The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Harvest of Stars series

  CHAPTER 1

  A dead man spoke with a machine.

  Yes, I understand why the Oneness has raised me back into being. Trouble is loose, and again there is need for me to go to and fro in the world. But tell me what and how, that I may do my work as soon as may be and return to the Oneness.

  Yet he was not truly dead, nor truly a man. Before he who sometimes called himself Venator perished, the cybercosm had downloaded the configurations of his mind into the program of a neural network that mapped his brain; and meanwhile it gave the aged flesh a sleeping away into cessation. For a span thereafter, the consciousness was an electrophotonic intelligence in an organo-metallic body. That was only a span, to accustom it to its new condition. Then, as had been promised the living man, he got his reward for faithful service. The cybercosm merged the mind with itself.

  Identity regained was, at first, bitter and bewildering.

  The reply ran: Our great peace lies once more under threat. Someone or something has breached the walk of our inmost secrets. Those were not material walls, Venator knew. They were encryptions and lines of communication that ought to have been secure against all that the laws of nature allowed to exist. A strange genius had found ways to corrupt the very system. We know this from the fact that there has been more activity, not our own, than can be accounted for by quantum fluctuations; and that was determined only lately. Thus we do not know what files have been ransacked, or for what purpose, save that it cannot be benign.

  And the speaker was not truly a machine, a sophotect with individuality. It was a part or aspect of the central intelligence—not the actual Teramind, of course, but distantly joined to that apex through nodes of ascending power. So is the forefinger of a human a distinct thing while also a component of her hand, which is a component of her arm, which is a component of her entire organism. But this mind could, when desired, become one with as many others as necessary to deal with any question or any danger. What it was now was merely what it deemed to be sufficient.

  And neither of these two was truly speaking. Directly linked, they exchanged information and thoughts at well-nigh the speed of light. In less than a second, Venator knew what had gone on in the thirty years since his death, saw what it might portend, and realized what he must do.

  But let words stand in for that lightninglike discourse. It is not altogether a false analogy. As he settled into his re-created state, Venator began to remember how it had felt being human, how it had felt to talk.

  —Almost surely this business is centered on the Moon, and most likely the virusmaster is there. Little active hostility to the order of things remains on Earth, and it is ideational or emotional—ill informed, ill organized where it is organized at all, devoid of any significant resources. But ever more Lunarians grow ever more restless. No longer simply expressing dissent, refusing cooperation with Terrans, or evading what laws of their republic they can, increasingly often they openly violate those laws that do not please them; and acts of sabotage are occurring. Although agents of the Peace Authority have not succeeded in discovering what the membership of the Scaine Croi is, they estimate it in the thousands, and certainly its sympathizers include most of the race.

  —But the Lunarians are a dwindling minority, a dying breed. Or so they were toward the end of my life. What menace can they offer?

  —Their birth rate is rising anew. They are getting back a belief in their future. It is the influence of Proserpina, direct and indirect, that inspires them. What else? This was foreseen and feared already in your day.

  —Proserpina is so remote, though, so small and poor. The colony was a desperate gamble. We thought it might well fail. At worst, it should not have posed a serious problem for centuries to come. What has changed yonder?

  —The colony has struck firm roots. Its population prospers and slowly enlarges. Left to itself, it can reach equilibrium and survive indefinitely.

  —We meant to see to it that that would be the probable outcome: an equilibrium, a tiny and static nation isolated in the far fringes of the Solar System, insignificant and virtually forgotten by the rest of humankind.

  —Exactly. Thus far our policies have worked well. Proserpina is contained. Resentment among its people was expected and allowed for. What was not properly expected was the degree to which that resentment would infect the Lunarians on Luna.

  —Hm. I could have guessed it. Proserpina may be invisible to them, but in spirit it blazes forth that their old wild ways are still alive, still free. Humans who rebel are not those without hope, but those who suppose that at last they see the end of the tunnel.

  —You can well judge, who have been human yourself.

