The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Not likely, Wahl thought. Not those decorous amusements. The Ginza? Or worse? Unwise to insist on knowing. “Be home for dinner.”

  “I am not sure I—”

  “You heard me. Hour 1900, in time to dress properly. No later.”

  Leandro flushed fiery. He wolfed his food, mouthed a formal request for leave to go, and stalked out.

  A meal in silence had little savor. “You were too hard on him, dear,” Rita ventured sadly.

  “I didn’t enjoy it,” Wahl reminded her. “Without discipline, he could get into serious trouble.”

  “I understand. This horrible atmosphere, conflict, racial tension, and too few safe, healthy outlets—” She touched his hand. “But perhaps we should be gentler. It’s not easy being young. Here, it’s very hard, for both of them.”

  He regarded her. She was short, well-formed, round-faced, always an excellent helpmate and hostess, but her bubbliness had dwindled on the Moon. More than the social and political situation oppressed her. She was among those who could never quite be physically comfortable in low gravity. “Harder on you,” he said, “and you don’t complain.”

  She smiled a little. “Nor you, old duty lugger.”

  “I’ve enjoyed past duty more,” he admitted. Even police actions and relief efforts in stricken corners of Earth. Even the niggling negotiations and boring parties that a Federation delegate must endure. He hadn’t wanted to enter politics, but they persuaded him that Argentina needed someone of his caliber in Hiroshima, and, yes, he had gotten several worthwhile things accomplished. For those, his reward was first to be talked into administration of the African Protectorate and now into this cauldron called Luna.

  He took several mouthfuls, consciously tasted them, and vowed, “I’ll have things under control within five years. God willing, no longer. And then we’ll go home and never leave again.” To the lively life in Buenos Aires, the serenity of the house in San Isidro, the freedom of the ranch in La Pampa.

  She smiled once more. “Oh, surely now and then to Guangzhou. Where else shall I buy my frivolous clothes?” He chuckled back at her and they finished their breakfast in mildness.

  But then it was time to start the daycycle’s work. See the news; play whatever communications had arrived; answer those that required it; at the appointed hour, call Sato Fujiwara. The shipping-line executive was a friend of Philip Rabkin and willing to brief the governor about the deputy. By all accounts, Rabkin was a reasonable man, but best to come well prepared to the lunch with him later today. Groundwork, and also a practice run for meeting the really difficult cases like Fia.

  Wahl’s private office comforted him with its mementos, pictures from home, a Noh mask, a Moshi-Dagomban figurine in wood, his archery trophies (it had been a minor triumph, adapting his skills that well to Lunar conditions), an eighteenth-century crucifix on the wall. He settled down before his terminal and keyed for tidings.

  URGENT. CONFIDENTIAL flashed at him. What the devil? His nightcycle staff had entered an override. He keyed afresh. The report smashed forth.

  “¡Madre de Dios!”

  It was as if he had dived into his pool and it had turned to ice around him. He caught his breath, exhaled most carefully, willed muscles to slack off, felt his pulse drop to a hard slugging. The forebrain took over.

  Constabulary headquarters had sent notification: About 0130, as per his orders, a vehicle was bound across Mare Imbrium for Archimedes Station. Aboard it was the accused murderer Darenn. (No proper name. He was among the many Lunarians whose parents, scofflaw, had not registered the birth. Nor had he made good their omission. His ident as George Hanover was false, although some of his race did still use Terrestrial names as alternatives. A fake registry was easy to arrange. The datalines were infested with subversive operators and the computer worms they planted.) The transfer was being made in secret because, detained in Port Bowen pending trial, he had become too flammable a symbol. Earth-gene Selenites in a mutinous humor might riot, or Lunarians might organize an attempt to free him, or—Violence, breakdown of law, while outside waited the vacuum and the radiation. Archimedes was a strongpoint; one could control who went in and out. At the same time, telecom of every sort guaranteed the killer his rights. He should have been sent to Archimedes in the first place. But who could think of everything?

