The Fleet of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  By agreement, the Centaurians had beamed an encrypted update to overtake Dagny a little earlier than now. Of course the news was four and a third years' old—the news from Sol that had been relayed back to him was twice that—and woefully scant, stating simply what they knew, and even that small bit inevitably distorted by misunderstanding, prejudice, and what Guthrie considered superstition. But it was better than nothing. He played the message into his memory without giving it much attention. There'd be time for that during the last stages of his approach.

  Lunarian rang in his audio sensors. "Aou, ship inbound out of the fifth octant. Zefor speaks, commanding this detachment of guardians for the Council of Forerunners on the free world Proserpina. Name yourself and your purpose.''

  Guthrie's reply speared back. He used the same language, but, as always, gave it his own flavor and threw in some ancient Americanisms. "Come off it, amigo. You know damn well who I am. I'd guess your honchos have been expecting me since before you were born."

  Five billion years ago, when the Solar System was in embryo, a globe began to form, next outward from what would become Mars. Jupiter, already coalescent—the giants grew fastest—roiled the planetesimals with its gravity and aborted this planet. However, some of them had gotten to a size at which the energies of accretion and of radioactivity melted them. Heavy elements sank down to their centers. When they cooled and solidified, they had nickel-iron cores. In the course of time, collisions shattered all of them, as well as lesser bodies, until nothing but a belt of asteroids remained.

  Early on, though, such an accident blasted the outer layers off the largest. The result was a ferrous spheroid two thousand kilometers across. Recoiling, eventually it strayed too close to Jupiter, and the monster threw it outward. The new, eccentric orbit was canted about forty-four degrees off the ecliptic plane; like other quantities, this varied somewhat over time. Perihelion brought it within slightly more than a hundred astronomical units of the sun. Aphelion was more than thirty-one thousand astronomical units distant, beyond the Kuiper Belt of comets and well into the Oort Cloud of those icy objects. As eons passed, one of them crashed on it, leaving a rich deposit of frozen water and organics. A metallic impactor bequeathed its own treasures. At this moment in humankind's existence, the worldlet had rounded Sol and was outbound again. It had not yet come very far; the period was almost two million years.

  When Guthrie first saw it, remotely and under high magnification, it flashed and glittered, lights everywhere across a once murky surface, light of sun and stars reflecting off domes, roofs, towers, masts. They streamed past as he drew closer, for his path was curved and the planetoid spun rapidly, once around in nine and a half hours. He began to make out roads, rails, spacefields, ships coming and going like fireflies. Farther off, he recognized structures in space, a few of them satellites, most of them just sharing the same orbit—habitats, factories, entrep6ts, supplementary harbors, and things less readily identifiable. He supposed two or three were naval, while others were devoted to research of various kinds and to activities that wanted ample isolation, such as the production of antimatter.

  Be that as it may, Proserpina had obviously waxed prosperous and populous. To be sure, a majority of its folk were elsewhere, in lesser colonies on smaller bodies and in mining bases on comets, thinly spread across immensities that dwarfed the inner Solar System, but growing, venturing, driving their frontiers ever outward, starward.

  That suited the Lunarian temperament, Guthrie thought. They'd like the solitude of their settlements, far more profound than among the asteroids of Alpha Centauri. Each could go its own way, developing its own culture. He had gathered, nevertheless, that as a general rule, the basic social forms resembled those that had prevailed on Earth's Moon under the Selenarchy. Ties of kinship knitted families and their retainers into phratries. Several related phratries made up a phyle, a loose framework for considering matters of mutual concern and acting more or less cooperatively. Stronger, often handed down for generations, were bonds between the seigneurs, who held the balance of wealth and power, and their armurini—"companions," meaning followers, vassals, samurai, or whatever inadequate rendering you gave that word. Most major enterprises were carried out by courai, not exactly companies or guilds, which tended to draw their members from the same phratry; but some were possessions of the seigneurial families.

  On Proserpina, where people and things and doings were concentrated, something else had perforce evolved, as close to a government as Lunarians could maintain. The phratries elected a Council of Forerunners. In consultation with them—through a kind of electronic Althing, Guthrie thought—it set policies and organized major public undertakings. The majority of its enactments amounted to safety regulations and the like. Lunarian leadership was always more prone to say, "Thou shall not" than "Thou shall." Still, various positive works were carried out. They were paid for by ad hoc levies on their beneficiaries.

