Harvest the Fire Read online

  His aim had not been to capture the scene in words. It was too familiar, and forever too awesome. He stood at Beynac Point on the northern rim of the Tycho ringwall, awaiting his beloved. Southward, rock sloped down toward the crater floor it shadowed; afar lifted the central peak, up into darkness and crowned with stars. They were gentle of contour, those heights, eroded by millennial cosmic infall, but mighty of mass. Northward the rampart fell in highlights and glooms to a land where meteorite splash lay like hoarfrost and mountains marked the horizon. There Earth shone aloft, three-quarters full, blue-and-white marbled glory, brilliance to wash all stars from her part of heaven.

  His breath and heartbeat were a susurrus lost within a silence as vast as that sky. Yet everywhere works of humankind thrust into sight, radio masts agleam, monorails tracing bright streaks, domes and hemicylinders at the junctures of roads, microwave dishes hurling invisible energy from dayside to the mother world, things tiny at their distances, toylike, widely strewn, but everywhere. The Habitat passed slowly across upward vision. The solar sails that held it in its otherwise unstable orbit around the Moon outshone any sister planet.

  As Nicol watched, it entered the shadow cone, dimmed, and disappeared. For an instant the vanishment of his childhood home stirred him to eagerness. The symbol he needed—?

  His hope had been to make what was around him speak somehow to the spirit. The poem should evoke what was here and what was past, life born and dying and relentlessly born again in extinction after extinction through billionfold years, spilling forth into space and finding that to live it must make itself alien to itself; and thereby the poem should raise up the truth that the spirit is always a stranger and alone, with nothing to keep it alight but whatever bravery it can bring into reality—No, not so flat, not so shallowly obvious; he would weave a music to sing what cannot be said.

  The idea flickered out, useless. “Damn,” he mumbled in archaic Anglo, “damn, damn, and God damn.” Rage tasted acid on his tongue.

  After a minute or two he calmed down enough to bark a laugh. He knew full well how easily fury could seize him, and this was ridiculous. A moonflitter pilot frustrated because his verses wouldn’t come right!

  At least he knew better than to dwell on how he had suffered the same defeat over and over, for as long as he could remember. Let him instead look forward to Falaire’s arrival. When she wasn’t at the trailhead where they were to meet, he had keyed the bulletin screen there and learned that some last-minute business would detain her for about an hour. He had entered a message in reply, that he would hike on up to this lookout. It had seemed a chance to think, feel, work on that which was within him.

  Now he thought the poem would never take shape. Oh, yes, he could salvage bits of imagery that weren’t too bad and give them a framework competently built; but why? The thing would be dead, with nothing of the horror or the austere hopefulness he had intended. To hell with it—another archaism, very suitable, as anachronistic as his dreams. The way of a man with a maid did not go outmoded.

  “Time,” he ordered, aloud rather than by touch. His informant replied likewise: “1432.” Falaire was half an hour later than she’d recorded she would be. Nicol sighed, then wryly grinned. She was no more predictable than most Lunarians. She might even be legitimately delayed.

  He tried to contemplate the view for its own sake. Earthlight poured over a tall young man, caucasoid Terran, thin to the point of gauntness although springily muscled. Gray eyes looked from a sallow hatchet face. He kept his beard inhibited and his black hair short. His voice when he spoke was a somewhat harsh tenor. Thus had his DNA made him, and he disdained to get any changes, whether cosmetic or basic.

  Magnificent desolation, he thought. What a wonderful phrase. And not from a poet; from a perfectly straightforward Apollo astronaut, centuries and centuries ago, blurted forth when first he espied this realm. The time had been right, the achievement happening, the man in and of it; and so the words came, not after struggle and soul-search but as if by themselves. O daughter of Zeus, howsoever you know of these matters, tell me.

  “Jesse, aou!”

  The clear soprano, ringing in his sonors, made him whirl around. Up the trail toward him came Falaire. Her low-gravity lope seemed to him more as if she danced, or even flew. That was not really because the solar collectors and cooling surfaces outspread from the lifepack between her shoulders resembled dragonfly wings. Nor was it because the silvery space suit, mostly bionic, fitted the slim curves of her like a second skin. It was herself, gracefulness and impulsiveness embodied.

