The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “We will start by seeing what comes of the agreement you worked out today, Mamselle Tam,” Hakim added. “It may lead to real progress, especially if your town cooperates. But the Lahui cannot continue as they are, either.”

  “You’re asking us to transform ourselves faster than we can,” Aleka remonstrated. “I tell you again, we are not tribeless neonomads of the Ortho. Our ways are us. Give us time to adapt them. Give us enough scope, enough access to resources, that meanwhile we can at least produce for ourselves what we want, instead of depending on you and, and paying your price for it!”

  Hakim’s look went stern. He too must be near the end of his patience. “I hear you again, Mamselle Tam, and I repeat that what you ask for is not possible. It would infringe on existing ranges, ranches, extractive industries, which are marginal already. It would disrupt ecology throughout this part of the Pacific. It would be incompatible with plans for adjustment and conversion as those industries are phased out. These are considerations of planetary significance, mamselle,” beside which the death of one little culture was a quantum fluctuation.

  “This argument is foolish, pointless,” Delgado put in. “Dr. Hakim and I aren’t going to decide anything. We’ll report and recommend, along with hundreds of other investigators,” including sophotects and surveillance robots, “but the decision will come from Hiroshima. Bring your case into the public communications if you wish. Get your representatives to try convincing their delegates in the Assembly. Appeal to the High Court and the President.”

  “Or to the Teramind?” Aleka jeered. The apex, the ultimate intelligence of the cybercosm—in an earlier era, she thought momentarily, she would have said “God.”

  She slumped. “No. I’m sorry, señores You do mean well, by your lights, and you’re quite right, I have no further business here. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go home.”

  They made polite reply and escorted her back topside, these civilized men whose presence she could no longer stand. She used the informant on her wrist to call the boat to her. “Adiόs,” she said—not “aloha”—and sprang down into the cockpit. Ka’eo accompanied her as she drew away.

  The rainstorm afar had passed with subtropical swiftness. Ahead of her the sun was descending. Gold shivered across waves that swung deep blue and violet. They lullabied, they rocked her. The air was cooling; green odors off the range fell aft and she breathed a subliminally fine salt mist. In limitless heights, sunset glowed off the wings of an albatross. For this while, she was free.

  She did yearn homeward—her cottage, jasmine and hibiscus fragrant along the porch, palms murmurous overhead, gravel and bamboo and beautiful stones around the longhouse, the sweep of its roofbeams challenging Paniau’s peak in heaven, lanes and gardens where folk strolled easily and talked softly and someone plucked strings or blew into a flute—shops and ships by the docks, worksteads closing at day’s end and machines that never rested, the cenotaph to those lost at sea, for a measure of daring went with being of the Lahui—

  —but first she wanted a time alone with her ocean and the silent nearness of her oath-brother.

  There was no haste. She had instruments for night. Besides, a Moon not much past the full would presently rise. She stopped the motor and touched a command. Mast, boom, and centerboard extended, mainsail and jib deployed, rudder and helm came forth. The wind was fair for Niihau. She wasn’t particularly hungry or thirsty; Delgado had been hospitable in his stiff fashion. However, she took a water bottle and a food bar from the cabin locker before she settled down to steer.

  Bound on its own course, the submersible dropped below the eastern horizon. Ka’eo was hardly more than a roiling in the water, several meters to starboard. Often he went under for minutes at a time, while she refrained from wondering what he snatched for himself. Now and then an aircraft glimmered across the sky, no more than a spark afloat. She was free to seek peace.

  It did not come easily. No loosening of muscles, no mantra was of great help. She set about understanding this past day as part of an entirety. Nothing really new had happened. It was only that things were coming to a head, which she had known they would. That knowledge grew in her throughout her life, with roots that went back in time to before she was born and in space to the ends of the Solar System. But she had seen, she had felt, for herself.

