The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Again Rita gathered her strength together. “Yes, I hope I shall be able … to persuade señor Haugen and the others, and keep the staff here under control, and—For two or three hours, perhaps yes.”

  “Brave lass.” Dagny smiled into the grief. “I’m on my way, then. Later we’ll mourn Jaime. Right now we have things to do for him. Hasta luego.”

  She flicked off and called the mayor of Tychopolis. His phone program recognized her and put her straight through to him in his own chamber. “Hallo. Not up yet? Well, move. Listen, I need immediate transport to Tsukimachi. Immediate. A suborbital if you can get me one. Yes, these bones can still take that kind of boost. Otherwise the fastest jet the local constabulary have available, and I’m not talking about a Meteor or an Estrella. I’ll accept nothing less than a Sleipnir.”—

  —“Never mind why. A good many lives may depend on it. That’s enough for now, and you will please keep it to yourself. Pull rank, use my name if need be, but get me the craft.”—

  —“I’ll meet you at the port, TrafCon office, in case we need to browbeat those people, in exactly one hour. It’d be nice if the boat had some breakfast aboard for me, but what it must have is readiness to launch. Okay? See you.”

  She blanked and left her bed. Inalante would swing it. He was powerful, he was able, and he was a son of Kaino.

  In the bathroom, splashing cold water on her face, she began to feel the aches and drag of weariness. Sleep had been in short supply these past few daycycles. She’d hoped for peace till 0900 or 1000 this mornwatch, because after that all hell might be letting out for recess. (Which it already had, in a shape she hadn’t expected.) At her age, you didn’t bounce back after just a catnap. Had she ever been that young? It seemed impossible.

  The mirror showed eyes that appeared unnaturally large and bright in the bony pallor around them. Anson Guthrie had remarked a while ago that she looked more ethereal every time he saw her. But she bloody well couldn’t afford to be, not yet, maybe not anytime this side of the ashbox. After weighing what her physician had told her, what her experience suggested, and what the situation was, she took a medium-strength diergetic. That, with coffee and food and will power, ought to get her through the next hours without too high a price to pay afterward.

  Somewhat recharged, if a little chilled, she made herself presentable in warm coverall and half-boots. A hooded cloak should keep her from being noticed; few people were out this early. She recorded a noncommittal message for callers, took the bag she kept packed for hasty departures, and went forth.

  Hudson Way stretched quiet. The ceiling simulated blue sky, stray clouds still faintly pink from sunrise, strengthening light which set aglitter the dawnwatch moisture in the duramoss underfoot. The air blew and smelled like an appropriate breeze. The ambience was a bit too perpetually pretty for her, but most residents in this neighborhood were Terran and had voted to have it thus. There were other places she could go to pretend, in full surround, that she walked by a gray sea and its drumroll surf.

  At the corner of Graham she boarded the fahrweg and rode out to the spaceport, changing lines twice. Fellow passengers were sparse and paid her no attention. She had freedom to think.

  Poor Rita. Poor kids, though Leandro was at the university and partly estranged from his father, while Pilar had been in school on Earth for two or three years. Poor Jaime, above all. He’d lived with such gusto, when his job didn’t exhaust or infuriate him. He’d been her opponent more often than not, but a fair one, playing for what he believed was right, right not just for Earth but for the Moon.

  And now he was dead. How convenient for some people. How potentially disastrous for the rest.

  Murder? Hard to imagine, there in his home. Besides, nobody had ever attempted it when he went out, though he kept no bodyguard. To be sure, he was formidable by himself, a vigorous Earth-muscled man with combat experience and a black belt in karate.

  That made his death in a swimming pool the more incomprehensible. Especially as opportune as it was.

  It shouldn’t have been, Dagny thought—not for anyone, neither the coldly calculating Lunarian magnates nor the most radical, slogan-drunk Terran demonstrator. Until a short while ago, it wouldn’t have been. Given the present political climate on Earth—leaders and publics daily more conscious of how much the state of affairs on Luna contradicted and defied their world order—any governor was bound to make correction the goal of policy. Zhao’s patient pressure and Gambetta’s concessions had failed. Over and over, a crisis was patched up while the society evolved onward. Wahl’s mission was to bring this globe back under Federation law and make sure it stayed there. No compromises.

