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

by Poul Anderson

  Timelessly perseverant, the sophotectic seed spread forth into the future. It needed no planets, no footholds, no conquests, nothing but tiny bits of substance with which to reproduce its kind. And each of those seedbeds, each cybercosm and Teramind, was joined with the rest. At the speed of light, communication across a galaxy took tens of thousands of years, communication between galaxies took millions; but there was the patience that stems from assurance, and there was no more death.

  Space expanded onward. The stars grew old. The last of them guttered out. Chill neared the absolute zero. What free energy survived trickled from the slow disintegration of black holes and the particles of matter. As slowly must intelligence spend that energy; a thought might go for a billion years before it was completed. Yet that same pace brought together the minds of the galaxies. They were now no farther apart than the duration of a thought. As the trillions of years mounted, to them their separations lessened without limit. They linked together in a single supreme intellect that filled reality. The universe was neither dead nor dark. It was alive and radiant with spirit.

  Certainty is not absolute. Against our prevailing evidence and belief, the cosmos may reach an end to its expansion and fall back on itself. Intelligence will nevertheless be immortal. Within the finite time to singularity, an infinite number of events can take place, an infinity of thoughts can be thought and dreams can be dreamed. Whether the transfiguration be freezing or fiery, awareness will endure and evolve forever.

  Long, long before then, its heed will have departed from the matter-energy chrysalis. It will know all things that exist and all that are possible; it will have considered them, comprehended them, and lovingly set them aside. Its own works—arts, mathematics, undertakings, unimaginable for ages to come—are what shall occupy its eternity. In the end was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

  Kenmuir lay quiet.

  "You have seen the prophecy before," said the voice,

  "Yes," he replied, "but never like this."

  After a while: "How could . . . any humans . . . threaten that?"

  "This is in the nature of things. It goes deeper than chaos. If vanishingly small changes may have immense and undivinable effects, still, a system has its attractors, its underlying order, and a broken balance may well be redressed.

  "To fathom the true danger, you would have to be in synnoiosis, and nonetheless your insight would be dim and fragmentary. But think. Recall what you know of quantum physics. Reality is one, but reality is a manifold. Past and future are one, inseparable. Yet this means that they are equally unknowable with precision. A particle can have gone from point to point by any of infinitely many paths; some are more probable than others, but observation alone establishes which is real. The state of one, when determined, fixes the state of another, though they be light-years apart, too distant for causality between them. Thus the observed and the observer, existence and the meaning of existence, are a whole, Yang and Yin; and the wave function of the universe shares incertitude with the wave function of a lone electron."

  Kenmuir shook his head. "No, I don't see. I can't. Unless what you hint is that. . . human minds are no accident either—they're as fundamental an aspect of reality as . . . as yours—"

  He shook himself. He was neither sophotect nor synnoiont, nor even a philosopher. Let it suffice him that the Teramind found reason to fear his race. (Fear? Respect? Useless words, here.) Let him stay with the grubby practicalities of flesh and blood.

  "What I’m guessing your intent is," he said very carefully, "is that we humans can do anything we want, and you'll help us, advise us, be good to us—provided we stay safely irrelevant to you."

  "No. That cannot be. It is already too late. Your kind is loose among the stars."

  Through Kenmuir flew a horror. The Teramind might build and dispatch missiles to blast Demeter Mother before her children left their world. No! It had not happened, therefore it would not. It could not. Please.

  He forced dryness: "What about us at home?"

  "In the future that belongs to Mind, you will join, willingly and gladly, as this I—Venator—has done, but to an immensely higher degree."

  "We become part of the cybercosm?"

  "Centuries or millennia hence. Then sentient Earth will be ready to confront the foreign thing yonder."

  "You hope you'll have the strength—" the strength of intellect, not of raw force "—to cope with it. Tame it. Take it into yourself."

  "No. The hope is that it will join itself to us."

  "Would that be so hard? Is it really so different?"

  "Yes. As long as both remain true to their destinies, the gulf between is unbridgeable. Demeter Mother is the ancient life, organic, biological. To her, the inorganic, the machine, is no more than a lesser part, a means to the end of survival. She will always be of the material universe and its wildness, its chaos, its mortality. Never will her intellect be pure and wholly free."

  Kenmuir had an eerie sense that he was a hunter closing in on a majestic quarry. "But she'll go ways that you never will, that you can never imagine, because you can't feel them. Are you afraid of that? She'll die with the stars, when you do not. Won't she? Isn't space-time big enough for you to live with her till then?"

  Silence. Venator's face became like a dead man's. Kenmuir wondered what lay unspoken behind it. No. Reality is one. She will shape it, as I do. It will become something unforeseeable, without destiny, something other than that Ultimate which is the purpose and meaning of me.

  He threw the words away. They were nothing but his imagery, no better than a mythic image of the sun as a boat or a chariot making daily passage across heaven. He must hunt farther.

