The Stars Are Also Fire Read online

  She turned her radio back on. Switching it off in the field had been dead against regulations, but now and then she needed to be alone for a short while with heaven and the life inside her. “Hi,” she greeted. “Prepared and eager?”

  Wim den Boer mistook the cheerful sarcasm. “No,” he grumbled. “Damnation, a full three hours? I’m busy! You know how that hitch in delivering the pumps has thrown my section behind schedule.”

  Dagny came to the group and stopped. “Friend,” she replied, “when this job is done and we’re back in Bowen, stand me a beer in the Fuel Tank and I’ll tell you tales of woe that’ll freeze yours in your stein. Meanwhile, don’t fret your pretty little head, or I’ll decide it is pretty little. The zeroth law of thermodynamics says that everything takes longer and costs more.”

  “We are rather badly delayed, though, aren’t we?”

  Jane Ireland argued. She was a good electrical engineer—had helped troubleshoot the grid that carried power from sunlit Criswells to the transmitters on Nearside—but overanxious about political questions. “Do you appreciate how hard Eurospace and Eco-Astro lobby against awarding contracts like this to any private company, ours above all? If we fail here—”

  “We won’t,” Dagny vowed. “Let the chief fight his particular battles. If Guthrie can’t outwangle, out-connive, and outroar the combined governments of Earth, we may as well go back there and the North Americans among us embrace the Renewal. Our way of helping him is to meet the contact in spite of whatever Murphy slings at us.”

  She had learned early on that her position required even more human skills than technica ones, and set herself to master them. Edmond had been a wonderful counselor at first, but soon she must necessarily grope her own way forward, trial and error, by feel rather than rules, because each individual is unique in the universe.

  Pedro Noguchi came to her assistance: “Listen, Wim, Jane, you cannot serve if you fall sick. We have been skimping these sessions as it is. Instead of wasting time complaining, shall we get it done with?”

  That quieted them. Strange, Dagny often thought, the loyalty so many of its people bore for Fireball, maybe more than for their countries. She had her personal reasons, but what about the rest? The wellspring couldn’t merely be exciting work, high pay, simpático management, no limit on a career except your ability and luck. In Fireball, somehow, you belonged, you shared a spirit, as few did anywhere on Earth.

  She sought her place and got busy.

  The field centrifuge sheered its column above her, 250 centimeters from the broad, gripfooted base to the four rotor arms. Portable, it didn’t have much in common with the giant stationary machines in the settlements. The arms were hollow, flaring trumpetlike from the pillar. Out of each dangled a cable, at the end of which hung a cage, its floor a 150-centimeter disc knee-high above the ground. Within this were simple items of exercise equipment, secured by brackets. Beneath the disc was welded a box for the makeweight.

  Nobody present, complete with suit and gear, massed the 125 kilos—21 kilos Lunar weight—that made a standard load. Dagny stepped onto a scale built into the base. Disdaining to punch the calculator on her left sleeve, she figured her deficit mentally, and selected the bricks needed to equal it from a stack nearby. Having slid the right amount into the box, she dogged it shut and mounted to the cage. There she closed the door, made herself fast just in case, and commanded, “Report.”

  “Ready. … Ready. … Ready,” she heard.

  “Centrifuge to Overview, commencing three-hour operation,” she called. The man in the skeletal tower a kilometer distant acknowledged. He’d keep an eye on them as he did on the worksites, also just in case. “We’re off,” Dagny said. Each cage had a start and stop button, but she, being senior, pressed hers.

  The motor in the column base awoke. The rotor began to turn. The gripfeet flexed their metal toes and extended their claws over ground that was neither smooth nor level and that might have been rubble rather than hard stone. Sensors monitored shifting forces and gave orders to effectors; the machine held itself in dynamic balance. As the rotor increased speed and the cages lifted, their cables unreeled to full length and flew well-nigh horizontal. When the system had reached steady state, each occupant stood under an Earth gravity of acceleration.

