The sophotect made arrangements while he was on his way to the flyport. A fahrweg took him below the ringwall, out to the drome. Antique installations like this remained in service in regions of lesser prosperity and population, also on Earth. His fellow riders were few. The vehicle waited in a launcher already set and programmed for its destination. A mobile gangtube admitted him to it. He secured himself in a seat. Go, he pressed.
Against this gravity, the electromagnetic acceleration was gentle. In moments he was falling free along an arc that would carry him high above the Moon and a quarter of the way around it.
Silence brimmed the cabin. Weightlessness recalled to him, a little, that ocean of thought in which he had lately floated. He looked out the viewsereens. Beneath him shadows edged a magnificent desolation of craters and worn-down highlands. Monorails, transmission towers, solar collectors, energy casters glittered steely, strewn across that wasteland. Few stars shone in the black overhead; light drowned them out. To north the sun stood at late Lunar morning. Earth was not far from it, the thinnest of blue crescents along a darkling disc. They sank as he flew.
Idly, he turned off the cabin lights and enhanced the stars. Their multitudes sprang forth before him, more each second while his eyes adapted. He traced constellations, Eridanus, Dorado—yonder the Magellanic galaxies—Crux, Centaurus … Alpha Centauri, where Anson Guthrie presided over his companion downloads and the descendants of these humans who had left the Solar System with him. … No, the Lunarians among them didn’t live on the doomed planet Demeter but on asteroids whirling between the two suns. …
Had that exodus been the last and in some ways the mightiest achievement of the Faustian spirit? A withdrawal after defeat was not a capitulation. Someday, against all believability, could it somehow carry its banners back home? Wliat allies might it then raise? It was not yet dead here, either. He was on his way to meet with a living embodiment of it.
Revolt—No, nothing so simple. The Lyudov Rebellion had been, if anything, anti-Faustian. “Reclaim the world for humanity, before it is too late!” Keep machines mindless, create anew an organic order, restore God to his throne.
But Niolente of Zamok Vysoki had had much to do with stirring up that convulsion; and Lilisaire bore the same resentments, the same wild dreams.
A warning broke Venator from his reverie. Time had passed more quickly than he thought. Jets fired, decelerating.
The vehicle and the ground control system handled everything. He was free to observe. His glance ranged avidly ahead and downward. Images of this place were common enough, but few Terrans ever came to it. He never had, until now.
Eastward the mountains fell away toward a valley from which a road wound upward, with Earth and sun just above the horizon. Westward the castle rose sheer from its height, tiered walls darkly burnished, steep roofs, craggy towers, windows and cupolas flaring where they caught the light. It belonged to the landscape; the design fended off meteoroids and radiation, held onto air and warmth. Nevertheless, Venator thought, a Gothic soul had raised it. There should have been pennons flying, trumpets sounding, bowmen at the parapets, ghosts at night in the corridors.
Well, in one sense, ghosts did walk here.
The flyer set down on a tiny field at the rear of the building. A gangtube extended itself from otherwise bare masonry and osculated the airlock. The huntsman went in.
Two guards waited. In form-fitting black chased with silver, shortswords and sonic stunners at hips, they overtopped him by a head. The handsome faces were identical and impassive. They gave salute, right palm on left breast, and said, “Welcome, lord Captain. We shall bring you to the Wardress,” in unison and perfect Anglo.
“Thank you.” Venator’s own Anglo was of the eastern, not the western hemisphere. He fell in between them.
The way was long. An ascensor brought them to a hallway where the illusion of a vast metallic plain was being overwhelmed by blue mists in which flames flickered many-hued and half-glimpses of monsters flitted by, whistling or laughing. It gave on a conservatory riotous with huge low-gravity flowers, unearthly in shape and color. Their fragrances made the air almost too rich to breathe. Beyond was another corridor, which spiraled upward, twilit, full of funereal music. Ancestral portraits lined the walls; their eyes shifted, tracking the men. At the top, a vaulted room displayed relics that Venator would have liked to examine. What was the story behind that knife, that piece of meteoritic rock, that broken gyroscope, that human skull with a sapphire set in the forehead? The next chamber must have its everyday uses, for spidery Lunarian furniture stood on a white pelt of carpet; but the ceiling was a blackness containing an enormous representation of the galaxy, visibly rotating, millions of years within seconds, stars coming to birth, flaring, guttering out as he watched.
He came to Lilisaire.
The room she had chosen was of comparatively modest size and outfitting. One wall imaged a view of Lake Korolev, waves under a forced wind, dome simulating blue heaven, a pair of sport flyers aloft, wings outstretched from their arms. On a shelf, a nude girl twenty centimeters tall, exquisitely done in mercury-bright metal, danced to music recorded from Pan pipes. A table bore carafes, goblets, plates of delicacies. Lilisaire stood near it.
The guards saluted again, wheeled, and left. Venator advanced. “Hail anew,” he said with a bow, in Lunarian, using the deferential form. “You are indeed gracious.”
She smiled. “How so, Captain?” As before, her reply was in Anglo.
