The Stars are also Fire - [Harvest the Stars 02]

by Poul Anderson

  She recalled to him the long, Machiavellian struggle to keep Luna sovereign, out of the Federation, waged by Niolente and her cohorts after Guthrie and Rinndalir left for Alpha Centauri and Fireball began disbanding. He had not known of several missions into deep space, whose purpose was never divulged, nor that those were what seemed to have given Niolente the confidence to keep striving.

  Of course, in the end it had not helped her. Events torrented, the proclamation of the republic by one faction, its instant recognition by the governments of Earth, the dispatch of Peace Authority troops to its aid. No doubt the old woman had then resolved to die fighting, for the armed force she whistled up had no hope whatsoever. It was inevitable that the Authority would afterward ransack every site she had ever occupied, including any databases kept in them.

  Kenmuir had not been aware that all the material was confiscated, that what was later released was incomplete, or that the official story about the accidental wiping of some files was inconsistent with the methodical procedures of the man in charge. Nobody had taken any special notice. The whole business was soon forgotten, except among certain of her direct descendants.

  "She was working on something in far space?" he breathed.

  "It must have been," Lilisaire said. "A weapon or—I know not what."

  "Then how should I?"

  She drained her glass and beckoned him to pour another. First he finished his own. The leopard got up and padded about the room, black and gold among the light-shards.

  "Hear me," Lilisaire said. "The tradition I spoke of goes further back still, to the time of Dagny Beynac. A son of hers made an expedition into the deeps from which he did not return. Naught of real explanation was ever given. The family held to itself whatever knowledge had been gained."

  In hopes of eventual profit? That would have been quite Lunarian. But so, too, would have been keeping the secret for a memorial, an enduring sacrifice to sorrow.

  "Searching what records remain, for the conquerors did not find everything, I have come to feel sure that this discovery was what Niolente had intent to make use of," Lilisaire continued. "Could we acquire it, we might achieve a part of her hope. But time is short, and even before the Habitat makes everything too late for us, the enemy's suspicions may lead him to take forestalling action. Thus, as soon as I had this clue, I sent for you, who will be able to look further."

  "I, uh, I've no idea where to begin," he demurred.

  Again her look pierced him. "On Earth."

  "What?" He realized he was gaping, and snapped his jaw shut. "How?"

  "Well do you know that the first Rydberg was the first child of Dagny Beynac, and came to be in her close confidence. And . . . to this day, the Fireball lodgemaster guards some arcanum, which appears to go back to that time of upheaval."

  "You mean—"

  She sighed. "A thin possibility, yes; but I see scant others."

  "A weapon—" Chill tingled through Kenmuir. It was bad enough when Fireball turned spacecraft against the Avantists. Justified though the action might have been, the outrage it globally provoked brought on the end of Fireball and of sovereign Luna. A teratonne nuclear warhead, an asteroid made dirigible—"No!"

  "It may not be that," she said quickly. "Or if it is, the menace alone should win us our freedom. In any case, why, since the powers on Earth are so anxious to keep it secret, the simple threat of disclosure would be a weapon for us, nay?"

  He tossed off a long drink. The wine deserved closer attention, but he had to brace himself. As the glow spread through his blood, he became able to say, almost thoughtfully, "Y-yes, if the information's been buried that deep, there must be a strong reason. . . . It could be a good reason, though."

  "I ask no betrayal of you," she said with a flick of scorn. "Find what you can and choose what you can."

  It hurt worse than he would have expected. "I scarcely believe the Rydberg will confide in me just for the asking," he said.

  Warmth returned, and with it a smile. "If you explain, maychance he will. If not, or if what he tells is of no avail, then—" She let the sentence trail off like music.

  "Yes?" he prompted out of his pulsebeat.

  "I have other agents on Earth. Would you be willing to join forces with one of them? Your ken of space may greatly help."

