The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  “What else can they do?” sighed Kenmuir. What else but resign themselves, taking whatever comfort lay in the fact that oblivion was still some centuries removed? It had taken every resource that Fireball at its height commanded to send a few bodies in cold sleep across the gulf between. At Centauri they could do no more than this; and unless a handful came back to Sol, any such effort would be futile. The distance to the next marginally habitable world was too much; radiation during the voyage would wreak irreparable damage. Downloads could go, yes. Guthrie’s explored among those stars. But the humans were rare who wished to be downloads. Those that did could continue as well at the sun where they were, together with the Lunarians on their asteroids: a settlement as unmeaning as Rapa Nui had been in its Pacific loneliness after the canoes no longer sailed.

  “They do not yet know it,” said the voice, “but they are finding their way toward a salvation.”

  “How do you know?” Kenmuir demanded. “You don’t care, do you?”

  “Granted, the Teramind tells them through the cybercosm, as it tells the people at home, that it has little further interest in them, or in anything of the empirical universe. That is not entirely so. If the ultimate law of physics is now known, the permutations of matter and energy are not. Therefore probes are seeking forth through interstellar space. As for the Centaurians, microprobes are observing them, unobserved by them.”

  It stabbed Kenmuir. Did then the cybercosm lie?

  Peace flowed healingly into the wound. There must be a righteous reason, which he would learn in due course. What human was always candid, perhaps especially with those others who were loved? Indeed, pretense is a necessity of thought. You map three-dimensional planets onto two-dimensional surfaces; and this itself is a simplification, for the map is not a Euclidean plane. To compute their short-term orbits, you make those planets into geometrical mass-points and ignore everything else in the galaxy. You found a corporation and treat it legally as a person. You talk about a community or the human race, although nothing exists but individuals. You talk about individuals, or yourself, although the body is many different organisms and the mind is a set of ongoing interactions. …

  “And we do hear something directly from them,” he offered.

  However avidly he had studied it, not until this moment did he quite appreciate how seldom that news came, how slight it was. At first it had been voluminous, to and fro, but later—Well, he thought, it would not be hard to discourage the colonists from sending. They had so much else to occupy them. As for the Solar System, here too people were wrapped in their own concerns and had half forgotten about a frontier or uncharted ranges beyond it. … “They’re developing a symbiosis—” not a synnoiosis “—of … life and machine?”

  “Yes. Demeter Mother.”

  This time the visions were clear, lasting amply long for him to apprehend them, and they spoke. They spoke of another and alien system, a biocosm, integral with the basic ecology. There the ultimate mind was not cybernetic but human, downloads who had in this wise returned to being alive, a Gaia not transcendent but immanent in and aware of herself. She guarded and guided life. She was life.

  —Afterward Kenmuir whispered, “What’s dreadful about this?”

  “It is what will save them at Centauri,” answered Venator’s lips. His eyes remained blind, except to whatever moved inside him. “The Mother will find that she can do what is impossible today, take a personality from download back to re-created flesh. Demeter the planet must die, but the seed of Demeter will go forth among the stars.”

  Shivers went cold through Kenmuir.

  “Yes,” said the voice—sadly?—“you are inspired, you are wonder-smitten.”

  Defiance stirred anew. “Why should I not be?”

  “The vision, the achievement is wholly Faustian. And likewise would the settlement of Proserpina be: of a far lesser magnitude, but in the same spirit, and not light-years remote but here, at home, within striking distance of Earth.”

  Kenmuir felt his face show bewilderment.

  “Attend,” said the voice. “Your kind has always fought, as life must, for survival and for betterment. And, uniquely, you did not fit your ways to reality, you changed the world to fit you. You tamed fire and crops and beasts, you explored, you invented, you spread across the planet. The landscapes of whole countries were, century by century, made into creations not of nature but of their human dwellers.