  She drew to a halt before him. For a moment they looked at one another. She was a trifle on the short side for a Lunarian woman, topping him by just three centimeters, but the features within the transparent helmet were purely of her race, face high in the cheekbones and tapering to a narrow chin, short and slightly flared nose, full mouth, ears that were not convoluted like his, great oblique eyes changeably green beneath arching tawny brows. Hair that was deep blond under daylike light fell in ashen waves past snow-fair skin that here was tinged a faint blue. He felt himself in the presence of faerie.

  “Uh, well beheld,” he greeted at last. The lilting Lunarian words dropped awkwardly off his tongue. He had mastered the language enough for practical purposes, but knew how far beyond him the subtleties were. Sometimes he lapsed into Anglo or Spanyó because he couldn’t find a native phrase and perhaps it didn’t exist.

  Well beheld indeed, he thought, and added in haste, lest he gape at her, “How went your doings?”

  She spread her fingers. A Terran would have shrugged. “Down some roads unforeseen.” She did not explain, nor apologize for making him wait. Instead, she laughed. “We were to fare around afoot. Come. So much talktime has brewed unrest in my blood.”

  She set off along the rim trail. He went beside her silent until he ventured, “It is as beautiful as they say.”

  She glanced at him. “You have indeed not betrodden it erenow? I thought everyone in Tychopolis had”—which meant at least a hundred thousand—“as well as visitors from elsewhere.”

  “I’ve only walked it once, in the opposite direction from Beynac Point and only as far as Starfell. Of course, I have followed the whole circuit on the vivifer.”

  “Followed.”

  He heard the scorn, and bridled a bit. “I don’t pretend that was the real thing.” A full-sensory simulacrum was still merely a simulacrum. The illusion of an actual experience that a dreambox gave was still merely an illusion. “But how many chances have I had? How often have I been here, for how long at a time?”

  She laughed again. “Beware. Those prickles could pierce your suit.” Briefly, she took his arm. “I promised I’d show you a byway that’s not in the common database.” A shout: “Hai-ach!” And she was off at a full, bounding run.

  Barely able to keep up, the breath harsh in his throat, he felt anew how clumsy he was, how ill fitted for this world of hers. His ancestors had not been changed in their genes so that they could keep their health and bear live children under the gravity, nor had they evolved through generations a way of living and thinking and feeling that was unitary with their stark land.

  And yet nearly all the rather few people they passed on the trail were Terrans. Some had been born and spent their early years on Earth; for most it had been the high-weight zone of the Habitat. Permanently settled on the Moon, they required nanomaintainors to hold the cells and fluids of their bodies in balance, with stiff regular exercises to keep their bones and muscles from atrophying. Nevertheless the Moon was their home, they had made it over as they chose, and Lunarians long since outnumbered could do little more than resent them. A fresh pang of sympathy for the metamorphs struck into Nicol. He too was a man without a birthright.

  He did see two or three besides the woman who soared ahead of him. One led a moonwolf on a leash. That was a rare sight. Only a Lunarian would want such a vacuum-adapted beast, and hardly any owned them these days—too expensive, if nothin
g else. Nicol wondered what coursings this man took his pet on, across the hills and into the craters. Who was he? Surely of Selenarchic descent, like Falaire, but unlike her family, he must have retained a fragment of former wealth.

  When she finally halted, nobody else was in view. She had veered onto a side path that switchbacked down the outer ringwall until it came to an end at a narrow ledge. Dust puffed up from the regolith under their boots, was repelled by their outfits, and settled. It did not fall fast, but there was no air to hinder it. Stone hulked into the sky behind. Ahead, it slanted down toward a wastescape where the sole token of humanity was a transmission tower, reduced by remoteness to a metallic spiderweb.

