Harvest the Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Nicol deactivated him, then closed and locked the door. In like fashion, he covered his traces throughout the return to Lirion’s quarters. The Lunarian still lay blind with sleep. Nicol put the key back and went on to his own place.

  There he could let go and tremble.

  Not for too long, though. He must pull his nerves together, consider and comprehend what had happened, and plan what to do.

  Odd, how quickly he arrived at his decision.

  CHAPTER 13

  Across two thousand kilometers, to unaided vision the carrier was no more than a star, lost in the cold horde. It had ceased to move among them; Verdea fell free on trajectory, paralleling its course at practically the same velocity. The sun still dominated these skies, a tiny blaze you dared not look near without protection, but its radiance had shrunk to less than two percent of what Earth and Luna knew. Some two years into its journey, the carrier had left the orbit of Jupiter behind it. Speed had dwindled away, though, on that long climb; almost nine more years remained to its destination beyond Saturn.

  If ever it got there, Nicol thought.

  When he magnified with his optics, the ship swelled to a strange small moon, a hundred-meter spheroid shining metallic save for shadows cast by the flanges that ribbed it like meridians. At the forward “pole” a mast jutted from the dome of the command turret, crowned with sensory and communications antennae. Aft projected the cylindrical lattice that held, at its end, a fission power plant together with a docking facility for the booster that had launched this vessel from Mercury orbit and the booster that was to bring it to harbor upon arrival. Equatorially between, a reinforcing spiderweb of struts braced four long spars sticking straight out, each terminating in a jet motor that could be swiveled around for orientation maneuvers. A thin metal skin sheened across the whole web, a radiating surface for the refrigerators inside the hull.

  When Nicol magnified further, he saw how the flanges were not simply added radiators. To several of them clung the emplacements of energy projectors and nuclear-tipped missiles.

  Well, he had known that. He had studied the images Hench stole from the secret database, and had rehearsed in simulation, so grindingly often that now he went through his part like another machine. That was not necessarily a reassurance. His mind was too free to think about contingencies and about what would come after, if he succeeded and survived.

  Lirion’s voice rustled in his ears: “Three minutes. Are you ready?”

  “I am,” he answered.

  “Fare fiercely,” called Falaire. He had no reply to that.

  Instead, he ran mentally through a final review of his outfit. Space-suited, he lay several meters from Verdea in his darter. He had found no better name to give the craft, designed and built for this one buccaneering; the Lunarian “catou” wasn’t really translatable. Harnessed full-length to an acceleration couch that would turn to hold itself always beneath him, he kept hands on a control panel—though mostly it was the robotic systems that would perceive, compute, decide, and act, faster than flesh ever could—and looked out through a grid of curved bars; otherwise, his section was open to the sky. His helmet stuck into a larger one that, upon his orders, gave him whatever display, amplification, readout, or virtual reality he might want. A rack beside him held the tools and weapons he would need, unless he met some lethal surprise. Behind him stretched a ten-meter cylinder—motor, reaction mass, nozzles pointing along three axes to thrust him hard in any direction. The ensemble would have been ludicrous elsewhere. Here it was hawk-functional, until it had served its purpose; then it was expendable, to be left adrift in the deeps.

  Not unlike him.

  He did not see the energy gun flash on Verdea, nor the light-speed strike of the blade it unsheathed. He saw the mast on the carrier flare white-hot at one point, another, another—break into loose fragments—for a short while they sketched the thing they had been, until they began slowly tumbling apart, a ruck around the turret—the ship was stricken dumb—“Go!”

  Ten gravities slammed Nicol backward. A red mist blurred his universe. Stepped-up oxygen flow stung his nostrils.

  The boost stopped. It was as if he had fallen off a cliff. A moment later it smote again, laterally. The swing-around of his couch dizzied him. And again and again. He was zigzagging, randomly though always with an inward-bound component, lest a lightning gun draw a bead on him.

