The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Venator raised his brows. “Aleka? … Oh, yes. Alice Tam. She’s alive and well.” A smile flickered. “Inconveniently much. That’s what I mainly have to discuss with you, if you’re able.”

  Kenmuir shrugged. “I’m able, if not exactly willing. The constabulary on Luna were … not unkind. I’m medicated and rested.” In the body, at least. The mind, the soul—Anxiety died. He returned to the detachment that had possessed him of late, whether because he had been unknowingly tranquilized or because his spirit was exhausted; he stood apart from himself, a Cartesian consciousness observing its destiny unfold.

  “Shall we sit?” Venator suggested.

  “No need.” Nor wish.

  “Do you care for refreshment? We’ve much to talk about.”

  “No, I don’t want anything” that they aboard could give him.

  “Pray rest assured you’re in no danger,” Venator said. “You’re in civilized keeping.” The features bleakened, the tone flattened. “Perhaps more civilized than you deserve.”

  “We can argue rights and wrongs later, can’t we?”

  Venator went back to mildness. “I believe we’ll do more than argue, Captain. But, true, we’d best get the empirical out of the way first. Would you tell me why, m-m, Aleka didn’t take you along when she escaped?”

  “Isn’t that obvious? I’d have had to retreat to a safe distance, then run to the ship, after which she’d have had to lift. It could have cost us as much as an hour. We didn’t have that long.”

  “Obvious, yes. An hour at two gravities means an extra seven kilometers per second. I was probing the degree of your determination. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me where she’s bound?”

  “I can’t. She and the ship decided it between them after letting me off.”

  “As I expected,” Venator said calmly. “What you don’t know can’t be extracted from you. Not that it matters. One may guess. The goal clearly isn’t Mars, which would be a hazardous choice in any case. Several asteroids are possible, or conceivably a Lunarian-colonized Jovian satellite. She’s running on trajectory now, conserving her delta v and thus her options. Unless she comes to fear we may close in, and accelerates afresh, it will take a while for her to reach whatever goal she has in mind.”

  Whereupon she would be in communication range. Kestrel’s antiquated laser wouldn’t carry an intelligible message across two or three astronomical units; her radio would require a high-gain receiver; and who yonder would be listening for either? Close by, Aleka’s intent to signal would be unmistakable. She might perhaps land.

  “Your scheme worked, fantastical though it was,” Venator continued. “I think it worked precisely because it was fantastical. We can’t overhaul her before she completes her mission, and we aren’t trying any longer.”

  Yes, Kenmuir thought, he and she had estimated a reasonable probability of that. The ships of law enforcement were few and widely scattered through the Solar System, because their usual work was just to convey personnel or sometimes give aid to the distressed. Besides, even today, the Falcon class counted as high-powered. It had become mostly robots and sophotects that crossed space. They seldom demanded energy-wasting speed. It was humans who were short-lived and impatient.

  “You see, we don’t want to provoke her into haste,” Venator explained. “We want time to persuade you two of your folly, so you’ll stop of your free choice.” He frowned. “Consider. Do you imagine the revelation of a minor planet out among the comets will make you heroes? Think about it. Your brutal destruction of the Beynac download will shock the world.”

  Kenmuir sighed. “I told the police and I told them, she made me promise.”

  “Need you have kept the promise?”

  Kenmuir nodded. “She’d been betrayed once.”

  Venator’s smile was briefly unpleasant. “To your benefit, as it turned out.”

  Kenmuir made a grin and gestured around his cell. “This?”

  “I didn’t mean you were after personal gain,” Venator said. “I confess that your motives puzzle me, and suspect they puzzle you also.”

  Once more Kenmuir had the sense—nonsense, cried his rationality, but the feeling would not go away—that he and Aleka had been the instruments of some great blind force, and it was not done with them yet, and they themselves were among its wellsprings. But he had better stay with immediacies. He could take advantage of the huntsman’s desire for conversation.

  “What’s the situation on Luna?” he asked. His interrogators there had given him no news.

