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

by Poul Anderson

  After they had long been cramped in their vehicle, freedom to move brought exuberance as abrupt as the sunrise. "Hai-ah!" Kaino shouted. Forward he went in panther leaps. His spacesuit, state of the art, flexed around him, almost a second skin. Powerpack and life support scarcely weighted him. The dense globe pulled with a force 86 percent that of home, ample for Lunarian health and childbirth, liberating in its lightness. Landscape rivered from the near horizon to flow away beneath his feet. Breath sang in his nostrils, alive with a pungency of sweat.

  He halted at the nearest formation. Ilitu joined him. They gazed. The robot trailed forlornly in their direction. It was built and programmed for a certain class of scientific tasks; at everything else, if it was capable at all, it was weak, slow, and stupid.

  "What is this?" Kaino whispered.

  From space, the travelers had simply become aware of curious protrusions on an unfamiliar sort of territory. They could not untangle the shapes. Seen close up, the thing was sheerly weird.

  An Earthdweller would have thought of coral. Lunarians knew that marvel only in books and screens. An intricate filigree rose from the ground, thin, its topmost spires some 150 centimeters high, its width variable with a maximum of about 100. Variable too was the brightness of strands, nodules, and rosettes; but many gleamed in the hard eastern light.

  Ilitu walked around it, leaned close, touched, peered, hunkered, rose, took a magnifying glass from his tool pouch and went over the irregularities bit by bit. When the robot reached him, he ignored it. The sun climbed higher, breakneck fast to a Lunarian. More stars disappeared.

  Kaino began to shift about and hum a tune to himself.

  "A ferrous alloy, I think," Ilitu said at length. "You observe whole metallic sheets strewn across the regolith. I deem they're overlays, not the inner iron bared, although we must verify that. I would guess that this and its fellows are spatter formations. An upheaval flung molten drops and gobbets about. When they came down in a group, they welded together as they solidified, which they would have done very quickly."

  Kaino went alert. "A meteoroid strike? We've no sign of a crater."

  "It may have happened when the planetoid was forming out of fragments, itself hot and plastic. . . . Hai, that suggests the original, catastrophic collision occurred near Jupiter, because I should think a strong magnetic field was present to urge so many gouts along converging arcs. And that suggests enormously about the origin of this body and its orbit. . . about the early history of the asteroid belt, the entire Solar System—" Ilitu beat fist in palm, over and over. He stared outward at the fading stars.

  "If Father could have known!" broke from Kaino.

  "Yes. I remember. He would have jubilated." Ilitu's softness went thoughtful again. "This is but a preliminary, crude hypothesis of mine. It could be wrong. Already I wonder if this unique planetoid may not have had, in the past, a kind of vulcanism special to itself. It does possess a significant magnetic field of its own, you recall, and the formation here has several resemblances to the Pele's Hair phenomenon on Earth."

  "Eyach, we can take a few hours," Kaino said. "Gather more data."

  Ilitu raised his upper lip off the front teeth. His parents would have grinned differently. "I will."

  He took out a reader, keyed a map onto the screen, and studied it. His eyes darted about, correlating what he saw with the cartography done in orbit. Iron growths were scattered across the plain. About two kilometers hence, close to the southern horizon, a metallic band glistered from edge to edge of vision, some three meters wide. On the far side of it reared a whole row of coraloids, up to five meters tall.

  "We'll go yonder," he said, pointing.

  Kaino laughed. "I awaited no less. Ho-hah!"

  They set forth, as swiftly as before. In a few minutes Kaino veered. "Where go you?" asked Ilitu without changing course.

  "That bush there." It was small but full of sparkles.

  "I'll study the major objects first. If time remains and you've found this one interesting, I'll come back to it." Ilitu continued.

