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

by Poul Anderson

  They were technicians, not scientists or engineers. But probably no one could have foreseen the danger. Our sole sureness is that every fresh venture into the universe will meet with surprises,

  Never before had humans walked on anything quite like the fracture plane across this cosmic shard. About ten kilometers long and twenty wide, it gashed transversely near the middle of the rough cylindroid. Around it was rock, lighter material that had overlain the primordial core and stuck to it through the sundering crash or, immediately afterward, fell back in a half-molten hail. Dark and rough reached that surface. Meteoritic strikes to wear it down and crater it had been rare in those realms where the fragment wandered. The plain of the plane stood forth stark amidst this stonescape, its sheen faintly grayed by dust, its pockmarks few and wide-scattered.

  On the Orionward edge of that scar reared the peak Beynac had seen from space. The collision must also have formed it, a freakishness of forces at this special point. Maybe a shock wave focused by a density interface had hurled liquefied metal upward in a fountain that congealed as it climbed. The height was not a mountain but a spire, swart, outlandishly twisted and gnarled, a sheer 1500 meters from the rubble at its base to the top, which hooked forth like an eagle's beak over the flat ground of the fracture.

  At its back, rock wasteland lay in tiers and jumbles. When you fared yonder afoot, you saw a strip that was barely thirty meters wide between the jagged horizons to left and right but that lost itself in murkiness for more than a hundred kilometers ahead. Standing beneath the spire and gazing in the other direction, you saw the plain, well-nigh featureless, bordered by stars on either side and by a riven escarpment opposite you, twenty kilometers away. Above loomed a dark that at night was crowded with constellations, glowingly cloven by the Milky Way, haunted by nebulae and sister galaxies. Then the sun tumbled aloft, shrunken to a point but still intolerably fierce, radiant more than five hundred times full Moonlight on Earth. The visible stars became few, but the spindle of Sacajawea, in her companion orbit, might gleam among them. Weight likewise gave a faint sense of not being altogether lost from manhome. It was ghostly at the ends of the asteroid, but here, close to the centroid of a ferrous mass, it exceeded a tenth of a g.

  Thus the scene where Edmond Beynac died.

  "Go up onto the peak," he ordered Nkuhlu and Oliveira. "Along the way, take pictures and gamma readings as usual. What I want you to bring down in your packs is some pieces of the top—exact locations laser-gridded, do not forget this time, by damn! Yes, and a core, a meter or two deep. Plus a seismic sounding. I need to know the inside of this thing. Just how in bloody hell did it happen?"

  He respected the men, therefore he did not add what was obvious, that he had given them a difficult, perhaps dangerous assignment. Himself, he went with Ilitu into the badlands on the farther side of the scar. There he had found another enigma to investigate, strata where theory said no strata should be.

  The ascent by Nkuhlu and Oliveira turned into a small epic of the kind that goes as undertones through every heroic age. Gravity was low but gear was massive and the faces to climb precipitous. An hour might be spent in peering at the next stage before attempting it. At that, thrice one man or the other would have fallen to his death, had he not slammed short on a line attached to his well-anchored partner. Life support labored, spacesuits grew hot, breath harsh, mouths dry; rest was measured in minutes on a ledge, doles of water sucked from a tube, rations and stimulants pushed through a chowlock—until at last, shaky-kneed on the summit, the pair looked down at desolation and out into immensity.

  Thereupon the real work began. Never before had they wrestled with such stuff as this. It was not rock, it was metal; it was not uniform but multiply and intricately alloyed, a tangle of layers, encysted lumps, and vacuoles. When an ion torch cut free a sample, white-hot gobbets might spit back. When a sonic pulse went downward, the whole footing might tremble.

  What caused the disaster was a shaped minicharge. It should simply have split an anomalous plumbic vein, to produce recoverable specimens. Instead, the explosion found a resonance. Weaknesses unstressed for billions of years gave way. The eagle's beak broke apart. A dozen huge, a hundred lesser chunks fell.