  “Yet always, too, there was a sense of limits, humility, fear of the gods and of the nemesis that follows upon hubris. You lived in the cycle of the seasons, knowing yourselves mortal, and when you saw an ancient order of things broken, you mourned for it. Invaders who slaughtered, burned, and enslaved had their own orders, their own pieties. In every myth by which you lived was the warning against a reach too high, a pride too great.

  “But the Faustian spirit arose. In the story, Faust bargains with the Evil One for limitless power. At the end, his soul is lost. But there is a sequel in which he returns and redeems himself, not by repentance but through attempting an engineering work that holds back the flood waters and makes them do man’s bidding.

  “Even so did the Faustian civilization grow away from its childhood modesty. Its mathematics went down to the infinitesimal and outward to the infinite and the transfinite. Its physics probed the atom and the stars. Its biology moved life from mystery to chemistry, and at last made the soul a process that could be downloaded. Meanwhile it conquered the world and went on to the Moon and the worlds beyond.

  “It was, it is that spirit that knows no bounds, acknowledges no restraints, does what it will because it wills and then looks onward for new victories to win.

  “It overwhelmed all else, crushed every small shy foreignness, forged the total state, and very nearly exterminated the race.”

  Kenmuir lay mute for a spell, gathering his words, before he replied:

  “No, I can’t accept that.” He could do no other than set his monkey wit against the Teramind. “You refer to what came out of Europe, Western Christendom, don’t you? Well, at its worst it was never more evil than the rest, it simply had more power. And it got that power from the science it originated, which was also the power to end sickness and hunger, to understand the natural world and learn how to save it. Everybody else had been destroying nature too, more gradually but without any way of ever reversing the harm. This was the civilization that abolished chattel slavery and made women the equals of men. It was the civilization—the spirit, you’d say—that gave birth to the inalienable rights of the individual, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It gave us the planets and can still give us the stars.”

  He had not known he could speak like that. He was no orator. What subtle forces passed through his skin to evoke whatever had been latent in him? The Teramind played fair, he thought.

  “What you say is as true as what you heard,” answered the voice. “Just the same, it means disunity, strife, and chaos, eternally.”

  “What else—what would you have?”

  “Oneness. Harmony. Peace. The Noösphere, and in the end the Noöcosm.”

  Again an apparition, a dream. Intelligence immortal, forever transcending itself, until its creations and comprehensions overmatched the whole material universe.

  For billions of years to come it must explore, discover, take inspiration from that cosmos. The destinies of the galaxies were as yet incalculable. Already, though, the Law that bound them seemed clear; only its manifold unfoldings remained mysterious, and with every new experience the capacity to foretell the next would increase.

  Timelessly perseverant, the sophotectic seed spread forth into the future. It needed no planets, no footholds, no conquests, nothing but tiny bits of substance with which to reproduce its kind. And each of those seedbeds, each cybercosm and Teramind, was joined with the rest. At the speed of light, communication across a galaxy took tens of thousands of years, communication between galaxies took millions; but there was the patience that stem
s from assurance, and there was no more death.

  Space expanded onward. The stars grew old. The last of them guttered out. Chill neared the absolute zero. What free energy survived trickled from the slow disintegration of black holes and the particles of matter. As slowly must intelligence spend that energy; a thought might go for a billion years before it was completed. Yet that same pace brought together the minds of the galaxies. They were now no farther apart than the duration of a thought. As the trillions of years mounted, to them their separations lessened without limit. They linked together in a single supreme intellect that filled reality. The universe was neither dead nor dark. It was alive and radiant with spirit.

  Certainty is not absolute. Against our prevailing evidence and belief, the cosmos may reach an end to its expansion and fall back on itself. Intelligence will nevertheless be immortal. Within the finite time to singularity, an infinite number of events can take place, an infinity of thoughts can be thought and dreams can be dreamed. Whether the transfiguration be freezing or fiery, awareness will endure and evolve forever.

