Harvest the Fire - [Harvest of Stars 03]

by By Poul Anderson

  “Nor may yonder freedom last,” Falaire said. “The cybercosm has decreed that they too shall be squeezed together into a little black-hole satellite.”

  “It’s not that hopeless. Is it?” Was it?

  Suddenly quiet, she answered, “It need not be.”

  He caught his breath. A chill shiver went through him.

  She leaned forward. Her voice remained soft, but never had he seen or heard a higher intensity. “There are actions we can take, deeds we can do, even now, even now.”

  The knowledge flashed for a moment, that he was alarmed because a fragment of common sense told him he should be. “Hold on. You don’t mean—Wait, the Scaine Croi? Surely not. A, an exercise in futility.”

  Scorn retorted: “What know you of the Scaine Croi?”

  “Why, uh, a resistance movement—” The name it gave itself meant The Knife Loose In The Sheath. “An underground, but, but what’s the use?” Subversive propaganda privately circulated, which wasn’t illegal. A few alleged acts of sabotage, a few alleged murders or other violences. Rumors of arsenals. Senseless.

  “By being, it has kept our souls aflight,” she said.

  Yes, maybe that, he thought in his confusion. Affirmations, rites, mutual psychological support. . . . He didn’t believe she indulged in such things much if at all, nor that anyone else did who still bore the old, aloof Selenarchic spirit. However, those Lunarians who in former times would have been their followers, knights and bailiffs and retainers, yes, those might draw nourishment from a secret society.

  Nevertheless—”Action, though, did you say?” he protested. “Revolution? Guerrilla warfare? Insane!”

  Once history was otherwise, he remembered. Had he lived before the cybercosm was omnipresent and omnipotent, he might have taken up a gun in some cause of his own.

  Her coldness bit at him. “Think you I am stupid?”

  “Of course not!” he cried. “I just don’t see—”

  She gazed beyond him and said low, “Through eons, a black hole shrivels away to naught. Rebellious particles quantum-tunnel out of it.”

  He realized abruptly and in full that she was not talking abstractions. He should have been shocked. Instead, a thrill coursed along his spine and out to the ends of his nerves. “You have . . . something under way.”

  Her look returned to hold him. “Yes. Dare you fare with me?”

  “I can’t—I don’t know—”

  “Dare you come hear what it is? You can refuse it.”

  And lose her. Clearly, she had invited him this time for this purpose. Had she ever had any other?

  “Or you can help fire a shot for a freedom that will also be yours,” she challenged.

  It was crazy . . . lunatic. He must not let himself be borne along—on a swelling torrent of fury, of need to strike at something besides shadows—How was it happening?

  Well, he could go listen. He must, or lose her here and now, and into the bargain know himself for less than a man. Mustn’t he? What harm in listening?

  “I c-can’t promise, you understand,” he stammered, “but, but, yes, I’ll come.”

  Exultance flamed. She flowed erect. “Then let’s be dressed and afoot. At once!”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER

  6

  From his concealment Venator looked out into a room square-sided and bleakly functional. There was little furniture, but an array of sophisticated communications and computation equipment crowded it. A man sat before a screen, working a keyboard. He was caucasoid, of small stature, with a pinched yellowish face on a large head. In the three daycycles Venator had lain here, the man had not left the apartment, nor had earlier surveillance agents ever observed him. Food came in via robotic delivery tube according to orders entered at a local distributory. A brief visit by Lirion had conveyed the information that his name was Hench, he was an Intellect, and some kind of conspiracy was certainly going on.

  The download’s vantage point did not ordinarily let him watch just what the dweller busied himself with. It happened that now he could see. It was not helpful. A screen displayed a chessframe, and he deduced that the game was not simply three- but four-dimensional; the pieces “matured” and “aged” with time. Hench was playing against a computer. The rationale of the moves on either side was beyond Venator’s comprehension.

  Two Lunarians entered. Lirion led, a scarlet gauze cloak fluttering from his glitter-strewn blue tunic. Exultation lighted the stern old countenance. Venator recognized his companion from scenes clandestinely recorded in the course of spying on him whenever possible. The pair had met a few times, to go topside where no one could listen in on them, and the other was readily identifiable—Seyant, nominally the lessor of these quarters, heir to the modest remnant of a Selenarchic fortune, a peripatetic and somewhat enigmatic young man. He was in form-fitting black, with a broad belt of possibly natural leather holding a large sheath knife. A habitual expression of easy arrogance seemed now to be a hard-held mask for his own excitement.

  Hench looked at them, did not rise, but struck the cancellation key. His game blanked out of existence.

  “You need not have done that,” Lirion said. “You could have put it on hold.”

  “Why?” Hench replied in Lunarian accented and acrid. “It was pointless, except to fill in some empty time.”

  Also meaningless, Venator thought. Even with an intelligence exceeding that of a Leonardo or an Einstein, he must needs set the computer to play at his level; else it would have beaten him in perhaps a dozen moves.

  “Will we get action tonight?” he demanded rather than asked.

  Lirion nodded. “We should. Falaire has dispatched a signal to me. They will arrive shortly.”