He went back to the Terrestrial language. Why make it clear how well he knew hers? But courtliness, yes. “The tension between—I won’t say between our races or even our societies, my lady, but between your class and mine. And still you set privacy aside, though I understand full well how your people prize it, and you receive me in your home.”
Her tone stayed amicable. “Also enemies negotiate.”
“I’m not exactly an envoy, my lady. And to me you are no enemy. Nor are Earth or the World Federation enemies to you.”
The voice stiffened. “Speak for yourself, not them.”
“Who wishes you harm?”
“Wishing or nay, they make ready to wreak it.”
“Do you refer to the Habitat, my lady?” he asked: a socially necessary redundancy.
She evaded directness. “Much else has Earth done to Luna.”
“Why, it was Earth that brought Luna alive.”
She laughed. The sound was brief and low, but in some sly fashion uttered with her whole body. “You have a quite charming way of affecting naïveté, Captain. Let me, then, denote us as dwellers on the Moon.”
He followed her conversational lead, for his real purpose was to explore her attitudes. “May I speak freely?”
“Is that not the reason you came?” she murmured.
Now she was playing at being an innocent, he thought. “When you say ‘dwellers,’ I suspect you mean Lunarians, not resident Terrans, not even those Terrans who are citizens. And … if you say ‘Lunarians’ to me, do you perhaps mean the Selenarchic families—or the Cordilleran phratry—or simply its overlings?” Try, cautiously, to provoke her.
The green gaze levelled upon him. The words were quiet but steady. “I mean the survival of the blood.”
That should not have put him on the defensive, but he heard himself protest, “In what way are you threatened, your life or your property or anything that’s yours?”
“My lineage is. You propose to make Lunarians extinct.”
The shock was slight but real. “My lady!”
Lilisaire finger-shrugged. “Eyach, of course the fond, foolish politicians who imagine they govern humankind, they think no such thing, insofar as they can think at all. They see before them only the ego-bloated eminence that will be theirs, for that they opened the Moon to Terrans.”
“The gain’s much more than theirs,” he must argue. “Those people who’ll come are bold enterprising sorts. What new work has been done here for the past century or longer? They’ll bui
ld the way your ancestors did, cities, caverns, life—make the Moon over.”
For they were the restless ones, the latent Faustians, he thought for the hundredth time. They found their lives on Earth empty, nothing meaningful left for them to do, and their energy and anger grew troublesome. He had wondered whether the Teramind itself had conceived this means, the Habitat, of drawing them together here where they could expend themselves in ways that were containable, controllable—in the course of lifetimes, tamable.
“They will swarm in,” Lilisaire sa d, “they will soon outvote us, and all the while they will outbreed us.”
“Nothing prevents you Lunarians from vying with them in that,” Venator said dryly.
Except, he thought, their lack of the strong urge to reproduce that was in his race, that had brought Earth to the edge of catastrophe and was still barely curbed, still a wellspring of discontent and unrest. The Habitat would give its beneficiaries some outlet for this, for some generations. Lunarians were never so fecund. Why? Was it cultural or did it have a genetic basis? Who knew? To this day, who knew? You could map the genome, but the map is not the territory, nor does it reveal what goes on underground. He himself supposed that the effect was indirect. Arrogant, self-willed people did not want to be burdened with many children.
Again Lilisaire laughed. “At last a thousandfold worn-out dispute shows a fresh face!” Lightly: “Shall we leave it to twitch? Be welcome, Captain, as a new presence in an old house. Will you take refreshment?”
He had gotten used to Lunarian shifts of mood. “Thank you, my lady.”
She poured, a clear sound against the Pan pipes, gave him his goblet of cut crystal, and raised hers. The wine glowed golden. “Uwach yei,” she toasted. It meant, more or less, “Aloft.”
“Serefe,” he responded. Rims chimed together.
“What tongue is that?” she asked.
“Turkish. To your honor.’” He sipped. It was glorious.
“You have ranged widely, then—and, I deem, as much in your person as in vivifer or quivira.”
“It is my duty,” he said dismissingly.
“What breed are you?”
Momentarily he was taken aback, then recognized the idiom she had in mind. “I was born in the southern end of Africa, my lady.”
“A stark and beautiful land, from what I have seen.”
“I was small when I left it.” If you had the synnoiotic potential, you must develop it from early childhood, or it was gone. His mind flew back to the sacrifices his parents had made—his mother giving up her career, his father, pastor in the Cosmological Christian Church, seeing him bit by bit losing God—to be with him in the Brain Garden on St Helena, give him some family life while he grew into strangeness. But parents had always surrendered themselves and their children to something larger. History knew of apprentices to shamans, the prophet Samuel, Dalai Lamas, lesser monks of many faiths, yes, boys made eunuchs because only so could they advance in the service of the Emperor. … “I do go back now and then.” It was indeed beautiful, that preserve where lions walked and grass swayed golden beneath the wind.
He must not let her pursue this subject. Lilisaire stood pensive. How much did she know or guess at? It was actually a relief when she said: “Maychance we should consider your business, that late we can take our ease. I think I would enjoy showing you about my abode.”
“I’d be fascinated,” he replied, which was no lie, although he realized he would see nothing she didn’t want him to see.
