustain air that humans could breathe; but just a few primitive plants and creatures clung precariously to existence along the shores. Inland were rock, sand, dust blown on scouring winds, as stark as Mars. Why? Many factors, strong among them the absence of a huge moon to stabilize the rotation axis; and Luna was the child of a cosmic accident, a monster collision, back near the beginning.

  No wonder that search had never found spoor of other thinking races. Life was a rarity. Sentience must be infrequent to almost the vanishing point. Maybe, in the whole of the universe, it had evolved on Earth alone.

  It would make itself be the meaning and destiny of that universe.

  Venator advanced the scene through time until he found an image of Demeter as it was now—four and a third years ago. Cloud-swirls marbled sapphire and turquoise ocean. Snows whitened a wintering north country and the crowns of mountains. Southward and lower, continents and islands lay soft green and brown, hues of forest, meadow, marsh, pastureland for mighty herds and breeding grounds for mighty flocks.

  The scan magnified, focused, sped close above the world. He glimpsed a stand of birch, their leaves snaring sunlight; wild horses in gallop; a hillside blue with cornflowers; a village of small homes; a town lifting spires above a harbor where pleasure boats rocked at their moorings and a freighter unloaded its cargo; traffic on roads and aloft; a contrail like a road to heaven, slowly breaking up, where a spacecraft had ascended.

  All this had Terrans, with their proliferating robots and molecular machinery, wrought in less than three hundred Earth years, while in space their Lunarian allies made the asteroids blossom. All this, despite the fact that on a day not very much further ahead, another senseless cataclysm was to destroy the planet, and nobody knew how or if any creature upon it could survive.

  Deep within himself, Venator felt a shudder. Here, if ever, the Faustian spirit had made its absolute manifestation and seized its ultimate home.

  No, he thought, the thing went beyond even that. It was not simply sheer, unbounded will, demonic energy and brazen laughter. (“We’ve decided the motto and guiding principle of our government shall be ‘Absit prudentia nil rei publicae profitur,’” Guthrie had communicated once. “Gracias to the database for fancying it up into Latin. What it means is ‘Without common sense you ain’t gonna have nothing.’” The insult to every concept of a guided society stood brutally plain.) It was that the necessities of the adventure had brought forth something altogether new and strange.

  The scan winged onward. Cultivated fields passed beneath, goldening toward harvest. They were few and mainly for chemical production. Basic food and fiber were manufactured, as on Earth or Luna. Those who wished—on Demeter, most people—supplemented with kitchen gardens, orchards, the bounty of wild nature. The scan showed another woodland. It was that nature, the global web of life, which had made this world fit for humans.

  But technology could not in a few centuries do the work of evolution through gigayears. The ecology here was inevitably simple, fragile, poor in feedbacks and reserves, always near the edge of catastrophe. Earth’s had crashed again and again in massive extinctions. Demeter’s began to die when it was barely seeded; and there would have been no rebirth. A whole cybercosm could not take over the task of nursing it back to health, bringing it along to ripeness, keeping it in balance as an organism keeps itself in balance, being it … unless that cybercosm permeated the life, and had the awareness and purpose and—love—of human minds downloaded into it. … Demeter Mother.

  Venator had walked the veldt among lions and Cape buffalo, scaled a glacier, shot rapids, disarmed more than one dement gone violent. From this alienness, he recoiled.

  Like a providence, the console said: “Your call.” The view from afar blanked out and Fong’s full-body image appeared.
Evidently he had commandeered a similar unit where he was. He saluted. “Reporting, señor.” His face spoke for him: failure.

  Venator tasted vomit. He swallowed. “Well?”

  “I’m sorry, señor. The persons are gone. As nearly as we’ve been able to find out, they—two of them, male and female—went hastily to the volant they’d come in and skipped off. That was about forty-five minutes ago.”

  Proserpina, first and always. “What about the file they were invading?”

  “I think they left it running, and it finished and turned off. If they’d learned we were on our way—they could have posted an inquiry—that would be a logical thing to do, not disclosing to the net that they were in fact gone. Buying time.”

