The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “Self-protective secrecy.” Not absolutely true. “I’ve been let into a little of it—” partly because that was expedient, partly because she had pressed herself on the leaders, being interested and eager. Adventures into strangeness.

  “Those connections could prove valuable. As for your access to databases and communication lines—”

  “That’s straightforward,” she interrupted, for impatience was rising in her. “I am an officer of a recognized community, who has to deal with government officials. Sometimes that’s best done under administrative confidentiality. You know, so the discussion can be frank and undistracted. Accordingly, I’ve learned my way around in the datanet. But I don’t have unlimited access.”

  Supposing she theoretically did, how could she tell what was being kept hidden from her, or what was engineered to delude her?

  “Muy bien,” said the machine. “Let us get to the point.” At last, at last! “The lady Lilisaire has found clues indicating there is a secret. …” It went on.

  Aleka sat mute for a while before she whispered, out of her amazement, “I’d no idea. I don’t know what to say. Or what to do.”

  “The hope is that you can discover the truth, and that it will give back to Luna some power over its future.”

  She shook her head. “Impossible, if they—” they “—want to keep it from us.”

  “Necessarily? You will have what help we can provide, beginning with a confederate highly knowledgeable about space.”

  Lilisaire and this thinking engine would not throw her away on a totally absurd endeavor. Arousal thrilled. She leaned forward, hands gripping knees. “Tell me about her.”

  “Him.” With her senses whetted, she took in every word of the succinct account that followed, every lineament of Ian Kenmuir’s displayed image.

  But. “I’m afraid—” she began uneasily.

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I’m afraid he may be, uh, compromised. If he’s been to see Lilisaire recently, and she’s under suspicion—”

  “We are aware. Could you not make him disappear with you?”

  “Um-m.” She considered. “Yes, maybe. Whether anything will come of it, I can’t say, except that the odds look poor.”

  “Will you make the attempt?”

  Go slow, she warned herself. Hang onto independence and common sense. “Why should I?”

  That was curt, but the machine didn’t seem to take offense. Could it, ever? “Granted, the risk will be significant. You shall not assume it without compensation.”

  “What am I offered?” A Lunarian attitude, she thought.

  “If you make an honest effort and fail, a substantial sum. Before you refuse, think what it might buy for your people.”

  “Depends on the sum.” They could wrangle about that later. She thrust onward. “What if somehow I succeed?”

  “How would you like a country of your own?”

  “What?”

  The machine explained. At the end, she was on her feet, sobbing, “Yes, yes, oh, Pele, yes.”

  The machine started to discuss details.

  When she left, emotionally exhausted, dusk was creeping out of the east. By the time she got back to Fell Street, night had fallen. The clouds made darkness heavy; the glow from the pavement could not entirely raise it. Fog streamed thicker on a wind grown colder.

  She felt unable to cope with Mama’s good cheer. In an autocafé she got a hasty supper, paying no attention to the taste. At the inn she went straight to her room.

  Try to relax, try to get sleepy. A pill could knock her out, but she’d wake in the same turmoil as now. She had already decided against patronizing the quivira. Matters were amply complicated without adding memories of things that never physically happened. A vivifer would have been ideal, but this place didn’t have any. Bueno, the multiceiver could engage her eyes and ears, while imagination supplied additional inputs.

  But what to watch? She retrieved a list of major broadcasts. None appealed, and she didn’t care to check out hundreds of lesser channels. The informant on her wrist, then. Thousands of entries in it, both text and audiovisual, both facts and entertainments. Many of them she hadn’t yet seen, only put in because she thought she might like to someday.

  She keyed for the sort of thing she wanted and pushed the bezel against the scanner. Titles and brief descriptions marched across the screen. Having chosen Sunrise Over Tycho, she directed the multi to get that from the public database, and settled back. This was a comedy she remembered favorably, set in the early days of Lunar colonization, when life was simpler, entirely human.

