The Fleet of Stars Read online

lokepa continued more mildly: "Eh, you po'e have done many wonderful things. You've a lot to teach us. But aren't those works of yours, like the wildlife under Luna, aren't they a tradition you keep up, something that got started before there was a cybercosm? What we want to do is build something genuinely new and free." He broke off. "Never mind. I talk too much."

  "It is nothing immediate in any event," He'o said, "nor nigh to here."

  The remark clinched an impression that had been closing in on Fenn daycycle by daycycle. He gulped. “You don't think you can colonize on the Moon?"

  "That was always doubtful, as you must have known from the first. Now, after our committee goes home, its report will be much debated. But I am already certain of the decision. No, we cannot,"

  "But you—" Fenn said, aware it was in vain, "a Habitat of your own, according to your own design—and Luna has more vacant sites left than you could begin to fill—"

  "Ah, we'll be back from time to time, to study and ask questions," lokepa told him soothingly. "You Selenites have a freight of experiences we need to draw on."

  "Where else could you go?" Mercury and Venus: infernos. The Asteroid Belt and the moons of the giant planets: every useful site long since occupied by machines, which by now had exhausted most of the resources worth exploiting. Proserpina and the comets: afar in eternal night, and their Lunarians would not make Terrans welcome. The stars: impossible. The first tiny migration to the nearest of them, which Anson Guthrie led, had surely been the last ever.

  Unless .., those stories you heard lately, and the official declaration that they were totally unconfirmed— they had a great deal to do with the rising restlessness on Earth and Luna. The possibility that you yourself might live forever—

  No. Shove it.aside. Too nebulous, too complicated. "Mars?"

  "Maybe," lokepa said. "Uh, you understand, don't you, if we Lahui do set up a colony, only a few of us would settle there. Like the ancestors, in a way, canoeing across the ocean to a new island. Most stayed behind."

  "Such an albatross venture cannot be for material gain," He'o said. "It must have a prospect of profit or it cannot come to pass, but the true prize will be the freedom of the Dao Kai to grow unhindered; and that freedom will reach back across space to our home world."

  "What we could do on Luna seems too limited," lo-kepa added. "But mainly we've seen, better than we knew before, that Luna is also cybercosm territory."

  Again Fenn couldn't quite grasp what the issue was. Did either of his companions, actually? He had a feeling of enormous blind forces at work.

  They fell silent. Presently they entered a populated section, men and women, and especially children, in the passages, portals giving on apartments, service centers, small enterprises, a measure of noise and bustle. “Nana 'oe!'' lokepa bawled. A lightsign shimmered ahead. YING-ZHOU, Isle of the Blest. They surged in, took a table, the humans cross-legged on cushions, and called for beer. Fenn's card declared him responsible, but the servitor didn't ask for it, probably because the boy looked older than he was. He'o enjoyed a brew as much as his companions did. Talk grew lively and wandered widely.

  —Fenn lifted his third beaker. "Here's to life!"

  "May the tide so flow," He'o wished.

  lokepa beamed. "I think it's doing exactly that, lads. What we hear about Life Mothers yonder—rebirth—"

  "And those ships the Proserpinans have got!" Fenn cried.

  "Haw, the cybercosm doesn't like the current state of affairs one bit," lokepa said. "Especially when we're finding out how long the facts were kept secret. Embarrassing, no?"

  "Nothing is certain," He'o cautioned. "These are scarcely more than rumors. We hear them in stray communications from Terrans on Mars, who have heard things from Lunarian neighbors, who have heard it from other Lunarians there, who say they have heard it from Proserpina. 1 cannot blame the Synesis for being noncommittal. Some truth doubtless floats somewhere in all this, but I wonder how much is sheer Lunarian mischief-making."

  Fenn's gladness vanished. Uncertainty, he thought. Rumors, rumors, denials, equivocations, and more rumors. Meanwhile, here he sat, year after year after year, bound to the same creaking wheel.

