The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “Not yet,” Venator told him. “But she will soon.”

  “And you—the, the cybercosm—the government—it really won’t try to suppress the news or, or any consequences that follow?”

  Venator caught Kenmuir’s gaze and held it a moment. “You and your friends can help us in that, you know. In fact, you must. The Federation—the humans in key positions—we don’t want them led or forced into taking stands it would be hard for them to retreat from. As you guessed earlier, the less said publicly on either side, the easier for everyone concerned.”

  It was not a capitulation, Kenmuir realized. It was an adaptation to circumstances. It could be the first move in a new plan that extended centuries ahead. … No, he would not think about that. Not yet.

  “I’ll certainly be glad to cooperate,” he said. “So will Aleka and, uh, Matthias, I’m sure.”

  Now Venator grinned, above raised brows. “Like Lilisaire and her Lunarians?”

  “I think they’ll agree.”

  “The story can’t actually be blotted out, you know,” Venator reminded. “What we can try for is that your people be discreet enough to allow mine to be the same.”

  No, the story could never be blotted out, Kenmuir thought. Not out of him. Pain surged. O download Dagny!

  “Must we talk about opposite sides?” he asked fast. “I still can’t see why the issue has to be … irreconcilable. Are a few Lunarians in deep space such a big factor? How can they be, in the near future or ever?”

  Venator frowned. “It seemed more clear to you before,” he said. With a shrug: “It did to me too, then.” He paused. “Let me propose a very crude analogy. Picture an intelligent, educated Roman in the reign of Augustus, speculating about what things would be like in another thousand years. He says to himself, ‘Perhaps the legions will have marched over the whole world as they did over Gaul, and everybody everywhere will be Roman. Or perhaps, which Caesar’s current policy suggests is more likely, the frontiers will stay approximately where they are, beyond them the forests and the barbarians. Or perhaps, pessimistically, Rome will have fallen and the wild folk howl in the ruins of our cities.’

  “I don’t know which future he chose, and it doesn’t matter, because of course the outcome was none of them. A heretical offshoot of the religion of a conquered people in one small corner of the Mediterranean lands took over both Romans and barbarians, transforming them entirely and begetting a whole new civilization.”

  Faustian civilization, Kenmuir thought.

  “Just the same,” he argued, “the sheer power of—your—cybercosm, which is bound to grow beyond anything we can conceive of—”

  “The biocosm will grow too,” Venator said. “And as for influences on it and on us, what may humans turn into, they and their machines, out among the comets?”

  An idea struck from the rim of Kenmuir’s mind. By its nature, the cybercosm must seek for absolute knowledge; but this required absolute control, no wild contingencies, nothing unforeseeable except the flowerings of its intellect. The cybercosm was totalitarian.

  “Well, as events have developed, this has become yet another factor to deal with,” Venator went on. “There are many more, after all, and in any case the universe will doubtless continue springing surprises for millions of years to come. Time will see who copes best, and how.”

  Totalitarianism need not be brutal, Kenmuir thought. It could be mild in its ways, beneficent in its actions, and … too subtle to be recognized for what it was.

  Wings flashed overhead. He looked aloft, but the sun dazzled sight of the bird from him. A hawk, hunting? Never could he have imagined that ruthless beauty, had not a billion years of unreined chance and blind will to live shaped it for him. Suddenly he could endure remembering what had happened in the tomb on the Moon.

  Maybe there would be no real affray between the Daos. Maybe in some remote age they would find they had been two faces of the same. Or maybe not. He knew simply that he was with the Mother.

  “And this is rather abstract, isn’t it?” Venator was saying. “We can do nothing but handle the footling details of our lifespans, one piece at a time.”

  Kenmuir considered him. “That isn’t quite true of you, is it?”

  “Not quite,” Venator admitted. After several more strides through the wind: “In spite of everything, I don’t envy you.”

  Nor I you, Kenmuir thought.

  “I would nonetheless like to know you better,” Venator said. “Can’t be, I suppose. Shall we discuss those practicalities?”

