The Stars Are Also Fire Poul Anderson

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NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. AH the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, or are used fictitiously.

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE

Cover an by Vincent DiFate

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 0-812-53022-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-7020

First edition: August 1994

First mass market edition: October 1995

Printed in the United States of America 09876543

TO LARRY AND MARILYN NIVEN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For advice, information, suggestions, encouragement, and much else I am indebted to Karen Anderson (first and foremost as always), Gregory Benford, CJ. Cherryh, Larry J. Friesen, Robert Gleason, Alan Jeffery, Mike Resnick, and S.M. Stirling. They are not responsible for any errors or other infelicities that remain in this book, but without them there would have been many more.

It is clear that I have also drawn on the thoughts of Freeman Dyson, Hans Moravec, Roger Penrose, Gun-ther S. Stent, and Frank J. Tipler, Again, nothing bad is their fault, the more so since I have often contradicted this or that in their writings. For that matter, some of their own ideas disagree with each other. All are immensely interesting and reach for the very heart of truth.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

(Some minor figures are omitted)

Aiant: A husband of Lilisaire.

Annie: Former wife of lan Kenmuir.

Anson Beynac: Oldest child of Dagny and Edmond

Beynac. Carla Beynac: Sixth child of Dagny and Edmond

Beynac. Dagny Beynac: An engineer, later an administrator, eventually a political leader on Luna in early days;

her download. Edmond Beynac: A geologist, husband of Dagny Beynac. Francis Beynac: Fourth child of Dagny and Edmond Beynac. Gabrielle Beynac: Second child of Dagny and Edmond Beynac. Helen Beynac: Fifth child of Dagny and Edmond

Beynac. Sigurd Beynac: Third child of Dagny and Edmond

Beynac.

Bolly: A henchman of Bruno. Bornay: Son of Lilisaire and Caraine. Brandir: Lunarian name of Anson Beynac. Bruno: Mayor of Overburg in Bramland. Caraine: A husband of Lilisaire. Mary Carfax: Alias of a sophotect in Lilisaire's service.

Delgado: An officer of the Peace Authority. Diddyboom: Pet name given Dagny by Guthrie. Dagny Ebbesen: A granddaughter and protegee of

Anson Guthrie; after her marriage, Dagny Beynac.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Erann: A grandson of Brandir.

Etana: A Lunarian space pilot.

Eyrnen: A Lunarian bioengineer, son of Jinann.

Eythtt: A henchman of Lilisaire.

Fernando: A priest and leader among the Drylanders.

Fia: Lunarian name of Helen Beynac.

James Fong: An officer of the Peace Authority.

Miguel Fuentes: An engineer on Luna in early days.

Lucrezia Gambetta: Second governor general of Luna for the World Federation.

Petras Gedminas: An engineer on Luna in early days.

Anson Guthrie: Co-founder and chief of Fireball Enterprises; his download.

Juliana Guthrie: Wife of Anson Guthrie and co-founder of Fireball Enterprises.

Zaid Hakim: An agent of the Ministry of Environment of the World Federation.

Einar Haugen: Fourth governor general of Luna for the World Federation.

Stepan Huizinga: A leader among the Terran Moondwellers in early days.

Ilitu: A Lunarian geologist.

Inalante: Mayor of Tychopolis, a son of Kaino.

Iscah: A metamorph of Chemo type in Los Angeles.

Ivala: A wife of Brandir.

Eva Jannicki: A spacefarer for Fireball Enterprises.

Daniel Janvier: President of the World Federation at the time of the Lunar crisis.

Jinann: Lunarian name of Carla Beynac.

Charles Jomo: A mediator in East Africa.

Ka'eo: One of the Keiki Mqana.

Kaino: Lunarian name of Sigurd Beynac.

Aleka Kame: A member of the Lahui Kuikawa, serving as liaison with the Keiki Moana and other metamorphs.

lan Kenmuir: An Earth-born space pilot of the Venture.

Lilisaire: A Lunarian magnate of the Republic era.

Matthias: Lodgemaster (Rydberg) of the Fireball Trothdom.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Lucas Mthembu: Birth name of Venator.

Dolores Nightborn: An alias of Lilisaire.

Niolente: A Lunarian magnate of the Selenarchy era, leader of the movement against incorporation of Luna in the World Federation.

Manyane Nkuhlu: A spaceman for Fireball Enterprises.

Irene Norton: Alias used by Aleka Kame.

Antonio Oliveira: A spaceman for Fireball Enterprises?

Joe Packer: An engineer on Luna in early days.

Sam Packer: A consorte of the Fireball Trothdom.

Rinndalir: A Lunarian magnate of the Selenarchy era, co-leader of the exodus to Alpha Centauri.

Larf Rydberg: A spaceman for Fireball Enterprises, son of Dagny Ebbesen and William Thurshaw.

Vila Rydberg: Wife of Lars Rydberg.

Sandhu: A guru at P raj rial oka.

Soraya: A metamorph of Titan type in Los Angeles.

Mohandas Sundaram: A colonel of the Peace Authority on Luna.

Alice Tarn: Anglo version of "Aleka Kame."

Temerir: Lunarian name of Francis Beynac.

The Teramind: The apex of the cybercosm.

William Thurshaw: Youthful lover of Dagny Ebbesen.

Tuori: A wife of Brandir.

Uncans: Pet name given Guthrie by Dagny.

Valanndray: A Lunarian engineer of the Venture.

Venator: A synnoiont and officer of the intelligence corps of the Peace Authority.

Verdea: Lunarian name of Gabrielle Beynac.

Yuri Volkov: A former lover of Aleka Kame.

Jaime Wahly Medina: Third governor general of Luna for the World Federation.

Leandro Wahl y Vrribe: Son of Jaime Wahl.

Rita Vrribe de Wahl: Wife of Jaime Wahl.

Pilar Wahly Vrribe: Daughter of Jaime Wahl.

Zhao Haifeng: First governor general of Luna for the World Federation.

What did you see, Proserpina,

When you were down in the dark?

Why speak you not of that hollow realm

Where the puzzled, quiet shades

Half-dreaming drift through starlessness

And you were their captive queen,

Now when we welcome you back to earth

For as long as you may abide?

The nieadows blossom beneath your feet,

The world is awash with light,

But the springtime grass has roots thafreach

To trouble the bones below.

Is this why you walk among us mute,

Is this the gift of your love,

To save us from knowing what you have known,

Until you descend again?

—Salerianus,

Quaestiones, II, i, 1-16

Long afterward, there came to Alpha Centauri the news of what had happened on Earth and around Sol. How that news came, breaking the silence that had been laid upon it, is another story. At the time, few dwellers on Demeter gave it much heed, disturbing though it was. They were in the course of departure from the world their forebears had made home, for in less than a hundred years it must perish. However, one among them was a philosopher.

His young son found him deep in thought and asked why. Because he would not lie to a child, he explained that word lately received from the Mother Star troubled him. "But don't be afraid," he added. "This is nothing that will touch us for a very long while, if it ever does."

"What is it?" inquired the boy.

"I'm sorry, I can't quite tell you," said the philosopher. "Not because it's a secret any longer, but because it goes too far back," and because ultimately it was too subtle.

"Can't you tell me anyway?" urged his son.

With an effort, the father put disquiet aside. Truly, four and a third light-years distant, they need have no immediate fears about the matter, or so he supposed. He smiled. "First you must know some history, and you have barely begun to study that."

2 POOL ANDERSON

"It jumbles together in my head," the boy complained.

"Yes, a big load for a small head to take in," the philosopher agreed. He reached a decision. His child wanted to be with him. Furthermore, if he took this chance to describe certain key factors, a realization of their importance might dawn for the poy, and that might someday make a difference. "Well, sit down beside me and we'll talk," he invited. "We'll look at the beginnings of what you're wondering about. Would you like that?

"We could start anywhere and anywhen. Creatures not yet human, taming fire. The first machines, the first scientists, the early explorers—or spaceships, genetics, cybernetics, nanotechnology—But we'll start with Anson Guthrie."

The boy's eyes widened.

"Always remember, he was just another man," the philosopher said. "Never imagine him as anything else. He'd hate that. You see, he loves freedom, and freedom means having no masters except our own consciences and common sense.

"He did do more than most of us. You remember how it was his Fireball Enterprises that opened up space for everybody. Many governments didn't like having a private company that powerful, nearly a nation itself. But he didn't interfere much with them; he didn't want their sort of power. It was enough that his followers were loyal to him and he to them.

"This might have changed after he died. Luckily, before then he'd been downloaded. The pattern of his mind, memories, style of thinking, were mapped into a neural network. And so his personality went on, in machine bodies, as the chief of Fireball."

"Aw, it's not like that," the boy protested.

"I'm sorry," his father apologized. "Often I'm vague about how much of your education you've quite grasped, as young as you are. You're right, the truth is endlessly more complicated. I don't pretend to

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 3

know everything about it. I don't believe anybody does.

"But let's go on. Of course you have learned how the Lunarians came to be. Human genes needed changing, if human beings were to live, really live and have children, on Earth's Moon. What you may not have heard much about is the other metamorphs, the other life forms that got changed too, many different new kinds of plants and animals and even people. You may not have heard anything about the Keiki Moana."

The boy frowned, searching memory. "They—they helped Anson Guthrie once—they swam?"

"Yes. Intelligent seals," his father said. The boy had encountered full-sensory recordings of the ordinary species. "They lived with a few humans like dear friends, or more than friends." The philosopher paused. "But I'm getting ahead of myself. That community wasn't founded until after the exodus."

"What's that?"

"Oh, you haven't met the word? Doubtless it is rather archaic. In this case, 'exodus' means when Guthrie led our ancestors to Demeter."

The boy nodded eagerly. "An* the an—ancestors of the Lunarians who live in our asteroids. They all had logo."

"Not strictly true. Probably they could have stayed. But they wouldn't have been happy, the way everything was changing and Fireball itself soon to be no more."

"Because of the machines?"

"No, that isn't right either. Drfn't forget, people have had machines of one kind or another for ages. They made the machines better and better, till at last they began to build robots, which can be programmed to do things without a person in control. And then finally they built sophotects, machines that can think and know that they think, like you and me."

Now the boy's voice took on the least tinge of fear.

4 POUL ANDERSQN

"But the so-pho-tects, they made themselves better yet, didn't they?"

