The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  She laughed. “Don’t be such a glumbum. How long to Pacific Northwest, ten hours? If they haven’t figured out where we got to, they’ll scarcely be waiting at the other end. And from there it’s a hop on the hydrofoil to Victoria, no?”

  He couldn’t tell how much of her cheerfulness was genuine, but it lightened his mood. He’d never before had occasion to use a conveyance like this. In his methodical fashion, he took stock. The cabin was about three meters square. Two facing benches, well cushioned, could fold down into beds, and a table could be lowered between them. An eidophone and an entertainment cabinet stood at the front end. In the rear were a sanitor cubicle and an air unit that was a miniature version of a spaceship’s.

  Spacelike, too, was the silence in which the car flew on forcefields through vacuum. The tubeway was barely visible outside; a little dust had inevitably blurred its clarity. Drive rings flicked by every few hundred meters, or now and then a pump. Forward and aft he saw the power cable as a thin gleam crossing the piers that, at their own intervals, supported the tubeway six meters above ground. On the left at a distance, the eastward shaft ran equally straight. As he watched, a carrier in it bulleted past.

  Now and then he spied a remnant town—more accurately, village—or an isolated home. Otherwise the prairie stretched like a sea, grass rippling in golden-green billows before a wind on which hawks and wild geese rode. It must be hot; light cataracted from a sky empty of clouds. He dimmed the windows and looked forward to the leafy shadows of Dakota New Forest.

  Aleka racked the luggage Packer had gotten for them, filled with clothes and toiletries. From its holder she took the lunch and the thermoses of coffee and lemonade she had prepared at his cuisinier. After their breakfast there, they wouldn’t be hungry for hours, but the sight of the things resting tidily on a shelf made this compartment their nest.

  “I ought to have helped,” Kenmuir apologized awkwardly.

  “You will, amigo, you will.” Aleka turned the water tap beside the sanitor upward, fountained a mouthful, and came back to bounce down onto a seat. “I’m going to make you talk yourself hoarse.”

  He settled opposite. Even under reduced sunlight, her skin and hair glowed. Ring shadows flowed across the curves of her. “What do you mean? You’ve seen everything I did.”

  “Have I? I doubt it, ’cause I don’t know how to see. If you got a hasty peek at the layout and training manual for our community yacht in Niihau—a barkentine, she is—how much would you retain? Never mind the names of sails and lines, could you draw me a picture of them? Bueno, I’m no spacer. Tell me what you learned in Prajnaloka and what it means.”

  He scowled. “Much less than we hoped, I’m afraid. My fault. I should have realized that the basic data are at the end of the text, and skipped ahead to them. I’m sorry.”

  “Pele’s teeth! Will you stop hogging the blame for everything? We had what—three minutes max?—before the word came to scoot. I’m not sure I savvy what kind of beast we grabbed the tail of. That’s your job, Kenmuir. Start talking.”

  Her eagerness heartened him. Nonetheless he rummaged through his mind a while before he spoke, and made academic phrasing a defense.

  “You undoubtedly did see that a clandestine Lunarian expedition went to a unique body far out beyond Neptune, which a similarly secret astronomical program had located, back in Dagny Beynac’s time.” She nodded. “A giant asteroid, mostly iron, therefore with a surface gravity comparable to Luna’s. Other metals are abundant too, and it’s accumulated a vast hoard of cometary materials, ices, hydrates, organics, preserved virtually intact.”

  “Yes, I got that far, and wondered what the fuss was about. Treasure trove? We’ve ample materials a lot closer to home, don’t we? In fact, what with recycling and shrinking demand, aren’t extractive industries supposed to peter out in the course of the next century?” The full lips curved ruefully. “I puzzled, and the rest of what we managed to screen didn’t register too well. Something about, uh, Rinndalir and Niolente mounting later expeditions.”

  “Correct. I wondered, myself, what they did, and skimmed the text till it reached that part. There I slowed down, which I shouldn’t have, and was immersed when we got the alarm.”

  “So?”

  “They were sending robots, with a very few trusted persons, to prepare the ground for a colony.”

