The Stars are also Fire - [Harvest the Stars 02] Page 4

Few others were afoot. This being a wealthy section, some went sumptuous of tunic and hose or sweeping gown, while the rest were retainers of this or that household, in livery not much less fine. One led a Siamese-marked cat on a leash—metamorphic, its genes transformed through generations to make it of tiger size. All moved with the same grace and aloofness as the animal. A pair who were talking in their melodious language did so very softly.

  They were doubtless a little surprised by the huntsman. Terrans seldom came here, and he was obviously not one who lived on their world but from Earth. Under the former Selenarchy his kind had been debarred from entering the neighborhood at all except by special permission. However, nobody said or did anything, though the big eyes might narrow a bit.

  He could have given them back those looks, and not always upward. Many Lunarians were no taller than a tall Terran, which he was. He refrained. A huntsman on the hunt draws no needless attention to himself. Let them glance, inwardly shrug, and forget him.

  What they saw was a man lithe and slender, in his mid-thirties, with light-brown skin, deep-brown eyes, and black hair a woolcap on a head long and high. The features were sharp, nose broad and arched, lips thinner than usual for his ethnotype. Clad in a plain gray coverall and soft boots, he carried at his hip a case that might have held a hand-size computer, a satellite-range phone, or even a medic, but which in fact bore something much more potent. His gait was unhurried, efficient, well practiced in low-weight.

  It soon took him from the district of old and palatial apartments, through another and humbler inhabited mainly by his species, on into the commercial core of the city. Three-story arcades on plume-like pillars lined Tsiolkovsky Prospect, duramoss yielded underfoot, illusions drifted through the ceiling far overhead. Here there were more folk. Most of the Lunarians wore ordinary garments, although their styles of it—upward-flared collars, short cloaks, dagged skirts, pectoral sunbursts, insignia of phyle or family, colors, iridescences, inset glitterlights, details more fanciful still—would have been florid were it not as natural on them as brilliance on a coral snake. Three men came by together, their walk and posture, black kilts and silver-filigree breastplates, comparatively brusque manner and loud speech, said they were from Mars. Asterites were scarce and less readily identifiable.

  Terrans numbered perhaps three out of ten. Some declared themselves Lunar citizens by some version of Lunarian garb, often the livery of a seigneurial house. Others stayed with Earthside fashions, but one could see by their carriage and by tokens more slight that they were citizens too, or at least long-term residents. Among themselves both kinds used ancestral tongues, unless Lunarian was all that they had in common.

  About a third of the Terrans were here from Earth on assorted errands. Tourists were conspicuous by their rarity as well as their awkwardness and stares. Why trouble to come for pleasure when you could have the experience more easily and cheaply in a quivira? Your brain would register and remember the same sensations.

  These people were too sparse to be a crowd. Half the shops, restaurants, bistros, bagnios, amusement specialties, and cultural enterprises in the arcades stood closed and vacant. Background noise was a susurrus through which a gust of music would twang startlingly strong or a drift of perfume entice the nostrils. A conversation ahead of him resounded clearly as the huntsman drew near.

  "—sick of being second-class, all my life second-class. So far can I go, so much can I achieve, then I strike the invisible wall and everything begins to happen in such ways that nothing further is possible for me."

  The language, Neudeutsch, was among those the net had implanted in the huntsman. He slowed his pace. Familiar though the complaint was, he might possibly get a little useful input.

  Two sat at a street-level table outside an otherwise empty café tended by a robot. The speaker was plainly a Terran Moondweller, though he wore a Han Revival robe in a forlorn sort of defiance. He was as well-muscled as if he lived on Earth; perhaps he worked off rage with extra exercise. The skin stood taut on his knuckles where he gripped a tumbler. His companion, in a unisuit, was just as plainly a visiting European.

  She sipped her own drink and murmured, "Not quite all your life."

  "No, of course not. But we've lived here for two hundred years, my family." The man tossed off a gulp. His words tumbled forth. "My parents went back to Earth only to have us, my siblings and me." Evidently it had been a multiple conception, three or four zygotes induced, to spare having to repeat the whole expensive timespan. Probably, the huntsman thought, gestation had been uterine, to save the cost of exogenesis. "As soon as we were developed enough, they returned with us. Nine months plus three years they were gone. Should that have lost them what miserable employment they had? Should the need make us aliens, inferiors? The law says no. But what does the law count for? What is this damned Republic but the same old Selenarchy, in a disguise so thin it's an insult?"

  "Calm, please be calm. Once the Habitat is ready, things will soon become very different."

  "Will they? Can they? The Selenarchs—"

  "The magnates will be overwhelmed, obsolete, irrelevant, within a decade, I promise you. Meanwhile, the opportunities—"

  The huntsman went past. He had heard nothing new after all. The woman was involved in one or another of the consortiums already searching out potentials for the Moon of the future. Perhaps she had some use for the man, perhaps he was merely a chance-met talkmate. It didn't matter.

  What did matter was that that future lay in danger of abortion.

