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

by Poul Anderson

  He lifted a hand. "Have no fears," he said. "Besides the morality of destroying a mind, we are barred by the fact that we haven't time enough, neither to make a convincing imitation of you nor to make you over. You are not electrophotonic, you are organic, with the inertia of all material things. Molecular interactions go at rates constrained by the laws of the universe, and the Teramind did not write those."

  His fists clenched at his sides. "Explain that to your Aleka. She will know you by what you share, everything that I have denied myself."

  He smiled and finished lightly, "Ironic, isn't it, that at this final hour the cybercosm must appeal to the oldest, most primitive force in sentient life?"

  Kenmuir ran a tongue gone dry across his lips. "If you can indeed recruit me."

  Venator gazed straight at him and answered, "I can't. I am bringing you to the Teramind."

  * * * *

  45

  A

  vast and duskful space—a chamber? Sight did not reach to the heights and ends of it. Glowing lines arched aloft and down again, some close together, some meters apart. Seen over a distance, they merged in an intricacy, a hieroglyph unknown to Kenmuir.

  The air was without heat or cold or scent or sound.

  He had woken here after falling asleep in the room at Central to which Venator brought him. Unwarned but somehow unsurprised, he saw himself stretched half reclining in a web from which a number of attachments made contact with feet, hands, brow, temples. His skin and clothes were either illuminated or faintly, whitely shining. A mighty calm was upon him, yet he had never felt this aware and alert, wholly in command of mind and body. He sensed as it were every least flow through blood vessels, nerves, and brain. Solemnly he awaited that which was to happen.

  Facing him, Venator lay likewise; but although the huntsman's eyes were open, they seemed blind and his visage had become a mask. What now did he see, what knowledge was his?

  The presence of the Teramind, Kenmuir thought, the nearness of the great core engine, save that the Teramind was no single machine or being. It was the apex of the cybercosm, the guiding culmination, as the human brain was of the human organism. No, not really that, either. All machines in a way stemmed from it, like men and gods from Brahm, and the souls of its synnoionts yearned home toward it.

  But here was no static finality, Kenmuir knew. This was not what artificial intelligences, set to creating a superior artificial intelligence, had wrought; it was the cybercosm as a whole, evolving. Already its thoughts went beyond human imagination. How far beyond its own present imagination would they range in another hundred or another billion years?

  Venator's lips parted. "Ian Kenmuir," he said gravely. Did the Teramind speak through him, as through an oracle?

  "I am ready," Kenmuir responded. He had no honorific to add; any would have been a mockery.

  "You understand you are neither sophotect nor synnoiont. You are outside. Therefore I shall be what link between us there may be."

  Otherwise, could the presence give Kenmuir more than discourse, displays, a shadow show? By Venator, whose flesh was human, he might be made able to comprehend, to feel, what the unhuman alone could never quite convey.

  "Ask what you will," said the voice.

  "You know what has brought us to this," replied Kenmuir as quietly. "Why have you kept Proserpina hidden away?"

  "The answer is many-sided."

  And will it be true? wondered a rebellious mote.

  "You shall judge its truth for yourself," said the voice.

  Self-evident truth, at the end of a road of reasoning? But could he follow that road, up and up to its end? "I listen. I watch."

  Something like an expression fleeted over Venator's countenance and through his tone. A pain, a longing? "We share a memory, you and I."

  Luminous amidst the dark, the image of Lilisaire, so alive that even then Kenmuir caught his breath. The gown rustled and rippled about her slenderness. Felinely, she turned to look at him. Dark-red and flame-red, her hair fell over the white shoulders, past the fine blue vein in her throat. She smiled at him with the big, oblique, changeably gold and green eyes and with the lips he remembered. Did she purr, did she call?

  More images came, flickered, and fled. It was not a document, not a sequence or montage, it was a stream of dreams to awaken him. Beneath his tranquility, it hurt. He had not wished to count up her lovers, her betrayals, the men she killed and the men she had had killed, the men she wedded and enwebbed, the men she broke to her will or lured down ways whereon they lost themselves, the willfulness now glacial and now ablaze but always without reckoning or truth, the fact that she was feral.

  "Beautiful, boundlessly ambitious, infinitely dangerous," murmured the voice.

  "No," Kenmuir denied. "Can't be. One mortal woman—"

  "One whom circumstance has made the embodiment of her blood."

  Images out of history. Lunarian arrogance, intransigence, outright lawlessness, in the teeth of unforgiving space Intrigues, murders, terrible threats. The Selenarchy sovereign, holding its nation apart from the unity of humankind. Rinndalir's scheme to wreck the whole order of things, for the sake of wrecking it. Niolente's fomenting of revolt on Earth and war on the Moon, her death like a cornered animal's, and in the ruins a secret that her bloodline had kept through centuries. Lilisaire, again Lilisaire.

  "No!" Kenmuir shouted, the calm within him shaken asunder. "I won't condemn an entire race!" He swallowed. "I can't believe you would."