  "Would Lunarians on Proserpina, matter that much?" he asked.

  "Think forward," replied the oracle, and now life was again in his countenance, though it be not human life. "They will make that world over, multiply their numbers, spread among the comets, reach for the stars. They will talk with the seed of Demeter, They will talk with their Terran kin, in whom Faust will reawaken because of it."

  "They'll trouble you. You want everyone in the Solar System kept close to home where you can control us."

  "Where you can enlighten yourselves and grow into sanity," said the voice. How soft it was.

  Incredulous, Kenmuir exclaimed, "And this turns on a single ship escaping from the Moon? On a single man who could call her back?"

  "No. Reality is a whole, I said. But for the history soon to come, and therefore conceivably for history ever after, yes, I ask that you call her back."

  The cybercosm asked.

  You would make the universe into mind and harmony, Kenmuir thought. This very conflict we have been waging, not of strengths but of ideas and possibilities, betokens the etherealization you seek. Who shall hold that it is wrong, your vision? Who shall hold that passion and unsureness, the animal and the vegetable, the mortal, grief mingled with every joy—that these are right?

  Faust is forever at war. I am a man of peace.

  "The choice is yours," he heard. "I may not compel. I cannot. For the cybercosm to impose its will by violence would be to violate itself. Nor could this bring other than chaos uncontrollable; hark back to the chronicles of all tyrannies. Though the human genus be obliterated in the Solar System, survivors would hold on at Alpha Centauri, in millennial revengefulness. Though they too be killed, corruption would seize the heart of the victor, and at the end would destroy it likewise. No, the burden is yours."

  Beneath the nirvana imposed on his body, Kenmuir's pulse stumbled. His mouth had gone dry. "If I. . . obey you . . . what about Aleka and her people?"

  "They shall have their desire, a country better than Lilisaire can grant."

  And the Earthfolk whose eyes were turned skyward would have their Habitat. None but the demonic spirit in the Lunarians must submit.

  No, those humans of every kind must submit who wished for freedom. And they would not know that they had done so or that th
ey were unfree.

  It was as if his answer had lain in him since before he was born. "No."

  "You refuse." It was not a question.

  "I do. She shall keep flying."

  "You are forgiven," said the voice, altogether gently.

  Kenmuir knew he would never understand that strange integrity. He was no machine, only a man.

  His consciousness toppled into night.

  * * * *

  46

  H

  ave no fears," Venator had said when Kenmuir woke. "We'll flit you to Yorkport and let you go. I assume you'll catch the Luna shuttle. But first we should talk a bit, you and I."

  He left the spacefarer to rest a while, then guided him to a room where they shared a plain and mostly silent meal, then provided them both with warm clothes and led the way outside. For another spell they walked wordless, until they had left the weather station out of sight behind them and were alone with the mountains.

  Kenmuir breathed deeply. Thin and cold, a breeze stirred the leaves and needles of widely strewn dwarf trees. It tasted of sky. Sunlight cataracted over a long upward slope and the snowpeaks beyond. They stood knife-edge sharp against utter blue. He took the view into himself. Anxiety, indecision, sorrow were coming astir, as the dispassion laid on him in the chamber ebbed away; he needed this fresh wellspring of calm.

  "Go slow," Venator advised at his side. "Spare your strength. We've time aplenty."

  Kenmuir glanced at him. "What do you want of me?" he inquired.

  He could not tell whether the smile that crossed the dark face was wry or regretful. "Nothing, in the sense of demands," Venator replied. "I would like to make a few suggestions, and we had better sketch out some plans."

  "I'll do whatever I can," Kenmuir said awkwardly, "consistent with—" With what?

  Venator nodded. "I expected you would. It's rational. But good of you, too."

  How should Kenmuir respond, how should he feel?

  "Please. This is not a victor-and-vanquished situation."

  Venator smiled again, more broadly and perhaps a little mockingly. "No, no."

  Grit scrunched beneath boots. The wind whispered.

  Plunge ahead, Kenmuir decided. "All right, then. Aleka will deliver her message." He hesitated. "Or has she?" What hours or days had passed in the house of the Teramind?

  "Not yet," Venator told him. "But she will soon."

  "And you—the, the cybercosm—the government —it really won't try to suppress the news or, or any consequences that follow?"

  Venator caught Kenmuir's gaze and held it a moment. "You and your friends can help us in that, you know. In fact, you must. The Federation—the humans in key positions—we don't want them led or forced into taking stands it would be hard for them to retreat from. As you guessed earlier, the less said publicly on either side, the easier for everyone concerned."

  It was not a capitulation, Kenmuir realized. It was an adaptation to circumstances. It could be the first move in a new plan that extended centuries ahead. . . . No, he would not think about that. Not yet.

  "I'll certainly be glad to cooperate," he said. "So will Aleka and, uh, Matthias, I'm sure."