  12

  The Mother of the Moon

  Spacious and gracious, the Beynacs’ living room gave a near-perfect illusion of being above ground and on an Earth long lost. Flowers on shelves splashed red, yellow, violet, green against ivory walls, above deep-blue carpet. Their perfume tinged air that went like a summer breeze. Furniture was redundantly massive. A giant viewscreen could have presented the outside scene or someplace within the Moon, but instead held an image from the Dordogne; trees stirred in a wind that blew up a hillside to a medieval castle, their soughing an undertone to peacefulness Opposite it hung family pictures, not activated at he moment, and a scan-reproduction of a Winslow Homer seascape. A cat lay asleep on one chair.

  But you moved with unearthly ease and if you dropped something, it fell dreamlike slowly.

  Three people entered. “Welcome,” Dagny said. “We’ll give you the grand tour later. Right now it’s time for a drink before dinner.”

  “I see already, this is quite a place you’ve got,” Anson Guthrie replied. “Bueno, you’ve earned it.”

  “We have built much of it ourselves,” Edmond told him. A little bragging was allowable. The job had never been easy, often damned tough, what with shortages of materials, equipment, and, above all, leisure. It had taken years.

  Again Dagny felt glad of how lightly those years seemed to have touched her grandfather. She had not encountered him in person for five of them, and pictorial messages or the occasional phone conversation didn’t convey enough reality. Besides, his recent loss was of the kind that can break a spirit. But when she met him at the spaceport, his bass still boomed and he hugged her as bear-vigorously as ever. Though the hair was white and thin, the craggy face deeply furrowed, he bade fair to keep the helm of Fireball for decades more.

  Which was well for her and hers, and for everybody everywhere who loved liberty. Why care about skintraces? Lines now radiated from the corners of her mouth and eyes when she laughed, ’Mond had gone frosty at the temples, yet neither of them had noticeably slowed down.

  “Yes, Dagny’s supplied me gossip along with business talk,” Guthrie said. “Good workmanship here. It’s got a solid feel to it, the sort you seldom find any more. Meant to last beyond your own lives, eh?”

  The woman nodded. “So we hope. Of course, it’s nothing like your home on Earth.”

  “Which one?”

  “Hm, well, I happened to recall the Vancouver Island estate. The sea, the woods—” Her stay there had probably been the happiest of her infrequent visits to the planet, apart from times when she and ’Mond were together in his France. She gestured at the screen. “We have to pretend.” Quickly, lest he get a false idea that she felt the slightest bit sorry for herself: “But we’ve got plenty you don’t,” more and more as Tychopolis grew. Bird-flight in Avis Park. Beautiful Hydra Square. Wonders, bred for Luna, in the zoo and botanical gardens. Outside, stern grandeur, sports—dashball, rock skiing, mountain climbing, suborbital flits, exploration—and the excitement, bewilderment, and occasional heartbreak of a civilization coming to birth.

  “Right,” Guthrie agreed. “Wish I could’ve called on you before. Too busy. Always too backscuttling busy.” He took a turn around the room, glancing at things. “I do miss books,” he remarked. “Antique bound volumes. When I was young, dropping in on somebody, if they were readers, what you saw on their bookshelve
s would tell you more about them than a month’s palaver.”

  “I remember from your houses,” Dagny said. “No need to remind you about the transport problems we had till lately.”

  “Nevertheless we can oblige you,” Edmond said. He took a hand-held cyberlit off a table, where it rested beside a small meteorite full of metallic glints, and started it. Titles and authors’ names appeared on the screen. “Here, play with this.” He gave it to Guthrie.

  The jefe unscrolled part of the catalogue, darting to and fro among its items. Most were in the central library database, listed here because they interested the Beynacs. Some were personal property. He evoked a few pages, including representations of texts and pictures centuries old. “Fine collection,” he said meanwhile. “This gadget’s not the same as holding a real book, but then I daresay the Egyptian priest told Solon, at boring length, how much more character hieroglyphs had than any spindly alphabet.”

  He was no clotbrain, Dagny reflected, in spite of his sneers at self-styled intellectuals.