  Aleka laid a finger to her chin. He found the gesture charming. “Strange. The way I remember—I studied that period up and down and sideways when I was young.” As if she were old! “It was wildly romantic to me, Fireball bringing the last totalitarian down at the cost of its own power, Guthrie and Rinndalir leading their people away to Centauri—” He saw the vision flame in her.

  How many on Earth particularly cared any longer? And those few who did, to whom the stars still called, they’d settle for the Habitat, because there would be nothing else in their lifetimes. Even Aleka, Kenmuir thought, named the Demeter story romantic: a myth, no, a fairy tale. Her myth, the ideal by which and for which she lived, was of deep seas, a lonely island, and fellowship with the nonhuman. Not the inhuman, as for him; the nonhuman.

  Her passion faded. “Would Rinndalir get involved in any such project?” she asked. “I remember how he said more than once, like when recruiting for the migration, that the Oort Cloud itself is too close to Earth. Nothing less than an interstellar passage could give gap enough to stay free, to keep from being swallowed up eventually by the Federation.” She shrugged. “His idea of freedom, not mine.” A sigh. “But damn, I’d’ve liked to’ve known him.”

  Kenmuir prickled, realized he was being jealous of a ghost, and sat back scoffing at himself. “I suspect that was camouflage for Niolente,” he said. “To him the adventure was irresistible, but, naturally, he wanted her to succeed too, back here in the Solar System.”

  “Succeed … how? I mean, why the secrecy? The Moon was a sovereign state—fully sovereign, outside the Federation. Why not simply announce the discovery of the asteroid, claim it, and start settling it openly?” Aleka paused. “That is, if anybody’d want to go.” She winced. “Endless night, so far from the sun.”

  “I’ve thought about that.” Kenmuir did not tell how many hours he had lain awake thinking. “At first, Fd guess, the idea was mainly to keep the asteroid—Proserpina—in the possession of their house, their phyle, for whatever gain was to be had. In that era, the demand for minerals and ices was growing. It might at length make a distant, rich source profitable. That never quite happened.

  “After Fireball began dying, the position of the whole Selenarchy became hopeless. Niolente led a series of brilliant delaying actions. Yet she must have known she was only buying time.

  “Time for what? I rather imagine she had several different possibilities in mind. But one of them was Proserpina. Ready it, arm it, and then reveal its existence, then plant a colony that would declare itself a new, independent Selenarchy. She may have dreamed that in the long run it would force a second … liberation … of the Moon.”

  “A daydream, for sure.” Aleka grimaced. “Not a beautiful one, either. In my eyes, anyway. We’re well rid of the Selenarchs. Their heirs are bad enough.”

  “You’re not a Lunarian,” Kenmuir replied.

  She gave him a long look. He thought he saw compassion. After a moment, though, she said, “Value judgments aside, how’d she expect a few squatters on a lifeless rock, away in the dark, could stand off the Federation? With missiles? Earth could send warheads that’d blow the whole asteroid to gravel, if Earth had to.”

  “If Earth had to,” Kenmuir repeated. “Why should it? The purpose of installing weapons would be to force extreme measures, an atrocity, if the Federation insisted on denying the right of some Lunarians to live peacefully and remotely according to their customs. Which it would not, at such a price. Totalitarianism, the whole concept of purposeful social control, was newly discredited.”

  Aleka gazed out at the great, peaceful landscape. “Overreaction to the Avantists.�
��

  “No doubt. Since then, the cybercosm has evolved, and, yes, on the whole it’s done well by us. Just the same, you’re in rebellion against it.”

  “Not really.” He heard the distress. “My people are caught in a dilemma. It’s not right against wrong, it’s a conflict of rights. The one way I can see out of the trap is for us to get that cession from Lilisaire. Maybe I should be grateful for this situation that’s given me a chance to earn it. But why the horrible tangle that’s got us running from we know not what? I tell myself and tell myself, it’s a misunderstanding, maybe a bit of overzealous bureaucracy, and it’ll all soon straighten out. If I truly thought we were a menace to society, I’d hit that phone and call the police this minute to come for us.” She tautened in her seat. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I, I suppose so,” he faltered.