  Venator’s voice and bearing eased. “Well,” he said as if it were interesting but of little importance, “the lady Lilisaire caused us considerable trouble, in which several of her colleagues gleefully joined. Fortunately, we avoided significant damage or casualties on either side, and things are quiet now. Officially they’re under house arrest. In practice, what we have is an uneasy truce. The outcome of that will depend largely on you, my friend.”

  “How?”

  Venator turned serious. “You can still halt what you’ve set moving. Tam has ignored our calls, but Kestrel must have taken note of them and will doubtless inform her of any that come from you.”

  “What could I have to say?” Not, in the presence of machines, that he thought he loved her.

  “You, and you alone, can make her come back, keeping the secret of Proserpina.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Criminal charges can be dismissed, you know, or a pardon can be granted.”

  Emotion stirred anew in Kenmuir. The sharpest part of it was anger. “See here,” he stated, “I never proposed to serve as a martyr, nor does she. If and when the news comes out, the Solar System will decide whether we did wrong. In spite of—” his voice faltered “—the download—when that story too is made clear … I dare hope for pardon from the whole human race.”

  “Spare me the rhetoric, please,” Venator scoffed. “You’ve calculated that the government will be in so awkward a position that its best move will be to quietly let infractions go unpunished, while the more radical Lunarians prepare to emigrate to Proserpina. In exchange, you won’t emphasize any irregularities we may have committed.”

  Kenmuir nodded. “Yes, that’s approximately what we’re trying for.”

  “I’ve gathered you’re a student of history,” Venator said. “Tell me, with how many governments of the past would that calculation have been rational?”

  Surprised, Kenmuir stood wordless before he muttered, “I don’t know. Perhaps none.”

  “Correct. You’d have been dead by now, unless we chose to torture you first. If our secret got released, we’d put down the restless Lunarians by force, exterminating them if necessary. We’d tell people that the revelation was a falsehood concocted by you evildoers. We’d go on to tell the people, at considerable and emotional length, what a service we had done them, suppressing these enemies of the state. But most of the propaganda we wouldn’t issue ourselves. Plenty of journalists and intellectuals would be eager to curry favor by manufacturing and disseminating it. Many among them would be sincere.”

  “Yes …”

  “As it is, you are safe, while Tam runs loose because we did not expect that major weapons of war would ever be needed again. You have the cybercosm to thank, Kenmuir. You might show some trust, some gratitude.”

  “But you violated the Covenant!” the spaceman protested. “And—and—” And what? How horrible an offense, really, was the hiding of a piece of information?

  “Exigencies arise,” Venator said. “My hope is to convince you of that, before it is too late.”

  “Suppose you do,” Kenmuir retorted wildly. “How can I convince Aleka?” Any passwords or the like could have been drugged or brainphased out of him. Any image of him could be an artifact, in this world where so much reality was virtual.

  Venator hesitated. When he spoke, it was slowly, and did the thin face draw into lines of want? “She ought to listen to you and have faith in you, ought she not? As for ho
w she shall know that it is in truth you—” He looked away, as if he wished to see through the metal to stars and Earth. “My intuition is that you two are lovers. All the little intimacies, body language unique to the pair of you, incidents forgotten by one until the other reminds of them, the wholeness arisen in even as brief a time as you’ve had—if we wrung that quantity of data out of you, the process would leave you a vegetable. And could we write an adequate program to use it with a generated image? Perhaps the Teramind could. Perhaps not. I daresay it could reprogram your brain, so that you would become its worshipper and ardently do, of your own volition, whatever it wished.”

  He lifted a hand. “Have no fears,” he said. “Besides the morality of destroying a mind, we are barred by the fact that we haven’t time enough, neither to make a convincing imitation of you nor to make you over. You are not electrophotonic, you are organic, with the inertia of all material things. Molecular interactions go at rates constrained by the laws of the universe, and the Teramind did not write those.”

  His fists clenched at his sides. “Explain that to your Aleka. She will know you by what you share, everything that I have denied myself.”