  Dagny unbuckled. For a minute or two she looked between the bars, upward from Luna. Some persons faced the ground, some sideways, some kept their eyes mostly closed, whatever gave them the least vertigo; she chose the heavens. Stars went in a wild wheel whose hub was above her head. Her breathing and that of her companions had loudened. Vibration was a faint thrum in her bloodstream. Heaviness laid a hand on her suit, flesh, bones, every last cell of her.

  It felt pleasant, actually. She reveled in low-weight, but nature had not meant her for that freedom.

  Standing there, she wondered how long ago her fate was set. A third of a billion years, when her ancestors crawled from the sea and must uphold themselves? ’Mond could tell her exactly. She knew the end result all too well, the multitudinous, marvelous, imprisoning adaptations that evolution forged on its single world. Lunar gravity simply was not enough for the creature from Earth.

  Oh, nowhere near as bad as micro, You didn’t get nauseated, your countenance didn’t puff, muscles and skeleton dwindled rather slowly, you could go years before the harm was irreversible and then have a few years more until you died—or so the extrapolation from lab animals and computer models forecast. But the decay was pervasive, a matter of fluid balance and cell chemistry, cardiovascular degeneration, bloodbrain barrier malfunction, tumorous growth of various tissues, sclerosis or necrosis of others, the earliest effects clinically detectable after a twelvemonth or less.

  If you wanted to keep your health, you’d better subject yourself often to the heft for which you were born.

  Born. Dagny’s hand stole to her belly. Memories tumbled through her like the stars overhead.

  They hadn’t intended this, she and ’Mond, not till they were sure it was safe. Her booster shot wasn’t due for half a year. Could that failure be another consequence of low-g? (Perhaps idiosyncratic, because Lord knew plenty of love got made on Luna, frequently in delightful ways impractical elsewhere.) The doctor suggested abortion. Dagny demanded violently to know what the alternative was. The doctor called a conference across orbital distance. The specialists opined that the pregnancy would probably be normal.

  After all, embryo and fetus would be afloat in the amniotic fluid, the little primordial ocean. Mammals, including a monkey, had borne young on the Moon, and the young lived, once experiment had established what the proper centrifuging regime was for a given species.

  The specialists guaranteed nothing, of course. Knowledge was too scant. Science would be glad of the opportunity to observe and learn, but Mrs. Beynac must understand that this eventuality was quite unanticipated. The regimes and treatments collectively dubbed biomedicine could extend life expectancy to well over a century, but biomedicine could not alter the basic human organism. That required modification of the DNA. A scheme was under development, offering the sole realistic hope for a genuine Lunar colony—highly controversial, not relevant to Mrs. Beynac, who might find her infant’s welfare requiring she move back to Earth. …

  Okay, if absolutely necessary. Only if. Anyhow, she could get one more field job under her belt before the belt stretched too wide to fit in a spacesuit. Morning sickness—racking, an order of magnitude beyond that now half-unreal first time—had been outlived. The signs and tests reassured. Fireball would never dismiss or demote or reprimand her if she transferred Earthside, but Fireball had urgent need of her on Farside. So here she stood, at her second trimester, alert, able-bodied, carrying Edmond’s child.

  Juliana, she said within herself. It was going to be a girl. Juliana, Moon baby, welcome to the future.

  Enough remembrance, enough sentiment. If you wanted to maximize the benefits of high-g and minimize the time you must spend under it, you didn’t only
stand or sit, you exercised.

  Hunkering down, Dagny unfastened the bar bells and rose holding them. She moved with care, to avoid dizziness. The Terrestrial pseudo-weight was a waistline average, the differential between head and feet nearly ten percent. Coriolis force posed less of a nuisance; still, you had to allow for it too. The big centrifuges were far more comfortable in both respects. Downright luxurious, the largest at Port Bowen—private compartments, couches—Dagny grinned. She strongly suspected Juliana was begotten there.

  Raise the bells, lower them, raise, lower, swing them crossways, commence the stationary hogging. Flex, tense, flex, let your body enjoy while your mind rides the carousel of stars. Breathe deep, flush out the lungs, smell the sweet sweat, savor the growing warmth. The heart beats high, the blood quickens, and is that another quickening below, does Juliana also dance?