His father put an arm around his shoulders. "Don't be afraid. They have no wish to harm us.

Besides, they're far away at Sol. Yes, Earth has come to depend on the cybercosm, all those wonderful machines working and . . . thinking. . . together. That's made Earth very different from what we have here—"

The philosopher stopped, knowing how readily dim fears arise in children and grow until they leap forth as nightmares. Already he had softened his utterances. He did not know what the cybercosm portended for humankind. Nobody did, maybe not even itself. Let him set the little heart beside him at rest, as well as he could.

"But it's still Earth, the Earth you've been told about," he said. "The countries are still all in the World Federation, and the Peace Authority keeps them peaceful, and no one has to be hungry or fall sick or go in fear." He wondered how much softening was in that sentence, for indeed he spoke of a world so distant that np ship had borne any of his kind across the space between since Guthrie spent the whole wealth of Fireball to bring a handful of colonists here. Communication with it had virtually ceased. "And we are just as different, in our own ways, from what Earth once was," he finished.

The boy's mother came into the room. "Bedtime," she told him. "Kiss Daddy goodnight."

The philosopher stayed behind, meditating. A violet dusk filled the old-style windows, for the companion sun was aloft, remote in its orbit. Presently he rose and went to his desk. He wished to record whatever ideas occurred to him while the news was fresh. As yet they were unclear, but he hoped that eventually he could write something useful, a letter to the man his son would be. Piece by slow piece, he entered:

"Few of us will ever fully understand what has come to pass—perhaps none, "as strange as it was and is.

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 5

Surely we cannot foresee how far or how mightily the aftermath will reach, whether out among the comets or onward to trouble the stars. A man and a woman searched back through time, bewildered, hunted, alone. Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless.

There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery."

i-tilisaire, Wardress of Mare Orientate and the Cordillera, at Zamok Vysoki, summons the captain lan Kenmuir, wheresoever he be. Come, I have need of you.

From Luna her message rode carrier beams through relays circling millions of kilometers apart, until it reached the communications center on Ceres. Then the hunt began.

Out here in the deeps, vessels seldom kept unbroken contact with any traffic control station. The computer on the big asteroid knew only that Kenmuir's ship had been active among the moons of Jupiter these past seventeen months. It flashed a question to its twin on Himalia, tenth from the planet. Shunted through another relay, the answer spent almost an hour in passage. The ship had left the Jovian realm eleven daycycles earlier, inbound for a certain minor body.

Given the flight plan Kenmuir had registered, calculating the direction of a laser beam that would intercept him was the work of a microsecond or less. It required no awareness, merely power over numbers. Within that vast net which was the cybercosm, robotic functions like this were more automatic than were the human brainstem's regulation of breath and heartbeat. The minds of the machines were elsewhere.

Yet the cybercosm was always One.

The ship received. "A message for the captain," she said.

POUL ANDERSON

Kenmuir and Valanndray were playing double chaos. Fractals swirled through the viewtank before them, in every color and in shapes beyond counting. Guided more by intuition than reason, fingers stroked keyboards. Forms changed, flowed, swept toward a chosen attractor, tumbled away as the opponent threw in a new function. Caught in their game, the players breathed quickly and shallowly of air that they had ordered to be cool, with a tang of pine. They ignored the cabin-wide audiovisual recording at their backs, a view from the Andes, rock and sky and snowdrift on a shrill wind.

The ship spoke.

"Halt play!" snapped Kenmuir. The contest for a stable configuration froze in place.

He spent a moment beneath Valanndray's gaze before he decided, "I'll take it at the console. No offense meant. It may be a private matter." Belatedly he realized that the apology would have gone better had he expressed it in Lunarian.

He felt relieved when his passenger replied, in Anglo at that, "Understood. Secrecy is precious by scarcity, nay?" If the tone was a bit sardonic,.no harm. The two men had been getting along reasonably well, but tension was bound to rise on a long mission, and more than once they Bad skirted a fight. After all, they were not of the same species.

Or maybe that saved them, Kenmuir thought flittingly, as he had often thought before. A pair of Terran males like him, weeks or months on end with no other company, would either have to become soul-brothers or else risk flying at one another's throats. A pair of Lunarians like Valanndray—well, alterations made in ancient genes had not brought forth any race of saints. But neither of this team found his companion growing maddeningly predictable.

Kenrhuir doubted that their occasional encounters with sophotects had soothed them. An inorganic intelligence—a machine with consciousness, if you

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 9

wanted to think of it in those terms—was too alien to them both.

He shrugged the reflection off and walked out into the passageway.

The ship murmured around him, sounds of ventilation, chemical recycling, self-maintenance of the whole structure. There went no sound or shiver of acceleration; the deck was as steady beneath his feet, at one-sixth of Earth weight, -as if he were on the Moon. The corridor flickered with a chromatic abstraction, Valanndray's choice. When it was Ken-muir's turn to decorate, he usually picked a scene from his native world, contemporary, historical, or fantasy.

Where his path descended, he used the fixed ladder rather than the conveyor. Anything to help himself stay in trim. The command cabin lay near the center of the spheroidal hull. Its interior displayed ambient space, a representation better than reality. Solar radi ance was muted lest it blind. Star images were bright ened to overcome shipboard lighting. Unwinking, they beswarmed the dark, white, amber, coal-red, steel-blue, the galactic belt icy among them. Jupiter glowed like a lamp, the sun was a tiny disc rimmed with fire-tongues. Kenmuir settled at the main control board.

"Screen the message," he ordered.

His voice sounded too loud in the encompassing silence. For an instant, bitterness woke anew.

Command cabin! Control board! He told the ship where and how to go; she did the rest. And hers was a narrowly limited mind. A higher-order sophotect would not have needed anything from him. He knew of no emergency that even this craft couldn't handle by herself, unless it be something that destroyed her utterly.

His glance swung over the stars of the southern sky and came to a stop at Alpha Centauri. Longing shook him. Yonder they dwelt, the descendants of those who had followed Anson Guthrie to a new world, and so

POUL ANDERSON

tremendous a voyage would scarcely be repeated ever again. From here, at least. Maybe their own descendants would find ways to farther suns. They must, if they were to outlive their doomed planet. But that wreck would not come for lifetimes yet, and meanwhile, meanwhile—

"Pull yourself together, old fool," Kenmuir muttered. Self-pity was contemptible. He did get to fare through space, and the worlds that swung around Sol should have grandeurs enough for any man.

Let him thank Lilisaire for that.

Wryness bent his lips upward. Gratitude was irrelevant. The Lunarians had their reasons for keeping as much human staff of both races in their space operations as possible. He, Terran, served a genuine purpose, less as a transporteer who could tolerate higher accelerations than they could than as advisor, trouble-shooter, partner of the engineers whom he brought to their work. A sophotect with similar capabilities wouldn't necessarily do better, he told himself fiercely; and if he depended on life-support systems, why, a machine had its requirements too.

The thoughts had flashed through him in a fraction of a second. The message grabbed his attention.

Its few words rammed into him. He sat for a while dumbstruck.

Lilisaire wanted him back. At once.

He had expected some communication about the job ahead. To read it in isolation had been an impulse, irrational, a sudden desire to escape for five or ten minutes. Such feelings grew in you on a twenty-four-month tour of duty.

But Lilisaire wanted him straight back.

"Easy, lad, easy," he whispered. Put down love and lust and all other emotions entangled around her. Think. She was not calling him to her for his personal sweet sake. He could guess what the crisis might be, but not what help he might give. The matter must be grave, for her to interrupt this undertaking on which

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 11

he was embarked. However mercurial some of the Lunarian magnates were, they all took their Venture most seriously. An alliance of entrepreneurs was their solitary last hope of maintaining an active presence in deep space.

Absently, as a nearly automatic accompaniment to thought, he evoked a scan of his destination. It was now about six million kilometers away. At her present rate of braking, the ship would get there in one more daycycle.

Magnified and enhanced, the image of the asteroid swam in the viewtank as>a rough oblong lump, murky reddish, pocked with craters shadow-limned against harsh sunlight. Compared to the lesser Jovian moons where Valanndray, with Kenmuir's assistance, had led machines in the labor of development, this was a

pygmy.

However, a robotic prospector had found resources worth extracting, not ices and organics but ferrous and actinide ores. A work gang was waiting for human direction—robots, of course, not sophotects: mindless, unaware, though versatile and adaptable. Skilled vision identified a landing field, a cluster of shelters, glints off polished metal skins.

Nearby loomed the skeletal form of a shield generator, big enough for its electrodynamic fields to fend particle radiation not merely off a spacecraft, but off an entire mining plant. Nevertheless it was small, when he compared those that had let him visit Ganymede and return alive.

A visit, and brief. The settlers there were sophotects, for only machines could function in such an environment and only machines that thought, that were aware, could cope with its often terrible surprises. In law the big inner satellites of Jupiter were territory of the World Federation Space Service. In practice they belonged to the cybercosm.

Kenmuir dismissed the recollection and stood up. His heart thudded. To be with Lilisaire again, soon,

POUL ANDERSON

soon! Well, if his feelings were like a boy's, he could keep his words a man's. He went back to the recreation room.

Valanndray was still there, toying with orbital mechanics variations. He turned to confront the pilot. His face, fine-boned, ivory-pale, lifted ten centimeters above Kenmuir's. On this crossing he had laid flath-boyancy aside and clothed his litheness in a coverall; but it was of deep-blue perlux, and phosphorescent light-points blinked in the fabric. Recorded snow blew behind him, recorded wind beneath the musical voice: "So, Captain?"

Kenmuir halted. Tall for an Earthling, he had long ceased letting Lunarian height overawe him. "A surprise. You won't like it, I'm afraid." He recited the message. Within him, it sang.

Valanndray stood motionless. "In truth, a reversal," he said at length, tonelessly. "What propose you to do?"

"Set you off with the supplies and equipment, and make for Luna. What else?"

"Abandonment, then."

"No, wait. Naturally, we'll call in and explain the situation, if they don't already know at headquarters."

The big oblique eyes narrowed. "Nay. The Federals would retrieve it and learn."

Irritation stirred. Kenmuir had simply wanted to be tactful. Their months together had given him an impression that his associate was in some ways, down below the haughtiness, quite woundable.

Valanndray might have felt hurt that the other man was so ready to leave him behind.