  This was demented, he thought. He was no spy, no rebel, nothing but a middle-aged, law-abiding technician whose audacity was all in the head, interplay with impersonal forces, out among stars which the contentions and griefs of humankind would never touch. Yet she flung him a challenge, and—she wanted it, she needed it, this might be her life that he could save.

  "I will try," he heard himself mumble.

  She shouted, cast her goblet shattering against the diamond, and was in his arms.

  The living couch received them and responded to them.

  In his heart he could only praise the terrible necessity that had brought her race into being.

  * * * *

  8

  The Mother of the Moon

  N

  ight on Lunar Farside is a glory of stars. With neither sun nor Earth to override them, you need only walk away from human lights and your sky will brim with brilliance, six thousand or more stars revealed to an eye that has nothing between it and them but a clear plate and a few centimeters of breath. They gleam unblinking where they crowd the crystal dark, and the brightest are not all white; many burn steel-blue, gold, amber, bronze-red. The constellations are no longer geometrical diagrams so much as they are prodigally marshalling hosts, planets ablaze among them. Nebulae rear thunderhead-black or float softly aglow. From horizon to horizon arches the galactic belt, not milky to sight but icy, a winter river banked and islanded with night. Beyond it you may spy its nearer sisters, the clotted Magellanics, Andromeda vague and huge, perhaps one or two more glimpsed across yet greater deeps. Turn off your receiver and you are wholly of this vision, in a silence as vast as its reaches; far, far beneath it, the murmurs of your body declare that you are alive, you are what is beholding. Sometimes a spark hastens aloft, a satellite. It is quickly lost in the Moon's shadow.

  Dagny Beynac sighed and turned back toward camp. She couldn't stand long agaze, she had work to do.

  First, scheduled whirly time. The boss ought not to keep anybody waiting. She swung into kangaroo pace, eight or ten kilometers per hour across the murky lava, an easy and exhilarating rhythm. The lamps ahead glared the stars away from her.

  The other three were already at the centrifuge. In undiffusing vacuum, not entirely helped by reflection off surroundings, light and shadow, whiteness and dust made their spacesuits a goblin chiaroscuro. Like every newcomer, Dagny when she arrived on the Moon had had to learn how to see, especially after sunset on Farside. Today she effortlessly identified yonder shapes, the supply depot and shelters in their background, the crews and machines, the widespread complexities they were creating. A multi-facility astronomical observatory was under construction in Mare Moscoviense, and she in charge of housing for its personnel. Advancement was fast if you were able, if you survived.

  She turned her radio back on. Switching it off in the field had been dead against regulations, but now and then she needed to be alone for a short while with heaven and the life inside her. "Hi," she greeted. "Prepared and eager?"

  Wim den Boer mistook the cheerful sarcasm. "No," he grumbled. "Damnation, a frill three hours? I'm busy! You know how that hitch in delivering the pumps has thrown my section behind schedule."

  Dagny came to the group and stopped. "Friend," she replied, "when this job is done and we're back in Bowen—, stand me a beer in the Fuel tank and I'll tell you tales of woe that'll freeze yours in your stein. Meanwhile, don't fret your pretty little head, or I'll decide it is pretty little. The zeroth law of thermodynamics says that everything takes longer and costs more."

  "We are rather badly delayed, though, aren't we?" Jane Ireland argued. She was a good electrical engineer—had helped troubleshoot the grid that carried
power from sunlit Criswells to the transmitters on Nearside—but overanxious about political questions. "Do you appreciate how hard Eurospace and Eco-Astro lobby against awarding contracts like this to any private company, ours above all? If we fail here—"

  "We won't," Dagny vowed. "Let the chief fight his particular battles. If Guthrie can't outwangle, outconnive, and outroar the combined governments of Earth, we may as well go back there and the North Americans among us embrace the Renewal. Our way of helping him is to meet the contract in spite of whatever Murphy slings at us."

  She had learned early on that her position required even more human skills than technical ones, and set herself to master them. Edmond had been a wonderful counselor at first, but soon she must necessarily grope her own way forward, trial and error, by feel rather than rules, because each individual is unique in the universe.

