The Stars Are Also Fire

by Poul Anderson

  He wondered. Her work? Like him, she was in the Rayenn—and of it, as no Terran would ever be. She served as a liaison with outsiders of both species, the sort of public relations, intelligence gathering, and counseling that no sophotect could quite have handled. However, she appeared to operate mostly on her own, dealing with people and taking time off pretty well as she pleased. Lunarians were typically more interested in results than in procedures.

  (Appeared? No, surely that was what she did. He could not imagine her condescending to take employment on any other terms. After all, her folks were of the Selenarchs, who had dominated the Moon when it was a sovereign nation. Her father still clung to a scrap of the estate at Zamok Orel in Lacus Somniorum. Nicol could imagine how grimly the old man struggled to maintain a castle gone empty, on nothing but his citizen’s credit, and how poisonously it must gall him to accept that from the government. He had heard that her brother had given up and was spending his own entitlement income on pleasuring himself to death in Tsukimachi. Falaire might have done the same, or might have lived a life more prudent and equally meaningless. She chose to win something better for herself than modest comfort, for she possessed the drive and the capabilities to get real work and succeed in it. But no, she would never let any boss monitor her hours. Leave that to Terrans.)

  Her words jarred him out of his thoughts. “You, though? What, no other woman?” Was that a gibe? “You’re not a-space for any lengthy whiles.”

  “No,” he snapped. As if by mutual consent, they let go and stepped apart. He shouldn’t have replied so churlishly. The implied question had touched a nerve and he didn’t want to answer it. His women had in fact been few, because few had especially interested him, any more than most men did. She was different. Therefore she could hurt him. Since meeting her he had not even patronized a joyeuse. He sought to change the subject. “Who is?”

  In his mind, the robots and sophotects that took ships between the planets didn’t count. How many of those were left, anyway? Spaceflight was dying out, being phased out, no longer much needed or wanted. Someday, he supposed, it would be one with the building of pyramids or the grazing of cattle. On Mars and Luna, too, machines had taken over transportation. Only the Rayenn was left in human hands, and that was only a courai.

  (Flittingly he considered the word, for it had never gotten entirely within his comprehension, no matter that it now occupied his days. The organization was not really a company or a guild engaged in conveyance. It was an alliance of Lunarian magnates, with their underlings, as much for security and influence as for a profit that was marginal at best. Lunarian shippers and travelers used it more for the sake of pride and clannishness than because it was genuinely competitive with the cybernetic lines. The ceremonies and traditions it maintained, some of which went back to Fireball Enterprises, were for none but Lunarians. … It was sheer luck that the Rayenn needed a few Terrans and he had the innate ability to acquire the necessary skills. Generally his flights were hops, suborbital between points on the surface or up to the Habitat and back. But every now and then a job demanded higher accelerations than Lunarians could readily tolerate. …)

  Once again her voice recalled him. Damnation, he thought, why this foul humor, why this wandering off on paths he had already trampled into ruts, when here he stood with Falaire? “They often are at Proserpina,” she was saying.

  Her face had turned eastward, away from Earth’s brilliance. Did he see rapture? Stars gleamed yonder. “Yes,” he replied slowly, “they make long voyages. They have to.”

  “And they wish!” she exclaimed. “It is their desire.”

  Their need, he refrained from insisting. The comets that they mined for ice, organics, and minerals were plentiful but spread through the immensities of Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Not that the settlers on the iron asteroid minded traversing such reaches, he supposed. They or their parents had chosen to go dwell in eternal night. If they had not automated their spacecraft, that too must be a choice of theirs, perhaps because they feared creating another cybercosm. Still, Nicol wondered how souls so fierce and mercurial passed the time aboard.

  “They don’t often wish to come back to Luna,” he remarked, largely to keep silence at bay. “When did their last ship before this new arrival call, seven years ago? Of course, that’s a minimum four and a half months in transit,” if the vessel went under boost the whole distance, extravagantly, at a full Lunar gravity. “Oh, no longer than an average comet mission, I should imagine—”

  She swung upon him. He saw the quick ire he had come to know too well. “The energy cost, you clotbrain! They’re forced to be niggard with fuel, reserve it for work that is vital—”

  “I know—”

  “—or for simple survival. And now this embargo laid on them!” Her rage spat at the lovely blue planet above. “Earth, Earth’s machine overlord, would fain strangle them!”