  5

  THE SMALL TOWN Eos clung to the rim of Eos Chasma, near the eastern end of Valles Marineris. Behind it, Margaritifer Sinus reached past the horizon: cultivation, then boulders, dunes, craters, basaltic upthrusts, dust scudding and whirling on ghost-thin winds. A road ran through, soon lost to sight; the spear of a laser pylon gleamed bright but, at its distance, tiny and lonely. Below the town, cliffs and crags descended, weirdly sculptured, subtly tinted, into shadowed depths. Looking that way, northward, you could see the land begin to climb again, and know that after some three hundred kilometers it would topple into Capri Chasma. Likelier, though, your gaze would turn west, where the incredible steeps and deeps of the Valles rived the planet across well-nigh a fifth of its girth.

  Geologically fascinating, this country was also rich in the minerals that had been a primary reason for human settlement on Mars. Long afterward, living in a stable economy with a basically machine-run and recycling industry, many people on Earth had trouble understanding the economics of that, if they thought about the matter at all. Luna was obvious—a site for solar energy collectors and a staging area for interplanetary operations, back in early days when much of the work could be done only by humans. Once established, such a set of communities naturally continued itself. But Mars? Was not the accessible wealth of the Solar System overwhelmingly in the asteroids and comets?

  True. Yet very little of it consisted of anything that could properly be called ores. Mostly it was a jumble, requiring elaborate and energy-costly refinement. Although energy abounded in space, the capital investment necessary to capture it was by no means negligible. On Earth, geophysical and geochemical forces had beneficiated and concentrated materials through ages before humanity was—deposits, veins, lodes, Golcondas. In less but still meaningful measure, the same thing had happened on Mars, especially in its youth, when volcanoes raged manifold, waters flowed wild, and atmosphere was more than a wisp.

  The expansion of extraterrestrial operations generated a voracious demand. The Martian gravity well was fairly shallow. Between that factor and proximity, colonists were better able to supply workers on the asteroids—with manufactured goods, chemicals, food, other biological products—than Earth was.

  As for life support, on Mars it did not need the great domes and excavations of Luna. Dwellings could stand on the surface, radiation-proof, airtight, and biointe-grated. Metamorphic species could flourish in the open, supplying the colonists as well as the exporters among them. Mines became profitable.

  In some such words, you could explain to a latter-day Earthdweller why there were people yonder. Probably you need not add that both Terrans and Lunarians had immigrated because both races could readily reproduce under that weight. Equally plain to see, those born in a particular land, and generation by. generation adapting it to themselves and themselves to it, would choose to remain. They would evolve their own traditions, their own unique institutions. The Republic of Mars was actually two nations in all but name—if the word "nation" quite applied. Isolated by more than distance, it took little part in the politics of the World Federation, and after the Reconstitution, its role in the Synesis was slighter still. Yes, the Earthdweller could follow this logic of history.

  If he was a rationalist, like many of his contemporaries, he might require an effort of imagination to feel why the Martians abided yet, now that their exports were wanted no more and the spacecraft that called at their planet were few and far between. Nothing forced them to endure straitened circumstances. They had plenty of accumulated citizen's credit, unspent because Mars didn't have much for them to spend it on. They could pay for charter passage and comfortable relocation on Earth or Luna.

  Well, but a true rationalist took emotions into account. He could look around him and see how people everywhere sought for something g
reater than any individual existence to love, to belong to, and how tightly they clung to whatever they found. Mars was the Martians' birthright

  Surely David Ronay had it in his blood and bones. When he wedded Helen Holt and brought her to Sananton, it was to ground that a forebear of his had broken almost four hundred years earlier—about seven hundred and fifty of Earth's. Besides running the plantation and other operations of the estate, he was active in civic affairs and eventually served as regional deputy to the House of Ethnoi. Besides being his partner, she spent time on the educational net teaching basic linguistics and semantics. She also kept shrewd watch on their investments. Better than most, she saw how this world, thrown on its own resources, was perforce rediscovering, or perhaps reinventing, venture capitalism.