  —Terran human. Lunarians are not like me. (Memory stirred, a Lunarian woman walked again with her red hair and wicked laughter, the download must set aside a download’s equivalent of pain.) Nevertheless, I think that they and I are akin in this.

  —They are not insane. There is no reason to anticipate insurrection on the Moon. However, the violation of our databases clearly indicates an organization both strong and cunning, with tendrils into the cybercosm. It also indicates enmity, not so? Both these point toward the Scaine Croi.

  —What action has the Peace Authority taken?

  —Intensive investigation. (Details followed, not a welter of them but a coherent, mathematically precise representation.) As you see, progress has been slight. The special capabilities of a download, halfway between the organic and the cybernetic, could prove of critical importance. Your record, your gifts and skills and experiences while alive, singled you out. Therefore you have been resurrected.

  —Agents with Terran genes would certainly have … difficulty … penetrating a Lunarian underground. Also, that outfit will maintain its private lines of communication. Meanwhile, any Lunarian willing to dissemble a bit, or just key in to the public database, can learn about most of the things Terrans are doing. Yes-s-s.

  —Another possible indication: Lirion is bound back for Luna.

  —Lirion of Zamok Zhelezo? … No, wait, that was the family stronghold at Ptolemaeus. He went to Proserpina and founded Zamok Drakon. We met, he and I, a few times, on his first return to the inner System.

  —This will be his third.

  —After so many years? He stirred up ample trouble earlier, but we never got enough evidence to arrest him and he went freely home. I bade him good-bye. If cats could smile, he would have been smiling like a cat. Oh, no, he has not come back for nothing.

  —The temptation is to seize him and brainphase his knowledge out of him, legality or no. But he doubtless has emergency means, such as blowing his skull to bits, and we have no idea what his disappearance might trigger.

  —Besides, he in himself may provide a spoor to follow into the heart of whatever this conspiracy is. I will seek him out, and then we shall see.

  Through Venator’s ghost went the olden thrill of the hunt.

  CHAPTER 2

  —Earth overhead in a hollow halidom,

  Bone-studded stone—

  With a curse, Jesse Nicol bade the recorder in his helmet cancel. The lines he had been composing went out of existence. He wished he could annihilate them as easily in his memory.

  His aim had not been to capture the scene in words. It was too familiar, and forever too awesome. He stood at Beynac Point on the northern rim of the Tycho ringwall, awaiting his beloved. Southward, rock sloped down toward the crater floor it shadowed; afar lifted the central peak, up into darkness and crowned with stars. They were gentle of contour, those heights, eroded by millennial cosmic infall, but mighty of mass. Northward the rampart fell in highlights and glooms to a land where meteorite splash lay like hoarfrost and mountains marked the horizon. There Earth shone aloft, three-quarters full, blue-and-white marbled glory, brilliance to wash all stars from her part of heaven.

  His breath and heartbeat were a susurrus lost within a silence as vast as
that sky. Yet everywhere works of humankind thrust into sight, radio masts agleam, monorails tracing bright streaks, domes and hemicylinders at the junctures of roads, microwave dishes hurling invisible energy from dayside to the mother world, things tiny at their distances, toylike, widely strewn, but everywhere. The Habitat passed slowly across upward vision. The solar sails that held it in its otherwise unstable orbit around the Moon outshone any sister planet.

  As Nicol watched, it entered the shadow cone, dimmed, and disappeared. For an instant the vanishment of his childhood home stirred him to eagerness. The symbol he needed—?

  His hope had been to make what was around him speak somehow to the spirit. The poem should evoke what was here and what was past, life born and dying and relentlessly born again in extinction after extinction through billionfold years, spilling forth into space and finding that to live it must make itself alien to itself; and thereby the poem should raise up the truth that the spirit is always a stranger and alone, with nothing to keep it alight but whatever bravery it can bring into reality—No, not so flat, not so shallowly obvious; he would weave a music to sing what cannot be said.

  The idea flickered out, useless. “Damn,” he mumbled in archaic Anglo, “damn, damn, and God damn.” Rage tasted acid on his tongue.