  Pedro Noguchi came to her assistance: "Listen, Wim, Jane, you cannot serve if you fall sick. We have been skimping these sessions as it is. Instead of wasting time complaining, shall we get it done with?"

  That quieted them. Strange, Dagny often thought, the loyalty so many of its people bore for Fireball, maybe more than for their countries. She had her personal reasons, but what about the rest? The well-spring couldn't merely be exciting work, high pay, simpático management, no limit on a career except your ability and luck. In Fireball, somehow, you belonged, you shared a spirit, as few did anywhere on Earth.

  She sought her place and got busy.

  The field centrifuge sheered its column above her, 250 centimeters from the broad, gripfooted base, to the four rotor arms. Portable, it didn't have much in common with the giant stationary machines in the settlements. The arms were hollow, flaring trumpet-like from the pillar. Out of each dangled a cable, at the end of which hung a cage, its floor a 150-centimeter disc knee-high above the ground. Within this were simple items of exercise equipment, secured by brackets. Beneath the disc was welded a box for the makeweight.

  Nobody present, complete with suit and gear, massed the 125 kilos—21 kilos Lunar weight—that made a standard load. Dagny stepped onto a scale built into the base. Disdaining to punch the calculator on her left sleeve, she figured her deficit mentally, and selected the bricks needed to equal it from a stack nearby. Having slid the right amount into the box, she dogged it shut and mounted to the cage. There she closed the door, made herself fast just in case, and commanded, "Report."

  "Ready. . . . Ready. . . . Ready," she heard.

  "Centrifuge to Overview, commencing three-hour operation," she called. The man in the skeletal tower a kilometer distant acknowledged. He'd keep an eye on them as he did on the worksites, also just in case. "We're off," Dagny said. Each cage had a start and stop button, but she, being senior, pressed hers.

  The motor in the column base awoke. The rotor began to turn. The gripfeet flexed their metal toes and extended their claws over ground that was neither smooth nor level and that might have been rubble rather than hard stone. Sensors monitored shifting forces and gave orders to effectors; the machine held itself in dynamic balance. As the rotor increased speed and the cages lifted, their cables unreeled to full length and flew well-nigh horizontal. When the system had reached steady state, each occupant stood under an Earth gravity of acceleration.

  Dagny unbuckled. For a minute or two she looked between the bars, upward from Luna. Some persons faced the ground, some sideways, some kept their eyes mostly closed, whatever gave them the least vertigo; she chose the heavens. Stars went in a wild wheel whose hub was above her head. Her breathing and that of her companions had loudened. Vibration was a faint thrum in her bloodstream. Heaviness laid a hand on her suit, flesh, bones, every last cell of her.

  It felt pleasant, actually. She reveled in low-weight, but nature had not meant her for that freedom.

  Standing there, she wondered how long ago her fate was set. A third of a billion years, when her ancestors crawled from the sea and must uphold themselves? 'Mond could tell her exactly. She knew the end result all too well, the multitudinous, marvelous, imprisoning adaptations that evolution forged on its single world. Lunar gravity simply was not enough for the creature from Earth.

  Oh, nowhere near as bad as micro. You didn't get nauseated, your countenance didn't puff, muscles and skeleton dwindled rather slowly, you could go years before the harm was irreversible and then have a few years more until you died—or so the extrapolation from lab animals and computer models forecast. But the decay was pervasive, a matter of fluid balance and cell chemistry, cardiovascular degeneration, blood-brain barrier malfunction, tumorous growth of various tissues, sclerosis or necrosis of others, the earliest effects clinically detectable after a twelvemonth or less.

  If you wanted to keep your health, you'd better subject yourself often to the heft for which you were born.

  Born. Dagny's hand stole to her belly. Memories tumbled through her like the stars overhead.