  He smiled and finished lightly, “Ironic, isn’t it, that at this final hour the cybercosm must appeal to the oldest, most primitive force in sentient life?”

  Kenmuir ran a tongue gone dry across his lips. “If you can indeed recruit me.”

  Venator gazed straight at him and answered, “I can’t. I am bringing you to the Teramind.”

  45

  A vast and duskful space—a chamber? Sight did not reach to the heights and ends of it. Glowing lines arched aloft and down again, some close together, some meters apart. Seen over a distance, they merged in an intricacy, a hieroglyph unknown to Kenmuir.

  The air was without heat or cold or scent or sound.

  He had woken here after falling asleep in the room at Central to which Venator brought him. Unwarned but somehow unsurprised, he saw himself stretched half reclining in a web from which a number of attachments made contact with feet, hands, brow, temples. His skin and clothes were either illuminated or faintly, whitely shining. A mighty calm was upon him, yet he had never felt this aware and alert, wholly in command of mind and body. He sensed as it were every least flow through blood vessels, nerves, and brain. Solemnly he awaited that which was to happen.

  Facing him, Venator lay likewise; but although the huntsman’s eyes were open, they seemed blind and his visage had become a mask. What now did he see, what knowledge was his?

  The presence of the Teramind, Kenmuir thought, the nearness of the great core engine, save that the Teramind was no single machine or being. It was the apex of the cybercosm, the guiding culmination, as the human brain was of the human organism. No, not really that, either. All machines in a way stemmed from it, like men and gods from Brahm, and the souls of its synnoionts yearned home toward it.

  But here was no static finality, Kenmuir knew. This was not what artificial intelligences, set to creating a superior artificial intelligence, had wrought; it was the cybercosm as a whole, evolving. Already its thoughts went beyond human imagination. How far beyond its own present imagination would they range in another hundred or another billion years?

  Venator’s lips parted,, “Ian Kenmuir,” he said gravely. Did the Teramind speak through him, as through an oracle?

  “I am ready,” Kenmuir responded. He had no honorific to add; any would have been a mockery.

  “You understand you are neither sophotect nor synnoiont. You are outside. Therefore I shall be what link between us there may be.”

  Otherwise, could the presence give Kenmuir more than discourse, displays, a shadow show? By Venator, whose flesh was human, he might be made able to comprehend, to feel, what the unhuman alone could never quite convey.

  “Ask what you will,” said the voice.

  “You know what has brought us to this,” replied Kenmuir as quietly. “Why have you kept Proserpina hidden away?”

  “The answer is many-sided.”

  And will it be true? wondered a rebellious mote.

  “You shall judge its truth for yourself,” said the voice.

  Self-evident truth, at the end of a road of reasoning? But could he follow that road, up and up to its end? “I listen. I watch.”

  Something like an expression fleeted over Venator’s countenance and through his tone. A pain, a longing? “We share a memory, you and I.”

  Luminous amidst the dark, the image of Lilisaire, so alive that even then Kenmuir caught his breath. The gown rustled and rippled about her slenderness. Felinely, she turned to look at him. Dark-red and flame-red, her hair fell over the white shoulders, past the fine blue vein in her throat. She smiled at him with the big, oblique, changeably gold and green eyes and with the lips he remembered. Did she purr, did she call?

  More images came, flickered, and fled. It was not a document, not a sequence or montage, it was a stream of dreams to awaken him. Beneath his tranquility, it hurt. He had not wished to count up her lovers, her betrayals, the men she killed and the men she had had killed, the men she wedded and enwebbed, the men she broke to her will or lured down ways whereon they lost themselves, the willfulness now glacial and now ablaze but always without reckoning or ruth, the fact that she was feral.

  “Beautiful, boundlessly ambitious, infinitely dangerous,” murmured the voice.

  “No,” Kenmuir denied. “Can’t be. One mortal woman—”

  “One whom circumstance has made the embodiment of her blood.”