  In haste, before she could ask him, or he ask himself, what drove him: “I was describing the context of those times. I think Niolente believed that if the Federation government learned prematurely about Proserpina, it would occupy the body on some pretext and forbid emigration. She meant to present it with a fait accompli, a world developed enough that her claim would be indisputable and enforceable.

  “Now of course a ship of hers might be noticed meanwhile and tracked. Against that contingency, early on she took another precaution. It wouldn’t be as effective as fortification, but it could be quickly done and it should give her a talking point. Her engineers put in a sophisticated detector system coupled to a huge, high-powered, thoroughly protected radio transmitter. At any sign of outsiders anywhere in the vicinity, it would shout the whole story to the Solar System and Alpha Centauri.”

  “What good in that?” Aleka inquired.

  “Federation units could not then declare they were the discoverers,” Kenmuir said. “Niolente was probably overrating the deviousness of her opponents—reading hers into them—but in any event, the arrangement exists to this day. No one can approach without touching off the news, except by using the proper pass code; and apparently that information perished with her.”

  “Couldn’t the system be nullified?”

  “Doubtless, though the effort would be considerable. Among other things, some robotic weapons are also in place. The job was never done, because there was no reason to. The Peace Authority—or, rather, a few top-level officials and the nascent cybercosm—became the sole inheritors of the secret. They’ve kept it ever since.”

  “Why?”

  “At first, I’d guess, simply to avoid provoking the Lunarians further. Establishing a republic and reconciling them to it was amply hard already. Later, as the cybercosm increased its capabilities and influence, it must have decided for reasons of its own to continue the policy. In the course of a generation or two, the number of humans who were told was brought sharply down. Close to zero, maybe. At least, this is the explanation that occurs to me for how Proserpina has stayed unknown.”

  “Till now,” she said ferociously.

  He responded with bleakness. “Chances are, it will remain so. We didn’t read as far as the useful data, orbital elements and the rest. If we tried to make our story public, we’d be called hoaxers or dements, and quite possibly committed for treatment. We have nothing in support of it but our naked word, and half of that is nothing but conjecture. The likelihood of our gaining anything more is … ridiculously small.”

  “We’re taking the shot, though,” she declared.

  “Yes, we are.” Alone, he might well have surrendered.

  The car fled onward.

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” she whispered at last. “Why this secrecy? What harm if Lilisaire leads a few Lunarians off to Proserpina? Give them time, and they’d make it come alive, same as the Moon. And it’d bleed off their opposition to the Habitat. What reasonable objection can the—the authorities have?”

  She had not said “the cybercosm.” Dared she?

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I honestly can’t imagine.”

  They passed a branch tubeway, curving off before it straightened and pointed southward over the horizon. It was behind them in less than a second. However, it had drawn his attention aft. Luna stood wan and waxing above the east. There had this wild hunt of his begun, there had its course been set, long and long ago.

  34

  The Mother of the Moon

  “Yes,” Dagny Beynac sighed. “It is too much.”

  “But you can’t let go,” said Anson Guthrie almost as softly.

  “Should I? You always held that nobody’s indispensable, and the idea that anybody is means the believers are in bad trouble.”

  Her white head drooped. She leaned back into her lounger and let it shape itself to her gauntness and warm the shivering out. Eyelids fell. They lifted again and she beheld the familiar room, old furniture, young flowers, the viewscreen tuned to Earth and full of sunlight, bright water, forest, the house on Vancouver Island and children at play on its lawn.

  “Yeah,” Guthrie agreed.

  The strength to talk flowed slowly back. He waited. Today he had come in a special body, four-legged, four-armed, but with two hands that looked and felt very like human hands. Besides the sensor-speaker turret, on top was a holocylinder in which he generated the appearance of living, middle-aged Guthrie. It must be difficult to control all of that at once. Now and then the image stiffened to a three-dimensional picture. Otherwise it spoke, smiled, regarded her with love as if it and not the turret were what actually saw. She did not know who else had ever encountered him like this. Maybe no one.