  They hadn't intended this, she and 'Mond, not till they were sure it was safe. Her booster shot wasn't due for half a year. Could that failure be another consequence of low-g? (Perhaps idiosyncratic, because Lord knew plenty of love got made on Luna, frequently in delightful ways impractical elsewhere.) The doctor suggested abortion. Dagny demanded violently to know what the alternative was. The doctor called a conference across orbital distance. The specialists opined that the pregnancy would probably be normal.

  After all, embryo and fetus would be afloat in the amniotic fluid, the little primordial ocean. Mammals, including a monkey, had borne young on the Moon, and the young lived, once experiment had established what the proper centrifuging regime was for a given species.

  The specialists guaranteed nothing, of course. Knowledge was too scant. Science would be glad of the opportunity to observe and learn, but Mrs. Beynac must understand that this eventuality was quite unanticipated. The regimes and treatments collectively dubbed biomedicine could extend life expectancy to well over a century, but biomedicine could not alter the basic human organism. That required modification of the DNA. A scheme was under development, offering the sole realistic hope for a genuine Lunar colony—highly controversial, not relevant to Mrs. Beynac, who might find her infant's welfare requiring she move back to Earth. . . .

  Okay, if absolutely necessary. Only if. Anyhow, she could get one more field job under her belt before the belt stretched too wide to fit in a spacesuit. Morning sickness—racking, an order of magnitude beyond that now half-unreal first time—had been outlived. The signs and tests reassured. Fireball would never dismiss or demote or reprimand her if she transferred Earthside, but Fireball had urgent need of her on Farside. So here she stood, at her second trimester, alert, able-bodied, carrying Edmond's child.

  Juliana, she said within herself. It was going to be a girl. Juliana, Moon baby, welcome to the future.

  Enough remembrance, enough sentiment. If you wanted to maximize the benefits of high-g and minimize the time you must spend under it, you didn't only stand or sit, you exercised.

  Hunkering down, Dagny unfastened the bar bells and rose holding them. She moved with care, to avoid dizziness. The Terrestrial pseudo-weight was a waistline average, the differential between head and feet nearly ten percent. Coriolis force posed less of a nuisance; still, you had to allow for it too. The big centrifuges were far more comfortable in both respects. Downright luxurious, the largest at Port Bowen—private compartments, couches—Dagny grinned. She strongly suspected Juliana was begotten there.

  Raise the bells, lower them, raise, lower, swing them crossways, commence the stationary jogging. Flex, tense, flex, let your body enjoy while your mind rides the carousel of stars. Breathe deep, flush out the lungs, smell the sweet sweat, savor the growing warmth. The heart beats high, the blood quickens, and is that another quickening below, does Juliana also dance?

  No, Dagny remembered, way too early, not yet, not yet.

  The pain went through her like a harrow through a field.

  * * * *

&nbs
p; The hospital in Port Bowen was small, austere, and superbly equipped. By the time Edmond Beynac got there from his current expedition, his wife was almost ready for discharge.

  "You needn't come," she had said to him over the phone when first he called. "I'm okay. I'll be out of here fast."

  "Bloody 'ell!" he had replied, his accent thickened. "You ‘ave—un avortement—se meescarriage, een a, a God damn spacesuit—and I should stay from you?" While the radio link carried an image, it was poor and the screen tiny. She couldn't be certain, but thought she saw tears on his cheeks. She never had before.

  Aborting as convulsively as she did, incompletely till her team got her inside and the armor off, had in fact torn her up considerably. She was young and vigorous, though, and the hospital staff had more than surgery at their command, they had the latest molecular biotech.

  She was sitting up in bed after a walk along the corridors when he arrived. The reader in her hands displayed The Sea-Wolf; she liked adventure stories, and hardly any were being written these days. The room was private, but on that account a cubicle. Edmond's bulk crowded her. Not that she minded. His arms went strong around her, trembling a bit, and his kiss gave her a dear scratch of stubble, and when she laid her head against his breast she felt the slugging behind the ribs.