  Images out of history. Lunarian arrogance, intransigence, outright lawlessness, in the teeth of unforgiving space Intrigues, murders, terrible threats. The Selenarchy sovereign, holding its nation apart from the unity of humankind. Rinndalir’s scheme to wreck the whole order of things, for the sake of wrecking it. Niolente’s fomenting of revolt on Earth and war on the Moon, her death like a cornered animal’s, and in the ruins a secret that her bloodline had kept through centuries. Lilisaire, again Lilisaire.

  “No!” Kenmuir shouted, the calm within him shaken asunder. “I won’t condemn an entire race!” He swallowed. “I can’t believe you would.”

  “Never. Do we curse the lightning or the tiger? They too belong with life.”

  Next the dream was of a world. A thunderbolt fixed nitrogen that nourished a forest. Under the leaves, a carnivore took his prey and thereby kept a herd healthy, its numbers no more than the land could well feed. The sea that drowned some ships upbore all others, and in its depths swam whales and over their heads beat wings. Dead bodies moldered, to be reborn as grass and flowers. Snow fell, to melt beneath springtime and water it.

  A specter passed by, desert, rock thrusting naked where plowed soil had washed away and blown away. A river ran thick with poison. Air gnawed at lungs. Horde upon horde, humankind laid waste around it as never a plague of locusts did, and where songbirds once nested rats ran through the alleys and the sewers.

  But that was gone, or almost gone, and Earth bloomed afresh. It was the cybercosm that saved the forests and their tigers—yes, human determination was necessary, but only through technology could the change happen without catastrophe, and the cybercosm kept the will to make the change alive in humans by its counsel and its ever more visible victories over desolation.

  Again the tiger sprang in Kenmuir’s sight. Phantasmagoria ended. He lay among the gleaming arcs and heard: “Equally should the Lunarian people, who have done much that is magnificent, join their gifts to the rest of humanity in creating and becoming human destiny.”

  Though peace had returned to him, it still served his selfhood, his mind. “This is true, but is it enough? Why must every branch of us grow the same way? And what way is it?”

  “No single one. Whatever multitudinous ways you and your descendants choose. Think back. Who today is forced? Is Earth not as diverse as at any time formerly, or more?”

  Yes, Kenmuir agreed: and not just in societies and uncoerced individuals but in the
richness of nature restored across the globe, from white bear on polar ice to bison and antelope on the plains, from hawks asoar to peacocks in the jungle, from palm to pine, from mountaintop to ocean depth, alive, alive.

  The voice went on: “However, should not reason, compassion, and reverence guide you? Else you are less than apes, for apes at least act according to their birthright, and it is in your birthright to think.”

  Kenmuir could not help but recall what else was inborn, and how thin a glimmer consciousness was upon it. But let him not stray off into that realm. Get back to the question that brought him here. “Why don’t you want Proserpina known? Are you afraid of a few Lunarians on a distant asteroid?”

  As ridiculous as that sounded, he nearly regretted uttering it. Then he decided it was best gotten rid of.

  The reply came grave. He thought that the Teramind had no need to bluster like the God of Job; it could afford patience, yes, courtesy. “Of course not—as such. What is to be feared is the spirit that would be resurrected. In the end, fate lies with the spirit.”

  “I, I don’t understand,” Kenmuir faltered. It couldn’t mean some mind-over-matter absurdity.

  “The Faustian spirit. It is not dead, not quite, here on Earth; it lives, underground and unrecognized, in the Lunarians; and at Alpha Centauri it flourishes triumphant.”

  Kenmuir knew not whether the vision of Demeter came to him out of the darkness or out of memory. How often had he filled himself with those images transmitted by the colonists across the years and light-years? How much was envy a bitter or a wistful part of his being? Lost in the dream, he could merely ask, “What’s wrong there?”—for all he saw was splendor, courage, and ineluctable tragedy.

  “It was, it is a spirit that does not accept limits, that has no end or check on its wants and its endeavors. The forebears of the folk yonder would not make their peace with the powers they had aggrieved at home, although peace was offered them. They were not able to, because they were never content. Therefore they chose to depart, over a bridge that burned behind them, to a world they knew was doomed. Now their descendants will not accept that doom.”