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

by Poul Anderson

  Now he could again reason integrally and objectively. When he stopped for a meager lunch, on the rim of a gorge that plunged down to a sword-blade glacial river, he called up for fresh consideration the memories he had brought with him from Vancouver Island, halfway around the globe.

  * * * *

  Rain blew off the sea, dashed against the house, blinded the antique windowpanes. A wood fire crackled on the hearth. Its flames were the sole brightness in the high, crepuscular room. Their light ghosted over the man in the carven armchair.

  "Yes," Matthias rumbled, "Ian Kenmuir was here last week. And spent the night. Why do you ask, when obviously you know?"

  Seated opposite him, Venator gave a shrug and a smile. "Rhetorical question," he admitted. "A courtesy, if you will."

  Eyes peered steadily from the craggy visage. "What's your interest in the matter, Pragmatic?"

  Equally obviously, it was considerable. Venator was present in person and had declared his rank in order to impress that on the Rydberg. Nevertheless he kept his tone soft. "My service would like to find out what his errand was."

  "Nothing criminal."

  "I didn't say it was."

  "Ask him."

  "I wish I could. He's disappeared."

  Brows lifted. The big body stirred. "Do you suspect foul play?"

  This might be a chance to make use of the loyalties that bound the Fireball Trothdom together. "It's possible," Venator said. "Any clue that you can give us will be much appreciated."

  Matthias brooded for a minute, while the rain whispered, before he snapped, "A man can drop out of sight for many different reasons. We're not required by law to report our whereabouts every hour. Not yet."

  Did he dread a stifling future? "Not ever, sir," Venator replied. He was sincere. Why should the cybercosm give itself the trouble? "Police protection is a service, not an obligation. It does, though, need the cooperation of the people."

  "Police. Hm." Matthias rubbed his chin. He scorned cosmetic tech, Venator saw; the veins stood out upon his hand, under the brown spots. "If one individual may have come to grief, it concerns the civil police, not the Peace Authority." Had he been fully informed, he would doubtless have added: Most especially not a synnoiont agent of it. "You're being less than candid, señor."

  Venator's preliminary data retrievals had led him to anticipate stubbornness. "Very well, I'll try to explain. To begin indirectly: Do you support the Habitat project?"

  "You mean putting L-5 in Lunar orbit?" The voice quickened. "Of course!"

  "I should think your members all ought to," Venator pursued.

  Matthias scowled. "Some among us have Lunarian sympathies. That's their right."

  "Do they include Kenmuir?" Venator intensified his timbre. "Doesn't he care about other Terrans who hope to go where he's gone, make their lives where he's made his?"

  "Spare the oratory, por favor," Matthias said.

  Venator assembled words. "It's no secret how hostile most Lunarians are to the Habitat. Nor is it a secret that Kenmuir not only pilots for the Venture, he has . . . close personal ties to his employer." Venture, Venator, passed through him. What an ironic similarity. "We have reason to believe he came to Earth on her account."

  "To sabotage the project?" scoffed Matthias. "Pragmatic, I'm an old man. Not much time's left me to spend on stupid games."

  Venator suppressed irritation. "My apologies, sir. I'd no such intention. Nor do I accuse Kenmuir of anything unlawful. It's only—the potentialities, for good or ill—" He let the sentence trail off, as if he forbore to speak of spacecraft and meteoroids crashed with nuclear-bomb force on Earth, malignant biotech and nanotech, every nightmare that laired at the back of many a human skull.

  "What ill?" the Rydberg snorted. "At worst, the Habitat gets cancelled. I agree that for a small minority of us, that would be a disaster, or at least a heartbreaking setback. But let's have no apocalyptic fantasies, eh? Kindly be specific."

  That was no easy task when Venator could not hint at the truth. "We're trying to understand the situation," he said carefully. "It appears the Lunarian faction has something in train. But what? Why don't they proceed openly, through normal politics or persuasion? Call this a bugaboo if you wish, but the Peace Authority dares not stand idly by. Events could conceivably get out of hand, with disastrous consequences." So had they done throughout history, over and over, always; for human affairs are a chaotic system. Not until sophotectic intelligence transcended the human had there been any hope of peace that was not stagnation, progress that was not destruction; and how precarious was still the hold of the steersman's hand! It was encouraging to see the white head nod. "At the same time, we have no legal grounds for direct action. We cannot prove and in fact we do not claim that Captain Kenmuir, or any particular person, has evil intentions. They may be . . . misguided. Inadequately informed. As we ourselves are at present."

  "You may be on a false trail altogether."

  "Yes, we may. Without more information, we cannot just assume that. You know what duty is."

  "What would you have me do?"

  "Tell me what Kenmuir wanted of you."

  The face congealed. "It's normal for consortes to pay respects at Guthrie House when they get the chance."

  "I doubt that Kenmuir was making a pilgrimage or seeking help in a private difficulty. Else why has he disappeared?"

  Matthias sat unyielding. "The Trothdom honors the confidences of its consortes."