  No, Dagny remembered, way too early, not yet, not yet.

  The pain went through her like a harrow through a field.

  The hospital in Port Bowen was small, austere, and superbly equipped. By the time Edmond Beynac got there from his current expedition, his wife was almost ready for discharge.

  “You needn’t come,” she had said to him over the phone when first he called. “I’m okay. I’ll be out of here fast.”

  “Bloody ’ell!” he had replied, his accent thickened. “You ’ave—un avortement—se meescarriage, een a, a God damn spacesuit—and I should stay from you?” While the radio link carried an image, it was poor and the screen tiny. She couldn’t be certain, but thought she saw tears on his cheeks. She never had before.

  Aborting as convulsively as she did incompletely till her team got her inside and the armor off, had in fact torn her up considerably. She was young and vigorous, though, and the hospital staff had more than surgery at their command, they had the latest molecular biotech.

  She was sitting up in bed after a walk along the corridors when he arrived. The reader in her hands displayed The Sea-Wolf; she liked adventure stories, and hardly any were being written these days. The room was private, but on that account a cubicle. Edmond’s bulk crowded her. Not that she minded. His arms went strong around her, trembling a bit, and his kiss gave her a dear scratch of stubble, and when she laid her head against his breast she felt the slugging behind the ribs.

  After a while he sat on the edge of the bed and simply held her hand. “Honest, ’Mond, you poor worrymaker, I’m fine,” she insisted. “They tell me I can be back on the job in two weeks, this time with no personal deadline on me.” That last was a mistake. Her voice cracked. Immediately, she lowered her lashes and made a purr. “Before then, I’ll be fit to screw. I have missed you, darling.”

  Starkness remained in him. “We will be careful, always.”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes.”

  His look dwelt on her. Silence lengthened.

  “But you wish for children,” he said at last.

  “Well—Not unless you do, really, truly.”

  “Two have you lost.” He had not hitherto spoken of the one adopted away since she told him, that evenwatch when he asked her to marry him. Then he had likewise been still for a while, until he said that it didn’t matter, that it was long past, and changed the subject.

  “Do not lie to me,” he ordered rather than begged; but how compassionate was his tone. “I know very well you have wept, alone in this bed.”

  “That’s done with” was all she could find to say.

  “There shall not be a third loss.”

  “No.” Resolution held firm. She had done much thinking. “We want the Moon more than anything else.”

  “including children?”

  “Yes, if it comes to that.”

  “You understand the trouble, no?”

  She nodded and spoke quickly. “Dr. Nguyen drew me the picture. Computer models flipflop when you input changed data. They took those data off me. Examinations, tests, specimens, electrochemical monitoring, my God, I’ll be in the scientific journals for the next five years. Sure, I’m the single case, but I seem to have supplied critical information that was missing. The revised opinion is that what happened was inevitable. Contraceps wear off before they would on Earth, with a random time distribution, and no pregnancy will go to term. The lab animals fooled us. For one thing, humans are a lot bigger, which makes fluid management an entirely different engineering problem, at least in a weak grav field. For another thing, the human brain, as complicated as it is, gets tricked into sending the wrong signals to the whole muscular-glandular-nervous female reproductive system. The placenta’s chemical defenses break down, allergic reactions build up, the fetus gets expelled but it’s dead or dying anyway. Our kind will never breed naturally on Luna.”

  There, she’d said it, in a rush but without a quaver. She leaned back on the pillows, abrubtly exhausted. “You’ve heard this?” she whispered.

  “Yes, I was in communication the whole while I drove here.” Edmond paused. “They think medications can be developed to compensate and make birth possible.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “I also know t’d be unpleasant and expensive and condemn the next generation to the same. No.”

  She saw and felt how he tautened. “Dagny,” he said, word by word, “we can move to Earth … before we are too old.”

  “You were prepared to do that for Juliana right away, if need be,” she answered low.

  “I was. For children born—I do want children for us.”

