Harvest the Fire Read online

  For an instant, rancor spoke again. “What else have I to do for amusement, in this my cage?”

  She had a certain bleak justice on her side, he thought. The genes that made her a Lunarian, to whom Luna was natural, had given her a Lunarian psyche as well. Nicol was not the first Terran to think that it was almost as if her kind were descended not from apes but from cats, or perhaps wolves. When the modern world thrust upon them such modern things as democracy or the prohibition of private revenge, it had been like a trainer in an ancient circus making a leopard learn tricks. Generations of the animals had doubtless lived thus, more safely and prosperously than in the wild, but within them smoldered always the leopard heart. Lunarians, being human, knew what their condition was.

  Well, you could not let carnivores prowl your streets after dark, could you?

  Falaire finger-shrugged. “No matter today,” she said. “I’ve brought you to what I promised to show you. First I bind you anew to hold the secret of it, as you swore erstwhile. We’d not have tourists enter, whether by vivifer or in yawping, gawping person.”

  He wondered what landmarks she had used to find it, and how the knowledge of it had stayed hidden this long. With a slight chill, he felt the alienness of her, whose love-making had burst over him like none he ever knew among his own kind. “You, you honor me, my lady,” he stammered.

  Did warmth touch her words? “I’ve come to think you trustworthy.” It was the highest compliment she had yet paid him. Mostly she had simply remarked that she enjoyed his company and his body—when she was in the mood for them. He had not risked saying anything that went deeper.

  She took his hand and led him on, carefully now. The crag and an overhang behind it masked a crevice. They squeezed through and turned on their lamps. He gasped. Around him lay space enclosed by crystals, as if he stood in the cavity at the middle of a huge geode. They glittered, sparked, refracted light into a million shifting bits of rainbow. When he touched them their edges and points were knife-keen. He imagined he felt the electric thrill that the photons awakened, making their atoms sing.

  “Why, this is a miracle,” he whispered.

  “Say rather, a charming whim of the universe.” Her mirth mocked his awe.

  “The geologists—how would they explain it?”

  “They shall have no call to.”

  Those who thus hoarded scientific treasure were indeed alienated, he thought, and shuddered a little.

  Then he lost himself in the marvel. Two hours had passed when they left it and climbed back to the rim trail.

  Falaire glanced aloft. He knew she could tell time by the terminator on Earth and by what stars the planet left visible. “We must turn home,” she said.

  Cheer had welled up in him, down among the jewels. “I’ve no objection,” he laughed.

  “I’ll be occupied elsewhere this evenwatch,” she replied without expressing regret.

  Dashed, he gulped before he asked, “Would that be with Lirion?”

  He hoped so, oh, he hoped so. In the ten daycycles since he arrived, the captain from Proserpina had been closeted with one Lunarian after another, some prominent, some obscure. They included leaders of the Rayenn. It would be logical to consult Falaire, who moved in her work between the Lunarian and the Terran worlds. Maybe it was Lirion she had seen just before she joined Nicol today.

  “Nay,” he heard, “with Seyant.”

  The news took him by the throat. In spite of common sense and all his resolutions, he cried, “What have you to do with him?”

  That smug rotworm, he wanted to snarl. I’d kill him if I could. I’d drop him from orbit and watch him splash.

  They met through her. She and Nicol had been wandering down a path in the wilderness below this crater. It was soon after they got acquainted, that wondrous chance meeting in the Rayenn’s local ground control station. Already something glowed between them.

  The cavern would have reached beyond sight, had they been able to look straight across its floor. Trees walled them in, Lunar-gravity high, elm and oak and white birch, broken by occasional canebrakes and small flower-studded meadows. Leaves rustled overhead, parted their vaults to give a glimpse of sky as blue and sun as bright as if they had been real, drew back together in the breeze and cast shadows speckled with light. A squirrel ran fiery up a trunk, a butterfly went past like a tiny flag, a daybat winged in pursuit of a glitterbug. Soil lay soft underfoot, breathing fragrances forth into coolness. She walked hand in hand with him as Ianeke had done on Earth.