  Venator eased his manner a little. "May I guess? You keep a secret here. You have for centuries, the same as you've kept that historic spacecraft."

  "We're far from being the only association that has its mysteries, sanctuaries, and relics," Matthias said low.

  "I'm aware of that. But did Kenmuir perhaps ask you what the secret is?"

  Silence responded.

  Venator sighed. "I don't suppose I may ask the same thing?"

  Matthias grinned. "Oh, you may. You won't get an answer."

  "If I came back with an official order and asked?" Venator challenged.

  Implacability: "Still less would you get an answer. If necessary, I'd blow out my brains."

  Venator shaped a soundless whistle. The fire spat sparks. "Is it that large a thing?"

  "It is. To us." Matthias paused. "But not to you. Nothing important to you. So much I will say."

  "If you did tell me, and if you're right about that, which you probably are, I'd take the secret with me to my cremation," Venator promised.

  "Would you? Could you?"

  Venator thought of screened rooms and sealed, encrypted communication lines. "Why do you mistrust us like this?" he asked softly.

  "Because of what you are," Matthias told him. "Not you as an individual, or even as an officer. The whole way things are going, everywhere in the Solar System. It makes small difference to me. I'm old. But for my grandchildren and their children, I want out."

  "How is the Federation government oppressing you? It means to give you the Habitat."

  "The purpose of government is government," Matthias said. Venator recognized a quotation from Anson Guthrie. "Muy bien, this one meddles and extorts less than any other ever did, I suppose. But that's because it isn't the real power, any more than the national and regional governments below it are. The cybercosm is."

  "We rely on the cybercosm, true—"

  "Exactly."

  "But that it plans to enslave us—there's an apocalyptic fantasy for you!" Venator exclaimed. "How could it? In the name of sanity, why should it?"

  "I didn't say that. Nothing that simple." The heavy voice was silent for a moment. Outside, wind gusted and the rain against the house seethed. "Nor do I pretend to understand what's happening. I'm afraid it's gone beyond all human understanding, though hardly anyone has noticed as yet. For my race, before it's too late, I want out. The Habitat may or may not be a first step, but it's a very long way to the stars."

  Alpha Centauri, Venator thought, a sign in heaven. Without Guthrie and
his colonists yonder, the dream —the chimera—would long since have died its natural death.

  "Meanwhile," Matthias finished, "I'll keep hold as best I can of what's humanly ours. That includes the Founder's Word. Do you follow me?" His bulk rose from the chair. "Enough. Adiós, Pragmatic."

  * * * *

  The odds were that it didn't matter, that the lodgemaster had spoken truthfully and his defiance was symbolic. Indeed, what real threat did Kenmuir and his presumptive companion pose? Venator had guessed she possessed an expertise to which the spaceman would add his special knowledge; between them they might be able to devise a strategy that would find the Proserpina file and break into it.

  Unlikely to the point of preposterousness, at least now, after it had been double-guarded by DNA access codes. More and more, Venator wondered if the whole business was not a feint, intended to draw attention from whatever scheme Lilisaire was actually engineering.

  Other operatives were at work on the case, both sophotectic and human. He was their chief, but he knew better than to interfere. If and when they wanted his guidance, they'd call. Until then he'd assimilate their reports and get on with what he could do best himself.

  Kenmuir and his partner were worth tracking down for the clues they could maybe provide to Lilisaire's intent. Besides—Venator smiled—it was an interesting problem.

  Striding along, he reconsidered it. They could not forever move around hidden from the system. Already spoor of them must be there, in Traffic Control databases, in casual encounters, perhaps even in an unusual occurrence or two. People observed blurrily, remembered poorly, forgot altogether, or lied. The cybercosm did not. For instance, any service sophotect that had chanced to meet Kenmuir would recognize his image when it came over the net and supply every detail of his actions.

  But machines of that kind were numbered in the millions, not to speak of more specialized ones, both sentient and robotic. The system was worldwide, hopelessly huge. A search through its entirety would take days or worse, tying up capabilities needed elsewhere. And during those days, what might Lilisaire make happen?

  Well, you could focus your efforts. Delineate local units of manageable size. Inquire of each if anything had taken place fitting such-and-such parameters, within its area. That should yield a number of responses not too large, which could then be winnowed further. It would still devour time, but—

  Whatever he did, he must act. However slight the chance of revelation was, he could not passively hazard it.

  Venator shook his head. Sometimes he still found it hard to see how Proserpina could possibly mean that much.

  The short-range politics was clear enough. Let the fact out, and the Terrans who wanted the Habitat would suddenly find themselves in alliance with the Lunarians who abhorred it, or at any rate not irresolvably opposed to them; and how could the Teramind itself make the mass of humankind realize that this threatened catastrophe?

  Because why did it? Revival of the Faustian soul, how vague that sounded. How many dwellers in this mostly quiet, happy world knew what it meant, let alone what it portended?

