leaders will negotiate with ... acceptable representatives of your side, trying for a permanent arrangement. You can pursue them and start real hostilities going, if you like, but / think you've come out of the affair mighty well."

Delgado gnawed his lip. Finally: "Would you come aboard and tell us more, seflorita?"

"Oh, yes, yes."

As she slipped closer, Aleka's pulsebeat accelerated. She spoke the Thorn Mantra to herself and strength flowed back from some inner well. A single bound lifted her out of the cockpit; she caught a rail with one hand, pressed bare feet against the sun-warmed metal of the submersible, and swung herself onto its deck. Her boat drifted free, Ka'eo watchful beside it.

The constables stared at the visitor, the men with pleasure. They saw a young woman—twenty-eight—

of medium height, clad in shorts and halter. Swimming, running, climbing, strenuous play had made her figure superb. Many breeds of human had come together in tawny skin, wavy blue-black hair bobbed just below the ears, round head, broad face, short nose, full mouth, big russet eyes.

Disciplined, the squad members stayed at their posts while one man accompanied Delgado to greet her.

Stiffly, the commander shook hands. Her palm was hard to the touch. "Bienvenida," he said. "I don't believe you've met Dr. Zaid Hakim. He joined us to observe for the Ministry of Environment.

Dr. Hakim, Seflorita Aleka, uh-m, Kame?"

She smiled. "Alice Tarn, if you'd rather speak straight Anglo," she said. "Buenas tardes, seflor."

Hakim, in workaday civilian clothes, bowed. "How do you do," he replied. His usage was scholarly, his accent clipped. "My compliments on a remarkable performance. Do I understand correctly, you speak for your community, Mamselle Tarn?"

"No," Aleka told him, surprised. "No one person can do that. I'm a, an interpreter, you might say." But why should he know much about her folk? How many 72

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different groupings were there in the world? Half a million? And a number of them changeable as foam, too. The Lahui Kuikawa amounted to about ten thousand humans on a small Hawaiian island and maybe fifty thousand Keiki Moana, maybe considerably more, prowling the greatest of the oceans.

Had their obscurity been what protected them, and was it now coming to an end?

"Let's go below and talk," pelgado proposed. To the crew: "At ease, but keep alert."

His cabin was cool and dim after the molten-bright water outside, cramped but adequately equipped.

It extruded three chairs. "Do be seated," he urged. "Refreshment?" A servotube brought coffee for him and Hakim, beer for Aleka. She felt she'd earned it.

Was earning it. The catnip tingle vanished from her awareness as Hakim said, "Yes, you did amazingly, mamseUe, but I fear it was basically futile." He raised a hand. "No, no, we shall not give chase. However, the Federation cannot strike deals with a bandit gang."

Aleka braced her spirit. "They aren't that, senor."

"What, then?"

"Nothing you—the Federation has a word or a law to fit, really. They are kauwa."

"Please explain."

"Where shall I begin? 'Kauwa' in modern Hawaiian usually means a servant, but it can also have its old meaning of an outcast, an exile, not necessarily a public enemy but someone who doesn't fit into society, maybe because his birth was irregular, or because he doesn't conform to the rules, or he's simply been too long away from his people."

"I must remember the word," Delgado said. "The world has quite a few like that." These men were not her enemies, Aleka thought. They did not want to oppress anybody. It made them the more dangerous.

"Bueno," she continued, "as the numbers of the Keiki Moana increased, they naturally had to range farther to support themselves.. . . Wait. Let me fin-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 73

ish, por favor. They could not and should not have kept on being pensioners, fenced off and fed.

They aren't pets or show animals, for Pele's sake, they're sentients! They had their, their own potentials to realize, their own culture to develop, and it couldn't be the same as ours. Do you expect sophotects to think or feel or act like you? Then why should metamorphs? And what might we learn, what might we get in the way of inspiration, from a nonhuman organic civilization?"

She had almost said "living," but checked it. Best not let out any antagonism toward artificial intelligence, no, call it electrophotonic intelligence. Otherwise her words were beginning to run smoothly. How often had she used them on outsiders, trying to explain?

"For that, they needed to be self-sufficient. You know about the fish ranches, dolphin domestication, aquaculture, recreational enterprises, salvage and repair and scientific survey work and all the rest, whatever they could do together with humans, at sea or on the reefs. It was labor-intensive, but viable because it spared the capital cost of robotization. The proceeds let us of the Lahui give a living to our poets, thinkers, singers, artists, dancers, inventors, dreamers. Our spirits.

"But robotization got to be cheap. And the Keiki population grew. Poverty did. More and more of them had to go hunting for food. Fewer and fewer were in regular, direct relationships with the Lahui, the core society. There's the origin of the kauwa, senores. The poor people, the fringe people. Yes, certain of them have gone back to a kind of savagery. But can you blame them?"

Aleka drew breath. "Pardon me if I've repeated common knowledge," she ended. "I know you've heard most of this before, Major Delgado. But sometimes it's hard to tell what is common knowledge, out in your Orthosphere."

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Hakim raised his brows. "Then you consider your . . . Lahui to be of the Heterosphere?" he asked.

"Bueno, we don't have much to do with the cybercosm or the global economy. I suppose, yes, to you we may all look like kauwa." Defiantly, Aleka knocked back her beer.

Had the Lyudov Rebellion succeeded—or had it even won to a middle ground, where some bounds were put upon the machines—But that was a daydream. It had been a lost cause from the start; and maybe rightly. No sense romancing about a wildness that ceased long before she was born. Yuri Volkov had stopped doing so... and he and she drifted apart.. ..

"Your metamorphic friends could have ample food, and whatever else they require, for the asking,"

Hakim said. "They need only heed the law, quit damaging property and ecology."

"Give up their freedom?" she challenged. "Hunting is in their genes."

"Humans adapt."

"Humans have had far longer, and many more opportunities. Why, the world as it is came from them.

And I'm not sure now well or happily adapted most of them are."

"Given proper population restriction, a limited amount of predation on wildlife would be allowable, integrated with the general ecosystem. But the seals' hunting is uncontrolled, and becoming serious."

"Birth control isn't in their genes either." Abruptly she felt how forlorn her arguments were in the face of this implacable reasonableness.

"Humans generally manage." Hakim paused. "There are exceptions. Your little society—your, ah, Lahui Kuikawa—has not reduced its birth rate much. I mean your part of it, the human members.

Already you are crowded on your island, are you not? Soon you too will have to give up your freedom, as you put it."

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 75

"We need time," Aleka pleaded. "Of course we have to stabilize our numbers. The Keiki close to us know it too. We're working on it, both our species, and we'll bring the idea to the kauwa. They aren't stupid either. But—a life with so few children around us, so few pups—Give uptime!"

She wanted to go on: It's not an either-or matter of personal choice and everybody making the correct renunciation. It's that we have always been a young folk. Merriment and recklessness, sudden moonlit lovemaking and houses full of growth, birthday festivals, carp flags flying in springtime, yes, and reverence for the aged, whose wisdom not many of us have reached to, all these things and more have always been our lives. We can't instantly become something else.

And then, the Keiki Moana are our spirit kin. Very likely we have learned more from them than ever they from us. Forebears of ours were caretakers of their colony, after it outgrew its Big Island refuge and was moved to Niihau. (Fireball, its original protector, had disbanded. Guthrie himself had gone to Alpha Cen-tauri. Somebody must mediate between these beings and the human-machine world. Have you forgotten the history that made us, you men?) As they began to sustain themselves, other humans joined in, to help and to share. Selection: The new recruits were they whom sea and open sky, village and open boat, firelight and starlight, called away from the cybernetic world.

They raised their children accordingly. Those of the next generation who did not like it moved elsewhere. Those who did like it stayed, and their children in turn became still more the Lahui Kuikawa, the Free People. And they were oath-siblings to the Keiki Moana, fared with them, foregathered with them, rejoiced with them, mourned with them, until those strong sea-born instincts roused human urges that they had believed were safely buried.

No, she wanted to say, we haven't gone into hiding. We haven't tried to bring back an ideal Stone Age that

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never was. I'm proof of that. But we have made a life that is our own, that is us, and we will not willingly let it die.

Useless, here. She had said quite enough.

Hakim smiled—a little regretfully, she thought. "I can sympathize," he told her. "I expect that after further study I will recommend that the government agree to your proposal and see if any arrangement can be made with the—the kauwa. At least, with this particular, perhaps unique band of them. We will rely heavily on you ... civilized . . . Lahui, to help negotiate and afterward keep the arrangement in force."

His lips drooped. He shook his head. "But in honesty, mamselle, I do not expect anything important to result. At best, the robbers will agree to be fed and medicated and otherwise provided for.

History suggests that this will demoralize them, encourage the criminal element, and do nothing to curb their breeding. There is also your culture to deal with. In many ways it seems admirable. But can it accommodate itself to—let me be frank—to the real world?"

Time, Aleka wanted to cry. Give us time, give us space, land, and waters where everything isn't owned or regulated; let us be alone a generation or two, till we have changed ourselves without destroying ourselves.

Useless, here.

Useless, likewise, to linger. After what had happened, the team wouldn't cruise farther. It would report and doubtless be ordered back to base, whence it would be dispersed on other duties. If the counsel of Delgado or Hakim was wanted, their telepresence would be immediately available, wherever they might be On Earth.

Aleka had a familiar sense of lying in a box while the lid closed.

Nevertheless she stayed for two or three hours. The men had questions for her, shrewd but courteous. They were more ready to listen than to talk. She found herself telling them unexpectedly much about her home.

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—the island, a mountain looming above coral ground, orchards, meadows, parklands, once lovely in their sea-girt loneliness but now with little solitude anywhere, because the village had grown till it was—

—the town. Formerly a longhouse stood surrounded by the cottages of the dwellers, who had it in common for their ceremonies, celebrations, and mutual business. Today a dozen such clusters served as many 'ohana—

—extended families, whose members shared in caring for each other from birth to cremation. Yes, of course children knew who their parents were and took the most love and guidance from them; but uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents were nearly as close and you were always welcome in their homes. Yes, of course people quarreled, feuded, lied, swindled, stole, betrayed, perhaps more than among atomic individuals with easily made, easily dissolved relationships; but their 'ohana found its ways to compose matters. Besides friends, respected elders, and traditional mores, they had the influence of the luakini—

—the temple, where they attended the simple rites and heard anew the simple words of the Dao Kai that Kelekolio Pela had uttered long ago, the Sea Way for a sea folk. They also held secular assemblies, where those adults who wished could debate and vote on public questions and where cases were tried. Criminals were handed over to the police on Oahu, but the worst punishment was exile, expulsion from the island, the 'ohana, the people—

—and their songs, stories, dances, games, festivals, solemnities, some of Keiki Moana origin, all special to the Lahui soul. The community did not try to wall itself off, but it did nothing to encourage casual visitation, and except for educational purposes children did not watch multiceiver programs before they had had their twelfth-year initiations. Afterward they might well go elsewhere for part of their schooling, as Aleka had done. Yet if their early lives had taken hold

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in them, upon returning they would want their beloved ethos to abide. Whoever grew discontented was free to move away. Increasingly many were doing so. This was not always gladly—

—for indeed the Lahui, human as well as nonhu-man, had grown beyond the numbers which their permitted stretches of ocean and their industries could support. Economic independence had been the aim, the two races joining their different abilities to win a living from the waters. Given robotics, biotics, energetics, nanotechnology, trained minds, skilled bodies, life went on with a beguiling appearance of simplicity for generations. The products were traded for manufactured goods from outside and a modest amount of luxury. But as the island population waxed, global demand waned; recycling and direct synthesis accommodated ever more of it. When mining and refining operations beyond Earth were dwindling, how should a few minor enterprises on her sea much longer endure?

"Oh, yes," Aleka said. "We can live on our Federation credit. We'll not starve or fall sick or go homeless. Gracias for that."

Hakim overlooked the bitterness in her voice. His stayed mild. "No, any thanks are due modern productivity. Credit merely shares out the goods. What have your people been spending theirs on?"

Aleka shrugged. "Whatever a given person fancies. Not uncommonly, something for their 'ohana.

Keiki usually order toys, unless they save to buy a piece of capital equipment. I mean those who draw their credit. They're the minority."

"Who is to blame if most are unregistered?"

"I'm not blaming," Aleka sighed. "I'm telling. When none of us have anything but credit payments, that will be the end of us. Lives will go on, no doubt, but the meaning, the heart will be out of them, and what we walking, swimming ghosts will do, I can't foresee."

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 79

"You shall have to change," Delgado declared, his tone less brusque than the words. "It begins with your kauwa. We don't want to hunt them down—robots, guns—and imprison them. But they threaten the regional balance of nature and it must stop. So must their unrestrained breeding. By compulsory inoculation, if nothing else will do." He did not mention the historical precedents. He could rely on her to realize that the kind of popular opposition which several of those measures had had to overcome w.ould not arise in this case.

"We will start by seeing what comes of the agreement you worked out today, Mamselle Tarn," Hakim added. "It may lead to real progress, especially if your town cooperates. But the Lahui cannot continue as they are, either."

"You're asking us to transform ourselves faster than we can," Aleka remonstrated. "I tell you again, we are not tribeless neonomads of the Ortho. Our ways are us. Give us time to adapt them.

Give us enough scope, enough access to resources, that meanwhile we can at least produce for ourselves what we want, instead of depending on you and, and paying your price for it!"

Hakim's look went stern. He too must be near the end of his patience. "I hear you again, Mamselle Tarn, and I repeat that what you ask for is not possible. It would infringe on existing ranges, ranches, extractive industries, which are marginal already. It would disrupt ecology throughout this part of the Pacific. It would be incompatible with plans for adjustment and conversion as those industries are phased out. These are considerations of planetary significance, mam-selle,"

beside which the death of one little culture was a quantum fluctuation.

"This argument is foolish, pointless," Delgado put in. "Dr. Hakim and I aren't going to decide anything. We'll report and recommend, along with hundreds of other investigators," including sophotects and surveillance robots, "but the decision will come from Hiro-80

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shima. Bring your case into the public communications if you wish. Get your representatives to try convincing their delegates in the Assembly. Appeal to the High Court and the President."

"Or to the Teramind?" Aleka jeered. The apex, the ultimate intelligence of the cybercosm—in an earlier era, she thought momentarily, she would have said "God."

She slumped. "No. I'm sorry, seftores. You do mean well, by your lights, and you're quite right, I have no further business here. If you'll excuse me, I'll go home."

They made polite, reply and escorted her back topside, these civilized men whose presence she could no longer stand. She used the informant on her wrist to call the boat to her. "Adi6s," she said—not "aloha"—and sprang down into the cockpit. Ka'eo accompanied her as she drew away.

The rainstorm afar had passed with subtropical swiftness. Ahead of her the sun was descending.

Gold shivered across waves that swung deep blue and violet. They lullabied, they rocked her. The air was cooling; green odors off the range fell aft and she breathed a subHminally fine salt mist.