  After a minute or two he calmed down enough to bark a laugh. He knew full well how easily fury could seize him, and this was ridiculous. A moonflitter pilot frustrated because his verses wouldn’t come right!

  At least he knew better than to dwell on how he had suffered the same defeat over and over, for as long as he could remember. Let him instead look forward to Falaire’s arrival. When she wasn’t at the trailhead where they were to meet, he had keyed the bulletin screen there and learned that some last-minute business would detain her for about an hour. He had entered a message in reply, that he would hike on up to this lookout. It had seemed a chance to think, feel, work on that which was within him.

  Now he thought the poem would never take shape. Oh, yes, he could salvage bits of imagery that weren’t too bad and give them a framework competently built; but why? The thing would be dead, with nothing of the horror or the austere hopefulness he had intended. To hell with it—another archaism, very suitable, as anachronistic as his dreams. The way of a man with a maid did not go outmoded.

  “Time,” he ordered, aloud rather than by touch. His informant replied likewise: “1432.” Falaire was half an hour later than she’d recorded she would be. Nicol sighed, then wryly grinned. She was no more predictable than most Lunarians. She might even be legitimately delayed.

  He tried to contemplate the view for its own sake. Earthlight poured over a tall young man, caucasoid Terran, thin to the point of gauntness although springily muscled. Gray eyes looked from a sallow hatchet face. He kept his beard inhibited and his black hair short. His voice when he spoke was a somewhat harsh tenor. Thus had his DNA made him, and he disdained to get any changes, whether cosmetic or basic.

  Magnificent desolation, he thought. What a wonderful phrase. And not from a poet; from a perfectly straightforward Apollo astronaut, centuries and centuries ago, blurted forth when first he espied this realm. The time had been right, the achievement happening, the man in and of it; and so the words came, not after struggle and soul-search but as if by themselves. O daughter of Zeus, howsoever you know of these matters, tell me.

  “Jesse, aou!”

  The clear soprano, ringing in his sonors, made him whirl around. Up the trail toward him came Falaire. Her low-gravity lope seemed to him more as if she danced, or even flew. That was not really because the solar collectors and cooling surfaces outspread from the lifepack between her shoulders resembled dragonfly wings. Nor was it because the silvery space suit, mostly bionic, fitted the slim curves of her like a second skin. It was herself, gracefulness and impulsiveness embodied.

  She drew to a halt before him. For a moment they looked at one another. She was a trifle on the short side for a Lunarian woman, topping him by just three centimeters, but the features within the transparent helmet were purely of her race, face high in the cheekbones and tapering to a narrow chin, short and slightly flared nose, full mouth, ears that were not convoluted like his, great oblique eyes changeably green beneath arching tawny brows. Hair that was deep blond under daylike light fell in ashen waves past snow-fair skin that here was tinged a faint blue. He felt himself in the presence of faerie.

  “Uh, well beheld,” he greeted at last. The lilting Lunarian words dropped awkwardly off his tongue. He had mastered the language enough for practical purposes, but knew how far beyond him the subtleties were. Sometimes he lapsed into Anglo or Spanyó because he couldn’t find a native phrase and perhaps it didn’t exist.

  Well beheld indeed, he thought, and added in haste, lest he gape at her, “How went your doings?”

  She spread her fingers. A Terran would have shrugged. “Down some roads unforeseen.” She did not explain, nor apologize for making him wait. Instead, she laughed. “We were to fare around afoot. Come. So much talktime has brewed unrest in my blood.”

  She set off along the rim trail. He went beside her silent until he ventured, “It is as beautiful as they say.”

  She glanced at him. “You have indeed not betrodden it erenow? I thought everyone in Tychopolis had”—which meant at least a hundred thousand—“as well as visitors from elsewhere.”

  “I’ve only walked it once, in the opposite direction from Beynac Point and only as far as Starfell. Of course, I have followed the whole circuit on the vivifer.”