Just the same, Kenmuir had grown tired of hearing coldly hostile remarks about the World Federation, and this one was ridiculous. Granted, Lunarians had not rejoiced when their world came back under the general government of humankind. Resentment persisted in many, perhaps most, to this day. But—name of reason!—how long before they were born had the THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 13

change taken place? And their wish for "independence" was flat-out wrong. What nation-states bred while they existed, as surely as contaminated water bred sickness, had been war.

"The message went inH clear because it must, if we were to read it," Kenmuir said. "We don't have cryptographic equipment aboard, do we? Very well, it's in the databases now. Who cares? If somebody does notice it, will he send for the Peace Authority? I hardly think the lady Lilisaire is plotting rebellion."

Recognizing his sarcasm, he made haste to adopt mildness: "Yes, we'll notify the Venture, though I daresay she has already. It ought to dispatch another ship and teammate for you. Within a week or two, I should imagine."

He was relieved to see no anger. Instead, Valanndray regarded the spacefarer as if studying a stranger. He saw a man drably clad, lean to the point of gauntness, with big bony hands, narrow face and jutting nose, grizzled sandy hair cut short, lines around the mouth and crow's-feet at the gray eyes. The look made Kenmuir feel awkward. He was amply decisive when coping with nature, space, machines, .but when it came to human affairs he could go abruptly shy.

"The lords of the Venture will be less than glad," Valanndray said.

Kenmuir shaped a smile. "That's obvious. Upset plans, extra cost." When everything was marginal to begin with, he thought. The associated companies and < colonists didn't really compete with the Space Service ; and its sophotects. They couldn't. What kept them going was, basically, subsidy, from the former aristocratic families and from lesser Lunarians who traded sk with them out of Lunarian pride. And still their | enterprises were dying away, dwindling like the num-4; bers of the Lunarians themselves. ... * He forced matter-of-factness: "But the lady Lilisaire, she's a power among them, maybe more than you or I know." His pulse hammered anew.

POUL ANDERSON

Valanndray spread his fingers. A Terran would have shrugged shoulders. "She can prevail over them, yes. Go you shall, Captain."

"I, I'm sorry," Kenmuir said.

"You are not," Valanndray retorted. "You could protest this order. But nay, go you will, and at higher thrust than a single Earth gravity."

Why that grim displeasure? He and Kenmuir had shaken down into an efficient partnership, which included getting along with one another's peculiarities. A newcomer would need time to adjust. But the Earthman felt something else was underlying.

Jealousy, that Lilisaire wanted Kenmuir and not him, though Kenmuir was an alien employee and Valanndray kin to her, a member of her phyle? How well the pilot knew that tomcat Lunarian vanity; how well he had learned to steer clear of it.

Or a different kind of jealousy? Kenmuir pushed the question away. Just once had Valanndray seemed to drop an erotic hint Kenmuir promptly changed the subject, and it arose no more. Quite possibly he had misunderstood. Who of his species had ever seen the inmost heart of a Lunarian? In any case, they had a quivira to ease them. Kenmuir did not know what pseudo-experiences Valanndray induced for himself in the dream box, nor did the Earthman talk about his own.

"If you loathe the idea, you can come back with me," he said. "You're entitled." On the Moon, obligations between underlings and overlings had their strength, but it was the strength of a river, form and force incessantly changeable.

Valanndray shook his head. Long platinum locks fell aside from ears that were not convoluted like Kenmuir's. "Nay. I have sunken my mind in yonder asteroid for weeks, hypertext, simulations, the whole of available knowledge about it. None can readily replace me. Were I to forsake it, that would leave the Federation so much the richer, so much the more powerful, than my folk."

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 15

Kenmuir recalled conversations they had had, and dealings he had had with others, on Luna, Mars, the worldlets of the Belt, moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Few they were, those Lunarian spacefarers and colonists, reckoned against Terrankind. Meager their wealth was, reckoned against that which the machines held in the name of Terrankind. But if they leagued in anger and raised all the resources at their beck, it could bring a catastrophe like none that history knew.

No, hold on. He was being fantastical. Ignore Valanndray's last words. No revolt was brewing. War was a horror of the far past, like disease. "That's right loyal of you," Kenmuir replied.

"I hold my special vision of the future," Valanndray told him. "Come the time, I want potency in council. Here I gain a part of it." The admission was thoroughly Lunarian. "I regret losing your help, in this final phase of our tour, but go, Captain, go."

"Uh, whatever the reason the lady's recalling me, it must be good. For the good of—of Luna—"

Valanndray laughed. Kenmuir flushed. The good of Luna? Hardly a Lunarian concept. At most, the good of the phyle. Still, that could entail benefit for the entire race.

"As for me," Valanndray said, "I will think on this. We can finish our game later. Until evenwatch, Captain." He laid right palm on left breast, courtesy salute, and strolled out the door.

Kenmuir stood a while alone. Lilisaire, Lilisaire!

But why did she want unimportant him at her side?

Because of the Habitat? Remote and preoccupied as he had been, he had caught only fugitive mentions of that project. It seemed the Federation government was definitely going to go through with it. That would rouse fury on Luna—a feat of engineering that would make mass immigration from Earth possible—but what in the manifold cosmos could he do?

What should he do? He was no rebel, no ideologue, nothing but a plain and peaceful man who worked in the Venture of Luna because it had some berths for

POUL ANDERSON

Terrans who would rather be out among the stars than anywhere else.

Let him shoot a beam to Ceres and ask for an update on Solar System news, with special reference to the Habitat.

No. A chill traversed him. That call, hard upon what had just passed, might draw notice. Or it might not. But if the cybercosm, ceaselessly scanning its databases in search of significant correlations, turned this one up—

Then what? He did not, repeat not, intend anything illegal.

Still, best if he didn't get that update. Wait till he reached Luna, maybe till he and Lilisaire were secluded.

Kenmuir realized that he was bound for his stateroom.

To reach it felt almost like a homecoming. This space was his, was him. Most of his recreations he pursued elsewhere, handball in the gym, figurine sculpture in the workshop, whatever. Here he went to be himself. From the snip's database he retrieved any books and dramas, music and visual art, that he wished. He thought his thoughts and relived his memories, uninterrupted, unseen if maybe he breathed a name or beat a fist into an open hand. A few flat pictures clung to the bulkheads.

They showed the Highland moor of his childhood; the Grand Canyon of the Colorado as photographed by him; his parents, years dead; Dagny Beynac, centuries dead.. . .

From a cabinet he took a bottle and poured a short brandy. He wasn't given to solitary drinking, or indulgence in glee or brainstir or other intoxicants. He severely rationed both his time in the quivira and the adventures he dreamed there. He had learned the hard way that he must. Now, though, he wanted to uncoil.

He took his chair, leaned back, put feet on desk. The position was more relaxing under full Earth THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 17

weight. Yes, bound for Luna, he would most certainly go at that acceleration or better.

Lilisaire's words implied he was free to squander the energy. So he wouldn't need the centrifuge to maintain muscle tone. Of course, he would keep up his martial arts and related exercises. As for the rest of his hours, he could read, play some favorite classic shows, and—and, right now, call up Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto. His tastes ran to the antique.

As the notes marched forth, as the liquor smoldered across tongue and into bloodstream, his eyes sought the portrait of Dagny Beynac and lingered. Always her figure had stood heroic before him.

He wasn't sure why. Oh, he knew what she did, he had read three biographies and found remembrances everywhere on Luna; but others had also been great. Was it her association with Anson Guthrie? Or was it, in part, that she resembled his mother a little?

For the thousandth time, he considered her. The picture had been taken when she was in early middle age. She stood tall for an Earthborn woman, 180 centimeters, against the background of a conservatory where flowers grew extravagant under Lunar gravity. A sari and shawl clothed a form robust, erect, deep-bosomed. He knew from recordings that her gait was free-striding. Her features were a bit too strong for conventional beauty, broad across the high cheekbones, with slightly curved nose, full mouth, and rounded chin. Eyes wide-set and sea-blue looked straight from beneath hair that was thick and red, with overtones of bronze and gold, in bangs across the forehead and waves down to the jawline. After half a lifespan of sun and weather and radiation, her skin remained fair. He had heard her voice. It was low, with a trace of burr—"whisky tenor," she called it.

If her spirit, like Guthrie's, had stayed in the world until this day, what might the two of them not have wrought? But no, she ordered oblivion for herself. And she knew best. Surely, in her wisdom, she did.

Hard to believe that once she too was young,

FOUL ANDERSON

confused, helpless. Kenmuir found his imagination slipping pastward, as if he could see her then.

It was a refuge from the present and the future. In the teeth of all fact and logic, he felt himself headed for worse trouble than anybody awaited.

The Mother of the Moon

It was always something of an event, reported in the local news media, when Anson and Juliana Guthrie .visited Aberdeen, Washington. Self-made billionaires weren't an everyday sight, especially in a small seaport, twice especially after the lumbering that had been the mainstay of adjacent Hoquiam dwindled away. Not that this pair made a production of their status. On the contrary, they took ordinary accommodations and throughout a stay—usually brief, for their business would recall them—^they avoided public appearances as much as possible. Dignitaries and celebrities who tried for their company got more or less politely brushed off. Instead, the Guthries were together with the Stambaughs and, later, the Ebbesens. This too caused wonderment.

What could they have in common with people who worked hard to earn a humble living?

"We hit it off, we enjoy each other, that's all," Guthrie once told a reporter. "My wife and I aren't silver-spoon types either, you know. Our backgrounds aren't so different from these folks'.

We've known 'em for years now, and old friends are best, like old shoes, eh?" Those friends said much the same to anyone who asked. The community learned to accept the situation. As the political climate changed, envy of them diminished.

The relationship came to seem truly remarkable when the Guthries bet all they had on the Bowen laser launcher and founded Fireball Enterprises. Their fail-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 19

ure would have been almost as spectacular as their success was, if less meaningful. But after seven years their company dominated space activity near Earth and was readying ships to go harvest the wealth of the Solar System. Nevertheless they returned to Aberdeen every once in a while and were guests in the same small houses.

At last they even invited young Dagny Ebbesen to come along with them up the coast for a little vacation. Centuries later, lan Kenmuir could conjecture more shrewdly than her neighbors ever did what the real reason was and what actually went on.

In the beginning the girl drew strength and comfort more from the woman. Toward the end, though, Juliana drew her husband aside and murmured, "She needs to talk privately with you. Take her for a walk. A long one."