  They rounded a bend and there Seyant came, toweringly tall, flaxen-haired, flamboyant of garb and feline of gait. Falaire hailed him. All three stopped in mid-path. He and she talked animatedly in a dialect Nicol could not follow. At length she made an introduction. Seyant stared down and murmured in flawless Anglo, as if the Terran would not understand any native speech, “Ah, yes, the Earthbaby you’ve mentioned.” To him: “I’m told you are an acceptably competent transporteer.”

  Since then Nicol had gathered in his turn little more than that Seyant had independent means, over and above citizen’s credit. Falaire sometimes quoted his witticisms. Whenever he met Nicol, he sank their barbs into the other man.

  She replied sharply, “That which I mean to do.”

  With a wrenching effort, he curbed a rage he knew was unreasonable. “I’m … sorry,” he muttered, but could not help adding,. “I know I have no claim on you.”

  She nodded. “We are sundered by more than race, Jesse.”

  They started off on the path. “You could become more nearly one with us if you chose,” she said after a while.

  “With whom?” he rasped. “The Scaine Croi?” This was not the first hint she had dropped.

  She regarded him, unwontedly grave. “You speak as if it were criminal to desire freedom.”

  She would despise him if he shammed. He would despise himself. “Freedom from what?”—when the Habitat bred Terrans who were glad of the World Federation.

  “From the system,” she said, “the cybercosm that, below all the mincing pretenses, rules over us.”

  “What would you have me do?” Sardonicism stirred. “Whatever it is, I’ll probably have to say gracias, no. I own to a taste for melodrama, but only in the arts.”

  In real life, he knew—he had learned from trouble and grief—it was too strong a temptation.

  “Maychance I will speak further, some other day-cycle,” she said.

  “Do, if you wish. Yes … please do.” His caution broke apart. “I’m always happy to speak with you, Falaire,”

  Her smile went over him like the Earthlight. “Ay-ah, we shall that. Tomorrow evenwatch? And then again after your next flight, oh, I will find hours for you.”

  But this nightwatch—

  “Meanwhile, you’ve other friends, nay?” she went on amiably. “They could receive you in that rowdy Uranium Dragon you showed me.”

  “Maybe,” he grunted in Anglo.

  “Or the Black Sword?”

  “No!”

  Alcohol was dangerous enough for him in his present temper. A den offering a drug more potent, such as exoridine, releasing all inhibitions, might cause him to attack somebody. Best might be if he stayed in his little apartment and got quietly drunk alone. Maybe, just maybe, a few verses would come to him that were not altogether worthless.

  Once more Falaire tucked her arm under his. It was a foreign gesture to her, a Terran gesture, and so the more moving. “We’ve yet a span to go, you and I,” she said. “Enjoy the sights.”

  His helpless wrath faded a bit. He could try. At least he had the sight of her, there beside him, profiled against stars.

  He decided that later, whatever she wanted, he would let her tell him what she thought he could do for her cause, whatever it was. No harm in listening.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hydra Square had changed little over the centuries, not at all in the forty years since Venator last crossed it. Then he had been alive, now he was a set of ongoing electro-p
hotonic processes in a neural network that received its information through the sensors of the machine it walked in. But when he allowed for different perceptions, he experienced the same as before. Fish still swam colorful and algae still waved sinuous under the clear paving. The fountain at the center still spouted its whiteness at the simulated sky, water descending in sonic-pulsed serpentine curves and its own music. The doorways on three sides still led to museums, which scarcely anyone visited now. The municipal service establishments on the fourth side did not see much more use. The plaza was a relic, embalmed in time, because the life of Tychopolis had moved elsewhere.

  He found it overflowing not far down in Tsiolkovsky Prospect. There too something of the old remained, duramoss underfoot, hard-surfaced lanes for motorskaters, three-level arcades of delicate pillars and arches—nothing more. The glowpanel ceiling no longer displayed shifting fantastical illusions, only chromatic abstractions culturally neutral. Most shops had been converted to tenements, crammed and raucous, although enterprises here and there displayed light-signs, animations, banners in their various alphabets, KAWAMOTO GYMNASIUM, BENGALI HOUSE RESTAURANT, TANJAY CASINO, LI YUAN TONG, WEIN UND WEIBER, HARMONIC COUNSELING, PYONGYANG VOLUPTUARY, SONGGRAM & CO., ISKUSSTVO I TAIINA, or things that even he did not recognize. His chemosensors told him that the very odors had changed, no longer subtle perfumes and smokes but simply of human bodies; nor did melodies drift eerily through the air.

