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

by Poul Anderson

  "It suits right well," she answered tonelessly.

  "I should have thought you'd be happier."

  "Nay, you did not." She turned to meet his eyes. Hers seemed to brim with light. The countenance could have been the mask of an Asian Pallas. "You are intelligent. You will have priced this prize you won."

  He had known he must speak plainly, but not that it would be so soon. The muscles tightened between his shoulderblades. He kept his voice level: "Well, yes. At any rate, I've wondered. Proserpina is open to you, with everything that may imply." Which was what? He couldn't tell. He wouldn't live to learn. "However, the Habitat—" He left the sentence dangling, reluctant to declare what they both understood.

  She completed it for him. "The Habitat is made certainty."

  "It always was, wasn't it?"

  She shook her head. "Not altogether, not while something in far space remained unknown, maychance the instrument of a victory clear and complete. But now it is found."

  For an instant he harked back to the house of the Teramind. Reality as discovery, mind as its maker— No, that couldn't be, not on any tangible, humanly meaningful scale, and even at the quantum level there must be more than the paradoxes of measurement; there must!

  "No weapon," Lilisaire sighed. "Merely an escape."

  As often in the recent past, he spun the mundane possibilities by his attention. Lunarians rebellious or adventurous—no few, either kind—would move to the iron world, piecemeal at first, later in a tide. The Federation would not oppose; it ought actually to help, because thereby both the case against the Habitat and the opposition to it should bleed away. Nevertheless, that colonizing effort would engage well-nigh the whole Lunarian spacefaring capability; and this in turn would draw folk from their homes on the inner asteroids and the outer moons. The Venture, the whole strong Lunarian presence on the planets, would fade from history.

  "And a bargain of truce," Lilisaire finished.

  For her part, Kenmuir thought, she could not denounce the long concealment of her ancestral treasure, and she must yield on the matter of the Habitat. Her interest in a smooth compromise was as vital as the government's, however bad it tasted to either. A phrase from centuries agone surfaced before him. "Equality of dissatisfaction." But what when that left the great basic contest unresolved?

  Carefully prosaic, he said, "Nothing is firm, you know, my lady. So far it's words exchanged between individuals and . . . sophotects. Most officials, not to mention the public, haven't heard of it, or anything about the whole affair."

  "Yet I foresee the end of our Luna." Her voice was steely, devoid of self-pity; she stood straight beneath the heavens.

  "No, not really—" Did he detect a flick of scorn across her lips? "A new beginning, anyhow."

  "Belike a new cycle," she gave him, "albeit a stranger to everything that was ours."

  No more millennial metaphysics, he decided. Aloud: "My lady, first we've years' worth of business to do. Most important to me, you made Aleka Kame a promise."

  Lilisaire finger-shrugged. "Eyach, she shall have her island and its' waters. Why not? What slight power that ever I wielded in these parts is slipping from my hands." She touched her chin, frowned, then smiled a tiny, cold bit. "Moreover, to have friends on Earth may someday prove useful."

  It took him a moment to catch her entire intent. "You don't want to go to Proserpina yourself, do you?"

  "Nay. Why should such be my wish? Here are the holdings of my forebears and their ashes, their ancient graces and sureties, memories of them on every mountain and memories of me that would have abided. Those shall I surrender for starkness and hardship and the likelihood of early death."

  "You needn't," he said around an unawaited thickness in his throat. "You can live out your life here in luxury."

  Her laugh rang. It sounded real, as if he had cracked some Homeric joke. "Hai-ah, how comfortable the cage! How well-mannered the visitors who come to peer! And if any of them should stray too near the bars—" She shook her head. Mirth still bubbled. "Moreover, how could I hold back from this last insolence?"

  He recalled her ancestor Rinndalir, who fared to Alpha Centauri. Had Lilisaire finally forsaken the shade of Niolente?

  Seriousness struck down upon her. She stood for a span unspeaking, her look gone outward, before she said most softly, "And as for death yonder, it will be the death of a Beynac."

  "Why, you, you can survive to a ripe age," he stammered.

  She ignored his attempt. "I am going, and in the vanguard. But therefore I can ill keep the promise I gave you, my captain, that you would be chieftain over my emprises in space, and dwell with me as a seigneur among the Selenarchs."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Ey, it does." She smiled anew. "You lie right gallantly."

  In hammering bewilderment, Kenmuir groped for words. "My lady, I'm glad if I've helped you, and if I, I harmed you instead, it wasn't my wish, and—It's enough for me that I served you."

  He wondered whether he meant it.

  "It is not enough for me," she answered. Her hand reached forth to his. "I pray you, let me see how I can redeem my pledge a little, at least a little."

  What he saw, amazed, was that she stood there as lonely and woundable as any other human creature.

  * * * *

  The breeze was light. Aleka motored two or three kilometers from Niihau harbor before she deployed mast and sail. Then her boat ghosted along over wavelets of shining blue and green laced with glassy foam. They murmured to themselves and lapped against the hull. Sometimes a crest broke, briefly white. The sun declined westward. Its rays burned across the waters. Out here, though, the air was cool. A frigate bird soared on high.

