Harvest the Fire - [Harvest of Stars 03]

by By Poul Anderson

  As he might lose a splendid sickness?

  “I know not,” she said. “There lies the greatness of it.”

  “But it can’t just be chaos,” he protested. Lunarians knew in their bones how unforgiving space was. “There’s got to be some order, something—positive—”

  “Eyach, yes,” she breathed. “I was not very certain of it when we embarked. We hear too scantily from yonder.” Nevertheless, she had embarked. Her voice strengthened. “But Lirion brought along not only vivifer scenes from Proserpina, such as you can play if you wish. He brought a dreambox program of life there. See you, he would be gone for many months, and this would relieve the barrenness of shipboard. Also, he foresaw the likelihood of one or two passengers coming back with him. From that program I have gained things I never quite had erstwhile, among them a clearer vision of my own desires.” She paused. “Would you care to essay it?”

  Astonished, he hesitated. “I, I have to spend most of my time with studies and simulations for the . . . hijacking, you realize.”

  “You can spare a bit. Indeed, I think it would be wise. To understand us better should hearten you the more.”

  He remained uncertain. A vivifer was one thing, presenting a show in several sensory modes like this image that surrounded him. A dreambox was not just interactive, it directly stimulated the brain. His nervous system would experience and record everything as real; afterward, nothing but his other memories and his reason would tell him it had been hallucinatory. He had seldom indulged, for he knew the temptation, the potential addictiveness, was high for restless, dissatisfied minds.

  Probably that wouldn’t be a danger in this case. The program had been prepared by and for Lunarians, aliens. But on that same account—

  Falaire was watching him. The jeweled moonlight filled her big oblique eyes.

  “Well—” He gulped. No, he would not be timid under that gaze. “Yes. Thank you.”

  * * * *

  Thus it came to pass that he sought the tank, disrobed, fitted on the helmet and associated connections, lay down in a fluid that smoothly changed its temperature and specific gravity to match his, slipped away toward sleep— He floated in space. At his distance from Earth, the sun was no more than the brightest of the stars. But they thronged heaven, and its bleak fierce luminance still equaled almost two full Lunas above Nauru. He could readily see Proserpina before him, and even trace out rills and ranges, darkling though the planetoid was.

  Well-remembered science spoke to him. This was a piece from the core of a larger body that had orbited in what was now the Asteroid Belt, one of several fragmented by collisions over the eons. Jupiter had cast it into an enormous, eccentric new path, which passing stars drew higher yet. Some two thousand kilometers in diameter, it was chiefly nickel-iron with a stony crust; hence the surface gravity amounted to eighty-six percent of Luna’s, ample for the colonists. Craters were few because impacts were rare in these immensities, but a comet had once crashed, bringing a wealth of ices and organics, and other comets were in range of venturesome spacecraft—and others beyond them, uncounted millions, the Oort Cloud reaching so far that its outer fringes mingled with the clouds around neighbor suns, an archipelago to lead multimillennial explorers ever onward. . . . Lights gleamed across the globe, the radio band seethed, humans lived here.

  The ghost of Jesse Nicol flew downward, swept low above, beheld roads and rails, turrets and towers, domes, blockhouses, ground vehicles and space-suited striders, spacefields, the comings and goings of ships.

  He went through an airlock and a tunnel to the country underground. For a short while he felt he was well-nigh home in Tychopolis, amidst slender arches, plazas where trees rustled to forced winds and fountains sprang singing, secretive doorways marked with kin emblems, small curious shops and worksteads—No. Those were Lunarians who walked the streets, quietly and alone or in aloof pairs or trios. At many heels or on many wrists and shoulders went a wild variety of metamorphic beasts, counter-colored leopard, miniature griffin, giant white bat, rainbow-winged hawk, feathered serpent. . . . Music trilled, soared, and throbbed on no Terrestrial scale. A troupe of dancers, masked and plumed, preceded a Selenarch and his lady. The ceiling high above simulated a violet sky where flames played in the clouds.

  Ranging about, Nicol found that he had not actually visited a city. Proserpina had none, simply nodes of culture and commerce. Most folk lived apart, families by themselves or in communities that were feudal units, except that “feudal” was too Earthly a concept. It could be anyplace from a forested cavern to a topside castle. At intervals he glimpsed a Terran. Circumstances through the decades had brought a few here to stay. What was their life, they the tiny, foreign, childless minority? He didn’t think Lunarians would deign to persecute them, but they were no part of the mainstream.

  Their special abilities must be useful now and then in work for which robots were not adaptable enough. (If the Proserpinans had made sophotects at all, it was not evident, and any such machines were surely kept subordinate, their intelligence strictly limited.) Great engineering projects were under way, expansion of living space and capabilities, exploitation of resources, life overrunning this world and reaching out. They went with less noise and fuss than Terrans normally raised, but they went.

  Nicol could, though, see how much more was needed, and how the work was beginning to starve for energy.