  But the governor necessarily had broad discretion, and must cooperate with the legislature, unless things got to the point of outright insurgence and troops were the only option. Few leaders would have gone ahead more carefully, yes, considerately than Wahl did: step by step, glad to reward, reluctant to punish, always concerned for the other fellow’s dignity, ready to give up plans for retirement and spend a decade or longer preparing the ground for full enforcement of the major laws, even admitting that meanwhile those laws might be modified. How had it come about that any Moondwellers could wish him dead?

  She had no clear answer. None existed. Human affairs are chaos. But, riding along, she could retrace their course into this particular strange attractor.

  Friction, contention, hard words, disobedience, resistance open or covert, arrests, penalties, unrepentance were everywhere. However, she thought the Uconda business last year was a prime factor. She’d had a bad feeling about it at the time, and tried to warn the governor, when he forbade expansion of operations at that Farside mine because it would measurably pollute local vacuum and radio background. The astronomers, quantum experimentalists, and other researchers at Astrebourg were naturally glad of the action in itself; but a number of them, Temerir most prominently, were enraged that it had been carried out by decree like that.

  Worst upset was Brandir. At his brother’s instigation, he had been quietly bargaining with the owners. He would compensate them well if they shut down altogether and began anew on territory he controlled. The deal would have enhanced his prestige, thereby his influence. It would have involved the owners and their workers giving troth to him, thus increasing his power. It would have bypassed the Lunar Authority, treated the sites as if they were private property, and so violated the intent if not quite the letter of the law. Wahl told Dagny in private that that was surely the real intention, and reason for him to forestall it. Of course this fuelled anger in the opposition.

  Had the Lunarian seigneurs cleverly fanned the emotion, or had it directly caused some among them to make a new move, or what? Dagny was uncertain. Her children told her what they wanted to tell her and no more, as did their children and children’s children. Sometimes that was considerable, sometimes they actually asked for her counsel, but this had not been one of the occasions, and when she taxed Brandir with it he went courteously impassive as he had done so often before.

  The catapults. Whatever brought it about, the catapults were the issue that could detonate revolt.

  Spaceport the fahrweg flashed and intoned. Dagny left it. The walk through the terminal, across mostly empty floors, felt long to her.

  She had come ahead of time. Nevertheless Inalante was waiting at TrafCon: a middle-aged man in black tunic and white hose, something of his father haunting the features and something of his grandfather, a steadiness beneath the rapid-fire speech, sounding through the voice. “Be you hale, kinlady. A Sleipnir stands provisioned and cleared for liftoff.”

  “Good lad!” she exclaimed, pleased out of all proportion. “I’ll bet you’ve even gotten black pudding aboard.”

  He smiled. “Unfortunately, what shops may stock it are not yet open. For haste’s sake, I ordered mere field rations stowed. But recalling you also like moonfruit, I brought these from my home.” He gave her a bag.

  Nor did it make sense that her
eyes should sting. They could be absolute darlings when they chose, her Lunarians, wholly human. Well, God damn it, that was what they were, “Gracias. Thanks. I, I’ll think of you from now on whenever I taste moonfruit.”

  “Need you further help?”

  “Mainly that you keep the city calm.”

  “I have been preparing through these past day-cycles,” he said grimly.

  “You’ll soon hear news that will change everything. I don’t know what the changes will be, nor do I dare tell you more here where we could be overheard, but expect a huge surprise.”

  “While you fare alone to cope.” The oblique eyes searched her. “Have you the potence of body for it?”

  “I’d better.”

  “Then fare you victoriously, mother of us.” Inalante took her hand and bowed deeply over it.

