The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Lights glared ahead. Buildings clustered together, a longhouse on four arches, an octagon white below an iridescent cupola, a corkscrew spire. A measure of heart came back. He straightened in his seat. Let him at least hear out this Irene Norton who was to meet him.

  The cab stopped. “The Asilo, señor,” it said. “Will you want further service at a particular time?”

  “N-no.” He got out. The cab departed.

  The street, narrow but clear and clean, had scant traffic, pedestrian or vehicular. The bistro occupied part of the ground floor of a square masonry structure; the rest might be apartments, or might have uses more peculiar. A lightsign danced surrealistically above the door. He went in.

  The chamber beyond was broad and long. Tables and chairs filled a splintery wooden floor. At the rear were a bar and cuisinier. The air lay blue-hazed. Among the reeks Kenmuir recognized tobacco and marijuana, guessed at opium and sniph. Customers sat at about half the tables, by themselves or in small groups. Synthesized music, at the moment tinkling not unlike a pi pa, wove beneath a buzz of talk, A live waiter bore a tray of drinks. Kenmuir hadn’t seen a dive like this in years. Downright medieval.

  He tapped his informant for the time. 2032. Half an hour to go, if Norton was punctual. He took a place off to one side but not so obscure that she’d have to search for him. The agent in San Francisco would have recorded his eidophone image and played it for her.

  The waiter delivered his order and came over. He was a metamorph himself, a Titan, his shaggy head 250 centimeters up into the smoke, the body and limbs bole-thick to support his weight. Upon such a mass, shabby tunic and trousers were somehow pathetic. One had better not pity him, though, Kenmuir thought; he could pluck an ordinary man apart. Had the management lately engaged him to stop violence, or had he stood by while that fellow was beaten last year? “What’s for you?” he rumbled.

  “Uh, beer,” Kenmuir said. “Sun Brew, if you have it.” Most establishments did, and it was drinkable.

  “Cash.”

  “What? Oh, uh, yes.” Kenmuir fumbled in his pouch and brought out a ten-ucu note. It had lain there for quite a while, but the fabric still showed startlingly clean against this tabletop. The waiter nodded and went off. The floor creaked to his tread.

  Kenmuir looked around. Although he wasn’t the sole standard human here, this certainly was a hangout for metamorphs. Several Tinies chattered shrilly. A party of Drylanders held likewise to themselves. A Chemo talked with two Aquatics, who huddled unhappily in garments that the water tanks on their backs kept moist. Why had they come so far from the sea? Was the Chemo, easily breathing this tainted atmosphere, taking advantage of their discomfort to work some swindle? … The impression of poverty was not universal. It was surprising how sumptuously dressed four Chimpos were, and what a meal they were tucking into. Yet they didn’t seem joyous either. … The saddest sight was perhaps a bulge-headed Intellect, playing a game of heisenberg against a computer. He’d have had to make it employ a low enough level of competence that he stood a chance.

  “Hola, amigo.”

  The throaty trill brought Kenmuir’s attention around. Another metamorph had come to his table, a female Exotic. Otter-slim save for hips and breasts, attired in a string of beads and her sleek brown fur, she smiled at him with great yellow eyes and sharp teeth. Her plumy tail arched up above the delicate features and tumbling black mane, seductively sinuous. “Are you lonesome?” she murmured. “I am Rrienna.”

  “No, thank you,” he said clumsily.

  “No-o-o? A handsome man like you shouldn’t sit all alone. You must have come here for something.”

  “Well, I—”

  “I don’t think you’d care to meet a Priapic. It could be arranged if you want, but—” She leaned close. Through the smoke he scented her musk.

  “No! I’m, I’m waiting for somebody.”

  She straightened. “Muy bien, I only thought I’d ask.”

  “I’m sorry.” How lame that sounded. “Good luck.”

  She undulated off. He caught a snatch of what she sang under her breath,

  “Gin a body meet a body

  Coming through the rye—”

  and then she was out of earshot, half lost again in the haze.