“You and your … lesser comrades?” (What intimation had she of his real status, not a simple captain among detectives but a pragmatic of determinor rank?) “have investigated Caraine and , Aiant, as well as others of the old blood.” (How quickly she had learned that!) “Now it is my turn, nay?” Her glance might have seemed candid. “Well, short and plain, I know naught of any plot to wreck the Habitat. True, you would not await that I admit it. Thus let me lay thereto that any such would be futile, stupid. Niolente herself could not in the end stay the all-devouring Federation.”
Despite her resistances, intrigues, fomented rebellion, terminal armed defiance, no. Venator wanted to say that the collapse of the sovereign Selenarchy, the establishment of the Republic, its accesssion to the World Federation and the rules of the Covenant were not merely the result of political and economic pressures. Ultimately, it was moral force. When Rinndalir left with Guthrie and Fireball began disbanding, the heart went out of too many Lunarians. Niolente’s had beaten rather lonely.
But: “We were not going to pick over dry bones, were we, my lady?” he advanced.
Lilisaire’s smile could turn unfairly seductive. “You are an intelligent man, Captain. I could come to a liking for you.”
“I certainly don’t accuse or suspect you of wrongdoing,” he said in haste. “I’m only, m-m, puzzled, and hope you can give me some illumination.”
“Ask on.” She gestured. “Shall we be seated?”
That meant more on low-g Luna than on Earth. He settled onto the divan before the table. She joined him. He was far too conscious of her nearness. A pheromonal perfume? No, surely nothing so crude, and so limited in its force.
“Taste,” she urged. He nibbled a canapé of quail’s egg and caviar. Her daintiness put him to shame.
He cleared his throat. “My service has found clues to some activity in deep space,” he said. “Probably it’s based in the asteroids, but we aren’t certain.”
He lied. He knew of no such thing, unless you counted that bitter resistance to Federation governance which died with Lilisaire’s ancestress Niolente. The service had monitored this woman as closely as it was able because it knew she was equally opposed to most of what the Federation stood for, and she was dangerous. It learned that she had been ransacking every record and database available to her, and some of her queries had come near the matter of Proserpina. If she reached it, that could prove deadly. And now she had recalled Ian Kenmuir from yonder.
“It’s not necessarily illicit,” Venator continued, “but it is undeclared, apparently secret. If it’s going to be consequential, the government naturally wants information about it.”
“Yes,” she said low, “to feed your computer models, to coordinate this also into your blandly running socioeconomic structure.”
He heard but ignored the venom. “Since you have enterprises out there, my lady,” and all the asteroid colonists were Lunarians, who could tolerate weak gravity, “I wonder if you might have some knowledge.”
Her voice became teasing. “If the undertaking be secret, how should I?”
“I don’t mean directly. Someone may have noticed something and mentioned it to you, incidentally.”
“Nay. I am too distant from those realms. I have been too long away.” Intensity: “Eyach, too long away.”
Because she must stay here to wage her hidden war?
“A forlorn hope of mine, no doubt,” he said. “And the whole thing may be a mistake, a wrong interpretation of ours.” What it was was a farce. He had no expectation of really sounding her out. He was after intangibles, personality, traits, loves, hatreds, strengths, weaknesses, her as a living person. Given that, he might better cope with her. “I’ll be very grateful if you’d look into your memory, put a search through your personal files, whatever may possibly call up something relevant.”
“Indeed I have memories. Yet you must tell me more. Thus far this is vacuum-vague.”
“I agree.” He did have specifics to offer her, concocted details that might be convincing.
“Best we range it at leisure.” Her fingers touched his wrist. She smiled afresh. “Come, you’ve barely tasted your wine, and it a pride of my house. Let us get acquainted. You spoke of your African childhood—”
He must be careful, careful. But with a mind like hers, it should not be too difficult to steer conversation away from the trivia that would betray him.
The daycycle passed. They drank, talked, wandered, dined, and went on from there.<
br />
To him, sexual activity had been an exercise desirable occasionally for health’s sake. He discovered otherwise.
She bade him farewell next mornwatch, cool as a mountain spring. He was only dimly aware of his flight back to Tychopolis. Not until he had been in oneness and cleared his head did he see how she had told him nothing meaningful, and how he might well have let slip a few inklings to her.
For a while he had even thought there was some justice on her side. But no. In the long term, hers was the fire that must be quenched. In the near future—well, Terrans had brought the Moon to life, beginning before there were any Lunarians. They had their own claim, their own rights, on this world, won for them hundreds of years ago by the likes of Dagny Beynac.
Buy The Stars Are Also Fire Now!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For information, advice, and other helpfulness I thank Karen Anderson, John G. Cramer, Victor Fernández-Dávila, Robert Gleason, A. T. Lawton, Bing F. Quock, and P. Wright. They are not responsible for whatever mistakes, misinterpretations, and inelegances remain here, but they saved me from quite a few.
Thanks are also due Frank J. Tipler for good-naturedly letting me show some ideas of his misused in the future as, alas, many an idea has been misused in the past or is being in the present.
About the Author
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, mysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Besides winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
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