  Venator nodded. His neck felt stiff. “I expect you’re right.” Oh, clever, clever. Lilisaire chose her instruments well. “Have you learned anything about them yet?”

  “We’ve just started, señor.” A partial image of a second man entered the field. “One moment, por favor.” Fong conferred. Again to the synnoiont: “TrafCon has now identified the volant. It went to Springfield Mainport and parked illegally, right at the terminal. Shall I contact the civil police there?”

  “No.” What use? “Look at bus schedules. Either the pair are hiding in town or they’ve boarded a flight to someplace else. Who’s the volant registered to?”

  “Um-m-m—” Fong squinted offview, at another screen. “Alice Tam of Niihau, Hawaii.”

  “Good. Carry on. Find out what you can, but don’t make a production of it and don’t linger past the point of diminishing returns. Do you understand? Confidentiality is vital. But bring me whoever can tell us the most about those persons.”

  “Yes, señor.” Fong left the scan field. Venator beheld a wall with a mural of lotuses.

  He swung his attention from it. While he waited, he could investigate Alice Tam.

  The file on her that the system assembled for him proved surprisingly rich. She had not courted publicity, but as active as she was, more got noted than the standard entries. Birth and upbringing in that curious little leftover society, studies in Russia, travels elsewhere, including Luna, work on the mainland with metamorphs and a couple of organizations trying to better the lot of metamorphs. … Yes, a great deal of time at the net, and many periods during which she had dropped out of sight. … Arrival at San Francisco Bay Integrate eight days ago. Blank, till her vehicle proceeded to Santa Monica. Blank, till it flew to a spot in the Salton Desert, stopped briefly, and continued to Overburg; get information on Overburg, later, later. … Two days there, then cruising around for hours till it descended at Prajnaloka. … And now to Springfield, where it sat abandoned.

  Images showed a young woman, comely, well-formed, vivacious, little or no sign of the steel beneath the flesh.

  Had she met Lilisaire when she visited the Moon? Probably. Perhaps that could be verified.

  How and why had she become Lilisaire’s ally? A complete data search ought to give hints, perhaps an answer.

  An officer entered the scan field. “An airbus left Springfield for St. Louis Hub at 1315,” she reported. “It arrived there ten minutes ago.”

  Just too soon. If Kenmuir and Tam were aboard, by now they had disappeared into the city, or else they were on one of a dozen different carriers bound for as many destinations. Once upon a time, monitors in every major transfer point could instantly have been set to watch for them. But Fireball brought down the Avantists, and the modern world was not totalitarian: it had never needed or desired intensive surveillance capabilities.

  There were plenty anyhow, of course, serving everyday purposes. Some could be mobilized, ranging from high-resolution optical satellites to traffic evaluation units and … as an extreme measure, every sophotect on Earth. But that would take time, because they could not be diverted without notice from their regular duties; and the operation would be conspicuous, inconveniencing citizens, causing them and their legislators to demand an explanation; and meanwhile, what might Kenmuir and Tam do?

  Little or nothing, in all likelihood. How could they?

  He had underestimated them before, Venator thought.

  Fong escorted an old man into view and introduced him as Sandhu. He fought to control his distress and hold onto serenity as he related how Tam and—Johan—had arrived according to a reservation properly made beforehand, and given every evidence of being sincere in their wishes. What had gone amiss?

  “I cannot tell you today, sir,” Venator soothed him. “The Peace Authority is on the trail of a criminal conspiracy. We request your silence. Have no fears. On the whole, the matter is well in hand, and we know your people are innocent of any wrongdoing.” He was glad to see the poor little fellow grow a bit easier.

  The call making the reservation—it could be traced back. In fact, Venator decided, that was the first order of business. It should give a lead into Lilisaire’s entire Earthside cabal. Let Kenmuir and Tam run fugitive a while longer, unless a limited, low-priority observation program happened to succeed. With the cybercosm alerted, anything they tried to do with whatever information they had stolen should close a trap on them.

  But tighten security around Zamok Vysoki. Have forces in readiness to blockade the castle, or even enter it and arrest everybody present. Afterward find ways to cope with the political uproar that would follow. It could not be as troublesome as the opening of Proserpina would be.