  He was no revolutionary, she knew. Nor was he a lackey. He cared little or naught what the constitutional structure might be, as long as he and his were left unmolested to pursue their own ends. Since that required peace, he had accepted the mayoralty here, in an uncontested election, to help maintain it. From this position he could maneuver for changes in rules that he disliked, meanwhile conniving at enough evasion of them to keep people somewhat content without provoking the Authority to intervene.

  No doubt a majority of Moondwellers felt more or less likewise. But their ambitions were seldom of a kind that Federation law would much hinder. It was the powerful and the radical who strained against restraints, and it was they who would break the system or be broken by it. Or both, Dagny thought.

  She went to her gate, through the gangtube, and into her vehicle.

  The crew were a pair of constabulary officers, pilot and reserve, Terrans. They greeted the lady Beynac with deference and promised her breakfast as soon as they were in stable flight. She harnessed into her seat and relaxed.

  Liftoff went deftly, at little more than two Lunar gravities. Altitude attained, the seat swung on its gimbals as the hull brought its length horizontal. A snort of thrust followed; then weight leveled off and there was only the almost subliminally faint thrum and hiss of downjets holding the mass aloft. Dagny’s engineering years came back to her and she spent a minute estimating how much more fuel-expensive this flight was, over the distance she must cover, than the suborbital she had tried for, besides being slower. But the idea was to be able to cruise freely and set down wherever you wanted, on a moment’s notice. When you had a pinch of antimatter to season your exhaust, efficiency was no big consideration.

  The reserve brought her tray and, seeing she was not in a conversational mood, withdrew. The coffee wasn’t bad but except for blessed Inalante’s gift the food was as dull as usual. Dagny ate dutifully. For the most part her look went out the window at her side to mountains, maria, craters, wrinkled below the sun and a sickle Earth. Now and then a work of humankind gleamed into view, a dome cluster, a monorail, a relay mast, a solar collector, a microwave transmitter beaming the energy invisibly to the mother world. Glare drowned nearly all stars. Once, though, she saw a spark soar across the high black and vanish into distance.

  Probably a cargo pod, catapult-launched from Leyburg, she judged. It would be loaded with something, chemicals or biologicals or nanos or whatever else was best produced under Lunar conditions. Her glimpse being insufficient for her to gauge the trajectory, she couldn’t tell what the pod was like. It might be meant for aerodynamic descent on Earth, parachute landing on Mars, rendezvous with L-5 or an asteroid or an outpost farther yet. Never mind. Wherever bound, it bore a magnificent achievement, and she had been among the builders of the groundwork.

  But catapults—

  Easy to hurl anything off the Moon, with its low escape velocity and its lavishness of virtually cost-free energy. The trouble lay in that “anything.” A hundred-tonne mass, shaped to penetrate atmosphere, would strike on Earth with the force of a tactical nuclear warhead.

  When Brandir and three fellow Selenarchs began construction of catapult launchers on their demesnes, did they speak truth about simply wishing to enter the business? On economic grounds alone, that seemed dubious. Certainly no permission had been granted. Wahl ordered the projects halted, pending agreement on safeguards. If that failed (and surely no lord wanted inspectors stationed permanently on his holding) the works must be dismantled. The Selenarchs argued, delayed, obstructed. Satellites observed men, machines, robots going in and out of the shell thrown around the engines “for meteorite protection while negotiations proceed.” Wahl sent investigators. They were turned back at the boundaries.

  His words of yesterday evenwatch passed again through Dagny’s head. How haggard his face in the screen had been; but she heard a ring as of iron. “I do not know what their intent is. They understand I cannot allow this. Do they not? Then why are they forcing the issue? I have a horrible suspicion that they have more weapons than we know of, an arsenal that would let their castles stand off what force I have at my command. They can trust that a shocked Earth will not respond with missiles, if they can threaten retaliation. They will call for talks about, yes, independence, or something that will amount to the same thing. Am I wrong in my guess? Can you give me a better one? If not, then on the mornwatch after tomorrow I will order the constabulary to occupy those estates, and we shall see what happens. I give them that long in the thin hope that you, Señora Beynac, can bring them to their senses. Nowhere else do I see any way of avoiding a fight, nowhere else but in you, señora.”