  They’d stopped scarcely soon enough, Nicol admitted to himself, annoyed. His heart thudded, his gullet was dry fire, his knees were about to give way. She just drew long breaths. A slight sheen of perspiration on her face caught the Earthlight, and somehow her locks had become tousled. He remembered her in bed, and vexation went from him. She was what she was. Let him bless fortune that for some reason she liked him.

  He would not, dared not admit weakness. “In truth a … a ramble,” he managed to croak.

  She smiled. “Gallantly spoken. Shall we take refreshment? I brought wine.”

  He wanted very much to sit down, but she did not. “Water first,” he commanded. The unit rose to his lips and he drank and drank. The chill revived him as much as did the wetness. She uncoiled a pair of tubes on a bottle at her hip and plugged them into their helmet locks. He thought how her fingers had once stroked across his lips.

  The wine was noble, full-bodied, perhaps akin to a sauvignon blanc. He needn’t be ashamed to say, “I don’t recognize this. Where has it been hiding from me?”

  She smiled straight into his gaze. “No synthetic. From the Yanique vineyard beneath Copernicus, held by the phyle that founded it. The lord of Acquai does not sell what they make, he bestows it on whom he will.”

  None of whom were Terrans, Nicol guessed. “You honor me.”

  “Nay. It’s friendship.” She slipped to his side and laid an arm around his waist. He did likewise. Sensors in the suit made it almost like holding her directly.

  Almost. “That’s the trouble with being topside,” he said, “this stuff between us,” and noticed that his jape had been in Anglo.

  She understood and laughed, although she replied in her own tongue. “Eyach, save the eagerness for when we have the right environs.”

  His sudden happiness began to ebb. “That is too seldom,” he mumbled, returning to Lunarian.

  She nodded. “Yes, I am a-busied more than I might wish.”

  He wondered. Her work? Like him, she was in the Rayenn—and of it, as no Terran would ever be. She served as a liaison with outsiders of both species, the sort of public relations, intelligence gathering, and counseling that no sophotect could quite have handled. However, she appeared to operate mostly on her own, dealing with people and taking time off pretty well as she pleased. Lunarians were typically more interested in results than in procedures.

  (Appeared? No, surely that was what she did. He could not imagine her condescending to take employment on any other terms. After all, her folks were of the Selenarchs, who had dominated the Moon when it was a sovereign nation. Her father still clung to a scrap of the estate at Zamok Orel in Lacus Somniorum. Nicol could imagine how grimly the old man struggled to maintain a castle gone empty, on nothing but his citizen’s credit, and how poisonously it must gall him to accept that from the government. He had heard that her brother had given up and was spending his own entitlement income on pleasuring himself to death in Tsukimachi. Falaire might have done the same, or might have lived a life more prudent and equally meaningless. She chose to win something better for herself than modest comfort, for she possessed the drive and the capabilities to get real work and succeed in it. But no, she would never let any boss monitor her hours. Leave that to Terrans.)

  Her words jarred him out of his thoughts. “You, though? What, no other woman?” Was that a gibe? “You’re not a-space for any lengthy whiles.”

  “No,” he snapped. As if by mutual consent, they let go and stepped apart. He shouldn’t have replied so churlishly. The implied question had touched a nerve and he didn’t want to answer it. His women had in fact been few, because few had especially interested him, any more than most men did. She was different. Therefore she could hurt him. Since meeting her he had not even patronized a joyeuse. He sought to change the subject. “Who is?”

  In his mind, the robots and sophotects that took ships between the planets didn’t count. How many of those were left, anyway? Spaceflight was dying out, being phased out, no longer much needed or wanted. Someday, he supposed, it would be one with the building of pyramids or the grazing of cattle. On Mars and Luna, too, machines had taken over transportation. Only the Rayenn was left in human hands, and that was only a courai.