  Kenmuir sat on a bench in the cockpit by the cabin door, opposite Aleka, who had the tiller. She wore just a cap and a sleeveless tunic. Her skin glowed bronze, A stray lock of hair fell across her brow. He kept his face steady while he gathered courage.

  She looked from the sea to him and said nearly the first words between them since they cast off. "You've changed, Ian." Her voice stayed low and he was not sure whether he glimpsed a phantom smile,

  "You too, I think," he returned. "Not surprising, after what you've been through."

  His mind played it over, the flight through space, the message sent, the long curve inward again, the ship and the sophotect that she wearily let rendezvous. It had not been unkind, she told him; it took her aboard and brought her back to Earth, where Venator interviewed and released her. No bodily danger ever, but she could not be confident of that, and Kenmuir dared not dwell on what she must have suffered in her spirit, amidst emptiness and machines. "I hoped you'd come right away after I got home," she said.

  Though he sensed no reproach, he winced. "I'm sorry. Been so damnably occupied—" He had explained that before, in their short phone conversations and today when he arrived. "You'll hear the details, as far as I can straighten them out in my head. Besides, well, I thought you'd first want to rest," in her land and on her sea, among her folk and merfolk. He had wondered, without asking, if that was why she proposed they sail out to talk in private. They could have gone someplace ashore. But here she wholly belonged. Or was it that this change of setting might break his tongue-tied hesitancy?

  Now she did smile, however tentatively. "Ah, bueno, lawa, that's behind us. The news that we'll have our new country, we Lahui, this is what you and I can celebrate together. For openers."

  He had no reply.

  She watched him for a time before she said, gently as the wind, "No? No. Por favor, don't misunderstand. I’m not blaming, I'm not begging."

  He met her eyes. "You never would."

  "Something has happened."

  "Only in me."

  She deserved straightforwardness. "I’m going to Proserpina," he said.

  "I was . . . afraid of that."

  "Don't be." It was he who pleaded. He leaned forward and caught her hand in both of his. "Listen. It's best. You're young, you have your life and you
r world to make, I'm old and—"

  "We could try," she said.

  "And lose those years for you? No."

  Her quietness abided. "Don't play unselfish. It's unworthy of you. You're returning to Lilisaire." She drew her hand free.

  "I'm trying to be realistic and, and do what's right," he said.

  The waves lulled. The frigate bird cruised on watch for prey.

  "This isn't a complete surprise to me," she told him. "He kanaka pono 'oe. You're a good man, an honest man. You can keep a secret but you haven't got much gift for lying." She looked to the horizon. "Don't worry about me. I'll be all right."

  Yes, he knew. She was too alive for anything else.

  Nevertheless—He grinned at himself, an old man's dry grin. In his expectations, she had responded fiercely, and it was not impossible that she could have lured him back to her. Well, maybe she had been feeling her doubts too. Maybe, no, probably she saw things more clearly and forthrightly than he had known, more than he did.

  He should be relieved, not disappointed. But he was only a man.

  Her concern burst over him: "You, though! Have you thought this through? You may well be the single Earthling—Terran—the single one of your race, away in that darkness with nothing but rocks and stars."

  When she spoke thus, he gained heart. "It's space, Aleka," he replied.

  She sat meditative, toying with the helm, before she said, "I see. Always it's called you, and this is the last way left for you to follow."

  He lifted his shoulders and dropped them, palms outspread. "Irrational. Agreed. But we—the Lunarians, and whoever's with them—we'll bring Proserpina to life."

  For whatever that would mean in the gigayears ahead. He felt no special involvement in them; being mortal and reasonable, he could not. Still, he would obscurely be serving Demeter Mother whom he would never know, and therewith give his life a meaning beyond itself.

  That thought was more than his monkey vanity. The Teramind concurred. He didn't know whether it would seek to conceal the migration to Proserpina from the Centaurians. He could imagine several tricks for doing so. Certainly the cybercosm was making sure that the tale of hide-and-seek within the Solar System would be soft-played, soon lost in background noise. There must be no monuments . . . It didn't matter, Kenmuir believed. In the long run, it didn't matter. When life is ready to evolve onward, it will evolve.

  Aleka nodded. "You'll be in space, Ian. No, I couldn't bear to bind you." A whip-flick: "As for our lady Lilisaire, I daresay you can cope with her."

  "It isn't that simple."

  "No."

  They sailed in silence. All at once, a form broached to starboard, and another and another. A troop of the Keiki Moana were out.

  Aleka regarded them with love. "We are different breeds, aren't we, you and I?" she said at last to Kenmuir. "And we're of the same blood."

  How many others might the future see?

  "What you will make, right here on Earth—" he began. He broke off, filled his lungs with the clean salt wind, and went on. "I wonder if in the end it won't prove to be as strange and powerful as anything anywhere in the universe."

  She laughed, low in her throat and defiantly. "The making will be fun, anyhow."

  It will be joy, he hoped.

  She took his hand again. "I wish you the same, darling," she said, "yonder where Kestrel is."

  The little ship that had been Kyra Davis's was outbound alone, to fare forever among the stars.