The Stars are also Fire - [Harvest the Stars 02] Page 16

  She turned on Greenwich and, a few blocks down, found the place. It was a leftover house in the sleek pastel-plastic style of eighty or ninety years ago. Those flanking and facing it looked deserted. Evidently city robots kept them in good repair, but Aleka wondered fleetingly how long it would be before other machines obliterated them to make room for more machines.

  Or would they? Why? Sophotects didn't proliferate for the sake of proliferation, as humans used to. The growth they strove for was ethereal, capabilities of the intellect, up toward the Teramind and beyond. Aleka shivered in the bleak wind.

  She confronted the door and spoke her name. Carfax had obviously entered instructions, with a recorded image, for it retracted at once. She ran tongue across lips, clamped teeth together, and went inside.

  A cramped room held obsolete furniture and banal pictures. Surprised, Aleka then decided this was for the benefit of any unwanted person, a constable or whoever, who could not be refused admission. She passed on into a space big and still. Walls had withdrawn to make a single chamber. Windows had blanked. The ceiling imitated sunlight and the air lay warm, but she guessed that was on her account, likewise a lounger in the middle of the otherwise empty floor. At the far end she saw a large gray panel, blank except for sensors, a screen, a speaker, and sliders that doubtless covered specialized outlets. A general-purpose robot stood in a corner adjoining. She assumed the sophotect took direct control of it. The mind itself, the physical system, was—elsewhere in the house.

  "Salud," she greeted out of a tight throat.

  The voice that replied had become a resonant baritone. "Bienvenida, Señorita Kame. Por favor, remove your outer garment, be seated, make yourself comfortable. What can I offer you? Food, beverage, narcotic, stimulant? I regret the choice is limited, because visitors like you are rare, but the usual things are on hand."

  "N-no, gracias." Aleka feared that if she tried to deal with a cup or plate, it would tremble. She felt grateful for Mama's wine.

  Reaction flared. Why the Q should she be nervous? Here was no god, but a machine—a single machine, sealed off from the rest of the cybercosm. Yes, it had awareness, it had gifts that in certain respects must be greater than hers, but in other ways it was surely circumscribed, naive, dedicated to this one service. When that ended and a new program was entered, it would not be the same mind, the same being, at all.

  True, she was on the verge of what might be a dangerous enterprise. But she'd taken risks before. Generally she'd enjoyed them. And the possible stakes—

  She grinned, for the sake of bravado. Peeling off her coverall and dropping it on the floor, she sat down. She would rather have kept her feet, but figured obscurely that this showed her more at ease, more in command. She did set the lounger straight upright and ignored its sensuous self-adjustments to contours and skin temperature.

  "Are you ready?" asked the machine. She nodded. Her heart thumped. "I speak for the Wardress Lilisaire. She has provided me a file of her information about you."

  Aleka frowned. "Was that safe? I mean, if she's being watched—"

  "How do you know she is?"

  "She has a reason for these precautions, doesn't she?"

  The voice made a chuckle. "Excellent. You confirm her impression of sharp wits. The file was not transmitted from Luna, it was carried as a recording to Earth by a messenger. He privately gave it to another person, who brought it here."

  Then presumably Lilisaire had no cause to suspect Aleka was under surveillance. That came as a pulse-lowering relief. "Are you, uh, empowered to make decisions?"

  "As far as feasible, yes. Why do you think you were called?"

  "It has to do with the Habitat, right?"

  Lilisaire had talked enough about that, with enough venom, when they met, although mainly she had set herself to charm and, under cover of it, inquire. Besides, everybody knew how opposed to the project the large majority of Lunarians were.

  "Yes," the machine said. "What is your opinion of it?"

  "I, I hadn't given it much thought," Aleka confessed. "The idea seemed—exciting—till I heard her. Since then . . . I sympathize. If Earthlings want to colonize, let them go to Mars."

  "A long, expensive haul."

  "What does expense mean, when you can pretty nearly grow your ships in the nanotanks, and they don't need human crews? Nor would you need a Habitat at Mars."

  "Shrewdly put. I was quoting the argument advanced by proponents. They are humans too, you know, in the government and out of it."

  Bitterness lifted. "What has the cybercosm bribed them with?"

  The tone was matter-of-fact. "Essentially nothing. Most of them are sincere. They accept the cost-benefit analysis produced for them because they trust the cybercosm. You know why. This is a more stable world, with more social and economic justice, than ever was before sophotectic intelligence developed. Do not be so hostile to it."

  Aleka's emotion subsided a little. "Oh, I'm not, not really. I'm . . . skeptical. At least, I often wonder where we humans are bound, and how much control over the course we have left to us."

  "Your Lyudovite background?"

  "I never was a Lyudovite!" she exclaimed. "How could I be? The Rebellion happened lifetimes ago."

  "But when you were studying at the Irkutsk Institute, you encountered persons whose ancestors fought in it, and who still hold it was a rightful cause wrongly crushed."

