The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Her mind sprang back to business. “Muy bien, let’s have a look.”

  Packer spoke a command. The computer shifted the viewpoint. Dagny beheld rubble, the rough-hewn angle of a pit, a mass suggestive of a clenched fist partly protruding, broken-off pieces of it scattered below. Packer turned the scanning over to her. She made the camera move in and out and around, illuminate murky recesses, magnify, induce fluorescence.

  “M-hm,” she murmured at length. “It’s what I thought, and I imagine you guessed.” She, though, had learned from Edmond Beynac.“A meteorite, ancient, buried in later lava flow. The plutonic character—unusual, to say the least. My husband will be most interested.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Didn’t you know? He studies meteoritics, besides what’s under his feet. Believes we won‘t understand the basics of how the planets formed till we understand the asteroids better.” Dagny clicked her tongue. “Swears that one of these years he’ll get out into the Belt and fossick around personally.” Her heart stumbled. Too many had already perished in yonder distances. “This rock will be evidence for his idea, his minority opinion, that there was once a body in that region big enough to get really hot before it cooled off again. He thinks the nickel-iron object that gave us the Tycho mines was a piece of its core.” Dagny shook herself. “But I’m wandering. Pedro’s right, we’ll have to remove this thing. The hole, and the fissures where the lava congealed around it, will te a potential weakness in the foundation. We can’t simply fill in and feel safe.” Not after the Rudolph strike, or the more recent, similar but worse disaster at the Struve Criswell.

  “What, then?” Packer asked.

  “Got any idea? A couple occur to me, but you’ve had longer to think. Between us, we ought to come up with something worth pursuing.” A cry interrupted. “Oh, damn. The joys of motherhood. ’Scuse a mo’. I’ll be right back, I hope.”

  Rising, Dagny slipped from the office compartment and aft through the outsize, purely household van she had dubbed her kidmobile. The family often traveling in it—recreation, mainly, with friends along, though this was not their first serious expedition together—it was well furnished, from the pilot house in front to her and Edmond’s bed cubicle at the rear. Beyond the pantry, kitchenette, and dinette, she found the main room and her children.

  It offered a space ten meters long by six wide. Foldout tables, collapsible chairs as thin as Lunar gravity permitted, chests that doubled as seats allowed passage, occasionally zigzaggy, no matter what was going on in the way of games, partying, entertainment, education, or simple ease. Duramoss made a living green carpet. Reserve tanks of water and air on the roof forbade any view straight up, but the windows on either side gave ample outlook. She saw the regular field van parked nearby, the whirly, strewn geological specimens and other clutter, the mountainscape, Earth big and lovely, the sun opposite stopped down to a wan disc. Music twanged from the speakers, for Dagny mercifully low—the newest feng-huang, she assumed. Her youngsters’ tastes were not hers. She sometimes wondered what their generation would compose when they were grown.

  Anson was outside with his father and the two grad students. Gabrielle, at seven the next oldest, sat before one of the computer terminals. That was in order, her regular schooling session. But why did five-year-old Sigurd hunker beside her? He should be at his own lesson. Francis, three, was curled up with a reader. That was nothing strange; all of them had acquired literacy by his age, except for Helen in her cradle, who doubtless would too, and Francy seemed a natural-born bookworm. What had he chosen today? He never cared for the ordinary stuff. …

  Her eyes took aim on Gaby and Sigurd. Intent, they had not noticed her arrival. She recalled past incidents, a quick switcharound when she appeared, an air of surreptitiousness, baffled half-suspicions. In two kangaroo bounds, she was there. The baby’s noises weren’t of the sort that meant emergency.

  The girl registered dismay, immediately masked.

  The boy’s mutinous expression stayed on him. He was the hell-raiser among them. Dagny peered at the screen. No, it did not carry an interactive math program. ARVEN ARDEA NIO LULLUI PEYAR—“What the devil is going on here?’’

  Her daughter blanked the display. “Nothin’,” she muttered. Color came and went in her face. She was outwardly the most Earthlike, chubby, topped with light-brown curls. Quiet, studious, was she inwardly the most paradoxical? “Just a game.”