  Long, long before then, its heed will have departed from the matter-energy chrysalis. It will know all things that exist and all that are possible; it will have considered them, comprehended them, and lovingly set them aside. Its own works—arts, mathematics, undertakings, unimaginable for ages to come—are what shall occupy its eternity. In the end was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

  Kenmuir lay quiet.

  “You have seen the prophecy before,” said the voice.

  “Yes,” he replied, “but never like this.”

  After a while: “How could … any humans … threaten that?”

  “This is in the nature of things. It goes deeper than chaos. If vanishingly small changes may have immense and undivinable effects, still, a system has its attractors, its underlying order, and a broken balance may well be redressed.

  “To fathom the true danger, you would have to be in synnoiosis, and nonetheless your insight would be dim and fragmentary. But think. Recall what you know of quantum physics. Reality is one, but reality is a manifold. Past and future are one, inseparable. Yet this means that they are equally unknowable with precision. A particle can have gone from point to point by any of infinitely many paths; some are more probable than others, but observation alone establishes which is real. The state of one, when determined, fixes the state of another, though they be light-years apart, too distant for causality between them. Thus the observed and the observer, existence and the meaning of existence, are a whole, Yang and Yin; and the wave function of the universe shares incertitude with the wave function of a lone electron.”

  Kenmuir shook his head. “No, I don’t see. I can’t. Unless what you hint is that … human minds are no accident either—they’re as fundamental an aspect of reality as … as yours—”

  He shook himself. He was neither sophotect nor synnoiont, nor even a philosopher. Let it suffice him that the Teramind found reason to fear his race. (Fear? Respect? Useless words, here.) Let him stay with the grubby practicalities of flesh and blood.

  “What I’m guessing your intent is,” he said very carefully, “is that we humans can do anything we want, and you’ll help us, advise us, be good to us—provided we stay safely irrelevant to you.”

  “No. That cannot be. It is already too late. Your kind is loose among the stars.”

  Through Kenmuir flew a horror. The Teramind might build and dispatch missiles to blast Demeter Mother before her children left their world. No! It had not happened, therefore it would not. It could not. Please.

  He forced dryness: “What about us at home?”

  “In the future that belongs to Mind, you will join, willingly and gladly, as this I—Venator—has done, but to an immensely higher degree.”

  “We become part of the cybercosm?”

  “Centuries or millennia hence. Then sentient Earth will be ready to confront the foreign thing yonder.”

  “You hope you’ll have the strength—” the strength of intellect, not of raw force “—to cope with it. Tame it. Take it into yourself.”

  “No. The hope is that it will join itself to us.”

  “Would that be so hard? Is it really so different?”

  “Yes. As long as both remain true to their destinies, the gulf between is unbridgeable. Demeter Mother is the ancient life, organic, biological. To her, the inorganic, the machine, is no more than a lesser part, a means to the end of survival. She will always be of the material universe and its wildness, its chaos, its mortality. Never will her intellect be pure and wholly free.”

  Kenmuir had an eerie sense that he was a hunter closing in on a majestic quarry. “But she’ll go ways that you never will, that you can never imagine, because you can’t feel them. Are you afraid of that? She’ll die with the stars, when you do not. Won’t she? Isn’t space-time big enough for you to live with her till then?”

  Silence. Venator’s face became like a dead man’s. Kenmuir wondered what lay unspoken behind it. No. Reality is one. She will shape it, as I do. It will become something unforeseeable, without destiny, something other than that Ultimate which is the purpose and meaning of me.

  He threw the words away. They were nothing but his imagery, no better than a mythic image of the sun as a boat or a chariot making daily passage across heaven. He must hunt farther.

  “Would Lunarians on Proserpina matter that much?” he asked.

  “Think forward,” replied the oracle, and now life was again in his countenance, though it be not human life. “They will make that world over, multiply their numbers, spread among the comets, reach for the stars. They will talk with the seed of Demeter. They will talk with their Terran kin, in whom Faust will reawaken because of it.”