"Huh?" Anson raised his shaggy brows. "What makes you think so?"

"I don't think it, I feel it," Juliana replied. "She's fond of me; she worships you."

He harked back to their own daughter—she was in Quito, happily married, but he remembered certain desperate confidences—and after a moment nodded. "Okay. I dunno as how I rate that, but okay."

When he rumbled to Dagny, "Hey, you're looking as peaked as Mount Rainier. Let's get some salt air in you and some klicks behind you," she came aglow.

The resort was antiquated, shingle-walled cottages among trees. Across the crumbling road that ran past it, evergreen forest gloomed beneath a silver-gray sky and soughed in the wind. A staircase led down a bluff to a beach that right and left outreached vision. Below the heights and above the clear sand, driftwood lay tumbled, huge bleached logs, lesser fragments of trees and flotsam. Surf brawled white. Beyond it the waves surged in hues of iron. Where they hit a reef, they fountained.

A few gulls rode the wind, which skirled bleak, bearing odors of sea and bite of spindrift. At 20

POOL ANDERSON

this fall of the year and in these hard times, Guthrie's party had the place to themselves.

He and the girl turned north. For a while they trudged in silence. They made an odd pair, not only because of age. He was big and burly, his blunt visage furrowed beneath thinning reddish hair. Her own hair, uncovered, tossed in elflocks as the single brightness to see. Thus far she still walked slim and light-foot, her condition betrayed by no more than a fullness gathering in the breasts.

Whenever she crossed a sprawl of kelp she popped a bladder or two under her heel. When she spied an intact sand dollar, she picked it up with a coo of pleasure. She was, after all, just sixteen.

"Here." She thrust it into Guthrie's hand. "For you, Uncans."

He accepted while asking, "Don't you want it yourself, a souvenir?"

She flushed. Her glance dropped. He barely heard: "Please. You and . .. and Auntie—something to

'member me by."

"Well, thanks, Didd>4>oom." He gave her hand a quick squeeze, let go again, and dropped the disc into a jacket pocket. "Muchas gracias. Not that we're about to forget you anyhow."

The pet names blew away on the wind as though the wind were time, names from long ago when she toddled laughing to him and hadn't quite mastered "Uncle Anson." They walked for another span, upon the wet strip where the sea had packed and smoothed and darkened the sand. Water hissed from the breakers to lap near their feet.

"Please don't thank me!" she cried suddenly.

He threw her a pale-blue glance. "Why shouldn't I?"

Tears glimmered. "You've done so much for me, and I, I've never done anything for you. Can't I even give you a shell?"

"Of course you can, honey, and we'll give it a good home," he answered. "If you think you owe Juliana

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 21

and me something, pay the debt forward; give somebody else who needs it a leg up someday." He paused. "But you don't owe, not really. We've gotten plenty enjoyment out of our honorary status.

In fact, to us, for all practical purposes, you're family."

"Why?" she half challenged, half appealed. "What reason for it, ever?"

"Well," he said carefully, "I'm auld acquaintance with your parents, you know. Your mother since she was a sprat, and when your dad-to-be married her, I was delighted at what a catch she'd made.

Juliana agreed." He ventured a grin. "I expected she'd call him a dinkum cobber, till she reminded me Aussies these days don't talk like that unless they're conning a tourist."

"But we, we're nobody."

"Nonsense. Your sort doesn't take handouts, nor need them. If I gave a bit of help, it was a business proposition."

Already in her life she knew otherwise. Helen Stambaugh's father had been master of a fishing boat till the fisheries failed. Guthrie put up the capital, as a silent partner, for him to start over with a charter cruiser that went up to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and around among the islands.

For a while he prospered modestly. Sigurd Ebbesen, immigrant from Norway, became his mate, then presently his son-in-law, and then, with a further financial boost from Guthrie, a second partner captaining a second boat. But the venture collapsed when the North American economy in general did. The old man was able to take an austere retirement. Sigurd survived only because Guthrie persuaded various of his associates and employees that this was a pleasant way to spend some leisure time. However, Dagny, first child of two, must act as bull cook when school was out. She graduated to deckhand, then mate-cum-engineer, still unpaid, her eyes turned starward each night that was unclouded.

"No," she protested. "Not business, not really. You, you're just p-plain good—"

POUL ANDERSON

Her stammer ended. She swallowed a ragged breath, knuckled her eyes, and walked faster.

Guthrie matched the pace. He allowed her a hundred meters of quietness, except for the wind and surf and sea-mews, before he laid a hand on her shoulder and said, "Friends are friends. I don't gauge anybody's worth by their bank accounts. Been poor too damn often, myself, for that."

She jarred to a stop. *Tm sorry! I didn't mean—"

"Sure." A smile creased his face. "I know you that well, at least." He sighed "Wish it was better.

If I could've seen you folks more than in far-apart snatches—" It trailed away.

She mustered the calm, though fists clenched at her sides, to look straight at him and say almost levelly, "Then maybe you could've steered me off this mess I've gotten myself into? Is that what you're thinking, Uncans? Prob'ly you're right."

Again he smiled, one-sidedly. "You didn't get into it all by yourself, muchacha. You had enthusiastic help."

The color came and went in her cheeks. "Don't hate him. Please don't. He never would have if I—I hadn't—"

Guthrie nodded. "Yeah. I understand. Also, when the word got to me, I looked into the situation a bit. Love and lust and more than a little rebellion, right? By all accounts, Bill Thurshaw's a decent boy. Bright, too. I figure 1*11 hire an eye kept on him, and if he shows promise—But that's for later. Right now, you are too young, you two, to get married. It'd be flybait for a thousand assorted miseries, till you broke up; and your kid would suffer worst."

Steadier by the minute, she asked him: "Then what should I do?"

"piat's what we brought you here to decide," he reminded her.

"Dad and Nfother—"

"They're adrift with a broken rudder, poor souls. Yes, they'll stand by you whatever you choose, what-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 23

ever the sniggering neighbors say and the dipnose government does, but what's the least bad course? They've also got your brother to think about. School alone could become an endurance contest, in the clammy piety that's settled on this country."

Momentarily, irrelevantly surprised, she wondered, "Piety? The Renewal doesn't care about God."

"I should'ye said pietism," he growled. "Puritanism. Masochists dictating that the rest of us be likewise. Oh, sure, nowadays the words are 'environment' and 'social justice,' but it's the same dreary dreck, what Churchill once called equality of misery. And Bismarck, earlier, said that God looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America; but when the North American Union elected the Renewal ticket, I suspect God's patience came to an end."

Shared need brought unspoken agreement that they walk on. The sand squelped faintly beneath their shoes; incoming tide began to erase the tracks. "Never mind," Guthrie said. "My mouth's too apt to ramble. Let's stay somewhere in the vicinity of the point. You're pregnant. That's shocking enough, in the national climate today, but you're also reluctant to dp the environmentally responsible thing and have it terminated."

"A life," she whispered. "It didn't ask for this. And it, it trusts me. Is that crazy?"

"No. 'Terminate' means they poison that life out of you. If you wait till later, it means they crush the skull and slice off any inconvenient limbs and haul it out of you. Yeah, there are times when that may seem necessary, and there are too many people. But when across half the planet they're dying by the millions of famine and sickness and government actions, I should think we can afford a few new little lives."

"But I—" She lifted her hands and gazed at the empty palms. "What can I do?" The fingers closed.

"Whatever you say, Uncans."

"You're a proud one, you are," he observed. "I've a hunch this whole business, including your hope you

POUL ANDERSON

can save the baby, is partly your claim to a fresh breath in all the stifling smarminess around you. Well, we've been over and over the ground, these past several days. Juliana and I, we never wanted to lay pressure on you, one way or another. We only want to help. But first we had to help you grope forward till you knew what your own mind was, didn't we?"

"I could always talk to you . . . better than to anybody else."

"M-m, maybe because we haven't been around so much."

"No, it was you, Uncans." With haste: "And Auntie. All right. What should I do?"

"Have the baby. That's pretty well decided. Juliana believes if you don't, you'll always be haunted. Not that your life would be ruined, but you'd never feel completely happy. Besides the killing itself, you'd know you'd crawfished, which plain isn't in your nature. Trust Juliana's insight. If I hadn't had it to guide me dealing with people, I'd be flat broke and beachcombing."

"You understand me too. You made me see."

"Naw. I simply remarked that considering how morons and collectivists breed, DNA like yours and Bill's oughtn't be flushed down the toilet." His tone, deliberately coarse, gentled. "That was no basis for decision. You were what counted, Dagny, and Juliana was who eased the confusion out of you. Okay, now it's my turn. We've settled the what and why, we need to settle the how."

Her stride faltered. She recovered, gulped, looked into the distances before her, and asked quietly, "You don't think I should keep the baby, do you?"

"No. You aren't ready to be tied down. My guess is you never will be, unless it's in the right place, a place where you can really use your gifts. It'll hurt, giving up the young'un as soon as you've borne it, but that will heal. You see, naturally we'll get the best foster parents we can; and I've got the money to mount a proper

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 25

search for them. Not in this country, under this wretched regime, but abroad, Europe maybe. Don't worry, I'll find my way around any laws there are. You'll know you did the right thing, and can put the whole matter behind you."

Once more, briefly, she caught his hand. '-'I won't ever—not quite—but.. . thank you."

"Meanwhile and afterward, what about you?" he went on in methodical fashion. "Let's do what I should've seen to before and get you out of here, permanently."

She stiffened. Her voice came thin. "No. I told you when you first suggested it. Dad needs me."

"And is too proud to let me hire him the kind of labor you've provided for free. I know. That's how come I never pushed the idea of putting you in a school where they teach facts and how to think for yourself instead of the Renewal party line. But the chips are down, honey. If you stay home and have the child, I doubt the community will be habitable for your family. And the story will forever be in your file, available at a keystroke to any busybody. If you drop out of sight, though, more or less immediately, the petty scandal won't grow, it'll die out in people's minds.

You'll just be a black sheep that left the flock, soon forgotten. As for your father's business, why, your brother's pushing fourteen. Quite able to take over from you, and eager, if I judge aright."

"I... I suppose so—"

They were mute for half a kilometer, alone between the sea and the driftwood.

Then she blurted, "Where? What?"

He chuckled. "Isn't it obvious?"