  White slenderness appeared in his view field, enhanced image of a missile. Evasion snatched brutally. The thing passed by at a distance of kilometers. He called up a look at Verdea and saw the Proserpinan slide across the stars; jet aglow. The carrier’s armament was only against meteoroids, controlled by robots programmed for nothing more tricky, but Lirion and Falaire weren’t taking chances. Whatever seemed to be converging on them, they would dodge while their own battery disabled it.

  A second missile shot by, hideously close. The blood drumming in Nicol’s head gave an illusion that he heard the whistle and thunder of its passage.

  Now the carrier was big before him. The couch faced him completely around as brake blast wakened. His heart sprang high, for he was closing in, he was under the defenses and safe from them.

  Deceleration ended, he was in free fall, the couch pivoted him back through a half circle. Quick! Not to risk punching through the ship’s hull to its terrible cargo, the darter would miss it by fifty meters and fly away on trajectory, inert. He touched the control that undid his harness and the control that swung back the grid. A third gesture unsecured the rack of gear. He clutched it in both arms and pushed with his feet.

  For a minute the cosmos cartwheeled. He let the rack go while he operated his jetpack. Stabilized, he recovered the object and, with vast caution, moved toward the vessel. The last few meters he went free. Contact shocked up through boots and shins to rattle his jaw.

  The boots took magnetic hold and he was there, aboard his prize.

  The knowledge that he lived swept over him in a wave and left him dazed, half delirious, breath going in and out, heart slugging, wet and pungent with sweat, garlanded with the galaxy.

  Sense returned. He looked about him. The hull curved away under his feet, smooth metal sharply shadowed. Right and left, flanges made high horizons. Behind him, the radiator disc bisected heaven. Ahead was an edge to sight, he could not discern the turret, but two pieces of the mast were visible above, drifting, flickering as they gyrated, like grotesque stiff comets.

  How still it was. His pulse had slowed to a low surf, his breathing to a whisper. Microgravity made him almost immaterial, a wisp of dandelion fluff briefly settled before the wind sent it onward.

  He felt detached from himself, an intellect calm and limpid, as if he had lately recovered from a high fever. It was interesting to consider what he had won.

  A hundred tonnes of antihydrogen, frozen into a solid block at a temperature of less than one kelvin. That made a sphere about thirteen and a half meters across, supported in a larger sphere of ordinary matter which it must never touch. Diamagnetism induced by the currents in superconducting rings provided the force. This required the same cold as did the keeping of the ice. A paramagnetic refrigeration system provided it. The power for that, and for all else, came from the fission generator at the bottom of the afterstructure. No more was needed; once equilibrium had been established, energy requirements were modest. It was in the sensors and feedbacks maintaining the balance that the true achievement lay.

  To aid them, the inner shell was surrounded by the big hull. The volume between held machinery and circuitry, but mostly it held coolant, bled off into space as necessary, and radiation shielding. Even at close to absolute zero, the antihydrogen ice gave off some atoms, and atoms of normal matter outgassed from the container. Also, in order not to perturb the magnetic levitation, the ship had no generator for a protective field against solar wind and cosmic rays. Thus a slight haze of gamma ray quanta and esoteric particles wavered around the cargo. The wastage must be kept as small as the laws of physi
cs made possible. The proper destiny of antimatter was to feed the fires of technology.

  Antimatter, negative protons, positive electrons, contrary spins, all mathematically equivalent to holes in the vacuum, and when they met with the kind of matter that nature knew, both went up in a blaze of energy, near-total conversion of mass, the ultimate power source.

  A metaphor, Nicol thought. Let it stand for the civilization and the dreams of the Orthosphere, the cybercosm in its reach from the Teramind to the humblest robots, the humans who lived according to its logic—set against the multitudinous civilizations and dreams of the Hetero-sphere, from metamorphs and dissidents on Earth to the wild Lunarians of Proserpina, and on beyond to the stars—What when they could no longer escape each other but came to their final meeting? Annihilation, or transfiguration?

  God! Here he stood sketching out a poem! He had work to do. His laughter at himself echoed shrill in his helmet.