  “No, no, not that,” he demurred, “not truly.” He curbed a reminder to her that Proserpina had its fusion power plants, robotic factories, chemical and biological industry, nanotechnics, everything required to keep life alive. What claim had the inhabitants on a continued supply of antimatter? If Earth was terminating production, that was because Earth, Luna, and Mars had reached an equilibrium economy and no longer needed so concentrated an energy source, while the Proserpinans had nothing to trade for it. If they must therefore cease expanding, strike a balance between their own population and resources, settle down forever on their single miniature world, why, that would be evolution, natural selection at work.

  Yet extinction had claimed some splendid creatures, mammoth, saber-tooth, great-antlered Irish elk; and it seemed to Nicol that eagles or tigers, existing on narrow ranges under strict protection, were not what their natures meant them to be. He would not argue with Falaire’s anger.

  Her tone quieted. “Eyach, I am a Lunarian,” she sighed. “I was born aggrieved.” As swiftly as it had flared, her temper cooled. A chuckle rang forth. “We came not topside for that, you and I, did we? Come, here is where we leave the trail.”

  He welcomed a release of tension. Glancing at the descent, he did have to say, “It looks tricky.”

  “It is,” she answered merrily. “Ho-ay!” She sprang.

  He swallowed his misgivings and followed, as cautiously as was consistent with not appearing timid. This section of the ringwall sloped steeply. Millennial small meteorite impacts had roughened it barely enough to provide footing. Under Earth weight he would soon have fallen, and even here a person could slip, roll, and plunge off a break to his death. The dust that, most places, held tracks for thousands of years, existed only in separate spatters. Yet Falaire leaped from point to precarious point with antelope sureness and speed.

  Having reached her destination, a worn-down crag like thousands of others, she waited till he arrived panting and shaky. “Take ease,” she invited.

  “I didn’t expect … you’d act this way … topside also,” he got out.

  She raised her brows. “Also?” she asked, half-archly.

  “I’m told that you fly in the Devil Sky.”—not a park where folk secured wings to themselves and flapped calmly aloft, but a cave where random violent winds were generated and a common sport was to try knocking somebody else a-spin. Every year saw numerous injuries and several fatalities.

  For an instant, rancor spoke again. “What else have I to do for amusement, in this my cage?”

  She had a certain bleak justice on her side, he thought. The genes that made her a Lunarian, to whom Luna was natural, had given her a Lunarian psyche as well. Nicol was not the first Terran to think that it was almost as if her kind were descended not from apes but from cats, or perhaps wolves. When the modern world thrust upon them such modern things as democracy or the prohibition of private revenge, it had been like a trainer in an ancient circus making a leopard learn tricks. Generations of the animals had doubtless lived thus, more safely and prosperously than in the wild, but within them smoldered always the
leopard heart. Lunarians, being human, knew what their condition was.

  Well, you could not let carnivores prowl your streets after dark, could you?

  Falaire finger-shrugged. “No matter today,” she said. “I’ve brought you to what I promised to show you. First I bind you anew to hold the secret of it, as you swore erstwhile. We’d not have tourists enter, whether by vivifer or in yawping, gawping person.”

  He wondered what landmarks she had used to find it, and how the knowledge of it had stayed hidden this long. With a slight chill, he felt the alienness of her, whose love-making had burst over him like none he ever knew among his own kind. “You, you honor me, my lady,” he stammered.

  Did warmth touch her words? “I’ve come to think you trustworthy.” It was the highest compliment she had yet paid him. Mostly she had simply remarked that she enjoyed his company and his body—when she was in the mood for them. He had not risked saying anything that went deeper.

  She took his hand and led him on, carefully now. The crag and an overhang behind it masked a crevice. They squeezed through and turned on their lamps. He gasped. Around him lay space enclosed by crystals, as if he stood in the cavity at the middle of a huge geode. They glittered, sparked, refracted light into a million shifting bits of rainbow. When he touched them their edges and points were knife-keen. He imagined he felt the electric thrill that the photons awakened, making their atoms sing.