  The screen showed a recording made on the spot. A jetflyer came down. Half a dozen spacesuited men sprang from it and by nearbeam demanded admission to the police van. They bore weapons that could blow it open. Surrender was the only option. The men entered, helped Darenn into a rescue capsule, and carried him off to their flyer. It rocketed away before any constabulary vessel could reach the scene.

  Wahl struck fist against knee. This meant that the corps, Earth’s guardians of order, had been infiltrated.

  He refocused on the report.

  Monitor satellites had likewise recorded the incident, from above, but they weren’t equipped to interpret what they saw. Data retrieval showed that the flyer had launched from Tychopolis spaceport. (No use inquiring further. Given today’s volume of traffic, Control was satisfied with preventing collisions and had stopped asking for surface-to-surface flight plans.) After taking Darenn and his liberators aboard, the flyer hopped over to Farside, Gagarin Base. From there, ground transport could carry the gang anywhere, anonymously. They left their craft behind. Therefore somebody had been willing to write it off, not a negligible cost, for the sake of this operation.

  Detectives found that the registration was false and the inboard database had been wiped. They would try for fingerprints, stray hairs and skin cells, any possible clue, but were not optimistic. By now, Darenn must be in concealment, perhaps getting a new face, new loops and whorls and every other mark short of his DNA—or perhaps only lying low until the next time Brandir wanted a killer.

  Brandir? That might be unfair. Another of the magnates could be behind this. Or it could be quite a different sort of conspiracy. But Wahl doubted that. It had the earmarks: a Selenarch ordering justice executed, then standing loyal to the executioner as a Selenarch stood loyal to all his vassals.

  Earth people commonly likened the Lunarians to cats. Wahl thought about wolves.

  Before he went any further, he had better review the entire case. It had not seemed major. Tangled, nasty, potentially dangerous after emotions began seething up around it, but not worth his close attention. That had changed. He keyed for background.

  Constabulary headquarters had organized the file well. He got a swift and incisive narrative.

  Rafael Adair was Earthborn, but a twenty-year resident. He went into partnership with the Lunarian female Yrazul. Probably they were lovers, a situation unusual but not unknown though seldom stable. They meant to prospect along the fringes of Mare Australe, broken country where they had found reason to think valuable concentrations of minerals might be; and that was rare on Luna. According to acquaintances who were afterward willing to talk, the relationship was going from tempestuous to embittered. Perhaps the couple hoped this joint venture would help them reconcile, perhaps they simply hoped to get rich.

  Adair chanced to be in camp, seeing specimens through analysis, while Yrazul was in the field. Her vehicle was a moondodger, fast, nimble, but unshielded. A solar flare was predicted. She planned to get back under shelter before the proton storm hit. Lunarians delighted in skimming the edge of danger.

  A meteoroid struck her car, smashed through, disabled engine and communications. Self-seal must have acted fast enough, closing off the drive section where she was, to preserve breathable air long enough for her to don her spacesuit. After that, she was stranded. Her contact with the robots she had been directing was gone, not that they could have done much to help. A satellite recorded the accident and transmitted to Monitor Central; but the transmission was continuous, the program was not set to flag an event so unlikely, and besides, the flare soon had Emergency Services fully occupied.

  When she failed to return or to contact him,
Adair should have taken their well-shielded van and gone in search. Instead, he waited hours. (Rage, cowardice, greed?) Finally he went. Later he claimed that he assumed she had driven into a cave or beneath an overhang. Else why had he not received a call for help? Storm or no, a satellite would have relayed it.

  A reasonable, if rather discreditable story. The trouble with it arose from the traces. Inspector Hopkins studied them too closely.

  As he reconstructed the story, Adair came within sight of her vehicle. She left it and ran to meet him and go aboard his. He turned about and drove off.

  Then Yrazul knew she would die. Already she had taken a radiation dosage that would keep her hospitalized for months while the nanos rebuilt her cells. Soon she would be over the threshold that cannot be recrossed. In the Moon dust she scrawled with a finger what had happened. Thereafter she forced her helmet up and drank vacuum. It was a death more merciful.