  Ruination, he was sorry. These poor creatures, living fossils, victims of regimes long since down in the dust with Caligula, Tamerlane, Tchaka, Stalin, Zeyd—genomes modified for purposes of science, industry, war, pleasure—why did they go on, begetting generation after hopeless generation?

  Lunarians were metamorphs too.

  Why did Terrans go on, when sophotects did everything better?

  Except being human.

  He had wondered if those opposing presences and examples might be the underlying reason why few of his species had ever made radical changes in themselves. Technologically it was quite possible. A person might almost casually shift body form, sex, temperament, anything. But no real demand existed, and therefore the means did not, and whoever did wish for transformation must do without. Could the sheer blind instinct for survival make people, metamorphs included, hold fast to the identities they had? Societies had likewise never become as different from what the past had known as he could imagine them having done. Were they also both driven and bound by a biological heritage that went back to t he prehuman?

  The waiter interrupted his reverie by bringing his beer. He paid and gulped it.

  “Buenas tardes, Captain Kenmuir.’

  He looked up. The heart thuttered between his ribs.

  “I am Irene Norton,” the woman said in a musical, young-sounding contralto. Otherwise she was undistinguished, pale face, shoulder-length brown hair. Of average height, she muffled her shape in a slit poncho and wide-bottomed slacks. That wasn’t uncommon, but he didn’t suppose she intended stylishness.

  He half rose. She waved him back. “May I join you?” she asked. When she took a chair, the motion was lithe.

  “D-do you care for a drink?” he stammered.

  She gave a steady look out of a visage held expressionless. “No, gracias. This is simply a, a convenient place to meet.”

  “No eavesdroppers?” What an idiotic question.

  She shook her head. “And I know the neighborhood and those who live in it, a little. Let’s not waste time. We’ll have to go somewhere else for serious talking, but first—” She leaned forward. Her arms came out of the poncho to rest on the table. “Has anything unusual, anything at all, happened to you on this expedition?”

  “Why, uh, well—” He barked a laugh. “The whole business is unusual, isn’t it?”

  “I mean, have you noticed something that could suggest, oh, you’re being watched?”

  It came to him with a start. He should have seen earlier, when she first gestured. The hands and wrists before him were well-formed, strong, and … golden-brown. That was a life mask on her head.

  She should have been more thorough about her disguise, or more careful in her movements. And she spoke almost as hesitantly as he. No professional, then. Another amateur, maybe just as bewildered and anxious? What was driving her?

  The sense of equal responsibility braced him. He saw what a funk he had been in, and how much it was due to feeling like a pawn—he who had taken a boat down through a gravel storm, on his own decision, to rescue five men stranded on a cometary nucleus.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Let me think.” He did, aloud, while he stared into his beer mug or sipped from it. “If Lilisaire is under suspicion and monitored, they could know she called me back from space. Have you been told about that? And of course they’d know I visited her at the castle. I took the regular shuttle from Port Bowen to Kenyatta. Somebody could have ridden with me or called ahead and had somebody else waiting to trail me. But—I’m no expert at this, you understand. However, she and I had discussed my procedure at length. When I rented a volant at Kenyatta, I debited the account of an Earthside agent of hers. I left it in a part of Scotland I know, with
instructions to return home next day, and went on foot about thirty kilometers across uninhabited Highland preserve to where another volant was waiting for me. That had been arranged by messenger or quantum-coded transmission, I’m not sure which, but in either case it ought to have been secure. I saw no sign of anyone else, and cloud cover—which had been forecast—hampered satellite surveillance, if they were zealous enough to order that. In Lake Superior Hub I changed vehicles again, and proceeded to a resort community on Vancouver Island, where I made a local call to Guthrie House and arranged an appointment with the Rydberg. I phoned San Francisco from there. The Rydberg told me it was safe, and I do believe it would take a special operation to tap that line. Today, according to the orders I got, I flew here without incident.”

  He raised his glance. His grin was wry. “I should think,” he said, “if they considered making the kind of effort needed to track me through all that, they’d have done better to arrest me on suspicion and interrogate. Simpler and cheaper.”