  "Never. Do we curse the lightning or the tiger? They too belong with life."

  Next the dream was of a world. A thunderbolt fixed nitrogen that nourished a forest. Under the leaves, a carnivore took his prey and thereby kept a herd healthy, its numbers no more than the land could well feed. The sea that drowned some ships upbore all others, and in its depths swam whales and over their heads beat wings. Dead bodies moldered, to be reborn as grass and flowers. Snow fell, to melt beneath springtime and water it.

  A specter passed by, desert, rock thrusting naked where plowed soil had washed away and blown away.

  A river ran thick with poison. Air gnawed at lungs. Horde upon horde, humankind laid waste around it as never a plague of locusts did, and where songbirds once nested rats ran through the alleys and the sewers.

  But that was gone, or almost gone, and Earth bloomed afresh. It was the cybercosm that saved the forests and their tigers—yes, human determination was necessary, but only through technology could the change happen without catastrophe, and the cybercosm kept the will to make the change alive in humans by its counsel and its ever more visible victories over desolation.

  Again the tiger sprang in Kenmuir's sight. Phantasmagoria ended. He lay among the gleaming arcs and heard: "Equally should the Lunarian people, who have done much that is magnificent, join their gifts to the rest of humanity in creating and becoming human destiny."

  Though peace had returned to him, it still served his selfhood, his mind. "This is true, but is it enough? Why must every branch of us grow the same way? And what way is it?"

  "No single one. Whatever multitudinous ways you and your descendants choose. Think back. Who today is forced? Is Earth not as diverse as at any time formerly, or more?"

  Yes, Kenmuir agreed: and not just in societies and uncoerced individuals but in the richness of nature restored across the globe, from white bear on polar ice to bison and antelope on the plains, from hawks asoar to peacocks in the jungle, from palm to pine, from mountaintop to ocean depth, alive, alive.

  The voice went on: "However, should not reason, compassion, and reverence guide you? Else you are less than apes, for apes at least act according to their birthright, and it is in your birthright to think."

  Kenmuir could not help but recall what else was inborn, and how thin a glimmer consciousness was upon it. But let him not stray off into that realm. Get back to the question that brought him here. "Why don't you want Proserpina known? Are you afraid of a few Lunarians on a distant asteroid?"


  As ridiculous as that sounded, he nearly regretted uttering it. Then he decided it was best gotten rid of.

  The reply came grave. He thought that the Teramind had no need to bluster like the God of Job; it could afford patience, yes, courtesy. "Of course not—as such. What is to be feared is the spirit that would be resurrected. In the end, fate lies with the spirit."

  "I, I don't understand," Kenmuir faltered. It couldn't mean some mind-over-matter absurdity.

  "The Faustian spirit. It is not dead, not quite, here on Earth; it lives, underground and unrecognized, in the Lunarians; and at Alpha Centauri it flourishes triumphant."

  Kenmuir knew not whether the vision of Demeter came to him out of the darkness or out of memory. How often had he filled himself with those images transmitted by the colonists across the years and light-years? How much was envy a bitter or a wistful part of his being? Lost in the dream, he could merely ask, "What's wrong there?"—for all he saw was splendor, courage, and ineluctable tragedy.

  "It was, it is a spirit that does not accept limits, that has no end or check on its wants and its endeavors. The forebears of the folk yonder would not make their peace with the powers they had aggrieved at home, although peace was offered them. They were not able to, because they were never content. Therefore they chose to depart, over a bridge that burned behind them, to a world they knew was doomed. Now their descendants will not accept that doom."

  "What else can they do?" sighed Kenmuir. What else but resign themselves, taking whatever comfort lay in the fact that oblivion was still some centuries removed? It had taken every resource that Fireball at its height commanded to send a few bodies in cold sleep across the gulf between. At Centauri they could do no more than this; and unless a handful came back to Sol, any such effort would be futile. The distance to the next marginally habitable world was too much; radiation during the voyage would wreak irreparable damage. Downloads could go, yes. Guthrie's explored among those stars. But the humans were rare who wished to be downloads. Those that did could continue as well at the sun where they were, together with the Lunarians on their asteroids: a settlement as unmeaning as Rapa Nui had been in its Pacific loneliness after the canoes no longer sailed.

  "They do not yet know it," said the voice, "but they are finding their way toward a salvation."

  "How do you know?" Kenmuir demanded. "You don't care, do you?"

  "Granted, the Teramind tells them through the cybercosm, as it tells the people at home, that it has little further interest in them, or in anything of the empirical universe. That is not entirely so. If the ultimate law of physics is now known, the permutations of matter and energy are not. Therefore probes are seeking forth through interstellar space. As for the Centaurians, microprobes are observing them, unobserved by them."

  It stabbed Kenmuir. Did then the cybercosm lie?