  The Council chose a Convener, primus inter pares for as long as the Council continued him/her in office. All its acts were subjecl lo review and veto al any lime by the Consultancy of the seigneurs who led the phyles. Weak though it seemed, the system apparenlly was more effeclive lhan analogues had been among such Terrans as ihe medieval Slavs or Icelanders. When ihe maximum aulhority thai anyone could possibly win was so limited, negotiation in a spirit of reasonably enlightened self-interest was usually the optimum course. A person of any rank who pushed too hard was apt to get killed.

  The Proserpinans even kept what seemed to be a small but well-disciplined naval force. Guthrie wasn't sure why. Did they actually have pipe-dream visions of being attacked across the gulf between them and Earth? Maybe Ihe idea was just to keep feuds from getting out of hand.

  Zefor's voice returned: "You will take parking orbit here, donrai." He recited the elements of it.

  "Quite a ways oul yel, eh?" Guthrie said. "Oh, well." He gave Dagny the numbers and felt the gentle tug of terminal maneuvers. ...-

  "We will provide transport to Proserpina."

  "No need for that, gracias. If you or your TrafCon will talk me in, I'll flit directly. Uh, this ship's self-guarding, and kind of touchy aboul slrangers Irying lo board. Please pass Ihe word around. I'd hate for somebody to get hurt."

  "Understood, donrai." Zefor sounded sardonically amused.

  Guthrie was already in his humanoid body. This time, unlike when he arrived at Centauri, the 3-screen in the turret held an image of his middle-aged human head. He thought that would be more useful, psychologically, here, where they still dealt directly with Terrans at least once in a while.

  He fetched a jetpack and attached it, secured a navigation kit to his chest, cycled through an airlock, and sprang free. The flight through space, englobed by stars, gave him a,couple of welcome hours to marshal his thoughts.

  The interlude would also have soothed him, had he been flesh. A download wasn't able to fear or fret—about its own prospects, anyhow. The circuits and programming did generate somelhing like devolion to causes, ideas, and, yes, living beings, and this led to concern aboul ihem. In a ghoslly way, love outlasted death.

  But I'm a much better lover when I'm alive, Guthrie thoughl, and I don'l mean only physically.

  He dismissed self-pity with the contempt it deserved— he remained entirely capable of scorn—and concentrated on the situation around him. It was certainly interesting.

  Proserpina swelled before him till it filled half the sky and the direction shifted gradually from ahead to down. Following the instructions in his receivers, he made a deft landing on a metal terrace that jutted from a slim, quite beautiful skyscraper. Lights, diffused by reflectors, hid space behind an artificial day. A machine waited to help him off with his gear and lead him to an entry lock. It was robotic, multiply equipped and adaptable, but essentially an automaton, without consciousness. The sophotects here were few, their intellects and free wills severely restricted.

  Guthrie passed to the interior. Moisture made shortlived hoa
rfrost on him. His sensors noted warmth, a ventilating breeze, weight. Gravity was about fourteen percent of Earth's, but that amounted to eighty-six percent of Luna's. An honor guard awaited him, a dozen tall men in close-fitting black and silver. It was also a real guard. While observing the usual prohibition on firearms inside buildings exposed to vacuum, the squad bore more than swords and staves; two electromagnetic projectors would disable him in short order if he misbehaved.

  As one, the men saluted, right hand on left breast. "Be you well received, donrai, captain, emissary," said the leader. When he spoke thus ceremoniously, Guthrie heard how Lunarian at Sol had diverged from what they spoke at Centauri. The differences weren't enough to cause a problem. "Whatever you desire and request that may be granted you, shall be, for that you have made this great journey and bear great tidings. Would you first seek the quarters prepared for you?''

  Same as last time, Guthrie thought. "No need. If people are ready to meet with me, I am too."

  "Three Selenarchs abide in that hope, donrai. Let us bring you to them."

  Yes, they've revived the old title, Guthrie recalled. It says they've never dropped their claim to their mother world, the Moon.