In limitless heights, sunset glowed off the wings of an albatross. For this while, she was free.

She did yearn homeward—her cottage, jasmine and hibiscus fragrant along the porch, palms murmurous overhead, gravel and bamboo and beautiful stones around the longhouse, the sweep of its roofbeams challenging Paniau's peak in heaven, lanes and gardens where folk strolled easily and talked softly and someone plucked strings or blew into a flute—shops and ships by the docks, worksteads closing at day's end and machines that never rested, the cenotaph to those lost at sea, for a measure of daring went with being of the Lahui—

—but first she wanted a time alone with her ocean and the silent nearness of her oath-brother.

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There was no haste. She had instruments for night. Besides, a Moon not much past the full would presently rise. She stopped the motor and touched a command. Mast, boom, and centerboard extended, mainsail and jib deployed, rudder and helm came forth. The wind was fair for Niihau. She wasn't particularly hungry or thirsty; Delgado^ad been hospitable in his stiff fashion. However, she took a water bottle and a food bar from the cabin locker before she settled down to steer.

Bound on its own course, the submersible dropped below the eastern horizon. Ka'eo was hardly more than a roiling in the water, several meters to starboard. Often he went under for minutes at a time, while she refrained from wondering what he snatched for himself. Now and then an aircraft glimmered across the sky, no more than a spark afloat. She was free to seek peace. , It did not come easily. No loosening of muscles, no mantra was of great help. She set about understanding this past day as part of an entirety. Nothing really new had happened. It was only that things were coming to a head, which she had known they would. That • knowledge grew in her throughout her life, with roots that went back in time to before she was born and in space to the ends of the Solar System. But she had seen, she had felt, for herself.

She searched out memories, less from here than from abroad, Russia, Yuri, the Lyudovite passion against the cyberneticized world that still smoldered deep down in her, missions to mainland America and the underground web of metamorphs that she touched upon, Luna and the cold Lunarian anger, the machines, everywhere the machines, and the sophotects in their multitudes and their oneness. ...

History had become the next phase of evolution. No use railing against it, any more than protesting the doom of Alpha Centauri's Demeter. At least, on Earth, when the dinosaurs perished the mammals

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came into their glory; and a dinosaur lineage lived on in the birds. Might likewise a doomed people somehow find their way to some rescuing transfiguration?

She found no clear answer, but thought, perspective, together with wind and sea and the tiller athrill beneath her hand, granted a certain calm.

The sun sank, the quick night fell, stars glittered forth. Not everything was downfall. Had she lived in the early years of the Lahui, she would never have seen such a sky. Technology moved forward, global population diminished, global greenhouse came under control and there were fewer obscuring clouds, light pollution lessened. Of course, a haze of it remained. She did not behold the splendor her ancestors knew, those of them who took their canoes from end to end of this ocean or those whom Yankee ships brought afterward from across the same reaches, east and west But then, she had stood on the Moon, on Farside where no Earth dazzled, and looked up into naked space.

She had stood within a single gigantic diamond, and through splintered radiance heard what might yet prove to be words of hope.

As if it followed her train of memories, Luna rose at her back. The mainsail filled with wan light, and glare cast a trembling road.

She put the helm over. Fabric crackled, water strewed brightness and gurgled, the boat came about.

"Aleka Kame," said the phone.

She started. Who might that be?

"Dolores Nightborn to Aleka Kame, to Alice Tarn," ran the voice. Female, it spoke colorless Anglo, but instantly she knew where it came from. "Acknowledge."

The blood thundered in her ears. The finger shook that reached to touch the instrument. Its panel, going luminous, was like a tiny window. "I, I receive," she heard out of her throat.

While the stammer traveled, she had more than a second to imagine its paths. It responded to a message

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that must have been routed through Oahu, addressed to her personally. Since she had left the number of this '\ phone in the local database, in case anyone wanted to ' make contact with her, the system did not need to instigate a search that might have gone around the planet. It passed the call directly out to sea. It likewise knew the central from which the call reached Earth. So her reply was riding a beam up to a relay satellite, was hurtling down to Luna, was surely passing through another station that encrypted it, was arriving at a place where waited the lady Lilisaire.

"Should we have occasion to communicate in confidence, I will be Dolores Nightborn, Should ever you be asked, that identity has been entered as a Terran resident ofjychopolis, and you may say you met her on your visit and share with her an interest in marine biology."

Photons crossed space. The flatscreen formed an image, the head and shoulders of a middle-aged woman, caucasoid, plump, totally undistinguished. And as synthetic as her voice, Aleka knew, an electronic phantom. "Hail," the face greeted. "Are you alone, and will you have time free in the near future?"

"Yes. Yes to both!" Aleka's heart slammed. She'd ripping well make free time, whatever demands anybody else tried to lay on her.

Transmission lag. She twisted about and stared at the Moon. Against its ashen-bright almost-disc, no points of light showed as they did on dark parts. If she took out her optic and magnified, she would see traces of human presence. No need. She knew what life laired yonder.

"It is well." The face smiled, the voice purred. "Aleka Kame, I want you to—" It broke off. Then, anxiously: "Dear, could I ask a favor of you? You remember me telling you about my kinswoman Mary Carfax in San Francisco Bay Integrate, don't you? Old and frail and living by herself. She insists she's all right, but when last we talked she looked terrible and I'm worried. Could you hop over, call on her personal-84

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ly, and let me know what you think? Til be your thank-slave, and next time you're on the Moon I may have something rather wonderful to show you."

Lilisaire had remembered to switch on a program that remade dialect as well as sound and sight. It was oddly comforting, in this huge stillness, to discover that she too could be momentarily forgetful.

Though what had shaken her self-command?

"Should I have need to convey a message to you in full secrecy, I will send you on a harmless pretext to Mary Carfax,, my Earthside agent nearest your dwelling place. She is another false identity, a sophotect. From it you will receive instructions."

Why this roundabputness? Who might be listening in?

Something rather wonderful. What Lilisaire had spoken of, that day in the diamond pagoda at Zamok Vysoki?

"Yes, I w-will be glad to," Aleka said. Her mouth had gone dry. How to mislead the possible eavesdropper? She seized an idea that winged past. "I've been wanting a short vacation anyhow."

Her taking it at this crisis would earn her reproaches, but her kind of service necessarily gave broad discretion, and she could quite logically ask what difference her staying on the scene would make. "Give me a few days to disengage here."

Transmission lag.

"Good. You are ... quick-witted," as I judged you to be. "And as a matter of fact, it would be more convenient if you paid your visit a week from now. I am so grateful. How have you been?"

Because it would be a natural action, and because it might be helpful there in the high castle, Aleka related her day.

—"Yes, something ought certainly to be done about this. Perhaps something can be done. We'll see.

Adi6s for now, dear."

The screen darkened. Only wind and sea and the hiss of the bow cleaving water spoke further.

Aleka's

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glance returned to the Lunar disc. Strange, if that was where her hope lay, hope for the ancient unreasonableness of life. Or maybe not so strange. Yonder, too, it had flourished from the earliest years, heedless of the machines that kept it in being.

The Mother of the Moon

iort Bowen had gained a few amenities, among them L'Etoile de Diane. The restaurant's menu was limited, but that was because all vegetables and fruit were fresh, raised in its own agro. unit.

Lately, as excavation and outfitting continued, it had become able to add fish and poultry. The proprietor spoke of wine which wasn't bruisingly shipped from Earth, beginning fairly soon. Dagny, who could ill affordtthe place, rejoiced when Edmond Beynac invited her. She recognized that that wasn't entirely on account of the dinner.

"Not bad," he said of his roast duck. "But if we chance to have Earthside leave at the same time, let me introduce you to a real confit d'oie. I know an inn at Les Eyzies where they make the best in the universe." He sipped from his glass and chuckled. "They should, by hell. They have been doing it for centuries."

Earthside together? Dagny told her pulse to behave itself. "Everything in those parts is old, isn't it?" she asked for lack of a brilliant response.

"No, no, we are living people, not museum exhibits or tourist shows." The broad shoulders shrugged. "But yes, that is an ancient land, and more survives than castles and archaeological sites. Most of my ancestors, they doubtless trace back to Cro-Magnon Man." He grinned. "Or further, if those geneticists are right who think Neandertal blood is in us too. I would not mind that, being descended from a little fellow

,

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who stayed alive in the face of the glacier and the cave bear."

She recalled a picture in a book, a hunter on those primeval barrens, and thought Edmond resembled him. Maybe the setting helped her impression along —not this small, warm, food-fragrant room where conversation buzzed low and music (Debussy?) breathed from the speaker—but the view in the ports and in the clear cupola. By day you dined underground; at night the topside section was opened for patrons who didn't worry about a bit of added radiation. Candles on the tables scarcely dimmed the splendor of Earth near the full; even some of the brighter stars gleamed through, unwinking and wintry. The ground was no longer bare and somber, it reached in a dream of luminance and shadows, as if every stone were alive and every craterlet a well where the spirits might give you your wish. Such works of humankind as stood in view became themselves magi-calH&e shapes in a painting by a man who had slain mammoths. Edmond sat poised against a cold wilderness through which he pursued bigger game than ever walked the tundra.

"You're interested in prehistory?" Dagny ventured. "You sure keep a zoo of interests."

He had a smile that came and went quickly but brightly. "Well, my father is professor of the subject at the University of Bordeaux. Me, I thought I might go into the same science, but then I decided most of the great discoveries in it have been made, and—Fireball was giving us the space frontier."

She couldn't resist: "Not exactly giving, as Anson Guthrie would be the first to admit."

He grinned. "Touchtf His prices, however, they are no more than the traffic will bear, and we do not have to deal with mole-eyed, lard-bottomed bureaucrats, we can simply pay and go. I envy you that you know him so well."

She had told him about her past, what parts seemed appropriate, in the course of their developing ac-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 87

quaintance. "I rarely see him any more. He and his wife put me in a good school, and they paid my expenses at the academy, but I had to qualify for it on my own and since I've graduated they've never shown me any partiality."

"I know."

She remembered she had already emphasized this to him, and flushed. A gulp of wine lent sufficient assurance for her to dangle bait. "Of course, we've stayed in touch, and I visited them on my last vacation and expect I will again occasionally." With a companion? Better swing the subject back.

"We were talking about you, though, for a change. You mentioned something earlier about not having gone directly into your profession."

"I bounced about." His tone softened. "We had a summer cottage in the upper Dordogne. In my childhood I got so familiar with the local farmers they nicknamed me Jacquou le croquant, Jacques the peasant, from a famous novel. I believed I would become a farmer too, until I found put that technology long ago made the family farm extinct and my friends were just administrators. Besides, my father's work, it soon had more romance for me. But then my mother, she has an export-import business, textiles and artwork, through her I came at age sixteen to spend a year in Malaysia.

That made me restless to see more of the world than tourists do, and at age eighteen I enlisted in the French section of United Nations forces." Could an unlucky love affair have given impulse? "We were sent to the chaos in the Middle East—you know, when Europe was establishing the Befehl there."

"You saw action?" Dagny dared ask, low.

"Oh, yes," he answered grimly. "Too much. Any amount of combat is too much. In between, I began really thinking. After two years I was wounded badly enough for discharge." So he'd stuck it out that long, having pledged his word, in spite of hating it, and must have been brave, because a man that smart could wangle a rear-echelon assignment if he tried. "The 88

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physicians fixed me all right, I carry only some scraps of metal in me and they do not bother. But I was quite ready for civilian life, studies, field work on Earth, my degree, and then, four years ago, a postdoctoral fellowship on Luna."

As he talked, he cheered up afresh. "Here I am happy," he finished. "True, it is not perfect.

Those hours per daycycle in the bloody centrifuge, we could very well do without them, hein? How do you spend that time?"

"Going through the standard exercises," Dagny said. "Doesn't everybody? Otherwise, read, write letters, watch a show, whatever. In a big unit, I mean. Not much choice on a field platform."

"On one of those, when I am alone except for a counterweight, I turn off my transmitter and sing,"

he confessed. "Then nobody else must suffer my voice."

•She laughed. "You see, the necessity isn't a total nuisance!"

"It is not too bad," he agreed, "not too high a price. When they begin to study Mars and the asteroids in earnest, I would like to go. But there is no limit yet on what is to do here." He regarded her. "Nor, I find, is there lack of good company."

Her heartbeat refused flat-out the order to quiet down.

As the ship neared on her approach curve, Luna in the viewscreens shifted from ahead to below, from thickening crescent to dun stoneland scarred with craters. Earth hung high and horned above the south. Silence had grown heavy. Kenmuir cleared his throat. "Well, Barbara," he said, hearing the awkwardness, "it's goodbye—for a while, at any rate."

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"May your meantime be happy," replied the ship. He had ordered a female voice when she spoke with him alone. The Lunarian-accented Anglo sounded friendly, even warm. Valanndray had specified a whistling, birdlike, unhuman timbre for himself. He hadn't said why and Kenmuir had never asked.

When all three talked together, the vessel used a neutral male tone.

"Thank you. And yours."

The absurdity of it struck at Kenmuir. His mouth twisted upward. What was he doing, swapping banalities with a sophotect? Yes, it was conscious, it thought, but in how constricted a range! By tapping the cultural database, it could give him an interesting conversation on any subject he chose, from the puns in Shakespeare to the causes of the Lyudov Rebellion, but he knew how purely algorithmic that was. Its creativity, its self lay in the manifold, ever-varying functions of a spacecraft.

And yes, he'd grown fond of this machine, in the way he'd formerly grown fond 6f his old laserblade or a particular plaid shirt or his and Annie's house on Earth, but that wasn't the same as affection for a human being or a live pet. Somehow he felt it would be wrong to leave without a farewell, but why?

Would the ship have been hurt? He couldn't believe that. Her words, comradely or concerned as the situation called for, gave simply the illusion of feelings like his. What were hers? Meaningless question. He imagined her taking pleasure in the challenge of a difficult maneuver, he imagined her longing to get back into full connection with others, with the cybercosm, and for that span share in a larger awareness than he would ever know; but this was anthropomorphism on his part. It was as inane as his naming her, privately, Barbara, after the first girl he had loyed and never gotten.

Too long aspace, a man went a bit crazy. By Earth standards, anyhow.

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"Commencing descent," she warned him. Also that was needless. Besides the instruments on the console, he sensed the swingaround. Had the algorithm computed that he would appreciate her gesture?

Signals flew back and forth. Electrophotonic intelligences meshed. Weight returned, settling Kenmuir in his chair, and the ship climbed down the sky to Port Bowen.

The thought of Annie lingered in him. His gaze sought Earth. Where was she yonder? Ten years, now, since last he'd heard anything; a dozen years since they parted. Mostly his fault, he supposed.

Space-farers were a poor risk for marriage. But theirs had begun so happily, nestled under Ben Dearg in a land whose heights and heather they had nearly to themselves. ... He sighed. "It's space you love, lan," she had said—oh, very quietly, with a bare glimmer of tears. "It doesn't leave enough of you for me to live on." Well, he hadn't quite given up hope of someday having a little touslehead or two of his own. But no woman whom a spacef arer would likely meet shared it as Annie once did, except dream-women in the quivi-ra, and he dared not call those up very often.