  Peace flowed healingly into the wound. There must be a righteous reason, which he would learn in due course. What human was always candid, perhaps especially with those others who were loved? Indeed, pretense is a necessity of thought. You map three-dimensional planets onto two-dimensional surfaces; and this itself is a simplification, for the map is not a Euclidean plane. To compute their short-term orbits, you make those planets into geometrical mass-points and ignore everything else in the galaxy. You found a corporation and treat it legally as a person. You talk about a community or the human race, although nothing exists but individuals. You talk about individuals, or yourself, although the body is many different organisms and the mind is a set of ongoing interactions. . . .

  "And we do hear something directly from them," he offered.

  However avidly he had studied it, not until this moment did he quite appreciate how seldom that news came, how slight it was. At first it had been voluminous, to and fro, but later—Well, he thought, it would not be hard to discourage the colonists from sending. They had so much else to occupy them. As for the Solar System, here too people were wrapped in their own concerns and had half forgotten about a frontier or uncharted ranges beyond it. . . . "They're developing a symbiosis—" not a synnoiosis "—of...life and machine?"

  "Yes. Demeter Mother."

  This time the visions were clear, lasting amply long for him to apprehend them, and they spoke. They spoke of another and alien system, a biocosm, integral with the basic ecology. There the ultimate mind was not cybernetic but human, downloads who had in this wise returned to being alive, a Gaia not transcendent but immanent in and aware of herself. She guarded and guided life. She was life.

  —Afterward Kenmuir whispered, "What's dreadful about this?"

  "It is what will save them at Centauri," answered Venator's lips. His eyes remained blind, except to whatever moved inside him. "The Mother will find that she can do what is impossible today, take a personality from download back to re-created flesh. Demeter the planet must die, but the seed of Demeter will go forth among the stars."

  Shivers went cold through Kenmuir.

  "Yes," said the voice—sadly?—"you are inspired, you are wonder-smitten."

  Defiance stirred anew. "Why should I not be?"

  "The vision, the achievement is wholly Faustian. And likewise would the settlement of Proserpina be: of a far lesser magnitude, but in the same spirit, and not light-years remote but here, at home, within striking distance of Earth."

  Kenmuir felt his face show bewilderment.

  "Attend," said the voice. "Your kind has always fought, as life must, for survival and for betterment. And, uniquely, you did not fit your ways to reality, you changed the world to fit you. You tamed fire and crops and beasts, you explored, you invented, you spread across the planet. The landscapes of whole countries were, century by century, made into creations not of nature but of their human dwellers.

  "Yet always, too, there was a sense of limits, humility, fear of the gods and of the nemesis that follows upon hubris. You lived in the cycle of the seasons, knowing yourselves mortal, and when you saw an ancient order of things broken, you mourned for it. Invaders who slaughtered, burned, and enslaved had their own orders, their own pieties. In every myth by which you lived was the warning against a reach too high, a pride too great.

  "But the Faustian spirit arose. In the story, Faust bargains with the Evil One for limitless power. At the end, his soul is lost. But there is a sequel in which he returns and redeems himself, not by repentance but through attempting an engineering work that holds back the flood waters and makes them do man's bidding,

  "Even so did the Faustian civilization grow away from its childhood modesty. Its mathematics went down to the infinitesimal and outward to the infinite and the transfinite. Its physics probed the atom and the stars. Its biology moved life from mystery to chemistry, and at last made the soul a process that could be downloaded. Meanwhile it conquered the world and went on to the Moon and the worlds beyond.

  "It was, it is that spirit that knows no bounds, acknowledges no restraints, does what it will because it wills and then looks onward for new victories to win.

  "It overwhelmed all else, crushed every small shy foreignness, forged the total state, and very nearly exterminated the race."

  Kenmuir lay mute for a spell, gathering his words, before he replied:

  "No, I can't accept that," He could do no other than set his monkey wit against the Teramind. "You refer to what came out of Europe, Western Christendom, don't you? Well, at its worst it was never more evil than the rest, it simply had more power. And it got that power from the science it originated, which was also the power to end sickness and hunger, to understand the natural world and learn how to save it. Everybody else had been destroying nature too, more gradually but without any way of ever reversing the harm. This was the civilization that abolished chattel slavery and made women the equals of men. It was the civilization—the spirit, you'd say—that gave birth to the inalienable rights of the individual, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It gave us the planets and can still give us the stars."

  He had not k
nown he could speak like that. He was no orator. What subtle forces passed through his skin to evoke whatever had been latent in him? The Teramind played fair, he thought.

  "What you say is as true as what you heard," answered the voice. "Just the same, it means disunity, strife, and chaos, eternally."

  "What else—what would you have?"

  "Oneness. Harmony. Peace. The Noösphere, and in the end the Noöcosm."

  Again an apparition, a dream. Intelligence immortal forever transcending itself, until its creations and comprehensions overmatched the whole material universe.

  For billions of years to come it must explore, discover, take inspiration from that cosmos. The destinies of the galaxies were as yet incalculable. Already, though, the Law that bound them seemed clear, only its manifold unfoldings remained mysterious, and with every new experience the capacity to foretell the next would increase.