The Stars Are Also Fire Read online

  Or he may have knowledge, or access to knowledge, that she wants. Those researches of hers are aimed at deep space. Very deep space.

  I propose to visit her.

  I have a pretext prepared. The odds are that she does not know that we know of her quiet inquiries. The order to monitor her came from high in the cybercosm—perhaps from the Teramind itself when it observed those questions being asked and foresaw where the answers would lead.

  She must know that agents of the Peace Authority have called on associates of hers. It would appear strange if none talked also with her. I do not expect to discover much, if anything. Yet … I am a synnoiont.

  GO, THEN, the system of which he was a part told him.

  That oneness died away. The huntsman removed himself from the net.

  For a while he lay quiescent. Nothing felt real. The facts and the decision were in him but he could not remember them other than as fading wisps of a dream. The physical world seemed flat and grotesque, his body a foreigner.

  The sense of loss passed, and he was human again. Hunger and thirst nudged him to his feet. “Put me in touch with the lady Lilisaire,” he directed the sophotect, and went to get his nutrition.

  It was minimal. He could savor good food and drink, if the amounts were moderate, but not when on the trail.

  Afterward he relaxed at the vivifer. The show he summoned was a comedy set in the New Delhi of Nehru. He did not set the speech converter; Indi was among his languages. The story was shallow and not especially believable—although he admitted to himself he had scant rapport with low-tech societies, today or in the past—but sight, sound, scent, tactility were well done. To have a more lifelike experience, he would have had to get into a quivira.

  A bell tone pulled him from it. So soon? He had been resigned to waiting hours before the system located Lilisaire and persuaded her to give audience to a constable.

  He hastened to the eidophone. Her image met him, vivid as fire. He saw, above a long neck, a face nearly classic save for the high cheekbones, peculiar ears with blinking stardrops in the lobes, gold-flecked sea-green of the big oblique eyes, flared nostrils, wide mouth where smiles and snarls might follow each other like sun and hailwind. Startling against blueveined white skin was the hair, auburn threaded with flame-red, swept up from her brow and falling halfway down her back. He knew from recordings that she was as tall as he, slender, long-legged, firm in the breasts and rounded in the hips. He saw a lustrous cheongsam, a headband patterned on the DNA molecule, and hardly a trace of her fifty-odd years. Medical programs accounted for only a part of that, he knew. With Lunarian chromosomes, she might reach a fourth again of his projected 120.

  If they both survived.

  “Hail, my lady,” he greeted in his fluent Lunarian. “You are gracious thus to respond.”

  For some reason, she chose to reply in Anglo. Her voice purred low. “Unwise would I be to linger when the Peace Authority calls.”

  He shifted to the same tongue. “You know full well, my lady, we have very little power within your country unless your government grants it. Wise you may be, but kind you certainly are.”

  She smiled. “A neat riposte. What would you of me, Officer?”

  “An interview, if you please. I think you would prefer it be either over an encrypted line or in private person.”

  Arched fox-colored brows lifted higher. “What could be so critical?”

  “I believe you have made a shrewd guess at it, my lady.”

  The mercurial visage refashioned cordiality. “May-chance I have. We shall see, Captain—Eyach, I have no name for you.” The sophotect, pretending to be a robot, had declared that was his rank.

  “My apologies, my lady. I forgot to instruct the communicator about that.” It was true, and he felt annoyed at himself. His name had long ceased to have meaning for him and he used any that suited his purposes. His actual identity was a function within the cybercosm.

  “Venator,” he said, accenting the penult. Roving through the databases, his favonte recreation, he had acquired a jackdaw hoard of knowledge. It amused him to resurrect this word from a language dead and well-nigh forgotten.

  Lilisaire inquired no further. Probably more Earthlings than not went without surnames these days, as Lunarians always had. He imagined her thinking in scorn: but the Earthlings have their registry numbers. Her courtesy remained smooth. “Then, Captain Venator, wish you to come directly to me at Zamok Vysoki? I will make you welcome.”