She turned her head to stare at him. Hope went in tides, to and fro with her blood.

Guthrie shrugged. "Well, I wouldn't come right out and say it till we had a notion of where you'd take your stand. But you know Fireball's more and more arranging for the education of its people's children, and

POUL ANDERSON

we're starting up an academy for professional training. Me, I know you've always been space-struck. For openers, how'd you like to come to Quito with us, and we'll see what develops?"

She stopped. "Ecuador," she gasped—to her, Cam-elot, Cibola, Xanadu, the fabled country that Fireball had made its seat because there the government was still friendly to enterprise, the gateway to the universe.

She cast herself into his arms and wept against his shoulder. He stroked the ruddy hair and shuddering back and made bearlike noises.

Finally they could sit down in the lee of a log, side by side. The wind whistled past, driving a wrack of clouds beneath the overcast, but the waters lulled, hush-hush-hush. The chill made them shiver a bit, now that they were at rest. She spoke in weary calm:

"Why are yotf so good to us, Uncans? Sure, you like Dad and Mother, same as you do Mother's parents, but you've told us about friends all over the'world. What've we done to deserve this much kindness?"

"I expected I'd have to tell you," he said slowly. "It's got to stay a secret. Promise me you'll never tell anybody without my leave, not your folks,, not Bill when you say goodbye to him—which ain't going to be easy, even if the affair is over—not anybody, ever."

"I promise, honest to Dr. Dolittle," she replied, as grave as the child who had learned it from him.

He nodded. "I trust you. The ones who make their own way through life, paying their freight as they go, they're who you can rely on.

"All right. I know your mother's mentioned to you that she wasn't born to the Stambaughs, she was adopted. What she's never known is that I am her father." •

Dagny's eyes widened, her lips parted, she kept silence.

"So I can be simpatico with you in your bind," Guthrie continued. "Of course, things were quite different for me. This was way back when Carla and I

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 27

were in high school in Port Angeles. Carla Rezek— Never mind. It was wild and beautiful and hopeless."

"And it hurts yet, doesn't it?" Dagny murmured.

His grin flickered. "Mainly I cherish certain memories. Carla went on to marry and move elsewhere; I've lost track and she hasn't tried to get back in touch, being the good people she is. Her folks were less tolerant than yours; they got her well and thoroughly away from me, but on religious grounds they didn't countenance abortion. When the baby was born, it was adopted out. Neither Carla nor I were told where. Back then, that sort of incident was no great rarity, no enormous deal. Besides, I soon went off to college, and on to foreign parts."

"Till at last—"

"Yeah. I came back, not to stay but to revisit the old scenes, well-heeled and ... wondering."

The girl flushed. "Auntie?"

"Oh, Juliana knew, and in fact urged me to try and find out. I might have a responsibility, she said. A detective followed up some easy clues and located the Stambaughs in Aberdeen. It wasn't hard to scrape up an acquaintance. I never meant to intrude, you realize, just be a friend, so I kept mum and swear you to the same. Wouldn't have told you, either, if I could've avoided it.

Among other things, the secret will be a burden on you, because I can't very well show you any favoritism if you elect a Fireball career. Space is too unforgiving. This day, however, well, you have a pretty clear need to know. For your heart's sake, anyhow."

Dagny blinked hard. "Uncans—"

Guthrie cut back to years agone. "Helen was growing up a charming little lady. Shortly after, she married. We're a headlong breed in that regard, it seems. You—Me, in my fifties, you're about to make a great-grandfather of me!" Brief laughter boomed.

"And—and you'll make of me—"

"Nothing, sweetheart. All we offer is a chance for you to make of yourself whatever you will and can."

POUL ANDERSON

They talked onward, until the cold drove them to walk farther. The sun had gone low. It was still no more than a brightening behind the cloud deck, but a few rays struck through to kindle the waters.

He who sometimes called himself Venator was also known, to those who had a need to know, as an officer in the secret service of the World Federation Peace Authority. In truth—for the ultimate truths about a human are in the spirit—he was a huntsman.

In late mornwatch of a certain day on the Moon, he finished his business with one Aiant and left the Lunarian's dwelling. After the twilight, birdsong, white blooms, and vaulted ceiling of the roota where they had spoken, the passage outside glared at him. Yet it too was a place of subtle curves, along which colors flowed and intertwined, ocher, mauve, rose, amber, smoke. At intervals stood planters where aloes, under this gravity, lifted their stalks out of spiky clusters as high as his head, to flower like fireworks six meters aloft. The breeze had a smell as of fresh-cut grass, with a tinge of something sharper, purely chemical. He could barely hear the music in it, fluting on a scale unknown to Earth, but his blood responded to a subsonic drumbeat.

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 hunts-

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 29

man. 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

POUL ANDERSON

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 1 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 caffi 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.

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 31

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 floes 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,

FOUL ANDERSON

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 THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 33

post-capitalist econemy 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 otjier, 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 reason-34

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able 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 hanomachines 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 THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 35

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; 36

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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 Ty-chopolis, 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 outmaneu-vered 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

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 37

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 Hertz-sprung, 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 them 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 far complacency. She could prove as formidable, and is certainly as ruthless, as her famous ancestors Rinn-dalir 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 38

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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.

She maintains connections throughout the Solar System. Some of these are with former lovers, especially influential Earthmen, who, if not actually her allies, are usually willing to oblige her with information and assistance. Her reckless, voluptuous youth is behind her, but her power to fascinate and mislead has, if anything, grown with the years. This is not a negligible factor.

It is one which the cybercosm is ill suited to comprehend or control.

She is highly intelligent, possesses an extensive cybemet, and has at her call a variety of agents. About many of these we have only intimations, no knowledge of identity, location, or function.

Lately our watch program over her communications detected a message to a spacer in the asteroids, bidding him come to her immediately. (Not knowing precisely where he was, she could not beam it quantum encrypted. Nor would he likely have had equipment to decode it.) She may not be aware that we are monitoring. If she is, she doubtless means to pass this off as involving some service he can do her which is no affair of the government's.

But the matter is almost certainly not trivial. This lan Kenmuir is an Earthman in the service of the Venture. His one distinction is that he has been her guest in Zamok Vysoki, and probably her lover. (That was not publicized in any way. Although Lunarians seldom like being in the public eye, they also seldom make any effort to conceal such doings, being indiffer-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 39

ent to gossip or contemptuous of it.) His very obscurity may well recommend him to her for her purposes.

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,

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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 blue-veined 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 cheong-sam, 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."

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 41

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 favorite 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 Earth-lings 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

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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 viewscreens. 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 Magellan-ic galaxies—Crux, Centaurus . . . Alpha Centauri, where Anson Guthrie presided over his companion downloads and the descendants of those humans who had left the Solar System with him... . No, the

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 43

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? What 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

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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 THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 45

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 naivet6, 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

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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 said, "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.

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 47

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

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her career; his father, pastor in the 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 later we can take our ease. I think I would enjoy showing you about my abode."

"I'd be fascinated," he replied, which was no He, 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 determiner 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 accession to the World Federation and the rules of the Covenant were THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 49

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 fopyou."

"I certainly don't accuse or suspect you of wrongdoing," he said in haste. "I'm only, m-m, puzzled, and hope you can give me some illumination."

"Ask on." She gestured. "Shall we be seated?"

That meant more on low-^Luna than on Earth. He settled onto the divan before the table. She joined him. He was far too conscious of her nearness. A pheromonal perfume? No, surely nothing so crude, and so limited in its force.

"Taste," she urged. He nibbled a canape of quail's egg and caviar. Her daintiness put him to shame.

He cleared his throat. "My service has found clues to some activity in deep space," he said.

"Probably it's based in the asteroids, but we aren't certain."

He lied. He knew of no such thing, unless you counted that bitter resistance to Federation governance which died with Lilisaire's ancestress Niolente. The service had monitored this woman as closely as it was able because it knew she was equally opposed to most of what the Federation stood for, and she was dangerous. It learned that she had been ransacking every record and database available to her, and some of her queries had come near the matter of Proserpina. If she reached it, that could prove deadly. And now she had recalled lan Kenmuir from yonder.

"It's not necessarily illicit," Venator continued, "but it is undeclared, apparently secret. If it's going to be consequential, the government naturally wants information about it."

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"Yes," she said low, "to feed your computer models, to coordinate this also into your blandly running socioeconomic structure."

He heard but ignored the venom. "Since you have enterprises out there, my lady," and all the asteroid colonists were Lunarians, who could tolerate weak gravity, "I wonder if you might have some knowledge."

Her voice became teasing, "If the undertaking be secret, how should I?"

"I don't mean directly. Someone may have noticed something and mentioned it to you, incidentally."

"Nay. I am too distant from those realms. I have been too long away." Intensity: "Eyach, too long away."

JJecause she must stay here to wage her hidden war?

"A forlorn hope of mine, no doubt," he said. "And the whole thing may be a mistake, a wrong interpretation of ours." What it was was a farce. He had no expectation of really sounding her out. He was after intangibles, personality, traits, loves, hatreds, strengths, weaknesses, her as a living person. Given that, he might better cope with her. "1*11 be very grateful if you'd look into your memory, put a search through your personal files, whatever may possibly call up something relevant."

"Indeed I have memories. Yet you must tell me more. Thus far this is vacuum-vague."

"I agree." He did have specifics to offer her, concocted details that might be convincing.

"Best we range it at leisure." Her fingers touched his wrist. She smiled afresh. "Come, you've barely tasted your wine, and it a pride of my house. Let us get acquainted. You spoke of your African childhood—"

He must be careful, careful. But with a mind like hers, it should not be too difficult to steer conversation away from the trivia that would betray him.

The daycycle passed. They drank, talked, wandered, dined, and went on from there.

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To him, sexual activity had been an exercise desirable occasionally for health's sake. He discovered otherwise.

She bade him farewell next mornwatch, cool as a mountain spring. He was only dimly aware of his flight back to Tychopolis. Not until he had been in oneness and cleared his head did he see how she had told him nothing meaningful, and how he might well have let slip a few inklings to her.

For a while he had even thought there was some justice on her side. But no. In the long term, hers was the fire that must be quenched. In the near future— well, Terrans had brought the Moon to life, beginning before there were any Lunarians. They had their own claim, their own rights, on this world, won for them hundreds of years ago by the likes of Dagny Beynac.