  And did it really spell evil? Reaching for the stars, Faustian man had well-nigh ruined his planet and obliterated his species. Yet the knowledge he wrested from an uncaring cosmos, the instrumentalities he forged, were they not that from which the age of sanity had flowered?

  Venator shivered in an evening going bleak. Westward the thinnest sickle of a new Moon sank below the mountains. Eastward, night was on the way.

  He had lived the horrors of the past, wars, tyrannies, fanaticisms, rampant crime, millstone poverty, wasted land, poisoned waters, deadly air, the breaking of the human spirit, alienation, throngs of the desperately lonely, the triumph first of the mediocre and then of the idiotic, in civilization after suicidal civilization. He had lived them though books, multiceivers, quiviras, imagination, guided by the great sophotectic minds. Not that they had told him what to think. They had led him to the facts and told him he must think. Against the past, he had seen the gentle present and the infinitely unfolding future. Therefore—yes, he was a hunter born, but nevertheless—therefore he became an officer of the Peace Authority.

  But did an arrogant and unbounded ambition necessarily bring damnation? Fireball Enterprises had created a fellowship of shared loyalty and achievement whose remnant endured on Earth to this day.

  At Alpha Centauri too, a remembrance and a lure.

  Venator hastened his footsteps. Another beacon shone before him, the lighted station.

  As if inspired by the sight, an idea came. He snapped his fingers, annoyed at himself. Why hadn't he thought of it earlier? Probably because the contingency against which it would guard was so remote. Still, it was an easy precaution to take, and if somehow it justified itself, why, the reward would be past all measure.

  Evidently it hadn't occurred to the cybercosm either. The higher machine intelligences could well have come up with it, if only by running through permutations of concepts at the near-light speed of their data processing. But they had loftier occupations than this. The lower-level sophotects were as capable as he was, but in different ways. The electrophotonic brain did not work like the chemical neuroglandular system. That was the reason there were synnoionts.

  Venator entered the main building and descended. Underneath it he went along a corridor where strange abstract shapes glimmered in the walls and strange abstract notes sounded out of them. Linked into the net, he could grasp and savor a little of what such art evoked. Isolated in his flesh, he could not. He was the sole human here, monastically lodged and nourished. That was by his choice. Mortal indulgences belonged among mortals.

  A detached sophotect passed by. The body it was wearing rolled on wheels and sprouted implements. "Greeting, Pragmatic," it called courteously. He answered and they parted.

  Elsewhere he had worked side by side with beings like this, and afterward sat in actual conversation. Not often, though. It had been agreeable and fascinating to him, but both knew how superficial it was. Direct data exchange was the natural way of the machines. Venator longed to begin upon it.

  When he reached his communion room, he was trembling with eagerness. But that was the animal, which knew that soon the brain would be in rapture. Endorphins. . . . Somatically trained, he willed calm, donned the interlink, lay down on the couch, and requested clearance.

  Although his purpose was simple and straightforward, he sensed the cybercosm as a single vast organism with a hundred billion avatars. The point-nexus that was his awareness could flash through strand after strand of the web, the ever-changing connectivity, to join any existence within it.

  A bank of instruments at the bottom of the sea tasted the chemistries of a black smoker and the life it fed. A robot repaired the drainage line of a village in Yunnan. A monitor kept watch over the growth, atom by atom, of fullerene cables in a nanotank. A service sophotect chose the proper pseudo-virus to destroy precancerous cells in an aging human. Traffic Control kept aircraft in their millions safely flying, as intricately as a body circulates blood. An intelligence developed the logical structure needed for the proof or disproof of a theorem—but from that work the flitting point must retreat, half dazzled, half bewildered.

  It was in wholeness with the world.

  After a split second more full than a mortal lifetime, it moved to its purpose. From the net it raised the attention of a specific program, and they communicated.

  In words, which the communication was not:

  SHOULD THERE BE ANY ENTRY WHATSOEVER OF THE PROSERPINA FILE, AUTHORIZED OR NOT, TRACE THE LOCATION OF THE SOURCE AND INFORM AGENT VENATOR. ALERT THE NEAREST PEACE AUTHORITY BASE FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION.

  DO NOT SPECIFY THE REASON FOR THIS.

  APPROVED, responded the system. ENTERED AS AN INSTRUCTION.

  And then, like a mother's anxious voice:

  You are troubled. You are in doubt.

  —I do not doubt, Venator saw. I do not quite comprehend, but I will believe.

/>   (How can the system, even the Teramind, know what the outcome would be? Humankind is mathematically chaotic. We can learn no more than that history has certain attractors. Attempts at control may send it from one to another, unpredictably. A new element, introduced, may change the entirety in radical fashion, from the configuration to the very dimensionality. Is it possible to write the equations? If they be written, is it possible to solve them? A danger is foreseeable, but a disaster either happens or it does not. We exist as we are because those who existed before us ran fearsome risks. How can we be sure of what we are denying those who exist after us, if we dare not set ourselves at hazard?)

  We cannot be sure.

  —But in that case—

  You shall know.