  “Followed.”

  He heard the scorn, and bridled a bit. “I don’t pretend that was the real thing.” A full-sensory simulacrum was still merely a simulacrum. The illusion of an actual experience that a dreambox gave was still merely an illusion. “But how many chances have I had? How often have I been here, for how long at a time?”

  She laughed again. “Beware. Those prickles could pierce your suit.” Briefly, she took his arm. “I promised I’d show you a byway that’s not in the common database.” A shout: “Hai-ach!” And she was off at a full, bounding run.

  Barely able to keep up, the breath harsh in his throat, he felt anew how clumsy he was, how ill fitted for this world of hers. His ancestors had not been changed in their genes so that they could keep their health and bear live children under the gravity, nor had they evolved through generations a way of living and thinking and feeling that was unitary with their stark land.

  And yet nearly all the rather few people they passed on the trail were Terrans. Some had been born and spent their early years on Earth; for most it had been the high-weight zone of the Habitat. Permanently settled on the Moon, they required nanomaintainors to hold the cells and fluids of their bodies in balance, with stiff regular exercises to keep their bones and muscles from atrophying. Nevertheless the Moon was their home, they had made it over as they chose, and Lunarians long since outnumbered could do little more than resent them. A fresh pang of sympathy for the metamorphs struck into Nicol. He too was a man without a birthright.

  He did see two or three besides the woman who soared ahead of him. One led a moonwolf on a leash. That was a rare sight. Only a Lunarian would want such a vacuum-adapted beast, and hardly any owned them these days—too expensive, if nothing else. Nicol wondered what coursings this man took his pet on, across the hills and into the craters. Who was he? Surely of Selenarchic descent, like Falaire, but unlike her family, he must have retained a fragment of former wealth.

  When she finally halted, nobody else was in view. She had veered onto a side path that switchbacked down the outer ringwall until it came to an end at a narrow ledge. Dust puffed up from the regolith under their boots, was repelled by their outfits, and settled. It did not fall fast, but there was no air to hinder it. Stone hulked into the sky behind. Ahead, it slanted down toward a wastescape where the sole token of humanity was a transmission tower, reduced by remoteness to a metallic spiderweb.

  They’d stopped scarcely soon
enough, Nicol admitted to himself, annoyed. His heart thudded, his gullet was dry fire, his knees were about to give way. She just drew long breaths. A slight sheen of perspiration on her face caught the Earthlight, and somehow her locks had become tousled. He remembered her in bed, and vexation went from him. She was what she was. Let him bless fortune that for some reason she liked him.

  He would not, dared not admit weakness. “In truth a … a ramble,” he managed to croak.

  She smiled. “Gallantly spoken. Shall we take refreshment? I brought wine.”

  He wanted very much to sit down, but she did not. “Water first,” he commanded. The unit rose to his lips and he drank and drank. The chill revived him as much as did the wetness. She uncoiled a pair of tubes on a bottle at her hip and plugged them into their helmet locks. He thought how her fingers had once stroked across his lips.

  The wine was noble, full-bodied, perhaps akin to a sauvignon blanc. He needn’t be ashamed to say, “I don’t recognize this. Where has it been hiding from me?”

  She smiled straight into his gaze. “No synthetic. From the Yanique vineyard beneath Copernicus, held by the phyle that founded it. The lord of Acquai does not sell what they make, he bestows it on whom he will.”

  None of whom were Terrans, Nicol guessed. “You honor me.”

  “Nay. It’s friendship.” She slipped to his side and laid an arm around his waist. He did likewise. Sensors in the suit made it almost like holding her directly.

  Almost. “That’s the trouble with being topside,” he said, “this stuff between us,” and noticed that his jape had been in Anglo.

  She understood and laughed, although she replied in her own tongue. “Eyach, save the eagerness for when we have the right environs.”

  His sudden happiness began to ebb. “That is too seldom,” he mumbled, returning to Lunarian.

  She nodded. “Yes, I am a-busied more than I might wish.”