  Despite the service centers at Hydra Square, the fountain in the middle of the plaza splashed through its silvery twinings and fractals alone. The door of the constabulary retracted to let a uniformed officer in and a couple of civilians out, otherwise the fish below the clear paving swam about nobody's feet but the huntsman's. No paradox, though Tychopolis be the largest of the Lunar cities. Here, too, automatons, robots, and sophotects increasingly took over such tasks as medical care, maintenance, and rescue, while the population requiring those attentions declined. He expected the area would again be thronged once the settlers from Earth had established themselves (for however long that would last, a few centuries, a few millennia, a blink in time for the Teramind but long enough in human reckoning). Unless their hopes died beneath the claws of the Selenarchs.

  No, he thought, have done with those ideas. He had found no evidence of any widespread conspiracy. It seemed he had an adversary more capable than that, brewing a menace less combatable.

  He never knew fear. An organism born to be brave had learned self-mastery on St. Helena and gone on into the cybercosm. But when he considered what might come of this, a thousand years hence or a million, bleakness touched him.

  Resolution resurged. He willed nonsanity away. Rationally estimated, the odds were high in favor of his cause. Let him proceed, and the future he had imagined would be one that he aborted.

  Besides—a smile played briefly—he expected to enjoy his quest.

  From the square he went on down Oberth Passage. Industry, computation, biotech, molecular, and quantum operations proceeded in busy silence behind its walls. Something was not perfectly shielded, and a stray electromagnetic pulse happened to resonate with the net inside his skull. Memories sprang up unbidden, dawn over a wind-rippled veldt; the face of a preceptor in the Brain Garden, dream-distorted. He leaped out of the influence and regained himself.

  The disturbance had whetted his senses. He observed his surroundings with redoubled sharpness, although there was little to see. Nobody else walked this corridor. The only emblems of ownership were on the doors of facilities now abandoned. An academic part of him reflected how the seigneurs of the Moon disdained the minor trades and businesses viable in a post-capitalist economy and mostly lived off their inherited holdings. To be sure, some of those were far-flung in the Solar System and not insubstantial on Earth. Also, a few individuals continued active in enterprises they deemed worthy of themselves. The associated companies of their Venture
were still breaking new ground on Mars, small moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the comets, the asteroids. . . .

  The huntsman's mouth drew tight. He went onward in long low-gravity bounds.

  Ellipse Lane curved off from Oberth. Fifty meters down it, he came to his lodgings. The front was as bare and undistinguished as the corridor. He put his right palm against the keyplate.

  It looked like any other, but it did not merely scan lines in the skin. All standard security devices could be fooled in any of several different ways, if someone had the will and the means. Were such an attempt made here, the lock would alert headquarters. Meanwhile it removed three or four cells from him, which he did not feel, and shunted them to a DNA reader. This identified him, and the door retracted. The identification took a little more time than usual, but so little that a watcher who didn't know would not have noticed. A hundred milliseconds or five hundred, what difference? Speed like that demanded an enormous capability, but it was present, hidden. The huntsman entered his den.

  After the door shut behind him, the place seemed barren. It wasn't really a home. Two inner cubicles held a bed, a sanitor, a nutrition unit, and whatever else was barebones necessary, but here were only screens, panels, receptors, and other unobtrusive outwardnesses of the great, thinking engine. The ceiling shone cold white, and air circulated odorless.

  When the site was converted to an apartment—he had heard that it was formerly a tavern—the secret service of the Peace Authority acquired it under the name of a data-synthetic person and remodeled it, an unnoticeable piece at a time. That seemed a reasonable precaution, inasmuch as the Republic of Luna restricted the Authority to a single office and a platoon in Port Bowen. A listening post and center for safe communications was desirable elsewhere, in a nation this widespread and tricky. Later the huntsman's corps had installed their special gear, and at the moment he was using the fictitious name.

  He went straight to work. More drove him than eagerness in the chase. For too many daycycles he had been just briefly and intermittently in synnoiosis. This episode of it would go longer and deeper, enough to sustain him until he returned to Earth and could again enter a full communion.

  Or a Unity—no, he dared not yearn for that. Not now.

  Opening the case at his flank, he took out the interlink, unfolded it, and adjusted it on his head. It fitted like a coif of closely woven black mesh with bright small nodules at a number of the intersections. Within was a complexity not much less than that in a living cell, and in certain respects more: crystals and giant molecules never found in nature, interactions down to the quantum level. It was best to be physically relaxed, however mild the demands of Lunar gravity. He reclined on a couch before a deceptively simple-looking control panel. "Is all clear?" he inquired.

  "All clear," replied the sophotect that had kept watch on the room and the communication lines. "Carry on at will."

  The huntsman plugged in his interlink. Wire and contact were structures comparably intricate. He willed. Synnoiosis began.

  The net that nanomachines had woven inside his head, when he was a cadet in the Garden, came active. It traced out the ongoing, ever-shifting electrochemical activity of his brain, rendered the readings as a multiple-terabaud data stream, and passed them on to the interlink, which translated them into machine language and conveyed them farther. As the system responded, the interlink became a generator of pulses and dancing fields whereby the net directly stimulated the brain.