  Night had lately fallen over the Lunar Cordillera. From Lilisaire’s eyrie three peaks could still be seen far to westward, on which brightness lingered. Only the edges were visible, flame-tongues slowly dying. Elsewhere the mountains had become a wilderness of shadowy heights and abyssal darks. Eastward they dropped away to boulders and craters almost as dim. Stars stood above in their thousands, the galactic frost-bridge, nebulae and sister galaxies aglimmer, but Earth was no more than a blue arc along a wan disc, low above that horizon.

  A clear-domed tower overlooked it all. From tanks and planters in its topmost room grew gigantic flowers. Starlit, their leaves were dark masses or delicate filigrees. Blossoms mingled perfumes in air that lay like the air of an evening at the end of summer. Fireflies flittered and glittered through their silence.

  Lilisaire entered with Kenmuir. Neither had said much in the short while since he arrived. She passed among the flowers to the eastern side and stopped, gazing out. He waited, observing her profile against the sky and her hair sheening beneath it

  A song crystal lay on the ledge under the dome. She picked it up and stroked fingers across its facets. Sound awakened, trills, chimes, whistlings, a shivery beat. She made them into a melody and sang half under her breath:

  “Stonefall fireflash,

  Cenotaph of a seeker.

  But the stone has lost the stars

  And the stars have lost the stone.”

  He had heard the Lunarian words before, a snatch of a lyric by Verdea. No tongue of Earth could have keened like them or carried the full meaning behind their images.

  Lilisaire laid the crystal back down and was again quiet. After a minute Kenmuir took it on himself to say in Anglo, “That’s a melancholy piece, my lady.”

  “It suits right well,” she answered tonelessly.

  “I should have thought you’d be happier.”

  “Nay, you did not.” She turned to meet his eyes. Hers seemed to brim with light. The countenance could have been the mask of an Asian Pallas. “You are intelligent. You will have priced this prize you won.”

  He had known he must speak plainly, but not that it would be so soon. The muscles tightened between his shoulderblades. He kept his voice level: “Well, yes. At any rate, I’ve wondered. Proserpina is open to you, with everything that may imply.” Which was what? He couldn’t tell. He wouldn’t live to learn. “However, the Habitat—” He left the sentence dangling, reluctant to declare what they both understood.

  She completed it for him. “The Habitat is made certainty.”

  “It always was, wasn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “Not altogether, not while something in far space remained unknown, may-chance the instrument of a victory clear and complete. But now it is found.”

  For an instant he harked back to the house of the Teramind. Reality as discovery, mind as its maker—No, that couldn’t be, not on any tangible, humanly meaningful scale, and even at the quantum level there must be more than the paradoxes of measurement; there must!

  “No weapon,” Lilisaire sighed. “Merely an escape.”

  As often in the recent past, he spun the mundane possibilities by his attention. Lunarians rebellious or adventurous—no few, either kind—would move to the iron world, piecemeal at first, later in a tide. The Federation would not oppose; it ought actually to help, because thereby both the case against the Habitat and the opposition to it should bleed away. Nevertheless, that colonizing effort would
engage well-nigh the whole Lunarian spacefaring capability; and this in turn would draw folk from their homes on the inner asteroids and the outer moons. The Venture, the whole strong Lunarian presence on the planets, would fade from history.

  “And a bargain of truce,” Lilisaire finished.

  For her part, Kenmuir thought, she could not denounce the long concealment of her ancestral treasure, and she must yield on the matter of the Habitat. Her interest in a smooth compromise was as vital as the government’s, however bad it tasted to either. A phrase from centuries agone surfaced before him. “Equality of dissatisfaction.” But what when that left the great basic contest unresolved?

  Carefully prosaic, he said, “Nothing is firm, you know, my lady. So far it’s words exchanged between individuals and … sophotects. Most officials, not to mention the public, haven’t heard of it, or anything about the whole affair.”

  “Yet I foresee the end of our Luna.” Her voice was steely, devoid of self-pity; she stood straight beneath the heavens.