  She searched out memories, less from here than from abroad, Russia, Yuri, the Lyudovite passion against the cyberneticized world that still smoldered deep down in her, missions to mainland America and the underground web of metamorphs that she touched upon, Luna and the cold Lunarian anger, the machines, everywhere the machines, and the sophotects in their multitudes and their oneness. …

  History had become the next phase of evolution. No use railing against it, any more than protesting the doom of Alpha Centauri’s Demeter. At least, on Earth, when the dinosaurs perished the mammals came into their glory; and a dinosaur lineage lived on in the birds. Might likewise a doomed people somehow find their way to some rescuing transfiguration?

  She found no clear answer; but thought, perspective, together with wind and sea and the tiller athrill beneath her hand, granted a certain calm.

  The sun sank, the quick night fell, stars glittered forth. Not everything was downfall. Had she lived in the early years of the Lahui, she would never have seen such a sky. Technology moved forward, global population diminished, global greenhouse came under control and there were fewer obscuring clouds, light pollution lessened. Of course, a haze of it remained. She did not behold the splendor her ancestors knew, those of them who took their canoes from end to end of this ocean or those whom Yankee ships brought afterward from across the same reaches, east and west. But then, she had stood on the Moon, on Farside where no Earth dazzled, and looked up into naked space.

  She had stood within a single gigantic diamond, and through splintered radiance heard what might yet prove to be words of hope.

  As if it followed her train of memories, Luna rose at her back. The mainsail filled with wan light, and glare cast a trembling road.

  She put the helm over. Fabric crackled, water strewed brightness and gurgled, the boat came about.

  “Aleka Kame,” said the phone.

  She started. Who might that be?

  “Dolores Nightborn to Aleka Kame, to Alice Tam,” ran the voice. Female, it spoke colorless Anglo, but instantly she knew where it came from. “Acknowledge.”

  The blood thundered in her ears. The finger shook that reached to touch the instrument. Its panel, going luminous, was like a tiny window. “I’ll receive,” she heard out of her throat.

  While the stammer traveled, she had more than a second to imagine its paths. It responded to a message that must have been routed through Oahu, addressed to her personally. Since she had left the number of this phone in the local database, in case anyone wanted to make contact with her, the system did not need to instigate a search that might have gone around the planet. It passed the call directly out to sea. It likewise knew the central from which the call reached Earth. So her reply was riding a beam up to a relay satellite, was hurtling down to Luna, was surely passing through another station that encrypted it, was arriving at a place where waited the lady Lilisaire.

  “Should we have occasion to communicate in confidence, I will be Dolores Nightborn. Should ever you be asked, that identity has been entered as a Terran resident of Tychopolis, and you may say you met her on your visit and share with her an interest in marine biology.”

  Photons crossed space. The flatscreen formed an image, the head and shoulders of a middle-aged woman, caucasoid, plump, totally undistinguished. And as synthetic as her voice, Aleka knew, an electronic phantom. “Hail,” the face greeted. “Are you alone, and will you have time free in the near future?”

  “Yes. Yes to both!” Aleka’s heart slammed. She’d ripping well make free time, whatever demands anybody else tried to lay on her.

  Transmission lag. She twisted about and stared at the Moon. Against its ashen-bright al
most-disc, no points of light showed as they did on dark parts. If she took out her optic and magnified, she would see traces of human presence. No need. She knew what life laired yonder.

  “It is well.” The face smiled, the voice purred. “Aleka Kame, I want you to—” It broke off. Then, anxiously: “Dear, could I ask a favor of you? You remember me telling you about my kinswoman Mary Carfax in San Francisco Bay Integrate, don’t you? Old and frail and living by herself. She insists she’s all right, but when last we talked she looked terrible and I’m worried. Could you hop over, call on her personally, and let me know what you think? I’ll be your thank-slave, and next time you’re on the Moon I may have something rather wonderful to show you.”

  Lilisaire had remembered to switch on a program that remade dialect as well as sound and sight. It was oddly comforting, in this huge stillness, to discover that she too could be momentarily forgetful.

  Though what had shaken her self-command?

  “Should I have need to convey a message to you in full secrecy, I will send you on a harmless pretext to Mary Carfax, my Earthside agent nearest your dwelling place. She is another false identity, a sophotect. From it you will receive instructions.”

