Guthrie’s image frowned. “Ma’am, let’s not waste time on ground we’ve trampled flat. I asked for this talk because I just may have found a way out. But it’s radical at best, if it can be done at all. Before I describe it, may I ask what the latest notions are for dealing with us? Don’t worry about repeating the obvious. I’m trying, at my distance from you and in my condition, to find out what the current context is that we’ve got to work in.”
“You must have been following the Assembly debates, if not the speeches and editorials and pronunciamentos everywhere else.”
“Sort of. One common idea is to kick us off Earth and break relations, starve us to death, isn’t it?”
“Gyrocephaly, agreed. But it shows how high feelings have become. As do the proposals to build a space military and bring Fireball and Luna to obedience, you to trial, by force of arms.”
“To take us over, is what that means. Ma’am,” said Guthrie without emphasis, “we won’t let it happen. Try, and we’ll boycott you ourselves and see how long you can keep going. Please explain to them.”
“I do, over and over. No, it won’t come to that. Trade with you will continue, in an increasingly strained fashion, because it must.” Mukerji shifted in her chair until she sat and spoke as if she were in the presence of a living man, looking into his eyes. “But if meanwhile a united Earth—in practice, a consortium under Federation governance—if we marshal all the resources we can spare and create our own space marine, then move out where you are and found our own bases, our own industries—this is under real consideration.”
Guthrie’s image nodded. “I see. No big surprise. And we couldn’t prevent, whether by embargo or attack. I wouldn’t let us. It’d go in the teeth of everything my Juliana wanted us to be about.” He made the noise of clearing his throat. “But have you folks thought what it’d cost you?”
“Much too much,” Mukerji admitted heavily. “Nevertheless, the end will be the destruction of Fireball and the reduction of the Selenarchs. For how can you compete with the organized effort of the whole mother planet?” She raised a palm. “Don’t preach to me about government inefficiency. Imagine your markets closed to you, piece by piece. Consider, as well, that we will not saddle ourselves with an obsolete set of positions for humans that robots can fill better.”
“Yeah. And full-aware artificial intelligence is on the way.”
“So the psychoneticists tell me.” Mukerji smiled, though not gloatingly. Sadly? “In no event can you long go on as you have done, Mr. Guthrie. Whatever we do or do not on Earth, time hounds you. Fireball has had its day. A glorious day it was. I would be sorry to see it end in ignominy.”
“And I,” he said, “to see it end. Not the business. The idea.”
“Untrammeled liberty? Another magnificent fossil, I fear.”
“Could be. I’m not absolutely convinced.” Guthrie’s image hunched its thick shoulders forward. “No, I never did believe anything can be forever. But it can change, it can evolve. We could force you to destroy us, in that criminally wasteful duplication of what we have. Or we could quietly get out of your way—but on our terms.”
Mukerji stiffened. “What do you mean, sir?”
“Some very, very tentative thoughts, which I’d like to see your reaction to. No promises on either side. Maybe you’ll kill the idea here and now. But for the sake of argument, hear it, please. If Fireball gradually disbands, with most of its assets transferred to Earth—to whatever organization you set up for the purpose—would you people first, in exchange, help us toward our goal? It’s not one that could ever, in any way, damage you. Would that kind of deal be arrangeable?”
“Go on,” Mukerji whispered.
Guthrie in the machine switched the playback off.
“She’ll keep this to herself till we make a concrete proposal,” he said. “That’s what I want from you, Pierre, an opinion as to whether it’s worth the large research effort necessary to find out whether a development effort would succeed. If you guesstimate it is, I’ll inform the lady, and she’ll stall for us as long as she can while we do our investigation.”
“Emigration to Demeter,” scoffed the engineer “Absurd. Se magnitude, you may as sensibly propose shipping se Atlantic Ocean up for Luna to ’ave water not from comets.”
“Wait, I didn’t mean the bunch of us,” Guthrie told him. “Not even a big fraction. Some hundreds, maybe.