  Easy, Dagny thought, take it slow, don’t drive them into hostility. They bore alien genes, but that DNA had come from two mighty self-determined parents. She caught Sigurd’s glance and held it. “Doesn’t seem like your kind of game,” she said mildly to this large, strongly built, redhaired muchacho.

  He flushed in his turn. “Aw, we wanted a break.”

  “If I were playing hooky, I’d do something more interesting. Unless this is. May I ask what it’s about?”

  Gaby was getting back some composure. “Per—per-mu-ta-tions,” she said. Triumphantly: “See? I did study.”

  Having the machine produce random combinations of, no, not words, syllables? Dagny shook her head. That couldn’t be right. Her glimpse had suggested a pattern, as if those were words in an unknown language. Could the pair be creating a fantasy world? Gaby showed gifts of that kind, insofar as she revealed any of herself. Sigurd, restless, resentful at being cooped up when his older brother had gone forth, might be finding an outlet in a shared dream.

  If so, it was nice that these utterly unlike two had set their fights aside and made something in common, for however brief a spell. Childhood secrets that had lain three decades forgotten stirred within Dagny. She’d better not push her invasion further.

  “Good for you, as far as it goes,” she said. “However, you are not supposed to study sets today, you’re to practice the mechanics of arithmetic. And you, Sigurd, are to improve your deplorable spelling.”

  “Bo-oring,” he whined. Gaby nodded, again and again.

  “I know,” their mother replied. “And you wonder why you have to, when a computer can do such jobs for you. Bueno, listen. You may not always have a computer handy, when you badly need to figure out something or write something that comes across unmistakable. More important, learning the systems is the single way you’ll get to understand them. If you’re ignorant of how the machines work and why, they won’t serve you, they’ll boss you. And you’ll be shut away from all kinds of wonderful things. Mainly, remember: Independent people have got to be independent.

  “Play games on your own time. You’re on Fireball time now. Prove that we can trust you.”

  Thus she led them back to their tasks. Francis, slight and blond, had barely glanced up from his reading. Past experience made Dagny believe he’d observed much more than he let on.

  Helen wailed. Dagny ascertained she didn’t need changing but was hungry, undid her tunic, and laid the infant to her right breast. (An excellent feature of life on the Moon—except when centrifuging, you could leave off the bra and yet never begin to sag.) “I’m busy too, dear,” she said, and returned forward.

  The dark little head pumped milk from her. Warmth and love flowed back. Yes, never mind all the extra trouble during pregnancy, she wanted anyway one more, another life to brighten hers and ’Mond’s before it flew out into the unbounded future.

  Unbounded in space. What was there for Earth? It shone so blue-and-white resplendent above the mountains. How much misery, how much terror and despair did the clouds veil? Poor North America, impoverished and stultified, the Renewal clinging like pitch to a semblance of power while the reality crumbled away in lawlessness. Poor Middle East, Befehl withdrawn, chaos loose, fanaticism a tide rising higher for every day that passed. … But in lands more fortunate civilization flourished, prosperity, liberty, and the true renewal, the healing of the planet, paid for by the riches that Fireball brought home. … The woman held her baby close.

  When she seated herself again at the office com, fears slipped away and Helen became simply a sweet
presence on the fringe of awareness Packer’s eyes widened appreciatively, then he too got straight back to work. They were occupied for the next couple of hours, save when Dagny took her offspring back to the crib. She found Gaby and Sigurd at their education. They did not act especially chastened

  “Um, yes, this sounds reasonable,” Packer said at last. Don’t just cut out the unreliable rock and replace with concrete. The metal frame of the building would carry downward the blaze at midday, the space-coldness at midnight; in the course of years, differing coefficients of thermal expansion could have fatigue effects. Therefore, seal a heat exchanger grid into the plug, such as automatically equalized temperatures. It would take some designing, but probably no more than an off-the-shelf program could handle, and the concept might well prove useful at other sites.