  —Information. Thought. Belief. Mind. Already life was evolving from the biosphere to the noösphere, and what went on in the brain mattered more than what happened among the stars.

  Venator harked back: From Guthrie’s rebellious exodus, unforeseeably, arose Demeter Mother. But at least she was light-years removed, only tenuously and indirectly in touch with Earth, an abstraction to most humans of the Solar System, nothing to catch their imaginations as the prophets and visions of old had done. Let her remain so, and hope she perished with her planet.

  Meanwhile, keep watch, but never let her know. Laser beams went back and forth between Sol and Alpha Centauri, bearing words and images. Merely words and images. To humans of the Solar System, the colonization that had once been an ongoing epic was become a commonplace, a remote background, irrelevant to them. The cybercosm encouraged that attitude by proclaiming its own lack of interest. It declared itself willing to communicate and give advice if asked—which seldom happened any more, as different as the Centaurians had grown to be. But physical space exploration was not for the Teramind. The grand equation that unified all physics had long since been written. The possible interactions of matter and energy were manifold and held surprises, but they would always be details, nothing that could not have been computed in advance or, at any rate, be accounted for as another permutation. The endless frontier lay in the mind and its creations.

  Venator smiled. Of course the cybercosm didn’t speak quite candidly. Miniprobes followed events around Alpha Centauri as best they could, and sent reports that were neither overheard nor made public. Unacknowledged spacecraft were ranging out into the galaxy, though decades or centuries must pass before word came back from them. The destiny of the cybercosm was to transcend the material universe, but before then, some of the permutations might prove important.

  Demeter Mother already had.

  However, she was afar, and everything else was farther. Proserpina orbited the cybercosm’s home sun.

  And Luna bore, as it had borne since the first Lunarians came to birth, the seeds of chaos. For a moment Venator wondered how often they had sprouted, not openly as history knew of but in secret. How many deaths had been murder disguised?

  Enough brooding on the past. Fong had returned to sight. Venator gave him his concluding instructions, ended transmission, and set about the next stage of the campaign.

  32

  The Mother of the Moon

  The phone roused Dagny about 0600. Its program recognized that the matter must be that urgent. She sat up, ordered, “Light,” and blinked at the suddenl
y seen room. For a moment its familiarity came strange to her, ’Mond’s picture, the children’s from years when they were little, the recent portrait of them with their mates and many of their descendants down to an infant in arms who was her newest great-great-grandchild, a very unlunarian posing done for her sake only, the gaudy purple-and-gold drapes she had lately chosen to liven things up—She had been gone. Her dead friend faded in awareness. She turned to the bedside screen and ordered, “Receive.” Rita Urribe de Wahl’s face appeared. She too must have been wakened, for her hair was unkempt and a robe was thrown over her nightgown. Tears sheened on her cheekbones and ran down to the corners of trembling lips. “señor, S-señor Beynac,” she stammered, “él está muerto.”

  Knowledge struck home like a knife. Dagny mustered her Spanish, though the other woman’s English was better, to cry, “Jaime? Oh, my dear! What happened?” Was it in truth a knife?

  “In his swimming pool—found—Nobody knows. The medics are there now.” Rita gulped, squared her shoulders, and made her voice toneless. “I have called you first, after them, because of what this can mean to everybody. You will know best whom to consult, what to do. He would have wanted it, I think.” The resoluteness cracked. “And, and you were always good to us.”

  Heartbreaking humility, Dagny thought. And undeserved. She’d cultivated acquaintance with the governor general, these past five years, as she had done with his predecessors, because how else could she play any part in containing the fires of strife? … But, yes, she had gained a certain liking as well as respect for Jaime Wahl y Medina, considerable sympathy as well as respect for his wife, and it showed.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “No, no, that is not necessary.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” Dagny said in English. “Stand fast, querida. I’m so sorry. But we’ve got work ahead, tough work, and I doubt it can be done on the com lines. Give me a couple of hours. Meanwhile, can you stall? Keep this quiet. Ask the medics to. Notify Haugen but ask him to sit tight. Collect what information you can but don’t let any of it out. Okay?”