  Hardly a Lunarian was in the throngs that hurried, jostled, gesticulated, chattered, dickered, laughed, sorrowed, kept silence, busy or idle or lost in some narcotic dream. They were as diversified as Earth itself, a dark man in a turban beside a dark woman in a sari, a portly brown person in sarong and blouse, a blond in form-fitting iridescence, a woman concealed by gown and veil, a man with a pearl-button cap above an embroidered robe, another who wore feathers and bird mask, a body-painted nude, motley and bells on one who capered, a woman bearing clan emblems on her breasts and a claymore across her back, on and multitudinously on. Unisuits, tunics, or other ordinary garb were commonest, but not by much. During his life Venator had watched people differentiate into ever more societies, some occupying their own regions, some no less distinct for being global. It started before he was born and continued further after he died. He thought that humans were driven to make whatever uniqueness, belongingness, communal and individual identity they could within the leveling huge impersonality of World Federation and cybercosm.

  And yet they weren’t unhappy, he thought. Who in their right minds would want a return of war, poverty, rampant criminality, disease, famine, cancerously swelling population, necessity to work no matter how nasty or deadening the work might be, mass lunacy, private misery, and death in less than a hundred years? It was the metamorphs and their few full-human adherents who were the malcontents, the troublemakers—Lunarians above all, but others too, perhaps more dangerous because less obvious. …

  No one hailed him as he proceeded, everyone made way, not in fear or humility but a natural, courteous deference. The body he employed was an ordinary general-purpose model, two meters high where the sensory turret rose upon a smoothly curved chassis with four legs and four arms. It sheened a modest deep blue, trimmed in silver. Plain to see, though, it either housed or was under the remote control of an intelligence, whose linkages ultimately traced to the Teramind.

  At a dropway he went down three levels to Lousma Passage. A short distance beyond was the hotel he sought, where flickerlight characters spelled SHIH TIEN GAN above an ornate door. The lobby scanned him, found in its database that he was expected, gave him Captain Lirion’s suite number, and admitted him to the appropriate corridor. When he reached the door there it immediately retracted, closing again behind him.

  The chamber he entered was furnished in Lunarian style and luxuriously spacious. Someone had transferred a substantial amount of credit, he thought. The man from Proserpina stood awaiting him. “Well beheld,” Lirion greeted.

  His tone was, if not cordial—a mannerism his race seldom displayed anyway—at least interested, and he smiled for a moment. “My thanks, donrai,” Venator replied in the same language. He chose the honorific carefully, to imply equivalent if not identical status. He could have spoken idiomatic Lunarian, but kept his range of expressions limited. Why demonstrate more abilities than he must?

  “I cannot offer you refreshment, can I?” Lirion murmured. A gibe?

  Venator formed a chuckle. “Hardly. But refresh yourself if you like.”

  “I do and will.” Lirion went to a spidery table on which stood a carafe and goblets.

  As he poured and sipped, Venator studied him. He was of characteristic Lunarian male stature, two meters, long-limbed, well formed, erect in diamond-dusted black tunic and hose. Pale brown features showed more Asian ancestry in their bones than was usual, but the big oblique eyes were amber-hued and the hair that fell to his shoulders was grizzled bronze. Otherwise, only a leanness in face and hands betokened an age approaching the century mark.

  “I hope you are comfortable and content here,” Venator said. The banality was another move to disarm wariness. Likewise had he come in person, rather than call on the eidophone or summon this visitor to Authority headquarters.

  “It has its differences from home. After many years agone, they strike at me,” Lirion admitted. “But I am cosseted, and no longer cramped inside a spacecraft.”