  Beynac and Ilitu had emerged back on the plain, out of a crevice where their headlamp lights touched on mysteries. They were bound diagonally across, toward the dome shelter at the far corner and the gig that should bear them again to their ship. The walls around them had screened out radio. Else Beynac would have heard his helpers, vocally recording each thing they did. He might have warned them. Or he too might not have guessed.

  He and his companion were well into the open when the overhang sundered. Tiny at their distance, the rocks went slowly at first. They accelerated, though, worse than a meter per second for every second that passed. They hit bottom at over two hundred kilometers per hour. In most places they would have bounced to a quick stop. Here the ground was smooth and hard. Friction, never much in low gravity, was almost nil. Moreover, the plain was not truly level. The increase of weight toward the asteroidal center of mass gave it a slight but real downslope.

  Oliveira and Nkuhlu went on their bellies and gripped anything they could while the peak shook beneath them. Dust, cast high when the stones landed, briefly obscured heaven. It arced down. Rising to their feet, they saw boulders and gravel fan outward across the iron of the plain, a sleetstorm aimed for the two figures at its middle.

  Now they heard a radio cry. "Nom de Dieu! À bas, Ilitu! Drop you, drop, God damn!" No man could dash clear of what was coming. The geologists flung themselves prone. Still they saw the rocks leap, bound, roll toward them. They felt those soundless impacts as drumbeats up through suits, flesh, bones. Sparks flew, momentary stars below the stars. There was time to think, remember, even speak.

  Ilitu, Lunarian, hissed defiance. Beynac called, steady-toned, "If I do not survive, tell my Dagny I loved her." Otherwise he ignored the frantic voices from spire and ship. But when the storm reached him, he transmitted, surely unawares, "O Maman, Maman— "

  Ilitu was lucky. A pebble pierced his garb, drew blood from a shoulder, and exited. The holes promptly self-sealed. As for Edmond Beynac, a lump the size of his fist smashed open his helmet. Air puffed away into emptiness.

  That is a kindly death. You are unconscious within seconds, gone very soon thereafter.

  * * * *

  His sons met with their mother in her home on the Moon.

  "Later, yes, we shall bring more folk into the circle," Brandir said. "This evenwatch must be ours alone."

  Like her and his brothers, he was standing. Behind him stretched the big viewscreen. Its mobile view of the River Dordogne, green valley and a castle on the heights beyond, seemed doubly remote from his tall, black-and-silver-clad form, the long pale hair and the features that were not wholly Asian nor of any other race upon Earth. And yet, Dagny thought, he too dwelt like a baron of old in his towered mountain.

  "Why?" she asked. Why not, at least, his sisters?

  Because, she realized, these men had not come to mourn with her. For she heard: "We have our father to avenge."

  "What?" she exclaimed. Punish a barren bit of wreckage?

  No. This new generation was strange but sane. If anything, below the cavalier style lay an inborn realism colder than she liked to think about. Language mutates. "What exactly do you mean?" she demanded.

  Kaino was the most outspoken among them. Through his lifespan she had heard him enraged, rancorous, sarcastic, hostile, but never so bleak: "We've a reckoning to make with them who wrought his bane."

  Chill touched her. "Wait!" she cried. "Those two poor guys who touched off the rockfall? No!" She filled her lungs, captured his eyes, and declared to them all, "I forbid you."

  When the ship returned, she had taken the pair aside to give what consolation she was able. "I don't pardon you," she said, "because I have nothing to pardon. Nobody could have known." Oliveira wept and kissed her hands. Nkuhlu saluted as h
e would have saluted Anson Guthrie.

  Brandir swept an impatient gesture. "Needless," he replied. "Innocence is theirs. I grant them my peace." His arrogance bore for Dagny a curious innocence of its own, akin to a cat's. "It is the Earth lords to whom we owe ill."