  “Oh, sure, first we run a simple model through the computer to see whether the notion’s loco,” Packer went on. “No, first we hear what Dr. Beynac thinks.” He was forever deferential to the mar who saved his life and limb, not in any servile way but in an abiding gratitude that Edmond and Dagny respected.

  “He’s due back soon,” she said. “Overdue, in fact. I’ll talk with him and call you this time tomorrow, okay?” Earth’s tomorrow; the sun over Lunar Taurus would stand a dozen degrees higher. “Happy landings.”

  She switched off, rose, stretched cramped muscles, and wished for an extra go in the whirly. No, too much trouble, and dinner to fix. Later, this evening, early bedtime—She grinned. Horizontal exercise didn’t count, officially, but damn if she didn’t wake at dawnwatch perkier than after anything else.

  She went aft. Study time was past. Gaby and Sigurd had not resumed their curious game. Dagny wondered if they would before they were home in Tychopolis and the privacy of their rooms. The girl slouched on a seat, staring beyond the windows, an electronic pad on her knees. Her lips moved, she scribbled something with the stylus, then again she was in reverie. Dagny decided not to pry. Francy had put a show of fractals on one terminal, or gotten a sibling to do it for him, and watched fascinated. Hunched over a table, Sigurd moved his toy soldiers and their machines through a battle. “Ee-ee-pow,” he breathed. “S-s-s-s. Crack.” They represented UN peacekeepers and imaginary villains, but Dagny doubted that was what he had in mind. She hardly dared ask.

  Not that she and ’Mond let their youngsters terrorize them. Not that affection and cheer were missing. But these, and their kind being born to other couples, would inherit the Moon, which was not Earth.

  Helen slept peacefully. Yet already you could see, in the big oblique eyes, the odd convolutions of the ears, the bones underneath the baby fat, that this too would become a face such as none of her forebears had worn.

  Sigurd turned his head. His countenance was going to be rugged, bearing at least a memory of his father’s. “Hiu-yo!” he piped, as if the small clash earlier had never happened. “Madre, you promised you’d tell ’bout Jefe Guthrie at Mars. Now?”

  He could reach out and take hold of her heart any time he wanted. All of them could. Though he didn’t know about his kinship, and maybe never would, Fireball’s lord was as much a legend to him as to everyone else. Dagny, who had stories directly from her grandfather, couldn’t stop mention of them from slipping free once in a while.

  “This instant?” she demurred. “I’ve soon got to rustle the rations.”

  “De-tails later.”

  “Tell, tell!” Francy cried.

  Dagny yielded. It was a funny story, how Anson Guthrie shot himself into orbit around Deimos and thereby confounded his opponents. What the incident had meant to politics and policy did not matter to this audience.

  “—and that’s why spacefolk call the crater Whisky’s Grief.” What was keeping the geologists?

  “Why didn’t the gov’ment want Fireball there?” Gaby had joined the group. Her mother couldn’t well fob the girl’s question off, could she?

  “That’s complicated to explain, darling. It wasn’t one government, it was three of them at loggerheads. Space is supposed to belong to the whole human race, but everybody is a citizen of some or other country—you and I count as Ecuadorans, your father’s French, the Guptas are Indian—and our governments make demands on us that often aren’t the same. Then, if we’re with Fireball—Hoy! There come our wanderers.”

  Through a window Dagny saw the camiόn trundle around the eastern flank of this mountain. Absurd, the relief that washed through her. If ’Mond’s party had met trouble, they’d have called to let her know. Nevertheless, they were notably later than usual, and Anson had been with them. … “Another time,” she pledged. “Right now I’d better hustle.”

  She had no real need for haste, but making ready worked the tension off. Start dinner. When she had leisure for it, she cooked according to standards she had learned from Edmond, unless he wanted to himself. In the field, and she riding herd on the gangs at Tychopolis, they settled for prepackaged stuff. But bring forth apéritifs and glasses. Change her coverall for a dress. ’Mond would d the corresponding thing, after a shower, and the kids would be quiet, though welcome to join in the talk. Happy hour, Guthrie called it. Oh, but nearly all her hours were happy.