  Kaino squatted down by the pseudo-shrub. Particles embedded in the darker iron caught sunlight and shone like glass. Maybe that was what they were, he decided after examination: fused silica entrained in the drops that had made the thing. Or they could be another mineral, such as a pyrite. He was no expert. Clearly, though, the geologist's intuition had been right. Here was nothing notable, merely beautiful. Kaino straightened and started off to rejoin his comrade.

  Ilitu had just reached the metallic strip in front of his destination. A leap brought him onto it.

  It split asunder. He fell from sight.

  "Yaaaa!" screamed Kaino. He went into full low-gravity speed. Barely did he check himself at the border of the ribbon.

  Ribbon indeed, he saw. This part of it, if not all, was no deposit sprayed across the rocks. It was, or had been, a cover for a pit—a cavern, a crevasse, or whatever—one of the emptinesses that seismic sounding had shown riddled the planetoid, as Ilitu predicted.

  It must have been a freak, a sheet of moltenness thrown sidewise rather than downward in those moments of rage when Iron Heath took form. Low weight let it solidify before it dropped into the hole—unless the hole had appeared simultaneously, the ground rent by forces running wild—The layer was thin, and the cosmic rays of four billion years, spalling, transmuting, must have weakened it further—

  Kaino went on his belly, crept forward, stuck his helmet over the gap. He failed to notice how the shingle slithered underneath him. Blackness welled below. "Ilitu," he called. "Ilitu, do you receive me? Can you hear me?"

  Silence hummed in his earplugs.

  He got a flashlight from his kit and shone it downward. Light returned dim, diffused off a huddled whiteness. Kaino played the beam to and fro. Yes, a spacesuit. Still no response. It was hard to gauge the distance when murk swallowed visual cues. He passed his ray slowly upward. The little pool of undiffused illumination wavered among shadows. An inexperienced man would have been nightmarishly bewildered.

  Kaino, intimate with the Moon and certain asteroids, interpreted what he saw. He couldn't tell how long the fissure was, nor did he care, but it was about 175 centimeters broad here at the top and narrowed bottomwards. Ilitu lay forty or fifty meters below him. A nasty fall, possibly lethal, even in this gravity; but friction with the rough walls might have slowed it. There seemed to be depths beyond the motionless form. Ilitu might be caught on a ledge.

  So.

  Kaino got his feet and aimed his transmission aloft. The ship was not there at the moment, but her crew had distributed relays in the same orbit. "Code Zero," he intoned. Absolute emergency. "Kaino on Code Zero."

  Etana's voice darted at him: "What's awry?"

  Tersely, he explained. "Raise Brandir," he finished. "We'll want equipment for snatching him out—a cable and motor to lower a pallet, I'd guess—as well as the full medical panoply."

  "Can't your Number One robot rescue him?"

  Kaino glanced at the machine, which had arrived and stood awaiting his orders. "Nay," he said, "it's useless." That body could not clamber down, and the program could not cope with the unknowns hiding in the dark.

  "You may need to haul me up too," he said. "I'm going after him."

  "No!" she yelled, "Kaino, you—" He heard the gulp. "At least fetch a line for yourself and have the robot hold it."

  "That may well take too long. Ilitu may be dying."

  "He may be dead. Belike he is. You don't hear him, do you? Kaino, stay!"

  "He is my follower. I am a Beynac. Raise Brandir, I told you." The pilot switched off his widecaster.

  He did take a minute to instruct the robot: Go back to the van, bring that wire rope, lower it to him if he was still down in the hole. Meanwhile he removed the bulky pack that held food, reserve water, and field equipment. Having activated his head and breast lamps, he went on all fours to the edge of the gap and set about entering it.

  Stones kept skidding around.
Twice he nearly lost his hold and tumbled. That made him laugh, low, to himself. On the third try he succeeded, bootsoles braced against one wall, life support unit against the opposite side. He began to work his way downward.