The Mother of the Moon

The great meteorite that blasted out Tycho Crater had been richer in iron and nickel than most of its kind. Fragments lay far-scattered, shallowly buried under the regolith. The larger ones, chondrules fused together by the impact, thus became ore deposits such as are rare on weatherless basaltic Luna. When expanding operations demanded a Nearside base in the southern hemisphere, they were a major reason to site it in Tycho.

Dagny Ebbesen was helping build it when her boss sent her to the Rudolph lode. "We've promised the workers better quarters, you know," Petras Gedminas explained. "It will be a standard assembly, but you will get experience in directing a job." He paused. "No. We are far from the stage at which any task is standard. Expect the unexpected."

His warning was unnecessary. In the course of two

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years, Dagny had learned it well. A habitations engineer, no matter how junior, must needs be quite a bit of everything.

Three daycycles after she reached the mine, about one-tenth of a Lunar day, the disaster happened.

A field van had newly rolled in. Calling ahead, the driver identified himself as Edmond Beynac, home-bound from an expedition with his assistant. They would like a little rest and sociability before going on. Dagny was eager to meet the geologist. His reports had been important to construction, showing where the rock could be trusted, in what ways and how much. Moreover, his discoveries and analyses had changed several ideas about the entire globe. And then the adventure of it, roving and beholding where no human had ever trod!

The hour was 2130, mid-evenwatch. Her gang worked around the clock, sleeping in relays, to finish before the sun got so high that heat and radiation kept them inside full-time. Someday, she thought, technology would remove that handicap. (Yes, and it would do something about the damned, clinging, all-begriming dust.) Weariness nagged at her bones. However, at twenty-two years of age, under one-sixth Terrestrial gravity, she could ignore it. She could lose herself in what she did and what she sensed.

Her project was still a jumble of excavations, frameworks, life-support and power systems half installed, men and machines intricately busy. High-piled supplies dwarfed the shelters. Some distance off, the original camp clustered in domes and beehives, not much larger, most living space was underground. There the centrifuge stood idle. The miners were at rest, except for two or three who kept watch over the equipment that did the heavy labor, digging, breaking, and loading.

That was two kilometers eastward, almost at the horizon. Sun, shadow, and upflung dust-haze obscured it; occasionally a piece of metal flashed.

The slim pylons of the funicular lifted clear to sight.

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In double file, widely separated, they marched from the pit, passed within a hundred meters of her, and vanished beyond the southwestern rim of vision. Their cable strands made thin streaks across the sable overhead. A gondola had just been filled with ore and winched aloft to hang by its suspension. The cable was set in motion again. The gondola started its journey through heaven like a spider dangling from a strand. It was off to deliver its burden to the builders of Tychopolis, who would refine and use the metals. They in their turn sent back what the crews here needed. This was the most economical means of bulk transport, given the shortage of vehicles and rugged-ness of the crater floor.

Rugged indeed: hillocks, shelves, boulders, pock-marks, cracks, clefts, a confused and darkling plain. Behind the mine, the uppermost ramparts of a ringwall segment hove into view. The sun having barely cleared them, they remained featurelessly black, their shadow a tar pool. Everywhere else, lesser shadows fingered stone. Stars were drowned in the glare. Soiled white spacesuits, bright-colored badges and tags, scuttled tiny amidst huelessness.

Earth, though, Earth ruled the northern sky. Waned slightly past half phase, the curves of it limned a blue and white marbling, an ocherous blur that was land, a luminance that lingered for a moment after you looked away from it as a dream may linger when first you awaken. Earth was glory enough.

Below it dwelt quietude. Without air, sound dies aborning. Sometimes Dagny's receiver conveyed a voice, but mainly work proceeded mute, skill set against time. Otherwise she heard air rustle in her recycler and nostrils, blood in her ears.

"Take over," she told Joe Packer, her second, and went toward the field van. Cabin and laboratory, equipped to travel hundreds of kilometers without recharge and sustain life for weeks, on its eight enormous tires it overtopped the main dome near which it had parked. As she approached, a ladder

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swung down to the ground, an outer valve opened. The new buildings would allow direct access, airlock to airlock, but as yet visitors must walk across to the entrance.

Dagny quickened her pace. Long since adapted, she moved in her spacesuit almost as easily as in a coverall, \ow-g lope, exultantly light. A similarly garbed figure appeared above the ladder. "Hi, there!" she called. "Welcome!"

The ground shook beneath her.

The violence went up through her boots and body like a thundercrash.

Almost, she fell. The stumble threw her glance at the sun. Her faceplate darkened to save her eyes and she saw its disc pale in a sudden blindness. She recovered her footing, sight flowed back, she stared northward.

A cloud rose high above yonder horizon. It climbed and climbed, roiled and sooty, thinning at the edges to gray, a smear across Earth. Sparks tumbled from it in long parabolas, as if stars fell.

Meteorite strike! Those were ejecta, flung rocks, shrapnel. Soldiers under fire cast themselves prone— "No. When it came from the sky you were a smaller target on your feet. And you must not run.

The rearview display strip seized her mind. She spun on her heel for a direct look. Close to the pylon nearest her, the loaded gondola was swinging in ever wilder arcs. The column shuddered.

Several meters beyond, a stone hit, spurted its own little dust cloud and gouged its own little crater. Another struck a boulder, glanced off, and skittered murderously low above the regolith.

The dust began to fall. Renewed blindness fell with it. Dagny felt impact after impact somewhere hard by. She stood fast and fumbled in a pouch after her scrub cloth. Perhaps it was to stave off panic that there passed through her: Power joints in spacesuits were fine, took the curse off interior air pressure, but when

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would the engineers develop tactile amplifiers for the gloves and let you properly feel what you were doing?

The Moon accelerates objects downward slowly, but has no atmosphere to hinder them. Within a minute, sixty mortal seconds, the local bombardment had ended and she could wipe her faceplate clean.

Relief flooded her in a wave, a sob, a looseness in the knees as if she would fall on them.

Nothing worse than dust seemed to have reached the camp or the mine. Well, of course the odds had always favored that, else this operation would have been impossible, though nobody expected anything so big to strike in any given vicinity, not for hundreds or thousands of years—Her gaze traveled onward and stopped. She strangled a scream.

The pylon stood warped. The cable held but was drawn line-taut and immobile, the engine at this end surely badly damaged. The gondola lay on its side, three meters distant. Its mad gyrations had unhooked it and strewn its load afar. Metallic chunks were piled and tumbled throughout Dagny's worksite.

Somebody cried out, a hoarse and jagged noise of agony. It broke a hammerstruck silence; suddenly the radio band clamored. Dagny switched her transmitter to full power. "Hold on!" she made her voice go overriding. "Shut up! We've got rescue to do!"

Meanwhile she bounded back to the scene. A dim part of her wondered how she dared take charge, she who'd never met anything like this. Classes and simulations at the academy felt unreal. But the leadership, the duty was hers.

Then she was too busy for doubts or fears.

"Names, by the numbers." They snapped in her earphones, one after the next. Janice Bye sprawled dead, her helmet split open, her face ghastly under the long sunlight. Two people appeared to be in shock, slumped useless and shivering. And Joe, Joe Packer was on his back, right leg buried under a heap of heavy chunks.

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Dagny knelt beside him. After the first animal shriek he had gone silent, apart from the gasping breath. His skin looked more gray than brown, studded with sweat that sparkled like dew. Against it his eyeballs stood appallingly white around dark irises and dilated pupils. Did Earth tinge them faintly blue? Dagny caught both his hands in hers. "How are you, Joe?" The question came forth steady.

He fought for the same control. "Like I'm choking," he mumbled. "Doesn't hurt... much . . . any more ... but dizzy and—uh-h—"

The spacesuit leg must have been ruptured, she decided, probably at the knee joint. Air would have gushed out, more than the reserve tank could replenish, before enough gunk oozed tree and hardened to plug a nole that size. Oxygen-starved on top of trauma, his heart might fail at any instant.

"Greenbaum, fetch an air bottle and coupling," Dagny snapped. You had to tell everybody exactly what to do, or they'd fall over each other's feet. "Royce, Olson, see to Etcheverry and Graf," the shock cases. "The rest of you, crowbars, spades, get this junk off of Joe. Carefully!"

"Bloody 'ell, 'ere, stand aside," she heard. It was a rumbling bass, startlingly like Anson Guthrie's but the English accented. In her rearview she saw the speaker loom above her. Behind him, another man carried something. They must be the geologists. Nobody from the main camp or the mine could have made it here this fast.

You couldn't let just anybody prong in. "What do you want?" Dagny demanded.

"Sacre putain de I'archev^gue anglais! Sat man, 'e weell die wissout air. Get from se way." The newcomer stooped, grabbed her by the upper arms, lifted her and set her aside.

Dagny swallowed anger. Edmond Beynac, had to be him, should know better than she how to handle this kind of emergency. And, yes, his companion bore a

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tank with an attachment. From their elevation at the ladder head they'd probably seen what was happening, figured what was likely needed, and immediately gotten it. Christ, that was quick thinking.

The two men hunkered down on either side of Packer and went deftly to work. "Greenbaum, never mind, come on back and help," Dagny remembered to call.

Presently Beynac straightened. The crew were gathered with their tools. Two men started to shift rock. "Not like sat, imbeciles!" Beynac roared. "God damn! You could roll pieces down onto 'im.

Comme ci." He plucked a bar from the nearest hand and demonstrated.

Yes, Dagny thought, things did behave differently on Luna, lower gravity meant less frictional force and—She heard a mutter of resentment. "Obey him," she commanded. "He's straw boss now." .

Evidently the men at the pit had received orders to stay and cope with the damage there, but the first ones from camp were arriving. Dagny went to get them organized. When she returned to Packer, he had been freed and lay in Beynac's arms.

"I take 'im to my van and geeve first aid," the geologist told her. "Per'aps sen se m&decins-~se physicians, sey can save 'is leg." Not waiting for an okay, he bounded off across the crater floor.

They were four who gathered in the main office. It belonged to Miguel Fuentes,, chief of operations at Rudolph. Dagny Ebbesen was there as a co-ordinate supervisor and Edmond Beynac had been invited for his expertise. The fourth was Anson Guthrie. He spoke from Earth via his image in a teleset on the table.