  “No, not really—” Did he detect a flick of scorn across her lips? “A new beginning, anyhow.”

  “Belike a new cycle,” she gave him, “albeit a stranger to everything that was ours.”

  No more millennial metaphysics, he decided. Aloud: “My lady, first we’ve years’ worth of business to do. Most important to me, you made Aleka Kame a promise.”

  Lilisaire finger-shrugged. “Eyach, she shall have her island and its waters. Why not? What slight power that ever I wielded in these parts is slipping from my hands.” She touched her chin, frowned, then smiled a tiny, cold bit. “Moreover, to have friends on Earth may someday prove useful.”

  It took him a moment to catch her entire intent. “You don’t want to go to Proserpina yourself, do you?”

  “Nay. Why should such be my wish? Here are the holdings of my forebears and their ashes, their ancient graces and sureties, memories of them on every mountain and memories of me that would have abided. Those shall I surrender for starkness and hardship and the likelihood of early death.”

  “You needn’t,” he said around an unawaited thickness in his throat. “You can live out your life here in luxury.”

  Her laugh rang. It sounded real, as if he had cracked some Homeric joke: “Hai-ah, how comfortable the cage! How well-mannered the visitors who come to peer! And if any of them should stray too near the bars—” She shook her head. Mirth still bubbled. “Moreover, how could I hold back from this last insolence?”

  He recalled her ancestor Rinndalir, who fared to Alpha Centauri. Had Lilisaire finally forsaken the shade of Niolente?

  Seriousness struck down upon her. She stood for a span unspeaking, her look gone outward, before she said most softly, “And as for death yonder, it will be the death of a Beynac.”

  “Why, you, you can survive to a ripe age,” he stammered.

  She ignored his attempt. “I am going, and in the vanguard. But therefore I can ill keep the promise I gave you, my captain, that you would be chieftain over my emprises in space, and dwell with me as a seigneur among the Selenarchs.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Ey, it does.” She smiled anew. “You lie right gallantly.”

  In hammering bewilderment, Kenmuir groped for words. “My lady, I’m glad if I’ve helped you, and if I, I harmed you instead, it wasn’t my wish, and—It’s enough for me that I served you.”

  He wondered whether he meant it.

  “It is not enough for me,” she answered. Her hand reached forth to his. “I pray you, let me see how I can redeem my pledge a little, at least a little.”

  What he saw, amazed, was that she stood there as lonely and woundable as any other human creature.

  The breeze was light. Aleka motored two or three kilometers from Niihau harbor before she deployed mast and sail. Then her boat ghosted along over wavelets of shining blue and green laced with glassy foam. They murmured to themselves and lapped against the hull Sometimes a crest broke, briefly white. The sun declined westward. Its rays burned across the waters. Out here, though, the air was cool. A frigate bird soared on high.

  Kenmuir sat on a bench in the cockpit by the cabin door, opposite Aleka, who had the tiller. She wore just a cap and a sleeveless tunic. Her skin glowed bronze. A stray lock of hair fell across her brow. He kept his face steady while he gathered courage.

  She looked from the sea to him and said nearly the first words between them since they cast off. “You’ve changed, Ian.” Her voice stayed low and he was not sure whether he glimpsed a phantom smile.

  “You too, I think,” he returned. “Not surprising, after what you’ve been through.”

  His mind played it over, the flight through space, the message sent, the long curve inward again, the ship and the sophotect that she wearily let rendezvous. It had not been unkind, she told him; it took her aboard and brought her back to Earth, where Venator interviewed and released her. No bodily danger ever, but she could not be confident of that, and Kenmuir dared not dwell on what she must have suffered in her spirit, amidst emptiness and machines.

  “I hoped you’d come right away after I got home,” she said.

  Though he sensed no reproach, he winced. “I’m sorry. Been so damnably occupied—” He had explained that before, in their short phone conversations and today when he arrived. “You’ll hear the details, as far as I can straighten them out in my head. Besides, well, I thought you'd first want to rest in her land and on her sea, among her folk and merfolk.” He had wondered, without asking, if that was why she proposed they sail out to talk in private. They could have gone someplace ashore. But here she wholly belonged.