  Memory rushed back, campus, the Russian plain, glorious Lake Baikal, Yuri, Yuri, and the village to which he took her, more than once. "I had a, a close friend, a fellow student. He came from that kind of family, yes. They tried to keep the old ways alive, handicraft, agriculture, it was pitiful to see. He introduced me to them. We were very young." Aleka sighed. "Later he . . . changed his mind." And they drifted apart, and finally she went home to Hawaii. By now he seldom troubled her dreams.

  "And you?"

  She shrugged. "I've got my work to do."

  "I am only familiarizing myself with you," the machine said mildly. "I know what Lilisaire has informed me of, but it is incomplete and abstract."

  However, Aleka reflected, it probably went beyond what she had revealed. Agents on Earth must have looked into her life before the Wardress decided she could trust her. Or earlier, yes. Lilisaire would have had more than a casual reason, a couple of mutual acquaintances, for inviting her to Zamok Vysoki that time she vacationed on the Moon, and bedazzling her.

  Aleka felt she ought to resent such snooping, but couldn't. She didn't even resent it that the ancestress Niolente had taken a part in fomenting and prolonging the Rebellion. A cold-blooded move, granted, in hopes of weakening the Federation until it gave up on incorporating Luna. But Lyudovites and Lunarians had a great deal in common.

  Aleka stiffened her will. "All right," she said, "I admit I've kept the sympathies I acquired then. To a degree, anyhow. I don't personally believe we can turn history backward. Nor that we should." It had indeed been a desperate cause: Keep humanity in charge. Do not permit the making of fully conscious artificial intelligence. Stop before it is too late, and then consider how much mechanization and automation is really desirable. "Too late," she repeated her thought.

  "But I live with what the system is doing to my people."

  "So you told the lady Lilisaire."

  She bewitched it out of me, Aleka almost replied. She had never confided like that in anyone else, feelings too deep to have clear form until she uttered them. Not Father nor Mother nor sisters nor Yuri had worked thus upon her. She did not yet know just how the Selenarch had.

  She curbed her words. A silent half minute went by.

  "Shall we proceed to the matter?" asked the machine.

  '"Olu'olu!" burst forth. Aleka caught her breath. "Por favor."

  The calm tone helped steady her: "You have an uncommon knowledge of peculiar byways in these parts, as well as of the global datanet."

  "I, I'm no . . . spy, or any such thing."

  "Would you care to describe your experien
ces? Again, I know of them from the Wardress, but hearing you in person gives depth to the information," the machine said.

  And it had to judge whether or not she actually was what Lilisaire required. Responding in a half-organized fashion stabilized Aleka further. "Details, anecdotes, they'd take the rest of this week. But—oh, in my student days I was exposed to a wide variety of places and folk around Earth, besides getting a technical education. You see, the Lahui need people like that, and the elders thought I had the talent, so they encouraged and supported me to knock around. Since then I've served as a liaison, with the Keiki Moana on the one hand and the outside world on the other hand. I've come to the mainland quite a lot on that account, because—bueno, metamorphs don't like to use telepresence, especially for important business. Among other things, they're afraid of eavesdroppers." Not without grounds, she thought. The authorities would want to keep an eye on them. They were a chaotic element, which might by sheer chance disrupt carefully laid social plans.

  "Your Keiki Moana seek cooperation with other Terrestrial metamorphs?" It was more a statement than a question.

  "The core, the—I hate to say 'civilized' Keiki, yes, they do." And therefore Aleka did, on their beloved behalf. "Nothing criminal, nothing revolutionary. But . . . we'd like to quietly establish communication, find our common interests, work toward an organization that can promote and defend them."

  Lunarians were metamorphs too.

  "Nothing criminal, nothing revolutionary," the machine echoed. "Yet to Lilisaire you hinted at underground activity."

  "Self-protective secrecy." Not absolutely true. “I’ve been let into a little of it—" partly because that was expedient, partly because she had pressed herself on the leaders, being interested and eager. Adventures into strangeness.

  "Those connections could prove valuable. As for your access to databases and communication lines—"

  "That's straightforward," she interrupted, for impatience was rising in her. "I am an officer of a recognized community, who has to deal with government officials. Sometimes that's best done under administrative confidentiality. You know, so the discussion can be frank and undistracted. Accordingly, I've learned my way around in the datanet. But I don't have unlimited access."

  Supposing she theoretically did, how could she tell what was being kept hidden from her, or what was engineered to delude her?

  "Muy bien," said the machine. "Let us get to the point." At last, at last! "The lady Lilisaire has found clues indicating there is a secret. . . ." It went on.

  Aleka sat mute for a while before she whispered, out of her amazement, "I'd no idea. I don't know what to say. Or what to do."

  "The hope is that you can discover the truth, and that it will give back to Luna some power over its future."

  She shook her head. "Impossible, if they—" they "—want to keep it from us."

  "Necessarily? You will have what help we can provide, beginning with a confederate highly knowledgeable about space."

  Lilisaire and this thinking engine would not throw her away on a totally absurd endeavor. Arousal thrilled. She leaned forward, hands gripping knees. "Tell me about her."

  "Him." With her senses whetted, she took in every word of the succinct account that followed, every lineament of Ian Kenmuir's displayed image.

  But. “I’m afraid—" she began uneasily.

  "That doesn't sound like you."