Lilisaire waited! A surge passed through him, half lust, half fear, and left him trembling.

Touchdown into a cradle was feather-gentle. He saw just two other vessels on the field^a globular freighter and a small, slim suborbital that was probably his transport to Zamok Vysoki. In Fireball's day the number could well have been a score.

Seeking to master himself, and thinking of what Lilisaire might want him for, he looked westward, past the control tower. The spark that was L-5 stood above that horizon. But no, he hadn't set the screen to enhance the stars, and the sun-glare of early Lunar afternoon hid most of them, including the derelict worldlet. Symbolic, an omen?

Now there was an anachronism for you. Kenmuir's tautness eased with a grin at himself.

Unharnessing,

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he went to get his luggage. After three daycycles of boost at a fourth again Earth's gravity, one-sixth was like blowing along on a breeze.

Stripped, his cabin had become a hollowness he gladly quitted. A single bag sufficed him. He had packed the rest of his effects; robots would fetch and stow them till he phoned instructions. He need not actually carry anything. His hostess could provide him clothes and such, lavishly. Too much. He pre-ferre4 his plain personal style, as well as his independence.

As he was about to command an airlock to open, the ship surprised him. "Fare you well, lan Kenmuir," she said. "May we travel together again."

"Why, why, I'd like that," he faltered.

Meaningless wish. If he was assigned a different craft, its intelligence would, routinely, get a download of everything Barbara knew about him. He would find the personalities indistinguishable—if personality, distinct individuality, could be said to exist in sophotects.

What then led her to send him off this humanly?

He didn't really understand these minds. Did they? Beyond a certain degree of complexity, systems go chaotic, inherently unpredictable and unfathomable even to themselves. No doubt the Teramind saw more deeply, but was that insight absolute, and did it include all of the vast psyche?

He thrust the question from him. It always gave him an inward shudder. "Until then, Barbara," he mumbled, and signalled the inner valve. It contracted. He passed through the chamber. The outer valve had already withdrawn, when the portal sealed fast to an ascensor shaft in the cradle.

Kenmuir stepped onto the platform. It bore him down to the terminal. He emerged.

The floor gleamed before him, wide and almost empty. The murals along it seemed to mock the triumphs they celebrated, Armstrong's landing, the

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Great Return, Anson Guthrie founding the base that would become this city, Dagny Beynac bossing construction of the hundredth Criswell energy collector. .. . None dated from the Selenarchy, although that era had seen the Mars colony begun, interstellar missions, Guthrie's and Rinndalir's exodus to Alpha Centauri. Lunarians didn't flaunt public achievements; they were too catlike, individualistic, secretive. . .. The air felt cold.

A lone man waited, clad in form-fitting black and silver. Kenmuir recognized him, Eythil, a trusted attendant of Lilisaire's. Mars-bred, he stood less tall and more broad than the average Moondweller of his race, strong, dangerous when necessary. His complexion was dark, his hair black and curly, but that was not unusual; many different stocks had gone into the ancestry.

He saluted, hand to breast. "Greeting and welcome, my captain." His use of his mother tongue, unprompted, was an honorific, implying worth—not status, but inborn worth—equal or nearly equal to the Lunarian. He also refrained from explaining that he would bring the newcomer to his lady, and from asking how the journey had been.

"To you I am indeed well come, Saljaine," Kenmuir replied likewise. The title had no Earthside equivalent, for Selenarchs had never bestowed rigid ranks on their followers. It might perhaps be rendered "officer," perhaps "faithful henchman."

They started across the floor. Being a Terran of the Orthosphere, Kenmuir felt obliged to make some conversation. "The port was not quite this deserted" —eerily so—"when I left last year. Has traffic fallen off more, or is it a statistical fluke?"

"Both are at work, I think," Eythil said. "I have heard of three large ships retired from service in the past thirteen-month, and might learn of more did I consult the official database." The insinuation was that he didn't believe every byte of information was THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 93

available to everybody, even in such apparently harmless areas as interplanetary commerce.

Kenmuir, who thought this was true, nodded. "Traffic must have grown sparse, or we'd not see random variations."

A part of his mind ran through the reasons—some of the reasons. Population decline wasn't one. The original steep drop (which had, for example, left spacious reaches of Scotland open to him in his

..boyhood and to him and Annie in their marriage) had long since flattened out and was approaching the asymptote of zero growth. Lowered demand for raw materials certainly was a reason: efficient recycling, goods made to last, few if any design changes. But what lay behind it? The old, driving dynamism had faded well-nigh out of people—How? Why?

Ferocity lashed in Eythil's voice: "Hargh, they will soon swarm again, the ships, when the Habitat comes with its Terrans breeding, breeding. Unless may-chance you—" He broke off. Kenmuir couldn't tell whether that was due caution or because a robot was moving across the floor to intercept them.

Robot, or sophotect? The turret could hold a human-capability computer. If it didn't, the body could be remote-controlled by an intelligence. This was a standard multipurpose model, boxlike, with three different pairs of arms, the four legs lifting its principal sensors to a level with his eyes. Where organic components were not in supple motion, metal shone dull gold.

It drew close. Musical western Anglo floated out of the speaker: "Your pardon, Captain Kenmuir, Freeholder Eythil."

They stopped. "What would you?" the Lunarian rapped. It was obvious that Kenmuir, just in from space, would be known; but the system's identification of his companion must give, more than ever, a feeling of being caged.

"•You are bound for your vehicle?" the machine 94

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said. "Regrets and apologies. Clearance to lift will be delayed about an hour."

"What the Q?" Kenmuir exclaimed, amazed.

"An accidental explosion has occurred just a few minutes ago on Epsilon-93. Do you place the designation? An iceberg lately brought here."

Kenmuir and, stiffly, Eythil nodded. They hadn't heard of the object, but that was natural.

Beneficiated pieces of comet stuff were, as a rule, set on trajectories that took them from the Kuiper Belt into Lunar orbit, there to be refined and sent down. Robotic, utterly routine, the operation hadn't been conducted much in recent decades, but no doubt the work was starting up on a larger scale. The influx of settlers after the Habitat was ready would want more water and air than the Moon currently recycled.

"Fragments are flying about," the machine continued. "None are expected to crash, but that is as yet not perfectly certain. Until every track is known, Traffic Control is interdicting civilian movement above ground, especially in this vicinity. For about an hour, is the estimate. You landed barely in time."

Eythil scowled. Kenmuir shrugged, although his impatience was probably sharper.

"Administration apologizes for any inconvenience," the machine said. "You are invited to spend the time in the executive lounge, with complimentary refreshments."

Eythil and Kenmuir exchanged a glance. Smiles quirked wry. "Never have I been there," the Lunarian admitted. "You, Captain?"

"No," Kenmuir replied. "Why not?" Satisfy a slight curiosity. Besides, the public bar and restaurant, big, well-nigh forsaken, would be spooky surroundings.

The room to which the machine led them was of a more intimate size. Its furniture, massive Earth-style, seemed somehow faded. Flat pictures of space pioneers hung on the walls. The air held a faint simulation of leather and woodsmofce odors. Kenmuir wondered why this retreat was maintained. How often

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had it seen use since the spaceport was completely cyberneticized? Well, it couldn't be much trouble to keep, and occasions like this doubtless arose once in a while. The system provided for improbabilities.

He and Eythil took chairs. The machine went to a dispenser. "What is your desire, senores?" it asked. Eythil wanted a Lunarian white wine—the vineyards under Copernicus still produced biologically—and Kenmuir chose ale. The machine touched the panel, the containers arrived, the machine poured into suitable goblets from off a shelf and brought them over. "If you wish anything more, call me, por favor," it said, indicating the nearest intercom input. "I trust you soon may be on your way."

"Thanks," Kenmuir answered. After all, either it or its controller was sentient. It departed.

Kenmuir sipped. A goodly brew, yes. Never mind that molecular machineries had assembled it; the formula was tangy, the liquid cold. "Hadn't you better phone to say we'll be delayed?" he asked Eythil.

"Nay, not if the wait stretches no longer," the other man said. They both stayed with Anglo. Odd, Kenmuir reflected, what a relaxed attitude to schedules most Lunarians had, when survival might depend on precision. Well, with them timing was practically instinctive, as fast as recovery from a stumble was to an Earthman in his high-gravity home. You got to know your competences andftheir safe boundaries.

"I wonder what exactly went wrong," he remarked. "It sounded like the kind of accident that shouldn't ever happen these days."

"Thus the cybercosm tells us," Eythil growled.

"M-m, nothing is guaranteed, you know. The planning may be total, but—I simply wonder if this blowup was due to an oversight, or a runaway chaos, or a quantum fluctuation that got amplified.

... I really don't know how these operations are conducted. In a few daycycles, if I have a free hour or two, I'd like to retrieve a full account."

"You will get one," Eythil said cynically. "Whether 96

or nay it relates what truly happened—if aught happened at all—will be for you to guess."

He was right, Kenmuir thought. The system could feed pretty much anything it chose into the database, complete with images, numbers, and mathematical analysis. It wouldn't be hard to bypass the human functionaries who were supposed to be in the loop. "Why should the mind lie," he protested, "especially when the story isn't to its credit?"

Eythil finger-shrugged. "Who knows? Incidentally to some broad design, maychance. Let us assume this happening will help make plausible the diversion of yet more resources to the Habitat project, and thereby hasten the destruction of Lunarian lifeways. Thus might the sociotechnic program esoterically calculate."

Kenmuir took a long, heartening draught. "Farfetched. You are bitter, aren't you?"

"Have I not cause?"

It surfaced in the minutes that followed, breaking through the normal reserve of Eythil's race toward Kenmuir's. The spaceman was familiar with most of it, but he listened throughout, because here was a need to speak. Moreover, he heard a few aspects that had not touched on him before.

—While the asteroids were invaluable sources Of minerals, as the comets were of ices and both were of organics, by themselves they did not suffice. A large body is required for the chemical fractionation that creates usable concentrations of most industrial materials. Hence prospecting and mining on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. On Mercury they were carried out entirely by machines—

—although even for them, Venus was too costly. In environments less horrific, humans were marginally employable: those humans whose desire for a frontier brought them there. Above all was Mars—

—to which Lunarians, especially, went in the high days of the Selenarchy. Terrans, too, could reproduce

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in that gravity field; but at first their numbers were less, because few were accustomed to land that could kill them. Mars remained a province of Luna until the Federation took them both over—

—"and we should yet be of Lunarian name," Eythil said. "Is not a member nation supposed to govern itself? But nay, afar on Mars we have less autonomy left us than here where we circle Earth."

"Well, you've gotten proportionally more Terrans," Kenmuir pointed out. "Whether or not they were bora there, they'll think, act, vote according to their psychological bent and their culture."

"You speak like a sociotech." Contempt edged the word.

"I don't mean to," Kenmuir said mildly. "One is apt to read a lot on space hauls. It makes for a bookish vocabulary. Oh, I am not only a Terran by race, I'm an Earthling. But I do sympathize with you Lunarians. All the old, irreconcilable issues are rising again, aren't they?"

—which once made Luna declare itself a nation, independent and sovereign: birthright, property right, education, the survival of a civilization that openly rejected certain basic ideals. He had often wondered what would have developed if it had stayed clear of the Federation. Idle imagining, of course. When reaction to the War Strike doomed mighty Fireball, the end of separatist Luna was in sight, however long a delaying campaign Niolente and her cohorts might wage. Yet, in some hypothetical quantum-mechanical alternative reality—

"Under the Covenant, the Assembly and High Council should at least respect our constitution,"

Eythil maintained. "But nay, more and more they reshape the 'fundamental ethic' clause to bring down olden law and ways. Decision passes ever more from living beings to machines."

Intelligent machines, Kenmuir thought, not subject to human corruption and cruelty. Yet undeniably this

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was governance by ... aliens? The Teramind bore something of the awesomeness of God, but it was not God—too remote, not fallible enough. As for the day-to-day details of life, maybe what gnawed some people worst was just a sense of having become irrelevant.

"It isn't due to any conspiracy," he argued. "It's the, the logic of events. The former nations scarcely exist any longer. They've broken up into thousands of different societies, in fact and often in form. The Federation has had to take over many of their duties. Without an integrated world economy, everyone would starve."

"Scant value has that economy had for us Martians of late."

"Well, declining demand for minerals."

"We could adapt, in a self-chosen fashion. But nay, it must be in Earth wise. You speak of the Federation as the sole viable government that is left. But that means that naught stands between the lone person and it."

"I know. History shows your fear is reasonable. Also, anomie is demoralizing. But you have to agree, the Federation government doesn't try to run people's lives for them. In fact, many of its interferences with you Lunarians have been to curb arbitrary powers of the Selenarchs that they aren't supposed to possess in a republic—"

Perhaps fortunately, the wall speaker announced: "Ambient space is now known to be safe. You may lift when you please, senores."

Silence fell between them, and prevailed while they went to the vehicle, launched, and flew.

Eythil might have been nursing his anger, or might have gone into some unearthly mind-realm of his own. Kenmuir had begun to feel a vague headache and feverishness. He wondered whether it was nerves, dread that he might somehow fail Lilisaire . . . whatever she wanted of him.

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The westering sun rose higher as the trajectory bore him in that direction. Earth, too, shifted across his sky, easterly and northerly. It shone at late first quarter, a blue crescent marbled with white clouds which, widespread over nightside, captured enough light from the stars and from below to make that part of it ghostly gray. So had it been when first she summoned him.

He did not yet know why she did—he, the most ordinary of men, an Earthman at that. ."Ey, but you are far from ordinary," she had purred when he got up the courage to ask. "Your whole career, your doings in the yonder, your ties to the past. You live not in a void nor by illusions, like so many. You know what has gone before, the land and folk and deeds from which your being springs; for you, time has reality, even as space does." That had not seemed quite an answer to him.

True, in repeated talks she had drawn him out concerning the Fireball Trothdom. He wasn't sure why, and he knew nothing that a datasearch program couldn't have found for her. It wasn't much more than an association, after all, a lodge or fellowship rooted in wistful ness for a grandeur long vanished, not unlike the Ronin, the Swagmen, or the Believers. Like them, it had its rituals, social gatherings, mutual helpfulness, and little else. Whatever the secret lore was that was said to be passed down from Rydberg to Rydberg, it couldn't be of any importance, and it had certainly not been confided to lan Kenmuir.

Maybe Lilisaire was trying to get an idea of what membership felt like. It was not a Lunarian sort of thing; it might provide a little insight into the other species. Or maybe she was interested because the Trothdom meant a great deal to Kenmuir, and in her fashion she, liked him.

She had said he was a fine lover. (The memory flamed.) "No, except that you inspire me," he replied honestly. She laughed and rumpled his hair. He did 100

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not delude himself that he was anything but an agreeable diversion, at best.