Officially he had no business here. The mine, like Tychopolis and almost everything else on Luna, was the undertaking of an international consortium under UN supervision. But Fireball was the principal con-58

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tractor to all the consortiums, and not only for space transport services. Besides, this was an informal preliminary assessment.

"The government inquiry will drone on for months and set the taxpayers back more than the repairs will cost," he predicted. "What we can hope for today is to reach the same conclusions it will, and lay our plans accordingly."

"What plans must we make?" Fuentes asked. "A meteorite that large was a freak to start with, and then it purely chanced to slam down close to where people were. We can't let an accident like that stop us, can we? Or are the politicians really so stupid?"

He made the three-finger Wait signal in the direction of the hologram, and all held their peace while radio waves passed through space and back again. Dagny grew aware of how small the room was, how crowded with apparatus, relieved merely by a couple of garish pictures stuck on the walls—Florida scenes, she guessed, their lushness pathetic in this place. The air recycler had developed a collywobble of some kind, which gave the flow whirring from the ventilator a faint metallic reek. She longed to be outside.

"Politicians aren't necessarily any stupider than the rest of us, including corporate chairmen of the board," Guthrie said. "I've studied the immediate reports. That rock wasn't so big nor so near that it should've done the harm it did. Obviously it found a design flaw; but we thought we'd engineered for the worst-case scenario, didn't we? What got overlooked? If we can figure that out pronto, and how to correct it, we'll know what to tell the commission. Then it can fart around as much longer as it wants; we'll meanwhile be doing what's needed." He rubbed his chin. "You're the folks on the spot. Got any ideas?"

Dagny looked across the table at Beynac. She noticed that she enjoyed doing so. He was about thirty, she guessed, very little taller than her but powerfully built, with long head, square face, straight nose, prominent cheekbones, stiff brown hair, green eyes.

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Not what you'd call handsome, no. But how he radiated masculinity.

With care, because their previous encounter suggested he might have a short fuse, she said,

"You're the geologist, Dr. Beynac. Could the local rock have unusual properties?"

"It does not," he declared. "I investigated the area myself, two years ago. When the deposit was found, a student of mine, a good young man, he studied more precisely. If we had seen possible trouble, we would have warned." Free of extreme stress, he spoke English with an accent mostly in the vowels and the lilt.

"Of course," she said. "What I mean is seismic-type waves. How do they transmit hereabouts?"

"Hein? Moonquakes are negligible, of scientific interest only."

"I know. But I'm wondering how the shock wave from the impact might have arrived."

"Not enough to knock anything down," he snorted. "You saw."

Dagny bridled. "Yes. I also saw what did get wrecked. Forces had to cause that. Where'd they come from? The impact. How'd they get here? Through the ground." Impulsively: "That should be obvious enough for anyone."

He didn't explode. Instead, his gaze grew intent and he murmured, "You have a hypothesis?"

"Fancy word for a wild-ass guess," Dagny admitted. "Still, I have been thinking. How's this sound?" She addressed Fuentes as well, and especially Guthrie. "A resonant frequency set that particular pylon vibrating. This in tun? sent a wave along the cable and made the gondola pendulum. If there was a rock layer down below that reflected the shock, the impulse would be repeated and the oscillations go crazy."

Beynac sat t?olt upright. "Pardieu!"he exclaimed. "I sink per'aps—" He leaned back, eyes half closing. "Perhaps. Let me too now think if this is possible. A transverse component—" He withdrew into his brain.

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"The probability is ridiculous," Fuentes objected. "The system would have to have had the exact suitable loading and configuration at that exact moment."

Dagny nodded. "Sure. What I'm proposing is a worse case than anybody imagined. It's just that I haven't got any better idea. Do you? They'll have to collect data, and run lab tests and computer models, to check it out. But maybe today Dr. Beynac can tell us whether it's worth checking."

Guthrie's words cut across her last few. "By damn, my guess is that you've got hold of its tail!

Good for you, lass!" His grin and wink added: How I wish I could brag you up, granddaughter mine.

"And if you're right, why, we needn't worry. I could draw a hundred royal flushes in a row before those conditions repeated."

Beynac stirred, reopened his eyes, and growled, "Not true, mister." Himself unwilling to wait out transmission lag, he went straight on: "This especial accident, yes,-I must do an analysis, but I believe today that Miss Engineer Ebbesen is basically correct. However, I am interested in meteoritics. That object was a member of the Beta Taurid Swarm. Orbital precession is making it once more, after centuries, a menace. Other strikes may well kill people in other ways. Take this that has happened for a warning. In every month of June, close down topside operations from sunrise to sunset."

Fuentes stiffened. "Wait a minute! Do you realize what kind of burden that would be?"

Beynac shrugged. "Pft! I am a scientist. I shall make my honest recommendation. The costs, they are your department."

Deferential, not obsequious, Fuentes signalled a pause for Guthrie.

The lord of Fireball smiled his oddly charming smile. "Gracias," he said. "I'd been fretting about that on my own for a spell. Do me a favor and don't stampede into a press conference, okay? We'll assemble our facts and figures and calculations, and then go THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 61

public. It's that important. Major strikes are a threat to Mama Earth herself. The dinosaurs learned that the hard way; and if the Tunguska object had hit a few hours later than it did, it would've taken out most of Belgium."

Beynac regarded the image with a freshened respect, Guthrie continued: "It could be that the human race makes a profit off the Rudolph smashup. We may get sentiment for a space patrol to track meteoroids, and deflect or destroy the dangerous ones." He laughed. "Fireball will bid on the contract."

Beynac surprised Dagny when he said, soft-voiced, "Another reason for humans on the Moon."

Reasons already aplenty, swirled through her.

Energy. Criswell solar collectors going up around the globe, to beam to Earth electric power clean and cheap and well-nigh limitless.

Science. Astronomy on Farside, a stable platform, a planet-sized shield against radio interference and light pollution. Chemistry, biology, physiology, agronomy under conditions unique and enlightening. Who could foretell how much more?

Industry. Today, small specialties. Ultimately, gigantic factories of every kind, with no surrounding vulnerable biosphere, their products easily launched for the mother world in aerodynamic containers that descended gently to destination. Or sent into deeper space—

Astronautics, building the fleet and homeporting the ships, at least until humankind had struck roots elsewhere. And so the future. Yes, Luna was poor in heavy elements, airless, waterless; but wealth of that kind waited unbounded in the asteroids and comets, along with the day when no more need be torn out of living Earth.

Adventure, discovery, deeds to do and songs to sing.

"We'll swing it!" she cried.

Heat rushed into her face. This was a business meeting. Why hadn't she felt such a childish outburst

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rising, and stopped it? Fuentes, that very proper man, looked the least bit embarrassed. Guthrie's image hadn't yet had time to show reaction. She foresaw him chuckling indulgently and moving the conversation onward. Beynac—Beynac's gaze had come to rest on her. And now he himself smiled.

"Good for you, mademoiselle," he said.

Sunlight spilldd from aloft and shattered into a million dancing brilliances. The sea ran sapphire-blue, turquoise-blue, cobalt-blue, amethyst, surges and swirls over long, gentle swells. It shushed and rumbled, noises as tender as the wind and as deep as itself. Westward a bank of cumulus towered white above a dim streak that was land. Elsewhere reached distances, moving hues, odors of salt and air.

Then the day went black. For a moment Aleka knew only the eidophone before her, the sights in its screen and the rage out of its speaker. Fuller awareness returned, but the warmth and breeze that washed her stopped at her skin.

Small loss, gibed a thought fleeting by. She had been in a mucho hard mood already, outbound to her rendezvous.

Now time was like a shark behind her. She sprang to her feet and leaned out above the port side.

"Ka'eo!" she shouted. "Hele mail Aboard, awfwi!"

Her companion reared out of the water and thrust himself over the low gunwale. The boat canted. It rocked back as his bulk slithered across the deck to the middle, forward of the cockpit where she stood. "K&ohi mai 'oe," she warned: Hold fast. The swimmer pushed his front flippers into a pair of cuffs secured to the framework. His dark sleekness dripped and shimmered.

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They had been idling along at four or five knots, for Aleka was in no hurry to meet those people who awaited her. She made the boat leap. In a minutest was planing, up and down in eagle swoops, forward at a unicorn gallop. The engine purred quietly, being almost half as efficient as a spaceship's plasma thrust, but air brawled around the hyalon screen in front of her.

Through it, Ka'eo's liquid brown gaze met the woman's. He barked and grunted loudly enough for her to make out. The language was basically Anglo, with many Hawaiian and Japanese loan words and a number—larger year by year, it seemed—that were purely of the Keiki Moana. But no human mouth could have shaped just those sounds.

"[What hastens us, oath-sister?]"

Aleka touched a disc on the pilot panel and a supersonic carrier beam gave him her reply, clear through the racket, in her version of the same tongue. "A fight between the inspectors and some kauwa. At least two dead." She looked at the transmission in the flat screen, tiny images, cries she barely heard amidst the booming of her speed.

To her eyes, the seal face did not change, save that whiskers stood straight out from the muzzle and fangs briefly gleamed. She had sometimes wondered what his kind read in the mobile features of hers. Maybe they were too alien for a play of expressions to convey much. She did sense horror in his tone. "[This is bad, orca-bad. Speak to them, sister mine! Make them stop!]"

Crazily into her mind lurched another question. Where did that phrase come from? Killer whales didn't haunt these seas. Keiki Moana had doubtless seen them on documentary programs and such, but why had their name entered the language, and as a word for evil? For centuries, her own race had pitied and protected what big cats remained.

Was the forebrain of the seal-folk so new and thin an overlay that an inborn dread of beasts which had

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preyed on their ancestors still dominated it? Then what other instincts also did?

"Metamorph" was an easy word to say. Was it that easy a thought to think? A strain of organisms in which the DNA had once been modified to bring forth something never seen in nature—Microbes that decomposed or sequestered toxic wastes. Trees with sap that was fuel. Exotic animals. Talking animals. Lunarians—But when you change the body like that, what changes do you make in the mind?

The soul?

Maybe it was only that certain Keiki had wandered far north, unbeknownst to humans, and brought back tales of orcas. Or maybe not. How little she really knew of these people, her friends and fellows in the Lahui Kuikawa.

No matter yet, surely not if murder went on any longer. She forced steadiness upon herself, recited the Tulip Mantra seven times, felt the painful tension leave her back and the trembling leave her hands. "Major Delgado, por favor," she said at the phone, in mainland Anglo. A man's pale countenance entered the screen. "I'm coming, top speed. But can't you get this under control?"