  Astonished, he said, “At once? I could take a suborbital and be there very shortly, but—”

  “If you, of the Peace Authority, have a suborbital available at Tychopolis, your superiors look on this as important,” she said, still at catlike ease. “Yes, do, and allow time for the taking of hospitality. I will await.” The screen blanked.

  He sat for a brief while recovering his equilibrium. How much did she know? What was her intent—to rush him along, to lead him astray, or merely to perplex him for sport’s sake?

  If she was on the attack, let him respond.

  Quickly he stripped, stepped under needle spray and dryer, and donned a close-fitting blue uniform with bronze insignia. Formality was his first line of defense. After hesitating, he decided to leave his interlink behind. He didn’t anticipate urgent need of it, and he was unsure what detectors and probes Lilisaire kept in her stronghold. The less she discovered about him, the better.

  The sophotect made arrangements while he was on his way to the flyport. A fahrweg took him below the ringwall, out to the drome. Antique installations like this remained in service in regions of lesser prosperity and population, also on Earth. His fellow riders were few. The vehicle waited in a launcher already set and programmed for its destination. A mobile gangtube admitted him to it. He secured himself in a seat. Go, he pressed.

  Against this gravity, the electromagnetic acceleration was gentle. In moments he was falling free along an arc that would carry him high above the Moon and a quarter of the way around it.

  Silence brimmed the cabin. Weightlessness recalled to him, a little, that ocean of thought in which he had lately floated. He looked out the viewsereens. Beneath him shadows edged a magnificent desolation of craters and worn-down highlands. Monorails, transmission towers, solar collectors, energy casters glittered steely, strewn across that wasteland. Few stars shone in the black overhead; light drowned them out. To north the sun stood at late Lunar morning. Earth was not far from it, the thinnest of blue crescents along a darkling disc. They sank as he flew.

  Idly, he turned off the cabin lights and enhanced the stars. Their multitudes sprang forth before him, more each second while his eyes adapted. He traced constellations, Eridanus, Dorado—yonder the Magellanic galaxies—Crux, Centaurus … Alpha Centauri, where Anson Guthrie presided over his companion downloads and the descendants of these humans who had left the Solar System with him. … No, the Lunarians among them didn’t live on the doomed planet Demeter but on asteroids whirling between the two suns. …

  Had that exodus been the last and in some ways the mightiest achievement of the Faustian spirit? A withdrawal after defeat was not a capitulation. Someday, against all believability, could it somehow carry its banners back home? Wliat allies might it then raise? It was not yet dead here, either. He was on his way to meet with a living embodiment of it.

  Revolt—No, nothing so simple. The Lyudov Rebellion had been, if anything, anti-Faustian. “Reclaim the world for humanity, before it is too late!” Keep machines mindless, create anew an organic order, restore God to his throne.

  But Niolente of Zamok Vysoki had had much to do with stirring up that convulsion; and Lilisaire bore the same resentments, the same wild dreams.

  A warning broke Venator from his reverie. Time had passed more quickly than he thought. Jets fired, decelerating.

  The vehicle and the ground control system handled everything. He was free to observe. His glance ranged avidly ahead and downward. Images of this place were common enough, but few
Terrans ever came to it. He never had, until now.

  Eastward the mountains fell away toward a valley from which a road wound upward, with Earth and sun just above the horizon. Westward the castle rose sheer from its height, tiered walls darkly burnished, steep roofs, craggy towers, windows and cupolas flaring where they caught the light. It belonged to the landscape; the design fended off meteoroids and radiation, held onto air and warmth. Nevertheless, Venator thought, a Gothic soul had raised it. There should have been pennons flying, trumpets sounding, bowmen at the parapets, ghosts at night in the corridors.

  Well, in one sense, ghosts did walk here.

  The flyer set down on a tiny field at the rear of the building. A gangtube extended itself from otherwise bare masonry and osculated the airlock. The huntsman went in.

  Two guards waited. In form-fitting black chased with silver, shortswords and sonic stunners at hips, they overtopped him by a head. The handsome faces were identical and impassive. They gave salute, right palm on left breast, and said, “Welcome, lord Captain. We shall bring you to the Wardress,” in unison and perfect Anglo.