  Why this roundaboutness? Who might be listening in?

  Something rather wonderful. What Lilisaire had spoken of, that day in the diamond pagoda at Zamok Vysoki?

  “Yes, I w-will be glad to,” Aleka said. Her mouth had gone dry. How to mislead the possible eavesdropper? She seized an idea that winged past. “I’ve been wanting a short vacation anyhow.” Her taking it at this crisis would earn her reproaches, but her kind of service necessarily gave broad discretion, and she could quite logically ask what difference her staying on the scene would make. “Give me a few days to disengage here.”

  Transmission lag.

  “Good. You are … quick-witted,” as I judged you to be. “And as a matter of fact, it would be more convenient if you paid your visit a week from now. I am so grateful. How have you been?”

  Because it would be a natural action, and because it might be helpful there in the high castle, Aleka related her day.

  —“Yes, something ought certainly to be done about this. Perhaps something can be done. We’ll see. Adiόs for now, dear.”

  The screen darkened. Only wind and sea and the hiss of the bow cleaving water spoke further. Aleka’s glance returned to the Lunar disc. Strange, if that was where her hope lay, hope for the ancient unreasonableness of life. Or inaybe not so strange. Yonder, too, it had flourished from the earliest years, heedless of the machines that kept it in being.

  6

  The Mother of the Moon

  Port Bowen had gained a few amenities, among them L’Étoile de Diane. The restaurant’s menu was limited, but that was because all vegetables and fruit were fresh, raised in its own agro unit. Lately, as excavation and outfitting continued, it had become able to add fish and poultry. The proprietor spoke of wine which wasn’t bruisingly shipped from Earth, beginning fairly soon. Dagny, who could ill afford the place, rejoiced when Edmond Beynac invited her. She recognized that that wasn’t entirely on account of the dinner.

  “Not bad,” he said of his roast duck. “But if we chance to have Earthside leave at the same time, let me introduce you to a real confit d’oie. I know an inn at Les Eyzies where they make the best in the universe.” He sipped from his glass and chuckled. “They should, by hell. They have been doing it for centuries.”

  Earthside together? Dagny told her pulse to behave itself. “Everything in those parts is old, isn’t it?” she asked for lack of a brilliant response.

  “No, no, we are living people, not museum exhibits or tourist shows.” The broad shoulders shrugged. “But yes, that is an ancient land, and more survives than castles and archaeological sites. Most of my ancestors, they doubtless trace back to Crô-Magnon Man.” He grinned. “Or further, if those geneticists are right who think Neandertal blood is in us too. I would not mind that, being descended from a little fellow who stayed alive in the face of the glacier and the cave bear.”

  She recalled a picture in a book, a hunter on those primeval barrens, and thought Edmond resembled him. Maybe the setting helped her impression along—not this small, warm, food-fragrant room where conversation buzzed low and music (Debussy?) breathed from the speaker—but the view in the ports and in the clear cupola. By day you dined underground; at night the topside section was opened for patrons who didn’t worry about a bit of added radiation. Candles on the tables scarcely dimmed the splendor of Earth near the full; ever some of the brighter stars gleamed through, unwinking and wintry. The ground was no longer bare and somber, it reached in a dream of luminance and shadows, as if every stone were alive and every craterlet a well where the spirits might give you your wish. Such works of humankind as stood in view became themselves magical, like shapes in a painting by a man who had slain mammoths. Edmond sat poised against a cold wilderness through which he pursued bigger game than ever walked the tundra.

  “You’re interested in prehistory?” Dagny ventured. “You sure keep a zoo of interests.”

  He had a smile that came and went quickly but brightly. “Well, my father is professor of the subject at the University of Bordeaux. Me, I thought I might go into the same science, but then I decided most of the great discoveries in it have been made, and—Fireball was giving us the space frontier.”

  She couldn’t resist: “Not exactly giving, as Anson Guthrie would be the first to admit.”