  In heart-thudding eagerness, he set about sharing the life. He found he could not. It was Lunarian. When he tried to play an active role, the scenes dissolved into illogic and grotesquerie. The program could not accommodate him. He quit his efforts and became a passive, invisible observer.

  He stood in taverns where captains returned from the comets related their odysseys. It was more than a quest for raw materials, it was shrewdness in the search and boldness in the seizing, it was danger—quakes, chasms, collapses, gravel storms, radiation leaks, equipment failures—and sometimes death, it was starlight aglisten on a mountain of ice sent tumbling toward Proserpina to become rain and rivers, it was comradeship (maybe more like a pride of lions than a band of Stone Age hunters) in striving and in victory. Wine splashed from crystal decanters, men and women flowed together. . . .

  He watched a breakneck footrace over the thin-skinned crevasses of Iron Heath, a ceremony each year to honor the memory of Kaino, who first betrod it. (That was an Earth year; Proserpina’s was nearly two million times as long, its seasons and the myths of its people cosmic.)

  He saw a duel to the death, swords beneath stars till one blade ripped the other suit and water vapor gushed out, white, swiftly gone, an icon of the departing spirit. He observed how the families negotiated peace and how the celebration and the mourning were equally grim.

  He attended a drama that was half a soaring ballet, and did not understand the conventions but sensed incandescent emotion. Nor did he understand what the wood-carver who sat on a mossy bank under a glass cliff was shaping, but somehow the curves and lines of it spoke to him. He heard songs—

  * * * *

  After he left the dreambox, for the rest of that daycycle everything around him seemed unreal, a parade of flat puppets. Only a nightwatch in which he drugged himself to sleep restored him to what he supposed was sanity.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER

  10

  Finally, finally the sessions ended, text, vivifer, simulators, practice; and actual work started. First Nicol brought out the guns, with their instruments, and installed them on the hull. Then came the docking module at the ship’s nose, section by massive section. That was still more demanding.

  Even so, as well schooled as he was, on top of his previous experience, the job proceeded rather smoothly. Robots did the bulk of the labor. He supervised, gave orders, made decisions, inspected and tested the results stage by stage, calibrated or adjusted, occasionally improvised, seldom exerted his full muscular strength. Often he need simply be present, aware of what went on but his mind free to wander.


  Toward the end his musings began to take form, as complex molecules do in solution, their lesser units meeting randomly but making bonds according to the chemistry. There was no moment of revelation, yet there was a moment when he realized that something irreversible had taken place.

  He stood on the hull, held fast by the magnetism his boots induced, a jetpack between his shoulders for when he must do more than walk from point to point, weightless because the ship went free on trajectory during these shifts. Sunlight had dwindled to a few percent of what fell on Luna, but his helmet must still darken to save his eyes whenever he happened to turn them that way. The matte surface shone mutedly, and shadows had slightly fuzzy edges. Illumination sufficed for ordinary purposes; otherwise, his suit carried assorted lamps to brighten a close view. Two robots scuttled like large beetles or stiff octopuses over the girders of the docking module, attaching the collar and the motors that would close it tight on the cargo ship’s after assembly. With the sun at his back, Nicol saw them as if they moved across an abyss where stars beyond counting burned and the Milky Way cataracted frosty through silence.

  Splendor, he thought. Here is the boundlessness out of which all things and anything may grow.

  His gaze drifted south until he found Alpha Centauri in the multitude. Yonder are download Guthrie and the descendants of his followers, he thought. Doomed with their planet, or hopeful? We hear rumors of strange developments—only rumors, for communication was always thin across four and a third light-years, and eventually it ceased. Or so the cybercosm tells us.

  No matter, I imagine. Unreachably remote. Such an exodus cannot happen again, at least not for a very long time to come and probably never. Proserpina, though, is here in the Solar System.

  Barely. Guarded by distance, it goes its own ways. Given the wellspring of power—antimatter—what eerinesses will it bring forth, and what may they provoke on Earth? Unforeseeable, uncontrollable, chaos in the scientific sense of the word. No wonder if the cybercosm wants to curb it. The very Teramind is troubled.

  Hu! A shudder. Best stay home among humans, my kind of humans.

  What have they? Contentment, yes, peace, prosperity, but also adventure and achievement. For most people. Their doings may be old in history, but to each generation they are new, a dawn, a boat, a mountain, an ancient monument, a young sweetheart, enough.

  Not for me, with my irrational, inchoate yearnings. For me, the passions will be in wild sports and wilder carousals, a play of lightnings above the ultimate void, until one way or another I kill myself and the void takes me back.

  Stop that! Sniveling self-pity.

  How ironic that this ship of fools bears the name of Verdea, the first Lunarian poet.

  As for me, when I return home, what about a career in space? The task beneath my hands has been meaningful in its way, a difficult and not undangerous exercise in preparation for a desperate venture. And I have generally enjoyed serving the Rayenn. At rare, brief intervals the work became so intense that I was it. That is the ultimate, the sole true joy, to lose oneself in something greater than oneself.