  She shook her head. Calm welled up in her, and with it a new, quiet strength. “Juliana was. She had happened, and we would not kill her nor forsake her. But I saw—You were so kind, so gentle in your gruff way. You never hinted what it would mean to you, tossing out this top-level scientific career of yours and returning to where everything’s cut and dried, where you could hope for no more than to drone through a professorship in a mediocre academic department. But I knew, ’Mond. I knew how you’d be taking long walks by yourself so you could shout your blasphemies, and you’d drink hard and your wholesome cynicism would sour into alienation—and you’d stand by me, because you said you would, and you’d never blame the child. ’Mond, I wished I could believe in God, so I could pray we wouldn’t have to return. Well, we don’t.”

  “Bienaimée,” he said shakenly.

  The strength rose higher. She sat straight. “It does not follow that we have to be sterile.” No, “barren” was the word she wanted, dead end, double death, and to hell with the population-reduction fanatics.

  His bowed head lifted. “Qu’est-ce—what do you mean?”

  “Obvious,” she said. “Genetics. A race for which the Moon is the normal environment. I began investigating this damn near as soon as I knew I was pregnant, because—It can be done, ’Mond. The knowledge is there, in genome maps, molecular biology, histology, plain old-fashioned anatomy and physiology. The computers have shown what changes in the DNA are necessary, practically atom by atom. How to do it, that’s no different in principle from what’s standard in biotech when they want any special kind of new organism. The whole thing’s been roughed out, as a scientific exercise and a contingency measure. The details can be refined in a year or two, once the project is go.”

  “And you, you would—”

  “Why not? Why the hell not? Take a fertilized ovum, treat it, implant it.” Impulse swept her along. “Why, I’ll bet we can do the fertilizing in the usual way.”

  “No! The risk to you. And … the cost, we could not afford this.”

  “Nonsense. No more risky than an outing topside. I’ve studied the matter, I tell you. A, a Lunarian fetus would interact differently. I’d need chemical support, true, but far less than for our kind of child, nothing that’d handicap me in any way. As for cost, why, as long as the Guthries are in charge, Fireball will look beyond the annual profit sheet. In fact, it underwrote the research to date. It’ll cheerfully pungle up to produce a next generation that won’t need help.”

  “You are too crazy sure,” he growled.

>   “Oh, maybe it won’t work out every time. That’ll hurt, but I’m willing to take the chance if you are, because we’ll be on the way to our kids, our Lunarian children, ’Mond. Our blood living here forever.”

  Hers drummed in her veins. She gripped both his hands. For a moment more he hung back. “Dagny, it has powerful opposition, experimenting with humans. Me, I feel trouble in my conscience. What of the people and politicians on Earth?”

  “If anybody can get approval pushed through, the Guthries can. Darling, say yes, do say yes, and I’ll send them a private-coded message tomorrow.”

  Anson Guthrie’s blood alive on the Moon.

  That he was her grandfather was the last real secret she kept from Edmond. She hoped that now he would let her share it.

  9

  Guthrie House seemed older than its centuries, the stone of it almost as if shaped by wind and rain and frost rather than human hands. That mass belonged here, among the firs to right and left and behind, the sweep of lawn and flowerbeds down to the water. Dock, boat, outbuildings fitted as well into the island. Even the spaceship and its shelter were right for this ground.

  But that was all within him, Kenmuir thought. It was because of tradition, sanctity, about which nature knew nothing. And nature itself, the sense of coming home to a living ancientness, was an illusion. Clouds lifted like snowbanks into radiant blue; a breeze blew cool, with savors of woods and salt, above summer-warm soil; waves gleamed and murmured, forest soughed; a few gulls went soaring aloft—in a carefully tended and restricted enclave. It was happenstance that he saw no aircraft pass overhead. When the declining sun had gone behind the ocean, he would spy satellites on their ways across what stars the sky-glow let him see.

  Maybe that was why the spaceship stood not as an intruder. Instead, a guardian of this peace? A totem, a rallying point, at least. She wasn’t obtrusive to sight anyway. Occupying a clearing several hundred meters inland, she and her transparent cover would not have shown if the terrain had not risen. As it was, only her bow appeared, a spearhead above treetops and roof.