And yet... she had called him back, urgently, at no small cost to an undertaking from which she stood to make a profit. In some way, however minor, she needed him.

His heart thuttered. He didn't know if he was in love—this was foreign to any such state anytime earlier in his life—or in thralldom. At the moment, he didn't care.

The flyer reached apoluna and descended. From the Cordillera reared the witchy towers of Zamok Vysoki.

Having landed, Kenmuir brushed past Eythil, straight into the gangtube. The slight malaise had faded out of him. If he was afire and ashiver, it was wholly with Lilisaire. Not until later did he hope he hadn't offended his proud escort, then wonder whether Eythil hadn't been amused.

No attendant waited in the room beyond. Clearly, the flyer had sent word ahead, and a robot or a servant would take his things wherever the Wardress desired. A voice from the air said, "Hail, lan Kenmuir. Betake you to the Pagoda and be made welcome."

He knew that turret and the way there. How he knew them! He bounded, he soared down the changeable corridors and through the multiform chambers. Lunarians moved in them, male and female, on various business of hers. Most were staff, whether or not they wore the livery, but several came from outside, and he recognized two magnates. No words or gestures passed between them and him, save for the swift and stylized eye contact that was courtesy. At the end of his trek he did find a guardsman, standing at panther ease, who saluted and let him through the door.

Sunlight exploded from a blinding center into sparks and flashes of every color his vision could capture. They flowed and shifted all around him with each least movement he made, across the glassy floor

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and the few fragile furnishings, the walls and ceiling and his hands. He had come into the middle of a single million-faceted synthetic diamond. Odors drifted on the air, spice, honeysuckle.

Barely audible wailed the minor-key melody of a canto of Verdea's.

By a table set with crystal, near a broad animate couch, poised Lilisaire. The auburn mane fell over bare shoulders and a full-length gown that sheathed her like a second skin. The wreckage of rainbows played on those whitenesses. Her only ornaments were stardrops hung from her ears and a finger ring whose jewel flickered with tiny flames. At her feet lay a pet he remembered, a black leopard with golden spots. It lifted its head and stared at him.

She smiled. "Yes, well are you come, my captain," she murmured in Anglo.

He stopped, suddenly helpless. She advanced. Her skirts whispered. He lifted a hand. She laid fingertips moth-lightly on the wrist. It signified that she was his superior, but he never thought to dispute that. The faintest of pressures urged him to the table. She lowered her arm and stood before him. "Pour for us," she bade.

He obeyed. The sound of it rang clear under the music. With a green glance she invited him to partake of the canapes—he knew they were superb—while she raised her goblet. "Uwach yei," she said.

"Your service, m-my lady," he pledged. Rims belled together. They sipped. The wine sang.

Her gaze steadied on him. He forgot the diamond radiance. "Service," she said low. "Mean you this?"

He caught his breath before he answered: "I do. And not because I'm your employee."

"My captain." Her free hand reached to stroke his cheek. He would have felt a blow less keenly and shakingly.

He snatched after balance. "What is this about?" he asked in his driest voice. "What can I do?"

"You may well have guessed. It concerns the Habitat."

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"Yes, I... surmised as much. You and your class have opposed it so hard."

The Selenarchic families must feel sore pressed, he thought, when they stooped to politics—what they called monkey dealings. Granted, it was for the most part indirectly. Those who, like Lilisaire, had substantial inherited property on Earth could raise up Terran advocates and get a few into the Federation Assembly —Useless. Public opinion (in such fraction of the public as paid any attention) excitedly favored what would be the first real pioneering their species had mounted in generations. Besides, the cybercosm had first proposed the scheme. Surely sophotectic intelligence superior to the human knew what was best for humanity.

Lilisaire's voice plucked him from his recollections. "Indeed. We waxed sufficiently troublesome that the government investigated us."

"Well, naturally, if you were making a fuss, a data scan—"

"Nay, more. Officers from Earth prowled about inquiring. One of them came hither soon after I had called to you. Nor was he an ordinary Peace Authority agent. He was of the best they have, a very syn-noiont."

Startled, Kenmuir exclaimed, "That was serious!"

She finger-shrugged. "Ey, he said not his nature to me. But I scented he was no common man. Later I carried a hunt of my own through the databases and among folk. Have no fear. It is unlikely he knows I did. And he found naught of wrongdoing." Her laughter chimed. "For, I regret, there has been none. Whence might the opportunity for it have come?"

Abrupt, cold fury spat: "Nay, we lie bound, awaiting the knife. It will not even slit our throats cleanly. First the women shall be spayed and the men gelded."

The leopard snarled.

Kenmuir fumbled for words. "Matters can't be that bad, my lady."

She put on calm. "Think. What has preserved us

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thus far, save that Terrans cannot breed on the Moon?"

His mind tried to resist her. What was preserved, it said, was the dominance of the Selenarchy, in fact if no longer in name. And that began to be eroded after biotech enabled his kind to live indefinitely under low gravity, healthy except for loss of muscle tissue if they didn't keep up their exercises. (For a second he imagined he could feel the engineered microbes implanted in him, their chemistry suffusing every cell.) More and more of the old species took up permanent residence. But, yes, their numbers remained limited by the inability of their women to carry a child to term, or raise one born on a larger world but less than about three years of age, nervous system still developing. However precariously, the Lunar aristocrats clung to dominion over the nominal republic.

"Now you expect a rush of settlers from Earth?" he asked stupidly.

"It will be unstoppable. The sociotechnic equations foretell it Hundreds of thousands declare themselves ardent to go. Once the Habitat is ready—"

—abandoned L-5 refurbished, brought into low Lunar orbit, provided with lightsails to exert the forces that would keep it on that otherwise unstable path, set spinning again in order to give full Earth weight around its huge circumference. Lo, a place for Terrans to bear young and see them through those early years, while easily going to the Moon and back—

"—and that will be no long while hence. Time hounds us, Kenmuir." She never used his given name.

He did not know whether it was due habit, hers being single, or a decision to avoid any true intimacy.

"But they'll be the flower of Earth," he argued. "The sort who want to do real work, live real lives, here, in space." Like himself, he acknowledged. He had been lucky, had gotten into the Academy, the Space Service, at last the Venture. How could be begrudge anyone else the stars?

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Her lip lifted. "Yes, the lords of the world and their machine masters should well rejoice to see that restlessness bled away from the planet. On the Moon it will be more easily contained." Her tone went urgent. "But understand you not? They will make Luna over. Their vast new constructions will break its peace while they in their hordes impose the society they want."

"Uh, that can't happen overnight."

"Swifter than you believe, my innocent captain, and with entropic certainty. I say to you, it will destroy us."

"Mars—"

"Mars is already lost."

Recalling Eythil, Kenmuir didn't dispute that. "M-m, your colonists on the asteroids and the outer moons—no, those places could never hold more than remnants," powerless, impoverished, until ships from Earth came to remove them under the banner of charity and efficiency.

He glanced down at the leopard and pictured it confined for life in a cage full of apes.

"We, or our children, will cease wishing to live," Lilisaire went on, quietly. "Some will drag out their last years, some not," but go violently, in rebellion, crime, suicide. "None will bring young into that kennel of an existence. In two centuries, three, no matter, this mischief-making, unconforming breed will be extinct. How convenient for the cybercosm."

Kenmuir doubted her concern for her species. Yet how genuine was the despair he heard beneath the steel! If she was right, if the Lunarians perished, a certain magnificence would have gone out of-the universe.

Shock: Could the cybercosm actually intend that?

The eyes regarding him were tearless, the slim body unbowed. "You must have some recourse in mind," he said slowly.

She nodded. The ruddy hair rippled. "A forlorn

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venture," she replied in the same level Voice, "belike in quest of a treasure that shall prove to be a myth."

Leaning slightly forward, suddenly tense: "Will you dare it?"

Almost, he gasped at the impact. "T-tell me," he stammered.

She straightened, relaxing her flesh. "It need be naught unlawful... on your part," he heard.

"Nevertheless there is a thing you can seek to learn for me, which has lain hidden away for lifetimes."

"What?"

' "In this house abides a fugitive tradition. Yet I have also fact to relate. Come, drink, calm yourself, hear me out."

He was amazed at the deftness with which she reviewed history. It was familiar to him, but she brought it into perspective—her perspective—and touched on matters about which he had known little.

She recalled to him the long, Machiavellian struggle to keep Luna sovereign, out of the Federation, waged by Niolente and her cohorts after Guthrie and Rinndalir left for Alpha Centauri and Fireball began disbanding. He had not known of several missions into deep space, whose purpose was never divulged, nor that those were what seemed to have given Niolente the confidence to keep striving.

Of course, in the end it had not helped her. Events torrented, the proclamation of the republic by one faction, its instant recognition by the governments of Earth, the dispatch of Peace Authority troops to its aid. No doubt the old woman had then resolved to die fighting, for the armed force she whistled up had no hope whatsoever. It was inevitable that the Authority would afterward ransack every site she had ever occupied, including any databases kept in them.

Kenmuir had not been aware that all the material was confiscated, that what was later released was incomplete, or that the official story about the accidental wiping of some files was inconsistent with the

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methodical procedures of the man in charge. Nobody had taken any special notice. The whole business was soon forgotten, except among certain of her direct descendants.

"She was working on something in far space?" he breathed.

"It must have been," Lilisaire said. "A weapon or—I know not what."

"Then how should I?"

She drained her glass and beckoned him to pour another. First he finished his own. The leopard got up and padded about the room, black and gold among the light-shards.

"Hear me," Lilisaire said. "The tradition I spoke of goes further back still, to the time of Dagny Beynac. A son of hers made an expedition into the deeps from which he did not return. Naught of real explanation was ever given. The family held to itself whatever knowledge had been gained."

In hopes of eventual profit? That would have been quite Lunarian. But so, too, would have been keeping the secret for a memorial, an enduring sacrifice to sorrow.

"Searching what records remain, for t)ie conquerors did not find everything, I have come to feel sure that this discovery was what Niolente had intent to make use of," Lilisaire continued. "Could we acquire it, we might achieve a part of her hope. But time is short, and even before the Habitat makes everything too late for us, the enemy's suspicions may lead him to take forestalling action.

Thus, as soon as I had this clue, I sent for you, who will be able to look further."

"I, uh, I've no idea where to begin," he demurred.

Again her look pierced him. "On Earth."

"What?" He realized he was gaping, and snapped his jaw shut. "How?"

"Well do you know that the first Rydberg was the first child of Dagny Beynac, and came to be in her close confidence. And ... to this day, the Fireball THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 107

lodgemaster guards some arcanum, which appears to go back to that time of upheaval."

"You mean—"

She sighed. "A thin possibility, yes; but I see scant others."

"A weapon—" Chill tingled through Kenmuir. It was bad enough when Fireball turned spacecraft against the Avantists. Justified though the action might have been, the outrage it globally provoked brought on the end of Fireball and of sovereign Luna. A teratonne nuclear warhead, an asteroid made dirigible—"No!"

"It may not be that," she said quickly. "Or if it is, the menace alone should win us our freedom.

In any case, why, since the powers on Earth are so anxious to keep it secret, the simple threat of disclosure would be a weapon for us, nay?" :

He tossed off a long drink. The wine deserved closer attention, but he had to brace himself. As the glow spread through his blood, he became able to say, almost thoughtfully, "Y-yes, if the information's been buried that deep, there must be a strong reason. ... It could be a good reason, though."

"1 ask no betrayal of you," she said with a flick of scorn. "Find what you can and choose what you can."

It hurt worse than he would have expected. "I scarcely believe the Rydberg will confide in me just for the asking," he said.

Warmth returned, and with it a smile. "If you explain, maychance he will. If not, or if what he tells is of no avail, then—" She let the sentence trail off like music.

"Yes?" he prompted out of his pulsebeat.

"I have other agents on Earth. Would you be willing to join forces with one of them? Your ken of space may greatly help."

This was demented, he thought. He was no spy, no rebel, nothing but a middle-aged, law-abiding technician whose audacity was all in the head, interplay with 108

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impersonal forces, out among stars which the contentions and griefs of humankind would never touch. Yet she flung him a challenge, and—she wanted it, she needed it, this might be her life that he could save.

"I will try," he heard himself mumble.

She shouted, cast her goblet shattering against the diamond, and was in his 'arms.

The living couch received them and responded to them.

In his heart he could only praise the terrible necessity that had brought her race into being.

8

The Mother of the Moon

Night on Lunar Farside is a glory of stars. With neither sun nor Earth to override them, you need only walk away from human lights and your sky will brim with brilliance, six thousand or moi*

stars revealed to an eye that has nothing between it and them but a clear plate and a few centimeters of breath. They gleam unblinking where they crowd the crystal dark, and the brightest are not all white; many burn steel-blue, gold, amber, bronze-red. The constellations are no longer geometrical diagrams so much as they are prodigally marshalling hosts, planets ablaze among them.

Nebulae rear thunderhead-black or float softly aglow. From horizon to horizon arches the galactic belt, not milky to sight but icy, a winter river banked and islanded with night. Beyond it you may spy its nearer sisters, the clotted Magellanics, Andromeda vague and huge, perhaps one or two more glimpsed across yet greater deeps. Turn off your receiver and you are wholly of this vision, in a silence as vast as its reaches; far, far beneath it, the murmurs of your body declare that you are alive, you are what is beholding. Sometimes a spark hastens aloft, a satellite. It is quickly lost in the Moon's shadow.

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DagnyBeynac sighed and turned back toward camp. She couldn't stand long agaze, she had work to do.

First, scheduled whirly time. The boss ought not to keep anybody waiting. She swung into kangaroo pace, eight or ten kilometers per hour across the murky lava, an easy and exhilarating rhythm. The lamps ahead glared the stars away from her.

The other three were already at the centrifuge. In undiffusing vacuum, not entirely helped by reflection off surroundings, light and shadow, whiteness and dust made their spacesuits a goblin chiaroscuro. Like every newcomer, Dagny when she arrived on the Moon had had to learn how to see, especially after sunset on Farside. Today she effortlessly identified yonder shapes, the supply depot and shelters in their background, the crews and machines, the widespread complexities they were creating. A multi-facility astronomical observatory was under construction in Mare Moscoviense, and she in charge of housing for its personnel. Advancement was fast if you were able, if you survived.

She turned her radio back on. Switching it off in the field had been dead against regulations, but now and then she needed to be alone for a short while with heaven and the life inside her. "Hi,"

she greeted. "Prepared and eager?"

Wim den Boer mistook the cheerful sarcasm. "No," he grumbled. "Damnation, a frill three hours? I'm busy! You know how that hitch in delivering the pumps has thrown my section behind schedule."

Dagny came to the group and stopped. "Friend," she replied, "when this job is done and we're back in Bowen-, stand me a beer in the Fuel tank and I'll tell you tales of woe that'll freeze yours in your stein. Meanwhile, don't fret your pretty little head, or I'll decide it is pretty little. The zeroth law of thermodynamics says that everything takes longer and costs more."