  But after this expedition, local spacehopping will be mighty pale stuff. Besides, I’d be unwise to stay on Luna. Clues just might link me to Seyant’s death, if the Scaine Croi hasn’t managed to pass it off as accidental. Or I might be blackmailed into aiding them again. No, better go back to Earth and let them forget me on the Moon. At night when it is in the sky I can look up, remembering.

  Why was I that—dement—thatstupid? How could I have been? Oh, I was subject to violent impulses all my life, and every so often they escaped my control, but never to this degree; and it did seem I’d fairly well mastered them. How else could I have trained for and held down the position of a space pilot?

  True, Seyant was vermin—in my eyes—but that was no excuse. If only I could remember that evenwatch better. Why didn’t I hit him with my fist? Well, but there the knife was in my hand; and there Falaire was, and he also her lover, or so she led me to think—

  Nicol froze. He stood motionless until a synthetic voice in his sonors announced, “Unit B is now positioned and ready for you.”

  He shook himself, feeling he should do it as a dog shakes a rat, and went onto the girders. While he tested and fine-tuned, his body working as competently and almost as unconsciously as the robots, his mind flew to and fro.

  I cannot be sure of the Lunarians. Maybe they mean to abide by their promises, maybe they don’t. Certain is that they have been less than candid with me.

  Have I any option but to go through with their piracy?

  A weapon would give me some small leeway. Maybe uselessly small, or maybe not what I would care to use. But at the moment I have none.

  That forbidden cabinet—Bluebeard’s chamber—Do Lunarians have a legend answering to Bluebeard?

  It may or may not hold weapons. If not, at least I’ll know I’m on an approximately equal footing with my shipmates, and feel more assured of Lirion’s good faith. If he does keep concealed arms, then I want to be able to play the same game.

  How to get into the cabinet?

  Nicol began thinking.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER

  11

  Again the ship gave Lunar weight, decelerating, her bows pointed sunward.

  Food aboard had been delicious throughout. Given a nanotechnic cuisinator, it had no reason not to be. Lirion had likewise been choosy about the drink he brought along. This evenwatch in the saloon, the meal was sumptuous, a festival. Brilliant patterns of light played in the bulkheads and music rollicked through jasmine-scented air. In Nicol’s honor it was of Earth, ancient, Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3.

  Lirion raised his goblet. “The instruments and gauges declare you have done your work well, Pilot Nicol,” he said.

  Amazing how easy it was to dissemble. Nicol had never considered himself subtle. But then, the woman beside him and the man across from him were not of his civilization, not of his breed. Tones, expressions, body language—

  “I’m less confident,” he said regretfully.

  “Ai, why thus?” asked Falaire.

  “I’m not satisfied the installations will all be stable under heavy stress.”

  “They are designed for it,” Lirion said.

  “By Lunarians,” Nicol replied. “With respect, your people aren’t used to thinking in terms of high accelerations. I don’t quite like the look of the docking module where it sits.”

  “An intuition?” Lirion scoffed.

  “Grant me some sense for things like this, by heritage and experience. Listen.” Nicol raised his forefinger. “We don’t know exactly how the operation will go, except that we’re bound to be improvising, and hastily. That could involve putting Verdea through evasive maneuvers at full thrust.”

  “True. We will be prepared for the contingency.”

  “But is the system, especially that module, as ready for it as you’ll be? Could it do any harm to find out in advance of action?”

  “What propose you?”

  “I’ve given it thought and made estimates. We should program for about an hour at, say, one Earth gravity, followed by several quick turns and short boosts at up to three.”

  “Three Earth gravities!” Falaire exclaimed.

  Nicol nodded. “Yes. Eighteen Lunar. It’ll be hard on you two. But properly medicated, cushioned, harnessed, et cetera, you can take it without any real damage and soon recover.”

  Lirion frowned. “Shall we add that much time, including the revectoring afterward, before contact? It will be costly of fuel, too.”

  “Admittedly. But we’ll need extra time anyway, if it turns out more work is required.”

  “And if it does not?” Falaire demanded softly.

  “Then you’ll have had your discomfort, even some pain, and the delay and all the rest—but not for nothing. We Terrans would call it insurance.” They knew that concept, though in their society it was minor.

  “M-m—” Lirion pondered. Wi
th the abrupt decisiveness of his race: “So be it.”

  Falaire caught Nicol’s arm. “Truly you are one of us, Jesse,” she breathed. When he glanced at her, her eyes gave promises.

  He suppressed a twinge of conscience. After all, he was not planning to betray her, only to make as sure as he could that she would not betray him. “Let me explain specifically what I have in mind,” he said.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER

  12

  As he expected, the tests showed everything to be in good order. As he also expected, they left the Lunarians exhausted, hurting, and in need of much heavy sleep. He was somewhat tired and sore himself, but thrummingly alert.

  Low weight and silence enclosed him. Cat-soft, his footsteps nonetheless seemed to racket in the passageways. Ease off, he thought, relax, or you’ll be so clumsy you’ll wake him, and what then?