  It was wicked going. He could not properly feel the surfaces through his outfit. The lights were a poor help, sliding off lumps, diving into cracks, mingling with shadows that dashed about like cat's paws of the gloom. Often he started to slip. Only low gravity and quick reflexes let him recover. As he descended and the crevice contracted, his posture made him ever more awkward. Stressed muscles hurt. Sweat soaked his undergarb and stung his eyes. Breath rasped a throat gone dry. He toiled onward.

  Wait. Had it grown a touch easier? More flex in the legs—He realized what he had been unable to see from above, that on the side where his feet were, the rift was widening again. If it broadened too much, he could fare no deeper. Unless—

  Somehow he maneuvered about until by twisting his neck he could look the way he was bound. Light picked out the sprawled form there and sheened off jagged pieces of the broken roof. Ilitu had indeed fallen onto a narrow shelf projecting from the wall at Kaino's back. Its ends vanished in the same darkness that gaped beside it. Pure luck. . . . No, not quite. That being the wall which slanted inward the whole way, and nearer to where the geologist fell through, it must have acted as a chute, its ruggedness catching at spacesuit and pack, slowing and guiding him.

  Now that Kaino saw his objective half clearly, he could estimate dimensions and distances. The ledge was about ten meters below him, an easy drop in this weight, but it was less than a meter wide, and next to it yawned a vacantness a full two meters across. Low acceleration would give him a chance to push or kick at the iron, correct his course, but he'd have just three or four seconds, and if he missed his landing, that would doubtless be that.

  "Convenient, being 98 percent chimpanzee," he muttered. After a moment's study he thrust and let go.

  His drop was timeless, utter action. But when impact jarred through his bones and he knew himself safe, he glanced upward, saw the opening high above him full of stars, and laughed till his helmet echoed.

  To work. Carefully, lest he go over the rim, he knelt Ilitu lay on his back. A sheetlike piece of metal slanted across the upper body. It had screened off transmission. Kaino plucked it away, tossed it aside, and heard wheezing breath. He leaned forward. Because he had come down at Ilitu's head, he saw the face inverted, a chiaroscuro behind the hyalon, lights and shadows aflicker as his lamps moved. The lids were slit-open, the eyeballs ghastly slivers of white. Saliva bubbled pink on the parted lips. "Are you awake?" he asked. The breathing replied.

  His search found the telltales on the wrists. "Eyach," he whispered. Temperature inside the suit was acceptable, but oxygen was at 15 percent and dropping, carbon dioxide and water vapor much too thick. That meant the powerpack was operative but the air recycler knocked out and the reserve bottle emptied. "Hu," Kaino said, "I came in time by a frog's whisker, nay?"

  He couldn't make repairs. However, accidents to recyclers were known and feared. There was provision. He reached around his shoulder and released the bypass tube coiled and bracketed on his life support module.

  More cautiously, hoping he inflicted no new injury, he eased Ilitu's torso up. His knee supported it while he deployed the corresponding tube, screwed the two free ends together, and opened the valves. Again he lowered his companion. They were joined by a meter of umbilicus, and his unit did duty for both.

  He wrinkled his nose as foul air mingled with fresh. That took a while to clear. Thereafter, as long as neither exerted himself—and neither was about to!— the system was adequate.

  He could do nothing more but wait. Curiosity overwhelmed him. Although the surface was metal-slippery and sloped down, he put his head over its verge and shot his light that way. A whistle escaped him. Somewhat under the ledge, the opposite wall bulged back inward and the two sides converged. He could not see the bottom where they met, because fifty or sixty meters below him, where the gap was about one meter wide, it was choked with shards from above. Most, bouncing off the walls and this shelf, had gotten jammed there. Some were pointed, some were thin and surely sharp along their broken edges. Even here, to fall on them would be like falling into an array of knives. Space armor could fend them off. His flexible suit could not. Kaino withdrew to a sitting position.

  Ilitu's breath rattled. The minutes grew very long.