"We are rather badly delayed, though, aren't we?"

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Jane Ireland argued. She was a good electrical engineer—had helped troubleshoot the grid that carried power from sunlit Criswells to the transmitters on Nearside—but overanxious about political questions. "Do you appreciate how hard Eurospace and Eco-Astro lobby against awarding contracts like this to any private company, ours above all? If we fail here—"

"We won't," Dagny vowed. "Let the chief fight his particular battles. If Guthrie can't outwangle, out-connive, and outroar the combined governments of Earth, we may as well go back there and the North Americans among us embrace the Renewal. Our way of helping him is to meet the contract in spite of whatever Murphy slings at us."

She had learned early on that her position required even more human skills than technical ones, and set herself to master them. Edmond had been a wonderful counselor at first, but soon she must necessarily grope her own way forward, trial and error, by feel rather than rules, because each individual is unique in the universe.

Pedro Noguchi came to her assistance: "Listen, Wim, Jane, you cannot serve if you fall sick. We have been skimping these sessions as it is. Instead of wasting time complaining, shall we get it done with?"

That quieted them. Strange, Dagny often thought, the loyalty so many of its people bore for Fireball, maybe more than for their countries. She had her personal reasons, but what about the rest? The well-spring couldn't merely be exciting work, high pay, simpatico management, no limit on a career except your ability and luck. In Fireball, somehow, you belonged, you shared a spirit, as few did anywhere on Earth.

She sought her place and got busy.

The field centrifuge sheered its column above her, 250 centimeters from the broad, gripfooted base, to the four rotor arms. Portable, it didn't have much in common with the giant stationary machines in the settlements. The arms were hollow, flaring trumpet-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 111

like from the pillar. Out of each dangled a cable, at the end of which hung a cage, its floor a 150-centimeter disc knee-high above the ground. Within this were simple items of exercise equipment, secured by brackets. Beneath the disc was welded a box for the makeweight.

Nobody present, complete with suit and gear, massed the 125 kilos—21 kilos Lunar weight—that made a standard load. Dagny stepped onto a scale built into the base. Disdaining to punch the calculator on her left sleeve, she figured her deficit mentally, and selected the bricks needed to equal it from a stack nearby. Having slid the right amount into the box, she dogged it shut and mounted to the cage. There she closed the door, made herself fast just in case, and commanded,

"Report."

"Ready. ... Ready. . .. Ready," she heard.

"Centrifuge to Overview, commencing three-hour operation," she called. The man in the skeletal tower a kilometer distant acknowledged. He'd keep an eye on them as he did on the worksites, also just in case. "We're off," Dagny said. Each cage had a start and stop button, but she, being senior, pressed hers.

The motor in the column base awoke. The rotor began to turn. The gripfeet flexed their metal toes and extended their claws over ground that was neither smooth nor level and that might have been rubble rather than hard stone. Sensors monitored shifting forces and gave orders to effectors; the machine held itself in dynamic balance. As the rotor increased speed and the cages lifted, their cables unreeled to full length and flew well-nigh horizontal. When the system had reached steady state, each occupant stood under an Earth gravity of acceleration.

Dagny unbuckled. For a minute or two she looked between the bars, upward from Luna. Some persons faced the ground, some sideways, some kept their eyes mostly closed, whatever gave them the least vertigo; she chose the heavens. Stars went in a wild wheel whose hub was above her head. Her breathing and

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that of her companions had loudened. Vibration was a faint thrum in her bloodstream. Heaviness laid a hand on her suit, flesh, bones, every last cell of her.

It felt pleasant, actually. She reveled in low-weight, but nature had not meant her for that freedom.

Standing there, she wondered how long ago her fate was set. A third of a billion years, when her ancestors crawled from the sea and must uphold themselves? 'Mond could tell her exactly. She knew the end result all too well, the multitudinous, marvelous, imprisoning adaptations that evolution forged on its single world. Lunar gravity simply was not enough for the creature from Earth.

Oh, nowhere near as bad as micro. You didn't get nauseated, your countenance didn't puff, muscles and skeleton dwindled rather slowly, you could go years before the harm was irreversible and then have a few years more until you died—or so the extrapolation from lab animals and computer models forecast. But the decay was pervasive, a matter of fluid balance and cell chemistry, cardiovascular degeneration, blood-brain barrier malfunction, tumorous growth of various tissues, sclerosis or necrosis of others, the earliest effects clinically detectable after a twelvemonth or less.

If you wanted to keep your health, you'd better subject yourself often to the heft for which you were born.

Born. Dagny's hand stole to her belly. Memories tumbled through her like the stars overhead.

They hadn't intended this, she and 'Mond, not till they were sure it was safe. Her booster shot wasn't due for half a year. Could that failure be another consequence of IOW-P? (Perhaps idiosyncratic, because Lord knew plenty of love got made on Luna, frequently in delightful ways impractical elsewhere.) The doctor suggested abortion. Dagny demanded violently to know what the alternative was. The doctor called a conference across orbital distance. The specialists opined that the pregnancy would probably be normal.

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After all, embryo and fetus would be afloat in the amniotic fluid, the little primordial ocean.

Mammals, including a monkey, had borne young on the Moon, and the young lived, once experiment had established what the proper centrifuging regime was for a given species.

The specialists guaranteed nothing, of course. Knowledge was too scant. Science would be glad of the opportunity to observe and learn, but Mrs. Beynac must understand that this eventuality was quite unanticipated. The regimes and treatments collectively dubbed biomedicine could extend life expectancy to well over a century, but biomedicine could not alter the basic human organism. That required modification of the DNA. A scheme was under development, offering the sole realistic hope for a genuine Lunar colony—highly controversial, not relevant to Mrs. Beynac, who might find her infant's welfare requiring she move back to Earth. .. .

Okay, if absolutely necessary. Only if. Anyhow, she could get one more field job under her belt before the belt stretched too wide to fit in a spacesuit. Morning sickness—racking, an order of magnitude beyond that now half-unreal first time—had been outlived. The signs and tests reassured.

Fireball would never dismiss or demote or reprimand her if she transferred Earthside, but Fireball had urgent need of her on Farside. So here she stood, at her second trimester, alert, able-bodied, carrying Edmond's child.

Juliana, she said within herself. It was going to be a girl. Juliana, Moon baby, welcome to the future.

Enough remembrance, enough sentiment. If you wanted to maximize the benefits of high-# and minimize the time you must spend under it, you didn't only stand or sit, you exercised.

Hunkering down, Dagny unfastened the bar bells and rose holding them. She moved with care, to avoid dizziness. The Terrestrial pseudo-weight was a waistline average, the differential between head and feet nearly ten percent. Coriolis force posed less of a 114

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nuisance; still, you had to allow for it too. The big centrifuges were far more comfortable in both respects. Downright luxurious, the largest at Port Bowen—private compartments, couches—Dagny grinned. She strongly suspected Juliana was begotten there.

Raise the bells, lower them, raise, lower, swing them crossways, commence the stationary jogging.

Flex, tense, flex, let your body enjoy while your mind rides the carousel of stars. Breathe deep, flush out the lungs, smell the sweet sweat, savor the growing warmth. The heart beats high, the blood quickens, and is that another quickening below, does Juliana also dance?

No, Dagny remembered, way too early, not yet, not yet.

The pain went through her like a harrow through a field.

The hospital in Port Bowen was small, austere, and superbly equipped. By the time Edmond Beynac got there from his current expedition, his wife was almost ready for discharge.

"You needn't come," she had said to him over the phone when first he caHed. "I'm okay. I'll be out of here fast."

"Bloody 'ell!" he had replied, his accent thickened. "Yoij *ave—un avortement—se meescarriage, een a, a God damn spacesuit—and I should stay from you?" While the radio link carried an image, it was poor and the screen tiny. She couldn't be certain, but thought she saw tears on his cheeks. She never had before.

Aborting as convulsively as she did, incompletely till her team got her inside and the armor off, had in fact torn her up considerably. She was young and vigorous, though, and the hospital staff had more than _ surgery at their command, they had the latest molecular biotech.

She was sitting up in bed after a walk along the corridors when he arrived. The reader in her hands

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displayed The Sea-Wolf; she liked adventure stories, and hardly any were being written these days.

The room was private, but on that account a cubicle. Edmond's bulk crowded her. Not that she minded. His arms went strong around her, trembling a bit, and his kiss gave her a dear scratch of stubble, and when she laid her head against his breast she felt the slugging behind the ribs.

After a while he sat on the edge of the bed and simply held her hand. "Honest, 'Mond, you poor worrymaker, I'm fine," she insisted. "They tell me I can be back on the job in two weeks, this time with no personal deadline on me." That last was a mistake. Her voice cracked. Immediately, she lowered her lashes and made a purr. "Before then, I'll be fit to screw. I have missed you, darling."

Starkness remained in him. "We will be careful, always."

"Oh, yes, oh, yes."

His look dwelt on her. Silence lengthened.

"But you wish for children," he said at last.

"Well—Not unless you do, really, truly."

"Two have you lost." He had not hitherto spoken of the one adopted away since she told him, that evenwatch when he asked her to marry him. Then he had likewise been still for a while, until he said that it didn't matter, that it was long past, and changed the subject.

"Do not lie to me," he ordered rather than begged; but how compassionate was his tone. "I know very well you have wept, alone in this bed."

"That's done with" was all she could find to say.

"There shall not be a third loss."

-"No." Resolution held firm. She had done much thinking. "We want the Moon more than anything else."

"Including children?"

"Yes, if it comes to that."

"You understand the trouble, no?"

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She nodded and spoke quickly. "Dr. Nguyen drew me the picture. Computer models flipflop when you input changed data. They took those data off me. Examinations, tests, specimens, electrochemical monitoring, my God, I'll be in the scientific journals for the next five years. Sure, I'm the single case, but I seem to have supplied critical information that was missing. The revised opinion is that what happened was inevitable. Contraceps wear off before they would on Earth, with a random time distribution, and no pregnancy will go to term. The lab animals fooled us. For one thing, humans are a lot bigger, which makes fluid management an entirely different engineering problem, at least in a weak grav field. For another thing, the human brain, as complicated as it is, gets tricked into sending the wrong signals to the whole muscular-glandular-nervous female reproductive system. The placenta's chemical defenses break down, allergic reactions build up, the fetus gets expelled but it's dead or dying anyway. Our kind will never breed naturally on Luna."

There, she'd said it, in a rush but without a quaver. She leaned back on the pillows, abruptly exhausted. "You've heard this?" she whispered.

"Yes, I was in communication the whole while I drove here." Edmond paused. "They think medications can be developed to compensate and make birth possible."

"I know," she sighed. "I also know it'd be unpleasant and expensive and condemn the next generation to the same. No."

She saw and felt how he tautened. "Dagny," he said, word by word, "we can move to Earth ... before we are too old."

"You were prepared to do that for Juliana right away, if need be," she answered low.

"I was. For children born—I do want children for

us.

She shook her head. Calm welled up in her, and

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with it a new, quiet strength. "Juliana was. She had happened, and we would not kill her nor forsake her. But I saw—You were so kind, so gentle in your gruff way. You never hinted what it would mean to you, tossing out this top-level scientific career of yours and returning to where everything's cut and dried, where you could hope for no more than to drone through a professorship in a mediocre academic department. But I knew, 'Mond. I knew how you'd be taking long walks by yourself so you could shout your blasphemies, and you'd drink hard and your wholesome cynicism would sour into alienation—and you'd stand by me, because you said you would, and you'd never blame the child. 'Mond, I wished I could believe in God, so I could pray we wouldn't have to return. Well, we don't."

"Bienaimge," he said shakenly.

The strength rose higher. She sat straight. "It does not follow that we have to be sterile." No,

"barren" was the word she wanted, dead end, double death, and to hell with the population-reduction fanatics.

His bowed head lifted. "Qu'est-ce—what do you mean?"

"Obvious," she said. "Genetics. A race for which the Moon is the normal environment. I began investigating this damn near as soon as I knew I was pregnant, because—It can be done, 'Mond. The knowledge is there, in genome maps, molecular biology, histology, plain old-fashioned anatomy and physiology. The computers have shown what changes in the DNA are necessary, practically atom by atom. How to do it, that's no different in principle from what's standard in biotech when they want any special kind of new organism. The whole thing's been roughed out, as a scientific exercise and a contingency measure. The details can be refined in a year or two, once the project is go."

"And you, you would—"

"Why not? Why the hell not? Take a fertilized

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ovum, treat it, implant it." Impulse swept her along. "Why, I'll bet we can do the fertilizing in the usual way."

"No! The risk to you. And ... the cost, we could not afford this."

"Nonsense. No more risky than an outing topside. I've studied the matter, I tell you. A, a Lunarian fetus would interact differently. I'd need chemical support, true, but far less than for our kind of child, nothing that'd handicap me in any way. As for cost, why, as long as the Guthries are in charge, Fireball will look beyond the annual profit sheet. In fact, it underwrote the research to date. It'll cheerfully pungle up to produce a next generation that won't need help."

"You are too crazy sure," he growled.

"Oh, maybe it won't work out every time. That'll hurt, but I'm willing to take the chance if you are, because we'll be on the way to our kids, our Lunarian children, 'Mond. Our blood living here forever."

Hers drummed in her veins. She gripped both his

hands. For a moment more he hung back. "Dagny, it

" has powerful opposition, experimenting with humans.

Me, I feel trouble in my conscience. What of the

people and politicians on Earth?"

"If anybody can get approval pushed through, the Guthries can. Darling, say yes, do say yes, and I'll send them a private-coded message tomorrow."

Anson Guthrie's blood alive on the Moon.

That he was her grandfather was the last real secret she kept from Edmond. She hoped that now he would let her share it.

Guthrie House seemed older than its centuries, the stone of it almost as if shaped by wind and rain and frost rather than human hands. That mass belonged THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 119

here, among the firs to right and left and behind, the sweep of lawn and flowerbeds down to the water. Dock, boat, outbuildings fitted as well into the island. Even the spaceship and its shelter were right for this ground.

But that was all within him, Kenmuir thought. It was because of tradition, sanctity, about which nature knew nothing. And nature itself, the sense of coming home to a living ancientness, was an illusion. Clouds lifted like snowbanks into radiant blue; a breeze blew cool, with savors of woods and salt, above summer-warm soil; waves gleamed and murmured, forest soughed; a few gulls went soaring aloft—in a carefully tended and restricted enclave. It was happenstance that he saw no aircraft pass overhead. When the declining sun had gone behind the ocean, he would spy satellites on their ways across what stars the sky-glow let him see.

Maybe that was why the spaceship stood not as an intruder. Instead, a guardian of this peace? A totem, a rallying point, at least. She wasn't obtrusive to sight anyway. Occupying a clearing several hundred meters inland, she and her transparent cover would not have shown if the terrain had not risen. As it was, only her bow appeared, a spearhead above treetops and roof.