  "Had we had a vessel that was ours," Kaino said between his teeth, "and a Lunarian crew—"

  "I would have sent him afare well-manned, and geared with the best that technics offers," Brandir stated.

  By now he could probably afford the cost, Dagny thought. His enterprises—the undertakings of those mostly young persons who had pledged fealty to him—were enwebbing the globe. Barred, though, among many things, were the building of spacecraft and any Moondweller enterprise more distant than to Earth.

  "Lunarians would have had a sense for whatever traps lay in wait," Kaino said.

  "Belike not fully they, either," Temerir answered.

  Dagny's glance went to him. Her third son generally kept silent until he saw reason to make some pointed remark. Slight, gray-eyed, pallid, he stood in his plain blue coverall as a contrast to Brandir's elegance and Kaino's flamboyancy. But his was the most purely Lunarian face of the three.

  "Nay," Brandir agreed. "Yet would the odds have been better."

  "And the venture ours," Kaino added.

  Brandir turned to Dagny. "This be the vengeance we take and the memorial we raise," he said, "that we break the ban of the overlords and set Luna free in space. Mother, we ask your aid."

  Dagny's pulse wavered, recovered, and beat high.

  They could not bring about a change in the law without her, she knew. They might amass the wealth of dragons, but politically they were dwarfs, in large part because they lacked the gifts of born politicians.

  Not that oratory, truth-shading, backroom bargains, wheedling, compromise, blackmail, bullying, bribery, promise-breaking, lip service, and self-puffery were very natural to her. "I, I don't know," she stammered.

  Her look went past Brandir to the Dordogne view. It had moved to a mossy spot along the shore, oh, could this be the same spot where she and ‘Mond came walking hand in hand, stopped, skimmed stones across the water, sat down on damp softness and let sun pour through them while he laid his arm about her waist and kissed her? His chin was a little scratchy . . .

  It was as if ice abruptly thawed. She had wolf-howled that first nightwatch alone after the news came, but things beyond counting were necessary to do and say, smiles beyond counting were necessary to manufacture, therefore let the automaton run through its program and at bedtime switch off. The emptiness could await her leisure, it would never go away.

  At this instant—

  Abide a little longer, only a short while more. Then she could loose the tears. Then she could go through his desk, his clothes, his books, the database of his calls and messages to her when he was in the field, all of their years, daycycle by daycycle. Then she could know with her whole being that he was gone into forever, and come to terms with the fact, and warm her hands at his memory.

  Not yet, not quite yet. At this instant, the eyes of his children toward her like guns, she had work to do. The triune god of Edmond Beynac had been kinship, truth, and freedom.

  She straightened. Her muscles pleasured in the movement. "Okay," she said. "I'll try. I'll do my bloody damnedest."

  Politics was more than fraud and brutality, she thought. In fact, most of it was honest, was simply the means by which people ordered the affairs they had in common. Suppose she started by approaching Technocommissioner Lefevre. He and 'Mond had been pretty close . . .

  Kaino embraced her. He hadn't done that since he was ten.

  She would not cry.

  He drew back. She said quickly, "Don't expect miracles. I may or may not get something going. At best, it'll take a long time, and we'll have to scrabble for allies."

  Brandir nodded. "Aught you may need that we three can provide, you shall have," he said, "including our patience."

  "Well, to begin with, your sisters—Verdea, anyway. She might stir up the kind of general sentiment we'll want," as Shelley and Byron did for the liberation of Greece, Solzhenitsyn for Russia, Jaynes for North America.

  "And Fia, yes, I think Fia," Brandir murmured.

  Helen, black-tressed, russet-eyed, reserved, formal, secretive, save where it came to music . . . Carla—Jinann, no, until matters got to the stage of emotional pressure, speeches, parades, demonstrations, appeals, at which point she could be a valuable link between Moondwellers, demonstrative Terrestroid and aloof Lunarian...

  "How long estimate you?" Kaino blurted at Dagny.

  His yearning cut at her. "I don't know, I told you," she sighed.