  Kinna Ronay was born in the medicenter at Eos, but the next day her mother flitted her the hundred-odd kilometers back to Sananton. There she grew up. In the course of time she gained a brother and two sisters. (That alone made the home foreign to any on Earth or Luna. The Republic had never tried to limit reproduction. Far from being a threat to this biosphere, humans had created and maintained it. Nor did their ten million or so overcrowd the elobe. Rather, more of them would have been desirable. But economics—how many offspring the average couple could afford—kept population down. The Ronays were relatively well off.) However, although the family was close-knit, the first of Kinna's siblings came three years after her, and thus she developed more or less independently of them. She was always an independent soul anyway.

  Regardless, as she grew taller, she got an increasing share of responsibilities in addition to her schooling. She did not resent what to her was simply natural. At its peak, the Martian economy had not been lavishly productive. It must concentrate on the extractive industries and on building the basis of survival. Scant capacity was left overffor robotizing jobs or for social benefits. People must work alongside the machines. It formed habits that stood them in good stead in these leaner times?”

  Not that Kinna was ignorant of the outer universe or shut away from it. The family were regularly in Eos on business or pleasure. They toured the planetr from polar ice dunes to the marts and monuments of Crommelin or the cities clustered in Schiaparelli. They were in telecommunication with friends everywhere.

  Kinna gained some familiarity with Earth and Luna too, as part of both her education and her everyday life. From time to time the multiceiver carried a program beamcast directly from the mother world. Otherwise the public database offered text, audiovisuals, music, the entire recorded culture of her species and much of the Lunarian. In the virtuality of the vivifer she experienced rain, sea, forests, a frenetic dance hall, a meditation on a mountainside, the ruins of New York, ascension to the Habitat and onward to Luna ... When her parents judged her old enough, they allowed her a few dreambox sessions. Afterward her memory bore, as if it had really happened to her, a day in mythic Avalon, being an eagle and then an owl, an evening (suitably disguised as a male) in the Mermaid Tavern, being (and somehow conscious of it) a planetary system or a molecule, all the ever-changing intricacies. ...

  But work held ample rewards. Riding about the plantation, at first with Father, later by herself, tending the crops and their symbionts, she never found two trips alike. There was bound to be a surprise, problem to solve, challenge to meet, a mutation, a disease, an ecological equilibrium upset. To restore the right order was profoundly satisfying. She liked seeing things grow beneath her hands—also in the workshop, where she proved to have a gift for fixing machinery and making useful articles. Thrice over the years, a giant dust storm overwhelmed the drift fences. The terror of it, then afterward the complexities and even the toil of digging out and reconstruction, brought her totally alive. Housework itself could be fun, when two or three tackled it and sang together. Looking after her siblings while the parents were away might get exasperating now and then, but down underneath, it was a joy.

  The family often made excursions into the Chasma, to hike or climb through its stern magnificence. In adolescence, Kinna explored with friends of her age, or alone. When time allowed, she was gone for days at a stretch, inflating a sealtent and activating a heater at night. This often began with a flit to some remote point along the Valles. Wonders were endless; wind-carved stone, mineral hues, caverns, crystals, ancient watercourses, perhaps a fossil. Such a find was an event, and not just because she got to report it to the museum and help dig it out. To behold that small, strange trace, to sense that after a billion years Mars again bore life—Chills ran deliciously up and down her spine.

  It was enjoyable to poke around in abandoned settlements, but also spooky and faintly saddening. Once people numbered more than they did today, and hopes ran high. They had actually talked of transforming the planet into a new Earth. Here lay the shells of dead dreams.

  Kinna straightened from them. Her glance went sky-ward. The Ronays were not giving up yet, thank you!

  Increasingly, however, her flits became the short one over to Capri Chasma and the Lunarian clandom there.

  Like Eos, Belgarre looked down from the cliffs to the depths. Otherwise the towns bore scant resemblance.. Here were no streets, luminous after dark, but mosaic pavement between buildings that stood well apart. The stone of them was seldom covered over, and centuries had not eroded its roughness. Utilitarian structures were topped with solar collector domes, but homes generally rose high, steep-roofed, with glazed balconies jutting from their walls as if sentries were posted inside, emblems of phyle and phratry emblazoned above their main airlocks. Grandest among them, the mansion of the Nan-tai etaine thrust two towers aloft and flaunted a banner by day.