  A door opened. The housekeeper robot scanned in, sensed people, and, in the absence of orders, withdrew, closing the door again.

  “Ah, your professional publications, ’Mond,” Guthrie observed. “Impressive clutch M-m, I see you’re stiff-necked as ever pushing your theory about a big ancient asteroid.”

  “The evidence accumulates,” the geologist answered. He sought the miniature bar. “But we are being inhospitable. What will you have to drink?”

  “I’m told they’ve begun brewing decent beer since I was last on the Moon. That, por favor, to go in hot pursuit of a cold akvavit, if you’ve got some.”

  “Dagny would disown me if we did not, especially when you were coming.” Edmond prepared the same for her, a dry sherry for himself.

  “But where’s your real writing?” Guthrie asked him.

  “Hein?”

  “Those novels Dagny’s mentioned, under the name—uh, blast, I’m getting senile—”

  “You are not, Uncans,” she declared. “You’ve simply got so much else in your head. Jacques Croquant, that’s his pen name.”

  “My secret is out!” Edmond groaned. “I did not know you had told him.”

  “I’d like to read ’em,” Guthrie said. “’Fraid my French has gone down a black hole, what little there ever was of it, but if a translator program won’t mangle the style too badly, I gather they’re fun.”

  Edmond shrugged. “Style, what is that? They are deep-space adventure stories I write in spare time for amusement. The pseudonym is because academics are snobs. They respect my Lunar work, yes.” As well they might, Dagny thought fiercely. It had revolutionized selenology. “But I want also my ideas about the early Solar System taken seriously, investigated.”

  “That might well be arranged, now we’re setting up a meteoroid patrol.” Guthrie continued his random retrievals. “What, three biographies of Charles de Gaulle? And his collected works. Hero of yours?”

  “In the twentieth century, exactly two leaders of major nations deserved the name of statesman, he and Konrad Adenauer. The rest—” Edmond shrugged again. “Eh, bien, I can imagine several of them meant well.”

  “’Mond’s got more regard for authority than I do,” Dagny put in.

  Guthrie smiled. “Yeah, you’re a natural-bora, two-dominants rebel, Diddyboom. So how does it feel to be turning into a power yourself, here on Luna?”

  “I’m not,” she denied. “Not really. It’s just that, you know how the governments load us with politicians and bureaucrats who can’t tell a crap from a crater. Being in administration forces me to deal directly with them, and if my friends and I can get the residents to support Fireball’s positions, and the right candidates into what few elective offices we’re allowed—ah, you know. The drinks are ready. Sit down, please do.”

  All three took chairs, though on Luna it was as easy to stand and gatherings often did throughout a social evening. The Beynacs preferred to maintain a few gestures, customs, symbols. Dagny wondered whether they would be able to through the rest of their lives.

  When Edmond cared about something, he cared passionately. “We must accept legitimate authority,” he argued. “Else society ablates itself until people welcome the warlord who will enforce a brutal kind of order that at least gives them security. The problem is not what makes a government legitimate. There have been many ways in history, royal or noble birth, priestliness, popular vote, a sociological theory, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is, how does a government keep legitimacy? How does it lose it? I say the breakdown comes when it begins coing more to people than for them. This has happened, it is happening, in more and more countries on Earth. In space, the disorder that soon or late follows breakdown, it would mean extinction. Fireball has more right to power than most of the governments that today claim power, because Fireball’s masters honor their obligations to Fireball’s people.”

  He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, Dagny thought, but when he kindled, a nova lit in her too. She sent a chill caraway nip over her tongue, followed it with the tingle of beer, and was not much calmed.

  “Gracias,” Guthrie said. “We try. Don’t thank me, however. Thank the folks who’re actually doing it, like this wife of yours. Or you personally, ’Mond, even if you avoid politicking. I’ve kept track, sort of. You two don’t scamp your responsibilities, you go out and look for more.”

  “If we do well, it is because of you, sir. You make us want to. You make it possible.”