  First, the odd pistol. He had slipped it from beneath his tunic and behind the things in the rack, the last time he went down into Verdea’s hold and practiced being in the darter. He got it, drew back his arm, and flung. The object spun free, gleamed fitfully as it caught sunlight, and was gone into viewless emptiness. Now he had only one to be careful of.

  Get going. Raise a foot, a single foot, breaking it loose from its grip with a minor effort. Bring it forward and down. Repeat with its mate. Take care to have a boot always planted. If your body, swaying virtually weightless, loses both holds, you will float up, a bubble of air and blood, spaceward bound. A snort of the jetpack will return you, of course, but that is awkward and (irrational, when the hull can withstand micrometeoroid impacts, but nightmares are real phenomena too) you want no chance of piercing through to the doomsday load.

  The turret lifted over the worldlet rim. It was a transparent hemisphere crammed with robotics and instrumentation, brain of the ship. No, say ganglion, nerve center, for the ship was an automaton, like a gigantic insect … bearing what pollen into the future? … Nicol lowered the rack and activated its magnetic base. He reached for the cutting torch it held. The next stage of his crime was a forced entry.

  Crime, or military operation? What difference, especially when he was a conscript? Or a mercenary?

  Where the flange on his left curved smoothly down to the hull, just short of the turret, a shape came from behind it and marched toward him. It shone like the metal everywhere around. Four legs bore a tank equipped with a jetpack. Above, three meters tall, loomed a cylinder topped by a sensory globe. From it reached four arms, each with its specialized hand. Any was capable of taking him apart.

  A service robot.

  Nicol’s helmet recognized an incoming signal on the general band and tuned to it. The voice he heard was female. He didn’t know why, maybe happenstance, the range in which it was synthesized being arbitrary, but this gave the final ghastly touch of wrongness. “What is the trouble? Hold still, do not stir, but explain, or I shall have to destroy you. This vessel and its cargo are inviolable. The command supersedes all else. Hold still, do not stir, explain the situation, or I shall have to destroy you.”

  When something unprecedented happened, the ship wakened the sophotect lying in reserve, and it took charge.

  Nicol slipped his rocket gun from the rack. The robot was very near. He fired. The missile leaped, trailing flame, and struck in a gout of smoke. Debris hailed. The robot halted, a ruin. Fragments went off into space, vanishing fireflies. Some of them ricocheted first.

  And he had worried about a landing!

  “You appear to be human,” the sophotect cried in language after language. “Unquestionably, an intelligence directs you. Explain, explain, or be destroyed.”

  Poor innocent. But more robots might well be on their way. Nicol replaced the gun, took out the torch, and moved up to the turret.

  Energy played. Hyalon fused and vaporized. Nicol cut away a segment and cast it aside. It bobbed off, clownishly wobbling. He entered.

  The layout within was complex, not meant for mortals, but his preparations had made it so familiar that his hands moved with never a hesitation. Touch this switch, keyboard that command, slide back this panel, sever that cable, bypass, nullify, make himself the master. Three more robots arrived, but they were little scuttering things which he demolished with a rapid-fire rifle.

  “You that do this, know that you are totally aberrant,” the sophotect pleaded. “Desist. I have powerful machines to help me.”

  Probably two or three big ones were left. They might appear at any time. They could perhaps overrun him.

  “I am acting under necessity,” Nicol stalled. “It’s to prevent a disaster.”

  Such as the expansion of sophotectic intelligence, awareness, humanity’s mind-child, through the universe, until in multiple billions of years it was the universe? No, he would not allow second thoughts, they could slow him down fatally. If he did not go through with the plan, Lirion would ask him why. He had forged his own plan after he spoke with Venator. Now he must abide by it or die.

  “Before my long-range sensors were blasted, they perceived another spacecraft. The responsibility presumably stems from it. Do you realize what potential for horror is here? Explain your actions.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nicol mumbled. He had reached the node he wanted. His fingers pounced to shut consciousness off.