  "I'm afraid he may be, uh, compromised. If he's been to see Lilisaire recently, and she's under suspicion—"

  "We are aware. Could you not make him disappear with you?"

  "Um-m." She considered. "Yes, maybe. Whether anything will come of it, I can't say, except that the odds look poor."

  "Will you make the attempt?"

  Go slow, she warned herself. Hang onto independence and common sense. "Why should I?"

  That was curt, but the machine didn't seem to take offense. Could it, ever? "Granted, the risk will be significant. You shall not assume it without compensation."

  "What am I offered?" A Lunarian attitude, she thought.

  "If you make an honest effort and fail, a substantial sum. Before you refuse, think what it might buy for your people."

  "Depends on the sum." They could wrangle about that later. She thrust onward. "What if somehow I succeed?"

  "How would you like a country of your own?"

  "What?"

  The machine explained. At the end, she was on her feet, sobbing, "Yes, yes, oh, Pele, yes."

  The machine started to discuss details.

  * * * *

  When she left, emotionally exhausted, dusk was creeping out of the east. By the time she got back to Fell Street, night had fallen. The clouds made darkness heavy; the glow from the pavement could not entirely raise it. Fog streamed thicker on a wind grown colder.

  She felt unable to cope with Mama's good cheer. In an autocafé she got a hasty supper, paying no attention to the taste. At the inn she went straight to her room.

  Try to relax, try to get sleepy. A pill could knock her out, but she'd wake in the same turmoil as now. She had already decided against patronizing the quivira. Matters were amply complicated without adding memories of things that never physically happened. A vivifer would have been ideal, but this place didn't have any. Bueno, the multiceiver could engage her eyes and ears, while imagination supplied additional inputs.

  But what to watch? She retrieved a list of major broadcasts. None appealed, and she didn't care to check out hundreds of lesser channels. The informant on her wrist, then. Thousands of entries in it, both text and audiovisual, both facts and entertainments. Many of them she hadn't yet seen, only put in because she thought she might like to someday.

  She keyed for the sort of thing she wanted and pushed the bezel against the scanner. Titles and brief descriptions marched across the screen. Having chosen Sunrise Over Tycho, she directed the multi to get that from the public database, and settled back. This was a comedy she remembered favorably, set in the early days of Lunar colonization, when life was simpler, entirely human.

  * * * *

  12

  The Mother of the Moon

  S

  pacious and gracious, the Beynacs' living room gave a near-perfect illusion of being above ground and on an Earth long lost. Flowers on shelves splashed red, yellow, violet, green against ivory walls, above deep-blue carpet. Their perfume tinged air that went like a summer breeze. Furniture was redundantly massive. A giant viewscreen could have presented the outside scene or someplace within the Moon, but instead held an image from the Dordogne; trees stirred in a wind that blew up a hillside to a medieval castle, their soughing an undertone to peacefulness. Opposite it hung family pictures, not activated at the moment, and a scan-reproduction of a Winslow Homer seascape. A cat lay asleep on one chair.

  But you moved with unearthly ease, and if you dropped something, it fell dreamlike slowly.

  Three people entered. "Welcome," Dagny said. "We'll give you the grand tour later. Right now it's time for a drink before dinner."

  "I see already, this is quite a place you've got," Anson Guthrie replied. "Bueno, you've earned it."

  "We have built much of it ourselves," Edmond told him. A little bragging was allowable. The job had never been easy, often damned tough, what with shortages of materials, equipment, and, above all, leisure. It had taken years.

  Again Dagny felt glad of how lightly those years seemed to have touched her grandfather. She had not encountered him in person for five of them, and pictorial messages or the occasional phone conversation didn't convey enough reality; Besides, his recent loss was of the kind that can break a spirit. But when she met him at the spaceport, his bass still boomed and he hugged her as bear-vigorously as ever. Though the hair was white and thin, the craggy face deeply furrowed, he bade fair to keep the helm of Fireball for decades more.

  Which was well for her and hers, and for everybody everywhere who loved liberty. Why care about skin-traces? Lines now radiated from the corners
of her mouth and eyes when she laughed, 'Mond had gone frosty at the temples, yet neither of them had noticeably slowed down.

  "Yes, Dagny's supplied me gossip along with business talk," Guthrie said. "Good workmanship here. It's got a solid feel to it, the sort you seldom find any more. Meant to last beyond your own lives, eh?"

  The woman nodded. "So we hope. Of course, it's nothing like your home on Earth."

  "Which one?"

  "Hm, well, I happened to recall the Vancouver Island estate. The sea, the woods—" Her stay there had probably been the happiest of her infrequent visits to the planet, apart from times when she and 'Mond were together in his France. She gestured at the screen. "We have to pretend." Quickly, lest he get a false idea that she felt the slightest bit sorry for herself: "But we've got plenty you don't," more and more as Tychopolis grew. Bird-flight in Avis Park. Beautiful Hydra Square. Wonders, bred for Luna, in the zoo and botanical gardens. Outside, stern grandeur, sports—dashball, rock skiing, mountain climbing, suborbital flits, exploration—and the excitement, bewilderment, and occasional heartbreak of a civilization coming to birth.