Leaving his hired volant on the airstrip and walking toward the house—gravel scrunched beneath his feet —Kenmuir found his gaze and mind dwelling on her. Kestrel, the little Falcon-class that Kyra Dayis piloted, she who long and long ago rescued Guthrie from the Avantists and did battle with his doubleganger. Kenmuir himself had once partaken in the annual rite of inspection, cleaning, recharging accumulators, the benediction that ended, "Be always ready to fly." Beneath the solemnity, a chill had coursed through him and the hair stood up over his whole body. He was very young then.... But something of the same stirred anew today. His race did live and die by symbols.

And the Lunarians by theirs—But what of the sophotects?

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It occurred to him that he had never looked up the history of this relic. What struggles and chicanery had it taken, not to obtain her, but to win leave to keep her in alert condition? Oh, she was totally obsolete now, but she had not been then; and to this day, license for storing any amount of antimatter on Earth was not otherwise given unless the machines were fully in charge of it and its containment.

Well, Fireball Enterprises, which had dominated the Solar System, did not dissolve quickly or without many concessions granted its folk. Let them have their memorial. Already in their lifetimes, they were becoming no more than a harmless sodality. After a generation or two, hardly anyone else remembered that Kestrel existed. To the cybercosm, she was an entry in the database.

Nevertheless, she was. And—Fireball, harmless? That remained to be seen. Kenmuir's pulse and footsteps speeded up.

A guard waited on the verandah. She was unarmed, ceremonial, a girl serving her apprenticeship before initiation into full consorte status. Matthias liked to have visitors greeted in style. She saw the Fireball uniform he had donned, the same gray as hers, and snapped him a salute, which he returned. (Meanwhile he reflected that in the days of the company there had been no formalities.

Such things accreted, like coral crowing on a sunken hull.) "Captain lan Kenmuir," he identified himself unnecessarily, except for her sake, "with an appointment to meet the Rydberg in private."

"Aye, senor," she responded. "For favor, follow me."

He had not been here in years, but as he entered the vestibule, memory billowed over him. The oak panels, the glass window where Daedalus and Icarus spread their wings—and down a hall, the great dark room with its antique furniture, carpeting and hangings, candelabra and crystal, pictures, books, traditions. In an armchair at the stone fireplace sat Matthias.

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Kenmuir drew to attention before him. "Hola, senor," he greeted as was customary here.

The old man nodded. "Bienvenido," he said. His voice was a bass rumble. Nor had much else changed since Kenmuir last encountered him. The frame was still massive, paunchy but not withered in the limbs or in the heavy, hook-nosed features; hair was a white cockatoo crest, eyes deep-set and unwavering. A Fireball emblem on the left breast made his plain blue robe uniform enough for him.

Fleetingly, Kenmuir wondered if Matthias had ever borne more than the single name. Many Earth lings didn't. He knew little about this master of the lodge. Given longevity, a person could serve for such decades that his or her past receded into obscurity.

"At ease," the Rydberg said. "Be seated if you wish."

"Thank you—gracias." Kenmuir took a chair facing him.

A chuckle grated. "Have we had our fill of Americanisms and anachronisms? What would you like for refreshment, Captain?"

"Uh, well—"

"As far as I'm concerned, it's not too early for a Scotch and water."

"Beer, please," Kenmuir made bold to reply.

Matthias gestured at the guard, who went out. The house had a small human staff as well as its machines, but for her this service was an honor. "You're seldom hereabouts," he remarked.

"No, sir. I've not been much on Earth, and when I am—" He simply was not a very sociable animal.

He'd call on a few friends here and there around the globe, seek out historic sites and daydream, go on days-long tramps through the preserves, that sort of thing. Sometimes he patronized a joyeuse, but not often. It always struck him as rather sad, even when she found pleasure in the specialty by which she prospered. "I ought to participate more in the Troth-dom, yes."

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"It's voluntary." Matthias leaned back, bridged his fingers, drooped his lids, and went on ponderously, "Let me see. When you called to ask for an interview, I retrieved what data the outfit has on you, but they're meager and parts may be incorrect. Check me out. Your ancestors include consortes of Fireball since it was a business, but your parents were Earthsiders and not deeply involved in our affairs either."

Pain twinged in Kenmuir. They should still have been alive. He, their single child, was just fifty-five years of age. But accidents happen also in cybernetic societies. Two volants under manual control, being above an Arctic sports ground where traffic was light, collided—and he out beyond the orbit of Pluto, helping to herd a comet.

"If I haven't been so active, sir, that's not because I don't value my membership." He was quite sincere.

"Agreed," Matthias said. "To continue, you won admission to the Academy. Starstruck from birth, eh? And, what's more, gifted for it. You began your career in the Federal Space Service, then shifted to the Venture."

Since Kenmuir knew that Matthias' own employment had been entirely in the Service, he said half defensively, "Well, sir, everything Earth-based has grown so—uh—"

"So efficient." Matthias nodded. "Hardly a place left for humans, except on the ground and that mostly makework. No place at all left for initiative. The Service wasn't that far gone in my time.

But as I approached retirement, I stopped envying the young."

Kenmuir's pulse jumped. "The Lunarians, they keep space human."

"Their kind of human."

Not to truckle. The Rydberg would despise that. "They do it for our kind too. They need us."

"Because their style of operations goes against all practicality."

"Not when it's their nature, sir. And Terran nature, too, for many of us, even these days."

"Yes, a flicker of the old spirit survives. For a while yet, a while." Matthias brightened a trifle. "The Habitat should revive it. I may live to watch in the flesh a bit of what I've only seen in vivifers and quiviras."

Kenmuir tensed. "That's what I've come here about."

Eyes probed him. "I suspected as much."

What did he actually know?

The girl returned with a tray, set the drinks on end tables, saluted, and left. "Good liftoff,"

Matthias toasted. The men brought vessels to lips. The tingle in Jus mouth gave Kenmuir impetus.

"You know what the Habitat will do to the Lunarians," he said.

"Civilize them, gradually," Matthias snorted.

"Not into a civilization they'll find endurable."

"So they claim." The tone was rough. "Have they really so little adaptability, or is this a handful of Selenarchs yelling and clawing because they'll lose their privileges?"

Kenmuir mustered his words.

"Sir, with respect, I know the Lunarians, every class of Lunarians, about as well as any Earthdweller—any Terran can. When you've been to the ends of the Solar System with somebody, over and over; it gives you an understanding of them." And he had met them at home and in Mars and in their tiny colonies clinging to asteroids that whirled among wintry stars, or dug into ice and rock beneath the majesty of Jupiter or the jewelwork of Saturn.

"You've come to love them, then?" Matthias asked softly.

Taken aback, Kenmuir could merely say, "Well, I, I feel for them."

Matthias lifted a finger. "Mind you, I don't hate them. I agree they're admirable, the way a tiger is.

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And, yes, they are a leaven in this thickening world of ours." He paused. "But we have our own race to think about." With a shrug: "As if what you or I think, what we do, will make the slightest difference."

Kenmuir knotted a fist. "The Habitat is wrong."

Matthias raised his brows. "Wrong, to give thousands of humans, and whole generations after them, once again a frontier?"

Yes, Kenmuir thought, he'd heard it before, the renewed dynamic, humankind looking outward from its games and shadow shows, to the endlessness of the universe. He was pleading the case of native Americans as the whites rolled across them on the way to the Pacific. But what was it Lilisaire had said, about a wave of Lunar colonists being directed into a holding tank? He had spent many a watch in space exploring the past of Earth. After the white Americans filled their new land, vested interests and demagogues did not take long to make citizens into subjects.

"Sir," he persisted, "I'm an example of what Lunarian freedom can mean to Terrans. If we're ever to go to the stars—" where download Guthrie was, but how barely! "—it will have to be together with them."

"Maybe. Speak your piece."

"They deserve a chance, the same as we do."

"I'd not deny that, if it be a fair chance. Though, to repeat myself, what choice in the matter do you or I have? Say on."

Kenmuir drew breath and plunged ahead. In the course of three daycycles, Lilisaire had filled out details of what she first told him, but mostly she had kindled him for her cause. He said nothing about what happened when they were not talking. Did Matthias, impassive in his chair, guess?

The Rydberg made a single comment: "Remarkable, that those activities Niolente got carried out in space could stay a secret."

"Well, sir, you know how basic the etaine is there." Kenmuir chose the L'unarian word because its usual translation as "family" or "clan" was not really right.

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Nothing that quite corresponded occurred in any Terran culture. Sometimes he had speculated that

"pride" might serve—but no, Lunarians weren't lions either. "Apparently the expeditions were highly cy-berneticized, the few organic personnel chosen for ties of blood as well as their skills. They'd keep silent. Niolente presumably meant to reveal her design at the right moment, under the right circumstances, which would give Luna the advantage she was working for, with her and her phyle in firm control of it.

"At the final catastrophe, it seems everyone who knew perished with her. They were holed up together under Delandres Crater, and you surely recall how the missiles collapsed their shell around them even though the Peace Authority was only trying to force them to surrender. I think she kept them in a group like that precisely to retain the secret, and threatened to catapult warheads only as a bargaining counter that might win favorable terms—amnesty, at least. Instead, it got her bombarded.

"Apparently, also, she'd wiped what files on the project she could. The record that the Peace Authority laid hands on was fragmentary. All that her adult children knew was that something major had been under way. You'd expect them to be close-mouthed about it, wouldn't you? They passed it down through the generations, under pledge of secrecy, very much like ... the Rydbergs in the Trothdom."

Hoarsened, Kenmuir drained his beer. A stillness followed, wherein his blood beat loudly through his veins.

"And now this female wants me to give you the Founder's Word, for her benefit and in hopes she can use it to thwart the Habitat," Matthias said at last.

"If, if possible, and if—"

"Exactly what does she fantasize it is?"

"Information. Long before Niolen|e's time, Dagny Beynac's son Kaino led a mysterious mission into deep space. The family never let out what it had been. Most likely it became the basis of what Niolente

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undertook. Meanwhile, Lars Rydberg had learned something, probably from Beynac herself, which he considered to be of the first importance."

"Concerning a giant weapon in remote Solar orbit?" Matthias scoffed. "To revive an impolite word, lunacy."

"I didn't—Lilisaire didn't necessarily mean that—"

"She'd like it. For her personal gain. Judging from your account, she's let slip no hint to many of her fellow magnates, if any."

"Sir, I'm not asking for—I wouldn't condone—"

"But you are hoping for a way to keep the Terrans on Earth."

"Not even that, sir, not in itself. Is it right to suppress information relevant to a matter as important as this? A decision made in ignorance could cost lives later on. I'm sorry if—if I—"

Matthias gusted a sigh. "Don't apologize. No reason to. No such knowledge exists."

"None?" Kenmuir protested.

"Lars Rydberg brought a secret home to.Earth, yes," Matthias said heavily. "He charged his eldest son with preserving it against a possible hour of great need. It has gone down the succession ever since." That was not by descent, although every lodgemaster had some Rydberg blood. "This is as much as the world has been told. I will not be the one who betrays it."

Kenmuir saw adamantness. "Can you give me any hint?" he pleaded. "If nothing else, can you tell me Lilisaire was mistaken and it could not help her?"

The old man nodded. "Yes, I believe I can truly say that." Again he sighed. "By now, after all the time that has passed, I wonder if it means anything whatsoever. We keep the faith, we Rydbergs, simply because this is one more tradition, rite, bond holding the Trothdom together, so a ghost of Fireball Enterprises can haunt living memories. ., . I'm the one who's sorry, son."

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Abruptly Kenmuir felt wrung dry. "I see. Thank you, sir."

"It was never a real hope for you, was it?"

"I suppose not."

"What will you do?"

"Report back."

"You're welcome to call from here."

"Thank you, but—"

"Ah. You want encryption?"

"Well, actually, I was to call a number on Earth, but—a secure line—"

"Tell me no more. For groundside communications, we have good security. Now and then, you know, the outfit gives aid to a consorte whose trouble is best kept confidential."

Overwhelmed, Kenmuir mumbled, "Sir, when you're opposed to my whole purpose—"

"Not entirely. I don't approve of the government concealing possibly critical information either.

But mainly, you're a consorte yourself. I owe you troth." The gaze was keenly gauging. "I trust you not to break yours."

After a moment: "If you're not in too big a hurry, let's have another drink. And dinner. Spend the night. I'd like to hear you yarn about where you've been."

No, Kenmuir thought, assuredly he would -not violate his oath. He would follow Lilisaire's next instructions as best he was able, to the point where he saw them leading toward a public menace.

He did not expect they would. She ought to know him better than that. But he must stay wary.

Events might flare out of control. And always—he harked back to his classical reading—the Lunarian spirit was Lucifer's.

10

The Mother of the Moon

9een from the Taurus Mountains, Earth hung low in the southwestern sky. Its crescent was thinning with the sun's slow climb over eastern ridges. Shadows had shrunken across the bench where the Beynacs were encamped, but still picked out uncountable pock-marks in the level grayish rock.

Above and below, the slope was likewise scarred, as were the heights around. Not yet lighted, the valley beneath lay as a lake of blackness. All contours were gentle, worn down by the meteoritic rains of gigayears, nothing here of Terrestrial crags or Martian steeps, an aged land withdrawn into itself and its secrets.

For Dagny the view, like everything on Luna, had splendor. Maybe the very bareness uplifted her heart, a challenge. At the moment she was giving it no thought. Her attention was for Tychopolis, some 2700 kilometers hence.

Joe Packer's face confronted her, clear to see through the new-model fishbowl helmet that topped his spacesuit. Its hyalon had self-darkened at the back against sunlight which would have blasted his eyes had he glanced straight and unprotected in its direction. The big holoscreen showed an excavator at work behind him, hazed in the dust it continuously stirred up. The images weren't perfect. No fiber-optic cable ran to these man-empty parts; a satellite relayed. The pictures were adequate for practical purposes.

"—satisfactory progress in general," Packer was saying. "However, we've got a decision to make.

This past nightwatch, over at the northwest corner of the Complex Three site, they hit a pretty huge boulder. It's evidently got more or less the same composition as the surrounding rock, so it didn't register on the ground-wave probe, but Pedro Noguchi says we'll THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 129

have to get it out, and that'll leave a hole in the side, plus a lot of cracks that must be due to it. I told him to hold off there till you called in." His smile flashed, vivid white against the chocolate skin. "Don't worry, I found plenty other things to keep him and his gang out of mischief."

"You would," Dagny agreed. Packer was every bit as competent as she was, slated to succeed her when she moved into general administration. For that reason, as well as to give him added experience, she felt free occasionally to accompany Edmond on his field trips—adventure, family life, helping out in his research. Still badly undermanned, the work was as basic to engineering and future habitation as H was to pure science. Building the structures for the University of Luna ought not to pose any extraordinary problems anyway.

But of course no project on the Moon failed to spring its surprises, and the ultimate responsibility was hers. Even ten years ago, she'd have -been tied to the spot. Telepresence capability*was like having another avatar.