Those who really want to go, leaving everything they had and risking everything they have, because they hate the rational new order taking over the Solar System.”
“They hate the fact that, in the long run, Xuan was right,” murmured his other self.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Maybe the machines own the future, maybe they don’t. I just don’t like turning it over to them for free. As for our consortes who stay behind, Pierre, they’ll be okay. The transition can’t happen overnight. They’ll be needed till they’re ready to retire on nice pensions. Attrition will reduce the human presence in space fast enough to suit anybody on Earth, I should think. Except for those who’ve elected to go start again from scratch at Alpha Centauri.”
“Whatever they make there,” his other self predicted, “it won’t be like anything that was before. It can’t.”
“Certainly not. It might well flop completely, everybody die off as miserably as the Greenland Norse, long before Phaethon puts paid to Demeter’s account. We can but try. Or can we, Pierre? Think of it as a problem in design, if nothing else.”
If the man had not quite kindled, he had begun to smolder as he listened. “Bien, say a sousand persons plus supplies and equipment.” He spoke slowly, almost under his breath. “Sey cannot stay in suspended animation longer san, eh, forty or fifty years. After sat, too much irreversible damage from background radiation and quantum chemistry. Serefore, about one-tenss c mean velocity.” His gaze went outward, among the unseen stars. “It can be done, yes, sough per’aps two or sree vessels rasser san one large—” He shook his head. “But no. Deceleration squares se mass ratio, remember. I doubt we ’ave antimatter to power so much. We may need ten or twenty years to make enough, after we build added capacity. Meanw’ile se ’ole social-political equation transforms ’erself.”
“Do we have to have reaction braking at the far end?” asked Guthrie in the humanoid.
Aulard looked at him. “W’y, no. Not if— Yes, I recall discussions long ago—” He tugged his chin. “M-m, we send a’ead very soon se little von Neumann machines to multiply semselves and sen build an industrial plant sat can make a sun-powered laser adequate to slow se ships w’en sey arrive …
“Now you’re talking!” exclaimed the senior Guthrie. “All we need do is boost our ark or arks to one-tenth light speed or thereabouts, and put ’em on trajectory. Is this workable?”
“I must compute before I can be sure, naturellement,” Aulard replied, “but I suspect it will still come close to exhausting your energy supply.”
“That won’t matter.”
“No,” said Guthrie in the humanoid, “it’ll antimatter.”
Unreasonable laughter met the childish pun, followed by a sudden excited seriousness.
42
A PEACE AUTHORITY squad had gone by, afoot, as Kyra neared the Blue Theta. She realized that sight was not uncommon in the North American megalopolises, and Erie-Ontario seemed peaceful enough. Nonetheless it struck at her. She remarked on it to Robert Lee.
“What did you expect?” he replied. His voice was flat. When she hugged him in greeting, his response had been brief and she felt him tremble. He sat slumped in the recliner opposite her chair. “The Liberation Army is organized and disciplined, but it’s tiny. The Chaotics were only united in their hatred of the Avantists. Now they’re falling apart into their separate factions—and paying off scores—and quite a few ordinary citizens did have a stake in the old order of things, you know, and are unhappy and revengeful themselves—and the economy’s a wreck—” He shrugged.
&nbs
p; Kyra was looking at the viewscreen. The sky soared crystalline blue above the towers, save where clouds scudded as dazzlingly white, trailing their shadows across and between them. Wind blew keen with approaching autumn. Abruptly she longed to be out in it. Lee had overheated the apartment, in spite of his thick shirt. This air lay dead upon her. “What will come of it all?” she wondered.
“My guess is, the present arrangements between the provisional government and the Federation Council will set themselves fast. Or, rather, they’ll expand. I wouldn’t be surprised if here we have the seed of a truly rationalized society, such as the Avantists only dreamed of. Feasible, because it isn’t imposed according to an ideology, it’s developing according to a demand. In that case, it’ll gradually spread its kind beyond these borders.” The momentary intellectual enthusiasm died away. “My guess.”
She turned back toward him. “Only your guess?”