  “They’ll trouble you. You want everyone in the Solar System kept close to home where you can control us.”

  “Where you can enlighten yourselves and grow into sanity,” said the voice. How soft it was.

  Incredulous, Kenmuir exclaimed, “And this turns on a single ship escaping from the Moon? On a single man who could call her back?”

  “No. Reality is a whole, I said. But for the history soon to come, and therefore conceivably for history ever after, yes, I ask that you call her back.”

  The cybercosm asked.

  You would make the universe into mind and harmony, Kenmuir thought. This very conflict we have been waging, not of strengths but of ideas and possibilities, betokens the etherealization you seek. Who shall hold that it is wrong, your vision? Who shall hold that passion and unsureness, the animal and the vegetable, the mortal, grief mingled with every joy—that these are right?

  Faust is forever at war. I am a man of peace.

  “The choice is yours,” he heard. “I may not compel. I cannot. For the cybercosm to impose its will by violence would be to violate itself. Nor could this bring other than chaos uncontrollable; hark back to the chronicles of all tyrannies. Though the human genus be obliterated in the Solar System, survivors would hold on at Alpha Centauri, in millennial revengefulness. Though they too be killed, corruption would seize the heart of the victor, and at the end would destroy it likewise. No, the burden is yours.”

  Beneath the nirvana imposed on his body, Kenmuir’s pulse stumbled. His mouth had gone dry. “If I … obey you … what about Aleka and her people?”

  “They shall have their desire, a country better than Lilisaire can grant.”

  And the Earthfolk whose eyes were turned skyward would have their Habitat. None but the demonic spirit in the Lunarians must submit.

  No, those humans of every kind must submit who wished for freedom. And they would not know that they had done so or that they were unfree.

  It was as if his answer had lain in him since before he was born. “No.”

  “You refuse.” It was not a question.

  “I do. She shall keep flying.”

  “You are forgiven,” said the voice, altogether gently.

  Kenm
uir knew he would never understand that strange integrity. He was no machine, only a man.

  His consciousness toppled into night.

  46

  “Have no fears,” Venator had said when Kenmuir woke. “We’ll flit you to Yorkport and let you go. I assume you’ll catch the Luna shuttle. But first we should talk a bit, you and I.”

  He left the spacefarer to rest a while, then guided him to a room where they shared a plain and mostly silent meal, then provided them both with warm clothes and led the way outside. For another spell they walked wordless, until they had left the weather station out of sight behind them and were alone with the mountains.

  Kenmuir breathed deeply. Thin and cold, a breeze stirred the leaves and needles of widely strewn dwarf trees. It tasted of sky. Sunlight cataracted over a long upward slope and the snowpeaks beyond. They stood knife-edge sharp against utter blue. He took the view into himself. Anxiety, indecision, sorrow were coming astir, as the dispassion laid on him in the chamber ebbed away; he needed this fresh wellspring of calm.

  “Go slow,” Venator advised at his side. “Spare your strength. We’ve time aplenty.”

  Kenmuir glanced at him. “What do you want of me?” he inquired.

  He could not tell whether the smile that crossed the dark face was wry or regretful. “Nothing, in the sense of demands,” Venator replied. “I would like to make a few suggestions, and we had better sketch out some plans.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” Kenmuir said awkwardly, “consistent with—” With what?

  Venator nodded. “I expected you would. It’s rational. But good of you, too.”

  How should Kenmuir respond, how should he feel? “Please. This is not a victor-and-vanquished situation.”

  Venator smiled again, more broadly and perhaps a little mockingly. “No, no.”

  Grit scrunched beneath boots. The wind whispered.

  Plunge ahead, Kenmuir decided. “All right, then. Aleka will deliver her message.” He hesitated. “Or has she?” What hours or days had passed in the house of the Teramind?