  Or was it that this change of setting might break his tongue-tied hesitancy?

  Now she did smile, however tentatively. “Ah, bue-no, lawa, that’s behind us. The news that we’ll have our new country, we Lahui, this is what you and I can celebrate together. For openers.”

  He had no reply.

  She watched him for a time before she said, gently as the wind, “No? No. Por favor, don’t misunderstand. I’m not blaming, I’m not begging.”

  He met her eyes. “You never would.”

  “Something has happened.”

  “Only in me.”

  She deserved straightforwardness. “I’m going to Proserpina,” he said.

  “I was … afraid of that.”

  “Don’t be.” It was he who pleaded. He leaned forward and caught her hand in both of his. “Listen. It’s best. You’re young, you have your life and your world to make, I’m old and—”

  “We could try,” she said.

  “And lose those years for you? No.”

  Her quietness abided. “Don’t play unselfish. It’s unworthy of you. You’re returning to Lilisaire.” She drew her hand free.

  “I’m trying to be realistic and, and do what’s right,” he said.

  The waves lulled. The frigate bird cruised on watch for prey.

  “This isn’t a complete surprise to me,” she told him. “He kanaka pono ’oe. You’re a good man, an honest man. You can keep a secret but you haven’t got much gift for lying.” She looked to the horizon. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”

  Yes, he knew. She was too alive for anything else.

  Nevertheless—He grinned at himself, an old man’s dry grin. In his expectations, she had responded fiercely, and it was not impossible that she could have lured him back to her. Well, maybe she had been feeling her doubts too. Maybe, no, probably she saw things more clearly and forthrightly than he had known, more than he did.

  He should be relieved, not disappointed. But he was only a man.

  Her concern burst over him: “You, though! Have you thought this through? You may well be the single Earthling—Terran—the single one of your race, away in that darkness with nothing but rocks and stars.”

  When she spoke thus, he gained heart. “It’s space, Aleka,” he replied.

  She sat meditative, toying with the helm, before she said,
“I see. Always it’s called you, and this is the last way left for you to follow.”

  He lifted his shoulders and dropped them, palms outspread. “Irrational. Agreed. But we—the Lunarians, and whoever’s with them—we’ll bring Proserpina to life.”

  For whatever that would mean in the gigayears ahead. He felt no special involvement in them; being mortal and reasonable, he could not. Still, he would obscurely be serving Demeter Mother whom he would never know, and therewith give his life a meaning beyond itself.

  That thought was more than his monkey vanity. The Teramind concurred. He didn’t know whether it would seek to conceal the migration to Proserpina from the Centaurians. He could imagine several tricks for doing so. Certainly the cybercosm was making sure that the tale of hide-and-seek within the Solar System would be soft-played, soon lost in background noise. There must be no monuments … It didn’t matter, Kenmuir believed. In the long run, it didn’t matter. When life is ready to evolve onward, it will evolve.

  Aleka nodded. “You’ll be in space, Ian. No, I couldn’t bear to bind you.” A whip-flick: “As for our lady Lilisaire, I daresay you can cope with her.”

  “It isn’t that simple.”

  “No.”

  They sailed in silence. All at once, a form broached to starboard, and another and another. A troop of the Keiki Moana were out.

  Aleka regarded them with love. “We are different breeds, aren’t we, you and I?” she said at last to Kenmuir. “And we’re of the same blood.”

  How many others might the future see?

  “What you will make, right here on Earth—” he began. He broke off, filled his lungs with the clean salt wind, and went on. “I wonder if in the end it won’t prove to be as strange and powerful as anything anywhere in the universe.”

  She laughed, low in her throat and defiantly. “The making will be fun, anyhow.”

  It will be joy, he hoped.

  She took his hand again. “I wish you the same, darling,” she said, “yonder where Kestrel is.”

  The little ship that had been Kyra Davis’s was outbound alone, to fare forever among the stars.