  Adair came back after the flare was gone and wiped out the message. Presently he called in to say that, grown worried, he had finally followed her tracks and discovered her, too late. He assumed she had chosen to perish in the open under the stars.

  Wahl came doubly erect. It was the astronomer Temerir, that cold brother of Brandir, Fia, and Verdea, who pried the case open. Yrazul had been a granddaughter of their sister Jinann. They hung together, those Beynacs. … Temerir went over the ground and thereupon summoned Stanley Hopkins.

  Would Yrazul really have left her moondodger, where she had some slight protection, unless she saw rescue coming? Why was the dust scuffled around her? Why did Adair’s van approach, retreat, and return? Its tracks showed its course. Left undisturbed, they might endure for a million years.

  Hopkins ordered the shell of the van checked for residual radioactivity. He learned that it could not have been out under the flare nearly as long as Adair related.

  Confronted with the evidence, the man broke. He pleaded fear. Well, nobody went willingly out into such a gale, armor or no. Inquiries in depth suggested he had other motivations. He was definitely guilty of abandonment, which on the Moon was a first-class felony. The law demanded he be imprisoned and rehabilitated.

  The old Lunar law, in force during the years of the Jihad, the chaos, and the Coordinating Committee, demanded death.

  Once established, the Lunar Authority had abrogated that, together with certain other practices. It seemed a largely pro forma betterment. How often did abandonment occur? Scarcely ever.

  Yrazul was of Selenarchic family.

  Maybe she could have been any Lunarian, or anybody at all. Wahl didn’t know.

  What he knew was that Adair, free on bail, had been knifed dead. (You didn’t trigger firearms inside a settlement. The old law made that too a capital offense.) It was a murder quick and clean; Darenn should have been able to leave his note explaining the reason for it and escape. Unfortunately, a burly Dutch spaceman happened to witness the job and in a flying tackle captured the Lunarian.

  Unfortunately indeed. What was becoming a cause célèbre had threatened to touch off a political crisis. Now it positively would.

  Wahl switched off the playback, rose, went around and around the room. You couldn’t really pace here, you bounded, airily, a wisp of dandelion fluff—you and your concerns mattering no more than that? But he must prowl his cage, and he would not whine.

  What to do?

  God be thanked, the hijacking was not yet in the news. He could keep it out for hours more; they were good people on his staff. Meanwhile he must prepare for the public reaction.

  A hunt for the gang and its master(s?) would be hopeless, merely infuriating the seditiously minded. Yet the government could not dismiss the outrage as a bagatelle. Such a sign of weakness would dismay the law-abiding, on whose support the Authority depended as every government does. It would incite new violations, more blatant than ever. The extremists would take fire; they might well rupture the legislature, give the entire system a possibly fatal wound, in spite of anything the governor and the moderates could offer them.

  Surely no sensible member of any faction wanted that, or an uproar, or a crime wave. They must make common cause, issue a joint call for order and reason, hold their followers steady.

  Who were the sensible ones? He needed an individual who could tell him and could bring them together, fast, before things disintegrated.

  Dagny Beynac.

  Had she the forcefulness, the sheer physical strength for these hours ahead? How old was she, anyway? A hundred and five, a hundred and ten? Something like that.

  Still, the last time he saw her, she had seemed hale enough. And she headed the Council for Lunar Commonalty, which she had taken a lead in forming. (Lunar, Wahl reassured himself, not Lunarian.) Unrecognized by the Authority, the Federation, any single nation, or the Selenarchs, it had become in several ways the most influential organization on the Moon; and that was largely due to her.

  Quick! Call Beynac.

  Easy, though. Take a minute and think. Was this really his best approach to controlling the damage? He should reconsider his relationship with her, and everything he knew about her. Begin with that talk they had had, the two of them alone, shortly after he assumed office here. He had asked if she objected to its being recorded, and she had grinned as she answered, “No, provided you keep it clean.”

  Having canceled his appointments, he played that part of it which to him epitomized the whole.