“I’m not doing any intuitional analyses yet. Not up to it.”
She considered the boyish face gone gaunt, dark rims under the eyes and the darknesses behind them. Pain for him deepened within her. “You do look scooped out,” she said low.
He grimaced. “It still feels that way.”
“After what they did to you.” To your chemistry, your brain, your spirit. Physical torture would have been less invasive.
“Let’s not talk about that,” he snapped. “I’ll recover.” His tone gentled. “Meanwhile, Fireball’s providing for me very decently. Including privacy, the best medicine of all.”
Kyra nodded. “Yes. Guthrie’s like that, and he has the power to hold the news media off you.” Pass the word around, a hint here, a bribe there, perhaps a veiled threat or two. How much longer could he work such beneficences?
“You didn’t escape them,” Lee sympathized.
“No, my part was too damn splashy. But I didn’t care a lot, and by now I’m fading out of the public mind, thank God.”
“Back to a pilot’s career, hey?”
“I don’t know.” Kyra tried to keep her speech calm. “Nobody knows what’ll happen. Doubtless my kind of tech will be wanted for years to come, at least, but—” She recoiled from the subject. “What about you, Bob? What are your plans?”
He stared at the hands folded in his lap. “I don’t know either. It isn’t … comfortable any more, being a Fireball consorte on Earth.”
“I should think folk hereabouts would appreciate us.”
“Some do. Others are, bueno, ugly. Most haven’t decided where they stand. It makes for awkward relations.”
“Might you be easier elsewhere? Maybe in L-5? I’m sure it can be arranged for you.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’ll resign.” He saw the near shock upon her. “It wouldn’t be desertion. Fireball—Fireball doesn’t feel the way it used to. Can you understand that?” He half smiled. “If you can, explain it to me, por favor, because I can’t. Everything’s confused and—” a whisper—“and somehow empty.”
Hearing him thus, beholding him, what could she but rise, go lean over the bowed head, lay her arms around him and draw him close to her?
“Gracias,” he mumbled after a minute or two. “That’s sweet of you.” She released him and stepped back. His gaze followed her. “You’re good people, Kyra. Just your coming to see me, that means more than I can say.”
Warmth washed over her brow and cheeks and breasts. “I wouldn’t leave an amigo with never a word to him.”
“I hope … we can get together again.”
“Me too. Sure. We’ll make it happen.”
They were silent for a span.
“Look,” Kyra decided, “what you need right now is to get the hell away from here. It’s absolutely lovely out. Let’s hop over to Niagara Park and totter around a few hours, except when we sit in the gardens, and then have dinner some nice little place, like amongst your Arab friends, and then I’ll tuck you in early.”
For the first time, Lee showed something akin to liveliness. “That sounds wonderful, but we can do better,” he said. “I’m in the quivira quite a bit these days. Why don’t we go there before we get that dinner?”
She frowned.
“Don’t shy off,” he urged. “It’s nothing perverse, nothing fantastic. The program I elect is pure nature. Hills, woods, seashore, wildlife, and nobody else. Freedom to wander, room to be alone, time to think. You can’t find anything like it in a park or a preserve or anywhere in poor, crowded reality. It’s healing me, Kyra.” He hesitated. “I’d love to share it with you.”
“The best you’ve got,” she murmured, moved.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied.
43
“SHALL WE HOLD our discourse outside?” Rinndalir had proposed.
“Why the devil that?” Guthrie exclaimed.
The Lunarian’s gesture flowed about the blue dusk of the room and the shifting, drifting pallors over its vault. Neither he nor the knight-shape his visitor wore seemed out of place among the fragrances and cold minor-key flute music. Nevertheless, “Here we are caged,” he said quietly.
Thus they walked forth together from the castle and down the mountain. The watch was near midnight and Earth stood almost full, barely above the horizon. Rocks and craters in the valley below laid kilometers-long shadows under its beams. The light sheened off Guthrie’s metal, rippled in Rinndalir’s cloak, turned his wings to opal. The spark atop his wand swayed to his stride, as if one of the stars crowded overhead had descended to dance.