  (Flittingly he considered the word, for it had never gotten entirely within his comprehension, no matter that it now occupied his days. The organization was not really a company or a guild engaged in conveyance. It was an alliance of Lunarian magnates, with their underlings, as much for security and influence as for a profit that was marginal at best. Lunarian shippers and travelers used it more for the sake of pride and clannishness than because it was genuinely competitive with the cybernetic lines. The ceremonies and traditions it maintained, some of which went back to Fireball Enterprises, were for none but Lunarians. … It was sheer luck that the Rayenn needed a few Terrans and he had the innate ability to acquire the necessary skills. Generally his flights were hops, suborbital between points on the surface or up to the Habitat and back. But every now and then a job demanded higher accelerations than Lunarians could readily tolerate. …)

  Once again her voice recalled him. Damnation, he thought, why this foul humor, why this wandering off on paths he had already trampled into ruts, when here he stood with Falaire? “They often are at Proserpina,” she was saying.

  Her face had turned eastward, away from Earth’s brilliance. Did he see rapture? Stars gleamed yonder. “Yes,” he replied slowly, “they make long voyages. They have to.”

  “And they wish!” she exclaimed. “It is their desire.”

  Their need, he refrained from insisting. The comets that they mined for ice, organics, and minerals were plentiful but spread through the immensities of Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Not that the settlers on the iron asteroid minded traversing such reaches, he supposed. They or their parents had chosen to go dwell in eternal night. If they had not automated their spacecraft, that too must be a choice of theirs, perhaps because they feared creating another cybercosm. Still, Nicol wondered how souls so fierce and mercurial passed the time aboard.

  “They don’t often wish to come back to Luna,” he remarked, largely to keep silence at bay. “When did their last ship before this new arrival call, seven years ago? Of course, that’s a minimum four and a half months in transit,” if the vessel went under boost the whole distance, extravagantly, at a full Lunar gravity. “Oh, no longer than an average comet mission, I should imagine—”

  She swung upon him. He saw the quick ire he had come to know too well. “The energy cost, you clotbrain! They’re forced to be niggard with fuel, reserve it for work that is vital—”

  “I know—”

  “—or for simple survival. And now this embargo laid on them!” Her rage spat at the lovely blue planet above. “Earth, Earth’s machine overlord, would fain strangle them!”

  “No, no, not that,” he demurred, “not truly.” He curbed a reminder to her that Proserpina had its fusion power plants, robotic factories, chemical and biological industry, nanotechnics, everything required to keep life alive. What claim had the inhabitants on a continued supply of antimatter? If Earth was terminating production, that was because Earth, Luna, and Mars had reached an equilibrium economy and no longer needed so concentrated an energy source, while the Proserpinans had nothing to trade for it. If th
ey must therefore cease expanding, strike a balance between their own population and resources, settle down forever on their single miniature world, why, that would be evolution, natural selection at work.

  Yet extinction had claimed some splendid creatures, mammoth, saber-tooth, great-antlered Irish elk; and it seemed to Nicol that eagles or tigers, existing on narrow ranges under strict protection, were not what their natures meant them to be. He would not argue with Falaire’s anger.

  Her tone quieted. “Eyach, I am a Lunarian,” she sighed. “I was born aggrieved.” As swiftly as it had flared, her temper cooled. A chuckle rang forth. “We came not topside for that, you and I, did we? Come, here is where we leave the trail.”

  He welcomed a release of tension. Glancing at the descent, he did have to say, “It looks tricky.”

  “It is,” she answered merrily. “Ho-ay!” She sprang.

  He swallowed his misgivings and followed, as cautiously as was consistent with not appearing timid. This section of the ringwall sloped steeply. Millennial small meteorite impacts had roughened it barely enough to provide footing. Under Earth weight he would soon have fallen, and even here a person could slip, roll, and plunge off a break to his death. The dust that, most places, held tracks for thousands of years, existed only in separate spatters. Yet Falaire leaped from point to precarious point with antelope sureness and speed.

  Having reached her destination, a worn-down crag like thousands of others, she waited till he arrived panting and shaky. “Take ease,” she invited.

  “I didn’t expect … you’d act this way … topside also,” he got out.

  She raised her brows. “Also?” she asked, half-archly.

  “I’m told that you fly in the Devil Sky.”—not a park where folk secured wings to themselves and flapped calmly aloft, but a cave where random violent winds were generated and a common sport was to try knocking somebody else a-spin. Every year saw numerous injuries and several fatalities.