  “At last.”

  “Have you the spaceship escape program ready?” Seyant snapped.

  Hench bristled. “What else has there been for me to do but play with it?”

  “You were to work with it.”

  Venator’s mind leaped. Spaceship escape program. It must be for Lirion, but it could not mean that his craft would depart suddenly, without proper clearance. An Authority vessel would then be sure to go in pursuit, at higher acceleration than he could tolerate. No, Hench must have implanted a subtle distortion in the Traffic Control system, such that it would believe it knew everything it should—for instance, whether any passengers went along—but in fact let the ship go without collecting any real data. If Hench had been able to worm into the secrets of the cybercosm—no doubt remained that it was he and his equipment that had done so—then subverting routine procedures was no trick at all for him.

  Lirion laughed. “Eyach, Seyant, hold your nastiness for when it’s wanted.”

  “It is his specialty,” Hench rasped.

  “I would have this thing go as planned,” Seyant answered sullenly. “We should have had one more rehearsal.”

  “You knew that what notice we got would be short,” Lirion said. “She cannot program him as she would a robot.”

  Hench’s lips twisted in a grin. “Besides,” he remarked, “what we play this evenwatch won’t be a scripted drama, it will becommedia dell’arte.”

  Venator recognized the archaic term. Did the Lunarians? How many would, out of humanity’s billion and a half?

  “We must hope you have the wit to carry your role,” Hench said to Seyant.

  “Keep your quarrels for afterward, I tell you,” Lirion ordered. “This will be flickery enough at best.”

  “I will not fail,” Seyant told Hench. “If you do, if the ship does not get clear, then you will soon be dead.”

  “Nay,” Lirion said. “Whatever happens, I forbid that.”

  “You are wise, captain,” Hench said. “Only a dolt would break a tool because it got misused.”

  As often before, Venator wondered about him. How was he recruited for this venture? It must have been before Lirion arrived, although what Venator had heard last time strongly suggested the basic scheme was Lirion’s, transmitted from Pro
serpina. The organization that made the arrangements was surely the Scaine Croi, which was Lunarian. It did have a few Terran adherents, for their own variety of reasons. But Hench scarcely counted as a Terran. He was a metamorph, an Intellect. The genome of his ancestors had been modified to shape a brainpower that computers made obsolete even before sophotects with full awareness were developed.

  Venator guessed that he, alienated from a civilization that gave him no real purpose in life, had been drawn in by the challenge, the chance to play a genuine game for genuine stakes—against the cybercosmic security system. It was clear that no organic intelligence less than his would have been able to plan and program for the operation, then see it through. Obviously the plotters could not employ a sophotect. Supposing that somehow they had been able secretly to build one with the needful intellectual capacity, they could never have kept it with them. Once it came into contact with the system, it would betray them, for it would realize where it truly belonged. Oh, Venator knew, he knew.

  Lirion addressed Seyant: “Remember, be not too blatant. Watch for my signal to quell yourself, lest we overdo.”

  The other scowled, offended. “I understand. Have I not already been working with him?”

  With whom, wondered Venator, and how?

  A trill sounded. Seyant stiffened, Hench gripped the arms of his chair. The coolness of a skipper came upon Lirion. “Admit them,” he directed the door.

  Two persons appeared. Venator did not know either the spectacular Lunarian female or the lean Terran male. She was altogether self-possessed. Sweat glistened on his face.

  Lirion laid hand on breast, Lunarian courtesy salute. “Well beheld, my lady and donrai,” he greeted.

  The man grew taut at sight of Seyant, who eased off and gave him a supercilious smile.

  “Pilot Jesse Nicol, Captain Lirion of Proserpina, Hench,” said the woman, with appropriate stylized gestures. She must be Falaire, and Nicol and Seyant must have met previously. . . . Jesse Nicol. Not very many people used surnames anymore, in those subcultures that produced those few individuals who attained his rank. A possible clue to this one’s background and personality. .. . He was clearly agitated, struggling to maintain a surface calm.

  “I have heard of you as a spacefarer of high worth,” Lirion said.

  Nicol glanced at Falaire, who nodded. Doubtless that meant that, yes, she had told the Proserpinan about him. “Thank you. But, uh, I’m hardly a spacefarer at all, compared to you,” he said. His Lunarian, grammatical though unidiomatic, came out with slightly exaggerated precision, as if he were drunk but didn’t want to show it. That wasn’t actually the case, however; Venator knew the signs. Maybe Nicol was just overexcited.

  “It is not the distances traversed that matter.” Lirion’s smile was sardonic. “Hai, the sole problem they pose is how to avoid going quantum from boredom.”

  “But once you’ve gotten to—a new comet, say—”

  “Yes, the unknowns can kill.” Uncharted gravel swarms, crevasses hidden under frozen gas, quakes, eruptions, even in those cold regions; it must be like pioneer days in the inner System.

  “Not quite the same thing as a task done a few thousand kilometers from home, which a machine could do better,” Seyant drawled.

  Nicol flared. “Do you pretend you’ve ever done either?”