  The life mask barely frowned. She wasn’t practiced in using one. “I think,” she said, “that they may be more clever. Lilisaire’s agent warned me a very high-powered agent had come to see her, Lilisaire, in person.”

  “Yes, she told—”

  Urgency cut across his words: “Search your memory. Has anything happened, no matter how trivial it seems, anything you can’t quite explain?”

  A slight shudder passed through him. He pushed his mind back into time. Nothing, nothing. … Wait.

  “Not really, but—Well, when I first landed on the Moon and her man met me, our flight was delayed about an hour because of an accident in orbit.”

  “What happened?” Beneath the poncho, she crouched.

  “Nothing. We were taken to the executive lounge and given a drink while we waited. Then we were let go.”

  “A drink. And you never mentioned this to Lilisaire?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe, maybe not. With everything else to talk about—”

  “Pele!” She sprang to her feet. “Come on!”

  “What?”

  “Āwīwī!” She grabbed his hand and tugged. “I could be wrong, b-but I’m afraid I’m not. Come on!”

  Numbly, he obeyed. They threaded among the tables, rearward. The waiter loomed in front of them. Norton gave him a few rapid words in a language Kenmuir didn’t recognize. His massive countenance turning grim, he stepped aside and waved them to go ahead.

  “I picked this place to meet because I know it,” Norton said in a voice slurred by haste. “I picked a time after dark because we might need darkness. Now, if we hurry, if we’re lucky, we may—Here.”

  They had passed through a hinged door to a storeroom. She swung another such door aside. A stairway descended into murk. She touched a switchplate, feeble fluorescence glimmered forth, she drew Kenmuir along and shut the door behind them. They started downward.

  But he was no criminal, he protested silently, wildly. He had done nothing unlawful, nothing to make him a fugitive. Why was he in flight? Only this morning he’d been conversing with Matthias over breakfast. The lodgemaster had admitted, grudgingly, that Lunarians might after all be the best hope of humans for getting to the stars, or even of humans becoming less than totally dependent on sophotectic intelligences—if that was desirable. … It seemed impossibly long ago, another age, well-nigh as lost to him as the lifetime of the first Rydberg.

  14

  The Mother of the Moon

  Homebound from Jupiter, the Caroline Herschel passed within naked-eye range of L-5. Nevertheless the gigantic cylinder gleamed tiny athwart space, half in light, half in darkness, its tapered ends pointed at the stars, jewel-exquisite. Firefly sparks flitted about it, spacecraft, machines. Earth and Luna were crescents to sunward, large and small opalescent and ashen.

  “We should have arrived a few months later,” Eva Jannicki said. “We might have inaugurated the dock and drunk liters of free champagne.” Though the orbital colony was an East Asian, mainly Japanese project, Fireball was inevitably a full partner and would dominate its commerce.

  “I think our people will always gather mostly on Luna, when they do not on Earth,” Lars Rydberg replied. “That is where our traditions have struck root.”

  “Oh, you!” The little full-figured woman gave the tall rawboned man a look of comic despair. Blue eyes returned her glance, from beneath cropped yellow hair and above jutting nose and lantern jaw. “That was a joke. I hoped you might know Three times in these past four months I saw you smile. Once I distinctly heard you laugh. I thought my efforts were finally bearing fruit.”

  “You exaggerate, ray dear, as usual.” Rydberg’s lips turned upward, ruefully. “But maybe not much. I fear we Swedes are like the English of legend. If you want to make us happy in our old age, tell us a funny story when we are young.”

  “There, you see, you can, if you try. Besides, you told me you aren’t Swedish by ancestry.”

  He looked from her, out the port to the sky. His tone harshened. “That was a mistake. I should not have. Could you please forget it?”

  Silence fell, making the ventilators sound loud. The two who manned Herschel floated adrift in it, weightless, while the ship moved on trajectory toward the point where final maneuvers were to commence. At this point in its cycle, air renewal had increased the ozone; there was a slight odor as of thunderstorm.

  Jannicki reached to touch Rydberg’s sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said low. “I didn’t mean to offend you. Especially now, of all times.”