  On foot and by slipway, the trip was lengthy to the palace appointed. Much that he saw was unique. Most construction was aboveground; excavations in an iron mass went slowly. Although human works had long since covered the entire planetoid, there was no city in any Terran sense. Nodes of culture and commerce served those functions, preserved those peculiarities. People walked as aloofly as always, but filled the passages, arcades, shops, pleasure centers, and esoteric establishments more densely than elsewhere. However soft their speech and gait, the sound of them became an undertone—to him, like the purr of a giant cat. Clothing styles were distinct from the Centaurians', tending toward flamboyancy. Among the frequent pets—a tiny hawk, an angora squirrel, a monkey, a ferret, a gaudy bird, perched on shoulder or wrist—he spied larger beasts striding along—a brace of greyhounds, a dwarf bear, a tawny-spotted black leopard. He wondered where the owners exercised them. They expressed an arrogant opulence.

  Basically, though, Proserpina was Lunarian, akin to the Centaurian habitations—tiers of slender arches, beneath ceilings in which mirages played colorful; ornaments fantastic or subtle; parks where outsize flowers bloomed under soaring low-gravity trees; intricately dancing fountains of water, fire, lightning; emblems on secretive doors; strange worksteads; a troupe of dancers, masked and plumed; pervasive fragrances and low plangency of music; no Terran bustle and babble, everything quiet, flowing like currents in a sea, but as intricately and with the same sense of underlying power and potential violence. Oh, Guthrie remembered, he remembered.

  He came at last to the meeting place, at the end of a vaulted corridor that flickered with the illusion of blue flames and nacreous wings. His escort left him at a doorway curtained by water falling with dreamlike slowness and foaming off down a channel in which swam phosphorescent snakes. The cataract stopped as he drew near and began again when he had passed through. The room beyond was surprisingly small and intimate, ceiling alabaster, walls covered with gold leaf and studded with gems in calligraphic patterns. Perhaps the door at the opposite end led to something larger, or to a labyrinth. A table of lacy-thin metal bore a wine carafe, goblets and a bowl of fruit. Three stood waiting.

  One glided forth and made salute. "Honor is yours, donrai, captain, emissary," he greeted. "After these many years, we joy at this fulfillment. I am Velir, the present Convener, who receives you on behalf of all Proserpina."

  The Centaurians had told Guthrie what little they knew about him—seigneur in Phyle Aulinn, Warder of Zamok Drakon, shareholder in ships and industrial centers, a strength buttressed through his wives and other alliances—a spacefarer in his youth, scout around Mars and even, it was said, Earth—ruthless, which one in his position must be, but self-controlled and pragmatic— suspicious of the Synesis to the point of hostility, but maybe a little more realistic about it than would completely suit Guthrie's purposes. In his nineties, he was heavier than the average Lunarian, almost portly, with amber skin, grizzled black hair, Roman nose, brown eyes very steady. His garb was rather plain, purple tunic, black hose, white shoes and belt, but on his breast hung a diamond the size of his fist.

  "Let me present you to my colleagues," he went on. "Catoul of Phyle Randai, who attends for the Consultancy." That one was middle-aged, muscular, clad in scarlet, his expression withdrawn and wary. "Luaine of Phyle Janou, Wardress of Zamok Gora, who attends for the Captains of the Outer Comets." She was lean, red-haired, keen-featured. Diffracted light went in rainbow ripples over her floor-length gown.

  Of course, Guthrie thought. In a territory this far-flung, the chieftains wouldn't trust their big cheese to talk with me alone, when they know damn near nothing about my aims or powers. Also, if Velir's policies have suffered a reversal or two lately—and as of nine years ago, it looked like they might—he could be sitting a bit shaky in the saddle.

  Guthrie bowed to them. "Well beheld," he said. "Forgive me if I'm not courtly. I never learned how."

  Luaine smiled. "Much else have you learned, sauvin," she murmured. The honorific, connoting wisdom as well as importance, was higher than the common "donrai," whose literal meaning was simply "lord/lady," like "se-nor" or "Herr."

  Controlling the image of his human countenance, Guthrie smiled back. "Gracias. I hope to learn more while I'm here, and maybe get something done about it."