Yes, flitted through her, history in space moved headlong, ever faster, like a comet plunging sunward. Not only-here. An L-5 under construction, spaceport, industrialcenter, home for Terrans where they could bear children wholly Terran. The wealth of the asteroids in gathered. Ice from the deeps of space, soon water in abundance wherever humans wanted it. Not too many years later, antimatter produced so copiously that ships could burn it to accelerate through an entire voyage, bisecting Pluto's orbit in a trio of weeks. But when that liberation was won, Guthrie said, Fireball would first launch probes to the nearer stars. . . .

Her mind sprang back to business. "Muy bien, let's have a look."

Packer spoke a command. The computer shifted the viewpoint. Dagny beheld rubble, the rough-hewn angle of a pit, a mass suggestive of a clenched fist partly 130

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protruding, broken-off pieces of it scattered below. Packer turned the scanning over to her. She made the camera move in and out and around, illuminate murky recesses, magnify, induce fluorescence.

"M-hm," she murmured at length. "It's what I thought, and I imagine you guessed." She, though, had learned from Edmond Beynac. "A meteorite, ancient, buried in later lava flow. The plutonic character—unusual, to say the least. My husband will be most interested."

"Beg pardon?"

"Didn't you know? He studies meteoritics, besides what's under his feet. Believes we won't understand the basics of how the planets formed till we understand the asteroids better." Dagny clicked her tongue. "Swears that one of these years he'll get out into the Belt and fossick around personally." Her heart stumbled. Too many had already perished in yonder distances. "This rock will be evidence for his idea, his minority opinion, that there was once a body in that region big enough to get really hot before it cooled off again. He thinks the nickel-iron object that gave us the Tycho mines was a piece of its core." Dagny shook herself. "But I'm wandering. Pedro's right, we'll have to remove this thing. The hole, and the fissures where the lava congealed around it, will be a potential weakness in the foundation. We can't simply fill in and feel safe." Not after the Rudolph strike, or the more recent, similar but worse disaster at the Struve Criswell.

"What, then?" Packer asked.

"Got any idea? A couple occur to me, but you've had longer to think. Between us, we ought to come up with something worth pursuing." A cry interrupted. "Oh, damn. The joys of motherhood. 'Scuse a mo'. I'll be right back, I hope."

Rising, Dagny slipped from the office compartment and aft through the outsize, purely household van she had dubbed her kidmobile. The family often traveling in it—recreation, mainly, with friends along, though

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this was not their first serious expedition together—it was well furnished, from the pilot house in front to her and Edmond's bed cubicle at the rear. Beyond the pantry, kitchenette, and dinette, she found the main room and her children.

It offered a space ten meters Jong by six wide. Foldout tables, collapsible chairs as thin as Lunar gravity permitted, chests that doubled as seats allowed passage, occasionally zigzaggy, no matter what was going on in the way of games, partying, entertainment, education, or simple ease.

Dura moss made a living green carpet. Reserve tanks of water and air on the roof forbade any view straight up, but the windows on either side gave ample outlook. She saw the regular field van parked nearby, the whirly, strewn geological specimens and other clutter, the moun-tainscape, Earth big and lovely, the sun opposite stopped down to a wan disc. Music twanged from the speakers, for Dagny mercifully low—the newest feng-huang, she assumed. Her youngsters' tastes were not hers. She sometimes wondered what their generation would compose when they were grown.

Anson was outside with his father and the two grad students. Gabrielle, at seven the next oldest, sat before one of the computer terminals. That was in order, her regular schooling session. But why did five-year-old Sigurd hunker beside her? He should be at his own lesson. Francis, three, was curled up with a reader. That was nothing strange; all of them had acquired literacy by his age, except for Helen in her cradle, who doubtless would too, and Francy seemed a natural-born bookworm. What had he chosen today? He never cared for the ordinary stuff. . . .

Her eyes took aim on Gaby and Sigurd. Intent, they had not noticed her arrival. She recalled past incidents, a quick switcharound when she appeared, an air of surreptitiousness, baffled half-suspicions. In two kangaroo bounds, she was there. The baby's noises weren't of the sort that meant emergency.

The girl registered dismay, immediately masked.

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The boy's mutinous expression stayed on him. He was the hell-raiser among them. Dagny peered at the screen. No, it did not carry an interactive math program. ARVEN ARDEA NIO LULLUI PEYAR— "What the devil is going on here?"

Her daughter blanked the display. "Nothin'," she muttered. Color came and went in her face. She was outwardly the most Earthlike, chubby, topped with light-brown curls. Quiet, studious, was she inwardly the most paradoxical? "Just a game."

Easy, Dagny thought, take it slow, don't drive them into hostility. They bore alien genes, but that DNA had come from two mighty self-determined parents. She caught Sigurd's glance and held it.

"Doesn't seem like your kind of game," she said mildly to this large, strongly built, redhaired muchacho,

He flushed in his turn. "Aw, we wan'ed a break."

"If I were playing hooky, I'd do something more interesting. Unless this is. May I ask what it's about?"

Gaby was getting back some composure. "Per— per-mu-ta-tions," she said. Triumphantly: "See? I did study."

Having the machine produce random combinations of, no, not words, syllables? Dagny shook her head.

That couldn't be right. Her glimpse had suggested a pattern, as if those were words in an unknown language. Could the pair be creating a fantasy world? Gaby showed gifts of that kind, insofar as she revealed any of herself. Sigurd, restless, resentful at being cooped up when his older brother had gone forth, might be finding an outlet in a shared dream.

If so, it was nice that these utterly unlike two had set their fights aside and made something in common, for however brief a spell. Childhood secrets that had lain three decades forgotten stirred within Dagny. She'd better not push her invasion further.

"Good for yqu, as far as it goes," she said. "However, you are not supposed to study sets today, you're to practice the mechanics of arithmetic. And you, Sigurd, are to improve your deplorable spelling."

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"Bo-oring," he whined. Gaby nodded, again and again.

"I know," their mother replied. "And you wonder why you have to, when a computer can do such jobs for you. Bueno, listen. You may not always have a computer handy, when you badly need to figure out something or write something that comes across unmistakable. More important, learning the systems is the single way you'll get to understand them. If you're ignorant of how the machines work and why, they won't serve you, they'll boss you. And you'll be shut away from all kinds of wonderful things. Mainly, remember: Independent people have got to be independent.

"Play games on your own time. You're on Fireball time now. Prove that we can trust you."

Thus she led them back to their tasks. Francis, slight and blond, had barely glanced up from his reading. Past experience made Dagny believe he'd observed much more than he let on.

Helen wailed. Dagny ascertained she didn't need changing but was hungry, undid her tunic, and laid the infant to her right breast. (An excellent feature of life on the Moon—except when centrifuging, you could leave off the bra and yet never begin to sag.) "I'm busy too, dear," she said, and returned forward.

The dark little head pumped milk from her. Warmth and love flowed back. Yes, never mind all the extra trouble during pregnancy, she wanted anyway one more, another life to brighten hers and

'Mond's before it flew out into the unbounded future.

Unbounded in space. What was there for Earth? It shone so blue-and-white resplendent above the mountains. How much misery, how much terror and despair did the clouds veil? Poor North America, impoverished and stultified, the Renewal clinging like pitch to a semblance of power while the reality crumbled away in lawlessness. Poor Middle East, Befehl withdrawn, chaos Joose, fanaticism a tide rising higher for every day that passed. . . . But in lands 134

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more fortunate civilization flourished, prosperity, liberty, and the true renewal, the healing of the planet, paid for by the riches that Fireball brought home.... The woman held her baby close.

When she seated herself again at the office com, fears slipped away and Helen became simply a sweet presence on the fringe of awareness. Packer's eyes widened appreciatively, then he too got straight back to work. They were occupied for the next couple of hours, save when Dagny took her offspring back to the crib. She found Gaby and Sigurd at their education. They did not act especially chastened.

"Um, yes, this sounds reasonable," Packer said at last. Don't just cut out the unreliable rock and replace with concrete. The metal frame of the building would carry downward the blaze at midday, the space-coldness at midnight; in the course of years, differing coefficients of thermal expansion could have fatigue effects. Therefore, seal a heat exchanger grid into the plug, such as automatically equalized temperatures. It would take some designing, but probably no more than an off-the-shelf program could handle, and the concept might well prove useful at other sites.

"Oh, sure, first we run a simple model through the computer to see whether the notion's loco,"

Packer went on. "No, first we hear what Dr. Beynac thinks." He was forever deferential to the man who saved his life and limb, not in any servile way but in an abiding gratitude that Edmond and Dagny respected.

"He's due back soon," she said. "Overdue, in fact. I'll talk with him and call you this time tomorrow, okay?" Earth's tomorrow; the sun over Lunar Taurus would stand a dozen degrees higher.

"Happy landings."

She switched off, rose, stretched cramped muscles, and wished for an extra go in the whirly. No, too much trouble, and dinner to fix. Later, this evening, early bedtime—She grinned. Horizontal exercise didn't count, officially, but damn if she didn't wake at dawnwatch perkier than after anything else.

!f

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She went aft. Study time was past. Gaby and Sigurd had not resumed their curious game. Dagny wondered if they would before they were home in Tychopolis and the privacy of their rooms. The girl slouched on a seat, staring beyond the windows, an electronic pad on her knees. Her lips moved, she scribbled something with the stylus, then again she was in reverie. Dagny decided not to pry. Francy had put a show of fractals on one terminal, or gotten a sibling to do it for him, and watched fascinated. Hunched over a table, Sigurd moved his toy soldiers and their machines through a battle. "Ee-ee-pow," he breathed. "S-s-s-s. Crack." They represented UN peacekeepers and imaginary villains, but Dagny doubted that was what he had in mind. She hardly dared ask.

Not that she and 'Mond let their youngsters terrorize them. Not that affection and cheer were missing. But these, and their kind being bora to other couples, would inherit the Moon, which was not Earth.

Helen slept peacefully. Yet already you could see, in the big oblique eyes, the odd convolutions of the ears, the bones underneath the baby fat, that this too would become a face such as none of her forebears had worn.

Sigurd turned his head. His countenance was going to be rugged, bearing at least a memory of his father's. "Hiu-yo!" he piped, as if the small clash earlier had never happened. "Madre, you promised you'd tell 'bout Jefe Guthrie at Mars. Now?"

He could reach out and take hold of her heart any time he wanted. All of them could. Though he didn't know about his kinship, and maybe never would, Fireball's lord was as much a legend to him as to everyone else. Dagny, who had stories directly from her grandfather, couldn't stop mention of them from slipping free once in a while.

"This instant?" she demurred. "I've soon got to rustle the rations."

"De-tails later."

"Tell, tell!" Francy cried.

Dagny yielded. It was a funny story, how Anson

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Guthrie shot himself into orbit around Deimos and thereby confounded his opponents. What the incident had meant to politics and policy did not matter to this audience.

"—and that's why spacefolk call the crater Whisky's Grief." What was keeping the geologists?

"Why didn't the gov'ment want Fireball there?" Gaby had joined the group. Her mother couldn't well fob the girl's question off, could she?

"That's complicated to explain, darling. It wasn't one government, it was three of them at loggerheads. Space is supposed to belong to the whole human race, but everybody is a citizen of some or other country— you and I count as Ecuadorans, your father's French, the Guptas are Indian—and our governments make demands on us that often aren't the same. Then, if we're with Fireball—Hoy! There come our wanderers."

Through a window Dagny saw the camion trundle around the eastern flank of this mountain. Absurd, the relief that washed through her. If 'Mondvs party had met trouble, they'd have called to let her know. Nevertheless, they were notably later than usual, and Anson had been with them. . . .

"Another time," she pledged. "Right now I'd better hustle."

She had no real need for haste, but making ready worked the tension off. Start dinner. When she had leisure for it, she cooked according to standards she had learned from Edmond, unless he wanted to himself. In the field, and she riding herd on the gangs at Tychopolis, they settled for prepackaged stuff. But bring forth aperitifs and glasses. Change her coverall for a dress. ,'Mond would do the corresponding thing, after a shower, and the kids would be quiet, though welcome to join in the talk. Happy hour, Guthrie called it. Oh, but nearly all her hours were happy.

At odd moments she watched the vehicle arrive, the riders unload what they had collected, the graduate assistants carry those boxes into the field van, Ross and Marietta slept there, and generally had their

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meals there. It wasn't exclusion on the Beynacs* part. The young people rated some privacy; eating, sleeping, and laboratory studies weren't everything they did in those quarters. Father and son approached their roving house. Against dun rock and long shadows, their spacesuits dazzled with whiteness. What a liberation dust-repellent impregnants were! "Don't snub technofixes,"

Guthrie used to say. "Progress consists of *em. Has, ever since Ung Uggson chipped his first flint."

Dagny lost sight of them as they stepped onto the gangramp. Noise followed, outer airlock valve opened and shut, gas pumped back into the reserve tank while boots banged down the companionway to the lockers: A bass grumble drifted up, "God damn, I smell like a dead goat," and Dagny smiled.

Skinsuits went into the washer, which began to purr. Edmond and Anson returned to deck level.

Dagny met them at the hatch. Both wore bathrobes. No puritan, the man remained uncomfortable with the casual nudity common among Moon folk. At least, he felt adults should avoid it before children of the opposite sex.

Dagny sprang to him. "/ think you smell exciting," she laughed. "C'mere, you." She cast her arms around his neck and her mouth against his. .

After a second or two she let go and stepped back. "Hey," she said, "that was like kissing a robot. A sweaty robot, but otherwise not programmed for it. What's the matter?"

He scowled. Anson stood sullen. "Clean yourself," Edmond ordered him. "Then go to your bunk."

"Hold on," Dagny exclaimed. "What's this about?"

"No supper for him," Edmond snapped. "He was insubordinate and reckless." To the boy: "Go."

"Wait just a minute," Dagny countermanded. "What did he do?"

"He left us," Edmond said. "We were sorting our specimens into the boxes and did not notice before he was gone. We called and got no answer. His tracks

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went upslope to bare rock where we could not trail him. For more than an hour we searched, until we found him in a cleft. He had not answered us, that whole while."

"I couldn't receive you." Anson spoke with a clipped precision which in him registered fury. "The ridges screened it. That overhang below your site must have blocked the satellite relay."

"You told me already. And I told you—bloody hell, how many times?—you do not leave your party without permission." . '

"When I started off', you didn't call me to stop."

"You knew we were not watching. Hein? I told you, if you want to walk around, you must stay in line of sight. If you get into a no-reception zone, you retrace your'steps. Immediately! Mon Dieu, you could *ave been lost, somesing could 'ave 'appened—" The father's voice wavered. "After daycycles, we might 'ave found your mummy."

Dagny wondered whether this was their first real exchange or they were going over the ground again for her. Undoubtedly Anson had received an awesome tongue-lashing, but it had only stiffened his spine. "That's far too true," she said to him, keeping her ' tone ^ow. "Why did you do it?"