  “Thank you.” Venator’s own Anglo was of the eastern, not the western hemisphere. He fell in between them.

  The way was long. An ascensor brought them to a hallway where the illusion of a vast metallic plain was being overwhelmed by blue mists in which flames flickered many-hued and half-glimpses of monsters flitted by, whistling or laughing. It gave on a conservatory riotous with huge low-gravity flowers, unearthly in shape and color. Their fragrances made the air almost too rich to breathe. Beyond was another corridor, which spiraled upward, twilit, full of funereal music. Ancestral portraits lined the walls; their eyes shifted, tracking the men. At the top, a vaulted room displayed relics that Venator would have liked to examine. What was the story behind that knife, that piece of meteoritic rock, that broken gyroscope, that human skull with a sapphire set in the forehead? The next chamber must have its everyday uses, for spidery Lunarian furniture stood on a white pelt of carpet; but the ceiling was a blackness containing an enormous representation of the galaxy, visibly rotating, millions of years within seconds, stars coming to birth, flaring, guttering out as he watched.

  He came to Lilisaire.

  The room she had chosen was of comparatively modest size and outfitting. One wall imaged a view of Lake Korolev, waves under a forced wind, dome simulating blue heaven, a pair of sport flyers aloft, wings outstretched from their arms. On a shelf, a nude girl twenty centimeters tall, exquisitely done in mercury-bright metal, danced to music recorded from Pan pipes. A table bore carafes, goblets, plates of delicacies. Lilisaire stood near it.

  The guards saluted again, wheeled, and left. Venator advanced. “Hail anew,” he said with a bow, in Lunarian, using the deferential form. “You are indeed gracious.”

  She smiled. “How so, Captain?” As before, her reply was in Anglo.

  He went back to the Terrestrial language. Why make it clear how well he knew hers? But courtliness, yes. “The tension between—I won’t say between our races or even our societies, my lady, but between your class and mine. And still you set privacy aside, though I understand full well how your people prize it, and you receive me in your home.”

  Her tone stayed amicable. “Also enemies negotiate.”

  “I’m not exactly an envoy, my lady. And to me you are no enemy. Nor are Earth or the World Federation enemies to you.”

  The voice stiffened. “Speak for yourself, not them.”

  “Who wishes you harm?”

  “Wishing or nay, they make ready to wreak it.”

  “Do you refer to the Habitat, my lady?” he asked: a socially necessary redundancy.

  She evaded directness. “Much else has Earth done to Luna.”

  “Why, it was Earth that brought Luna alive.”

  She laughed. The sound was brief and low, but in some sly fashion uttered with her whole body. “You have a quite charming way of affecting naïveté, Captain. Let me, then, denote us as dwellers on the Moon.”

  He followed her conversational lead, for his real purpose was to explore her attitudes. “May I speak freely?”

  “Is that not the reason you came?” she murmured.

  Now she was playing at being an innocent, he thought. “When you say ‘dwellers,’ I suspect you mean Lunarians, not resident Terrans, not even those Terrans who are citizens. And … if you say ‘Lunarians’ to me, do you perhaps mean the Selenarchic families—or the Cordilleran phratry—or simply its overlings?” Try, cautiously, to provoke her.

  The green gaze levelled upon him. The words were quiet but steady. “I mean the survival of the blood.”

  That should not have put him on the defensive, but he heard himself protest, “In what way are you threatened, your life or your property or anything that’s yours?”

  “My lineage is. You propose to make Lunarians extinct.”

  The shock was slight but real. “My lady!”

  Lilisaire finger-shrugged. “Eyach, of course the fond, foolish politicians who imagine they govern humankind, they think no such thing, insofar as they can think at all. They see before them only the ego-bloated eminence that will be theirs, for that they opened the Moon to Terrans.”

  “The gain’s much more than theirs,” he must argue. “Those people who’ll come are bold enterprising sorts. What new work has been done here for the past century or longer? They’ll build the way your ancestors did, cities, caverns, life—make the Moon over.”