  Alone, Venator remembered. Several months alone, accelerating and decelerating at one Lunar gravity. So immense was the distance. Light itself took three days. Well, most Lunarians minded solitude less than most Terrans did, and of course Lirion would have had a database full of books, music, shows, games, perhaps pastimes more esoteric, quite possibly a dreambox. The ship ran herself; companions for him would have meant more mass to boost, more precious antimatter to spend.

  But then why was the ship so large? There must be carrying capacity for several people, including life support, and for tonnes of cargo. When asked upon arrival, Lirion said casually that this had been what was available. Venator doubted that. He badly wanted an excuse to go aboard and inspect.

  “Yes, it has ever been good to come back,” Lirion finished.

  Each time to brew trouble, Venator thought.

  Across his awareness flashed what biography his service had been able to piece together. Descended from the great Selenarchic rebels Rinndalir and Niolente, Lirion was born in Zamok Zhelezo at Ptolemaeus Crater. His father, who retained a certain amount of wealth, power, and connections, went into politics, struggling and conniving to keep the Moon from conversion into a republic in fact as well as in name. The establishment of the Habitat doomed that endeavor. Meanwhile, the existence of Proserpina had been revealed and the migration of disaffected Lunarians began. After his father’s death in a brawl with Terran newcomers, Lirion took over management of the phratry’s interests, which included a share in the Rayenn transport association. He was often in contact with Earthfolk. They liked him, deeming him a moderate. In reality, it now seemed, he was among the secret founders and leaders of the Scaine Croi. At age fifty he sold out his rapidly depreciating holdings and moved to Proserpina—among the last who did, as scant as was the antimatter left in Lunarian possession. He prospered yonder, building Zamok Drakon and founding a family that grew prominent in a revived Selenarchy. His gifts for organization and intrigue served him well, bringing him to the forefront of enterprises among the comets and in councils at home. Despite the abyss between, he maintained encrypted contact with unidentified persons on Luna; and sometimes he returned. …

  “You should grace us oftener,” Venator said.

  “Belike it will not happen again,” Lirion replied. “Passage in a ship with naught better than fusion to drive it would eat a twain of years or worse. I have not many left me.”

  And yet the Proserpinans had laid out what was necessary for this journey of his, Venator thought. “Your business is important, then.”

  “So thinks your
service,” Lirion answered dryly.

  “The Peace Authority has a natural concern, yes.”

  “My mission was announced beforehand. I am here on behalf of my world to seek persuasion, that Earth provide us with more antimatter.”

  Not just for spacecraft motors, Venator knew. For heavy engineering works of every kind, to make Proserpina over. The iron core that gave it a gravity comparable to Luna’s and offered riches to industry also made it monstrously more difficult to hollow out habitations than on this basaltic globe. “Pardon me if I ask elementary questions. Communications are thin, and your people have not been exactly forthcoming, you know. How small has your supply”—that the original settlers brought along—“gotten?”

  “The end of it is in sight,” Lirion said, which Venator judged rather noncommittal. “We have no access to Mercury, that we might forge our own.”

  A vision of the inmost planet rose before Venator. He had never been there. No living creature had, nor any machine that was not armored and specialized against its inferno. But the vivifer had presented it to him, had let his mind range the pocked and scarred terrain, through freezing nights and furnace days. From the nearby sun raged energy measurable but unimaginable, captured and brought to focus by huge installations across the land and up in orbit, an achievement worthy of gods. Photons slammed into nucleons, quantum convulsions went through the vacuum, newborn particles positive and negative hurtled down magnetic lines of force to their separate destinations—Operated at full capacity, the Mercurian plant had yielded hundreds of kilos of antimatter per Terrestrial day.

  He no longer felt awed. Now he was a machine, and all machines were his kin. Although his reborn individual self did not comprehend, nor remember as more than fragments, what it knew when it was one with the cybercosm, he recalled how it had embraced the whole universe.

  Yet that self was human too, with a feel for human things. He decided that enough polite phrases had passed back and forth, few though they were. If he piqued Lirion, he might provoke a reaction that would give him a little insight, a bit of a clue to the man’s real intentions.