  “Hold,” Falaire interrupted. “Seyant, be more mannerly. At least two of Pilot Nicol’s tasks were in fact hard and dangerous.”

  “I would be glad to hear of your experiences,” Lirion invited.

  “Why?” Nicol growled. To Falaire: “All right, why did you bring me here?”

  “It was indeed unwitful,” Seyant said. “What made you imagine we could trust a loosemouth Earthbaby?”

  Nicol flushed and tensed as if to lunge. Falaire laid a hand on his arm and he curbed himself. Trembling a little, he told her: “If you wanted me insulted, you needn’t have taken me this far.”

  “No, Jesse, never that,” she murmured. Louder: “Seyant, hold your jaw.”

  “Like the lady Falaire—and unlike too many Lunarians, I fear—I have no dislike of your race, Pilot Nicol,” Lirion said. “It is not mine, but it brought mine into being, and in its time it wrought mightily.” He gestured at Hench. “Our respected associate here hails from Earth.”

  Still belligerent, Nicol snapped, “What’s this all about?”

  “Your promise, Jesse,” Falaire reminded him.

  He swallowed. “Yes. Whatever I hear, I’ll keep confidential—”

  “Amazing, if true,” Seyant remarked.

  Nicol glared. “You make me wonder if I’ll choose to hear it.”

  “You said you would,” Falaire put in.

  “Yes—but if it’s something wrong—”

  “It is not,” Lirion assured. “No evil, no harm. Rather, a deliverance. Your name can live in history with Anson Guthrie’s and Dagny Beynac’s.”

  “Then why this God damn secrecy?” Nicol blurted in Anglo.

  Lirion understood. “You shall hear.” He sighed. “Would we might offer you proper hospitality. May it later be unbounded.”

  “I could ... do with a drink.” Harshly: “But get to the point.”

  “Observe his demeanor,” Seyant said. “Does it suggest him reliable?”

  Indeed, such brusqueness would be rude anywhere, Venator thought. Among Lunarians it approached the obscene. If Nicol had lived and worked on the Moon, he knew that. If it escaped his control now and then, he must be under a nearly unendurable intensity of emotion.

  He jerked a thumb at Seyant’s knife. “Scaine Croi, huh? Your badge. Your childish ego token.”

  Lirion frowned. “We are squandering time and strength alike.” His voice softened. “Pilot Nicol, in the name of the universe wherein we both find our lives, I ask your patience. This first meeting need not hold you overly long. Thereafter you shall decide whether there will be more.”

  Falaire took Nicol by the hand and with her eyes. He breathed deep before he said, “Very well. Speak.”

  “Maychance you have perceived that Hench is an Intellect,” Lirion began.

  With a heavy attempt at affability, Nicol said to the metamorph, “If you”—not a sophotect or an interlinked cybersystem—”handle all this gear by yourself, you can’t be anything else.”

  “Computers do most of the work, of course,” Hench replied in pedantic fashion. “But they are strictly isolated.”

  “What’s the purpose?”

  “For me? A pleasure not otherwise attainable, in the thing and the doing.”

  “As can be yours, Pilot Nicol,” Lirion said, “together with rich material reward.”

  “If he has the nerve,” Seyant added, just loudly enough for Nicol to hear.

  “Say on,” the spaceman grated, “before I break that blatherbrain’s snotful nose for him.”

  “Seyant, be silent,” Falaire said. “Jesse, we need him too. Bear with that for our sake . . . and yours.”

  “Even for Earth’s, maychance,” Lirion added.

  “How?” Nicol asked.

  “You have seen on the news what my mission is, and that it fails.” The dialogue that followed reiterated Proserpina’s need and the Federation government’s refusal.

  “Why this denial?” Falaire cried. “It would cost them well-nigh naught, set against the wealth they command. And we have offered to trade for the stuff.”

  Nicol stared at her. “We?”

  Her gaze met his in pride. “Yes, I am of the Scaine Croi, and the Scaine Croi sees the morrow of the race and someday the liberation of Luna as on Proserpina. It was I who thought you may be the means of our salvation.”

  “Which could also be your own,” Lirion pursued. “I too inquire, why are we denied? None of the excuses but ring false. Nay, it is that the cybercosm thinks millennia ahead. It computes how a new civilization could rise to full power among the comets and reach out for the stars. Then would it lose control over the destiny it wills for itself and the unive
rse. No longer could humans, all organic life, be confined, be kept—ai, ever so kindly—for pets—nay, not that relevant, but an incidental epiphenomenon. Rather than that, shall they not bring forth whatever it will be that they dream of by and for themselves?”

  “Bad enough having Guthrie’s colony at Alpha Centauri,” Hench put in. “The cybercosm can hope it will perish when its planet does, in a few more centuries; or, at least, that its survivors never get any farther. At worst, those people will be many years’ travel away. Proserpina is here in the Solar System. No, it won’t pose a military threat, unless you count maintaining defenses against possible attack. Aggression would be ridiculous. But given an adequate energy source, it will be going its own ways, gaining its own potency, and—people on Earth, Luna, Mars will notice. They will begin to question the order of their world, the whole philosophical basis of its existence.”