  The process appeared to be as uncomplicated as the outward show of the things themselves. It was in fact an achievement beyond the creation or the full understanding of any merely human intelligence. It joined two orders of being that were utterly unlike—organic and inorganic, chemical and electrophotonic, life and post-life.

  It was not telepathy, it was communication by language through an interpreter. But to master that language, the huntsman had paid with his childhood and youth. And it was not a language that went through the ears or the eyes, the sensor or the keyboard. It went directly between nervous system and circuitry.

  For him, its fullness was a transcendence higher than ever he knew in sexual union, mortal danger, or intellectual challenge. He had asked sophotects how it was for them, but they had been unable to explain. If nothing else, among them oneness was as normal an occurrence as feeding was to him.

  This was only a partial, almost superficial, interface. He dealt in straightforward information, material that could have been rendered in text, graphics, and speech. The sophotects involved, the one here and the one at headquarters in Port Bowen, were conscious. They thought, but they were narrowly specialized and focused, content to dwell immobile, essentially bodiless, with all input and output going along the data lines. The system itself was limited in both databases and capabilities. Even on the Moon, larger nets existed; but if he tapped into them, he might alert his prey.

  Nevertheless, this synnoiotic session was more than a hurried report or query. Far faster and more comprehensively than could have been done in the flesh, he gave out what he had learned and received what he asked for. He need not trace a way through hypertext; associated facts and ideas came to him as an integrated whole. Entire histories became his. A hundred variant plans of campaign developed, simulated their probable consequences, and left behind them what parts he deemed worth fitting into a new synthesis. Above and beyond loomed the sense of how it all reached through space-time, past and future and the ends of the universe, and how fateful it might yet prove.

  The cool and luminous ecstasy had no counterpart among mortals, although religious enlightenment or a basic mathematical insight shared aspects of it. He was in a single mind that built its own memories and discoursed with itself by many thinkings on many levels conjoined. That polylogue was not for any human tongue to repeat. Even its material content grew cumbersome when set baldly and linearly down.

  * * * *

  Aiant, husband of Lilisaire, resident here in Tychopolis, is seldom in contact with her and almost never meets her. They are second cousins. She succeeded her father in the ancestral estates by right of optigeniture, but Aiant contested this and there is reason to suspect he had the father assassinated. Although she was only 23 at the time, Lilisaire undertook intrigue and occasional surreptitious violence on her own behalf. In the course of five years she outmaneuvered him, leaving him stripped of most of his conciliar powers and close to bankruptcy. Then she married him. The alliance works well. He is secondary but not subjugated, and profits by serving her interests, especially her share of the spacefaring Venture.

  He and his city wife (probably chosen for him by Lilisaire because of her family connections, she being of the Mare Crisium phratry) received me courteously if not cordially and were as cooperative as could be expected. They were eager to convince me that there is no plot to sabotage the Habitat, as I had led them to believe we suspect. A full-scale investigation by the Peace Authority would inconvenience the Venture at best, and might turn up matters that really are being kept secret. They retrieved all the data I requested (not knowing me for a synnoiont, who could get more out of this information than an entire detective squad).

  Conclusion: They are ignorant of any untoward activity, and their organization is not involved in any, although individuals and cabals within it may be.

  It was already established that Caraine of Hertzsprung, Lilisaire's younger husband, their adult son Bornay, and Caraine's other two wives are equally uninvolved. Although oftener together physically with Lilisaire than Aiant is, Caraine has little to do with her various undertakings. The alliance is useful to both, coupling Phyle Beynac and Phyle Nakamura in a genetically and strategically desirable bond between the Cordilleran and Korolevan phratries, and a personal affinity exists. However, besides his estate, Caraine is engaged in politics, being one of the few Lunarians, especially of Selenarchic descent, who has condescended to develop parliamentary skills.

  As such, he is valuable to the aristocratic faction, machinating to keep t
hem in effective power and the Terran minority effectively disfranchised. Lilisaire would likely regard it as wasteful to engage his energy and talents in anything else. Moreover, in recent months he has been fully and conspicuously occupied in the effort to mobilize opposition to the Habitat sufficient to force the cancellation of the project. Improbable though his success is, he would scarcely be wanted meanwhile in any clandestine endeavor. Nor have his wives and children left home or communicated with anyone off the Moon.

  Thus Lilisaire may well be the only Lunarian magnate preparing trouble for us. This gives no grounds for complacency. She could prove as formidable, and is certainly as ruthless, as her famous ancestors Rinndalir and Niolente.

  Evidence: Legal proof is lacking, and the case would in any event not be prosecuted by the present Lunar government; but the Peace Authority intelligence corps has ascertained that in younger days she killed at least two men in duels. One was fought topside in the wilderness with firearms, one in her castle with rapiers. She has traveled widely, even braving the gravity of Earth, where she has a large inherited property. She has gone out to Mars, the asteroids, Jupiter, and Saturn. She is enamored of deep space and of endeavor in it. (A more distant ancestor of hers was a grandson of both the explorer Kaino and the poet Verdea.) But she is coldly realistic about her part in the Venture operations.