  "So strong and distinguished a guest," said Catoul. “What scathe that we cannot better comfort and pleasure you." Did his tone carry a hint of dislike, or perhaps uneasiness in the presence of a machine being? "What we can offer that you may desire, that you shall have."

  Guthrie shaped a grin. "Anything whatsoever?"

  "Nay, a few exceptions," laughed Velir. "But come, let us converse at ease."

  Gracefully and graciously, the Lunarians poured wine for themselves, toasted him, exchanged words about his home on Amaterasu and theirs in these deeps, as if this were a social occasion.

  It was Luaine who finally nudged it toward business. "And how fare they at Centauri?" she asked.

  "You'd know better than me," Guthrie said. "I've been out of the game for a long while. Nor do I have a lot of information about you folks; and as for what's going on in the rest of the Solar System, I'm plain ignorant."

  "Then what do you think you can accomplish?" demanded Velir. His phrasing was less blunt than that, but clearly Catoul didn't like his straightforward style.

  "Look," Guthrie said, "suppose I lay out the obvious, and we'll cut down on the pussyfooting." He left the last word in Anglo. "It's evident that something mighty big is in the works—or else is being kept under the hatch. The involvement of a gravitational lens suggests it has implications going way beyond the local planets, out into the galaxy. And then the cybercosm, and the whole status of humans on Earth, Luna, Mars—Terrans especially, my native breed—on Amaterasu we don't know a gap-toothed byte about it, and I believe we'd better. So I've come to collect some on-the-spot information."

  "We shall be more than pleased to provide it," said Velir. "Be prepared to spend considerable time. There is much to convey, eyach, very much."

  "But you'll not be content to sit and blot up our version," Luaine foresaw. "Not you, Anson Guthrie."

  "Gracias for saying it for me, my lady," the download replied. "Yes, I will want to look around on my own,"

  "And act on your own?" murmured Catoul.

  "We'll see. Needless to say, I won't do anything against your interests."

  " 'Interest' is a matter of interpretation."

  Luaine raised a hand. "Hold," she said. "Guthrie, I will put a spacecraft and crew at your disposal."

  Velir narrowed his eyes. "Nay," he stated softly. "You will not."

  Jealousy? Suspicion?

  "Gracias," Guthrie told them, "but that's not necessary. Just refuel my cruiser and I'll get about handily by
myself."

  "Indeed—" breathed Luaine.

  Velir donned courtesy. “That is easier wished for than done, sauvin. You must be aware that we have no access to the energies the sun lavishes on Mercury. For us, antimatter production depends on fusion plants. It is costly, and scant in volume. We require the all too precious material for the enterprises by which we live, with a reserve for emergencies and defense."

  "Defense against who?" Guthrie countered. What attack was possible across hundreds of astronomical units? Even c-ships with nuclear warheads would be detectable in plenty of time to intercept And would the Synesis ever make war? Could it? Not without the cybercosm to help. Every drop of knowledge about the cybercosm that had trickled to him over the centuries pointed to a rationality and a—morality—transcending the human.

  "Maychance you will come to understand the answer to that," Velir said.

  The implication is, it's pretty tricky, Guthrie thought. Could well be.

  "I'll listen, sure," he answered. "I'll read your summaries, watch your presentations, take your tours, whatever you want. Above all, I'd like to talk with people. Many assorted kinds of people." He paused. "But I tell you fair and square, I want my ship refueled, and not simply for a voyage home. It'll be to your advantage too, my lady and lords. Maybe more than we can guess today. I'll be working to make you agree."

  Or make the right one of you agree, he thought. Or somebody else who can swing it for me. Intrigue ahead, lots of quiet deviltry, and possibly some not so quiet!

  18

  A BOAT LEFT Malolo and skimmed off across open sea. Before long the great hull had dropped under the horizon, and Fenn and Wanika were alone. It was a gentle day, cloudless except for a snowy bank in the west, a breeze barely ruffling the backs of low swells. Glitter played over changeable blues. A single albatross cruised on high, incredibly white. Man and woman sat in the cockpit, feeling sunshine in their blood and salt in their breath.