  Skinsuited, Kinna and Elverir slipped from a side lock. Their biostats immediately activated inwoven heater nets against a temperature of minus fifty degrees and plunging. Brilliance as cold struck through their helmets and into their eyes, a clarity and abundance of stars seen only when the air had lain many hours windless, the Milky Way frozenly cataracting through silence. Deimos glimmered low and wan; only hours of watching its slow course and changeable brightness would single it out. Earth stood higher, coruscant blue.

  Kinna stopped. "O-o-oh," she breathed.

  Elverir tugged at her arm. ."Ho-ay, come, dawdle not," he said.

  "But it's so beautiful."

  "If my elders see us, belike they'll send me back to my task, since I need such meager sleep."

  She knew he had been given time off—grudgingly, but the pride of the house demanded it when a visitor came specifically to him. Now she realized why he had drawn her aside and whispered that she should leave her room, gear up for outdoors, and meet him at this hour, without telling anybody. The knowledge of naughtiness gave a tingle in her blood. They set off at Martian pace, neither the stride of the Earthling nor the bound of the Selenite, but a long, easy lope.

  Having arrived shortly before sunset, she had not yet had a real chance to speak with him. "What is that job, and why's it urgent?" she asked.

  His young voice—they were the same age, seven and a half—cracked a trifle. "The ... avinyon, the mine ... ti etaine pir si courai—" Mostly they used Anglo, over the eidophone or in person, because he wanted to practice his. It was apt to fail him when he got excited.

  "Oh." Although learned mainly from programs, her Lunarian was better; she had a talent for languages. "That ice lode of yours." It was the source of the old money in his etaine—not quite "family." Depleted, it was nevertheless still being worked. She understood that honor more than profit drove the business these days, to maintain standing in the courai—not quite "company"— that marketed the water.

  A quasi-instinctive jag of alarm went through her. The deposit had lost its former importance, and presently it would be gone. Yet they were talking about water. She was barely four when word came that the Synesis had decided to bring no more in, because the Martians had an adequate supply and the readily exploitable comets were used up; but she remembered the grimness that fell upon her pare
nts. Later they explained to her how water was always lost, gradually but inexorably, molecules escaping into the atmosphere to be cracked apart by ultraviolet radiation, oxygen binding to rocks and hydrogen flying off beyond the sky. Complete conservation was possible only if you sealed everything tight, the way they did on Luna. Within the next fifty years, Martians would either have to start going underground, which meant changing their entire lives, or start leaving Mars—unless they could build enough ships and robots of their own to go after ice in the largely untamed Kuiper Belt, or could make some arrangement with the mysterious Proserpinans.... Kinna shivered, as if the air had reached in and touched her.

  She jumped to practicalities: "What's the trouble?"

  "We have had a ... collapse, a rock slide. It must be cleared away. I take a shift guiding the machines."

  On Earth or Luna, Kinna thought, the machines would guide themselves. Mars couldn't afford equipment that good. She wasn't sure why. Something about the resources, human as well as natural and technological, that would have to be invested to make the apparatus that made the apparatus that was needed. Why had neither Federation nor Synesis ever managed to give Mars a boost over the threshold?

  "But I'll let Orlier and Zendant do the whole of it while you are here," Elverir was saying. She saw how he smiled at her. The blood thudded in her head, beneath the words in her earplugs.

  Silly, she thought. We'll never have a romance. We're too different. He's just a friend. But he does make all the Terran boys seem so boring. And he is handsome.

  Black-haired, brown-skinned, rather broad in the nose and lips, he showed the African strain in his race more than most Lunarians did; but the characteristic ears, cheekbones, and big oblique eyes—green in his case— stood forth. Under the gravity, he was growing up on the short and stocky side, even as Terrans commonly grew tall and slender compared to Earthlings. They two were about of a height.