  He grinned. “Touché! His prices, however, they are no more than the traffic will bear, and we do not have to deal with mole-eyed, lard-bottomed bureaucrats, we can simply pay and go. I envy you that you know him so well.”

  She had told him about her past, what parts seemed appropriate, in the course of their developing acquaintance. “I rarely see him any more. He and his wife put me in a good school, and they paid my expenses at the academy, but I had to qualify for it on my own and since I’ve graduated they’ve never shown me any partiality.”

  “I know.”

  She remembered she had already emphasized this to him, and flushed. A gulp of wine lent sufficient assurance for her to dangle bait. “Of course, we’ve stayed in touch, and I visited them on my last vacation and expect I will again occasionally.” With a companion? Better swing the subject back. “We were talking about you, though, for a change. You mentioned something earlier about not having gone directly into your profession.”

  “I bounced about.” His tone softened. “We had a summer cottage in the upper Dordogne. In my childhood I got so familiar with the local farmers they nicknamed me Jacquou le croquant, Jacques the peasant, from a famous novel. I believed I would become a farmer too, until I found out that technology long ago made the family farm extinct and my friends were just administrators. Besides, my father’s work, it soon had more romance for me. But then my mother, she has an export-import business, textiles and artwork, through her I came at age sixteen to spend a year in Malaysia. That made me restless to see more of the world than tourists do, and at age eighteen I enlisted in the French section of United Nations forces.” Could an unlucky love affair have given impulse? “We were sent to the chaos in the Middle East—you know, when Europe was establishing the Befehl there.”

  “You saw action?” Dagny dared ask, low.

  “Oh, yes,” he answered grimly. “Too much. Any amount of combat is too much. In between, I began really thinking. After two years I was wounded badly enough for discharge.” So he’d stuck it out that long, having pledged his word, in spite of hating it, and must have been brave, because a man that smart could wangle a rear-echelon assignment if he tried. “The physicians fixed me all right, I carry only some scraps of metal in me and they do not bother. But I was quite ready for civilian life, studies, field work on Earth, my degree, and then, four years ago, a postdoctoral fellowship on Luna.”

  As he talked, he cheered up afresh “Here I am happy,” he finished. “True, it is not perfect. Those hours
per daycycle in the bloody centrifuge, we could very well do without them, hein? How do you spend that time?”

  “Going through the standard exercises,” Dagny said. “Doesn’t everybody? Otherwise, read, write letters, watch a show, whatever. In a big unit, I mean. Not much choice on a field platform.”

  “On one of those, when I am alone except for a counterweight, I turn off my transmitter and sing,” he confessed. “Then nobody else must suffer my voice.”

  She laughed. “You see, the necessity isn’t a total nuisance!”

  “It is not too bad,” he agreed, “not too high a price. When they begin to study Mars and the asteroids in earnest, I would like to go. But there is no limit yet on what is to do here.” He regarded her. “Nor, I find, is there lack of good company.”

  Her heartbeat refused flat-out the order to quiet down.

  7

  As the ship neared on her approach curve, Luna in the viewscreens shifted from ahead to below, from thickening crescent to dun stoneland scarred with craters. Earth hung high and horned above the south.

  Silence had grown heavy. Kenmuir cleared his throat. “Well, Barbara,” he said, hearing the awkwardness, “it’s goodbye—for a while, at any rate.”

  “May your meantime be happy,” replied the ship. He had ordered a female voice when she spoke with him alone. The Lunarian-accented Anglo sounded friendly, even warm. Valanndray had specified a whistling, birdlike, unhuman timbre for himself. He hadn’t said why and Kenmuir had never asked. When all three talked together, the vessel used a neutral male tone.

  “Thank you. And yours.”

  The absurdity of it struck at Kenmuir. His mouth twisted upward. What was he doing, swapping banalities with a sophotect? Yes, it was conscious, it thought, but in how constricted a range! By tapping the cultural database, it could give him an interesting conversation on any subject he chose, from the puns in Shakespeare to the causes of the Lyudov Rebellion, but he knew how purely algorithmic that was. Its creativity, its self lay in the manifold, ever-varying functions of a spacecraft.