  “Why, this is a miracle,” he whispered.

  “Say rather, a charming whim of the universe.” Her mirth mocked his awe.

  “The geologists—how would they explain it?”

  “They shall have no call to.”

  Those who thus hoarded scientific treasure were indeed alienated, he thought, and shuddered a little.

  Then he lost himself in the marvel. Two hours had passed when they left it and climbed back to the rim trail.

  Falaire glanced aloft. He knew she could tell time by the terminator on Earth and by what stars the planet left visible. “We must turn home,” she said.

  Cheer had welled up in him, down among the jewels. “I’ve no objection,” he laughed.

  “I’ll be occupied elsewhere this evenwatch,” she replied without expressing regret.

  Dashed, he gulped before he asked, “Would that be with Lirion?”

  He hoped so, oh, he hoped so. In the ten daycycles since he arrived, the captain from Proserpina had been closeted with one Lunarian after another, some prominent, some obscure. They included leaders of the Rayenn. It would be logical to consult Falaire, who moved in her work between the Lunarian and the Terran worlds. Maybe it was Lirion she had seen just before she joined Nicol today.

  “Nay,” he heard, “with Seyant.”

  The news took him by the throat. In spite of common sense and all his resolutions, he cried, “What have you to do with him?”

  That smug rotworm, he wanted to snarl. I’d kill him if I could. I’d drop him from orbit and watch him splash.

  They met through her. She and Nicol had been wandering down a path in the wilderness below this crater. It was soon after they got acquainted, that wondrous chance meeting in the Rayenn’s local ground control station. Already something glowed between them.

  The cavern would have reached beyond sight, had they been able to look straight across its floor. Trees walled them in, Lunar-gravity high, elm and oak and white birch, broken by occasional canebrakes and small flower-studded meadows. Leaves rustled overhead, parted their vaults to give a glimpse of sky as blue and sun as bright as if they had been real, drew back together in the breeze and cast shadows speckled with light. A squirrel ran fiery up a trunk, a butterfly went past like a tiny flag, a daybat winged in pursuit of a glitterbug. Soil lay soft underfoot, breathing fragrances forth into coolness. She walked hand in hand with him as Ianeke had done on Earth.

  They rounded a bend and there Seyant came, toweringly tall, flaxen-haired, flamboyant of garb and feline of gait. Falaire hailed him. All three stopped in mid-path. He and she talked animatedly in a dialect Nicol could not follow. At length she made an introduction. Seyant stared down and murmured in flawless Anglo, as if the Terran would not understand any native speech, “Ah, yes, the Earthbaby you’ve mentioned.” To him: “I’m told you are an acceptably competent transporteer.”

  Since then Nicol had gathered in his turn little more than that Seyant had independent means, over and above citizen’s credit. Falaire sometimes quoted his witticisms. Whenever he met Nicol, he sank their barbs into the other man.

  She replied sharply, “That which I mean to do.”

  With a wrenching effort, he curbed a rage he knew was unreasonable. “I’m … sorry,” he muttered, but could not help adding,. “I know I have no claim on you.”

  She nodded. “We are sundered by more than race, Jesse.”

  They started off on the path. “You could become more nearly one with us if you chose,” she said after a while.

  “With whom?” he rasped. “The Scaine Croi?” This was not the first hint she had dropped.

  She regarded him, unwontedly grave. “You speak as if it were criminal to desire freedom.”

  She would despise him if he shammed. He would despise himself. “Freedom from what?”—when the Habitat bred Terrans who were glad of the World Federation.

  “From the system,” she said, “the cybercosm that, below all the mincing pretenses, rules over us.”

  “What would you have me do?” Sardonicism stirred. “Whatever it is, I’ll probably have to say gracias, no. I own to a taste for melodrama, but only in the arts.”

  In real life, he knew—he had learned from trouble and grief—it was too strong a temptation.

  “Maychance I will speak further, some other day-cycle,” she said.