  He faced her anew. “You did not,” he replied with some difficulty. “I should apologize for snapping at you. You touched a nerve, but you could not know, it was not your fault.”

  “Well, you’ve never talked much about yourself,” she agreed. “And nerves do wear thin,” during fifteen weeks with hardly anything to do but maintain health in the centrifuge, read, watch recorded shows, listen to recorded music, and pursue what other recreations are possible in free fall. “Our sheer uselessness—”

  “No. We could have had an emergency, something the ship could not cope with alone. And before then—” Outbound eagerness, study, preparation. Supplies and support borne to Himalia Base. Participation, helping explore and prospect the outer moons, sharing in the telepresence when humans directed robots through the radiation rain upon the Galileans and into the king planet itself. The knowledge that this remoteness and unknownness required humans, were they to find and understand and someday make use of the stark wonders around them. Rydberg pondered. “Again I apologize. Memories ran away with me. It’s another bad habit of mine, repeating the obvious.”

  She smiled. “I forgive you.”

  “Really?”

  “That has perforce become one of my habits.”

  “Amazing, that you have not cut my throat.”

  “Oh, I probably lack a perfection or two myself. Were you never tempted to cut mine?”

  “Of course not. Quite apart from the mess and the legal consequences, what a terrible waste.”

  “My feeling exactly.” She paused. The lightened mood left her. “When the new ships replace these, when it’s a few daycycles at one g to most destinations—”

  “And the automation is so advanced that a single person is enough—Yes,” he sighed. “I too will often miss the long voyages. But maybe before this comes to pass, we will be retired to planetside duty and living off our memories.”

  “Memories indeed.”

  “Indeed.”

  She fluttered her eyelashes. Her voice went husky. “We can still add to them, you know. Hours yet before we’ll be wanted at the controls.”

  He smiled. “Now it is you speaking, the obvious.”

  Together they kicked the bulkhead and soared aft.

  When presently they rested at ease, harnessed against drift, otherwise in one another’s arms and warmth and breath, she said, “Yes, the psych staff took a correct compatibility profile of us.”

  “I trust we will be teamed again,
more than once,” he replied in his solemn wise.

  “I too. And as for our leave—You haven’t told me, not really, how you plan to spend yours, aside from visiting your … parents … on Earth.”

  He stared before him at blank metal. “I am not sure. It depends.”

  “Nor am I sure. My ties are all Fireball, you know. I’ll meet friends, doubtless make new ones, variety—” Her tone grew wistful. “But afterward, we two, a rendezvous?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated.

  Being of a size for Luna if not Earth, Herschel was just a short while in parking orbit, then descended to Port Bowen. Since discussions had gone on beforehand by radio and a quick inspection showed everything apparently in order, her crew were soon finished at the office. As customary, they took separte quarters in the Hotel Aldrin—privacy, total privacy, any time they wanted!—but she was hurt when he declined to make straight for the Fuel Tank with her. He didn’t notice. “I may join you later,” he muttered, and hurried off to his room.

  Alone, he put through a call to Geneva. Business hours obtained in Europe, and he got the live contact he wished. “Hold a moment,” he said, and debited for quantum coding. “Now, please, what have you learned?”

  When the detective told him, he whistled long and low and sat for a span mute, until he commanded, “This is to stay strictly confidential.”

  The reply after transmission lag came stiff. “Sir, you knew the reputation of our agency when you engaged us.”

  “Yes, of course.” Fireball’s were not the only people touchy about the outfits to which they belonged. Because that was where they belonged, far more than in their countries or any other part of an impersonal civilization? “No offense. You did an excellent job. Keep the file encrypted, please, till I can get to Earth and study it in detail.” Not that that would likely make any difference. “After which, I suppose, I’ll want it wiped and forgotten.”

  Having switched off, Rydberg jumped to his feet and paced, not Lunar-style paces but short, jerky steps as if to make the room feel larger than it was. Finally he observed the time and swore. Late duskwatch. Aside from police and the like, nobody administrative was at work. He couldn’t very well call the Beynac home, could he?