  A motion caught Kaino's eye. He flashed his beams at it and saw a line descending. The robot had been obedient to his orders. The line slithered across the ledge and onward before it stopped. With limited judgment, the robot had paid out all.

  Kaino saw no stars occluded. Nevertheless the machine must be at the rim of the chasm and thrusting an antenna over, for he received: "Your command executed. Pray, what is next?" On a whim, he had had the synthetic voice made throaty female. He wished now he hadn't.

  "Drag the cable, m-ng, north," he directed. Inclined though its orbit was, the planetoid had a pole in the same celestial hemisphere as Ursa Minor. "I can't reach it. . . . Ah. I did. Stop." He secured bights around his waist and, with an effort, Ilitu's, precaution against contingency.

  The program had a degree of initiative. "Shall I raise you?"

  "No. Stand by." No telling what the damage to Ilitu was. A major concussion at least, a broken back or rib-ends into the lungs entirely possible. Rough handling might well kill him. That would be the end. The expedition had no facilities for cellular preservation, let alone revival. Better wait for a proper rig, trusting that meanwhile he wouldn't die or that cerebral hemorrhage wouldn't harm his brain beyond clone regeneration.

  Again Kaino composed his mind. Time trudged. He remembered and looked forward, smiled and regretted, sang a song, said a poem, considered the wording of a message to somebody he cared about. Lunarians are not that different from Earth humans. Often he looked at the stars where they streamed above him.

  And ultimately he heard: "Kaino!"

  "I am here," he answered. "Ilitu lives yet."

  "Etana loaded a flitsled with medical supplies, took it down to camp, and returned to the ship," Brandir said. "I've brought it here. She thinks she can land nearby if need be."

  "Best get Ilitu to our van, give him first aid, and then decide what to do." Kaino explained the situation. "Can you lower a pallet?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "I'll secure him well, then you winch him aloft, gently. Lest we bump together, I'll abide until you have him safe."

  "Once you were less patient, little brother," Brandir laughed.

  "I will not be if you keep maundering, dotard," Kaino retorted. A wild merriment frothed, in him too.

  The pallet bumped its way down the slanting wall, out of blackness and onto the ledge. Kaino took advantage of weak gravity to hold Ilitu's back fairly straight as he moved him. He undid the bight, closed and disconnected the air tubes, fastened the straps. "Haul away," he called. The hurt man rose from his sight.

  "I have him," Brandir transmitted after a few minutes.

  "Then let the robot reel me in," Kaino whooped, "and we'll go—go—go!"

  The cable tautened, drawing him toward the stars.

  Afterward Brandir determined what happened. He had rejoined his machinery, which rested well back from the crevasse rim. The robot was very close to it. At the moment of catastrophe, four billion-odd years ago, rocks as well as metal were thrown on high. The horizontal gush of molten iron that made the deck over the crack had a mistlike fringe that promptly congealed into globules along the verge. The stones dropped back on these and hid them. The planetoid swung out into realms where meteoroids are fugitively few. None ever struck nearby to shake this precarious configuration.

  Low gravity means low friction with the ground, and here the shingle rested virtually on bearings. The weight at the end of the line tugged at the robot. The regolith underfoot glided. The robot lurched forward. It toppled over the edge and fell in a
rain of stones.

  Below it, Kaino tumbled back to the shelf, skidded off, and plunged into the lower depth. The knives received him.

  * * * *

  In the big viewscreen, surf crashed on a winter shore. The waves ran gray as the sky, burst into white, sent water hissing up the sand almost to the driftwood that lay bleached and skeletal under the cliffs. Wrack flew like smoke low above; spindrift mingled with rain-spatters; the skirl and rumble shook air which bore a tang of salt and a breath of chill. It was as if Dagny Beynac's living room stood alone within that weather.

  She thought that maybe she shouldn't have played this scene. It fitted her mood, she'd had it going since dawnwatch, but it was altogether alien to the young woman before her. Might Etana read it as a sign of hostility, of blame?