  At odd moments she watched the vehicle arrive, the riders unload what they had collected, the graduate assistants carry those boxes into the field van. Ross and Marietta slept there, and generally had their meals there. It wasn’t exclusion on the Beynacs’ part. The young people rated some privacy; eating, sleeping, and laboratory studies weren’t everything they did in those quarters. Father and son approached their roving house. Against dun rock and long shadows, their spacesuits dazzled with whiteness. What a liberation dust-repellent impregnants were! “Don’t snub technofixes,” Guthrie used to say. “Progress consists of ’em. Has, ever since Ung Uggson chipped his first flint.”

  Dagny lost sight of them as they stepped onto the gangramp. Noise followed, outer airlock valve opened and shut, gas pumped back into the reserve tank while boots banged down the companionway to the lockers. A bass grumble drifted up, “God damn, I smell like a dead goat,” and Dagny smiled.

  Skinsuits went into the washer, which began to purr. Edmond and Anson returned to deck level. Dagny met them at the hatch. Both wore bathrobes. No puritan, the man remained uncomfortable with the casual nudity common among Moonfolk. At least, he felt adults should avoid it before children of the opposite sex.

  Dagny sprang to him. “I think you smell exciting,” she laughed. “C’mere, you.” She cast her arms around his neck and her mouth against his.

  After a second or two she let go and stepped back. “Hey,” she said, “that was like kissing a robot. A sweaty robot, but otherwise not programmed for it. What’s the matter?”

  He scowled. Anson stood sullen. “Clean yourself,” Edmond ordered him. “Then go to your bunk.”

  “Hold on,” Dagny exclaimed. “What’s this about?”

  “No supper for him,” Edmond snapped. “He was insubordinate and reckless.” To the boy: “Go.”

  “Wait just a minute,” Dagny countermanded. “What did he do?”

  “He left us,” Edmond said. “We were sorting our specimens into the boxes and did not notice before he was gone. We called and got no answer. His tracks went upslope to bare rock where we could not trail him. For more than an hour we searched, until we found him in a cleft. He had not answered us, that whole while.”

  “I couldn’t receive you.” Anson spoke with a clipped precision which in him registered fury. “The ridges screened it. That overhang below your site must have blocked the satellite relay.’

  “You told me already. And I told you—bloody hell, how many times?—you do not leave your party without permission.”

  “When I started off, you didn’t call me to stop.”

  “You knew we were not watching, Hein? I told you, if you want to walk around, you must stay in line of sight. If you get into a no-reception zone, you retrace your steps. Immediately! Mon Dieu, you could ’ave been l
ost, somesing could ’ave ’appened—” The father’s voice wavered. “After daycycles, we might ’ave found your mummy.”

  Dagny wondered whether this was their first real exchange or they were going over the ground again for her. Undoubtedly Anson had received an awesome tongue-lashing, but it had only stiffened his spine. “That’s far too true,” she said to him, keeping her tone low. “Why did you do it?”

  The boy met her gaze. He was the beautiful one of her brood, slim, straight, cat-graceful, bird-soaring in this gravity for which he was made. Already the great height that would be typically Lunarian had brought his head even with his father’s. Ash-bond hair fell in bangs over milk-white temples wherein a vein stood as blue as the big, slanty Lunarian eyes. The cheekbones were Asian, the nose and mouth and chin Hellenic, though neither blood was on him; it went with the altered genotype and had surprised the geneticists themselves. They talked of chaos inherent in biological systems, but she gathered this meant “We don’t know.”

  At her he smiled, to her he spoke gently. “It was all right, Madre. I wasn’t in danger. The sun gave me a direction, and the high, jagged peak south of us, that’d be a landmark any time I climbed to where I could see it.”

  “Merde!” Edmond roared.

  Dagny shushed him with a gesture. “But why did you go, dear?”

  “Bueno, I got out of sight before I noticed, and then I thought how I wanted a better look at those formations we found in the cleft, that Padre doesn’t think are interesting.” Anson shrugged. “Honest, I’d have come back before they were ready to leave.”