  I haven’t murdered you, he thought amidst the instruments. Not quite. You can be restored to function. You can be restored to the cybercosm. I’ll argue for that. But will it make any difference to you? I’ll never know. You are too alien. As I am.

  Now he could go about his work at leisure and in peace.

  When it was done, he put the weapons and the cutting torch back in the rack, lugged it well out onto the hull, and with a heave sent it off into space, where the pistol had disappeared. When his shipmates asked, he’d explain that the loss was accidental; a robot he’d believed was demolished had suddenly flailed its limbs in a last convulsion before going dead, and also cast itself adrift. They shouldn’t care especially. There should be no further need for the equipment.

  After the rack was gone from sight, he called to Verdea, “All finished and ready for you. Approach at will.” His voice came flat as the fall of a stone.

  No need to talk the Proserpinan in. Robots did the piloting better than he or Lirion would ever be able to. He watched the ship draw cautiously nigh until she went behind the curve of the carrier. A while afterward he felt the thud as she docked and made fast.

  More words to and fro became necessary. Falaire went into space, a living relay satellite for them. Nicol, the lord of the antimatter carrier, manually worked the motors on the rim, aiming the hull as the computers directed him.

  The proper direction that they calculated was for two hours hence. At that point Verdea would commence thrust, forcing her captive onto a new and swifter trajectory. Given so much mass, as well as the need for care, acceleration would be low. However, at the end of about eighty hours she could detach. The treasure ship would be bound for her home port, making orbitfall five years hence.

  Meanwhile Nicol had ample time to rejoin her. The keenness of battle had eroded from him and left the dullness of total exhaustion. Eighty hours? Let him sleep and sleep, wake to go to the sanitor and maybe eat and drink a bit, then sleep some more. His tomorrow could wait until he was ready to cope with it.

  He left the turret, pushed off, and jetted into the open, where stars reached everywhere around him.

  CHAPTER 14

  Weight that was low for Lunarians felt more ghostly to an Earthling than no weight at all. It brought a peculiar dispassion upon Nicol, as if a part of him stood aside and watched the doings of strangers.

  But he was not truly calm. Beneath the rationality that observed, judged, and calculated, there crouched an animal ready to spring. Every sense whetted, he saw the shifting colors in the saloon bulkheads, heard the sibilance of his feet on the deck, scented a pine odor and slight chil
l in the air, with renewed knife-edge sharpness. The hour was on hand that would settle whether he lived or died, and how.

  Lirion, who had called this meeting, waited with Falaire. His arms were folded, his features unreadable, and he had dressed in plain gray. She contrasted, a low-cut dark-red gown clinging to her, hair loose over the bare white shoulders. They had not seated themselves. Nicol took stance across the table from them. “Well beheld,” he greeted in their language.

  “Are you rested and refreshed?” Falaire asked.

  “Yes,” he replied truthfully if perhaps misleadingly.

  “Good,” Lirion said. “The time is nigh, Pilot Nicol,” when Verdea would disengage and accelerate either for Juno or Proserpina.

  “What is your decision?” Falaire inquired. Her eyes never left him. They seemed elfishly big and luminous.

  Though Nicol had no wish to temporize, he judged it was best to get the matter spelled out. “What would you have me do?”

  “Have I not said it enough?”—not often, because Lunarians did not entreat, but more than once. “I’d have you come with us to our world, and abide.”

  Lirion nodded.

  “It need not be a lonely life,” Falaire urged.

  Her idea of loneliness was not his, her race lacked the Terran drive for sociability; and he knew she would never be constant, and doubtless would eventually weary of him and dismiss him. Yet he believed that in her way she was sincere.

  “Remember,” Lirion added, “you would be paid more than on Luna, by at least the cost of the fuel you save us, and be safe from Federation law.”

  For my part in the piracy, Nicol thought; but I can explain how I was trapped into it. For the murder … which I did not commit.

  “Do you think you’d be safe from me?” he replied, level-voiced. The fear was surely in them: What if he learned Seyant was still alive? Their gang must have taken precautions, which included seeing to it that he did not stay on Luna; but nothing was infallible.