  Her posture remained erect, but the big bones stood forth in her spareness—not ugly, he thought; no, beautiful, like a strong abstract sculpture. Against the pale skin, her eyes seemed large and bluely luminous, as if from a star behind them. Rather than unisuit or tunic and slacks, she wore a caftan of gray iridon. Her only jewelry was a Saturn brooch at her throat and a worn golden ring.

  “Understand, por favor,” she said, and her voice still resonated, “I claim no legal status. The Council is a forum. When its members reach basic agreement on an issue, it advises and urges, pro bono publico.” She laughed. “That doesn’t happen too often.”

  “Hm, I shouldn’t think so,” Wahl agreed. For courtesy’s sake, although he had heard that she knew Spanish well, he used English too, despite the fact that his was colorless. “Two genetic types, more unlike than any races on Earth.”

  “We all live on the Moon,” Beynac replied sharply. “It is our country.”

  She sat in this conference chamber as the spokeswoman of her fellowship, its representative to him. To what degree did she speak for her world? He had better explore carefully. But not timidly. Absolutely not.

  “A Lunar nation? I am afraid, madame, that is impossible. At least within … my lifetime. May I speak frankly?”

  “I’ve been hoping you will,” she said.

  “From my studies and briefings, and from what I have observed at close range for myself, I suspect Lunarians and Terricolas will never be able to form a durable society.”

  “I’ve seen unlikelier metals alloy.” Beynac shrugged. “And if in the end it’s the Lunarians alone who inherit Luna, what’s bad about that? They’re our blood.”

  Daycycle by daycycle as he dealt with them, Wahl had begun to question it. In lineage, yes; but how much did that mean? How akin are mastiff and dachshund? Wrong comparison, he thought. Terricola and Lunarian were not the same species, perhaps not the same genus. They could never breed, not even a mule-child.

  “Well,” he temporized, “conceivably someday in the far future—”

  “The future has a way of arriving sooner than we expect,” said Beynac. “But let’s get to business and save the philosophy for dessert. Of course we aren’t talking revolution or any such foolishness today, neither you and I nor they and I. What I’m here about, Governor, is how to keep from encouraging foolishness.”

  Wahl inclined his head. “I appreciate your guidance, madame,” he told her, quite sincerely. “You have had a long experience.”

  Beynac smiled. “I collect governors.”

  “I the t
hird, ay?” Japing faded. “You said you wish to talk honestly with me.”

  “And you with me, right? We size each other up.”

  “I see.” Wahl tugged his chin, looked beyond the human before him at an image of his garden at home where roses nodded to a breeze, and marshalled words. “Tell me, if you will, how do you—how did you—judge my predecessors?”

  The reply came prompt and blunt. “Zhao had a fair amount of wisdom. I always respected him. We always did, whether or not we liked some particular action of his. Gambetta was a politician. Well-meaning, but to her this was one more step toward the presidency of the World Federation.”

  “Would you like to see her win it?”

  “We wouldn’t mind, on Luna,” said Beynac dryly.

  “I should think not. She gave you everything you wanted.”

  “Correction, por favor. Half of what the assorted groups among us wanted.”

  Piecemeal, reluctantly. Forced by connivance, tricked by semantics, and maybe to a degree psychologically intimidated—anything to avoid trouble. Not that Wahl believed Beynac had engineered that pressure. It came from the barons, the businessfolk, the multitudinous malcontents, unorganized but vocal, who were the atmosphere that rebellion breathed.

  The intelligence Wahl had received declared that this woman sought ever to mediate, to work out compromises. After all, while most of her descendants were Lunarian, it had long ceased to be a secret that she had an Earthside son from whom stemmed also a family.

  The trouble was, not every one of those compromises had proven viable, nor had every one of them been lawful.

  Wahl chose his words. “Notwithstanding, madame, my impression is that for Gambetta you have little respect.”

  “That’s as may be, and it doesn’t matter any more,” Beynac said. “You’re in charge now.”

  “Exactly.” Appeal to her. “And, madame, I too mean well. With my entire heart, I do not want conflict. As for my wisdom, I hope you will lend me yours.”