  For they were the restless ones, the latent Faustians, he thought for the hundredth time. They found their lives on Earth empty, nothing meaningful left for them to do, and their energy and anger grew troublesome. He had wondered whether the Teramind itself had conceived this means, the Habitat, of drawing them together here where they could expend themselves in ways that were containable, controllable—in the course of lifetimes, tamable.

  “They will swarm in,” Lilisaire sa d, “they will soon outvote us, and all the while they will outbreed us.”

  “Nothing prevents you Lunarians from vying with them in that,” Venator said dryly.

  Except, he thought, their lack of the strong urge to reproduce that was in his race, that had brought Earth to the edge of catastrophe and was still barely curbed, still a wellspring of discontent and unrest. The Habitat would give its beneficiaries some outlet for this, for some generations. Lunarians were never so fecund. Why? Was it cultural or did it have a genetic basis? Who knew? To this day, who knew? You could map the genome, but the map is not the territory, nor does it reveal what goes on underground. He himself supposed that the effect was indirect. Arrogant, self-willed people did not want to be burdened with many children.

  Again Lilisaire laughed. “At last a thousandfold worn-out dispute shows a fresh face!” Lightly: “Shall we leave it to twitch? Be welcome, Captain, as a new presence in an old house. Will you take refreshment?”

  He had gotten used to Lunarian shifts of mood. “Thank you, my lady.”

  She poured, a clear sound against the Pan pipes, gave him his goblet of cut crystal, and raised hers. The wine glowed golden. “Uwach yei,” she toasted. It meant, more or less, “Aloft.”

  “Serefe,” he responded. Rims chimed together.

  “What tongue is that?” she asked.

  “Turkish. To your honor.’” He sipped. It was glorious.

  “You have ranged widely, then—and, I deem, as much in your person as in vivifer or quivira.”

  “It is my duty,” he said dismissingly.

  “What breed are you?”

  Momentarily he was taken aback, then recognized the idiom she had in mind. “I was born in the southern end of Africa, my lady.”

  “A stark and beautiful land, from what I have seen.”

  “I was small when I left it.” If you had the synnoiotic potential, you must develop it from early childhood, or it was gone. His mind flew back to the sacrifices his parents had made—his mother giving up her career, his father, pastor in th
e Cosmological Christian Church, seeing him bit by bit losing God—to be with him in the Brain Garden on St Helena, give him some family life while he grew into strangeness. But parents had always surrendered themselves and their children to something larger. History knew of apprentices to shamans, the prophet Samuel, Dalai Lamas, lesser monks of many faiths, yes, boys made eunuchs because only so could they advance in the service of the Emperor. … “I do go back now and then.” It was indeed beautiful, that preserve where lions walked and grass swayed golden beneath the wind.

  He must not let her pursue this subject. Lilisaire stood pensive. How much did she know or guess at? It was actually a relief when she said: “Maychance we should consider your business, that late we can take our ease. I think I would enjoy showing you about my abode.”

  “I’d be fascinated,” he replied, which was no lie, although he realized he would see nothing she didn’t want him to see.

  “You and your … lesser comrades?” (What intimation had she of his real status, not a simple captain among detectives but a pragmatic of determinor rank?) “have investigated Caraine and , Aiant, as well as others of the old blood.” (How quickly she had learned that!) “Now it is my turn, nay?” Her glance might have seemed candid. “Well, short and plain, I know naught of any plot to wreck the Habitat. True, you would not await that I admit it. Thus let me lay thereto that any such would be futile, stupid. Niolente herself could not in the end stay the all-devouring Federation.”

  Despite her resistances, intrigues, fomented rebellion, terminal armed defiance, no. Venator wanted to say that the collapse of the sovereign Selenarchy, the establishment of the Republic, its accesssion to the World Federation and the rules of the Covenant were not merely the result of political and economic pressures. Ultimately, it was moral force. When Rinndalir left with Guthrie and Fireball began disbanding, the heart went out of too many Lunarians. Niolente’s had beaten rather lonely.

  But: “We were not going to pick over dry bones, were we, my lady?” he advanced.

  Lilisaire’s smile could turn unfairly seductive. “You are an intelligent man, Captain. I could come to a liking for you.”