  Instead of calling Brandir, she was flying to meet with a widow.

  —She dozed. ’Mond spoke to her. She could not understand the words, but he smiled.

  The craft gyred about, reduced forward momentum, maneuvered downward. Dagny woke to a glimpse of the docking cradle. The shaft beneath it made an O of blackness. She’d contributed to the design, long ago, long ago: a hole to receive most of the short-lived isotopes in the jet, a cup above whose skeletal structure picked up an amount negligible compared to natural background count. Nowadays motors induced much less radioactivity in their reaction mass. But coping with the problem back then had been quite a challenge, and fun.

  The boat settled gently. A gangtube stretched itself on its wheels from the nearest gate to the airlock. The pilot climbed down from his control cabin, now above her, and said, “Here we are, m’lady. We’ve orders to stand by for three hours. If you’ll want us later than that, please call our headquarters and request it.”

  “If I don’t have to make a lightning advance to the rear inside that time, I probably won’t need to,” she replied. “I can bum a ride home, or take the train. But gracias, boys. You’ve done well, and your being handsome didn’t hurt the trip any.” That was one advantage an old crone had, she could get away with practically unlimited impudence. In fact, people found it winning, and were disarmed.

  A young lieutenant rode out in the tube and said he had been sent to escort her. She let him carry her bag.

  The fahrweg ride to the governor’s mansion was short and direct. They made it in silence. Other passengers were pretty subdued too; you could almost smell the worry in them. Few details were yet public, but everybody knew a crisis of some kind was close to the breaking point.

  In the entry she gave the man her cloak to stow with the bag. That was really no way to treat an officer of the Peace Authority, but he seemed honored. She continued to the well-remembered living room. Two persons rose from their chairs as she appeared. The third was already on his feet, Lunarian fashion.

  Rita went straight to her. Dagny embraced the small woman, stroked the dark hair and murmured. Most of her looked over the shoulder at her breast, to Erann.

  Brandir’s grandson met the gaze, smiled faintly, and bowed. He was a beautiful youth—how old by now, eighteen?—with the silvery-blond hair and silvery-blue eyes that ran in his branch of the bloodline. The towering form wore close-fitting green raiment and soft red shoes.

  The second visitor was Einar Haugen. As the shivering in her arms
lessened, Dagny addressed him: “Buenos dias. Though it isn’t exactly that, is it?”

  She let Rita go. The vice governor—former vice governor—shambled over to shake hands. He was a tall, thin man whom Wahl had never given anything very important to do. “This is terrible, terrible,” he said in the same English. “You are most welcome, madame. Most good of you to come. Please be seated. Coffee?” A pot and cups had been set out. “Or anything else?”

  Dagny waved the offer aside. “No, I’m already wound as tight as my mainspring will go.” He blinked. She saw that, while he got her drift, he didn’t recognize the idiom. It was an antique, at that. And he, he couldn’t be much over fifty. She caught Erann’s glance again. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was a house guest,” the Lunarian answered.

  “Hm? I didn’t know the Wahls still knew you particularly.”

  “There was a matter for privacy. In kindness, Governor Wahl agreed that I sleep here. That would let us meet alone whenever he discovered an hour free, as harried as he was. This mornwatch I deemed it best I stay to relate such little as I can that may throw light on the misfortune. Having talked to the police, I would have taken me hence, but honored Haugen told me I should abide your arrival.”

  As well he might, Dagny thought. Erann had spoken smoothly, his countenance revealing nothing. That too was Lunarian style, not suspicious in itself—’Mond’s and her great-grandson!—but the wind was for sure blowing weird.

  They all settled down, the boy cat-watchful. Dagny regarded the woman. “Rita, dear,” she said, “you’re walking wounded and about to fall on the deck. Don’t deny it. I’ve seen the signs many a time before. In a few minutes I’m going to find you a sedative and tuck you in for a watch’s rest or longer. But first can we get it over with, telling me what you people know?” She wanted that directly, not filtered through another mind. Learning just what had happened was vital to planning her own course.