The boy met her gaze. He was the beautiful one of her brood, slim, straight, cat-graceful, bird-soaring in this gravity for which he was made. Already the great height that would be typically Lunarian had brought his head even with his father's. Ash-blond hair fell in bangs over milk-white temples wherein a vein stood as blue as the big, slanty Lunarian eyes. The cheekbones were Asian, the nose and mouth,and chin Hellenic, though neither blood was in him; it went with th~e altered genotype and had surprised the geneticists themselves. They talked of chaos inherent in biological systems, but she gathered this meant "We don't know."

, At her he smiled, to her he spoke gently. "It was all right, Madre. I wasn't in danger. The sun gave me a

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direction, and the high, jagged peak south of us, that'd be a landmark any time I climbed to where I could see iU"

"Merde!" Edmond roared.

Dagny shushed him with a gesture. "But why did you go, dear?"

"Bueno, I got out of sight before I noticed, and then I thought how I wanted a better look at those formations we found in the cleft, that Padre doesn't think are interesting." Anson shrugged.

"Honest, I'd have come back before they were ready to leave."

"If you did not bloody lose your way in that—that jumble, that labyrinth." Edmond's hands trembled a bit. He'd want comforting tonight, Dagny knew.

"I wouldn't have," Anson argued. "I never do."

It could well be the truth, she thought. Not that he'd been anywhere alone before now, but on guided excursions he acted as though he'd drawn maps in his head. Virtually no visitors, and few long-time residents, could do that, on this world that was not Earth.

This world that was to be his.

She mustn't undercut 'Mond.. "You could have discovered the hard way that it's possible," she said. "In any case, you were selfish and inconsiderate, you made a whopping lot of trouble, and most especially, you breached discipline. If you don't learn better, someday you may cause somebody's death. Go wash and lie down."

Mute, haughtily erect, the boy departed. When he was out of sight, the man embraced the woman. She laid her head against the hard solidity of him, inhaled his warmth and male smell, clutched him tightly. "I 'ate sis," he whispered in her ear. "But we are obliged."

"Oh, yes, oh, yes," she breathed. "For their sakes."

If he and she knew what was right. How many of the old rules held? These were not children like any that had ever been before. In a sense, they were not human. They'd never be able to breed with her kind, nor even abide for very long on Earth. Not for them were wind 140

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and wave, blue heaven, thunderheads, rainbows, the great wheel of the seasons; theirs were the naked stone and the scornful stars and a life to make from a new beginning. She had not believed the otherness of their flesh would matter too much. Else she would not have borne them. But how foreign were their souls?

11

As soon as she left the tubeway that had taken her from the airport, Aleka Kame realized she needed a wanner garment than she had brought along. The sky hung low and leaden. A raw wind harried tatters of fog borne in off the sea. Earth's atmosphere didn't always respond as it should to the nudges it got from Weather Control, and sometimes even short-range local prediction failed.

Ultimately, the planet was chaotic.

Having noticed a dispenser in the station, she went back. The booth was basic, but she didn't want anything fancy. In fact, she did not need to strip for the scan, as lightly clad as she was. When she had specified a brown calidex coverall and debited herself, the system took three minutes to prepare it and drop it out the chute. She put it on over her blouse and shorts, picked up her bag, and went forth again.

The carrier had let her off within a few blocks of her first destination. Walking up Fell Street, she saw that more of the houses that lined it had gone empty since her last visit. They stood shingled, turreted, painted, sealed and silent in their eld, museum pieces. What tenants remained were generally old, caretaking to earn a bit of extra credit. However, a number of small businesses were interspersed: personal services, entertainment, curio shops, hand-prepared food and drink, a place to linger and chat over coffee. Traffic went sparse, pedestrians, motorskaters, minicars, the occasional machine on duty at which she could only guess.

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Passing §teiner, she saw what was new, a quivira opposite Alamo Square. It was designed to blend in with its archaic surroundings; she would not have known its nature except for the schematic cosmos discreetly flashing above the entrance.

So people were now coming here to lie in the tanks and enjoy the dream-lives they could not find in reality? Then the neighborhood wasn't actually dying ... unless a sociotechnic computation had shown that this might restore a little vitality to it, and that that was desirable for some larger end.. , .

The Albergo Vecchio filled a building which the occupants had gotten permission to remodel. A signboard creaked in the wind, with a garish amateur painting of peasants in a harvest field passing a leather bottle around. The walls behind the door, similarly decorated, enclosed a tiny bar and several tables with red-checked cloths. Cooking odors drifted from a reconstructed primitive kitchen. Mama Lucia bustled out to cry, "Benvenuta, carissima!" and hug Aleka to her vast bosom. Nothing would do but that the guest immediately have a tumbler of wine and a slab of bread and cheese.

Upstairs in her room, which was also small and meticulously antiquated, Aleka sighed, shook her head, and smiled a bit sadly. She always stayed here when she came to San Francisco Bay Integrate.

It wasn't fake, not really; it was a family's gallant effort to keep themselves independent, doing work they could care about. And, yes, it offered a haven from the machines. Her window overlooked a vegetable garden. As far as she knew, the plants were all traditional.

If you wanted this kind of respite, a quivira could give it in totality; but the real thing, though limited, cost rather less.

Of course, you didn't get away from a multiceiver and an eidophone. Aleka called the Mary Carfax number. An aged female face appeared on the screen. "Buenos tardes?" it quavered.

Aleka named herself. "I'm a friend of your grand-

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niece Dolores Nightborn," she said. "She suggested I come by, since I'm in town, give you some news you may not have heard—nothing major, but nice—and see if you need anything. I'll be glad to help wherever I can."

"Oh, yes, yes. Dear Dolores. Gracias, mil gracias, seftorita. Can you come over pronto, for tea?"

Hard to believe that this was an electrophotonic intelligence speaking while a program modulated the transmission. Aleka held her own features stiff, her voice calm. The effort made her forget and say, "Mahah"by way of thanks, but no matter, she herself wasn't playing identity games, not yet. "Sure, I'll be happy to. In about half an hour, bien?"

Quickly she changed to a decorous unisuit, flipped the coverall together around it, and went back downstairs. "I've a lot of errands," she told Mama. "Don't know when I'll be in." Beneath the easy words, she shivered.

The display at the station directed her to a stop on Columbus Avenue. She had never seen that district before. It busied itself, but not directly with human concerns. On her right a wall rose a sheer hundred meters and ran for a kilometer or more, like a palisade, windowless, seemingly doorless. Recesses and flutings made a subtle pattern over which smoked the hues of a thousand different sunsets. Light also played, in coruscant sparkles, across a building on the other side, whose soaring intricacy suggested a fountain. Complementing it with height and grace, a metal framework reared beyond, where cables made a moving network around silvery control nodes. Aleka sometimes wished she had the brains to understand sophotectic esthetics, not simply admire it or stand bewildered.

A sense of enormous energies filled her, though the wind whistled through silence and traffic was still thinner than along Fell. The cybercosm sent communications to work scenes far oftener than it dispatched material bodies. Perhaps a score of machines were in THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 143

her visual field. A huge, torpedo-shaped transport murmured by, self-steered. Two little flyers buzzed overhead, optics bulging out of bluish metal, arms trailing aft below the wings. A fractally dendritic manipulator glided past, three meters tall; its finest extremities quivered and shimmered in the gusts. A wheeled, multiply tentacular globe was a sight new to her. And on and on.... Which were robots, which were intelligent and aware, which were puppets of a thing that might reside halfway around the planet? How much did the question mean? Electrophotonic minds could mesh at will in every possible configuration, achieving every potential—

She was not quite the sole human. A man strode by, so purposefully that he must have some occupation here. A consultant, a technician? A woman stood at a distance, apparently discoursing with an anthropo-morph that could almost have been taken for a spacesuit. Could she be a synnoiont? Two other men, grizzled and vaguely shabby, walked in surly conversation. Local residents? Probably. Those would be few, -because flesh and blood tended to feel uncomfortable in environs like this, but on that account lodgings in side streets would be cheap.

"Mary Carfax" had one. The seething data traffic everywhere around must help screen hers. She'd be free of people living close by, who might wonder why she never left home. All that had been necessary was to smuggle the apparatus in and install it. The precaution of slipping a false registry into the database would have been more difficult to take, but, given Lilisaire's connections, not impossible. Aleka knew something about that kind of trick.

She turned on Greenwich and, a few blocks down, found the place. It was a leftover house in the sleek pastel-plastic style of eighty or ninety years ago. Those flanking and facing it looked deserted. Evidently city robots kept them in good repair, but Aleka wondered fleetingly how long it would be before other machines obliterated them to make room for more machines.

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Or would they? Why? Sophotects didn't proliferate for the sake of proliferation, as humans used to. The growth they strove for was ethereal, capabilities of the intellect, up toward the Teramind and beyond. Aleka shivered in the bleak wind.

She confronted the door and spoke her name. Carfax had obviously entered instructions, with a recorded image, for it retracted at once. She ran tongue across lips, clamped teeth together, and went inside.

A cramped room held obsolete furniture and banal pictures. Surprised, Aleka then decided this was for the benefit of any unwanted person, a constable or whoever, who could not be refused admission. She passed on into a space big and still. Walls had withdrawn to make a single chamber.

Windows had blanked. The ceiling imitated sunlight and the air lay warm, but she guessed that was on her account, likewise a lounger in the middle of the otherwise empty floor. At the far end she saw a large gray panel, blank except for sensors, a screen, a speaker, and sliders that doubtless covered specialized outlets. A general-purpose robot stood in a corner adjoining. She assumed the sophotect took direct control of it. The mind itself, the physical system, was—elsewhere in the house.

"Salud," she greeted out of a tight throat.

The voice that replied had become a resonant baritone. "Bienvenida, Senorita Kame. For favor, remove your outer garment, be seated, make yourself comfortable. What can I offer you? Food, beverage, narcotic, stimulant? I regret the choice is limited, because visitors like you are rare, but the usual things are on hand."

"N-no, gracias." Aleka feared that if she tried to deal with a cup or plate, it would tremble. She felt grateful for Mama's wine.

•Reaction flared. Why the Q should she be nervous? Here was no god, but a machine—a single machine,

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sealed off from the rest of the cybercosm. Yes, it had awareness, it had gifts that in certain respects must be greater than hers, but in other ways it was surely circumscribed, naive, dedicated to this one service. When that ended and a new program was entered, it would not be the same mind, the same being, at all.

True, she was on the verge of what might be a dangerous enterprise. But she'd taken risks before.

Generally she'd enjoyed them. And the possible stakes—

She grinned, for the sake of bravado. Peeling off her coverall and dropping it on the floor, she sat down. She would rather have kept her feet, but figured obscurely that this showed her more at ease, more in command. She did set the lounger straight upright and ignored its sensuous self-adjustments to contours and skin temperature.

"Are you ready?" asked the machine. She nodded. Her heart thumped. "I speak for the Wardress Lilisaire. She has provided me a file of her information about you."

Aleka frowned. "Was that safe? I mean, if she's being watched—"

"How do you know she is?"

"She has a reason for these precautions, doesn't she?"

The voice made a chuckle. "Excellent. You confirm her impression of sharp wits. The file was not transmitted from Luna, it was carried as a recording to Earth by a messenger. He privately gave it to another person, who brought it here."

Then presumably Lilisaire had no cause to suspect Aleka was under surveillance. That came as a pulse-lowering relief. "Are you, uh, empowered to make decisions?"

"As far as feasible, yes. Why do you think you were called?"

"It has to do with the Habitat, right?"

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Lilisaire had talked enough about that, with enough venom, when they met, although mainly she had set herself to charm and, under cover of it, inquire. Besides, everybody knew how opposed to the project the large majority of Lunarians were.

"Yes," the machine said. "What is your opinion of it?"

"I, I hadn't given it much thought," Aleka confessed. "The idea seemed—exciting—till I heard hef.

Since then ... I sympathize. If Earthlings want to colonize, let them go to Mars."

"A long, expensive haul."

"What does expense mean, when you can pretty nearly grow your ships in the nanotanks, and they don't need human crews? Nor would you need a Habitat at Mars."

"Shrewdly put. I was quoting the argument advanced by proponents. They are humans too, you know, in the government and out of it."

Bitterness lifted. "What has the cybercosm bribed them with?"

The tone was matter-of-fact. "Essentially nothing. Most of them are sincere. They accept the cost-benefit analysis produced for them because they trust the cybercosm. You know why. This is a more stable world, with more social and economic justice, than ever was before sophotectic intelligence developed. Do not be so hostile to it."

Aleka's emotion subsided a little. "Oh, I'm not, not really. I'm . . . skeptical. At least, I often wonder where we humans are bound, and how much control over the course we have left to us."

"Your Lyudovite background?"

"I never was a Lyudovite!" she exclaimed. "How could I be? The Rebellion happened lifetimes ago."

"But when you were studying at the Irkutsk Institute, you encountered persons whose ancestors fought in it, and who still hold it was a rightful cause wrongly crushed."

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Memory rushed back, campus, the Russian plain, glorious Lake Baikal, Yuri, Yuri, and the village to which he took her, more than once. "I had a, a close friend, a fellow student. He came from that kind of family, yes. They tried to keep the old ways alive, handicraft, agriculture, it was pitiful to see. He introduced me to them. We were very young." Aleka sighed. "Later he ... changed his mind." And they drifted apart, and finally she went home to Hawaii. By now he seldom troubled her dreams.

"And you?"

She shrugged. "I've got my work to do."

"I am only familiarizing myself with you," the machine said mildly. "I know what Lilisaire has informed me of, but it is incomplete and abstract."

However, Aleka reflected, it probably went beyond what she had revealed. Agents on Earth must have looked into her life before the Wardress decided she could trust her. Or earlier, yes. Lilisaire would have had more than a casual reason, a couple of mutual acquaintances, for inviting her to Zamok Vy-soki that time she vacationed on the Moon, and bedazzling her.

Aleka felt she ought to resent such snooping, but couldn't. She didn't even resent it that the ancestress Niolente had taken a part in fomenting and prolonging the Rebellion. A cold-blooded move, granted, in hopes of weakening the Federation until it gave up on incorporating Luna. But Lyudovites and Lunarians had a great deal in common.

Aleka stiffened her will. "All right," she said, "I admit I've kept the sympathies I acquired then. To a degree, anyhow. I don't personally believe we can turn history backward. Nor that we should." It had indeed been a desperate cause: Keep humanity in charge. Do not permit the making of fully conscious artificial intelligence. Stop before it is too late, and then consider how much mechanization and automation is really desirable. "Too late," she repeated her thought.

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"But I live with what the system is doing to my people."

"So you told the lady Lilisaire."

She bewitched it out of me, Aleka almost replied. She had never confided like that in anyone else, feelings too deep to have clear form until she uttered them. Not Father nor Mother nor sisters nor Yuri had worked thus upon her. She did not yet know just how the Selenarch had.

She curbed her words. A silent half minute went by.