Guthrie willed that his radio voice remain prosaic. “Do you really want to leave this, and forever?”
“Nay, not all my race so desire,” answered Rinndalir. “I and certain others.”
“To skip the consequences of your share in the late unpleasantness?”
Laughter purred. “Scarcely that. Have we not staved off every demand by the Federation for our extradition and trial? It would be amusing to continue that game.”
“Instead, you’d give up your power and luxury to try for a fresh start in what’s a wild-ass gamble at best? I don’t recall as how aristocrats ever went in for pioneering. They left that to the bums, failures, desperados.”
Rinndalir’s voice became dispassionate. “The move will be politically convenient for the Lunar state. If this handful of us admit complicity with you, who shall prove otherwise? Then the Selenarchy dispatches us, for our crime, into the same exile that you are negotiating for yourself. Why do you protest, my lord? The resources that Luna can contribute will expedite your faring by years and make your survival the less unsure.”
“Ha, you want me to believe you’d go on this forlorn hope out of patriotism? I suppose next you’ll offer to sell me the ticket concession at Armstrong’s footprints.”
“It is perhaps forlorn for your human party,” said Rinndalir, unruffled, “but scarcely for us. I need not remind you that the Alpha Centaurian System holds abundant asteroids. Yours is the task, the dream, of bringing alive a world the size of Earth, until destruction overtakes it. In.space, my breed will soon be at home.”
“You can be right around Sol.”
Waves went through the argent locks beneath the cowl, within the helmet, as Rinndalir shook his head. “Nay. Civilization—the logical, organized, machine future—would find us however far we might remove ourselves. I dare trust another star is remote enough.”
“For you to brew more trouble,” Guthrie rasped.
Rinndalir smiled. “Fear us not. Like your contingent, we will be much too busy engineering our new habitations.”
Guthrie’s lenses bore fixedly on him. The silence between them hissed with cosmic noise. Dust puffed up from their feet, captured Earthlight and starlight, arced down-ward again.
“Were you plotting this all along?” Guthrie asked at last.
“Not precisely,” Rinndalir admitted. “We are no gods, to guide history—if indeed the very gods have any fore-sight over chaos. But, yes, we have taken what opportunities we found, done what we were able, to break the crust
of things, to hasten the destruction whence rebirth arises.”
“You bastards,” said Guthrie dully.
“It is our nature.” The easy tone went grave. “Set aside your resentment. You need us, I say. And do you in honesty regret the necessity now upon you? It is not even that. Well do you know you could compromise, temporize, maintain your merchant adventury much as it has been for another lifetime or two. Instead, you yourself choose to go free.”
“But you—”
“We also, we of Luna, see before us the end of the life that was ours, a wall toward which we helplessly career. Not that it was so wondrous a life any longer, my lord. Pleasures, illusions, intrigues, games—” In him, the sudden fury was astonishing: “How weary I am of playing games!” His voice leveled, though a pulse still beat through it. “Let us, your kind and mine, let us escape into reality.”
44
ELECTRONS, PHOTONS, FIELDS interacted, their play more fast and their scope more vast by orders of magnitude than ever could be in a living brain. To the hypercomputers, a thousand years were as a day and a day was as a thousand years—of work, if not of awareness. They neither perceived nor willed, they were tools for minds that did. Someday soon that would change. Meanwhile, obedient, they enacted in mathematics a million different destinies of matter and energy. Within them there came into being whole new realms of machinery and chemistry, missions and enterprises, set into motion, carried to destruction, devised anew, tested again, over and over, in a span of realtime months. It was as if the actuality would be anticlimax.
Guthrie was not among the men and women who programmed the computers that wrote the ultimate programs. Nor was he among those who studied the outcomes and, by instinct or intuition—experience, creativity, desire—sensed when the course of pseudo-events was going awry and decreed: “Try something else.” His skills lay elsewhere, commanding, cajoling, conniving, conspiring, as captain and pilot of Fireball through its last voyage.
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