  Guthrie shook his head. “Not me. Never think that. Those who believe in an indispensable man don’t survive long, nor ought to.” He grinned, tossed off a considerable draught, and added, “Mind you, I’m not modest. I do a braw job where I am. But that’s in an outfit which is sound because its members are.”

  “And they are because it is.”

  Dagny nodded to herself. She had watched mutuality grow and strengthen, year by year. This new, fast-spreading, altogether spontaneous practice of swearing troth to the company, which in the person of an officer pledged faith of its own—

  “You started Fireball, Uncans,” she said softly. “You kept it going through every terrible trouble.”

  “Juliana more than me,” Guthrie answered, low in his throat.

  Her eyes stung. “We all miss her. You—” She leaned over to lay her hand briefly upon his.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he growled. “I soldier on.”

  “She would have wanted you to,” Edmond said.

  “It’s your nature,” Dagny murmured.

  Guthrie shook his heavy shoulders. “Hey, this is in danger of turning serious,” he protested.

  Dagny saw how he wanted to veer from the intimate. But when would another chance come to talk quietly? “Please bear with us a little while longer,” she appealed. “We’ve so been wanting to hear your thoughts, your knowledge. Earth is in such a bad way, and Fireball seems to be almost the only strong force for good that’s left.”

  “Hoo-ha, lass!” he exclaimed. “Jesus Christ couldn’t live up to that kind of billing. You know better. You could name as well as me plenty who haven’t let power short circuit their wits.”

  “Yes, they keep progress alive, at least in science and technology,” Edmond said. “Foremost, those of the super-rich who are enlightened, like you. The ‘Savant Barons.’”

  “And a few in government, much though I hate to admit it.”

  “But what of the populace? What of the vast majority, in every land, who can find no real place in this high-technology universe you have created?”

  “Yeah. The High World versus the Low World. It’s more than a journalistic duck-billed platitude. Count yourselves lucky. Everybody in space is High World. Not as a pun. Necessarily.”

  Dagny felt her brows draw together. “That may be why we have trouble making sense of what’s going on on Earth,” she ventured.

  “Sense there is mighty thin on the ground, honey. Day by day, scarcer and scarcer, in spite of the b
est efforts of us whom you want to canonize.”

  “Newscasts, analyses, books, personal communications—here on the Moon, it all seems … abstract? Surreal?” Dagny forced herself: “Is there really going to be a war?”

  “Wars are popping already, around the planet,” Guthrie replied somberly. “We call ’em disorders or revolutions or whatever, but wars is what they amount to. And, yes, I’m afraid the big one is on the way.”

  “The Jihad?” Edmond’s tone went hoarse. “Those preachers—But it is not Islam against the infidels, not truly, is it? Nothing so simple.”

  “No, sure not. I’d call it the last full-scale revolt of the Low World against an order of things it doesn’t understand and feels forever left out of. The High World will have its share of Muslim allies, and the Mahdis will have theirs of every creed and none.”

  “What will come of it?” Dagny whispered.

  “Not a general blowup,” Guthrie assured her. “I expect nukes will get fired in anger, but not many nor high-yield. The whole hooraw is too complicated, changeable, scrambled geographically and ethnically and economically and you-name-it—too much for any clear-cut showdown. My guess is we’ll see years of fighting, minor in some areas, a blood tsunami in others. The High World countries will end on top, but they’ll be so shaken that things can’t go back to the same for them either.”

  He paused, then finished: “I doubt there ever was or ever will be a war that was worth what it cost, when you figure in the costs to everybody concerned, including generations unborn. But what comes out of this might be better in a few respects than what we’ve got now. For instance, I don’t see how that rattlebone, patchgut Renewal can survive the strain.

  “On the whole, though, be glad you’re on the Moon, you and yours, with nothing worse to worry about than vacuum, radiation, meteoroids, life-support failure, and bureaucrats.”

  “Most glad for our children,” Dagny said.

  “Of course.”

  Now they all wanted to change the subject. “Where are the youngsters, anyway?” Guthrie inquired.