  “Just the same,” she said, “you carry on. Fireball can’t do without you.”

  “The hell it can’t. Quite likely better.”

  “Then why do you stay at the helm?”

  The face grinned wryly. “Well, if nothing else, given the power it’s gotten, sometimes acting damn near like a government, Fireball does need restraint. Otherwise it might degenerate into being one.”

  “For Luna? We could do a lot worse.”

  “MacCannon forbid!”

  She tried to match his effort at lightness. “Oh, you certainly wouldn’t want the job.” Lunarians thwarted, angry, the mighty among them weaving God knew what plots. Terran Moondwellers still more divided, some avid for independence, others dreading what it could mean to them, both factions threatening to mobilize. The Federation equally split on the issues—the right of societies and especially metamorphs to be themselves, an end to an increasingly troublesome and costly problem, versus the common heritage principle, fear of a rampant new nationalism, powerful interests vested in the status quo—and unable to reach a decision, now when Earth’s mounting woes claimed most of its attention. … Whatever humor had been in him and her flickered out.

  “No,” he said, “I’m in my right mind. Besides, the united governments would never stand for it. Privatizing government?” His visage grimaced. “But somebody’s got to run the show here, and their man Haugen sure as entropy isn’t succeeding. Not that Wahl could have for much longer, without you. You’re the one who’s been shoring things up, over and over, year after year, and it’s worn you hollow.”

  “Not I,” she protested. “The Council—” for Lunar Commonalty, not the High Council of the World Federation but her unofficial, informal gathering “—and the magnates and mayors who’re wise, and—the common sense of common folks—” She had spent her breath. Her pulse wavered.

  “Yes,” Guthrie persisted, “but you’ve been what brings them together and holds them together, smooths down their squabbles and tickles their egos and prunes them back to size, gives them a direction and holds them to it, provides the God damn leadership.”

  His long, drawled sentence gave her time to recover. No doubt that was part of his intention. “I’m more a symbol, really, than a leader,” she said.

  “Could be, which makes you all the more important. But the minority piece of you, the brains and guts, that’s boosting away too.”

  Against a gravi
ty field like Jupiter’s, or a dead star’s, or a black hole’s. And she’d about exhausted her fuel, she thought. “Even being the symbol, the grand ancient, is getting to be too much,” she mumbled. “This latest—” An appeal on the big public screen had not stopped rioting between the Terrans in Leyburg. She’d gone to stand there in person, in plain sight at the top of the cybercenter ramp, where anybody could throw a rock that under Lunar weight could kill her. The alternative would have been the turmoil going altogether out of control, deaths, destruction, possible major damage to the life-containing structure, martial law, and unforeseeable consequences everywhere around the Moon. “It wrung me dry.”

  And it had been no more than a wave on an incoming tide, and did anybody know, did anybody dream what ran underneath?

  A new song from Verdea was going widely about. Though the Lunarian was close to untranslatable, snatches of it found utterance among Terrans in their ancestral tongues, as if somehow it spoke to them too—a phrase tossed into talk, a shout through nightwatch, a scrawl on a bulkhead, a flash onto a communicator screen.

  “—You: Law alone, sight unbloodied, and never a heart ripped loose for gods that never were. Death is no more than stones that lie still in the groundgrip of waterless wastelands; ever obedient whirl the worlds; their ways you will understand and their whys will be born of your brains. You have given yourselves to serve and to master the steadiness of the stars.

  “But the dust of stones shall be bones, dry bones rising for a journey from doubt into darkness. Your forgotten begotten shall trouble your dreams, the heart shall break its cage, and death shall laugh at your law. For the stars are also fire.—”

  When first she heard it, Dagny had gone cold. She felt without any reason she could name that her daughter was less crying rebellion than looking beyond, into a future far and obscure.

  The words broke free before she knew. “Oh, Uncans, I’m so tired! So old. I can’t go on.”

  I’m sorry! she immediately meant to say. I don’t want to whimper.