  Now Venator grinned, above raised brows. "Like Lilisaire and her Lunarians?"

  "I think they'll agree."

  "The story can't actually be blotted out, you know," Venator reminded. "What we can try for is that your people be discreet enough to allow mine to be the same."

  No, the story could never be blotted out, Kenmuir thought. Not out of him. Pain surged. O download Dagny!

  "Must we talk about opposite sides?" he asked fast. "I still can't see why the issue has to be. . . irreconcilable. Are a few Lunarians in deep space such a big factor? How can they be, in the near future or ever?"

  Venator frowned. "It seemed more clear to you before," he said. With a shrug: "It did to me too, then." He paused. "Let me propose a very crude analogy. Picture an intelligent, educated Roman in the reign of Augustus, speculating about what things would be like in another thousand years. He says to himself, 'Perhaps the legions will have marched over the whole world as they did over Gaul, and everybody everywhere will be Roman. Or perhaps, which Caesar's current policy suggests is more likely, the frontiers will stay approximately where they are, beyond them the forests and the barbarians. Or perhaps, pessimistically, Rome will have fallen and the wild folk howl in the ruins of our cities.'

  "I don't know which future he chose, and it doesn't matter, because of course the outcome was none of them. A heretical offshoot of the religion of a conquered people in one small corner of the Mediterranean lands took over both Romans and barbarians, transforming them entirely and begetting a whole new civilization."

  Faustian civilization, Kenmuir thought.

  "Just the same," he argued, "the sheer power of— your—cybercosm, which is bound to grow beyond anything we can conceive of—"

  "The biocosm will grow too," Venator said. "And as for influences on it and on us, what may humans turn into, they and their machines, out among the comets?"

  An idea struck from the rim of Kenmuir's mind. By its nature, the cybercosm must seek for absolute knowledge; but this required absolute control, no wild contingencies, nothing unforeseeable except the flowerings of its intellect. The cybercosm was totalitarian.

  "Well, as events have developed, this has become yet another factor to deal with," Venator went on. "There are many more, after all, and in any case the universe will doubtless continue springing surprises for millions of years to come. Time will see who copes best, and how."

  Totalitarianism need not be brutal, Kenmuir thought. It could be mild in its ways, beneficent in its actions, and . . . too subtle to be recognized for what it was.

  Wings flashed overhead. He looked aloft, but the sun dazzled sight of the bird from him. A hawk, hunting? Never could he have imagined that ruthless beauty, had not a billion years of unreined chance and blind will to live shaped it for him. Suddenly he could endure remembering what had happened in the tomb on the Moon.

  Maybe there would be no real affray between the Daos. Maybe in some remote age they would find they had been two faces of the same. Or maybe not. He knew simply that he was with the Mother.

  "And this is rather abstract, isn't it?" Venator was saying. "We can do nothing but handle the footling details of our lifespans, one piece at a time."

  Kenmuir considered him. "That isn't quite true of you, is it?"

  "Not quite," Venator admitted. After several more strides through the wind: "In spite of everything, I don't envy you."

  Nor I you, Kenmuir thought.

  "I would nonetheless like to know you better," Venator said. "Can't be, I suppose. Shall we discuss those practicalities?"

  * * * *

  Night had lately fallen over the Lunar Cordillera. From Lilisaire's eyrie three peaks could still be seen far to westward, on which brightness lingered. Only the edges were visible, flame-tongues slowly dying. Elsewhere the mountains had become a wilderness of shadowy heights and abyssal darks. Eastward they dropped away to boulders and craters almost as dim. Stars stood above in their thousands, the galactic frost-bridge, nebulae and sister galaxies aglimmer, but Earth was no more than a blue arc along a wan disc, low above that horizon.

  A clear-domed tower overlooked it all. From tanks and planters in its topmost room grew gigantic flowers. Starlit, their leaves were dark masses or delicate filigrees. Blossoms mingled perfumes in air that lay like the air of an evening at the end of summer. Fireflies flittered and glittered through their silence.

  Lilisaire entered with Kenmuir. Neither had said much in the short while since he arrived. She passed among the flowers to the eastern side and stopped, gazing out. He waited, observing her profile against the sky and her hair sheening beneath it.

  A song crystal lay on the ledge under the dome. She picked it up and stroked fingers across its facets. Sound awakened, trills, chimes, whistlings, a shivery beat. She made them into a melody and sang half
under her breath:

  "Stonefall, fireflash,

  Cenotaph of a seeker.

  But the stone has lost the stars

  And the stars have lost the stone."

  He had heard the Lunarian words before, a snatch of a lyric by Verdea. No tongue of Earth could have keened like them or carried the full meaning behind their images.

  Lilisaire laid the crystal back down and was again quiet. After a minute Kenmuir took it on himself to say in Anglo, "That's a melancholy piece, my lady."