  "I also must drink of time," Temerir said.

  Surprised, she regarded him where he stood limned against her flowers and asked, "What? Why?"

  "I mean to search after the great planetoid that Father dreamed of," the astronomer answered. Brandir was having his personal observatory built for him on Farside. "The hunt will likely consume years. That is the more so because it shall be our secret."

  "Huh? A scientific project secret? You'll sneak time for it when nobody's looking? How come, for Christ's sake?"

  He spread his fingers. His parents would have shrugged. "Father's emprise won clues for me to follow. But few ever paid much heed to his notions about the early Solar System. Those were taken for the idiosyncracy of an elsewise mighty mind. It should be easy to let the matter slide back into obscurity—with your help, Mother. Who foreknows what a Lunarian may someday discover?" The wintry gaze sharpened upon her. "Unless all here tonight pledge muteness, I will not make the seeking I wish to make in honor of Edmond Beynac."

  A shiver passed through Dagny. Was this, in his way, the most formidable of her sons?

  * * * *

  21

  S

  een from above, the plains reached endless, a thousand mingling hues of green below a summer sky of the same vastness. Often a wind sent waves through the grasses, swift and shadow-delicate; Kenmuir could well-nigh hear them rustle, smell the odors of growth and of sun-warmed soil. Where terrain sank to make a wetland, trees walled the water-gleam and more wings than he could count wheeled above. A few roads ran spearshaft-straight, with hardly any movement upon them. Transmission, towers stood as lonely. They seemed no violation of the landscape. Rather, those soaring, gracefully crowned slendernesses brought to the fore the life around them.

  Which, in a fashion, they also guarded, Kenmuir thought. They were integral to the technology and, yes, the social system that kept all this in being. It hadn't been enough that population decline, plantations genetically engineered for efficiency, and direct synthesis had, between them, emptied many old agricultural regions. To restore a sound ecology—oftener, to create a new one—and then maintain it, that took more than a wish and an economic surplus. It demanded an analysis, a comprehension of the totality, beyond the scope of unaided human brains.

  Yes, he thought, the cybercosm was doing a better job of ruling the biosphere than man had. As long as governments heeded its counsel, Earth would stay green.

  Counsel? Or command? Was there a difference? You accepted a policy recommendation because it made sense, and presently you found there was no going back, because it had become a basis of too much on which people depended; and so you accepted the next recommendation. But hadn't that always been the case? And purely human politics, short-sighted, ignorant, superstitious, animally impassioned, forever repeated the same ghastly mistakes. Kenmuir had once read a remark of Anson Guthrie's: "Is it freedom when you're in a cage bigger than you want to fly across?"

  He shook off his reverie and glanced about him. Three volants were visible afar, and a suborbital went as a rapid spark through heaven. Below him he spied other gleams, machines on their business of ground transport, inspection, tending the country. Trees shaded a small town. How white and peaceful it looked. He supposed the dwellers were all folk who enjoyed surroundings like these. Those who d
idn't simply live on their credit probably worked through telepresence, except for local service enterprises. And they had their hobbies, sports, tours, civic affairs, maybe some special ceremonies and observances; and surely, beneath the placid surface, private lives now and then got as tangled and stormy as ever. So, in its own manner, was the community where he grew up.

  But on clear nights he would walk out of it and from a hilltop yearn toward the stars. How many were they who still did? By what right would Lilisaire deny them a meaning to their lives?

  "Damn!" Kenmuir muttered. "You've a real gift for fribbling away time, haven't you, lad?" He'd brooded enough in the Drylander camp after Aleka left and before her flyer arrived for him. If he meant to honor his commitment, and he did, then indecisiveness amounted to betrayal.

  After all, the purpose was only to recover information that might well be illegally secreted. If it was important, and if the Federation Council and Assembly possessed it, then everybody who cared to inquire would soon have known too. But nobody did. And democracy, rationality itself weren't possible without adequate data.