The officer in charge of the Peace Authority's investigative team bit his lip. "We're trying," he grated. "They don't listen. Do they understand?"

"Maybe not. More and more of their younger ones have little or no direct contact with us. But what's happening?"

"At the moment, a standoff. See." Delgado swept a scanner around, and Aleka saw.

His party's craft, a small submersible with an observation turret, lay near the edge of a biorange. To starboard, the green, loosely woven mat of vegetation reached beyond sight, rippling to waves and currents, drinking light, weaving atoms together into material desired by its designers—in this case, Aleka knew, anticarcinoma virus base. In the offing an attendant glided about, agleam, oblivious of everything but its duties, a versatile machine with a program capable of

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some learning and much adaptation, nevertheless just a robot and unaware.

To port, blood streaks curled luridly bright. Repeated bursts of foam showed where a body plunged or broached or slapped the water as if it were the enemy. They circled the vessel, those shapes, around and around, more than Aleka had imagined, two or three score. The clamor out of their throats reached her faintly over the phone, hoarse and harsh. Del-gado's team had spaced themselves along the rails, ten men and women in blue field uniforms. Each pair of hands gripped a firearm.

The view went back to the commander's face. "I've called on the amplisonor for peace, again and again," he said desperately. "They pay no attention. They're no real threat to us, of course, but—What should we do? Submerge? Leave the vicinity?" He tautened. "We can't let them suppose they've won, those lawbreakers."

"Hang on," Aleka said. She tapped for her location. It appeared on the pilot board. "I will be there in about ten minutes." She drew breath. "What exactly went wrong? Por favor, begin from the beginning, senor."

In the world beyond Hawaii she had learned the value of courtesy, even carefully measured deference. Besides, her brief meeting with him had given her the idea that this was a decent man.

If his task put him at odds with her, that wasn't his fault; and today they could join to fend oif more deaths. They must!

He nodded. "Ciertamente. On our cruise we've found considerable evidence of widespread violation, especially ecological; but you can hear the details later, when we enter our report. However, we saw nothing so blatant as here, where we've come on that band of seals—uh, metamorphs—openly plundering fish, kinds offish necessary to the health of the range. You probably know which I mean."

Aleka did. They weren't the little darters developed to eat parasites, they were the grazers that kept the sea

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plants well pruned: fat, sluggish, temptation incarnate.

Delgado seemed to draw comfort from speaking methodically. "I called on them to cease and desist.

They ignored me. I had us move closer, to no effect. Senorita, our duty is to the law and the general welfare. More and more seals were converging on us. It was clear a large gang had been poaching. I sent a man down onto a diving fin with a shock gun. The idea was to hit a few of them—only painfully, you understand, no serious injury—hoping they would disperse. Instead, two of them scrambled up onto the fin, before our man saw, and attacked him. Senorita, you know those are big animals, with sharp teeth. His squad mates on deck shot them dead. Quite rightly. He returned.

Now the creatures act as if they think they're besieging us. Naturally, knowing you were on your way, I had you called."

He sighed. "I could wish, now, you had joined us earlier, yes, had accompanied us from the start.

But that is hindsight, no?"

"Your plan was reasonable under the circumstances, Major," Aleka gave him.

Inwardly, to ready herself for the encounter ahead, she rehearsed those circumstances: complaints, suspicions, proven losses, violent incidents, not to mention the demographics. The Peace Authority was bound to look into them. If anything, the surprise lay in how long it waited. Delgado had dropped hints—about hopes that the Lahui could somehow resolve the problem among themselves—thereby helping people around the planet believe that the tribes and cantons and ethnoi of Earth worked, because that helped keep people happy and orderly—Yes, when at last there was no choice but to mount an official investigation, it made sense for the First inspectors to go forth on their own, as well prepared as databases and vivifers could make them. Consciously or unconsciously, a local guide might lead them astray.

Yet she was in fact a human liaison, within the

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Lahui, between the Keiki Moan a and the outer world. It also made sense for her and a metamorph to join the team after a while, discuss their experiences, conduct them to wherever else they two felt the inspectors should observe things. That they had been on their way when battle erupted was a coincidence.

Not a very unlikely coincidence, Aleka thought. Not when you recalled how conflict seethed in these waters.

Delgado scowled, as if deciding he had shown too much softness. "These are not the first killings," he stated. "Humans have died."

"Not just humans," Aleka countered.

She could well-nigh hear him thinking, choosing his words. After all, sentient metamorphs had full rights under the law, whether they descended from his species or another. Sophotects did, which could not really be said to have any ancestors—if "rights" in any traditional sense bore any meaning for inorganic intelligences, Aleka thought while she waited.

"The destructive activity has been .. . almost entirely ... by the ... seal beings," Delgado said.

"Those humans who got killed were trying to stop it." They had come upon it mostly by chance, and reacted more strongly than was prudent. But who would have expected fury to respond?

"Seven altogether," Aleka answered. "And some nonfatal injuries. Keiki Moana lost many more."

Humans generally had tools aboard their vessels, knives, tridents, boathooks, anchors, which could double as lethal weapons. The vessels themselves could, if driven hard against swimmers.

Delgado's visage congealed. "It is going to stop, senorita. And I did not say no humans are to blame."

She believed she knew what he meant. Something of the chill crept back into her. "Hang on," she repeated. "Don't provoke anything. My partner and I will be there pronto."

He nodded and went from the scanner field, though he left the phone transmitting. She peered ahead, past

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Ka'eo's bulk. The submersible was now on the horizon, a fingerling to behold but rapidly growing in her sight. She switched to manual control and sent her hands in a dance across the board. The boat swung about to a precise aim and bounded onward.

"Did you follow that, Ka'eo?" she asked.

"[I think so, oath-sister,]" he replied.

"What do you make of it?" Since it was to a Keiki she spoke, that was literally: "How do your senses take this water?"

"[A riptide through reefs.]" He fell silent for a bit. Arrow-swift in the chase, his folk were oftenest slow and careful in their serious thinking, as though the skill was new enough to them that they still had great respect for it. Aleka had wondered if that might not be exactly true. A mere few centuries since the experimentation that brought this race into existence—Had the earliest humans likewise pondered their way forward?

"[Kauwa,]" he said, as nearly as he could pronounce the word. The judgment was self-evident, but what followed drew on his knowledge. "[They are not here at this same time by happenstance. No, they are a band, under leadership that planned the foray. Else they would by now have scattered.

They must have nets or mesh bags down below, which they were filling with fish to take home. But home, to them, cannot be a fixed rookery, or I would have heard of it. They must shift about between islets, rocks, small uninhabited coves and beaches, according to some scheme. It is the germ of a ... a nation, oath-sister.]"

Aleka grimaced. "Nomads. I was guessing as much." Hadn't it been inevitable, sooner or later? "Why did they attack when they were caught robbing, why didn't they flee?"

"[The attack must have been in rage, by those two of them. It is clear that the alpha bull commanded the others to hold back, yet also to stay. He must want to show strength, determination.]"

Her heart stumbled. It quickened again when the

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croaking, ringing voice went on: "[But perhaps he hopes to bargain or, anyhow, talk. He knows he cannot prevail. If a little wisdom drifts within him, he knows as well that no kauwa nation can long survive, once the landfolk go on hunt. Nor can it be worth surviving, without anything more than what few poor things they can steal, without writing, pictures, robots, machines, tools.]"

Without hands, Aleka thought. Sadness closed teeth upon her. By what right had those scientists bulged out these brains, to make a creature that was neither a good human nor a good seal?

Research into the nature of intelligence was no excuse. They should have been downloaded, those scientific minds, so that they could be burning in a virtual hell.

No. She overrode herself. Were it possible to go back in time, by what right could she annul the creation of beings she loved, oath-brethren of the Lahui and fountainhead of its identity? Ka'eo was what he was, a good Keiki Moana. Open a way for his race to find its own fulfillment.

Coolness took over. Her boat was approaching the Authority craft. She cut the drive. Noise died away, the hull came down, waves splashed alongside, casting brine on her lips, and she slid onward to the outlaws.

They had seen her coming and fallen quiet, darknesses awash in the swell. Sunlight gleamed off wet pelts and big eyes. Ka'eo freed his flippers, turned about, and barked at them.

Delgado's image entered the phone screen. Aleka saw him standing on deck near the turret, amidst his armed crew. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

"Trying to establish contact, Major," she answered. "With luck, we'll negotiate."

"What? No, you can't. These are criminals. We've been in touch with the station ashore. It's activated monitors in the range, and the damage that they report has been done—"

"For favor. We two aren't about to make a treaty. We may find how to end this business without further

70 FOUL ANDERSON

bloodshed. Our chances are best if we aren't disturbed meanwhile. If they aren't."

Delgado flushed, then swallowed, nodded, and stepped aside. He was an able officer, Aleka realized. He'd simply been placed in a situation he didn't comprehend. How well did she?

Wake swirled behind a long form. It reached her boat. A scarred head lifted to look over the gunwale. After a moment, Ka'eo slipped overside to join the chieftain.

What happened in the next hour was not altogether clear to the woman, and sometimes unknown. The Keiki Moana communicated among each other by far more than speech. Often they dived below, remaining for minutes; or they swam off through the pack, touching noses here, stroking flipper across back there; or they floated mute and motionless. Two frigate birds cruised on high, wings and split tails like drawn swords. Clouds in the west loomed larger, glooms grew beneath them, a rainstorm fell blue-gray and she heard the whisper of it across the kilometers.

At the end, she too had her say. Thereafter, "[So shall flow this tide,]" the alpha bull grunted, and went back to his gathered followers. Brief raucousness resounded. As one, they plunged. Time passed before she saw them emerge, far off, bound north. Several of them towed pursed nets full of a harvest that glistened.

"What is this?" Delgado was crying. "What have you done?"

Aleka sighed. The hour had exhausted her, wrung her bloodless. "We agreed they could go—"

"Scot-free? Carrying off their booty? No!"

"Senor, they lost two camaradas, others of them are in pain, and their efforts have gone for very little. The fish they took are already dead. If you let them return home in peace, they'll leave the bioranges alone for three months as measured by the Moon, and won't raid fish herds either.

They'll subsist as best they can on what they catch in the wild. Meanwhile their THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 71

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