  “Do, if you wish. Yes … please do.” His caution broke apart. “I’m always happy to speak with you, Falaire,”

  Her smile went over him like the Earthlight. “Ay-ah, we shall that. Tomorrow evenwatch? And then again after your next flight, oh, I will find hours for you.”

  But this nightwatch—

  “Meanwhile, you’ve other friends, nay?” she went on amiably. “They could receive you in that rowdy Uranium Dragon you showed me.”

  “Maybe,” he grunted in Anglo.

  “Or the Black Sword?”

  “No!”

  Alcohol was dangerous enough for him in his present temper. A den offering a drug more potent, such as exoridine, releasing all inhibitions, might cause him to attack somebody. Best might be if he stayed in his little apartment and got quietly drunk alone. Maybe, just maybe, a few verses would come to him that were not altogether worthless.

  Once more Falaire tucked her arm under his. It was a foreign gesture to her, a Terran gesture, and so the more moving. “We’ve yet a span to go, you and I,” she said. “Enjoy the sights.”

  His helpless wrath faded a bit. He could try. At least he had the sight of her, there beside him, profiled against stars.

  He decided that later, whatever she wanted, he would let her tell him what she thought he could do for her cause, whatever it was. No harm in listening.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hydra Square had changed little over the centuries, not at all in the forty years since Venator last crossed it. Then he had been alive, now he was a set of ongoing electro-photonic processes in a neural network that received its information through the sensors of the machine it walked in. But when he allowed for different perceptions, he experienced the same as before. Fish still swam colorful and algae still waved sinuous under the clear paving. The fountain at the center still spouted its whiteness at the simulated sky, water descending in sonic-pulsed serpentine curves and its own music. The doorways on three sides still led to museums, which scarcely anyone visited now. The municipal service establishments on the fourth side did not see much more use. The plaza was a relic, embalmed in time, because the life of Tychopolis had moved elsewhere.

  He found it overflowing not far down in Tsiolkovsky P
rospect. There too something of the old remained, duramoss underfoot, hard-surfaced lanes for motorskaters, three-level arcades of delicate pillars and arches—nothing more. The glowpanel ceiling no longer displayed shifting fantastical illusions, only chromatic abstractions culturally neutral. Most shops had been converted to tenements, crammed and raucous, although enterprises here and there displayed light-signs, animations, banners in their various alphabets, KAWAMOTO GYMNASIUM, BENGALI HOUSE RESTAURANT, TANJAY CASINO, LI YUAN TONG, WEIN UND WEIBER, HARMONIC COUNSELING, PYONGYANG VOLUPTUARY, SONGGRAM & CO., ISKUSSTVO I TAIINA, or things that even he did not recognize. His chemosensors told him that the very odors had changed, no longer subtle perfumes and smokes but simply of human bodies; nor did melodies drift eerily through the air.

  Hardly a Lunarian was in the throngs that hurried, jostled, gesticulated, chattered, dickered, laughed, sorrowed, kept silence, busy or idle or lost in some narcotic dream. They were as diversified as Earth itself, a dark man in a turban beside a dark woman in a sari, a portly brown person in sarong and blouse, a blond in form-fitting iridescence, a woman concealed by gown and veil, a man with a pearl-button cap above an embroidered robe, another who wore feathers and bird mask, a body-painted nude, motley and bells on one who capered, a woman bearing clan emblems on her breasts and a claymore across her back, on and multitudinously on. Unisuits, tunics, or other ordinary garb were commonest, but not by much. During his life Venator had watched people differentiate into ever more societies, some occupying their own regions, some no less distinct for being global. It started before he was born and continued further after he died. He thought that humans were driven to make whatever uniqueness, belongingness, communal and individual identity they could within the leveling huge impersonality of World Federation and cybercosm.

  And yet they weren’t unhappy, he thought. Who in their right minds would want a return of war, poverty, rampant criminality, disease, famine, cancerously swelling population, necessity to work no matter how nasty or deadening the work might be, mass lunacy, private misery, and death in less than a hundred years? It was the metamorphs and their few full-human adherents who were the malcontents, the troublemakers—Lunarians above all, but others too, perhaps more dangerous because less obvious. …